Butterflies in mourning
Darkened clouds forewarning
A long forgotten mooring
Icy rain, like tears, are pouring
Then you feel it shine on you
Then you feel the light shine through
Finally knowing what to do
You shine too
Journal
Ignite
Are you ready to rewrite Your ordinary life? Hop on top a rocket And ignite Want a chance? To remix the dance? Give it a little gas And then ignite
My writing on Medium
I’ve posted a couple of things at medium.com. I welcome your comments!
Go to: https://medium.com/@lolife
Recent Writing
I wrote a piece over at Badger Hill Brewing called “Approximately 10 No-Bullshit Things You Can Do To Be Happier in 2016 (and beyond!)“. Do them. Every day.
I also wrote something for Minnesota Business Magazine, thanks to my friend and business partner Nancy Lyons. I wanted to say life partner but that would confuse you! It’s called “Women, Men and the Workplace“.
I like writing stuff about stuff. Let me know if some stuff of yours needs writing on it.
New Blog
My blog got hacked by some pimply fucktard with low self-esteem and friends who think he’s a loser. Even his parents hate him. So he took his rage out on my blog. Die in a fire, idiot.
But I’m back! I’ve tried to import my old posts. Let me know problems if you see them. Currently I’m running a default theme but I’ll fix that eventually.
Thank you for reading by blog! Hopefully Google will update all my links eventually.
Cheers,
M.
G+
As you can plainly see, I haven’t been blogging much lately. I still enjoy long(er) form writing and I intend to keep writing on this blog. I’m sure it will continue to emb and flow a bit. My RSS feed is still screwed up, so most people aren’t paying attention anyway! One of these days I’ll get that fixed up. You know the story about the cobbler’s kids having crappy shoes….
I am still sharing my thoughts, though, mainly on Twitter and a little on Google+. You know what to do!
Creation
This is where we begin.
By writing.
On a blank page.
Meaning springing like grass
growing. Slowly
but steadily
and always
upward.
War
I recently read Sebastien Junger’s book War. It was captivating because of the real life-or-death action and thought-provoking because of the deeper central idea. If you think about it, for the last 100,000 years, anatomically modern human beings have been struggling for survival. Many times, what was trying to kill them was other human beings. Junger quotes a statistic that 15% of pre-civilization human beings were killed by other human beings. Because of this, core to our culture and, to some extent, our nature, is the concept of the war party. Young men gathered together to go fight and perhaps die in defense of their people.
This is an interesting and powerful notion and Junger’s book brings it to life through the eyes of young soldiers stationed at remote outposts in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan.
We see this instinct prevail in non-war ways, too. Men get together to hunt and fish, party or work and they bring to the dynamic these macho ideas of brotherhood and self-sacrifice that have been part of our existence since before we were human. To sacrifice for the tribe is the highest and most honored value. In spite of the seeming contradiction with “survival of the fittest” it appears that we are evolutionary descendants of those willing to sacrifice for tribe.
I’m going to Restrepo tonight, which is the documentary Junger made while writing this book, and I can’t wait. I’ll report back.
don't talk about sex
There is a weird disconnect going on. I love weird disconnects because they are saying something. I don’t know what this one is saying.
We all like sex. Our culture is permeated with sex. And yet we never talk about sex in a real way. We joke about it and we might share a few details with our best friend. But we never really talk about it. It’s off the table. I wonder why that is. How often do you and your partner have sex? What’s your approach to masturbation? Do you like oral sex? Do you swallow? Anal? Do you like to dress up? Or role play? Do you trim or shave your privates? What’s your favorite position(s)? How about a play-by-play of the last really great sex you’ve had?
All of these topics are off limits. We can all answer those questions. There are interesting thoughts that are associated with those sorts of topics. We could learn from each other, learn about each other and understand better this very weird overlay of sexuality that is a major part of the human story.
Some of you maybe think I’m some sort of a perv already because I broach these topics. Even though most of us are sexually active people, admitting that you take an interest in sex can be perceived negatively. In the wrong context, talking about even the most normal sexual acts can get you fired or sued.
Why is this?
I think there are interesting sexual topics that are under-discussed because of this weird disconnect. I’m not just talking about the sorts of preferential questions I mentioned above. Sex is deeply hardwired into our conscious and unconscious behavior and it is fascinating. But please don’t talk about it.
sparkfail
sparkfun.com had a sale. Everything was free, you only paid shipping on the first $100k they sold. They have a blog post congratulating themselves about it.
This is a hilarious act of denial. Their site was virtually unavailable during the sale. I was not able to accomplish a single thing at any point over the course of 90 minutes. Further, they encouraged people to put things in their shopping basket the night before but then they cleared all of those shopping baskets right before the sale. If you look at the twittersphere, for every happy person there is probably 10-50 unhappy people. sparkfun’s technical inability to keep up with interest turned what could have been a great promotion into a PR disaster.
And they congratulated themselves for it. They congratulated their IT department for it. Their system didn’t work for 99% of visitors and they are happy with that.
It’s fucking bizarre.
Let me add — I know how hard it is to scale for massive concurrency on a site. Sometimes surprises happen or weaknesses are revealed in big web operations. I’m forgiving of that. I’m not forgiving of bad planning or shoddy execution.
The bottom line: sparkfun achieved their goals. Customers did not. That is backwards.
lolife 
You must be logged in to post a comment.