Watching the Kavanaugh hearings, or reading autobiographical articles, there is always a lot of gratitude being expressed for one’s mentors and teachers. It always makes me feel a little funny. When I think about who taught me stuff in my life or guided me in some way, I can eventually come up with a few names, but it takes an effort.

I am self taught. Of course none of us are really self taught. There is a vast reservoir of knowledge available to us thanks to the genius and work of our ancestors, but I’m talking about personal in the flesh mentors. I’ve picked up stuff from this or that person over the years, but I don’t have any story about how Mrs. Crabadopolous in the third grade set my feet on the path that has led to the magnificent flowering of my present being.

I learned about life and love and computer programming in the school of very firm knocks. I didn’t get much help from anyone, never served an apprenticeship, with the one exception of Big Al Meltzer on the big press in the print shop. I have done a bit of guru-following, but it always ended in disappointment.

As a result, I am a poor teacher. My instinctive reaction to anyone seeking instruction or guidance, is “Figure it out for yourself.” I am a lone wolf software developer. I do everything myself, programming, web site, accounting, tech support, etc. No employees. I do have an associate/old friend who I facetime with once a week for an hour or two who helps me out with interface and web design and general brain-storming. I pay him well-deserved royalties. That was my wife’s idea and it has been invaluable, but I would never have done it on my own. I am a lone wolf Christian. I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but I don’t go to church.

All the articles say that how well you do and how long you live and how groovy your life is depends on the number of your friends and family and human connections in general. I sure hope that’s not true.

Facebook is a way for people to interact with other people, and these interactions would not be taking place without Facebook. Yes, they have secret algorithms to addict you. They decide which people you will interact with, what kind of news you will receive, and they censor conservative voices. That’s all true. But, in spite of all that, a huge, valuable service is being performed.

I post something on Facebook. John and Richard give me a like. Nancy makes a comment. I reply to her comment. John replies to my comment. I reply to his. He laughs. Other people observe but don’t say anything. We have all enjoyed a snippet of a conversation that raised our spirits. It’s not the same as being physically present and hearing the voice and seeing the face and hearing the laughter, but a non-trivial amount of information and vibes are being exchanged.

That’s invaluable! That’s communication that would never otherwise happen with people you wouldn’t even know. I know Facebook sucks, but I just can’t quit it.

This post went on Facebook first. Now I am putting it on my blog, which nobody reads, but I keep it up as a matter of principle. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have stolen the eyeballs away from the blogs, but I am here, have been for fourteen years. I’m doing it for my great great grandchildren.

More or less in chronological order.

pin setter in a bowling alley

baling hay

construction

setting up motorcycle rig at a carnival

cleaning out a corn silo

night janitor at newspaper printing place

dishwasher at a Chinese restaurant

dishwasher at a pizza joint

stacking cartons of ketchup on the assembly line at a Heinz factory

building walls at a prefab housing factory

attendant at a mental hospital

lab assistant in a research lab

dishwasher at the student union

part of a survey crew

window installer

computer programmer at a number of different places

farm worker

roofer

carpenter

printing press operator

print shop foreman

computer programming

CFO at a book publishing company

more computer programming

business owner

One of the many things that are hard to do, is to be able to gauge one’s own talents and skills relative to other people. As a result you have earnest American Idol auditioners who sincerely believe they have what it takes to go all the way, and not only do they not, they are embarrassing, they can’t sing at all. I have a five year old friend who believes she is a great singer/songwriter and fiddle player, and she probably will be someday, but currently her gauge is miscalibrated.

Probably no one is completely accurate when assessing their own capabilities, but many people are way off, in either direction. There are some people who greatly underestimate themselves, and there are perhaps more who overestimate themselves, sometimes wildly.

These thoughts arise because, although I enjoy programming (it is a high art), lately I have felt more like writing stuff. And thinking about that caused me to think about evaluating my writing abilities, relatively speaking. I thought, I’m a good writer. My writing is clear and concise, and has some punch to it. I get to the point.

But, it’s not like I’m a great stylist, like Hemingway or Fitzgerald or somebody. I think writing a novel would be quite a ways over my head, because of style if nothing else. But the real question that comes up is what do you do if you have all the tools you need? When it is no longer a question of style, it becomes a question of your honesty and courage and ruthlessness.

Deep in the secret caves of your experience is where you find the universal. If you’re not writing about that, you can still be a writer, but not a “serious” writer. Just thinking about being a writer brings up these issues of your character and who you really are. Knowing how to sell isn’t enough. You have to have something to sell, and the only thing you have is your precious. Your self.

Think of all the aspiring musicians, actors, beauty contestants, writers, stock brokers, athletes, who have absolutely zero chance of success, and they don’t know it, and nobody can convince them otherwise. The problem is that everyone around you will be telling you you haven’t got a chance, regardless of how good you are. So you can’t go by them. You have to know your self, and that’s hard for some reason.

Just Opinions
? @NickSew

Just Opinions Retweeted Richard M. Nixon

Absolutely right. What little character I have comes entirely from having a paper route. To deliver them I bought a new Schwinn with a U.S. Savings bond that my grandfather gave me on my 10th birthday.

Just Opinions added,
Richard M. Nixon
@RichardNixon103
All young men should be required to get a paper route.

I grew up as an Air Force brat, never living in one place for very long, 3 years at the most. I went to Kindergarten in Alaska (before it was a state) after moving there from Chicago, first grade in Pennsylvania, then on to San Mateo, California for the year my father was in Korea. Then Rantoul, Illinois, Hanau, Germany (before the Berlin wall was built), and Fargo, North Dakota for my senior year in high School. Before Chicago there were a number of different places, but I don’t remember them.

It’s an unusual way to grow up. While I was in college at Iowa State, I went to see a counselor for some reason I don’t remember. He gave me the Minnesota Whatchamacallit Personality Test to see where I was at. When I went to talk to him about the results he said that either I was lying when I answered the questions, or my background was just too weird for the test to be valid.

I never had a friend for more than a couple of years. I saw a few of my relatives occasionally, but not very often. My brothers were separated from me by four and eight years, so I didn’t have much to do with them. My parents were fine people, but it was an Anglo-Saxon consciousness with few outward exhibitions of emotion. My world and my parents’ world were very different and unaware of each other.

I think an unconscious yearning for family and friends was a major factor in why I was attracted to the Farm, but it didn’t really work. I always felt apart during the eight years I was there. Now that I’m 74, I yam what I yam, as Popeye says, and I don’t worry about it too much. I function pretty well in social situations, and there are people whose company I enjoy, but I am essentially a solitary person.

Now I am on social media and I have… Acquaintances? Friends? Viewers? I don’t know what you call them, but I have an online persona expressed on Facebook, Twitter, and my blog that reaches some small number of people. It’s a way of interacting that is congenial. I get praise and blame, likes and insults, but they are removed in time and space, so I can deal with them at my own pace on my own terms.

I’ve been posting to my blog at just-opinions.com for 14 years. It is a record of what I have been thinking about for a decade and a half. The traffic has been modest, to say the most. There has been very little interest in what I have been thinking, except for me.

I, being very interested in myself, find it to be an astonishing perspective on our times. I imagine, when I am long gone, my great-great-grandchildren stumbling across it in their virtual reality, and weeping at the astounding profundity of these ancient insights.

I have experienced living on both sides of the political divide. I was a member of SDS and an acid head hippie communard back in the day. Now I am a conservative, Christian, Republican who loves President Trump.

You would think that would give me some sympathy for the other side, since I’ve been there myself, but you would be wrong. When I was on the left I thought that those on the right were evil or morons or both. Now I see, clear as a ringing bell, exactly the same thing on the left.

Of course, no matter which side I was on, I never thought of myself as an evil moron. Looking back I don’t think I was evil, but Moron? definitely!

I don’t know for sure the moral to this tale. Maybe it’s just to remember that when you are looking into another human being’s eyes, that’s you you are looking at.

For those who wonder what I could possibly see, other than Adolf Hitler, when I look at Trump, it is this:

I don’t know Donald Trump personally, so all I have to work with is his public persona, or should I say, his many public personas.

I see a man with an IQ that is off the charts, who loves to win, who has dominated Manhattan real estate for decades, who loves his country, who has chosen to devote his remaining time, at great personal sacrifice, to fixing all the things about the governance of the United States that have been deeply troubling to him for a long time.

And he is succeeding. He is guy who fixes things that are broken. We are fortunate to have him. We shall not see his like again for a very long time.

Among the many experiments that the Farm conducted, was the experiment to see if it was possible to form tribal connections among complete strangers that were as strong as blood relations. I believe the experiment was at least somewhat successful, and has had a real impact on the lives of of those of us who were part of the experiment. Family-strength relationships were formed.

It’s part of the hippie realization. There was that brief magical time. It only lasted a couple of years at the most. It was a time when you could trust someone that you met on the road, in a strange town, just because they had long hair. It didn’t last long, and was probably never completely true, but it did happen, I swear.

There is a modern diaspora. Families are scattered. The number of families that still have multiple generations living close to each other is dwindling. I am separated by thousands of miles from my children and grandchildren. I can afford to go to see them about once a year. I don’t have any relatives older than me. No cousins that I am in touch with, no uncles or aunts, no grandparents, no parents.

But what I do have are people who I know, who are older than I am, younger than I am, and much much younger than I am, and they occupy those slots of parents and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, cousins and siblings to some extent. They are my family as much as my real family in some ways, almost, but not quite.

Is this OK? I don’t know. I hope so because this is a real modern dilemma. The old family thing is not happening like it was, for more and more people. Are robots really the answer?

In 1968 when I was living with my wife and two children in a top story 7 room Victorian flat in the Haight for $164 dollars a month, and working downtown on Montgomery Street for a computer consulting company, It never occurred to me to think about making money.

I was making plenty of money, and thinking about it was so square. I was actually embarrassed to be making as much money as I was already. I was dropping acid pretty much every weekend, and it wasn’t no micro doses. It was orange sunshine or equivalent.

It’s hard to believe now, but at that time San Francisco was no more expensive than Cleveland or Des Moines. I could have bought real estate in the upper Haight. I could have started my own business and ridden the microcomputer wave. I could have done a lot of things, but it never even entered my mind. I flew around the country consulting, programming. I bought a fancy stereo setup, with a reel to reel tape recorder and giant speakers with my travel expenses.

If I had just stuck with it I would have been right there at ground zero when the Apple II, and later the Mac, came on the scene. Instead I was on the Farm, seduced by dreams of enlightenment. Well, if enlightenment is the dropping away of illusion, I’m way more enlightened now. Wish I had been when I made all those stupid decisions.

I love my life. I love my wife. I love our house. I love what I do to make a living. I even love our beat-up 2010 Scion XB and our 2008 Toyota Tacoma. I never expected to own such fine vehicles. I have many internet-connected devices. I have multiple sources of high quality television programming. My stereo is not expensive, but it’s way better than the one I had in 1970.

I really have nothing to complain about. If it weren’t for envy I would be completely content.

But I coulda been a contender. Enough money to not worry. Maybe more than that. Maybe multiple homes. Maybe a plane. Maybe popularity. Would I be happier? Who knows? Probably not, for one reason or another.