I did not call you inhuman. If that is your takeaway, then I accept the full blame as I am not as good a writer as I should be. The only people I will call inhuman all wear shity red hats made in china while spreading a pandemic Virus and eating livestock dewormer. I tried to say you live in a bubble outside the typical human experience. As do I, and everyone using this website. At this point we are talking past each other. I promised to give the internet six months, maybe I can come up with something not so inflammatory to try to get a point across before my promise is kept and I can go back to dying. Back in the old days when recycling our newspapers, instead of massive wholesale changes to our society, was going to save the world we could live on a minimum wage. barely, poorly, and not in a healthy way, but we could live. Can't do that today, hell people can barely live on $15/hr. The one good thing to come out of this pandemic is the rise in wages due to the labour shortage. I was raised to fight for people. The Catholic Church I went to in the 70's sent people to fight for civil rights in the South (while ignoring the local KKK and molesting kids, but let's just add that to the list of shit) I was raised to build the community you would be proud to live in. And for 50 plus years the entire world has shit in my face for trying. The emotional reaction I have to my life right now is that every cause I've joined has been destroyed demonized and mocked. Perot was talking about universal health care as a pro-business move, and that college was too expensive and a drain on the US economy in fucking '92 (30 years ago now). Howard Dean would have gone down as one of the best presidents in the 21st century. Even after the DNC let him die after the Fox "dean Scream" edit, he came back with a 50 state strategy that took back Congress... only to be kicked to the curb again and sent back to Vermont. Occupy is its own swirl of shit. Both non-profit education foundations I worked with died because we had to fight kick and scratch for money to keep operating, only to frustrate the people willing to volunteer. And these are just the big fights that maybe some people will recognize. If you meet an asshole in the morning, well you met an loser. If you meet losers all day long, look in the mirror. It finally took failing health to realize the things I believe in are not only not popular; some even have active well-funded counter movements. And I'm sick of the taste of shit in my mouth. I'm sick, literally in my case, of fighting and losing. It's not been amusing at all to watch the reactions of people to my decision to start saying "NO" and wanting to live at least a few years on my own terms. People I've known for 30 years and more now won't talk to me because I won't give time and money. The disconnect here between you and I, and I take the blame for not conveying my thoughts well enough, is that every hobby should have room for both. Every Hobby NEEDS room for both. I want beginners, even if I don't really "get" the kids these days as I shake my cane at them. But I also want my events of old farts where we can hang out and do our thing. If you walked into your fancy watch event and demanded they make digital watches cool again because the kids these days are all digital, you'd be laughed out of the event and blacklisted. there is an analogy there that I am butchering, hopefully it comes through. My fight is not with you. My disgust and anger is with (gestures around at everything with a pissed expression on his face) Your kid is above ground, you gotta fight that battle because otherwise you are a sociopath. I get it. Hell, I even hope you win more than you don't. Long after I'm forgotten, I hope that you and yours are surrounded by grandkids laughing at the idiots thinking shit was falling apart. I did. The things I like get destroyed so I started saying no more often, stopped trying to roll the boulder to the top of the hill, stopped fighting for people that hate me unless I write checks, started standing up for my personal well-being and stopped participating. When I try to defend the things I enjoy, I end up screaming past people in barely read internet forums. Call me a bitter old man if you want, hell I sort of agree with you. But I keep coming back to the old cliche of inside of every angry old cunt like me is the corpse of an optimist. NO.Here's where we differ. You want people to enjoy astronomy your way. I want people to enjoy astronomy.
I bear you no malice and zero ill-will and will happily accept your slag as the cost of doing business.
Recalibrate, mutherfucker
And come down from the mountain more often.
LOL. Okay, you do you. I can 100% understand that "up the mountain" is a substantially better time than "down the mountain" and if this wide-ranging conversation has made one thing clear, it's that your life should be more fun. And that's why I'm grinning through your outrage, coming back blow-for-blow and happily joining you in this discussion wherever and however you wanna have it. I haven't misunderstood you once. I've gotten your message every time. I just have the useful perspective of not being you so I can accept or reject your statements based on their intrinsic value, rather than the value you feel they have. There's a whole lot of loss in your life. That's clear. There's a whole lot of loss in your experience. There's a whole lot of loss in your stories. But loss isn't everything. Here, look: The mistake every esoteric hobby makes is presuming that if the old farts hang out in a room, that room will be welcoming to newbs. I don't care what the hobby is, I don't care who the old farts are, jargon exists for in-group bonding and our stories help to say who we are to each other, not to outsiders. The deeper in you are, the more important it is to throw a bone to the naifs. And I think astronomy is in a truly deep-shit place, frankly. I had a telrad 30 years ago and I couldn't find a decent goddamn scope on Amazon. Sure - you chatted with the Orion folx and think those things aren't garbage but they sure don't come across that way. Light pollution is worse now than it was then 'cuz if you can make an LED streetlamp twice as bright for half the voltage, you're gonna put in streetlamps that are 4 times as bright in the name of "safety." Meanwhile "astrophotography" has gone from "hypered film and mirror lockup" to "I spent twelve hours in Photoshop" at which point I can draw a nebula from scratch quicker so the actual joy of finding something is super-divorced from the experience anybody gonna get. Meanwhile the people who can give people these experiences are living every day like it's 1995 and figure the newsletter is too expensive to keep up because stamps are outrageous. What was is dead, man. It sucks. I've played coulda shoulda woulda about any number of things in my life or the world or anywhere else and you gotta deal the hand you're dealt. I'm glad you were raised to fight for people. I was raised that life is nasty, brutish and short and was literally taught that any playground dispute was to be resolved by striking first, striking hard, striking dirty, and continuing to strike until I was physically separated from my target by a superior force. Conflict is resolved through murder and you must do unto others before they do unto you. It's no way to fuckin' live. I've worked really damn hard for my bubble, thanks. It is my triumph. It's also clear. I can see out of it. I can feel the wind, I can feel the heat, and I'm hyper-aware of the rose bushes. So it's not that I don't see your point? It's not that I don't empathize with it? It's not that I don't feel - deeply - every emotion driving it. It's that I've learned to recognize what burdens to lay down. And I want more than anything else from these discussions is get you to consider that point of view.NO.
The disconnect here between you and I, and I take the blame for not conveying my thoughts well enough, is that every hobby should have room for both. Every Hobby NEEDS room for both. I want beginners, even if I don't really "get" the kids these days as I shake my cane at them. But I also want my events of old farts where we can hang out and do our thing.
This, boys and girls, is how a wordsmith comes back at you with the now classic "OMG WHO HURT YOU" retort. Thanks for the chuckle. Everybody's life sucks. Everybody has a life of loss and pain. Working on the Perot campaign a million years ago my eyes were opened to the reality that even the rich kid's lives had troubles and pressures and pain points. Some of us put up with it till we are dropped in a hole in the ground. Some of us suck on a shotgun. some of us take a long drive into a bridge pylon so it looks like an accident. Some of us WAKE THE FUCK UP and decide to not play the game anymore because life is too short to beat your skull against a wall for people that don't really care if you live or die.There's a whole lot of loss in your life. That's clear. There's a whole lot of loss in your experience.
And some of us are less worried about "OMG WHO HURT YOU" and more focused on not letting them hurt us anymore. There's a very simple choice here, and I don't care how many exchanges it'll take to get you to see it: You can live your life based on what was or you can live your life based on what is. You wanna talk old farts? Let's talk old farts. I like these old farts because they arrange speakers that match my interests, they attract collectors and vendors who have cool stuff and they have a wealth of knowledge that I can't easily get anywhere else. And right now, Seattle has two chapters: NAWCC 50 and NAWCC 135. Why? Ask the guy running it now and it's because "some people didn't like meeting on Sundays." Ask the last charter member of NAWCC 135 (1981) and it's because "people didn't want to drive all the way to Seattle." So I ask this guy where exactly 135 is. It's out on the Kitsap Peninsula. How many guys left? Like 8 or so. And this is why they really wish we could have "our" meetings where we were because they were walking distance from the ferry dock which meant it saved them $40 and 2 hours of driving. "Our" is in quotes because are those meetings 135 or 50? Well nobody really knows, and we haven't collected dues for two years because COVID and the simple fact that nobody knows which organization should actually collect them. So on the one hand, we got old farts with beef from 1981 keeping the organization from growing. On the other hand we started doing shit on Zoom anyway so two of our most worthwhile participants are from Oregon and San Diego. The only way this gets resolved well is if me, youngest guy in the club by 30 years, says "hey I'ma take this on and arrange it so that it works for everybody." And the only way I'm going to do that is if I'm not going to get a bunch of blowback for messing with tradition. Because some people can't let go of 40 year old beefs.