PEER INTO THE FUTURE...
The year is 2004...and the Democrats win with an impressive and indisputable margin. The sun is shining, there are fresh flowers by the bed, and the smell of fresh coffee wafts into the room. Good portentions!
Among the Democratic proposals and visions are these:
Peace - 99% of the world cherishes Peace. Refocus on Peace instead of War. Bill and Jimmy Carter are brought on the re-establish old friendships around the globe, and get back to the thankless task of helping the world to become a peaceful garden of delight, tolerance and sustainability.
Prosperity - Create dynamic new forms of work, such as those described in "The Ecology of Commerce" and touched upon by Al Gore...which focus on activities, engineering and so on that is geared toward improving and cleaning up the environment. Not all work need be pollutive. That much has become abundantly clear. No. It has become abundantly smoggy.
Generosity - What with all the homeless and destitute people left in the wake of "the Bush in a China Store" phenomenon, there will be a huge need for magnanimous individuals, groups and organizations to come forward with ideas, help and relief.
Honesty - It will be the obvious and entirely discernable honesty that will help them to be elected, and it will be honesty that keeps them elected. A most refreshing change! The world throws a party! We have reached the other side of the real bridge to the 21st century. And to think! It WAS meant to be a peaceful century after all!
Forgiveness - All around the world, and even here in America, there is an overwhelming need for forgiveness. To facilitate this, Al and Hill will reach across the aisle and appoint Republicans to Cabinet positions and include them in more meetings. The point being that the problems are so large that neither side can manage it alone...especially when the other side is trying to destroy them.
Reconciliation - Past wounds must be healed. We can set a good example for other peoples, and feel better here at home.
Unity in Diversity - We need to celebrate both our unity and our diversity. There is, in fact, unity IN diversity. We need to remember and speak of this. Solicit the best everyone has to offer. Don't just pay back contributors and forget the rest. And NEVER sit back while a state gets into harms way...as Bush/Cheney did California. (If you don't think blackouts are a danger...read about New York's blackouts!)
Environment: Air, Water, Land - 99% of Americans and Earthlings are in favor of caring for and protecting our precious resources. Those whose activities are destructive must be helped in their attempt to find solutions to the problem. But they surely shouldn't be encouraged to pollute even more, which is essentially the case today.
Conservation - Conserving and gleaning our resources. Conservation will be taught in schools at a young age, and it will be non-controversial and incontrovertible. Oil Companies, for example, don't want people to use less oil. But if they were made responsible for the pollution emitted, they would realize there are more costs than they would have us accept. Air pollution is easier to hide than water and land pollution. We need to wake up to this fact. We will.
Education Reform - Standards are way too low. There is no reason why every child, and indeed adult, can't have as good an education as the few who are so often unappreciative of their now rare opportunity.
Just as Home Offices have flourished and will be encouraged -- as they, (among other things) reduce road traffic, energy use, air pollution and accidents -- so to will home schools and neighborhood schools be afforded the same comforts. I imagine there will be democratic opposition to this at first.
There is no reason that every child couldn't have access to all the available information, including telecourses from our best universities. It is by brains and heart that we will secure our welcome place in the world...and do the best work imaginable.
Preventive Health - As the Babyboom bubble approaches old age, and health care is taxed to the max...it will be necessary to have strong preventive health measures built into our educational opportunities.
The current regime, as manifested in Pharmaceutical Companies and the folks with whom they do business...are probably not all that keen on people being healthy. What if everyone were always healthy? It could happen! We do not really want them to stay in business if it means we must get sick for them. Why they even invent illnesses. Need to focus more on health and care. We'll have a lot more money to do good in the world.
Sustainability - We must realize that we cannot grow ad infinitum. There is great beauty and simplicity in sustainable economies and lifestyles. This will help stabilize and maintain the earth's remaining resources.
Alternative Energies - By now people are sick of propping up the Cheneys of the world. Alternative Energy will be given a priroity heretofore unimaginable. And it will be welcome, nay, applauded!
Advanced Transportation Systems - Europe and Asia are way ahead of us on this. We need, and will encourage and develop cleaner, faster, safer, even more beautiful and lasting forms of transportation.
Humanitarian Superpower - World Relief, Philanthropy... Our national stock will rise to the extent that we move from a mere financial and military superpower and become a humanitarian superpower. We can do it, and will...if we only have the will.
Transparency of Government & Business - Along with accountability, transparency wil become a lost best friend...who returns, much to the people's delight and applause. The current trend will continue, and eventually the untrustworthy will be weeded out, if not locked up.
Except for the most sensitive of matters, there will be clear accounting and accountability. One can see where their taxes are being spent or invested on the internet. The government will actively solicit ideas for better and better ways of doing things while reducing waste on an ongoing basis.
The Low Road - The Low Road is an ancient Chinese concept which means the road of helping others...as opposed to the road of self aggrandizement. Of course this can't be legislated, but it can be introduced into the national dialogue. With such great losses in wealth, people need to know that there are better things to life than great wealth. This will be a form of preventive health, and an enhancer to the quality of life of Americans.
Reciprocal Maintenence - It will be imperative to move from a model of reciprocal destruction to the more healthy and natural model of reciprocal maintenence.
Non-Profits - Non-profit organizations will become all the rage, as profit loses it carotene. Just thought I'd say that!
Smart Military - As the richer nations refocus their attention on giving a helping hand to the poor and needy, there will be less reason for people to want us dead. I'm too tired to develop this idea, but, although needed, it needn't be so wasteful and killerly.
Villages - Rather than having neighbors spying on neigbors, Hillary will present ideas and work toward creating and maintaining communities wherein neighbors once again know one another and help one another. "Trust the people" as Bush USED to say. When neighbors help neighbors, there is less likelihood for crime or terrorism. Again...preventive health...on a social scale.
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line. -Benoit Mandelbrot
Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines. -Buckminster Fuller
As above, so below
Thursday, August 15, 2002 -- Charlotte, NC
My life is fractal.
And, true to Mandelbrot's words, clouds are indeed not spheres, mountains are certainly not cones, coastlines are by no means circles, bark is nowhere near smooth, and lightning, well, lightning... Lightning, my friends, traveleth not in any straight line...unless, that is, it happens to be in searchez of moi, your author and companion on this fractal path which has been the cruel circumcisionstance of my risible existence -- plagued, as it has been, with lightning curses, dreams of flying, and the strange events surrounding my rendez-vous with 9/11, that horrific day in Manhattan all those many weeks ago...
You have got lots of good, clean yogurt. Just thought I'd say that. What I really wanted to say was that I think I may have figured out where I want to go with this writing thing, this albatross, this, this self-indictment. And it may or may not have anything to do with yogurt. Some things, you see, are beyond my control.
You see, my dear readers, the is a perfect metaphor for life in these peculiar times, if not, indeed, life at all times. But how freakin' lucky to have had it presented to us in this lifetime! Although scattered and seemingly chaotic...there is still an underlying design, architecture, which, when seen in the right light, shows itself to have a certain beauty, and a beauty which contains seeds of other beauties, and on and on, ad pukeum. As above so befuckinglow. So is it with life, so it is with this tome. Or so I would hope...
I sometimes think that the reason I attract lightning is that I am really the Acid Rainman, sprung full-dazzled from the head of the allmytighty hermself, asabovin' the sobaloney. But I may be wrong, as I was that onanother Tyme. Joyce infection! Joy sinfexion!
I have to apologize for my interior monologue. Like most people I have an inner and an outer self. And frankly my inner life is more richly splathered than my outer miserabilia, in nearly every way, save friends, family, music, words. So far be it for me to exclude my interiority from the record. I should, however, forewarn the editor that my interior voice likes to fuck with tools given it to convey its message, and as such, at least as far as I have noticed, it, like Joyce above it, relishes the tinkerage of langerage, I should say, to convey, by example, the meaning, I wish to convey.
Be that as it may, whatever that may mean, there still stands before us the words by the sagely Laurence Sterne, who says of his masterwork, which Schopenhauer hailed as being among the very best of all time, for its interiority I might add, that:
"[digression quote]"
And indeed, it was the great stony-headed Schopenhauer, in his "Art of Literature", who said that "a novel is great to the extent that it treats of interior things rather than exterior things". Thoughts over reportage.
I don't know, at this point, whether this story will wind up being tilted toward the one or the other. These are such interesting times Lord only knows what sort of fun will present itself as I piece together this time capsule for future lamperkins.
Among the recent events that have already occurred over the past few months what some have called the theft of the Presidency, the 9-11 attack on New York (which I happened, by fate of a cancelled flight, to have witnessed), the global warming floods of prophesy, too much water, too little water, the privatization of the world's water and next, air, the melting of the polar ice caps, the Middle East war, war with Iraq, the market collapse, a thriving eBay and still functioning Salon, yet a moribund Enron and WorldCom, the proliferation of the use of fear as a political tool -- i.e. home-spun terrorism launched on our own people, the death of impartiality, and pink has become the new black. I take my coffee pink. Not really. I just said I did.
In other words, the entire world may change dramatically while I'm talking to you, and you can bet that I will do my best to do my duty to my audience (you three) and report AND think, as best I know how, the goings on, as I, again, piece together these catechisms and catacombs of thought, knowledge, wisdom, dross, lists, and so on, necessary to complete the architecture that waits to be assembled around your mind as further on you read.
My promise to you is that that you will gain valuable, hard-won knowledge from having read this work the requisite three times. Indeed, I will even grant that one reading will give you more tools for daily living than a dozen novels you could find at B. Daltons or Waldenbooks...two places I never have to worry about carrying this work, I might add, nay, subtract.
Useful Pleasantries
Friday, August 16, 2002
I like to collect wisdom. And granted, the quality of one's knowledge is relative to the quality of one's being, and I haven't been the most disciplined evolver of my own being known to Man, OR Dog, and as such some of the knowledge which I have collected, in more evolved beings, might well manifest as wisdom or some simulacrum thereof, whereas in my case, it usually only registers as knowledge or information or nothing at all. A palimpsest maybe. Smoke signals. Bongo Death. One or two slip through though, and these are what sustain me in whacked out times such as these we are now sloshing through.
One of the bits I recently ran across, for example, is that of "useful pleasantries". Or as Gurdjieff, the peregrinative dehypnotist, put it: "Do what is simultaneously useful for others and pleasing to one's self". In that spirit, I will try to construct this work you are now reading. And I hope you find it useful, and that I find a degree of pleasantness in writing it...for God knows I have grown weary of living foot to mouth. My feet aren't as olfactively neutral as I once knew them.
Take the Low Road
"You take the high road and I'll take the low road
And I'll get to Scotland before ye..."
- Loch Lomond (Traditional Scottish ballad)
There is a piece of software over 5000 years old which still works fine, even on today's machines. It is basically an "expert system" which, when used properly, produces, among other things, impartial answers to your questions. The "I Ching" (Book of Changes) is that software. And it has and will have a greater shelflife that any Microsoft can muster.
Compensation
"Why do you think they call it compensation?"
- Surreal McCoy
We've got a problem here. Compensation is its name. It comes in many guises, but it is always a stand-in, an invisible man, for something else. You are a shorty or you have a microshnitzel, so you compensate by buying an SUV or some hotrod or maybe you dedicate your life to compensation, and become an expert at pulling it down, since, in this case, you are so rarely asked to pull down your pants, unless it is for a laugh or to please the schadenfreudists.
The Schadenfreudists
schadenfreude: pleasure at the misfortune of others. (ex: Reckless caccinations when someone trips on a banana, but not by smoking it.)
Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines. -Buckminster Fuller
As above, so below
Thursday, August 15, 2002 -- Charlotte, NC
My life is fractal.
And, true to Mandelbrot's words, clouds are indeed not spheres, mountains are certainly not cones, coastlines are by no means circles, bark is nowhere near smooth, and lightning, well, lightning... Lightning, my friends, traveleth not in any straight line...unless, that is, it happens to be in searchez of moi, your author and companion on this fractal path which has been the cruel circumcisionstance of my risible existence -- plagued, as it has been, with lightning curses, dreams of flying, and the strange events surrounding my rendez-vous with 9/11, that horrific day in Manhattan all those many weeks ago...
You have got lots of good, clean yogurt. Just thought I'd say that. What I really wanted to say was that I think I may have figured out where I want to go with this writing thing, this albatross, this, this self-indictment. And it may or may not have anything to do with yogurt. Some things, you see, are beyond my control.
You see, my dear readers, the is a perfect metaphor for life in these peculiar times, if not, indeed, life at all times. But how freakin' lucky to have had it presented to us in this lifetime! Although scattered and seemingly chaotic...there is still an underlying design, architecture, which, when seen in the right light, shows itself to have a certain beauty, and a beauty which contains seeds of other beauties, and on and on, ad pukeum. As above so befuckinglow. So is it with life, so it is with this tome. Or so I would hope...
I sometimes think that the reason I attract lightning is that I am really the Acid Rainman, sprung full-dazzled from the head of the allmytighty hermself, asabovin' the sobaloney. But I may be wrong, as I was that onanother Tyme. Joyce infection! Joy sinfexion!
I have to apologize for my interior monologue. Like most people I have an inner and an outer self. And frankly my inner life is more richly splathered than my outer miserabilia, in nearly every way, save friends, family, music, words. So far be it for me to exclude my interiority from the record. I should, however, forewarn the editor that my interior voice likes to fuck with tools given it to convey its message, and as such, at least as far as I have noticed, it, like Joyce above it, relishes the tinkerage of langerage, I should say, to convey, by example, the meaning, I wish to convey.
Be that as it may, whatever that may mean, there still stands before us the words by the sagely Laurence Sterne, who says of his masterwork, which Schopenhauer hailed as being among the very best of all time, for its interiority I might add, that:
"[digression quote]"
And indeed, it was the great stony-headed Schopenhauer, in his "Art of Literature", who said that "a novel is great to the extent that it treats of interior things rather than exterior things". Thoughts over reportage.
I don't know, at this point, whether this story will wind up being tilted toward the one or the other. These are such interesting times Lord only knows what sort of fun will present itself as I piece together this time capsule for future lamperkins.
Among the recent events that have already occurred over the past few months what some have called the theft of the Presidency, the 9-11 attack on New York (which I happened, by fate of a cancelled flight, to have witnessed), the global warming floods of prophesy, too much water, too little water, the privatization of the world's water and next, air, the melting of the polar ice caps, the Middle East war, war with Iraq, the market collapse, a thriving eBay and still functioning Salon, yet a moribund Enron and WorldCom, the proliferation of the use of fear as a political tool -- i.e. home-spun terrorism launched on our own people, the death of impartiality, and pink has become the new black. I take my coffee pink. Not really. I just said I did.
In other words, the entire world may change dramatically while I'm talking to you, and you can bet that I will do my best to do my duty to my audience (you three) and report AND think, as best I know how, the goings on, as I, again, piece together these catechisms and catacombs of thought, knowledge, wisdom, dross, lists, and so on, necessary to complete the architecture that waits to be assembled around your mind as further on you read.
My promise to you is that that you will gain valuable, hard-won knowledge from having read this work the requisite three times. Indeed, I will even grant that one reading will give you more tools for daily living than a dozen novels you could find at B. Daltons or Waldenbooks...two places I never have to worry about carrying this work, I might add, nay, subtract.
Useful Pleasantries
Friday, August 16, 2002
I like to collect wisdom. And granted, the quality of one's knowledge is relative to the quality of one's being, and I haven't been the most disciplined evolver of my own being known to Man, OR Dog, and as such some of the knowledge which I have collected, in more evolved beings, might well manifest as wisdom or some simulacrum thereof, whereas in my case, it usually only registers as knowledge or information or nothing at all. A palimpsest maybe. Smoke signals. Bongo Death. One or two slip through though, and these are what sustain me in whacked out times such as these we are now sloshing through.
One of the bits I recently ran across, for example, is that of "useful pleasantries". Or as Gurdjieff, the peregrinative dehypnotist, put it: "Do what is simultaneously useful for others and pleasing to one's self". In that spirit, I will try to construct this work you are now reading. And I hope you find it useful, and that I find a degree of pleasantness in writing it...for God knows I have grown weary of living foot to mouth. My feet aren't as olfactively neutral as I once knew them.
Take the Low Road
"You take the high road and I'll take the low road
And I'll get to Scotland before ye..."
- Loch Lomond (Traditional Scottish ballad)
There is a piece of software over 5000 years old which still works fine, even on today's machines. It is basically an "expert system" which, when used properly, produces, among other things, impartial answers to your questions. The "I Ching" (Book of Changes) is that software. And it has and will have a greater shelflife that any Microsoft can muster.
Compensation
"Why do you think they call it compensation?"
- Surreal McCoy
We've got a problem here. Compensation is its name. It comes in many guises, but it is always a stand-in, an invisible man, for something else. You are a shorty or you have a microshnitzel, so you compensate by buying an SUV or some hotrod or maybe you dedicate your life to compensation, and become an expert at pulling it down, since, in this case, you are so rarely asked to pull down your pants, unless it is for a laugh or to please the schadenfreudists.
The Schadenfreudists
schadenfreude: pleasure at the misfortune of others. (ex: Reckless caccinations when someone trips on a banana, but not by smoking it.)
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