Today is my birthday. I was born in 1961, on the edge of the 60s that dramatic moment in American history. They say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Can you hear it?
When I remember being a kid and my father told me that they shot black people I told him that we should go to the white people and show them who we are and then they wouldn't have to be afraid. "Speeches, Poetry" was my collection of child talk recorded on my dad's old Webcor in 1965. I've been doing a bit of recording myself. The other day I decided to write about the riots but I went back to restating what to me is obvious, that people want not to transcend but to transform, not themselves but others. This morning one of the heads I follow said that although some people want to end oppression, others seek to reverse oppression. He said in the Middle East it is well understood that in order to make peace you have to have blood on your hands. I believe that the Culture Wars are not over and they underly what goes on. So there will be blood. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but underneath all of this tumult is a high degree of conviction that will not relent until it has blood on its hands. Or as the little hoodrat in my head says, 'some motherfuckers need to be pacified'. Right now most Americans have a very good idea who those motherfuckers are. As for me, I can't remember ever using the word on this blog. I think most people are lazy and foolish. They're much more likely to shoot themselves in the foot. That, my friend, is a religious profundity.
Yesterday, after the third declaration of curfew, I decided to dust off my pistols. My shooting buddies and I used to joke that Barbara Boxer, our wealthy California Senator was behind the purchase of our favorite shooting range at which our club sublet. The lessee could no longer afford the hiked rent and so the club closed forcing us into more ghetto accommodations, or the waitlist for more ritzy accommodations. Our reasonable gun club became the excluded middle the result being I'm pretty rusty from two years of not shooting twice a month. It took me 20 minutes to recall my muscle memory, but not before having loaded a magazine with the rounds in backwards to my horror and dismay. Mario Puzo laughs in his grave. Everything is unevenly distributed. Everything is unevenly distributed.
So my health is better than it has been in probably 17 years. I can still put my socks on standing up. I saw a set of stunning before and after pictures of Mike Tyson last week. He coming back. The before was from 2009. In 2009 I looked pretty good, so I couldn't make a similar comparison. I only know that in 2003 when I was so broke I literally couldn't afford a Big Mac, that I did some cardio-kickboxing and got down to 185. This past Christmas I was at 217 and now I'm at a very stable 195 or thereabouts. My driver's license from '08 says 210. I never consistently weighed myself so I was really just guessing back then. I always assumed that I could get my breath back, but it has proven fairly difficult. My VO2 max is pegged at 29.6, down from 34 a year ago February. On the other hand, my bloodwork is improving steadily. Specifically, my blood pressure is good, my cholesterol is better but still not good. My A1C is down 2 points so I am almost not diabetic something I had no clue about before January of this year. Once again, I had not been measuring. All of us are pretty sure we're OK, but OK is not a number. When it comes down to it, if you like your face in the mirror, that's quite enough. That has got to be the easiest 'like' given on the planet. I think most people are lazy and foolish. I'm working against that in myself.
In my company, the oldest startup in the world, we remain something of a Porsche garage. We are full of very smart people trying very advanced competence on very expensive hardware. Trying to be known for service by word of mouth is a marketing nightmare. So we have finally built a product we will be branding and shouting about. Other than that, we are limping and stumbling forward, massively crippled by the destruction of the airline business and trying to pivot over to healthcare data integration. The family and the extended family is all squared and sorted. I could use a few more cans of soup in the larder, but we're all surviving these various apocalypses on a better than average basis. We are in constant pain, but not suffering. It's a tough workout.
I have been thinking in a way I haven't for quite some time what it is like to look like I do. When I don't bother to affect any persona, more and more on these inside-only days, I look like an old black man. I'm stepping into a few paradigms that are different. While I'm comfortable on the inside, part of me is a bit conflicted, during this crisis of rationality, on 'the optics'. I am not Morgan Freeman and I'm worried about the reason that Denzel Washington hasn't stopped making action films. Nobody in America has a good idea what an old black man is supposed to be other than a 'respected civil rights leader'. I'm the same age as Obama and he remains his own unicorn, all the rest have big fat round pumpkin heads like Colin Powell, John Lewis and James Earl Jones. I'm definitely getting rid of my t-shirt collection I have acquired over these 10 years of working the home office, and I'm finally comfortable with Orvis. But on any weekday afternoon run to Home Depot, I look like just another gardener - so long as you don't look at my hands. Oh well, this could have its advantages. Esse quam videri.
I always used to wonder, since I've always expected to live quite some time, what the hell to do for 20 years after you are 60. My parents remain stubbornly clear and present and sometimes dangerous halfway through their 80s. My grandparents, except for the polio survivor with the 2 pack a day smoking habit, all outdid the statistics. Outside of the optics, I'm very confident about what I expect to be doing. There will be plenty to keep me busy. Two of my greatest time sucks have been gaming and reading. A good 1100 books and probably ten times that many hours in virtual worlds. I'm giving all that a sharp haircut and am going back to school in software engineering. I will be taking all of my accumulated skill and wisdom in the digital arts, for what that is worth, and reinventing it from top to bottom in the language of Go. Having written thousands of essays here over the past 17 years, I will do the same in code over the next 17. I expect it all to hold together. Outside of that, I'll probably get my knee fixed and do a half marathon, get some sort of Porsche or another, preferably the kind I can beat on, and do some interesting driving, and if retirement is in the cards, I think I'll be pretty good at studio mechanics if not some more advanced bass guitar and keyboard proficiency. I have already cut 5 albums of my own material. I can easily see getting back into mixing tracks again. If I ever decide to go for it, I'll also purchase a serious 750 mm telephoto lens for my Nikon and get cranking out more digital photography.
As you can see by my t-shirt in the photo above, I retain my humblest admiration for both religion and science, the two greatest open source inventions of mankind. While both have failed spectacularly in their organizational hierarchies and relationship to power, they are the primary avenues of disciplined discovery of the self and of the universe. They form the perfect circle of human endeavor whose programming language is philosophy but whose operating system remains mysterious. I am happiest when exploring their realms and their history. Well, that and enjoying my wife's cooking. That woman is a treasure. Oh yeah I have kids too. Well, at least I'm not paying for them any longer. Speaking briefly of money, I am also rekindling my interest in cryptocurrency and all distributed, secured methodologies that will survive the current world destruction. So much to do, so much to do.
Anyway, I've got to go get in some steps this morning. I expect to be eating a bunch of cake and excellent home cooking today. Cheers.
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