Tag: change

Monday’s Theme Music

I like songs about change. This particular song, “Change,” by Blind Melon, has lyrics that cling to my dreamer’s mind.

So I want to write my words on the face of today.

And then they’ll paint it

And oh as I fade away,

They’ll all look at me and they’ll say,

Hey look at him and where he is these days.

When life is hard, you have to change.

I heard the song the year it was released. I thought the lyrics haunts the shadows of our existence. We strive to live, and some attempt to make a difference, but we’re such small drops of beings in such a huge ocean of beings. The song’s lyrics seemed sharp as volcanic rocks when Shannon Hoon, the group’s singer, died three years later. He’d been fighting addictions and substance abuse. He had to change, but couldn’t. Happens to a lot of us.
In the era of the Internet of Things, change is a speeding variable to modern life. See an actor and wonder, like the lyrics, where is he/she these days? To the Google machine to see. No, they’re not dead; they just faded away.
0

Saturday’s Theme Music

I’ve always enjoyed the domestic image this song, “Our House,” produces. Whoever wrote it was looking back on a working class household. The song was released in 1982. Hearing the lyrics, I wonder how much of it would be written differently. Would Dad still put on his Sunday best? Does Mother still iron his shirt before he goes to work?

Something to think about.

1

The Cusp of Revolutions

I’m pretty excited this morning. Awoke in that state. I owe this excitement to a teenage woman.

I didn’t meet her, but I saw and listened to her. It was during our weekly beer meeting of the BoBs, the pretentious and silly name of our group, “Brains on Beers”. It’s actually a group of retired doctors, scientists, engineers, professors, etc, that meet to have a beer each week and talk. We mostly talk about science, technology, politics, and beer.

We also collect and donate money to buy materials to help local schools and their STEM educational programs. One of the projects we support is the southern Oregon robotics team. The teenager was with that group when four of them came to us to pitch their project for a donation.

An adult leader and three local high school students were making the pitch. Christina, the young woman that I found so inspiring. She loves science. My sense, from listening to her, is that she loves life, knowledge, and learning. Her dream is to join Space X and go into space and colonize other places. Her enthusiasm was like gulping a dozen shots of espresso at once. It was beautiful to behold.

Her comments and enthusiasm trickled into my thinking streams. Eventually, a week later, thoughts came together and bubbled up from my subconscious thinking, and I realized, we’re on a cusp of a revolution.

No, make that revolutions.

People feel and see them coming. That scares and intimidates them. Many people dislike change, or are uncomfortable with change. I’m not too good with it, myself. Processing change requires time and energy. I often feel like I lack enough of either, and just want to climb into bed and cover my head.

Yet, I could see the revolutions coming so clearly in my thoughts this morning as I contemplated my fading dreams. I saw at least another industrial revolution as we move away from fossil fuels and introduce more robotics and automation.

We’re undergoing an information revolution right now. How we acquire, process, and spread information has evolved, and that evolution is speeding up. To combat it, guerrilla warfare comprising of false information and false equivalencies have been

We’re undergoing gender revolutions, and revolutions that are overturning Business As Usual. Sexual assaults, bigotry, and prejudice are being exposed. In a sense, we needed the Trump Administration, because its existence turned on the lights, revealing the ugliness that we’ve institutionalize and accepted as normal and standard.

Of course, the technological and digital revolutions are underway, as well. These are leading to social and cultural revolutions. These revolutions will cause yet greater economic and political revolutions. The great democratic revolution will itself undergo another revolution because the representative form of government, with its elections that establish a ruling class, has been outgrown. So have nation states, as we conceive of ourselves more and more as humans sharing a planet with finite resources, with a need to improve how we use those resources, and begin developing plans to seriously use exo-resources on other worlds.

That’ll launch the space revolution.

It’ll all be a bloody mess for a long time, of course. We know that economic, social, political, and regional stagnation and siloing reduce cooperation and create obstacles and roadblocks. Some like these obstacles. They even want to build walls, because they’re afraid, or they don’t want their comfort zone to change, which is wholly understandable.

But, smart people are out there. They’re perceiving these problems, and they’re conceiving solutions and new approaches.

Trust me. I heard one.

0

We Wait

For an angle

a bargain

a chance

a death

 

an ending

a friend

a good reason

a hopeful outcome

 

an idea

a jolt

a king

a love

a meaningful encounter

a new beginning

an opportunity

a purpose

 

a result

a sign

a time

an understanding

 

a vacancy

a win

an x-ray

the young

 

and a zephyr of change

0

Power Pieces Dream

I dreamed that I discovered I had these pieces with the power to change the world.

The pieces weren’t special to regard. Several sets existed and seemed to serve different purposes. As I was just learning about these, I began sorting the shapes and noticing their colors. I began experimenting with their uses. For that purpose, I chose the black shapes. Each of these were about four inches long. Shaped like angle-iron, they appeared to be plastic.

I looked over a familiar scene from our town, Ashland, across the highway and valley to where Grizzly Peak rules a sloping landscape dominated by vineyards. Using the black power pieces, I put four along the bottom and top of the scene, and two more on either side. With these blocks outlining that scene, I knew I could change it. I knew I could put it anywhere I desired.

I was thrilled and pleased to realize I’d discovered that I had these power blocks and capability. I experienced an epiphany that I had the power to change. I wanted to learn more, and share the information with other people. As the dream concluded, I felt rewarded, satisfied, and optimistic.

0

A Dream of Departure

Man, were we busy. People were returning from other assignments, and we were all going in new directions. I knew them all, co-workers, comrades, friends. Our energy was high. My wife was busy with a special task but was becoming frustrated with her role and how others regarded her.

Our commander got up on a table to address us. He began lamely. Not getting the response he expected, he went in a new direction and then told us he’d talk to us later. We resumed our preparations.

I was happy and excited, anticipating new directions. “We need to celebrate,” someone said. “Yes,” I agreed. “We should get beer,” another said.

“I can make beer,” I announced. As I did, I went back to a clear plastic bag. Dry yellow foam filled it. Holding it up, I said, “This is beer.” The bag was as light as cotton candy. “You just need to add water.” Others were doubtful and amazed, but I was undaunted, joking with them about the brew that would result.

The bag was not closed. Tilting to one side as I pressed forward, much of the yellow foam fell out. I remained undaunted and in a humorous frame. Still talking and laughing, I began scooping up the foam and shoving it back into the bag. Another came to help, holding the bag open for me. We found this very funny.

We crossed the gathering and paused. My wife intercepted me. She was angry. “Who spilled the water?” she demanded, pointing. It took several repetitions before we grasped her question and where the water had been spilled. It wasn’t much and didn’t matter to me or the others. This irritated my wife, who stormed off in dismay. Shrugging it off, the rest of us continued to prepare to party and depart.

Afterwards, my wife and I walked along a sidewalk. Everyone was moving their possessions from their homes. Movers were going to some houses. We waved at folks that we knew but then started finding some possessions discarded along the walk. We didn’t think that stuff was supposed to be there. Beginning to pick up the first pieces, we quickly discovered a larger cache of personal, prized possessions. We were stunned. The quantity was too large for us to do anything except heap it. The mystery of how it all came to be there consumer our attention.

While we did that, one of the people came along. Recognizing some of the stuff as hers, we pointed things out to her. “I don’t care,” she said. “They can do what they want with them. I’m through with it. I’m going on.”

They settled the question in my mind. If it didn’t matter to the owner, why should it matter to me?

So much depends upon how something is regarded.

0

Coffee Dreams

A mug of hot coffee warms my hands against the April’s winter shadow. I sit with my dreams and myself to think.

My dreams took a different turn last night. It feels like a turn for the better. Although multiple elements seen in past dreams, like being in class to learn and working with technology, were present, the dream most sharply recalled featured spilled coffee.

A thirty year old version of myself, I was at a huge room. I thought of it partly as a classroom but also as a work center. It was enormous, as large as say, an NBA basketball area. It was dark, with low task lights doing most of the illuminating. Rows of consoles with work stations filled it. Each work station feature a personal computer but also a link to a master computer. They also had television monitors, telephones, and CD/DVD players and burners. Most were unoccupied.

I’d never seen them before but now was working at one, or trying to make it work. I was holding a cup of coffee. The cup was plain, low and white with a handle. It seemed to be ceramic, nothing fancy. Coffee kept slopping out when I moved. I became aware of this and mildly frustrated. Most of my frustration was that I didn’t want to spill on the work station. Magically, the cup didn’t seem to actually lose much coffee between drinking and spilling from it.

A man and a woman who I didn’t know came up behind my station. They talked about me like I wasn’t present, yet were watching my work and commenting on it, with the woman, slender and white, with dark hair piled on her head, and dressed in a pale yellow and white gown, was telling the man, a white guy in shirt sleeves, khakis and glasses, that she was thinking of helping me. She noted how I made some of the same mistakes that she’d made. This prompted me to focus harder and think more carefully about what I was doing, which was typing. The keyboard was wrong, with the keys spaced awkwardly, even haphazardly, forcing me to struggle and repeat the typing.

When I spilled coffee for the third time, she commented on it, almost as a joke. I explained that I knew why I was spilling coffee, observing that the handle was too small for my fingers but didn’t extend enough for me to grip with more of my hand, so my grip was precarious and not balanced. The cup had a shallow draft in my opinion, with a wide mouth, and that’s why the coffee easily spilled out as I moved around. She seemed impressed with the explanation.

Walking across the work space, I came to where a teach sat with students. The teacher wasn’t anyone I know, but was young, white with dark hair in a bob. She was talking to the students in a chatty, happy voice. The other students were my age or a little younger. I was dismayed that they all seemed to be on a break. She was using the break as a teaching and bonding opportunity. I heard her say, “We all have work to do but you can work at your own pace.” I was happy working, because I had a problem and I wanted to solve it, so I decided to return to work.

But then I thought that I’d watch a movie. I had a DVD in hand. I don’t know what movie it was. I realized, though, that I could put the movie on at my station and watch it there, while I worked, so I turned to do that. When I did, I spilled coffee a fourth time.

That made me smile.

Awaking this morning and thinking about the dream, I felt empowered, invigorated and optimistic. I can’t say why. Was it the spilled coffee? I put a lot of faith in coffee to help me think, focus and work, but that was usually around preparing and drinking it, and not spilling it.

Coffee is associated with get up and go with me. Drinking coffee is part of my rituals for preparing to do multiple things, from writing, cleaning and yard work to washing the car and traveling. So the coffee in the dream is about entering a new stage of activity. The moments of sitting and taking a few sips of coffee is always the cusp of a new beginning for me, a signal to start. Spilling it was important because it didn’t matter to me or anyone else. The cup was limitless; more coffee was always there.

From all that, I decided, I’m ready to step up my pace of work and activity. I have the coffee, now let’s get to it.

0

Change, Resistance, and Complacency

Writing science fiction, one area I end up studying and contemplating is change. I was happy to come across this Harvard Business Review (Walter Frick) interview with Tyler Cowen. Cowen’s newest book, ‘The Complacent Class’, addresses how America has become complacent and averse to change in recent years.

I’ve watched this develop. NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard – was the rallying chorus to battle many new construction suggestions. Property values and appearances take precedence over more pragmatic uses of land, usually in the name of property values, especially when one small set who don’t live in the area will benefit to the detriment of those living in the area and fighting the action.

Yet, we can see the concrete results in places like Oroville Dam. Oroville Dam was headline news during some of February as record rains struck parts of California. The dam’s spillway was opened but damage caused it to be closed. With water rising behind the dam, the emergency spillway was employed but the visibly fast erosion taking place concerned many. Fears that the dam was going to collapse caused mass evacuation. Many area residents were pissed because the water behind that dam in their back yard benefited others living hundreds of miles away.

Almost as an extension of NIMBY, Homeowners Associations (HOAs), have developed to protect individual neighborhoods and developments here in southern Oregon. A large part of that is the agreement to establish a new development is centered around having an open green space, or mini-park, as part of the development. That park, and the attendant common areas, need a management focus. Hence, the HOA is used. To protect property values, the HOA restricts changes and uses. Home owners are limited to what they can plant; fruit and vegetable gardens are generally off-limits, frustrating people who want to grow their own produce. Some common interest developments address this by creating a community garden.

So, from the economic and social ramification of residing in America in the early twenty-first century, to watching and thinking about politics, to imagining our future, Cowen’s book entices me.

______________________________________________________________

HBR: And all this is happening during a time when we see a lot of change in technology, particularly in IT and machine learning, and, potentially, artificial intelligence. How does that progress fit with your thesis?

Well, there is a lot of change, but it’s concentrated in some areas. Look at a classic 20th-century notion of progress: how quickly you can move through physical space. That hasn’t gotten faster for a long time. Planes are not faster. With cars, there’s more traffic. It’s actually harder to get around, and that makes the physical world less dynamic. It’s harder to build things in the United States.

The thing that’s much easier to do is sit at home and have all of life come to you. You speak to your Alexa or your Echo, and you have things be ordered. You use the internet. You watch on Netflix. It’s made us all much more homebodies, feeling we don’t need to change things, more comfortable in our consumption patterns. And obviously that has big private gains, or people wouldn’t be doing it. But there’s nonetheless a collective effect that I think is worrying when our physical and geographic spaces become less dynamic, less mobile, less intermixed. And that’s the America we’re seeing today.

Read the entire short, engaging interview at HBR.

 

4

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑