Expecting the Unexpected

Usually, the things you'd never expect to happen are most effective.  Simple logic dictates this.  Foreseeing something inspires preparation, even if it's just mental preparation.  Preparation reduces effects.  If you don't see it coming, it's hard to dodge.

A few unexpected hits in a row can be more than disconcerting.  Trying to climb out of a crater is hard enough without incoming rounds digging the hole deeper.  At times, it can seem like there's no way up.

There's no option, when unexpected events occur, but to keep going.  There will be setbacks.  Stopping only exacerbates them.

The unexpected will happen.  Solutions won't always be forthcoming.  Knowing that your plan is to put your head down and move forward puts you ahead of the game.

Morning Coffee Post #5150

No coffee, yet.  Something is wrong with the world.  The next move is coffee, though.

Temperature steals motivation.  Cold seems to stifle my starter.  Maybe, after a good stretch, the outlook will improve.

***

Coffee brewing, now.  Soon, warm caffeine makes things better.  The world smells optimistic. 

Stifling Control

Almost every time you look into why a cool invention never went to market, it's because the government got involved and drove the inventor/manufacturer out of business.  I sincerely believe that if Apple hadn't gotten their iphones manufactured overseas, they wouldn't have made it to the shelves.  A long line of bureaucrats, who've never done a constructive thing in their lives, effectively demand a cut for themselves.  If any one of their little greasy palms don't get satisfactorily greased, they make it nearly impossible to innovate.  

They'll use whatever useful idiots they can to shut innovation down.  Law enforcement, who just enforce what laws/regulations they're told to enforce, get their marching orders from bureaucrats.  Courts take those laws and regulations and allow the invaluable time of the inventor/manufacturer to be stolen, with no compensation for that time.  Even if someone wins, they're too far behind to ever recover.

If constituents never come to the realization that government is stealing their future, innovation will cease.  History shows us that when innovation ceases, technology regresses.  This generation's great-grandchildren may not be living in brush arbors and riding donkeys, but, if they don't get a grasp on government, that may not be too far off.

Zip It

Opinions are rarely humble.  Try as they might, opinions are rarely honest, either.  Against their will, they're almost always purposefully misleading and arrogant.

Nobody needs to hear my opinion.  Rarely does anyone want to hear it, and even less often is it useful.  Still, it occasionally spills, involuntarily and unsolicited, from my lips.

Talking Airwaves

Pace dictates a lot.  Nothing takes longer than waiting.  Quicken at your own risk, though.  There's too much you'd like to happen fast that nobody else does.

Chatter increases for no good reason.  Disguised as sense, nonsense floods.  Listening to traffic ebbs and flows beat the air moves time like blabbering water in a creek. 

Humpday

Breaking up the week requires waypoints.  Getting there can make the week better.  Not getting there is still okay; hitting them at the right time just puts points in the plus column.

The End Game

Long jokes are a gamble.  They don't always pay off.  When they do, it's priceless; when they don't, recovery might not be possible.

It's a good thing I find everything funny.

Mind-Wipe

I love it when I think about something off-and-on, all day long, and think, "I can blog that later," only to get home and say, "What was it I was thinking about?"  That's where I am.  A commentary on my brain.  Or lack thereof, I should say.

From time to time, I'd add a sentence and think, "Yeah, that'll fit well."  It's all gone.  Every idea, every word... all gone.  I remember the process off adding the sentence, but not the contents.

Less than an hour's drive wiped my memory.  I didn't even listen to much on the radio.  Something did it.  Whatever it was, it blanked out my head.

Warm and Caffeinated

Hot coffee, when it's cold outside, provides a comforting contrast.  Fauna stirs in the cold.  How their tiny bodies handle cold so well remains one of the mysteries the creator miraculously solved.  After all, they don't have coffee.

Behind the Times

Most old stuff that makes you think, "That's ahead of it's time," really isn't.  It just means there were probably a lot of people thinking about whatever subject you believe to be recent a lot earlier than you thought.  If you believe those topics are important, it also means you're probably not as well researched on the history of those important topics as you think.

No Place Like It

I woke up too early, today, making the day seem longer than usual.  After work, I got some chili for my dad and I to eat when I went by to see him.  After we'd been sitting there for little while, eating chili and watching old westerns, I got this feeling that I'd been out in the world too long, today.  I needed to get home.

Nothing feels as good, anymore, as being at home.  I believe it wouldn't be hard for me to become a hermit.  I know 'feeling at home' is a thing, but this is more than just comfort.  There used to be many reasons to want to go places.  Now, my house beats all of that.  I prefer it to anywhere else.

No Digging Necessary

Don't take this seriously.  There's no meaningful subtext buried.  Nothing here is that deep.

Shovels aren't required, either.  Save 'em for other places.  There's plenty to shovel, elsewhere.

Vanity Vanity

It's late, and the directness of night persuades consciousness to fantasize of sleep.  Motivation in the search for words wanes.  Out of respect for continuity and the fact that only in the last few years has this hour seemed late, I'll give it a shot.

Nah.  It's all in vain.  Go to bed.

...and Wash Away the Rain

Existence arbitrarily acts.  Caught up in observing the astoundingly random, time can lose meaning.  Even purposeful action quickly spins off into irregular routines.

Some time-ending Vonnegut catastrophe might happen tonight.  Or maybe it happens tomorrow.  Maybe it's never.

Maybe it was 2 years ago, and we're all hallucinating on the event horizon of the newest black hole in the galaxy.  Neurons, defying the laws of physics, fire.  Daisy-chained to infinitely amplified alpha waves, they broadcast one last fantasy to the cortex of all humanity. 

Evaporation

Memory fades.  Things escape.  What's important today will be yesterday's news, tomorrow.  Not long after that, it'll be gone.

Rain floods and fills every low spot.  Everything gets drenched.  It seems it'll stay wet forever.

The Sun comes out, though.  Water evaporates.  Soon, the puddles are dry, again.

Where We Began

Words click together like a syllabic jigsaw puzzle.  Patterns vary and only fit together.  Meaning subjectifies.

Every time seems like a strange time.  Time is strange.  Wander in from the past.

Connective tissue inaudibly verbalizes tomorrow's tasks.  Missing information from countless realities steals comprehension.  Place speaks as well as time.  Motive force meets intangible and pushes what it can't touch.

Knocked Down

Reassessing on a regular basis is probably a good idea.  If not, situations will force it.  When forced, it's never a good time or place.  

Life keeps fishtailing down the road, knocking over light posts... never slowing down.  It's going somewhere, but nobody knows where it'll wind up.  Just stomp the gas and look for a new trail to knock down.

Ease on Down

Loving the result doesn't necessarily mean you have to love the process.  Enduring the journey can be trying.  There's nothing that says you can't have fun along the way, though.  Make it whatever you want.  Eventually, you'll get there. 

Slow Down

A decade might seem like a long time.  Then, the realization hits that ten years have passed and you still haven't done that thing you meant to do last week.  At least it seems like last week.  Ten years is nothing.

Before you know it, people younger than you start talking about their grandkids.

Weeknight Yawnings

Staying up late to watch football got me, again.  Heavy eyelids try to keep me from seeing well enough to type.  One eye's already closed, and the other is threatening to close against my will.  Time to mosey on back to bed and try to get to sleep. 

Night All Day

Dusk seemed to start before noon, today.  Clouds and rain set somber shadows.  Streetlights are on.

Wet reflections in the dark puddle slop emit murky glows down the driveway.  Evergreen and perennial trees in the middle of the yard look to have jet black needles and leaves.  Even the gray sky looks to be a different color.

Rolling thunder keeps me company.  Pitter-patter rain sings a lullaby, really trying to put me to sleep.  Bedtime will be early, tonight.

None of that Other Mess Matters

Music and laughter knock the edge off of almost anything.  Turn the volume to 11.  That's the real reset. 

What's that Smell?

This time of year, the vent for my vehicle's climate control always switches to outside air without my permission.  Some foul odor from outside gives it away, at which point it's too late to keep the stink out.  The only choices to get rid of it is to quickly hit the 'recirculate' button, and hope to ride it out, or to open the window and pray that you've already passed what caused the stench.

Riding the motorcycle, back in the day, there were a lot of smells.  They typically passed quickly and didn't seem as intense.  Maybe it was olfactory fatigue.

Now, when I pass something stinky on the highway, it's way more alarming in my car, if that outside vent is open, than it was on my bike.  PEW!!!

Drink the Milk

I need a snack.  Maybe I'll eat some cereal...  Or some chips.

...

I got cereal.  It's good.  

...

Finished.

Goodnight.

Future's Past

Forward-facing future wastes no time re-evaluating.  Eventually, it will.  Every time.

Looking back is not only necessary, but inevitable.  In time, if the future doesn't learn from its past, it's doomed to circle back and repeat it.  No exceptions.

Going back, examining past mistakes, is the only way to avoid them.  Learning anything new requires knowing the past.  Only then can it be possible to avoid being forced to learn the same lessons over and over.  Wasting away, pretending to make progress, while actually revolving around the same set of nonsense issues, expends precious energy, yet teaches nothing.

Be Careful

Be careful when attempting to implement rules which seem to override laws previously enacted to prohibit such rules.  The original law might've been encated to prevent imposing rules to coerce people to do things which would violate their human rights, or the human rights of others.  If not evaluated closely enough, they may create the danger of prosecution for those who would enforce the rule. 

History is full of those who believed they were fully within the law as they violated the human rights of others.  They were assured by those in power that they would never be prosecuted for engaging in or encouraging what had been, up to that time, a recognizably illegal violation of human rights.  When the government changed hands again, however, they were held fully complicit for the violations in which they took part.

The bottom line is that you should know what's right and wrong.  Doing wrong, whether legal or illegal, is still wrong.  Deluding yourself into believing you're doing right, just because the current prosecuting entity chooses to say it's so, can very well result in prosecution in the future.

Going Broke Printing Money

Everything's getting so expensive.  There's been so much currency created, lately, that it no longer takes keen observation skills (if it ever really did) to see that what's in everybody's wallet, paycheck or bank account is being devalued on a massive scale.  When you see different products go up several percent every time you go to the store, you know something's not right.

I'm not that old, but I can remember when the money supply numbered less than a trillion dollars.  Prior to 2020, the supply never inflated by a trillion dollars in a single year.  2008 had been the largest inflation of currency, during the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debacle and the bailout of all the super-rich banksters.  As much as that hurt, it was still an increase of less than a trillion a year. 

 In 2020, alone, the supply went up by $4 trillion.  

There's no way you can regulate the negative effects that's going to have on the pocketbook of the average American.  They've played with the supply since before World War I, creating the Great Depression and setting boom and bust cycles.  The claim is that they can control the extent of the busts by controlling the supply, but their busts have always been worse than the way our money was before they started trying.

Hopefully, government money creation will be slowed before things spin out of control.  It used to be that a Hundred Dollar Bill was a lot of money.  If those guys don't get their act together, it won't be long before a 'Benjamin' won't get you a dollar's worth of anything. 

A Bit of a Chill

Don't ever expect the weather to be the same tomorrow as it was today.  It was 80 degrees, yesterday.  Now, it sounds like it's sleeting out there.  Even if it's not, the temperature dropped about 20 degrees in 2 hours. 

Happy New Year!

Let 2022 be your year.  Here's hoping that all of your resolutions are successful.  Enjoy your black-eyed peas and pork; I know I will.