Archive for February 2023

— My Eyes Popped When I Saw The Legal Bill

Yea, there were lots of headline images to choose from with guys in business suits shaking hands, making a deal.

BORING!

Plus, the design is awful (I laughed out loud and knew I had to use it), so I figured you'd figure I cobbled it together myself. Nope. So, proof there's people out there just as devoid of talent as I in terms of image making.

One of the testimonials from a member includes:

I found your website at the beginning of the Paleo days and have followed you ever since. [...] The essence of the experience has been change. You go from one thing to the next as the spirit moves you. I don’t want to miss out on what’s next. — Alan from Utah

This is true. This being the 20th year, when someone asks me what I blog about, "everything" is always the answer. It's never seemed complicated to me. Essentially, fundamentally, a blog is an online journal of a predominantly personal nature. So, I have always cringed at the notion of writing about one thing for years and years and years as though I'm some objective bystander. BORING!

I have no idea how they do it. It would be like working at the same job for 20 years. And I mean, the same fucking job: no promotions, no new tech...the same damn thing day after day after day after day.

I suspect that's why single-issue bloggers eventually go off the rails into bullshit territory. You need something new for engagement's sake, but you're an ABC blog, so you can't write about XYZ. Guess you'll have to write about ABC...bullshit bullshit yada yada, or something.

Observe how Paleo went junk "food" and LC went epileptic diet (clinically ketogenic) for so many. Gotta keep the peeps engaged. I did lots of new stuff too (potato hacks, beans, gut bug stuff, etc.), but always involving an omnivorous, real food paradigm. I evolved; or rather, my understanding and flexibility with diet and nutrition improved to make things more sensible and accessible. I didn't morph into anathemas like fucking candy bars and sticks of GRASSFED!!! butter. What one eats should not be complicated, requiring continual "engaging" guidance from gurus and their flock.

That said, there's a fat blurry line with a blog, and you're never going to get it perfect or just right. At times you're going to share too much; or, you're going to obsess about your own life without enough purpose or object lesson concerning what you're writing about.

That's a continual struggle and the sweet spot is that you have people on one side thinking you're sharing too much personal and on the other, those who want even more of the gory details.

In general, I think an impersonal blog or newsletter is fucking boring. I hope you do to.

Anyway...

To the subject matter. I'm yet again into a new thing; thus, why the foregoing introduction. And yes, I still have pending stuff to publish. My focus has been spread thin. I haven't blogged much about my trip back to the village and I'm saving some of that for when I better develop The Story of a Girl and Her Girls and publish the subsequent parts.

Those two girls are so fantastic. Check this out; it's like 20 seconds.

(Don't even get me started on the dismal state of child rearing in America...)

So, I'm back in Phuket, taking care of a bunch of stuff—including an enormous paperwork clusterfuck involving my motorcycle—and getting ready to move at the end of this month, if not sooner. Undecided where, but it will either be back to the village full time, or to Pattaya Beach where it's only a 7-hr drive to the village—and not a 2-day trip from Phuket...so you have to fly and the airport east or west is 2-hrs drive from the house.

Something else is afoot too.

It has to do with My Easy Way alcohol cessation, which hits the 6-month mark in 2 days. I've been reflecting on that obligatory video and post. The title of this post is testament to what that will be about; which is, there is no way to predict how it's going to go when you quit. Initially, you're focussed on the task of just not drinking, which thankfully, was ridiculously easy for me, this time, at long last. And, you're nostalgic. Perhaps you're a bit depressed because you're truly not having as much fun as you used to, so you're condemned to a slightly or way more mundane life.

So what are you gonna make of it?

If you stay the course it's almost like you can't help yourself but to rebound into making your life fun, challenging, exciting yada yada, again...only from a different perspective and motivation. What's mine? The girl and her girls. It's both the motivation and the reward.

And it doesn't come from some half-drunk, weepy, and forlorn place that's gonna be forgotten about by the time you wake up sober anyway. It's almost the opposite. I'm rather unemotional...stoic about it, even. Lemme tell ya what. Having a chick 32 years younger than you has its definite challenges...

So, what do you do? Well, anyone gets to do what they want but in my case, it adds up to being one more thing—and a rather prescient one at that—where it takes more and more to actually get me angry. And that process evolves from that conscious stoic resolve to a natural response where whatever that thing in the minute is, it's all just information. I can act on it or not, chalk it up, or forget about it.

It also serves as a reminder that I did not, in fact, know it all at the age of 30. Yet.

...I require more than just getting up everyday and writing for some hours. Right now, it's heavily weighted toward Twitter which is going well. From zero since Elon took over—my old account with 8k followers was nuked almost 2 years ago—to closing in on 400 followers. I'm figuring out the code without engaging in all the bullshit people do to get high numbers of brainless morons and they're in abundance. I don't need it. They'll never be paying members.

Here, take a look at this thread (the replies and nested replies) and tell me how many of those 200ish regurgitators are serious candidates for a paying membership. Maybe 2 or 3.

So, I'm starting a business. A real-world, physical business. Like...get up in the morning, move shit around, pound on stuff. Not just tap-tap-tap. I built a house in the province of Sisaket in the spring and summer of 2020, sitting out Covid 1.0.

I relished in that experience, and plus, rural Thais are accustomed to 10-hr day, 7-day work weeks. I got it done in 2 1/2 months with 3-4 guys...older, mature village guys who know how to do everything because they have to. They have to know how to farm rice or cassava or papaya when the pickin's good. They have to know how to raise and tend to livestock. They have to know how to build houses and commercial buildings and they're all jacks of all trades...from laying the concrete pad to setting the concrete columns to laying the concrete blocks to setting the windows to welding together the steel roof structure to running plumbing to setting time. The only things subbed out in my build was electrical, painting, the commercial interior doors, and the front 100% stainless steel gate.

Have a quick look. All cash out of pocket, about $40-45K, estimated. The land is free and clear, too. And unlike in the "land of the free," there are no property taxes whereby, you're actually leasing "your land" from the state.

What that wonderfully exciting daily experience did was to instill in me a desire to start a construction company here in Thailand.

I grew up in and around construction. Various family members were in various trades and I spent large swaths of my youth, from age 10 onward, working on construction sites. It's like blood in veins to me.

If I wanted to do this in America?

I would even get started in "The Land of the Free."

TOO MUCH FUCKING BULLSHIT!

So, you get to follow along as I start and operate a construction company as an American in Thailand...ridiculously easier, faster, and cheaper than in the so-call land of the free...and utterly shameful delusion.

So here we go...details, details, details. All of them.

What Kind of Construction and Development Company?