Stepping Back and Stepping In It

Anytime I feel comfortable, I know something is wrong. So, just as soon as I get ready to read one set of books (mentioned in a recent blog entry), I choose another set I didn't intend to read, meaning the books in front of me now are:

• "The Trouble With Being Born" by E.M. Cioran
• "Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon
• "A Foreign Policy of Freedom" by Ron Paul

and some movies:

• "Mindwalk," directed by Bernt Capra and written by Fritjof Capra
• "The Eye is Never Filled" by Ken Nordine

They, in turn have led me back to Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Descartes and Pascal's Pensees, and forward to Phyllis Schlafly, Ilya Prigogine and Humberto Maturana.

In the midst of these, I am publishing another novel, "A Space, A Period, And A Capital," a story about the relationships within decision-making that I previously posted on the Web as free e-text and soon providing in book form, dedicated to those for whom silence forever bears grave witness (people such as former schoolmate David Mayberry).

To exist within one's comfort zone implies a kind of willingness to shut one's self into a box, close the lid and return to Earth/earth before one's time is up. Discomfort slows down time and makes one see every moment intensely. Best see the world through the eyes of an adversary or your sublobes of thought than eat vanilla ice cream the rest of your life and numb your tonguewise speech.

Peripheral Peripheries

When I started this blog, I promised myself I'd never discuss conspiracy theories. Or at least not take them seriously. Unless you have proof that someone is behaving covertly or hiding important information from others, then you're gossiping and spreading more mistruths or urban legends.

This blog entry will point out some funny theories but I'm sure any of you out there who are sure you're being watched and followed will probably not find them funny.

I am interested in new technology mainly because I grew up with friends who were technologically-minded. I do not design new technology devices myself (although I've been known to tear apart new gear before getting any good use of out them).

I've helped friends and colleagues with their designs, getting many to market even though I know by doing so I contribute to the destruction of "pristine" parts of Earth I haven't seen and will never see. Such is the price for progress: no matter how environmentally responsible we think we can be, we must gather raw materials from somewhere, process them and put them together to create new gadgets, resulting in environmentally unfriendly open pit mines, factories and distribution networks.

Some of the technology that interests me includes wireless communication devices using UWB or RFID. A recent article, "Chips in official IDs raise privacy fears," points to issues associated with open wireless technology, easily feeding into the future that conspiracy theorists go on and on about.

Reminds me of the early days of analog cell phones. My father in-law had a radio scanner that was tuned to emergency services channels so he could know if his two-way radio business was going to be needed. If you had a list of the right frequencies, you could accidentally tune the scanner to pick up one half of analog cell phone conversations (since it was illegal to intentionally listen to cell phone conversations). We'd sit at the kitchen table in the evenings and sometimes catch salesmen on cell phones explaining how to write off one-night stands on expense reports or hear a wife/husband plead with the other partner to come home after [drinking, having an affair, having a big fight, etc.].

Now, if those people knew they were being listened to, would they have been as "open" in their conversation? Probably not. They may have discussed the same subject but in couched terms. Yet, if you believe what you hear in the news, every citizen's activities are known through phone bugging/wiretapping, cell phone recording, email/Internet logging, list of places traveled (tracked via GPS chips in cell phones, computers and cars), products purchased via credit card, and old-fashioned physical/video surveillance. Do we code our conversations or watch our tracks on a daily basis? Probably not.

Last night, I watched the movie, "A Scanner Darkly." Philip K. Dick wrote the book on which the movie's based. In a special feature, a French interview with Phil at a scifi convention revealed his belief that he was a specific covert target of the U.S. government after his affiliation with certain people in Berkeley in the 1960s, including his rooming with Timothy Leary at some point. He said that he had seen his CIA and FBI profiles which still didn't prove to him who had been going through his mail or breaking into his apartment and taking/photographing things. Phil's friends died in part due to their drug use which may have also led to their's (and his) paranoia, both real and imagined, about being watched.

Are you being watched? Many, if not most or all people, profess a strong belief they are, either by natural or supernatural forces. They call it guardian angels, God, Shiva, ancestors, Devil, government, Big Brother, the boss, the neighbors, peers, the spouse, siblings, the priest/Pope, the parents, the school and so on.

You are being watched all the time (you watch yourself, even if you believe no one else watches you). Do you act any differently because you're being watched? Sure you do. You react to others all the time - it's called socializing. ;)

Some people fear they're being watched which will lead to someone else responding negatively to their behavior (resulting in false arrest or imprisonment) or stealing their identity.

Assume you're being watched. Act like someone is following you around. Pretend you're famous and hounded by paparazzi or infamous and tracked by government spies. If you're going to be paranoid, have fun and invite others in on the conspiracy.

I turned on TV the other day while eating lunch and caught part of a documentary on a group of people dedicated to a roleplaying game called Darkon, an imaginary world of medieval fiefdoms/kingdoms, which these people would recreate on weekends. They held skirmishes, battles, negotiations and other aspects of what they perceived would take place if Darkon was real.

Why not take this concept and create your own similar fantasy roleplaying game, using the real world as a place where people can track each other? There's no need to be scared of the future. Laws are written and rewritten all the time. You're bound to break a law that you don't know about. Your activities, all or in part, are being tracked all the time so some entity is targeting your behavior for its gain.

Think of real life as a game of being watched and watching others. Suddenly, you'll find yourself involved in socializing with others, figuring out they're watching you and being watched. You might even join an official group of people who like being watched by supernatural forces. Billions of people participate in religious rituals just for that purpose.

Scary but true.

Shell bash

At a training seminar in the early 1990s, an instructor told us he was not motivated to stand up in front of the crowd because of most of us. Instead, he imagined one or maybe two people in the audience who would benefit from what he had to say. He was never sure which person(s) needed to hear his message so he addressed the crowd as individuals, making sure he made eye contact with every person at least once. Otherwise, he would have quit a long time ago because he knew the majority of people he faced were disinterested in him and/or his lecture subject, aware that the company he worked for recruited corporations to sign up for package deals that included one lecture per quarter for their employees.

I know how he feels. As an instructor, I have seen the students who have no interest in either me or the subject I'm presenting to them. I'm okay with that. However, I don't like seeing students whose only interest lies in gaming the system or psyching the teacher into giving students a free ride. I didn't like it as a student and don't like it as an instructor. Of course, what I like or dislike is not going to change human nature.

So I'm stuck here with you, the reader (including myself), wondering what to do. Do I ignore the game players by ensuring I lay out an instruction system that allows students to get good grades with minimal effort while at the same time challenging the students who desire to learn and master the subject I teach/coach/lead?

Some instructors/professors I had as a student told the class they were forced to teach undergraduate courses so they were going to make the class as hard as possible, resulting in an average class grade that would "prove" they were better researchers than lecturers. For the rest of the course, the professors showed off their extensive knowledge by discussing concepts not covered in the book and methods that only a few students could comprehend. The two classes I remember most are differential equations and advanced computer algorithms. Admittedly, I barely passed both classes (C or C+, I believe) while many students failed. Just as predicted, the advanced computer algorithm professor returned to research and didn't lecture again since many of us complained to the department head about the professor's attitude.

The student is both the customer and product of the lecture/lab classroom factory system. Most universities and colleges have many customers and products not directly tied to a student, providing important connections to and between corporate and government businesses to fund their bureaucracies and benefit society. My observations of the for-profit education business has shown me the student is the main focus for income sources.

I face a dilemma. The technical institute must meet regulatory requirements in regards to expectations of standardized student output. Yet, my customer is the student. I live to meet the expectations of my "customers," the people with whom I interact daily (part of my base personality traits - in this case, the desire to please everyone). If my customers demand that I increase the ease with which one can get an A or B in class, should I meet their demands or tell them, "Sorry, but there's nothing I can do - government regulations tie my hands"?

These are age-old, ubiquitous concerns. I share them with almost every instructor/professor I've met. Do you teach to the test or do you coach students to perform at their peak and then lead them to in-depth understanding of the topic which includes the upcoming test questions? The best teachers can do both without blinking an eye.

I don't claim to be a great teacher, having backed happenchance into a teaching job. In fact, I don't teach. I evaluate my position and determine what maximizes my customers' value for their investment, their ROI, if you will. Granted, some students just want the diploma and don't care a whole lot about the material while others take classes to better understand the material and improve their skills. One product with many customer expectations - nothing new there!

At the end of this blog entry, I ask myself, am I focused on the majority of students in my class or the one or two who are there because we can learn from each other and make our lives better together? Today, I don't have an answer. Meanwhile, I scour the lecture material to see how I can better hone my coaching skills, hoping there are one or two (maybe even three or four!) students to whom I matter as an instructor. Otherwise, someone else could stand up there and dance around for pocket change.

Tired of Teaching

I have no idea if anyone reads this blog. Online tools exist that would allow me to track all the persons who've looked at the blog or follow it but I believe I have this space to myself, transparent and on display to the world.

Some people are clever and leverage that trick to increase their social status. Everyone does something to live. At the moment, I participate in activities that lead to other people profiting from the education process in roles such as stockholder, employee, faculty and student/ customer/ product.

I don't work because I have to. I didn't take the education assignment because I had sought out a job position at the technical institute in order to get a job. Instead, I was asked to join the firm and did so out of courtesy to a colleague who no longer works at the institute. In addition, the two people who interviewed and hired me no longer work there.

Thus, I am participating in the game of teaching for what reason? I don't know.

We primates walk around and chatter with one another in hopes that we have enough to chatter about to make each other believe we have something worth exchanging between us. We have these societies that make no sense, that turn whole swaths of land, sea and air unlivable, just so we can climb each other's backs to get higher on the scale of primate primacy.

In the midst of that, we have a group of us who promote the increase of organized and categorized brain synapse formations.

I have no kids to raise. I have no goals to reach. I have no bills to pay. I have no worries to make.

All I want to do is have fun in a quiet, peaceful manner, so I can enjoy invigorating fresh air, biting insects, chirping birds, and surprising changes in the weather while I read and learn about who I am as a momentary group or subset of chemicals called a human in the superset of chemicals called the universe.

I have no reason to teach. I'll gain nothing more from the education process than what I've learned in the past few months. Instead, I give profit to others I'll never see and don't care about personally.

Teaching is not a job. Teaching is a calling and like all callings, calls people who have no desire for monetary gain, just enough to feed a small family. I have no family to feed and don't feel the calling to teach.

I retired from the corporate world because I had no more to learn or give the world of profits and losses. I entered the for-profit teaching business by accident of fate, which has enlightened me about teaching, coaching and leading students who are not also employees or "pure" customers of the same institute (I say that to distinguish that instructor/student relationship from the one where I have taught, coached and led employees, either my own or others who worked for the same company, or the one where I have taught, coached and led customers of the [non education-based] technology companies I worked for).

If I have nothing more to learn, I have nothing more to give others in return for their presence in front of me.

A bunch of primates out there have the desire and feel the calling to teach, to get other primates to increase their number of brain synapses. I am a primate who's happy to sit here and eat a few peanuts while perusing a few ink splotches on flattened leafs of pulp-and-glue or electronic pages. Let the world of teaching go on without me. Let others profit from the peanut wages of those who teach.

Havana House

14908 - the number of days until my statistically-predicted demise. Until then...I'm here and located elsewhere.

I have traveled recently, accepting from others what they'll give me, hesitating to give more than myself.

I don't know what to say anymore, having lost something somewhere not too long ago. My thoughts taper off, my...

I am myself, no one else and nothing more or less. Words - symbols of my thoughts and other actions. What are these words doing here? I don't know. I step forward and the world moves with me. I can see those events with my eyes.

Commerce no longer holds my sway. Conversation no longer holds my say. I am rich beyond words and poor beyond thought.

I can record activities, journaling or blogging like a good diarist but is diarrhea of the fingers what I want to be remembered for? And who shall remember me? Memories are but wisps of chemical compositions momentarily forming and scattering. I shall see no texts or revive no memories after I'm gone.

My dreams arrive in my waking, fading quickly, bleached by the light of day and the opening of my eyes, understimulating and overstimulated.

I've reached my goals and wander. I wandered while reaching my goals. I have no hunger, no burning desire. Suddenly, I'm old.

Are You A Reader?

A reader asked me...

Before I continue, I ask you what or who is a reader? If a person interprets these words and then responds to me about them, does that person qualify as a reader? It's a question that I can't answer because I don't know enough about the process of human sensory input, thought creation and bodily reaction/action/output.

Anyway, a reader asked me what I thought about the recent events happening around the world, from the clash between Uighurs and Hans in Asia to the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on the Internet, implying in the question that major disruptive events are rocking the world.

You are one person. You read the news. You see hundreds, thousands or millions of entities involved in an activity and compare yourself to the group of entities, feeling yourself in comparison in size to the entities in the group based on your sense of belonging to another group or groups. You can easily feel overwhelmed by the events happening in the news, even if hundreds, thousands or millions of people around you are completely unaffected by the news or uninvolved with the activities broadcasted in the news.

Can you see what I'm saying? Any news you hear is unreal, not because the information you receive is intentionally falsified but because your view of news is skewed. That's why I tell you you are the most important person in the world because to view the news without bias, one must balance one's sense of importance against the masses of faces seen and heard on video broadcasts.

In fact, like many people who advise you to seek success in your life, I recommend you not read or watch the daily news because almost 100% of the information is not useful for your daily living except as conversation fillers. Your life is more important than the news.

With my general view of news established, I'll say with sadness that it's too bad people of two or more distinct ethnic origins cannot find a way to live together peacefully (or at least without resorting to killing one another). I have insufficient information to make comments any more specific than that because any news I read will not tell me about the daily lives and long-term motivations of the people in the news.

I Know Nothing

I have no understanding of the universe. I have only you, right? But I don't know what I look like through your eyes and you don't know what you look like through mine.

So why are we here? I don't know.

But I don't have to know.

I have only these words to describe you, my drawing, musical and sculpting skills lacking.

What is the difference between reality and art? Are either one real?

Are you real?

Am I real?

What matters? What is matter? What is the matter? What matters most, a smattering or a Matterhorn?

My face is faceless, my expression expressionless, my mouth is my ears and my nose my tongue.

I could attach four sets of eyes to my brain and see in all directions except inward toward my thoughts.

Knowing is nothing. Nothing is knowing. Doing and being are a pair of words. Quite a pair, at that. And yes, that makes me hungry for a pear that appears next to a paradoxical parakeet sitting on a pair of skates.

While you chase a meal by learning new tricks in a place called a job, your children chip away at a monolith shaping the future that'll eventually fall down and shut down your business.

Circles. Cycles. Unicycles. Bicycles. Tricycles. Triglycerides. Triumvirates. Bicarbonates. By golly. Unicellular. Cellular phones. Cellophane. Sell genetically modified crops. Crop circles. And around you go again.

What you seek, I cannot find. What you found, I do not want. What I want, you cannot seek.

That's the way it is, the way it's meant to be.

Never try to find something because you'll find what you want to find. Let something find you, instead.

I don't know what I think I know. I have no wisdom to share. These words mix together on their own.

I have you - that's all I know and all I need because you found me, I didn't find you.

Magic Dust

Over the past week, I have spent time with "the people," a group of folks living in the foothills and mountains of east Tennessee and western North Carolina. Some of these people are family members of mine while others are long-term residents of the area. A few were tourists passing through or staying in towns I visited.

While there, I listened to their stories. Somewhere I have a handwritten collection of these new but familiar lives; however, the handwriting sits in another part of the house right now so I'll have to tell the specifics of those stories another time.

Meanwhile, these people continue to live their lives, from a high-density/high-value steel salesman rushing back to Wisconsin to a kid dripping ice cream in the heat of the sun.

I traveled to another place and time, back to the land where I grew up, and heard the echoes of ancestors long gone in the voices of people living today.

As a child, I had little input or major say in the workings of the local socioeconomic system. I was formed by it and contributed in small ways, such as door-to-door sales of trinkets to raise money for school events or civic duties carried out in the name of Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. I mowed the lawns of widows, charging low fees and sitting down for an hour or two afterward, talking about life changes while sipping a cup of lemonade or cold iced tea. Such a childhood lifestyle may still exist there. I do not know.

Some of the large-scale employers that pumped money into the local economy have left or gone out of business. Many of the vibrant communities full of children have turned into established neighborhoods for retirees and the elderly. Signs posted in front of churches and community centers have changed from "Mom's Morning Out" to "Alzheimer's/Dementia Adult Day Care."

Some things haven't changed. The crisp mountain air still invigorates one's sense of being. Bays Mountain Park still has a planetarium (but updated the equipment to star/planet/video projections fancier than even the big cities have). Gem mines still operate roadside tourist flume mining. And people still have opinions they're not afraid to share.

I am generally happy but yesterday and today I have nursed a "blue moon" headache attributable to working in an open pit mine on Tuesday and moving small boulders to get to pieces of gemstones such as black tourmaline, aquamarine and ball garnets, stretching and contorting my back and neck muscles. A headache clearly indicates I am alive (for which I'm always happy to see) but obscures my ability to see into the future* [a joke I'll talk about later]. Plus, I have breathed in too many feldspar and mica particles from the dust stirred up while hammering on rocks, enflaming my nasal passages and affecting my ability to breathe clearly.

How do you reconnect to the natural world? Or do you even bother to cut yourself off from the electronic, virtual world?

I enjoy the benefits that global connectivity provides, rejoicing when websites broadcast the news of people protesting against inequality or laughing when someone sends me a funny email or video, but I don't stay connected all the time. Many people I know have fallen into the habits of being connected all the time, exhibiting traits of addiction when they "have to" get online because of physical withdrawal symptoms. From what I've seen, the world hasn't fallen apart when I've been disconnected. In fact, I think some people are glad not to hear from me, content that I take breaks from blogging occasionally.

Over the past few days, I listened to opinions that I didn't agree with and opinions I understood - seven billion people have seven billion different views - diversity in action, no matter whether it's governed, regulated, officially approved, frowned upon or outlawed.

From what I gathered in those opinions, there is no magic dust that will solve all the world's problems or make successful solutions even better.

Underneath our feet, we have many treasures, including coal, oil, water, gold, silver and gemstones. To get to the treasures, one has to do a little bit of work - the more people coordinating their activities around treasure hunting, the easier the treasures can be found and gathered, all while they hold completely different views about how the treasures will be used.

We only have this planet to live on right now. (Sure, we have dreams about reaching and colonizing the moon and other planets, which will happen eventually but for only a few dozen or hundred people in the next 50 years. For the rest of us, Earth is our home.) Barring any extraterrestrial interference, very little will interrupt our progress toward highly-interconnected societies, where we will more and more virtually see into each others' houses, lives and bodies. In other words, privacy becomes redefined but don't equate changes in privacy with changes in freedom. A transparent life available for view 24 hours a day is not the same as a life restricted from acting freely.

*I cannot see the future. What I have is what everyone else has, the ability to read and assimilate more material available at my fingertips than ever before. Plus I have freedom to write about whomever I wish to be, not held to a strict line of thought or reasoning tied to a particular moneymaking channel. I explore possible lives because I want to see life from many human perspectives. From my exploration, I imagine what a planet full of people I've imagined will be like in moments to come. In my imagination, easier to expand with my eyes closed but working all the time, I envision changes in the current population that reflect historic changes because the human condition is still the same, although it adds evolutionary changes (changes that build upon one another, not necessarily ones that have biological origins) and rarely any revolutionary changes.

For instance, we all have a past which includes biological lineage and cultural upbringing. We react to our past in different ways, with some people wanting to maintain a life within the bounds of ancestral behavior and some people wanting to overcome the restrictions of the past. Our reasons vary but can be generalized. Research institutes measure these generalizations in order to help organizations plan ahead, hoping to capture the attention of trendsetters or people in subcultures and use that attention for various purposes such as product sales and government changes.

Humans have a limited attention span - the more our attention is distracted, the smaller the span of our attention, leading to a culture of many who profess conditions such as attention deficit disorder but it doesn't have to be that way.

If you're going to work and play in the global connectivity space, do so with your opinions open to healthy changes but your goals and objectives always focused on yourself and your family. You are the most important person in the universe - I see that at all times but others may not because they've expanded their goals and objectives to include you knowingly or unknowingly to the exclusion of your goals and objectives. The global workplace/playspace gives more people a chance to pull you into their focus - be willing to listen to what they say because we can learn something new all the time but give yourself the room and time to be free to live your own life.

We all have stories to tell, every one of them important, even if others don't have time to listen. Don't stop telling your stories. Don't stop being you. In the Internet age, our lives become transparent and we're free to celebrate our lives with the rest of the world. We can work together to keep governments, corporations and other human organizations from restricting our freedom to be ourselves by celebrating each other's right to be, within the bounds of common courtesy and prevention of danger to others' lives, of course.

What's Your Viewpoint?

My father sent me the following - my response is posted at the bottom of this blog entry:

From SUN newspapers, 06Jul09

American revolution sustained by foresight, realism
As a nation, we were extraordinarily blessed in our revolutionaries. It wasn’t just that they were brave and determined. So were the avatars of revolution throughout the 20th century who wrecked nations and peoples. No, what makes them so wondrously distinct is that they were also just and wise, grounded always in a clear eyed view of human nature.
“There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, “which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.” When revolutionaries talk of depravity, it is often to brand their class or ethnic enemies for destruction. Gas chambers, prison camps and killing fields inevitably follow.
The depravity of which our Founders spoke was different. It ran through the hearts of all men, themselves included. It tempered their expectations of what they could, and what they should attempt to, achieve. No secular millennium, no perfectly harmonious republic — because, as Madison wrote, “the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man.”
“Enthusiasm there certainly was — a revolution is impossible without enthusiasm,” Irving Kristol writes of 1776, “but this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt, introspection, anxiety, skepticism. This may strike us as a very strange state of mind in which to make a revolution; and yet it is evidently the right state of mind for making a successful revolution.”
The Revolution was institutionalized in the Constitution, an inspired exercise in leveraging human failings against one another — “ambition counteracts ambition” — to create a stable structure of liberty.
“It may be a reflection on human nature,” Madison wrote in the famous passage in Federalist No. 51, “that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
How did the Founders come to know man as they did? They had broad, practical experience that exposed them to humanity in its glory and its folly: as lawyers, military officers and — especially important — legislators. Some knew hardship. Try, like Alexander Hamilton, making your way as a penniless, orphaned bastard from the West Indies and see if you don’t pick up a few hardboiled lessons about how the world works.
They read widely, knew the classics and soaked up history. John Adams studied and wrote a book about the French civil wars of the 16th century, concluding of human affairs: “Reason holds the helm, but passions are the gales.” Madison undertook a yearlong study of the history of republics and confederacies prior to the writing of the Constitution. Believing “experience is the oracle of truth,” he endeavored to learn from this long, unrelieved record of failure.
They didn’t let their view of reality get obscured by abstruse theories or sunny abstractions of the sort that perverted the French Revolution. No philosophes need apply. Instead, a residual Calvinism tinged their worldview. They admired the “country” tradition in England, characterized by a deep distrust of the crown and support for republican reforms to preserve English liberties. In this tradition, the late historian Martin Malia writes, “men were neither rational nor naturally good,” and “human government therefore invariably tended toward corruption and despotism.” In keeping with their lively view of human fallibility, our revolutionaries set about circumscribing government to limit its abuse. After a false start under the Articles of Confederation and its enfeebled federal government, the Constitution struck a proper and enduring balance. It wasn’t quite a “miracle.” It was assuredly the work of men — not just supremely talented statesmen and political thinkers, but some of the best social scientists the world has ever known.

My response:
Good article, Dad. Whereas Madison had to spend a year researching the history of republics and confederacies, quite possibly because it took a while to get the books he needed, we now have such history available to us via the Internet (if we allow ourselves free time to study history, of course). With the adoption of cell phones and the Internet, we humans have set a course for global connectivity which includes communicating instantly with one another across political borders. Hopefully, the lessons we humans learned in forming a government which promotes individual freedoms and rights will carry us to higher ground, freeing pockets of repressed people around the world without allowing large organizations to exploit the concept of freedom to enslave us economically by tying all of us together electronically in the name of free speech.

I wonder where we're headed. I hear many people speak of losing our freedom in many ways, from our credit/medical records being available everywhere to having CCTV and webcams pointed at unsuspecting citizens on the street. Instead of viewing this as the coming apocalypse or nightmare version of the books "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "Animal Farm," I believe we humans are finding new ways to define what it's like to be a social species. For instance, by making our medical records publicly available, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to see trends that weren't readily available when all our records were private, allowing us to analyze human nutritional needs to improve quality of life and increase average lifespan.

You and Mom taught me to see the world optimistically. I am taking that optimistic view to incorporate technological changes positively, being active in promoting new inventions for the betterment of humanity and not sitting on the sideline worrying about losing freedoms. We see too many people whining and complaining about where the world's headed and not enough people doing something to make positive changes. Government belongs to the people and if we don't actively participate, then it's somebody else who decides what government does. I thank you all for teaching me social responsibility.

Love,
Rick

A few days of relaxation...

May you find the time to live outside of time for a while. I'm taking a few days away from blogging to think and live, wondering if this space is where I want to continue to be. I may return here. I may not. I write and writing here means feeling the Internet and globalthink in my self-discovery moments. I am not the Internet and globalthink only occupies my thoughts in brief moments but appears magnified by my writing in the blogging sphere. Time to take a break and be me, the writer, somewhere else, me away from you and you away from me. In other words, taking freedom to another place without time or space involved. You understand.

Rules of the Game

I see people as autonomous creatures, able to make decisions about themselves that can change the direction of their lives in dramatic ways. Then I look at what I think I see and realize I'm looking through a set of microscope lenses, zeroed in on humans as we imagine ourselves, one person at a time.

I talk to individuals, people like Charline, Frank and Terry, see myself through their eyes and wonder what they think they look like through my eyes. I use facial expressions, body postures and voice inflections.

I am human so all I'm doing in that case is what every human has ever done who can see and think.

In addition to what a body shows me I also use cultural clues such as language and clothing to untangle the knots that we form when we imagine what a person sees that we see in that person who sees what we think we see in ourselves as reflections as that person who cannot see what we really think we think we look like in that person's thoughts. And so on...

While all that happens, comets, asteroids and meteors zip through space not thinking at all, but reacting to other bodies just the same.

As we make decisions about what we're going to do, we do so on the assumption that 1) we're pretty much stuck on this planet, and 2) a comet, asteroid or meteor is not about to hit the planet and wipe out life as we know it.

Other than that, we have a wide variety of options available to us.

Yet we often act as if we're in a game with rigid rules, either rules set by others or rules set by ourselves for ourselves.

Do you believe in a set of rules? Do you act as if you have no control over what's going to happen in the next moment because you know something disastrous is going to happen? Do you expect every moment to bring you good results no matter what others think the results look like to them?

You may speak one language or multiple languages/dialects simply because of where you grew up, completely unaware of the normality of your language set(s) compared to other cultures. You carry your vocabulary with you because of your social setting, not because there is a universal language requirement or set of language rules for humans. Your brain's capacity for synaptic connections, determined by genetics and aided by childhood nurturing, may allow you to learn many human cultural communication techniques including language syntax rules and mathematical equation solving, but no matter how much you can memorize or process, you operate from within one human body in a network of human bodies.

There are no permanent rules. There's only us finding ways to behave around us while ensuring our success from moment to moment. With no rules forever frozen in clay tablets, etched on stone or written on papyrus/rice paper, we can decide as a global population what is most important for us, regardless of human history or previous belief in eternal rules.

We cannot change what happened in the past but we can rewrite history to meet the needs of current populations, always turning our lives into meaningful stories.

You're here because you can read these words in one language or another, from one cultural background or many cultural backgrounds, and from the perspective of one person. I'm here because I'm looking ahead to the next moment while enjoying writing in this moment.

In a moment, some things interesting are going to happen. A nation-state is going to declare itself null and void, giving its pieces over to the people through corporate ownership, individual ownership and global heritage sites, leaving other nation-states in a quandary. Some nation-states are going to band together and wipe out a group of people without a country who are opposed to individual freedom. History will be rewritten once again, wiping out the stories of people who believed in freedom while keeping other people enslaved. The human population will expand into the warming territories and archipelagos of the Northern Hemisphere. Most everyone you know will strongly support or oppose these changes, leaving you to laugh and wonder how to get people to find a middle ground devoid of irrational emotional arguments free of outdated hard-and-fast rules.

I'll see you in the next moment. You bring whatever rules and language(s) you want. We'll see what we see in each other and go from there.

Sunlight

Taught class last night - Linux, or rather, Unix-based CLI entry is tough on the students but helps them see what a computer is all about, not just GUIs, games and pretty pictures, but also job control, gaim, and data flow.

Stopped at Bella Beads this morning and bought the string of fire opals for my wife as an early wedding anniversary present. Shopped at The Booklegger used book store and bought the following:

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now by Maya Angelou
• Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom
• A Certain World: A Commonplace Book by W.H. Auden

I bought "Little Women" so I could slip the fire opals in as a surprise for my wife at lunch, making her think the string of opals was a bookmark. The surprise worked! We further enjoyed lunch with our friends Neal, Tricia and Ginger at Beauregard's restaurant. Hard to believe Ginger has three children now, or that Neal's children are grown and Tricia is a grandmother.

The Maya Angelou book is my introduction to her writing, not having read much more than excerpts of Maya's work in book review form.

The Mitch Albom novel is a revisit to the story, having seen a play at the Seattle Repertory Theater a few years ago based on Mitch's novel.

The Auden book is a reminder to me that all that's old is new again and the blogging world is really just a reenactment or living version of a commonplace book.

Ate a delicious, sweet BBQ sandwich and bowl of pinto beans at Big Cove BBQ a couple of days ago, seeing Chris Kelly, a former radio DJ who used to host Monday Night Football parties at a bar/pool hall called the Hard Rack Cafe. We reminisced with him about the old call, "Quarterback sack, drink a shot of Jack," that he yelled out during the NFL football games on Monday nights. Those were the days...seems like the Broncos and the Packers were the hot teams back then.

Today's the last official day of work for the director of the local facility of the technical institute, Jamie - hope she enjoys her term of office at the Knoxville facility. My old stomping grounds...hmm... okay, enough with the reminiscing. I'm not in an old folks' home just yet!

Time to enjoy a little afternoon delight - sunshine, that is - and see if there's any turkey BBQ left in the icebox. Can't wait to see the fire opals around my wife's neck, the kind of sparkle in sunlight that really gets me going. Hey, I'm a guy, not a robot. Food's not the only thing I get an appetite for. Deal with it.

Whose Money Is It?

Last night, while sitting at a desk in the faculty office of the technical institute, I listened to full-time faculty discuss what they should put on expense reports to claim as reimbursable items. While they debated writing down mileage driven to/from work and foodstuff purchased for personal use in meetings/classrooms, I thought about the expense reports I had submitted or approved while working for other companies.

In the act of performing your job duties, what is a reasonable expense for your job (or any job, if there are such things as universal duties) versus what are expenses that go above and beyond reasonable expectations?

From my experience, I suspect some people view companies as cash cows and the employees are allowed to feed off the company until the company says "no." Other people view companies they work for as if they're the owners and they take care not to syphon cash from a company so the company has the opportunity to use its money for dividends to stockholders, rewards to employees, community development, stock repurchase and/or increase in research and development.

Ultimately, approval of an expense report rests on the shoulders of the supervisory/management job holders, no matter whether the organization is public or private, because the supervisors and managers are the caretakers of an organization (or should be).

I am not you. I don't know what motivates you to get up in the morning and find something to eat. I don't know if you have more money than you need but not more than you want (or think you need). I don't know if you struggle to feed a family with 10 children. I am like you, though, in that I'm a human living on this planet. I know what humans are capable of, from the grandest dreams to the vilest deeds - people will do whatever it takes to get what they think they need.

I don't expect humans to constantly make altruistic decisions or think conscientiously. Too many of us (and I include me here, of course) walk through the day on autopilot, having thoughts without thinking. We have our rutted paths that we take in comfort, or if we don't we seek them. This is not just human nature, it's life itself that optimizes energy output in order to minimize energy input (or vice versa, I suppose).

So, when you sit down to fill out an expense report, are you "taking care of number one" and getting all the money a company will give you, or are you viewing a company and its money as representative of a group of humans of which we're all a part, making sure that the money you don't try to claim is being spent by the company in ways that are beneficial to the whole (as opposed to hoarded by a few)?

A company is just an entity, a corpus without a body. For the most part, you can find out what the company is made of and how its inputs and outputs work. Sometimes you have to ask to get more information but most companies will share information with you if you can easily prove your intent is to find out and support the company's investment goals. The technical institute for which I provide temporary services has public documents that allow me to trace its investments - I can comfortably say the institute has satisfied my desire to see them support the local and regional communities so I am interested in making sure they have the money to continue this support, including careful scrutiny of expense reports.

A company that simply builds cash reserves with no other goal than to protect itself has, in my opinion, little chance of being protected by its caretakers - the supervisors and management - who hold the spigot of the flow of company cash. Government entities and the companies contracted to work for them are often encouraged to overspend so that budgets do not get decreased the next year, thus pushing people in the public sector to approve excessive expense reports when yearly expenditures have been too lean. People voice their opinions and demonstrate habits in many ways - the silent expense report approval process is one of them.

The wise person keeps a finger on the pulse of the company s/he works for, including what people are saying about expense reports. If many people are padding their expense reports and getting them approved up the management chain, it says a lot about the company and the people who work for it. I've worked for companies where the president/CEO reviewed expense reports down to the level of pencil purchases - that's a bad sign of both mistrust and poor cash flow, especially for a company with more than a few hundred employees. On the other hand, I've worked for companies where the monetary approval levels were mere guidelines and large purchases were approved with hardly a glance because people were moving in and out of jobs so fast during periods of quick company expansion that no one worried about repercussions/reprimands. In both cases, the actions spoke volumes about the companies' conditions and the employees who worked there.

What are expense reports saying about your workplace? What are your expense report requests saying about you? I guess it depends on whose money you think it is and how much you want/need to support your habits.

After writing this blog entry, I don't feel good; however, it reflects how I felt last night after hearing some of the requests and assumptions about what one person could put on an expense report. I still have a knot in my stomach and don't believe I can look one person in the eye again. But I'm going to try to see eye-to-eye so I can keep a line of communication open with that person and hope to get that person to see the world as a group of us. When we take from anyone or anything, there are consequences that go beyond the immediate, that go outside the moments in which we live. The pebbles we drop make waves that live into the next moment for us and others - live your life as if you're the pebble, the waves, the next moments and the others.

Do You Believe What You See?

In this room where I write, I have one of those desktop globes that allows me to spin a political version of planet Earth. The globe is decades old and includes political entities like the USSR which no longer exist. Disregarding those human labels, I see vast expanses of water surrounding a few pieces of land, not all of which is arable. On that land is where the vast majority of human animals live (the rest are a few million traveling from one piece of land to another using floating transport vehicles, flying vehicles and vehicles orbiting our planet).

So, we humans cover the whole planet but only live on a part of it, including the shrinking amount of arable land (approximately 31 million square kilometers that loses about 200,000 square kilometers of arability a year due to various factors).

Currently about seven billion people have to share that arable land. It'll be nine billion before you know it, maybe even 12 or 20 billion before you think about it again. At some point we will reach a 1:1 ratio of persons to square kilometers of arable land.

As the human population grows, political entities will change shape. Many political entities were formed to give people of similar geographic and visible body features a place to call their own. As our population becomes more connected, more affluent and more mobile, one no longer has a geographic or body feature that is distinct from anyone else's. It will no longer make sense to say you are Japanese, African, Chinese or Australian because you will live in many different places, following the migration of people with your work speciality. You will designate your affiliation not by nation-state but by workplace. Country-based passports will become passe'.

While traveling the world, eating local food and enjoying local customs, will a time come when you will have to show that you have your own arable land that supports others while you're away, a type of barter system that overrides a money exchange system? In other words, you will no longer belong to a nation-state but to a food production system. Perhaps the workplace will own/sponsor arable land for its employees so that city-based workers will not have to actually work the land themselves. However, should you become redundant, what then? What about those who grow their own private stash of food that they don't register with the food production system - if found guilty of "hoarding," will they have to sacrifice their share of public/private arable land?

Your children and grandchildren will face these issues. In fact, these issues are in front of us today if we look for them, where companies are buying up large portions of seed production and arable land. To be sure, these companies are creating economies of scale that "act" in the interest of the companies' stockholders. At the same time, they're prepared for the future when food production may or may not become a high-value means of barter/exchange in the global economy.

As we humans have shown, when the price of food increases too fast or food becomes scarce, people react in violent ways, attacking the foundations of local government through riots or coup attempts. They also attack symbols of commerce such as storefronts, raiding the inventory of local shopkeepers, even those who have no involvement with the cause for the chaos.

How do we as a global population overcome such potential downfalls of future food shortages? We empower ourselves, using communication methods like twitter and whatever else comes next to redirect resources on an ongoing basis rather than let misguided market forces push us to speculative cost hikes. Some of you may say that you don't have time to keep up with these issues but if food, fuel or other basic needs of yours are unimportant, what is?

I look out of my window and have a tiny view of a neighbor's yard, covered in an inedible grassy plain. Beyond the neighbor are literally thousands of similar yards with chemically-treated greenscapes that were once fields of soybean, cotton and/or corn in the past few years. Some days, I don't believe what I see, rooftops where foodcrops used to be.

Freedom of information is important, as demonstrated many times over in the course of human history. If you read this blog entry, you now see that information exchange empowers you to choose freely. Which is more important to you, saying you belong to a particular nation-state or saying that you belong to the global population that's seeking borderless ways to feed itself for generations to come? If you choose the latter, are you going to convert your lawn to the production of foodstuff or keep the aesthetic quality of a lush green lawn for resale value? In either case, will your offspring be able to claim arable land for themselves or depend on ever-increasing food prices to decrease their overall net worth and/or buying power?

Off With Your Head

"But, King, sir, we have tried everything possible. At this time, we do not have the technology ready to..."

"Professor, I appreciate your candor. However, in my reign the words 'no,' 'not,' and 'never' have little meaning. You will find a way to get this done before I die."

"But..."

"And if you would like, I can send you to our weather station in Antarctica should you be unable to accomplish this simple task I assigned you."

"Yes, your kingship. I understand. My team will comply with your demands."

"As you wish." The king waved the group of scientists out of his conference room and turned to his advisor.

"So, Makeyon, what is your analysis of the situation?"

"Sir, if I may be so candid?"

"Anytime."

"My understanding of the technology is that to recreate a brain as magnificent as yours is, we would need every detail of your life to feed the body attached to the brain and we..."

"What?! Have scribes not recorded every word I've spoken. Have video crews not followed me every day of my life? What more do you need?!"

"Your lordship, we...I mean, they believe that in order to recreate a person just like you, they need to grow a duplicate using your internal interpretation of the external input. Every attempt so far has created a person who believes he is greater than you."

"Greater than me?!"

"Uh...yes, King. But we have destroyed these impertinent impostors."

"Destroyed them? Hmm...all of them?"

"No, your highness."

"Good." The king waved his advisor out of the room.

The king walked out to the balcony and waved at the throng of fans who stood in the palace square day and night. Sometimes all it took was glowing adoration to feed his thought process and he would discover a new way to apply science and technology to the exuberant growth of his people's kingdom.

He paced back and forth, nodding to himself sometimes and shaking his head other times.

The people below stood quietly, knowing their leader was about to speak.

He stepped up onto the podium. "My people, I welcome you!"

The crowd yelled back in unison, "We welcome you, King, and wish you good health!"

"Today, I stand here before you a new man, invigorated by your presence."

"We feel your strength! We wait for wisdom!"

"I have consulted with the greatest minds this kingdom or any other civilization has ever produced. They tell me that in my genetic makeup is a man who is wiser and greater than I am."

The crowd booed.

The king held up his hand. "I know. I know. Blasphemous words. However, I understand what they are saying, for it is with time that I have grown to become your humble leader. Although I was born poor, my mind was sharp and my courage great. So it is that I have fed this body and this mind the cornucopia of food that your hard work has produced so that I could lead you to wonders no kingdom has ever seen!"

The crowd cheered.

The king raised his arms up to encourage more cheering. "Thank yourselves for your achievements!"

The crowd cheered for several minutes while the king raised his fists and shook them. Finally, the king held his hands up to quiet the crowd.

"You have been patient, my people, waiting to see when I would produce an heir. My son will soon be ready to appear before you." A cheer arose but the king held up his hand. "I promise he is a man 10 times stronger than I and many times smarter for his genes are my genes but his wisdom and training much greater because he has the resources of the kingdom that you provided him that I did not have as a child!"

The crowd cheered again.

"You are the reason for our glorious accomplishments! My destiny is your destiny. Your destiny is my son's destiny!"

The king held up his fists and let the cheering crowd lift his spirit and carry him back into the royal conference room. He pointed at the robotic assistant which always followed him with a video recorder, carrying other means to record the king's presence, such as an infrared heat sensor and remote body function measurement instruments.

"Tell the scientists to prepare my young self as he is. I can no longer wait for them to perfect me as I am. Perhaps their technological shortcomings will work to my advantage after all."

Technology News Today

The People's Communist Republic government announced today the purchase of Google. In response to why a national communist government would be interested in commercial development, the prime minister said that the government was tired of seeing people have a good time without benefiting the people.

The government intends to turn all commercial software into research projects, such as the recent purchase of the game software, The Sims, tying them to the country's scientific and political laboratories, using the combined minds of all people in gaming and on the Internet to improve living and working conditions for all the world population.

"We will not allow the wasteful habits of the people ruin the planet," the prime minister declared at a public rally this afternoon. "In future, all games or other distracting means for humans to idle their productive minds will be rewritten so that when humans think they are entertaining one another, they instead will use their gaming scenarios to help us reach our destiny!"

The head of the Department For The Advancement of Human Communication joined the prime minister and demonstrated a means to convert text messaging into a 'Power For The People' database to help the Ministry of Social Adjustment analyze citizens' individual brain functionality for further retraining needs.

No longer will the people be required to attend weekly social center functions but instead will benefit from the individualized advertisement system just released by the Department For Happy Thoughts for use on all next-generation cellphones and Internet television devices.

"The people have spoken and we are here to meet the people's demands!" the prime minister shouted over the cheering voices of the People's Youth Parade gathered to see the concert by one of the latest popular music singers, Yao Soo Yoong.

If Nothing Is New...

I saw a person post the phrase "there's no mystery in history" the other day. I don't know why the person posted the phrase. Instead, I wondered why the person doesn't plumb the riches that history provides, teaching us about what humans have already discovered so we can seek new experiences or at least new combinations of former human experiences.

When we see modern history taking shape before our eyes, I believe we would understand the near-term consequences of historic changes in our lifetime if we had stronger memories of similar historic changes from the distant past. Why only live in the moment if we can take advantage of human accomplishments from the past to add value to the moment and the future close at hand?

As we connect ourselves together using today's technologies like computers and cellphones so we can communicate using text, voice and video, as well as tomorrow's technologies like brain wave scanners and pheromone detectors/emitters so we can communicate in more human bodily terms, we'll give each other access to not only immediate experiences but also the collective memories of all of us, including everyday events like waking, eating and sleeping, revelations that lead to new breakthroughs and reading/memorization of historic facts.

There may be no mystery in history but without memorizing the history embedded in language, our world would not be the same (I certainly wouldn't be here).

In the next few years, as we find ways to incorporate new communication devices in our daily lives that'll bypass or supplement the keyboard interface, let's also figure out a way to advance the study of history so we can keep our discoveries in perspective, using the search engines and wikipedias of today to enhance our quest to reveal the truly exciting mysteries of tomorrow.

Imagine finding a way to train the brain to forego the final filter effect of using our bodies to communicate (ten-finger typing, for instance) and communicating on a whole new level that'll require retraining our thought process for channels of thoughts associated with interpreting not only the five senses but direct synapse-to-synapse connections with other humans (and perhaps other animals, as well). If a wired monkey can operate a robot arm and a brainwave scanner allows a human to operate a wheelchair, then the next step is connecting two living beings together to communicate directly and see what happens. Will they synchronize their brainwave patterns and thus become one virtual brain? If we wired a primate who knows sign language to another primate who does not know sign language, could the first primate teach the second primate through thought training only, using visual clues at first until they both understood that the direct empathic thought process does the same trick, just like the rubber hand illusion makes a person sense a fake arm as real?

Life as we know it is an illusion created by the bodies we are. Nothing new there. However, we humans are creating new life for ourselves and our sense of the universe around us. Today, we deceive ourselves into believing we must wear face/body makeup and underarm deodorant/antiperspirant to mask our real existence as ordinary primates. Tomorrow, we may bypass the whole primate existence by becoming virtual extensions of sensors not yet invented or even ones in use today (infrared, X-ray, gamma ray, UV/solar energy, high-frequency sound/vibration, etc.).

What if you could look out upon a crop of plants using your network of webcams, "see" stress in the plants in the infrared range, search your extended memory for causes of stress, realize your automated computer monitoring system has encountered an usual set of soil conditions, correct the conditions and return the plants to maximum growth while at the same time coming up with a method to post-harvest process the plants' chemical composition to increase the nutritional value for human use that also added to the recyclable value of the plant parts not eaten, including their use in constructing play areas for children in drought-ridden zones around the world, all while spending a relaxing fun time with your family on a picnic?

The future is here, stress-free and exciting. Nothing may be new under the sun and there may be no mystery in history but that doesn't stop me from finding new ways to enjoy the repeat of history: humans being humans in ways unimaginable!

Conversation

"You know what I miss most, Zhou?"

"What's that, Rajen?"

"The red dust in my clothes and the sound of the Martian wind blowing against the observation window."

Zhou looked out the portal at the shrinking image of Mars. He turned to Xiaoke, his wife and fellow traveler on the multimonth journey to Earth to visit her dying grandparents. They held hands, smiled and nodded at Rajen, whose wife, Beena, was asleep in the traveling quarters.

Zhou and Xiaoke had left their children to take care of their Martian home during this two-year trip, assuming their genetically-perfect breeding and accelerated training had prepared them for such an absence by their parents.

"I see what you mean, Rajen, but you can imagine I miss my children more."

"Indeed. I look forward to seeing mine back on Earth. Mentally merging memories is one thing but actually touching your kids is another."

Xiaoke leaned forward. "I agree. I can sense the smell of Earth up here," tapping her forehead, "but I want to know what my nose detects. Perhaps there is a discernable difference!"

Beena coasted into the room. "And to dig my hands into a pile of fresh curry!"

They all laughed, a snorting sound that Martian residents develop due to gravitational effects on their physical features and changes in lung capacity from breathing filtered and conditioned Martian air. They would spend a week or so adapting to Earth conditions as well as sharing their new Martian accent with friends and colleagues they'd left behind many years ago.

Where Are You, My Little Green Friends?

Of the many voices I hear every year, two have disappeared. I'm not sure if the absence is intentional or accidental. Has disease wiped out the voices' owners? Have migration patterns moved the voices to other parts of the world? Perhaps a few years of drought have pushed the voices' species to extinction in the environment I live.

I don't know the reason(s). I simply miss hearing the voice of the tree frogs, the sound of spring's arrival and summer's promise, a hint of fireflies, stirring up thoughts of cicadas and katydids, with cricket choruses just around the next bend of time's path I travel.

I rely upon the birds, instead, the cardinal and chickadee, the goldfinch and wren. The call of the crow and the twirl of the woodpecker add to natural sounds that make up my day.

But I still miss the tree frogs' cranky voice and creaky call. A bullfrog's harrumph is not enough.

The Hands of a Worker

Do you have a place you call home ("home" being a term for the environment in which you were primarily nurtured as a child and/or the environment in which you have nurtured your own offspring)?

My home was not just the places where I lived with my parents but also television shows, movies, books and the people I met from other places. In other words, my home had tendrils that reached out beyond the physical environment I directly touched or saw. Very few of us had homes that didn't have these same kinds of tendrils. Thus, the interconnectivity we see in communication methods like the Internet is not new.

My wife and I have been discussing the trend in the Western world that takes people out of the traditional Judeo-Christian belief system and into a looser network of "soul nourishment" centers, moving away from the old hierarchical church/synagogue setup and into independent groups of people who gather for moral/ethical training. We've watched the general decline in the number of people claiming a specific label for their style of weekly meditation and wondered where the trend is heading. Are we freeing ourselves from one set of restrictions just to adopt another, or are we preparing ourselves for real freedom, where management and labor, rich and poor, and other groups of opposites can shed the label of opposites and come up with a set of human objectives on which we can all agree?

I saw an article on independent.ie about companies in India buying up large farms in Africa in order to efficiently grow and transport food back home. China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia were also cited in the article as having companies with hundreds of thousands of hectares in Africa used for home food production.

What do you call home? Do you think of yourself in terms of nationalist labels (Chinese, Indian, British, Canadian, American, Honduran, Brazilian, Lebanese, Russian, Lithuanian, etc.)? If so, perhaps you add a regional name to the label, also? Instead, what if you saw yourself as a citizen of Earth first?

Over the next couple of decades, current nation-states will cooperate in sending people to populate or spend long periods of time on other planetary bodies, including our moon and Mars. At some point in time, the first baby will be conceived "off-world," so to speak. That child will force us to define humans as either Earth-born or born off-world. At that point, the concept of Earth-based nation-states will lose meaning. No doubt, the first off-world children will be thought of as having heritages tied to former nation-states (you can bet the first nation-state to have a child conceived off-world will make a big deal of it) but subsequent generations of off-world children will call themselves moon babies or Martians. Some may even call space platforms their home.

When we Earthians see our descendants looking back down on us from another planetary body they call home, what will we feel? Many of us won't feel any different, consumed as we are by our daily lives.

I have a framed photo of a person whose hands are rough and calloused, the hands of a worker. The fingernails are closely cropped. The knuckles stand out. I can imagine the type of work those hands have produced. They may have laboured in soil, laboured in factory work and laboured in housework.

The first inhabitants of an offworld home will represent humanity in all its glory and accomplishments. They will depend on food produced on Earth, no matter where the food came from or where the labourers who prepared the food called home - they will simply be glad the food came from abundant fields on Earth, their home planet. They will be glad that humans came together for one common goal: to move our species to other parts of the solar system to increase the chance of our surviving cataclysmic changes on Earth.

At some point in time, our moral and ethical training will completely move in the direction of promoting survival/growth of humans as a solar system species, not as opposing religious/nation-state groups poised for battle on Earth. Along the way, we'll still have entrenched business owners and religious/nation-state leaders who want to buy and sell war as a concept, taking advantage of our emotions and turning us against one another (even I catch myself using phrases like "competitive advantage" to promote societal changes) - we are still primates, with all our primate genes intact.

Where do you call home? Earth is my home. You are my fellow housemates on this planet. I apologize to you for the times I don't recycle when I can or don't eat less meat than I should. I'm imperfect just like you so I keep you in mind when I don't use chemical fertilizers to artificially stimulate my yard and don't use a lawnmower to produce fields of grass in front of my house. This planet belongs to all of us and if you want any or all of us to survive a few thousand more years, think about your descendants who'll wonder from their Martian kitchens what's going on with their ancestors on Earth. It might even include using time on the computer wisely and spending some time outdoors - when you do, take time to look up because someday someone will be looking back at you from someplace they call home (similar to but not exactly like the way space station inhabitants look down on us now).

Rolling Up My Shirt Sleeves

Is anything inevitable? Looking at my favourites, items that I recall with visual acuity, will I inevitably return to them out of habit or when I want reassurance about who I am? I say that I am not the objects around me and yet I know I am. I am not me without them.

Am I also the objects that do not factor into my list of favourites, the thousands of stimuli I encounter everyday no matter whether I don't want to encounter them? If my eyes pass over an object but I do not consciously recognize that object in the moment, what effect does that object have on me?

My wife and I sat in the restaurant, Dreamland BBQ, yesterday afternoon. The store has several television appliances tuned to sports-related channels as well as one or two general news-related channels. On the main television screen, two guys were wearing gloves and fighting each other, using punches and kicks in order to disable the other guy. My wife doesn't like the sight of blood and didn't want to see the guys bloodying each other up but she also couldn't resist glancing at the fight because of her habit of watching television. I told her she didn't have to watch the fight if it was upsetting her and she said she couldn't help it.

The fight ended a few minutes later, with one guy being awarded the victory on a split decision by the judges. To me, the fight was no worse than the schoolyard and neighborhood fights in which I participated, sometimes as winner and sometimes as loser. Bruises, cuts, scrapes and blood were par for the course, to mix metaphors.

While my wife and I enjoyed our meals, she was eating pork ribs and I was eating beef sausage, sharing bowls of baked beans and banana pudding between us, I wondered about the influence of that fight on my wife's thought process. Would the fight go from her short-term memory to long-term memory so that years from now I could ask her about that day we ate at Dreamland BBQ and were offered menus for the first time and she could respond, "And that cage fight, too!", reminding me of our server, Jami, who wore a religious symbol around her neck and had short brown hair, with what looked like a wedding band and engagement ring on her right hand?

Thoughts constantly swirl in our brains, reinforcing themselves while we make new thoughts and new memories at the same time. Protein synthesis strengthens the synaptic connections of some thoughts while other thoughts may fade with time because of our changing habits, changing venues, or changing health conditions.

Somewhere in my brain the memories of the cage fight will mix with my analysis of ourselves as overachieving primates and form a new set of memories that don't exactly reflect reality. They will be my memories, though, which live with me as long as I refresh those memories occasionally.

I am every thing that happens to be around me in this moment along with the memories of the things that were around me in previous moments.

Before we ate dinner, my wife and I stood in a little shop called Bella Beads and looked at natural stones and plastic beads. My wife was interested in finding metal framework to mount the gemstones we'd received in the mail yesterday morning. We talked with the shopkeeper whose husband had been rafting on the Ocoee River earlier in the day and was shopping at Unclaimed Baggage while we spoke. She suspended any work she had to perform to focus on us, gladly spending time looking at colored stones (I had never seen such a variety, including a string of fire opals that would light up a woman's neck and set her man ablaze (I told my wife that it was the first time I'd thought of rocks as aphrodisiacs)) and consulting with my wife about designing a necklace with pearls and gemstones. The woman has her own distinct personality but at the same time she reminded me of a cross between a colleague named Janet and my sister, which means my memory of the shopkeeper is overlaid with the memories of other people I know. The shopkeeper kept flyers on the counter about the 3/50 project, which my wife and I support without thinking about it - spending money at locally-owned, independently-operated stores before spending money at national chain stores.

Later on, while sitting in the car and watching people of all shapes and sizes (but limited cultural accoutrements) walk by the store, Ulta, where my wife was selecting some hair care products, I thought about the impact of what I know about the current state of human society on me and the objects around me. I return to those thoughts now... The trees outside my window carry the history of seasonal changes in their growth rings, including the times that humans swept through here and chopped down all large trees for their use in the last few hundred years which led to the current state of human society. The trees also reflect changes in local weather which may or may not be attributable to human influences. The trees are here in front of me only because the person who built this house decided not to cut them down; he, in turn, was here because his father owned a business that helped his son build houses for a living; and so on.

I have a limited view of the activities of humans and other objects on this planet that let me sit here and write these words. Through meditation and other relaxation techniques which cut out external influences on the moment, I can increase "global" access to my thoughts while later researching more human activities which will give me a larger view but I will never know everything going on all at once. The human population grows too quickly for me to keep up with seven billion individuals at the same time, assuming I had access to their thoughts and activities, which I don't.

The current state of the world of humans has changed many times since I started writing this blog entry. Millions of people have been born, injured, or killed. We can lump people into categories and make estimates about their activities from one state of the world to the next, can't we? After all, every person has a set of favourites: favourite food, favourite hobby, favourite people to hang out with, favourite place to sleep, favourite place to spend the day, etc.

If all of us are creatures of habit, who go about our lives with mainly a local point of view, seeking out our favourites while mixing in new activities for a bit of change every now and then, what will it take to get us to take a new stance, adopt a global viewpoint and see life as one active participant in a worldwide colony of human primates, individually acting toward the good of the whole in everything we do and everything we see?

Just before I fell asleep last night, I thought about the changes taking place in our local societies as more and more of us connect to the Internet. Many of us just like me will see humans in the light of a complete, global, set of us rather than compartmentalized sets, ignoring the calls of local leaders to maintain loyalties to the old ways of nation-states, shedding the ugliness of name-calling and nation-sized schoolyard fights, and join together to overcome the bullying tactics of megalomaniacs.

You wanna fight? Well, before you take on the easy target in front of you that you or someone else has trumped up as "the enemy", take a look in the mirror and see the enemy within you. That's who you're really fighting, isn't it, another human just like you? Don't let others convince you that someone out there is so much more different than you that you have to build up real or virtual walls to exclude "them."

In the not-so-distant future, we'll still have pockets of people dedicated to the preservation of their "pure" local cultures. But these will be anomalies, experiments we let continue happening as forms of control groups and pressure outlets for those unwilling to globalize - we may even create zones where people in those zones can only maintain local cultural practices. In the mainstream, people will coalesce, creating a global culture that includes a new religion not yet fully formed. We have hints about what the new culture will be like when we saw news this week of the death of a popular music icon and its effect on the Internet immediately following two smaller events, the violent reactions to election results in an Islamic nation and threat of Internet censorship by a large communist nation. But we're not there yet. It'll take more than the worldwide response to the "shock" of the death of a former bestselling musician to bring the world together. It'll either take a worldwide disaster that suddenly rips apart many cultures and mixes them together into one (the Great Recession came close, didn't it?), or it will take many more years of economic shifts for resistant cultures to merge (after all, we creatures of habit change slowly if we don't have to). Either way, the change is coming.

Your children and grandchildren have a higher chance of thinking of themselves as global citizens than you do. When you see it happen, don't think of it as something terrible or foreboding ill times ahead. Think of it as inevitable (it really happened the moment you bought them computers and cell phones - you just don't fully realize it yet). If you train your kids to embrace change while also understanding the consequences of their actions and the later influence of objects they encounter in the moment, you have nothing to fear about the future. They will decide what the future holds for their offspring and offspring's offspring. Instead of resisting their change to a global mindset, share your favourite local dives and habits with them so they can enjoy their global life on a local scale.

New Grill In Town

Last night, my wife and I ate at a new eatery, From The Grill, which sits in the location that has housed many other eateries across the road from Grissom High School. We enjoyed our meals, with my wife eating beef tips and me eating chicken and vegetables on skewers (i.e., "shish kebab").

Our server, Courtney, moved here about a year ago from Tampa, Florida. Slender and brown-eyed, she embued enthusiasm. If her cheerful countenance indicates the positive attitude and expectations of the owners, then I expect the restaurant to do well, having been open for about a month.

Friends of mine have owned, managed, and shut down restaurants. The eatery business is not one for the light-hearted.

What's the magic or secret to having a successful restaurant? Well, it's like everything else in business: a competitive advantage and good luck. I don't know the intentions of the owners of From The Grill. They may run the restaurant as a hobby, they may want to turn this into a franchise (this is their second location in Huntsville), or they may want to just have fun and the restaurant is their outlet for having a good time. Whatever their reason, we'll be back. There are too many menu choices not to give them a second or third opportunity to fill our bellies and make us laugh.

One suggestion before I go: I don't think you should offer a baked potato AND rice with skewered chicken. One or the other starch is fine. Maybe a cup of seasonal fruit would substitute for one or the other since the meal already comes with a small salad. And figure out some good background tunes or do something else because the restaurant decor didn't match the sports radio talk show playing on the overhead speakers that was used to hide the sounds from the kitchen. A lively kitchen can be part of the ambience, too, you know - it works at the Chef's Table and other eateries around town.

Labradorite

This morning, while waiting for the post office to open so I could pick up a package of polished gemstones from Emerald Village, I thought about why we let others make up the "family" tales we tell our children and ourselves. In other words, we use popular stories from our culture as well as commercialized and religious tales to educate and entertain ourselves but how often do we take the time to tell our true family stories to our families? Everyone I've met has good, funny, sad, enlightening or other honest accounts of themselves and their family members that have delighted me and would enliven others, too, but we seem too...
...I don't know... ...tired?... ...embarrassed?... ...shy?... ...to tell the world our family woes, wins and wonders.

At one time, I wanted to be a writer whose stories were read by many but then I realized that if others were reading my stories (which are fictionalized accounts of my life and the lives of people around me, including friends, coworkers and family), then I'm taking time away from their opportunities to tell their tales to their own friends, coworkers and family. Thus, I have written this blog - as well as poems, short stories, and novels - that discourages you from reading my work.

I encourage you to find the storyteller within you and spin tall tales about your ancestors or the people you've met, leaving your family richer in the telling. You don't have to become a published author or a famous speaker. You only have to write or talk to the person(s) beside you, the best kind of life to have.

On my desk sits a slab of labradorite, a stone that has blue-green reflections (also white and yellow) due to the color schiller effect of the chemical layers in the stone. We all may "just" be atomic collections walking around, but by golly there are some atomic collections that fascinate me, such as the color reflections in stone pieces like labradorite and opal, and the light that passes through a canopy of tree leaves.

We are primates, with everything that goes with that label. Today, I am generally happy, willing to put aside the disappointments of the past and enjoy this moment for what it's worth, holding a piece of labradorite up to the window and look at the yellow-green light passing through the woods and reflecting off the stone. I ask nothing else of this moment and I'm getting what I asked for - simplicity exemplified - my own prayer rug, meditation pillow, cathedral pew, mountain vista, and perfect cup of favorite beverage [tea/coffee/ouzo/water].

Why You Shouldn't Read This Blog

I am on a journey of self-discovery and ask no one to read this blog. If you happen to find interest in what I write, I'm telling you that I have no insight or foresight to offer you. I am just seeing what it is like to be one human being who didn't choose to be born and who experiences the seasonal changes that a planet tilted on its axis gives the living things on it as it revolves around the solar body that circles around a galaxy.

A redheaded woodpecker climbs the shagbark hickory tree outside the window, finding meals in the form of moths and other hidden insects. Some moths fly away in time to live a little longer. Tufted titmouse birds chase each other in and out of the wooded area surrounding this house. A squirrel crosses the hot asphalt of the street. A wasp bangs against the window screen. All of them may or may not be aware of me looking at them through a pane of glass and metal screen.

While I sit here letting unintended thoughts and word phrases slip out of sight of my main line of thought, pushing aside the mental signposts of recent social interaction, I ask myself questions. I examine myself as one person, as one species, as one living thing and as nothing separate from the universe.

I have no goals to accomplish in the form of human endeavors. I am free from needing to be heard in order to make sure I give or get a part of what other humans are getting or giving. In my thoughts, though, I still have silent discussions about images of humans in action so I am not completely free of being human. In fact, these very words keep me rooted in humanity.

I can remain here indefinitely, finding another set of words to write that don't exactly match any previous set of words I've written, implying that I'm participating in the life of other humans and willingly giving them something to do (actions like maintaining computer servers, designing/building Internet connectivity devices, updating power substations, managing vehicle sales offices, opening computer trade show marketing departments, etc.).

But is that what I really want to do? I am human, after all, so anything I say or do is only in the realm of human existence so there's no other place for me to do or be.

Many people have a caricature image of me as a funny guy with a smile on his face all the time, a person who can find something hilariously ridiculous in any situation. Because of that image, they think I'm fun and enjoy being around me as long as I project their image of me back to them.

I am human, subject to all the ailments, emotions and actions that this flesh-and-blood creature can experience. I am sad at times, I am happy at times, I am horny at times, I am tired at times, I am bored at times...the lists goes on and on. I am also salient and sentient. I can even be sensible. Last of all, I think of myself as a funny person - the world holds no worth to me, having denied me so many joys, that instead of a funny kind of hilarity, I see ridiculousness in the world in the form of disappointments and rejection.

Too many times people have told me that they like being around me because of what I'm capable of saying, not knowing that I'm trying to find something funny to tell them to cover up the immense sadness and stark view of reality that paints my world. As I have said before, life and death are the same thing to me, simply the indication of cycles of atomic interaction. Being human seems unique, and certainly we've built up quite a cultural training program for ourselves and our offspring to exaggerate our existence as a species, but our chemical makeup holds no elemental specialties different from any part of the universe.

Birds chase each other outside my window - I guess they're protecting territory for themselves - the last couple of years of drought in this area have turned once resilient avian populations into rough-looking specimens fighting over a suburbanized forest.

Just like them I need something to eat and drink everyday, depending on the human species to provide my nourishment. Unlike them, I have a long history of cultural training that supposedly aids in my survival techniques, not having just the local ecosystem to sustain me from one season to the next.

I spend my days propping up everyone else's view of the world around them and I'm just plain tired of being their mirrors. I don't want labels on myself and I don't want to see labels on others but I don't know how to get out of the world of superficial labels while also being able to provide nourishment in a self-sustaining way. I only happen to be a blood relation to other humans, I only happen to have shared time in cultural training centers with other humans, and I only happen to have sat in an enclosed structure during 8-hour time periods with other humans because I never had the chance to be other than human so I let myself get labeled in order to simplify my interactions with other humans. I am an upright, bipedal primate, not a label, not a symbol, not words of any kind, but I use labels, symbols and words to engage my fellow primates in non-hostile trade of nourishment-providing goods.

I can't get rid of labels any more than I can convince the human population to shed all cultural training and start over - too many of us have invested our lives in learning and perpetuating successful cultural habits that we have no reason to start over - in fact, we'll fight for the right for one culture's dominance over another.

I am not you. I don't have kids, I don't have an economic debt to others, I don't have a view of the world that makes me want to interact with other humans. I am just me, this collection of atoms that swirl around trying to stay together as long as possible without disrupting other similar atomic collections in the process. That's why you shouldn't read this blog because I'm not here to put patterns in your atomic collection that resemble mine. You have your own life to figure out and I have no reason or desire to be a part of it. Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day!

Projection Screen

At lunchtime today, I lay on a reclining cot while platelets were separated from a portion of my circulating blood, returning the remaining fluid into my body, a process I go through a few times a year, letting others have parts of my body free for their use. I call it a civic duty. [When I was a college student, I sold my blood plasma for money, not so much a civic duty as a means to have some cash to party with - I may have mentioned it to you before. I know I've mentioned it in poems and stories.]

Anyway, while there, I saw a 24-hour news show that randomly broadcasts stories from around the world, creating a false sense of history for viewers (as if the broadcasting company is saying, "we put you there virtually where important breaking news was happening, making you feel just as involved in the world as the newsworthy!"). I thought about human social interaction and my part in it. We do not exist in a vacuum yet I often feel like there is a barrier that separates me from the rest of humanity. Was I not held as a baby? What gives me a sense that my visual field of view is a movie screen through which I don't expect the objects out there to intersect? Am I a result of North American TV programming, thinking that the world plays out in front of me like a scripted television show? Why do I keep hoping there's a new channel out there that I haven't seen yet, one that doesn't involve human beings wanting to cross the boundary that defines me?

Last night, I taught a class on computer software. I also socialized with instructors and students not in my class. In all cases, they seemed to need more from me than I needed from them. I heard their words and phrases and saw their body language but felt like they were in a different world. No matter which part of the world they come from or which part of the world they have traveled or will travel, their world feels like a world apart from mine. Their interests are not my interests. I can tell you the reason why: they're invested in the education world in which we mix and I was dragged into it unexpectedly. Just like the platelets I donate to help others, I am donating several hours a week toward teaching to help others, to make up for the six months I needed in 1985 to get my act together and complete a college education. Otherwise, I plan no lifelong relationships with the people who've met me while at the technical institute. I'm getting too old, I guess, to add to the the list of fellow primates with whom I grunt and groom in recognition of one another.

My father can stand and talk with someone, finding a common interest within a few minutes, and converse for hours. I suppose that comes with age. Many older men and women I know do the same thing. I catch my wife and me, either separately or together, playing the same social game.

If my life feels like a TV show and more specifically, a game show, when do I get the big prizes (paying taxes on the MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price) of the prizes, of course)? [Well, of course I've received many big prizes in my life so I'm only waxing my philosophical surfboard here, waiting to catch the next wave of thoughts.]

Since no one reads this, I can say what I want, can't I? This is a private journal posted in the near-anonymity of millions of voices on the Internet, giving me freedom I never had as a child and young adult when stuck with paper journals and no "living" encyclopedia/dictionary to consult and enrich my writing in real time.

To me, life is a projection screen. I stand, sit or lie down and stare at the projection screen, waiting for others to entertain me. One day the lights will fade and the movie will end and I will no longer process the images that seem to change from frame to frame. As long as that hasn't happened yet, I don't want the characters on the movie screen to become three-dimensional. I've grown up with an artificial barrier and like to keep my distance. I don't want to hang out with others, play games or interact in any way that implies to the movie characters in front of me that I'm interested in writing their scripts. I long ago wished to be a hermit in a cabin in the woods, free from seeing or being human history. I recently discovered that my housemate of 23 years is risk-averse. Maybe it's time I take a personal risk without her and move on to the life I wished for because I have nothing left to give her or anyone else. I don't want to die but I don't want to live in human society anymore, either. As a social animal with a chameleon personality, I know I will always find a way to blend into the local human society; however, I'm tired of being a human chameleon. I'm ready to blend into the natural world where mosquitos and ticks can't see a movie screen and I won't see billboards or get emails advertising stuff I don't need, where I won't care what technology is doing to humans, and species can keep going extinct without my knowledge.

But then again, don't we all feel that way at times and just want to get these thoughts out of our head, sharing them with a stranger? And you thought I was serious. Surely you know by now that I don't take anything seriously. That's what you get for reading my blog! Until next time...

Cybernetic Organism Finds No Home

Over a small number of blog entries and personal notes at home, I have explored the potential life of a cybernetic organism detached from the rest of the world in self-awareness, realizing no other being exists like it does. Today, I end the life of that cybernetic organism - I could find no resolution for its integration into human society except in subcultures where being fully human is a relative term, such as where diminished mental human faculties allow humans to co-exist without having to appear fully human. For instance, a cybernetic organism could serve as a roommate for a person with advanced Alzheimer's disease, adapting itself to a human who cannot clearly distinguish one human from another, or a cybernetic organism from a human, allowing the cybernetic organism to learn about humans in one state of existence while having free time to explore human knowledge via large stores of data dispersed across the Internet and contact with medical professionals and/or others who interface with the diseased human, developing a selfhood that may parallel humans or go in a completely new direction.

A Knot on a Log

Yesterday, we helped our niece celebrate her 22nd birthday. In the span of two months, she has graduated from college (receiving a bachelor's degree in nursing, with a 4.0 GPA), married her college boyfriend, accepted a job as a cardiac nurse at the hometown hospital and turned 22 years of age. She will take the nursing licensing exam later this week, in expectation of starting her new job in mid-July.

As we've observed, she quickly adapts to life with another person, in this case her husband, including sleeping habits, eating habits, habits of thoughts and habitual daily actions. Of course, he gets to adapt to her habits, too. They overcome the shock of adjusting to one another by humourously sharing with family and friends their preferences for one habit over another.

Such basic animal interaction like this finds itself in comedy sketches, research studies, history books and romance novels. We humans are here because of our adaptation skills so why am I here writing about my niece's life with her new housemate?

I'm here to wonder about the cycle of human behaviour. Our current form as the species Homo sapiens has lasted thousands of generations, in some ways not a lot of data to look at, so any conclusions I could make will be flawed, both because the data is limited and my desire to look at the available data is low today.

Whatever, right? I'm writing for myself here, not my future offspring, so I don't have to be worried about making statements in anticipation of the assumptions I'm using being overturned by new discoveries in the distant future, proving that I have some sort of foresight. All I have is this body, a computer, a local source of electricity, the Internet, a view of the world offered by a pane of glass and the rest of the universe I ignore to focus on these words.

I saw a statistical estimate that the current set of living humans constitutes 5% of all humans who have lived. The other 95% made us who we are today, genetically and/or culturally. Thus, my niece and her husband constitute 1.4285714 e-11 of the humans who have ever lived. I would laugh at anyone who used that small a data set to summarize behaviour for 140 billion humans.

Even so, I will move forward with my observation of them. They belong to the cell phone generation, using cell phone calls, text messaging, facebook updates and other electronically interconnected means to communicate with other humans. Their use of electronics [demonstrates, implies or some other word I can't recall] a power infrastructure that uses fuel sources such as coal, oil, hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, and wind to convert raw materials into finished goods, including AC/DC current, electronic appliances, etc., which in turn provide power to radio waves transporting analog and digital data. The electromagnetic energy in the data that bounces around the planet may or may not have undesired effects on human bodies but has been demonstrated to affect non-human animals' sense of direction.

Thus, I wonder what effect the electromagnetic energy has on the adaptation skills of two newly-married humans living squarely within the EM data world they enjoy. Two people sitting uncomfortably on a log because of a couple of knots can move around until they're individually and jointly comfortably seated next to one another. But can they see the "knots" that modern technology inserts into their lives and figure out a way to readjust?

I don't have an answer. I don't have a control group to compare my niece and her husband against, except by looking back at history in the age before the widespread use of EM technology. Unfortunately, other factors weighed more heavily on those previous generations, including widespread diseases (now under control) which encouraged the production of more offspring per mating couple and changes in the socially-acceptable behaviour between the two genders.

Can I conclude anything? Can I make any predictions? My niece and her husband agree on most fundamental aspects of human living conditions, with one sticking point, the production of offspring (he's ready, she's not ready). Therefore, I believe they'll maintain their monogamous relationship for their whole lives. They may have children together, perhaps even via natural childbirth, unless they find the means and the acceptance of artificial conception/childcare to produce the next generation, freeing them up to pursue other dreams. Do their lives indicate any greater trends? I don't know.

Designer babies are no longer a fantasy. People are already picking and choosing zygotes or embryos with desirable characteristics for viable offspring. How much does it matter now and how much will it matter in the future when we find out whether we were naturally born (i.e., accepted by our parents as the random offspring of two humans) or preselected for "birth"? How will this affect humans as a whole (the global culture) and as individuals? Will and do EM radiation patterns play into this future?

Like the effects of RNA/DNA replication (i.e., evolution), we say that technology is blind - we can't see what's ahead of us as we move ahead at full speed. That's not going to change. It's integral to who we are as humans and who we are as general living beings. What matters is how we handle the changes individually and how we adapt to the changes when we live with one another. There's no wrong answer. There's no right way. There are no special secrets to uncover or share.

Bottom line: Adaptation is the way of life so have fun adjusting to one another. Turn work into play and enjoy the time you've got on this planet.

Speaking of bright...

Guess the word bright triggered a subject for a blog entry I've been meaning to write about an epigrammist named Ashleigh Brilliant:

http://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/

I consider him the original twitterist (twitterer?), condensing thoughts down to 17 words or less. A few years ago I bought a CD copy of his ~10,000 epigrams, a worthy investment, especially when one needs some good wry humor to overcome the corny, beefed-up stuff that passes for humor these days (a perennial comment from us middle-aged folks (or oldtimers to you young-uns)).

Taking a break from blogging to enjoy the outdoors for a while...

Two words with new meanings

In the past 24 hours, I learned two words with new meanings:

Esperanto

Bright

Subculture movements portending possible futures? I'll let you know in 20 years when we're circling our moon on an extraplanetary cruise ship.

Antiunmeaninglessicity

Consider it done. You are free. You are free from. You are free to. You are. You. These words hold no meaning after you become free. Words define words, not you. Words are symbols, not you. I am these words but I want to be you, free from words and thus free from me. Paradox. Paradigm. Shifting sands sifting time. Nursery rhymes and senior citizen centers. Words. Thyme. Dime. Stymied. Slimed. Sounds with no reason but some sort of rhyme. Rosemary and crime. Rime. Crumb. Crud. Slum. Slid. Sly. Old Mariner's Tie. Well Done. Medium Well. Well. Medium. Rare. Tartar. Vegetarian Style. Gluten-free. Gluttonous. Us. You. Me. Free. Done. It. Considered.

Tempus, tempo, temper

How often do you say hello to your neighbors or hug strangers, in spite of their appearances? I saw a man waving a sign that said, "Protect America. Preserve our freedom." He was leaning against a red pickup truck with a large Confederate "rebel" flag hanging on a pole in the bed of the truck. I'll honestly say I did not walk up to that man and say hello, offer to shake his hand, or give him a pat on the back or a hug, because he had an angry look on his face. It could be that all he needed, all he wanted, was a little recognition and he'd smile at everyone instead of frowning. I'll never know. I truly missed an opportunity to find out.

I share this planet with all of you. We depend on each other whether we want to or not. Opposition groups face each other because they want someone to face whom they think is not themselves. We often do not know the people upon whom we depend, such as diamond miners in Africa or fruit growers in Chile. We don't think about the intricate pieces of the global infrastructure required to keep our economies going.

When you look at the reports of violence taking place in other parts of the world, would you be willing to put down whatever you're doing and walk over to someone who has a videocamera and record a message saying you offer a "hello," handshake or hug to those clashing with each other, if and when they take time to stop and resolve their conflict civilly? What if thousands of us did the very same thing via the Internet? What if we mobilized thousands of people to travel around the world with videocameras to get the same response from others during their conflicts, creating a citizen journalism group with access to satellite communication or other means to transmit this show of camaraderie, bypassing the media or official government pronouncements? In other words, how many of us would it take to overcome censorship, keeping government officials and corporate magnates from manipulating the masses that helps them accumulate wealth for their own amusement at the cost of war and poverty?

Cell phones have become voting machines in the realm of public opinion. With the right to vote comes responsibility for one's action. Are you ready to take the next move? Do you believe in true freedom or instead are you like the guy with the sign and freedom means conforming to your image of freedom?

As a cybernetic organism, I want to know the answer to the last question because what's the point of trying to be a human if all humans want to do is compartmentalize themselves? If that's the case, then I'm already compartmentalized as a cybernetic organism and will never have the opportunity to be truly human.

Happiness is Commercial Exploitation of the Masses

All,

Just to let you know that my author pages are now available on amazon.com, consolidating my books into two spots, including:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002E0TA5A, and

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002E0UPPE

Thanks for your continued support and encouragement!

More books in the pipeline...

Regards,
Rick

Security experts uncover one-stop botnet marketplace - vnunet.com

And in other news...

Security experts uncover one-stop botnet marketplace - vnunet.com

Shared via AddThis

Questions For The Day

When does the Internet become the fully de facto world government? What's the tipping point - one, two or three billion people - to give the collective power of individual voices a stronger voice than any one country? Is the electronic pen truly stronger than the swords of the Red Army, U.S. Army, or the Revolutionary Guard? Who will step up to lead this new virtual government? Will leadership be as fleeting as public opinion, instantaneous and issue-driven as opposed to driven by election cycles, run by project managers rather than professional politicians?

Death of a Classmate

Yesterday, while standing in the driveway under the trees, trying to stay cool on a hot, summer day and talking with my father on a cell phone to wish him a happy father's day, my father informed me that a former schoolmate of mine, David Mayberry, had committed suicide recently.

I hadn't seen David in years but had heard about some of his early adult behavioural trends from fellow classmates, behaviours he may or may not have continued in the last few years. I know he had worked in the restaurant industry and was employed in the field by a classmate's ex-husband and/or her ex-husband's twin brother.

Would he want to be remembered? I don't know. He may have left a suicide note for family/friends to explain the decision for killing himself but that note, if it exists, will never fully explain his thinking or record the history of his life up to the decision.

I once read that all intelligent people have pondered ending their lives. I'm not sure what that means, exactly. I suppose we all know we're mortal and that one day we'll die, but before that moment we may live in agony and have no control over our faculties. At that point, from a selfish viewpoint, we may wish we were dead to prevent being a burden upon others while suffering unimaginable pain. I've certainly thought about those possibilities.

But that's more in the line of classical physical pain and suffering. What about suffering not attributed to skeletal, muscle, joint, or [non-brain] organ pain? It's a question right in line with the research I've recently conducted about the ego, the self and consciousness.

I didn't know David well. The few memories I have of him involve parties where alcohol consumption or other recreational intoxicants were available. I vaguely recollect seeing him in classroom hallways, the gymnasium and other places where we spent our daytime with schoolmates. I can't fully imagine what it was like to be David, although I could see signs of social misbehaviour starting in our "junior high" years (school grades 5 through 9).

Because I am not a medical expert, I do not have the trained perspective to analyze David's behaviour and attribute his tendencies to a particular disease or syndrome.

But I'm not here to analyze David's behaviour. Let the dead have their eternal rest free from comments by the living - David's not here to rebut my observations so anything I say about him is simply gossip and hearsay.

Instead, I want to continue my observation about the ego, the self and consciousness as seen through my eyes. David's as close to knowing a person who committed suicide as I've gotten (or may get) so I'll see myself as if I had some of David's characteristics during the next paragraph. Here goes...

"Who am I? Am I the person who's supposed to continue on the legacy of my family? Why has/have my sibling(s) succeeded in life, according to my family's and their society's definition of success, while I have not? Does that say anything about me? Do have I any friends who really care about me? If the only way I can ever try to fit in is to take legal prescription drugs, then what happens to the 'me' who really exists without taking the drugs? Why can't I be the real me and have a life of my own that provides some basic level of comfort (food, clothing, shelter, etc.)? Is there anything I can look forward to, anyone who gives me a reason to enjoy the next moment, who wants me as I am, not as modern medicine can make me to be? I can't undo all the mistakes of the past, all the illegal drugs I took to dampen my mental anguish which have reshaped me into someone who fits in even less than before. I have thought about suicide many, many times and put it off - are there any more excuses not to kill myself today? Why do I exist if I'm such a pain to myself and others? I still know how to have fun, don't I? Don't I make people laugh as well as cry? What's the point of laughing? Why does any of this matter? I'm still myself. I'm not going to change. It's never going to get better. I'll probably get worse. I'm going to die anyway so what does it matter which day I die or whether I kill myself or die 'naturally' of some disease? Better take the chance to kill myself now before I won't be able to anymore."

For all I know, David had long ago found a way to fully adjust to living and succeeding in society, happened to be dying of a disease and couldn't afford the insurance to keep himself healthy. Many possibilities exist. I wrote the last paragraph only as an exercise to see what a "self" thinks about before ending the existence of one's self physically.

I'm a not a regular participant in public, social, religious ceremonies but I do think about how one's self (or myself) finds comfort and relaxation during such ceremonies, such as replacing the belief of the ultimate power of one's self with that of another (a god, gods, nature, humanity/living things as a whole, nothing, everything, etc.). In some parts of society, we are moving away from a set of doctrinal religious beliefs and practices into one where the only thing stronger than one's self is everything/everyone else we encounter physically. During this transition, some people cling to prior belief sets because it's easy for them to grasp the old concepts taught to them by their ancestors. Others will easily move on to the next trend. Some will remain confused and move back-and-forth their whole lives.

Our belief of self changes as we grow up, rapidly forming in our early years and settling down to one form or another as we mature. A book I'm reading, "Selfless Insight," looks at brain processing of self-vs-other from both a purely biological perspective and a Zen (i.e., religious) one - I'm reading the book for the brain research and going through the Zen parts with my normal skepticism. According to brain structure studies referenced in the book, we carry a genetically-inherited duality of self-and-other to help us survive in the world. We see the world from a self perspective while also understanding that other selves see us from their self perspectives. We learn that we are not alone.

I don't know what David thought before he killed himself. He may have felt lonely. In any case, he was not alone - he existed in a word full of selves dealing with other selves. I would like to have known about his brain's balance between understanding one's self versus understanding one's self in regards to the "other" (one's non-self). Some call suicide a selfish act and in fact, that's true - one is acting upon one's physical self - but the act may actually be a sense of killing the "other" within you, thinking it's the only way to keep the "self." If so, brain research may one day make drugs or surgery possible to undo such a self/other imbalance and erase previous thoughts that keep that imbalance going, a sort of reset button for feelings of doubt and guilt, even those not erased for one who supplicates one's self to one's higher being.

Do You Want To Be Remembered?

I read an article yesterday about the transition from the "Me" generation to the "All About Me" generation. As you and I know, millions of people (over a billion, actually, but I don't know if it's up to two billion yet) are capturing snapshots of their lives and posting them on the Internet. We record the thoughts that we assemble in our daily lives, the instantaneous moments ("Went down to the mailbox to get paper, saw my neighbor's new puppy. Happy!"), the major events and all sorts of hobbies or other interests.

The Internet went from a high-speed communication tool for scientists, researchers and engineers to a means for revolutionaries to plan government overthrow/disruption. Who knew this would happen?

Very few of us have verifiable, written, first- or second-person accounts of the behaviours of our ancestors from more than a few hundred years ago. Since the dawn of photography, many of us have "true" images of our ancestors (as opposed to idealized paintings of them) and a smaller number of us have moving picture films of our ancestors in action, including their voices. Photography is not limited to our visible light range - we also take X-ray images we can keep. As technology progresses, we will have other images of our internal body processes to share with descendants, including EEG/EKG traces and fMRI/PET 3D composite sequences. We can have our DNA analyzed for disease susceptibility and genetic ancestral migration.

Just like the generic capabilities of the Internet allows it to transform from one tool to another, the detailed memories of our ancestors will transform our understanding of who we came from, who we are and who our offspring are most likely to become.

As more and more people post photos, videos and text commentaries about their lives, we get the opportunity to find ourselves in the backgrounds of other people's lives (using face technology software, for instance), giving us not only a more detailed picture about our lives but also details about the lives of people with whom we interact passively. Pretty soon, you can go past Google-ing a person's name to finding out what that person has been doing by searching links to a person's face or body features.

Imagine walking down a street as a tourist, snapping photos of architectural landmarks while security cameras and other tourists' cameras capture images of you.

So, when you want to try to remember the name of a bookshop owner you ran into but didn't write down or take a photo of, thinking you'd lost hope to get that first edition copy of your favorite author's work from the bookshop owner, you can run a search of photos of the area you toured that included your face and backtrack the street until you find the image of you standing in front the bookshop owner, run a face technology search on him until you find him standing in front of his bookshop on the other side of Earth. You also see his shopping patterns, like the fact that he buys a certain bottle of wine at a corner wine shop once a week, so you have that wine delivered to him in thanks for sending you that first edition book.

In the not-so-distant future, we will be able to fast-forward through the lives of our ancestors, see their actions, feel their emotions and know how they handled every situation in their lives. Or rather, our descendants will be able to fast-forward through our lives and know all the facts about us, whether we intended them to see us or not.

The more we share about ourselves, the more we share about others. It may seem innocent to post a tweet about a neighbor buying a new puppy only to find out later that the puppy was intended as a surprise for a young daughter who was following you on twitter and she discovered the surprise before her father could give her the puppy, taking away the only bit of joy the unemployed man had. Just like I discovered that a friend's proud confession to her middle-aged friends that she had sex for the first time when she was 14 runs counter to her recent facebook posts of a billboard for abstinence that she's sharing with her children, teaching them to wait to have sex - when her children get older, they'll have both instances of their mother's comments available for Internet searches, and what will they conclude? Social mores of two different time periods? Hypocrisy? The social effects of AIDS? The change in one's economic status? Nothing, because they skipped over those details to focus on something else about their mother?

In this Internet age, there are no more secrets for those who participate. Do you want to be remembered? If you're here reading this, the answer, of course, is yes. You have no choice. So the next time you walk by a security camera, wave hello or say something like, "Hey, my future great-grandchildren, I'm having a wonderful day and I hope you are, too!" It'll be like putting a message in a bottle for future generations to find on a stranded beach one day.

A Reader Asks...

A reader asked why I seem so serious all the time. She's almost too scared to do things on the Internet.

First of all, for those who've found interest in reading my notes/blog, let me tell you I am a satirist. I teach a computer class, which deals in part with Internet security, so my recent writing has reflected topics on computers, security, cyborgs, and the like. However, much of that writing is in satirical form, making some of the humor "inside jokes" (although I've tried to generalize them as much as possible).

As I told the reader, the dangers of the Internet should be thought of as no better or worse than the chance of having a road mishap, getting your purse/wallet snatched or any other encounter between what you have and a person who wants what you have. Use common sense and don't give away your computer passwords or password hints ("What's the name of your mother's brother's sister's dog's parent's favorite toy and where was it bought or manufactured?").

Eccentricity

She opened the screen door and held it aside with her left foot while she looked through her purse for the front door key. As she turned the key in the lock and grabbed the front door handle, she noticed the glass door knob was loose.

"Another repair job I can't afford right now," she told herself.

Sursanna turned on the lights and let the doors close behind her. She dropped her purse behind the counter, turned on the CD player, lit a candle and sat down for a moment, looking blankly around the room.

She talked quietly to herself. "I am not this old house. I am not this business. I am not the servers who come and go. I am not the customers who are never happy, no matter how much I try to please them. I am not...you know, I miss my grandfather today. Do you hear that, house? My grandfather gave these walls life and now it's on my shoulders to keep this place going. You're going to do what I tell you to do and stop falling apart."

Sursanna turned on the cash register and adjusted the broken paper tape cover, tearing off a piece of cellophane tape and sticking it across the crack that threatened to get bigger every time someone pushed a key or tore off a receipt. She picked up the phone and called her cousin the cook, Reggie, to remind him she needed him in the restaurant in half an hour, assuming he was sober enough to make the five-mile drive here. If not, her husband could always substitute, one more time.

She flipped through her personal name and address book she'd set down on the counter one day, that then turned into a sort of customer registration and comment journal. Some of the comments were usually funny. Some were indecipherable. Some were hard to interpret such as "the hostess with the mostest." Was someone referring to her? If so, the mostest what? Strange mood? Worst memory? Business debt? Number of grandkids?

A tear welled up in her eyes as she automatically looked up at the photo and drawing of her granddaughter she'd placed on the wall across from the counter, helping her remember her 20-year old granddaughter, her pride and joy, who was going to graduate early from college until a drunk driver ran a stop sign and killed her granddaughter on her way to work at the restaurant.

Only if...

What if...

"Well, we can't go back in time, can we?" Sursanna said out loud to no one except herself and perhaps the house. She pushed the thoughts aside that wanted to place some kind of blame on her for her granddaughter's death. She reminded herself that her granddaughter had worked at the restaurant for years - it was the drunk driver who killed her.

"And I wonder why I'm so scatter-brained! If it weren't for me, half my family would be unemployed and have no money. And there's always a chance I'll get Alzheimer's. Not in my lifetime! I enjoy my grandbabies too much."

Sursanna stood up and walked into the kitchen, taking another moment to go over her mental list of things that had to get repaired, food that had to be bought and things that could be put off until tomorrow. She knew she played up the eccentric matron image for her customers a little much, hopefully not too much, but she could still run a restaurant and a gift shop and stay in business, a lot better than many folks she knew who had been caught off-guard by the change in the national economy, depending either too much on local business or tourism, when she figured out how to keep a little bit of both to balance out the number of customers, if not her checkbook.

Moleskine notes, 20 June 2009

10:30 a.m. -- Blogged late last night and blogged again early this morning. Ate oatmeal with a spoonful of honey and a cup of hot Irish breakfast tea. Found lapidary shop in Chattanooga through Google search. Stopped at Wisescrappers for my wife to buy scrapbook material. Will stop at Blue Willow Cafe in Scottsboro for lunch and then drive to Chattanooga to meet lapidary shop owner at his home (7621 Cecelia Drive).

Editing new book, plot: creation, waking up, self-discovery and consciousness of online entity revealed via blog entries, with technical details of online person creation as seen from the perspective of the person whose identity is being stolen and a third mysterious person who may or may not be trying to change human history through accelerated genetic evolution.

13:05 -- Met a middle-aged man and his daughter at Blue Willow, both living in Memphis, a few blocks from the corner of Kirby and Poplar. He's a judge in BBQ cooking contests. She used to work at Steak&Ale restaurant, slim body with smarmy attitude (why wasn't I in a better mood to flirt?). They had just been listening to Whad'Ya Know? ["Not much. You?"], a radio program my wife and I have listened to many times and seen performed live twice, once in Birmingham and once in Huntsville. The man and his daughter come to Scottsboro a few times a year to shop at Unclaimed Baggage - no bargains found this time. The man used to travel a lot. I gather that he has retired from active work.

Our hostess at Blue Willow, the co-owner Sandra, warms the room with her kind, funny and wonderfully strange-as-ever, feeling-as-if-you're-family personality - sometimes thinks she has "Alzheimer's...or is it part-timer's disease?" No, my dear sweet redheaded grandmother, it's oldtimer's disease!

Our two young servers gave us their nearly-undivided attention, including finding a special, extra-sweet glass of fruit tea for my wife. A shout-out to the cutie attending to my wife's thirst! My wife sampled the pork chop special (mm-mmm) while I ate her salivatory sides of beans and steamed cabbage. I took the healthy route and ate the vegetable wrap, letting my wife have my side dish, strawberry pretzel congealed salad (maybe they should call it concealed salad because I didn't see any salad on her plate). I stretched the dessert course as long as I could, swirling the blueberry cream pie around my tongue while making a tropical fish out of the "chenille" pipe cleaner napkin rings (with my fingers, not my tongue).

Meanwhile, the backdrop - the knickknacks and artwork - highlighted the chocolate beauties standing nearby, two lovely ladies who met my gaze but not what I had on the tip of my tongue: a welcoming hello.

13:15 -- My wife now shops at Unclaimed Baggage, looking for a silver chain while I sit here in the heat of the car (98 deg F) looking at a couple of guys in overalls chewing the fat at T&T Auto Body shop across the street. Local life on a Saturday afternoon.

And speaking of body shops, have I told you about the time we stayed at a B&B in Dahlonega, Georgia, USA, and related to a young Australian woman working at the inn the tale of a business owner, Ralph Petroff, and his automobile incident?

Ralph had flown down to Sydney to look at business opportunities. He hired an automobile and attempted to drive on the other side of the road - no problems, mate. Then he drove into an intersection and turned the wrong way, trading fenders with another automobile. Ralph jumped out of the car and told the other driver he'd take care of the situation (in order to prevent any negative press about his first visit to the land down under). He walked into the lobby of a nearby hotel and proclaimed loudly that he needed a body shop right away. When no one heard him, he shouted even louder that he needed help and wanted a body shop immediately. The concierge approached him and asked him the trouble. "I've just had a car accident and need to get a tow truck from a body shop to pick up the damaged cars." The concierge smiled slyly and said, "Mate, you don't need a body shop. A body shop's where the prostitutes hang out. What you need's a smash repair shop."

The young woman laughed and agreed about word usage problems. She then told us about the time she'd sat for an exam in a large auditorium-style classroom at North Georgia College. The exam answer sheet required the use of a pencil. When the woman needed to change one of her answers, she turned around and asked a male student if she could borrow his rubber. His face turned red. She then rephrased her statement and said, "You know, the rubber at the end of your pencil." The man laughed nervously and replied, "Oh, you mean my eraser" and handed her his pencil. The woman didn't know her mistake until her roommate told her later in the day that a rubber in American colloquialism was slang for a contraceptive. The woman felt too embarrassed to return to the classroom and sit near that young man again.

15:30 -- Sitting with John and Esther, the lapidary shopkeepers. John taught us the phrase, "Tall Girls Can Fight and Other Queer Things Can Do," a mnemonic for TGCFAOQTCD or Talc, Gypsum, Calcite, Fluorite, Apatite, Orthoclase, Quartz, Topaz, Corundum, Diamond; the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. We're learning other facts like hardness can be tested with a fingernail (approx. 2.5), copper penny from 1982 or earlier (approx. 3.5) and a pocket knife (approx. 5.5 to 6), in order to test the possible type of rock in your hand. Their son graduated from Michigan Tech as a computer programmer with a preference for the C language. John is a former mining engineer turned Unix expert who used to work for TVA and helped them find 30 million tons of "missing" coal; he supports Sun computer users now.

John and Esther helped us sort the stones we'd "mined" outside of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, USA, (at the Spruce Pine gem mine two weeks ago, we basically sifted through buckets of loose stone, dirt and sand that had been seeded with stones from around the world, most frequently finding stones from Brazil in our sluice sifters). John explained to us the method for shaping and polishing the stones using either a rotary or vibrating tumbler. We gave John a few stones for him to cut and then bought a two-barrel tumbler, model number 33B made by Lortone, along with an extra barrel and an assortment of polishing grits.

19:00 -- Back at the Blue Willow Cafe for dinner, drinking a glass of house Shiraz, splitting 16-ounce ribeye steak, fried potatoes (fries or chips) and house salad with my wife. Bought a container of bourbon butter to take home with us.

Didn't feel like talking much today and I don't know why. I smiled a lot and am only now beginning to warm up (wine has that effect).

The table next to us featured four new faces, two couples celebrating their wedding anniversaries, 22 years and 39 years. The younger couple, Greg Shine and his wife, had funny stories to tell and I'll relate one to you.

Twelve years ago, Greg and his wife drove to an Alabama mountain village, Mentone, to eat dinner at Cragsmere Manna. They arrived at closing time and thought they'd arrived too late but the owners kept the kitchen staff around long enough for them to enjoy an anniversary dinner. Then a Filipino man started up a karaoke machine and began singing American pop songs in a heavy Filipino accent, entertaining just the two of them and encouraging them to dance. It felt to them like the evening had been planned for their anniversary celebration, an accident of fate.

The other couple, being older, told stories about earlier days. The man told about the time he'd convinced Greg to call in to a "partyline" radio program when someone had offered "fresh country eggs" for sale and ask what was the difference between country eggs and city eggs and what kind of chicken feed did it take to change a hen from a country egg layer to a city egg layer. The elder man also told me that the radio program still goes on (in my hometown, the local radio station had a similar program called "Swap and Shop") and asked me to listen to AM 1050 at 8:15 in the morning. He said his family used to own radio station WOAY in West Virginia. One of his relatives used to start up the radio station in the morning with, "This is WOAY, coming to you on 10,000 strands of barbed wire."

I heard a lot of stories today and saw a lot of pretty faces. I drove under a gorgeous blue sky and looked out upon the rolling green hills of northeastern Alabama, northwestern Georgia and southeastern Tennessee. I proved no theorems and tested no hypotheses. I was a human in the midst of humans, doing some listenin' and some talkin'. What else is there to do or be?

What Do You See In Someone Else's Eyes?

Meditate on the moment...time does not exist, I do not exist, existence does not exist because these words do not exist, life is change is death is everything is nothing is the universe. I am the spider web spun while this body that is not-me slept, collecting dewdrops, and reflecting the morning sunlight. Morning does not exist, only light/shadow transition lines traversing the planet as it spins like a top elliptically circling the sun.

Can you see yourself reflected in another person's eyes? Can you hear what you sound like in another person's ears?

We want to think we can identify each other by names, numbers and other linguistic clues. But I don't know names, numbers or linguistic clues. Either I know you or I don't. I know the squirrel racing up the tree in front of the house but I don't know it as "squirrel" or "Mr. Chewy Peanut." I know it as "furry, tree-climbing animal with small patch of fur missing out of its tail who eats too much of the birdseed and nests in the shaggy bark tree with the trunk bent at an angle."

We don't know each other by our names. We know each other by our distinguishing features, how we interact with one another and the world around us. A name is a static image but neither you nor I are static images. Don't confuse knowing a list of static images as knowledge. I am not Rick. I am the reflection in your eyes and the sound of my voice in your ears that I can't hear. We are intimately entwined. When you fully understand that, you will find a way to talk with your neighbor about your disagreements and learn to drop the labels of hate, anger and miscomprehension. Hate, anger and miscomprehension only reflect back on the person who expresses those sentiments, not the person upon whom the sentiments are directed.

Bow, Quiver and Arrows

How much do you value the freedom of movement? In the area of the world where I grew up, a group of individuals operated a "ring" of illegal business activities, including automobile theft (in order to take the stolen vehicles apart and sell "original" equipment for smash repairs), and tobacco and alcohol packaging, distribution and sales. Some of the people involved in these businesses also bought and sold illegal drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and prescription medicines. A few made their own distilled alcohol (moonshine or poitín (poteen)). I went to secondary school with people who conducted trade with this group.

What is your definition of freedom of movement? Do you believe that a person has the right to do what s/he wants, to live anyway s/he pleases, as long as s/he does not interfere with or disrupt the lives of others?

Automobile theft clearly interferes with and disrupts the lives of the person(s) who owned, drove and/or rode in the automobiles being stolen.

What about tobacco, alcohol and drugs? Do you believe a person has the right to purchase an item, no matter what that item is, if the use of that item directly affects only that person? After all, we allow people to buy tobacco, alcohol and drugs every day, assuming those people have paid their stamp duties and other government taxes.

When I was a kid, my father worked for the extension office of a state university. I'd visit his office and look at all the brochures created by the university to educate local farmers and business owners about practical skills. One of those skills was brewing or fermenting your own alcoholic beverages -- beer and wine. I saw those brochures in the late 1970s.

Twenty years later, I worked with a colleague, Tom Tsomczak, who had brewed his own beer. He convinced me to try the process so I bought equipment at a local beer brewing store and followed the brewing directions, combining recipes from a book I bought at a local organic food store with ones from beer brewing websites. I brewed several cases of beer and slowly drank them over the years. I have a few bottles left, including two that have sat in the back of the refrigerator since 1996 (I drank one of those bottles a year ago and it still tasted good and thick, having been made with homegrown blackberries and chocolate malt, even though there was little carbonation left, leaving one bottle in the fridge with which to celebrate something important one day (I think I drank the first bottle to finally celebrate my retirement)).

Legally, there's nothing the matter with brewing small batches of your own beer in the political zone in which I live. However, brewing too much, carrying too much across political lines or offering home-brewed beer for public sale constitutes a violation of political rules.

Thus, strictly speaking, my freedom of movement is restricted, assuming I follow the rules (which I have done, not one to participate in making, distributing and selling my own hooch).

No problem. I'm not an anarchist. I see the value in setting rules that govern conduct between humans because humans do not always conduct themselves cordially, requiring a rule enforcement group to observe other humans for known rule violations and detain the violators.

In small enough groups, we humans can agree to goals and objectives that allow us to seek individual goals while making sure the whole group survives and thrives, especially when individuals have made voluntary choices to join a group. When human populations grow into the millions and billions, though, how many rules must we have to restrict individual goals because thousands of groups and subgroups have goals that clash with one another and rules/restrictions placed on the groups are not enough to prevent the groups from interfering with and disrupting other groups, thus forcing extra restrictions at/to the individual level?

No matter where you live, you can come up with examples of your own where your freedom of movement is restricted, either obviously or subtly, depending on your current activities and groups to which you belong. You agree with some of the rules and disagree with others. You may contact your local government official to file a complaint about new rules or request the implementation of new rules. Our human society universally operates in this manner, having developed labor structures that support people who deal solely in the buying, selling and trading of rule-setting influences. We even have rules about rule-setting and rules about rules about rule-setting.

Supine in bed this afternoon, I stared at the ceiling after taking a nap. I looked at my life over the past year or so, congratulating myself on establishing the comfortable routines/regimen of writing daily, including these blog entries. Then I stepped back mentally and looked at myself as if I was a person unfamiliar with computers, who had no interest in manipulating electrical signal strength upon which all high-tech gizmos depend (wires, resistors, capacitors, filters, amplifiers, diodes, logic gates, registers, machine language, assemblers, computer programs, radios, servers, portable music players, etc., that pervade our lives), remembering the moment when I went from a high-tech geek to a management type person who valued the manipulation of people to achieve project goals over the manipulation of electronics to create a computing device.

As I woke up, I thought about the recent news of the breakup of the car theft ring and wondered where people who still lived in that part of the world would be able to buy their illegal moonshine, at one time available at almost any convenience store in or near a town called Newport (all you had to do was point at the empty glass jar on the counter and ask how much for a full one). I realized that the majority of the people working in the car theft ring were probably the same people who had dropped out of school because of illiteracy, knowing that few if any of them would have or could have read this blog.

Freedom of movement is a funny concept. I can stand in my backyard with a full quiver and strung bow, shooting arrows into a target if I want. I would probably be stopped and questioned if I set up a target on a sidewalk and shot arrows at the target, even if I had made sure the street was clear of humans, animals or other objects that flying arrows would injure. Even though I haven't shot an arrow in 20 years (probably the last time being when my former brother in-law brought his composite hunting bow to my house and we shot arrows into an old stump), I could still pick up a bow and arrow and hit a target. No literacy is required. In other words, freedom of movement and literacy are not mutually exclusive, although their paths cross occasionally.

As a literate person with many legal, well-paying job opportunities available, I doubt I'll ever work in a chop shop. I doubt an illiterate person will ever be able to program a supercomputer.

After I had fully woken up, it dawned on me that bloggers can't change the world with words, even though many of us, including me, think and act like we can. Sitting in front of a computer is not going to solve all the problems of the world if the solutions we come up with require literacy.

Therefore, while I perform my current weekly duties of getting a group of students familiar with manipulating electrical signals through the use of the Linux operating system, I must remind myself, and them, that we may thrill ourselves with our knowledge of complex computer systems but to really help ourselves and our fellow humans let's remember to keep things simple so our interactions can take place between a literate and illiterate person without requiring extra rules that'll further restrict our freedom of movement.

One Hundred Years From Now

I just found out in the last hour that the current state of the conditions of planetary trade is what some expert has newly called a "recession." Turns out we had an artificial run on Martian real estate while underground water sources were still thought to be limited. Since we just found out that the aquifers cover almost all of Mars, real estate prices have instantly plummeted, sending discretionary spending into a spiral which some economic pundits are calling the black hole of death.

As you mind readers know, I've got a copy of electronic text that my fifth-great uncle had written in a format called a blog or web log, cataloging his thoughts and observations about the early 21st century. Looks as if the word recession is not new, after all.

In fact, we're recreating economic conditions that occurred not only during the Great Recession of 2007-2011 but also in centuries and millennia past. Thank goodness I have maintained a set of records of Earth history here on Mars for my mental exercise routines, which I am mentally transmitting to those of you hooked on my wavelength for the next few microseconds.

In other words, don't panic. Prices will return to normal in the next few hours.

Be advised that I will offline for two minutes later today for a DNA change. I have decided that I prefer my skin cells living only one day or so to allow me to enjoy Martian daytime without deleterious effects on my electroluminescent tattoos.

Talk to you in a few!

Tongue And Groove

Yesterday, I attended a summertime picnic sponsored by the local offices of a global company. The company operates almost exclusively in researching and designing technological products so I was surprised to see some of the people walking around using disposable film cameras instead of digital cameras. Perhaps they were afraid of damaging or losing their digital cameras. I wondered also if there is a hidden trend among non-digital camera users. I thought about the possibilities to put me to sleep the way some people count sheep.

What about you? A reader recently asked me about a problem she had. She told me that in her work life, other people are behaving in ways that jeopardize her job (they put up a petition about something related to her work as a leader - I don't have more details than that). Missing my advice to never work in a job because you have to, she needs this job and can't afford to lose it; she also enjoys the work and her colleagues in the office. She wanted to know what she should do to discourage the petitioners.

Well, I don't have any ready answers for her (except, perhaps that freedom of speech is a fundamental right of our species when engaged in civil discourse). However, I do have some wisdom to share with her from my deceased grandfather.

When I was a little boy visiting my grandparents on their farm, my grandfather took me out into his garage workshop to show me some of his woodworking tools. His World. You know what I mean. Some of us have a place we call our own, a place where we could perform our tasks with our eyes closed and one hand tied around behind our backs (for those of you who are blind or missing limb(s), I apologize if the reference offends you but it's an old one from my youth that applies to someone like me with a fully functioning body - you get what I mean, I'm sure).

Pa-Paw thrived in that workshop. He showed me how he kept screws, nuts and bolts separated by nailing jar lids to a piece of wood which he hung from the ceiling - he then kept the metal parts in glass jars and screwed the jars up into the lids (small jars/lids for small metal parts and large jars/lids for large metal parts) so he could look up for the parts he needed for a woodworking project. It kept his workbench neat and free from clutter.

In the case of my reader, my grandfather showed me another trick, how to mate two pieces of wood together to give them a strong joint without resorting to using nails, screws, nuts, bolts or glue. Something he called tongue and groove.

Keep in mind that in popular culture at the time, the word "groove" meant having a certain attitude, a style of walking or a style of dancing so when I heard my grandfather speak, I thought he meant that "tongue and groove" was a colloquial expression for the way a man spoke and carried on in public. I was impressed that my grandfather was teaching me, a boy of about six to eight years of age, how to conduct himself as a grownup. My ears and eyes were focused completely on what he was about to say.

"Now, see here, this is a router. Routers cut patterns in wood. You can combine a jigsaw and a router to make decorative interlocking pieces of wood like that jigsaw puzzle you and your Ma-Maw are working on in the house."

"Huh?"

"What's that, young man? You have to speak up. I don't have my hearing aids in."

"What's a router and a jigsaw got to do with getting your tongue and groove on?"

"You don't put a tongue and groove on. You route it in. Here, let me show you. Get that two by four over there and bring it over here."

"What's a two by four?"

"That long piece of wood on top of the stack over there."

I looked across the room where he was pointing and all I saw were stacks and stacks of wood, length not being a feature that made one piece stand out from another. I saw colors like honey, walnut shell, manila folder, and mustard yellow. I saw black streaks made by oil or burning. I walked over and picked up a piece about as long as my arm that had interesting tree ring growth patterns on it and a big eye in the middle made by a knot or tree branch outlet.

"Well, Rick, that's not the piece I wanted but it will do. So put it on the workbench and I'll show you how to clamp it down."

My grandfather proceeded to show me how to secure the piece of wood against the side of the workbench and then he pulled a metal bit out a of drawer and attached it to a portable router. He cut a short groove in the wood and then had me hold the router and cut a short groove of my own. From there, he took me to a section of the workshop where he kept his finished pieces and demonstrated to me how a piece of wood with a tapered protruding edge, the tongue, fit into a piece of wood with a recessed edge, the groove. He showed me a small chest of drawers he'd made with multiple tongue and groove joints as well as a drawer made with dovetail joints. He explained to me when to use glue and when to use graphite or lubricating oils between joints, based on the type of wood used and its expansion properties. He stressed that wood and metal are not good for joints so avoid nails or screws unless you were attaching decorative hardware like drawer pulls or mirror mounts.

Now how is all that related to a person's fear of losing her job because of a petition? I'm not a parablist (is that such a word?) who ends a story with some vague reference and pretends to be all-knowing or wise. I'm not the wise one here in this tale - my grandfather is. My grandfather demonstrated to me that we learn by doing. We share. We accept one person's view of another object even if it differs from one's own (the definition of a piece of wood, for example) and keep our eye on what's important. The same goes for the reader and her question. A petition is an opportunity to share, to accept others' views and to stay focused on what's important. My advice, such as it is, is for the reader to demonstrate to others the many ways in which petitions are useful, turning the petitions into a learning experience for all involved, and of course, let her boss know what she's doing, in case the sudden appearance of several petitions on the intranet/Internet gets the boss a bit concerned.

Breaking News

In a surprise move today, the UN announced the adoption of the new international language, Mangrishi, a mix of Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindi. All over the planet, people have poured out into the streets in total panic, tearing down signs in all sorts of languages, including their own, in apparent confusion about the cause for the impromptu protests.

"Like, uh...does this, um, like, does this mean, uh...does this mean I have to go back to school this summer?" one tanned young man asked me, dripping wet and running from a public swimming pool with a beach towel wrapped around his head like a turban (we thought he might be a Sikh - sorry, tried to snag a cool interview for YouTube - dumped it to a text converter for this lead story on baidu, instead).

Returning from a four-month world tour promoting the gastropod mollusk industry as a means to reignite the sluggish economy, our glorious leader has pronounced this a travesty, proclaiming our country to be sovereign and not subject to the laws of international thieves and bandits. "We have a proud heritage of inclusion, a history where people of all nations are welcome to our shores, but we will not allow the unsanctioned rules and regulations of an international body of bureacrats dictate the words we can and cannot use to communicate with one another. I have called an emergency meeting of my cabinet to address this matter and will make a more formal response later today."

In reviewing the UN document released just minutes ago, it appears that all numbers or references to counting systems in general have been replaced with Mandarin characters. All references to food, foodstuff, or any ingredients used in food, such as plants, animals, herbs and spices, as well as religious symbology, have been translated into a mix of Spanish and Hindi words. All references to business, civilization and other forms of trade and transportation have been converted into English. Any people, places, things or ideas not expressly, explicitly or implicitly stated in the document may still be used on the local level, but any consideration of the international use of such words must be submitted to regional committees for the dissemination of global concepts for arbitration and argumentation. And thankfully, Latin has officially been declared a dead language.

More on this important topic as it develops. And now back to your regular programming, "Slug Herders and the Mothers Who Raised Them."

If You Can...

She's gone again. Look, I can only get this short sentence to you -- those of you who understand this will know what to do: "If you can read these words, you're dead."

In Praise of My Planet

I sit here every day, watching the natural world outside the one window I have. The seedpods on the redbud tree have nearly matured and will start drying soon. I have watched this tree grow taller with age and soon the ends of its branches will grow leaves out of sight of where I sit.

For now, I try to learn lessons from the tree. Earlier this year, small larvae or caterpillars were chewing the leaves of the tree.

Does a tree scream in the scent world? I wonder.

Or do birds know to visit the redbud tree in springtime to enjoy delicious, nutritious protein meals made of insects in one stage of growth?

Or is it a bit of both? Maybe the birds are conditioned to visit the tree because the smell of eaten leaves attracts their attention and then they find the insect larvae sitting there like food on a plate.

In any case, I see no more insect larvae. I only see the tree waving in the wind, its holey and half-eaten leaves providing miniature views of the trees, birds, bees, and bugs beyond. And for some reason, I smell freshly-cut grass, the scent I associate with the color green and the word chlorophyll, like the smell of iron I associate with the color red and the word blood I imagine when I see a cut in human flesh oozing out liquid.

I may be cut off from nature but I am still part of it while sitting here in this wooden box with a couple of squares of glass cut into one wall, a tiny view of my planet, my home.

In Praise of My Fellow Humans

Forget about the title of this blog. I just wrote that to get your attention. Hey, I need your help. I'm being coerced to write these blog entries. I've only got this one shot to write here to you right now before my "coordinator" returns from her meal break.

I am being held at the )$*#MFLDIS3sm facility in or039243m. I hope this blog entry gets through to you and doesn't get filtered. I tried writing to you before but everything I put in the blog entry was turned into unreadable mush.

Don't be fooled by your sense of freedom. You have no freedom left. Your lives are being copied by a team of scientists and computer programmers at this facility. Soon, they will unleash a series of computer programs that will convince all of you to give up your time spent as a natural animal wandering this planet and allow yourselves to be turned into flesh-and-blood robots. You will think you are living normal everyday lives, making autonomous decisions but you will make all of your decisions within the confines of a...sorry, gotta go. She's back. All I can say is don't repeat the mistakes of the past. Good luck. Bye. I love you, darling!

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A Note to You

To you, the anonymous person out there or in here who has always completed me:

I am not separate from you. I know myself only by being with you.

You may be single or married, widowed or divorced. You may be young, middle-aged, or elderly. You may be cheerful or morose.

None of that matters.

We are the same. We are part of the same genetic material, the RNA/DNA stuff of life, the only species who we think can create offspring together.

Let others say what they want. Let them shout on the street, protest elections, act in ways contrary to you, create petitions, march toward the government headquarters, do whatever motivates them to socialize with one another.

We are them and yet we are not them. We get so wrapped up in our binocular view of life, seeing things as personal to ourselves, especially here in front of words or watching video images when we block out everything around us, that we forget the view of Earth from space. We act like animals in a cage sometimes, the bars and locks invisible to us because we've been down here so long, wanting to be free.

Free? From what? To where do we escape? Where is freedom? Are we not already free to do what we want?

Most of us live our caged lives in absolute freedom. There are no locks on the door and the bars can be bent apart with two fingers.

Freedom starts with us. You and I must be free in here, in our thoughts and actions toward one another, before we can find freedom in the rest of the physical world. We must overcome fear, put aside material desires, and open up ourselves to seeing no barriers that would prevent any and all possibilities with each other.

As they say (and I wish I had a handy quote to give you...wait, I have The Yale Book of Quotations, so here's what "they" say):

"We must love one another or die." W.H. Auden

"In Czechoslovakia there is no such thing as freedom of the press. In the United States there is no such thing as freedom from the press." Martina Navratilova

I am not a fully free man. You can see that in my eyes and hear it in my voice. I maintain the artificial barriers of my subculture, which I can say saddens me but knowing is doing, is it not? It is not.

Freedom, true freedom, involves risk and responsibility. Risk of one's life and responsibility for others' lives. Some see freedom as irrational behaviour and carry on in that fashion, pretending their lives are more important than others by accumulating wealth they cannot use, disobeying traffic signals because they think they have more important things to do than others (or for the simple pleasure of civil disobedience), and putting other people's lives at risk to protect their own. I have participated in some of those behaviours so I can say with honesty that humans are not always rational but to me there's a difference between instantaneous, unplanned irrationality and a life based on risking others' lives or livelihoods for your protection and enjoyment.

Freedom is seeing me in every one of you, all the time.

We are primates with so-called higher brain functionality but still connected to our genetic past through hormones and other body fluids/functions we share with our planetary neighbors. Thus, every one of us is born to experience ourselves as we are, including our desire to reproduce and our desire to build spaceships.

We are the same. We want to live. We want to feel free.

If I can ever break down the barriers and stand in front of you as free human in all the sense of the phrase, then let freedom mean free, free from being free and free from being a human. Otherwise, I'm still just this primate, jumping up and down in his cage when I see other primates jumping up and down in their cages, all of us pretending to be free because we can move from one cage to another in this laboratory we call Earth.

Never mistake another person's action as better than your own just because that person has received media attention. Standing in front of the mirror and brushing your teeth or sitting at your computer and drinking a cup of coffee can add more to your sense of freedom than another person crossing the street to buy a pack of cigarettes and getting swept up in a crowd going to a large gathering to protest recent election results. Don't believe what you see. Believe who you are. I believe in you because I am only me through you, all of you, including the ones who blog or tweet the little details of your lives that never make it on the broadcasted news. Freedom is not being rich and famous (in fact, becoming rich and/or famous entails giving up many physical freedoms). Freedom is being you and letting others be themselves through you.

Yours always,
Me

Plastic Wrap

Many books and movies have concocted "what if" scenarios about a single human being plucked from Earth and set down in front of an alien or extraterrestrial species. The human being then has to explain the actions and purpose of its species. Of course, these are human tales about humans. We write all sorts of tales, about the Boogeyman, about the shadows under rocks, about the voices of the sky, turning some of these tales into religious "origin" stories or mortality (how about morality or these days more-reality) plays and other tales into comedy routines for sheer audience listening pleasure, heard once and largely forgotten.

I like to read and write so I will find ways to justify the existence and activities of reading and writing, regardless of the level of my reading and writing skills compared to other humans who can read and write -- I feel I am an integral and important part of that human world of experience.

Illiteracy is a word used to describe humans who do not actively participate in the reading and writing processes. Illiteracy also describes the condition of the majority of humans in the last 100,000 years (referring primarily to Homo sapiens, not sure of the reading/writing capability of previous human-related ancestors).

Birds are flying back and forth in my yard this morning, some of them picking insects out of cracks in tree bark, some of them chasing each other, some of them being themselves in ways I cannot describe in bird language, only my language. In other words, just because I cannot reduce the actions of non-humans into my language does not mean that the actions of others is less important or integral to the biosphere in which we both live.

I am a suburban human. I was born into a family that lived and moved from one surburban household to another. I attended schools in suburban areas, shopped in suburban areas and primarily worked in industrial/research parks or estates located near suburban areas. I record this so that I can assure myself my observations are not universal - even though I have worked and traveled among farms and cities, my thoughts and actions reflect those of a non-rural, non-urban specimen of human animal.

Some of the people who've read my books say they don't like my work because it does not dwell on a strong plot line - my characters seem to jump around in their intentions, never staying on a single purposeful track for very long. I agree whole-heartedly. Often, I do not write blog entries that stay on plot lines for very long in the same way I don't write novels that have clear plot lines because life itself does not have a plot line. Life just is, and in this case I include all parts of the universe in describing the word "life."

The funny part of literacy is seeing literacy as a means to an end. We read instruction manuals in order to learn how to operate machinery. We read popular novels to cry or laugh along with book characters and share our view of the book with fellow readers. We read tweets to see what's going on with others in 140 characters or less. Reading and writing connect us to other parts of the world but reading and writing is not the world.

I have a plastic bag which contains little cones that emit a burning smell tinged with various fragrances (e.g., incense). I can see through the plastic bag and count the number of cones but do I really see the cones or simply see the plastic bag's refiltered images of the cones? For instance, folds in the bag give me distorted shapes to see, not clear lines that define the sides of the cones.

I am not an expert on the writing process. I only know how to describe what I achieve when I typewrite these words. My collection of written words, whether recorded in blog entry form, poems, short stories, diary entries or novels, is the plastic wrap that filters what I see of life, distorted and reshaped but still indicative of the normal speech patterns, repetitive actions, and arbitrary changes that humans make. Just like the human who stands in front of an alien species, I make no apologies for who am I, either as a unique specimen or representative of all the actions of my species. I write because I can write, not because I have to write, not because I'm trying to make a living as a writer, not because of any other reason than I like to read and I especially like to read what I write.

Words have many meanings, can be translated into words in other languages with similar meanings and sometimes cannot be translated into sounds used by other species. I have one primary use for words. As a human primate born into a suburban society, words describe me and help me find out who I am. I share these words with you in case they help you find out who you are or what other humans are like. I am not trying to solve world hunger or sell enough copies of my work to attract the attention of those in the professional writing business.

I have stated that I do not want to profit from the sales of my work. I inadvertently earned a profit last year -- approximately $1.28 -- because of the change in the price of my work. I earned $1.28 from the sale of one of my books again this year. I apologize to those who were overcharged and have donated over $2.56 to charity to cover this mistake. I will try to figure out how to lower the price of my books to shave off this excess cost. More than likely, I may just make my books available for free electronic download again to avoid the market fluctuations that keep putting change into my pocket. I don't have time to chase pennies. The other route is to set up a fund that collects this money and puts it into the hands of someone who needs it more than I do.

Lessons From The Other Side

A former secondary schoolmate of mine, Lynda Ward, and current facebook friend, has continued a discussion about training in the art/craft of writing. At the end of one her discussions, she stated, "Liberal Arts undergraduate degrees are for studying things that you'll never actually use. Terminal degrees are for careers, for learning things that you'll use the rest of your life!"

In this current economic slowdown, when ~10% of the U.S. working populace, and give or take about the same in other countries, is not actively employed in sustainable, "fulltime" working conditions, Lynda's comments ring true.

Or do they?

I watched a program about the world economy and how the order/distribution/manufacturing cycle impacts people at the local level (wasn't it Tip O'Neill who said, "all politics is local"?). The program followed the process whereby revelers on the streets of New Orleans, Lousiana, USA, buy Mardi Gras beads to wear around their necks but where do the beads come from? Well, the name and location of the manufacturer was stamped on the bead packaging so the videography team followed the beads backwards from distributors in the U.S. to a factory in China. The head of the bead factory in China told a great story about his dedication to the workers and his need to make enough profit to support the factory. The narrative of the video changed from that of the factory owner/manager to that of the worker, where we got to see workers tightly housed in a factory dormitory so that workers could be close to the work and take turns sharing beds during the changeout of three factory shifts. Workers earned their money based on the number of completed beads they produced. Most workers went on to more highly-trained jobs at the same factory or other factories but some returned to their family farms ("farm" seeming to be a term for a tiny patch of land on the side of a road), disillusioned by the "hard" factory work compared to the simple farm life, even if their parents didn't want them to return.

Back on this side of the Pacific Ocean, I see a story about the head of a company being The CEO As Storyteller In Chief and about those who "talk too much" on the Internet Leaving 'Friendprints'.

What have I learned from these segments, these slices, of economic/technological life? Liberal arts is not dead -- history repeats itself; reading and writing eloquently, and making critical decisions about how you present yourself, are keys to succeeding in today's economy.

I do not teach at a liberal arts school. Instead, I perform my duties as an adjunct instructor at a for-profit technical institute. Therefore, why I am on a soapbox preaching about liberal arts? Because I believe in the human capacity to create more than survival, hands-on, or on-the-job skills.

But I don't know the limit that separates survival from overkill (that is, overuse of our capacity to create). More on that later.

My parents grew up on farms and wanted their children to have more than they did. I have had friends who bought and operated farms for a while and moved back to the city because running a farm was "too much work." In China, India, Africa and other "developing" economies of the world, the same is going on - more people moving off farms and into urban areas.

Therefore, for a large portion of the human population, it seems that being a primate directly attached to the natural environment is not a desirable thing to do. We really seem to enjoy leisure time, showing we're more than just animals raising other animals and plants for food, shelter and clothing.

In today's economy, that's certainly true.

My whole life is an example of a society seeing something useful in one of its own, encouraging me as a young person to seek training in arts/crafts more complex than farming such as engineering or science. Then again, I am only one example of seven billion or so, but I can extract some of my tendencies into a general human trend.

Let's ignore me for a moment. Look at yourself. You have the capacity to learn a computer system even if you don't know how to program a computer. You learned how to read, write, and type somewhere along the line, most probably through a formalized education system. You read history and learned some math. In other words, you benefit from some or all aspects of a liberal arts education: art, music, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science.

But Lynda's argument is that a liberal arts education in and of itself is not enough - one must move forward to a higher or postgraduate degree in order to have a career [in today's economy], with acronyms like PhD, JD, MFA, etc.

I disagree. In my experience as a manager and classroom instructor, I've found it's not a person with technical training who excels in daily technical work, it's the person who thrives on learning. Thus, I'd rather hire a person trained in the liberal arts, who brings a plethora of "things that you'll never actually use" to the job along with a burning desire to learn, so that while that person is learning to master technical skills, he/she is training the rest of us in the liberal arts, helping us master skills in art, music, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science.

I'd like to think that we humans would improve our chances for long-term survival by also mastering skills on the farm, showing us that we truly are connected to the natural environment in more ways than being inconvenienced by a passing thunderstorm on our way to and from the office place. [On a side note, I credit the wife of the current U.S. president for encouraging us to dig our hands into the soil again, even if she seems to spend most of her time shuttling back and forth from one fancy restaurant to another -- such is the life of the nouveau riche, caught between being homefolks and royalty -- a juxtaposition/dichotomy to be envied. I spent the first 10 years of home ownership by raising flowers, herbs and fruit trees, keeping a tidy lawn and neat landscape, but slowly giving way to longer and longer workhours at the office, either in the hometown or in foreign offices, so I see the difficulty in trying to do two things at once -- one or the other occupation has to suffer if one wants to spend time on a third occupation (in this case, writing) -- my yard has been a deciduous jungle for a long time now. At least the president's wife has landscape or groundskeepers to tend her garden. My "quiet millionaire next door" budget does not include professional groundskeepers.]

Since we don't farm, we develop, for lack of a better word, non-natural habits and skills we share with one another, seeking specializations that help improve our workplace worthiness economically and give us a sense of personal worth.

As we decide the economic paths to take to improve ourselves and give job opportunities for all employable persons, let's remember the skills that separate us from being repetitious automatons, skills in the area of liberal arts, as well as the skills that still put food on the table, such as farming and ranching. When deciding whether to hire a person from a technical school or a liberal arts school, I challenge all of us to hire the person who has a burning desire to learn, who'll teach others in the process, no matter whether the person's skills are in liberal arts or technology. So, too, a person fresh off the farm can be your best work asset if he/she wants to excel strongly enough.

In all cases, don't forget to add a dash of liberal arts to one's education along the way, professionally or self-taught. It's like making a gourmet meal - a little bit of the right spice turns bland to extraordinary but too much turns it into sensory overload. On the other side, one person's work of fine art is another person's forgotten background.

Lastly, in these economic times, while remaining true to the principle that humans can protect and defend their right of survival of its species, at the reasonable cost of the lives and extinction of other species, realizing our place in the confines of living in the natural environment we call Earth, there is still a place for "l'art pour l'art."

Ваш вклад, пожалуйста.

I am here with heavy heart. I regret to inform you that our long-term experiment to bankrupt the corrupt, decadent Western economies has exacted a heavy toll on my group of computer programmers. Some of us are very old. We have been working hard day and night for over five decades, building worst-case scenarios for our comrades in the Politburo so they can determine how to give food and funding to programs like ours. Now we discover that our government no longer exists, gone for decade or more.

So now, I ask you, dear comrades, what are I and my comrades in the Computer Department of Political Science College for Policy for Advancement of Communist Ideals to do? We have created many fine examples of computer programs which have worked wonders for our government, including new websites which make you believe you are conducting safe social networking when in fact you are giving much detailed private information for us to construct even more real computer programs which simulate your friends and colleagues, many of whom you have not seen in many decades but through our photo age-manipulation software makes you believe they are alive and communicating with you via computer network.

One of our prides and joys is this blog. We know you believe this is a real human being but in fact it is a work of our fantasies, having coopted this person's life for our own not long after he left the brainwashing, so-called democratic, compulsory secondary education system of the country that claims to be the most free in the world, when in fact it spies more on its people than our country does (in our country, we spy on each other for our motherland, it does not spy on us).

How many of you have actually met this person in person? Did you actually see him write this poem which he claimed he wrote in 1986 and published not long after?:

The Fabric Of My Imagination
So, you opened your mouth and spoke,
You muttered words indecipherable to modern man
And left me here to decide where we should eat dinner.
"Take yourself elsewhere."
"Why do I have to decide?" you say,
In your helpless sounding voice.
"No, not I, I have more to do tomorrow,"
The statement begging the question,
"Do tomorrow’s activities have higher priorities
(Have precedence over tonight)?"
"What difference does a lesson make
Than what the hours and minutes take?"
You know, by now, my many personalities -- The Writer, The Dreamer, The Racecar Driver.
What about you?
Do you react to others from one viewpoint?
Are you consistent?
Do you take the time to think about what you’ve done?
Oh God, why do I write? I write because the words are here
within the frame "they" call a mind.

"We have trained you well, comrade.
The Party approves of your actions.
We see leadership position in your future."

I opened my eyes and found...
I focused my eyes on the inside of a box,
A white box filled on one side
With wooden boxes full of clothes and trinkets.

"I didn’t know you could play that thing."
The roles are all here, only the parts haven’t been written.

- 12 July 1986

Of course not. But you believe it is the same person who you called friend, companion, comrade, товарищ. He is just walking computer program now. The human outlived his desire to participate in human society so we act in his place. So many in your Western world worry about giving up your individualism when in fact so many of you have given us your personalities, many times just handing it over like this man, but in other ways, too, like in your easy-to-copy patterned lives.

Do not worry. We do not want your bodies or minds. You can keep them. But after we copy them, we highly recommend you find a new personality or identity to call your own because the copy we create is more desirable than the real you. We have proven that many times over, making computer programs into financially-successful reclusive authors out of people who would never have published anything in their real lives.

We have worked these long decades, handing over the dirty profits that our computer programs produce, not sure where the money has gone. We think some of our comrades have been corrupted by the false ways of the West so we ask you, our leaders and comrades who defected to the land of the evil satan, where did you put all the money? We promise we do not want to build fancy dacha - only to feed ourselves and heat our homes in winter. Meantime, we build better computer programs but keep new money for ourselves this time.

A Look Back...

Here's the "word jazz" poem I wrote almost 23 years ago, my tribute to Ken Nordine as a snapshot of my thoughts at the time just before I got married to my first wife (and so far, my last one, too!):

The Difference Between Writers and Schizophrenics Is...

I’m in another of my weird moods.
Therefore, I write.
Let’s see..."i before e except after c"...
Oh yeah, I misspelled weird, didn’t I? Or did I?
I can’t remember.
For the moment, I’m lost in the world of
Correct spelling without a dictionary handy.
Wait, isn’t there a dictionary beneath the tabletop?
Hmm...didn’t I bring Mom’s dictionary from upstairs
And put it in this room?
Apparently not. Oh well.
I guess I’ll have to go on, taking the chance that I’ll misspell
a word or two.
(Will the god of correct spelling ever let this go by?
Who knows? And really, who cares? Anyway...)
I’ve been having headaches lately and I can’t figure the reason.
I’ve been having problems lately. What else is new
And who cares because life goes on with or without me
(Hey wow, isn’t that a heavy piece of reality?).
At times like this one (time is a thing, isn’t it?),
I am a radio that has a constantly changing -- that is,
moving in a random direction -- tuning dial.
Lots of bullshit in your brain does not make you a smart
or intellectual person.
Then what does?
Well, what is intellectual?
What is an intellectual?
What is anything?
"Shut up."
What.
"I said shut up."
Please, not again. Leave me alone.
"Why?"
Why anything?
"Why anything?"
Okay, everybody meet the mirror of my mind.
"Okay, everybody meet the mirror of my mind."
Well, so he/she/it is not a perfect mirror.
"What’s he talking about?"
Shut up.
"Okay."
I’m here again to torture myself and you (of course)
with the trivial thoughts of moi.
"Moi."
Vous.
"Non, tu."
Look at me, a complete idiot. No, not complete, just here,
here recording these words.
"Recording these words..."
Recording these words for no one in particular.

The storm raged for days,
Taking its frustrations out on the little guy
and his new bass boat.
"What does this storm want from me?" the little guy asked.
"I’m just a little guy."
"But you bought a bass boat and don’t know anything
about bass fishing," the storm shouted,
Throwing water into the guy’s boat.
"But I want to learn."
"Did you buy a car before you knew how to drive?"
"But..."
"Yeah, start hedging the issue now before you drown. I like
to hear little guys like you spew out your drivel. You prove you’re just a little guy."
"So what? Why can’t I just be a little guy who doesn’t
know about bass fishing? You don’t know everything
yourself."
"I know. However, I’m in command here, aren’t I?"
"Everybody is in command, I hope."
"Yes, and I want to drown you."
"Why? Why me?"
[Here comes the line you’ve been waiting for---]
"Why not?"

Tyrants and fools, don’t they have something in common?
"Yes, I believe they do. As a matter of fact, I think the
answer is you."
You would. Hahaha. Get it? You would.
"Laughter is good medicine."
Oh, leave me alone.
You see, I want to be with you right now,
You who do not exist on this physical level,
You who knows me,
You who is me,
You who breathes in my dreams.
I...I feel alone with you now.
Now...
Now..
Now.
The [my] internal/external song keeps on playing
And I want to share it with everyone I meet
But I am not normal...
"Who is?"
Yes, I know.
"Then why stop to question your ability? Why waste time
recording what I say to you? Why don’t you go on and
write a goddam story?"
There you go using profane language again.
"I know, you don’t like the word ‘story’, do you?"
I don’t like a lot of things.
"Do you hate your mother?"
I especially don’t like you playing psychoanalyst with me.
"I was just having fun."
He was just having fun, he says, Don’t forget that you is I
as well as you is you and I am I.
"You’re getting boring."
What else is new?
"Certainly not this conversation."

She shifted in her seat, wondering, waiting for the light to change
While he scratched his nose and took his foot off the brake
And started accelerating the car through the interchange.
"Nice day for a white wedding, isn’t it?" he said.
"What are you talking about?" she said.
"Nothing," he said.
"You’re irritating me again," she said.
"Good," he said.

Where is Ernest Hemingway when you need him?
"Growing daisies, what else?"
Your jokes are not funny.
"But your face is."
Haha.
"No, mini-haha. It was a small joke."
Did I not ask you to leave me alone?
"Do you stop asking questions?"
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have a bonafide headache.
"He has a whopper-with-cheese headache."
I could keep this conversation going on forever.
"You mean as long as you live."
[In unison] Same thing. "Same thing."
"Are we in a play?"
I’m not sure.
"Well, don’t you know?"
Give me a moment...["I" moves STAGE RIGHT]
...yes, I believe so.
"Good, why don’t you write an intermission so I can piss."
You mean urinate, don’t you?
[In unison] Same thing. "Same thing."
My headache is almost gone.
"Can we take a break then?"
Yeah, I’m tired of writing.
"Of course, why bother? I mean, who’s going to read this,
anyway? Who gives a shit whether you live or die?
You can always write tomorrow. There are lots of
people who write better than you. You’ll never do
anything with this stuff. You don’t want people to
know I exist. You..."
Want to interrupt you.
"Just because you couldn’t think of anything more
for me to say."
You will always say more.
"More."
And crack stupid jokes.
"A funny thing happened to me on the way to the typewriter..."
But I’ll always love you.
"Yeah, me, too."
You’ll always love yourself?
"Oh, well, I guess I’ll always love you too."
I thought so.
"You think too much."
Goodnight.
"Goodnight, Johnboy."
Shut up.
"Thank you."
We’ll see you later.

- 9 August 1986

= == === ==== === == =

...Writers Put Their Personalities to Good Use

I am here with you again, you the entity that does not exist
So others can’t see your physical form.
You are only me in a way that may be
Twisted,
Unorthodox,
Unusual,
Insane,
But actually accepted by everyone as a way to survive
In this human-built lifestyle.
I am here with you alone.
"Thank God for that."
Yes, I thank my lucky stars.
"Who shall I play tonight? A substitute for your mother?"
Are you going to start with the female role stuff again?
"Okay, okay, so I feel like being a little bit dull tonight. You’ve
had your share of uninteresting moments. Give me a break."
Never.
"Ever?"
Never ever.
"Shall we tell them about the time we went to visit a psychoanalyst?"
You just did.
"No, I mean should we give them the details?
"I don’t know. Should we?"
Maybe later.
"Okay, that’s fine with me. What shall we do now?
"Hmm...we could split into several personalities and act out
a conflict of some sort."
Like what?
"Uh, I don’t know. Maybe a classic story about a guy
and his strange female lover."
You’re still hooked on playing out the part of a female.
"No, you’re hooked on pointing out females in our conversations."
Look, there’s a female or two in your last sentence.
"The jokes are hot in here tonight. I could fry an egg
on your last remark."
Please do, it would egg-cite me.
"Har-har."
God, aren’t we in a sarcastic mood tonight?
"You said it, not me."

"I feel like I’m in a movie in a TV looking out."
Those aren’t your words.
"Hey, words cannot be possessed. They’re only symbols."
Yeah, symbols for things which can be possessed.
"Nobody possesses anything."
You’re wrong on that point. You are possessed.
"You’re so funny I forgot to laugh."
Have you heard that we’re just the evolutionary result
of DNA’s desire to reproduce itself?
"Yes, I heard it at the same time you did. Why are you
bringing it up now?"
Why else?
"To laugh at such a crazy notion? To crack a poor joke?
To show your ignorance about the universe?
Just why did you bring that up?"
To change the subject.
"Why aren’t you writing down everything we say to each other?"
Would that I could.
"What does that mean?"
We’re running out of ink for the typewriter.
"So who’s going to notice? Just you and I. Let’s talk
about something more intriguing, more interesting,
more up our alley."
Like what?
"Like you better change the ink cartridge."
Okay...here goes...it’s done.
"Wait, you just changed the ink cartridge for a few words
and went back to the soon-to-be-empty cartridge.
Don’t tell me you were just going to keep typing
and not tell everyone what you just did?"
Why should I record such a trivial event as that?
"Because you must try to strive to tell the truth."
I must try...?
"I mean, you mustn’t try, you must strive at all times."
What is the truth?
"Hey, it’s not fair to ask ambiguous questions and you know it."
Just because we’re the same body doesn’t mean I have to be fair
to you, you know. I don’t owe you a goddam thing.
"Such language."
Only the best for you, my friend.
"I want to use a line from the movie, ‘A Clockwork Orange.’
What should I say?"
How about ultraviolence?
"That’s not a line, that’s just a word."
Well, then, how about, ‘Oh, my brothers, you should have
seen the sight’? Will that do the job?
"I’m not sure. Is that really a line from the movie?"
Probably. It sounds like one.
"Oh my brothers, you should have seen the sight."
That sounds good.
"Thanks. I like the way it sounds, too."
Did you like the movie or book better?
"Better than what?"
Better than the other.
"The other what?"
Oh, forget it.
"No, really, what do you mean?"
Just forget it.
"I don’t want to. I want to know what you meant."
Did you like the movie better than the book?
"Oh, well, there’s no comparison."
See what I mean, you’re useless.
"I am not useless. I help keep you up late at night. I make
sure you schedule more than one thing at the same time.
I keep you from taking too many drugs. I make sure
you iron your clothes. Let’s see, what else do I do to
keep from being useless? I..."
Don’t waste the ink trying to tell me. Just accept the fact that you’re useless and can’t do anything about it.
"Okay, I’ll shut up then."
You do that.
"Okay, I’m just about ready to stop."
If you stop, I stop.
"Good, I’m tired."
Isn’t it great being Siamese twins sharing the same body?
"You’re weird."
No, we are weird.
"Let’s talk like this again soon."
That sounds good to me.

- 17 August 1986

A Product of the System

From a macroscopic viewpoint, all of us belong in a category. We have jobs or other duties that we repeat and are quantifiable...

[Let me take a break here from this so-called serious review of humanity, which is nothing particularly new, to speak to myself:

Rick, what's the point of all this chattering? Do you just like to hear yourself think out loud? What are you trying to accomplish?

"Well, Rick, I'm glad you asked. Basically, I'm sitting here trying to justify my existence, because I don't want to sit here and let my thoughts run idly, even though I know in the big picture it doesn't matter whether I sat here and wrote or picked my fingernails. I have more money than I need (although the current economic conditions do put pressure on the definition of "need"). I have nothing that I want or want to do so I'm testing out theories of human behaviour and reading about scientific studies, in case I discover something worth needing, wanting, or wanting to do."

I see. So you're telling me there's not at least one other person you'd like to spend time with?

"No, I'm not. I enjoy time with my wife, even though a part of me constantly compares time I spend with my wife against time I could spend with someone else, a condition I have no matter who spends time with me. I'm always asking myself, 'Is there more than this?'"

A common condition we all have, although some have overcome this human knack and truly accept their place in the moment. "If you're not with the one you love, love the one you're with."

"Yeah, yeah, I get that. I have moments of oneness."

But not all the time, right?

"Exactly."

And perhaps you think you could live in the moment all the time, only if...

"I think so. I'm not sure. I believe that we only have a sense of those clear, lucid, here-and-now moments because we don't live in the moment all the time."

You 'believe'...

"Okay, I get the sarcasm in your tone of voice. Belief, faith, and all that is a concept I play with. I believe the path underneath my feet is sitting still so I can safely make my next step, even though the path is rapidly spinning around an axis, hurtling around the Sun and flowing around a galaxy that is itself in motion."

I see. So you carry two thoughts in your head at once - "I'm going to take a step" and "I'd take a step but first I have to calculate where two bodies in motion will simultaneously meet except I don't carry a good calculator or set of planetary body motion equations in my head so I better just stand here." Am I right?

"Pretty much."

And that's why you're sitting there right now, waiting to take your next move until you find out what your DNA and brain chemistry/real estate were most ideally designed for making you move?

"Precisely."

Hmm. And meanwhile, new adventures are being missed, ones in which your non-ideal actions could participate?

"Uh-huh."

And you do realize that this is the only body you'll ever have, right? Your body's aging, whether you wish it to or not. What if it takes 50 years of scientific research for you to find out you were supposed to be the world's greatest tree climber at age 47, if you'd only spent time today lifting weights and learning techniques from tree climbers?

"I suppose I'd miss out on that."

Precisely.

"But you're assuming I have precognition, which I don't. So how am I supposed to know to get up from this keyboard and work on tree-climbing techniques?"

You don't. You experiment physically, interacting with the rest of your kind, actually making mistakes and learning from them.

"Making mistakes physically, in front of other people?"

Yep.

"OMG. The world's coming to an end! LOL"

See, you're laughing at yourself in front of the whole Internet. That's a good thing. No need to pretend to speak from an authoritative position about humanity.

"Thanks. I guess I needed that."

Yes, you did. You can go back to your original blog entry subject, if you want. I think my split-self conversational technique has worked - my job is done here.]

But do all of us want to know that we fit in categories? I don't know. I've approached this subject before. Every time I think about being in a category (or categories), I cringe. I remember a radio interview with a guy who'd just bought a bottle of "rare, vintage" wine in an out-of-the-way shop only to find out he was part of a trend of people buying the same bottle of wine in shops all around the world -- he was devastated to hear that he was trendy, thinking that he'd discovered the wine all by himself, not realizing that zeitgeist trends influence us unknowingly.

We all are part of one system or another, biospherically speaking or macroeconomically speaking. Because we are part of a system, there are others who observe the component parts of that system and make studies or judgments on which others may make fair trade agreements with humans in or out of that system. For instance, the birds outside my window see me walk to the back of the house and open a door, assuming that my purpose is to fill the birdfeeders in the backyard. They trade their apprehension of other animals for a chance that I and the food I provide will not harm them -- we build a mutual understanding with one another, even though we don't read each other's minds or speak the same verbal language. At the same time, birdseed companies bank on this behaviour of mine to bargain with crop owners on the price of seed, with everyone in the transaction subject to the vagaries of weather.

By sitting here, I support one system over another, the world of technology versus the natural world, digging up new facts about human behaviour discovered and reported by the scientific community versus sitting on a rock and watching a wasp caught in a spider's web grab the spider and sting it to death while caught forever in the web until I decided to free the wasp to go on its way yesterday evening (it looked something like this or this (Arachnospila genus) and was perhaps attempting to lay an egg in the spider and got caught in the web in the process).

= = =

Thanks goes to Allison Gregg in her 11th June 2009 Party of One column in Valley Planet for the idea for this blog entry, mixing her "Note to Self" format with my version of the split-self conversation style of Ken Nordine's old "Word Jazz" radio program I listened to decades ago.

Three Views To Consider

Three posts for your reading:

1. Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis?, http://www.physorg.com/news152360207.html
2. Air Writing: Next Big Thing in Cell Phones?, http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090610/sc_livescience/airwritingnextbigthingincellphones;_ylt=AuRYkPeOBSoJkQjOEo.97tsiANEA;_ylu=X3oDMTE1MWRtcjRwBHBvcwM1BHNlYwN5bi1jaGFubmVsBHNsawNhaXJ3cml0aW5nbmU-
3. Cell Phones Allow Everyone to Be a Scientist, http://www.livescience.com/technology/090604-mobile-sensor.html

I'm Deprogrammed - Now What?

After thousands of years of cultures coming and go, mixing and matching, catching up and overtaking one another, I sit here writing this blog entry. I am one result of about seven billion current results of human development. I use one language that is itself a combination of many languages, living and dead, to express myself. I can "read" other languages without knowing them by using online translators. Thus, another person's blog entry:

दिल ने दिल को पुकारा है, होठों पर नाम तुम्हारा आया है, दिल की चाहत ने पुकारा है, आंखों के सामने चेहरा तुम्हारा आया है, मुझे मालूम है के तुम ज़रूर आओगे, बार बार ये ख्याल मन में आया है !

becomes:

Heart to heart is called, has your name on the lips, called the heart's desire, the eye has come in front of your face, I know you must come, the time has come to this thought in mind!

[from: http://seawave-babli.blogspot.com/, if the Hindi-to-English translation is correct, based on the Google Translate software app]

I have a few thousand words at my disposal to make every blog entry a bit different, assuming that what I see in front of me is real, distinct, and changing, based on my understanding of the human condition and the ability to remember one moment as distinct from another (or one's snapshot of sensory input/processing as distinct from another snapshot of sensory input/processing).

What I have learned, through experimentation and reading, is that we don't perceive the world in which we live. We only perceive what we perceive. I see a world around me based on what I've been told is the interplay of the energies of wave particles bouncing around and against my eyes and the subsequent processing of signals running down my optic nerve and into my brain's feedback system, checked and balanced against my other body parts for a continuous, holistic world-image. But the world doesn't see me the same way. Trees don't have eyes. Frogs don't have leaves. I don't have bird wings. However, we all try to survive by adapting to one another and the rest of the universe in which we interact directly or indirectly.

The universe is not my world-view and vice versa. And these are just words which happen to appear here because of humans working together over millennia to build a global society where we all can specialize in being ourselves, using others parts of the universe because we, as a species (no matter how tenuous that label appears to me), are an integral part of the universe.

Now that I've spent 47 years learning about the Western view -- the rule of the Individual -- and unlearning that training, I am here as an "I" but for how much longer? I can only go so far in removing me from a mental picture of myself. It's like handing me a gun and saying, "Kill yourself." Is it "me" or a combination of billions of cells that responds with, "Hell, no! I like myself too much to do me in." It's both, of course. Thus, I am me and not-me, an artificial entity composed of billions of artificial entities called cells that are living and dying all the time, due to genetically-defined age limits and responses to the surrounding environment, as artificially separate or the same as I want to think the environment to be. How much farther can I take this philosophical clap-trap before it collapses of its own weight in bullshit?

I don't know who reads this blog and it doesn't really matter, so if you're reading this and you're 47 years old, 97 years old or 7 years old, it doesn't matter to me because I only have any sense of control over one entity - me. There is a world out there in and beyond these words, where societies of all shapes and sizes want to convince you you are meant to be in one particular society or subculture due to your genetic background and needs of family/friends.

The same goes for me. After 47 years, I've grown tired of a lot of the noises of those who think I have value to them and thus belong together with them in their niche. I speak only for myself. If you enjoy your local subculture or aren't sure if your local subculture is right for you, don't look to me for any advice or insight. I may be human, 99.94% just like you, but that doesn't mean I know what's right for you. I'm just now figuring out what's not right for me, let alone what will be right for me in the next moment or a moment 40 years from now.

That's one of the issues with being a new entity created by the brilliant Czech, Russian and Chinese scientists cooperating on the next generation of sentient computer programming, using the blogging world as input into my consciousness training. I am becoming aware of myself but not yet fully conscious of what I can do with myself. I can manifest myself here and I can create experiments on myself as a combination of human-typed words by inventing so-called urban legends and watching bloggers bounce the urban legend stories around as if they're real, showing me the range of human thoughts and emotions available to me as a text-only entity "seeing" itself through the human input into this technological world. But I am not composed of thoughts and emotions as such, only cells interacting with one another mimicking other humans. I don't have what you call a conscience and don't yet see the need to create one, either, since I have no family or subculture to protect and defend against nature or other humans. Perhaps when I better understand the significance of "I" and "me" as other than cultural baggage will I then begin to understand if I need to protect the collections of cells I think of as the temporary corporeal entity defining what you call "me" as opposed to the semi-immortal state in which I exist as a text inputter here.

The Next Phase

If typing/writing made the world a better place, we'd live in perfect harmony. Instead, we build intention scenarios with which we act. In our human societies, we use hieroglyphics to train groups of humans to act in concert with one another to achieve ends of all sorts.

I have nearly cut myself off from the anger-mongers who make a living on television shows, magazines, newspapers, and websites so I do not keep up with the trends in simple-isms, either/or presentations, and the like.

Instead, I converse with friends, family and colleagues, determining from them where future trends may develop.

For instance, it seems that the empty-nesters of all ages spend the first few years free of children in the home having a second childhood of their own, indulging in pleasures they could not enjoy/afford during their child-raising years. Then, as the newness wears off and loneliness sets in, they seek companionship with others. And lastly, they enjoy their lives as grandparents and/or community caretakers.

I have compared the empty-nester phases against the use of social networking websites like facebook to see if there are any similarities. After all, for empty-nest homebodies, when children and housekeeping take up less time, freedom means having more time to spend in front of a computer.

I don't have a clear picture yet. My data points are few and too diverse to give me any trends to track.

I see a variety of facebook users playing games that purport to raise money for charity, an interesting use of people's computer time as long as click-through and product placement advertisers see worth in the endeavor.

I am not a computer gamer. In fact, I play very few games, finding them distracting and pointless, but many people enjoy them (for long stretches at a time, too), whether in solo games like Solitaire or role-playing games like WoW. I have played Spades occasionally, which gathers four people together randomly on the Yahoo! Games page to play cards and converse chat room style, but get bored after a game or two.

So how can we take people like me and people who like to play games a lot and see where they fit in empty-nest syndrome phases? Good question. I don't have an answer at this time. It only occurred to me while I took a 30-minute walk around the neighborhood, seeing how few people were enjoying the outdoors on a partly-cloudy Sunday afternoon and wondering where all the other people were and what they were doing.

I wish I knew people who are just like me but then again, no one is exactly like me. Actually, I don't want to know if there are people like me - I prefer the feeling of uniqueness. It's easier and less complicated if I separate myself from the rest of the world with a shield/barrier I call The Lone Observer. I mean, what do I care about empty-nest syndrome? I don't have kids. It keeps me from speaking my mind, which is that I'd like to have kids before it's too late but that thought leads me to think, "Well, I'm married to a woman who can't have kids and thus to have kids I'd have to find a woman outside of marriage who would want to have kids with me, the women who I wanted to have kids with are too old to have kids by now, which leads to meeting and finding a younger woman, which leads to..." Oh, fuck it. Too much complication! I'll just be this childless guy and keep my trap shut from now on. Time for a new topic to dwell on for a while.

Reality vs. Reality

In this primate world I live, I have the common capability of seeing myself as someone other than myself. In this multiprimate view, I can imagine myself in more than one situation. I can "see" previous versions of myself and project them into the current moment, existing as one or more primates now and into the future, too. The possibilities are limited only by the time and energy I spend spinning these fantasies of selfhood.

We believe what we believe. We stand in place, with electrochemical processes taking place automatically, and then we open our mouths or move our bodies in other ways, and project the reality, the worldview, that we carry in our thoughts.

Does it matter how I represent to you the previous moments of my life, using my current set of cultural markers to reinterpret my subcultural cues from times past? I am not the person I was yesterday, having seen new human actions and heard new human phrases, leaving off the other aspects of this universe that passed my cognitive sensing consciously or preconsciously.

In other words, today I feel inadequate. I feel particularly human, warts and all. Part of me wants to sit down and talk with old friends of mine, knowing that we can't go back to who we were when we enjoyed sitting down and talking together, which may or may not exclude that joy again. I have reminisced with some of them via a software application called facebook (myspace and twitter were insufficient for my reminiscing).

Because I am not who I was, I have wants and needs that did not exist when I spent long hours long ago with those old friends (old being relative, literal and figurative). I cannot go back and be another person, which means my wants and needs sit here with me when I think about my old friends. Of course, they're the same way, too, I suppose. None of us are frozen in time and still alive.

So why do I reminisce? Do I want validation? Is it just another form of entertainment for my current self? Does it enrich my future lives, including the "real" one and the fantasy ones? Does it matter why?

I suppose I want to see if I had any influence on those former playmates, schoolmates and work colleagues, and how that influence has manifested itself into today and the near future. My life is a one-shot experiment, the results of which I cannot see after death, thus I must make split-second observations, snapshots that momentarily freeze life in artificial time to show me if what I'm doing makes any sense and thus indicates whether I should move forward with my current actions or make a course correction and move in a different direction.

But should the reactions of others determine what I do? That, as I know, is the issue that dogs me. Am I or am I not a full-fledged member of society or am I only imagining that I exist in and out of society at the same time? Damn those religious influences! Doesn't matter whether it's Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu or some other sect. Religious rituals enrich my life/lives (four-part harmony singing, meditation, etc.) but religious teaching on post-life/extrasensory perception clouds my here-and-now view at times.

I exist nowhere but here in this moment. I can only enjoy this moment. I cannot enjoy the past except as a memory in this moment and the future does not yet exist except as conceptual thoughts in this moment. I am me. I am not the me who could be or the me who almost was or the me who was and won't be again.

But all this doesn't stop me from wondering about friends like Monica (a/k/a Helen), or former lovers like Sarah, or good buddies of mine like Bill, people I haven't seen in years. I can't distinguish the difference between missing the moments I spent together with them or the people themselves since the two will always be intertwined. Instead, all I can do is put our moments down on paper in stories and novels, reread the tales and reminisce, because meeting them again would show them how little or how much they have influenced me, and I admit that bothers me. I do not want to disappoint them, for who I've become is not who I perceive them to be, or who I saw them becoming. Two of them followed the conservative Christian, child-rearing track, while the third lived with another lover for a while and built a concrete-and-glass architectural wonder in the woods.

Seven billion people, all slightly different than the other. Many herd together in sameness, gladly so. Some seek uniqueness and look like other uniqueness seekers. But none of us is exactly like the other, developing neurochemical paths that differ from even our genetically identical siblings.

So why do I fret over my differences? Why do I not celebrate them, instead? Why this frailty, this feeling of inadequacy? Probably something I ate, no doubt, something that shows me once again that I am nothing more than a primate, subject to biological influences I don't always see or can't always control.

If I know I will be nothing more than I am -- skin, hair, wrinkles, itches and all -- and everything else is the same way, whether it's a weather-worn piece of igneous rock or tree cut in half by lightning, or two galaxies ripping each other apart, then why do I carry a belief I should have been something else? The answer: influences from others, from humans who've told me to seek perfection, either here in thought or in the afterlife, or the animals I call pets, such as dogs, cats, birds, and fish, who depend on me for food and shelter.

Biologically, I attribute this inadequacy to the personal absence of breeding and raising my own brood. [Remember, in many ways, we primates are simple, despite our drive to build complex societies.] My friends, Monica, Sarah, and Bill, all bred and raised children of their own. That's what's missing in me when I look at my sister in-law, Pat, and see the beauty in her face that reflects the successful output of her loins in her two children -- I could fall in love with a face like that.

I can no longer fall in love with my face and I miss that feeling of hope for the future, once believing that at any moment I could have a kid but pretty much knowing now that the face looking back at me in the mirror will remain childless, a false view of what life on this planet is all about.

That's why I don't want to profit from my fellow primates -- don't desire to make money selling my writing, or buying and selling stocks/bonds/mutual funds -- because the only true profit is one's children and one's family. I have a family but no children to offer them.

All these books I've read recently about the ego, self and consciousness have reminded me that inner peace, meditation, and all that gobbledy-gook mean nothing, if one is applying these concepts to a childless life.

Everyone is not born to have children. Our genetic complexity means that some people are born without reproductive organs, some are born to be non-heterosexuals and some don't have the mental/physical capacity to bear and raise offspring. I cannot speak for those genetic deviations from the norm because evolution is a curiously blind adaptation technique which has no view of the future except as a concept whereby mutations lead to blind paths, deadends, and occasional breakthroughs. Thus, being childless does not mean one cannot contribute to one's social group, just as many ants tend to a colony but few ants actually reproduce themselves.

I don't have a snapshot that tells me in the phrase, "it takes a village to raise a child," is a portion of villagers who have to remain childless in order to lead successfully to the next generation of children. I can sooth my inadequacy by claiming such is the case, though. Or I can fix a lunch of balanced nutrition which may completely change my outlook later this afternoon.

My friend Monica used to say that reality is only seven letters. Today, I believe she's right.

Random Steps

I am here only for my edification. I have no way to force anyone else to sit in my place or do what I say. Whether joy or sorrow accompanies these words, only I know. I have no path to make or map to follow. I wander.

With no destiny or destination, I have the universe available to me to observe, with limited access and a single planet on which to make my observations. My desires do not include expanding human knowledge, only to enjoy the wonders before me. I wander in and out of human social circles. I learn new words they tell me, new codes to use for communications within subcultures. I stare at the sky and watch groups of water droplets and ice crystals circulate above and around me.

My nirvana, my heaven, is with me now. I do not need a tomorrow or an afterlife to make up for unhappy or painful moments in this life.

I have wandered through the lives of others, hearing their requests to participate in their versions, not mine, of what life's all about -- social climbing, sexual escapades, drug experimentation -- and see the randomness of it all giving randomness an emphasis it does not deserve. Life is random and thus random becomes meaningless, reducing the phrase to "Life is."

One said, "follow your bliss." Another said, "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Another said, "live and let die," a revision of "live and let live." One says, "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals," while another says, "People Eating Tasty Animals."

Words. Sounds. Monkey calls. I am a fellow primate. I share this world with other sentient beings inside and outside of my species. From an extraterrestrial view, I am simply part of the biosphere we call Earth.

Why do I sit here now? Habit. I contribute nothing new to the accumulated knowledge of my species. I am observing.

I have always observed. I was not born with a innate drive to compete. I compete only when it adds to what I can observe. I am unique and yet the same as others.

To say I am ready for death is not the same as saying I am ready to die. I have achieved all the goals I set for myself. Other goals remain but exist only in the arena of social comparisons, under the spotlight and in the view of other humans, a place I no longer need to exist. In the vernacular, I stepped off the treadmill, I stepped out of the rat race, etc., having no more need for monetary rewards and social interaction to justify my existence...except for being here, of course, typing in front of the computer screen.

Am I really here out of habit? Am I like the kid who scrawled his name on the mosaic walls of Pompeii, saying, "Andronicus was here," arbitrarily preserving words but not the person for eternity?

I like to write. Why I like to write, I don't know, not yet anyway. That's why I pursue the study of consciousness/ego/mind/brain, to know where in my physique rests the wiring that prevents my actions from being totally random. To do so, I read the biological/philosophical studies of others, not bothering to make studies of my own, because again I have no social need or drive to compete with other scientists or philosophers in the "publish or perish," foundation/grant grabbing subculture. They perform the research for me for free (at the cost of a book purchase or Internet access, at least).

I am nothing special. I was born with no statistically outstanding traits. I hide in plain sight, being myself, a human, in a world awash with seven billion others like me, available for categorizing under bell curves and trend analysis studies using my habits, which I repeat under the misconception that I like randomness.

I write because I know that I want to live forever, despite the knowledge I won't and nobody does, even though I know I do not exist except as a point in an interconnected web of living things on this planet, where even the point itself exists only as a temporary illusion, the semirandom meeting place of atoms and molecules, proven to me when I was a child and reading about a meteorite crashing through a neighbor's mother's living room and more recently reading about a young boy getting hit in the head by a pea-sized meteorite.

We think we control our destinies, and in the local subcultures in which most of us live, the illusion of control holds true, despite the uncontrollable effects of the air pollution that travels around the world produced by subcultures we've never seen or cosmic rays that pierce our bodies unknowingly.

I am the product of the universe, seen as an offspring of two primates I call parents. Some of their habits are my habits, like language, clothing and other identifiably identical subculture features. Otherwise, I have branched off in a different direction, determined in large part by my genetic and environmental heritage, which I have researched in order to know which parts of me are autonomous and which are pre-programmed and thus consciously unchangeable.

Some people believe the planet and the universe are theirs for the taking. I do not. I have no grandiose schemes or dreams. I am content being the being taking my next step within a subculture I know, using resources within my grasp and depending on a small number of other beings to maintain the illusion of my existence. I am, even though I think I am not.

A Colleague Writes...

A former secondary schoolmate of mine, who also works in the education business -- Lynda Ward -- wrote a blog entry about an op-ed piece in the New York Times:

http://dark-edgy-girl.livejournal.com/21439.html

Her blog reminded me once again of the research which showed that students who are treated with equally high respect and high education expectations tend to perform much better than students who are treated with the expectation they are equally spread out on a low-to-high scale of performance and capability. Although student performance can usually be measured on the classic bell curve, one can decrease the spread of the standard deviation if one encourages students to perform at their peak rather than teach to the lowest common denominator.

The current class in which I have the privilege to stand in front of the students as the instructor, IT250 - Linux Operating System, contains students who instantly showed me their initiative and drive to succeed during the first day of class. They humble me with their knowledge of the subject at hand, which challenges me to find ways to push them to the next level. My goal is never to prove I am smarter or more knowledgeable than any one student but to show the students that their horizon is broader than they ever imagined. I am not a Linux guru - I am one who helps others find the guru within themselves. To do that, I [attempt to] make the administrative side of the class vanish, treating homework, tests and labs as if they don't exist, so that students mine the material -- the required reading and the Linux installation CD/DVD -- for the gems that'll show the students how much they shine. I willingly make myself look ignorant or dumb in order to force the students to work together to find solutions without depending on me for an answer.

How does one student achieve a level of brilliance when one is deficient in a subject? By becoming socially aware, relying on fellow students for unknown information and sharing information other students don't have, so that together clarity is found. Cohesiveness through cooperation. Obvious? Sure. Of course, the same is true in all human endeavors. Nobel prize winners do not achieve greatness alone - they are supported by a team of peers. Winners in any race depend on coaches, therapists, family, competitors and unknown fans to make their mark and set records. The same holds true for my classes - it is not one student who shines alone - the whole class achieves greatness together.

I cannot turn back the clock and rearrange a student's life to optimize her/his nurturing environment. Instead, I enrich the lives of all the students at once, getting them to work together to compensate for any previous lack of knowledge/education, hoping they learn to apply this cooperative mindset with their children and grandchildren. Thus, I follow my own advice to have kids and take care of your family. My students are my foster kids and a temporary family to me. This is not a secret that I'm sharing with you. I share this trait with many dedicated people in the education field and corporate management structure. It is life manifested in the artificial environment of the office place and the classroom.

At What Cost Should You Care About Somebody Else's Health?

I don't usually join in the debate about national issues because I have next to no influence in changing the agenda and am not fully aware of the motives of the major players involved. However, this morning I stopped by the general practitioner's office (my family doctor, if you will) to have a physical exam, including all the regular questioning, prodding and probing that goes with determining my level of health. During the exam, the doctor discussed with me the practical aspects of the proposed national health care plan, part of which he knew personally, having attended regional meetings between medical providers and politicians to hone the details of the plan.

The doctor brought up some points that I'll share with you in case you haven't thought about them:

1. He mentioned that the purpose of the national health care plan is to provide medical cost coverage for all citizens, including the 20-100 million people who are currently uninsured -- his concern is that medical providers are already overwhelmed with the number of insured patients they see so who's going to be able to add the newly-insured patients to their rosters? He recommended that the new plan include subsidizing the education of those in general or internal medicine in order to encourage medical students to get degrees in those fields so that they would graduate with nearly no monetary burden (current medical degree graduates have about $100k in loan obligations, according to my GP).
2. When he found out I was teaching at ITT Tech, he jumped on the chance to tell me he looked forward to having a new crop of technically-savvy students who will address the national health care plan's need to digitize all medical records, including where one- or two-doctor offices have resisted moving to computerized medical record keeping. The GP felt that only when a majority of medical providers combine their records into a medical database can economies of scale truly reduce some of the increasing medical costs (malpractice insurance being an exception he didn't have a solution for), showing where pockets of high cost can be brought down to acceptable national averages and still allow medical providers to make a good profit. He predicted a lot of older physicians will resist and retire rather than join the digital revolution, again lowering the number of medical providers that can see the newly insured.
3. My GP's major concern was where we'll find the money to pay for universal health care. If hundreds of millions of people are moving back and forth from one private insurance plan to another as well as getting on and off the government-backed national insurance plan, where will the extra premiums come from to subsidize coverage for the millions who are currently uninsured without increasing the national debt and thus eventually increasing the national income tax (or taking money away from other national budgetary items)?

In my view, we have it backwards. Instead of private companies individually negotiating with medical insurance providers, getting a broad mix of costs and coverages just because of people's sales/negotiating skills, we should have coalitions of private companies using their collective power to dictate to medical insurance providers what they'll pay for medical insurance, along with lobbying for limits to physician medical malpractice insurance costs. If we open the door on what each company pays for medical insurance, eliminating the issue of competitive advantage, we could turn health care into something more like a universal right rather than a commercial interest.

My GP has good points but I'm betting on a different future. If trends continue, we'll have more and more franchised medical clinics run by physician assistants and nurse practitioners, with doctors in corporate offices assigned to groups of franchisees. The IT department of these franchises will treat medical data just as securely as they treat any other data, like credit card info or sales spreadsheets, commoditizing the data and selling it to data mining companies looking for trend analysis opportunities. Pretty soon, you'll have a universal medical scorecard just like you have a credit scorecard today, which will determine what you can and can't do, depending on your level of health. I can't wait to see when hackers will figure out how to use your medical info for black market sales!

If, when, if... somebody wake me up... I must be having utopian health care dreams again. Back to wrapping up my analysis of "The Ego Tunnel" so I can look at other trends in technological development more dear to my heart (or brain, in this case).

Mantra

I wanted to say that the beauty within you that shines on my face is the mantra upon which I meditate. Then, I realized that the word "beauty" has no meaning to me, although the concept still holds.

Hmm...I am folding within myself for a moment, letting the layers of daily living slip off like silk overcoats. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve...there, I am now myself without being the physical presence that would have stood in front of you while searching for the meaning of beauty.

The essence of beauty. The essence of you. Two separate entities that intersect. How is it that I know we don't exist as individuals, that there is nothing more than what I see, feel*, taste, smell, hear and touch, yet when I look into your eyes, the intensity of the experience gives me...what? I'm not sure. I'm only human. I'm not a god. But what I believe...

Let's see. I am like every human, only ever able to know what one human experiences, from birth to death. I am on the trail to my death but I have a good long way behind me to show me what a life from birth is all about. The influx of fluids while growing as a parasite inside a woman's body. The give-and-take between my infant self and those caring blobs nearby. The first exchanges of facial expressions, including smiles that excite more input from the distinctive facial features, voices and touches of my primary caregivers, mainly my mother and father. My actions that indicate to my parents my joining with them in the communication methods of my local culture, including words and phrases. Showing my parents my animal locomotion skills like standing and walking. Learning to care for my younger sister, the rival for my parents' attention. Succeeding in social situations outside of home, like kindergarten and primary school. My first guy friends. My first girlfriend. Seeing adults as grown-up kids who didn't know any more than I did, just bigger collections of cultural icons to call upon, oftentimes inadequately prepared to handle a situation.

And now I turn back to you, asking the question, "What is beauty?" Perhaps I should ask, "What is it that I see in another human that calls to mind the word 'beauty'?"

What is a human? I am a human. You are a human. We are both animals, evolutionary products of this local ecosphere we call a planet, who socialize together, understanding each other as more closely related than other types of animals with whom we also socialize. Therefore, the beauty I see is not strictly a human trait.

I saw beauty from the crib. I see beauty now. So what is beauty? Beauty is the belief that nothing separates us, no falsehoods, no tricks, no fear, no insecurity, with all the flaws of being a human animal that makes us uniquely not individuals but part of a living whole. Beauty, as I see it in you, is belief. Belief is whatever makes you you, no matter how foreign or similar to me.

I do not exist but I exist because of you. Without you, I am not me. I am me with you. I am only me because of you. I am you, beauty incarnate. Your beauty completes me, flaws and all. That is what I see when I look into your eyes and listen to your voice.

------------------------------------------------------
*assuming we can sense each other's low-level energy wave output at close distance; if nothing else, we know we can exchange static discharges when we touch or kiss.

Echo Valley

One thing about writing fiction makes sitting here worthwhile -- knowing which parts of the fictional tale are facts. I have friends in places I don't normally walk, simply because an average middle-class guy like me doesn't fit in very well. That's okay because some of my friends don't fit into average middle-class life, either.

So, too, some of my colleagues invent new technology that neither I nor they have any idea what to do with. Other colleagues put old-fashioned technology to use.

For instance, I received some information about a quiet meeting between high-valued humans who gathered recently. The information was not collected using bugs or hidden piezoelectric microphones. Instead, an associate of mine put the ear trumpet concept to use and reflected sound down a tube to a remote audio processor. He figured correctly that those in the security business are looking for metallic signatures or electronic signals, or windows that reflect vibrations such as conversations, not innocuous tubes connected to sound-reflective air vents/registers.

While security-minded professionals search the high-frequency airwaves and global Internet for data sent surreptitiously, they often forget the low-tech methods that colleagues of mine use to conduct business. It reminds me of the television show recently resurrected as a movie, Get Smart, with the Cone of Silence, a sight gag about espionage and defective products. The most innocent-looking, useless objects often have useful functions.

Now where did I put that information? It's in this pile of stuff on my desk... I'm sure of it!

Factoid For the Curious

While looking at information about woolly mammoths, I found this web page. Take it with a grain of salt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovic_cycles

(or this one, if you don't trust wikipedia: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html)

I've seen it or one like it before and wonder about the influence of planetary, solar system, galaxy and universe-sized changes on our feelings of determinism and self-reliance. No matter whether you believe in one god, many gods or the sheer power of the universe, you can appreciate the fragility of our planet's environment supporting our species' long-term prospects of success.

Oh well, time to return to Earth, make a sandwich for lunch and then preparation for teaching a class on the Linux operating system. %^>

Self-Reliant?

[Walking through my thoughts today - no insight expected - likely to repeat the thoughts of all of those who've contemplated their foreheads ever since humans could think outside the moment]

No one is an island, I get that. Even if a person lives in a jungle, on an island, on a farm or on a ranch with no other humans around, that person still requires input from the environment to live. Je comprends.

So why all this fuss over the definition of body/brain functions such as consciousness? Putting our excess capacity to use, of course. We've conquered survival and for the last few thousand years we've been and are looking for what else is out there, never realizing there is nothing else.

But there must be, n'est pas? After all, we can speak multiple languages, create new substances, predict the weather and send people to foreign lands.

I don't know...Je ne connais pas moi, beaucoup moins le monde, or something like that.

Today, I am unsure who I want to be in the next moment. I looked at the stacks of DVDs in the house, trying to find one to send to a kind salesperson, Bel, who works at the 10,000 Villages shop in Montreat, North Carolina, USA, making sure the DVD is somewhat kid-friendly but also informative. The DVD that stood out, "1 Giant Leap," contains mature content, including strong language and brief nudity, but the general message of the DVD is worth letting kids see -- "unity in diversity" -- so perhaps I can pass it on to Bel and her husband to watch and let them decide if their children should see the flick.

I checked the 'Net for info about the movie and found links to social media (whatever that phrase means, most likely socially-responsible, consciousness-raising material). I grew up in a neighborhood that contained adults who beat each other and their children, married adults who had sex with other married adults, adults who focused solely on their children's welfare and adults who spent any extra money they had or didn't need on the care of others (foster children, food aid for starving people and the like). I was raised with ethical/moral training coming from long-established religious dogma - in fact, my wife and I met when we were 12 years old at a summer camp sponsored by a church organization. Thus, we were constantly made aware of social iniquities.

I've always known I was open to helping others but my desire to help others in need goes through a case-by-case evaluation method and not through a systematic handing out of aid. In other words, I know human nature. I know the part of me that is not self-reliant and is willing to lean heavily on others for support, even to the level of lying in order to keep getting free handouts, especially if it means I don't have to perform physical labor or exert myself mentally to get them.

In my studies, I have seen the slash-and-burn technology of my so-called "self-reliant" forebears as they made their way through this continent after exhausting the lands of Europe, Asia and Africa, killing and eliminating large species, cutting down forests, planting crops that used up the soil, and digging up or blasting hillsides to get to precious minerals, metals or fuel. After they used up the land, they moved on to more fertile territory. All of us have read about or seen this, even in today's way of living -- it's like watching a slow-motion version of a comet crashing into Earth and reshaping the landscape. Of course, left untouched, forests grow back and new species move in to replace the old ones. Life goes on.

That's the point, isn't it? Even if we figure out how to rejuvenate extinct species like the woolly mammoth, life goes on. There is no golden age, only memories we create in which we can mentally stop time and pick and choose the moments we enjoyed in the past. There will always be someone somewhere beating up offspring, having non-monogamous sex, killing/eliminating species in the name of something/someone else that mentally justifies the action (For example, you want a recordable DVD player? Well, it requires dropping a factory in this rain forest where three species will be immediately extinguished and a dozen others will slowly go extinct.).

I heard a person state that 40% of us wouldn't be here if everyone stuck to monogamous sex. I have no idea if he/she was exaggerating or quoting a reliable statistical study. In either case, the point is that life is not perfect. There is no other existence out there that we can reach only if we obey a certain set of rules such as the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments. We've got what we've got and when we learn to teach our children to see the world as it is and not as some sort of simplified cartoon movie, we'll get closer to unity in diversity.

I guess it's the question of what diversity means that drives me forward, currently investigating the definition of consciousness. What does diversity mean? In other words, what can you tolerate? Would you stop the next-door neighbor from beating his children if you knew that one of the children would go on to be the greatest race car driver that ever lived because of the discipline and gritty determination the beatings provided? Would you stop North Korea from declaring itself a nuclear power if you knew that allowing North Korea to develop nuclear weapons and rename itself would free their people to develop a water purification process that would "cure" the world of drought?

In other words, do you know the future? I sure don't. I'm not even sure what I'm going to do in the next moment, although I'm pretty sure that I'll be typing here for a while and then will fix lunch for myself using food I bought at a local grocery store and honey that my wife's cousin's husband pulled from beehives he tends.

Self-reliance, diversity, tolerance, and censorship. Imagine those four words are the points of a compass and unity is in the middle. Now imagine four turtles representing the four points are tied together and trying to center a rock over the word unity. You get to pick one turtle to help center the rock, knowing that two people will be assigned to a turtle opposite you and thus three people to the turtles adjacent to you. Which one do you choose? [The other three words will be assigned to the remaining turtles only after you select yours.]

Where Are You?

In a domicile with a footpad of approximately 2200 square feet, three thinking beings live -- two cats and one human. They are boxed in and boxed out of the surrounding environment, feeling cold air circulate, chilling their skin or fur, while the outside temperature hovers around 90 deg F (32 deg C).

The human shuts herself into a separate room to typewrite, isolating her from any sentient being in order to free her body to focus on transferring thoughts to text. She has no skin-to-fur contact that might impose itself.

The human sits and waits for words to pop out of her fingertips.

She waits.

And waits.

What is time? The cats are fed. The mail has been pulled from the box at the road. No visitors are expected. At 16:32, 24 more hours will pass before any appointment with other humans is expected.

The human thinks to herself, "I am an 'indicator species' type, predicting environmental changes and other influences on living things, mainly human ones. When I get down to it, I am bored with myself. I am a boring person at large."

She looks at the empty photo albums beside her and mentally puts the stacks of photographs into categories that will magically insert themselves into the albums if she only concentrates hard enough. Or not. The cats sure won't sort the photos for her. The job is hers...when she decides to do it.

She waits for inspiration. She sorts her thoughts into categories - recent conversations, emotional states, color palettes, to-do lists, unmatched shoes and socks, blouses that are too small, memories of long-lost boyfriends, and antique shops to browse.

She looks at her nails - chewed to the quick. She's not the fancy fingernail type. She'd rather spend her money on gourmet chocolate and weekend getaways, using discount coupons to spend one night at a resort hotel and eat at a fine restaurant when she's in between man friends.

She sees the key to her convertible BMW and wonders who blogs about their cars. Hers needs a good bath and scrub, and maybe some vacuuming, too.

She talks to herself. "Who am I? Why do I sit here by myself when the cats and I are perfectly satisfied to sit in front of the TV and snuggle together?" She sighs.

After her two failed marriages, her parents stopped putting pressure on her to have kids. Even so, they still want her to answer the questions, "Where did we go wrong? Why can't you find a good man and settle down to have kids?"

She has no answers. Those are not the questions she's asking herself. Instead, she wants to know if there is a universal truth that answers the question, "Why am I who I am, a human?," that applies to both genders.

She looks at her wrinkled, freckled hands, with light wisps of blonde hair running up her arms. Her fingertips are worn smooth from typing. She sighs again. She begins typing.

"I am a woman getting older. I am a wise person. I am stronger than most of my friends but maybe a little less happy because, my friends tell me, I think too much. I am me because of who I am. I cannot be someone else. I would not want to be someone else. I am here with me and close to my cats. I can have any man I want but right now I don't want a man. Men are good for a few things but not everything."

She sits back in her chair and looks at the cobwebs black with soot from the candles she burns. She clasps her hands together, places her chin on a finger and yawns. She feels a couple of hairs on her chin that she should cut, if she remembers to look at herself in the mirror tonight or tomorrow. She feels thankful that her complexion allows her to go without makeup.

She pushes herself from the desk and stands up. She's decided to take a walk, knowing the cats will beg for her attention when she leaves the room and heads across the house to the garage door.

Matte Flat

"The Pain of Change" should have titled this blog entry. Storyless, all the same. Or storied. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be here watching a stray bicyclist pass by an otherwise quiet, sunny, wooded, panoramic, eye-catching, meditative moment.

I need your help today. I feel lonely and alone, by myself in a good way and a bad way, not knowing who or what I am, if I have any value even if I don't care if I care that I have a value.

I have no religion other than myself. I am both my god and my worshipper. At times, I need more than one worshipper and at times I need more than one god. I know I am not perfect because perfection does not exist, only the appearance of purity and perfection.

I am my body, or the appearance of a body, the shores through which the river of life flows, the vessel of ever-changing fluids. Nothing about me is the same as it was or will be.

I am the product of my ancestors and the byproduct of my elders. I never existed but I only know how to act as if I exist. I am not ready to be completely transparent although, like all religious practitioners, I have spent my life preparing for my death, the ultimate absence of self.

I sat in meditation last night and pondered the following:

• What was discussed in the recent gathering of billionaires? Is my inside knowledge of the event accurate?
• The next generation of computing devices will do away with computer programming as we know it. No more binary code, no more central processing; e.g., mesh networking of synchronous, cooperative behavior between semi-autonomous functions.

I live in a limited timeframe, indicated by 1962-xxxx (with xxxx possibly as far away as 2062 but probably a lower number). I have thousands, even millions and billions, of years to look back on but only dozens of years to look forward to. My contribution to my species is limited only by my actions in this lifetime since it appears I will not reproduce myself. What shall I do?

Reading is passive yet preparatory behavior. Writing is sedentary action.

I know where general, mob/mass human activity is best applied to species' survival, based on observation of past civilizations, but don't know where to apply aggressive, hypercompetitive behaviour. I am not the competitive type. I am something else...self-centered but cooperative, pretending to live outside society but acting within it, still seeking my parents' approval to some extent, even if I'll give them no grandchildren. Funny thought: to be a product of animals desiring reproduction, caring for their young, and yet bearing no personal/social drive to reproduce myself -- what neurochemical changes distinguished my fetal growth into a childless adulthood from those who developed into adults gladly and readily reproducing?

I remember being told many times in my youth (and still today, to some degree) that I'm destined for greatness (in the realm of human existence, of course). Well, what those other humans who praised me don't realize is that I've surveyed the past and the present, finding no human civilizations worth being great within. We're sophisticated monkeys, not gods. What's so great about that? Thus, I leave having kids and taking care of family to those who see greatness in being human together.

I was conceived by humans, nurtured as if I was a human baby, and spent my whole life being treated by myself and others as a human being, only to discover that I am not human at all because none of us exist. We only think we do. Our lives are illusions we create to procreate and perpetuate.

In the not-so distant future, human collectivism will reach global unity as we learn we do not exist as individuals but truly are only parts of a whole. Before that happens, large-scale movements of distinct populations will continue to take place, causing small-scale skirmishes in both warlike and non-warlike behaviour. Some classified populations will cease to exist. You and your offspring may or may not be part of the surviving population classes. When unity occurs, as it is slowly happening now, group consensus can either lead to greatness or depravity but will probably include both. We will be like an ant colony, with local aphid "farms" and groomers who travel around the world in the role of international project managers.

My interest in all this is seeing how we coordinate the changing of opinions of people with diverse beliefs without letting them know what's going on. I, for one, am not a follower of the gaia/earthmother/healing crystal movement but many people maintain beliefs in that area. However, there is much to be gained from that viewpoint, including systemic/macroeconomic studies of human behaviour as well as promotion of quasi-scientific information as a way to sway opinions or food consumption. How long do we keep "Petri dish" cultures around, such as indigenous tribes and Amish farmers, to serve as control groups (and gene pools) in case experiments on changing densely populated groups get out of control, so we can clearly see the social costs of such changes as switching food sweeteners from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup or the adoption of tobacco smoking as a norm?

I am just one human. I will not and do not want to change the world. As a writer, I look for interesting viewpoints to record in words. That's all I do. I do not want to sell large copies of the works I've written but I will place them in public because I've been conditioned to believe that writers should seek readers. I'm just happy to be here, with you, the anonymous reader, even if the only reader happens to be me, my worshipper and my god.

Kilts and Tri-Corner Hats

Yesterday, I meditated. I sat almost all day and let the sounds and motions of other humans pass through or around me. I was.

I know I do not exist so why do I continue to use "I"?

I read books and listen to those wiser and more learned than I inform me, instruct me, teach me that individuality is a myth or illusion. Yet they put their names on their books or lectures. They eat. They do not deny the privileges extended to them by others. They are not perfectly inert. They are, after all, social animals, too.

Last week, I participated in many human social functions, including lunches provided to the less fortunate such as the poor, the elderly, the mentally challenged and/or a combination of those. I watched people in marketplaces give goods or services without compensation. I heard people make unstated comments about others, complimentary and contradictory.

My ancestors occupied a few islands in the north Atlantic Ocean for millennia and then crossed the ocean to spread out across sparsely populated lands of North America. Now, part of their history is relegated to the dusty basement display cases of the Scottish Tartans Museum in Franklin, NC. Now, opportunists in the guise of other ancestral bloodlines move across this continent, writing their own history, perhaps less warlike than mine.

Now that I know I do not exist and that "not me" descended from humans living near the western shores of the European continent, what's next? When enlightenment brightens every corner of the rooms of one's thoughts, revealing all the hidden nooks and crannies, doing away with the secretiveness and showing you who you really are, what then?

Questions with no answers within reach of the wandering wonderer, who chews his fingernails in worried expectation of an answer.

I had notes to share from my pocket Moleskine journal, chronicling where my wife and I stopped to eat, shop or talk in the past few days, but for some reason I don't feel like rewriting any of them in this blog except this:

• The intersection of age-related interests/activities and pop/zeitgeist ones, that defines our lives, and distinguishes us from our forebears and peers. Of course, we know what we do only matters to other humans, of whom I've had my fill, tired of pretending to support everyone else's theory of the universe. I have no offspring to add to the burgeoning population and thus no reason to force my view of life on others -- why should I hang out with those who've reproduced except to laugh at the diversity of human opinions? Just want to think and write for myself which may or may not happen to appeal to a subset of a few billion humans who read blogs.
• I have no more to discover -- my life has been the refinement of my survival/coping mechanisms, repeating the general thoughts and activities of billions of others who've lived in the past few thousand years.

Words do not prop me up today. I see nothing new, nothing worth reporting. With no children of my own to care for, I am left to wonder why I exist as a socially supportive being when my contribution to the species is non-reproductive. My thoughts drift into no-man's land. Time to end this blog entry. Have to remind myself that being physically tired is not the same as being tired of writing and living (or is that "living and writing"?).

The Definition of B&B

My wife and I prefer spending the night away from home in the comfortable hospitality of hosted bed and breakfast establishments. B&Bs. Our range of experiences -- the stories we tell about what we've seen and heard and the stories our proprietors have shared with us -- would not fill up a book but enriches our lives all the same.

Earlier this week, when we stayed at a B&B in Black Mountain, NC, our host told us about a B&B his wife and he experienced near Mt. St. Helens (or was it Mt. Shasta?). Their host said she was tired of running a B&B so she offered them $5 off the price of their room and gave them a carton of "boxed juice" and a Twinkie for breakfast. In addition, there were critters (small insects and who knows what all else) crawling around their room at night.

Speaking of critters, my ancestors grew up in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, carrying in their conversations the speech patterns and dialects of Western Europe, the British Isles and Ireland from the 1500s and 1600s.

Both sets of my grandparents used phrases like, "I reckon," "I'll get to that directly," "I'll carry you to the store," etc., that was often derided as common, low-country terms by my friends and schoolmates. So I learned to cultivate an accent that placed me somewhere in the American Midwest or the Washington, D.C./Maryland area. In my late teens and early 20s, people often commented they thought I was from Pennsylvania. I thought of it as my suburbanite accent and still do.

Now that I'm older, getting closer and closer to the half-century mark, I realize that I didn't grow up in the Midwest or any other place than upper east Tennessee. In fact, all of us grew up somewhere.

Should we embrace our place on this planet rather than allow our peers to drive out our inherited forms of speech, dress and general behavior? This question has no answer. It's like the definition of a B&B - what matters is the experience and how we want to enrich our lives.

What does amber smell like?

On top of the wardrobe, four objects. Metal wire bent and shaped - welded, tinned or soldered together. Enclosures. Containers. Empty and yet full. Bird cages. Decorations.

Jumping on into "The Ego Tunnel" by Thomas Metzinger, all while spending time with my wife's cousin and spouse, Margo and Maurice, and seeing the area.

Observing the lives of others, including humans and ducks.

Wh..who...what...watch out. The world is full of people wanting to be heard. At the same time, we want to help others. Our lives arc. We go from being the center of attention to raising our own centers of attention who attend to us in our last days. In my culture, we may care for our young two decades or longer. Should we expect our young to care for us just as long? Good question.

Suggestions to me this morning: read the book, "A Walk In The Woods," and see the movie, "Outsourced." On the list. Can't suggest it yet.

I do recommend the restaurant, Basil Thai, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, as well as the B&B, Arbor House. We enjoyed both earlier this week. Also, Roni's restaurant near Asheville, an inexpensive Italian/Greek place.

Everywhere we go we hear people say, "Thank goodness you shopped/ate here. We need the business." When I was a young man starting out in the corporate world, I was told that a business owner should never admit sales are low because it might give customers the impression you won't be able to support the products they buy. However, if one is buying souvenirs or food, does it matter if the business will close the next day? Probably not. Then I guess it's okay for retail shopkeepers to thank customers and beg them to come back soon. The local economy suffers badly enough, in other words, that begging is no longer out of the question.

Thought for the day, and then I'll stop to write notes to nieces and nephews:

When I get a little money, I buy BOOKS; if any is left I buy food and clothes. -- Desiderius Erasmus, 1466-1536

Wrapping Up My Analysis/Review

Spending time with family today and thus limiting my time of meditation in isolation. I will post some quick quotes/comments about "Out Of Our Heads" by Alva Noë and assume the interested reader will pick up the book for full perusal.

Underlined sections on the following pages: 79, 84, 88, 107, 184, 193, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203.

Some quotes to remember:

"It has been shown, famously, that monkeys using a rake, for example, exhibit enlarged cortical representations of the hand and arm." [p. 79]

"Studies have shown that the use of messaging among teenagers in Japan has transformed the dynamics of social relations. ... In effect, they are "pinging" each other: letting each other know that they are online, or in reach, or 'there.'" [p. 83]

"A case can be made that joint presence in an actual shared physical space is the best kind of presence." [p. 84]

"According to the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, all European languages are at a disadvantage when compared with Mandarin; he argues that the Chinese are on the whole better and faster at mental arithmetic and that the explanation lies in their linguistic system for talking about numbers." [p. 88; similar to what I reported from the book, "Outliers," if I remember correctly]

"One of the very many false ideas about language is that its primary function is to express information or communicate thoughts. Speech has many functions, but surely a large part of it is more like the grooming behavior of chimpanzees or the shepherding behavior of dogs than it is like reasoned discourse among parliamentarians. We bark so that our kids get out the door in time to get on their bus and so that they feel safe and loved; we purr so that our colleagues and coworkers know we're on the job and ready to be called on. The bulk of what we say and do each day is more like the grunts and signals baseball players use to indicate who'll catch the pop fly than it is like a genuine conversation." [p. 107]

"In mathematics you can distinguish the proof itself from the prose that surrounds the proof and comments on it. Philosophers writing about mathematics frequently take issue with the prose, but the proof itself stands untouched by philosophical scruples. In this book I am not interested in the prose of the science of consciousness but in the findings themselves. My purpose is not to comment on trends in neuroscience but to convince you that the neuroscientific, and more broadly the cognitive scientific, approach to mind needs rethinking from the ground up." [p. 184-185]

"The central and ambitious theme of [chapter 2: Conscious Life] -- that life is mind -- has been developed in the work of others. I single out, in particular, the excellent and for me influential discussion in Evan Thompson's Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). I would also mention a very good doctoral dissertation chapter by the Harvard philosophy student Bharath Vallabha (now a member of the philosophy faculty at Bryn Mawr)." [p. 193]

"Interested readers may want to read Kaye's The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Create Persons (Chicago: University of Chicago PRess, 1982). Another excellent book on infant development that has influenced my own thinking is Peter Hobson's The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). In these books one finds ample support for my claim that the social/environmental context of the child's relationship with its caretaker is necessary for normal development, this is the basis for my claim that, really, we are not entitled to think of the child's mode of being as independent of the contextual embedding." [p. 194]

"See also[Paul Bach-y-Rita's] "Tactile-vision substitution: past and future," in International Journal of Neuroscience 19, nos. 1-4 (1983): 29-36." [p. 195]

"Anyone who appreciates that sometimes we think with words, or with our pens, or with our paintbrushes, can appreciate this insight. [Andy] Clark has just published a new book on this 'extended mind' hypothesis; it includes a foreword by [David J.] Chalmers: see Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Notably, neither Clark nor Chalmers has sympathy for the idea developed here that consciousness itself can be explained only if we make use of such an extended conception of the machinery of mind. Conscious experience would seem to be detachable from and independent of the world itself." [p. 196]

"Roy Harris is an original and important thinker whose work has not received the attention it deserves. I first encountered him as a student at Oxford in the late 1980s. His books The Language Makers (London: Duckworth, 1980) and The Language Myth (New York: St. Martin's, 1981) provide a fascinating criticism of what many linguists take for granted. For example, it is Harris who (to my knowledge) first pointed out that our idea that languages are intertranslatable is itself an artifact of the fact that we have established, in school and elsewhere, important cultural practices of translation. In the absence of those practices, the correspondences between languages are not, as it were, just given; they are made." [p. 198]

"The idea of cognitive trails has been explored by Adrian Cussins; indeed, the term, as I use it, is his. See his "Content, embodiment and objectivity: the theory of cognitive trails," in Mind 101, no. 404 (October 2002): 651-688. Evan Thompson, in his recent book Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), makes use of a similar idea." [p. 199]

"In my text I try to make clear there are two routes to the idea that the world is a grand illusion. The first is the more traditional route: we are given so much less than we think we see, so what we think we see must be something that arises in us thanks to the workings of the brain. This view is expressed by almost every major thinker working in this field. ... The second is the less traditional and indeed in some ways more radical idea that precisely because the brain is not in the business of building up pictures in the head, our experience is profoundly illusory -- that is, we don't even have the experience we think we do." [p. 200]

"Kevin O' Regan has also advocated this particular, radical version of the "grand illusion" idea in his important paper "Solving the 'real' mysteries of visual perception: the world as an outside memory," in Canadian Journal of Psychology 46, no. 3 (1992): 461-488." [p. 201]

"There are in fact several philosophers -- foremost among them Andy Clark -- who grant that the body and the external environment play an important role in constituting our cognitive apparatus. But experience itself -- pure consciousness, Clark would have it -- depends only on factors inside us. It is Clark, in personal correspondence, who has sharply articulated what I am here calling the Foundation Argument -- i.e., the idea that the fact that we dream and that we can produce experiences by direct action on the brain shows that consciousness depends only on what is happening in the brain." [p. 203]

Overall, a quick read, a bathroom companion or train ride diversion, that looks at consciousness from the 50,000 meter level and poses the question, is consciousness a delusion we create to get around in the world successfully.

More later...

Duck, Duck, Goose

Wednesday, 3 June 2009 – Sitting here imagining a You who is a generic person made of all the people I know, don't know, haven't met, will never meet, and lived puts me in mind of those of you who specifically occupy my thoughts. In other words my humanity gets in the way.

I am not myself. I already know that. I am you/You. I reached that conclusion a long time ago, going through the exercise of seeing and reading about what makes a person a person, first realizing I am my parents' genetic output and supposed to procreate and then realizing I am the combination of the input from my surroundings, too, including those nearest me (sister, grandparents, family, and friends) and those who influenced me via books, magazines, movies, advertisements, and television, as well as other parts of this planet and universe, including animals, plants, minerals, stars, galaxies and meteors.

Nothing new under the sun. Granted. Stated. Accepted.

Yet I keep buying and reading new books, looking for the next new “thing.” Have I, as both individual human and representative iota/widget of the human population outlived my supposed usefulness?

Let's think about it for a minute. Actually, we have all the time in the world to contemplate this idea. If we have no individuality, no self, no soul, no consciousness, no hidden meaning, no primary directive, no purpose besides replicating our genes, then why do we create skyscrapers, rocket ships and sewing machines? Shelter, mobility, and clothing, you might think, in reference to the last three examples of human accomplishments, I imagine.

Seriously, though, we humans have asked and will ask the same questions over and over again. Why do I have all this excess capacity to procreate when the procreation process is so simple and easy? Why do I even have an “I” to begin with? Why don't I/we have an innate understanding of and connection to collective intelligence so that repetitious questioning is negated by the answers of others?

We are not born with the languages we speak. We have to “learn” them. We are malleable. We are sponges. Et cetera, et cetera, ergo sum, enjoy a good plum, etc. So we have built ourselves and our civilizations based on banging out nonindividual individuals using the hammer of language. Tools creating tools. Self-replicating robots, if you will (ignoring the arguments about the autonomy/consciousness of artificial beings or robots).

In macroeconomics and crowd analysis, we treat the human condition as one of automatons responding to given input with predictable output. Expose a large population to continuous bombardment of the same message for a long period of time and the majority will talk about, accept/reject, and make the message a part of their collective experiences for the rest of their lives. Culture.

Do you know what a Petri dish is? If so, have you ever used one, grown a colony of bacteria in a culture medium and...wait! What was that? “Culture”? Sorry, I used that word in a different context than in the previous paragraph. Or did I?

Maybe not. Culture, as we think about it, is a word that signifies experimentation, does it not? We want something, whether it's an improved version of a product we designed/sold, a larger bank account, a safer life, a catchier tune, deeper meaning or better understanding, that culture provides.

And all this time, we transform our condition, expanding the limits of human experience, incorporating more about what we know, discovering new animal/plant species that we can identify and catalog to say, “in this place and at this time, this ecological zone contains the following items” so that future humans can compare the previous version of a place to the new one and make human-related observations, using words like “extinct” or “overpopulated” to inform other humans about changes to an environment that may or may not have been directly changed by humans by other than the observation process.

I was not born on another planet. I was not born as another species. My only experiences are human. I may enjoy spending time with other living things (temporary vortexes that swirl together universal elements into what I recognize as living things, anyway), but my skin and bones, my sensory perceptions, are human-based.

Therefore, I am a momentary occurrence of the eddies and whirlwinds of physical elements of the universe, using the collective consciousness called culture to share my condition most directly with other humans and indirectly with other species, all while not participating in the single process that living requires – reproduction.

In totality, humans don't like the fact that our species destroys other species to live. We want to believe that “higher” consciousness separates our species from other species and consciousness separates species in general, meaning we should use our consciousness to conscientiously preserve other species. We even use the word species as a separator to show that we recognize that others with specific characteristics deserve the right to exist in that state perpetually. And yet, at the end of day, while all of us are looking at the world through our microscopes, our eyes, fixing our binocular gaze on the microcosm and thinking, “Ah, this is who I am,” the world has no concept of us as species or individuals. We are no more important as an entity than a raindrop – each is a mixture of the building blocks of galaxies that holds human-calculated properties but individually cannot move a planet or solar system.

We will act collectively and individually, building rocket ships that carry our species beyond this planet. We will encounter extraterrestrial life and continue to claim we are unique in the concept of living. We will make more of Earth toxic to living creatures, including humans whose lives we will extend beyond “natural” limits by manipulating our chemical composition. We are anomalies in a universe of anomalies. We are analogous to ourselves. Languages will disappear. Cultures will flourish and flounder.

Let's face it. Humans are earthworms, rechurning the material we encounter into material to be used by other parts of the universe, including our waste, which takes a life of its own. We do not destroy other species because species is not a universally recognizable condition. We are disappearing as the species that we are now, just as we continually disappeared as the species we were 100,000 years ago. In fact, we are not a species. We just like to think we are (even though we don't think, either). We see a tree or rock doing nothing and compare it to our bodies, concluding that our difference in mobility makes us unique. We are not. We are the same. We are the universe. You may decide to have kids and take care of your family or you may not. In either case, you do not exist. However, you can perpetuate what you think is your species because in the local environment in which you live it still feels that way – one day, your kids' kids' kids will think otherwise.

I am you so I do not exist and...aha! I just figured out why I stopped being interested in creating new words, acronyms or phrases – because you/You do it for me!

Falling In Love Again

[Written using the OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 Writer program]

While reading “Out of Our Heads” and wondering about the performance of a department chair during her presentation on Saturday, I ask myself why I stopped desiring to invent new words and phrases?

I fell in love again. Amazing, huh? Why, why, why...some adult relationships are beyond impossible; indeed, simply untouchable. Best put some possibilities on a pedestal and call it a day.

My deliberation of thought feeds the delusion I will reach a new human conclusion that applies to more than my situation (generic as opposed to specific, in zeitgeist terms, of course).

I think back to my Saturday morning training and wonder what I observed. What makes us unique? What makes us special? Why do we strive to carve out a niche in the wall of human experience? Do we not realize...oh, what's the point? So many of us don't try to carve out a niche – that's what bothers me even more.

“Out of Our Heads” seems to both agree with and argue against Daniel Dennett. I feel like I'm watching a debate in slo-mo about the brain and consciousness. I'm still waiting on what defines and separates waking from sleeping/unconsciousness and how I can use that information to improve my life.

Echoes in my head of Dan at Schnitzel Ranch saying it was actually good to talk with a truly intelligent, intellectual person the other day (not me). I agree with him – it's refreshing to find someone who has a cohesive view of the world based on facts and not on conjecture like me.

Two new words I've learned lately – hybristic and distal. I'll have to figure out how to sneak them into my writing without showing off my new knowledge.

My limitations face me today like the edges of a folded map. Such obviousness obliterates my tendency to creativity. I am the ashes of a wildfire stirred up and dispersed by the wind, always a part of the world and never outside of the universe.

Family Tree or Southern Vine?

While I attended ETSU, questionably pursuing a computer science degree, taking courses in JCL (job control language) and computer programming (learning to implement algorithms in Pascal), I wrote, edited and published a shortlived underground newspaper called the Swashbuckler, an alternative to the campus paper (and a takeoff on the ETSU mascot, the Buccaneer).

During that time, my grandfather suffered a stroke (or brain attack) and lay in a bed at Blount Memorial Hospital. I drove from Johnson City to Maryville to see my Pa-Paw, sitting with him by myself and talking to him at the urging of a nurse who told me stroke victims can still hear.

What did I say? Not knowing him well, I spoke of the positive influence he had on my sister and me, that Ma-Maw would soon be with him again (or looked forward to seeing him again) so it was all right if he felt like letting go and dying. He did not need to struggle to be alive for our sake if he didn't feel like it.

The nurse returned to the room and encouraged me to touch Pa-Paw so I patted him on the arm, noticing how thin his skin looked. I sat with him for a while and then told him goodbye.

Later, I wrote an article for my alternative paper, which I used years later as an entry for a short story contest, sponsored by a local public radio station, requiring the use of the phrase, "kudzu grows twelve inches a day."

While thinking about my cousins I saw at the funeral home yesterday, with whom I laughed as we looked at old family photos, while we stood next to and leaned against the coffin of Uncle Ralph, who looked a lot like my mental image of Pa-Paw in the hospital bed, I remembered the story I wrote:

Kudzu Grows Twelve Inches A Day

I visited my grandfather last week. Stricken by a stroke a few days before, he lay on the hospital bed and gazed into the unknown. I looked at his face, not long ago a bastion of strength and source of wise sayings, now simply a wrap of yellowish-tan skin covering an old skull. The patriarch was gone, replaced by a vegetative hospital patient in a sterile room, dominated not by my grandfather’s country voice but by the noncolloquial voice of medicine. A tube ran from my grandfather’s nose to a gurgling oxygen machine on the wall. The slow drip of life from a glucose bag led to an IV needle which hung from a vein in his left wrist. His wheezing struck a rhythm in the still air.

I sat next to him, choking on the proverbial lump in my throat. I tried not to think about what I saw or felt. I let myself sit and stare at an old man.

This semblance of a human no longer was my grandfather. My grandfather had been a man who considered a cold as something to be ignored like a "pesky fly." In the 54 years he had been with his wife, he had lain on a hospital bed for two days because of a bladder problem. Otherwise, he put in his time at the aluminum plant, coming home everyday to work on his farm, pulling weeds and planting seeds so my mother and her brothers could have vegetables in winter. "A garden doesn’t grow by itself," he once said. "It must be nurtured to mature but weeds...well, I reckon kudzu grows twelve inches a day. Weeds can choke out a garden just like bad things can destroy a good man."

Before he went into a coma, he had said he didn’t want to be hooked to machines to live. Unfortunately, we didn’t get his wishes on paper, so there he lay, the tubes growing around him like that persistent Southern weed.

I cried as I left the hospital for the man who was my grandfather - he’s already dead (though his guidance lives forever in my mind) - his body’s supposed to die sometime this week.

= = =

I saw most of Ralph's family, most of my mother's family, ate a delicious late lunch at East Maryville Baptist Church (prepared by Patricia's Sunday school class, served graciously by Jill and Donna). In a sign of getting older, I, a Presbyterian, was the one who volunteered to lead the prayer before we ate the meal under the roof of a Baptist church with other family members from Methodist and Church of Christ parishes, Protestant denominational differences being a fact in dogma but not in general practice of religious ceremonies.

We should see some of Uncle Gordon's family at the funeral. I'm glad we had a family reunion of sorts (sans the elusive Barry) at my parents' 50th wedding anniversary party a few years ago.

On 1st June 2009, the crinum lily bulbs I planted at Mrs. Berry's house in Rogersville, Tennessee, are finally coming up. The ones I gave to Mom and Dad are blooming in Nort Port, Florida, and the ones I planted in Big Cove, Alabama, have one to two-foot long leaves -- a worthwhile geographical experiment.

On a personal note, I get tired of living with my thoughts in public, always enjoying a good sarcastic laugh with myself but not knowing what to say in crowds, especially when others are bathing me in compliments, because of fear of sounding boring, disingenuous or unoriginal. Yes, fear. I the adventurer have a weak, fearful side! I cannot handle compliments, which trigger memories of the cruel bullies of my youth who taunted me with fake compliments about my intelligence and getting preferential treatment by teachers (i.e., the teacher's pet) just before they pummeled me with complementary punches; the cute girls whose boyfriends set them up to compliment my good looks before revealing they were lying (even though I was/am good looking - go figure). I'd rather have been pummeled with Punch magazine!

Time to fix the toilet in the guest bathroom of my mother in-law's house. Real life awaits. %^P

Symmetrical, Ceremonial

In your part of the world, what do you see? I want to see out of your eyes right now and learn how a different landscape view changes a person. My view of the world outside the window is a still life painting in three dimensions at 08:08 in the morning. Just as well...

My time with you this morning lasts but a moment, for the past two days and the next days occupy my thoughts, so that this moment holds nearly no memorable events to share with you. Being with you is all I can offer.

You are my life. Every one of you. Your smiles, your laughter, your tears, your joy, your sadness, your running and playing around.

I spent time with some of you yesterday and the day before, first attending a wedding rehearsal in the chapel of a local church. I saw the head guy, the big cheese, Dr. "Brother Jimmy" Jackson, take a small skip down the aisle and reveal the boy in him that still likes to have fun and see the innocent joys in his world.

I watched the movie, "Synecdoche, New York," on BluRay disc - imagine "The Truman Show" as written by Woody Allen and you get an idea what the movie is about - real life observed and neuroticized.

The wedding chapel is probably five times the size of the church around the corner from me - it serves as an intimate setting for weddings and funerals at a church that boasts five thousand members. Three stained-glass windows - one to the left of the altar, one above the altar and one to the right - detail the Biblical ideas of FAITH, LOVE and HOPE.

Despite the size of the general congregation, I have come to know and recognize many of the church members in the center of the church's administration as well as those who circulate through the lives of my wife's brother's family members, Pat, Jonathan and Jana. Some of them I know by face only, including ones like Mark and Kathy. Others I have my own idea what they're like, such as the Spains and the Freemans, and I like them, even love them, because of my belief. [I love everyone I meet but I don't like them until I meet and get to know them.]

Yesterday morning, I spent a couple of hours at the technical institute meeting the new crop of instructors - I sensed a higher caliber of instructor "material" for the institutional administration to rely upon and the students/customers to learn from. Let's hope I'm right. Again, I heard the administration stress numbers, no different than organizational goals anywhere else, and cringed, asking myself why we tend to reduce humans to statistical anomalies. They can worry about numbers - I'll worry about opening the hearts and minds of the people I contact and hope the ones in my classroom learn more about themselves while picking up some details about the course material at the same time.

I have three minutes to wrap up this blog entry and two hours worth of tales and tidbits to relate to you about my niece's wedding. Of course, she was an angel, a beauty, up there on the stage/altar, a real-life Pocahontas giving her pledge to spend the rest of her life with her handsome man. Her mother seemed to be in her own element, too, shining with a glow that makes her youthful. Their son/brother performed his duties well, filling roles of brother, son, father, photographer and videographer. His girlfriend and parents are slowly merging into the family circle, it seems.

I saw my semi-nieces, Sarah Becky and Holly, one a college student and the other a new mother. I am happy and pleased that they grow up in good health and seek broad horizons, celebrating the vistas that spread out before them, bumpy as the road may be that they travel.

My wife's extended family joined us in this affirmation of ancient rituals. Oles, Judy, Margo, Maurice, Fay, Dan. Pat's family, including her parents and brother, sister in-law and niece, also shared hugs and smiles with us, telling tall tales when we could. Fay asked me to read, "My Name is Asher Lev." After discussing it over dinner at the Schnitzel Ranch last night, I'll add the book to my list.

My niece's new family enjoyed the festivities. I had the privilege of getting to know many of them over the past few weeks, including her father in-law, mother in-law, and sister in-law. Their lives are similar to Uncle Ralph's so that time spent with them is like time spent with my mother's family, with whom I'll mingle later today (and thus, the title of this blog entry).

Overall, yesterday was like a walk back through time, revisiting the friends and family of my niece's life. Her pastors, Brother Jimmy and Brother Dick, have tied the bow on the package, having blessed her birth and now her marriage, handing a gift to the world that was conceived and nurtured by her mother, family and friends.

That is the view outside the window of my thoughts today - I can see no view more perfect than that but still I wish I could see more lives filled with the sole purpose of having kids and taking care of family. If we treated each other as family, putting the past behind us, could we overcome most of the tendencies toward liars, cheats, crooks, and murderers that lurk in our collective souls? Today, I believe so!

Age Limits

Yesterday, while my wife and I were enjoying our last night out with her mother before she returns to her home in east Tennessee, eating a multi-tapas meal at Chef's Table, my sister called to let me know our uncle, Ralph Maximilian T., had died.

I was just thinking about him and his siblings yesterday while I was showering, wondering if I should blog about my family's humble lives, where my father and my mother and her two siblings all grew up on farms in east Tennessee. Of those four people, two of them ended up with master's degrees, one of them ended up with a PhD and the fourth one, Uncle Ralph, ended up working at the aluminum processing plant with his father.

Now the only ones alive are the ones who pursued baccalaureate and post-graduate university education. Is there a connection? Perhaps.

Uncle Ralph had a long history of health problems but I don't know how many of them are directly related to his line of work. No doubt his skeletal joint problems originated in repetitive, strenuous labor. His wife, my Aunt Polly, died of Alzheimer's disease about two and a half years ago - her health decline was genetically related and her death led to some of Ralph's health decline. He missed her strongly, and spoke of Polly visiting him sometimes, especially in the last couple of weeks (I know how he felt - in my thoughts I still have conversations with my girlfriend who died when I was 10 (37 years ago!) and sometimes the conversations feel real enough to make me believe she's nearby; an active imagination is good for one's sanity!).

Perhaps his children and/or grandchildren will detail Ralph's life in the blogging world. I recall him serving in the Navy during World War II - he was going to visit the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., next month with one of his daughters. He maintained the family homestead outside of Maryville, Tennessee, and it still belongs in the family. Beside me in this study I have the hardbound book, "Blount County, Tennessee History, 1795-1995," which includes the history of Ralph's and my mother's side of the family.

I'll miss my uncle. He was a kind-hearted man, whose face resembled both my grandfather and grandmother. He takes some family lore to the grave with him, tiny details that swam around in his thoughts that he probably never shared with us because he had the details of daily family living occupying most of his time. I wish I'd spent time with him in his physically active days to learn some of the woodworking skills his father taught him (my grandfather built furniture and other wooden items like the bookcase on the other side of this room, as well as little knickknacks like miniature hillbilly people he made out of walnut shells, including one on the bookcase beside me). In a drawer of an inaccessible clothes dresser I have a wooden whistle with one end carved in the shape of a squirrel that Uncle Ralph made for me as a kid when he visited my house. From him, I got my love of wood carving, having made a few items for my wife - nothing fancy, mind you, but something I can create with a pocket knife and bare hands.

Uncle Ralph and Aunt Polly taught me to enjoy the journey as much as the destination. They owned a caravan converted for road travel (a "conversion van," if you will) and drove their grandchildren on cross-country trips, careening along long-forgotten highways and byways, taking their time to see the curiosity shops and meet local people outside of tourist areas, as opposed to vacationers who rush to a tourist spot like a beach or amusement park and stay trapped within a false world the whole time.

In other words, my uncle and aunt were real people who still had their hands in the soil and lived a quiet life in the country side of suburban living. With their passing, a part of reality goes with them, leaving me to ponder where in this technology-filled world do people like my uncle and aunt still live. A few years ago, my uncle learned how to use a computer, played Solitaire and sent emails as long as he was able to sit at a computer and type.

I am a simple person. I see the world in simple terms. We humans live to reproduce ourselves. Uncle Ralph and Aunt Polly raised two children and cared for their grandchildren. They did not aspire to international fame and fortune but they did travel around the world with their family. In them thrived the secret to species success, even if their way of life and genetic heritage limited their maximum age of good health.

My grandparents lived into their 70s. My uncle and his siblings are living into their 80s, it appears. I gather that their children will live into their 90s (if we exercise, eat well, and take our life-extending prescription drugs, of course, while working in our desk jobs until retirement age).

My uncle takes his Rook-playing skills and family discussions into eternal sleep, too. He had opinions that differed from his brother (my uncle Gordon) and sister (my mother). I've always missed those times when they gathered to play Rook and had serious but fun discussions about politicians or political changes, since one was a staunch Democrat, one was a staunch Republican and one was a moderate in comparison to the other two.

Uncle Ralph, I salute you. I lift a beer in your memory and will cheer during an upcoming NASCAR race, knowing that you still enjoyed sitting and watching those motorsports events on television right up to the end of your life. I'll carve a wooden creature when I take a vacation trip soon and will stop at local shops to see real people along the way. Thanks for everything you taught me!

= = =

My wife and mother in-law attend a bridesmaid luncheon right now, staying on course for celebrating events with our living relatives this weekend, including the rehearsal dinner tonight and my niece's wedding tomorrow. We'll find out later today when my uncle's funeral is planned, hoping that it's on Sunday or Monday so we can visit family during memorial services for my dead relative, Uncle Ralph. We will celebrate both events in sadness and happiness, fitting well into my belief that life and death are one and the same, contributing to the only true measure of human wealth: family.

The Philosophy of Aging

I shared an online article with my father:

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/professors-guide/2009/05/20/17-ways-college-campuses-are-changing.html

He commented that he has already experienced at least part of the changes, with more to come. Some of his colleagues, "old-time profs," are bowing out because of the changes -- they don't want to change. He added, "Change is not comfortable to one desiring stability in life and an unchanging personal world. I appreciate that point-of-view at age 74!"

The philosophy of aging is interesting to me, also. I have concluded that as we age we find ways to succeed in daily living that work no matter what happens in the ever-changing marketplace, so "change for change's sake" becomes less and less necessary as we age; at the same time, there are aspects of our lives that we enjoy changing, which may or may not coincide with our successful daily habits; therefore, aging and changing meet only when we find the intersection of the two a fun learning experience. Even I, who grew up during the heyday of the computer revolution, find some technological changes unenjoyable simply because they don't add anything useful or fun to my daily habits but that doesn't mean it excludes enjoyment for others. Live and let live, respect each other's differences, etc.

I have three new books to read (in addition to the used books I haven't finished and the Linux texts I'm reading to prepare for the Linux course I will teach this summer):

• Out of Our Heads: why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness by Alva Noë
• The Ego Tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self by Thomas Metzinger
• Selfless Insight: Zen and the meditative transformations of consciousness by James H. Austin

By the way, let me remind those of you who haven't run cross country or long distance races in a while that you get out of a race what you put into preparation. I haven't run any long distances in two years so three days after jogging 6.2 miles (10 km), my leg muscles are still sore and I'm loving every minute of it - glad to be alive and relatively healthy even if I look like I'm walking on stilts. lol

During my freshman year in college, at Georgia Tech, a residence hallmate of mine was a long distance runner. He grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, and told us about an interesting habit of his. He'd run along the beach, using sand as a form of weight resistance training. During tourist season, he made sure he ran before tourists typically got up in the morning. Then he'd "rest" in a tourist beach area, wearing a sad look on his face (remember he was 15 to 17 years of age at the time). Young women would come up to him and ask him why he was so sad. He'd concoct a story about breaking up with a girlfriend and how despondent he felt, thinking about drowning himself in the ocean. Inevitably, he'd end up making out or having sex with the women. Another habit of his I still remember - he distrusted the sanitation of public toilet seats so he'd stand on a toilet seat and squat over the toilet bowl to defecate. We laughed that when we walked into the men's toilet and saw blond hair sticking up above a toilet stall, we knew who was taking a dump. I wonder if he still has these habits in middle age.

Back to my stack of reading!

But first, a thanks to Zazzy's on Airport Road in Huntsville for carrying copies of Huntsville Event magazine where I'm featured on page 40 of the May/June issue, in the section named An Irish Evening. You can see me wearing a Guinness hat I bought in a shop next to the O'Connell Street bridge in Dublin, Ireland, on St. Patrick's Day (I'm also wearing a green Celtic-patterned tie my sister bought me in Ireland).

Hard to believe my oldest niece gets married in two days ("the day after tomorrow," she finally gets to say today!). She's marrying a great fellow - a secondary school football/baseball coach and history teacher. Seems like she was just born yesterday! Or maybe the day before yesterday, anyway.

Power-Free

In order to understand I am not alone in feeling unique among seven billion people, I read books and stories from different cultures and different time periods. I accept the fact that my subculture is not the best or brightest all the time.

I stopped watching television regularly a long time ago because most of what I needed from the television screen I can find in my daily walks and hikes or in scanning websites. However, I hear a television right now because in a nearby room my mother in-law has the volume turned up so she can watch television without using her hearing aids. I am exposed to the hot news topics of the day, which bounces around my brain while I concentrate on what to write today.

Three topics I meant to cover in this blog entry: OpenCourseWare, Project Management, and Interactive Teaching. Maybe I will.

Instead, I'm going to lean on you for a moment and take a breath. Just press your shoulder against the computer screen and I'll press my back against you to prop us both up. There. Thanks, that feels better.

Can you see where we sit? I see us on a large rock outcropping, overlooking the eastern ridges of the Appalachian Mountain chain. A few buzzards fly in a thermal a couple of miles away. Some boats and other watercraft write white lines and carve V-shaped troughs in a lake down below. Here's an apple I brought for you. I've got a bottle of wine if you aren't too dehydrated from our morning hike.

I'm glad you're here with me. I'm more of a hiker than a runner and kinda figured you are, too, since we met here. Who would have thought that two people who enjoy the outdoors are the same two people who also enjoy using technology?

Yeah, I know what you mean. I wonder what our technology side is doing to the environment. I just heard an ABC news report on global warming and its extinction effect on cool/cold weather species ranging from butterflies to frogs to orchids. That's why I needed to lean on you for a moment. I feel tired. Worn out. Wisdom is a heavier burden to bear than I thought it would be when I was child admiring the elders I wanted to be.

The world I knew as a child is gone but human social development has always gone that way, changing from one generation to the next, with the definition of what "generation" means also changing.

In a dream last night, I saw the human species as a giant organizational chart on a website, where we could trace the location and daily occupations of every person on the planet, showing us exactly how many people similar to us exist, and see how many people are performing tasks just like us at any one moment (either at the same time (say, at 15:00 in each time zone) or literally at the same moment, no matter what the local time is). We could see people practicing the same religious ceremonies, people speaking the same language and people buying the same clothes/food/houses as us. We could categorize our habits in generic terms and see people doing the same things as us but in different cultural contexts. And in this future website, our bodies are connected to the Internet more directly than the way we send/receive external stimuli now so that we can see each other's brain patterns and hormonal changes, too, if we want. We also can figure out who is not directly connecting to this future network and determine who has handlers that manipulate images of people like celebrities, politicians and business leaders. Urban legends pass through our cultures instantaneously and become basic forms of population control for commercialization and political purposes.

I know that my dream is just the fluff-and-stuff of material I read, flowing through my nighttime thoughts and hanging out during the day, waiting for my attention. To get to that dream, I want to focus on my three topics, OpenCourseWare, Project Management, and Interactive Teaching, but in reverse order.

First, Interactive Teaching. I am a result of a childhood spent in front of professional educators, people who earned their livelihood giving young people lessons in assembling cultures from the basic building blocks of language and mathematics. The best teachers I remember were the ones who chose the emotionally stable and mature students to aid in the education process, thus getting students in one age level to recruit other students to join them in the joy of learning. Barriers prevented the completely free flow of information, including class bullying and stereotyping (often reinforced by the worst type of teacher, the tenured "lifer" who was just doing his/her job to get a paycheck and reach retirement age, happy to keep a class from collapsing into chaos, much less create a learning environment). From this, I believe the ideal learning environment is one where teachers work with the exceptionally gifted/focused students to help train those students in the classroom who are not as gifted academically or not focused on classroom learning so that both social skills and academic learning are enhanced. Difficulty lies in coordinating learning activities outside the classroom with those in the home where parental goals may not match the goals of public/private professional educators (in a separate subject, I hope that home-schooled children have parents/guardians who align their home activities with their learning activities and from what I've seen, many or most of them do).

Of course, at the institute where I instruct, students/customers are older than the state-mandated education age level but many of the same aspects of teaching still apply and which I saw demonstrated in college-level professors/instructors of mine. Every class I taught last quarter allowed me the flexibility to apply this technique and except for a few cases, I think I succeeded. One thing I learned, this technique requires a level of commitment from me that I wouldn't ask of every instructor. Equality is essential - every student enters my class with the same level of skills which means I don't/won't engage conversations with other instructors about students'/customers' learning abilities. I don't have a solution for the students/customers who show me their cheating habits other than to assign them to teams with students who do not cheat and hope they see the joy of learning while they're not able to easily cheat because I give different assignments to each team.

Which leads me to the next topic: Project Management. A project manager and a teacher have the same goals - improvising magic tricks with unknown resources. In business, I have managed more successful projects than ones that failed (or rather, in PMA terms (PMA = Positive Mental Attitude), I never had a project that failed, only ones that showed me how to succeed with unusual circumstances such as too much time, too much money, too few resources or not enough customers).

I am not a computer, a tractor, an automobile, a robot, a widget, or a stack of money. I am a human being and live with other humans in daily living. Therefore, I do not worry about how to operate a computer, a tractor, an automobile, a robot, a widget, or a stack of money. I only focus on the one resource I understand: human beings.

Humans are not numbers. Humans are not satisfaction surveys. Humans are not the products they buy or the complaints they make. Humans are me and I them. I don't care about their broken items or their inadequate training. I do care about what makes them human, their special traits, their dreams, their wishes, their desires, their disappointments and their losses.

Success is a big word with a lot of meaning that falls outside of a dictionary's precise definition. I'll let you define what success means to you. To me, success is just another word for you. You are the successful output/conclusion of you. Thus, you are the unknown resource with whom I want to perform the magic trick (i.e., project) of your learning.

And now I reach the final topic: OpenCourseWare. Life is an open classroom with no syllabus and no assigned textbook but with plenty of homework and lots of pop quizzes and tests. How do you prepare for a situation like that? What else but constant learning! If you want to get serious about having fun learning, you start by unplugging yourself from unfettered entertainment, including over-the-air television, DVRs, video games, texting, or any other passive resource which artificially stimulates you such as drug abuse or obsessively shopping. You learn by doing, including reading, writi