A Year of Development

To most of my relatives and acquaintances, I have been focused for the last three months and much of my spare time over the past year on trying to get my writing business up and running. The others, and readers of my blogs, know different: the writing business is, as it always has been, a potentially sustainable means for sharing my personal perspective, knowledge, and skills; but developing those things has been my true focus. Much of that development is currently embodied in my research into a simple, unified way to understand history so that I and others can intelligently contribute to a better future as defined by select values.

I don't mean to imply that the time wasn't productive from a business perspective. A year ago I was completing my book Death Stoppers Anthology; and this year I conceived and published in parts the beginning of a new novel, BIOME, which is a prequel to my first novel (Lights Out). I also worked on instrumental music, a purely artistic form I enjoy on a visceral level, releasing a soundtrack album for Death Stoppers Anthology and starting one for BIOME. As I did with Lights Out, I've incorporated life lessons and results from my research into its prequel, in some ways running the research in parallel with the fiction as my creative energy spilled into both.

The many months I spent hunting for a job that could meet my family's financial expectations were just as depressing as the news and outcomes of research that reinforced my expectation of a catastrophic future unfolding soon. Always trying to define and understand the problems I seem to have a penchant for sensing, I developed a framework for assessing the financial, practical, and ethical aspects of potential work, which benefited from understanding and improving on one of the most interesting predictions of my main research. As a result, I achieved a level of confidence I have been seeking for most of my life, which sadly has risen inversely with confidence in the judgment of others in business and government who I had respected as a default condition.

I learned how to get rich, and why I probably won't. Getting rich involves enabling the customization of environments (the essence of what my research defines as happiness), with minimal effort by the customer, and with mostly invisible costs at the point of sale. Implicit in that process is hope: the promise of more, for as long as anyone wants it, which is the essence of perpetual growth. Success depends on deceit, because each aspect of its realization is based on a lie, or at best a special case that is treated as a generalization. Customization requires increasing amounts of resources, which has costs that may be hidden but are not inconsequential. Limits to resources are real and we are attempting to exceed them, turning the appearance of perpetual growth into a reality of rapid decline. Knowing what I know, I can't lie – to myself or others – and I can't live with myself and encourage unhealthy and ultimately lethal behavior.

Since my preferred contribution to making the world better is the sharing of insights about how it works, and doesn't, along with ideas about what might be changed based on values and experience, this personal account is presented as both background and overview so that you, the reader, can derive some context for what I've shared and intend to share. It also serves as a reference point in the body of work I'm most proud of – my writing, which is available on my blogs and Web sites.

Finally in this last blog post of 2015, I would like to acknowledge the love and support of my wife Debbie. Over the dozen years we've been together we have helped each other through many challenges and grown closer through those and the good times; finding home always where we were, rather than where our stuff was. Our relationship has been a daily reminder of how much good remains in the world: what – and who – must be cherished, not as an abstraction but as the essence of life worth lasting for as long as possible.

Celebrations

I recently celebrated by fifty-fifth birthday, the first one that followed my personal transformation from a "reluctant planet-killer" into a "death stopper." As detailed in my new book, the transformation kept this birthday from becoming my last, dangling a thread of hope in place of a push over the precipice of despair about a future that looks grimmer by the day.

Since finishing the book, that hope has been manifested in an evolving vision of an ideal world. I now find myself seeing that vision overlaid with my experience of the real world, with the differences highlighted in almost overwhelming contrast. The contrast is overwhelming in large part due to coincidental timing with the consumption orgy preceding another celebration, Christmas, which cynically and hypocritically objectifies the most precious of human motivations, love, and uses it to accelerate our sabotaging the system of life that keeps the world habitable.

Despite my new-found courage and vision, I allowed some partial indulgence to mark this particular birthday, which typically signifies entrance into a sort of "pre-retirement." My wife and I stayed overnight at a local bed and breakfast, which unfortunately is now up for sale. I ate some not-so-healthy food, along with some good stuff. After more than a year of going without a watch, I finally got a replacement. I even felt okay with it, up to a point.

That point was reached during a trip to the local grocery store after we got home. There I was forcibly reminded that everyone including us is working at the equivalent of a job: buying unhealthy stuff that makes us and others unhealthy until society says we can do otherwise, which of course it will never do because too much personal power depends on it. It was craziness set to an appropriately mind-numbing musical soundtrack of repeating Christmas songs, much of whose meaning was lost in another century.

In the healthier (and more honest) version playing in my imagination, the store aisles would be replaced by an open space dominated with locally-grown food and products people had personally created. Neighbors would know each other and be committed to helping each other on a regular basis, so the "Christmas spirit" of giving would be a normal aspect of life, with competition for how much good we could do instead of how much power we could wrest from others to enhance the lives of a few close ones. The mall where I got my watch would be replaced with such markets, if anything, but more preferably it would be returned to open space that could be colonized by wildlife.

With Christmas only ten days away, the old habits are already returning. I expect I'll be compromising a bit even as my thoughts are further turned toward what a better future might look like and how to help create it.

Final Solace

I recently completed the last chapter of a short story called "Final Solace," based on music that I created during and after the illness that took my mother-in-law's life nearly two years ago. It was also the final chapter in over a quarter-century of grieving that began with the death of my own mother and included the sudden death of my father.

To date the music hasn't earned a dime, though I'll be happy if it earns much more than that. But money was never the point; it was – then and now – a means to promote and help support my continuing creation of artificial experiences that convey what are (to me) meaningful ideas, observations, and feelings that others might benefit from. "Final Solace," in all its incarnations, is among the most meaningful of those creations.

My mother-in-law, Alice Sampson, was perhaps the greatest fan of my art, which was a great compliment coming from one of the greatest people I've ever known. I say that in all honesty, not just because of our relationship, but objectively because of the way she lived her life and the impact she had on all around her. The first half of the first track of the album, "Getting By," was created before her condition took its tragic turn, as I thought of the long days she spent reading and watching T.V. It was her strongly positive reaction to it that convinced me to create related music as events unfolded.

While the music tracks honor the last year I knew Alice, they also resonate with similar memories of my own parents, which I drew on while composing them. Creating music for me has almost always been a channeling directly from my subconscious to an instrument such as a computer, followed by some more thoughtful editing. I felt those experiences, and the music flowed. The result, as with almost all of what I create, is snippets of a soundtrack, like what I've payed in my head, and often hummed, since I was very young.

Alice's last days had a lot in common with what I experienced with my mother, which was the most stressful few weeks of my life. Diagnosed with cancer when it was too late to treat, my mother chose to die at home with my brother and me, aided by Hospice, an organization I can't praise enough. My father died suddenly of a heart attack after working years without a break; the track "Memories" best matches how I remember that time, and my struggle to pick up the pieces of a life that totally depended on his guidance.

A few months ago, after publishing the individual "Final Solace" tracks for wider distribution than the album, I decided that context was needed for the people who might listen to them. In the mean time, having listened often to the music, I had been thinking of it as more of a soundtrack for how anyone's final days might unfold. It made sense on that basis to write a short story, told from the first person. With a better understanding of how the world might look when I'm elderly, I had my main character inhabit such a future, and created a family that I'll never have. Personal details are intentionally vague, including the protagonist's gender, but the main elements that I want to convey are, I hope, crystal clear.