Tag: Culture

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Aesthetics Culture Travel

Day 1995 and Mongoose On The Loose

I am scouting real estate (it’s an involved story) and came upon a weasel or polecat who appeared to be become stuck in an empty pool.

The setting was a rocky, wooded coastal habitat which I learned is also exactly the kind of edge habitat where small hunting carnivores like weasels and polecats move between cover and human structures to hunt lizards, insects, rodents, and even snakes.

Little Rikki The Least Weasel needed some help getting out of an empty pool

Naturally my mind went straight to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi of Rudyard Kipling fame. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in The Jungle Book in 1894, about a brave young mongoose who protects a British family in India from cobra snakes. You can read it to your child or to yourself here.

The story is simple and timeless. A boy and his fearless animal bravely face down danger with love and loyalty. Rikki-Tikki is rescued after a storm by the family, with whom he bonds. It’s tale beloved by children as the mongoose especially cares for the child Teddy, and fiercely protects him from the danger of the poisonous cobras.

He spent all that day roaming over the house. He nearly drowned himself in the bath-tubs, put his nose into the ink on a writing-table, and burnt it on the end of the big man’s cigar, for he climbed up in the big man’s lap to see how writing was done. At nightfall he ran into Teddy’s nursery to watch how kerosene-lamps were lighted, and when Teddy went to bed Rikki-tikki climbed up too; but he was a restless companion, because he had to get up and attend to every noise all through the night, and find out what made it. Teddy’s mother and father came in, the last thing, to look at their boy, and Rikki-tikki was awake on the pillow. ‘I don’t like that,’ said Teddy’s mother; ‘he may bite the child.’ ‘He’ll do no such thing,’ said the father. ‘Teddy’s safer with that little beast than if he had a bloodhound to watch him. If a snake came into the nursery now

I did indeed feel safer knowing a least weasel was patrolling the perimeter of the property. The area had a large overgrown garden which must have had good hunting. So we set about finding an empty hose to give Rikki something to climb upon so he could make his way out of the pool.

The “least weasel”safely out of the pool or is he a genet or a mustelid?
Curious as any polecat or genet he looked eager for help.
Rikki Tikki Tavi keeping the Ionian save from snakes and lizards.

Thankfully the mustelid or young beech marten was every bit as curious and interested as the mongoose of Kipling. He ran right up to the hose, grabbed onto it and raced up just far enough to reach the height of the pool ladder onto which he leapt and scuttled up and over the poolside to freedom. He very nearly waved goodbye to us. I felt much safer exploring the overgrown garden knowing he was on the prowl.

Categories
Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1994 and Wondering if 2000 Days Should Be The End? Or A New Beginning

I am getting closer and closer to a big milestone on here. Day 2000! I’ve been writing for two thousand days in a row and hitting publish. Five years and five months (almost six at 5.7 months) or 285 weeks of daily journaling in public.

I began in the height of the pandemic, and one can hardly recall just how bizarre those years were now. The great weirdening which began long before the pandemic arrived for almost everyone sometime in those long years.

Static and yet unstable. A long horizon of the long now, keeping us in semi-stasis as the institutional bulwarks cracked, and then crumbled, and then began accelerating into change. Everyone is holding on tight and pretending like it’s not a white knuckle era.

We are over the vibe shift, the Vibecession, and another vibe change after that and who knows what is coming next. I feel the same sense of being unmoored as I did when I started.

This despite having built a stable and thriving family and investing career. The biggest problems I had when I started (children, visas, family abroad) remains the same problems I have now. The temptation to simply change how we live is ever present. We escaped from some of flatland but more can be done to build communities and nations that are capable of thriving in the ceaseless change.

I still feel like I don’t know what’s coming, even as the future I sensed has come into being at an alarming right. But the perpetual not knowing can drain hope and energy if you are not careful to replenish. It’s exhausting physically too. The energy to understand what’s coming gets harder day by day and so we must get stronger ourselves.

I’ve probably put over a thousand hours of writing into this (maybe closer to 1500 as it runs from 20-45 minutes of time on any given day) so I’m a better writer but I don’t know if I’ve become a more palatable or appealing one. I don’t care too much as this is for me more than it is for any audience.

Most humans seem to prefer smoothed algorithmic writing over hand crafted artisanal human writing. Which is fine by me, as I don’t necessarily want to change my personal spaces to pander to anyone.

I was on a podcast recently where I reiterated my hope for being a node in the future. I want us to hope for the best by seeing clearly about the worst. That focus on solving problems is replenishing for the soul.

I’ll remain a little under the radar as a specialty node broadcasting to my oddballs. I’ll feel better about broadcasting know that is the long. The longevity posting, the nuclear posting, the odd travels and strange people posting will continue. I will try to broadcast on the pirate wires of the human web.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1992 and Bad Feeling About This

I have had a gut feeling that won’t shake off. I’ve been trying to stay off the radar and keep my head down for a couple of weeks with the ambition of scouting ahead on a few projects and preparing a few next moves.

I feel as if we have so much information at our disposal as to the direction of the future and so little real actionable information as to how these trends will turn out. It’s very nerve racking

Ask anyone in technology right now and it’s a raw guts driven sentiment out there. Anything could happen including some very bad outcomes. It’s a “who knows except God and the those who control the compute” sentiment.

I feel a little queasy about something but I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t think stuff is irredeemably bad but the mess of politics, culture clashes and other sundry disagreements between continents, companies, factions and individual contributors isn’t ideal.

Categories
Travel

Day 1988 and European Interstate Highway System When?

I had a long travel day. I didn’t expect it to be long as the drive on Google Maps estimated it to be around 5 hours or so. That’s barely a third of my waking hours so I can easily shove that into an early morning and get a workday in right?

Alas I didn’t take into account that in America that’s four to five hundred miles of well maintained interstate travel. Easy peasy especially with a Starlink for rolling calls.

But in Europe it’s a whole other beast requiring concentration, quick corrections and constant change. Roads are a mishmash of local jurisdictions, variable paving quality and constant switches in speed limits and limited straightaways.

Also a lot depends on which country is in the EU versus Schengen zone (so many border crossings) versus just a NATO ally but neither EU nor Schengen.

Then finally you must factor in how corrupt its various elites happen to be at any given time versus when they are in a debt restructuring and revitalization phase. A corrupted ally might have much worse roads than a debt restructured southern EU member.

I did a cruising tour of coastal roads in the Mediterranean last summer from Croatia through Albania to Greece and then another run from Tirana to Istanbul so I’m not a total novice to grand tours.

But today felt exhausting as more need kept coming in and then my rolling calls got interrupted by my “hold on lemme get through this border crossing” as rather expectedly borders were on a bit of a high alert.

Thankfully I’ve made it to my destination just as the markets wrap in American after having stopped for a dinner I’d hoped would wrap quickly but turned into a leisurely discussion of the various news items of the day between Dutch, British, Swedish, Albanian, Slovenian and Greek tourists. They all seem to enjoy a long dinner while I just wanted to get my butt into bed so I could do some actual work and also write my post. So my duty is done. European driving in a nice Audi is harder than American driving in a base model Subaru. Fancy that.

Maybe Brussels should consider an interstate highway system for the European Union if they are serious about shouldering more of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization responsibilities. Eisenhower did a good thing making America’s system so free hero status to however can manage it on the continent.

Categories
Finance Politics Startups

Day 1987 and You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out

As a school child, I was taught that the American constitution and our bill of rights protects our inalienable rights (given by God) from the government. The government doesn’t protect us. We wrote protections to guarantee our rights from the government m.

Yet you’d be hard pressed to find anyone pitching a government law these days that isn’t wrapped in logic about us needing protection from the world. Our laws now protect the American people from worldly fears.

Precious few of us discuss needing protection from the government in order to exercise our rights. The government protects us from the world’s many from dastardly threats. We don’t care so much about protecting our rights from the government anymore.

Protect the children, consumers, workers, businesses taxpayers we plead. Save us! And lawmakers respond in kind. It’s for your own good might as well be the nation state’s motto.

And what do we have to show for it? Are we freer? Do our financial systems enable life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? It sure doesn’t seem like our recent track record is working well. Have the last two crashes and subsequent legislative responses led to a more productive prosperous economy?

Sarbanes-Oxley (and the enormous growth of private venture capital) mean companies don’t need to go public anymore, and prefer not to given the compliance cost.

Which of course means the small private investor has zero chance to grow assets like the already wealthy routinely do.

I scan 20 years of tech life, and can’t think of a single instance of regulation actually improving anything for the everyman user/investor

Antonio Garćia Martinéz on Twitter 6/9/26 regarding Databricks raising a series M at a reporter 165B valuation

You used to be able to buy an initial public offering for a startup and grow with it. Now most of the gains are in the private markets. So if you were a SpaceX private investor you might have a great summer but it’s hard to say if you will want to buy the IPO.

It all reminds me a little bit of my favorite Christmas movie A Christmas Story. The movie follows a young boy and his family’s misadventures during Christmastime in 1940. He wants a a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle for Christmas. Everyone from his mother to the mall Santa Clause insists “you’ll shoot your eye out!”

Ralphie is disappointed by Santa Clause saying he’ll shoot his eye out if he gets a BB gun

Now I don’t want to spoil the movie but let’s just say that the kid doesn’t come to any harm despite getting his wish even if there are a few moments of fear and regret. Because ultimately he’s a responsible kid and it’s a BB gun.

I’d hope we continue to conclude that Americans are responsible people. Sure BB guns, frontier large language artificial intelligence models, and investments in the stock market all come with risk. But isn’t a life with Christmas magic, helpful compute and capital gains worth it?

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1982 and Gate Keeping Is Back

One of my most disappointing life lessons remains the value of gatekeeping. Sometimes the fences do indeed make good neighbors and Chesterton may have had a point.

My ambition coming out of school was to be in media, more specifically I wanted to be a fashion editor. A job a million girls would kill for right? No, I am not falling for the nostalgia dross of the Devil Wears Prada sequel.

A not uncommon response to growing up in a mountain town or remote place, is the desire to is escape to bigger places. Media used to be the portal to the stories about the wider world. You found new worlds in books, magazines, movies, television and eventually the internet. Many of us want to reach broader culture of the world.

Alas I was immediately confronted with the reality that those jobs were glamorous and thus badly paid. I couldn’t afford a job at Vogue nor did they want me so I made websites instead. I became a fashion editor after my own fashion.

Like so many millennials, I had naive expectation that if we could simply open up the gates keeping regular people out of these rarified closed worlds we’d not only bring more beauty to regular people but the beauty of regular people would also improve culture.

Yeah, that’s not how social media turned out is it? I still feel some guilt over how much the “here comes everybody” age of social media degraded many of the spaces I aspired to be inside.

And I am witnessing a new wave of closed spaces and gatekeeping emerge in order to nourish the cultivation of culture that gets crushed under the weight of algorithmic speed and microsecond trend cycles.

The rise of the group chat is an immune response to a world without any sort of borders or checkpoints for quality control except the pricing mechanism. Why cultivate taste if we can cultivate cost? If we haven’t figured out a taste barrier a price one will have to do.

I am personally opposed to price being the barrier function to culture, but if no one is willing to enforce standards in any other manner I am not shocked that we will go further inside perceived safe spaces in order to avoid the harsh glare & garish expectations of mass market access at all hours to all people.

I am trying to remain committed to being accessible to others by remaining online but even I gate-keep myself now with little litmus tests and hurdles to keep from being flooded by asks and audiences. The private world of access cycles will come and go and for now the fences have gone back up.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking Travel

Day 1979 and A Bathing Suit I Can Now Wear

My health must really be on the mend. Not so long ago (a thousand days or so) I could not tolerate wearing a bathing suit as the compression of the material hurt so badly.

Heat and sun only added insult to injury as my body struggled to manage inflammation. I had purchased a bathing suit I loved that became known as “the bathing suit I never wore” as I was simply packing it as an aspirational garment.

It was packed carefully in my suitcase trip after trip, in the hopes that I might have a good day without pain. Years went by and I never wore it. It was a sad joke. Not for aesthetics or vanity, but for the cruel pain that poor health puts you through.

If you go through the tags on the blog for ankylosing spondylitis you will see a journey of some length. The blog chronicles it from its starting years and, one day I hope, to its finish. I’ll may never be cured but I am finally living again.

The pale blue Ionian coastal waters protected from development and over traffic contain a beautiful array of fishes

I know it sounds silly that being able to wear a bathing suit without pain is a huge milestone, but I was unable to participate in the most basic outdoor activities with my own family.

A bathing suit was an aspirational garment not because I too afraid to be seen in it, but because the compression along my rib cage and spine hurt so badly.

And today I was on a boat for four straight hours including jumping off into the warm aquamarine waters of protected coastal Ionian water.

Nothing hurt at all. And I am not on any immune suppressant drugs at all at the moment. I am not on antibiotics. I am on a simple peptide regime. And now my swimsuit is being worn so often I need a second one so it can dry.

A halter top from Norma Kamali and a hat from a tourist shop.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1978 and In And Out of Reality

The “circuit” of conferences, events, parties and social goings on can make you feel like a consummate insider or give you social anxiety. For some of us, a given circuit is an exercise in social overwhelm, and for others it can be highlight of their calendars. It takes all kinds.

The “circuit” is a part of life for every industry. For some it’s a bit more glamorous; oh yes I’m off to such and such fashion week for cruise. And for others it’s much more pedestrian. A cash bar with drink tickets in a Courtyard by Marriott surely does the trick for state level budget professionals.

At a certain point, you realize there is always another room and a better party and a circuit inside the circuit and you get rid of the highs and lows of the experience and simply learn to live with the iron law of the circuit and schedule life around various aspects where real life and circuit life intersect. Everyone is on some part of the circuit.

Many places are aggressively part of the circuit. My hometown of Boulder lobbied hard to take on Sundance from Park City. I was just in Deer Valley above Park City for a new crew of energy policy folks. Swapping Hollywood schmoozing for nuclear energy seems like a wise move though I don’t know how Boulder will handle an event of that size.

Meanwhile, I learned that Athens is booting up a new technology conference that I just missed. Right before summer high season is an excellent time to bring folks down to the Mediterranean before jumping off to private islands and yachts.

I wonder about other mainstays on the circuit sometimes. Austin won’t host SXSW forever one imagines. But where should it go and should it split up? March will never be the same.

Burning Man is changing, maybe forever, and even storied camps are selling their vehicles. It’s a great week on the circuit and that time will surely be coveted. If I were Wyoming, I’d been keen to extend folks out from the Federal Reserve contingent within the western region but one doubts Nevada coordination with Wyoming is a top priority amongst old party hippies and economic enthusiasts, but you better believe the overlap includes a few folks.

Not that the circuit is a geographically constrained issue for most people on the most serious aspect of the circuit. And if it is you probably fly private or have excellent transit logistics. Bouncing from Fashion Week to Word Economic Forum isn’t a huge stretch if that’s your world.

I’m thinking about the circuit because I was on a chunk of business that was circuit related most of the spring. There was a brief pause in international traffic as the Iran situation worked itself out but everyone seems to be back to normal travel again.

The friction of coming in and out of reality is surreal. The circuit is not exactly part of normal reality as if you only participate in a few events it is the unreality of your calendar which makes it so special. If you live entirely outside of reality, it’s not quite so special.

I myself always find reality special but the dip in and out of unreality is jarring. I find one foot in each is hard to manage. I’m in unreality at the end of the circuit. And I need to reach again for reality even on vacation in unreality land.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1977 and Summer Whites

Fashion rules are not hard rules. Soft rules apply to soft people who lovingly break them if something better would liven the mood. Being mercurial is a delight for them.

Soft rules do bind some people though. That’s the old canard about conservatism.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. Frank Wilhoit

If you take the above statement at face value it makes for interesting thought experiments. Is the fashion industry is a conservative industry? Why then does it present to some as an entirely progressive culture? Fashion scholars could go on at length.

And this cultural rules exist ,about when to wear white that no one follows except those who are fearful enough to have it forced on them.

I am on an island after Memorial Day so I’m well into wearing white territory. No white before Memorial Day or after Labor Day isn’t enforced now in any meaningful sense but years after late‑1800s upper‑class habits dictated a practical, status‑signaling summer color meant for seaside or country time which were put away when people returned to sootier cities in fall.

At least I hope you aren’t somewhere covered in soot in either winter or summer. I myself am in full costal grandma regalia from white cotton pants to summer weight cashmere. Isn’t it absurd we have summer weight wools? It should really be a tee shirt but like I said soft rules for soft people.

Pools on pools
Categories
Emotional Work Travel

Day 1972 and Exposure Therapy

When the pandemic first kicked off I was relieved that travel ground to a standstill in my own life. I am a bad traveler. Which is a shame as I travel a lot.

If exposure therapy actually worked, you’d think I’d be better at managing the sympathetic response my nervous system kicks in at the prospect of leaving home.

Even well into being middle aged and well traveled, I find every aspect of travel from packing to driving to transcontinental flight to be anxiety inducing.

I should be better at this. I was was the founder of a company that specialized in travel cosmetics. I am an expert level packer as I am still on the road every few weeks. I even have a three bag cascade system complete with emergency medical supplies and plans for almost any issue you could encounter.

None of that makes it any easier. My body hates travel on a deep visceral level. I drove to the remote deserts of Utah to visit a nuclear reactor and then back to Montana in the space of three days.

Now I’m flying across the pole to another continent. I had 36 hours between the trips to unpack and repack. Logistically that would be a challenge for almost anyone. Not for me. I breeze through it.

But the fear and anxiety that my nervous system kicks in has never gone away. No amount of breath work or training or planning tamps it down. Even beta blockers and benzodiazepines barely scratch the surface of the fear. Maybe my my mother was right and being put on airplane at six weeks old was a bad idea