Category: Musings

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Strange Tears

I’m a mean hard bastard.

I’ve been that way all my life. Which is why I find myself in this very strange place.

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I feel like my world is slipping away.

It was David Bowie’s passing that popped the bubble for me. Or maybe it was a combination of seeing Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek Into Darkness and Bowie’s passing that managed to pound through my defenses.

Th 1These entertainers are people I’ve never met, so it shouldn’t be personal.  But they are touchstones in my life. Their loss is a sign of unrelenting change.

I heard the strains of Space Oddity on the radio this morning and was suddenly singing along & crying. It was weird.

Unintentionally, I started tallying the losses in my personal life.

I’ve seen my share of death. In the ‘80s and ‘90s the tally increased weekly. After a while I stopped going to funerals. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about or want to remember those folks. It was that I couldn’t bear any more losses.

61260414Time is catching up with me.

I know in the not too distant future I’m going to have to bear more losses. The numbers are probably going to increase faster too.

Folks in my family are getting up there in years. I have friends who aren’t in the best of health and while I love them, time and distance have made us into very different people.

You see, time takes its toll on relationships too.

Why am I crying? Even hard assed warriors cry. I’m not ashamed of my tears.

The catalyst of music or movie is one thing, that’s the trigger.  What is the underlying cause of my tears right now?

Is it that I’m not as good as surfing the winds of change as I once was? Is it sadness that some days I feel like a dinosaur watching the last sunset? Is it fear of being left all alone?

I know these feelings aren’t unique.

There are books and plays, movies and TV shows that have explored these feelings.

Dracula, Dr. Who, and at least one book by Heinlein pop into my head instantly. These stories ask the question:

If you could be immortal would you?

Could you bear the mounting losses while continuing to walk endlessly into the future?

How long before the transient nature of life made you a monster, disconnected from all the things that make us human? Would you, after a few hundred years, stop being human because you can no longer keep count of those you’ve loved and lost.

How long until the voices, faces and lives become background noise, and your interaction with them is limited to nothing more than furthering your agenda? You agenda would likely become an agenda, the normal lived couldn’t see and one in which their life or death is but a drip from a leaky faucet.

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Perhaps it’s normal to think of these things at points in your life. We know we’re mortal, we know we’ll end.

Maybe the lesson is to just cry.

Maybe from time to time, we should let it all out, not hold anything back, and don’t dwell on it.

When our tears have finished, then we’re supposed to pick up the less brittle pieces of ourselves and move on with grace earned by our successes, failures, and even our tallied losses from years of living.

Like everyone else, I’m clueless. I can tell you this;

Time keeps moving on and so probably should we.

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The annual shopping trip…

NGWOW I needed that!

For many years now, a very good friend and I have been having an annual Christmas expedition.  This year getting away from the house was a welcome and much needed relief.

Somehow our once a year trip always goes off without a hitch.  This year no exception. As in the past several expeditions, all our shopping is accomplished in a single day. The tradition is to fortify ourselves with a little alcohol, a good lunch then shop. Then snacks, then more shopping then yet more shopping and the whole time we’re laughing and enjoying our time together.

This year my friend went above and beyond the call of duty and were it not for his expert driving I would probably have given up and gone home.  There were way too many cars, way too much busyness, and too dang few parking spots.

I don’t know if my friend knows how much I appreciate his efforts yesterday, but he and his other half deserve a round of applause and my profound and deep thanks for helping to make a wonderful Christmas for me.

Driving home I had a smile on my face that couldn’t be jackhammered off my face. I’m still smiling and it’s not from Alcohol It’s from joy.  I had such a good time this year that I’m looking forward to next year. My friend probably cringed at that, because it means putting up the Christmas tree. (But you do such a beautiful tree, and I’ve got a couple of laser pointers that might help!)

I can tell you, absolutely nothing beats love, kindness, and having truly outstanding friends. Except perhaps spending a day laughing your ass off with them.

I hope each of you has equally awesome people in your lives.

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While writing another piece…

I got to thinking about the internet and wondering about it’s effects on the world.  The piece in question was about Trump calling for us to cut the internet going into ISIS controlled areas.

1450552308_full.jpegAs I thought about it I wondered if you were to disconnect ISIS, would young internet addicted people from the West continue to join their ranks?

If messages of radicalization weren’t regular, would the radicalism simply flame out?

This line of thinking has caused me to wonder, “Is the internet with it’s ability to instantly show the disparity between cultures and living conditions actually the source of the problem?”

When the third world can see the first world through the window of technology, does that engender social unrest, or even civil war? Desire and greed are natural human emotions.

Taking someone from the poorest slum in Brazil to Rodeo Drive and handing them $50 would by most measures be considered cruel. They could window shop all they wanted but never purchase any of the bright shiny baubles.

Gene Roddenberry explored these questions a bit in StarTrek. The Prime Directive wasn’t about protecting The Federation, it was about protecting less advanced cultures.

I suspect his thought on the matter may have been based in the cargo cults that sprang up during and after World War II.

Essentially you had an extremely disruptive event where native people were confronted with technology that was for all intents magic to them.

Items of great value were given to the locals by visitors descending from the sky. These items held little value to the visitors but took on great value and importance in the lives of the natives.

Then one day the visitors left. Taking with them the source of new gifts and wealth. So the natives built effigies of planes, hoping to entice the visitors into coming back.

It reads like the plot of an Ancient Aliens show but it happened.

Maybe the question is; “Have we technocrats been inadvertently cruel and thoughtless by bringing the internet to all parts of the world? Are we essentially saying ‘See, we have all this and you can’t?’”

We talk about the disruptive technologies that appear in our society and their effects. What effect do these disruptive technologies have on third world societies?

As an experiment we could shut down those parts of the internet that service Daesh then see what happens. If their violence ceases to spread then we might be on the right track.

These are questions I think are worth answering.

Fear not!

I’m not becoming a social justice warrior. I’ve already been there, done that, and donated the T-Shirt to the preservation of female unicorns society. They used it to light the bonfire that killed the last male unicorn. Now they’re asking for donations funding recombinant DNA research to preserve the unicorns!