[Personal notes – feel free to skip or ignore this blog entry]
TLA – three letter acronyms.
The redbud tree is nearly denuded of seed pods, thanks to weather, birds and squirrels.
Two women jog down the road, one pushing a baby stroller.
An automobile speeds past, the driver disobeying speed limit signs posted in the neighbourhood.
The aquarium water filter/circulator gurgles, a gear out of gear, gushing few bubbles into the flow.
Some data points stare at me from the Internet browser software tabs:
- The beginning of wisdom
- To conquer or not to conquer – that is the question
- The law of unintended consequences – corollary no. 14f7
We live in the “I cannot” mode or the “I can” mode at any time.
We think simultaneously in both.
Raccoons chase one another in the attic space above our living room and bedroom, attracting the cats’ attention.
As my brother in-law noted, there is a certain thrill in the hunt, lying low, waiting for the prey to wander by, adrenaline pumping through your body.
But there is no thrill in killing raccoons that’ve chewed holes in the house eaves. They are not worthy prey when they are frolicking on top of fiberglass insulation or wandering outside to eat.
I share this house with my wife, two cats, spiders, crickets, lizards, bees, wasps, birds, raccoons, chipmunks, snakes, mice and other living things (dust mites, bacteria, algae, fungi, lichen, tropical plants).
Most of us, in pure classification terms only, are eukaryotes (a word I did not learn in childhood science classes). In pure numbers, most of us are invisible eukaryotes, with some prokaryotes around, to keep us on our toes, so to speak (for a description of alternate lifeform classifications, see Domain, once again).
But I digress.
A bicyclist passes by, followed by two trucks, one labeled “XFinity” and the other “Comcast.”
A few birds flit past, presumably to check if birdfeeders in the backyard were filled in the last few days (answer: no).
I, this set of states of energy, float within the comfortable confines of my ecosystem, a subculture, rarely threatened with external, immediate forms of death.
Sure, a plane could crash into the house, or a tornado whip through the yard during the next major weather disturbance, but the chances of either one happening are close enough to zero to allow me to ignore them. There is absolutely no chance of a driveby shooting or being kidnapped by spies in my life, meaning I need not be paranoid or feed the paranoid needs of others to be wanted/desired/meaningful, no matter now negative their paranoid needs may be.
Thus, I conclude, I exist within the “I can” mode most of the time.
What can I do?
I can build verbal trails, evidenced here, that are structured within a framework of satire and sarcasm, layering a thick molasses-like glue through and through, slowing down the progress from understood word meaning to misconstrued phrase, in order to deflect incoming signals, stimuli, like the funhouse mirror I’ve always been.
There are, of course, the narrative constructs of the Committee and the Book of the Future to place within a time-based structure.
What is real or not real is unimportant to me.
Reality is no better a term to use than to say (to an imaginary extraterrestrial alien), all lifeforms on Earth are exactly like the first one you found, Methanocaldococcus jannaschii.
Perception is reality, just as religion is reality to many and atheism is reality to some.
Was the EU your idea or the invention of a person with a bureaucratically political mindset (can there be politics without bureaucracy (or bourgeoisie, for that matter))?
Can a superculture, much like the UN, but much, much more than that (yes, Star Trek fans, you may think of the Federation of Planets; no, Star Wars fans, there will be no Galactic Empire), arise and absorb the political entities we now call countries while still holding allegiance to the power/voice of the people?
In other words, when do we directly vote for representatives of the supercultural administrative bureaucracy?
When do we say Earth is the first member of the Solar System network of colonies?
Should the EU members lead the way and declare themselves members of the UE (United Earth), rearranging financial categorisation of political entities accordingly, eliminating the [old] geographical boundary method of identification?
You can guess what the combined future prediction algorithms of all subcultures processed through the network of supercomputers have said in the Book of the Future, can’t you?
Time is irrelevant. Power shifts are inevitable. The truth is what you make it out to be.
The clock, not my stomach, tells me to eat food for lunch – that says a lot right there, doesn’t it?
treetrunkdings 