Oh My God!

A White Russian is a drink intended to be served layered.  The Patron is the one who is responsible for mixing those layers, not the bartender.  This is one of those little-known facts of life that should, but often fails, to guide our conscious lives.
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There is a common image of the artist as a bedraggled loner ensconced in his studio (artists are always male in the common mind).  Whether the artist is a writer, painter, sculptor, or whatever, he is moody, disheveled and teeters uncertainly on the cat-walk of sanity.

The writer sits alone in his rat-infested flat above a whore-house with red neon light screaming unheeded warnings across the walls of his mind.  There is a single lamp spilling unnecessary light on the termite-eaten desk.  He hunches over an Underhill Upright - upright referring to the writer, not the machine - a bottle of squalor stands guard at his right hand as he bangs out veiled autobiographies to an uninterested world.

The painter lives alone in a dingy, cavernous room with wooden planks for flooring.  Alone, that is, unless he has just sold a painting and can pay a local night butterfly to pose nude - nude is on purpose, naked is not - while he dispassionately outlines the curves and ignores the scars.

Painters have beards, writers do not.

Amidst these land mines of solitary creativity and psychological case studies, there is one art form that stands out as unique in all of art history.  It is the single art form that thrives on socializing and public adulation.  It is the one art form in which mental instability is paraded and glorified, rather than castigated and clucked at.  It is the one art form in which there are job descriptions and career paths, and whose jargon has invaded the natural landscape of communication.

The theater.

I hear you...what about the military and pro sports?  Those are destructive, not creative, and the mental illnesses on display are not favored in polite society.  A soldier or a linebacker cannot quote Shakespeare and Ionesco, nor can he distinguish between the five conventional plots.  Most certainly, these Cretaceous outcasts could never understand the deus ex machina, though they pray fervently for just such a thing.

No, in the theater, there are educated and erudite folks who just happen to like taking off their clothes for money in acts that require no consummation.  These beasts of the boards know the subtleties of body language, they rehearse for hours to place just the right inflection on a syllable, they thrive on the praise and applause of their peers, and most of all, they live for the blood-screaming immediacy of the theater.

There is no other art form in existence in which a happenstance assemblage of artists, technicians and machines must work in perfect synchronization for two and a half hours every night to create magic.  And there is no other art form in existence in which the consumming public expects that magic on demand.

Image a gaggle of art lovers hovering around a painter screaming nightly for a new masterpiece.  Or how about stuffy readers seated in the flat of the writer awaiting their due on time and on cue.  You would more likely receive cacophonous hissies about the vagaries of the creative muse, than steamy dressing rooms choked with anxiety and pheromones, and full of painted liars ready to offer their souls for your applause.

Yes, in the space of time that most of us slough off on the couch in front of the TeeVee, this group of highly suspect human beings emote to the point of leaving a physical residue on the stage - not just actors but crew as well.  In a quiet moment, if you listen very hard, you can hear the Stage Manager having a cow in her corner backstage.  She has screamed every curse and epithet known to humankind trying to push the talent onstage.

Pulses are pounding, the hairs on the nape of the neck are standing erect, pupils are dilated - just another night in the theater.

Before and after, the entire company gets sauced.  Before to calm the nerves and focus the fear - nay terror - of stepping in front of an audience.  After because the thrill of the moment and living in the eternal now is something humans are ill-equipped to survive.  Ram Daas would be envious of the showman's life: there is no future or past, just now.

That is why persons of the theater are so prized among the lesser artisans of film and TeeVee.  In those bastard arts, only the stage-trained and tempered can hold up under intense pressure and deliver identical performances time after time.  "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star," roared Peter O'Toole's character in My Favorite Year.  He spoke from the heart in that singular line.

The theater is a mystical place.  Great brotherhoods are forged in 10 short weeks, though they fade just as quickly.  Indeed, the stage has produced some of the greatest talents ever to emote a catharsis.  Even their deathbed scenes are truly of note. 

The great Victorian actor Edmund Keene is still quoted "on the boards" for his Earth-quaking last thought as he expired, "Dying is easy...comedy is hard."

Perhaps the uninitiated will not remember Wilfrid Lawson, but there is a tale of Titanic proportions among theater folk:

Sir Lawson met an old friend on the street after a long absence.  They retired to a pub for a long list of courage.  At one point, the friend suggested they take in a show, and Sir Lawson said there was a show up the street that was "fair".

They stumbled their way over to the theater and, with luck, were able to get two tickets in the back of the house just moments before the curtain rose.

As the show went on, the friend remarked, "Seems a bit slow, old boy."

To which Sir Lawson replied, "Hold on, it will get quite a bit more interesting in just a moment."

The friend inquired, "How so?"

"Do you see that woman on stage there?" said Sir Lawson.

"Yes," came the reply.

"When she finishes dressing, I'm supposed to enter," he hissed.

Such incredible toying with the Eternal Now are not possible in film and TeeVee.  They are edited out.  Theater is immediate and gut-real.  There is no "cut" and do-over.  There is only NOW...

Film and TeeVee people are known for drugs and overdoses.  That doesn't happen in the theater.  The high from just one tiny show is so overwhelming that there are only two answers: one, the orgy, and two, drinking heavily to bring you down.  Theater people don't need drugs, they live the greatest of them all - NOW.

 In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he noted that one could look into the eyes of a traveler and see how far they were from home.  When Arthur looked into Ford's eyes, he was nearly thrown from his stool.  This was a metaphor not for aliens or travelers, but for theater people.

We know each other across time and space, no matter the distance or medium.  We can look into each other's souls and know that both of us have stood upon the threshold of Time and touched the Big Lie at the center of the Universe.

Theater is a unique and wonderous thing.  There can be no other experience like it, for even the shamans know theater.  It is the deepest of all human experiences, which is why audiences crave a taste, though they dare not step into that abyss.

Theater has no rival.  It is mystical in a way that no solitary artist will ever experience, for ultimately he cannot share his experience with anyone, even those looking at his tints or brushstrokes.  Only those who have journeyed to the Center together and survived can ever share the Mystery that is theater.

That is why the very stitching of culture uses the lines from the stage.  That is why the undergarments of God are the Costumes of Ages.  That is why even the Universe uses make-up to show us her best face - though we call them flowers or so other appellation.

Once you have tread the boards, you cannot see the world in the same drab way that the rest of humanity envisions it.  Once you have played on the Far Side, nothing less will suffice.

As Shakespeare himself noted, "The play is the thing in which we shall catch the conscience of the king."

Theater is dangerous and should be handled with the utmost of care.  Those who toy lightly with it are bound to receive radiation burns.  The older the play, the deeper the magic.

Can you name a single work of art that is more than 2,000 years old?

I thought not.

But the Greek plays and the Roman plays are still produced today, as fresh and alive as they were millennia ago.  They don't need restoration because they have not faded.  They don't reside in a single place but are available to anyone anywhere at any time.  Theater IS immortality.  Shakespeare is just as relevant now as he was 400 years ago.  So too Aristophanes and Thespus, Ionesco and Wycherly.  The past lives in the eternal NOW, and it is connected to the future, because at some point those great plays will be produced long after we are dead.

Show me a Mona Lisa that can achieve that.

Oh, to tread the boards once again and live in the immortal moment for just one second longer.

Human, meet thy true god...

Quaternions And Escape Velocity

Something that seems to come up consistently in my studies is the concept of a "break-away civilization".  The idea is that some portion of human beings have secretly advanced, technology-wise at any rate, to the point where they have, or are very close to having split off from the rest of us.  At first blush, this idea may seem fanciful, but on further consideration could explain a great many things.


As a culture, we often visualize the technology that will shortly become commonplace.  Just a simple example is Star Trek.  It is no mistake that cell phones resemble the show's communicators.  There are crowd suppression technologies called, rather blatantly, PHASER, which is a stun weapon.  Quantum mechanics has shown a possibility for making transporters real.  And lately, 3D printers are getting closer to making Star Trek replicators a reality.


In short, if we can imagine it, it is quite possible to make it happen.  Since we are products of Universe, it stands to reason that we can not conceive of anything that is not possible within Universe.  The Star Trek example is but a small, recent data point, but it's important that we establish the ability of humans to conceive of something, then proceed to make it a reality.  In concise terms, we create our own future, and are not passive recipients of it.


The next building block is the ubiquitous 'black project'.  That Boeing's Skunk Works or Area 51 exist is beyond question.  What actually occurs in these facilities (and the many like them worldwide) is a topic of hot debate.  What we can say for sure is that these operations are involved in the secret development of new technologies.


That governments hide new technologies is not open for debate.  One aspect of Columbus' voyages that is little known is that he was given three ships that used a radical new keel design, and part of his mission was to test the design in practical application.  It took more than 300 years for the documents confirming this to be made public.


Certainly, the development of military aircraft is usually decades ahead of what is publically known.  The B-1 bomber was in service for at least 20 years before it was acknowledged.  There's growing evidence that the infamous 'black triangle' UFOs are some type of new craft under development, or already in service.  Speculation has it that the triangles are under the Aurora program, which confuses the highly advance craft with rather pedestrian hypersonic craft, which is actually fairly old technology.  Lifting-body hull designs, such as the shpace shuttle, are based on theories and designs dating to the 1920s and 1930s.

Spherical Triangle Quaternion

I think we can stipulate that those technologies that are generally known are, at the very least, decades behind current state-of-the-art.


One last data point is the well-known technological curve.  There is a well-proven process in the development of technology.  The learning curve starts off fairly flat and slow, with the discovery of some process, then the development of engineering capability to exploit it, then the curve goes into a wild climb as more and more is learned about the process and how to exploit it with engineering.


A prime example of this effect is computers.  Almost within my lifetime, computers have gone from massive, room-sized, vacuum-tubed affairs that used boxes full of punch cards to run simple applications.  Within the span of 50 years, I now have more computing power currently being used to generate this article, than was available to land men on the Moon.  


Even storage capacity has grown exponentially.  My first hard-drive cost hundreds of dollars, was the size of an old 5.25" floppy drive, and could hold 33 megabytes of data.  I currently have a terabyte of memory on this computer that cost less than $100, and is a small fraction the size of the old drive.


Another example is video technology.  In the span of my career, video has gone from 1" magnetic tape to solid-state storage.  In the 80s, we used to sit around in SMPTE meetings, oohing and ahhing over HD video, using massive cameras and CRT displays.  My step-daughter is hawking a hand-held device this weekend that offers full HD video and full stereo audio in a hand-held device that costs less than $200.


So, where is all this going?  Glad you asked.

Die Glocke

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a journalist named Igor Witkowski started digging through all the Nazi documents that had remained nearly undisturbed since the (ostensible) fall of the Third Reich.  He found a number of documents revealing a secret Nazi technology called Die Glocke, or the Bell.  This device was based on a radical new physics, or more correctly, an ancient physics re-discovered, that had remarkable, if magical, properties.

In its simplest description, two cylinders are placed one inside another, then filled with some material, which may have been some compound of mercury.  They are then counter-spun to amazing speeds while being zapped with massive amounts of electricity to create a plasma.  The result was the bell-shaped device floated off the ground, above tree-level, and glowed with a shifting pallet of colors.  The description more or less matches common reports of UFOs.


Joseph P. Farrell's "Nazi Brotherhood of the Bell," goes into great detail on this topic.


At the end of the war, this technology vanished.  There is no paper trail that researchers have come up with, no artifacts related to it, and no reports in the open, until Witkowski's discovery.  It does, however, match descriptions of things like the Kecksburg UFO and numerous other 'urban legends,' such as the Philadelphia and the Montauk Experiments.  Certainly, if someone had this kind of technology, it would be kept so secret as to be used to justify mass murder to protect it.

Norway Spiral

The basis for this physics, now popularized as 'hyperdimensional' physics, is the development of James Clerk Maxwell's quaternion geometry, which is at the base of modern electrical theory.  Essentially, quaternions are gaps between a group vectors, which are the foundation of the physical Universe we perceive.  The gaps are called 'scalars'.  These gaps are said to hold magnificent amounts of energy, and are the basis of scalar technology, anti-gravity and zero-point energy. 


 In other words, the theoretical grounds for these 'modern' theories is over 130 years old, and more, because Maxwell's work grew out of others before him.  Certainly, Nikola Tesla's work fed off these theories.  The Maxwell equations taught in schools today are 3D tranlations that throw away the scalar part of the problem.  One way academia hides the information in plain sight.


The idea for torsion physics, the spinning of objects to create energy, actually comes from very ancient 'myths' and 'legends,' as well as Medieval metaphysics and alchemy.  Obviously, this knowledge is very old, and has only recently been revived, though still hidden from popular culture.


The brother of film director Brian DiPalma was a researcher involved in tortion theory.  His experiments showed that balls spun to thousands of rpm, and launched along side un-spun balls, rose much higher and faster, and fell more quickly than the un-spun counterpart.  This defies logic, but the results are confirmed by Russian research.


Assuming that 'someone' has been pursuing the technology of Die Glocke for the past 70 years, we can posit that the technolgy is very mature by now, in terms of engineering.  Given the curve of development just in the public sphere, 70 years is an amazingly long time with the implication being that this technology is very advanced, practical and in use somewhere today.


Given the example of Columbus' ship keel design, we can say that governments have a vested interest in hiding technology, using it for the benefit of a few, and the ability to keep it secret for hundreds of years.


Therefore, we can conclude that a radical new technology, as represented by Die Glocke, would not simply disappear.  It has gone somewhere.  And since it represents the ability to engineer a radical new physics, it stands to reason there are machines that take advantage of it.  Finally, the ability to hide it is much simpler than one might assume.  Through the use of grant money and 'peer review,' scientists can be steered and led in the opposite direction, down logical dead-ends, for decades if not centuries, to keep them away from these concepts.  


In simple terms, by applying large quantities of money using a hidden agenda, academia can be directed towards Einstein and Newton, to avoid them getting a whiff of Maxwell and Tesla.  This is in spite of the fact that Newton was modified severely at the beginning of the space age, and Einstein was just trashed over the past week.


Top it off by publically ridiculing anyone that chases those leads, and viola!, you have a well-kept secret.  Any researcher that gets too close is publically lashed and his/her foibles are made fodder for the media.  Thus, most researchers view certain topics like live wires, and won't go near them for fear of losing tenure (which is a form of control, as well).


So, where does that leave us?  Well, pretty much all UFO reports could conceivably be terrestrial technology.  Scalar weapons, such as weather modification, and even things like crop circles are easily conceivable within hyperdimentional physics.  Certainly, the ability to travel across vast distances quickly and cheaply are implied, making the solar system accessible, at the minimum.  Vast amounts of cheap, pollution-free energy are implicit, as well.  Even something like the Norway spiral would be child's play with such technology.


If some group had these capabilities, and had the ability to hide it from all of humanity, what would they do?  


Obviously, the temptation to split off from mainstream society and pursue a separate course in history would be a natural outcome.  In the process, they would want to strip us of as many resources as possible to fund and launch a completely new and separate economy.  The would have to steal the money, since simply budgeting, granting or asking for it would expose the whole shootin' match.


Finally, they would most likely develop an attitude that they are far superior to those of us left behind, and so would become intolerably ego-centric, certainly narcissistic, and likely megamaniacal, when dealing with us puny 'left behinds'.


Do we have evidence of this?


The reports of highly advanced craft in Earth orbit, seen with third-generation night-vision technology, could be evidence of a spun-off humanity, already exploiting space in ways that make the shuttle and ISS look like children's toys.  Gary McKinnon hacked NASA and was able to read lists of personnel who were currently noted as being off-planet (hundreds, not a half-dozen).  Researchers have found dozens of photos showing what appear to be bases on the Moon and Mars.  Together, these things point to a hidden culture, if not a full-blown civilization.


How to pay for it?  Well, no one can deny that untold trillions of dollars have gone missing and are simply unaccounted for.  On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld admitted to Congress that $2.3 trillion were missing from the Pentagon budget.  The next day, all the evidence was destroyed by a missle.  Certainly, all the bail-outs of recent years have simply vanished.  No one knows where the money has gone, there is no accounting, and the Federal Reserve told Congress flat out that they could not ask where the money was being sent.  And who can honestly believe $300 hammers and $900 toilet searts?  Just a few examples over the past 20 or so years.


Finally, there is no doubt in the minds of many people that certain elements of the 'elite' act in a manner that is simply hard to explain, except that they have some sort of backdoor exit, in case the natives get out of hand.  The sheer hautiness on the part of the 'elites,' and their brazen flaunting of the control structure in recent years, says that they no longer worry about revolt.  In fact, they toy with us trying to cause just that, as a form of entertainment.  


The only thing, besides a complete mental disconnect from history and reality, would be knowing they have some way to escape not just retribution, but the whole darned ball of wax.  In other words, they have an ace in the hole which creates an attitude of superiority and untouchability.  


Given all these things together, it would seem reasonable to at least theorize about a 'break-away civilization'.  It is plausible, and certainly circumstantial evidence exists to support such a theory.  I would go so far as to venture that the group of people who think of themselves as the 'elites' have the motivation and opportunity to pursue such an agenda.

The remaining question would be, if we were to have incontrovertable proof of this, would we even want to stop them?  


After all, having them leave the planet, and thus the rest of us, in peace would seem desirable.  Ultimately, it comes down to whether or not these 'elites' see us as vermin to eradicate, or just an annoyance to leave behind.  


Given their past efforts to wipe out what they deem as undesirable humanity (us) would argue against a laissez-faire attitude on either side of the equation   The first task is to expose such an effort, if it exists.  At that point, we can decide the appropriate action to take.  Most importantly, it demands that we open our eyes and our minds to all possibilities.  As Sherlock Holmes is often quoted, "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."


Which brings us full-circle back to a certain famous Vulcan of Star Trek fame...


It all reminds me of the brilliant Douglas Adams, who in the Hitchhiker series, mentioned one civilization who created a planetary crisis and packed up the most useless people in the society and flung them into space in 'escape' craft.  Perhaps he was on to something there.

Twenty Eighty-Four

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!

-Winston Smith, Nineteen Eighty-Four

In some ways, my blog is like Winston's diary. I'm not sure if I'm writing to the world I knew as a child, or the to world my daughter will inherit.

Certainly, it's for the reader, a way of connecting with strangers across the globe, who hopefully find in my words a solidarity of thought or experience. It's a way to clarify my own thinking and test drive ideas: kick some philosophical tires, as it were.

Today, I wax introspective. Why? Well...one, it's Sunday, and my Sunday musings usually stray far afield. Two...my colleagues Clif High, over at HalfPasHuman, his faithful henchman Igor (EYE-gor) and George over at UrbanSurvival have jointly been predicting and speculating about some Earth-shaking event(s) that will commence at roughly 6pm Jakarta time and will reverberate through January, with particular attention on the date of January 7th.

What is it? Heck, I don't know. I'm not qualified to speculate on the nature of future events, but I have a pretty clear bead on the past. I do know, from about ten years' worth of experience that Clif's webbots have been spectacularly right about many things. From 9/11 to large-scale blackouts, from the Columbia shuttle explosion to Banda Aceh, from Katrina to Chinese wedding quakes, the bots have been eerily right again and again.

Whatever the event(s) turn out to be, the effects will appear in history books in the year 2084. Our progeny will read with the dispassion of those long separated from horrific events about whatever IT is that the bots have been harping on for better than two years now.

What can we do to prepare? Well, like any normal, red-blooded Texan, I armed myself, bought some farm land up in the mountains, loaded in water and food, seeds, gold and a generator. The salient point that I take away from all this, though, is it is NOT what you do to prepare, but how you react after the fact. As Douglas Adams might have said, DON"T PANIC!

We know from experience that fascists always use crisis to advance their control structures. That's a given. They will put up Judas goats who will make pseudo-logical and impassioned pleas to follow the Party line. They will point the panicked sheep to Onkel's waiting breast, where he will suckle us and nurture us through this difficult time -- for a price, of course: your immortal soul.

I hear so many folks talk big. "I'll never go down quiet," they boast. "I'll give up my gun when they pry my cold, dead fingers off the trigger," they growl. Fact is, most people don't know how they'll react under severe stress. When something so horrible presents itself to your eyes, most people shut down reason and start acting on pure instinct. I've seen it dozens of times. They talk big, but they don't look deep inside and find the trigger of their panic, and corral that sucker.

Furthermore, we have all been trained and conditioned by mass media to turn to "authorities." We can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, we must seek out the proverbial gurus at the tops of corporate/government mountains to give us sage advice and thoughtful direction.

Bullshit!

There is only one authority that I trust with my life and the lives of my family: me. My mother will tell you, when there was a crisis, I was the one you could count on not to panic. Even as a kid. Maybe I have my great-aunt Tish's genes. In 1910, during the Halley's comet panic, she was 12 years old. Her mother told her to get on her knees and plea to the God of Our Fathers to spare the Earth from the comet's deadly effects. Tish's answer? "If we're all going to die, why do we need to pray?" (She arrived in Texas in 1899 in a covered wagon...I loved that woman)

At the tender age of 13, I gashed my forearm down to the artery. Sure, I cried, but I calmly wrapped my arm while my dad nearly went into orbit, not to mention damn near killed all of us on the way to the hospital. A 18, I saw a Canadian man have a heart-attack in the Gare-de-Nord in Paris. His wife was, well...hysterical and there were about 50 gawkers all standing around watching him die. I doffed my pack and applied CPR and kept him alive until the ambulance arrived. Several years ago, the neighbor's kid broke both his radius and ulna, so that his forearm had a new elbow. I set the bones and slung the arm while his mother looked like a loose balloon. In Guatemala a while back, I was on a bus when a woman went into labor. Half the bus was stunned into statue-like indecision, while the other half were in complete panic. Since I had done a video on childbirth, I had a pretty good idea what to expect, and so delivered the baby somewhere near San Isidro. I wasn't prepared to go blind, but when it happened, I began to make a mental list of things I could still do, rather than focus on what I couldn't do. It all boils down to one thing:

DON'T PANIC!

Self-reliance and self-trust is a lost art. The media have been used for decades now to implant deep in our minds the profound distrust of our own abilities and to seek the all-knowing, all-seeing counsel of "experts" and "authorities." I mean, just watch the news. How many reporters do you see anymore that give you thoughtful analysis of their own. Most are incapable of such mental legerdomain. Instead, they act nervous, concerned and near-panicked, and immediately turn to some "authority" to give us an idea what is happening and what to do about it.

Us? HA! We're just little helpless babes that can't make an informed decision without the guidance of our "betters." You watch. IF this 'thing' happens today, what will be your first reaction. Pay close attention to your thoughts the second you hear about it. Do you panic and start trying to figure out which "authority" will give you the best instrustions? Will you run for the SuperDome and beg your maters for deliverance? Or will you take immediate steps to protect your own first. Will you gather you bug-out pag by the door, arm yourself and get into a defensive posture before turning to media for more information on the situation (not instruction, mind you...big difference).

The key to Life, the Universe and Everything is how you react. That is closely related to how you prepare, and preparation is 90% mental. Think about how the military, police and other "authorities" are trained. They are given repeated preparation to act and react in a particular fashion so that under stress, it becomes automatic. They don't have to think (which shows). You job is to prepare your mind so that in a stess situation, you react automatically, but the trick is, don't turn off your mind. Always think and always listen to your gut. Your gut will tell you the right thing, if you've been careful to filter out the subliminal training you've been getting lo these 60 years of TeeVee.

Remember that telegraph from the future, called "Nineteen Eighty-Four?" The US is at war with Russia. The US has always been at war with Russia. No, wait! The US is at war with China. The US has always been at war with China. Oceania, EurAsia, East Asia...we live in the tri-lateral world of Winston Smith. You are now, and have been trained for your whole life to love Big Brother. The question now is can you uninstall the buttons before 'whatever-it-is' happens today?

What if the bots are wrong? Good! Can't wait to think that. I don't seek out disaster, I just don't panic when it comes. Do I believe the bots? No. Not one bit. They are just like all other predictors: you make enough predictions, some are bound to be right. So what good are they? They are thought experiments. They present scenarios which I use to mull around possible reacts, so that if a situation presents itself, I'm not surprised or panicked, but simply begin to execute the plan.

So why have I prepared for 'whatever-it-is?' Simple, being armed is a natual state for a Texan. I'd feel naked without tools of defense. Farmland is useful for generating income, building a retirement palace and having a weekend escape from the big city. Extra food and water? Well, there's earthquakes, storms and volcanoes here, not to mention utilities in Indonesia are, well...unreliable. A bug-out bag? Ever since I started living on my own at the tender age of 17, I've had a bag of necessities within easy reach. Just plain prudent, and has come in handy on more than one occasion. I haven't done anything to prepare that I wouldn't do on a warm, sunny day in the Texas hill country. It's just a case of ant and grasshopper.

And so I send this out to the people of the past, or the people of the future. The message from this time is, "DON"T PANIC!"

In the end, you're either Ford Prefect or Winston Smint. I'll take Ford any day. Have towel, will travel.

Clif, George, Igor...no one has any idea what thing is coming at us tonight/tomorrow. I certainly don't. Reading the bot output, to me, is like reading Revelations in the Bible. Makes no sense but has some cool images. I'm watching the news to spot when the moment arrives, though according to Clif, the show-shine boy up the alley will be talking about it. I'm curious though...what is this thing that has been sitting like a dead elephant in the middle of the predictive output for better than two years, and is bigger than 9/11 in orders of magnitude? All Clif and George can come up with, besides a dozen scenarios, is that the world will change profoundly next week.

Well, shucks! That happened when my daughter was born.

Next?!

Sickhomeness

One of the best trilogies (in 5 parts) of all time is 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.' Of course, that's my opinion, but since it's my blog, that's all that matters. In the opening pages, Douglas Adams notes that the farther away from home a man gets, the stranger the look in his eye, and when Arthur looked into Ford's eyes, it nearly made him insane.

There is truth in that observation. You see it when you live overseas in the eyes of fellow adventurers. It is most extreme here on The Far Side. Part of it is due to the longing one feels for those comfort things that define 'home.' No matter how much one likes one's new home, or how comfortable one feels, or even how similar the new digs are to the old, there are still things missing that, when one closes one's eyes, one pictures in one's mind and calls them 'home.' Doesn't one?

I thought I would compile a short list of the things I miss about Texas. Texas is a great place, don't get me wrong, but it's been taken over by yankee carpetbaggers and Americans, so just as well I'm not there. Still, in my heart there are things that I miss and wish I could have here. So here goes. Feel free to play at home and see how your notes compare.

1. My daughter: 'Nuff said.
2. Blue Northers: the deathly calm before the storm, the Wall o' Weather headin' atcha, the wild wind and lightning, the sudden change from hot and muggy to cool and fresh. Nothing in the world like that.
3. Fat Texas Burritos: a massive tortilla, slathered with refried beans, taco meat, sour cream, tomatoes and lettuce, and piled with cheese. Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard.
4. Pork Loin: Mom's loin roast with garlic, rosemary and black pepper, crisp on the outside and tender inside, with a little brown gravy and new potatoes on the side.
5. West Texas: The Great Emptiness...driving down hiway 235 with a hundred miles of nothing on the longest, straightest road I've ever seen, doing 120 mph with the top down. And don't forget the endless horizon...
6. Fresh Mowed Lawn: lying on the grass, listening to the cicadas, the sprinkler chick-chick-chicking, a cold beer or seven in the cooler next to the hammock.
7. Elbow Room: ah, the feeling of being able to stretch out and knowing no one but the federal government is watching you. Nothing like a little privacy and 10 minutes' worth of solitude.
8. The Shooting Range: going down to the range on Saturday afternoon to pop off a few founds. Hell just having a gun in the house would be nice.
9. Quiet: Islam is the noisiest religion ever invented. I'd love to wake up with an alarm clock one day and not all the hollering at 4am.
10. Leg Room: I'd love to get in a car, on a bus or walk down the street and know that everything was laid out for someone 6'-2" tall.

Don't get me wrong, I love living on The Far Side. This is my new home and I am very happy here, but if I could just bring a few extra things, it would be perfect. Texas is pretty close to Heaven, but it's been infested with 'Merikans who think they have some claim to bung up the place.

I don't think anyone ever truly acclimates to a place that isn't home. The things that brought you comfort and joy as a kid stick in your subconscious and act like a homing beacon. There's a lot of things that override that impulse, but it is there, none-the-less, whispering in the background, tempting you with the sights, smells and sounds of home.

They say you can never go home. It is an imaginary place that no longer exists, if it ever did. To a certain extent, that's true. Home is what we call the memories that we cherish and the ideals we hold. Home is what we call the expected, even though the unexpected finds us anywhere. Perhaps there is some magic ratio of expected to unexpected that reaches a threshold called 'home.'

In any case, the farther one gets from home, as Douglas noted, the stranger the look in a man's eyes. Perhaps that is what we call the eyes of age, because even time takes us far from home, though the body stays planted in one spot. In that respect, home is truly where the heart is.

Kinda like baseball...you don't always make it home again, and even if you do, you always come from the opposite direction.