Best Things in Life

The best things in life are not things.

I got up early this morning to go hike my favorite trail in fresh snow. It was enough snow to make it pretty but not enough to make streets difficult. Two fat tires and two wafflestompers beat me to the trailhead, but secondary trails were virgin snow. I enjoyed the crisp air and the solitude, I wrote my name in yellow on snow, and I resolved to hike and bike more often... no matter the circumstances.

What a beautiful way to pass the morning.


- © 2009 by Willy

It's In My Nature

A scorpion asks a frog for help crossing a river. Intimidated by the scorpion's prominent stinger, the frog demurs. "Don't be scared," the scorpion says. "If something happens to you, I'll drown." Moved by this logic, the frog puts the scorpion on his back and wades into the river. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog.

The dying frog croaks, "How could you? You know you'll drown!"

"It's in my nature," gasps the sinking scorpion.

_______________

This fable of The Scorpion and The Frog is also a lesson on misplaced trust, on the limits of logic, on not escaping the insuppressible nature of things, and more:

What was the incentive for the frog to even entertain help carry that scorpion? NONE! It was not just the scorpion's nature that's in question here but more so it is the frog's nature to blame. That frog should not have helped in such an event with a clear eventuality. Wasn't this the co-dependency on the frog's part that sank them both? YES!

It is what it is, I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam. THIS co-dependent frog must question everything. I must fight my nature and do just my own... cross the river solo, and not help the scorpions. Kindness has its limits, clearly, and so I have my demons to fight.


- text © 2009 by Willy

Outplay Them

"Excuse me... do you have the time?" said one of the two young men in front of the mall's record store this morning.

Translated it means "Hold on there until my buddy blindsides you. And, by the way, do you wear a Rolex?"

I said "No" forcefully and kept a fast pace. He wanted to know when the store opens. I said a second "No." He walked after me in frustration as I kept him in my peripheral vision, but finally stopped.

The next step would have been to press the button on my switchblade.

This was early on a Sunday morning, while walking the mall due to inclement weather. I carry my handgun at night but seldom go out then, and haven't been in a bar in a decade or two. I haven't had an incident like this in years and years. I live in Podunk and we have little crime.

I'm 60 years old and so many pounds have transferred from my chest to my gut that it seems I've gotten to the point that I no longer repel punks. I remember the good old days when some road rage idiot would get out of his car, I got out of mine and he stopped cold, mumbling while he got back in.

The truth is that I can no longer fistfight nor run away, so my options are down to being more aware, reducing opportunities for incidence, and increasing the counter-lethality to match.


If you can't outrun them, outplay them.

But if I cannot evade, outplay or outthink them, I will shoot.




- text © 2009 by Willy

Exit Strategy

Johnnie and Jane went trick or treating on Halloween and knocked on an old lady's door, who gave them candy but felt it odd to close the door on them because they just stood there instead of running off to the next house, so she asked "What's the matter, kids?" and Johnnie said "We don't have an exit strategy."

Before you laugh: Afghanistan is costing us a million dollars per soldier per year.

A good joke can be reused. This one came out years ago and it was about President Bush on Iraq. President Clinton had Somalia and Bosnia, and it could have definitely been used with President Johnson on Viet Nam. The only difference is that this year "exit strategy" is called "off-ramp." It's all the same. It is unfortunate that we keep finding ourselves in the same spot, year after year, but I have to trust that our President knows a hell of a lot more than I do.

But wait... maybe I should apply this to my personal life. I should think ahead and ask myself "how am I going to get out of this" before I do anything. If I had, I would not have dated, gotten engaged, married, nor had kids (now you can laugh). I've made mistakes year after year. So, now, and in the future, I will not even date. I'm going to stick to the predictable, the reliable, even the boring... to what I know... solo... that has a built-in exit strategy. I will keep a much lower profile ("remain in the noise floor" in engineering), because I will not enter.

Versus the more common exit strategy of leaving once they get some.



- text © 2009 by Willy

P.S., That I need what I know is yet another blog.