All Your Bass Lines Are Belong To Us

Do you challenge yourself to extrapolate a generalisation from familiar, local domestic tranquility?

Do you declare that your family and their friends are boring because you're a young person fresh out of university with an education in international relations and you're stuck with a summer internship in your nation's capital?

Have you just completed hiking 8% of the Appalachian Trail, close to finishing half the AT in segments?

Were you a restaurant cook who took a demotion from master chef to free up time to get an engineering degree while adopting four young children on a decreased salary?

Are you a bargain shopper, using the phone and the Internet to find holiday destinations, spending $200 for a two-bedroom condo on the beach to accommodate your family of six instead of $4000 for a house rental "near the beach"?

Do you own a military contracting business with which you hope to find a way to take competitive advantage of the poor handling of oil recovery in a body of water a few hours away? [Your version of "declaring war" on a global corporation: co-opting the corporation's intellectual property for your nation's use, a fair trade for the corporation ruining your nation's globally-recognised maritime zone.]

Do you carry a fishing rod in your car for THE moment when mayflies have risen and fish are so plentiful along the shoreline you think it's a stocked lake?

Do you travel around the world for leisure, business or what?

Do you know the official rules for the card game, Uno?  Tournament or regular?

Are you five months pregnant and will never tell your child he was a "surprise"?

Do you buy only specialty beer or pack your megacooler with alcoholic water that some call American beer?

There are days when I want to be alone to carefully consider thoughts generated by the Book of the Future but find myself in a small crowd of people enjoying a holiday weekend with their powered watercraft, lakehouse, freshly-stained wooden dock and beef on the barbie.

Smile to make people think you're up to something.  They have no idea what you're thinking about.

I'm a plain guy, with a smile on a face, who contemplates the universe because it's the only reality I have to deal with.  I happen to live in this time period with a set of people who come and go and share a world history with me that we all know fairly well, overcoming assumptions (that have built myths and legends) through frank conversation.

I generate generalisations to anticipate the kinds of conclusions people might draw with limited information.  From the generalisations, I look at the trends they'll create through socialisation.  Then I take my time to decide if I'll participate.

After all, what's the rush?

Do you seek popularity (for yourself or in crowds) or truly desire to preserve your species and avoid wasting energy on frivolous expenditures that people you know buy in unison with everyone else?

Yes, I laugh at everything but I take every moment seriously because they're all I've got.  I don't kid myself about the facts - material goods and socialisation are illusions that frame the moments.

There are days when I see life is replication and everything else is a waste of our time.  Then I wake up from that illusion and put its life-optimisation mindset of the moment to use in another way.

Where are we going today?  Do you want me to tell you?  Aren't I supposed to be on a two-week holiday from all this?

From what I've been told, Iran and Egypt plan to take advantage of the Israeli "slaughter" of boat people to negotiate some minor treaties that rarely hit the major newswires.  The Book of the Future points me to another area of life that I hadn't looked at in a long time and am not sure is relevant to this blog - shouldn't I stay focused on life in this near space of the galaxy and not concern myself with interactions between bodies we can't see from here are fluidly living and may not have influence on us for millions and millions of years?

I wanted a two-week break from science and science fiction sounding blog entries.  I'm going to take it (minus today).  No major contact with my species for a while - I want to wind down and listen to the vibrations of this planet I call home because it has so much more to tell me than when I pay attention to people's responses to my eternal grin.