Talk to any divorced / separated guy where the dust has settled and it is all rear view mirror shit.
It’s the same as talking to a cancer survivor, they may well be able to put one or two X’s on the calendar and say this is the day I got handed that sheet of paper by the doctor, this is the day I first coughed up blood, but asking them when it all started, and when it all ended, that’s a hmmmm question, maybe several pots of coffee later you’ll get a final definitive answer they are happy with, accuracy wise.
But, by the same token, ask them, are you divorced, are you separated, are you beating cancer, is your marriage over, these all have pretty much instant “yep” or “nope” answers.
They are all talking about processes that happen and evolve over time, but from one perspective you are trying to place markers in that timeline to divide it up into chapters or sections like a storybook, and the other perspective is simply asking is it history yet?
If it is still unravelling, it isn’t history, and if it isn’t history, you have no idea where you are in the timeline of events, is this the end, sure feels like it, or maybe it is just the end of chapter one, and there are 11 more chapters to go, and with hindsight, it was only in chapter 5 that shit really started to get crazy…
The primal folly of being human is something that you can hear all military types who went off to a hot war say, after the event, “we never really thought *we* would get killed”.
Of course, by definition, only the survivors get to speak, but even so, what sort of fucking idiot thinks you can go off to WAR, WAR FOR FUCKS SAKE, and not really think that it does anything other than *dramatically* increase your chances of dying young.
No, *you* fucks can all go off to war, I’ll stay behind and fuck your wives and girlfriends up the ass.
No, prophecy is a tricky business, I knew one guy years ago, fellow biker, no fear at all, not much sense either, I used to always say to him that he was gonna fucking kill hisself, he always laughed, still here aren’t I asshole, I went away for nearly a year, came back, down the pub, hey, it’s a Friday night, where’s JC?
Dead, months ago now, lost it blatting over the downs, went head first straight into that big granite milestone on the corner at seventy…..
oohhhh….
But, prophecy isn’t just tough when it comes to individual events, it also applies to whole series of things, I’ll be honest with you, at 16 I had no real idea how my life was going to turn out, what I was going to do, or amount to, or where I would go, or what I would be.
Looking back, I can’t say any of it was unpredictable, nevertheless, at no point did I have any future insights that were worth a handful of shit.
And if my oracle of delphi act falls flat on its face when I try to apply it to something as insignificant as my own life, what hope is there for looking at western society as a whole?
Sure, I can do like I did with JC back in the day and say you’re a mad fucker who is going to end up badly, but calling how or when or to what extent, no way.
JR was another one from back in the day, now, he wasn’t a mad fucker, he just wasn’t a lucky fucker, he died last year, but it took him 5 years to go, he got totaled by a blind fuck in a Volvo, ended up a T5 paraplegic, ended up with just over a quarter of a million compo, of course, the insurance company being bastards knew that being a T5 paraplegic really fucks your life expectancy, so instead of paying him the lump sum, they offered him 40k up front at 20k a year for 11 years, which meant they trousered 120k when he died after 5.
He sure as hell didn’t predict he’d end up like that, nor, I suppose, did the blind fuck in the volvo, who apparently lost a leg as well.
It’s the problem I have when people ask me for advice.
All I can offer them is all I have myself, there are some strategies that you can implement, some things you can try and avoid, trying to position yourself so you can adapt to whatever does come down the pipe, apart from that it is suck it and see, I got no more idea than you, in the words of the Goose, I just got here myself man.
This dipshit, familiarity breeds contempt, playing with toys that he thinks will allow him to get a shot off fractions of a second quicker than with the bog standard safety method, compare that with a guy who takes a full send to draw or even a second and a half, but who always hits what he aims at, at range too, and by range I mean 75 metres… knew a guy who could do that all day long, hit coke cans at 75 metres with a 9 mm, never fucking missed, his draws weren’t quick though…,. at 50 metres he could hit them swinging…
It’s like the old revolver thing where you only loaded 5 and always kept an empty chamber under the hammer, just in case, and the standard response to the question “what if you need more than 5 rounds” was two fold, you’re fucked, and you shouldn’t a bin there in the first fucking place…
5 rounds to ol Jake was 5 headshots.
Like those guys who play pool, who once they get one ball sunk they always just get on and clean the table, if you are as good as them, it’s all down to sinking one off the break, if you ain’t as good as them, you may as well just hand over the ten and walk away from the table, never having picked up the cue.
Course old Jake learned to shoot “barking”, I had no idea what barking was, and he explained it to me, you had one long gun, that was it, probably a fairly large calibre, never any optical sights, too fragile, so you wanted something to eat, say a squirrel.. but sometimes a bird.
If you aimed AT the squirrel, you blew the shit out of it, there was nothing left to eat, so you aimed at the bark, not the branch itself, but the bark, that the fucker was stood on, so we are talking better than bullet diameter accuracy or you go hungry, get it right and the bark burst upwards, stunning, breaking bones and sometimes even outright killing dinner, that fucker could *shoot*, I can remember him picking up an old .308 and firing at an ant hill a *good* 400 yards away across the river, and standing behind with binocs watching the bullet, he would hit that ant hill every fucking shot.
Ol Jakes advice about being in a gunfight would echo mine about life, if you are in a place where shaving 0.5 seconds off your draw time is significant, you already fucked up, and you *still* better off hitting what you want with every single shot.
eg there *may* be theoretical situations where the cowboy quick draw is the deciding factor, for values of the truly exceptional people who can already shoot the balls off a gnat at 50 paces while drunk in the rain and in the dark too… for everyone else, it is just an exercise in burning up your limited time doing anything *but* the few things you could do in theory that might actually make a difference.
That’s the other difficult thing about prophecy, even if your advice is fucking good, which it is unlikely to be unless it is fairly vague and addresses your PRESENT weaknesses, chances are, whoever is getting the “benefit” of it won’t wanna hear what you have to say.
But the biggest difficulty of all with prophecy is that the penalty for being right is often worse than the penalty for being wrong, I have literally lost count of the number of people who literally will not speak to me any more, because they asked me what I thought about some business venture or some romantic involvement or some family problem, and like a fucking idiot I told them exactly what I thought, eg it has about 999 ways to go very badly wrong and fuck you up, and they ignored it, and it did go wrong and fuck them up.
Prophecy, you see, is useless to those who do not want to change themselves, they just want to avoid certain outcomes, nooo man, they will say, you ain’t listening, I’m not trying to avoid the casino, or the roulette table, I’m trying to avoid letting it all ride on 13 black and LOSING, hey…
The only way *that* can happen is if others are forced to change what they do, in order to accommodate *you* not changing what you do and still reducing the risks to you.
See this guy, even with an open chamber, he never sweeps the camera guy.
Plus, he does the opposite of the doofus above, this guy is all KISS all the way down.
and the proof, 425 yard shot with a 9 milli, first shot on target.
impressive