I’ve always been afraid of heights. The phobia is so strong that it can paralyze me. I’m actually fine as long as I’m in an enclosed space, but the minute I’m in the open air, and very high up, I start to feel stuck and sick at the same time. I can’t move no matter how much willpower I try to muster. When I was a kid I went with my family and we took the elevator to the observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York City. When we got to the deck I got out and after a little practical joke by my brother, was completely trapped on the deck, paralyzed with acrophobia. It took my parents a while to get me to peel off the back wall and back down to the ground floor.

I have come into some surprise money recently so I’m very familiar with this scenario. I haven’t spent much of it because I would rather have it around and act as a kind of fiscal buffer to help me avoid running out of money when a lot of bills come due all at once between paychecks. The only really demonstrative thing that I’ve spent money on recently has been my full body drawing of my favorite Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner from a great artist that I got in contact with by the name of Tyler Kirkham. Beyond the art, the only other thing that I’ve bought would be my Gunnars glasses for work. Beyond those two things the money is still being kept and I don’t know if I’ll ever spend it, I like having the security too much, I think.

The Plinky system is broken for this prompt, but I wrote some good material about it a while ago so I’m going to just hack it together and get it out. 🙂

The coolest thing I’ve seen in another country is easy. It’s the iconic Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.

It is an iconic part of Paris and in my Western mind it dominates everything I think about when I think about the City of Lights. It’s also the only tower on the planet that I implicitly trust. I trust the Eiffel Tower with my life, enough to ascend to the first stage and walk to the edge and look down. For anyone who knows me, this DOES NOT HAPPEN. But it did in the City of Lights. There are many other reasons why Paris will always be a part of me and beloved in my mind, but this tower is the cherry on top. I will never stop thinking of Paris and the French with affection, no matter how silly sometimes the French behave. If I had to leave North America for some reason, I can definitely see myself living here.

Okapi (Okapia johnstoni)

This is obvious, and as usual with me, there are two answers depending on my mood. The first and foremost animal I would keep would be an Okapi. These are wonderful creatures. They are between a zeebra and a giraffe. They are rare, they are precious, and they are not quite horse size. To keep them, they'd need a paddock with their native environment painstakingly copied to ensure their happiness. I would also find ways to entertain them and keep them active and engaged – in many ways if you elect to keep a pet, it's your responsibility to make their lives, quite literally, the Life of Riley.

The other pet that I would keep would be river otters. They are the definition of playful in the dictionary and I would again have to keep them in a crafted environment and occupied at all times to make sure they lead a perfectly delightful life full of love, pleasure, and happiness. Once again you get to understand the role of human as keeper. If you keep a thing, you best be prepared to sacrifice for it. You are removing them from a huge amount of their natural life. That trades price is abject paradise, and it's your job to ensure it never changes.

So will I ever have pets like these? Not in Michigan. Plus I'm not a zookeeper so without winning the lottery keeping a non-domesticated animal in this framework would be impossible. If I even thought about following any of this I wouldn't be able to keep up and then I would be guilty of the worlds worst sin. Keeping without permanence. That's the definition of selfishness and the soul of vile depravity.

If you think my opinions on pets is harsh, you should hear my thoughts on human beings who abuse domesticated animals! But that's another post.

With each succeeding year of my life I look back on how foolish I was earlier in my life and try to pin this moment in time. I cannot. When I was 18, society told me I was technically an adult – I could leave home, go to war, and die trying. When I turned 21, society told me I could now attempt to kill myself with alcohol. When I turned 25, society told me I could rent a car and drive off a cliff. With each progressive limit I've found that the actual "adultness" that I thought I had was just a part of a much larger pathway. I still am not an adult, but now I'm in open rebellion against adulthood. I covet things of my youth and I do my best to enjoy as much of it as I can. Being foolish, being a chatterbox, being random, that's a part of it. I also read comics, I watch shows that were on air in the mid 90's. Generally I question the condition known as adulthood. I've grown up being taught that adults behave a certain way and that as a kid, I would understand when I got older. Now that I'm 35, there is actually nothing to understand. People age in epicycles. They don't really ever become an adult, they drag pieces of their childhood along with them. The costumes change but usually the childish behaviors continue on. I've been fond of stating that if you laid gym mats in any office filled with adults they would all start thinking about laying on them and taking a nap in the middle of the day. No matter how old they are, they would all fixate on that and covet that idea. They would never allow themselves to do so even if encouraged because it's not what adults do, it's what children do. And in that, I never want to grow up. I've seen the adult world and it's just like a childs world, only it has inescapable consequences. If I grow out of my childishness, my loud voice, my odd behaviors, my passion then I will have ceased to be myself and I will have succumbed to the banal frost that has claimed the unbearably dull. Life is about tasteless remarks made in compromising situations. Life is about talking to yourself and making sound effects and skipping down the hallway and frying ants to death with a magnifying glass. When I lose my childhood I will be ready to die.

There are two distinct parts of me. There is the workplace me where I have a little liberty with how I dress myself and my non-workplace me where I have total liberty on how to dress myself. It's a matter of making the change that makes me the happiest. In the summer I will immediately pitch the pants and the stuffy button shirt and switch to shorts and a teeshirt with some sort of cleverness emblazoned all over it. The only time I have complete liberty at work is when I'm in off-shift. If people want me to come in when I have declared the time to be mine then they have no choice but to cope with how I am dressed. Changing out of work clothes into clothes that you prefer to wear is also a hallmark of my family which is where I probably picked it up. If that's the case then this entire post is merely a justification for what I learned growing up, but I still stand by it.

us_labatt_blue

My principal vice is beer. I'm quite fond of the sudsy fuel of civilization. When I was younger I didn't think beer was really all that appealing. The taste of it was what drove me off. It was bitter and strange and very much unlike everything else I had experienced. However I've noticed that with age comes either a more refined palate or a deader one. Now I love the taste of beer, all kinds too. I'm comfortable with a stout, a lager, a pilsner, or an ale. One thing I am quite certain of is that beer in aluminum cans definitely is worse than beer in glass bottles. I won't buy beer unless it's shipped in glass. I can't really explain it, but I'm quite sure that beverage scientists have studied beer out of a can and found no appreciable difference in the product. Perhaps I'm just an elitist that way.

As for quitting, I'll never. Life isn't worth living if all you are is chaste, penitent and pure. Life isn't worth living without beer, without bacon, or without butter! Yes I carry more weight than I want to and I long to have a body shape that isn't apple-shaped, but to get to that point would require that I sacrifice the very things that make life worth living. Quite a large amount of life is wasted in unavoidable suffering, so denying the few things that bring you pleasure, a small respite from suffering is worth trading in the years you would have otherwise spent being "good". What's the value of a long life of suffering versus a slightly shorter life filled with a rich kaleidoscope of things to eat, drink, see, say, and learn? Death comes for everyone and sometimes it's fate, you can cheat death with machines and pills and guesswork-in-white-coats, but if you get to the end of your life without scars, without memories, without passion and most notably without pleasure then it wasn't a life you were living but a death you were coveting.

They'll have to pry my bottle of beer from my cold dead hands. I refuse to see the world in any other way. The last thing I intend to do is be tied to pills, a machine, or the opinions of a bumbling quack.

If you lead your life richly and you eat well and smartly, using real food, then a long lifespan is just another wonderful gift. Living in an iron lung and eating a feed bags worth of pills isn't living. It's breathing. I'd welcome death at that point.

Challenger

The three events that come to mind, out of a tangle of so many are:

1) The Challenger Accident – 10 years old

2) The fall of the Soviet Union – 16 years old

3) The Chernobyl Accident – 10 years old

Each of these events changed the world. I remember that I was walking in the hallway of my school when the news struck. It was just the start of that whole disaster which led to the discovery that an O-Ring had failed and it pretty much stunned our space program and slowed down subsequent space missions to a crawl. I can remember seeing the explosion pattern on the TV news for weeks after the event.

The fall of the Soviet Union was next. It, in some ways, began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and lead to it's final death years later. When the Soviet Union went to the great beyond, so did the Cold War that had raged between the United States and the USSR. It was a pivotal moment in world history as two enemies suddenly stopped fighting because one simply ceased to exist. The Russian Federation appeared in it's aftermath and we never really got the Cold War started again after that. When the Soviets failed, they left a huge number of nuclear weapons floating in a sea of doubt. I still personally doubt that the Russian Federation has control over all the Soviet missiles that they established. A part of me even thinks that someday some Ukranian goat herder will blunder into a mobile ICBM trailer and wonder if the rusted out hulk is still dangerous.

The third bit was Chernobyl. It pretty much sealed the fate of nuclear power on Earth after proving that a really bad accident is really bad for everyone. Of course, we never learned our lesson with Chernobyl and so we had to learn it all over again with Fukushima.

There are other events, I"m sure, personal events that meant more to me, but these were the best world-changing events that I could come up with on the spot. These are the sort of events that you never forget. I don't put September 11th, 2001 on this list because frankly, that event upset a lot of Americans but it wasn't as vast as the events I detailed above were. Challenger, the Soviets, and Chernobyl affected everything from space travel, to global politics and safety. So for those wondering about 9/11, that's the order of importance for me.