blog of kaiyen

for sale

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

As I have mentioned in the past, I bring a camera just about everywhere I go, and have one in hand while I am walking to and from work, in particular. I walk a relatively mundane, residential route to work, basically the same route, and the truth is that even when I’m in full “there is a photograph everywhere, you just have to look for it” mode, I do end up taking a lot of the same photos.

I’ve walked by this truck for sale a number of times, wanting to find a good way to take its picture. It’s at a gas station literally right at the corner from where I live – maybe 500 feet. It’s this big, old (but not classic-old) truck. Probably a major gas guzzler, and the kind that has little hope of selling unless a buyer is needing something to haul stuff.

I think I might have finally found an angle that works. I wish a bit more of the FOR SALE could be read, but it’s there. And it’s been fun doing straight black and white lately.

Slides will be next for my camera…

Under the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State Dulles pushed forth a nuclear policy known as MAD – mutually assured destruction.  It’s a rather frightening approach, but the idea was that if we had enough weapons with enough range and power, we could basically ensure our safety by raising the stakes so high that no country – not even the Soviet Union – would ever dare start a nuclear exchange.

Eisenhower’s and Dulles’ strategy had some particular flaws – their pursuit of a MAD policy lead to one particularly powerful bomb that, should it be dropped from a bomber aircraft, the explosion would be so large that the plane would not be able to get out of the fallout zone even at maximum airspeed.  It was also instituted early enough in the nuclear standoff that neither side had truly considered how to conduct diplomacy and brinksmanship in such a situation.  MAD led quite directly, in my opinion, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is easily the closest we ever came to being blown off the face of the earth.  This has some interesting parallels to our current situation with Iran and North Korea and their respective nuclear programs.

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I wish I were “blogfamous.”  Where I wrote stuff on here and people would comment on it, put it up on digg, etc.  I wish I stirred people’s imaginations or whipped them into a frenzy or whatever.  I wish I were more interesting, maybe.

This is more, I think, than just wanting to be famous or being a hero or having my 15 minutes of fame.  Of course, I would love it if I did something, preferably more like a career than a flash-in-the-pan kind of moment, that made me pop up on the radar of others.  It’s more that I want to write things that are meaningful to others, that resonates with them and makes them think, or laugh, or motivates them to do something (comment, yell at me, get upset, whatever).

I’ve always thought of myself as a good writer – someone who can string a few interesting sentences together and generally uses proper grammar.  I have no illusions of currently or ever being a notable satirist or anything extraordinary like that, but perhaps good enough in general.

What worries me is that maybe I’m simply…boring.  And more than a little bit lazy.  The former is just rather sad.  Maybe I don’t have that many interesting thoughts to share with others, or that those that I do aren’t fodder for conversation (I do post now and then, after all, but the issue is whether the infrequency of my posts is due to a lack of interesting ideas).

The laziness has to do with how often I make myself get up and post something when I’m struck by a bit of news or some commentary by others.  There are lots of really interesting people out there that really do make me think, for good and bad (the myth of the Death Panel gets me riled up a lot), but I don’t get up out of bed, away from the work computer when I’m in the middle of some administrivia e-mail, or jump on the computer in general when I read something that whips up a thought or two of my own.  For some reason I just don’t.  But I should.

So..anyway.  I wish I weren’t so full of self-pity, either .  I blog because I need an outlet for commentary when I feel I have something to say.  I know a few people follow what I write.  I know that that number is not large.  I don’t blog to be famous, but I think all of us wish we were the kind of writers, bloggers, commentators and thinkers that make others stop and want to blog about us.

Hm.  This was rather random.