Introduction

___Leaving behind all of the painful mistakes I have made before, I am getting ready to make a few more, right here in full view of anyone who wants to see! I am probably inured to ridicule, having spent my entire life deflecting it, so I am even ready to invite some! Well, only in humor.
___But not every thing here will be humorous. For example, the small text size that is the default in Firefox is not humorous at all. I can barely read what I am typing, and I am quite unhappy with all those young software engineers, and an older one I know, who seem to think that litte tiny letters improve their web sites. Well, just don't program text in pixels, and make the contrast adjustable, and we'll all survive. Please rely on relative scaling whenever possible. All typos and misspellings are hereby attriibuted to poor vision.
___Since this is to be my personal blog, I am making no promises to anyone that I will follow a paricular theme or show any respect to anyone. That is, I am not making promises. Don't be expecting any severe ridicule, either, unless the subject is selfish people. However, if you look at my profile, you will notice that I am mostly interested in relationships, and, not so obviously, consider development of sustainable culture to be my life's work.
___On the subject of relationships, I have been diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome, an Autism spectrum disorder, and with ADD or ADHD, the combination of which, combined with dysfunctional parenting, left me incompetent in relationships, hence without the ability to support myself, either. So beginning at the beginning, I read (red) ethnographies to learn about people, and studied human evolution to predict the internal structure of the human being. This strategy was very helpful. Then all I needed was to get 10 years of medications and even more years of therapy to deal with the persistent mental health issues I had. Moreover, I needed to care.
___Asperger's is a condition in which social behavior is not instinctive, but not in which connection with others is unwanted. Untying all of the nots in the last sentence, Aspergers sufferers lack instinctive social skills, but have normal desires for connection, and may possess normal or even exceptions skills of reading emotions of others. But without the instincts to support social connection, they experience exagerated loneliness, and need to make very focused efforts to learn social skills, so they can come out of their loneliness. This is why I am so interested in relationships. As important as they are to everyone, You might need to ask an Aspie to find out just how important they are.
___The meaning of life is experienced through relationships. My sister says that the meaning of life IS relationships, but I believe that the meaning of life is really plural, in fact so multitudinous that counting them would take a lifetime. Good enough we take a lifetime to have them. Anyway, Even fun that seems totally narcissistic, like the elation of coming down a ski slope, depends hugely on the emotional ballast provided by the background experience of human connections. (You get to the bottom of the slope and do what? Put on a poker face because you don't want anyone to know what fun you had??) As someone who has felt absolutely isolated, without any bonds to any other person, I can report that fun isn't much fun without love somewhere. Is the human being that is isolated from all other people able to find meaning? Probably there are examples, but are the rare individuals who are able to live alone actually feeling meaning? Meaning, I believe, is tied to social reality because meaning is created socially. Meaningful is how we describe the links we have to other people, the elemental emotional bonds that keep us in community. Even a child raised by wild animals would navigate the world in terms of the relationships s/he had within that community of animals. What about "The Man Who Planted Trees"? He lived alone and created profound meaning. But not without caring about other people, and not without connecting. What about someone who is completely narcissistic? I ask you, what are the meanings of that life? If the tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear it fall, does it make any noise?
___I may be challenged on this point, as others will seek exceptions to the rule just because, by generalizing, I have included them in the rule. But for me it is true that relationships provide the substrate and medium of meaning, the reasons and motivations that drive me through life. I have many meanings, and they accumulate, as I build my relationships, as I multiply them and improve their quality. My life did not start to make sense, I did not have any sense of direction, until I decided I would abandon any project that did not bring me closer ot other people. By declaring that my activity has as its first purpose to connect me with others, that the productivity I seek must somehow enhance my relationships, I have eliminated the noise of my life. Now there is mostly music. Sense. A way to judge the value of any proposed activity, project or plan. The point of any thing I do is not the thing, but its impact on my relationships, taken at every level of detail, from the immediate and personal to the grandly attentuated, to the impact that my life has on LIFE, on the Earth, on the ability of Earth to support life. Hence my interest in Sustainable Culture.
___From the beginning, in a family system riven by cruelty, I wanted to have a different relationship with my children (I have only one son, he does not live with me). I wanted to have a relationship that would be sustainable over generations. I wanted to have a relationship formula in which rebellion was not necessary. My belief was that, if I could communicate love and support, if my children did not need to fight with me to feel secure and prepared for the life ahead of them, if they could self define without alienating me, I could have them in a sustainable family system, a system that would promote well-being. I was naive, of course, the reality is not so simple, but at an early age I was already wishing for something "sustainable". The desire has not evaporated. My "family" is still quite cruel, although I experience little of that cruelty myself, and still very narrow minded and shortsighted. Much of my family lives in abject poverty, in the ruins of war, lawlessness, depravity, ignorance, and corruption. And what I worry about most is that my family looks set to burn down its house. Global climate chaos multiplied by a human population in excess of Earth's carrying capacity multiplied by human evolution (necessarily) lagging behind the needs for positive, creative, caring adaptation, equals a profound disaster in the making. At the extreme, Possibly the end of all life above the level of paramecium.
___The next posting was written yesterday, before I opened this blog. Writing it for a different blog, where it is not germaine, motivated me to open this blog.