In early 2013 I was apparently trolling (in the “deep sea fishing” sense) the old USENET archives on Google, because I did participate in some of the earliest Internet communities, pre-World Wide Web, especially during college. Today I was looking through my draft WordPress posts and found this one from then.
From a post by me to alt.dreams on 11/7/1994 called “Another plane crash dream.”:
“Did you perhaps consider that maybe you got into the car accidents because you were thinking about car accidents beforehand? ‘Hope I don’t get in a car accident, hope I don’t get in a car accident–whoops, I got in a car accident.’ See what I mean?”
That’s 19-year-old Jason logic for you, though there is probably a grain of truth to it. I don’t know if the original poster ever answered and can’t be bothered to look it up now (because I should be working).
Mostly I just wanted to post something to Gohlkus Maximus today because I haven’t posted anything in a long time. I had planned on doing some writing and then a month later lost a co-worker, detailed in my most recent post.
Aside from the wonderful honeymoon feeling Dawn and I still enjoyed from our 2013 wedding, 2014 was a pretty lousy year. A lot of losses for both of us in a lot of ways, and hard times for some of my close family members, made it really hard. We ended the year with an ultimately renewing experience — Dawn had microfracture surgery on her knee, which was fascinating to learn about and, more importantly, wildly successful for her.
2015 is starting out better, at least for me and Dawn specifically — we are doing the Whole Life Challenge, which is all kinds of interesting. It is a way to kick-start ourselves into restoring good habits we’ve had in the past anyway. Getting knocked out of a healthy routine isn’t all that difficult, especially with the big disturbances of 2014. So we’re working on doing better this year.
If anyone were to ask me now what the secret of life is, it’s kind of two-fold: be honest with yourself, and go easy on yourself. I think everything else kind of follows from that. I don’t know what 19-year-old Jason would have said, but it sure would have been easier if someone had told him that who he would have listened to. He’d probably have listened to 39-year-old Jason, especially given how voraciously he consumed science fiction.
This morning I had an interesting dream which included David Byrne performing onstage with a monkey. I would pay money to see that happen. I won’t spend any more time thinking about it, though.