New blog series

It's been tough to find a focus for this blog. It started as a place for rants, witty rants, livid with rage rants etc...

Then it became a general repository for impressions, some book reviews, thoughts without a place-holder of any kind.

It is still the blog of a moody bastard, but I realized that I cannot just rant about whatever ticks me off. It is a digital foot-print that might be counter-productive later, or it simply changes my brain chemistry, leading to negative spirals. Cannot have that.

Politics, religion, but also management, personal development, fatigue at this and that, are all things I need to figure out by myself.

BUT

There is fitness. I can write about exercises, fitness, and the personal development challenges. Matching life, work, friends, with social pressure, peer pressure, judgement spoken and unspoken, expectations, confidence (physical, mental) and the staples of this endeavor, as rare as they are simple

• REST
• NUTRITION
• EXERCISE
• FOCUS

They are not quite in order of importance, but mostly yeah, they are. Broad categories, of course, but you get the idea. They might eventually stand for other, bigger things. Convenient screens for other things I might want to say.

It will be a journey, and there will be rants, but I will also try to share lessons. Rants will be 99% about the idealized, totally disconnected from reality messages coming off the damned internet. The true petri-dish of all things good and evil. The image crafting, idea spewing volcano which mostly only manages to frustrate us all with unattainable standards of clock-work precision in scheduling one's life, with the touch of "sprezzatura". The art of being naturally and effortlessly being good st doing stuff without so much as breaking a sweat, all delivered by polished characters who are essentially there for the money, and live and thrive in social context so unique that their "recipes" "tips & tricks" and whatever else they foist on the poor internet surfer is pretty damn far from useful.

Universal truths that require so much customization as to be basically rubbish "for girls" or "for dudes" crap. I might want to set some ground rules for myself and for you if you visit and comment.

Let's start with one: here we do not talk about "girls" or "dudes" or any of that horse-shit. Here we talk about humans. Get this straight, or leave.

But I digress, because ranting is addictive. Let's start with some-one who pretty much got it right instead. Meet my 2 of my favorite fitness people. There are more (Scooby, Jeff Cavaliere etc...) but they'll pop up in the next weeks. So, follow the links and take notes!

• Molly Galbraith at Girls Gone Strong  
• Alan Thrall, at Untamed Strength and his video channel on Youtube: Train Untamed!)

Read their stuff, listen to some of what they say, we reconvene next week. Fresh(er) than today (I slept like ass, and also not that much) and ready to get better. 

The Dragon in the Sea

I think I am reviewing books with the subconscious urge to compare them to G.R.R. Martin´s "A song of Ice and Fire". There is just so much that an author could to to make the story come to life without writing 9000 pages, but I suppose everyone has to make a buck. Anyway, here goes.

The Dragon in the Sea (Under Pressure) is a damn good book. It is a new Frank Herbert, away from his familiar landscape, the Arrakis/Dune which is now a quite well known setting (starting with David Lynch's adaptation, and on with videogames, spinoffs and telefilms). 

Herbert shows remarkable competence at narrating an adventure entirely set inside a small sub marine, a Hell Diver. The author shows the tricks of a good narrator, by giving us a high dosage of technical language, which even if you have never been in the navy, definitely gives to the "feel" to be there. He is accurate in his description of the sub-tug, and by the time we are through with the book, it feels like we have lived ourselves in those claustrophobic quarters. Its bulkheads, control panels, dials and gauges, levers, rudders. It sets a stage, with quick brush strokes, without killing it with too much detail. 

<< Oil. The war demanded the pure substance born in the sediment of rising continent. Vegetable oil wouldn't do. War was no vegetarian. War was a carnivore. >>

The plot is simple: in the near future (VERY near, for us, about the late 2030s) the USA is quite oil-starved. The crews of the hell-divers, 4 men units, risk their lives to, literally, steal oil from underwater continental shelves of the EP (Eastern Powers), dragging a "slug", a 1 mile long tank. The waters are infested with wolf-packs, submarines patrolling the enemy seas, but there is more. "Sleepers" in the US Navy have consistently sabotaged the last 20 missions, resulting in the loss of 20 crews. The journey is nerve-racking, and the submarine has to endure the strain of ordinary warfare, coupled with acts of sabotage. The task of the protagonist: to find out what is it that drives men insane during those missions, but also find a way to stop the sleepers. 

What is truly remarkable, is Herbert's ability to characterize. Thoughts in italics provide a commentary to the author's suggestions on where the truth might lie, and on where a man's sanity might be hiding, on the backdrop of the function of religious belief in a high-tech future. The titular Dragon in the Sea, is in fact the Leviathan: "In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea". It haunts the crew, and especially the deeply religious captain Sparrow. Instead of droning on for 7 volumes, Herbert gives us access to the security files of the characters, with the voice of the protagonist. Of Sparrow we know that he is <<"forty-one. Picture of a tall, thin man with balding sandy hair, a face of sharp planes, stooped shoulders. He looks like a small-town college professor, thought Ramsey. How much of that is conditioned on his early desire to teach mathematics? Does he resent the fact that his hardcrust Navy family forced him to follow in the old man's footsteps?" >>

The same man will pull the most insane feats of leadership and seamanship. Better still, the profile of Leslie Bonnet: <<"Held from advancement to his own command by imperfect adjustment to deep-seated insecurity feelings." The Unwanted, he thought. Bonnett probably doesn't want advancement. This way, his commander supplies the father authority lacking in his youth.>>

There is more than psychology. Some Anthropology which is right up my alley. Ramsey is called by second name until he faces combat, after which they all switch to a friendlier first name:

<< Johnny! thought Ramsey. He called me Johnny! And then he remembered: We've met the enemy. The old magic is dead. Enter the new magic. >>

There is a sense of completion, at the end of the journey: 

<<"Take her in, Les," said Sparrow. "You've earned the right."

Bonnett reached up, adjusted the range-response dial. His shoulders seemed to take on a new, more positive set. Ramsey realized abruptly that Bonnett had come of age on this voyage, that he was ready to cut his own cord. The thought gave Ramsey a tug of possessive fondness for Bonnett, an emotion touched by nostalgia at the thought of separation.

Truly like brothers, he thought.>> 

I am a navy person at heart, so I melted a little when I read that. The final note, to come full circle, is on miracles (and many happen during the mission). <<"There's such a thing as being on God's side. Being right with the world. That's really the thing behind miracles. It's quite simple. You get in . . . well, phase. That's the mechanical way of saying it. You ride the wave instead of bucking it." >>

So, read this book if you like navy stories (especially submarine stories). Read this book if you like war stories (especially cold war). Read this book if you want to see some real character analysis elegantly laid out in less than 200 pages.

The beauty of an interrogation

Yesterday, roughly at 16:30 GMT+1, the Earth completed its 34th full revolution around the Sol star since I was born. Yeah, it was my birthday all right. And it was a good  day too, filled with the predictable comings and goings at work, but also loads of beautiful messages from friends, wishing me all the Best. I really really liked it. Also, I cake at the office, bonus points. So what now? Now you are my friends, and you get to listen to me being really deep, and since my birthday is still fresh, you get to nod in approval; nod lots,  please.

Now with the questions! What is so good about being alive? If one is lucky enough (and I am more than enough) plenty of things make life worth it. I cannot imagine for a second to identify myself with the words from the dark, tormented TV character, usually someone with the  Gothic and vampiresque looks of a damned soul about them: I did not ask God to be alive! Woe! Oh, the burden of being alive! Lo! The futility of toiling for all those years, for nothing! All Dust! 


...Sure...

I see it differently though, and since today it is my birthday, I feel authorized to drop some deep deep thinking upon you innocent bystanders. It is a thought that crosses my mind rather frequently, which might make me edge towards hedonism, I fear. It is a trite thought, perhaps, but one to  which I relate easily: it is the journey that counts, not the destination. It is not the probability of all of this happening, or not happening, of life existing only on Earth or on a million distant suns, just blossoming, next to waning forever, at the pinnacle of progress or in the barbarous Dark Ages. It is just our ability to sense that, and to appreciate the wonderful miracle of conscience. The ultimate purpose of all this, if there is one, escapes me, yet I am also not chasing it all.

Is it hedonism then? The belief that the pursuit of what one derives pleasure from is intrinsically good? I think not. I think it is our ability to sense our own and one another's feelings, to relate and too want to react to them, with kindness, with awareness, with initiative, that should make us proud to be alive. I think it is this beautiful Indian summer that drives me to speak my mind in these terms. It might be the carrot cake that  I tasted today at Sowohalsauch, the walk in Boxhagener Platz I took yesterday, or just the rush of adrenaline that still courses though my veins after the run, but I feel very much alive.

There is this book I just finished: The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov. It is a great book, that touches many interesting themes. Social engineering, time travel and the paradoxes that time itself inevitably fixes, making one wonder what is the connection, the fil-rouge that seams all of us and everything else into this huge fabric, this tapestry of Bayeux made of many, infinite, possible realities. It is mind boggling, and could drive one mad, like it  happens to one character in the book. Another character, the protagonist as a matter of fact, Andrew Harlan, has a moment that describes wonderfully that feeling of epiphany that, from time to time, we have all felt, as if in the presence of something great and momentous, yet just beyond our reach.

He had only to move his hand to feel the warmth and softness of her flesh, and he dared not do that, lest he wake her out of whatever dreaming she might have. It was as though she were dreaming for the two of them, dreaming herself and himself and all that had happened, and as though her waking would drive it all from existence. It was a thought that seemed a piece of those other queer, unusual thoughts he had experienced just before. Those had been strange thoughts, coming to him at a moment between sense and nonsense. He tried to recapture them and could not. Yet suddenly it was very important that he recapture them. For although he could not remember the details, he could remember that, for just an instant, he had understood something. He was not certain what that something was, but there had been the unearthly clarity of the half-asleep, when more than mortal eye and mind seems suddenly to come to life.

I think that Andrew Harlan, in feeling that question hovering above his head, the answer just brushing lightly against his forehead, feels finally alive and starts his liberation from the huge machinery that had constrained him until then. It is the miracle of conscience, that unanswered question that enters my mind between sense and nonsense. I hope it remains so, for another 36500 nights!!!