Archive | June 2023

How Oscar Wilde Created a Queer, Mysterious Symbol in Green Carnations

Do you know about Charles Dawes?

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Taking chances makes us human

Jun24

I’m going to give my useless opinion. But here goes. When I was growing up a gentleman from the Explorers Club used come every year and give a presentation and I so wanted go with him. And except for the 18 year old these men were old enough to make what they thought was an educated choice to go (and the money) and do something extraordinary.

Nothing in human history would have been done without people who made those kind of choices. This includes people like our ancestors who boarded the May flower as one of mine did. Have you been to Disneyland and seen the ship in the lagoon that was the same size? Imagine that in high seas.

Imagine the women who were Suffragettes. They made the choice to be different or those of us who marches for gay rights knowing and risking attack.

People make choices to explore and to be different. You have to have a certain mindset and the people who don’t have the stupidity gene think you are crazy to be different.

I can’t tell you how many stupid things I’ve done out of curiosity. But a few highlights are going down the American River not once but twice in a high flood year. Once getting out and doing the biggest rapid with just a life vest. And i don’t swim that well. And learning that some choices really hurt like getting a 3rd degree sunburn I still bare the scars from but I wouldn’t have traded that for the world. Doing those things teaches you so much so as having people scream they were going to kill you because you’re gay was with it but terrifying during the first Pride parades or getting badly burned can really hurt.

Nothing of value is learned by staying home. Nothing would have been discovered with out people who make the choice to say “What lf?”.

Yes they wasted several navies money from their choice. But what if they had succeeded? And the same spirit with the addition of desperation pushes those migrants on boats. They could stay home.

The same choices settled the West. Pushed Lewis and Clark and Sacagewa with her baby. It pushed Sally Ride into space. It pushed my grandmother to be a Suffragette climb mountains and get her college degree in 1910 before she could vote. It pushed my dad to ride the rails as a hobo in the Depression to come to LA from Illinois. And to take me on those rafting trips.

I would never have come out of the closet, become a witch and a Druid. Been backpacking in the wilderness or down a river, written books or done anything of value without that curiosity or need to see what’s over the next hill.

We humans at our best, take chances to learn things , to explore and have fun sometimes and we, I admit, do it for the thrill when it succeeds. Those men were warned and knew they could die and they did because taking wild chances can fail and fail spectacularly. It wouldn’t be news otherwise. But we humans wouldn’t have achieved anything or tried for better lives without risk takers.