“My mother made me a homosexual!”
“If I sent her the material, would she make me one too?”
and so I find myself looking at what I am, and wondering if I would have made me like this, I doubt it, because it isn’t very nice, but on the other hand as a design adapted to the environment and stimulus around me, I can’t really fault it…
…since it is that time of year for photos of the year past etc, I’d have to pick something abandoned as a picture of myself, maybe Baikonur cosmodrome, but maybe just an abandoned whaling station or old hard rock mine…
… I don’t mean one of those cavernous empty spaces where everything was pulled out and sold for scrap, I mean those places where the receivers came in one day and everyone just put their tools down and walked away and haven’t been back since.
I have a workshop out back with all the usual stuff, welders and compressors and air tools and paint equipment and bench power supplies and oscilloscope and a lathe and cnc mill and so on…. in the past year I’ve used the milling machine once and a few of the spanners and hand tools, everything else hasn’t been touched…. I have to question the purpose of it all.
To be sure, the capacity and capability is there, but the drive just isn’t, and my main reason for not saying fuckit and ebaying everything is I still have a sense of identity tied up with it, I still see myself as an engineer, and an engineer without tools is like a man without a cock and balls… there is a difference between not being able to fuck and not wanting to fuck….
The indolent, sedentary and reclusive lifestyle of MGTOW is attractive, so attractive it is very easy to get totally into it, and end up doing sweet fuck all with your days, day after day… and while this can be a good thing, not working for the man or the wimminz, it can also be a bad thing, not staying healthy, not staying fit, not staying active.
On the other hand, I am in a minimum energy transfer orbit from here to there, everything is shut down to minimum, even my activity, I am in many ways like the tools in the workshop, the old 10 MHz Hitachi oscilloscope may be junk by modern standards, but it works, and if you ***need*** a scope chances are 1 MHz is way more than enough, and suddenly the old Hitachi is worth its weight in gold.
I could go through the entire workshop like this, it is as far away from the dream tech palaces that you can see on the telly with the bad ass chopper builders vs bad ass hot rod builders type programs as you can get, it is all old and obsolete crap, and more than that PORTABLE crap.
So my old lathe only has a 4.5″ swing over the bed, but it is rigid and has 3 and 4 jaw chucks and screwcutting / power feed and a VFD drive, and the old mill only has a horsepower at the spindle and 2,500 RPM at that and only a 12″ x 3″ and 3″ working envelope in XYZ, but, it is surprising what can be done with that if push comes to shove.
And that is why it, and I, have sat idle, push hasn’t come to shove, I’m still in that minimum energy transfer orbit, which is nothing if not minimising burn rate and maximising remaining resources and ability, when I eventually arrive wherever it is I am going, or if I never get there, prolonging survivability.
My resolutions for 2013 are pretty much getting the motorsickle back on the road, I already did a lot of the hard work back along the way before I lost interest when my FRA hit the fan, lot of powder-coating, new wheel and steering head bearings, new tyres, skimmed disks and rebuilt brakes, only really a complete re-wire and some paint and tidying up to do, new chain and lights etc…. and try to get some more work on the black economy, and… that’s about it….
Back in 1974, which is the first time I can CONSCIOUSLY remember seriously thinking about my own personal future in some detail, I will admit I never got much beyond the year 2000 in my future gazing, that was a big enough stretch, and it probably included a fucking flying car… but, I’m sure I’d have been secretly pleased to know that there was a one off truly hand built (nobody can even identify the engine maker, much less the motorsickle maker on my bike) bike in my workshop, even if the fucker wasn’t running.
I’m sure I would also have been pleased that I was still listening to good music, and that I had worked my way through a ton of cunt.
I would not have been pleased at the idea that I was economically inactive, and I would have found it hard to credit that I was short of money, or back in the UK living like a hermit.
The electronic and computer revolution was simply not on the radar, a personal spaceship was a simpler thought than a personal computer, and my handheld smartphone that does fucking everything including location fixing…. shit….my dad grew up in the UK with no fucking running water…
Since I could never have predicted back then that I and the world would be where we are now, one thing I have learned is the futility of sitting here now and trying to predict where we will be in the year 2030… 2015 is only two years away and it’s a real push, except I can see the wheels falling off the wagon already.
So, getting my motorsickle back on the road, keeping my head below the fucking parapet, and emptying my balls now and again into some skank, that’s it for my predictions and resolutions for 2012, so as far as resolutions go they aren’t exactly 4k hi-def 32 bit colour…
May your 2013 be as free from interesting moments as I hope mine will be.
I don’t actually believe that though, the economic reset has to hit, and if it does fixing up my motorsickle may become the last of my priorities, or, it may become the only thing that matters…
… that’s the only problem with minimum transfer orbits, you’re committed to a destination, and you have to get there safely and stock up again before you can embark on another excursion, I’m going to enjoy the relative tranquillity of this excursion while I can, I probably won’t get another one… none of us will…. meantime all I can do is continue to imitate a boring rock that is not on a collision course, such a low priority I fall off everyone’s radar, fuck it, not like I have a choice.
