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Preparations

by MAÔ, posted in Travel

In getting ready to be away for an extended time I’ve found myself returning again and again to Rolf Potts’s Vagabonding. Some thoughts I’ve had from reading the book:

“Life at home can’t prepare you for how little you need on the road.”

While I’m not backpacking this time around, even sorting out what I need and don’t need has been cumbersome. I’ve stored a portion of my clothes, books, and superfluous ‘things’ that will wait for me until I return, at which point I’m hoping to sell off a good chunk of my goods either at a yard sale or online.

“Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes . . . all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, or shooting free-throws, or meditating.”

– Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgramage

Alaska was only a thought, somewhere distant, living at the edge of my periphery. I don’t recall when it took root. But when I visited last year it blossomed. There was a vastness to the country that I had never seen the likes of before – which stood before me in such a way that I felt both insignificant and at the same time a part of the frontier. It was a continuation of something I looked for that first time I was in Europe, and I knew I’d have to go back.

“If you’re already in debt, work your way out of it – and stay out. If you have a mortgage or other long-term debt, devise a situation  (such as property rental) that allows you to be independent of its obligations for long periods of time. Being free from debt’s burdens simply gives you more vagabonding options. And, for that matter, more life options.”

Well, debt is something I’ve considered in painstaking detail since getting out of school. I’ve made some financial mistakes; followed certain passions that weren’t always viable; spent too much, made too little, and sat idle occasionally while trying to reorient myself. Debt is a weight, and I work every day to lighten that load.

“I think if I can make a bundle of cash before I’m thirty and get out of this racket,” [Charlie Sheen says in Wall Street], “I’ll be able to ride my motorcycle across China.”

When I first saw this scene on video a few years ago, I nearly fell out of my seat. After all, Charlie Sheen or anyone else could work for eight months as a toiulet cleaner and have enough money to ride a motorcycle across China.

And that quote from Chapter 1 has stuck with me since first reading it in 2003. My copy of the book is beaten up, highlighted, scribbled in, and full of notes about places I want to see and methods of transportation. I regret not taking the plunge that year. Back when I was debt-free, and I needed a year off from school because I just couldn’t concentrate. But it’s never too late to do what you wanted to do. Sure, maybe it feels a little more complicated. But, it’s not too late.

I was having lunch the other day with some friends, and one of them asked whether I had the wanderlust. Yes, I do.

“To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.”

– Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Why facts and figures are just facts and figures

by MAÔ, posted in Economy

There’s a lot to be said for statistical analysis. Aside from the obvious, “There are three kinds of lies,” statistics help interpret the real world into manageable bits that our brains can digest. Because, if all we took in was raw data all the time, it would be difficult to make sense of anything.

Once information [from sensory organs] is processed to a degree, an attention filter decides how important the signal is and which cognitive processes it should be made available to. For example, although your brain processes every blade of grass when you look down at your shoes, a healthy attention filter prevents you from noticing them individually. In contrast, you might pick out your name, even when spoken in a noisy room. There are many stages of processing, and the results of processing are modulated by attention repeatedly.

– Teach-nology

Statistics works much the same way that our brains filter out “noise”. By collecting data points from related information, we can visualize or understand more complicated systems of data that may otherwise be beyond our grasp.

When we look at a positive trend in the stock market followed by a precipitous decline of share values it can look like the world is coming to an end. But if we retrace the historical data points of the market we recognize its cyclical nature and understand that, at some point, the decline will cease and the market will rise again.

Mark Twain was attributed with the quote as saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

So I guess what I’m saying is while we may not have the specific facts of a situation to rely on, we can believe that there is a historical context with which we can view it. Knowing that the Spanish Influenza killed approximately 50 million people between 1918-1919 isn’t as important as recognizing that these kinds of pandemics happen, such as in 1957, 1968, and 2009. Investigating what worked and what didn’t can help us today.

And these cycles occur across all industries, geopolitical affairs, and economies. It’s just a matter of finding an applicable context to compare then to now.

 

 

Stock Market Crumbles

by MAÔ, posted in Economy

It’s was a week of heightened concern for investors. While I generally view downturns as an opportunity for reentering the market, I know it can be disconcerting when you watch 10% of your investment balance just disappear.

From the Wall Street Journal: “Investors are bracing for more volatility ahead. The Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX, jumped to 45.67 early Friday, the highest level since at least October 2011. The VIX, which is based on options on the S&P 500, tends to rise when stocks are falling and decline as markets rise.”

Questions as to how bad the Coronavirus spread will be, or what the resulting financial ramifications may do to the economy are running through the newspapers and television networks. When health becomes a concern, it’s easy to forget rationality.

There are things to consider when it comes to selloffs. Most importantly, it’s primarily led by investment bankers who are concerned about the long-term profitability of their holdings given the health concern. It is in no way an admonition about the stability of any individual company. Some industries will face losses in this cycle, but we’ve seen time and again that cyclical losses are to be expected.

While it’s never clear how long something like this might last, it’s good to remember that it can’t last indefinitely.

A New Rundown

by MAÔ, posted in Social

Postponed the Rundown for me to ruminate on six months of daily posting yesterday. I still can’t believe it.

My goal with the weekly rundown was to share things of value, and not waste anyone’s time. I’m not sure that it’s been exactly as I intended. Most weeks I struggle to find something to at least list as what I’m listening to or doing. And they’re not actionable by anyone reading. Beyond that, I’ve been delinquent in monthly reading lists for December and January, so I need to rectify that as well.

What then should a weekly rundown from me look like? As I consider it, I’ll probably try a few different things. It’ll likely change with Alaska influencing me as well.

Anyway, here are just a couple of things I’m sharing with you this week.

Half-a-year

by MAÔ, posted in Writing

Today is basically half a year of my posting every day. It’s… unbelievable. I wasn’t sure that I’d make it this long keeping up with daily posts. You get in a groove.

Admittedly, some days are harder than others. Some days I’ve found no time to write, heading from one gig to another. Some days I’ve been able to queue up a week’s worth of posts in one sitting.

One or two days, I just got it in under the wire.

This is a bit of a milestone for me, and thank you for taking any time to read this at all. It’s my practice and testing area; an avenue for thoughtfulness and experimentation; and a crucible of trying to come up with the right word for the right situation. But it’s been one-hundred eighty-three days, and damned if I’m not looking forward to the next six months.

Huh… How about that?

Making history

by MAÔ, posted in Inspiration

History is not made by those trying to make history. Rather, it is crafted by those trying to improve a problem.

The Wright Brothers saw the flying contraptions of the 19th Century and wondered, “What if they could be controlled while in the air?”

Thus, beginning with the Wright Glider in 1902, airplane controls saw the ability to manipulate roll, pitch, and yaw. They weren’t trying to become historical aviators. They wanted to fix a problem they identified in aviation, and they did.

Revisitations

by MAÔ, posted in Organization

There’s a collection of things that I intended to return to at some point. An inbox with flagged messages dating back to 2013. Folders with articles and scraps of papers and clippings from newspapers and magazines. All of it held my interest long enough for me to say, “I’ll return to this.” And yet, the stream keeps coming and revisiting any of it seems, at best, questionable.

And yet, there’s the possibility that something in there will spur something here. So I hold onto it.

Some book I read suggested that you should keep a tickler file, containing those things of interest to you that you may want to return to someday – given you have the time. Just make sure you make the time.

Zombies

by MAÔ, posted in Social

Heard this piece from The Why Factor on BBC World Service, all about zombies. It was the noise at the start that got me – this sort of clicking, vocal low growl. It was a little unsettling. But listening through, it got me thinking.

It seems that AMC’s The Walking Dead led this current phase of popularity, and while I thought that maybe the zombie was waining, it seems to still be going strong. Last year’s Zombieland 2 (which I still haven’t seen), popular games like The Last of Us, and the white walkers from HBO’s Game of Thrones all point to a strong showing by the reanimated corpse.

The zombie, and the wider horror genre, is a cyclical beast. While zombies have been en vogue starting from the October 31, 2010 airing of Days Gone By, the first episode of The Walking Dead, they were made popular first, and in their current iteration, by George Romero in his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Though Romero lost the rights to that film, it became a lucrative franchise for him as he created five more films in his Dead Saga. Dani Di Placido at Forbes wrote this history of the zombie legend following Romero’s death in 2017.

Before Romero, Americans knew of the zombie mostly from White Zombie, a 1932 film about a Haitian honeymoon with voodoo and raised corpses. The Haitian zombie wasn’t bloodthirsty – it was merely a resurrected person to be used as a slave by a sorcerer. Director Wes Craven revisited this aspect of the zombie legend in 1988’s The Serpent and the Rainbow. In A History of Zombies in America from NPR’s Rachel Martin and Rund Abdelfatah, the Haitian beginnings of zombies are explored in depth.

Through the 80s and the 90s, zombies got more of a B-movie treatment. Slasher films were the mainstay, with films like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Sleepaway Camp following up on the popularity of 1978’s Halloween. The masked killer got a revamp in 1996 with Wes Craven’s Scream, ushering in a smarter, meta-version of the slasher film.

While the film industry wasn’t doing great with zombies, video games were killing it. The Resident Evil series, started in 1996 for Playstation, was immensely popular and eventually got its own film adaptations as well. Additionally, new life for the zombie came in the 2000s, including the 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the 2004-remake of Dawn of the Dead. In 2003, Robert Kirman began the long-running series Walking Dead for Image Comics, which would be adapted to television by AMC.

And books as well get the zombification treatment, with popular novels like Max Brooks’s World War Z, Stephen King’s Cell, and M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, not to mention the Seth Graham parody mashup of Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.

So while I echo Romero’s sentiment that the zombie genre has become overrun in recent years, there is still plenty of material to pull from for a bevy of stories to tell about the living dead. I suppose horror, and its fan-base, is just waiting for the next resurgence – maybe it’ll be Universal Monsters this time around.

Further reading: