It has been a rather extraordinary year so far. I like the way it's heading.
I realize that I am not foolish and that if I only maintain an even keel, I may very well move ahead, but sometimes I sail into rough waters. That's where I am right now, but there's light in the distance.
The Age of Sail
I have replaced my science fiction with a somewhat new genre of reading which is making me an interesting person. They are personal stories, fictions all, of character. And I am investing more and more time into embodying into myself a bit more - how shall we say - perhaps a bit more Griffindor. Some bravery, some presence. In my work, I am getting more aligned with the technologies that are most likely to make us money and gaining confidence. Some great fraction of this I am attributing to my reading of the Aubrey Maturin series which twist my Anglophilia towards the inevitability of my Anglo American cultural heritage. At some point I'll need to recover some French, but these days I am feeling how much my sense of propriety is Western in those traditions. I see direct parallels in the organization of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and the software industry - don't ask me how, it's complex, but I'm seeing it nonetheless. Sometimes one can do a great deal with a Brig. And certainly I see how Aurbrey's fortunes and misfortunes mirror my own. All one can do is sail. Sail against all odds and maintain your ship. Arcane and forgotten, we will all be, but for today there remain prizes at sea.
EDC & The Grey Sheepdogs
If my son didn't bust his budget, I would probably own a rifle now. As it stands I have only gotten my pockets a bit more emptied of cash and filled with survival gadgets. Knives, tools & lights. A quarter of watching videos about hunting, shooting, sniping, hand loading and many other gun oriented immersions have given me a stirling education about what's out there to know and what I actually want to know. As an extension of my go-bag paranoia I have come full face with what lethality I feel comfortable with and what the Sheepdog Class generally talks about. Of course I harken back to Bill Whittle's revolutionary rant and the consequences of what the more vocal Right has been yammering about for the past several years. On the whole, it feels a little like parenthood. I have this instinctual aversion to the hard work of going Grey which I can already tell will be overcome by my unwillingness to be irresponsible. I hope that I'll fall into it naturally. But I suspect it will all be some kind of inevitable accident, like parenthood.
Going back to my new year's resolutions:
Quick - Say it all before you stop caring.
- New refrigerator (check)
- New Couch (picked out)
- New XBox (meh)
- Calesthenics - 1 each per day to 100 each situps, pushups, 4 count jumping jacks (better idea)
- Tai Chi (on the way)
- New Bike (not)
- Integrate Cubegeek & Cobb (soon come)
- Move static websites to Amazon (had a better idea)
- Move Limbo to Evernote (mostly done)
- Mac Mini (postponed)
- Start Men's Meetup in SouthBay (check)
- Find a Bar (in progress)
- 35 Year Reunion (check)
- Finish First Draft of Borky's Beach (meh)
- Read Classics {Middlemarch, Don Quixote, Finnegan's Wake} (also in progress)
The score is good.
In fact, I'm seriously downgrading my gaming, going bigger on the exercise and Tai Chi towards Aikido and some Kendo equivalent. Writing is not so important as doing things outdoors, and the indoor stuff is more about my regular work than some ineffables for my personality. So like I said, all is moving along positively.
The problem is simply this. I need to find a way to get more money. And that means I have to get aggressive and make a plan. I've been sitting on my cool surfboard waiting for the big wave. It's time to put a motor on it and cover more ocean.
The Royal Family
I am coming to some harsh conclusions about my Family First attitude, and I'll be putting them to the test over the next few years. But it's starting to feel like I'm losing a great deal of trust in public institutions, and that very much means public corporations. I'm starting to feel very proprietary. I don't have words for it this minute but it rather goes back to a sense I have about the inevitability of war, of nepotism, of irresponsible classes and of the consequences of meritocracy in a libertine society. The preliminary conclusion is that the people who are best off in the world are those who are the masters of guilds and patriarchies. Is that exactly fuedal? Not sure, but it sure ain't public and it ain't democratic. The masses are a force of nature. (New Cobb rule, that).
Tonight I watched a repeat of two hours of HD colorized video of WW2. What struck me was how many Frenchmen were turned in a matter of months into refugees in their own country. I know how relatively easily that could happen in Los Angeles, and how very difficult it would be in more rugged, remote country where civilians already knew how to shoot rifles.
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