TIME MASTER

His people called him Cronot, the time master. Little did they know he had nothing to do with time — absolutely nothing. His vocabulary contained no temporal terms of either the chronological or spiritual variety, which he considered the same thing. Nor did he refer to the material world in terms less lively than event or being; there existed no mere things.

Off the track of time, that clothesline from which the spectacle airs its latest developed film, he became like the camera left in a field throughout spring whose film when played back at an accelerated rate reveals the interrelated lives of its plant and animal denizens. Knowing he was the accumulation of all the events of his life experience he could observe the any period in the same way by enveloping the succession of events in the event of recollection at any time he chose.

So too could he serve as a fair witness to the minutest changes in what those distracted by time’s impatience would consider a rigid thing. Knowing that the eternal present is the only instant of existence he maintains stability unachievable within the spectacle.

While all around him his people pursued promises of a carrot just like they eat in the penthouse in the tallest building in the world through a maze of multiple multiple choices and tricks to be performed, he reached down and pulled a fresh one from the fertile loam in his garden.

As his people schemed on capturing the golden goose for the perpetual something-for-nothing golden eggs promised to be out there somewhere he collected his breakfast daily from his hens.

Knowing all too well the race as intimately as any of his people still nipping at each other’s heels on the stairway to the penthouse, he laughed heartily at his dogs frolicking in the open field while he massaged his healing heels.

Having worked from dark to dark to earn a brighter future that never came, as most of his people yet feel compelled to do, he took profound delight in watching the Earth expose and hide the sun any now it was a good idea.

Once the willing maker of better traps for gawking mice along the spectacle midway, he sympathizes from the distance afforded by the internet and the wisdom to realize it is still the midway, gaining more variations and seeming more real every day.

To his people it seemed like he could disappear — at times.

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.

IMAGING

Ally

Arouse

Arena

Adventure

Absolution

Ablution

Being

Burgeon

Beat

Belly

Borne

Born

Curl

Comatose

Comfy

Cramp

Conscious

Curious

Density

Different

Dabble

Defend

Depend

Delicious

Easy

Edgy

Eager

Earthling

Evolving

Eternal

Essence

Forms

Frames

Future

Flames

Find

Favorite

Games

Goings

Gettings

It is not our task to have the right answer before we die,

It is our gratitude to find more profound questions

throughout our naturally curious lives

however long that gift

may survive our

impatience for

conclusions.

Grockings

Groupings

Graphings

Happy

Hum

Handle

Hit

Hurt

Hesitate

Ideas

Ideals

Imagination

Iconoclast

Isolation

Individual

Journey

Justice

Jury

Jail

Journal

Joy

Karma:

Knots

Keep

Keen

Knowledge

Kosher

Lecture

Learn

Love

Lure

Leap

Loose

Mother

Meaning

Micro

Macro

Memory

Momentum

Naïve

Note

New.

Nurse,

“Not

Now.”

Open

Opiate

Obviate

Oblivious

Organism

Operation

Poem

Ponder

Pleasure

Pressure

Palpate

Penetrate

Quaint

Qualms

Quantify

Quisling’s

Quality

Quest

Ribosomes

Remember,

Romantic

Roaming

Riddles

“Reality”

Scenario

Setting

Story

Saga

Spontaneity

Silenced

Civilization is a stragedy of erroneous eras

we’re all too willing to ignore

because it’s all we know

how to be

told to

do

.

Tradition

Test

Trait

Talley

Truth

Tell

Unique

Umbrage

Until

Understand

Universal

Unity

Variety

Verify

Very

Vaporous

Vortex

Veil

Wander

Wonder

Wisdom

Wax

Wizard

Wane

Xanthippe’s

Xeric

Xenobiotic

Xenia,

Xenopus

X'ed

Youth

Yawn

Yin

Yang

Yearn

Yoga

Zazen

Zero

Zocalo

Zeal

Zoetrope

Zoo

MEMAGRAM FOR CINNAMON

So, here comes Cinnamon with an old meme for old me, so I'll reply with answers that haven't changed in the two years since I last got tagged with it.

1) I have not seen a doctor, nor needed to, since my hypochondriac, registered nurse wife went home to her mother thirty-seven years ago. Proper diet and homeopathy have succeeded where junk food and the AMA failed with regularity.

2) I have not owned or driven a car for thirty-three years, with two exceptions in emergency situations.

3) I have been celibate for the past twenty-two years in an ongoing experiment to learn if sex would arise without my initiation of the act, leaving me with the unavoidable impression that I am not sexually attractive or that I am attracted to women dedicated to the same experiment. Playing hard to get and succeeding too well.

4) I have lived nineteen months naked in a tipi in the wild, albeit owned lands.

5) I witnessed the night long labor of a friend’s natural childbirth resulting in a new life opening its eyes for the first time to see sun peek simultaneously over the horizon, followed momentarily by the shadow of a curious cow come to look in the window.

6) I have seen two different UFOs close enough to see silhouettes of beings inside moving across lighted panels and fell asleep watching a third dashing to and fro across distant mountains.

7) I survived being caught sailing from Pascagoula across the gulf to Tampa by a minor hurricane which, in the middle of pitch black chaos, caused me to leap to the conclusion that there might possibly be a god. When the thirty foot seas remained after the winds died to batter my boat like a pebble in a maraca, I let their namesake, Aeolus, have all the screaming insanity that emergency prolonged over two days can build with both blaspheming barrels.

There is an amazing corollary to the first three in the list above: with out a car, doctor or persuasive pursuit of wimmin I have lived quite luxuriously below the United States’ poverty level for twenty of the last thirty years. I have satisfied myself with the truth in the phrase, “The measure of a man’s true wealth is the things he can live without.” and the reality in the quote, “I can cover the earth in leather or wear my own shoes.”

I feel no obligation to pass this tag on, its having arrived here by accidental shenanigans and playful intrigue by an idle English idyller.

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.

PLAYING THE GAME

Sitting here turning tiles and cards in games on the computer as my mind wanders where it will. It seems to be the place I sit to meditate on the effect of laws in the micro of the game and the macro of civilization. The garden is for meditating on nature.

I have become familiar with the results of enough various choices in both Mah Jong and 3-up Solitaire to enjoy the facility with which I navigate to the conclusion, avoiding traps and noticing every quirky option. I am not even sure I am playing the games as they were designed to be. I just know that I am doing everything the computer lets me do to get as far as I can go. What’s so great, what’s so worth posting about, is it no longer matters whether the conclusion is a cleared board or being stopped by an unbreakable lock.

This may not seem like a big deal unless you can relate this to the macro part of this metaphor and my inability to cool out and do less than rant against the monumental debilitation of individual human thought wreaked by following the edicts of external authority by abdication of personal accountability to oneself and the security of anonymity amongst the mainliners. Yeah, unless you can relate to that …

The way my mind works, or malfunctions for those of you who indisputably know how it’s supposed to work and/or think, I am able to transfer through apt metaphors lessons learned in one variation of the Tao into another manifested variation, in much the same way that the functions of friction and resistance in mechanics and electronics share the same effect with a myriad other fields across the universe both manifested and energetic.

So now I’m cool with the brainwashed portion that remains of everyone who has ever sold themselves out for shiny beads and fifteen minutes of fame. Until I was thirty-three my fence was damned near as brainwashed as Tom Sawyer’s was white. Then the cook took the children back home to the Chef for her old fashioned recipe and I had to learn how to feed myself for the first time. It’s been a long, strange weaning and there are still some insidious apron strings yet to be discovered, but I’m losing karmic weight. Going organic in every phase of my life, or learning to, has shed a lot of pounding headaches.

With this new attitude about the sheeple, I can grant that, except for the republicans and fundamentalists, no one is 100% offering themselves up willingly to the Matrix and most only serve it in plausibly deniable positions like the clerk typing requisitions for depleted uranium ammunition with no inkling of or responsibility for its eventual use.

About a year ago my angst about the ills of civilization began to take over my most lyrical moods of praising the benefits of natural symbiosis and universal connection so I began a separate blog, Canary in a Cage, to handle the venomous vitriol that the political, environmental and energy crises brought to a head. It didn’t help keep the gut wrenching concern from poisoning my best moods.

So now, when I get those OMG and WTF moments about events within the zoo of civilization I’m gonna treat ‘em that way; as if they were entertainment by another species living in a world they created through the proxy of an imaginary god and are fair game for satire, snark and scripts for the Daily Show. I won’t separate the civil from the natural subjects this time, I will just take on an extremity of this new way of looking at playing the game with the aliens in the zoo and having fun stretching the possibilities within the cages in my new persona. Like an aboriginal Australian who announces to the tribe he has reached a new outlook, I am taking on a new name; gregraetgar shall henceforth be known as Yodood.

For folks who think they cannot exist without a belief system, Yodood’s philosophy is very simple really; life is an ever changing, growing story about existence in a universe whose nature permits everything. Yodood, that’s me, believes that if the story is of a universe as malicious as the atrocities committed within the mythical world of civilization, I wouldn’t want to exist in it. A couple of posts back I discussed having or getting to live one’s life. Knowing that being glad to be alive is the only state of mind from which ones actions can be of benefit makes it a piece of cake to edit the story by keeping the “have to” parts in the western civilization pigeon hole along with any good it may have manifested. In this way the natural world remains a place I get to live because civilization, while permitted by nature, is a perpetuated mistake I don't have to live in.


So now I can play the game of “civilization” with a detached facility I had ‘til now not developed and shall relish all the days of my life. Yet another graduation in a career whose only evidence is my wake. Prosit!

My Flickr Mosaic

She didn't have to tag me with this one, Leslie inspired me when she posted her Flickr Mosaic composed of photographic samples in answer to the following 12 questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

1. Todd, my other choices were Sweeny Todd, no thanks! 2. Shrimp, 3. Pascagoula, MS, 4. PURPLE, 5. Uma Thurman, 6. Strawberry, Kiwi & Banana Smoothie, 7. Bali, 8. cheese cake, 9. Naturalist, 10. Friends, 11. love, 12. vapour

Here is what to do if you would like to create your own mosaic:

• Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
• Using only the first page, pick an image.
• Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

BLOGS THAT EXCELL

I have observed a range of responses to memes and awards go from giddy outbursts of the closet exhibitionist in every blogger through total indifference to ivory tower animosity towards cretins daring to touch the hem of genius.

Awards seem to generate from the feeling anyone gets upon observing something extraordinary making one turn to see if anyone shared it or might. In my relatively small blogroll, I have such wishes to share tid bytes and whole stories with which my reading is littered and am often tempted to start one of those many blogs that are a sort of ongoing award show with a daily collection of links to such awardable posts. About one out of ten of my posts give shout outs to individuals or posts whose thinking or action inspires my own. The family of folks I tune into daily have extensive enough blogrolls that I need not have one of my own except as my own speed dial but I continue to add them to aid their exposure if not my daily visits.

Two of this daily family have hit me with the Excellent Blog Award which, while being the kind of flattery that will get them anywhere, seems to dilute itself by coming with the stipulation that each awardee then award ten more. Burbanmom listed her 18link speed dial, “All of the blogs I have listed under 'Family, Friends and Blogs I Like'”. Minx included me in her decade as, “so here are my list of 10 victims who are less lazy than me -,” and went on to list nine other boggers far beyond my skills or talent. As blogosphere inbreeding would have it, both Minx and Burbanmom got awarded by another on my blogroll, Leslie. And so it goes.

And me, what about my ten? I am still holding off on awarding the the last of five Thinking Blogger Awards which befell my duty way back in ‘06 sometime. With one tenth of the concentration the word excellent requires to be used for any one of these folks I give you my list of excellent blogs not already awarded such as far as I know.

The Far Queue — Pisces Iscatiot’s words have no meaning until he puts them together. Consistently, though too rarely of late, the most thought provoking writer in my sphere of discovery.

The Time Being — Steve Kilby’s daily stream of creative thinking is the kind of honest self examination and meditation on love and life that allows his originality to shine through all the derivative artifacts with which we all must express our thoughts.

Karoline in the Morning — Read her gentle words, feel her sense of life invade your defenseless places and soon there is nowhere to defend, and you are filled with Karoline.

Unremitting Failure — Mike’s drollery is the most constant joy in my blogging experience. He’s got some poignant zingers in amongst his dry humor, so wait ‘til it’s over before you guffaw too loudly, it may be about you.

Empress of Dirt — Melissa has a garden blog like I will have if I ever learn to grow enough food to sustain myself year round. Her love of growing things and creating garden art and showing photos of what she loves to see in Ontario is inspiring to say the least.

Driftglass — The only one writer blog amongst my political animals category, Driftglass seems to find the same horrors being perpetrated by our government that I do and expresses them with far more vitriolic insight born of closer experience in the arena I only catch putrid whiffs of.

Well that’s six out of ten, as far as I got with my first attempt with the thinking blogger award.

°•°
˜

Memes, a tag game within the blindman’s bluff of the internet, seem to be generated by a genuine wish to know more about perceived secrets held by intriguing bloggers. It’s a whole new world, this making fast friends based on no more than our perception of the mind and intent authoring pixelated words expressing observations, interests, ideas and preferences without a voice to measure passion or a face to pigeonhole with physical prejudices. One would think it would be a purely mental activity. Without natural direct experience of one another we are only information along with the lying agendas and the possibly photoshopped pictures that create our world view on the news. We have, in this modern age of instant worldwide communication brought mankind full circle to where the level of individual success within society no longer depends on the believability of authority or reported facts at hand but the on the ability of the perceiver of the chaos of information to find the theme relevant to specific concerns. No more laws, walls or weapons for an established truth to work from — we are face to face with creations too vast to be believed, much less understood, in which only our grounding in the natural curve can find meaning. The government is no longer a guarantee of nourishment in the shopping aisle, we must revert to hunting and gathering the berries of truth growing in the jungle of information. Memes serve as taste samples of particularly interesting berries.

Whoa, sorry about that little side track into the liberating effect of the internet. Burbanmom also tagged me with the six unimportant things meme??? which comes with the following rules:

(1) Link to the person that tagged you.
(2) Post the rules on your blog.
(3) Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
(4) Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
(5) Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

Here goes a delve into the unimportant habits and quarks here in the vapors —

1) I cannot put my palms down flat due to a symmetrical gradual shriveling of my pinkies over the past twenty years.

2) Because of one, above, I am often mistaken for a mason when shaking hands.

3) Because of one, above, I have a callous on my right pinky from pressure on the mouse that is as large as the callous I developed on my bird finger from using pencils, pens and paint brushes all my life.

4) Before either pinkie began to draw up like a chicken foot there appeared an minute indentation in each palm as if a stitch had been taken from within my hand.

5) The indentations in my palms are the anchor points for the rigid, shrinking tendon that is pulling my pinkies into fists of their own.

6) I am very careful about not falling on my face or slapping anyone or thing because it really hurts to try and straighten out my pinkies even slowly.

C’mon, you guys. The meme called for unimportant. There exists no limit to the unimportance of the infinitude of my quirks, I feel like the savant that can reel off the first few thousand decimal places of pi.

Realizing that everyone is not so gifted, I will embarrass no one by passing this meme on. Because the six are to be chosen at random, choose yourself if you so choose. Happy meming.

INSIDE THE ACTORS' STUDIO MEME

Perhaps the first time I heard the term, meme, was on the old TV show. Inside the Actor's Studio, when during his interview of actors, James Lipton would work in the following questions, the answers to which always seemed to exaggerate the spread between genuine candor and maintaining the hyped image. I like meme's despite their me-me-me aspect, or, if you're like me in valuing the uniqueness of the individual over willingness to conform to external authority, because of the work meme's do to help one find ones forsaken self under the mindless conformity demanded by western culture taken on faith and fear of punishment.

1. What is your favorite word?

Threshold

2. What is your least favorite word?

Can’t

3. What turns you on?

uniqueness

4. What turns you off?

conformity

5. What sound or noise do you love?

wind in the trees

6. What sound or noise do you hate?

the whine in my brain around circuitry

7. What is your favorite curse word?

motherfucker

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

anthropology

9. What profession would you not like to do?

run the lives of others (would like not to be done by anyone!)

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

If you must bring up this mythical terminology: this IS Heaven being made to seem to be Hell by people running around worrying about just such mythical improbabilities as their main concern as if life were one big report card from the big Santa in the sky that pre-adolescent mankind still believes in.



I realized that although it was at least twenty years ago that I used to watch this TV show, or any other for that matter, Google's spell check still doesn't recognize the word, meme.

THE 8 MEME

Souls in Limbo —— Iturraldi

I found this meme at Deep Thinker and thought it would be enlightening to do:
Name 8 things that…

…I am passionate about:
•Finding themes to variations in nature
•Playing variations to songs on my flute
•Creating lyric metaphors about man in nature
•Becoming conscious of the symbiosis with nature that sustains me
•Reducing my footprint on the earth by getting off the grid
•Raising my own food
•Watching animals play
•Being a loving friend to all who care

…I often say
when alone (95% of the time)…
•c'mere kitty
•chuckle, chuckle
•wow
when with people…
•I don't know
•I love you
•says who?
•no thanks
•wanna hit?

…that changed my life forever
•Moving from Tampa, Florida to Pascagoula, Mississppi at 13
•Joining the marines to get out of Mississippi
•Reading Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
•Outgrowing a 9 year IBM corporate mentality
•Living in a tipi
•Knowing Raja Rao
•Loving Mary Gardner
•Reading Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

…to do before I die
•Fly, like in my dreams
•Understand that western civilization is not devolution
•Feel love for everything
•Live a thousand years or say goodbye now
•Witness the soul plane become manifest in daily life
•Leave no footprint
•Exemplify my evolving wisdom
•Talk to a dolphin

…musical that I can listen to over and over
from my iTunes playcount for recent music—
• David Gilmore's On an Island
• Easy Star All-Stars' Dub Side of the Moon
• Deep Forest's Boheme
• Mickey Hart's At the Edge
• Baca Beyond's The Meeting Pool
• Pink Floyd's The Wall
• Barbara K's Ready
• Leonard Cohen's anything at all

…that attract me to other people
• Egoless candor
• Original thinking
• Adventurous eyes
• Genuine listening
• Deft demeanor
• Wise behavior
• Radiant wellbeing
• Heretical humor

…I learned in the last year
• A summer garden can get too much rain, even in Texas
• To raise chickens for eggs
• To use arugula in killer guacamole
• To make hummus and tabouli from scratch.
• Many genuine friends through blogging
• Too much about politics for comfort
• The actual divide between politics and people's best interests as demonstrated by the Political Compass
• To love my neighbor despite rancor in the past

There are quite a few among my links whose answers I would be interested in seeing, but don't care for assigning chores to unwilling friends so I shant tag anyone, in hopes it will be picked up voluntarily.

WHAT LOVE HATH WROUGHT

Photo nicked from Melissa at Empress of Dirt

Memes. Tags. The games bloggers play to exercise their writing skills and frankly display their lifetime accumulation of intimate oddities has been around since the interweb got bulkier than gossamer.

This particular tag came to me from Red Dirt Girl in a convoluted game of using my name nicked from Minx to admonish her for failing her duty to pass on her Amazing Blogger Award to seven others as part of earning it. So she promptly hit my pseudonym with the tag with no idea of who I was or how amazing the blog of Ike Onoclast might be. I complied with her demands in the comment section of her post about the award just for the fun of it which only piqued her penchant for intrigue. She showed up in the comments on the Why post below sussing me out and demanding seven real amazing facts about myself. I actually had typed out the list below before realizing that she had given me no award and that to do so after the fact wouldn’t be the same, which is fine with me. I’m just having fun and I get the sneaking suspicion she is too. With no further ado

1) I have not seen a doctor, nor needed to, since my hypochondriac, registered nurse wife went home to her mother thirty-five years ago. Proper diet and homeopathy have succeeded where junk food and the AMA failed with regularity.

2) I have not owned or driven a car for thirty-one years, with two exceptions in emergency situations.

3) I have been celibate for the past twenty years in an ongoing experiment to learn if sex would arise without my initiation of the act, leaving me with the unavoidable impression that I am not sexually attractive or that I am attracted to women dedicated to the same experiment. Playing hard to get and succeeding too well.

4) I have lived nineteen months naked in a tipi in the wild, albeit owned lands.

5) I witnessed the night long labor of a friend’s natural childbirth resulting in a new life opening its eyes for the first time to see sun peek simultaneously over the horizon, followed momentarily by the shadow of a curious cow come to look in the window.

6) I have seen two different UFOs close enough to see silhouettes of beings inside moving across lighted panels and fell asleep watching a third dashing to and fro across distant mountains.

7) I survived being caught sailing from Pascagoula across the gulf to Tampa by a minor hurricane which, in the middle of pitch black chaos, caused me to leap to the conclusion that there might possibly be a god. When the thirty foot seas remained after the winds died to batter my boat like a pebble in a maraca I let its namesake, Aeolus, have all the screaming insanity that emergency prolonged over two days can build with both blaspheming barrels.

There is an amazing corollary to the first three in the list above: with out a car, doctor or persuasive pursuit of wimmin I have lived quite luxuriously below the United States’ poverty level for twenty of the last thirty years. I have satisfied myself with the truth in the phrase, “The measure of a man’s true wealth is the things he can live without.” and the reality in the quote, “I can cover the earth in leather or wear my own shoes.”

I feel no obligation to pass this tag on, its having arrived here by accidental shenanigans and playful intrigue with a long stemmed sweetheart.

THE GAME WE FORGET WE'RE PLAYING

Having followed a link to the Wikipedia page on simulation I tangented off on a metaphor for how we can slip into our avatar in the civilization game so readily, being plugged in since birth. In a way a new born is like a circuit board full of the standard set of transistors soft wired according to their genomic memory prepared to deal with experience in nature by tweaking the analogue knobs for a clearer picture, only to be hardwired by civilization’s digital demands for certainty to gain security from the threats it alone poses — if not certainty, at least a bribe, a tithe, a tax just to keep ‘em out of your kitchen or insure they won’t be throwing a garbage can through your store front window.

So we wake up every morning with fresh possibilities of learning more about our relationship to the natural world our ignorance of which is leading to an imbalance that could end life as we know it. Before our eyes open the game powers up and our avatar’s agenda, financial and social maintenance, baby’s diaper, shaving, lipstick, hangnails all become much more immediately demanding of ones time as we once again slip into the game and fail to question our playing at all.

Matrix was a pretty cool, stylized scenario on the idea. If the story had come to reveal that each of the cable drained entities had actually volunteered the use of their energy to a hypnotic propaganda system as the patriotic, good for the country thing to do, it would have hit the nail quite a bit more on the head.




The Thirteenth Floor takes the man as simulation theory into the game aspect further by posing that game playing tekkies get so deep into their science they discover that they themselves are avatars for individuals in the “realer” world. This comes much closer to the idea of the avatar we begin manipulating within this poor, crudely digital, law and order simulation of nature we call civilized behavior replete with its sophisticated knowings blinding it to natural happenings.

The Truman Show gave me goose bumps by reminding me of my early sensitivity to changed behavior in adults whenever I entered a room. I often spun around unexpectedly, hoping to catch them resorting to who they were before I showed up, the false back of a set piece, a changing back drop, something to confirm a suspicion I have never quite lost. As I got older I realized that my suspicions were true; adults do hypocritically alter their behavior for children to the point that most parents become even more dedicated avatars to protect their children from the game they play and cannot imagine an alternative to. The only thing new was that I no longer saw the adults as aware parts of a conspiracy from which they too suffer. What appears to be a conspiracy is an unwitting complicity in support of a belief system whose whole premise of man’s exceptionality in the scheme of things, his grant from above of anything he can grub for himself below as upheld by the western version of civilization is poisonous bullshit held together with extremely frightened blind faith and unctuous prayer, the most fragile of last resorts, the most deadly of explosive treacheries an avatar can inflict upon its player for volunteering to play the game.

Then there are the exposés of the wizards behind the simulation ala Oz in the movies Network, Wag the Dog, and Broadcast News showing the gears under the hood of the roadster to hell.

Of course there are the attempts to accurately reproduce reality to be found in actual computer game simulations of hockey, golf, car racing, family life, war against whomever, history and empire building.

In the field of alternate realities Second Life is like the second derivative of civilization, still locked into the original parameters while Uru is more like a differential of nature requiring the avatar to figure out alien nature and probable clues to vague puzzles of an alien culture.


Cruder, though no less effective in conditioning the reactions of the avatars are the mathematical simulations in the form of pie charts, bar graphs and asymptotic plots of chaos should alternatives be considered. With the two year billion dollar campaign season being waged among a baker’s dozen of professional scammers for the right of one of them to be of “service to the people” for four years in the White House I cannot but wonder if there isn’t some other reason they want the job. Polls conducted with all manner of intended results are hawked as the wave of the future just to scare people the other way or play to the lowest common denominator of being on the winning side no matter what the principles involved.

Another sort of simulation has been suggested by having seen Steve Kilby’s proudly posting an award to his blog, the time being, the dubious honor of its requiring a genius to be understood. Seriously!! The subtitle to the site, The Blog Readability Test, is What level of education is required to understand your blog? and the award itself states “This Blog’s Reading Level: Elementary, Junior High, High School, College under grad, College post graduate or Genius. Considering that Einstein once said that if you can’t explain something to a child, you don’t know what you’re talking about, or something to that effect, it would seem that writing only geniuses can understand is ultimate sophistry. To check into their criteria a bit closer I entered the URLs of my blog buds and fellow canaries and was flabbergasted at the results. I won’t name any names to protect the reputations of my friends but: All the poetry/photography/art inclined blogs were restricted to high school or less education while the political ranters rated at least under grad reading required up to genius level for a USA hating group of armchair revolutionaries. WTF? Since when is being easily understood a minus and being relevant only to a rare few a virtue?

I am interested in one simulation I came across and posted on a couple of days ago, the Political Compass. I am hereby requesting anyone who cares about such things to take the test and copy/paste your resulting chart in an email to me so I can plot your position on the political map and perhaps against your reading requirements if their appears to be a trend. I love this kind of shit even though I know it amounts to less than a hill of beans, it must be a recessive gene.

CYBEREAL FUTURE

Erica’s, aka Babyldorkgalactinerd's, comment on my last post grew to be and deserves a whole post in reply.

Chuckle, I do at the resistance you show to my idea that the extrapolated future of society is to make online games the real world so that linking books and transporters really do replace fuel farts of dangerous vehicles, exploitation of exotic cultures and rape of natural resources. Wars can be fought by gamers in their world if that's what they want, leaving the rest of us free of collateral damage to develop coagulations of kindred minds with no will or way to harm others.

For one who rejects cybereality in such a future, it will be like visiting Grand Canyon before the tourist village was established, to be seen as the ruins of a no longer needed tourist industry, visited by occasional lovers of beauty, nature and history who still know the real world is nature, being much less violated now that the clever manipulations of society are restricted to their version of the real world with minimal affect on the natural world.

Back when Buckminster Fuller was fueling World Games I perceived the possibility of a species split for humanity which I labeled the Twidgets and the Naturals. His think tank, composed of the cream of the graduating classes in chemistry, physiology, earth sciences, was dedicated to the possibility of containing all the earth degrading effects of technology within giant city sized domes which recycled all its effects without affecting the environment outside. It was pretty far out, such a structure, but ran out of energy when his candle burned out.

But could not all the human addictions — family, fame, power, luxury — acquired within western civilization, beyond food and shelter, be satisfied by a cyberworld of ones own choice, if one must be had at all? Hell, if you don’t want to live in any of the worlds you find, take the good parts you do find and fashion your own. Expansion unlimited, no need to exploit indigenous people. My own daughter, once addicted to Everquest, confessed to a preference to relating to me in the game rather than visiting (now the game is heaven, but that's another story). The only transportation required would be of the half breeds who live on their natural farms and deliver their produce and food products to twidgets in the cybereal world, door to door, having become atrophically, apathetically effete in the natural world, more so than addiction to autos and air-conditioning has already accomplished. Of course there will be cross overs of all degree, whatever works.

The past is littered with simple myths taken as reality by people in their time, this one would be to save us from the inevitable future resulting from western culture’s myth of antagonism toward and destruction of nature and each other by which we live in its invisible prison without bars, by deactivating its effect on the planet as the population willingly adopts the more benign myth of a proxy life behind the cybereal separation and its limitless room for imperial expansion and clever innovation.

URU, ANYONE?

I just discovered that they finally released a Mac version of the online game, Uru. I was a Myst fan from day one and a devotee of firm resolve after Riven. Like many of the tangents I take to the merest of nuance, the beautiful first island in Riven where the trees were leveled for pages in the linking books outside the wooden fence and the biological bounty allowed to flourish within put me on the lookout for an ecological theme to the game. As wonderful as it was, Riven never made me forget the idea of having an adventurous saga of a game wherein success requires adaptation to the peculiar natures of various habitats visited, not learning cultural language and counting so much as the tao of the place. The lesson within the game was to be that life is smooth when going with the ways of nature and a struggle when attempting to bend nature to ones desires for convenience, expedience, status and conquest; those actions that have populated mankind into a corner here on dear old mother Earth. I had even framed letters to the Rand Brothers, the original Myst team and Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, proposing a collaboration on such a project just as the brothers went their separate ways. My resolve evaporated into pipe dreams before I mailed them.

One of the reasons I mention this is that not only will I be distracted from the decaying political scene which only churns my stomach, that I will probably be posting far less and then only in observations from the garden and the game. We’ll see how long it takes for either to have political nuances.

Although I am a rank novice so far and the Mac version is short some of the deluxe features available to pc peeps, I have learned that groups and individuals can develop their own worlds that may either remain private or go public. I see it as a way to meet fellow bloggers and have conversational exchange (I haven't learned how or earned enough merit to do that yet and must stand there like a deaf mute while a beautiful girl makes gestures and says things to me I cannot answer except by being obnoxious by jumping up and down or getting too close) and mutual activities. This may be the future of society, with only the true romantics even stepping outside their reality tunnel life inside to experience life first hand. The game can be quite absorbing.

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I’ve given up on all but one of the tomato plants and am planting squash and new arugula in their place since both succumbed to bugs. New tomato seeds where the squash were. This is only the second full summer I have had a garden and the extremes of three rainless months of June-Sept in the 100°s every day last year and heavy rains on all but twenty days through out this year yet to be warmer than 95° by the end of July this year so far has left me far more clueless than I would have ever expected. Both extremes ruined the tomatoes — drought toughened ‘em up so that when it finally rained the new growth/moisture exploded them, while constant rain kept them so juicy that part went to rot before the rest ripened unless I picked them before fully ripe. This all means that next summer will be as new an experience as the first two — and who knows what normal is?