Lex Anteinternet: Elemental activities.

Lex Anteinternet: Elemental activities.: 

Elemental activities.

Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig, and those that would not should be compelled by force. 

Hillaire Belloc

The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures

The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures: 

Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures

Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures: 

Contrary to our natures

When this blog was started several years ago, the purpose of it was to explore historical topics, often the routine day to day type stuff, from the period of roughly a century ago.  It started off as a means of researching things, for a guy too busy to really research, for a historical novel.

It didn't start off as a general commentary on the world type of deal, nor did it start off as a "self help" type of blog either.  Over time, however, the switch to this blog for commentary, away from the blog that generally hosts photographs, has caused a huge expansion here of commentary of all types, including in this category and, frankly, in every other.

 

The pondering professor of our Laws of History thread.

Readers of this blog (of which there are extraordinarily few) know that I've made a series of comments in the "career" category recently that touch on lawyers and mental health. They also know that I was working on a case (actually, two cases) in which an opposing lawyer, without warning or indication, killed himself.  That's bothered me a great deal thereafter.  It isn't as if we could have done anything, but that it occurred bothers me.  And, as noted in the synchronicity threads, I've been reading a lot of comments in lawyer related journals and blogs on this topic as well.  Perhaps they were always there and I hadn't bothered taking note of them, or perhaps that's synchronicity again.

In that category, I stumbled upon a piece written by a fellow who runs a very well liked blog, and who is a lawyer, but whom has never practiced.  I very rarely check that blog, The Art of Manliness, but it's entertaining to read (or probably aggravating to read for some) and I was spending some early morning time in a hotel room waiting for a deposition to start and stopped in there for the first time in eons.  Sure enough, there's an article by a lawyer on the topic of mental health.  Specifically, there was an article on depression, which is the same thing that a lot of these lawyer journals are writing on.  Having somewhat read some of the others, and being surprised to find this one, I read it. Turns out there's an entire series of them and I didn't read them all, but in the one I did read, I was struck by this quote:

If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.

I think there's a whole lot to that.
 

The "office" your DNA views as suitable. . . and suitable alone.

Indeed, I think a drove of current social and psychological ills, not just depression by any means, stem from the fact that we've built a massively artificial world that most of us don't really like living in.  It's a true paradox, as I think that same effort lies at a simple root, the human desire to be free from true want.  I.e., starvation.  Fear of starvation lead us to farming to hedge against it, and that lead to civilization.  Paradoxically, the more we strive for "an easy life", the further we take ourselves away from our origins, which is really where we still dwell, deep in our minds.

Okay, at this point I'm trailing into true esoteric philosophy and into psychology, but I think I may be more qualified than many to do just that.  Indeed, I was an adherent of the field of evolutionary biology long before that field came to be called that, and my background may explain why.  So just a tad on that.

Some background

 

With my father, at the fish hatchery, as a little boy.

When I was growing up, I was basically outdoors all the time, and I came from a very "outdoorsy" group of people. And in the Western sense.  People who hunted and fished, garden and who were close to agriculture by heritage.    They were also all well educated.  There was no real separation in any one aspect of our lives.  Life, play, church, were all one thing, much as I wrote about conceptually the other day.

When I went to go to college, post high school, I really didn't know what I wanted to do and decided on being a game warden, which reflects my views at the time, and shows my mindset in some ways now, set on rural topics as it is.  However, my father worried about that and gently suggested that career openings in that field were pretty limited.  He rarely gave any advice of that type, so I heeded his suggestion (showing I guess how much I respected his advice), and majored in geology, and outdoor field.

As a geology student, we studied the natural world, but the whole natural world back into vast antiquity.  Part of that was studying the fossil record and the adaptive nature of species over vast time.  It was fascinating. But having a polymath personality, I also took a lot of classes in everything else, and when I completed my degree at the University of Wyoming, I was only a few credits away from a degree in history as well.

Trilobites on display in a store window in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now extinct, trilobites occurred in a large number of species and, a this fossil bed demonstrates, there were a lot of them.

That start on an accidental history degree lead me ultimately to a law degree, as it was one of my Casper College professors, Jon Brady, who first suggested it to me.  I later learned that another lawyer colleague of mine ended up a lawyer via a suggestion from the same professor.  Brady was a lawyer, but he was teaching as a history professor.  I know he'd practiced as a Navy JAG officer, but I don't know if he otherwise did.  If lawyer/history professor seems odd, one of the principal history professors at the University of Wyoming today is a lawyer as well, and the archivist at Casper College is a lawyer.  I totally disagree with the law school suggestion that "you can do a lot with a law degree" other than practice law, but these gentlemen's careers would suggest otherwise.

Anyhow, at the time the suggestion was made I had little actual thought of entering law school and actually was somewhat bewildered by the suggestion.  I was a geology student and I was having the time of my life.  I was always done with school by late afternoon, and had plenty of time to hunt during the hunting season nearly every day, which is exactly what I did.  By 1983, however, the bloom was coming off the petroleum industry's rose and it was becoming increasingly obvious that finding employment was going to be difficult.  Given that, the suggestion of a career in the law began to be something I took somewhat more seriously. By the time I graduated from UW in 1986, a full blown oilfield depression was going on and the law appeared to be a more promising option than going on to an advance degree in geology.  I did ponder trying to switch to wildlife management at that point, but it appeared to be a bad bet at that stage.

Casper College Geomorphology Class, 1983.  Odd to think of, but in those days, in the summer, I wore t-shirts.  I hardly ever do that now when out in the sticks. This photos was taken in the badlands of South Dakota.

So what does that have to do with anything?

Well, like more than one lawyer I actually know, what that means is that I started out with an outdoor career with outdoor interests combined with an academic study of the same, and then switched to a career which, at least according to Jon Brady, favored "analytical thinking" (which he thought I had, and which is the reason he mentioned the possibility to me).  And then there's the interest in nature and history to add to it.

Our artificial environment

So, as part of all of that, I've watched people and animals in the natural and the unnatural environment. And I don't really think that most people do the unnatural environment all that well.  In other words, I know why the caged tiger paces.

People who live with and around nature are flat out different than those who do not. There's no real getting around it.  People who live outdoors and around nature, and by that I mean real nature, not the kind of nature that some guy who gets out once a year with a full supply of the latest products from REI thinks he experiences, are different. They are happier and healthier.  Generally they seem to have a much more balanced approach to big topics, including the Divine, life and death.  They don't spend a lot of time with the latest pseudo philosophical quackery.  You won't find vegans out there. You also won't find men who are as thin as pipe rails sporting haircuts that suggest they want to be little girls.  Nor will you find, for that matter, real thugs.

You won't find a lot of people who are down, either.  

Indeed the blog author noted above noted that, and quotes from Jack London, the famous author, to the effect  and then goes on to conclude:

If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.

I think he's correct there. And to take it one step further, I think the degree to which people retain a desire to be closer to nature reflects itself back in so many ways we can barely appreciate it.

Truth be known, we've lived in the world we've crated for only a very brief time.  All peoples, even "civilized people", lived very close to a nature for a very long time. We can take, as people often do, the example of hunter gatherers, which all of us were at one time, but even as that evolved in to agricultural communities, for a very long time, people were very "outdoors" even when indoors.

Ruin at Bandalier National Monument.  The culture that built these dwellings still lives nearby, in one of the various pueblos of New Mexico. These people were living in stone buildings and growing corn, but they were pretty clearly close to nature, unlike the many urbanites today who live in brick buildings in a society that depends on corn, but where few actually grow it.  The modern pueblos continue to live in their own communities, sometimes baffling European Americans.  I've heard it declared more than once that "some have university educations but they still go back to the reservation."

Even in our own culture, those who lived rural lives were very much part of the life of the greater nation as a whole, than they are now.  Now most people probably don't know a farmer or a rancher, and have no real idea of what rural life consists of.  Only a few decades back this was not the case.  Indeed, if a person reads obituaries, which are of course miniature biographies of a person, you'll find that for people in their 80s or so, many, many, had rural origins, and it's common to read something like "Bob was born on his families' farm in Haystack County and graduated from Haystack High School in 1945.  He went to college and after graduating from high school worked on the farm for a time before . . . ."

 Louisiana farmer, 1940s.  Part of the community, not apart from it.

Now, however this is rarely the case.  Indeed, we can only imagine how unimaginably dull future obits will be, for the generation entering the work force now.  "Bob's parents met at their employer Giant Dull Corp where they worked in the cubicle farm. Bob graduated from Public School No 117 and went to college majoring in Obsolete Computers, where upon he obtained a job at Even Bigger Dull Corp. . . "

No wonder things seem to be somewhat messed up with many people.

Indeed, people instinctively know that, and they often try to compensate for it one way or another.  Some, no matter how urban they are, resist the trend and continue to participate in the things people are evolved to do. They'll hunt, they fish, and they garden. They get out on the trails and in the woods and they participate in nature in spite of it all.

Others try to create little imaginary natures in their urban walls.  I can't recount how many steel and glass buildings I've been in that have framed paintings or photographs of highly rural scenes.  Many offices seem to be screaming out for the 19th Century farm scape in their office decor.  It's bizarre. A building may be located on 16th Street in Denver, but inside, it's 1845 in New Hampshire.   That says a lot about what people actually value.

Others, however, sink into illness, including depression.  Unable to really fully adjust to an environment that equates with the zoo for the tiger, they become despondent.  Indeed, they're sort of like the gorilla at the zoo, that spends all day pushing a car tire while looking bored and upset.  No wonder.  People just aren't meant to live that way.

Others yet will do what people have always done when confronted with a personal inability to live according to the dictates of nature, they rebel against it.  From time immemorial people have done this, and created philosophies and ideas that hate the idea of people itself and try to create a new world from their despair.  Vegans, radical vegetarians, animal rights, etc., or any other variety of Neo Pagans fit this mold.  Men who starve themselves and adopt girly haircuts and and wear tight tight jeans so as to look as feminine as possible, and thereby react against their own impulses. The list goes on and on.  And it will get worse as we continue to hurl towards more and more of this.

But we really need not do so.  So why are we?

"It's inevitable".  No it isn't.  Nothing is, except our own ends.  We are going this way as it suits some, and the ones it principally suits are those who hold the highest economic cards in this system, and don't therefore live in the cubicle farm themselves.  We don't have to do anything of this sort, we just are, as we believe that we have to, or that we haven't thought it out.

So, what can we do

First of all, we ought to acknowledge our natures and quit attempting to suppress them .  Suppressing them just makes us miserable and or somewhat odd.  To heck with that.

The ills of careerism.

Careerism, the concept that the end all be all of a person's existence is their career, has been around for a long time, but as the majority demographic has moved from farming and labor to white collar and service jobs, it's become much worse. At some point, and I'd say some point post 1945, the concept of "career" became incredibly dominant.  In the 1970s, when feminism was in high swing, it received an additional massive boost as women were sold on careerism.

How people view their work is a somewhat difficult topic to address in part because everyone views their work as they view it.  And not all demographics in a society view work the same way. But there is sort of a majority society wide view that predominates.

In our society, and for a very long time, there's been a very strong societal model which holds that the key to self worth is a career.  Students, starting at the junior high level, are taught that in order to be happy in the future they need to go to a "good university" so they can obtain an education which leads to "a high paying career".  For decades the classic careers were "doctor and lawyer", and you still hear some of that, but the bloom may be off the rose a bit with the career of lawyer, frankly, in which case it's really retuning to its American historical norm.

Anyhow, this had driven a section of the American demographic towards a view that economics and careers matter more than anything else.  More than family, more than location, more than anything.  People leave their homes upon graduating from high school to pursue that brass ring in education. They go on to graduate schools from there, and then they engage in a lifetime of slow nomadic behavior, dumping town after town for their career, and in the process certainly dumping their friends in those towns, and quite often their family at home or even their immediate families.

The payoff for that is money, but that's it.  Nothing else.

The downside is that these careerist nomads abandon a close connection with anything else. They aren't close to the localities of their birth, they aren't close to a state they call "home" and they grow distant from the people they were once closest too.

What's that have to do with this topic?

Well, quite a lot.

People who do not know, in the strongest sense of that word know, anyone or anyplace come to be internal exiles, and that's not good.  Having no close connection to anyone place they become only concerned with the economic advantage that place holds for them. When they move into a place they can often be downright destructive at that, seeking the newest and the biggest in keeping with their career status, which often times was agricultural or wild land just recently.  And not being in anyone place long enough to know it, they never get out into it.

That's not all of course.  Vagabonds without attachment, they severe themselves from the human connection that forms part of our instinctual sense of place.  We were meant to be part of a community, and those who have lived a long time in a place know that they'll be incorporated into that community even against their expressed desires.  In a stable society, money matters, but so does community and relationship.  For those with no real community, only money ends up mattering.

There's something really sad about this entire situation, and its easy to observe.  There are now at least two entire generations of careerist who have gone through their lives this way, retiring in the end in a "retirement community" that's also new to them.  At that stage, they often seek to rebuild lives connected to the community they are then in, but what sort of community is that?  One probably made up of people their own age and much like themselves.  Not really a good situation.

Now, am I saying don't have a career?  No, I'm not. But I am saying that the argument that you need to base your career decisions on what society deems to be a "good job" with a "good income" is basing it on a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, you remain that Cro Magnon really, whose sense of place and well being weren't based on money, but on nature and a place in the tribe.  Deep down, that's really still who you are.  If you sense a unique calling, or even sort of a calling, the more power to you.  But if you view your place in the world as a series of ladders in place and income, it's sad.

As long as we have a philosophy that career="personal fulfillment" and that equates with Career Uber Alles, we're going to be in trouble in every imaginable way.  This doesn't mean that what a person does for a living doesn't matter, but other things matter more, and if a person puts their career above everything else, in the end, they're likely to be unhappy and they're additionally likely to make everyone else unhappy. This may seem to cut against what I noted in the post on life work balance the other day, but it really doesn't, it's part of the same thing.

Indeed, just he other day my very senior partner came in my office and was asking about members of my family who live around here.  Quite a few live right here in the town, more live here in the state, and those who have left have often stayed in the region. The few that have moved a long ways away have retained close connection, but formed new stable ones, long term, in their new communities.  He noted that; "this is our home".  That says a lot.

Get out there.

 Public (Federal) fishing landing in Natrona County, Wyoming. When we hear of our local politicians wanting to "take back" the Federal lands, those of us who get out imagine things like this decreasing considerably in number. We shouldn't let that happen, and beyond that, we should avail ourselves of these sites.

And our nature is to get out there in the dirt.

Go hunting, go fishing, go hiking or go mountain bike riding.  Whatever you excuse is for staying in your artificial walls, get over it and get out.

 

That means, fwiw, that we also have to quit taking snark shots at others in the dirt, if we do it.  That's part of human nature as well, and humans are very bad about it.  I've seen flyfishermen be snots to bait fisherman (you guys are all just fisherman, angler dudes and dudessses, and knock off the goofy crap about catching and releasing everything.. . you catch fish as we like to catch fish because nature endowed us with the concept that fish are tasty).   Some fisherman will take shots at hunters; "I don't hunt, . . . but I fish (i.e., fishing hunting.  Some "non consumptive (i.e., consumptive in another manner) outdoors types take shots at hunters and fisherman; "I don't hunt, but I ride a mountain bike (that's made of mined stuffed and shipped in a means that killed wildlife just the same)".

If you haven't tried something, try it, and the more elemental the better.  If you like hiking in the sticks, keep in mind that the reason people like to do that has to do with their elemental natures.  Try an armed hike with a shotgun some time and see if bird hunting might be your thing, or not.  Give it a try.  And so on.

Get elemental

At the end of they day, you are still a hunter-gatherer, you just are being imprisoned in an artificial environment. So get back to it. Try hunting.  Try fishing. Raise a garden.

Unless economics dictate it, there's no good, even justifiable, reason that you aren't providing some of your own food directly. Go kill it or raise it in your dirt.

Indeed, a huge percentage of Americans have a small plot, sometimes as big as those used by subsistence farmers in the third world, which is used for nothing other than growing a completely worthless crop of grass.  Fertilizer and water are wasted on ground that could at least in part be used to grow an eatable crop.  I'm not saying your entire lawn needs to be a truck farm, but you could grow something.  And if you are just going to hang around in the city, you probably should.

The Land Ethic

 

Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie.  The Muries lived in Wyoming and have a very close connection with Teton County, although probably the majority of Wyomingites do not realize that. This photo was taken at a meeting of The Wilderness Society in 1946. While probably not widely known now, this era saw the beginnings of a lot of conservation organizations.  At this point in time, Leopold was a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Decades ago writer Aldo Leopold wrote in his classic A Sand Country Almanac about the land ethic.  Leopold is seemingly remembered today by some as sort of a Proto Granola, but he wasn't.  He was a hunter and a wildlife agent who was struck by what he saw and wrote accordingly. Beyond that, he lived what he wrote.

A person can Google (or Yahoo, or whatever) Leopold and the the "land ethic" and get his original writings on the topic.  I"m not going to try to post them there, as the book was published posthumously in 1949, quite some years back. Because it wasn't published until 49, it had obviously been written some time prior to that.  Because of the content of the book, and everything that has happened since, it's too easy therefore to get a sort of Granola or Hippy like view of the text, when in fact all of that sort of thing came after Leopold's untimely death at age 61.  It'd be easy to boil Leopold's writings down to one proposition, that being what's good for the land is good for everything and everyone, and perhaps that wouldn't be taking it too far.

If I've summarized it correctly, and I don't think I'm too far off, we have to take into consideration further that at the time Leopold was writing the country wasn't nearly as densely populated as it is now, but balanced against that is that the country, in no small part due to World War Two, was urbanizing rapidly and there was a legacy of bad farming practices that got rolling, really, in about 1914 and which came home to roost during the Dust Bowl.  In some ways things have improved a lot since Leopold's day, but one thing that hasn't is that in his time the majority of Americans weren't really all that far removed from an agricultural past.  Now, that's very much not the case.  I suspect, further, in Leopold's day depression, and other social ills due to remoteness from nature weren't nearly as big of problem.  Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd guess that the single biggest problem of that type was the result of World War Two, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War One.

Anyhow, what Leopold warned us about is even a bigger problem now, however.  Not that the wildness of land is not appreciated.  Indeed, it is likely appreciated more now than it was then. But rather we need to be careful about preserving all sorts of rural land, which we are seemingly not doing a terrible good job at.  The more urbanized we make our world, the less we have a world that's a natural habitat for ourselves, and city parks don't change that.  Some thought about what we're doing is likely in order.  As part of that, quite frankly, some acceptance on restrictions on where and how much you can build comes in with it. That will make some people unhappy, no doubt, but the long term is more important than the short term.

It's not inevitable.

The only reason that our current pattern of living has to continue this way is solely because most people will it to do so.  And if that's bad for us, we shouldn't.

There's nothing inevitable about a Walmart parking lot replacing a pasture. Shoot, there's nothing that says a Walmart can't be torn down and turned into a farm. We don't do these things, or allow them to happen, as we're completely sold on the concept that the shareholders in Walmart matter more than our local concerns, or we have so adopted the chamber of commerce type attitude that's what's good for business is good for everyone, that we don't.  Baloney.  We don't exist for business, it exists for us. 

Some thought beyond the acceptance of platitudes is necessary in the realm of economics, which is in some ways what we're discussing with this topic.  Americans of our current age are so accepting of our current economic model that we excuse deficiencies in it as inevitable, and we tend to shout down any suggestion that anything be done, no matter how mild, as "socialism".

The irony of that is that our economic model is corporatist, not really capitalist, in nature.  And a corporatist model requires governmental action to exist.  The confusion that exists which suggests that any government action is "socialism" would mean that our current economic system is socialist, which of course would be absurd.  Real socialism is when the government owns the means of production.  Social Democracy, another thing that people sometimes mean when they discuss "socialism" also features government interaction and intervention in people's affairs, and that's not what we're suggesting here either.

Rather, I guess what we're discussing here is small scale distributism, the name of which scares people fright from the onset as "distribute", in our social discourse, really refers to something that's a feature of "social democracy" and which is an offshoot of socialism.  That's not what we're referencing here at all, but rather the system that is aimed at capitalism with a subsidiarity angle. I.e., a capitalist system that's actually more capitalistic than our corporatist model, as it discourages government participation through the weighting of the economy towards corporations.

It's not impossible

Now, I know that some will read this and think that it's all impossible for where they are, but truth be known it's more possible in some ways now than it has been for city dwellers, save for those with means, for many years.  Certainly in the densely packed tenements of the early 19th  Century getting out to look at anything at all was pretty darned difficult.

Most cities now at least incorporate some green space. A river walk, etc.  And most have some opportunities for things that at least replicate real outdoor sports, and I mean the real outdoor activities, not things like sitting around in a big stadium watching a big team. That's not an outdoor activity but a different type of activity (that I'm not criticizing).  We owe it to ourselves.

Now, clearly, some of what is suggested here is short term, and some long. And this is undoubtedly the most radical post I've ever posted here.  It won't apply equally to everyone.  The more means a person has, if they're a city dweller, the easier for it is for them to get out.  And the more destructive they can be when doing so, as an irony of the active person with means is that the mere presence of their wealth in an activity starts to make it less possible for everyone else.  But for most of us we can get out some at least, and should.

I'm not suggesting here that people should abandon their jobs in the cities and move into a commune.  Indeed, I wouldn't suggest that as that doesn't square with what I"m actually addressing here at all.  But I am suggesting that we ought to think about what we're going, and it doesn't appear we are. We just charge on as if everything must work out this way, which is choosing to let events choose for us, or perhaps letting the few choose for the many. Part of that may be rethinkiing the way we think about careers.  We all know it, but at the end of the day having made yourself rich by way of that nomadic career won't add significantly, if at all, to your lifespan and you'll go on to your eternal reward the same as everyone else, and sooner or later will be part of the collective forgotten mass.  Having been a "success" at business will not buy you a second life to enjoy.

None of this is to say that if you have chosen that high dollar career and love it, that you are wrong.  Nor is this to say that you must become a Granola.  But, given the degree to which we seem to have a modern society we don't quite fit, perhaps we ought to start trying to fit a bit more into who we are, if we have the get up and go to do it, and perhaps we ought to consider that a bit more in our overall societal plans, assuming that there even are any.

Lex Anteinternet: "If this is a time to rest and recover, then be su...

Lex Anteinternet: "If this is a time to rest and recover, then be su...: 

"If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt."

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Fr. Joseph Krupp.

Fr. Krupp's Facebook post here was synchronicitous for me.

I didn't take much time off last year.  And my not taking "much", what I mean is that I took three days really off, just off, because I had surgery and was laying in the hospital.

That's not really good.

I'd like to claim that it was for one reason or another, but truth be known, i'ts something I imposed upon myself.  And I do this every year.

Indeed, I'm much worse about it than I used to be.

All the things you hear about not taking time off are 100% true, if not 200%.  You become less efficient, for one thing.  And if you work extra hours, sooner or later, you'll acclimate yourself to working the extra hours to the point where you need to. That's become your work life.

Christmas in my work place essentially always works the same way.  We work, normally, the day before Christmas, December 24, until noon. At noon, we dismiss the staff and all go to a collective lawyer's lunch.  That institution is, I think, a remnant of an earlier era in our society in general, when it could be expected that most professional institutions would remain a certain size and everyone who worked there would have a sort of collegiality.  It sort of recalls, in a way, the conditions described by Scrooge's original employer in A Christmas Carrol, in the shop run by Mr. Fezziwig.

This use to really prevail in firms when I was first practicing.  I recall being at lunch on December 24 at a local club restaurant in which other firms would also be there.  Everyone was doing the same thing.  I haven't seen another firm at one now, however, for years.  Maybe they just go somewhere else, but I sort of suspect that they're not doing it.

Well, good for us. It's hard not to have a certain feeling of sadness about it, however, as three of the lawyers who once were part of that are now dead.  Others have moved on long ago.  New faces have come, of course.

Anyhow, that institution sort of ties up the afternoon of December 24, but it's an afternoon off.   If you are a Catholic with a family, it's always been a bit tight, as we normally go to Mass on Christmas Eve and then gather after that. Christmas is obviously a day off, as is Boxing Day, December 26, although most Americans don't refer to Boxing Day by that name.

This year Christmas came on a Sunday, which was nice as it made December 23 the day of the lunch and effectively an extra day off.  We took, of course, Boxing Day off.

Sometime in there, I began to wonder why I hadn't taken the whole week off.  With just three days off, beyond Sundays, and having worked most of the 52 Saturdays of the year, I should have.  I had the things done, pretty much, that I needed to get done.

What was I thinking?

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Well, I'm actually at the point, in spite of myself, that I'm so acclimated to going to the work that I feel guilty if I take time off.  And frankly, the Internet hasn't helped much.  On the afternoon of the 23d, I received a text message asking me if I was working that afternoon.  I wasn't, and they were gracious about it, but this is how things tend to be. It's hard to actually escape the office.

On Boxing Day I went goose and duck hunting.  Conditiond were great.

I should have had my limit of geese and ducks, but I shot like crap.  It'll be part of an upcoming post, maybe, but my hunting season has been messed up due to surgery.

I was going to go with my son, but events conspired against it, so it was just me and the dog.  

Earlier this year, my wife had us buy a bigger smoker. We had not had one until fairly recently, when we won one at a Duck's Unlimited banquet.  That one is a little traveling one, sort of a tailgating smoker, and can work from a car's battery system.  You can plug it in, and we've enjoyed it, but due to its size, we decided to get a bigger one and did.  It's been great.

This was my first occasion actually using it, something necessitated by the fact that our oven is more or less out due to some sort of weird oven thing that happened to it which will not get addressed until sometime this week.  Besides, I'd been wanting to try smoked waterfowl.

It turned out great.  I should have taken a picture of the finished bird, but I didn't.  Maybe one of the top two roasted geese I've ever had.

Anyhow, I should have taken this whole week off, but didn't.  I may take some time later this week, however.  

It's been a really long year.

Lex Anteinternet: A Stream

Lex Anteinternet: A Stream: 

A Stream

Some mental meanderings, if you will.

ῥίζα γὰρ πάντων τῶν κακῶν ἐστιν ἡ φιλαργυρία*

1 Timothy.

I have to admit that I'm disappointed by the failure of Senate File 103, the bill that would have increased the number of hunting licenses reserved for for in state hunters.   That is, of course, open to skeptical retort as I'm an instate hunter, and I would have potentially benefitted from that.

But more than that, as I've noted here before, I'm basically a subsistence hunter and I'm serious about it.  I'm not a "head hunter".  Indeed, I don't personally grasp the amount of money that people will spend to hunt out of state, but I suppose that its based on retaining a connection with the wild they've lost through urbanization.  Maybe that is what makes sense of it.  What I think would make more sense, personally, is to hunt locally, and if that's too expensive, they should focus their efforts accordingly to make it less so.  But because they don't, and because their expenditures in Wyoming are part of the economy, we cater to that and the bill didn't pass. 

Setting aside the tourist dollars aspect of it, and just the monetary and subsistence aspect of it, this is one of those putting values over money type of judgments that seems to be lacking a lot in the modern world, and indeed, in fairness, is generally lacking in any one era.  The point of outfitters and the opponents of the bill in the legislature is that outfitting and out of state hunting is a business in the state, it brings dollars into the state, and we shouldn't hurt business.  And there's a lot to be sympathetic about in that argument, particularly as the state is really hurting for cash. But there's philosophical reasons to set monetary concerns aside on some things.  There are things that we should value over money in ways that are hard to define as they're all intellectual.

Also, pure monetary arguments can be really bad ones, and generally almost every really awful idea that has made the world worse has some economic aspect to it.  Henry VIII gained support fraudulently usurping Papal authority in the English church not so much by brilliant theological arguments, which were lacking for his campaign, but by driving monks out of monasteries and handing them over to his supporters.  It was devastating in every way and reverberates through society today, but when you get right down to it, temporal monetary considerations trumped the concerns stretching out to eternity.  Money often wins.

Still, it shouldn't.

Monetary considerations played into a legislative argument this past week on another topic.  Not that this is surprise, that plays into a lot of arguments in Cheyenne.  This one was about marijuana.  There's a bill to legalize it and regulate it basically like alcohol.  "The state would generate a lot of money from taxing it" came up as an argument.

That's true, but the state would also generate a lot of money by legalizing heroin and taxing it, or legalizing prostitution and taxing that.  You get the point.  Things aren't made illegal because they have a negative taxation aspect to them.

Indeed, most of the "we'll tax it" type of arguments for legalizing something that has as association with vice are not well thought out anyhow, as rarely does anyone balance the taxation against the costs the vice creates.  Nobody, that is, figures out how much caring for those who are permanently wasted on dope will cost, and contrary to what people assert, that will happen.

When I was a National Guardsmen I ran into one of my former soldiers on the street, after he was discharged.  He asked what I thought he should do as he was so badly addicted to marijuana he couldn't get off of it.  I guess it was nice to be asked, but still in my 20s, even as an NCO, I didn't really know what to tell him.  I offered some advice, but I don't recall what it was.  More recently somebody I know related to me how one of their daughters had gone to school, dropped out, and came home a wreck as she was addicted to it and in a state of severe depression.  They got her off of it, but she's now working in a hopelessly low paying occupation and likely will live a really marginal life.

I don't see a reason to encourage any more stupefaction of our society than we already have.  If it were up to me, I wouldn't have repealed prohibition in the 1930s, and I'm not a teetotaler.  

I know why we do these things, however.  We've built a world that we don't like much, and its easier to spend our cash blotting it out from our consciousness than to really address it.  Or, and probably more accurately, those who benefit from the society we've created are profiting mightily from it and they'd resist any changes.  It's easier for them to just hand you a joint.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed. 

Edmund Burke

I was stunned this past week to learn that the United States has now authorized more money to be spent on pandemic relief than it spend on the New Deal.  It's also more money than the United States fought fighting every war we've fought since the end of the Cold War combined.

That's insane.

I get that something needed to be done, but that didn't need to be done. There's no way to spend that sort of vast amount of money well or wisely.  It will be wasted.  It will also be inflationary.

I'm not yet 60, but I can see it approaching and I pretty much figure, with this sort of vast injection of cash into the economy, inflation is inevitable  Goodbye retirement.

Now, that's sort of a selfish view, but at some point a person must be realistic.  In looking at the actual impact of pandemic on the economy it turns out that most of the economy was hardly impacted at all.  What was massively impacted was the service sector.  No matter, relief checks are going out to people who never lost their jobs and were never in danger of losing them.

The section of the economy that did find their work impaired is fairly large, around 10,000,000 people.  That's a lot of people, but it's actually a small percentage of workers.  And the money being thrown around to everyone won't help them much, as a large percentage of those jobs are never coming back.  Lots of people acclimated to working from home where they are comfortable, don't have to buy as many work clothes, can be around their cats, dogs and families, and don't have to put up with the guy three cubicles down who thinks that basketball is interesting.

Because they aren't coming back, not as many restaurants and bars are either. They just aren't.

Focusing that money where it was needed would have been a good idea. Throwing out checks to everyone on the assumption that people are going to run out and buy 500 cups of Starbucks doesn't make any sense at all.

As a further aside on this, the Democratic controlled House of Representatives seems set to act on a bunch of social policy bills of a "progressive" nature.  I haven't heard of their acting on a "Green New Deal" slate yet, but if they ever intended to, this probably shot their bolt.  It's not really possible to have any kind of New Deal when you just spent way more money than the New Deal itself cost, unless you are willing to super heat the economy.

The irony of all of this is that it can't really be said that the current occupants of Congress don't remember the inflation of the 1970s and how awful that was.  They must, as a lot of them were there then, or at least in politics.  The same generation that came up in the awful early 1970s has never left power.

 

He who loses money, loses much; He who loses a friend, loses much more; He who loses faith, loses all.

Eleanor Roosevelt

I had an interesting conversation with a coworker the other day who is somewhat obsessed about his graduating high school senior's plans.  I can understand that, the future of children when you have them, particularly those whose future you can not accurately foresee, is a constant and deep worry for parents.

It lead in a strange direction, however, and that lead me to ponder something further.

My father's father left home when he was 13 years old to go to work.  My mother's grandfather started working as an office boy, the same occupation my father's father started off as, when he was still a child.  I don't even think he was a teenager at the time.  My father's grandmother came to the United States from Ireland when she was 3 years old, accompanied by her 19 year old sister who raised her.  She never saw her parents after age 3 again.  My mother was descendant in part from Quebecois, which in turn means that she was also descendant almost certainly (and certainly my DNA would support that) from orphans from Ireland adopted right off the docks in Quebec, the survivors of Coffin Ships who lost their parents in the journey from Ireland and who would be raised as French speaking Quebecois.

I note all that for a tricky reason.

All of the people here I can identify went on to successful lives.  My father's father ultimately briefly came back to Iowa and then went on to Colorado as a businessman, married, and then pursued his career successfully to Nebraska and then Wyoming.  My father's grandmother moved, probably with her sister, to Colorado and married a shopkeeper in Leadville, and retired to Denver.  My mother's grandfather ultimately came to be the CEO of the company he started off as an office boy for.  They all had successful, and moral, lives and had successful families.

They also all lived in an era when the impact of immorality was pretty obvious and, while they were not the recipients of advanced degrees, the plain facts of biology were known and obvious to all.  We've lost all of that.

Wealth seems to be a lot of the reason why.  They all spent part of their lives living hand to mouth, although not all of them by any means.  Very few people do that now, which is overall a good thing.  But it's also the case that society has become so rich that there are now a lot of people who are made miserable by it.  Part of that is that people have a lot of time and money to spend on what are really basic urges, and to stray off in ways in which they come to try to self identify themselves by things that were in the background, but not self defining, in earlier eras.  People are now identifying themselves by their diets and sexual urges, for example.

Only a vastly rich society can spend so much time thinking about food and sex and define individuals in society that way.  If you move from Cork to Victorville Colorado and its 1890, for example, self defining yourself as a vegan would not only not occur, it'd be regarded as stupid, as it would have been stupid.

This doesn't mean that our vast wealth has liberated us from such things, but rather its seemingly enslaved us to our basest instincts.  Free from nature and distant from nature's God, we want to be gods ourselves, but can't seemingly think of a better way to do that than to redefine the most basic nature's that God has given us.  

That can't and won't go on forever, but the longer it goes on the worse the fall and recovery will be.

With luck, it might even snow for us.

Haruki Murakami

It wasn't snowing when I got up.

All the second half of this week the weather report has been promising a massive amount of snow.  The southeastern part of the state is supposed to get up to three feet of snow.

I'm really skeptical that will happen.  It isn't snowing here yet.  We'll see.  Anyway you look at it we really do need the snow or we're going to be in a severe drought this summer.

The thing that always surprises me in these circumstances are the reactions to the weather.  There's lots of complaining about it.  But other than drive to work in it, we don't really have to deal with it for the most part, unless you are employed in an outdoor profession, which is indeed totally different.

Lawyers who do litigation used to have to contend with the weather constantly, but now that everything is done via the internet, this isn't the case anymore.  The last major winter legal trip I made was to Baker Montana, and that's now over a year ago.  The weather wasn't great when I did that, to be sure, but I used to contend with winter travel constantly.  Not now.  And I wonder if the days of travel will really ever come back.  They probably won't.  It's changed much about work, including even the psychology of it.

Not that I haven't done some traveling, even during the pandemic.  And indeed, I've managed to catch bad winter weather twice while doing it, although both were daytrips.

Anyhow, for most people, winter snowstorms merely mean that you drive to work in the snow.  Not everyone does that well, however.  I was nearly killed earlier this week when some person on a snow day rocketed through a red light and nearly hit me.  They never slowed down.  And I've been seeing my fair share of out of state license plates on cars of what may well be new residents in which they're driving in an obviously scared condition.  If we get hit again COVID refugees will likely start rethinking their relocation.

Indeed, the weather in Wyoming is just flat out bad in ways that don't occur to most Wyomingites but which are actually bad and difficult to explain.  A Texas friend of mine once pointed out to me that Wyoming's northernmost latitude is still further south than northern France, which it is.  Indeed, much of Wyoming's latitude is on the same plain as northern Italy or southern France.  The reason he pointed this out is that he was convinced that because this is our latitude we must have the same weather than the south of France does.

Not hardly.

We're deep in the interior of the plains and our winters are long and summers short. We have wind constantly all year long.  Ft. Fetterman, outside of what is now Douglas Wyoming, had the highest insanity rate in the Frontier Army, and the wind and weather conditions are often blamed for that.  Every other year its noted that Wyoming has a high rate of depression and that this contributes to it as well, most likely for immigrants who come in here thinking that the nice conditions they saw in June are what we have all year long.  Indeed, I once read a deluded comment by somebody who bought some land outside of Bosler Wyoming about how they intended to retire there from their university job in California and then the only worry they'd have is which horse to ride that day.  Well, they don't ride horses outside of Bosler in January except by absolute necessity.  My guess is that person, if they moved out at all, hated Wyoming by March.

Be that as it may, our indoor life everywhere has insulated us from really dealing with the weather.  Last week the county shut its offices and the school district did as well.  I simply drove to work, not realizing that it was that bad.  Right now, the State of Colorado, which likes to have a massive fit about everything has mobilized the Colorado National Guard for the storm.

Well, like Dire Straits sang, "Money for nothing and kicks for free".

One thing that weather like this usually brings up is a comment to the effect that "on days like this it sure is nice to work indoors".  I've honestly never thought that.  Maybe its growing up here and being a semi feral person, but as long as I don't have to brave the highways, I like the big storms.

__________________________________________________________________________________

* "[F]or the root of all evils is the love of money."

Lex Anteinternet: Rediscovering the obvious: Diet and hunting, fish...

Lex Anteinternet: Rediscovering the obvious: Diet and hunting, fish...: For those who follow dietary trends, the current in vogue diet is the "Paley\o Diet".  And for those who take the National Geograp...