Fuel Price Jump

 As I was filling up my car this weekend, I realized that the price was different - about 22 cents different - from the price I had paid the week before, and that the price of that fuel was about 20 cents or more expensive than the week before.  

I wish I had the receipt for the fuel purchase for both weeks - I do not really print them out anymore - but I can pretty conclusively remember that the price has gone up about 16% in the course of two weeks, which officially made it over 2 X the cost of gas during the low point of The Plague.

I shudder as I filled up the tank, as I am enough of an economically savvy person to realize the implications of this as it works its way through the system.  Because literally everything travels at some point by a fuel powered conveyance, be it big rig or delivery truck or auto drop off.

The change will not show up there at once, of course.  It will trickle in. Prices will start to go up, first on the delivery side and then on the item side.  Delivery charges have already bumped up for the services that I use:  Alibris went from $3.99 to $4.49; overseas shipments have climbed as well.  

Then, of course, the change ripples out.  People begin to have to make choices between fuel and other things.  All of a sudden, the expendable category of expenses become more expendable. Non-essentials become the non-purchased, services become something that is done at home.

It always amuses me - in a dark sort of way - when Our Political And Social Betters react with a sort of lukewarm enthusiasm to this sort of problem.  "It is temporary" we hear, or "we are doing "things" (usually undefined things) to resolve the issue".  In point of fact very little gets done that is of impact; in the past they have simply played for time until the market corrected itself.  That works every time of course, right until the market does not correct itself.

I checked on the price yesterday.  It had gone up another 10 cents in less than 24 hours.  I am now starting to think of ordering items that have delivery charges now, before the delivery charges climb again.

The Great Emergency may not be upon us.  But A Great Emergency may very well be.

Resisting Pleasures

 

One of the things as I have continued to move through life that I have discovered is learning give things up.

I cannot confess to you that this came as a conscious decision or an accident.  It just seems to be something that has been happening organically over the last few years.

It happens in many and varied ways:  setting aside alcohol (for the most part), practicing reuse/reuse/recycle/ do without out instead of immediately spending, learning to be more satisfied with the simple than the complicated, learning to make a practice of a life spent doing, not a life spent entertaining myself ,and learning (very slowly) to let go of pride and the need to always be right or even recognized.

I have found it important as it is helping me learn to do an important thing:  learn to say no to myself.

In so many ways, I am my own worst enemy.  I coddle myself,  I make excuses for myself, I do almost everything in my power to please myself.  Every time I learn to say no, I infinitesimally strengthen my self discipline.

It is not that for most of these anything is particularly wrong with these things.  It is that, practiced without control, they make us slaves of them.  Pleasure practiced unstintingly and without the ability to say no always ends with the inability to control one's self.

I am not speaking here precisely of the physical elements that cannot be overcome (although they too can be bad; addiction is an awful thing).  I am speaking of those things which do not become physical or psychological addictions which we still find ourselves unable to refuse.

I suppose this could be considered a form of ascetism, although I am no practicing ascetic - rereading The Sayings Of The Desert Fathers I am about as far away from that rigorous life as could be expected.  But neither is it the complete yielding of the hedonist to everything that could present one with pleasure.

It does give one wonderful benefit, which Epictetus refers to above:  it frees one from the slavery of whatever pleasure is in question.  When I resist a pleasure simply for the sake of doing so - when I refuse to overeat or spend the money or let the incident pass without anger (because pride can be a pleasure like any other), I prove to myself that I can either have the thing or let it go.

Which is how we would define an adult, would we not?  The ability to manage one's life and exercise pleasures at our decision, rather than being in a place where we do whatever we want whenever we want - in other words, we act as children, fulfilling every pleasure thought that comes into our brain.

We do not expect children to act except at children - but we expect adults to act as adults.  Sadly perhaps, Western Civilization has in many ways adopted the actions of children - of fulfilling any pleasure at any time - as the real evidence of freedom.  In point of fact it is quite reversed:  adults control, children cannot.  And the difficulty will become - and may already be - that for many, the shackles have already quietly slipped on their wrists, and they simply do not realize it.

The Information And Knowledge I Had At The Time

 Ed, The Forty-Five's Resident Optimist, got me thinking.

His response to an earlier post (in part) got me rambling along on my morning walk with Poppy the Brave:

"When I look back at the things that went wrong in my life with the power of 20/20 hindsight vision, if I really get to the very moment that triggered it, I would almost always make the same decision I did back then with the information and knowledge I had at the time.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think it is impossible to look back and think that we could have done any better then or look to the present and think we can avoid making mistakes now."

Ed is always a thoughtful commenter, and as I walked and chewed on his thoughts, the line that kept coming up was "with the information and knowledge I had at the time".

Information, knowledge - data if one wishes to name it as that - matters.

In my own life - the only one I can confidently comment on - I wonder how often I have truly sought out all the information and knowledge to make a truly informed decision.  Which, of course, then brings into question precisely where one is deriving it from.

I have heard the argument from more than one person that college really only teaches two things:  information and the ability to find and research said information in that it can give one a structured process for how one goes about researching a topic and what level of information or data is "enough" to make a conclusion (not to say by any means that this is solely the domain of college; many people learn it through other ways or simply "have the knack").  My rule of thumb that I eventually arrived at in graduate school was when all of my sources either a) essentially said the same thing or b) began quoting each other, I had likely gathered "enough" information to begin forming assessments.

It strikes me that while this is a thing which comes to be valued in college and graduate level thesis and dissertations, it is a strikingly absent practice of philosophy in most daily life.

In reality, information seeking is not something that we as a society seem to value much anymore.  We value "news", which is really nothing more than stories told about (usually) current events.  Our seeking of data and knowledge has been reduced to thirty second to two minute slices of time that usually tell us "what" happened, and maybe "who" was involved, but not much more.

In thinking through this, three elements of information or data gathering came to the fore:

1)  The information -  What information are we gathering?  Where are we gathering it from?  Who are we gathering it from?  How many pieces are we gathering?  A jigsaw puzzle of a 1000 pieces that only had the edge pieces and five pieces in the middle done would not tell anyone much about what it was intended to picture.

2)  Totality of information - Do we have all the information we need to make the decision?  Have we only undertaken gathering information from those sources that most comport with our own internal likings and bents (I am often guilty of this)?

3)  Reliability of information - This is, to my mind, the hardest of all.  We can have great pools of information (in the day, it was represented as individual pieces of data on 3 x 5 note cards), the information can essentially "rhyme" in terms of content, and we can even have gathered it from a variety of sources - but is it reliable?  Is it true?   How do we determine that (that could be an entirely separate post)?

To Ed's point, most of us do the best we can at the time with the inputs that we have.  The question - at least for me - is if I am seeking out the very best information and casting a wide enough net, or if I am simply willing to settle for what agrees with the decision I may have already made.

First Say To Yourself

 

Inflection Points

 I have commented more than once how much I enjoy the good folks at Chant de Depart and their writings: Old AFSarge with his (very good) historical fiction, Juvat with his weekly updates of just life/running an cabin rental business/Wine cruises, Tuna with his occasional very thoughtful reflections, and Beans with a cornucopia of random subjects, some surprisingly deep.  I have said it before, but if you do not follow them, you are missing some fine writing.

This week there was a back to back set of postings that had me thinking:  one, a posting by a long-time comment Pawel Kapersky on the view of the current Russian -Ukrainian conflict from Poland, and the other a daily update in the ongoing series Sarge is posting about early World War II, in this case France just before the invasion.

This two contrasting pieces - one current, one about events 80 years ago - got me to thinking about realizations of the world changing, and how seldom it is a process that we seem to realize is occurring until, looking back, we always realize that it had happened.

It is not just confined to the sort of world shaking events the authors above are writing about: it happens in simple things as well.  The relationship that breaks that one realizes had fallen apart years ago yet no-one commented, the business that failed because it failed to take advantage of technological change and thus doomed itself, the religious organization that eventual fell apart because it made a key decision on a principle of faith that eventually dissolved its purpose for being.  The day you realize you will never regularly drop your children off at school again.

Most of the world and indeed, even ourselves, often do not notice that these moments are slipping by.  We realize it after some point of course, when the divorce paperwork is filed or the business goes out of business or the religious organization simply dissolves.  At that moment, we can look back and clearly see that point at which everything turned to a new direction; the old one simply ended.

I think there is value in coming to understand those moments, a value that our world scarcely places on such things - the world, of course, would simply tell us to be in the moment and follow the river wherever it leads, which of course presumes that the river is going somewhere that we want or need to be.  That is a pretty big assumption which can be more impactful in some cases than others:  knowing that Box store is going out of business in the future may be inconvenient if they have our favorite brand of crackers; knowing that the international political system may be reset has a slightly different impact.

The moments are difficult to catch - if we become caught up with and involved in the system to the point that we are always doing, and not observing and pondering.  History is a help here, from the history of states and how they act to the history of individuals in our lives and how frequently they break relationships and which dating relationship they may be on.  The signs are there for those that can see and think on them.

The benefit of realizing such moments is, I think, threefold.  One is simply that forewarned is forearmed, and to the extent we can see these sorts of changes, the better prepared we can be.  The second is that in knowing them, we are much less surprised of the changes in the situation as we always have a constant sense of awareness (zanshin  in Japanese).

The third, though, is the most important though perhaps the least relevant: it allows us to realize those points of changes and denote them in our mind, for the sake of memory or remembrance.  Knowing when something changed, we can look back before and think of those memories and events not colored by the new outcomes (which may have changed how they are viewed) but rather by the events in the fulness of their time and place in history.

A world that too often seems to value exclusively the stream of progress and future, where visual images and current interpretations come to dominate the way the world is viewed will be a world which, in every sense, no longer can understand how it came to where it was or even why it got there.  And to not know how one arrived at a point makes it all the more difficult to either move forward meaningfully or retrace one's steps.

Pine Spring

 Above the dark green,

sprite green needles raise their tips:

Spring follows hard on.

Morning Walks With Poppy

One of the morning practices  is that Poppy the Brave and I go for a walk.

The reason for going is probably split about 50/50:  She very much likes and needs her walk in the morning, and I need to put in the miles as well.  So every morning that is not frozen beyond measure (cold puppy paws) or dumping rain (A wet me is an unhappy me), I assemble my walking clothes, strap on my weight vest, pocket a bag for "duty", get the leash, and off we go.

Being in an urban area, the roads to walk are both well marked and limited in their novelty.  I can make one loop which is about 1.25 miles or another loop that is about the same.  I can make a full loop of my old running path for 3 miles.  But these are all roads that I have walked and other than the occasional new landscaping or for sale/for rent signs, there is not a lot of newness to be seen.

I struggle with the best time to walk.  I prefer to walk in the dark (morning or night), both because I simply find it more enjoyable (less people out) and the dark somehow makes it easier to ponder and think.  That said, I struggle with getting my "morning routine" in before I walk, as if I do the sun has inevitably started to come up.  I have not found a suitable compromise between "wanting to complete my routine" and "wanting to get out before the sun rise".  

When I walk, I generally do so without headphones.  I have worn them on occasion but in point of fact I am easily confused by doing two things at the same time; I cannot multi-task.  As a result, I have come to view this time as thinking or meditative time:  I think about things I might post on (this post, for example), argue through trends I see occurring, and generally just give myself 30 minutes to an hour to mull things over.

Poppy of course is wandering back and forth across the path: sniffing here and there, starting to bolt after the rabbit grabbing a last minute snack or a squirrel grabbing an early one, occasionally adding her contribution to those that have been there before, and the now-expected "squat", followed by me grumbling about the fact that I have to stop and pick things up (and then walk the rest of the way with a bag in my hand).  She loves it and generally - after the first rush of being out, is generally a good companion under some level of moderate control.

The remarkable thing to me is how much I miss these walks when I cannot take them.  I have come to value the  ability to organize and manage my thoughts before the world comes crashing in.  Of course, I have to manage such things appropriately:  any urge to "see what the world is up to" has to  be mercilessly put down lest that becomes the point of my morning constitutional.

I wish I could get better at it of course:  I still spend too much time thinking on things that I have no ability to actually influence and can engage myself in rather heated imaginary conversations with myself or others.  Like everything else, I suppose walking with the dog is a practice which it can take a lifetime to achieve balance in.

Poppy, of course, already seems to have achieved balance.  But perhaps that is simply in a dog's nature.

The Man Who Has Anticipated Troubles

 

I Require The Same From Them

 

On Apathy

 In a comment from yesterday's post, Leigh notes that Francis Schaeffer has commentary about the growing apathy for society.

And something clicked for me:  Apathy.  What I am feeling is apathy.

Apathy, for those that may not know the history, is derived from Ancient Greek and is really an opposition word to "πᾰ́θος" (pathos), a word which had several meanings but included things such as strong feeling, pain or suffering, or even misery.  The "a" makes it in opposition, thus "ἀπάθεια" or "without feeling".  We have changed the meaning slightly to meaning "without feeling" or "without caring".

How does one arrive at apathy?  Especially when in so many ways, we all seem to come out of youth with a great deal of caring and feeling and enthusiasm (or most of us, anyway;  I sure there are some but I am also certain I did not recognize them at the time).

If I sit and think about my own journey in the past two years - and I think that is a fair measure for this current feeling - it seems to be a combination of personal and impersonal factors.  For the personal factors, the single biggest seems to be my job change of two years ago this month (otherwise known as  A Sort Of Hammerfall).  While a good many things came out of that unintentional and unexpected transition, what also came out of it was a vast sense of the fact that  4 years of supreme effort and always trying to meet expectations, of stress and worry and putting off others things to make the work move forward was ultimately reduced to a review telling me I failed and a letter reassigning me.  Just to be frank, it is hard to find the follow up effort (beyond the loyalty I have to my current management, who took me in and for whom I need to succeed) to continue to be deeply invested on a personal level.  It becomes a matter of earning my salary and hoping to yield financial gain - in other words, a business arrangement.

The Plague was another contributing factor, more of an external one - not that it impacted me very much directly, but it did deeply impact the world around me.  I - and heads far wiser than I - could clearly see the impact that closing businesses and enforcing demands would have, on the economy and on people's lives.  Those conclusions were either ignored or glossed over as "it will just all work out".  It has not all just "worked out" and we are continuing to deal with the backwash today and we will for years to come.  In other words, we - all of us - will be expected to recreate that which a few thoughtlessly destroyed with the stroke of a pen.

In my religious life, the combination of halting in person meetings and the lurch of the church away from what has been defined as "traditional Christianity".  We became much less a people about holiness and seeking God and became much more about other things.  Again, as with The Plague, the expectation is that I would merely go along with it all.  My thoughts or my opinions had no place.

The last thing - and the most difficult to write about without engaging in partisan sorts of things - is simply the nature of the society (American, in my case) of the past two years.  Sufficient to say that for any number of reasons - politically, socially, intellectually - I find I am effectively an outsider in this society.

The thing that comes across as I write all of this is that my perception (whether that is reality or not) is that I have no voice or ability to influence or change these things that I am involved in.  I contrast that to something like my own personal life - say, my mortgage.  I have a direct impact on my mortgage and therefore care about seeing it paid, even if I am not always thrilled about doing it.  Over time, if I regularly pay for another 20 + years, it will be paid off.  As opposed to all of the other things I have listed above, where effectively I can be in them and do them for the rest of my life and have not a whit of impact on any of them.

I suppose the argument could be made that there is a sense that I have a limited investment in any of these things anymore.  And that is by combination of circumstance and choice, I guess.  The circumstances may (or may not) have caused the disconnect; I have chosen to continue to let the disconnect occur.

But how, the logical question follows, would someone such as myself starting caring about such things again?

At its most basic level, I might feel more engaged if  I felt like I actually had a place in any/all of these things.  Secondarily, if any/all of these things had a vision and goal that was moving in a way that it impacted my world view for good, not just treated it as "along for the ride" and a fait accompli that of course I had to support and endorse it.

To some extent this all rings of selfishness (and perhaps to some extent that is true), but I would be less than honest to myself and to you if I did not follow the thoughts where they lead.  In short, the world about me has done everything in its power to disengage my caring about or interest in it except on a very personal level.  Is that selfishness, or simply an understandable reaction to the circumstances?

The way to overcome not caring is to care; how, I wonder, do I truly begin to re-care about things that in some way feel as if the passion and vision have been burned out of my soul?

The Unreality Of Consequences

We have not experienced any kind of significant kinetic disturbance in greater Europe since the fall of Yugoslavia and the resulting civil wars that resulted (ultimately) in the US Involvement in Serbia in the late 90's.  This week, apparently, we find ourselves there again.

War in the modern world is an odd, disturbing thing.  It is now literally broadcast into our homes and consciousnesses in a real time basis:  I sit as I write this in my chair with the heat on and a cup of coffee by my side; the lights are on and Poppy the Brave is sitting in her chair to my left, watching out the window to see if anyone is walking on this cold morning.  With the flick of a mouse, I can watch ongoing military action:  explosions, vehicles moving, the sounds of shells and shots, aircraft screaming overhead.

In effect, it is like watching a television show or movie or game:  moving images, sounds, even perhaps graphic detail.  But all with the very real sense of unreality.

The reality, of course, will come later and in ways that are actually impactful:  pictures of dead bodies and burned buildings to match the actual dead bodies and burned buildings half a world away; the inevitable crash of markets and the bemoaning of lost retirements and investments and supply chains stretched even further; skyrocketing energy prices which impact the cost of everything; the inevitable yammering of all sides about whose fault this is and what should be done; and the lessons learned from every state about how this situation feeds into future situations.

We are not a serious people.

Violence is our entertainment, our escape.  Death and destruction to us has become unreal because it is simply a way that amuse ourselves.  We watch movies of violent content and we laugh.  The destruction we see on the screen - large or small - desensitizes us as we know, in the back of our brain, that somehow it is not real or lasting.  Thus fed on violence and destruction, the images we see - because in the modern world, the wars and destruction are only ever "over there", not here.

I have written that as a martial arts practitioner, one of the great things that one becomes aware of is the outcome of one's actions.  Even though we train with wooden weapons (bokuto) or unsharpened swords (iaito) and practice paired drills (kumitachi) with care and cadence, the reality that is always at the back of one's mind is what damage can be caused, even as an accident.  Blunted weapons are still weapons and although we rigorously train to avoid contact, it is always a possibility (although no-contact is something that is drilled into our heads from the first day we train).  As a practitioner, one is very aware of what the "possibility" looks like.  I am sure that for anyone that trains in any martial art or any shooting art, the consciousness is the same:  all actions have consequences, be they the cut of the sword or the pulling of the trigger, consequences that will long outlast the moment in which the occurred.

This is my great fear as we roll into a period of turmoil and strife:  we have trained generations in the concept that there are no more consequences to such things than the restarting of a game or the rewinding of the movie. We know - as entertainment - that the dead are never truly "dead" and there are never long term impacts on lives as a result.  We have spent years creating a fantasy land of violence as a passive form of entertainment and enjoyment with no equivalent training or reality based observations in the cause and effect of situations.

The gladiators of Old Rome cried out "Ave, Caesar.  Morituri te salutant" (Hail Caesar.  We who are about to die salute you), understanding what was about to happen.  We, in our blithe ignorance, merely move to click a button so we can watch more.

The Cattle Of Dawn

 

The cattle of dawn

are immune to the hoarfrost

that fogs my glasses.

On Being Stupid

 An acquaintance of mine recently had a career ending decision.  It was an innocent enough mistake, but in this particular field it was the sort of mistake that apparently one does not come back from.  Beyond just the surprise and shock of this happening and of course the opportunities that will definitely not occur because of this (some things may happen in the future, but not being there means definitely they will not happen), they feel completely foolish about something which, in retrospect, they simply should have never done in the first place.

It impacted my entire thought pattern as I went through the day.  Most because it makes me reflect on all the stupid things that I have done.

I use the term "stupid" in my case advisedly:  foolish, not think ahead, thinking there were minor consequences when there should have been major ones.  The fact that for most of them, I walked away with significant impact made me all the stupider when it really mattered.

My lack of judgement when I was young was profound.  I was easily led and so usually went along with what my best friend at the time suggested, which ended me up in activities which - in retrospect - probably would have been arrested for (no, nothing that significant:  there are no impacted people or dead bodies.  Just minor acts of what would pretty much labeled "disturbing the peace" in those days - but in a small town, that would have been enough).  Strangely enough, I skated through them all without incident.

When one gets older, of course, there is less room for error. That failed to deter me though:  I managed to avoided get shot at or arrested at least twice in my pursuit of being romantic (again, nothing that significant:  hopping fences and showing up late at night was, apparently no more welcomed by fathers in those days than it was by me in mine).  There were more consequences this time - my dating life ground to a halt - but again, impervious in my foolishness and my youth, I learned nothing.

Then, of course, you become an adult.  And if things did hurt before, they definitely will then.

My biggest and most decisive feat was quitting my then-secure job to strike out on my own in The Firm.  Somehow, without a business plan, business model, or even any real experience, I just decided I was going to make it.  Newsflash to my younger self:  The laws of economics care not at all about what one has "decided".  Besides interrupting a career and basically having to start where I left off 16 months later, I also had the pleasure of totaling out my losses - it is fair to say had I stuck with where I was in my "boring" job, I likely would be in a very different financial position now (Full disclosure:  the job would have disappeared anyway, but I would have been 1.5 years farther along in the field in a much more career rich environment than having to re-enter it later from a position of "I really, really need a job").

It happened with people as well.  In an attempt to make a quip that would make senior management laugh at a former company, I managed to so completely torch a friendship that it took almost 3 years for the individual to speak with me again beyond a simple greeting.  And I am reasonably sure it was not the first time that occurred.

When writing about these, I do not feel as if I am writhing in the fire of the decisions over and over again. I have made peace with that part of my past, and accept it for the outcomes that happened and the foolishness that got me there.

Then why did this event with my acquaintance impact me so much?

I think it impacted me because I am fearful that I have continued to learn nothing from them.

Somehow, I still find myself to be that same intensely self-centered young man to whom consequences seem to pass me over and by.  I am still far more impetuous than I should be.  My ability to plan often feels constrained by my unwillingness to do the dirty work to make for actual successful outcomes.  And even until a few years ago, it could be argued that I continued to play chicken with Fate in ways that were neither wise nor prudent.

It is easy enough for me to diagnose my own problem.  It is easier still to come up with the solution, which is a lot of quiet, dirty work day after day, following a plan which may seem as foolishness at the present time, but will yield the results I desire, and clearly staying within the well-marked driving lanes of common decency and social mores.  My problem is - at is has always been  - accepting that this is the way to where I want to be and neither getting sidetracked into foolishness or pretending that somehow, even now, playing chicken with Fate will still always count in the win column for me.

If I truly believed that there was a risk of losing, I think I would be a lot more concerned about not even rolling out on the track to try to the game of Fate chicken in the first place.  Because boring but successful beats foolish, risky, and stupid exhilaration almost every time.

A Tank Of Fuel

 Driving home last night from dinner, Nighean Dhonn mentioned in passing that she had finally broken down and stopped to get fuel for her car.

Her car - An early 2000's Ford that has rather amazing fuel economy and was the car I brought back in October - is not overly used by her:  between school and work and possibly the trips she takes, she may be at a tank of gas every 2-3 weeks.  Still, usage is usage.

We have very different views of "when is the right time to fill up" in my household.  My version - derived from TB The Elder after multiple incidents of me acting like the teen-age idiot I was and getting the tank down to "E" because I did not want to spend money and having to make a call to my father to come rescue me one too many times - is to err so far on the side of caution as to be ridiculous to most.  My family gently chides me for the fact that on road trips, I begin to get uncomfortable at a half tank and downright panicky at a quarter tank.  I currently fill my car up weekly, which is about a quarter tank of usage, both to have a full tank and to (at this moment) save money - more on that below.

My family, in contrast, has varying views of when is the right time, running perhaps from a half tank to what I feel like is "coasting on fumes". They know their cars better than I though, and to date we have not had a "I ran out of fuel" call from any of Na Clann - and as long as we do not, it remains their business.

Nighean Dhonn confessed that she had broken down and fueled up because she was holding out that prices were going to drop  - but they did not.  In New Home, our fuel prices has undergone a steady increase in pricing over the last two months - no big leaps, but in dribs and drabs.  Interestingly, The Ravishing Mrs. TB reminded me that we are still below the price of fuel when we arrived here in 2009 - but we are getting darn close to that number, something that has not happened in all the years we have lived here.

Gas prices in an urban area are odd, as you might imagine.  The place she usually stops runs about 10 cents more a gallon that the fuel station I fuel at (same parent organization). The stations are equidistant from our house but in different cities.  And that is the cheapest price of gas of course - the differential becomes more between a "named" station and where I fuel up.  10 to 20 cents is not necessarily a lot of money, but it end up being half a gallon or more over a fill.  And that does not ever cover the differences with geographies in a city (Key point:  Never need to buy fuel in the center of a city).

I always value these small interactions, not just for the fact that there is awareness that something needs to be done (e.g., fuel for the car is needed) but the awareness that things are getting more expensive.  Questions beget more questions, and more questions beget begin to reveal how the world actually works instead of how we are told the world works.  And often speaks with a voice that is difficult to ignore.

A Disconnected Viewing

There are often moments where I feel disconnected from the world at large, a sort of third party observer to ongoing events and trends.

To some extent I suppose, this derives from the fact that in over 90% of ongoing events, trends, and movements I have no preference or "dog in the fight".  The term "yesterday men", coined from somewhere, fits me to (the proverbial) T:  my causes are in the past, my future has become limited to a rather frighteningly short scope of time (20 - 40 years max, if genetics are any indication), and even within that future, there is scarcely very much that I aspire to except rather simple objectives and goals, rather than the great movements and grand plans of this time.

It is hard to discuss and maintain a reasonable discussion, as my willingness and patience in discussing things like politics, social movements, etc. has dropped to to zero, as long time readers of this blog have no doubt noted.  There is little enough to excite me in what should be my logical political ideology, as the only choices left are either foolishness or a such a weak opposition that seems to spend as much time destroying its own side as fighting back - and the alternative, of course, just considers me inconvenient at best, a sinner at worst, and in all things a mechanism for funding.  Almost to my surprise, I have found a home in a thought camp that considers all such things to be both foolishness and the final realization of how desperately men and women desire to have power over their fellows.

As events swirl and cast themselves like waves upon the shore, piling up and then pulling back only to smash more fully again, I continue to find myself almost a cynically bemused observer - like one who watch a sporting event not caring which side wins as one is ambivalent about both teams.  I cannot bring myself to care - on a high level - about the ramblings and ravings of which war will come or which economic sector will fall.  That bothers me a bit of course, because those events are made up of people, even as I am person.  All of the casting and swirling events will impact the lives of people, the guilty and the innocent, the deserving and the undeserving. This, perhaps, is the great challenge to my faith:  how do I passionately care about the individual while not caring about the wider situations?  I have not bridged this gap effectively.

I would perhaps feel more confident if - on any side - I saw the sort of leadership and vision that at least promised, somewhere out there, that there was a better outcome.  I do not.  We have reached - in every arena - the apotheosis of modern leadership theory:  Mendacity.  Appearance is more important than reality, and wishing it to be "so" is more important than what is "so".  And to be clear, this applies across every group, across every spectrum.  In a quest for purity of idealism, we have effectively surrendered any chance of actual progress.

And, strangely, I have become okay with that.

It is odd, this sudden realization that the course of the world is no longer of concern except in the most basic of circumstances.  My circle of concern has narrowed to an extremely limited group of individuals and causes.  Show kindness and respect in all measure to as many as you can - that should be and is my standard.  But support, endorsement, even involvement - that has fallen to a very small nucleus indeed.  As I have written before - and maintain - my connection to the readers and commenters to this blog and the blogs I follow have become far more real to me than any perceived connection I have to a state or a movement.

And so I find myself watching the world with the bemusement of the historian watching what he has known quietly - or not so quietly - as it careens towards a situation where it will find - perhaps to its shock - that the laws of power,  and social and economic practices work as they always have.  

Gravity, as they say, always wins in the end.

The Frogs of February

 

De Re Rustica: Quotes

 Below are some quotes De Re Rustica by Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. 

"For there are to this day schools for rhetoricians and, as I have said, for mathematicians and musicians, or, what is more to be wondered at, training-schools for the most contemptible vices - the seasoning of food to promote gluttony and the more extravagant serving of courses, and dresses of the head and hair - I have not only heard but have even seen with my own eyes; but of agriculture I know neither self-professed teachers nor pupils.  For even if the state were destitute of professors of the aforementioned arts, still the commonwealth could prosper just as in the time of the ancients - for without the theatrical profession and case-pleaders cities were once happy enough, and will again be so; let without tillers of the soil it is obvious that mankind can neither subsist nor be fed."

"For one who would profess to be a master of this science (agriculture - TB) must have a shrewd insight into the works of nature."

"Nevertheless, as Marcus Tullis (Cicero - TB) has very properly sad in his Orator, it is right that those who have an earnest desire to investigate subjects of the greatest utility for the human race, and to transmit to posterity their carefully weighed findings, should try everything.  And if the force of an outstanding genius or the equipment of celebrated arts is wanting, we should not immediately relapse into idleness and sloth, but rather that which we have wisely hoped for we should steadfastly pursue.  For if only we aim at the topmost peak, it will be honour enough for us to be seen even on the second summit."

"For agriculture can be conducted without the greatest mental acuteness, but not on the other hand, "by the fat-witted""

"One who devotes himself to agriculture should understand that he must call to his assistance these most fundamental resources:  knowledge of the subject, means for defraying the expenses, and the will to do the work.  For in the end, as Tremelius (Gnaues Tremellisu Scrofa - TB) remarks, he will have the best-tilled lands who has the knowledge, the wherewithal, and the will to cultivate them."

De Re Rustica

 You are reminded (yet again) that you have married the right girl when, for Valentine's Day, she gets you what you really want:

These are the first two books in the Loeb Classical Library of the three set volume of Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella's works, De Re Rustica (On Agricultural Affairs).  Along with Marcus Porcius Cato The Elder's book De Agri Cultura (On Agriculture) and Marcus Terrentius Varro's book Rerum Rusiticum Libri III (Agricultural Topics in three books), it forms the bulk of what we know about Roman agricultural practices in the late Roman Republic and Early Imperial Periods.  

Of Columella himself, we know very little and it is all from his writings.  We know he was from Baetica Hispania (Modern Spain) and probably born in Gades (modern Cadiz).  We have evidence he was a tribune in the Roman army from a monument in Tarentum (modern Taranto, Italy), possibly having served in Syria.  We can guess, based on other references, that he was born sometimes in the latter reign of Augustus Caesar (~ 4 B.C.) and probably died sometime in the latter part of Nero's reign or in the Year of Four Emperors (~ 68 to 70 A.D.). He had an uncle, Marcus Columella, whom he praises as a good farmer and who, it is a likely guess, he spent some amount time with.  We know he owned farms in Caresoli, Ardea, Albunum, and Caere.  

And we know from his works he was a keen student of agriculture.

His work is divided into 12 books:  Preface, Selection of land and management of farm staff, Soil enrichment/ploughing/crops, Cultivation/pruning/grafting of vines, Cultivation/pruning/grafting of fruit trees and olives, Animal husbandry and care (cattle/horses/mules), Animal husbandry and care (sheep, goats, swine, dogs), Poultry and fish ponds, Apiculture, Gardening, Duties of the farm overseer, and Duties of the farm overseer's wife (including recipes for pickling, preserving, and making wine) - in other words, everything one should know to run a successful farm in the 1st Century A.D.

The work is one of those sorts of historical miracles: known and quoted by Pliny the Elder, Cassiodorus, and Isidore of Seville, it somehow got lost in history only as fragments until copies were found in monastery libraries in the early 15th Century (proving again, by the by, why the idea of creating small communities to preserve knowledge really matters and things like The Benedict Option really matter in the modern world).

I know what you are thinking:  Why such interest?  This is written for a system and way of life that disappeared (literally) centuries ago.  What could it possibly teach us, other than some obscure Latin phrases and give Latin practice.

The first reason, of course, is I simply love a good book, and from what I have read so far (I have completed Volume 1 and am in Volume 2, Book V), Columella is a careful writer.  He knows exactly what he is writing about in great detail and although, for example, I only understand a bit from his chapters of viticulture, I am willing to bet that an actual practitioner would recognize many of the techniques mentioned from his description 2,000 years later.

The second reason is simply that I am interested in low input agriculture.  While the Romans had some technology (including concrete we still cannot replicate), they also were working with very basic conditions:  they were largely dependent on weather as it occurred;  Inputs to the fields were only those they could grow or gather themselves:  green manure, animal manure, even human manure and urine.  There were some exotic plants, but at the same time no farmer was going to "bet the farm" (literally) on an unproven technology or crop.

The third reason is that to me, it reads like a travel log.  Columella writes of grapes that we know nothing of, other than potentially the region they were originally from:  Massic, Surrentine, Alban, Caecuban, Bituric, Aminean, Basilic.  These names, their descriptions, what they imply - to me, they excite me as much as the name of foreign civilizations long dead, that we only know through their architecture and writing.  It becomes an agricultural journey in the Ancient World.

Not all the information is useful, of course.  All authors - Columella, Cato, and Verres - presume the use of slaves to complete the work instead of small independent yeoman farmers (which would eventually become the large Latifundia farms of Italy), so there is also a less savory side to the writings - but quite reflective, given the times.  And it makes some of their advice not applicable at all in current times, as most people (like myself) that are reading such things and even trying to do such things would not have such a labor force available.

Does that make this work (or these works) less useful?  I do not think so.  In modern times, we keep trying to find ways to farm more productively and less destructively.  It turns out - be in in Rome or China or Japan - people had actually been doing this for thousands of years, where maintaining the fertility of the land was a paramount need as one needed the land to produce.  

We need only look back to look ahead.

February Moon

 

February Moon

pretends that it is the Sun;

stars laugh in silence.

A Friendship Renewal

There is nothing more amazing or wonderful when a thread that has not been used in years gets picked back up by the Creator and placed back upon the loom.  

The story starts - as all stories do - some years ago with The Valkyrie, an acquaintance of an acquaintance that became a friend.  This things are never perfect of course:  sometimes one meets someone and that, as they say, is that.  Other times, however, the friendship seems to take for reasons that are not always clear to me.  In that sense, I suppose, there is something about us that is somewhat more than the words we exchange and the interests we may share, something that simply calls out to us upon occasion that "this one is a friend" where others are not.

(I note in passing that The Valkyrie is, in fact, a she.  As is The Shield Maiden.  I have always had far more female friends than male friends.  It just seems to be the way it is.)

Friendships in the InterWeb age are interesting things.  At best for many of them, you see them occasionally or not at all (for example, I think it has been at least 6 years since I have seen the Shield Maiden in physical form).  But that does not mean they are any less real or engaged for all of that, technology being what it is these days - and if that were truly true, there would be no long term friendships (Uisdean Ruadh and The Actor) in my life, since those date long before the InterWeb even existed for the masses.  Conversations can become disjointed, randomly starting and stopping at any and all times of the day and night, or suddenly they can lurch back mysteriously to something that was discussed five interactions back.  But the conversations can be just as meaningful, the laughs just as loud, the thoughts just  as profound as if one was in person.

Things happen, of course.  People get busy, people have lives.  This is the other reality of the InterWeb - essentially it is pulling time from other places and other things.  An investment in a InterWeb friendship is different in that aspect, that the friendship is much more writing and typing than in the direct sharing of activities.  And so, for various reasons, people drift on as they do with any physical friendship.

Sometimes, though, something random happens and the friendship is renewed.

The renewal of friendship - especially one you valued - is truly a happy moment.  Not only for the joy of having that person back in your life.  Friendships - real friendships - are precious things, things that it often feels like we have squandered in our modern world of "likes" and "hearts".  I can have 200 business relationships that I speak with every day; that will not replace the actual value and worth of a single friendship, even if (as with InterWeb friendships) sometimes unevenly applied.

There is nothing finer than to suddenly discover, amongst the weave, a previous color or pattern you had not seen for a while suddenly reappear.