In what world do you enter another country's airspace, drop bombs on them, and then say “We're not at war with them”?
Officially entering hermit mode. Though it is kind of impossible to block out the outside world right now.
Journal
Bid my little one farewell the other day and now there's a big gaping hole in my heart. He's halfway across the world now and it'll likely be quite a while before we see each other again. Two foxes quenching their thirst from a watering hole in Namibia keep me company while I sulk.
Will spend the day cleaning and getting the place in order. Hermit mode begins tomorrow.
Come next week, I shall be entering full hermit mode for a good month in an effort to finally bring THE SOLAR GRID to a close; only inks, letters, and some colors remain on the final chapter. Without a kitchen though, proper hermit mode can be difficult to pull off; it kind of necessitates a great deal of meal prep. I've got my microwave, kettle, minifridge, and grill outside, so I think I can make it work.
Went to the Grand Egyptian Museum with my little man who I am blessed to have spend some time with me in Cairo these days. Playtime of course is kind of all the time, which I am taking full advantage of while I can.
Little time for anything else so inbox has climbed to 216, and RSS reader is at a whopping 1898.
Life away from daddy mode to resume next week.
“Samuel Greedy, a shrewd financier, founds a bank in El Dorado, California. A.A. Stone, an up-and-coming contractor in El Dorado, finishes his first big job, recieving payment in cash to the tune of $1 million. He deposites his sum in Mr Greedy's bank. The bank now has $1 million in capital. In the meantime, Jane McDoughnut, an experienced buy impecunious El Dorado chef, thinks she sees a business opportunity — there's no really good bakery in her part of town. But she doesn't have enough money of her own to buy a proper facility complete with industrial ovens, sinks, knives, and pots. She goes to the bank, presents her business plan to Greedy, and persuades him that it's a worthwhile investment. He issues her a $1 million loan, by crediting her account in the bank with that sum.”
Still slow-reading Yuval Noah Harari's SAPIENS
“McDoughnut now hires Stone, the contractor, to build and furnish her bakery. His price is $1,000,000. When she pays him, with a cheque drawn on her account, Stone deposits it in his account in the Greedy bank. So how much money does stone have in his bank account? Right, $2 million.
“How much money, cash, is actually located in the bank's safe? Yes, $1 million.”
And about a page later:
“What enables banks — and the entire economy — to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.”
In a way yes, I agree with Harari, but also no, I don't, because most capitalists lack imagination and tend to only trust proven track records. So their trust in the future tends to be tied to something's proven success in the recent past. It is trust in the future as long as that future is tethered to the past, in most cases anyway.
Another interesting bit a few more pages in:
“Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.”
This checks, and explains the tendency of a particular echelon of Western capitalists to always chase the next new shiny innovation to pump their money into. But it also fails to acknowledge that the problem today isn't the lack of tangible wealth as much as it's a problem of adequate distribution. What investing in new innovations in the past did was allow for the creation of new jobs that relied on that innovation, thus creating just enough “wealth” for those new employees to delay the inevitable market collapse. Presently, all indications are pointing towards new innovations that eliminate jobs rather than create them, creating more even more wealth disparity, with most of the pie going into the mouths of those who have no need for it.
Capitalism is a dead-end system, its very demise being the doing of capitalists (and their science labs) themselves.
This is something Harari unfortunately seems very unwilling to see or acknowledge, despite it being spelled out even in his own description of it. But he seems fascinated by it, more than critical, and given his evident smarts, has a way of convincing you that everything he says must be true. But much of it simply isn't. #reads #journal
It almost looked like I wouldn't be able to pencil a page of TSG the other day, but I managed to squeeze it in later in the evening, so you'll notice I readded it to my daily to-list after taking it out.
I used to use a whiteboard for this sort of thing back in Houston, but with much work being done at the Cairo studio over the past three months—work that involved tearing into walls—I had to do without a wall-mounted whiteboard and opted to try a block-pad instead, starting each day with a fresh sheet of paper. It is evidently impossible for me to function without some form of daily checklist.
I typically throw away a day's sheet as soon as the day is over, but I've been keeping them for the last few days now, realizing that it's something you can't do with the whiteboard and can only do with this, and so, perhaps there can be some kind of use for them; glued onto canvas to use as the backdrop for an artwork, folded and sewn into some kind of artist book, etc.
My artist brain doesn't always get along with my anti-hoarder brain.
Inbox 33, RSS at 1836(!).
Kitchen is now in the hands of a dear friend, who designs and manufactures this sort of thing. Passed a preliminary design his way and the rest is up to him. Despite the kitchen's small size, I do not anticipate speediness; probably 2-3 months if I were to guess. Time moves very differently in Egypt.
Few days of existence without handymen around. Have all but forgotten what my routine used to look like and feel like I need to retrain myself all over again. The idea was that Cairo would allow for the space and time to do all things creative, but it hasn't quite turned out that way, not yet.
(Photo above taken in downtown Cairo.)
A most suffocating heatwave swept through the country last week, but it broke over the last couple days and a most pleasant breeze—cool and minty—is making its way through the studio this morning.
Plumbing and electric work are finally done, as is all the wall and floor fixups they necessitated (although, a couple more wall touchups would be ideal but I'm just way too drained to deal with them). Next up: the actual fucking kitchen.
Debris cleanup was a full 3-day process after electrician tore into walls. I'm starting to believe that the vast majority of Cairo dust is really the result of construction debris. There's so much across the city and it never ends.
Will no longer look down on drywall. Perhaps there are some benefits to using it after all.