Concept

 

My muse loves to tease me. Here I am, busy looking for nonsense I can contradict on Facebook and immediately I can tell it’s bored because I have the urge to type something even though I have no idea about what. My muse can be as dull and mechanical as it is romantic and spontaneous, so I won’t define my muse by gender, that simply wouldn’t be fair. It can be boring at times, but it is never to be ignored. Let’s see what pops out this time. Aaah! It has to do with concepts! What is the best possible definition of concept I can think of? According to Google’s dictionary, Oxford languages, a concept is “an abstract idea; a general notion.” Ask a religious person where heaven is, my muse whispers.

And my fingers start as if by remote control. My muse takes over!

First, understand that all religions believe in some sort of life after death. Whether it be reincarnation, resurrection, or rebirth of some kind, there must be a holding tank, so to speak, and in Christianity, that area is “heaven,” where all deceased Christian’s souls are held, waiting for the Resurrection upon which they will be returned to earth in physical bodies as their former selves. While there is no scientific evidence of an afterlife, the concept has been handed down generation to generation for well over over two thousand years – long before mankind had ever seen a penguin – creating a strange, surrealistic dogma that is in conflict with not just human logic, but proven facts as well.

The generally accepted concept of heaven is loosely based on angels flying around with harps and a set of big, pearly gates that everyone has to pass through to gain access to everlasting life. How pearly gates got into the act is beyond me or my muse, so, for guidance, I went to Wikipedia:

“In some Christian denominations, the Pearly Gates are an informal name for the gateway to Heaven. The name is inspired by Revelation 21:21, which describes the New Jerusalem as ‘twelve gates, each gate being made for each tribe of Israel.’ In popular culture, the gates are depicted as large gold, white, or wrought-iron gates in the clouds, guarded by Saint Peter, the keeper of the ‘keys to the kingdom.’"

I still don’t know how the gates became pearly, but that is the best explanation AI can currently come up with.

If someone points up at the sky and says, “heaven is in the sky above,” they are ignoring the fact the earth is round. Sky is relative only to where you may be at the moment. If everyone on earth all pointed up at the sky at the same time, they would be pointing to every point of the universe. Some would pointing toward the sun or the moon or Andromeda or wherever the earth happened to be in its daily rotation. Some would be in daylight, some in darkness. No one would be pointing in the same direction. This leads to two distinct possibilities: One, there is no heaven, or two, heaven is not where everybody thinks it is.

We know life, as we know it, anyway, does not exist outside of our atmosphere and that atmosphere does not extend very far up into the not-so-magical sky. Can heaven be located in a non-life supporting environment? Could it be on Mars? How about over in another galaxy? What is life, by the way. Simply put, life is a condition that naturally converts matter from one form to another using energy. Yep! That’s it! Any physical entity that uses matter to convert to energy that is used to create matter in a different form for its own sustenance is alive. Taking a leaf of lettuce and converting that form into bone cells or skin or feathers or driving an organ that rationalizes and compares is is a great example of life. The kicker we humans don’t understand is where in the chain did lettuce learn to convert dirt, light, and water into glycosylated flavonoids, phenolic acids, carotenoids, vitamin B groups, ascorbic acid, tocopherols, and sesquiterpene lactones that other life forms learned to consume in the first place?

But how about a dimension that mortal humans simply can not imagine? One where life as we know it is not sustained, but in a different form from our limited knowledge it might flourish. Is heaven perhaps a dimension, an undiscovered astral plane that spans time and distance and space that mortal humans can not conceive? How far does it extend? Is it limited to our own solar system? Does heaven span the gap between galaxies? If heaven is indeed an ethereal storage area for our un-powered souls, we know it can not be like the cloud where we store our photos on the Internet which requires physical computers and lots and lots of electrical energy. It has to be a reality that exists in a natural, universal state that we can not access. A natural state that, so far, eludes detection by our science.

But everyone knows where heaven is. Everyone points up. And that is a concept. My muse is really enjoying this. I think my muse knows there are penguins we haven’t discovered yet.

George

Complex

I’m embarrassed by the number of articles I haven’t written. I forget the inspiration I want to capture by the time I find a keyboard or scratch paper to scribble down quick notes. I find myself repeating phrases to myself until they just fade away, displaced by the wonder of marvelous items I discover while rummaging around looking for blank paper.

At first I made light of it, trying to fluff off my occasional distractions as normal aging amid a faster, more complex environment that doesn’t allow us time to absorb the constant, unavoidable changes in our daily lives. Changes none of us can escape. Like turning off my daughter's downstairs floor lamp.

In our rush toward an effortless existence, we have siphoned off technological breakthroughs such as sending disciplined energy through space in coherent methods to allow us to communicate with our fearless explorers as far away as the moon. We now use our vastly increasing knowledge to control a lamp I simply don’t want to walk down the stairs to turn off. From the comfort of an overstuffed sofa sitting in front of a colorful wide screen, sharply focused, showing me what happened today in Gaza that shouldn’t have, I ask Alexa to do it for me. I simply have to remember the name of the lamp. Easy. Peasy.

For you, maybe.

“Alexa, turn off the downstairs lamp!”

The light doesn’t flicker, Alexa has not relayed my command. Perhaps she hasn’t heard me.

“ALEXA, TURN OFF THE DOWNSTAIRS LAMP!” Nothing. Darkness is still banished from the downstairs staircase.

I slowly disentangle from the couch and go to the kitchen counter where my granddaughter thoughtfully left a list of Alexa and Echo controllers and their respective subordinates. Yes, they have so many voice activated appliances they have to break them up into families. There are two desk-top lights, but each is assigned to a different controller or else they both come on at the same time. I read the list twice, but the downstairs lamp isn’t on it. The hard part here is I used the lamp last year when we stayed downstairs in the guest room. I used the lamp, by name, for several days, but my memory is as silent as an alligator waiting for a raccoon to wash it’s food at the water’s edge. The raccoon senses danger and backs away, but not me.

“Alexa, turn off the floor lamp!” Nothing. As frustrated as I am, I am determined not to walk down the stairs.

“Alexa, name the lamps downstairs!” The silence is embarrassing.

“Alexa…”

“Here,” my wife says as she hands me a note. “Try this one.”

“Alexa, turn off Bunny Rabbit!” I said. The light emitting from the stair well faded away.

“Where did you find the name?” I asked.

I texted them in Orlando, I needed to hear the television instead of you.”

I read the note again. I swear I’ve never heard the name Bunny Rabbit before. Well, maybe not since last year, anyway.

- George

Modern Cruise Ship - 2023

The Second Greatest Scam

 

Everyone has their own idea of the greatest scam ever pulled on mankind, but only a few acknowledge the current popular myth that may be the most pervasive in modern history. Need a hint? Let’s start with the manufactured foundation the big lie is based on: the entertainment media’s obsession with obscure, unlikely mortals, who through inhuman sacrifice and orgasmic, hyper-devotion, become pedestal-mounted demigods who command the respect of world leaders and the social elite of every nation. I’m writing about the perpetuated image of the arduous hard work, personal sacrifice, superhuman skills, and the absolutely blind devotion that creates the incredibly talented, elite superheros known as Chefs de Cuisine.

According to the media, neurosurgeons, theoretical mathematicians, and space shuttle crews undergo far less stress and nowhere near the intensive training the average executive chef apparently receives. Obviously, poor misguided commoners reap far less fame and fortune than the culinary idols known world-wide for creating a world-class, single leaf salad. Why are the entertainment elitists, especially Hollywood, absolutely enamored with mythical, gastronomical decadence and the infrastructure that supports it?

Movie after movie depicts the trials and tribulations of becoming a world class chef, winning the hearts and wallets of all mere mortals while making food, that, personally, I just don’t like very much. Except desserts. I do like French desserts. And that revelation, I confess, was an epiphany triggered by my daughter when she said she liked French desserts, but not their food. She pried the lid off my subconscious grievance about the fanatical global fanfare of “creating” outlandish food only the absurdly rich actually eats. It has been simmering in the subconscious regions of my mind ever since a pretentious server at a local French restaurant scoffed when I inquired about sausage gravy over biscuits for breakfast. “We don’t serve ANY gravies for breakfast,” she sniffed. My bad. Being deep in the heart of Georgia had inadvertently set the “local” cuisine latch in my taste-buds. She didn't even mention biscuits.

According to Wikipedia, “A cuisine is a characteristic style of cooking practices and traditions, often associated with a specific region, country or culture.” Let me see if I can help demist the fog here. Americans will eat anything with sugar on it. If that doesn’t work, just add salt. It’s always one or the other. I have said for years if Americans were handed a plate of sugar, they would put syrup over it. We have friends we avoid eating with because they put so much sugar on their spaghetti sauce I’m afraid I’ll contract diabetes before morning. We produce American cuisine in factories and prepackage it so even my dog can be trained to hit the microwave start button. We fill bags with air and toss in a few ounces of chemically produced crunchy product, flavored to increase your ghrelin hormone levels while diminishing your leptin levels, add a good dose of sodium chloride and sell it by the truck load, especially during football season.

Wikipedia’s definition of Gastronomy doesn’t help much, either. “Gastronomy is the study of the relationship between food and culture, the art of preparing and serving rich or delicate and appetizing food, the cooking styles of particular regions, and the science of good eating.” As mere mortals who eat primarily for sustenance know, it’s what you do with what you got that determines a region’s choice of foods. It is not much of a choice for many countries on earth. You’ll notice words like “starvation” and “malnutrition” are not factored into the overall concept of international cuisine. Neither is the word, “profit.”

Not convinced yet? Count the French restaurants in your neighborhood, and then count the Italian and Mexican restaurants as well. Now, which one comes in third place?

I rest my case.

George