Technicalia, I am getting dizzy

Lately I have either signs of dimentia or confusion from the dizzying changes in technicalia. Seems every day there is some new online social club you can join-Plaxo, Facebook, Twitter, et al. Twitter lets you put in 140 characters as a message to an expanding list of "followers" you generate to read that brief concept. And reading them is like trying to decipher a foreign tongue. But there are many interesting things to chase down and surf from those little snippets of data--they refer you to exotic or previously unknown sites full of intereseting data that may or maYy not have practical purpose. I find myself wasting time. However, ifyou have half million followers, as some actually have, you can promote something to that group reading your little pieces of data, and my friend Laura Sherman who has "Your Chess Coach", teaching kids and adults to play (she is a master herself) has reached and developed a chess public through Twitter. It has practical uses. But how do you keep up?

Talking to a buddy yesterday in the Qual section of the Flag AO, who queried why kids go around texting, buried in their cell phones. I ventured that they were wanting to be acknowledged, wanting to be assured that they exist in this rapidly moving world where people are piling up one on top of the other and individuality is dying in a grossly accelerated homogenization of the species. They are crying out to be acknowledged for themselves and not being able to "be" they are "doing." Inasmuch as the elements of life are "be" "do" and "have"they can't achieve the be. You have to decide what to be so you can be that and then do the things that that beingness is so you then can have the things that the beingness wants and achieves through doingness to get it. But to do that, you have to back in, learning what you want to Have first, to find what you need to do to be that. So these kids are craving beingness, but seem to be sucked up in a technical spiral like my character in my novel Nimrod's Peril---the N'aa'maan, who lives for information, data, thinking of it is food, rather than developing spiritually he just gets more data, not knowing that knowledge is not data, but certainty. Seeking certainty, these kids are texting texting texting. Doing, doing doing.

Angel on a Harley

How do you forget when you have been within someone's universe and you wanted to stay, but then it is gone? How do you stop wanting to reach and find that being and hold for as long as you can? Do you ever stop the longing, the intense aesthetic dream that may not have ever been, but you know it was real--real enough to create angst from its absence? She is gone,but you know you will see her again someday, and maybe even make it become real, as impossible as it may seem, but you know it may leave you bereft again for it still may be as tentative as the angel she seemed to be. This thing called love. This intensity of admiration. This obsession. This phantom of delight. This poem is dedicated to her, wherever she is, if she is real. Was she real? Or was our joining an ephemirality only, as tenuous as the fog that permeated my being that day, or was it months, years?

Angel on a Harley

Her eyes told me that there was a world beyond mortal sight.
Then I saw the shimmering moonlight that was her hair,
All a tumble
With waterfalls and birdsong
that I could hear across the rift of our universes.
Her gossamer blue wings iridesced in and out of my vision.
And there was a hint of lilac
And something else
Undefinable, like the smell of wonder.

She revved her Harley, just feet away from my open window at the stop light.
She looked into my mind and smiled a smile that sucked me right out of my
Head and smacked me against the wall that separated our worlds.
She laughed.
The very air became her joyful laughter,
Blessed
As in kissed
Made love to
She let me in and I soared
United
For that sparking instant
In a joining I had always known was possible.
I knew then that a moment could be a lifetime
And it might be enough,
But it was not enough,
Just to know.

The light changed.
She fled away.
Weaving through traffic.
I couldn’t catch her.
The last I saw was her red taillight dropping over the other side
Of the overpass a quarter mile ahead.
I was bereft.
I am still trying to catch my breath.
After seeing an angel on US 19.
I wonder if I was dreaming.
I want to go to heaven if that is where she is.
Or get a fast Harley and catch her..

Facebook, what is it really?

As Alice's White Queen said, "I am trying to believe three impossible things before breakfast."

It is getting curiouser and curiouser.

I have asked about Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo and the other seemingly innocuous social type internet programs---and who is really behind them, what do they have to gain, do they harvest information about the members, is it all legit? I sniffed a sinister origin, and have asked many friends what they think and nobody seems to worry or even wonder about what comes their way on the net when asked to join or have been to confirm that Joe Blow wants to be a friend. Who can resist being a friend?  Watch this little video below and if true will answer this question.  What the hell, I am sure "they" have a dossier on me and have had one for a long time for I have been a rather mellow dissident and always have been a relatively harmless question-asker who nobody really should worry about.

Here’s a relevant video. I haven’t Snoped it yet, but I don’t always trust Snopes. This video answers my paranoia.

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/603.html

With satellites that can track your every move, read the time on your wristwatch from miles above the earth, with tv cameras on street corners in major cities, with social security numbers, economic stress, environmental threats and terrorists,  the coming identity card and even chip implants to assure you of your security and well being, we are already in a kind of cyber prison with invisible but impenetrable walls. We can run but we cannot hide any more. 

But we must remind ourselves that we are immortal, eternal spiritual beings temporarily housed and even warehoused in this transportation and communication system of flesh that we are being more and more convinced is ourselves.  This is a lie. We have been and are being implanted by electronic and ideas jammed in our heads through all the media and TV every day that we are weak and nothing, and have to worry about all this, but now our big brother is going to take care of us. where is this going?  I think you thinkers know.  Nowhere good. So rather than leave you with this doom message, which I have sworn never to do, I want you to know there is a way.  Know thyself for who and what you are.  Never think you are what they say you are or have become. You are your best friend. You are more powerful and good and greater than anyone every allowed you to think you are, and you, with your friends, can come together and defeat this oncoming blight by simply knowing who you are and your power is without limitation.  "They" are cowards, hiding behind lies and terrified of you. Don't be fooled.  Together, believing in ourselves and not in the lies that they want us to believe, we can kick their ass.

Lovingly

LDSledge
Maverick