The Unabomber and Punky Brewster

Two historic events have been in the news recently.  These feel incongruously tied...

The 20th anniversary of the arrest of Ted Kaczynski (AKA The Unabomber) is coming on April 3.  Yahoo! News has published a number of stories about Ted, mostly about his life and writings in prison.  Much of this reporting has been well worth reading.  Ted Kaczynski's life's work in writing is being preserved at the University of Michigan, where Ted earned his PhD in Mathematics.  As far as serial killers go, Ted has to be one of the more fascinating and enigmatic characters.  It is much harder seeing the writing of Jeffry Dahmer being preserved in perpetuity by an academic institution.
I was in college when The Unabomber's Manifesto was published in 1995.  The internet was in its infancy at the time, but it was available online and I downloaded and read it in entirety.  I've tried more recently to read it and its repetitiveness made it hard to complete.  Or perhaps my attention span is now shorter than it once was.
I had graduated by the time Ted was arrested in 1996, but was still fascinated by the story of the Unabomber.  What I found most compelling about him was that, while his methods were madness, his message was hard to argue against.  I've met a few PhD's who I struggled to understand how they got their degrees, but good schools like UofM don't typically just hand them out and, it was easy to see Ted's intelligence.  Still, one must ignore the bombings to think truly think this.
And that makes his message harder to take seriously.  How a few random bombings, often against bit players in technology, will affect any real change is, frankly, a really dumb idea.  It did get his Manifesto published, but the New York Times likely did that to sell more newspapers over any other reason.
One other fascinating aspect of Ted's life was that not only did he believe and espouse the dangers of modern technological society, but he lived what he believed in a small cabin without electricity or running water in Montana.  It is much easier to write about the destruction of the world, Al Gore style, finger-wagging and living a very comfortable existence.
A few years after his arrest and conviction, OFF! Magazine published Ship of Fools by Ted Kaczynski.  I heard a blurb about this on NPR and wrote the magazine editor for a copy, which I still have.  This led to a short correspondence with the magazine's editor, Tim Lapietra.  I continued to get OFF! for a few years, giving me insight into the fringe left of American society - a scary place indeed.  I wish I could find Tim's final editorial from the magazine as he made some personal observations of the fringe left and what it was really preaching.

And 10 years before Ted was arrested, while the Unabomber was bombing computer store owners, the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up over coastal Florida - the other historic event in the news this week.

I can vividly recall the first space shuttle launch in 1981.  I was riveted to the idea of, not a rocket, but of a spaceship blasting off and returning to earth to be reused.  The space shuttle was infinitely more cool than a rocket.  I even had an Estes model rocket designed to look like the space shuttle - painted flat white (with house paint), just like the real thing.
By 1986, space shuttle launches were become routine, at best, and maybe even boring.  In order to bring public attention back to the space program, NASA held a contest, American Idol style (long before reality TV invaded), to transform a commoner into an astronaut.  A school teacher, truly "one of us" was chosen.
Our school classroom was not one of the many which watched the doomed space shuttle Challenger launch on January 28, 1986, but it was all the talk at recess.  Being of a certain age when things blowing up is cool, the initial reaction of many of us was, "Gosh, it is a spaceship, don't they blow up all the time?"
Being probably too old for  the TV show Punky Brewster, I'm slightly embarrassed to still remember the episode post-Challenger that dealt with the Challenger destruction.  Why this memory is stuck in my mind almost as vividly as the actual destruction of the space shuttle is yet another mystery of the feeble mind.  We are not in complete control of our memories!

Space shuttle launches continued after a hiatus, with new o-rings.  Despite Punky Brewster, the astronauts still must have been reminded of that old joke during prelaunch readiness that, "this thing was built by the lowest bid!"
Manned space missions are even more boring now than they were in 1986.  After the 2003 Columbia destruction on reentry into the Earth's atmosphere (Don't make spaceships out of Nerf!), the majority of time in space was spent making sure the shuttles survived launch with a few minutes to look at an ant farm sent into space by a grade school in Topeka, Kansas.
Unmanned missions continue to provide much more data, and excitement, at a fraction of the cost and risk.  Mars Curiosity and Rover provided real data and vivid images long after they were expected to die a quiet death on the surface of an alien planet - something impossible with a manned mission.
Meanwhile, manned missions are now using Soviet Soyuz technology derived from the 1960's to put humans in the International Space Station.

And maybe that is where the connection between Ted Kaczynski and the Challenger destruction actually do come together.  The Unabomber was railing against the technological destruction of humanity and society, while the Challenger brought this to life with horribly tragic and visible consequences.  And now we're reduced to using cold war (ancient, but still probably unacceptable to the Unabomber) technology to put humans into space, to accomplish things of questionable value relative to what modern automation and robotics can do.
So while Ted's message against nearly all technology is impossible to live - not many of us want to live in shacks in the woods, perhaps a Luddite can help us think about what technology can, and should be used for.  And more importantly, an Atavist can help us think about what it should not.

Stories I Tell Myself

A short time ago, I was complaining about the lack of winter having the effect of prolonging 2015.  The 10th day of the year came with winter in full force.  Temperature dropping all day.  Wind howling all day.  So brutal that only a short dog walk was tolerable.  With a planned plumbing project apparently not needed, I sat down to read Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F Thompson.

I've read much of what Hunter S Thompson has written in book form, so when I saw on a website somewhere a reference to the book written by Juan, his son, I immediately requested it from the library.  It was listed as "In Cataloging" which often means a long wait, but it was available within a day.  I originally planned to read this on an upcoming trip, and I rarely sit down and read an entire book in one sitting.  But I did so with Stories I Tell Myself on that frozen windy day.

The book tells the story of Juan growing up in the shadow of his father.  I was sort of expecting something along the line of  Agusten Burrough's Running with Scissors, but Juan's growing up was substantially more normal than that.  If I were to compare it to another Burrough's book, it is almost closer to A Wolf at the Table, but not with the same level of overt brutality.  Largely, it sounded as if Juan's youth was grounded much more in his mother, with his father a figure to be feared.  After his parent's divorce, I read between the lines that there were several years with minimal contact between Hunter and Juan.  Juan alludes to this, but doesn't come right out and say it.
Juan also goes out of his was several times in the book to point out that he is describing things from his memory and that his memory may be incomplete or possibly erroneous.  This is part of the narrative that runs through the book, and I found it interesting as also something I've become increasingly aware of.

The most prominent theme in the book is one of the relationship between fathers and sons.  This almost seems to be more important at some points than the fact that Juan's father is the famous and eccentric Hunter S Thompson.  Still, after reading books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Screwjack, growing up with Hunter does have aspects and events that might be expected.
It was somewhat shocking some of the other figures who appear in the book:  Jimmy Buffet, Kieth Richards, John Kerry - if more than eccentric, Hunter certainly had a diverse A-List crowd he moved in.
Sometimes the right book comes along at the right time and Stories I Tell Myself was one of those.  As my dad's recent death has had me pondering my relationship with him over the years, Juan's book allowed for a different perspective and some introspection.  Not that my dad, although he did work in the book publishing industry, should be compared to Hunter as this would be like trying to compare peacocks and robins, or maybe peacocks and suspension bridges.

The other thread running through the book is the overall theme of growing up.  All of the painful moments of awkwardness, confusion, alienation, childhood difficulties are laid bare.  This is more poignant as Juan appears to be somewhat clingy to his mother and quite an introvert.
Like most of us, Juan eventually finds his own life and ends up surprisingly normal, even somewhat boring at the end of the book.

There was one detail of the book I found somewhat maddening.  Juan first goes to college at Tufts and writes about being lonely and quite unhappy there.  Transferring to Colorado University and spending a year in England suites him better before returning to the US to finish college.  He writes, "Upon my return to Boulder for the first of my two senior years, I declared English literature my major."  And on the next page he graduates.  This implies graduation from CU in Boulder, but his bio states he graduated from Tufts.  So either he transferred back to where he was previously miserable, or his bio is wrong.  Either way, something is missing either in the story here, or in the editing.  While a minor detail, I find this hard not to perseverate on.

There are a few revelations about Hunter I found surprising as I read the 272 pages.
First, I was surprised at the level of money issues he faced.  It reads like this was mostly self-induced, as it often is.  But I would have thought that a famous writer who had sold millions of books could endure poor money habits without as much effect as was eluded to in the book.  More than anything, this probably supports the notion that no matter how successful a person is, living at the end of means is dangerous.
The other revelation was Hunter's relationship with drugs and alcohol.  I had always assumed that his consumption of drugs and alcohol was somewhat exaggerated as part of the persona that sold his wares.  Peter Whitmer's unauthorized biography When the Going Gets Weird makes mention of health issues early in his life from overindulgence, and I inferred from this that as he aged, he was more careful - or possibly he needed to be more careful.  Apparently, overindulgence in both alcohol and cocaine was a daily occurrence and it is somewhat surprising that Hunter lived as long as he did.  Still, the effects of this debaucherous lifestyle become clear through the end of the book and the end of Hunter's life.

The book ends with a narrative around Hunter's ultimate suicide and final, spectacular sendoff.

The book was a good read and a different take on an interesting man.  As with much of HST's writing, it wasn't always clear if the main thrust of the book was about Juan, or Hunter.  I'll end, not with a something about Juan Thompson or Hunter Thompson, both of which would be easy, but I'll end with a quote from Peter Hamill's A Drinking Life.  Because while Juan's story is distinctive as the only son of an eccentric, gonzo father, the larger story isn't unique - but is the same story experienced through history of growing up and becoming an individual separate from where anyone came from.

I was myself now, for better or worse.  I was forever Billy Hamill's son, but I did not want to be the next edition of Billy Hamill.  He had his life and I had mine.  And if there were patterns, endless repetitions, cycles of family history, if my father was the result of his father and his father's father, on back through the generations into the Irish fogs, I could no longer accept any notion of predestination.

2015: Saudade

Somewhere around late August, too early, I started looking for the end of 2015.  Not that 2015 was a bad year ... overall.  I didn't use my vacation time too well, but that which was used appropriately, I enjoyed.  Planned trips worked out and the impromptu ones were a brief hoot.  Some longer term issues at work have (largely) improved, and my work hours allow me to leave when I want more often.
I may have even been pushing for the end of the year, but it was like pushing on a rope; time will pass at its own rate.  Never faster, never slower.

"Certainly a measure of this reactionary navel-noodling can be attributed to the standard metaphorical casting of autumn as the season when winter's deathly breath first fogs your rose-colored glasses, but on a more fundamental level I think it has to do with the reaping of gardens and good intentions, both of which tend to come in well below spring's predictions." 

Michael Perry (Truck - A Love Story)

Christmas came with the winter solstice behind it and the new calendar waiting to be hung on the wall, but Christmas morning woke up to 50 degrees after a Christmas Eve bike ride warm enough to wear shorts.  

On a rational level, I enjoyed the uncharacteristically warm December; my heating bill certainly has.  The warm weather made for more bike riding and some of the most comfortable deer hunting I've had.  Yet, the lack of winter was bringing with it a sense of prolonging a year that needed to end, the warm weather behaving as a nagging sense that something is unfinished, the epoch won't advance until some beastie somewhere is set free.

For the fourth year, I've time lapsed daily pictures of my back yard.  I very likely have the most photographed back yard in the township.  Proof that the year started and is over.

Bronnie Ware's Top Five Regrets of the Dying is repeated all over, so it isn't included here.  But it is worth rereading occasionally.  The last regret is one that seems to request attention after 2015.  Happiness is a choice.  It sounds so easy, and it probably can be.

There are already things to look forward to early in 2016.  An annual trip south is actually quite close.  A trip west, very far west, to scrawl a few difficult check marks on of the bucket list is being planned.

Since Christmas, winter does seem like it may have arrived.  With winter winds and daily highs nearer freezing, the calendar can be changed.  I'm not sure if the beastie has been slain or set free; only time will tell.

Looking back over the four years of time lapsed video brings with it a sense of hope.  Winter, in some form, will always come.  Winter will relent to spring, bringing green and good intentions.  Summer will bring the deliciousness of muggy mornings and evening walks watching the Queen Anne's lace and chicory grow.  Fall will bring the hopefulness of the treestands.  And winter will come, yet again, with the right mindset, accompanied by happy reflection since happiness is a choice.

Thanks for everything.

Confessions of a Climate Agnostic

There were a lot of pomportant people in Paris and they seemed very self-congratulatory after signing a climate treaty.  Other than the smiles, hand-holding and comments like, "this is historic," it should be noted how little coverage the final agreement actually received.  The day after signing, it wasn't even mentioned on the evening news.  Even NPR had only a tacit story on it.
After learning more about the agreement, the lack of coverage probably makes more sense than should be admitted.  The final agreement has a lot of "shoulds" in place of "shalls" and there are basically no ramifications, other than global shaming, for non-compliance.  No country other than Luxembourg seems to really care about public shaming - there is always someone else to blame.  There is also very little in the way of objective measurements across the globe, making compliance with the suggestion even more doubtful.
The should versus shall should not be downplayed.  I should eat healthier and exercise more.  The law says I shall not walk out of Walmart with Twinkies without paying for them.  The former is a suggestion, the latter has consequences.  While the scale of a global environmental agreement is much bigger, the binding of the language is the same.
Reportedly, some of these "shoulds" were put in place at the urging of the US since the Obama administration was fearful that "shall" would then require Senate approval of the agreement, and this would not be a requirement if the agreement is merely a suggestion.  So rather than face the difficult political work at home, John Kerry pushed for a, largely, vapid agreement.

What the Paris agreement will allow, is for a lot more finger wagging.  Al Gore has been finger wagging for quite some time now.  And, frankly, something does need to be done.  However, even Mr. Gore does not agree that anything drastic needs to be done.  He is quite content living a lavish 1%er lifestyle while earning his living as a professional finger wagger.  He has attempted to address his oppulence, but his response is actually more dangerous than the problem his lifestyle creates.
I could almost admire his honesty if he said some form of, "I'm imperfect, and like everyone else, would like to do better.  But alas, I'm human so do as I say, not as I do."  What his response is really saying is, "I'm very wealthy, so I can live an extravagant lifestyle with only some guilt and an insignificantly small additional expense.  Those of you who are not rich must make real sacrifices."  (and he says this with condescension).  Elsewhere, the referenced "10 geothermal wells" are noted as being under Al Gore's driveway.  Just How friggin' long is his driveway?
I shouldn't pick on Al Gore too much.  It is just too easy to do and if the environmental movement ever does take off for the non-Birkenstock crowd, he would have to find something else to prognosticate on.

Expanding in a minute, I do see climate change as a real and growing threat.  What is almost unbelievable is how little population is discussed as part of the issue and solution.  As soon as procreation is mentioned, eyes get wide and hands are thrown up - having seven children, even if you can't afford three, is a basic human right!  Sadly, in the first world through the third, the people having seven children are too often the ones that can't raise them in a more sustainable manner.  The lack of including population changes as part of any solution, or even any discussion, of the environment in the future is further evidence of the (lack of) real importance of the issue.  As Al Gore has taught us, real sacrifices must always be made by someone else.

The question most of asked around the issue is, "Do you believe in global warming?"  This question itself is wrong and unfortunate.  The branding of the phenomenon as "global warming" was a huge mistake made decades ago.  Branding it as "climate change" allows for more honest discussions without including anecdotal observations of a frigid winter in Dallas.  There should actually be three questions:
So, is the climate changing?
Yes.  This is fact, and there is data to support this.  Denying this is, frankly, wearing blinders.
Is the climate change caused by human activity?
Somewhere between probably and almost for sure.  Scientific fact is hard to come by, but the vast majority of climate scientists are not dumb and while modeling the atmosphere is notoriously difficult, most models together point in generally the same direction.  Even the most conspiracy-minded skeptic must admit that, at best, human activity is not helping since, as above, the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is fact.
What should be done about it?
AAAHHHHHHHHHH, here is the real question.  The difficult one.  The question even Al Gore doesn't want to live by if he really believes what his prophet persona says.
The question of what to do about it must not be based exclusively on hard climate science, since any changes shall take into account economic theory, social changes, etc.

As much as I've spent much of my adult scientific life poopooing the "social sciences," they play a bigger role here than what anybody wants to admit.  Until the Joe and Jane six-pack crowd sees a short term benefit to changes that might improve the climate situation, it will never take hold.
Witness how when gas was $4/gallon a few years ago, the sale of small cars began to noticeably creep up, while in our current oil-glut environment, larger vehicles are again making a strong comeback.

Great, so the answer is to make not being a granola really, really expensive, right?
Wrong, economic theory must also play a role.  As resilient as the atmosphere may or may not be, the global economy is a fragile glass figurine in comparison.  Any attempt to affect a large change quickly will result in catastrophic consequences, even if the long term result is good (and modeling the economy long term is harder than the environment).  Negative changes in the economy moves people, business, and government into preservation mode and the climate will quickly become an even lower priority.
Similarly, it is ludicrous to expect advanced economies to digress - the economy must grow or die and any politician who suggests a decrease in lifestyle for the next generation will be railroaded out on a log.
We also should not expect developing economies to do anything other than pursue the lifestyle that the developed world has.  Suggesting otherwise is borderline evil.  I do sometimes wonder if the developing world is not in a better position to move ahead of the developed world - without the entrenched infrastructure in places like the United States, France and Germany, is it easier to put a different, more sustainable infrastructure in Subsaharan Africa? If environmentally friendly solutions are such a no-brainer and so much better for the long term economy and technologically advanced to the point everyone should have them, how come they are not becoming the norm in places like China, India or Brazil?  Maybe not quite as much of a no-brainer as the solar crowd would hope.

The difficulty of individuals making changes can be illustrated by what I do to help and hurt the globe.  I do this not to flog myself, or to be self-congratulatory, but to illustrate that almost everyone does things that help and hurt.
I recycle nearly everything I can, but I also realize that much of what is recycled does end up in a landfill.
I have a longer-than-average commute, but I chose my truck as the highest mpg open-bedded 4wd vehicle available at the time.
I drive very little on the average weekend, but pursuing mass transportation is not something I have much interest in.
I could buy a more efficient 4-wheeled vehicle, but then I would have yet another vehicle which is not really helping.
In the summer I do most of my commuting on a motorcycle which uses much less fuel than most cars, but my bikes are not really built for fuel efficiency and, frankly, I ride motorcycles because I like motorcycles, with any environmental benefit a tertiary thought at best - do motives matter?
I heat and cool my house with geothermal and keep it at a cool 64F in the winter, but if the house wouldn't have had geothermal when I bought it, I probably wouldn't have put it in myself.
I've looked into solar panels, and even ran full electric to my pole bard with that in the back of my mind, but any payout for solar panels, using realistic estimates, would be at about the anticipated lifetime of them, so I don't think I'll do it anytime soon.  To be clear, it is getting closer to being cost effective if subsidies are maintained, but looking at the actual cost, it is not.  And I can think of better uses environmental or otherwise for that money.
I see water scarcity as a potentially much larger problem in the future, but water use minimization is almost silly living in the Midwest.
I have planted many trees on my property, but they keep dying.

Everyone of these things has a "but" in it.  Nobody wants to destroy the environment or return to the days of burning rivers.  Everyone could be doing more and probably should (even Al Gore), but...
And that is the real answer, there are no easy answers to this.

Dad's Christmas Cookies

For at least the last decade, Dad always sent Christmas Cookies.  These were large cookies decorated with copious amounts of frosting to look like Santa Claus, at least mostly like Santa Claus.  While the gesture was nice, most were never eaten - something I always felt a little guilty about.

Dad was diagnosed early in 2015 with pancreatic cancer.  He had some unusual issues, and after a few misdiagnoses, late stage four pancreatic cancer was confirmed.  I knew pancreatic cancer wasn't "a good one" to get, but until doing some reading, I didn't understand the degree of badness to this, especially at the stage he was at.

Dad was always a rock.  He was never flashy, never flamboyant or loud, or boisterous.  There were prayers for the miracle-cure which wasn't to come; my Dad and his wife said those prayers were answered in thousands of small miracles after his diagnosis, which was yet another lesson I needed to learn from that man.

In the classic sense, I guess we weren't close.  Our interests were very different.  I usually (only) saw him once or twice a year.  I communicated with him 10-20 times a year in addition to our visits - yet his diagnosis and the realization that his life would likely end, and soon, from pancreatic cancer hit me like a boulder.
All of my Dad's kids got together about a month after his diagnosis for a rally-around-Dad weekend.  On one evening, Dad showed a slide show of 35mm slides from our youth on his father's very antique slide projector.  Dad assumed this would be, at best, tolerated.  It was probably one of the highlights of my year.  We all really enjoyed watching the pictures and reliving childhood memories - creating new memories in the process.
We all had a great time that entire weekend - and it wasn't until the drive home that I realized why his diagnosis hit so hard.
Time spent thinking and putting thoughts to paper helped me put into words how with a strong foundation, Dad was able to help raise five interesting kids that were able to develop freely into their own very unique and independent selves.  I ultimately sent this to him for Father's Day - almost too late - and read it at his funeral.

I saw Dad a few more times over the spring and summer, watched the ever-healthy man deteriorate.  He never complained, never lost faith.  Just like his whole life, he was accepting and enjoyed every single positive second.  Early on, there was a lot of communication, but that waned as his condition worsened.  Updates, both good and bad, came mostly from his wife - a woman who showed the strength of Samson and compassion of Mother Teresa.

Dad died on Father's Day.  Maybe because I saw him the day before, I see his death on a day to honor dads as inexplicably non-negative.  His funeral really was a celebration of his life, as well as a roller-coaster of emotions since there were many people there who I hadn't seen in years.

Since Dad's death, I miss him in ways I never could have imagined.
I miss how he would read something I would post on Facebook, and then email me about it.  I'm not sure if his lack of Facebook comments was that he didn't totally get it, or his deference to my being a somewhat private person.
I miss how he would always have some reason to email me after I saw him, and asked if I made it home OK.
I miss how he would always send me a really cheesy online birthday card.
I miss realizing that my habits and mannerisms had grown to match his more than I was comfortable with.
I miss just knowing ... he is there.

And I miss those Christmas Cookies I didn't eat.
To be honest, I have a hard time seeing Dad make and decorate cookies; there is a lot I learned about him in his last few months that is difficult to picture.  But the cookies would come every year, very near, sometimes shortly after, Christmas, when my taste for sweets of any kind was diminishing.  There would always be an email preceding the cookies that "something was coming" for me.  A rumpled box would then show up, with cookies wrapped in cellophane and bubble wrap.
It hurts a little knowing that that box will never show up again, and I will still feel guilty about not eating those cookies.  Maybe this year, I will make some cookies, and I will frost them to look like Santa.  But I will not eat them - because whether it is Christmas, or Father's Day or any time in between, when I think about my Dad, I don't ever want it to be without a little bit of ache.

Nostalgia and Old Photos

I bought my first digital camera in 2008.  I actually bought three that year.  This was shortly before the motorcycle trip to Alaska, and I decided a very small digital camera made a lot of sense given the premium that space was going to be on the trip.  I loved my tank-like Pentax K-1000, but carrying it and a couple lenses was out of the question.  The first camera was a very small Leica that in some ways was form over function.  It broke en route to Alaska and was replaced by the much more capable Nikon CoolPix, purchased in Fairbanks.  The screen on the Nikon camera recently quit while going to The Keys this year, but the camera still functioned.  The Leica should have been discarded long ago; both the Leica and the Nikon were disposed of after the Keys trip, replaced with a new Nikon CoolPix that I can only hope will last as long as the 2008 model.
The third digital camera purchased in 2008 was a Kodak P850 and is still functioning well.  While low resolution by 2015 standards, the optics are actually quite good.

Prior to 2008, all my photography was 35mm.  As a result, I, like many others, have several boxes of developed pictures.  Some of these are semi-organised, but there are two boxes that were just a scattering of photos ranging from my infancy (very few) to sometime around the year 2000 when I got much more organized in photo storage.
Earlier in the year, I had uploaded most of my digital pictures to Google Photos.  The ability to have unlimited storage of pictures at a size that is reasonable for all but the most optimistic artistic uses is quite a valuable service.  Yes, I suppose Google can paw through them and they could get hacked resulting in my fishing pictures from 2009 being exploited, but I'll take the minor risk of that in trade for the service.  After loosing many pictures to a hard drive crash several years ago, I believe strongly in redundant storage.
With time available around Thanksgiving, I recently spent a few hours selectively scanning in older pictures to be uploaded, borrowing a very convenient Go Doxie scanner for the task.

Looking through the pictures brought back a lot of memories - which is I suppose why the pictures are taken in the first place.  What I was struck by, was the nostalgia the pictures brought.  Some negative, but most positive.  Even pictures which came from times that in retrospect were difficult, maybe even unhappy, seemed smoothed over in a way I didn't think was possible - especially looking back at that time.
The most evocative pictures were taken of my first two houses.  I only had a very small number of pictures taken of my first house, with slightly more of my second.  Both of those houses were moved into after stints in apartments which I hated, so the positive memories of being on top of the world on moving into my own building on my own piece of the planet is perhaps understandable.  It is easy to look back on the first house and try to construct a memory of how simple things were then.  But in reality, it was far from simple.  I was working two jobs, basically living paycheck to paycheck.  I was in school with very little time for anything else.  The memory of things being simple is just a mental construct.
Similarly, my financial situation on moving into my second house was far from rosie.  I was unsure of my job choice and there was a general, but intense, unease for the future.
Despite (seemingly) significant financial, work, and personal issues, I remember the energy available to clean, repair, improve, rebuild the first house as something special.  I see that occasionally in other people moving into their first house.  Over the last 25 years, that energy is easy to replace with contentment (not complacency).

There were also several pictures of various vehicles I owned that brought on nostalgic memories.  Digitizing the few pictures of my first car, I know the rose colored glasses were on as I thought about life at the age of 16.  I had to try to put it in a more realistic perspective; I'm somewhat surprised that the pictures are tinted in a red hue, given how awful the mid-teens were.  But I guess that first car was a bright spot, and even quite important to my eventual future.
I was also surprised about some of the things that I could not find any pictures of.  In 2015, there are multiple digital pictures of just about everything, no matter how trivial.  I could not find any pictures of my first motorcycle, something I see as quite depressing now.  I could only find a few images of my favorite truck, a 1994 Ford F-150 purchased as a graduation present to myself after college.  But these images are just in the margins of pictures of other subjects.  Several other vehicles are completely non-existent, seemingly erased forever from photographic memories.

There is probably a genetic reason for the more generally positive view of the more distant past, but I'm not sure why that would be.  It is likely quite dangerous, as it could easily lead to discomfort or discontent with the present.  The Germans have a word for this, weltschmerz:  World weariness or discomfort with the present, especially in relation to an ideal state.

This nostalgic view of the past could also lead to dire atavistic behaviors.  Quitting the job and trading everything for the relive of the college lifestyle would appear, and be, quite reckless.
"Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation."  -Robert Pirsig
Still, there is that ever present current...

I have the pictures to temporarily relive events like my first house, first car, first deer, but while the pictures are real, the memories will be somewhere between distorted and created.  The rosie nostalgia is evidence of this.
And that ends up being the real reality of the pictures.  The pictures, like the memories, like nostalgia, only show a single snapshot in time.  This snapshot, whether in silver halide/gel form, ink on paper, digital, or grey matter, is edited by the brilliantly feeble brain to be something that never was, even though it seems so real.  The shutter of a camera lasts a fraction of a second and the reality captured is just that brief.

It is easy to look at pictures an assume, maybe even hope, that the memories are just as real, but they are a modern personal mythology.  They are reality completely assimilated with Aesop's Fables, Zeus and Apollo and Harold and the Purple Crayon all combined into one narrative.

“It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past." — Jim Bishop

The Sound of Sleeping Dogs

As I write this, I should be deer hunting.  I'll say I feel guilty about not hunting, only because I can't think of a more relevant term other than guilt - I'm sure there is a long German word to describe it that I don't know about.
Past years have taught me that one deer is a reasonable goal, and usually I'm scraping vacation days by now to get that.  This year is different since I have not used many vacation days productively and I've got time to burn.  Since I can be hunting, I somehow feel I must be hunting - one of the reasons I made the decision to no longer bow hunt several years ago.

After getting a deer opening morning and spending the following day getting him in the freezer, I haven't acquired the energy to go back out.
I'm on the edge of getting sick, or maybe getting better.  While restorative, sitting in a treestand may not help what could be a ferocious cold - and hacking out a lung is counterproductive to waiting for a deer.

I picked up True Story by Michael Finkel from the library.  As I paused early in the morning, putting the book down while reading, I realized part of the reason I was so content to stay indoors.  It is more than just because there is now fresh venison in the freezer, or sickness.  I put the book down and the only sound I could hear was the therapeutic sounds of dogs sleeping.
Many of the books I've read this year have been listened to while in a car.  I do like audiobooks, but I'm not sure that listening and reading are equivalent.  Of the books I've actually read, many have been hurry-up-and-read before something else comes up.  I've read some at work this past year - very likely the worst possible manner to read anything.  All the preparation for uninterrupted deer hunting has created some much needed space.
This year has been more than hectic.  Dad's illness and death.  The cycle of work early and sleep early.  The formerly mentioned misuse of vacation allocation.  Even the vacation time used, while restorative, has seemed somehow rushed.  There have been down times, but much of that has been consumed watching TV - a past time I find simultaneously enjoyable and mind numbingly painful.

True Story is a gripping book.  It tells the story of Christian Longo and the murder of his wife and three children.  But the book is about the author, Michael Finkel, nearly as much as it is Longo, as the critical events take place shortly after Finkel is fired from The New York Times and disgraced from the profession of journalism due to fabrication.
What is terrifying about Longo's story is how absolutely normal it seems at times.  But, for a few poor decisions, things might have turned out very different.  There but for the grace of God go I.  Poor decisions are added to poor decisions and things spiral out of control - a train wreck in slow motion.
I looked up what Finkel is doing now, and it appears he is back in at least tepid relations with the field of journalism (not at The Times).  There is some criticism of this, but at least he fully admits his mistakes, and publicly.  The rarity of admition should be somewhat restorative in itself.
Underneath the book is the magma of half truths and small lies that are easy to rationalize and may help smooth over wrinkles in the short term.

Much like my time deer hunting, I thoroughly enjoyed the time reading True Story.  And I know there will be more time for both reading and hunting before the end of the year.
After pausing to listen to the dogs contented breathing, some appliance fan came on somewhere, ending that serene, brief moment, and I returned to reading.