One of the things that is essentially male is to pass on advice to our boys, and younger clan members.
Now, as a man in my fifties, I have known for more than ten years that there was one shitload of stuff that my dad knew, but did not tell me. Why not?
Because what counted was what he DID tell me, the stuff he didn’t tell me was stuff he knew I had to learn for myself, so the best thing he could do was tell me the stuff he did.
For example, he was smart enough to know that there are some lessons in life that simply cannot be taught, the individual has to experience them for himself, and all you can do is PREPARE them, and after all, they are not you, their world is not your world, and their responses may not be yours, so preparing them for as many eventualities as possible is the best possible thing you can do for them.
Further to yesterday’s post about how to spot a niggerz, and trends over at the spearhead with an ever increasing numbers of wimminz / niggerz agitators and ever increasing numbers of “useful idiots” that argue with everything because the alternative is to accept that some aspect of their life sucks, so rather than acknowledge that they shoot the messenger.
Now if I cast my mind back to times where my dad could have warned me, I recall that in actual fact he just looked at me, and with the benefit of hindsight and being a father myself, he was doing that age old calculation, what can I tell this boy, if anything, that will prepare him better for the situation he now faces?
And a lot of the time he said fuck all, because he had done what he could, and some of the time he asked me what I wanted to do, go down road A or road B, and offered help either way.
In hindsight, I always made the better choice, nota bene, no such thing as right and wrong choices, just better and worse choices, and again with the benefit of hindsight, the better choice is always one that maximises your future options, and the worse choice is the one that limits your future options.
Getting your face and hands tattooed, robbing a bank at gunpoint, throwing away what you have to set up house with a slut, these are all worse choices, because once you make any of them your future choices are always drastically limited.
Those three example choices never actually go away, I could do any of them next week, which is another thing about better vs worse choices, AT THE TIME, worse choices always seem like once in a lifetime deals, grab it now or forever lose it, and better choices always seem like meh, I can do that shit next week if I feel like it, whereas the reality is the exact opposite, because the worse choice collapses the future option tree and suddenly the better choices are no longer available, and this collapsing of the option tree is EXACTLY what differentiates between a better and a worse choice.
At this point I must stress that simply not making a choice, in the interests of keeping that future option tree as wide and diverse as possible, is in fact making a choice, the choice of choosing not to make a choice, and therefore choosing to open a third path, the path of the cypher who has no choices and is influenced by others, and there is always enough of that shit in life for anyone.
Let us take “game” for an example.
I am not a proponent of game, and if you think I am you have not read this blog sufficiently, but neither am I a detractor, it is what it is, and like all things it has good and bad, and like all things it offers lessons, good and bad, to those willing to watch and learn.
However now over at the spearhead there is an ever increasing number of posters who are defiantly anti-game, and openly ridiculing anyone who buys into it, and an increasing number of posters who are pro-game, and openly ridiculing anyone who rejects it.
And they are BOTH wrong, because the real choice is not pro-game vs anti-game, the real choice is between pro/anti game rulebooks, and no rulebook and making each individual play / choice as it arises.
It is human nature, it is lazy / easier to go by a given book of rules than it is to examine each choice and play your cards, it is also easier to swallow when things go wrong, because the choice was not made by you, but by the book you follow.
Go over to ZeroHedge and see everyone who took liar loans blaming the nasty evil bankers for pushing those loans on to them.
___I__ do not have a liar loan motherfucker, I refused to take them, and I also forfeit the House as an ATM and second and third re-mortgage and interest only mortgage (what fucking idiot would sign up to a loan where you NEVER repay the capital????) but then I chose to forgo the SUV in the driveway and two foreign holidays a year and all the other shit you spent your credit on.
Yes, it is a TOUGH choice to go without, to only have what you can buy for cash, to live within your means, to be driving an old car while you smirk at me with your flash new motor and foreign holidays and hello ladies let me buy you some champagne.
It is a TOUGH choice to refuse to sign up for infinite credit and to effectively spend the next ten years living in the lap of luxury, WHILE CONSUMING YOUR ENTIRE LIFETIMES’ WORTH OF PRODUCTIVITY AND VALUE IN ONE SHORT ORGY OF CONSUMPTION AND EXCESS, but it is a fuckton EASIER than being where you fuckers are now, having consumed everything on offer and used up your lifetimes worth of productivity, and then getting presented with the fucking bill, and facing the rest of your life in austerity to pay it off.
Their future options trees have one branch, with one teensy tiny microscopic twig coming off it, in the shape of a lottery win as an exit strategy alternative to paying the piper.
I may be in a mere flat, but I have my workshop out back, nobody can repo any of my shit or vehicles, I am sat directly in front of my paid for giant screen TV, in the exact ideal viewing position, with my paid for quality speakers on quality stands again with the ideal stereo image focusing on the exact spot where I am sitting, the small table by my side is in the ideal and comfortable place for me, and while my income is low, I can live within my means, and have as much free time to do my own shit as I please.
If times get harder economically, I can cut back my already meagre living expenses by as much as 50% without any great genuine hardship, it will be austere and it will be putting on extra layers of clothing instead of the central heating, but I HAVE THAT OPTION.
I might not LIKE that motherfucking option of wearing pullovers and walking to get around town, but I HAVE that motherfucking option. My option tree is quite diverse.
Option trees start inside your head, with your fucking attitude to life, and this is the stuff my dad DID teach me, and so the things he might have said or taught me but did not do not matter, because after all like all human beings, we had limited time together on this earth, and neither of us knew how much time we would have together, so he taught me to have options, rather than teaching me a rule book and a list of his experiences and choices and specific things that he could warn me about.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, there were times when he considered as an option simply washing his hands of me, as doing otherwise would have limited his options arbitrarily.
If you think he was being harsh, he was not, he would have done anything for me, except to support and enable me to be a complete fuckup, get my face tattooed, rob a bank, throw away my life to play house with a slut, those things I could do on my own two feet, without limiting his options.
And that was perhaps the greatest lesson he taught me about options, the difference between being a father and being an owner of your children.
“Why didn’t you protect me from some of the bad choices I made dad?” is a question I never asked him, but could posit as a theoretical one now.
And though he is long gone, I can hear his answer, “Protect YOU from choices YOU made boy???” and he would just look at me, and say “I TRIED to teach you son, don’t blame me if you chose not to listen and thought you knew everything and were a man enough to run your own life.”
and the unspoken rest, he could have sacrificed his life to try to save me, and I would not have been saved because I was still running my own show, and then he would have given up all his options trees too, and then we would both have been fucked, and my memory of him, WHICH STILL GUIDES ME TODAY, would be a lesson in how to limit your options and fuck up and wail that it ain’t my fault, I had no choice, I was talked into shit, people PROMISED me shit, I didn’t REALISE it would end like this, I didn’t THINK IT THROUGH, and I don’t wanna be PUNISHED for it.
As the economy and democracy unravels in the western world, and the options trees of millions of people collapse into single branches with few offshoots, or in the case of war to the end of the branch completely and personal annihilation, I raise a glass to my dear departed dad, “I can’t live your life for you boy.”
No, but he did the best job he could, under the circumstances of HIS life, to prepare me for MINE.
And with THAT realisation I sleep far easier having walked away from my own kids, when the only option the State and my psycho skank ho ex were prepared to offer was for me to destroy myself and my option tree and present myself as sub-human low life pond scum to have any kind of contact at all with my boys.
Under those “only offer on the table” circumstances the only things I would be teaching my boys is how NOT to prepare for their lives, as it is, I am an enigma to them, sure, mummy says their daddy is an antichrist who would have raped them and then eaten their bodies, but mummy says a lot of shit and none of it is true, nobody who lives in her house can be under any doubt about that, whereas daddy, well, who knows what daddy is, and as / when / if they eventually get to know him, he will still have an option tree open, to do the best job he can, under the circumstances of MY life to prepare them for THEIRS.
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, I really don’t like to fling the shit, I don’t mind telling it like it is, but flinging the shit is altogether more childish, so it is with some disquiet that I find myself in a place where what I am doing is only just over the border between flinging shit and telling it like it is.
