Ephemeral Truculence

Global domination is a rather tedious affair; it requires ruthless strategy, timely alliances, and a ridiculous amount of luck.  I was able to spend Sunday afternoon playing RISK with some good friends of mine.  It’s not that we’re all as geeky as we may at first seem, but it’s a good pass time when winter seems eternal. After the game was put away, I couldn’t help but think about how terrible it is to have applied so much effort into something that means nothing. Ok, so the bragging rights are worth everything… but that’s another story.

Life is just a series of choices followed by a series of consequences. 

I enjoy watching the economy, and I try to make smart financial plays based on the information that is available to me. I find it particularly interesting that there is two completely different schools of thought in regards to investing.  On one side you have technical analysts who are strictly interested in the historic data, and how it can be used to predict what’s going to happen tomorrow.  On the other, you have fundamentalists. They are like little school kids sitting in a circle during story time. They’re looking for positive signs of growth, stability, and always cheer for the hero.  The thing that surprises me the most is that both approaches make both groups of speculators quite a bit of money.

As I was walking through the grocery store parking lot this evening, I suddenly became cognizant of the fact that something was amiss.  Two guys were standing about 50’ to the left of me.  Another guy was walking towards me.  As I was getting nearer, the guy in front of me started staggering pretty severely. He took one final lunge at me, but ended up lying on the pavement, several feet short.   During those few short seconds it became very obvious that he was intoxicated. After he had fallen, his two “friends” started calling to him.  I feel bad for leaving him there, but self preservation won out.

I’m not going to even attempt to wrap up these various thoughts with one conclusive statement. Instead, I just wanted to drive home the point that sometimes things don’t have to make a whole lot of sense logically, in order to work out. Science tells us that falling space debris and genetic mutations are going to destroy humanity. They likely will, but there’s also a survival aspect to the whole thing, and it can never quite be accounted for. It means that my interests are your interests, and that your problems are mine.   You could say that life is a game of chance, or that it’s what you make it, but it's more likely that it's both or neither. 

There is this mentality in N. America that says that you have whatever you work for. Before it’s all over, you’ll invariably discover that everything that you worked so hard for wasn’t really all that important after all. It’s just about as inconsequential as the, nearly forgotten, RISK game.

Eventually all of the pieces will be put back in the box, and I'm perfectly confident that we will see things quite differently then.