Year: 2025

Flywheels of Interdependence launched May 25th (2025) at Kent, Ohio's Kluth Gallery, where I read for almost an hour, with a short intermission and a reading of Seti Gandaki by poet Janice Bury.

I had picked some of my favorite poems, including the Lighthouse of Maracaibo, Gesar's Story and Makers, but I was also encouraged to read 11 out of 12 poems from my Scaghaich saga. I focused on political poems about community activism that quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and I explained the influences and research behind each poem.

Thanks to all the listeners who came out on Memorial Day Weekend. I'm hoping to schedule some more readings soon.

Click here to read Flywheels.

Meet Bruce Lee is about the actor and martial artist who became revered in America for his Gung Fu style. Bruce Lee often compared his style to water. Water bends when you hit it. It absorbs the blow. At the same time, water can cut a giant canyon in the desert or punch a tunnel right through rock, given time. Water has a timeless quality to it. Wait long enough and it erodes mountains.

Water breaks free of structures designed to contain it. It leaks out of containers, overflows dams and evaporates from the reservoir. Lee said step one is to avoid limiting beliefs. They just hold you back. Self-actualization requires you to break your mold, to grow beyond your containers.

Lee said, "My personal message to people is that I hope they will go toward self-actualization rather than self-image actualization. I hope that they will search within themselves for honest self-expression."

He described his approach to life, “Having no method as method;  having no limit as limit.”

He said, “I am what I am here and now.”

Bruce Lee was a Philosophy major (me too!) and he believed that conceptual forms were empty of inherent essence, which he referred to as "form of no form." He may have been influenced by the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein or possibly, buddhism, which both portray similar concepts.

He describes his philosophy as Jeet Kune Do, the idea that true strength and adaptability come from understanding how seemingly opposing forces, like strength and suppleness, are actually complementary and interdependent. It's akin to the Hegelian dialectic. Our brains love to say it's either this way or that way but that doesn't always help. We are more successful when we bring the two halves of the whole together.

Seen that way, conflict is just another illusion.

"See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through." -- Bruce Lee

Read Meet Bruce Lee in Flywheels (2024), page 180.

This poem plays on Buddhist and Eastern philosophical concepts. Just Be is the practice of dropping all duties and obligations for a moment and relaxing in the moment, appreciating everything around you without reflecting on or analyzing it.

Let it Be is the Beatle's song. Be Here Now is Ram Dass' book. I'm calling on them to initiate the practice. Comparison to the past and the future seems inevitable, but you can drop that too and exist solely in this moment.

In buddhism, there's an analogy of the teaching to a lotus flower, which flowers while it is producing a seedpod. That the flower and seed exist simultaneously is like the student who studies Buddhism but also has Buddhism as his or her inherent nature. Some say the flower is the cause and the seedpod is the effect and in the lotus flower they appear simultaneously, exemplifying how cause and effect are not separate - the cause is in fact the effect.

Ram Dass says the goal of all religions is liberation. We can see beyond the material world and it's practical constraints to find faith in a deeper, intrinsic system based on kindness and love. When we place the benefit of others equal to our own benefit then we don't have to defend our self at the expense of others. There's something magical about the practice of sharing - it builds community, so in giving, we also receive and by that shared joy we are liberated.

Read Just Be on page 195 of Flywheels.

  Screenslaved is a short story about video gaming, but it's set in a dystopian future world that's not so far from our own.

  On March 15, 2019, a young man attacked the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and then proceeded to attack the Linwood Isalamic Center. He attempted to livestream the attacks in a twisted effort to encourage others to act violently against Muslims. I did not watch the video, but I couldn't help but compare it to video game livestreaming which is incredibly popular.

  I have two sons and they are kind and wonderful humans, but they do like to game and when they are video gaming, they don't eat for hours, they get "hangry" and they stay up way too late at night. I've shared the story about the Korean couple whose baby starved to death while the parents played a particularly engaging video game, but they play in a group. It's their social time and you can hear them talking about the bosses they are about to destroy or yelling and cursing when their character is killed. I thought this could make a good background for a story about the future of gaming.

  My kids wear earbuds when they are communicating, so I only hear their end of the conversation. Sometimes, I have to ask them to take out their earbuds to talk to them, so I invented new tech called the "eyebud." It's like an Oculus visor but it's got two wireless projectors that mold to your eye sockets. Kids are supposed to take them off between games.

  I wanted to critique the Christchurch killer's motivations in targeting a religion, but I thought I'd better not make the story about Islam, because then I might be encouraging the bad behavior I want to prevent. Instead I invented a religion centered on a messianic figure known as Jebix. In the culture of this future world, Jebix beliefs have fallen out of favor, supplanted by a new, unnamed religion that is both more "woke" and much stricter. This unnamed religion controls the government and it's at war with the Jebix believers.

  I don't want to spoil the ending, but you may have figured out the plot already. I still think you'll find the story fanciful and thought-provoking. I've performed it live and it's a crowd favorite. Things are a little different in the future, for example, the cost of living has gone up quite a bit and they have robots to help perform menial tasks.

  Learn more by reading "Screenslaved" in my book, Capital Disrupt. I played around with the title, until my screen went to sleep and that's when "Screenslaved" came to me. It's a dramatic title, but I think we're learning from social media studies that we all may be a little screenslaved.