The Emerald Rose

         Been one of those weeks so far. But then again, most of them are.

        I started thinking about the past few years and the advances and all in the world, technology, medicine, and just life in general. We have come light years in all of those areas, …….so why do I feel like a little kid on the old playground ride we used to call the “whirlly gig thing”? (That’s the big round, maybe six or eight feet across platform with like “hold on bars” on it that just goes round and round and round.) As a kid you tried to see how fast you could make it go and then hold on for dear life as the centrifugal force tried to throw you off. Last man holding on was the winner. In other words going around in a circle so fast that everything blurred, so tight a circle you were dizzy to the extreme of almost, note I said almost, throwing up. And even if you did jump off you would be staggering around for a while trying to regain your balance and all.

        Well that’s what life seems to be coming to all around us. In one respect just having a little cabin in the woods on a lake or a pond, the only noise being the birds chirping, and the limbs rustling in the breeze seems like Nirvana these days.

        As a kid going anywhere was pretty easy, throw some clothes in the suitcase, check the wallet, and just go. Now a days it takes a trip-planner and checklists as long as your arm just to begin to think about getting away for a few days of solitude. And even then how much real solitude? And we’ve done it to ourselves!!

      The idea of not having my Blackberry, or Droid,, and worse yet no signal for either, nor any e-mail, or even an occasional telephone call is so totally frightening it scares even me! I have a ‘mini’ 9″ computer, a 15″ laptop, and my Blackberry and my Droid,…….talk about a sickness. They are almost my security blanket for life. But I’m not totally dependant on high tech. I can go two or three days without my Bluetooth wireless headset for remote, and hands free calls. Why hell I’m more afraid of running out of battery power for my iPod when I go away, so my “bag of snakes” (a/k/a portable charger units and wires) all go with me as well. And if you really want to see panic stricken you ought to see me if I am somewhere and happen to glance at the remaining battery level in my B’berry or Droid and find it is less than 25%! I start assessing the nearest place to go where I could buy a recharging unit for it, you know the kind that plug into the cigarette lighter (no there is a woolly mammoth in car design these days) with the springy little cord to your phone. (Thank God they have pretty much standardized the plug types now on all these items!)

           I used to meditate a bit, nothing formal mind you. In fact, when I moved here to Florida to start anew about 14 years ago, I actually tracked down a couple that were accredited teachers of Transcendental Meditation. We had a great chat they were friendly, relaxed, so centered, etc., in short everything I was looking to achieve with meditation. It went very well until they told me the price was $2500 to teach me, and that they could not budge from that price. Sooooooo, back to ambient music and try from there to get centered.

          I can’t understand, again unless I am either so far advanced (not) or so omnipotent with wisdom and thought, (double not), why we don’t recognize this cancer that is eating our minds alive called “progress”! Remember that ad for the “Hulu” web site or whatever it was where you could sit mindlessly 24/7/365 watching old TV programs and accomplish nothing whatsoever. The “pitch guy” in the commercial gently talked about it and how “Hulu” was going to reduce your mind to a bubbling mass of protoplasm which he, as a real alien, would then suck out through your ear and leave you a wasted husk of a body. IT’S HERE NOW, THEY ARE ALREADY DOING IT!!!!! We are indeed becoming mindless.

         Ok I’m an old fart but ask me if I really care why my daughter-in-law spends at least six facebook entries a day musing over where to go to lunch and dinner, and breakfast tomorrow morning? And it’s not just her! That is the real scary part, it’s what they fondly call “social networking”. There is a boatload of those type of things and they are all competing like mad to capture minds and bodies. I could probably” tweet”, “link in” or whatever the others are, with 140 characters of useless information to more people in five minutes than provide a tad of brain fodder to ten people. (ADD Attention Deficit Disorder is the next form of the “Black Plauge” consuming today’s world. )

       But ask me if I’m immune to it? Hell no, it’s along the lines of survival of the fittest, “eat or be eaten”, “dog eat dog” . It’s not that I want to, but if I don’t where will I be in a month? Kids don’t call home anymore, even on the holidays and birthdays, they will e-mail you  or “tweet” you after their personal Social Networking Tool tells them it is your birthday. No lie!!

         When I got my droid the computer took over, it started linking crap all over my machine, my twitter, my facebook, my linked in, my u-tube, my contacts or what us old farts used to call our “address book”, and the next thing you know it’s telling me that next Thursday is Henry Davis Birthday (who the hell is Henry Davis?)

          What I also have determined is that our basic eye hand coordination skills are in severe decline. Just check out handwriting. Look at notes and things, even that which intelligent folks are using. Used to be only Doctors wrote totally illegible, but now? Man it’s every one. And they make up their own words, abbreviations, and anything else they want to do. The rules of grammar are simply a book used to hold the front door open for the cat to come and go.

          (SIGH!) All I really wanted is a little peace and quiet and an occasional brief respite to contemplate the beauty and awe that we live in on this earth. The sound, or actually lack of sound when you are on a downwind reach in a sailboat where the only sound is the water lapping the bow as she cuts through the water moving at the same speed as the wind creating nothingness. The beauty of just lying quietly and watching the clouds in the sky on a summer day, imagining what you will with what you see. Closing you  eyes and taking a deep breath of the fresh air, or the wonderful smells that used to emanate from the local bakery, or steakhouse roof vent.

        Oh well back to the mundane insanity we call life, or as a new blog I’m contemplating writing will be called “Life,….man’s unfinished symphony.”

  -30-

      Also beginning with this blog entry I am going to put a favorite or meaningful quote for all to ponder as they move through the day,….enjoy

“Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”

                                                                                                                 – Carl Sandburg