“Beam me up Scotty”

Back in the “Little House on the Prairie” days, you saw your neighbors when you went grocery shopping in town, at “Joe’s we sell everything here” store where YOU could buy a bag of flour and Smith & Wesson at the same time. Probably the only other time you had “Face Time” with anyone is when you saw/met your neighbors at church, EVERY Sunday.

Thanks to Technology, we don’t have to see your faces at all. And, I mean anybody. Your neighbors, your relatives, or your enemies. One hundred plus years ago and up until the invention of the telephone, if you saw an enemy, more than likely you had to be faster on the old draw better than your enemy, to survive the conversation. Today we are lucky if we even run into a neighbor, relative or enemy at Walmart or the tons of other stores available to us.

Of course we all have had the experience mostly regretful, that every Thanksgiving we have to put up with 42 cousins, aunts & uncles (all on the wife’s side) not counting the children, and I can guarantee you that SOMEONE there, continually, year after fucking year, commands the audience with….wait for it…..POLITICAL BULLSHIT! Wanna see a battle between Trumpers and Liberals? Come to my wife’s Family Thanksgiving that I’m obviously obligated to attend.

Here’s a free ticket! YES! We all had to purchase a ticket to eat some turkey and see all those Sheeple we hadn’t seen nor heard from in a year, and the fact that I paid $100 for my wife and two kids tickets ($25 each) had absolutely nothing to do with preventing my escape from that awful day from Noon on (most families have the dinner time set at 3:00 PM in order to have a few hours of watching Football Games)…..

Thanksgiving at Uncle George’s began at 12:00 Noon. Now, there was a room about the size of, oh let’s say, Uncle George’s and Aunt Alice’s master-bedroom suite that had one of those new projection type television/movie projectors projecting on the wall, about ten feet wide, plus that projector was split-screening four of the major college football games on Thanksgiving Day….

BUT, and it’s a BIG BUT, you had to purchase a $5 ticket to get in “THE ROOM” as many of us called it, PLUS, get this! Uncle George was THE Grand Poohbah, he only let ten other dudes in “THE ROOM” at one time. That means if you were not there by 11:00 AM Thanksgiving morning to run to “THE ROOM” to grab a folding metal chair, bringing your KFC bucket and a six-pack, you had to wait in the line outside the bedroom door in the hallway with the other dudes to get in, if and when some other dude left “THE ROOM”.

Like when some dude not wearing a diaper finally just had to go pee in the hallway bathroom which many times had women waiting in line as well….when the master-bathroom was occupied (I really think some dudes DID wear diapers). That’s how us other dudes got into “THE ROOM”.

I would normally say “In conclusion “ but this is the beginning of this essay. Although technology is freeing to some extent, not so on Thanksgiving Day. While personal contact is good depending on whether you’re meeting a friend, a relative, or an enemy, with today’s technology like the cellphone and personal computer, I say that it’s a good thing most of the time as we can cut off/close the “Personal Conversation/Encounter” simply by…..Wait for it….HANGING UP! Later blame it on a dead cellphone battery.

Not so, on Thanksgiving Day. No escape for me, we drove 350 miles to be there every year. My wife is having a great time. My kids are having a great time. Just one time, what would turn out to be our last Thanksgiving at Uncle George and Aunt Alice’s house, I shut down the Trumpers, the Liberals, and the religious folks. I did so in a manner that Mark Twain, Abe Lincoln and Einstein would be proud of.

I didn’t buy a ticket to “THE ROOM” that last year. I stuck around the dude that was the loudest, he was the first dude I shut down in the political “category”. I digress no further. Wither it’s a friend or relative that steers the conversation in a direction that you didn’t want the conversation to go, this time I stuck around for the comedy-relief of listening to the Sheeple because I knew I would eventually take part in the conversation and expose the Sheeple for who they are. Oh! But I may have angered a few dudes enough to place them in the “Enemy“ category as far as THEY were concerned.

Back in the Wild West, I would have been prompted to kill them as I’m the fastest on the draw when it comes to sharing facts and proving that they are facts, oh, and I’m good at table-talk in Poker. That one last time, giving many enough food for thought to perhaps turn some from a Sheeple into a people.

“Congratulations to the Rams. Buddy, you owe me $350,000”. And the conversation heats up to the degree that one of you mentions a baseball bat, just saying, and his threat turns out to be fruitless as your close friend Dale is a member of the Hells Angels. Dale and five other HA’s appeared at the dude’s nightclub and after a warning to never touch a hair on my head, the dude handed Dale a large satchel. “It’s all there, right? I really don’t think you need me to come back”, Dale said. The dude pulled out a stash of $100 dollar bills from both best pockets of his suit, from his underwear, and from his shoes. End of story.

Moral of that story? If you’re the dude refusing to pay up, and you are on the other end of the line, you should have known to hang up the moment you heard my voice. Then, immediately after hanging up, you should have grabbed the money from your nightclub’s safe, jumped in your car, and drove away, screeching tires kind of driving away, never looking back.

Yes, all he had to do is hang up his cellphone. In the Wild West, there would have been at least a shooting or two. So, what I’m saying is that with today’s technology, You can just hang up and later say, “My battery went dead”.

Me, the dude with the great tip on today’s Super Bowl? I was in the Doctors/Clinic/Emergency Room this morning when the Ram’s Team Doctor, Doctor Neal ElAttrache administered the Schedule One dope through a vein in Stanford’s anus (perfect place, hard to detect). I’m “The Bodyguard”. My little bet was placed at Noon in Las Vegas today along with my buddy/client’s-client’s bets in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Stanford is still running around his house, nonstop, leaping over couches, sometimes diving to the floor covering himself up in the Fetal Position, then a second later, jumping up and running around the house again. What a great honor for Wide Receiver Cooper Krupp to receive the MVP Award, which means that for the passes from Stanford that really mattered/counted, Cooper caught them all, so this is also a great accomplishment for Stanford. He was just too juiced to be the MVP because of all the after-game interviews required. “This Bodyguard work is fun”. I made a ton of money today!

Postscript: Most of the preceding is fiction, for entertainment purposes. The rest is serious. All of what I just said is a preamble to the following. After moving back to the states from Mexico and living with a “Gamer”, I have discovered a whole new method of communicating using just the computer. You can almost say that except for emergencies and communication with close friends and relatives, the cellphone is useless to the gaming community, especially with a platform named DISCORD. Similarly, for as many negative aspects about Facebook, it does build real friendships via Facebook.

In fact, I can say that I’ve made real friendships/relationships all over the world using FaceTime. What I have discovered in the gaming community is that DISCORD goes much farther beyond Facebook in that certain multi-player games like STAR-WARS and MORTAL ONLINE 2 have tons of individual channels and sub-channels on DISCORD. In One game when you listen or take part in the audio conversation amongst players, you are discussing how to get more goodies to build up your character and in the other game, if you are in a “Guild” all that’s discussed is how to KILL another player that is not in your particular guild, in other words, survival of the strongest.

One guild in MORTAL ONLINE 2 is the largest and IS the guild that my buddy/roommate and another mutual “Gamer” friend joined. They both had to “Interview” for acceptance into LEGION, the largest guild on DISCORD for the video game MORTAL ONLINE 2.

As a non-gamer audience sometime conversational participant, and Co-Host of THE DUDE SHOW, I began analyzing this whole scenario, the conjuncture between these two completely different on-line programs, one a video game platform and the other a communication platform.

Now, when you look at DISCORD as a separate entity, it’s a wonderful platform for COMMUNITY BUILDING and building real relationships/friendships. Wither you are a member of a DISCORD Channel for people that like to raise ducks, or your channel is for all those weirdos that like to spin their brush-hair into human-hair “wool” for sweaters, or…..wait for it……you are a member of the largest guild on DISCORD (LEGION) for MORTAL ONLINE 2, you are making friends, in many cases, real friends.

The vast majority of folks are there on DISCORD because of the friendships they develop along with advice on how to train your pet alligator, how to circumnavigate the globe on a Skate-Board, or learn to play a video “game”, DISCORD is the place for you. For the players of MORTAL ONLINE 2, you are on DISCORD in a PRIVATE channel only because the guild you are in accepted your application.

Many of these game-related guilds accept anyone as a member as long as you’re not a robot. They are small guilds compared with LEGION, and they’re desperate to grow their membership. I have listened to the discussions in the LEGION GUILD and each time I listened (because my buddy/roommate is a member), all I have heard is discussions on the various strategies and methods pertained to KILLING anyone and everything else that is not a member of the guild. Want to learn how to kill a non-member’s horse and pull the underwear over the enemies’ head before you kill him/her? Become a member of LEGION.

Now, I suspect that the hundreds of smaller guilds are ALSO discussing THEIR battle plans as well. I predict that some of the largest of the guilds will also be negotiating MERGERS with the strongest in order to combat LEGION. But guess what? LEGION will continue to grow as well and will never lose their position as the number one, killing-est union.

As a student of the evolution of our species, not Ape to Man (Darwinian), but the evolution of cultures/society and the evolution of political ideologies, which I always refer to as the “Sticks and Stones (as weapons), all the way to modern technology nukes, etcetera”, I view this type of evolving communication trend to be a key in our species evolutionary experience.

Think about this. As I mentioned earlier about the “Game” being all about killing, the KEY phenomenon on DISCORD that beats Facebook and all other platforms, is the way the players are….wait for it…..ORGANIZING! Most of these players have no clue what’s happening other than the joy of killing the enemy. They are in a video game where they are required to join a guild on DISCORD, they’re not going to run amuck killing people in real life or anything like that!

“Gamers” as I have come to discover, are mostly very intelligent, above average IQ people. One of my “Gamer” friends is studying Physics to one day become a Physicist. Wither they know it or not, they ARE in the beginning of an era where TECHNOLOGY WILL eventually defeat the global puppet-masters as our species finally crosses over the estimated 150-year threshold between the Age of Pisces (age of religions and wars) into the Age of Aquarius (the age of Technology & Peace).

I believe and predict that the types of community/friendship building platforms will continue to evolve and eventually will be the one critical achievement that allows humanity to ORGANIZE COLLABORATE and create the SYNERGY to change our world for the better. Sure, we as a species and planet will still have to endure and survive some really terrible shit.

We are at the tail end of the Age of Pisces so that “Wars & Rumors of Wars” kind of thing is still with us, give or take a huge Asteroid hit or two. I believe, as a species, we are coming to a fork in the road. One path leads to the extinction of our species, and the other path leads us fully into the Age of Aquarius.

Technology will be a huge part of creating a long couple thousand years of Peace, exploring the Universe, meeting other intelligent life-forms/beings (although they are already here). Think Star Trek for potential future technical advances, “Beam me up, Scotty”.

Another complete essay written (typed with fat finger) on my cellphone. For those of you that like reading my essays on my website for all the images I usually include, this essay will be published on Facebook as a “Link” to my blog at www.tcsblog.net as usual, usually an hour or so after my initial Facebook posting.

Also, can’t forget, tune into THE DUDE SHOW on Twitch, at https://twitch.tv/thedudeshow, a show with a Stoner Pro-Gamer giving instructions (educational), myself, a 73-year-young non-gamer dude as audience participatory cannabis-infused banter (if you’re an old fart like me, you will be entertained if you are a stoner), and our gamer/stoner friends that join us for every show for the educational part and the entertainment part as well.

Thanks so much for reading. I’m optimistic that many of you will “get it”, and join in the conversation on how we are going to ORGANIZE COLLABORATE and create the SYNERGY in order to save our species, like George Carlin once said, (paraphrasing), “Guess what folks, when we are gone, if we DO extinct ourselves, our planet will still survive, as it has for billions of years and billions more years to come”. I’m an optimist. I believe we WILL survive. “Beam me up Scotty”.

This essay was brought to you by those wonderfully visionaries at IRTHKOIN. The Evolutionary Crypto-Currency coming soon to your laptop, computer, and cellphone, stay tuned for news.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peace & Abide, La paz y la morada, السلام والالتزام , שלום ושמירה, Paix et Demeure, Խաղաղությունը եւ մնալը, Мир и пребывание,, 平和と遵守, 和平與恪守, Aştî û Abad, صلح و عبید, Fred och Abide, Kapayapaan at Patuloy, Frieden und Bleiben, Mir i Ostanite, शांति और निवास, Hòa bình và ở lại, Мир и Абиде, שלום און בלייַבן, สันติภาพและการปฏิบัติ, Mir in bivanje,