• What is greater? Everything that exists already or what could exist but doesn’t yet?

    This is where I’m calling out God specifically. How bout it pal? Did you use up all your ideas, or is the vault full of unreleased hits just waiting to be unleashed into the vastness of existence?

    Did you think to even make yourself into a god? It’d be wild if the creator of all things hadn’t even remembered to gift themselves the power to create or rule over the things you’ve created and rule over. You’d just be like the hole inside a volcano. Built an island full of inhabitants but don’t even get to claim the stone walls or magma below. Just the unthinking orifice.

    I’ve read some books attributed to you. Orifice work for sure. Don’t worry, I’ve never believed in the divine guidance of those works. Divine inspiration, sure, guidance? Nah.

    It’s funny how many people could take offense to even thinking about these things. I know atheists that would rather go to church and cringe through a sermon than to listen to my out-loud thoughts on wondering how people believe in something so obviously problematic.

    Not that you don’t exist. It’s just I have questions about some assumptions my fellow mammals have created. Unlike the initial question I raised. There are significantly more creation stories than the ones breathed into by my ancestors. The problem with humans, is we give greater value to old ideas than new ones. It’s why we prefer the first of most products. Harvard, Coca-Cola, Monotheistic books loaded with contradictions.

    I’d prefer new tails of a religion. Not in like the go see it at the cinema kind of way but in a, here folks, worship this tale of tales. It will make you a better person. You’d be a better person to write a book than read a book. Both types of people can be like the volcanic orifice but one spews a new platform to stand on and the other takes ideas with them into the abyss.

    So here’s what I want. If there was a chance, that there are more uncreated wonders than created wonders, I’d like to see something positively shocking for once in my life. Doesn’t have to be now but you know, at one point. I feel everyone typically gets to see just enough horrors to know that the world is a shockingly dangerous and indifferent place but so rarely are we shocked by something beneficial.

    Maybe it’s just we take everything for granted. All the amazing things we already have. Maybe our God is only a god of entropy and the only options are really fast decay or moderately slow decay and that’s really all they check for in prayers. If people want faster or slower entropy.

    People probably aren’t even thinking about that possibility.

    If true, it would make a load of difference to not only pray for slower entropy but to pray correctly. In the unique way that this god requires to receive and respond.

    Burnt offerings always were the best prayers. Burn the goat so that the gods can devour the smoke and the rest of us get mutton. Vegan options available in 2024.

    Anyways, I think that’s it. We need to know. Someone should write a book.

    At some point.

  • Making Magic

    From time to time, I enjoy pulling a rabbit out of my hat.

    Nobody ever asks for a magic show. Maybe kids do, but most likely it’s because they were introduced to magic or reminded of magic just five minutes prior. They’re never like “I’m bored, do a magic trick”. Likewise, your boss will never ask, even if a magician just left their office.

    A customer might ask. Your customer might be like, “hey, I see that magician as your competitor, how come your business doesn’t provide us magic of equal quality?”. This is where you have to explain to them that plumbing or whatever you sell them, has no magic tricks included in the sale.

    This is probably starting to read like a Seth Godin book so I’ll stop with this metaphor business and get to the point.

    I have a vast catalog of skills that have nothing to do with the work or products I sell. I developed these skills for the sake of doing the thing, not because anybody ever offered to pay me. Even then, I have occasionally been paid directly for them incidentally. Chances are, I delivered the work for free, to get better at doing the work. If I was paid, somebody insisted.

    When you happen to have a skill that nobody knows you have, and you deploy it when nobody requests that specific solution because they didn’t even know it was an option, yet it turns out to be the exact thing needed.

    That is a magic trick.

    Magic tricks are fun with friends too. Knowing how to gain access to a restricted or unique place, participate in secret events, share a new hobby or talent. Even people who think they know you don’t know everything about you. Surprise them from time to time.

    What I really want to get at is this. There is no point to me writing in this blog. Nobody is paying me, nobody is reading it. Nobody is commenting. Why am I here doing this?

    I’m doing it for the same reason I’m learning guitar, or learned improvisational comedy and stand up comedy, or learned to kayak or sail a boat. The same reason I know how to work spreadsheets and make films and audio production and pyrotechnics and electrical mechanical troubleshooting. Ok that last one is strictly work related.

    The thing I’ve learned about learning random things is this. It rounds itself out. Every skill you learn reinforces the other skills. It gives you perspective. Disciplines transfer in unique ways, processes cross contaminate each other. You get good at knowing the path and process for tackling a new challenge you have never encountered.

    You reduce complacency because you can look at anything with a dozen or more lenses than other observers.

    You quickly solve a problem that people didn’t know they had, with a resolution nobody expected, with skills nobody knew you had. It’s fucking magic.

    The older I get, the more tools I have, the more I experience this feeling and I deeply enjoy it.

    Will writing a blog allow me to crush a canary without actually crushing a canary? I have no idea, but it could. I guarantee much more of my success has been from the random things I’ve needlessly learned, than from any knowledge I intentionally set out to benefit from.

    Conversely, things I’ve learned from working a job, have transferred beneficial skills to my personal life. I worked the line at Taco Bell at 16, and I can still tightly wrap a burrito at home whenever the need arises.  The key is, those skills are expected at your job, at home when you deploy work skills, you’re a magician.

    The skills you learn elsewhere in life are what you can bring to the table at work or school which will allow you to crush your competition and your competitors. The more random the skills, the more surprise they will deliver.

    Do you recall Arthur C Clarke’s three laws? (Adages if you’re modest than he was)

    1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
    2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
    3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

    Here they are as lifted from Wikipedia. All three are worth pondering. Like most people, I only think about the third regularly.

    I am a human being, a machine of flesh and blood, with an evolved technology with malleable software in the form of a brain. Learning new things upgrades the software which expands the functions of my body’s technology.

    Since it is unlikely, and also because I don’t have the confidence to learn things better than everyone else, (I’m no genius after all). I follow a strategy of learning the things that most other people just can’t be bothered to learn. The obscurity of the skill, highlights the value, even if infrequently useful.

    So I’m not going to be able to develop “advanced technology” but because I’m focusing on skills most people don’t have, I can fake it with basic skills in obscure knowledge.

    I couldn’t think of a skill more obscure than actual magic. I personally have been highly interested in it all my life. I even have half a dozen books on magic tricks and deception yet I’ve never read them. I simply can’t be bothered. I’m too busy or whatever.

    Someday, I’ll likely pick up those books and learn some deception along with an actual magic trick or two, and really satisfy this craving to amaze and bewilder crowds.

    In the meantime, I’m going to focus on what’s “indistinguishable” since it’s the lighter lift.

  • Who blogs and why?

    It’s really hard to justify starting a blog when there is no compelling reason to do so but here I am.

    This first post is primarily a test to ensure the site is working correctly.

    I intend to use this site to post ideas and opinions that I have that I would previously posted on social media but those threads are so saturated with ads, sponsored and suggested posts, and other noise it didn’t seem the place. Mostly social media is only good to see who has been born, died, or recently traveled, otherwise it isn’t getting through.

    To spike my own pretentiousness, you could spend an hour writing something thoughtful on social media only to have someone respond without even considering the reality of the discussion.

    Reality in America is currently on life support and there are more people trying to tear everything down rather than working to build.

    Maybe that’s why I created this blog. To build. One could hope.

    I purchased this URL a few years back. Possibly during Covid lock down. I also bought MobyPussy.com at that time. My intent for that site was to re-write Moby Dick with all female characters. If you want to do that heavy lifting for me, I’m happy to post it.

    My initial thought with this website, was that it would be great to have a website where all types of famous authors could post anonymously. Where the work is curated but never credited. I am not a web programmer, I don’t know any famous authors, so I’m posting my own writings, even though, on this first day, I wouldn’t even consider myself an author.

    As they say in the many self help books disguised as business, wellness, or sociology books, “you have to start where you’re at”.

    This is where I’m at. I’m going to post a picture to test whether that’s something this poorly coded site can support.

    Toodles

    Non Serviam