Category: Family Stuff

I am sitting in a museum gallery full of art works that were painted with supplies that could be easily purchased from a local home improvement store. Requisite materials include at most two to three cans of paint, rollers, and masking tape. As I sit here, I am listening to college kids wax rhapsodic about modernism in art and music. This was their assignment, and they have labored mightily.

Across the various musicians, they uniformly spout the same flavor of partially digested verbal diarrhea that was served to them in their classroom environments by the anointed among the professoriate. They share the same tropes about the abstractness allowing art to be being deeply personal, different, elegant, and so on. Each focuses on being different by using key concepts that ultimately fit into the unifying theme of the night; the theme of, “if you don’t get it, you’re too dumb to part of the elite.”

A large number of the students outward appearance is geared towards expressing their independence from convention. Their uniqueness compared with the crowd. They seem to want us to admire them for standing alone and unafraid against the assailants of convention and conformity. In doing so, they all fit the prevailing convention and conform to the dominant norms. They conform neatly in their nonconformity, and in so doing they reinforce the walls of the ivory tower.

Each performance I listen to represents one of the students’ attempts to “break the mold” and be different by copying the rule breaking of another. Most just succeed in creating noise. One, in particular, seems to me the music you would get if you asked a deaf mathematician to compose an interesting piece of music. I sit here with my own “deeply personal” experience mostly limited to disgust and a deep sense of “otherness” imposed on me by the fact that I haven’t succumbed to the captivating preaching of modern art’s version of Jim Jones. I haven’t consumed the Kool-Aid so to speak.

I actually enjoyed Liz’s composition. Clearly Liz doesn’t really understand abstractionism, since there was some structure within her piece to give the listener something to find beyond whatever happens to emerge from the vacant space created by the absence of actual art. That is a big part of why I liked it.

Unfortunately, I can’t claim ignorance as a shield. I helped somewhat with editing the narrative that Liz and her partner presented. I can sing along to the siren song of modern art. I understand what it is that I’m supposed to see in this kind of presentation or performance. But knowing the lingo and arguments doesn’t make me an adherent. This emperor is naked. The vast majority of the art within my current environment, visual or aural, is void of that which makes meaning, or so I claim. But that means nothing to the anointed.

I am the unwashed. My lack of appreciation for meaninglessness, or, better stated, my inability to see deep meaning where it isn’t inherently present, gives the anointed the right to discount my views. They are free to mock my ignorance and congratulate themselves on their sophistication. Where I see a fat, weak, hairy, ugly diseased old man strutting naked through the streets, they see gilded robes of richest purple adorning a king.

I believe there are those who can hallucinate a royal robe and crown onto a naked man. Some do indeed find significant meaning and joy in the cacophony of light and sound. However, I believe they are far fewer than we are led to believe. I’m certain a great many of the people I’ve encountered in the art world, and they are many, endorse the views of the anointed for fear of being ostracized as the unwashed. They seem afraid to speak the quiet part out loud.

Unlike in the parable of the emperor’s new clothes, pointing out the emptiness and absence of meaning makes no impact. That lack of significance is a feature that they cling to, and punt the responsibility for creating meaning away from the artist. Pointing it out only emboldens them to mount their ivory towers and condemn you as an ignoramus.

In what other discipline can you gain adherents and praise for creating emptiness and nothingness? I hate modern abstractionism.

I should shy away from controversy more often, but that doesn’t seem to be in my nature. The following essay/article is just one among many examples where I have failed to follow that sage advice. In what follows, I say what I mean, unfiltered by what is considered popular or acceptable. I’m not an “expert” in this field, but given that the experts treat the topic with religious zeal, I don’t have much faith in them. I only have room for one religion in my life. The rest needs to support it’s own weight.

Read at your own peril.

Why Write This at All?

Among the many things I do at work these days is oversee work done by several student hires (engineers in training). As part of that, I ask them to ask me any questions they have when they submit their weekly progress reports. In that request, I don’t limit the questions to work or engineering related topics, and I quite enjoy the opportunity to delve into topics that aren’t often on the menu in the venerable halls of the Space Dynamics Laboratory. I’ll generally spend a lunch hour responding to the questions that aren’t necessarily work related, but this time I got a question that I don’t believe I can do justice to without taking more time than I can justify during the work day. As a result, I’m posting the answer here where I can put it together at my leisure while sitting in my home office.

The question was pretty simple, and basically asked me about my views on climate change. I had voiced some skepticism about how “settled” the science was, how much we actually know about the “settled science,” or how effective the dogmatic prescriptions for “solving” the crisis could be. I don’t really remember the exact topic, but this student was surprised that someone with my education and background was skeptical in that manner. As a result, he asked to understand better.

Preliminaries

To avoid any simple misconceptions about what I do and don’t believe or understand, I’ll state some fundamental positions that I accept as accurate for current purposes. They fall into two categoreies: things that I find morally correct and don’t expect to require scientific rigor, and things that I accept courtesy of the quality of the theory and experimental evidence behind them. It’s a high bar for non moralistic stances, namely: scientific models that predict a specific describable, observable, and testable behavior that are coupled with robust experimentation that consistently observes the predicted behavior.

• We have a moral responsibility to be wise stewards of the resources that constitute our environment (one of my moral absolutes).
• We have a moral responsibility to minimize human suffering to the extent we are able (another of my moral absolutes).
• Human activity impacts the “environment”
• Human activity is increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere relative to concentrations extant in the time period leading up to the industrial revolution.
• CO2, courtesy of it’s vibrational and rotational quantum modes, absorbs infrared energy and retains it for a time as heat (kinetic energy of the molecule). This meets my understanding of what it means for something to be a greenhouse gas.
• The “climate,” if defined by global average temperatures, changes.

So Why Don’t I Buy The Alarmism?

The students who I answer questions for will recognize by now that almost every answer has some form of “it depends” built into it. The world is far to complex for almost any honest, nontrivial, and interesting question to be answered by a simple definitive statement. Why I don’t buy into the apocalyptic climate alarmism isn’t exactly an “it depends” answer, but it’s close. It’s more of an “it’s complicated” answer.

It’s Complicated

The first and foremost reason I can’t sing along with the doomsayers ultimately comes down to the fact that the universe, and everything in it is complicated beyond human comprehension. That includes the “climate” we are trying to save.

The deeper you look into the microscopic, molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic worlds, the more unbelievably complex, finely balanced, and poorly understood it gets. The further out we look into the cosmos, the more complex, finely balanced, and poorly understood it gets. At every level, the more you learn, the better you understand how little we actually know.

A simplified version of this phenomenon is my progression in understanding from being a typical “know-everything” teenager to what I am today (a cynic). When I was 18, I “knew” many things (my parents would say I “knew” everything). I didn’t hesitate to speak in absolutes. I was frustrated with anyone who didn’t see things my way. My parent’s “just didn’t get it,” and I thought they should pay more attention to what was happening around them.

By the time I was 25 and in graduate school, I started to realize that some of the things I “knew” were simply assumptions based on an incomplete world view and set of information. But I still “knew” a lot, and was even more confident in the things I thought I knew courtesy of my enhanced education and the accompanying theories, experiments, and confidence of the academic world.

By the time I finished my PhD, I started to understand that most of the things I “knew” were ultimately founded on assumptions, simplifications, approximations, and assertions that happened to be consistent with (many, but not all) observations, but that weren’t actually valid or provable at the end of the day. In fact, I ultimately found out that many of the underlying assumptions that under-girded my prior confidence were demonstrably false when examined closely. They just happened to work well enough for the applications at hand to make them worthwhile.

Now, well into middle-age, I have few if any absolutes left that aren’t moral in nature. In terms of science, I have accepted that we can “know” nothing beyond a statement that observation is consistent with predictive models. And even then, we can only claim that knowledge in the relatively rare cases where we can make a definite prediction, then design experiments that generate observations that match the prediction.

The world according to an 18 year old me was pretty black and white. It contained few shades of gray, and didn’t admit much room for uncertainty. The scientific world as I know it now (middle age) is nothing but grays and uncertainty, but contains models that happen to be useful under correct conditions and within a limited scope. At the end of the day, though, everything is an approximation of a complex system. And no model we can conceive is capable of correctly identifying and/or determining the significance of all the potential inputs for real (complex) things.

One of the harshest corrections to my youthful confidence was the realization that outside of carefully contrived and controlled experiments that could we watched only imprecisely (currently believed to be lower-bounded by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), everything around us is influenced by more factors than can be accounted for. We must approximate and simplify everything in order to describe it. Even then, to be honest with ourselves, we have to describe it statistically. Every interaction between two things at any level, can only be dealt with through approximation and statistical description.

For simple systems with only a few inputs (like experiments in a physicist’s lab), we can describe the statistical model reasonably well in a tractable form. For simple systems on a scale where quantum effects don’t matter so much, we can approximate away the inherent randomness and write deterministic equations. However, as the dimensionality of the problem increases (we identify more factors that influence the outcome), our ability to describe even the statistics falls apart and we are forced into making progressively grosser (and more inaccurate) approximations and simplifications to keep the math doable. The further we are from the low-level physics-based descriptions of how things interact, the less confidence we can have in the results of the approximation.

Climate science is just one discipline where I apply this kind of skeptical approach. Because it is not exempt from the universal, climate science is built upon a stack-up of approximations, guesses, generalizations, and assumptions that, in the end, make the results doubtful at best and comprehensively stupid at the worst. I’ll provide a rationale for claiming this complexity and associated approximation and inaccuracy later, but for now I state it as something as close to fact as my prior statements allow.

In the case of a system as intricate, expansive, and infinitely complex as the “climate” or “environment,” we can’t even begin to comprehend, much less model, all of the linkages, dependencies, correlations, interactions, constituents, feedback mechanisms, and other factors that contribute to the behavior of the thing as a whole. So how can we honestly make predictions, design countermeasures, and forcefully extract resources from the unwashed masses to implement economically catastrophic measures that are supposed to prevent outcomes in an ultra-complex system we don’t actually understand? How can we have any confidence in the results of the prescribed measures given that they are based on models that have never accurately “predicted” anything other than historical data? How can we be so ignorant to believe that we actually understand any of it to a level that justifies the kind of apocalyptic hysteria that abounds? The answers to these questions are unsatisfying. Yet, we are told in loud voices with religious zeal that we must destroy the world as we know it to prevent a cataclysm, and do so now!

Every climate model I’ve encountered necessarily makes gross simplifications to accommodate computational and comprehensional limitations. In so doing, they disconnect feedback mechanisms, smooth out significant perturbations, work with very sparse data, uncritically inherit limitations of finer-scale models, and generally wipe away the complexity.

As a rough example, if you were to model the atmosphere over a 10 sqKm village to a height of 10km (about 30,000ft) in a 1cm grid spacing, you would have a 10^15 cells of atmosphere. If we assume that each cell only interacts with the ones immediately touching it, that results in a sparse tensor with 6 x10^15 elements. If each element could be accurately described by a single 16-bit integer, we’d need 2 petabytes of memory just store the state of the model, 12 petabytes to store the tensor (interactions), and a whole lot of time to iterate over the entire thing (about 24petaflops/time step if the interactions were simple and linear — spoiler, they aren’t).

To make it worse, the time-step for models can only be on a scale much smaller than the time scale for change within one of it’s cells. That means that the model must be recomputed multiple times a second on that 1cm^3 grid. Timelines on the order of decades would take centuries to compute even on modern supercomputers.

If that weren’t enough of a problem, there are more. Fluid and energy dynamics operate on scales much smaller than 1cm^3 requiring much finer grid spacing on the order of millimeters (a 1000x increase in data) or even smaller. The atmosphere is much thicker than 10km. In fact, it’s likely that effects out to the ionosphere (50-1000km) are relevant which adds a further 5-20x increase). Finally, my little 10km^2 postage stamp of a village is smaller than the typical grid spacing for atmospheric models. It would take about 1.5e^23 of these hypothetical villages to cover the globe. All told, that would result in something like 6×10^42 bytes of memory just to store the model. There isn’t enough storage in the universe to even hold that model. And you would wait your entire lifetime for the worlds biggest supercomputer to make a single time step. All climate models are necessarily so simplified as to be effectively divorced from the physics they claim to be based upon.

Being complicated isn’t enough though…

The complexity inherent in something doesn’t necessarily mean that we can’t get useful predictions out of seriously simplified models. The predictions of Maxwell’s equations were validated by Heinrich Hertz and many others, and ultimately led to the vast world of radio communications and other life-altering technologies. Maxwell’s equations are built on approximations and simplifications that fit observation. They aren’t how things actually “are,” but they are good at predicting what we see.

Classical physics is demonstrably wrong when applied at a small enough scale, but it is a very useful approximation when dealing with objects on a macro-scale.

All of quantum mechanics is built on similarly shaky simplifications and approximations, but it has been useful in describing and then predicting observable effects that have ultimately contributed to development of further theories and many useful technologies. The utility in these approximations comes down to their ability to predict things that otherwise would have been unexpected, inexplicable, or counter-intuitive, but are observable none-the-less.

The challenge with climate models at the heart of the the climate death cult have a terrible record of predicting observations. They do a great job of fitting historical data (they wouldn’t be published otherwise), but I have yet to see one that makes observable predictions that fit unfiltered/unselected/unedited data. Climate models when I was young predicted a coming ice age. Climate models since have predicted such lovely things as glaciers melting, sea levels rising, and many other such observable phenomena without success.

For every prediction that has come true, there are similar numbers that did not. Those odds are about as good as playing slots in Vegas, and I don’t base my lifestyle and choices on those odds. It’s about like predicting the weather in Hawaii based on how gassy my infant granddaughter is here in Utah.

I can’t tell you how many times I saw predictions for increased hurricane activity while I lived in Florida, only for the season to be average or below. When I lived in Ohio, the models predicted more severe tornadoes that didn’t arrive. When I lived in Alaska, it predicted extinction of polar bears, only for the polar bear population to increase a few years afterwards. And these were mostly macro-scale models that make less use of gross approximation than what the IPCC bases it’s recommendations on.

In order for a highly simplified model to be taken seriously, the predictive outcomes need to be observable and statistically robust. Climate models simply are not. Unfortunately, we don’t spend a lot of energy talking about the predictions that failed. We systematically pre-filter data before publication to bias towards the positive finding (true in all disciplines, not just climate science). We do lots of things to convince ourselves, but it’s just not that robust. My sense is that the outcomes that keep people up at night are predictions based on models that have been less accurate than a blind and deaf fortune teller predicting the end of the world based on lumps on the head of a child born under a full moon.

I miss having time to do things like cut firewood and take care of things like basic yard maintenance. I also miss being outside the typical dramas associated with a typical work environment. I like most of the people I work with, but it only takes one person or event to ruin a full day, and there are rarely days where that doesn’t happen. I get pretty tired of it.

My health has suffered as a result. The stress has contributed to out of control blood pressure. Sleep seems inadequate. I don’t have time or energy to exercise. I rarely see my family. My blood sugar doesn’t like my current diet of gas station food. I’m tired. I’m depressed. I’m feeling pretty crappy over all. About the only time I feel decent is when I’m on a fire call and riding adrenaline (that feature isn’t new though). Adrenaline is a temporary fix with a hard post-Event crash.

Maintenance around the house and on the cars is delayed or just skipped. Projects I started a while ago languish in an incomplete state. Dishes pile up for several days in a row. Laundry goes unfolded and gets wrinkled. Commitments that aren’t financially linked sometimes aren’t met. The business I wanted to keep alive as a hobby is officially dead because I never found the time to re-register it with the state this year. The projects I had planned for the business sit half done or less. I feel like a bit of a failure. And I feel like I need a break, even though I have taken more time off this year than I have ever done before.

ugh…

I think I’ll be okay, but this sucks right now.

Too bad I couldn’t make being retired work. The saddest part is that at the end of the day, I don’t really have any more money to do what I want than I had when I wasn’t working. In fact, I feel like I have less because I don’t have time to do stupid things like sell plasma to get unaccountable fun money.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a theater “watching” the (hopefully last) Indiana Jones movie. It’s too damn loud. And after less than 10 minutes, I hate everything about it. It’s clear they aren’t even trying to tell a decent story anymore. It’s all of the tired shit from the previous movies that was fun the first time or two, but that is beyond tired now. I want nothing to do with “artifacts” with mystical powers and caricatures of screaming Nazi bad guys. I’m tired of progressively implausible escapes. I’m tired of Harrison Ford. I’m tired of CGI taking the place of creativity and story telling. I’m tired of explosions covering all empty sound space.

I’m tired of popular culture in its entirety, and the laziness of those who would spoon feed me numbness in a bottle by way of a glowing screen.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that Hollywood is fully to blame. I think I have hit a point where I am impossible to satisfy. Almost everything either bores me, or makes me angry. Even a mindless adventure movie like the one I’m watching has to preach to me about racism. I’m sure it’ll get to gender theory and liberal feminism before long. Fuck Hollywood. I expect nothing more than to leave angry that the bastards got money out of my wallet, and that they took hours of my life for nothing. Because I expect that, my expectation will be fulfilled.

What’s wrong with me? I can’t stay happy. I can’t be happy for more than a few minutes. I’m excited and happy on the fire ground or responding to a medical emergency. A few hours later? I’m back where I was. I’m satisfied, if not happy, when I’m working on a project for myself. But that only lasts until I run out of energy, or money. I run out of energy much faster than I used to. Everything hurts too much. Even with the extra income that comes with working as an engineer, I can’t afford to entertain myself even in the reduced hours available to me after work and before I’m worn out.

I’m incredibly lonely much of the time. I have sort-of friends on the fire department, but only see them once a week unless there is an emergency. I have sort-of friends at work, but not really. I don’t really know how to be a friend, I think. I’m too screwed up. People don’t really want someone like me in their already busy lives. I disturb some with darkness. I make others uncomfortable because of my experiences and background that I’m terrible at keeping to myself. I’m too much of a heathen for the church crowd. I’m too straight-laced for the party set. I’m too much of a redneck hillbilly for the uppity crowd, and far too educated and have too much time in muckety-muck society to fit in with the rednecks. I’m a walking contradiction that makes me feel alone in almost every crowd.

I used to cope by staying super busy. I never let myself slow down enough to notice or at least think about it for very long. A therapist told me to slow down. Told me to spend time doing things just because. I started watching YouTube based on that advice a few years ago. Now I’m bored, but essentially addicted to it. And it has done nothing to make me feel better. All it has done is left me sapped of the motivation I need to do the things I used to do to cope. It has made me feel even more lonely and isolated than before. No friends. No interests. No progress.

I used to fill space with learning, but the “Academy” has lost it’s fucking mind. It is almost impossible to find interesting lectures or books that aren’t full of the new-age horse shit that preaches my privilege and original sin. Many of the great classics are hard for me to read now too since I find the eternal inhumanity almost universally addressed in them hard to swallow anymore. I feel bad enough as is without reading, listening to, or watching the corrupt nature of men, whether that’s part of “great literature” or a brainless attempt to paint white men as the perpetual oppressor and root of all evil.

My one enduring friend has found a new focus and commitments that contribute to my loneliness. I feel like in some respect I have taken a back seat to this new focus while I sit alone at night listening to the result while trying unsuccessfully to find something to watch on YouTube that doesn’t make me angry or depressed.

I understand that she spent years putting up with a similar but reversed situation. I don’t know how she did it. I have to figure it out though. This is important to her, and I need to support her. I just wish I were in a better place where I wasn’t already emotionally tapped out.

I wish I didn’t feel resentful when I spend a weekend on things I don’t want to do like go to a movie theater. I wish I didn’t feel resentful when I trade time and energy I wanted to use for a project trying to help keep up with things around the house. I wish I didn’t feel guilty when I don’t pick up all the slack so I can make some headway on something for myself. I wish I didn’t feel resentful when I lay in bed alone at night listening to practicing. I wish I didn’t feel like what I want doesn’t matter. I wish a lot of things I seem unable to bring to pass. It’s been that way for a long time.

When that happened, I don’t know. I was happy, hopeful, and generally satisfied most of my life. Shit happened and I moved on. Watching a very scary and sketchy childbirth (my niece) while my dad was in the hospital with cancer… bad, but I moved on. Dealing with chronic financial uncertainty as a kid… I moved on. A couple of scary car accidents… I moved on. Getting buried under a house from hell… I moved on. Terrible pregnancies that culminated in my kids being born early and struggling when they were newborn… I moved on. Schizophrenic and abusive brother in law… I moved on. Dangerous other brother-in-law who tried to kidnap my sister… I moved on. Leaving behind family and friends over and over again… I moved on. I used to be resilient.

I’m not anymore. I’m stuck, and unhappy. I don’t seem able to get over the loss of my friends and home in TX. I struggle with fear and the fallout from Liz’s illness. I’m still angry to the point of physical impacts over what the military did to me and my family when we moved to NM. I struggle with accepting where we are now as home. I struggle to put respectable effort into a job because I hate the government that pays the contract. I feel hopeless at the physical degeneration of the last several years. I don’t seem able to put a whole host of things behind me starting about the time we got to TX.

I’m lost too. Aside from not having the drive required to make my business work, I’ve accomplished pretty much everything I’ve set out to do, but feel like it was almost all a waste. Those accomplishments have not made me happy. Rather they have contributed to turning myself into something of a monster that is unsuited for the things I’m told make people happy. Too educated to be useful. To broad to be an expert. Too polished to be a grunt. Too rough to be a dandy. What have I done?

For three months, I’ve had a bad headache. That’s also about how long I’ve been back at SDL. It’s a challenge. I am being mentally and physically taxed being back at the grind. I felt better when I was trying to work for myself. The work is slowly killing me. The only question is whether I can adapt before it takes a permanent toll, or if it catches me before I adapt. I can’t really make everything happen that I need to without decent income aside from my retirement. As much as I loved being retired, my responsibilities don’t support that.

I have thought about trying to get on as an EMT or firefighter to cover some of the distance. I enjoy that work, even though it is demanding. But, it doesn’t pay nearly as well as doing what I’m trained to do. I’m also kinda old to reinvent myself that way. It’s better to let Isaac have that kind of position. Were I younger, and looking to start out, Fire/EMS would be high on my list. To some degree, I feel like I missed my opportunity. But that is probably looking through rose colored glasses.

I did realize over the last year that I don’t really want to do what it takes to make the business successful. That takes a kind of sacrifice I’m too old and tired to make, and dedication I no longer have. It’ll only ever be viable as a hobby, and I have plenty of those already. The only question is whether or not that gets priority. At the moment, it doesn’t. So it languishes.

I honestly just want to be retired and putter around doing things like volunteering with the fire department, working on projects, and taking care of my yard and animals. But two of those three things cost money, and with Liz going back to school I don’t have enough to make that actually work.

I believe I can survive another 10 years of working for someone else. In that window, I should be able to set things up so I don’t need the extra income anymore. If not, hopefully by then I’ll have figured out how not to have a headache every day.

One consequence of our unsuccessful effort to be self employed is that Liz has spent some considerable time thinking about our financial position and her position in particular if I should happen to die before she does. At present, 100% of our income ends when I die, and without an employer sponsored life insurance plan to cover the gap, our current life insurance would only give her a few years at the existing standard of living to figure out how to pay for the costs of life.

As she’s ruminated on this topic over the last several months, she has slowly come to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to go back to school to finish her Piano Performance degree. Finishing the degree means that she will be able to build a piano studio that draws from the serious piano student crowds and lift herself above the cutthroat neighborhood piano teacher market. It isn’t a path to riches, but it is a path to reasonable income doing something she has always loved.

This outcome happened to coincide with the sinking realization by both Liz and I that we weren’t on a track to profitability with the business. We looked at our savings burn rate, looked at the progress we’d made, looked at the work left to do, and realized that we needed to shift gears. Initially, that meant slowing down product development so I could take a part-time job and clear a back log of other projects. A couple of months ago, that shifted to me working part time and using the remaining time playing Mr Mom so Liz could restart her degree.

It’s been over a year since I walked away from industry and government contracts to start my own small business. Some of that time has been awesome. I love being the master of my own time. However, I don’t love being broke. I also don’t love the fact that there is very little chance that I’ll ever make money doing what I had hoped to monetize. At this point, I’m pretty sure that the idea I had hoped to turn into income is never going to amount to much more than a hobby.

What did I do wrong? Well, there are many things that come to mind:

• I selected a market segment occupied by a large number of offerings that are nominally free to end users by way of YouTube and other similar venues.
• I selected a market segment where the target audience is notoriously cost conscious (homeschool families).
• I over-estimated the quantity of work I would be able to accomplish in the last year.
• I committed to far too many things outside of the business that took large amounts of time and energy. I seem unable to really focus my attention on one thing. To make this endeavor work, I’d need to turn off everything else. I can’t do that.
• I underestimated the impact of inflation on the burn rate for my savings.
• I underestimated the investment required to get beyond a baseline website.
• I focused too much time on a product (my novel) that I knew was doomed to fail and was doomed to offer no more than a minuscule return on investment.
• I lost interest in the products when they switched from a hobby into a requirement.
• I over estimated myself.
• I didn’t fully commit to success.
• I gave up.

Yesterday I attended an EMDR session for the first time in an attempt to get a more permanent handle on the effects of PTSD. Today, I feel like shit. I’m depressed. I feel pretty damn hopeless. And I’m thinking and feeling things I haven’t in quite a while.

I should feel reasonably good. Last night I passed the practical part of Firefighter I certification, and have every reason to expect that I’ve passed the written part too. That is something of an accomplishment. We’re making slow but steady progress towards launching the business. Things are pretty stable. However, I feel awful.

The reality that we can’t really expect to make any money this year is setting in hard. This is kind of like how I felt when I had to give up on ever making money on the novels I’ve written — enormous amounts of work on something I am proud of, only to realize that the work is fundamentally worth less than the robotic actions of a McDonald’s cashier. The universe doesn’t give a shit about what I have produced. Somehow I’m supposed to just hold on and hope that in the future it’ll change it’s mind and that in a decade or so I’ll make enough to make up for some of what I lost by walking away from a good paying job. I hated major aspects of that job, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t miss feeling like people valued what I had to offer and seeing the evidence of that in my bank account.

Today, I feel like getting blind drunk and giving up to oblivion for a while. That’s not an option, but it’s how I feel. Hopefully it won’t last.

We did it. Elizabeth and I have started our own business, and I have walked away from a job for which I was well qualified but that I found unsatisfying and often distasteful. At this point, Elizabeth and I are working like mad and juggling each other’s time to balance Michael’s needs, the general needs of maintaining a household, and our need to focus on getting the materials put together that we need to formally launch a few courses come August.

The transition has not been without its challenges. The loss of my former paycheck represents about a 60% cut in take-home income, but we have mostly adjusted. It’s a loss, but one we can live with. I have had to adjust to working from home, but that has been remarkably easy. Elizabeth has had to adjust to balancing another demand on her time in an already saturated schedule while figuring out how to leverage the fact that I’m available to help now. Michael has had to adjust to the fact that Mom and Dad do things differently, that he has to go to Dad for help when Mom’s working, and that he can’t always run to Mom when he doesn’t like the way Dad does something. I’ve had to adjust to the fact that I can’t get away with spending all day working or else Elizabeth won’t be able to get her end of the business done. Overall, though, the transition has gone incredibly smoothly.

I like being home during the day and available to help. I like working on things I find mostly interesting, and more importantly, things that I chose to do. I enjoy being able to decide for myself what the priorities are. I like working together with Elizabeth to make what I produce better.

At this point, we are actively working on building online course ware. It’s a daunting task. Most of the time, the challenge is exciting and motivating. Today, however, I feel a little overwhelmed. The tasks ahead look no more difficult than they did before. My progress has been as I expected it. I don’t have a good reason based on the content or progress of the work to feel different today than I did a few days ago. But in spite of all that, I am in a bit of a low spot.

Low spots like this were super common before I quit working for “the man.” They were more or less the norm. However, I’ve had a happy reprieve for the last several months, and I fear their return as a regular part of my psyche. Even a few days of this has taken a pretty good toll on my generally improving mental health.

Hopefully a few more days of good tangible progress will be enough to break the cycle and set me back up and on my feet for a good long endurance run.

Several years ago, we purchased a Nissan Versa — a small hatchback car known for being cheap. It was supposed to be the car I drove to keep the mileage down on our other more expensive cars when we didn’t need the capability they presented. It turns out that I don’t need a pickup truck all the time, and that minivans aren’t required when there are only one or two people to transport. This car was supposed to cover the space where these two were ill-suited.

This little car served us relatively well for a few years, but not long before we moved to Utah, it started misbehaving. Some of the failures were relatively cheap and easy to fix, but ultimately the transmission began to fail. Looking around the wide world of information on Nissan continuously variable transmissions, I realized I should have done more homework before purchasing this pile of scrap. The transmissions are notoriously weak — to the extent that they are the subject of multiple class-action lawsuits that were just outside the parameters for the car I owned. Not only are the transmissions weak, they are horrendously expensive. Spending $5000 for a rebuilt transmission (not including installation labor and all the other random bits and bobs that accompany that kind of repair) to repair a car with 85,000 miles on it that only cost $10,000 new is a stretch.

While we weren’t super excited about putting a new transmission in the car, we didn’t rule it out either. The car was otherwise in good shape, and if repaired would be at least as good as anything else we could purchase for the cost of the repair. We thought about it, and decided we’d just drive it until it totally failed, then make up our minds when the time came. Instead of making a decision, we decided to delay that decision until we had no choice. In essence, we would get as much use out of the car as possible before potentially scrapping it or resetting the expiration date by putting in a new transmission.

While we bought the car for me to commute in, I’ve almost never driven it. One of the kids has generally had a stronger claim to it than I have, so it’s been the teenager car since we brought it home. For the last several months, Isaac has been using it to get to his martial arts classes, seminary, and his classes at Bridgerland. In essence, it’s been his car that I happen to pay for, and he’s had to deal with the stupidity of a transmission that randomly stalls and otherwise behaves badly. My decision to postpone a decision cost me literally nothing personally, since I didn’t have to live with the consequences.

That decision turns out to have been a major money saver. A few weeks ago, I was driving home when my phone rang. The display in the car indicated an unfamiliar phone number from a region where I know literally nobody. I had every reason in the world to ignore the call. I generally do ignore such calls. However, for some inexplicable reason I answered it and was surprised to hear Isaac’s voice.

“Uh… Dad… I’m not sure how to tell you this… I rolled the car.” This came out almost deadpan. He and a friend had been driving down a dirt road not far from home when he lost traction, skidded, almost recovered, but ultimately slid far enough into a ditch that the vehicle rolled over. Both his phone and his friends were outside of service range, but someone had come by on the remote road and let them borrow theirs that happened to be on a different carrier. Nobody was hurt beyond a few minor bruises and scratches. No property was damaged other than the car. No police were called. No ticket issued. Insurance covered the wrecker I had to call to get the thing back on it’s wheels and out of the ditch. In the end, all it did was make my decision about whether or not to fix the transmission very easy. I lost a car that needed $5000+ in repairs that would have been worth no more than $5000 even after I fixed it. No real loss. No real decision to make. The car is scrap metal, and that’s okay.

Now, not long after that experience, it appears I will be put in a similar situation. I’ve spent almost the last two years struggling with my government customer at work. They have created conditions where I really dislike the job I had expected to love. I like the company. I like the people. In theory, I like the application of our technologies. I can’t stand the way the government customer treats us. I can’t stand their indecisiveness and proclivity for assigning blame for their shortcomings to us. I can’t stand how they expect and hold us accountable for progress in spite of the fact that they themselves are the chief impediment. I can’t stand how we have wasted millions of dollars on a pile of paper that they don’t even bother to read, but insist on having in case someone somewhere questions their actions. I can’t stand my daily grind in a job where I had every expectation I would be happy.

I wanted to love my job. I suffered through jobs I hated while on active duty knowing that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I knew that somewhere out there the world found ways to actually accomplish things, and I expected to join it. I had evidence that my company routinely delivered things that met or exceeded expectations. Then reality torpedoed it all, and for months now I’ve pondered walking away and spending the resources I’ve accumulated trying to get a small business up and running so I could be answerable to nobody but myself.

At this point, I’ve developed multiple business plans. I’ve explored several markets. I’ve thought about the entrepreneur class I attended as part of the transition assistance program I went through prior to retirement. I’ve tried wringing time and energy out of myself after an exhausting day of drudgery to spend on developing the intellectual property I intend to use for the business. In that regard, I’ve failed. I can’t do it as a side-line. There isn’t enough time, and I don’t have the energy to do it. The effort it has taken, and my inability to make time for it, is evident in the infrequency of posts here… I don’t even have time and energy to sort my thoughts out on the only forum where I manage to do so. A side-hustle isn’t the answer. If I am going to make self-employment work, I need to be all-in.

Going all-in is scary. I don’t know how the average small business owner manages it. In the class I took, we were told to expect not to turn a profit for one to two years. We were told that the best strategy is generally to leverage whatever capital you have, and hope to roll the debt over until things creep into the black. This is particularly scary for someone who lived through an abrupt income shock and protracted poverty when my dad decided to leave the corporate world to become an artist. I am terrified of being poor again. Only now, after 25 years of professional life, do I feel like I can occasionally spend a few dollars without having a good reason. If I take the plunge and branch out on my own, that financial freedom dries up for at least the near-to-mid-term

I’ve struggled with this anxiety for a while now. I’m afraid of the decision to walk away from an almost sure thing. To walk away from a comfortable income and generous benefits. To tighten my belt again and return to the ways of a constrained income. To ask my kids to accept the impacts of my inability to continue to tow the line in my corporate drudgery. To put my heart and soul into a product line that may ultimately be rejected and wasted. I am a scared little man.

However, looking at my situation rationally, I have no excuses. Courtesy of my retirement I have a guaranteed income stream that puts me firmly in the middle class even without any business or employment income. I have access to medical care through both my retirement (for me and my family) and through the VA (just for me). If I am willing and disciplined enough to tighten my belt, I can make due without any employment income whatsoever. If ever there was someone outside the moneyed elite who was in a good position to take a risk starting a business, it’s me. I’m just afraid, and that has been the status quo for over a year.

That status quo appears to be on the fast-track to disruption. Today alone, I was twice within a hair’s breadth of walking away. My frustration and outright anger about our customer and the lack of progress has been breaking through to the surface often enough recently that upper management (a retired O6 who was trying to play the Colonel mentor for a promising O5 who just needs to see the light) called me in to try and convince me that life was good and that I should be more of a cheerleader. Instead, when he abjured me to be the O5 they hired, he learned how close I am to chucking it. They didn’t hire an O5. That’s not me anymore. What he had expected would be a “look on the bright side” rah-rah speech turned into more of a “don’t quit without giving us a chance to find you a different project” discussion. I left the meeting raging inside, if externally contained. That was the first close-call today, and it took almost all I had in reserve.

The second close call came when I saw the finalized guidance the Federal Government issued for requiring all government contractors to have a 100% immunized workforce no later than 8 December 2021. No exceptions for those who have acquired natural immunity through illness and recovery. Technical exceptions for religions objectors were included, but with coercive and punitive “accommodations” such as 100% masking, social isolation, weekly testing, and any number of other coercive measures that render those non-options. I’ve made my stance on the science of the vaccine previously pretty clear. What I haven’t talked about is the bigger issue though…

I spent 25 years in total being told how to dress, act, speak, look, think, and what medical interventions I was subject to. I was told when and where to go. I was told what to do for work. I was an indentured servant, held hostage to the pension I would lose if I said “no” to anything. As a result of my inability to say “no,” (a discussion on why is another topic, but accept it for now as a fact) I came away from the military with significant mental and physical health issues. I came away with children who were damaged by the frequent and severe disruptions caused by relocations and my almost constant and/or extended absences. I lost time with parents and siblings. I missed significant milestones in the lives of literally everyone I love. I came away with scars that run deep and will never fully heal. All because I couldn’t say “no!”

When I took off the uniform to try and piece my life back together, I earned the right to say no. I can’t get back most of the other things that the military took, but I can have that back. I WILL NOT relinquish that right without a warrant and an arrest. I WILL NOT BE COMPELLED to submit to any form of medical treatment or procedure without a court order and physical restraint. I WILL NOT SUBMIT to arbitrary demands based on political ideologies and agendas. I WILL WALK AWAY from a good paying job if that is the price of non-compliance. If that means that my decision whether or not to strike out on my own has been made for me, so be it. The more important decision has already been made.

We’ll see if the executive over-reach actually survives first contact with reality. It probably will in this scare-mongering world we now live in. People who are worthy of public notice don’t seem to value individual liberty and personal autonomy unless it involves some other cause celeb like recreational drug use, sex, body modification, abortion, etc. This isn’t a cause celeb. It’s quite the opposite, and I’ll find no friends who aren’t equally unpersons guilty of thoughtcrime. I believe that if it is eventually recognized as the government overreach it is, it will be after my lot has been cast and the consequences realized.

I will be demonized for my decision. But then again, I’ll be demonized if anyone from that torch-and-pitchfork mob of social justice warriors who fret so anxiously over my lack of compliance and obeisance to the anointed and all-knowing academic and government “experts” ever reads anything I’ve posted here.