Failure is your only option

I think up new inventions every day but rarely do they survive the mental scrutiny of rational thought.

On lifehacker, Jim Carrey puts it another way:

In a recent commencement address at the Maharishi University of Management, actor and comedian Jim Carrey spoke about failure, fear, and why you should pursue something that you love.

Failure is necessary and how you learn to get better, Carrey reminds you that failure is not exclusive to your dreams:

So many of us chose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect so we never dare to ask the universe for it. I’m saying: I’m the proof that you can ask the universe for it.

My father could have been a great comedian but he didn’t believe that was possible for him. So he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant and when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job and our family had to do whatever we could to survive.

I learned many great lessons from my father. Not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

Front deck refresh

Now that the backyard privacy fence is complete, time to refresh the look of the front deck, starting with the broken latticework underneath, which used to look like this:

Original pattern

Here are some of the patterns I’m considering, reusing the old lattice work strips where possible:

Star pattern

Galaxy pattern

Geometric patterns 2

Geometric patterns

Modern art pattern

 

Or if I’m really ambitious, I’ll turn it into a wood-and-metal mixed media display, something like this:

Mixed media pattern

 

Merlin and Erin would have selected one design for me, I’m sure…

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…after they watched the butterflies, hummingbirds, bees, birds, chipmunks and squirrels, of course.

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What the cabin in the woods looked like under construction in April 1987, still with the same latticework today in 2014 — time to bring the deck into the 21st century!:

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A Writer’s Secret

Thought to self: do not fixate on any one idea or image that bobs to the surface of one’s pool of consciousness before spinning out of the eddy and disappearing into the mainstream.

Which person will connect the dots between Chinese senior citizens collecting recyclable trash, Central American children escaping unstable societies, Carlos Slim suggesting part-time work is good for you, Bill Gates suggesting an old collection of New Yorker short stories to read, Elon Musk selling a “people’s car” version of the Tesla and Erin Kennedy organising a robot party?

What about the algae that gives the atmosphere the oxygen we need to breathe?  How much water and algae do we need off-planet to terraform our new digs?

I saw the first USPS vehicle making deliveries on Sunday driving down our street just now — what Amazon purchase was so important that it had to arrive before Monday morning?

I essentially quit hanging out in the virtual community known as Facebook, having checked in a couple of times since I quit because I didn’t have contact information for people outside of Facebook.  Once that was completed, my time spent on Facebook is over.  Although I enjoyed communicating with people in that social media space, I lost track of me, spending more time managing my Facebook personality than spending with the flesh-and-blood body that has to eat and breathe.

Primarily, since I was a young child, I have lived in and with my thoughts.  I learned to convert thinking into writing, and then examined the labels of “thinking” and “writing” to discover for myself why I am the center of my own universe.

I never stop eating and breathing but I sometimes stop being me in order to please the person in me who thinks he has to please other people enough so they don’t see the real me who’d rather sit in a nest of his thoughts than listen to others’ opinions that I have to pick through to find something in common that minimises controversy, lessening the chance that I have to stay connected to a person for longer than I have to.

I am not unique.  I compromise like many people.  Even these sentences are a form of compromise, walking the minefield of libel, slander and inflammatory comments I could make were I less civilised.

I write because it’s the quickest form of communication for me to scan when I want to return to previously-recorded thought trails of mine.

Time to close my eyes and remove myself from words, experiencing the living minideath of meditation that sometimes becomes sleep, the temporary suicide of self that rejuvenates me enough that I can stand to be around people again for a while.

Only as strong as our weakest link

I am back alone in the sunroom, meditating upon the organisation of states of energy that surround this structure and expose solar energy-converting appendages we say are green leaves.

When I sat down on my grandfather’s chair to write, I moved an instruction manual for a GWFSM4GP FMS GP Simulator to keep it from sliding off the fake mahogany Chinese storage chest, which in turn pushed a solar panel-charged battery compartment attached to two LED lights (i.e., solar spotlight) into a spider’s web.

The spider, smaller in total size than my thumbnail, spindly little thing, sometimes called a cellar or attic spider, started a gyration that caused the spider to spin like an acrobat in a sky-high rope dance, my own personal Cirque du Soleil performance.

There’s not a lot in the way of ready prey for spiders here in the sunroom so I often find the dead corpses of tiny spiders in dust-covered webs.

How much energy did that spider expend while pretending to be larger than it is in its circus act?

Dozens of trees, some only a few feet from our house, are large enough to cause significant damage to our domicile should they fall.

As I slip into meditative silence, I look back at the last couple of years of my life and marvel at yet another “midlife crisis” I experienced as I felt young again amongst the company of people in their 20s.

The world was mine, the universe a mere blip on the radar of territory to explore.

I wanted to shout from the treetops and sing in the shower.

But the moment passed and now I return to the simplicity of domestic bliss.

I see the fast-approaching date of my impending death and smile.

All is well.

I have achieved my personal goals.

I have enjoyed activities out of reach of my imagination.

I have helped send people into orbit of our planet aboard spacecraft.

Now I can meditate once again upon the happiness of being, no longer feeling inspired to boldly go where no man has gone before, content to watch blue-striped skinks skitter and scatter across hot asphalt roofs and a variety of spiders spread webs, hanging out and waiting for their next morsels, like me waiting for a thought to meditate upon in the World Wide Web.

Overthinking on the weekend

So, my wife jokes that she and I often overthink situations (such as my backyard privacy screen that I finally finished a year after designing a Rube Goldberg monstrosity and ended up with a simple double-thickness reed barrier).

But we drip tiny drops of Chinese water torture into a pail that pales in comparison to Roko’s basilisk — the thought that a future superintelligence will look back on those who did not help it exist or hindered its creation and doom them to eternal living torture!

Book titles we can’t wait to read…

“I was tailor made to be a trailer maid”
“Novel naval navel”
“An astronaut and his pet rock collection”
“Ten easy steps to avoid death for less than 100 million dollars”
“My TV viewing diary for the last fifty years”
“A Messi divorce: the demise of a popular futbol player”
“The evolution of the selfie”

Vocations through time

It’s vocation reminiscing week — today’s job well-remembered, if not remembered well:

working as an instructor for three terms/semesters for the vocational trade training business known as “ITT Technical Institute,” teaching incoming customers (i.e., students) about learning methods, Python programming language and SuSE Linux-based computer servers.

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And one last glance back at my sewer flow monitoring job — while I was working with Rick and Adam, we moved on to Erie, Pennsylvania, for another temporary flow monitoring project.  In the middle of the project, I flew down to Cape Canaveral to see my brother in-law’s experiment, called BATSE, catch a ride on a space shuttle launch, completing the circle for when I worked on the space shuttle main engine controller at Rocketdyne in the 1980s after the Challenger accident, which was even more fitting since the founder of the sewer flow monitoring company worked on the Apollo space program (he was part of the German rocket team designed the V2 rockets under the guidance of Wernher von Braun), turning the life science telemetry equipment from measuring astronaut blood flow into measuring the flow of liquid through sewer pipes — technology transfer!  Meeting interesting friends along the way…

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Deena Ramos, Klingon warrior, and her husband, James “Hardhat” White

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Dear Brenda, you were such a fun friend at the right time in my life…

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Before ADS, there was my first real corporate office job, working for GE Aerospace on the U.S. Navy test equipment called CASS, to whom us humble employees were awarded coffee cups for a job well done!:

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