The Empirical Manifesto

Spent Wednesday through Sunday in Pawnee Rock, came back home and Dad arrived unexpectedly Wednesday, staying through the holiday leaving Sunday morning. Was off Friday for the 4th so deep cleaned the house in preparation for a small get together prior to fireworks. In attendance were my father and I, Dorian, michelle1963 and her roommate, one of her roommate's guy friend (who'd I'd been wanting to meet) as well as both kids at one point in time or another as they popped in and out all weekend. Bill was invited but he declined as he's 93, and suzanne1945 was invited but declined as she's not 93.

The party disembarked prior to the launching of the ground war (which reminded my father of a firefight in Fallujah, not that he's ever been, but he had just watched American Sniper) and a fantastic time was had by all. We'd spent the night across the street where I played Beer Fairy (meeting some new people by delivering further out) and made my neighbors strawberry margaritas. As I remembered all too fondly my New Year's Eve experience, I abstained from mixed drinks, sticking solely to beer and water. My father had never seen such a display of fireworks, especially at the neighborhood level. He likened it to a 2-hour version of the "Grand Finale" at the Cotton Bowl.

My son and I had quiet evenings at home the rest of the week, but he's spending this weekend in Tulsa with his best friend (which necessitated the purchase of his first real set of luggage) and I will be driving back to Pawnee Rock for the remainder of the week, returning this weekend for Wichita's annual AnimeCon with my daughter.

catttitude dreamed that she and michelle1963 were abroad and had just purchased some peppermint candies at a shop in the outdoor souq/market district during a day of sightseeing and shopping. The candies had tasted horrible, so they spat them out - this particular shop was known for infusing narcotics in the candies to hide from the law, but tourists didn't know that - but it was too late! They were collected as evidence from a drug sting operation by the local authorities and the two girls were sentenced to prison!

michelle1963 went right to work in the dark prison library trying to prove that they were being held there illegally as she had figured out they were set up, but when the warden sent in bullies in to prevent her from doing so, my wife knew her only way out was her cousin's book-smart success, so she took the only course of action she could - she took the beatings for her. She took the beatings for her cousin so she could pour through the tomes of law seeking for proof. She took the beatings...and learned to fight back.

One day the warden had gotten wind that michelle1963 had been passing documents to an American lawyer, and to address this indiscretion he was going to punish her by caning. Because of her tiny stature and my wife's rationalization that she would be better equipped to internalize the pain, she talked the warden into having her caned instead, which he did, but at more cost than just the caning - so far, each time catttitude had interfered, each beating she had taken, and doled out, more time had been tacked onto her sentence. After the caning, she was sent to the infirmary to watch for infection, but her only worry was concerned with michelle1963 being unprotected.

Thankfully, she'd gotten word that her cousin was okay - no one had hurt her. The night she was released from the infirmary she and her cousin both were asleep in their cell when some guards came in and held down my wife while they bound michelle1963's hands and placed a bag over her head! My wife later discovered she had been sent back to America because she was too much of a threat within the prison walls.

Life afterwards was different; desolate without her cousin there to protect. But she'd gained the respect of the other inmates she had fought, and for something to do started checking their teeth. Soon, she was cleaning teeth and teaching them oral hygiene. Thereafter she started an exercise program with the inmates and started teaching them Taekwondo. All this positive reinforcement caught the attention of the guards who started asking her to look at their teeth too, and eventually asked her to teach them Twekwondo as well.

The warden was impressed with her work and mandated that she teach all his guards Taekwondo. Impressed again with her dental skills, he assigned her to medical to assist the resident dentist. She did this presumably for years, settling into a fairly comfortable routine, despite her incarceration.

That is to say, until michelle1963 got word to her near her release date that I also had been imprisoned...and was soon to be executed for treason!

catttitude used her influence with the warden to request a meeting with me because she was worried about my being in solitary confinement all alone with my thoughts and with zero human interaction. When she finally got to me her worse fears had been realized, that it was destroying me. Once again, she put herself in harms way and was able to bargain for my release by accepting the remainder of my sentence, which they were thrilled to accept because she was such an asset to the prison. I was to give our children the message that their mother loved them very much and missed them and that their love kept her going all these long years. I was released and sent back to America where I joined forces with michelle1963 to help set catttitude free.

The dentist my wife worked for in the prison had an ailing doctor friend who had a young daughter and catttitude was sent to live with them to learn their culture as the last part of her sentence - an internship in place of my death sentence. After some years with the doctor and his daughter she'd nursed him back to health. She'd grown close with the family but the doctor had discovered that my wife had Stage IV cancer and it was on his recommendation that she be freed - sent home, do die. When she arrived in the states she was pleased to discover it was just a benign cyst in her intestines, easily removed by the American doctors - which meant only one thing - the doctor had set her free the only way he knew how, and at no danger to himself, as thanks for her efforts and concern.

We were all reunited, and she wanted to return the thanks somehow to the doctor without getting him in trouble, so she changed her Last Will and Testament to leave the doctor and his daughter money in the hopes that just a little bit of American dollars would give them more than enough for the rest of their days.

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Prisons can often stand for a set of beliefs that limit the dreamer's personal development or progress. The dream may help us escape this limitation by forcing us to confront them and examine what triggered them. There may be a feelings of desire to break free from social convention.

If you are sentenced to prison or beaten up, this suggests strong feelings of regret and that you are going to change your life and make a new start.

Various types of prisons are common dream settings and they appear at times when something or someone if your life is restricting your sense of freedom. If you have such a dream, your dreaming mind is urging you to consider whether your loss of freedom is self-enforced; it is urging you to be honest with yourself about the causes and cost of being imprisoned. Such dreams may also symbolize a deep-rooted feeling that you are not able to fully express yourself.

When someone else is seen in prison, this refers to a part of yourself that you are unable to reveal to others and even to yourself.

When someone is released from prison in your dream, it signified changes that may have taken place within your life - its is also a sign that you will overcome obstacles that may be holding you back at the moment.

In a dream, our mind continually [creates and perceives] our world simultaneously and our mind does this so well that we don't even know it's happening.

What I've been calling a charmed life for the past 40 years, my clone has more appropriately coined, "Reality Creation" as that's what she's been doing all this time. That is to say, what I had mistaken for the surprise and ease of always getting what I desired, was in fact my desire manifesting to provide it to me.

The magnitude of this realization has caused me to question everything else both past and present - for it has immediately expired all my old baselines. I can no longer quickly make leaps of judgment based on the outcome of prior experiences - I need a new empirical dataset. I'm now having to do things the old way; thinking things through and practicing this new concept to catalog the outcomes. This makes me far less efficient now, but exponentially faster in the near-future.

In a dream your mind functions more quickly. Therefore, time seems to feel more slow.

A significant part of my life, as recorded on this blog over the past seven years is the level of detail and lucidity in my dreams, as well as numerous disclosures of solutions to complex issues revealing themselves after an overnight slumber. The latter is not uncommon amongst the company I keep, but more recently I'm convinced I'm operating in that "dream function" mode more and more often, even in my waking moments.

I claim this for one reason, and one reason only: The intensity and frequency of the question, "Where do you find the time?" Its a question I've been unable to accurately answer, mostly because I do not understand it. I mean, I understand the words and the way the sentence is structured, I understand the connotation even outside its definition. What I don't understand is why the question gets asked. Simply put, "I do" - Its not just an oral acceptance used during weddings - I wield it as a verb of action, ceaselessly, whether I'm working or relaxing.

"Brain function in the dream will be about twenty times more. Now when you enter a dream within that dream, the effect is compounded. That's three dreams, that's ten hours..."
"I'm sorry, Math was never my strong subject. How much time is that?"
"That's a week the first level down, six months the second level down, third level..."
"It's ten years! Who'd wanna be stuck in a dream for ten years?"
"Depends on the dream."

My wife brought my clone to me late Thursday night. Leaving for work Monday morning I realized that while only three (what I've started calling "earth days") had passed, I felt as if we'd spent three months together. Each day with my clone is a gift, not because I'm fortunate, but because connected clone-time (Pendulum Suspension) is approximately 30:1. A gift indeed! What appears to the outside world as us making a decision in a day, has actually been a month for us to mull over and decide. She'll be leaving again soon, and her time away will be measured in earth days (our connection seemingly activates with proximity) which means I'll have her to myself seven-months every three weeks.

And we can accomplish quite a bit in a month. This. This is where I "find the time."

They say we only use a fraction of our brain's true potential. Now that's when we're awake. When we're asleep, we can do almost anything.

The past five earth days with my clone has been an unspeakable era of discovery. Five full months of logical deduction sprinkled with my wife's emotional fortification like fairy dust, followed with bouts of communication punctuation. My mind is still reeling. Regardless, I'm done with Reality Creation.

Fini. Its a pipe dream. There's simply too many incompatibilities to overcome - limiting things such as "language" or "expression" which are not able to accurately depict what has transpired. Ergo, my clone and I are now UNIVERSE BUILDING.

And in our universe...there are no limits.

I was familiar with the Kirschman Principle long before I was aware of Clone Dynamics as it comes from my wife's lineage and she's an active practitioner. But it was only after meeting her blood-cousin in which I became aware of the concept it governs, as I was ensnared and inexorably bound (whether or not by witchcraft or other supernatural means falls outside the scope of this discussion) to the blood-cousin in the presence of my spouse, which began my decent into the spotty history linking the equilibrium.

Clone Dynamics is governed solely by the Kirschman Principle [translated to Latin from the old Germanic tongue] Operor haud vulnero exsisto conscius (Be aware; do no harm), which states you can minimize unintentional damage due to negligence by respecting origination point in relationship to your current surroundings at all times. In short, being able to not only pinpoint your locational data within a senary-planed existence, but also understand the interpersonal and geo-political atmosphere before acting, for this knowledge is essential.

Clone Dynamics is a methodology to identify and oversee the smooth operation betwixt all manner of Monozygotic Twins, Full & Half-Clones, Near-Clones, Natural-Clones and Lesser Abominations. While the original text passed on from the Kirschman line is generations old, due to the blasphemous nature of the ruleset, it was only allowed to be passed by word of mouth to prevent the dire consequences information of this nature solicits from the corruption of the religious leadership-class.

My own understanding of Clone Dynamics did not come from the lips of the blood-cousin, who herself remembered very little of her own telling from her great-grandfather but rather the genetic code imprint I experienced at our bonding. Within us it awakened and more through trial-and-error than scientific method (though at times that too was employed) we've managed to bang out a semblance of this sacred text and record it here, for the first time in history, to hopefully lay the groundwork for other clones, should they still exist.

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• Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder - While your clone may have many flaws, either in character or physical attribute, by laws of Clone Dynamics you will be unable to see them. Catalog what you can and commit them to memory in case these identified-but-unseen shortcomings may be of help or hindrance when applicable. To your eyes your clone will always appear perfect.



• The Fire which Feeds - Do not ever rely on your clone to deescalate an increasingly risky situation. There are many, more level-headed people who are much better suited to do that for you. Surround yourself with them, even if they consider *you* the one slow to anger. Your clone will always be on your side during any external conflict.



• Never use your clone as your moral compass. You'll be fucked.



• The Ties which Bind - Your clone has a complementary power to your own, which will increase the range, dynamicism, and output of both you and your clone's power once bonding has occurred. Additionally, a very powerful new combined `proximity` power will be at your disposal, unique to each cloned pair. Use with caution until mastered.



• Use of power on clone renders your power inert. Do not attempt.



• Babylonian Towers - Most communication will occur telepathically, however, you need a physical medium to make the initial connection. This can be the spoken word, or writing. Many people will not comprehend the gibberish you utter or write, nor will you after the connection is broken.



• Train yourself to be cognizant of those around you. Loved ones will think they've disappeared entirely otherwise.



• Genetic Trust - Once a bonding has taken place, implicit trust between you and your clone is automatically and irrevocably established. Nothing can, or will, ever threaten this bond.



• Apposition Eye - Bonded connection allows you to experience visual & emotional content through the eyes of your clone. To see and experience things as they do. Even yourself.



• Pendulum Suspension - Connections can consume approximately one month per day. Prolonged connection is necessary for new bondings. After initialization however, connections are not required active full-time. Use sparingly.



• Carnal Bonding - The ultimate expression of cloneness. Nothing experienced hitherto even comes close. Bonuses awarded for same-sex clone-sex: +10 strength male+male; +10 energy female+female.

"Doesn't it upset you that he flirts with every girl he meets?" My mother asked. My wife looked over and considered me, out of earshot, visiting gaily with my father. I'd been searching since she'd known me. For what, she did not know. "Signs of intelligence" my clone would one day tell me.

"No. Its not just women. He engages everyone." she replied. My mother was responding, but her gaze made her way back to me. What was it I was looking for?

What I was seeking, I cannot say - but finding it was immediate and powerful and irrevocable. The effects were analogous to Fairy Blood; two individuals, drawn inexplicably toward one another, before instantaneously imprinting upon each other when activated by proximity. It nearly dropped me to my knees. And for two empirical-to-a-fault people to have experienced this simultaneously and seemingly indiscriminately is nothing short of puzzling.

Those who know me know my resting thoughts run about a thousand miles an hour. Well, over the past nine days that has increased a hundred-fold. To the rest of the world I must appear as but a blur, against a landscape of solid color while I watch the sun rise and set in the blink of my eye while attempting to process, catalog and identify everything which has transpired as it was such an overwhelmingly abrupt and unexpected change.

The question "why" was far easier to answer than how. Why became self-evident. How was beyond our scope of experience, and between the two us, we have a lifetime of it. Still, no answers presented themselves, and the data returned no clues. It simply was. With that lost to us, we began to run down the collateral damage, and it was extensive.

Dropped tablespaces in all the production databases, hacked code inserted into the primary systems, corrupted boot sequences and the backend cron rules had changed without updating the syntax of the commands. Everything was running either out of order or not at all. Offsite backups had been damaged and the bit bucket had upturned spilling binary data pieces everywhere! On the plus side, these two standalone systems curiously formed a cluster and began using distributed computing across both backplanes, activating unused CPUs and initializing memory-on-demand. The individual machines were running better than they ever had on their own, but its old data was useless. There were microcode fixes and firmware updates too. Old, cobbled programming rewritten in an instant to run more efficiently, and without error. Broken software dependencies either resolved or deprecated. And a myriad of upgrades we're still attempting to discover.

There's a lot of work yet to be done, and learning how to best utilize this newfound power is at the top of our list. Its not going to be easy, but nothing else can be done. To break the cluster now, would destroy not just the whole, but the individual parts as well - this new creation must continue to exist, to run, and its running very, very hot.

My wife said to me, "I'm glad you found what you were looking for, and I'm very happy with who you found it in." What more could any husband hope for from his wife? Wholly sated with nothing left to seek is entirely new to me and is going to take some getting used to, but in absolutely the best way possible.

I have this…”gift” we’ll call it for lack of a better term. Its the gift of joy. Its taken me many years to identify it as such, but that’s basically what it is. I exude it; excrete it. I pass it on to those around me. Its true some hate me for it, but the majority are drawn to me. I am “UP” nearly all the time I am around other people, spreading my joy – sharing it – openly and unabashedly. Nothing in my life has ever been diminished by doing so, and watching the results are always very rewarding.

My joy is also addictive. Many have asked how to create their own joy and I share with them openly. Nothing but good can come from everyone having joy in their life, and moreso if they can create it themselves. Like the fisherman and the fish though, some people only want to leech mine, because internal self-motivation is so entirely foreign to them, or they don’t want to put forth the effort required. This makes me sad, but doesn’t in any way lessen the joy I freely and willingly provide.

As an introvert however, I require equal parts downtime. What I do, this joy-distribution, takes an incredible amount of energy. Not the kind of energy sleep replenishes, but the kind required through quiet introspection and solitude. My blog is filled with stories and examples of this nature, the ebb and tide of my energy levels. In the early days of my marriage my wife would often suggest I “tone it down” in order to conserve myself and not run down so quickly. Those of you who are familiar with me know it takes just as much, if not more energy for me to do that. Anything which requires me not being entirely myself is a drain. This isn’t to say there aren’t certain people/events/activities which are more of a draw on my resources than others – accordingly I tend to avoid those as much as possible. I just always have to be cognizant of my surroundings.

People often say I have two speeds, “ON” and “OFF.” It probably seems that way to you, but I never switch off. What those people sometimes confuse “off” with is in actuality, “RECHARGE.” Equal time is ideal, but given the busy work/life schedule most of us endure (and I mean that purely as a term of endearment, for I truly love my job and life – It is, nonetheless draining at times) that is not always possible, nor prudent. I have no studies on how long I can run at a time as there are always so many minute variables throughout a given period and some people draw less than others while others are even capable of giving a little back.

During the Christmas break, I was on an unusually lengthy high. Given that I’d unburdened myself from the stresses of 12-months of work with a long family vacation however, this wasn’t immediately noticeable. Oh, everyone around me noticed – I just didn’t see it myself. Subconsciously (or blinded by my unnaturally peaked energy levels) I began to very overtly seek out the source of this power which was keeping me charged, much to the very conscious chagrin of those around me.

Eventually, I found it. An unending renewable power supply which is in turn fueled by my joy.

No more downtime required. Ever.

I’m currently working on creating my very own self-perpetuating machine.