Like a billowing regatta at full sail, August’s armadas of clouds are gliding swiftly through September. They are spanking along above my languid lake just now. Where are they going so quickly?

Their chains of fluffy white hieroglyphics separated by blue spaces are a tantalizing code, if only I could read it. The outline of a code is there, but the clouds are blank. It’s as if they are inviting closed captions of my thoughts and words. I know this, but I don’t understand it. Hmmm. Knowing vs. understanding. That’s been bothering me a lot lately as I watch our society struggle with information.

Deep stuff. Connect the dots, Sully. OK…leap of faith here into filling those blank spaces (thank you Taylor Swift), if you care to swim along in my stream of consciousness…

Knowing things is like filling a glass. Understanding them is like drinking from it. But if you thirst for understanding, you need context and the big picture of honest history and – most of all – active thinking skills to connect the dots.

Connecting the dots isn’t someone else’s graphic dictated to you in clouds and blue spaces. It’s something you fill in with your insight, imagination and objectivity. It’s intellectual rather than emotional. If only thoughts came as easily as emotions! But thoughts don’t flow with knee-jerks, instincts and intuition fed by cues that surround us or a desire to simply feel good through instant gratification. Delayed gratification – that experiment where a candy is placed in front of a kid who is told that if they wait five minutes to eat it they will get two candies – is usually the better choice for a long-term benefit.

It’s the thinking choice as opposed to the purely emotional one of satisfying feelings in the short term. But we are no longer that uniquely American society of Horatio Alger values – wait and hope, sure and steady, rags to riches – who practiced delayed gratification for a long-term good. We are into the generations that reaped – demands, entitlements, rights. We are instant everything.

Have we dumbed down, or have we simply fallen asleep intellectually while our impassioned hearts fall into rhythm with the drumbeat seduction of emotional appeals? After all, we live in a culture force-fed by a media whose daily ratings thrive on emotional shocks and outrages. And education (history education in particular) has morphed over decades from a cold presentation of things & events into a rousing emphasis on political correctness and feelings. The three r’s of education have become Rights, Rewards and Reparations.

I noticed this shift from an emphasis on reason to an emphasis on feelings first as a teacher decades ago when siblings passed through my classrooms two or three years apart. The gap between sibs allowed me to see that the ability to make inferences was declining. The younger sibs invariably showed a greater readiness to follow feelings without critical thought. I attributed it to the growing number of hours spent in front of a TV set – a passive medium that pours its content into us without the chance to interact or think for ourselves. The whole idea of programming is to convince, to persuade that something is true or real even if it’s just acting or pretending. Emotionally stimulating, visual media is the perfect indoctrination tool, especially on the young, the innocent and the immature. The more empty the vessel, the more effective the suspending of disbelief and the more vulnerability to brainwashing.

And, of course, the TV is no longer a fixture confined by a tether with a plug on the end. Propaganda is portable with every device, every wireless connection, echoing and spreading the dominant one-size-fits-all hum and buzz of the popular culture as though we have emerged from metamorphous as a social insect in a homogenized hive. Methinks AI (artificial intelligence) will find little resistance to running our lives in the coming decades. We have been in basic training for it since the 60s.

Hey, where did the blue sky go? All clouds now. And was that a flicker of lightning? Methinks we’re in for a storm…

Must give a big one-size-fits-all thank you for all the emails/messages that came in about last month’s Q&A. Relationship stuff seems to really ring your bell. Will revisit in future Sullygrams. Meanwhile, I mightily wish I’d taken more photos of summer’s adventures (it’s an unfortunate truism that the most spontaneous and intriguing things go unrecorded), but below are some sketchy shares in words and photos from more orderly moments:

#1 Mexicali Rose is the name of the restaurant, and that’s my grandlad silhouetted against a magical setting; #2 dunno how my daughter and moi wound up fashion-coordinated by colors and shades – must be genetics; #3 summer sunsets are mandatory moments for poets and philosophers; #4 smoke and mirrors; #5 golf is how you cross gulfs; #6 that’s Peter and Bruce of Norby Nation practicing ballet in their drive…no, wait a minute, they are watching Sully slamdunk a basket after a steal (OK, I cannot tell a lie, dead-eye Peter the Hustler nails another three-pointer; #7 the governor’s reprieve did not arrive in time. #8 [from my FB page] …see, it’s like this. I bought this statue of an amorous lady for my garden, and it has a hole in the bottom. After I built a circle of pavers in a gravel bed for it, I decided to put a stake in the ground to come up through the hole (Freud was right) and anchor it against storms or tipping. So that’s why I drove to the beach and sat in the parking lot sharpening the broomstick while I listened to Sirius radio. Admittedly I could have shortened the broomstick to look less like a spear before taking it out of the trunk. And, yeah, I probably could have used a Boy Scout knife to sharpen it, but – hey – I’ve had these Japanese saws rusting in my basement since forever. Is it my fault they look like machetes? So, there it is, a geezer in the parking lot chopping and scraping a broomstick to a point with his rusty Japanese hibachi-machete style saws while all the matronly mothers pushing strollers with screaming toddlers and barking dogs veered away. People get so excited. Didn’t I smile and wave a lot? Yeah, I can see now I probably should have put the machete down before I waved, but unlike my mug shot, I smiled so hard I’ve got a hernia. Anyway, if you don’t hear from me for an indefinite period, write me now and then. You can use an alias… #9 Wisconsin Dells is a blend of aquatic glitz and dynamic river walks; #10 Seamus and Sully; #11-12 Lost count of the bags of river rock I’ve been hauling home but it was well over 100, which along with some blue fire glass finished off the “gravel moat” around my castle. All to create a setting for she-who-must-not-be-named. She’s very statuesque and something of a muse for me as I work in my Creatorium (no “m” in the middle of that please). So I guess it was inevitable that I’d begin to read her thoughts and feelings and write notes back to her. Hey, if people can relate to a pet rock, I can have a pet rock that’s sculpted into a divine fantasy!

Life…“rocks.”