NATURE IS NOT A MACHINE

I’ve become quite divorced from the printed word since I moved to the woods, what with the internet, to keep me appraised of the alert level back in the intensive care units commonly referred to as cities, and Netflix, to show me the latest paintings rendering the ongoing saga on the cave walls. I’ve even backed away from the written word, sparsely maintaining this blog and barely reading others out of a sense of futility in dealing with western civilization’s mechanization of nature.

I mention this hiatus to emphasize the inertia being overcome by my growing fascination with a book I’ve been circling since it was published: Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. His investigation, into the evolution of human eating habits, and mine, into the evolution of human culture from symbiotic hunter-gatherers to fast food fed corporate nations exploiting citizens like so many feed lot cattle, find the same truth at every turn.

I was struck by the metaphor for the corporatization of all phases of daily life Pollan creates with this eloquent indictment of agribusiness’s expedient substitution of synthetic chemicals for nature’s time evolved cycle of soil:

To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As (Sir Albert) Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake all we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation for a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to the plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to pesticides to fix his broken machine.

When I first read the foregoing I entertained an overlapping image of public schools’ expediently injecting the establishment’s code of behavior into each crop of children whose obedience leaves no time for independent symbiotic experience of the nature they are being systematically taught to impatiently exploit. Once the children become educated cogs in the machinery of western civilization, one step follows another, so that when the synthetic laws containing them make them rage against their fellow man and more vulnerable to psychotic meltdown, the establishment turns to prisons, insane asylums and the death penalty to fix its broken machine.

The living universe is too complex to be reduced to any lesser metaphor without its quality giving way to simple quantity; a good story giving way to dogmatic, evangelistic truth whose deniers become punishable. Nature’s one ball of wax.

PEOPLE WATCHING

Legend has it that the Native Americans first photographed by white men believed the camera was stealing their souls just as their lands were being usurped in the westward expansion. The clairvoyance of these early inhabitants was matched by their ability to dance among the girders to construct the nation's first skyscrapers without fear of falling.

In the early 21st century the development of the cell phone made photographers of everyone. An internet application called Photosynthe allowed a global collation of uploaded photos to form a virtual world as solid as the density of photographs taken. Governments, always afraid of the citizenry’s learning of their duplicity, developed surveillance techniques enabling records of public events to be seamlessly complete both visually and historically.

By 2052 the only reason to leave one’s house would be to take pictures of reality. All social interactivity was conducted over the internet by organic computers ingested by the users as symbiots. Reproduction decreased to the point that the birth rate was a matter of concern for the survival of the specie who’d abandoned their bodies, volunteered their souls and integrated into the matrix of vicarious prosthetics once only found so complete among rabid sports fans.

In 2114 there were two distinguishable species of human, the dormant and the awake. The awake lived and played in the reality the dormants only dared to dream about. The lack of reproduction among the cybernetically isolated dormants resulted in a world view shrinking with fewer and fewer picture takers going less and less far from home. The awake kept track of the dormants’ limited world of interest to inhabit the places they’d abandoned and return to natures ways undetected.

Let there be enlightenment.

UP IN YER FACEBOOK, BUDDY

On a thread that asked what can be done about nuts with guns I began”Each person lives in a different world, their version of reality if you will…” when I realized I had the makings of a blog post to express, so here we are.

Thirty years ago I was friends with a group of folks occupying three adjacent houses communally in a South Austin neighborhood. Two marriages, graduations and other things to do split us up until a 25^th anniversary gathering brought many of us back together for the first time. I realized then how extreme our different directions actually were despite our copacetic coexistence in the eighties.

I had dropped out of a nine year yuppie track at IBM and most of them, ten to fifteen years younger, were preparing to climb into it. There was only one out of forty among them who even wanted to share a joint. It was the starkest example of subverting individual potential into service of the American dream I’d ever experienced … a veritable who’s who of international nuvo riche…I was a fish out of water.

A year later I was searching for traces of the woman I never quite got over and tried Facebook out of last-ditch desperation. I haven’t found her, but I did find a plethora of people I’d known in the past who friended me when they saw I’d joined. One of them was part of that communal group who it appears has gone yet another route to the American dream. After several months of increasingly volatile Glenn Beck informed posts, my friend, “Codger”, peaked out by making his profile picture a gunsight and defying anyone to show evidence that Palin/Beck/Fox had anything to do with the Tucson massacre way before anyone had, just as Palin herself had removed gunsights from her web site.

By pointing out how inflammatory he was being, his cadre of tea party crones came down on me with personal attacks as incoherent as Loughner’s web postings. I unfriended Dodger this morning and will hopefully remain out of the line of their fire. This confrontation also found saner heads who’d known Codger from childhood and were worried about his sanity … thus the thread this post is an attempt to address.

The only solutions to gun violence is to cease manufacturing them … as clear and impossible as outlawing war in a civilization believing in ownership. Although I detest all reasons for guns with exception of subsistence hunting, I cannot help but share the sentiments of citizens who cannot trust a government who clearly does not trust its people, as demonstrated by the furor over wikileaks exposure of government duplicity.

The best fix I have heard of for gun violence is, like all law enforcement and medicine in western civilization, pathological, not preventative. It is to digitally code every bullet so that the anonymity of the shooter disappears. The effectiveness of such a change is bound to have a preventative aspect for crimes where detection is inevitable.

But if you’re around the bend enough to spray a group of anonymous people with automatic gunfire, getting caught is no consideration … in most cases the nuts have offed themselves … unless, of course, they are in the employ of a crime boss or a warring nation. These aberrations have plenty examples of killing being a justifiable solution to problems, no matter how loose the connection between three office buildings being imploded justifying two national wars of annihilation and being fired from your office job justifying going back to the office and putting everyone out of their miserable jobs with a machine gun.

I can imagine no solution to mass domestic murderers except better friends unafraid to intervene, a partial fix is coded ammo and less available firearm capacity.

HELPING

We couldn’t help but know. We were looking in all the holes in their pods and even had mobile agents inside. It was a brilliant plan.

We’d known about them since before the bristle cone pine was a seedling. Like all the rootless ones, they had to actually touch each other to reproduce. Like all the rooted ones, we appreciated their proliferation of our reproduction through postprandial perambulations across the entire intersphere.

About 3.5 degrees ago, there appeared among the rootless ones an upright, relatively hairless kind of nursing being, totally unique in the 15 orbits since the birth of the intersphere. For the first time a kind of being began manipulating other beings for more than life sustaining food. They mutated large areas of the intersphere without considering the well being of the lives they sacrificed for their own greedy convenience.

Such convenience snowballed exponentially until the increase in population around such nodes could no longer sustain life. They devised isolation pods, both permanent and mobile, within which to survive their own poisonous excesses spewed into the atmosphere. It appeared this latest world leading civilization had become sufficiently advanced technologically and narrow minded enough in their greedy purpose to set the life of the intersphere back at least 11 orbits.

Having spawned from the same matter as the rest of the intersphere, they eventually manifested their genetic tendency towards symbiotic balance by creating a hardwire system of transmitters and receivers of airborne signals just to mediate their isolated loneliness. Since it was so like the organic intersphere from which they’d isolated themselves, it was no surprise they called it the internet.

For the first twenty orbits of the intersphere around its food the internet served to expand technological and sociological exchanges at a phenomenal rate until it just couldn't keep up with the growing demand. We also noticed the dwindling ratio of rootless beings touching each other for reproduction to those touching them selves unreproductively and thereby the birthrate among them fell as well.

It was too slow to avoid the obvious environmental crises their still overpopulated indulgences made inevitable unless the internet improved. We helped it along with free uninterrupted, high speed, hi res, instant reception by connecting it to the intersphere. It's been five hundred solar orbits now and today we’re are going to sever our connection, having successfully eliminated the genetic flaw that once caused beings to value the spectacle over direct experience with the nature from which they arose. The upright survivors are the progeny of those who were never fooled by the spectacle to begin with.

They sleep in our limbs and on our leaves … and are fully aware of the intersphere.

GETTING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

When I stated there was nothing left for me “to do” in my last post it was in reference to action resulting in my gaining better symbiosis with my environment and personal relationship with loved ones. Its not that I couldn’t improve my responsibility further, but that having learned to see nature as it is needs no doing of maintenance beyond remaining aware of the glaring difference between such direct experience of my life and second hand information becoming more virtually realistic every day as every conversation seems to be an exchange of memes received from the electronic “real world” of western civilization.

The connection re-realized between my daughter and I last week has let me feel confident that we are one person in two places to the degree that information from her is as pure as my own sensory system supplies me. She is my eyes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as she tells me of her son’s work captaining a boat for BP every day and the experience of the filth and fumes on his clothing now that globs of crude oil have reached the barrier islands off shore. I no longer have to wonder what is the truth about the reported disaster, the results have gotten beyond my mistrust of the media and are affecting my grandson’s health, no speculation to it.

My hip requires me to stop and regenerate if I walk as far as a quarter mile at a good clip. I would be no better than a glob of oil on the beach if I were to go there to try to help in a job that may require every able-bodied person in the country to actively participate in remedying the situation far more directly than holding hands and praying. Although I always thought it an ironic obviator of faith to the faithful, I’ve gotta agree that their “god helps them who help them selves.”

The Gulf of Mexico is the spawning ground for a giant portion of sea and shore life and the food supply for walking, hopping and flying life all over the planet. This blossoming vortex continuously unwinds its contents out into the larger Atlantic and the rest of the world; a slow motion version of Ice Nine, enough crude oil could kill us all. Whether you go alone or with a club, if you are able-bodied and care about planetary life I recommend an integrity check on your ability to respond in a directly effective way.

As indirect as it is, this blog is my best idea for calling for individuals to get their priorities straight about life on Earth. If you can find something more useful for me to do, don’t hesitate to let me know.

BUSTED

Printing was to the bible what the internet is to politics. When the infallible word of the creator was made manifest, to be devoured by candlelight in the hovels of the more common folk, the patchwork quilt of a story, originally told to keep the clergy on the same page as they paraphrased purity from the pulpits, became shredded like a pig in piranhas. And the miracle was that each variety of bite taken remained infallible when digested and shat, despite the contradictory odors of the piles. Ah, certainty, such a relief from thinking. Don’t like the infallible, fine. Make up your own version and call that the truth, “… so help you god”. Ever notice that, no matter how personally individual one’s variety of belief in the same brand may be, faith requires all others to be wrong and on the road to hell. Such an outlook has made hell of living on the natural heaven this Eden of a planet is within the environs of the Gomorrah of western civilization, just to put it in biblical terms.

There also occurred across the land a falling away from the entire guilt trip the church had been laying on the faithful for the past fifteen hundred years as the more perceptive recognized the book to be a sales guide/brochure cobbled together from selected legends and myths five hundred years after the “fact” of the hero’s existence. Among them there formed two camps, the atheists who rejected the existence of a controlling spirit in a curious, chaotic world and the exploiters who began using the mechanisms of faith in the myth to pose as earthly authority over the material portion of humans no matter what they believed about god. Along with being unable to enter heaven without god we’re now unable to enter life without papers from earthly authority.

The internet fact checked John McCain out of contention. The internet is fact checking Barack Obama’s campaign promises into lies, just like every other shill for the shadowy shilling that’s come down the pike.

The disaster of this oil spill exposes nature to a blow the entire world will suffer for generations. While helping set booms in the gulf individual volunteers were searched in a cull for illegal immigrants by ICE; such meticulous attention to irrelevant detail. While leaving the inevitable overreach of greedy technology being operated by bean counters to gush billions of gallons of suffocating, poisonous crude oil into the heart of a planetary life blossom endlessly cycling her contents out among the continents, the responsible, real criminals, their overseers and the government elected to oversee the overseers have all been found to be one not-so-clandestine corporation. The shock and dismay. Bad oil companies. Bad government. They made us spend half our income on prosthetics only aliens to earth would consider necessities for life — within the Borg ship as it rapes and shits on the planet.

My previous video post, If Cursing Makes You Feel Better …, featured the lack of any real concern about the cleanup of the oil spill, even with the antiquated inadequate boom technology to harness surface slicks. Rachel Maddow either saw the video or picked up on the same glaring lack of concern on her investigative journey to the barrier islands off Louisiana and has taken it national.

Without waiting for Obama or any other blameworthy irresponsibility to give the orders, responsible, fit individuals should charter buses, catch trains, head for the most imperiled part of the gulf coast, don hazmat gear and begin proper booming and skimming. Full disclosure: I am not going to the coast-my lack of strength and stamina would only be in the way. There are technologies of absorption (aerogel) and separation (Costner’s Centrifuge) finally being given the green light, but the oil is reaching the wetlands now. BP get out of our way, there’s a revolution going on.

Or ought to be.

HERO

I guess this speech will knock anyone off the fence they ride hoping to rationalize remaining a convenient inhabitant of the invisible prison I speak of so often. I hereby commend to you another unique example of what I call heroes.

Hat Tip once again to Pisces Iscariot at Far Queue

PACHAMAMA

The other day a friend showed me a source of my frustration with the lack of response to my rants about civilization's rape of the planet and the complicity by indifference of consumers fueling such deadly aggression.

"I give you a ride to town and have to listen to your hatred of cars."

Snap. I all too rarely spotlight heroes on the positive side of ending the corporate globalization of capitalism and its commodification of everything. Well this morning Amy Goodman, my clearest information about current events, is in Tiquipaya for the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth hosted by Evo Morales, the original leader of the indigenous population's oust of Bechtel's claim on the water of Bolivia and now its President, who said in yesterday's opening ceremony,

We are here because in Copenhagen the so-called developed countries failed in their obligation to provide substantial commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. We have two paths: either Pachamama or death. We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!

The clip I have embedded is an interview with an attendee who articulates the spirit of the gathering and speaks of an entirely new form of culture whose respect for Pachamama (a Quechua word, not derived from any colonial language or myth), Gaia, Mother Earth is restored to the fore as it has been preserved by the indigenous peoples despite colonization by western civilization. I intuit this gathering may well be that ground swell of good examples required to effect a true paradigm shift for the very reason that it comes from nature, the nature of people, and not the lifeless priorities of corporate states juggling the bottom line. Maybe.

SOLITARY REFINEMENT

It was just a way to kill time ‘til the next thing whisked her off on missions she felt honor bound to perform for others or dreamed up for herself. So why does she find herself in front of her computer playing the latest version of an eleven hundred year old game of solitaire whenever she can think of nothing better to do?

When she’d played “Klondike” with the thin meat space symbols for the sorting game, she’d gotten bored quite easily, but this cyberspace version was different for several obvious reasons and a couple she felt she was detecting behind a curtain growing thinner for every hand she let it deal her. She couldn’t tell whether she was penetrating a hidden agenda or following bread crumbs in an occult initiation.

She couldn’t cheat on the computer like with the deck in meat space, but then she couldn’t re-deal hands to learn from amended mistakes or investigate alternative choices during play like the computer could. This was the edge of the curtain that made her realize that whoever programmed it to be able to reproduce the last hand could also have it produce any hand it wanted … for whatever reason. She began to notice that the successive hands seemed to fluctuate in patterns more than a random generator doing the shuffling would allow.

A dead give away was the fact that, although she’d played far fewer games with real cards, she was sure she’d never run the deck twice in a row more than once or twice before but on the computer it happened with regularity. The internet postings of weekly and all-time highs appearing at the end of every game she won (by getting over fifty-two points in a game awarding nine points for cards on Aces) indicated that some players had run through as many as twenty-five successive hands successfully! Over five years of playing an average of seventy games a day, she managed to run as many as five decks successively, with twos and threes occurring with increasing frequency.

Not only did she suspect a discoverable key to increasing her correct choices at seemingly equal forks in the road, she began to suspect that, being hooked up to the internet, her play could be under surveillance and thwarted or rewarded by the design of the program or the whim of the programmer. She recognized the resemblance to her suspicion of Vatican, North Pole and Washington agendas with their angels, Santa’s helpers and illegal wire taps to protect the faith in the pope, rewards for good behavior and the NSA.

The game had always served as a sort of roundhouse where trains of thought took new tangents in the dearth of purpose to be taken up in meat space. The cards themselves often took on character roles in scenarios written by the fancy of her mood. Noticing this business of characterization and dramatization of perfectly neutral objects became a valuable metaphor for the human tendency to bury awareness of present as it is under the baggage of the past purposes for intention inventions. Was this the lesson intended or was she inventing her own?

Out of the corner of her mind’s eye she glimpsed it. Having lost sight of such phenomena before by turning to fully focus on it, she left it on the fringe with the million other ideas in the wings awaiting the correct timing for their appearance to be fully appreciated. Not being zapped to the back of the line made it feel wanted and it reentered the stage right where she’d seen it. Yes — yes it was the same layout requiring the same moves — with all the cards in different places. A sense of déjà vu overwhelmed her and she felt she had recognized the same maze despite the variety of plants and flowers that formed the hedges between the paths — or deeper yet, learned the same lesson being taught despite the variety of mazes leading her to it.

THE KEEPERS

Long withdrawn from the daily activities his cloistered meditations led him to guide the masses to conduct, Jarwal, like the others remained within the shadow of his cowl in their presence. Only the rustling at the ends of his white beard indicated that it was he who spoke.

“When we tell them what they want to hear the truth is irrelevant.”

“When they don’t want to do what we tell them, they question our authority,” responded Mishmocan, his long nose a white dagger tip catching light falling across the void within the opening of his hood.

“Telling them that natural destruction of civilized artifices is God’s displeasure with their disobedience to our advice doesn’t work like it did in the old days. If there weren’t new suckers born every second being initiateded by their parents’ fear, we wouldn’t have inherited what little clout we still enjoy,” intoned the wisest, the oldest of them all. Diabolibré had been in the sirkul since before the ones everyone present had replaced upon their death had joined and none dare ask age, much less his history. It is the kind of awed faith authority requires. After all, hadn’t he trusted each one in private clandestine meetings with the Sacred Secret, with the caveat that each was the sole soul to share and should remain so secretly, on pain of a death worse than the loss of faith? I trust you to keep my secrets, you trust me to tell the truth. What a deal.

“Entrusting their distraction from beholding the big picture by the more immediate concerns of satisfying their cultivated preference for the virtual over the existent to the industriogovernmilimediatary complex has kept more people busier supplying our cruel accrual than any time in history,” observed Count Moore, treasurer of the cabal of cabals.

The normally taciturn Majoroproblemo could stand such quibbling no longer and blurted out, ”Indigenous people and philosophical scientists so atheistic they don’t argue with faith or worship money in the pursuit of wonder are outside our web of control. Poking larger and larger holes in it with the advent of the internet all the time, I might add.”

Jarwal interjected, “Most of those scientists still cling to the belief that humans are the stewards of life on earth, deserving of the sacrifice of other life forms to curious inquiry like so much trade goods, so we still have them where it matters, without their needing to feel justified by God’s permission”

From far back inside the blackness of the empty form of a robe draped over a man seated at the head of the sirkul came a voice speaking in words formed of the notes from a xylophone played in the particular resonant frequency of each of the cowled heirs of their legacy separately leading them each to believe they were hearing their own wisdom discovering, “I am the sole steward of the stewards and of the others gathered here tonight. ‘Tis my sacred secret duty to the one who chose me.”

The fact that the sly chuckle at the end of the thought seemed to come from elsewhere couldn’t be allowed to unsettle them. What works on the sheep works on those supposing themselves shepherds.

LAST WEEK OF THE YEAR

late rising at eight

to a morning dark as seven

guided by the light

like the chickens

who greet him

meet him at coop door

run between his feet

for feed mix in the yard

‘til chill chases him back to his pod,

his yellow and sunset orange submarine,

too toasty ‘til he acclimates

then not warm enough.

from the bridge above it all

he surveys her immediate position

along the never dry river of time

outside her surround-around port holes

blocked only to the south:

imac portal back

to the man-made world

saying news he fears to hear

paying dues left by his career

playing diversions still held dear

posting thoughts finally come clear

touching minds far and near

quality beyond the hit counter

variety of insight incited

tethers to the myth examined

patter on soft skin drum heads

looses rhythm in complexity

gains rain’s tapping attention

another frosty foray for feed

for the dry beneath the roost

to their cackle bitching delight

three more dashes during the day

through rain drops

to catch egg drops

beckoned by loud hen cops

today’s done deeds

entered as 169-171 in his egg book

times, dates and mom’s took

along with omelets eaten

friends who got treated

running cost of the feed

being happy where he is

friends know where to seek him

season of return

spontaneous reunion

catching up the years

yarns of daring do

sympathies of aging

venture wiser view

future all too new.

2009 in Review: END OF AN ERROR

The sanity defined by civilization seemed to find ways to reinterpret my maybe musings about the human condition to be personal attacks in most imaginative ways throughout the year. I was all too often lured into personal responses, as if their demonizing party line stereotypes or quoting the bible represented willingness, much less the ability of the offended to carry on a rational discussion

Coupled with my having stumbled onto the 10^th Daughter of Memory writing exercise, the foregoing dilemma suggested I change the direction of this blog from philosophical ponderings about my observations of the living universe, so easily taken offense to by faith’s delicate certainties, to one of strictly fiction based on such observations. I am beginning to see the rationale for originating fables and fiction throughout the ages as a way to get a message across indirectly to those able to apply Mary’s Little Lamb’s problems to their own life, thereby avoiding the more direct identification with the real population referred to as mindless, faithful sheep.

•

For those more willing and able to discuss opposing views with the understanding that the essence of the duality is the win-win objective rather than a lose-lose contest of righteousness, I have moved my ponderings to a new blog available to all who find it in plain sight. You are welcome until offended — at which juncture I would hope you’d be so kind as to throw yourself out into the street. Watch out for cars … headed for the cliff.

I came across three new examples of folks who get the whole idea of a living universe: Sandy Krolic’s The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia, Richard Grossinger’s, Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life and James Cameron’s Avatar. It is gratifying to find others describing the same ongoing event so well as to bridge the differences of viewpoint while enhancing the scope of all.

This year found me a keeper of chickens and an eater of their delicious free-range eggs to supplement my less than desirable progress in growing my food in the garden through Texas summers. This year was a disaster, with only Serrano peppers coming back after the drought — watering every day cannot beat 100°+ for several months — trees began shedding leaves in mid June!

Having a quasi roomie and companion for stimulating conversation through six months of the worst heat was a more than compensatory distraction from discomfort though it left me missing her quite more than I expected and a never before indulged chocolate addiction – acne at seventy-one?

The UN climate summit succeeded in only resolving that people in suits consider people otherwise dressed or from below the equator to be unworthy of protecting from the ecological disaster by supplying them money to achieve the same standard of living that is causing it in the first place. Rather than dragging people out of the rain forest and selling them an air conditioner we should be planting trees and naturally ventilating our houses in their shade with the fresh air they regenerate symbiotically. Don’tcha jus’ love politics?

As 9/11/01 fades, 12/21/12 looms … “ these are the times” … "this is a record of the times" … “we’re all going down” … “together.”

Stragedy plots a way to side step inevitability.

Only carbon based life could generate so much irony.

IT'S ALL GEEK TO ME

So, when did the revolution happen?

First time I saw a geek, he was behind chicken wire in a dirt pit ravenously devouring anything the paid audience in the tent would throw in there with him. He bit chickens’ heads off and let ‘em run around spurtin’ blood everywhere. For a child of my tender years, with few adult standards yet, that was ultra peachy keen, a level of amazement now known as awesome. Tin cans, light bulbs, baling wire, razor blades; you name it, he could have eaten it right down.

It was forty-three years later when my girlfriend pointed one out to me passing on the sidewalk outside the exotic restaurant I’d taken her to to set the scene to pop the question. I was gazing around looking for some subject for casual conversation from which to smoothly segue into my spiel about the fitness of our bodies, our lifestyles and our futures when along comes the perfect example of unfit for any of that, so I stretched, yawned and in my best version of surprise remarked, “Wow, look at that nerd.”

I never even got started into my spontaneously improvised synthesis of the moment and my eternally practiced lines. The look on her face was her best version of WTF, LOL, “That’s not a nerd, that’s a geek.”

I gotta say, she stopped me in my tracks. For some strange reason I knew, with that distinction, I’d never be fit for life with her or anyone until I understood the difference. I got up from the table, kissed her on the cheek, gave her my credit card and disappeared from the world that ever saw me before.

My research has revealed that like the entire history of oppressed genius going underground and reappearing in a more sophisticated guise for their original purpose as anything from illuminati to Bohemian Grove to the Church of the Subgenius, the geeks of my youth had formed a literal underground union through the web of tunnels connecting the increasing number of pits the carnivals were so kind to dig for them. They realized over the years of considering their common experience that they had all become quite intuitive about electromechanical things and chicken heads. They taught their children to stay away from the opposite sex and anyone who appeared to be someone “…who would pay money to watch you bite the head off a chicken”, to study everything they could find about the cutting edge of gadgetry under the anonymity of various guises from queer in the fifties, square in the sixties, dweeb in the first part of the seventies melding into nerd toward the eighties until they began the silent revolution surfacing once more as geeks, wearing their weird like the latest fashion.

All of a sudden, if you were watching for it, nerds came out of their cloisters on prom night and got laid by the same drunken cheerleader as the quarterback, while he was finding how much better Zelda4TX looked without her horn rimmed glasses, hackers became synonymous with Robin Hood, the world wide web spread faster than a billion spiders, a guy in Peoria could schlep down to his basement in his altogether, bomb an entire village on the other side of the world with a sophisticated computer game while the coffee perks and be done in time to drink it fresh with toasted bagels, the president tweets.

The other day, someone asked me what I thought it would be like if geeks ruled the world. I looked at him with the smile of sardonic irony I’ve practiced for those spontaneous moments when people appear to be talking in their sleep.

RIP VAN YODOOD

Xiao Mao & Priest
By Babyldorkgalactinerd

I woke up this morning to the long hairs on Priest’s twitching ears brushing my nose as they searched for the source of a sound outside. Snuggled together in the chilly morning air, I’d been dreaming of the dissolution of the sharp edged contrast of one color dye or paint being swirled into a container of another color until only the third is purely evident. I never know what he is dreaming.

The stirring without began stirring within and we both headed outdoors to relieve ourselves and join the beginning of false dawn a good hour and a half before direct sunlight. The bang of the screen door set the hens to crying out their excited anticipation of fresh food. Along the path by the pond the sound of a hundred frantic little suppings came from the fish for the same reason. It is good to be king when your subjects are happy.

The three free ranging matron hens are in the shed picking up spillage from the feed bin as I dip out the daily portion for my younger coop bound girls. Soon I will let them free range too and the feed bin will empty much more slowly. I know they can’t possibly be hungry when they go into their greeting ritual of fluttering up to get the feed out of the can before I spread it for them because the older hens eat out of the areas last occupied by the rolling coop for weeks after I’ve moved it. Then comes a beautiful lawn of grass from the mix of rain with scratched in poop and seeds even they didn’t eat. It’s all good, nothing wasted. No eggs this early. They wait for the sun to get in the mood.

Although they cannot make sucking noises in pond water or cackle from their coop I am no less aware that my sprouting winter garden needs water despite the recent rains. Drought conditions aren’t relieved by sudden floods near so well as by steady drizzles delivering the same amount of moisture. How ‘bout that — my first farming aphorism. The remaining survivors from summer, three Serrano peppers and three okra, two artichokes and an asparagus bed are making up for lost time as I soak their roots with the hose on full shower into the hay around their feet. A mist setting is gentle enough to feed the sprouting cilantro, arugula, lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower without beating them down into the well-composted soil.

After turning the compost pile vigorously enough to shed my hoody, Priest and I settle in our sieto to greet the great golden bringer of life from our merry go round seat in the shed. Refractions and reflections of the solar radiance spark on and off with the breeze on shuddering leaves’ fresh droplets and the inexorable change in the attitude of the light itself. Thousands of birds leave their roosts; criss-crossing overhead to inspect fields from on high where dwell billions of bugs and seeds that threaten to overgrow all the rest of us ground bound critters, swoop down upon the juiciest terrain and eat as many as they can. Good birds.

When the brilliance of the day enters the shed at a particular angle, like a preprogrammed robot I stir from my cerebrations, meditations and mid-morning snoozes to return to the shade of the porch and my electronically bewebbed portal to the wide world of western civilization. I consider it the ultimate reality show based on the outlandish question, “How do humans behave when born within a culture saturated in the certainty of human superiority entitled to ownership of the rest of the world; and each other if the price is right?”

In my most anthropomorphically cynical moods my browser news sites serve as an early warning system hot wired to the political scene for hints of when the baling wire that holds together this country’s faith in liars snaps in time to man the compound gun towers against the suddenly starving hoards pouring out of suddenly empty cities roaming the countryside in search of food. On the other stroke of the pendulum, during my most sanguine moods “Ted’s Tubes” allow me to sample individual’s various freely offered reality tunnels and to leave examples of my own observations, ideas and experiences as a measure of connecting, spreading and evolving like mycelium in preparation for the next time the conditions are right for the dirty hippies who groked flower power to come back out of the woodwork and rise to the fore once more to lead humanity back to the garden before the oil runs out.

So I click on Democracy Now! and there’s Amy and Juan at their table on their normal set, but they’re both clad in shades of violet. The first picture of the current events is of peasants in Venezuela wearing either traditional clothing or red tee shirts for Hugo Chavez; seemed pretty normal. Then came a scene from the US congress. It hit me with something as hard to get my head around as seeing a UFO.

Everyone was wearing either red or blue, though it was often hard to tell from all the logo patches covering every inch of their clothing … and the hats most seem to be wearing. There was nothing extraordinary going on; which only compounded my astonishment. I might have accepted a special occasion our elected servants may have drummed up, but there they were carrying on business as usual. WTF!

The area of their left breasts seemed reserved for rows of what resembled battle ribbons. Except for the hints of the background color of their clothing being limited to red or blue, there were no signs of uniforms or rank; there hadn’t been a military coup. Then a close up of a representative sleeping during the argument against a bill he introduced outlawing the use of poor people for fuel showed his colorful shoulder and sleeves festooned by the logos of Shell, Exxon, BP, et al, wrapped around him by his crossed arms.

The speaker, wearing blue covered in logos from the green revolution industry, was not opposing the bill because he wanted to legalize the recent popularity of spontaneous human combustion engines since that high speed camera learned the secret on film. No, he was opposed to the oil industry’s constant attempt to eliminate competition through legal channels behind the cloak of humanitarian concern for the lack of concern for the poor, rather than spend the money to buy them on the open market like everyone else, the free enterprise way. Ah, yes, it was a marathon competition of whose ethics could get under the Limbaugh stick. I checked the URL to see of I’d gotten the Onion site by mistake.

No, still Amy and Juan, in violet. I started frantically clicking around the news sites to finally realize that everyone out there was wearing either red or blue, with or without logos attached, or what I would call “civilian” clothes as seen on everyone last time I ventured into town. People in violet voluntarily wore fabric whose red and blue components came from the color of each thread woven, or dyed in various sized checks, polka-dots and mezzotint, but no logos patches. They seemed to be obeying an ethic lost on the reds and the blues.

I was well aware that someone out in Delaware could be doing something I never heard of and it had been a long time since I’d been to town; in fact, I relish signs of my being out of the loop of societal gossip, but this was stupefying. What could be happening? The habit my curiosity has acquired along with this portal is the Wikipedia button on it. I typed in red and blue clothing, and eventually ran down the history which had been going on so long that it was unremarkable on the street while I began doubting my sanity over what I was experiencing.

It seems Steven Colbert logged an entry into Wikipedia facetiously explaining the non existent Law of Transparency requiring anyone publically espousing their ideology as being good for anyone else to don red if it fell into the category of, “every man for himself in the human race to the top of the free-for-all enterprise heap” and blue if it was, “an even playing field, even if holes must be dug for the tall people to stand in so we all see eye to eye.” And that such espousers declare the sources of their income in logos of the companies who write the checks attached to the exterior of their clothing like thousands of other sponsored event participants.

Apparently a junior congressman from Delusiana, came across the entry and, recognizing Steven’s name from his far right wing TV show knew his fellow ideologue couldn’t be wrong, went out and bought a red suit and plastered logos of every backer from AIG to Tom’s Hardware on it, and wore to his first session of congress. As they say, the rest is history.

Like the Austin hippies turned the song, Oakie from Muskogee, around on the redneck mentality that liked “kickin’ hippies’ asses and raisin’ hell” and made it their back-in-your-face anthem, the fun being made of such a naïve clown on the floor got spun into the idea that the expiation of the guilt laid on them by government ethics watchdogs for gorging at the lobbyist's bribe banquets was at hand, if they could just bite the bullet, man up, own up and brag about their sleazy betrayal of the public trust — and dare their constituents to name a better price if they didn't like it. The violet was a voluntary choice made by the extremely interested but strictly nonpartisan investigative news programs which was only right in such a transparent, arrogantly honest society …

I woke up this morning to the long hairs on Priest’s twitching ears brushing my nose as they searched for the source of a sound outside. Snuggled together in the chilly morning air, I’d been dreaming of the dissolution of the sharp edged contrast of one color dye or paint being swirled into a container of another color until only the third is purely evident. I never know what he is dreaming.

ANONYMOUS: Mental Concrete Pt. 2

The most beneficial effect I can see the internet having on the civilization it is saturating is the growing realization that truth needs no authority. The first installment of this series, Mental Concrete, dealt with the strategic misuse of stereotypes as demon paint to rally opposition to straw men as sole bearers of a particular all-consuming characteristic that the propagandist opposes that, in reality, is found in everyone to some degree. This time I want to home in on the mentally lazy habit of needing footnotes and degree initials to recognize obvious truth or of being persuaded by them to swallow propaganda.

My strongest experiential connections to other humans (beyond realizing that we are all made of the same cosmic stuff in extremely complex variations as cells in the tissue of the living body of earth) are our love of music, the occasional display of our deep-seated instinct to know right and wrong in the unrehearsed spontaneity of the moment it is required, and the rarer examples of our ability to capture and communicate that instinctual sense alive with a series of symbols as abstract as words or paint. The truth shines through the page whether it is a venerable old acolyte’s hand drawn parchment by candlelight in a musty cloister or the soiled brown paper bag the MD 20/20 came in scrawled by the shaky claw of a junkie by barrel firelight in an alley or the canvas of a saintly artist deliriously daubing every photon of light striking his dilated pupils from that starry night sky. Hell, I’ve been inspired by things I misread – and was no less inspired for finding my mistake. That’s what this post is about. The authority required to be genuinely inspired!

We seem to be so conditioned by our education to respect authority that we are paralyzed without its approval of our behavior and beliefs, religious or not. The internet is instant access to virtually anything anyone has ever wanted the world to see, and much of what they didn’t, for an entire spectrum of reasons. It is possible with very little effort to assemble every word, song or videotape relative to any subject, except those redacted by the government’s black ops authority over anything too amazing for the common man they swore to serve.

With such a plethora of information one may surmise the popularity and profundity of any subject by the quantity and range of the variety of views from every reality tunnel and camera ever applied, with scattered attempts to establish “facts” about the subject denoted by the particular acronymic symbol following the names of that particular specialty of authorityhood who’s word dare not be questioned. A comparison of the great, unwashed, unlettered, anonymous’ synthesis against the officially accepted facts always yields interesting, often intriguing insight into the agenda of such official versions; especially when the difference is great.

The idea of authority in both audacity of assumption and specter of surveillance makes of any system based on it fraught with little Caesars polishing their act, to expand their sphere of influence among the lowly gullible, and their apples for those whose rules school those fools who would achieve their stool with lickspittle obedience. Some shit.

It seems to me that western civilization is brewing a situation where the authority resides in a collective tower of mental masturbation at some floor or other. Authority requires levels; what else is left to achieve when you know it all? Outside that tower is the chaos of independent reality tunnels based on the individual life experiences of people who don’t assume they know anything about how or why civilization exists, much less perpetuates the establishment of edifices and new rules. Nor do they care except when intruded upon in their daily, relatively symbiotic lives in local nature, so far as authority permits.

It appears axiomatic that the strength of influence one assumes for one’s authority will proportionally disable the possibility of experiencing life as it actually is. Authority distorts perception whether the observed even knows authority is there or not. When authority asserts itself, the subject must as well, whether it wants to or not.

Authority is officially recognized and rewarded for accomplishments in furthering religious, political and scientific snow jobs that keep the people praying, obeying and paying. The most ubiquitous source of recognized authority is the initial “$”; able to buy the obedience of political whores betraying their constituents, the forked tongues of Madison Avenue snake oil salesmen on infotainment mainstream media and the guns of mercenary mobs to force fear on the unpersuadable priceless that remain. This collection of stereotypes I just used is marbleized throughout civilization; no one is absolutely evil or without a price.

Ah, well, they litter the internet, those authorities. I try to stay away from them, but I guess it doesn’t even pay to talk to it without “doing” something that qualifies, much less question it any more – to its face that is. I guess I’m as guilty of stereotyping as anyone; I question all authority but that which I perceive self-evidently shining through another’s unqualified behavior like truth on a page. Is it me, or does that sort of authority seem to be most likely found in people who prefer remaining anonymous?

DAY AT THE BEACH

They finally had a whole day together. She’d been planning it for what seemed like a month. Now it was happening. She’d emptied and defrosted the refrigerator last night so that it could air out all day today while they were gone. She’d made an entry on her iPhone list of “things to do on the way back” in the order each place would be passed driving home along the coast road tonight. The list was stored under “lists” for Saturday, August 9^th on her iCal. Life had never rewarded her for her ability to organize it so well as it had since she got her iPhone.

The loud rip of a zipper tore through his dreamless kitten fur slumber brought back the sound of her voice describing what today would be like as he drifted off into the soma afterglow of their love making last night. After slipping his legs into shorts, his feet into sandals and his torso into a tee and sipping some ganjava into himself on his way to the car he picked up his surfboard, sketch pad and easel. He was toking a pinner as she emerged from the house with enough travel gear and beach equipment for a week on the Cote D’Azure.

An hour later, after frustrating logistical debates with the logic of a hybrid car too small to carry anything more than two people no matter how small its carbon foot print may be, they were on the road headed south with the rising sun hitting him twice behind his shades as it separated from its mirror. His surfboard, rather than being the first item to be left behind, saved the day, so to speak. They’d strapped her several travel bags to it making containment splints of her beach umbrella and his easel, all of which they’d tied to the top via rope through the open windows. They’d have to climb through the window if they went so far they’d have to stop before they got to whatever place it was she’d promised would spontaneously catch her fancy on the way.

As wonderfully romantic as her plan to find the perfect, secluded beach from a car traveling on a heavily trafficked road seemed, they settled for the place she couldn’t hold it any longer. When she returned from the bushes all the gear was gone and a furrow led away from the car and over the dunes toward the beach. She grabbed her giant woven beach hat and matching bag from the car and topped the dune to see their stretcher still loaded with the body of baggage but Tim was nowhere in sight. Making her way to the gear in her matching beach shoes in sand that would be tough going even in bare feet, she heard his whoop from a hundred yards out to sea as he surfaced at the same time as a dolphin beside him.

She loved him so much more than she ever could have loved, wanted to love Job. As great as Job was at whatever he was doing or how much alike they were, both qualities made their relationship impossible. They never saw each other; being so dedicated to their careers that her birth control pills were almost superfluous. They both had offices at home, for pity’s sake. It seemed like Tim was always there for her when she needed him.

As he looked up from a gingerly examination of the carcass of a Portugueses Man of War he’d found washed up to the line of sea weed left by the last high tide on his stroll back to Priscilla and the bundle he spied her busy unwrapping and reconstructing into their awning, barbecue pit, entertainment center with boom box and TV.

It was so much easier to love her than it had been loving Ursula. They’d loved each other so completely they became one person, never apart. It was wonderful at first. They couldn’t believe how lucky they were among all the dysfunctional couples they knew. They knew each other so well one could remind the other of intentions postponed or call bullshit on a recollection of a shared experience. No matter how spontaneous they both were about their approach to life, they found their tendency to treat each other’s work on themselves as if it were their own psyche which aroused twinges of resentment that, over time, built a wall behind which they hid thoughts from each other. Although the thoughts were suppressed, they recognized the hiding. They lost their sense of humor and it devastated them both. It seemed like Priscilla was open and eager to share her enthusiasm about her multi varied life to his complete delight during their rare times open in her schedule.

While Tim made several gesture drawings of the beach scenes, Priscilla busied herself preparing tasty tid-bits, which she popped into his mouth upon their reaching perfection. When she got to tossing caviar to the sea gulls halfway though the second bottle of wine, he got out his pastels to catch the feel of the rare scene of her spontaneity in wasting a hundred dollars worth of sturgeon eggs just for fun and the frantic, raucous excitement of the screeching gulls. His gift of groking auras enabled him to lightly brush the heavy, rough paper with lavender chalk around her outstretched body conveying the inebriated elevation of her perceptions and green in the air around the gulls that spoke of the loud cacophony of their cries. It was alive and was to hang in their living room for many years.

In the shade of the awning they made love, the strength of his contentment was a steady stage upon which she danced to her heart’s content. After sharing a few puffs on his post coital doobie she twittered all her friends and he slept the sleep of the gods for an hour or so. He woke with sand stinging his skin and before averting his eyes to open them he knew they’d see surf.

As puny as the surf is on the eastern shore there are occasions of a sea breeze steady enough strong enough to stack up water high enough that he could climb on for a ride long enough to satisfy his longing for Hawaii. He was ecstatic to find that the southerly winds were running the waves about forty-five degrees to the shore line so if he kept sliding out to sea on one he could ride it almost a quarter of a mile while Priscilla ran through the glass thin edge of the same wave as it washed ashore video taping his delirious antics upon the rock steady board.

After three such magic carpet rides she begged him to stop because the light was getting too dim. Her list remained stored on her iPhone while Tim drove past all her scheduled stops on their way home to the tune of her exhausted snoring. He was used to it, she was always exhausted by the time she gave it up to Morpheus. He loved it. It reminded him of what a live wire he’d gotten hold of. She dreamt of an endless summer of him on the board and her running the whole way beside him. She really enjoyed her work, but she cherished these times with Tim in between yesterday and tomorrow. He was always there, seemingly waiting for her, though he’d never call her late.

MEAT SPACE

It’s my favorite new term. I found it in a chat between programmers speaking about the effects of virtual reality’s influence on “meat space”. I like it for a number of reasons, the primary of which is its delineation of the threshold between being absorbed in ideating the potential of infinite possibilities in the mental, meditative, cyber space of the mind, and the singular, final realization resulting from action taken in material, “real” reality, meat space. You need only type “threshold” or “golden rule” into the blog search text block at the top of the page to find my previous posts to see how many times the concept comes up for me and what I feel about the existence of such a separation between thought and action; the interim where golden rule contemplation of ethical intent is required for harmony among humans.

This new slant on the threshold also suggests another pair of halves in my oft returned to theme of a species split. This time it’s between the entertained and the entertainers. Our culture is becoming defined by the amount of energy exerted by a service industry to supplant the energy required for the direct experience of nature so shunned by the served. There was a level of cultural depth not delved by the sifi blockbuster, Matrix: all the humans being milked for their energy were supposedly entrapped into such an existence. The tangent it suggested to me was the quite possible result of humans existing within western culture readily volunteering for the milking in return for being permanently entertained by electronic feed from only the most adrenalin soaked experiences continually being culled from wired sensory systems of humans (entertainers) being rewarded most for experiencing the most sensually entertaining activities in meat space. What a deal all around; meat space life as manna of porn heating cyber space up to room temperature.

The humans not wired at either end in such a future will be those who aren’t now — the indigenous cultures, to which many may repair by merely getting real about life on earth.

Jose Phillip Farmer’s series, Dayworld, described a world whose artificially boosted rate of reproduction was solved just as artificially as western culture seems destined always to try, by keeping dormant 6/7ths of the population 6/7ths of the time so that 1/7th of the population enjoys the world and its facilities one day per week in rotating occupation of meat space with, one supposes, no consciousness of the other six except how the day before left your house, did your job, etc. I imagine such people living seven times longer in a cultural world changing seven times faster would eventually dissolve like anything held too close to the heat.

No matter how we stack ‘em, the planet cannot sustain the population resulting from our insisting on artificially increasing food production and refusing to artificially limit the birth rate with contraception and incentives for smaller families. These are those interesting times the ancients supposedly cursed us with by telling fairy tales we had to close our eyes to believe. Meat space has more going on than any tale can nail. Just trimming off the fat is a lifetime activity.

TECHNOLOGY ENTERTAINMENT DESIGN - TED

I have been constantly entertained by the designs technology promises as I browse the entertainment technology has already designed on my never-quite-state-of-the-art iMac. The two TED talks I have embedded here seem to combine ideas that will enable any and all to access the information offered by any and all, anywhere, any time.

First is Blaise Aguera-y-Arcas, demonstrating Photosynth, a photo collecting/montaging program that can form 3D images of anywhere in the world that has ever been photographed from enough angles to form the subject. It not only lets you look at often photographed locations but enables you to scan it through time using the chronology of the photos.



Next is Patti Maes demonstrating wearable computer technology that can both scan ones surroundings and project applications upon them.



The possibilities of either innovation are staggering and when combined put anyone availing themselves of them capable of getting to the essence of any subject by synthesizing the various information available. Nothing beats actual experience for growing wisdom but it can never lead to the expression of more than one person's version of that experience, their reality tunnel. Photosynth, when expanded to more than photographic information, will enable the user to take as many versions of any subject as are available and get a model of its reality less subject to the idiosyncratic warps of personal filters than actual experience.

Of course, nothing can nor should eliminate the individual's unique slant on any subject no matter how informed, but this technology is bound to make personal biases less influential and may actually help shed them.

NOTES IN A BOTTLE

A recent alteration of my perspective has led me to view my previous posts as the notes in a bottle written by a self-exiled, misanthropic hermit from his island of natural habitat written in hopes of influencing such finders as care to abandon their habitual nature-hating destruction of the body on whose health we are all dependent. It would seem my bottles got swept up in the mid-Pacific, Texas-sized island of non-biodegradable trash and the notes became diluted by the prolific propaganda politics pours into any issue of importance.

It struck me right between the eyes the other evening when I tuned in Rachel Maddow to find out the fate of the captain in the hands of the Somali pirates. In my concern about the Bush rape of the constitution I had slowly morphed from a rabid distruster of all things political to political observer to political critic all the way to VOTER!!! I’d become a fan of Keith Olbermann and her because they seemed to represent my feelings about the duplicity of the neocons and the solution of Obama. It was only when Rachel broke down the breaking news that sharpshooters had simultaneously killed three pirates into the two party’s opinions before even mentioning the ultimate fate of the captor that it occurred to me that I wasn’t getting the facts of the daily haps, but the massaged political ramifications of everything from genocidal wars to gay love. Just as every valid citizen concern about the government is emasculated by being taken under its wing as a new department, i.e. EPA, NRC, FDA etc., the media’s economic need for sensationalism has divided the national concerns into conservative and the liberal chefs to flavor the faux food with just right kind of hot sauce for their target demographic.

As often as I have sworn off of posting political out of the unremitting frustration of hoping the greed greased gears of western civilization would grind more slowly and reconsider its ravenous consumption, I feel safe in saying nevermore. Politics is the national procrastination practiced by individuals intending to avoid personal responsibility for their actions by hiding in crowds taking sides. While I’m at it, I hereby cease posting on religion as well, for precisely the same reason. I leave both artificial schisms to those who love to dice the golden rule up into infinite rules of law and plagiarize nature’s laws as intelligent design.

So saying, I am happy to report that the three original surviving chicks are one month old today and the epitome of ugly ducklings, with chick fuzz molting and real feathers protruding from weird places. Surely the art designer for Dark Crystal must have raised baby chicks. In respect of the demise of three of the original chicks I have foregone naming the three three-week-olds until they begin having more reliable characteristics than the momentary markings of babes. They have all learned to climb the ladder to the roost and retire themselves at dusk. I play with them and talk to them in hopes they will, as I have read, imprint on me and come when I call if I ever come to trust them to free range outside the chicken tractor with the dogs around.

I have decided to dedicate a couple of beds to permanent inhabitants,

Artichoke, should live at least five years and yield up to 20 blossoms each the second year

Asparagus, should last forever if I treat them properly for the first year before harvesting.

In six months, I may be eating artichoke omelet.

WHO, ME?

Pisces Iscariot has returned the recognition I showed him a couple of years ago when I tagged him with the Thinking Blogger award by presenting It Must Be The Vapors with the Noblesse Oblige award yesterday. The Noblesse Oblige award is intended to be presented to blogs that satisfy the following criteria:

1. The Blogger manifests exemplary attitude, respecting the nuances that pervades amongst different cultures and beliefs.
2. The Blog contents inspire; strives to encourage and offers solutions.
3. There is a clear purpose at the Blog; one that fosters a better understanding on Social, Political, Economic, the Arts, Culture and Sciences and Beliefs.
4. The Blog is refreshing and creative.
5. The Blogger promotes friendship and positive thinking.

Methinks he stretched the criteria quite a bit for me but, because I am grateful for his esteem considering his razor sharp intelligence and lethal wielding of words in poetry and prose that cut through the heart of the matter to the expose the spirit energizing that fleshy pump, I accept the the honor of this award.

It Must Be The Vapors began three years ago as a way to communicate with friends who moved to India and has developed into an alternative to the journal I have been keeping for the better part of forty years. The ostensible intent of the blog today is to record my progress in and thoughts about becoming self sustaining off the grid of modern civilization by learning to become more symbiotic with the nature of the planet our culture so abuses. I've often gotten sidetracked by my irritation with political malfeasance, religious zealots' condemnations and the general public blindness to ecological disaster, my tirades about which I suspect are the prime reason Pisces Iscariot tagged me because he loves it when I'm angry.

The following posts are representative of my more satisfying compositions:
The Dynamics of Quality, the evolution of Chance the Gardener
Schism, an exploration of Yin-Yang
Fools for Tools, the evolution of prosthetics brings the devolution of humans

I would like to present the Noblesse Oblige award to the following bloggers with even less adherence to the criteria than was followed in my receiving it:

Unremitting Failure, for gems such as "Life. People say enjoy it. What, are they crazy? Life is holding us hostage! It intends to kill us! Hence those people who say enjoy life have Stockholm Syndrome! They're out there right now, some of them, throwing the frisbee with their captor! Not us. We're keeping our wits about us. We're waiting for life to slip up, to get lazy, to let--even once--its guard down. When it does, we're out of here."

Driftglass, for the most searing indictment of our political system anywhere, Drifty skewers left and right alike when they're acting like shishkabob.

Thanks again, Pisces.

For those recipients who wish to pass this on, here are the rules:

1. Create a Post with a mention and link to the person who presented the Noblesse Oblige Award.
2. The Award Conditions must be displayed at the Post.
3. Write a short article about what the Blog has thus far achieved – preferably citing one or more older post to support.
4. The Blogger must present the Noblesse Oblige Award in concurrence with the Award conditions.
5. Blogger must display the Award at any location at the Blog.