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Shutting It Down
Ephemeron
1. Something short-lived or of no lasting significance.
2. ephemera: Items, especially printed matter (as posters, broadsides, pamphlets, etc.), intended to be of use or importance for only a short time but preserved by collectors.

Today is the day I lay this blog to rest, at least in it’s current Monday-Friday form. I might still post a few times a week if I feel the need to comment publicly, but that remains to be seen. It might even wind up being where I take a while off and then resume it full steam again. Who knows. Regardless, it’s been a fun 14 months, the comments have been priceless, but it’s time to put this monster to bed before it loses its freshness. I can always be reached at jamesjk@gmail.com.

With the stats I accumulated from simply writing 5-10 minutes a day, it’s a tad depressing that I can’t make this my career without starting all over again, something not possible when you have mouths to feed. I’m not a sage by any stretch of the imagination but here are a few good rules I’ve learned that help get me through life and the curveballs it throws on a daily basis.

- Be good to people but don’t be phony.

- Find out who your true friends are and make an effort to keep in touch.

- Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness.

- Keep asking people questions about themselves. People love to talk about themselves and you’ll find out something new all the time.

- Don’t stop listening to music. Never underestimate the power of natural mood enhancers that this medium offers.

- In a lot of instances, beer is a much better pairing with food than wine is.

- If you do like beer, support your local microbreweries first. If you don’t drink beer, treat yourself to a Belgian ale just once.

- Even for a cynical bastard like me, take the time to appreciate the little things in life that make you smile, even if it’s as simple as being happy about getting 5 green lights in a row on your way home from work.

I feel it’s appropriate that I began this blog with a reference to Hunter S Thompson, my favorite writer, and will end this blog with a passage from his book “Hell’s Angels”. Hunter had spent over a year with a Hell’s Angels gang to chronicle how they lived and I can only hope one day to be able to have 1/100th of the mastery of the English language like he did in his own warped way. The excerpt below is near the end of the book, and his description of riding his motorcycle is also a fitting analogy for life. (The “…” in the text are also in the book, nothing is left out and it is not paraphrased.)

“But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right…and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it…howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica…letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge…The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others – the living – are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.”