Pale Half Moon

The other night as I was driving home from work I noticed the moon had not risen yet, and I had realized that I hadn’t seen the moon during the day in a long time. I don’t remember the last time. When I was a kid I remember looking up at the pale half moon in the blue afternoon sky and just staring at it for the longest time. I don’t remember what I was thinking, perhaps just musing over the raw possibilities of that moon in that sky.

In the early days of intelligent life I can imagine primordial man looking up at that moon must have wondered what it was all about. I wonder if the first person that realized the possibility of it being another planet wondered if other people were living on it. I wonder if they pondered the idea that there was somebody out there looking back at them. I wonder if that thought made them uncomfortable or if they were happy that there might be someone up there.

Today we have evidence of other planets orbiting distant stars, we even have pictures of large planets around distant stars. I can stand in the field at night, and look up at the stars and ask the same questions, ponder the same things, wonder what it all means.

I can look to the heavens, to the world around me, to my friends, my family, and the people I love. I ask all manner of questions, some I’ll find answers too, some not. Some questions are so complex, finding answers in a single lifetime is nearly impossible. And finally some answers I can’t find “out there,” some I can only find inside me.

But I can still look up at the night sky, and feel, with almost absolute certainty, that there is someone out there looking back at me, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Bridge

Since this space does not provide a source of income for me, and I’m not under any external pressure to produce content, blogging is primarily an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual outlet for the debris of my consciousness. Occasionally, this means that when I temporarily find safe harbor in some other venture, I will vanish from this place for a period of days, weeks, and even months.

During this away time I’ll often be engaged in some other task and have a thought that I want to expand and flush out. In the moment I don’t often have the capacity to write down what I’m thinking, so I don’t often return to those lines of thought. But sometimes the kernel of the idea sticks with me and I have to sit down and reprocess the kernel to find the truth that I stumbled upon.

This week’s kernel was about healing, but I can’t remember where I went when I originally processed the idea. I need to get better at taking notes, or maybe not have so many thoughts…

See You Later Alligator

What happens to our dreams? When we are children we dream of becoming, we dream of things we do not know, and we dream about who we’re going to be. But somewhere along the way those dreams fade away. Some times they are replaced, sometimes rewritten, sometimes just forgotten like a toy dropped behind the couch.

And then there are those dreams that are so beautiful we can’t wake up from them. They trap us at a point in time where we spin our wheels in the mud sliding sideways but never moving forward. My dreamer is a 5-year-old boy, from a quarter century ago, and the dream is a girl named Karen. Facts are few and far between, just the memories of a five-year-old, which are as ephemeral as a scent on the wind. I remember a classroom, and a poster we made as a get-well gift because she had an eye infection. I don’t remember her face, or the sound of her voice, or anything that would physically define her. I remember a catchphrase that we would say on parting, one of us would say, “see ya later alligator,” and the other would respond, “after while crocodile.” I don’t remember why she’s stuck in my head these last 25 years.

Other people, even friends and family, from before that time and after, are thought about rarely, or forgotten entirely, but she resurfaces every couple of weeks. Sometimes it’s just a passing thought, sometimes I stop and think about the mystery. Perhaps one day the mystery will be solved, perhaps I’ll wake up from that dream. I know that when I do wake up, I’ll smile and whisper, “after while crocodile.”

Second Star

It seems that the simplest questions may have the most profoundly deep answers. My own private journey started with a simple question, “If you could have anything, what would you want?” The instinctual, perpetually 17-year-old, part of my brain started running through a list of names before I said “Ein minuten bitte!” All those women, they’re fine and all, but there must be some deeper reason for the list, a truer answer to the question. Companionship maybe, or perhaps something more basic, like love.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple though, I don’t feel like I’m missing something major in the “love” department. Sure no girlfriend to speak of, but that is more of a work in progress, journey through life sort of thing. There are no glaring neon signs pointing to that particular void.

“If you could have anything, what would you want?” Sure, there are physical things, cars, houses, money, and the intangible, fame, prestige, power, but there is a root desire that took me quite a while to puzzle out. Freedom. Not freedom from responsibility, because in the end I set my own responsible standards, but freedom from social constraints. Freedom to me is, contributing to society, in a way that fulfils me. I want, and mostly have, a job that I love, working with people that I love, that challenges me, but doesn’t frustrate me all the time, and provides for life’s necessities. But more than that I want to be able to express myself without the social trappings of a politically correct world, instead we are all judged against what is considered “normal”.

The problem is, I don’t think a society that accepts ideas without prejudice would work, at least not for the current state of human evolution. To much of our idea intake has to be filtered by personal experience, otherwise we would just be flooded with sensation. If you think TV, radio, the internet, and everything provides too much information flow now, think about not being able to filter out what doesn’t interest you. Think about having to consider every idea before moving on to the next. The world would grind to a halt while we all process everything that comes our way. What I would like is to be free of the more visceral responses, the near over-reactions to stimuli we disagree with. I think that’s a much more manageable goal, a simpler freedom. The freedom to choose without worrying about what the rest of the world will think, to be inquisitive, without prejudice. A sort of Neverland utopia.

Rules Boundaries Limitations

I was called into work tonight to fix a problem with one of the graphics computers, and since it was a quick fix, and it is such a beautiful evening I thought I’d go for a drive. I ended up turning north out of the station parking lot and just kept going. I’ve had in mind for some time that I should head out to the county line, because I haven’t been outside this county for more than half a year. In fact, if the world was 20 square mile chunk of land, I could have been living happily in it for the past six months. So I drove north today, right up to the county line, and stopped short.

In a few weeks I’m going to Green Bay to visit friends, which means I’ll definitely be leaving the county. Crossing the border will involve no fanfare, and I probably won’t even think about it. But today, for whatever reason, that imaginary line in the dirt had significance. There were no repercussions for crossing it, or not crossing it, but in my mind the self imposed limitation made me pause. Walking right up and touching that boundary, but choosing not to cross it freed me in some small way. The drive up was slow, aimless, and whimsical. The drive back was energetic, exuberant, and reckless. In a few weeks I’ll cross that line without a second thought, today I’m at home in a box of my own making.

Heads Up

I’ve been toying around with the idea of corruption through power. In popular media we often see story lines where a person is gifted power, or money, and through the course of the story line the person alienates friends and is “changed”. But I’ve been thinking that the idea is wrong, that power frees people up to be the person they always were, frees them from responsibility for their actions, and frees them from consequences. The only true saints in this world are those that are good when there are no consequences for acting bad, and responsibility is the only thing that truly changes people.

This line of thinking almost always leads me to one of two walls, the first exists only in the fictional part of my brain, and the second exists where I breathe. For about 15 years I’ve had a character in my head that hasn’t made a successful transition to print. He’s just a guy that is gifted with ultimate power, and I’ve been wrestling with how he deals with the world once he realizes that his life no longer has limits. I am close to nailing his path down, or at least the major stops along the way, but I’m not sure what the final destination will be, I’m stuck not knowing how to become wise.

The second log jam occurs at the junction of teacher and pupil. A student studies for a period of time, and the teacher for a while can hold a students hand, can be a reliable fall back, but eventually the student has to learn to stand on their own, to be responsible on their own, to own their actions. Mostly, the teacher has to provide confidence to the pupil, until the student is confident enough to step out on their own. Using the metaphor of teaching a child how to ride a bike, the child has to be confident that they can stay up without their parents hand on the seat holding them up. But if the situation is modified, instead of teacher and pupil, think more along the line of two friends.

Say I have a friend who is bright and capable, someone who could lead, and lead in the right direction. But my friend doesn’t want the responsibility, or more accurately, is afraid they will mishandle the power, they are afraid of making mistakes. How does a person push an equal, or even a superior, to step up? Especially if the friend has been given the power but they have thus far abdicated, sat on the sidelines, trying not to be noticed, kept their head down?

Say Uncle

He slouches against the bar
small talking the ‘tender
he’s been alone, so alone
but he makes excuses
not to be with her
it’s too noisy
too busy
too smoky
but the truth is
he is too comfortable
too unwilling to take a chance
too scared to fail
so he slouches against the bar
and cries in his head
and sighs in his beer
and misses her