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The title poem in Anthony Hecht’s 1979 collection The Venetian Vespers is a dramatic monologue spoken by an aging American expatriate living in Venice. Across its roughly eight-hundred lines the speaker gives the impression of fleeing something left unstated – not a scandal or crime but his unsatisfactory self. In the sixth and final section he writes: “Ho fatto un fiasco, which is to say, / I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life, / A frangible and transparent failure.” The Italian can be translated: “I made a complete mess of it.” This indulgence in self-disgust continues: “My efforts at their best are negatives: A poor attempt not to hurt anyone, A goal which, in the very nature of things, Is ludicrous because impossible. Viscid, contaminate, dynastic wastes Flood through the dark canals, the underpasses, Ducts and arterial sluices of my body . . .” Here, Hecht makes an inspired transition: “. . . As through those gutters of which Swift once wrote: ‘Sweepings from Butcher Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud, Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.’” Those are the concluding lines of “A Description of a City Shower,” a pastoral parody and my favorite among all of Swift’s poems, first published in The Tatler in October 1710. Pat Rogers in his edition of The Complete Poems (Yale University Press, 1983) tells us it was also Swift’s favorite. The final three rhyming lines are inspired. An early edition of the poem was subtitled an “imitation of Virgil’s Georg[ics].” Nearly as good as the passage quoted by Hecht are the lines leading up to them: “Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, And bear their trophies with them as they go: Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. They, as each torrent drives with rapid force, From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course, And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge, Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.”
On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Germans invaded Poland from the west nine days later, on September 1, 1939. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. In one of those curious historical coincidences, on September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers, then working as a writer-editor for Time magazine, met with assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle at his home in Washington, D.C. Chambers revealed his own background as part of the Soviet spy network, which included officials within the Roosevelt administration. He named names: Alger Hiss, among others. Berle was skeptical. He reported Chambers’ revelations to the president, who dismissed them. Berle then shared what he had heard with the FBI, who interviewed Chambers in March 1940, and again in 1942 and 1945. The FBI took no action. In Witness (1952), called by Hilton Kramer "one of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American -- and one of the best written, too," Chambers describes what happened next: “I had had to hurry from my office at Time magazine to the airport to catch the six o’clock flight for Washington. I fastened my safety belt, chewed my gum, lay back and closed my eyes. The great plane took off into the serene evening sky of September 2, 1939. “On the plains of Poland, at the same moment, a new day was awakening the Polish nation to terror and insane distress as cavalry tried to turn back, with lance and rifle, a new force in the history of war and men—the German Panzer divisions. “In Moscow, a few days before, Stalin, with a tigerish grin, and a more reserved Ribbentrop, had signed the pact that made Nazism and Communism allies. By the same scratch of the pen, Stalin had unloosed upon mankind, for the second time in two decades, the horror of world war." Chambers had worked as a spy for the Soviet Union from 1932 until 1938, when he broke with communism. On August 3, 1948, Chambers testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He described the spy network at work in the late 1930s, including Hiss’ role. Though the statute of limitations on espionage had expired, in his second trial Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to two concurrent five-year terms in federal prison and eventually served three and a half years. For further context, I suggest reading Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017), concentrating on Chap. 19, “The Dead,” pages 463-499. Hanson tallies the carnage suffered by every nation. Poland stands out: “[B]y war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.” Part of the explanation for the slaughter is that Poland capitulated, though never surrendered, to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in little more than a month. Between September 1 and October 6, 1939, the country suffered some sixty-six thousand fatalities. “Poland alone,” Hanson writes, “lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined.” He continues: “Poland was the laboratory of Nazi barbarism, given that it was the site of over 450 German extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps. It was both the first country attacked by Hitler and the first to have its citizens—both Jews and Slavs—targeted for mass extinction. . . The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts. The six most infamous extermination camps of the Holocaust—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were all in Poland.” In praise of the Poles, Hanson writes: “Polish resistance fighters usually fought the Nazi occupation in a far more muscular fashion than their Western European counterparts, provoking a commensurately fearsome German response.”
Eccentricity in books is a tricky quality. It can be charming and inspire lifelong devotion. Take Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book I discovered in my freshman year. I redundantly keep three copies on the shelves nearest my desk. Tristram Shandy is another endlessly readable eccentricity. Among the less successful are Ronald Firbank’s novels, which I have tried hard to love for many years but always find tedious. Daniel Mark Epstein has written a poem, “A Dream,” about acquiring a copy of the most eccentric and readable work of literary – not criticism, not scholarship, perhaps love letter – I know, Ford Madox Ford’s The March of Literature (1938): “Someone learned of my collector’s interest In the finer points of this autographed edition, The March of Literature: From Confucius’ Day to Our Own. I read it first at twenty-one, Then passed it on to one friend, then another, Several copies lost and found in bookstores Now abandoned to the online trade. I wanted a clean one with the author’s name Written in his graceful hand, a book he’d held As he held the pen that wrote the heavy book That sums up all he’d read and learned In a lifelong lover’s quarrel with literature, As much as any man could ever know In one life of four thousand years of books In ten languages, works he knew by heart.” I read it at nineteen or twenty after reading for the first time The Good Soldier for a class. In his introduction to The March of Literature, Ford describes himself as “an old man mad about writing,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.” In a volume of more than eight-hundred pages you expect lapses, omissions and misguided judgments. I find it easy to forgive Ford, for reasons obvious in the sampler that follows: A third of the way through the book, in the middle of a digression on the English border ballads, Ford inserts a three-page digression-within-a-digression based on his Great War experience: “The writer happens to have been present at what you might call a poplar recension of folksong during several weeks in the fall of 1916. His regiment having spent a disproportionate time in the trenches during the First Battle of the Somme, it was given a long fatigue to do at a long distance from the trenches, so that they might at once rest their weary bones and get some exercise.” Here Ford writes of his friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad’s short story “Youth”: “The language is again so low-keyed, so of the vernacular, so just, so fluid that when you read you have again no sense of reading.” Here is Ford’s moving tribute to Dr. Johnson, a man with whom he must have felt substantial literary and personal kinship: “But ten years’ rest and the getting into his head of a conversational rhythm and a vocabulary comprehensible to most of the cultivated men of his day had on Johnson the effect of evolving a style that was at once sufficiently learned to save his face and sufficiently actual to let us read his Lives of the Poets with pleasure even in these anti-Latinistic days. It is a work that, had there been no Boswell, must have been a resounding monument to this great man. As it is, it stands almost forgotten like an Aztec temple lost in South American [sic] undergrowths. It is a great pity.” Ford nicely characterizes the best of eighteenth-century English prose: “In Gibbon we come upon a figure very different in timber from any of the other eighteenth century littérateurs, save only Richardson – and Johnson, if you can persuade yourself to think of him as a writer and not merely as a dancing bear, growling numbers in and out.” Ford suggests we look at works of literature on both the macro and micro scales, comparing the latter to music: “It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.” Ford then quotes a passage about storks, of all things, from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the paragraph here marked with the number three. Ford writes: “And I am prepared to leave it to the taste of my readers who may decide each for himself whether a passage of flawless prose gains or loses when the subject treated is one of universal interest.” The March of Literature is no dry textbook. It’s inimitably Ford’s work, as eccentrically personal as DNA. It ought to be academic but reads like inspired conversation.
The Battle of Malvern Hill was fought near Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederacy, on July 1, 1862. Not as well remembered as Antietam or Gettysburg, it was the last of the Seven Days Battles in the Peninsula Campaign, and prompted Confederate General Daniel H. Hill to say: “It was not war -- it was murder.” Union artillery from its position on the hilltop slaughtered General Robert E. Lee’s troops. Confederate casualties in one day of fighting totaled some 5,550; Union, about 3,000. In a grim twist, Union General George B. McClellan and his forces, despite the victory, retreated to Harrison’s Landing on the James River and Richmond remained securely behind Confederate lines until the war was nearly concluded, almost three years later. Herman Melville’s “Malvern Hill” was included in his Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). The poem is a dialogue between a Union soldier and the elm trees standing on the battlefield. It is notably unromantic and unconsoling: “Ah wilds of woe!” The speaker asks, “Does Malvern Wood / Bethink itself, and muse and brood?” The trees reply with the italicized stanza at the end of the poem: “We elms of Malvern Hill Remember every thing; But sap the twig will fill: Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.” R.L. Barth titles a four-line epigram, collected in Deeply Dug In (2003), with an unattributed quotation lifted from Melville’s poem: “Leaves must be green in spring”: “Malvern elms, limbs sap-filled and leaves green, Spring an easy consolation; However, where may they turn, who’ve known a jungle Blasted by defoliation?” Barth writes as a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War. He refers to the decade-long use by American forces of chemical defoliants, the most widely known being Agent Orange. The goal was to strip trees of foliage to prevent the enemy from concealing supplies and encampments. Traditionally, spring is a consolation for another winter endured, a rebirth of nature and hope, and green is its color. Barth’s jungle is “blasted,” denuded, without “easy consolation.” In his Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce, a Civil War veteran severely wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, defined war as: “a by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light.”
Certain writers lay claim to a piece of geography. Think of Cavafy’s Alexandria and William Kennedy’s Albany. Outsiders may visit but the deed is ironclad. When I hear something in the news about the Caucasus, that often-contested band of mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, I think of Tolstoy. In 1851, he fled to the Caucasus to escape gambling debts and joined the Russian army. During the Crimean War he served as an artillery officer and took part in the Siege of Sevastopol. Tolstoy turned the experience into grist for literature in such works as the 1863 novel The Cossacks and the 1872 novella “The Prisoner of the Caucasus.” His finest use of the setting comes in one of his masterpieces, Hadji Murad (1904). The first-century Roman poet Martial got there long before Tolstoy. In his recently published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books), R.L. Barth tells me the epigram “IX.45 is perhaps my favorite.” The poet addresses his friend Marcellinus, who is being sent to the Caucasus as part of the Roman army. For the next six-hundred years, Rome would battle for control of the region with the Sasanian Empire. IX.45: “Marcellinus, when you set forth To soldier in the frigid North Beneath the Getic constellations, Think how close those duty stations Approach the famed Promethean rock And fabled mountains! Taking stock Of these—the hero’s confidants Who heard his cries—you’ll say at once, ‘Prometheus was harder!’ Add: ‘Who had—and without going mad— Endured such suffering was fit To mold clay, fashion men from it.’” Bob writes: “I think it’s an absolutely first-rate poem. I’ve been thinking about this since the other night when I reread Turner’s essay on Martial, where he pronounced it ‘one of the best poems in ancient literature.’ I’m sure that was not Turner being provocatively perverse. It really is a remarkable poem.” Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. As punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle was sent daily to eat his liver. Each night it would grow back and the eagle would return the next day to feast on it yet again. Bob, writing as a poet, translator and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, tells me: “Other than the coincidence of the landscape, I think at least part of the reason for alluding to the great suffering and endurance of Prometheus is to warn or prepare his young friend Marcellinus for what he can expect in his tour of duty. He was obviously someone about whom Martial cared deeply, devoting three poems to him. When Martial devotes multiple poems to friends, they are usually friends in Rome itself and more or less of his generation."
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A time ago, I wrote a thing that felt like stumbling into a delightful discovery: On Foraging Mushrooms at Cheesman Park Sometimes I’ll amend a post, with updates from a later time, sometimes it’s easier to just make a separate part 2. Everything continues delightfully with picking them up from the grass I already walk around in regularly (frisbee, walking/scooting through or near the park). I’ve now encountered them far beyond {local park} I’ve now seen the same fruiting body in similar configurations in parks all around Denver. I’ll add a map screenshot. It feels like any time it rains even a little bit, and/or there is a bit of chilly weather (relative to the summer lately) or in many other conditions, these mushrooms will sprout. Anywhere there’s wood to metabolize. Mulch works, but it seems to particularly favor the root balls of long-gone trees, where there’s nothing above ground remaining. Sometimes I’ve made a guess and said “I think when it rains enough, mushrooms sprout right here: 👇” and it’s been correct. Other times I’ve simply noticed them in the grass along side of wherever I happen to be. Sometimes I see something that might be the caps in the distance, and i’ll go check and indeed, button mushrooms. Other times it’s a napkin. Improvements at cooking with 🍄 I’ve upped my bulk food prep game. I’ve always loved the instant pot, and now I have an even easier method. I could give it it’s own blog post, perhaps. I used to do a lot more chopping of things before steaming it into a meal in an instant pot. Then I’d use an immersion blender to blend it all together. Sometimes I’d use the blender before starting the instant pot, it all depended. Now I dump basically whole vegetables into the pot, washed but not cut (i’ll crack some things like carrots in my hands so they fit better), and cook it whatever amount of time the longest item needs. I might also cook soft stuff in, even the whole time (like dropping whole mushrooms into the pot before cooking everything for 50 minutes) or I’ll cook the whole thing slightly less (45 minutes), then open it up and add the ‘delicate stuff’ (like mushrooms, tomatoes, onion, garlic, still all whole or cut in half like once) and cook it 5 more minutes. Then everything gets spiced again, and then I use an immersion blender to blend/mix it all together. cooked Chickpeas can be added at the end after immersion blending to bring in some texture, ditto a few blocks of crumbled up tofu. If the tofu got a little sauté and tossed in the soup… damn. This method is much less work/time than it took before where i’d do more chopping/cubing of ingredients, sauté’ing some stuff before adding the bulk and cooking it. Sometimes the bottom of the contents would burn before the instant pot would get to pressure. So, this new method (whole plants placed loose into the container, some water, cook for as long as needed by the longest item (dry beans, squash) and then immersion blend. It’s all been excellent for me. ‘soy boy dinner’, some could call it. It’s conceptually similar (identical?) to beans/rice/sausage that I would cook for myself when I was a kid, and ate meat, but a bit more customized to my current personal preferences. I can make it delicious, and it makes a ton of food all at once. As always, I pour a big thing of olive oil over the whole thing when serving up in a bowl. An ongoing source of enjoyment and practical value I’ve now had exclusively fresh, free, delicious mushrooms from local parks now, for years, and feel reasonably changed by it. observation is a big part of curiosity, interest. Reading books by people who see some things so well and then write about it, of course changes ones own sense of observation. 1 I’m glad to have encountered cool books like this book about moss and this book about beavers, and this book about plants. I notice that if I’m doing my normal barefoot hill sprints thing, I can sometimes easily tell through my feet where I’ll find mushrooms. I continue to enjoy cooking with them, find them nourishing in all the normal ways, and of course stepping outside of capitalism is delightful. Bulk storage last year, ahead of the winter, after encountering surprisngly huge amounts of mushrooms, on a whim, I decided to try some bulk storage. the bulk storage I did for myself easily lasted through the winter, even though the winter was super dry. Turned out that mushrooms grew throughout the winter, especially in sunny spots, anytime there would be a bit of snow followed by warm-enough temps. So even after I opened my first bag of dried mushrooms that I stored in the freezer, I didn’t get very far through it before fresh mushrooms were popping up in the grass again and I’d go back to fresh mushrooms. The bag would go back in the freezer. Then I’d use up the fresh ones I got, go back to the dried ones. Last winter was very dry, but not super cold, so there were not many mushrooms growing throughout the winter, but again, I was surprised that there were any. Since last winter, I’ve made a few improvements to the process. I’ve gotten better at bulk storage. I’ll cook them at a lower temperature a bit longer in time (usually 220-240 f) and having a rack under them probably would make it go even better. I can pile them high on a baking sheet and turn them a few times: i’ll two sheets at a time, they can be condensed to a single sheet after the first bit of drying. Eventually, they’re fully dried and can be bagged and frozen. It takes a few hours. lower temperatures get closer to what a normal dehumidifier would do (140 degrees, maybe) but it takes too long for this large volume of mushrooms to get cooked down at that temperature. I finally got around to weighing the before and after weight of the mushrooms, and indeed the finished weight is exactly 10% of the pre-cook weight. The mass is about the same diminishment, so one can fit like three baking sheets of mushrooms, many pounds worth, into a small bag. In two stops at the park, I picked up enough mushrooms that, by the time I’d finished baking them down and storing in the freezer, I had enough mushrooms that I could not encounter another fresh mushroom at the park until next summer, and I wouldn’t bottom out the supply. two trips to the park, and I wasn’t even trying. I could have gotten 100 lbs of mushrooms both days, with just a few canvas bags. Here’s a photo. Up top is a container of about 2.5 pounds of mushrooms. The smallest of those bags contains the dried-out end result. The smallest bag has three containers worth of mushrooms in it. This represents perhaps 40 pounds of fresh mushrooms. Mushrooms contain every essential amino acid, and are as complete a protein as any animal flesh or excretion. I was still eating eggs for a while after I started eating mushrooms, and even after I began getting mushrooms for free. I noticed not liking that I was participating in the exploitation of animals (I’d been reducing my participation in it at a subconcious level for a time) but I was obviously paying for it every time I spent my own money on it. And ‘dairy’ and ‘eggs’ are the same as the rest. So any participation was close enough to full participation, and implied the correctness of the frame, which is low key ‘you/it/she low-key deserved what happened’, and it’s voluntary. There’s not even a health claim to be made for it. What I hope for you and mushrooms I want something for you, too. I write these things for me, sure, and even younger versions of me. I wonder where else around colorado these mushrooms grow. I suspect they may grow widely. and where besides colorado. If they grow widely like this, how many other people could slip a little of the shackles of human exploitation (capitalism) and entitlement to the exploitation of animals. and why not both-ish? at least the animals, but if one escapes a bit of capitalism, please certainly also have already freed other beings from your direct exploitation. (consuming individual animals, her excretions) what I hope for you and scooters This easy, whimsical, “oh look at me finding little fruits in the fairy circles as I prance about barefoot” energy is enabled entirely by a very particular vehicle. A scooter. 🛵 My scooter is very similar to this particular vehicle: HHH 200cc scooter Here’s a normal-enough vibe. I see something that looks like maybe mushrooms somewhere, pull the scooter up right next to them. I can ride my scooter directly to the mushroom, put the kickstand down, place the mushrooms inside the bag I store in my scooter bucket anyway, as if a basket of them had been dumped on the ground, hop back on the scooter, and take home the extra 2-20 lbs in the container I’d had in my scooter already. I can ride around anywhere easily with it, and never have to park it far from my destination. I love bicycles, truly, and yet I find denver to be too damn dangerous to use with a bicycle. Because of the entitlement of drivers, and ‘bad’/irresponsible/obedient-to-random-rules-from-supremacists road design, margins of safety and comfort just don’t quite work for me, getting around on a bicycle. I resent that, though. I loved the time of my life that I was using my bike a lot. And as soon as I got my first moped, I never rode that bike again. I’ll have another bike some day, and i’ll ride it, probably/maybe even around Denver, in some limited situations. But not at night, not if I needed to carry stuff, not if i’ll have to deal with cars/car traffic very much. buying scooters There’s been nice innovations in scooters in the USA recently! I got my scooter for $3200 in 2022 from a company based in Taiwan named Sym. Now in 2026 I’ve seen the same vehicle at the shop, also new, for $4400. On the other side of the strait of Taiwan are some quality manufacturers. One could get a similar version of the vehicle I have for $1600. It’ll show up in a week on a wood pallet, and all it needs is the front tire attached, and the handlebars attached. A friend got this scooter, it was super easy to put together. It costs more on HHH’s website directly, delivery is included. Amazon has it $400 cheaper, with a $400 delivery fee. Same either way. I was shocked at how easy the whole “buy a scooter off a website and assemble it” process was. Next time I’m getting a scooter, that’s what I’m going to do. To get my current scooter in the older way, I had to travel to a dealer in one vehicle, get dropped off, then drive the new other vehicle home. But having a brand new scooter dropped off at your house? amazing. And so cheap. It comes in a wood crate and uses metric bolts. I think most of the bolts on the crate (and handlebars) needed a 10mm socket and the front tire used a 17mm socket. A metric socket set like this is all one needs to do all the maintenance it’ll need, too. 2 Long ago I wrote a thing about scooters, since they’ve had such an impact on me, of course, how could I not, and then I could refer other folks to that page. I need to do a part 2. Any 125cc scooter from HHH also is great. One friend of mine has a 170cc scooter from them (the tank 200, obtained via facebook marketplace) and another friend has a 150 that is also lovely, obtained directly from HHH. The 150 size scooters have a 125cc engine, the 200 size scooters have a 170 cc engine. I don’t know why this is how it is. So, cheers to that. One of them gets to use the scooter now instead of an e-bike. One of them uses it instead of a regular car. Both are thrilled with the improvements. and if we all find it to be this way, maybe you will too. reducing car domination and capitalism and animal exploitation all at the same time? A scooter feels like an escape from car domination, and a way to obtain many interesting experiences (and to obtain instant free, ready-to-consume food). Foraging mushrooms feels like decapitalizing a certain portion of my food, and thus my life. Capitalism is so exploitative and coercive. How nice to reduce it’s footprint in my life. Speaking of exploitation and coercion… I cannot help think that people (me, I am people) could eat free mushrooms and replace any part of their diet that was animal flesh with mushrooms. (or tofu, or chickpeas, or store bought mushrooms, it doesn’t have to be foraged mushrooms obv), and in doing so doing escape participation in yet another exploitative system. I liked escaping capitalism via foraging, even when I was still participating in entitlement to animal exploitation. Now that I’ve Even without mushrooms, though, I would want for the same end result. The abundance of free mushrooms seems like a cool point to pass through on a stance towards the non-exploitation of animals, and a lesser exploitation of human animals (self and others). Resources The Light Eaters The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses Foraging Mushrooms from Cheesman Park (part 1) Mycorrhizal Planet: How Symbiotic Fungi Work with Roots to Support Plant Health and Build Soil Fertility Footnotes after reading a book about moss I began carrying a pocket magnifying glass and guess what? the outside is even more interesting to me now. ↩ When I got my first scooter, and at first on my second scooter, I’d let the scooter dealer do the oil changes. Now I do them myself, for the same reason I cut my own hair. It’s so convenient to do it when I want, where I want, and I’m good/good enough at it. Sometimes I can do it in 10 minutes using a plastic container I fetch from my own trashcan. It takes exactly one container of oil (it’s like 957mil or something) and I pour the discard oil back into that same now-empty container, and drop the waste oil off at a mechanics shop when convenient. It took a while and was not as easy the first few times I did it as it is now. The only cost is a container of 10w-30 or 10w-40 oil which is usually $8 or so. And I began doing the transmission oil myself too, and belt and rollers. None of it felt trivial the first time I did it, but now I’m much better at it, and can do it in a pretty low-mess, clean, fast-enough way. I feel very independent and cost-effective, having a car-like vehicle that can go 55 mph, can carry multiple people, can carry stuff, but has a 1.5 gallon gas tank, weighs only 240 lbs, and I can do all of/most of the maintenance myself, as someone who doesn’t give a shit about cars and has always disliked dealing with stuff like that. I will do the brake pads myself for the first soon, too. There’s many youtube videos about how to do anything, and the vehicle is so simple even ‘big’ car maintenance tasks are simple with the scooter. ↩
If you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music, the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens?
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello! It’s me, Craig Mod. I’m doing an event with David Marx in Tokyo this Friday night (17th) at Tiger Mountain, a small, hip bookshop. The in-person tix are all sold out, but it will be livestreamed, and there are still tickets for that bit. It costs about seven bucks, and would make the small bookshop running it super happy to sell more tickets! (Although I realize the timezone difference is terrible for most readers …)
The golden window of tech may have expired. In 2010, I came across a video of Mick Jagger being interviewed (text version here). It was for a re-release of Exile on Main Street with 10 new tracks. During the interview he says this: But I have a take on that — people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25-year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t. In 2009, I had just started to recover or find my footing from the dot-com bust and the 2008 recession. I wondered about the tech industry’s longevity and resilience then, having experienced my first taste of startup life from 2000-2002. After which, I did my best to navigate what it meant to be a maker on the internet, before it figured out how to make money. I certainly didn’t make any for a number of years. What Jagger said has stuck with me ever since. I often come back to this when I think about any industry or vocation — how long do people really make money doing a thing? Tech feels that way now, again — that for a decade or more, coming out of 2008, people started to make money hand over fist, and tech was rosy, optimistic and all blue skies. We believed we could shape a utopian future, but eventually extracting value came calling, and has always been at the core of capitalism. And tech is a capitalist endeavor. Today, streaming has lobotomized all earnings for musical artists, which has led to heavy touring schedules and lucrative reunions capitalizing on fanbases that have only become even more endeared to the artists of their youth or formative years. Audiences are willing to dole out hundreds of dollars to see their favorite artists perform for hours in an arena or venue. We’re at an inflection point again, facing a different kind of existential threat. The younger generation will chalk this up to how tech is today, while those of us with decades in this industry and the long view of experience have either accepted it, made good money from it and retired, or are fighting the good fight. Is that period gone for tech too? And if so, what’s the equivalent of touring? → This looks better on the web → Reply via email Thanks for reading and using RSS!
it’s been going well for me.
