Security is mostly a superstition...

 It does not exist in nature, 

nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. 

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. 

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Helen Keller 

Found that over on Brainyquote.com 

Looks like an interesting site.  I'm gonna have to spend sometime over there.

Reading the news from Boston yesterday and today....

My first reaction was too wonder just what it is the PTB are trying to distract from.

Yes cynical, I know.  But I always wonder when things like this happen is it real, or is it advantageous?

With the evidence mounting from 9/11 I'm almost ready to switch from my stance of 'I don't think they engineered it, but they did allow it to happen' to 'shit yeah, they did engineer it.'

Watching the spike in fear and anger around the bombings in Boston, it makes me wonder...

This is really gonna heat up the debate on gun control, can already see that coming.  'Home Land Security' could get a big bump from this.  At a time when we keep loosing liberty without even realizing this could be a killing blow to actual personal liberty.  An argument for more unregulated surveillance.  More cameras, more searches....

Without knowing who planted them, it's hard to say which group of people is going to be on the receiving end of a whole lotta hate.  Cuz someone will be.  Someone always is.

I'm sure the radical religious right will find some way of blaming gays and undocumented immigrants...

The initial out pouring of grief and condolences and support, is wonderful to see.

But it always gives way to an uglier side of human nature.

Which leads to musing on human nature...  

Which ricochets off in several directions....

And today I'm coming back to the question of safety.

And the illusion of safety the average American lives in.

In this country we actually think of death as a risk.  As something that can be avoided.

The facts of the matter are that everybody dies.  You are never really safe.

And all the cameras, searches, surveillance, and guns in the universe won't change that.

So, you insure that you have enough ammo to ward off a small army, to keep you safe and healthy....

But what about that misstep off the ladder?

Or the tornado?

Or the out of control bus?

Or the slip in the shower?

Or the infected tick?

The ways and means of our ends are as many and varied as we are.  You can't foresee every eventuality.  You can't assure the number of your days.

You are never safe.

Killing and bombing will never make you safe.

Sitting somewhere doing absolutely nothing will not make you safe.

Which explains the rate of anxiety disorders....

So how do we deal with this?

My approach is to lighten up and stop worrying about it.

I'm not advocating a wholesale abandonment of safety precautions here.  While you can never be totally safe, you can be safer, and there is the possibility of being unsafe, which should be avoided, if at all possible...

But, we are expected to plan for the future, invest for retirement, and never even consider the fact that we might not get there.  The illusional obsession of the Dark Ages was living this life for the next.  The illusional obsession of our age is living this life for later.

I think we need to start living our lives for this one, here and now.  For the moment.

And consider, each hour that you spend slaving away at your job, is a gamble that you make it to the next payday.  Each moment you don't spend with a loved one is a gamble that you'll get another.  Each time you put something off is a gamble that you'll have the opportunity to do it ever again.

I think it's time that we all agree to flip the saying 'time is money' to 'money is time', and get our priorities straight.  I think we all need to realize that another second of our lives is not guaranteed and start seriously thinking about how we want to 'spend' our time.

We need to stop obsessing about the length of years and be more aware of the quality of the many moments.  The world would be a lot better off if we all concentrated on Being, rather than on being safe.

My thoughts and good wishes are in Boston, with the victims and families.

Time keeps on slipping.....

I took today off to file taxes.
I have achieved my goal for the day.
Wooo Hooo, I made a whole 11,000 bucks working my ass off last year!!
Wow, really the best I can say for last year is, I survived.

Archon 35

While procrastinating even further I finished rebuilding the Archon 35 album.  I haven't been watching these things and somewhere in one of the many crashes and restarts and clearing outs the file got deleted.  So I finished rebuilding it.
I really hate trying to redo something.  I don't do well with recreating something like that.  It really doesn't feel right, it just doesn't flow.
But on rare occasions it does get done.

And for added time wasting value I rebuilt the album for Archon 34 as well.  This was somewhere between rebuilding and building.  I up loaded the pictures to Facebook, but this is the first time they've been on Picasa.  I even made a title page for it and everything...

Archon 34

I realized something the other day.
I should have been born British.  I have an affinity for GB.  I like their TV and tea and I love the country side and the small towns.  Would love to live in Glenbogle, Market Shipborough, or Port Wenn.  I make a mean bangers & mash.
And I was born in the year of The Doctor.  I'm turning 50 the same year The Doctor is.
From the chatter on the FB Archon board this is gonna be The Doctor's year.
The costume possibilities are endless...

 In the past I have considered Novice Hame....
Come on, Cat Nuns with guns, can you get better than that?

I have the pieces from the failed attempt at Idris....

Sarah Jane's Andy Pandy outfit would be fairly easy to do....

Madam Vastra is a challenge with several options....

There's Time Lords old and new....

Donna Noble would be fairly easy to do and has options, including a wedding gown....

Lot's of possibilities....
I really wanna go to Con this year.

Some Sunday Morning....

Now, I remember, exactly, why I didn't blog much last year.
It's adictive and time consuming....
I have actual work to do and I'm sitting here listening to the thunder and watching the snow, (Yes, we have thunder snow.) and typing and playing with the camera...



That's Riley being his cute self and the view out the back door at about 9:30...

Yes, I started this yesterday morning.  I had a plan...
And we all know how that works.
I was gonna take some pictures, and then get the work done.
Cuz as I said, I had serious work to do.
I'm working as a data collector for a retail intelligence firm.

Yes, I'm an economic spy.

See, I just did it again! I got a notion about a graphic.

  

So I had to go dig it out and edit it...

I had 3 jobs last week that were kinda F.U.B.A.R ed and  I still had had 2 of them to clean up.  It was about 4 hours of work and I was gonna get done then relax.

And well....
Oooooh Shiny and.....



So I started playing with the video on the camera, and I wanted to edit some of the footage....
 But I had to get a program for that...
And what should have been a reasonable blog entry got thrown out in the snow and I didn't finish work until about 9PM last night.
And what do I have to show for the whole day?
Well, I've got $40 dollars on the next paycheck ($10 of which will be gone before I even see it.), a whole bunch of cigarettes that I've already smoked (I buy tobacco and tubes now and make my own, saves a lot of money, takes a lot of time.), this post, which isn't finished and....



And that was Monday. This is Thursday.
The train went waaay of the tracks again.
Usually when this happens I just abandon the draft and move along, but I've got a lot of time invested here.
Monday I took the day. I had stuff I wanted to get done around the house....
Then I decided to finish this post. But I wanted to see if I could find a better program...
Which involved updating Windows and that crashed the computer....
And after I got Max up and running again at four in the afternoon my whole day off was shot to hell and gone and still had stuff to get done around the house.
I worked Tuesday and Wednesday. I've got today off and I have stuff I want to do around the house.
Why am I back for another go, I really wonder.
But I want to start using the video on the camera. I've got ideas to play with and need to figure out a less time consuming way to deal with them, so....
The whole idea Sunday was to do a video log of the snowstorm. I took the video and I'm gonna finish this if it kills me....


OK, let's play I surrender dear.  I've been screwing around trying to get the rest of the clips into this post for over an hour.  I'm done.  I've gotta work today and I have the new episode of Doctor Who waiting for me... 
I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or Max is just too old and slow to deal with it.
I keep loosing the embed code for the video.
So I'm done.  I'll mess around with all this some other time....

Pay no attention….

Have you ever stepped back stage?

Even if all you’ve ever done is a grade school performance you should be aware of the concept that all things have a hidden aspect, something that’s outta sight

And outta sight is outta mind…

The most obvious example is the theater with its proscenium arch and curtain.  What you see in front of the curtain isn’t even half of what is going on in that space, at that moment.  I’ve been on the stage, behind the curtain, in the dressing room, in the light booth, and out front working the house.  While you are, hopefully, comfortably seated and enjoying the performance, people are scurrying all around you managing your encounter, and the ones you see aren’t all the people involved in crafting your experience.  People who are not even present at the moment, had influence and input into your perception.  What you see is just the first ripple of the moment.  This is even truer for film than stage.

Think of the cooking show that takes you into the kitchen, the ‘back stage’ of the restaurant, and then realize that has a whole nother back stage.

What you see is never all that is there.

When you look at another person, do you see their brain, heart, guts?

No, if the person is alive and healthy, you don’t see all that.  You just accept that’s all there, cuz you’d really rather not see all that, cuz if you do see all that, then there’s something wrong….

OK, back track from the wild tangent, and think about all the back stages there are in real life.

And then ask yourself why you think you know who is really running your life?

The republicans and the democrats and the rabid right nut jobs are all actors.  They are the show, what’s in front of the curtain.  Let’s think about the back stage.  Let’s consider how much time, energy, and money is being put into this show, and ask, who’s the director? Writer? Producer?

In theater and film you get a list of cast and crew.  Where’s the crew list for modern politics?

Just who is it that is running this show?

I’d like to know.  Cuz they are really screwing things up.

We, the people of the planet, have the resources and ability to provide a comfortable and sustainable life for most everybody on the planet.

So why aren’t we?

Why do we have people starving?  Why is anybody living homeless?  Why are people dying from treatable illness?  Why is money always the greatest public concern?

Do we really have to bomb people into the stoneage to be safe?

I'd be willing to bet that if most people had enough to eat and a comfortable place to live, they wouldn't be so interested in taking things away form someone else.

Why do some people get fifty rooms all to themselves while someone else is living in a card board box?

If we live in a free market economy, why are we subsidizing any business?  What, exactly, happened to survival of the fittest?  How did we get anything that's too big to fail in the first place?

It's time for average people around the world to wake up and start demanding answers.

It's time to demand to be allowed back stage.

Off Grid....

Originally meant to be off the power grid, independent of the commercial power supply.

I should probably clarify here and now that I am anti, modern corporate start.  There are some things that should be entirely divorced from the profit motivation.  I think that anything that affects the health and welfare of just about everybody in society should defiantly be divorced from the motive of profit.  Power, water, healthcare, sanitation, safety, none of these should be run by the bottom line.  There should be no such thing as a for profit prison.  That’s nothing but a recipe for oppression.  I am firmly convinced that the drive for profit does nothing but destroy the common good.  The drive for profit will kill the last animal, chop the last tree, and shit in the last puddle of clean water.

The question that we all need to answer individually is, do we really want to go there?

If you really don’t want to live in an industrial wasteland, it is time to change the style that we are accustomed to.

Which brings us back to Off Grid, and its meaning, and how that meaning has changed, and how it will continue to change, cuz now, when you say Off Grid, it conjures the notion of camping in the woods with the arsenal of a small army and a 100 year supply of toilette paper.

And I think it is so much more than that.

The Grid is the playing board, The Grid is the base of the game, and unless you are camping in the woods with the 100 year supply of toilette paper, getting your water from a well or stream, hunting your own food, making your own cloths from their skins, and burying your own shit, you are on the board to some degree or another.

So how do you get off that Grid and still maintain some semblance of the life you know and love?

 

I think that instead of getting off The Grid, we need to start changing The Grid.

Cuz we need some kind of Grid, some kind of structure to our society.

 

And we need to fully realize that we control The Grid, not the other way around.  Just because this is the only thing you know, doesn't mean that something else isn't possible, and even preferable.

Just as we can choose to go play Uno or Candy Land when the Risk and Monopoly games are drawing to a close, we can choose the structure of the next Grid.

At this moment in time we are facing a game changer on a world scale.  We can choose to remain slaves to the corporate state, and let them dictate where and how we live.  Or we can quit playing their game, and start our own game.

And, at this point, I'll ask you to pause and consider:  Think about who exactly it is that does play Monopoly and Risk to the bitter, one person controls everything, end.  In my personal experience it's never been my best friends, my most considerate friends.  It's generally been the most aggressive and selfish of our group.

One of the things that I like the least about the modern corporate state is that it rewards, praises, and encourages the most negative of human nature and behavior. 

I want to stop playing their game.

I want to get off the old Grid and find a new one.

And I don’t think I’m alone in this longing for a better way.

I have few clues how to achieve my aim.  But I’ve gotta at least try.

New world order….

It’s time for one. 

We’re a little past the first decade of a new century, which has the bonus feature of a new millennium.  Weather we see or admit it, things are changing, in big ways.

It is seriously time for the human race to start adapting.

It is time for us monkeys as a collective whole to realize that we are messing with things that we don’t fully understand.  It’s time for all of us to realize that if we push the planet too far out of balance, we die, and mother earth comes back with a shiny new set of inhabitants.

And they don’t have to be as smart as we, supposedly, are to be ‘successful’.

Most of us are very familiar with two models of the modern corporate state, Monopoly and Risk.  Monopoly was designed to be a model of Capitalism, and it is a perfect model.  Risk is, of course, the game of world domination.   Most of us know how these games end.

Now I ask you, when was the last time you played either of these games to the end?

How many times in your life have you played either of these games to the bitter end?

Most of us quit long before the end, when it stops being fun.

What is going on in the world around us, right now, are global games of Monopoly and Risk, reaching the end of the fun.

Do we all really want to play to the bitter end?

It really is time for all of us to start thinking about a new world order, a new game to play.

I’m kinda partial to Candy Land, myself…

But seriously, I’ve been considering my personal future.  It’s not a pretty sight.

I don’t make much money.  I don’t really see that changing any time soon.  I live alone and that’s not a good thing, it gets even less of a good thing with each passing year.  (The stats on old people living alone are not good.)  I’m getting older.

For any hope of a decent retirement I need to change something.

I don’t want to play Monopoly and Risk for the rest of my life.

I’ve talked with many people about getting off the grid and living a different kind of life.  It’s time to find a new game.

Slip sliding away....

Wow, for me, 2012 is going down as a lost year.  Looking back on it I didn't really do too much in 2012, only one post for the whole year and not many pictures....  Which is telling for me.  I play with my camera a lot,.  09, 10, & 11 have at least 2 uploads from the camera every month.  2012 there's only 8 uploads for the entire year.
What I did in 2012 was work.  I worked for 4 different companies in 2012, still work for 2 of them.  Just the thought of doing the taxes hurts my head.  I worked a lot of hours in 2012 and the best I can say for the year is, I survived.  It wasn't a good year, filled with all sorts of minor disasters that had to be dealt with.
Sitting here, now, I am awed how an entire year can slip away.
Back in the fall of '11 when M passed, I lost Anya and Bird so close together....
I lost ambition or motivation...  Not quite sure what.  I meant to keep blogging.  I had things I wanted to write about.  I had ideas that I wanted to work on and things I wanted to do.  But all that got lost in the daily shuffle.
Head down, with all its implications and metaphors intact, I plowed through each job, each accident and occurrence, each day...  And I made it to the end and onto the beginning of the next.
And the wheel turns....
Cuz what has brought me back to reflection is Asheron's passing.  Strange that death triggers the swing on both sides.
Sorting through the pictures, trying to find the last ones taken of him....

Taken in March 2012.  The weather outside was frightful and Ash spent sometime inside.

I realized how few there are for 2012.
Which made think about the year.
Which has made me think.....

Still too early to tell if 2013 will be any better.  We'll have to wait and see.