Rain falling on metal rooftops

It was a damp and stormy night. Dank. Danke. Dansk.

A cold front met a warm front in the high and low pressure swirls spreading spindles of spinsters' bundles of spun steel wool.

A paralyzed cricket pulled itself across the Berber carpet in the barber shop quartet practice chamber.

Silver maple leaves left impressions on the cracked concrete floor.

Incantations illuminated LED wintry light sets strung highly.

Hot apple crumb pie, coconut cake and chocolate cherry dessert sugar-coated conversations set to PS3 and Longhorn/Aggie classics.

Ninth grade academy, Hilton Head escapes and John Battle primary school year set theory compete with claustrophobic six-inch cave height exploration for exciting achievements.

Chorus: Medical terminology is determined to slip in a dead language combination or two.

Limits limit only when limitations beat imitations for meditation and Haitian medical station sensations.

Backfeed Loops

The son of a Jewish farmer from Tazewell, TN, becomes an insurance agent in Kingsport and marries the daughter of an FBI agent. They settle down in Bellevue, WA, to raise their kids. He becomes a harbour pilot and she the owner/operator of a B&B.

An Alabama minister joins the military as a chaplain and 20-plus years later "retires" to Rogersville, TN, as a Presbyterian pastor, his wife playing the organ and leading the choir.

Wiccans sacrifice chickens in the woods.

Thousands of slaughtered turkeys marinate for an annual festival meal.

Sandy and John keep their neighbours safe from tornado threats.

Parents are addicted to parenting - are all dysfunctional addictions tied to displaced parenting skills?

Will governments require finger/eye/voice prints, blood/urine/skin samples, psychological profiles and brain scans of recipients of public assistance (public schooling, welfare/social security, pork barrel earmarks, military/civilian government subcontracting, drivers/passengers using public motorways, any government-subsidised service, anyone who uses government-issued money (physical and/or electronic)) as well as those paying into (through taxes, fees, etc.) and working directly or indirectly for providers of public assistance?

In other words, what if we turned every transaction into a Dept. of Homeland Security procedural process?

For instance, to use your mobile phone for a monetary/barter exchange, your phone would be required to make at least two or three biometric verifications of your identity.

Same for credit/debit card use and computer-based purchases.

What new private-exchange markets and other side effects would occur, given the above?

How many [more] of us would incorporate ourselves to hide our personal identities?

What are a corporation's unique "biometric" characterisations?

How would we ensure agents are registering the real biometric data of people they claim to represent?

While you follow the smoke trail of those thoughts, I'm pursuing the results of an experiment where a three-dimensional person like me has communicated with non-3D entities outside of the matter-based universe in which we think we live.

Squeezing my cameo through the eye of a needle, eh!

How do I know my cameo - my agent, my representative, my shadow - accurately presents myself to others and back to me?

I don't. I believe my mirrored reflection is me because of nearly instantaneous feedback but it isn't.

Until the majority can see what the few can see, it's an illusion that visionaries have to talk about in virtual terms.

If you met your antimatter self, would you know what you saw before you annihilated yourself?

Ready For The Satin Pillow

Death is personal, isn't it?

Whatever we've done - raising kids, living alone, collecting clay pots, raising cattle on the edge of a desert during a drought - is done after we're done.

Our loves and our losses go with us. The living go on with the loss of our love intact but losing intensity like a mountain disappearing in fog.

Old grievances may be reinterpreted by succeeding generations.

We get back to the pebble in the pond.

Statements made behind closed doors echo strangely amplified, the decay effect bouncing baby waves, too.

Best to air the grievances and begrudging statements as if all can hear, rather than install fear and confusion in descendants who have no idea why they repeat your inexplicable behaviour after you're dead.

I heard a father say, "Son, tell them what you want to be when you grow up," the father's face red with pride. The son replied, "I want to be a sniper and kill Muslims."

I asked them if they knew any Muslims. They did not. They only knew that Muslims hate America (their knowledge imparted to them by a select few media outlets/pundits, including the images shown on TV of cheering crowds in the Middle East after the attacks of 9/11/01).

I told them about American Muslim friends of mine willing to defend the same American dream as the patriotic father and son in front of me.

The conversation changed.

I'm not an evangelist - I don't preach or proselytise. I can only look to our future and project backward what this moment needs to be for us to succeed within the ecosystems available to us.

Resources.

Friends have told me my recent blog entries cast doubt like a dark, suspicious shadow on the moment and into the future.

The effect was intentional. I wanted to clear the air and to do so required stirring up dust, not sweeping it under the rug. I'll do it again, I'm sure.

I will repeat myself when our future requires such.

Happiness and humour are two squirrels chasing each other for fun, despite snakes and hawks lurking nearby.

Thanks to the Rogersville Produce Market, Jimmy and Whitney at McKinney's Restaurant in Hale Springs Inn and Sweet Creams making a delivery after a death in the family. Congrats to Williams, McBee, Hopson and Pearl in the win over VCU.

My friends in the cartel business are just as curious about the special request I'll call them for as the call the NCAA's going to make soon.

Have you ever been made or tagged because of your call sign?

Who's the Equaliser in your life? What's the last thing you want to be remembered for after you're gone?

Life goes on without us but our children's children's children['s children['s children...]...] depend on the actions we made right now while we're alive.

Let us find reason (rather than reasons) and logic in whatever triggers our emotional outbursts. We are not lemons or lemmings (or even lemurs, I don't think). We can choose the financial sources for our mortgages and information resources for family rearing without resorting to stereotypes.

Orange You Glad?

I'm thinking out loud here, letting thoughts flow through fingers on a non-designed course.

I woke up this morning with the word "stasis" and the word "status" competing to become "statice," "statics," or "state." Too bad I don't remember the dream associated with the words at play.

Duck hunting, blinds, and camo in Scottsboro, along with Ann at Walmart, Gail at UBC and Karli at Krystal.

By keying in all the groups in concert with and opposition to one another, we get to see why seven billion can resolve issues together, including peacelike negotiations and warlike fighting.

Humour does not mean peace or war. For many, the daily struggles omit all three.

I am a lazy guy, about as demotivated as a person can get who knows his lifelong dream will not be realised in his lifetime.

But I continue on. Hope is a stronger word than despair.

A messenger carrying a fraction of a message multiple generations in length knows that the game is neither won nor lost in a single generation.

I live as if my life never began and never ends, every action of mine making a significant difference, no matter how seemingly insignificant - an eternal symphony by a faceless/nameless composer, conducted by an invisible concertmaster.

My teachers guaranteed that the responsibility of freedom is not easy to handle. Every person adjusts according to individual capabilities.

I use humour, the sharpest, strongest, fiercest and gentlest talent I have.

I have no enemies but there are those I watch carefully, because I know many take advantage of the fact life as we know it is inherently not fair.

I live here and now, no when/where else.

Some would give corporations a corporeal reality but people run corporations. Corporations don't live and breathe except as memes in our shared social interactions. They are means for people to pay mortgages and raise children. Not an end in themselves.

As long as corporate officers and shareholders proport (and purport) job creation as the fuel for corporations, then I'll focus on the byproducts and waste that make corporations inefficient in the larger ecosocioeconomic picture.

We can talk all day about hierarchies, matrices and flat organisations laid bare by social media but at the end of every workday most people are heading back to their home lives dominated by a separate set of social media dominators.

Which one of the following would you call the most normal family situation?:

a. An Amazonian tribe isolated from modern society,
b. An Amish community living and working on farms insulated against the modern society around them,
c. An extended family living in a set of high-rise flats and working in the middle of a large metropolitan area fully participating in modern society.

What you say against a group or idea perpetuates that group or idea. The best way to oppose something is through silence.

Better yet, build a positive alternative that attracts people away from supporting the group or idea you oppose.

Negativity is a means to a dead end (and there will always be those who build a detour that avoids a dead end as long as possible, in order to extend their negative message pathway as long as they can before their untimely end is met).

Am I auditory or visual by default? I'm not sure. These words imply otherwise.

Thanks to Lamar and those who demo'd the color Nook at B&N in Choo-Choo city; Oh Henry's restaurant; the Times-News for local sports coverage.

Hot Air Cools Off And Falls Back Down

In the subcurrents, I catch films like The Shock Doctrine (based on Naomi Klein's book) and a refutation of the same at reason.com.

After all, I'm still looking at the whole species here, using local subcultures as examples of the bigger trend's effects.

I ask myself if an aggressive/nonviolent member of our species, who accumulates wealth through insight and hard work, is responsible to other members of the species.  You know, the "Atlas Shrugged" mentality.

I ask myself if our species is, in fact, a species at all.

All answers are valid until proven otherwise.

These thoughts and investigations, interesting though they may be, do not get me much closer to getting off this planet.

However, one must keep one's eyes open to untold futures, even if one must repeat oneself for clarity and boring accompaniment basslines.

Keep the opposition feeling important with their protests so they don't do any serious damage.

But you don't know what those with whom I liaise call the opposition, do you?

You just think you do.

It's more simple and more complicated than you think.

If you think.

I like my emotional states but cooler heads prevail, as if logic, a tiny part of our species, is the only part of thinking that matters.  They're wrong.  They don't think enough.

Humour is part logical and part emotional.

China has one more opportunity to get this right.  If it doesn't, then some want to take 'em out the old-fashioned way, dragging India, Pakistan and southern Asia down with 'em.  I'm computing the odds to see if I should increase my military-industrial complex investments or buy some quiet countryside far away from the action and let the situation play out the way the Committee of 7.5 prefers, no matter what that is.

Either way, I and my family will profit.

Like I say, my family is you - seven-billion strong - some will profit and some will lose.  That's just the way it is.

Even backyard streetball has winners and losers.  Choose your teams carefully - a true leader finds strength in every team member.  Can you?

Another Battlefront

In the battle for supremacy of "what if" scenarios, Lockheed Martin (nee Martin Marietta, GE Aerospace, ...) proposes its proposals for posing over the Moon.  What's in store at the other big guns' houses - Northrop-Grumman, etc.?

Journalists Interviewing Journalists

In non-news, here's a blogger, me, blogging about a blogger's nonnews blog entries.