Leadership

Sometimes you’re chosen through circumstance. Sometimes no one wants it and you’re better than nothing. Sometimes you run for the position. Running for leadership is no time to discuss complicated problems in any detail. You need a jazzy 30 second sound bite. It would also be nice if you had a catchy phrase that encapsulates something that is part of the voter’s being. For instance, "Family Values" is good. Everyone has "Family Values" and everyone can fill in their personal bias as to what it means. Leadership demands that you make promises. The promises have to be vague like "Improve your circumstances." It is asking for disaster to have a specific promise like "Lower your fuel bills". If you are someone who really likes to tempt the Fickle Finger Of Fate put a date on when this is to happen!! No one, not even psychics, can nail down future events to the minute!! The Fickle Finger Of Fate does exactly what she feels like doing, whenever, which means that the future events seen before an election are not exactly the future events after an election. Would you run a train off the tracks in order to keep a promise and by implication, also save your integrity??

Reality

We all have our own reality. Our individual realities are the product of all our life experiences from the day our soul is placed in our body. Each of us have reality challenges. Some are physical, some mental, and some external. Our reality interprets our world. In order to make sense of our surroundings, we interpret our world as a series of patterns. There are plenty of examples. For instance, we pattern groups of people, religions, cultures, and geographical locations. We bring our life’s experience to interpret these patterns. Each of us makes a judgment as to whether someone we meet is an acquaintance, friend or soulmate. Reality has 3 levels. The bottom reality involves the ego. Our 3 dimensional being, which we all eyeball in one another, has to be able to function efficiently and successfully or we are toast. This means that our ego or consciousness has to be in decent enough shape that we can cope successfully with randomness, order and chaos to achieve our life’s perceived aims and objectives. The next level is our life force. The life force is philosophically equivalent to our lower level ego but not exactly the same, but is, however, an integral part of our Soul. Our Soul’s interests are usually totally divergent from our ego’s interests because they both function in different environments. Our Soul is the main conduit between God and our 3 dimensional reality. Most people don’t have a clue about their Soul beyond being worried that they will lose it. How many times have you met someone and discovered that they were actually interesting once the ego was gently lifted out of the way??? Well, that’s their Soul talkin’!! The 3rd reality level is God. She really wants us to succeed so she helps us with our life force. Most people don’t avail themselves of God’s willingness to help them with their life force beyond asking her to give us something or remove us from whatever pot of water is boiling us at the moment. Poets, Romanticists, and the Inquisitive all have their reality. Their reality is "real" to them even though it may not be "real" to you. To have love you have to have compatibility with each other, with your interests, and lastly with your souls. This means that you have to match your "reality" with an outsider’s "reality". Do I exist??? Probably!! I think, therefore I am in my own reality!! Hopefully, you do too and are out there somewhere!!

Life Is (A) Stool

Life is built on 3 legs of (a) stool. The first being religion, the second science, and the third life force. Right now a lot of people are in a period of restlessness. This restlessness has a lot of specific names such as stress, me first philosophy, general dissatisfaction, etc.. Frequently, we get involved in power struggles, or mind games. If we win we feel better as we have absorbed part of someone else’s life force. If we lose, we feel like stool because they have absorbed some of our life force. It stands to reason that there is only so much life force floating around that we can absorb from someone else. The other problem is that we screw up our personal Time String which has to be strong to work efficiently. Our Time String brings good things into our life if we exclude the effects of randomness which hits everyone once in a while. The Time String also attracts events, usually in groups of 3, over relatively short periods of Time. The trick is to attract good events which is easier said than done. We all run into negativity all the time. Some people say we shouldn’t be doing this or that because we are wasting time. Others say they won’t read our blogs. Some criticize us for some other perceived shortcoming. My readers, this is all bullshit designed to absorb your life force. The trick is to turn the other cheek attached to your face rather than the one attached to your bum. In fact it is better to abandon all negative cheekiness!! If you add a smile during cheek turning this will drive them nuts overall and specifically / disorganize their life force / create anxiety / crisis of confidence in them / thereby getting them off your back!! If you adopt these principles then you will find that your life "is" rather than "isn’t"!!

One Of Life’s Little Conundrums

If God is all powerful and all seeing then she knows what is going to happen. If you agree with that statement then there isn’t any Free Will but there is Predestination. It follows that if there is Predestination then you and I cannot be held responsible for something over which we have no control / say in the matter. Consequently it would seem to me that all of us are going to heaven no matter what happens.

Love Triangle

The people in our lives can be classified in 3 categories, acquaintances, friends and soulmates. The acquaintances are those people that you perceive to have a personality about one or two notches above a brick wall. Friends come down to 3 basic subcategories, friend, friend with benefits, and any adjective friends. When we are young and filled with lots of hormones the territorial imperative tells us to reproduce our kind. This means young love is primarily a 3 dimensional experience which revolves around gorgeous bodies, smart cars, and financially rewarding jobs. There isn’t anything wrong with this setup except that it won’t last because of the trinity of randomness, order and chaos in our world. The presence of chaos means that no matter how much we try to bring order to our body it soon deteriorates beyond repair. There is also a possibility when you married your best guess, your souls were incompatible and you had no common long term interests. Time advances, your body start to go, sex disappears and to top it off your souls are acquaintances!! It is then that you realize that true love is based on an amalgamation of 3 things, people, common interests, and souls or in other words your garden variety love triangle!!

The Great Attractor

According to my religion, I’m made in God’s Image. If this is true, then both God and I loath doing a lot of unnecessary work. In my posting, "The Ms.’s Plan", I casually mentioned in passing that to keep things from becoming boring, she added randomness, order and chaos to spice up our life in this universe. Most of us have a conception of randomness because lots of things come out of the blue to whack us on the side of the head. Order is not too hard to understand, especially if you have been exposed to a mother that thinks cleanliness is close to godliness. Chaos is a lot harder to grasp. Normally, if something is chaotic, it means that something is on a road to rapidly becoming non-existent. It stands to reason that if God doesn’t want to do a lot of work yet wants us to last in this universe, then the universe has to have an Attractor to restore the Chaos to order. If you agree that this universe seems to be based on mathematics, then it is logical to assume that the Attractor has to be a number. The number has to be small because she also works on the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. My best guess is the number is 3. Let’s see. Love, to be eternal, has to be an amalgamation of 3 things, people, common interests, and souls. We have 3 dimensions, length, width and height. Three strikes and you’re out. Things, good or bad, usually happen in 3’s. Most discussions have 3 major points. Traffic lights usually have 3 lights, red for stop, yellow for caution and green for go. You are usually given 3 chances to accomplish something. Most people can only remember 3 things on a list. The triangle, consisting of 3 sides, is the strongest form of construction. The people you know in your life can be classified as acquaintances, friends and soulmates. Yes indeedy, it seems that the number 3 is The Great Attractor / The Great Attraction that holds my life together!!!

The Ms.’s Plan

When God created the inhabitants of this earth she had to give them something to do. She came up with the idea of having all the religions built on a book of core principles and illustrative stories to give the inhabitants an idea as to what was expected and to get them started. She decided to let the inhabitants work out the details for each specific life case and circumstance using the core principles and illustations as a guideline. This challenge to the inhabitants was the basis for the saying "The Devil is in the details.". Since travel and communication were limited in terms of time and space that could be covered at once, she was forced to organize circumstances in different parts of the world to get the word out through a variety of people and seemingly natural events in different places. To keep things from becoming boring, she added randomness, order and chaos as spices to the mix. God, besides having to give the inhabitants something to do, also had to put together systems so the universe would function efficiently. After Religion became chaotic as I outlined in "The Magic Box", the Scientific Method was invented and was based on the testing of an idea using methods that could be duplicated to come to a conclusion and then publishing that conclusion. This need to publish invented the concept of media because various people started to comment on the ideas being published and proven. They then extended this concept to anything that couldn’t necessarily be proven and might even be objectionable for one reason or another to some people. Finally, we reach blogging. For the first time in history, the ordinary people that aren’t going to be missed by the world at large when they die, can express their opinion worldwide for very little money. The ultimate Ms.’s Plan.

Creative Writing Hints

I was tooling around some blogs and noticed that a lot of people are going back to school. Here’s some first sentence hints to get them started writing winning stories.

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience. Perhaps like a guy who went blind because he used a pinhole box improperly to look at a solar eclipse. Now his sole objective in life is to visit every school to speak about the dangers of using pinhole boxes without reading the instructions first.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli and he was room-temperature beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as last night’s leftovers.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, something like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, similar to being on vacation in another city and discovering Jeopardy! comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like frying maggots in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a suburban neighbourhood with picket fences that resembled his ex-wife’s teeth.

16. John and Mary were like two hummingbirds who had never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, grandpa had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long that it had rusted shut.

19. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

20. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

21. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something similar.

22. The ballerina rose gracefully En Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

23. It was a family tradition, like chasing kids around with power tools.

24. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

25. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH conditioner.

26. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

27. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall

Truth Is Perception & Perception Is Truth

I’ve been watching the result of Hurricane Katrina on television. I don’t know who is right or wrong. All I can say is in the age of mass communication it comes down to "Truth Is Perception & Perception Is Truth". There once was a famous successful business leader who said to his executives: " I don’t care how you get there, or how hard you worked or what problems you had, I just want a successful bottom line on the due date." It seems to me that all I’m seeing on TV is a bunch of well bathed, coiffured people that aren’t sweaty and don’t stink telling me with a sincere, earnest face and some well chosen, soothing words that they are going as fast as they can and doing all they can do so in essence get off my back. I particularly like the ones that say "They are praying" and "Understand my pain". I sincerely hope that the ones that are praying have a better "in" with God than I as I’d sure like to see some results!! We are then shown a contrasting clip of hungry, sweaty people of color with no change of clothing existing in conditions which would lead to your and my immediate arrest and imprisonment if our farm animals were found in those conditions. I don’t know about you, but to me this type of leadership is not a confidence builder. I shutter to think that the world is relying on us as the last functional superpower to keep them out of trouble. To be fair, I can’t get too mad at our leaders because they are no more incompetent than anyone else in an executive position that can’t handle unusual problems in an efficient manner. For the first time in my life I fall down on my knees each night and thank God with all my heart that he loves us sufficiently to save us from our own stupidity!!

The Magic Box

Someone said somewhere that if something is technically ahead of our civilization then our civilization is going to think it is magic. When you think about it our civilization started out predominately believing in magic which really is a form of random thinking. I was taught that Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden Of Eden because of a failure to follow instructions. Once Adam and Eve were thrown out the thought crossed their minds that they better start following instructions. Since they didn’t have a clue about science, the only other alternative was to try to placate the person that threw them out of the garden. It was probably at this point that a division of labor / multitasking was developed as one person couldn’t do it all. Sex rears its’ ugly head and civilization starts to expand. Everyone had to be fed so classes of work was invented. Some classes had more value because those classes required more skills. Since our civilization has an element of randomness, sometimes things don’t go well as we all know. Since science didn’t exist, every right thinking person realized that the various gods were angry so one or several of them had to be placated depending on where you screwed up. The brighter lights realized that random god pleasing may not be all that efficient, so the better technics were codified or put in order. So now we have randomness and order in the system. The bright lights soon realized that if they were going to all this work then their rewards should be greater. They began to think why bother to clear it with the gods when they knew the answer. Next came the random idea that they could make exceptions to the rules. If someone, wanted to show their appreciation why not??? I have to stop now, there’s some chaotic pounding at the front door. I think it is trouble!! Now where did I put that Magic Box???