Once again, on the subject of why we can’t have the keys to the Cosmic Ferrari… I am preparing a presentation for a conference in North Carolina in June. Consider this the...
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As you all know by now, it has been my privilege to be interviewed on several podcasts over the past few months, finally fulfilling my lifelong delusion that someday, somebody might think I have...
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Just a few days later… This morning, the Bradford Pears are fully bloomed. In fact, on some of the trees in the neighborhood, the blossoms had already fallen and been replaced by their green...
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Thanks to Jesse Michels (@AlchemyAmerican) for my first “joint appearance” with @joerogan and @iamnickcook as we all speculate about the deployment of the Biefeld-Brown effect in the B2 Stealth...
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Winter: it’s the season that goes on as long as you can possibly endure it* … and then it goes on a while longer. Apparently the Bradford Pear trees up the street from me have not gotten...
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OK, this might actually be some kind of big deal. A few months ago, I wrote about going out to Los Angeles to spend an afternoon with Jesse Michels about the Townsend Brown bio. This evening, Jesse...
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Well kids, I’m at it again. It’s actually been a couple of months since I recorded this. The producers took their time adding some visual effects to the YouTube version above, and it was...
Read MoreI am reading Scott Galloway’s weekly blogpost this morning.
He quoted Frida here, and this seems to address the theme that I’m working on these days, too.
Final act… last chapter… going out with a bang…
…but not anytime soon.
And there’s a shit-ton to learn and do before the last bus ride.
This has been my mantra over the past week or so, re: my dismissal from Apple (email me if you need the password) on Jan 20 after five years of seemingly meritorious service :
I’m in good shape, at least for the time being, even without the bit of income I received from Apple that helped make my ends meet (or, as I half-joked on occasion, because I am old and have other means, “I could actually afford to work for Apple…”).
As the photo above illustrates, I’m floating free, and looking for a soft place to land.
(Incidentally, when I went a-Googling for a picture of a wing suit and first saw these images, my first response was “oooh… that looks like fun! I quickly came to my senses 😱)
Over the past decade, I dissipated a lot of creative instinct,s impulses and energies into social media… but I’ve been off of Facebook (and Instagram) since June of last year… and now I will attempt to focus that energy here.
Right now I’m just fondling the focus ring, thinking about which way to twist it.
Stay tuned, more to come.
This is a test.
I am experimenting with a slide-show plugin for WordPress.
These are photos from the 1970s…
I watched the first episode of HBO’s new show “The Gilded Age” last night. I’m not sure yet what I think of it. It’s created by the same guy who created Downton Abbey, and I liked that, but one episode in this seems over the top and a bit fatuous. I took a shine to Carrie Coon after The Leftovers and Fargo, but she seems wasted here in a role that is all about living in a ridiculously large house and wearing ridiculous dresses. Granted this was the pilot episode, so maybe it gets more worthwhile from here, but the viewing was at least hearing this line. I take a note these days whenever I see or hear the word “incorrigible.” Every time somebody uses that word, this little demon gets his smile on 😈
… Why aren’t you at work??
*
Marianne Williamson is the only presidential candidate that has made it to a national TeeVee debate stage that I ever had lunch with.
That was back about 1990, when she was just getting started on the lecture circuit, talking about A Course in Miracles. Long before “A Return to Love,” Oprah, or the 2020 Democratic Party primaries.
At the time I met her, I was in Los Angeles training for my brief career (1990-1991) as a Series 7 securities peddler. I heard Marianne at one of her lectures at a church in West Los Angeles, talking about how she was 
financially insecure, so I approached her after the lecture and we arranged a lunch meeting. Nothing came of it beyond that, other than the recollection that that was one of the most intense lunch meetings I ever had.
If nothing else, she and I are both Truman Babies (she 1952, me 1950).
This quote above is lifted from a profile in a recent edition of the New York Times.
Above: a portrait of the Silicon Slinger in Happier Times – ca. February, 2017
*
Long story short: on January 20, 2022, I was “terminated” from my job as a part-time product specialist for Apple, Inc. – after working for more than five years at their retail outlet in the Green Hills Mall in Nashville, TN.
As the story that follows details, I was fired for the grievous, cardinal sin of… asking a customer for her phone number.
… I’m finally owning it.
This is who/what I have been since the first time I got sent to the principal’s office.
For drawing a ‘naked stick figure’ of my third grade teacher, Miss Gaul.
Who, in hindsight, probably had no business being protrayed as naked in any context.
But what did I know, I was only 8 years old.
And already incorrigible.
Scott Galloway is a tech investor, commentator and business school professor at NYU.
I first learned of his existence on the Bill Maher show back in March, 2021. He made quite an impression. Maybe too strong an impression to ever be invited back.
But after I saw him on the TeeVee, I started listening to Pivot, the podcast he hosts with tech/business journalist par excellence Kara Swisher. They have as good a grasp of the Forces At Work in the World today as anybody.
Near the end of their first episode of the New Year, Galloway started talking about having lost a cousin to Covid. The cousin was all of 62 years old. In what almost amounted to a ‘hidden track’ at the end of the episode, Galloway said what I have quoted above.
And that, I hope, will be my mantra for the coming months.
Please say hello if you want to be among my “Dunbar’s Number”
It’s been a minute…
Happy New Year?
We’re having quite the “winter precipitation” event here in Middle Tennessee today. It started snowing just as I was getting out of bed around 7AM… oops, no walk through the neighborhood this morning. If I don’t get out later, today could be the first time in a couple of years that I don’t “close the rings” in my Apple Watch fitness apps.
What is it about a ‘snow day’ that invites the mind to wander? Is it just the notion that ‘nobody is going anywhere for a couple of days…’ that tempts us to back away from the usual sense of duty and obligation and consider other possibilities? That’s how I’m feeling at the moment. There is nothing I really have to do so… what would I like to do.
And it seems that the first place I turned is the open “Post” window for this website that I’ve been casually maintaining for what seems like a decade now.
Also: perhaps not coincidentally, today is the first anniversary of the “High Water Mark of the Conlunacy.” – apparently the last essay of any consequence I posted here.
Furthermore: I turned 71 while y’all weren’t looking, so all the miracles contemplated when I turned 70 remain germane.
I went on a road trip in late October/early November. From Nashville to Quebec Canada with stops in Gettysburg PA (for the battlefield) and Cooperstown NY (for the Baseball Hall of Fame) on the way up, and stops in West Hartford CT and Philadelphia PA (for family) on the way back. I nailed the timing, the foliage pretty much looked like this the entire time:
Shenandoah Valley, VA
Of course I took lots of photos along the way, but, also of course, I haven’t quite figured out what to do with them. Maybe I’ll just post some at random over the weeks or months ahead. Or maybe not.
Then it dawns on me, I can put the images on the web in a “shared album” via the Apple Photos app. Wanna see where I went? I’ll have to come back over the weeks ahead and tell the stories that go with the pictures.
An any event, Buster was certainly glad to see me when I got home. She is sitting wedged between my thigh and the arm of the chair I’m sitting in as I type, but here she is when I got home from the trip back in November. She likes to ride around the house perched on my shoulder.
I know, I haven’t been doing the Daily Busters, I haven’t been doing the occasional “Wisdom From A Typewriter,” hell, I haven’t been doing much online at all – mostly because back in June I got my sorry ass off of Facebook and Instagram, which is where I posted all that stuff.
Now I guess I have to find some… strategy?… for posting stuff here with some regularity. Such are the sorts of thoughts that never make it past the “vague intention” phase of their formulation – and beg for some attention in the midst of a ‘snow day.’
In the meantime, I have assembled all The Daily Busters in a shared Photos album you can view on the Web via iCloud.
Click the link above or the image to see all The Daily Busters
*
Having fully retreated from the toxic swamp of “social” media for the past six-plus months has altered my sense of ‘connection’ with the rest of the world – in ways that I am still hard pressed to make sense of.
On the one hand I rather miss the occasional – if ‘virtual – contact with people I care about.
On the other hand, I totally do not miss the obsessive ‘poke and scroll’ impulse or the subconscious desire for validation and gratification by inherent in “Like”s and comments. And I sure don’t miss being a peasant on Zuckerberg’s estate, tiling his digital fields for free while all the wealth goes to the Lord in his castle.
That’s about as much sense of the detachment as I can make for the moment.
In the months – years – prior to my “Zuckerberg Extraction”, I would often comment that I felt about Facebook (in particular) the way I felt about Scotch and vodka in the months/years before I finally stopped drinking. That was 34 years ago this past Thanksgiving. I wonder now, what was I like in that first year of sobriety? I think there may be parallels to what I’m feeling / experiencing now re: social media withdrawal. I don’t miss the reality of it so much as maybe I miss the idea of it, and even that passes with time.
But, still… what about the people I care about?
Who are they?
How do I stay in touch with them?
Do they want to stay in touch with me??
These are tougher questions to answer absent the casual association through the artificial mediation of something like Facebook.
But maybe I know where this is going, if I can muster the energy, focus, determination and consistency to get it there.
This vaguely forming concept of “analog social media” started during my road trip. I actually wrote and mailed a few postcards to people that I otherwise would have taken for granted would see my posts on Facebook. It was a much smaller potential audience, but as my friend Susan said when she got hers, “Postcards. What a great invention do you think they will catch on?”
Why the hell not?
So, I dunno, over the months ahead, I may pare down my bloated contacts database, find the 150 or so people I really want to keep in my life, and start sending them postcards – even if I’m not going anywhere.
Who knows, maybe some of them will send one back.
