Time Out. . .

Despite what anyone may try to tell you, there are no guarantees.  None.  Life is like that.

You may grow up to be the most wildly successful human on the planet, having had no formal training in anything, possibly being a high school dropout, after merely having had one good idea or an astronomical stroke of luck.  You may have degrees in several sciences and have the ability to make any piece of technology sit up and beg, but struggle through life, paycheck to paycheck, never quite making it to that 'financial comfort zone' that everyone tells us we should reach before retirement.  You could live to see all your children grow up and start families of their own, enjoying your grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, or in a one in one octodecillion chance, you take a shot to the head by a piece of meteorite while taking the garbage out before you go to work in the morning.  When it comes down to it, life can't even guarantee you'll be born.

No guarantees.

Well, there is one.

Eventually, life stops.  At the risk of sounding like a bad internet meme, When the end comes, what determines if we actually lived our lives or merely existed?  With that thought in mind, I took the day off yesterday.

"Okay," most people will think.  "You do that a lot."

The fact of the matter is, I don't do it often enough.  I work a full-time job, along with working to start my own business, and of course there are also the day-to-day projects that come with raising a family and keeping a hundred year-old house from succumbing to time and the elements.  I've run my own businesses before, but this time I'm shooting for full independence.  The gloves are off.

Among all the other things I love to do in this life, my writing has always been at the heart of the matter.  Even the long stretches where I wasn't able to really put pen to paper (yes, I still write in notebooks), I was constantly jotting down notes for new stories and plot twists for those in progress.  The desire to live off of my own work has become such a dominating presence that even in my dreams I am working feverishly towards an end.  The thing that makes me chuckle the most is the reaction I get from a lot of people who follow me on Facebook and my fledgling You Tube channel.  Since I am outdoors a lot, working with various crafts, or demonstrating and explaining scientific principles, many seem to think that I am constantly in a state of leisure.  "That looks like such fun!"  I get that one a lot, but yes, it is fun.

The thing is, none of it ever ends.  One thing leads to another.  As you are finishing one story, part of your mind is already devoted to the nuances of the next.  For a writer, the simple act of sitting on a sofa is difficult work, as you are constantly devoting brain run time to your stories.  Even though I've just started with the video channel, it has already sucked me in to a similar degree.  As I'm working on one video presentation, I am thinking ahead to the next.  I have enough ideas to carry me through the winter, all the while hoping that I start bringing in enough residual income to make it worth my while to continue.

Yesterday, though, I made a choice.  No Sci Fi stories, no cookbooks, no video blogs, no home improvement projects.  The only reason I posted an Instructable was that Kim and I were up till all hours the night before, experimenting with a project she would be working on with her Girl Scouts (and with a group of about 60, you want to make sure you have every step correct).  No, yesterday we fished and cooked and shared stories.  That was enough.

Sometimes you just have to walk away from the day-to-day minutia and learn to breathe again.  I caught an article this morning about just that; how a man walked away from his New York City office job, sold everything but his van and some bare essentials, and now lives as a nomad, touring the country and, apparently, surfing for a living.  That may seem a little drastic, but by comparison, my taking the day off to go fishing doesn't seem like much of a stretch.  When you stop to think about it, the average person with a full-time job will spend between 2000-2600 hours at work over the course of the year.  That's 30% of the year spent trying to afford the other 70%.  It's easy to see how the time can get away from us.  Before too long, the kids are grown and you're wondering why you didn't go fishing more often; especially since you can't now, because you have to work through your retirement to pay for their astronomical college tuition.

Yes, money is a factor.  Until life is like 'Star Trek' and people no longer use money, getting enough to be comfortable, or even just get by, will be a driving force in our lives.  My point through all of this is to find a way to live that you like.  Thirty percent of your year is an awful long time to spend doing something you dislike while daydreaming about the things you want to do.  We may not all be able to do what the New York fellow did and walk away from it all, but I have found that life is easier to understand when we just take a step back and ask ourselves, "what could I have done better today, and how can I do it tomorrow?"

I wonder how he affords his gas?

Re-engineering our Ingenuity. . .

One of the most challenging aspects of being an inventor living on the fringes of civilization is the difficulty in obtaining materials. One thing that has been weighing heavily on me these last couple of weeks is finding out that someone beat me to the patent office on an idea that, innocently enough, we were apparently developing at the same time. The sad part is, this person is selling the item for nearly $100 more than I was intending to go to market with, and making a killing doing so. Where I'm not certain that so excessive a price tag is necessary, I have to applaud him. He is a fellow inventor.

On a side note, don't get me wrong; I do not regret being here. As my fellow Sci-Fi buffs know well, self-described space bum, David Lister said, 'you have to have a plan'. Though mine isn't to get a sheep and a cow and raise horses, it was to make a life on these fringes and maybe awaken the inventive fire that lies dormant in so many of these small communities. Hence the vision of the Makerspace.

But I digress.

It wasn't very long ago, I was talking with one of the best friends I've ever had in this life about how society has had all of its creativity choked from us. Enormous corporations force disposable technology down our throats on a daily basis. We have become used to throwing things out because nothing is 'user serviceable'; nothing is repairable. As a steampunk I find this frustrating, because the mantra 'Don't pitch it, wrench it' doesn't apply. I have repaired computers until they were as technologically relevant as a boat anchor with a keyboard, but try to do that with your television or tablet. It's not quite as easy as going after your old transistor radio with a soldering iron. It might be different if the technology were more durable nowadays, but in that respect we've gone backwards. One of my hobbies is repairing old video game systems. I have soldered and desoldered ATARI consoles, modified them for stereo sound, even miniaturized them into odd cases (because I was bored). I once experimented with an ATARI game cartridge, which included taking out the chip, dropping it from varying heights, boiling it, running over it with the truck. . . The only thing that finally stopped it from working was a hammer. With that in mind, how tight do you clench your backside when you think of your game console maybe getting knocked off the entertainment center?

I am beginning another grand experiment this year in personal sustainability, which I will well document in the hopes of sparking an idea or two among you, my friends and contemporaries. I hear a lot of people complaining nowadays that this country, nay, the world, is 'going to hell in a hand basket'. It's not the fault of any government and it's not the fault of any corporate entities; the blame lies solely and squarely upon us. We LET the government start calling the shots, instead of the other way around, and we LET the corporate world dictate to us what we need and what we should buy.

I'm tired of it. Aren't you?

This is a calling, not a simple rant. This nation was built on ingenuity and the desire to be free, not only from religious and governmental persecution, but from any shackling of ideas and ideals. We are constantly saying things like 'if only I could. . .' or 'I wish I could. . .' What's stopping us? We haven't lost our ingenuity, we've just been taught not to use it. The answers are simple: If you have an idea, build it. If you can't, ask for help from someone who can. Statistics show that the average American produces approximately 1600 pounds of garbage in a year. That averages out to about 4.4 pounds a day and, out of that, 42% is paper textile (toilet tissue, paper towels, etc.). According to WM Recycle America, the United States alone throws out enough recyclable aluminum in a year to "duplicate the full commercial air fleet of the U.S." Now let's think about this in another direction. . . How much additional spending on our part to the producers of those products does that waste represent? How many replaced items that should have lived longer, could have been replaced, or just flat out could have been made by the consumers, themselves? I don't know about you, but with four kids in the house, I save a bundle each year just by making my own laundry detergent.

What am I tired of?  I am tire of 'experts' telling me how to live a better life and make the world a better place when we already know how to do it. Who's with me?