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Ten Things That Are Gonna Happen Maybe

April 18, 2008 4 Comments

I’m going to hang my arse out in the breeze a bit, and start predicting things.

1. I predict I’ll be way off

See, this is going badly already. It’s starting to remind me of my first To-Do lists:

1. Make list
2. Check list
3. Check off “Make list”
4. Ckeck off “Check List”

5. Lunch

So I acknowledge no one knows nuffin’, and I’m as no one as anyone. But the writing is on the wall for all these, if not in my lifetime, than at least my childrens’. Let’s read it:

1. Practically no one will commute to work. Almost no work will be of a physical nature involving drudgery. Most non-food things will all be made out of the same inexpensive stuff, just assembled differently
2. Large scale farming will shift to a sort of factory setting. Farm animals will no longer be necessary, as flesh for eating will be generated without growing animals. Continent-sized swathes of the Earth will return to wilderness. Populations will again move toward cities, when the only reason they ever left is conquered: Government corruption.
3. We will never run out of anything important.
4. The world can, and will, support many more people than it already does, as long as they are relatively well off. They will be
5. Things like surgery will become obsolete. Common colds and other humdrum maladies will be eradicated. Life spans will be greatly lengthened
6. Pan-pagan rationalist mysticism will be superseded by some great religion based on the family
7. Support for all political regimes will be based on economic matters alone. Economic hardship will be considered prima facie evidence of government malfeasance. All governments will move to a sort of Google model: Only those that require special treatment will be charged money. All other services of the government will be available free to the citizen. Few will want anything the government offers
8. The only problem for energy is storage. It will be solved and no other considerations about energy will ever matter again
9. Large scale warfare between nation-states will become obsolete
10. Numbers 1 through 9 will never happen because we will either elect socialist autocrats or reactionary statists whose worldview is based on either rationing goods or restricting intellectual freedom; or perhaps become gangster states based on resource cartels, a form of international rationing. And rationing by its very definition is never sustainable, kiddies. It only works in the lifeboat if someone’s coming to save you. And we eradicated Pan-pagan rationalist mysticism way back in item six, remember?

An Invitation Into A Disorderly Mind

April 17, 2008 18 Comments

I’m not a blogger.

I hate the word. It’s inelegant. The Internet is disorderly and inelegant, so it fits, but I more or less have never gotten the urge to be “a blogger.” This might seem counterintuitive to those who read the URL for this page and see dot blogspot right in my name. Google named it, I didn’t. Google couldn’t even name themselves properly. Who should expect them to name others wisely? I tire of gibberish in great things.

Bloggers are other people. I am not casting aspersions. I’m just telling ya, is all. I confused a few people yesterday, because I put the raw feed from my head on the page. If you look at the picture I supplied, and read what I wrote, it’s entirely coherent. But old friend AJ Lynch’s observation:

Say that again but slower this time.

and new friend anonymous’:

You want to share whatever you’ve been smokin’?

are entirely fair. They are cruising the Internet looking for people expressing themselves forthrightly. There’s nothing more forthright than the Internet. I can’t ever recall being told to Die In A Fire in real life, after all.

So I’m a little too obscurantist for the Intertunnel. I can’t help it. I write essays here. It’s different. I apologize unreservedly, in advance, for everything I’m ever going to say in the future.

Those were my wedding vows, by the way.

Perhaps I owe it to my audience to explain the idiosyncratic workings of my mind. Here goes.

See the picture at the top of the page? I saw it on our beloved Intertunnel yesterday. What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you see it? Wanna know what mine is? This:

Marilyn Monroe is sitting on a very old school sawhorse, one that I’ve made myself. I have never encountered another person still making them this way. I learned it from men, all dead now, for whom Marilyn Monroe was more than a Elton John retreaded song reference. My modern carpenter friends would never make sawhorses this way, as it is complicated and labor intensive compared to their designs. But I’ve used mine for 25 years and kept them outside for much of it. They don’t even wiggle in the joints yet. I do, and I generally am kept indoors at night. There is no shame in the carpentry trade in buying pre-made sawhorses now, either, although the people I first learned carpentry from would have never spoken to you for the rest of your life if you brought one to work.

Oh, and Marilyn Monroe? She’d be camped out on my doorstep waiting for me to come home, if she was still alive. Girls like that are a dime a dozen. I’d have to send my wife out to shoo her away. But man, look at those legs.

They’re 1×6 utility grade pine. Set the framing square at 24″ on the blade and 4″ on the tongue to get the angle right.

There Are Rules

April 16, 2008 6 Comments

There are rules.

These rules are not written in any one place. Right next to essential rules are nonsense. You must parse them.

The rules allow for almost limitless innovation. But if your worldview is based on limitless innovation by ignoring the rules, you’ll fail every time. And be derivative.

There are never any new rules. Just rules you don’t know yet. The same people on the divan were once in the cave.

You will never be happy if you break the rules. It’s likely you will not realize why you are unhappy, and will blame the rules you ignored for your troubles.

You will refer to things by their polar opposite, and be unhappy, and never know it.

A miss is as good as a mile with the rules. A little wrong might be the worst kind.

A person warning you that you are at war with nature is wasting their time if they are right. You will lose in a hurry. If you do not lose in a hurry, the person warning you is wrong.

A willing but uneducated person has a better shot at it than an intellectual, because an intellectual is only interested in ideas, and so reality is superfluous to them. Anything can make sense on a piece of paper.

You want to walk down that path, and smell those blooms, and scale those little steps, and sit on the porch with the people that live in that picture. And maybe you don’t know why.

I do, a little.

It’s Still Warm By The Stove

April 15, 2008 4 Comments

They come, one after another. I wish they’d leave me be. It’s still warm by the stove.

I got tinder and wood ’til I’m gone and forgotten. The food still comes from the ground if you make it. Still they come and cluck their tongues and try to take me from my squalor.

Squalor. I always loved that word. The pastor would boom it from the pulpit, and the newspaper would have it from time to time, back when they could still write, talking about some woman and her cats. People don’t understand thirty cats and one dish any more because they aren’t on a farm with a pile of something worth eating they’d like to find still there in February.

I live in squalor so what. But they come dressed like streetwalkers or wandervogel or something and want to save me from it. Save me from myself. How can anybody do that, anyway?

They don’t know about the shades that tread the house with me. Gone to their reward. I could not go away from them until they invite me to join them. And I will not let you scrub their residue from my walls.

I pray over their stones, including the granite stubs at our feet where we dared not write the names for fear of breaking our hearts over and over. But they have names in my heart, oh yes, they always did. I’ve whispered them in my own ear every day.

They come in their fancy cars, skinny with mindless exertions and not work, expiating their guilt on my doorstep. But you see, my life is like a coat that’s gone shabby and threadbare and I don’t care. Many garments are not for show on a farm.

So my life is lived in squalor, and this must not be, you demand. But I take one look at you and know that you never spent one moment in squalor, but your life is squalid. You’re a gilt-edge leather-bound thirty-dollar Bible with all the pages written by Beelzebub. Not the same, is it? People didn’t use to try to save you. They’d extend their hand and call you friend. I can’t find it even in church anymore.

Leave me be, by my little fire, to be warmed by the life I lived. I’ll not join you on your icebergs.

(I’m Not Going To) The Boatyard

April 14, 2008 No Comments

[Editor’s note: The author is bumming me out. He wants me to re-run this from years past, and I want to go to the boatyard, too, but I’m too busy.]
{Author’s Note: There is no editor. The boat is very real, and very dusty now.}

This is the time of year for the boatyard.

I got rid of my sailboat. Gave it away. I didn’t use it, and I tired of it calling out to me all the time, reminding me that it was there and I wasn’t using it. The reminder came, generally, in the form of a bill of some sort. If it just existed, that would be one thing. But it became a taxi to nowhere, up on blocks, with the meter running. No fun.

Don’t get me wrong; it was marvelous to go out on Buzzards Bay in the high summer and trail your hand in the hissing foam along the gunwhale and feel the sun and the breeze on your face. But it was an awfully long run for such a short slide. I spent as much time painting it as sailing it the year before I finally pulled the plug on it.

I made another boat. It was my original idea, to make a boat with my own hands and get out on the water in that. It would take all the dilettante out of it for me. However modest it might be, no one makes sport of a boat you made yourself. People have all sorts of ideas about other people’s boats at the harbor, most pretty catty, but there’s a sort of respect that comes with the fabrication of the thing.

I made the little boat all from mahogany and mahogany plywood. I finished it about three years ago or so. It was in the way, half built, for more than half a decade before that. I finished it in a flurry in three weeks so I could get it out of the way. I never launched it.

I stuck it in an unused bay in a friendly garage, and only the dust motes drift by it. It calls to me, as the other one always did, but in a different way. There is no meter. There is no urgency. There is no feeling of foolishness of pouring cash into a hole in the ocean.

Whenever you’re ready, it says.

Month: April 2008

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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