RE: 55 - The Banning of Anonymous Cryptocurrencies
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Phew!
If it was true you had 11 i was about annoy you with telling me of thy children/offsprings.
Do you still speak with em? Why do you say they are all better men than you?
PS - i would ask why you'd want 14...but understanding more of your mindset in the agorist life it isn't surprising. A clan of 14 can be deadly. 14, 11 or even 5 is enough to change a neighborhood, a village or town.
I realized that first hand when i did work in Zottegem on that permaculture farm...we were only 12 but man we were able to PRODUCE so much!
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Well, I reckoned 10 was enough, but demonstrated in my own childhood, as well as observed at every hand, that not all offspring work out as intended. I figured when I got old and toothless taxing my kids 10% each of their income would deliver me 100% of their average income, which was likely to be more than I ever earned during my own productive life. So, I better have a couple extra, because some of them were sure to turn out to be drug addicts I'd have to support until they were 26 (that didn't happen because they had to work if they wanted, say, heat, splitting firewood living with me. They all had heard of wonders like hot and cold indoor plumbing from their friends and jumped ship as soon as they were legally competent).
I have had to learn everything the hard way. I thought having kids would be about tossing the ball back and forth in the back yard, going fishing together, answering their questions about girls, and etc. I hadn't read the fine print in the Daddy contract. What really happens is that fathers have to crush their kids' hopes and dreams (No, you can't grab the red hot stove. No, you can't jump my truck with a motorcycle. No you can't go on tour with your band at fourteen, etc.) until they're old enough to escape. Turns out none of them are going to replace Social Security for the old asshole they finally managed to get away from, so I'm going to die with a hammer in my hand, preferably falling off a ladder onto my head without extended suffering.
I attended public school which created a terrible aversion to institutions and formal education I had to overcome. My kids were homeschooled and were earning wages on construction jobs by the age of 10. Because extracurricular programs don't require participants to be public school students, my kids were Vice President of everything and champions of debate, band(s), sports teams, and so on. My eldest was Captain of the football team (comprised of kids from several small towns) and took them to the State competition for the championship for the first time in 47 years. His younger brother was in a metal band that would get ~1M downloads of their songs and had groupies when he was 14. His younger brother was reading at 2. They were black belt competence in Tae Kwon Do (I didn't get them the actual belt because it is better to keep such martial expertise on the down low) and all of them were >6"taller than me after they went through puberty, better looking, and a lot smarter. I think kids got awards for breathing successfully in public schools, while I showed my kids that if they started buying $1k/month of shares (of companies like Coca Cola that sell them directly, instead of paying brokerage fees) when they were 15, they'd have >$3M by the time they were in their late 20's and they could live off dividends for the rest of their lives. I let them build their own computers so I could kick their asses at Duke Nukem on our home network, and buy 4x4's they could drive around the 'roads' I punched through the forest on our compound innawoods, but they had to repair them when they crashed (at <10 miles an hour, because the roads were so shitty). I taught them biology by having them come along with me to take genetic samples and track the data at hatcheries when I was working as a marine biologist for a state agency. They knew the best things in life were theirs to create and they themselves were the only thing between them and whatever they wanted.
Headhunters from elite Ivy League schools were offering them full ride scholarships, and paid corporate positions in the fields of their choice by their majority. I was still living on a boat and logging 6 days a week at 18. How the hell could I compete with them?
I found this man's channel and it sorta reminded me of you...in fact i found his DON'T SMOKE ANYTHING video and after watching the vid i just smoked some more.
I like his videos. It hurts me that i can never fully trust good people like this, if they've taken the jabs, even a placebo. Just the action of doing so alone doesn't sit well with me.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts regarding parenthood.
I had decided from a very early age that i did not want a family. Being constantly surrounded by artificial family-environments allowed me to see how cheap it all is. I am not saying that starting a family is a shallow endeavour nor cheap, but i was a man who was never a boy even at a young age, and i grew up psychologically and spiritually too soon.
This is just a reflection of my personal observations, with it's own bias and selective cognitive dissonance. I recognise it. I don't want to change it.
I have been contemplating Fatherhood and what it must have been like for my Dad, in his early-mid 20s, coming to England in the mid 80s with my Mother, and with two hands each and a dream in the heart they looked to England for freedom, only to be crushed by the realities of life, which they took in stride and enthusiasm. Over the course of the next decade, three children were downloaded into the world from the Mother's womb (me being the third...my Mother didn't know my Father had another woman, our half family until i was 7/8) and my Father became very very angry with life.
He would always say to me "Son I gave you the best clothes, the best food, whilst i and your mother starved and worked 16 hours at work, every day to feed you lot. Son you are a Horse, I am an Ox. Do you know the old adage?" (In Hong Kong we have a proverb..."Ox tils the land whilst the Horse enjoys the grain; Father makes money, the Son enjoys the fame!")
My Father worked at the Wok station managing 3-6 heavy big woks at the same time being the main cook/chef at Takeaways and Restaurants...paid extremely low wages, sleeping with my Mother on the takeaway counters or restaurant toilet floors.
I oftentimes think, or try to put myself inside my Father shoes...well the 35 year old version of him and the 34th, 33rd, etc etc. No matter what they did to me, i still admire my Parents greatly for their strength and...from them i realized ugly things of this world can become beautiful things...twisted love....can still become or attain a semblance of...love.
It brings tears to my eyes often when thinking of my Parents (i speak of them as if they're dead), we've come to a point of utter no return, because i say so. In choosing to be a man i have had to destroy my fetters, that to my Parents were boundaries erected out of love and protection against the white man's world.
If only it were some other way...those words we could never say. The ache in my heartbeat quivers, and the ventricular septal defect scar hums often as i work, i feel the 8 inch scar on my chest often, this ugly, ugly thing that alludes to the unhealed hole in my physical heart-muscle. It aches because in me resides my Father's anger against the world...anger for needing to give up his personal dreams for 7 fuckwits, two women and three labradors. Thats a lot of gobs to feed! And heads to smack!
I like the 10% taxation idea...it's actually a very oriental thing...well modern Hong Kong thinking...have kids, good investment, shine brightly on the clan name, good reputation, a pillar of society, respected, people bow down to ya, free meals at HK cafes etc etc.
I often watch other family's in my pipe-smoking moments. Either leant against a railing at a park, or just outside the basketball court, or what not. It confounds me why these people are not fighting with each other. I guess i have not believed in love since 2003.
Hearing your thoughts regarding your family, your sons and my brief glimpse into what happened between you lot, how you raised your children and what you instilled in them, and the absolute fuckery of not being able to tax the shit out of them speaks deeply to my HK haggling side...don't get me started i can haggle too lol. Oh the money would have been GOOD man trust me.
Alas, these are good memories to have. I prefer to remember me Mother and Father, in my current knowledge, of them actually being able to sit at a table...without my Mother pissing herself wondering when the next rice bowl will fly in her direction...or when my Father would suddenly grab her by the neck and....you know...
...that my Father has found love and peace in the Covid-Era. Doesn't matter if they had to throw me under the bus to get there, i just want them to apologise to my eldest sister and my middle sister, and my 2nd Mother. She has been alone for 20 years, raising my elder half-brother (who is a Snake Zodiac, very sharp, very handsome, very good with money, very good with women, he works at JP Morgan) and younger half-brother (he lived in Dubai for a year selling Wine....wtf bro how you not gonna hook jin up with this gig i can sell more than wine to these Dubyebye people bro have you seen people shit gold, i can make that happen trust me).
I hope you can find some love someday my elder-friend.
PS - Have you ever read of a modern fiction book called "The Lies of Locke Lamora"? Should be able to pick one cheaply at a err...whats it called...Goodwill? Or a charity bookshop.
One day, i would like to have a clique like Locke's. A...family of my own perhaps.
I have not. I've read John Locke, and I can recommend his discussion of liberty and sovereignty, although I read it before you were born, and I don't remember anything specific other than how I felt inspired by it. Nothing wrong with a family. In fact nothing was better for me in my entire life. But I recommend Yung Moon's Buddhist viewpoint of life as a perspective from which to view parenting. Eat the sweet berries while you're waiting for the rope to snap, and don't take it personally when it does.
Painting stuff takes little in terms of tools and pays pretty good. I am good enough with a brush that I don't need to tape anything and don't bother with rollers because rollers spray when you're rolling paint fast, giving me a lot of spatter to clean up. The trick with painting isn't covering what you want to paint. It's not getting any on anything you don't want to paint, because then you become a painter and a cleaner and you only get paid to do the one. I carry a wet rag with me and immediately wipe up drips before they dry, so when I walk away there's no clean up. I've also learned that with nothing but a wet rag I can remove dried paint from anything, even cloth. Don't let drips dry if you can help it, except on glass, because you can peel dried paint off glass with a razor blade clean as a whistle.
He's right about folks picking out their own paint. Cheapskates buy cheap paint, and if the paint fails, they're the ones that picked it out, but if you buy them good paint cheapskates will whinge about it forever, or until you charge them less, whichever comes first. If you buy them cheap paint and it fails, it's your fault, and they'll expect you to fix it at your expense. Folks can get real picky about colors, and if they pick out the paint, they're the ones that got it wrong. If you picked it out, suddenly you're buying new paint and it's coming out of your pocket. Let them buy the paint. Insist on latex paint, because you can clean it up with just water. Paint thinner is a PITA. Just say no unless you know paint thinner won't discolor trim, carpet, dissolve glues, and etc., and if you know any of that you're wrong, because it will. Also, you're better off just throwing away any tools you used to apply oil-based paint than cleaning them with thinner because brushes and rollers are much cheaper than thinner - and you can't dump thinner on the yard, down the toilet, in the garbage can, or anything. It's toxic liquid waste, and it's on you to dispose of it properly. I won't mess with it.
He's right about neighbors seeing good work being done coming over and getting some of that quality workmanship themselves, too. There are neighborhoods that I did work at one house, and then proceeded down the street one house after another, until I'd fixed or replaced stuff for everyone in the whole neighborhood. I go to one such neighborhood every day now that the weather's nice and do something for someone. I try to under-promise and over-deliver, and this generates satisfied customers almost without fail. Today I was weed whacking, and tomorrow I have handrails to install for a little old lady.
Washing windows on multistory buildings is another low investment job you can do with a bucket, a squeegee, a sponge, and a ladder. A razor blade is good to peel old paint drips and stuff off glass. You can get ~$20 a window which adds up real fast. Once you get good at it you can use long poles instead of ladders, but you have to be good to wash well a second story window standing on the ground. Cleaning gutters too. A lot of people have gardens growing in their gutters, because climbing up ladders is actually pretty dangerous, and people just don't want to do it. Ladders are the most dangerous tool I use, and I use all kinds of bladed tools all the time.
Parents make a lot of mistakes. Lord knows I did. A man of conscience starts awake of a night cringing at stuff they did they shouldn't have, or stuff they didn't do they should have, usually both. We have to learn as we go, and anything you ever learned by trial and error certainly will confirm to you learning how to do it right involved a lot of errors. Kids don't come with manuals, and parents never know before hand what they're getting into. We all remember what a crappy job our parents did and vow not to make those mistakes ourselves, which we usually do anyway, and add a long list of new ones our parents didn't make, which is humbling.
My parents are dead. I can't blame them anymore, and what I realize from this is that I never could anyway. Once I hit majority I became the responsible party. I used to think all that stuff I did as a father was important, but the really important thing is what my father told me he'd accomplished, which is to keep food in my belly, a shirt on my back, and a roof over my head. That's what is the necessary standard of successful parenting, and if you can manage to do that then the adults you managed to keep alive during their larval stage can take it from there. I did. You did. That's what adults are responsible to do. I remember blaming my parents for all sorts of things, like my dad saying he kept me alive and his job was done, so I don't take it too hard when my own kids make up all kinds of accusations against me. I kept food in their bellies, shirts on their backs, and a roof over their heads. What they make of their lives now is on them.
We really don't learn this until we have kids ourselves, though, and it's a valuable lesson, very humbling, and there isn't anyone that isn't improved by greater humility, particularly me. Humility is awfully difficult to achieve. Ben Franklin had a life's goal of embodying all the seven virtues, of which he reckoned one was humility. Later in life he wrote a letter to his son confessing he'd given up on humility when he realized that if he ever thought that he'd achieved it he'd be proud of it. Still, the more of it we get, the better men we'll be.
As to love, I suppose you're referring to wedded bliss. I am not in the market to be taken for a fool again, but thanks for thinking of me. I find a general love for humanity is a tall enough order, and our discussion of parents - the very embodiment of love and affection - reveals that when we start trying to love individuals the devil's in the details. Best to leave things general and impersonal if you ask me, because the better you know someone, such as yourself, the more unlovable they become. If I wasn't so forgiving I wouldn't even like me at all, TBH, and I'm obviously pretty biased pro-me, so others are probably just out of the question right out the gate. If you ever want to learn how to really, deeply hate someone, marry them. I did my sentence of husbandry already, and I've suffered enough for both of us. I am committed to run, not walk, away from warm fuzzy feelings.