Undisputed Champion Title of the World

Day Three.  The last day of my meditation.

Moss covers the shingles on one end of my house rooftop, underneath cedar limbs and next to the rising blast of air from the heat pump.

Lightning bugs of the single flashing light variety dance for each other behind me, bumping into the wiremesh screen in front of the sunroom windows - are they dancing to their reflections?

I sit on one of my grandfather's old chairs covered with an orange burlap-like fabric.

Next to me is his old recliner covered in black fabric.

This is ordinary me in an ordinary moment.  No fancy fashion parties or expensive bass buggy rides.  A simple, happy time doing nothing but making virtual hot air with my fingertips on wellworn plastic keys.

Early summer.

Retired for about three years now.

I do not own my life or my thoughts but I put them to action that pleases the simple, ordinary me.

We own, we belong to each other.

The fireflies and the swollen buds of bushy St. John's Wort are part of us, too.

Because these are words, they are actions conveying thoughts and images.

I get bored in crowds focused on one activity for very long times.  Hours-long sporting events no longer interest me.  I grew up watching 25 and 50 laps of wreck-filled races at the local track, not 400 or 500 laps of [yawn] pitstop strategies wrapped in adverts going round in circles.  If it weren't for our traditional season passes, I'd stopped attending the football games at one of my alma maters.

I desire informative conversations, not pointless adversarial arguments where people take turns shouting to hear themselves.

Although our interests vary with time and do not align, I am like you in many ways.  I want to take something valuable out of the moment.

I understand that the friendly masks I see around me often cover motives designed for activities in which I have no interest.

At the same time, I have never found anyone out to get me.  No arch-enemy.  No evil thing that goes bump in the night.

People who don't know me don't know me.  People who know me think about themselves (and if they think about me, they only think about me in relation to themselves).

I value my life and the quality of my life, however simple and ordinary.

We are us, no one else and no thing else.

I have no product to sell, no story to market/advertise.

Yet, I am using a variety of commercially-viable products to create this blog entry.

There is a cost to my convenient use of worldwide communications.

Rain drops on the sunroom roof, making metallic pock sounds.

When I am deep into creating characters for a story, my personality falls apart - I am no one and everyone, sometimes unable to maintain a normal conversation when putting characters through their paces in my daily thoughts.

That is my true self, able to split into multiple conversant personalities for the sake of fictional conflict and resolution.

My childhood education gave me tools to aid in expressing myself but it also attempted to substitute itself for me.

Eventually, I resisted the full inoculation of a superficial society into my congenital thought set.

Society wanted a chemical engineer with a U.S. Naval Officer commission.  I wanted the freedom to write and publish whatever and whenever I wanted.

I have willingly paid the price for my sense of freedom, knowing full-well that I do not own my sense of self or have a body independent from its environment.

Again, these words echo others before me and others will echo words like these after me but I state them in order to get past these thoughts and into thoughts about the next phase of my life.

I seriously consider every moment with thoughtful humour.  I can read major headlines, talk to local people (through both light-hearted superficial conversation and serious scientific/political discussions) and derive a satiric future to write about in this space.

But is that who I am or just an easy way to exist?

It's pretty easy to make up stories that parallel our 'real' life together in this solar system.

I choose to ask myself if I want to exchange this easy life for one where I once again participate in someone else's idea what life is all about.

I have no interest in pushing my life on others.  My life does not work for everyone.  Some people could not or would not sit here and think up satires about the interaction between people and their clashing subcultures - they'd rather live their lives in the moment and go on to the next moment (or they may have mental/physical impairments that prevent writing/thinking satirically).

Regardless of my sense of humour, my simple, happy, ordinary life involves you.  Because we have this planet and no other, I apply my satire toward making sure that in my lifetime our species is generally pointed toward a sustainable future, taking into account as many different, functional lifestyles as I can mentally keep track of or store in my computer database we call the Internet.

As always, I keep my intolerance antenna active and call for action to put an end to dysfunctional intolerant behaviour that tends toward species annihilation (especially ours) or environmental destruction.

After three years of comfortable midlife retirement, I'm ready for a change.  I'm still not sure what that change will be but I have a few ideas.

I never rush important decisions.  I have the weekend to sort through the possible changes that three days of meditation have posited (or deposited here before me).

However, for starters, yesterday, I put my 1962 Dodge Lancer up for sale on the Internet.  I have already attempted to sell our damaged 1992 Chevy S10 truck (damaged where a tree fell and crushed the cab) with a 6-cylinder, 2.8l engine and manual transmission in good condition.  A scrap metal shop offered about $200 so we're looking for a buyer who wants more than scrap metal value.

In other words, time to start lightening our load to make us more mobile, should we want.  Next we'll be getting rid of unused items in the house - I've already thrown away a lot of unusable cardboard stored in the garage.  Hope to recycle as many castoffs as we can.

Where we'll stop, nobody knows!