Ponderings and Musings

I went for a hike along the Cactus Forest Trail in Saguaro National Park East today. I made another video.

“John is a loner”. I’ve mentioned this statement before in my blog. It was written in one of my kindergarten report cards back in 1973 or 1974. Back then I enjoyed being around people from afar, and 50 years later this is still the case.

My family here at our Desert Compound is rather social. My husband has been a social butterfly since retiring nearly eight years ago. As I type this he’s off to the movies with our friend Marshall. Jamie, Chris, and Mike are all socially inclined as well. A lot of their social interaction is online and they have popular feeds and the like on the social media platforms of varying qualities. Jamie has always been quite gregarious and when he graduates from barber school later this year I’m sure that quality will make him that much better of a barber. He knows how to talk about more than just the weather.

Meanwhile, I talk about the weather a lot. From afar. I can go to events and chat with the best of them but only for a while, then I need some alone time to recharge and get myself back in order. I’ve always been this way.

When I mention this to people they say things like, “but you used to be on the radio!”

As far as I was concerned, back in my radio days I was sitting behind a microphone and talking to no one. At the last station I worked at I figured we were so low powered no one was listening anyway. It was easy to be alone while being “on stage”, I was sitting in a room by myself with a bit of studio equipment and a computer or two.

Even back in my club DJ days it was easy to be alone. I was in the DJ booth, not on stage like the folks do today, and it was just me, crates of records, two nifty turntables, some lighting controls, and hazy figures dancing on a dance floor over there. The door was locked, I didn’t take requests after that nasty woman demanded she dance to Melissa Etheridge NOW, and I liked it that way.

The gay community doesn’t do well with folks that like to be alone. There’s events every weekend in every corner of the country and every other part of the world and like my experiences in the past, I want to be there, while everyone does everything over there. Earl and I were talking about going to a local club to an event called “MEAT”. The social butterfly likes to see all the half dressed people dancing and drinking. I go along because it can be moderately amusing, but I usually dress like a secret service agent or something and stand in the corner with a beer bottle in my hand. When we decided yesterday that we weren’t going to go after all, because honestly we don’t need to be staying up until all hours and drinking alcohol anytime soon, I was very relieved.

I’m going to gather up my wits for a hike on Saturday morning instead.

People that socialize a lot usually think that us loners must be sad or angry or something, and I am none of these things. I just like being alone in my thoughts, doing my thing, and focused on some sort of project or related activity. It’s just the way I’m wired.

And I like it that way.

The first nine years of my life were spent growing up in a mobile home adjacent to a horse and cattle pasture. Two sides of the back yard were lined with electric fence. Grandma and Grandpa Country lived to the east of our little lot and our front yard faced the south. In the lot to the southwest diagonal, Dad built the two-story colonial home I spent the rest of my childhood in.

The mobile home was made by Great Lakes and I believe it was a 1959 model. The trailer was 10×50, with a very small bedroom in the middle of the unit and the “master” bedroom (that could barely hold a double bed) at the end opposite the kitchen, which was on the east end of the trailer.

I can vividly remember my dad, grandfather, and uncle building the 8×40 addition on the side facing south, which included a new “master” bedroom, a living room, and a laundry room just wide enough for the dryer. The washer continued to live in the bathroom. The old living room windows allowed us to look into the new living room. Mom kept the curtains in place.

Just out of curiosity I did a search and found a promotional photo taken in a 1960 model of a Great Lakes mobile home, and it’s the exact layout I remember from our trailer. In the back of the photo is a wall next to the small hallway; I believe we had a mirror on that wall.

Our stove and refrigerator were both a turquoise blue, with a small broom closet just to the right of the gas stove, and then the Hotpoint refrigerator. The broom closet had a can opener mounted inside. The stove was one that had a pilot light; no “click click” ignition system when you turned it on. In the photo above, the original main entry door is behind the young, handsome man; when dad built the addition that door led down two steps into the new living room. There were notches in the molding around the door noting the growth of my sister and me.

It’s funny that I can remember growing up in that mobile home like it was yesterday, and the sound of rain on the metal roof, the noise of snowstorms coming in off Lake Ontario in the winter and the amazing thunderstorms in the summer.

If you’ve been following along with my blog entries this week, you may have noticed that I have been in a bit of a reflective or pensive mood. There’s a couple of reasons for this. Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the midst of yet another mid-life crisis but then I realize in this day and age I don’t know what defines mid-life anymore. Is it mid 50s? Is it 50? 60? I really don’t know. But then I get lost in trying to figure out the mathematics when it comes to mid-life and I forget that I was trying to figure out if this is a mid-life crisis or not.

I’ve been reading more Stoic philosophical readings than usual. The theme is a continuation of my list of goals for 2024. I am really feeling drawn to reading again, and by reading I mean real books made of covers and pages and the like. I’ve restarted Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations, The Annotated Edition”, as translated, introduced, and edited by Robin Waterfield. When we lived in Chicago I read the “Enchiridion of Epictetus” and found it fascinating and it resonated well. “Meditations” continues this theme.

Every morning I’ve been pulling a quote from a Stoic quote generator and pasting it into my journal. It gives me something to think about. Today’s quote:

I will reveal to you a love potion, without medicine, without herbs, without any witch’s magic; if you want to be loved, then love

Hecato of Rhodes

It really is simple, isn’t it. If you want to be loved, then love. That’s it. In this day and age life seems way too complicated. These studies are helping me bring calm to the chaos.

I’ve kept a journal for over a decade. This particular journal is a personal one with no intention of sharing. While I’m pretty real and open in this blog, there are things that I still keep to myself. The personal journal has been maintained in the Day One app for almost its entire life. I’m not 100% satisfied with it, because I believe there is a certain je ne sais quoi achieved with the handwritten word. I’m thinking of writing some journal entries by hand using pen and paper and then filing them away and/or scanning them into Day One. I’ve also done some handwritten entries on my iPad using an Apple Pencil. For me to write unencumbered I must have as little friction as possible. Day One allows me to use the provided apps or a web interface if I don’t have an app on a particular computer, like my Linux laptop.

But honestly, the mechanics of my journaling are secondary to actually journaling. It needs to be freeform, flowing, and honest.

And now that I think of it, my blog entries are often the same way.

I know that since I’ve been amping up my reading and focusing on philosophies, my mood has been a bit better and I’ve felt more comfortable with being just me.

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”

Marcus Aurelius

This quote has been going through my head today. I read it a number of years ago when going through one of the many books I’ve read on Stoicism; it popped up again in a daily quote generator that lives on my “miniframe”.

It seems like society, and the mainstream news in general, wants us to focus on the negative. Everyone knows a car crash is more exciting than a high school graduation (just two random examples), and more exciting is what generates money via clicks and ad-revenue and the like.

But what does all the negativity pounding in from the outside do to our well being? How does it make us feel?

It makes me feel less than stellar.

If we are constantly bombarded by bad news we start to seek bad news. And if we seek bad news, perhaps we start generating bad news. We shouldn’t generate bad news. Look for the sunlight, even on the cloudiest of days.

There’s a reason I’ve stopped listening to news briefs and avoided the cable news networks and the like. Too many clouds that I can’t control obscure the sunlight that I seek.

If there’s one thing to take away from this random bunch of words, it’s this: find the sunlight and share the sunlight as much as you are able to do.

Here’s some photos from yesterday’s hike. They were taken with my iPhone 13 Pro.

If you took a gander at yesterday’s post about my latest hike, you’ll notice that it’s a video with not a lot of written dialog around it. In the video I talk about one of my core values. I believe we should give more than we take, and that extends to our activity on the Internet, we should do what we can to create more than we consume. It’s better to create content that shows the world who we are instead of focusing on consuming content that tells us who we should be.

Making the video, and then editing it when I got back home, was a lot of fun with me and helped me fill a creative niche. I’m going to be doing a lot more of that type of thing, whether it be making videos while flying, chasing storms, or just little snippets of every day life. As I was telling Earl yesterday afternoon, I used to do this sort of thing back in the ‘00s with a “flip” HD camera and some clever editing in the tools available at the time.

I know Apple and the other smartphone makers want us to use our smartphones for everything, including photography and videography. The thing is, I had a lot more fun playing around with my new GoPro Hero yesterday, a camera that’s designed to be a camera. I’m definitely an amateur at all this, but “use the right tool for the job” sticks out in my head.

When Earl and I were talking the other night about life in general, I mentioned that over the past few years he’s just seemed more relaxed and less concerned about opinions and the like. His response was simple, “when you’ve had cancer to remind you can die at any moment, the small stuff doesn’t really seem to matter anymore”. As I continue to read Stoic philosophy and the writings of Seneca, Epictetus, and the like, I am always reminded of “Memento Mori”, which translates to, “remember that you must die”. When you remember that no one gets out of this alive and any moment could be your last, you tend to not sweat the small stuff and focus on making the moment just be the moment.

For years I’ve been holding back on making practical effects laden videos and popping out “Bewitched” style because I was concerned I wouldn’t be taken seriously in my career or my aviation endeavors or I would be perceived as alarmingly immature for a man of my age. You know what? I’m still a kid with a vivid imagination in a 55 year old body. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Those that don’t understand will drift away. Those that feel a connection will come along for the ride.

I made a nine or so minute video of a hike up to Bridal Wreath Falls in Saguaro National Park. I had some fun with my new camera. I hope you enjoy sharing the experience with me.

My new pair of glasses arrived yesterday. While I should be wearing progressive lens, they don’t work very well for when I’m sitting in front of a computer, which is a good chunk of my time. So I have a couple pair of distant vision glasses and a pair for use in front of the computer. If we’re traveling somewhere, I’ll bring along my progressives to keep things easy.

With the advent of online, affordable optical companies like Zenni Optical, picking up a prescription pair of glasses for $30 is a no brainer. While there’s nothing wrong with my 1950s style “Gregory Peck” type glasses, at times they feel a little heavy. So I decided to go with a pair of aviators to add to the mix, depending on my mood.

I snapped a photo while pumping gas last night. The fuel cost more than the glasses..

For the upcoming storm chasing season I added a new (to me) GoPro Hero9 to the mix. Here’s my first video. It was a successful test.