Dreams of freedom and fears of a vague, impending disaster occupy my mind now. I keep my personal life out of this “pseudo-blog” as much as possible and I won’t intrude with it here either, except to say that I will be in Colombia soon for the first time and perhaps soon after that for a second and much longer stay.
I have had time to ruminate lately as I work a manual labor job (working with metal in a factory). Most of my thoughts have been fruitless wanderings down cerebral garden paths that led no where of any importance. I spent several hours working out FOREX risk/return calculations in my head and fantasizing about compound interest, spreads and minimum stop-losses on major currency pairs, and using Fibonacci retracements as a strategy. I convinced myself to try again with another demo account and I did make some good money my first days after working trying it out. But I didn’t really truly grasp what was moving the prices and it was little more than a guessing game in the end— albeit one with sensible risk-reward ratios that minimize losses and amplify gains—and it isn’t a viable plan with which I would put real money to work yet.
Another day this past week I worked through plot lines of a novel I had been tumbling around in my head. I am still wrestling with the basic logic of the plot. I mean plot in two ways here, because at the heart of the novel is a grand plot to rule the world. The two plots, the one of the events of the novel and the one that is the plan to rule the world which drives the events of the novel, have been advancing slowly and with some regression. I have hit some stumbling points in the practicality of how the characters would execute their grand scheme. This more than once has brought to mind the Umberto Eco novel, Foucault’s Pendulum in which the writing about the all encompassing, ancient conspiracy is inextricably intertwined with the conspiracy itself and the reader and writer of this Gnostic fiction become hopelessly entangled in a web of intrigue. Working out these issues as a novel is, in some ways, both my own way of living vicariously the characters and of my own plan for global conquest for which I still hold out hope. There will be more information to come on this subject…and hopefully a full novel as well.
These are the wanderings of a mind that otherwise would feel the effects of boredom. Fears of this encroaching doom haven’t bothered me much lately, in part because it feels so inevitable that I have given up worrying about it for the time being. The issue has been discussed at great length elsewhere and in my publications and educational videos, and I may devote some posts about my explanations of it in this blog in the near future (when I have the initiative to provide some more factual data and citations). It is basically an economic rebalancing of the world and the massive pain that this will cause before the change is complete. The ripples caused by fears of a Greek sovereign debt default were the most minor presages of what is to come. The domino effect predicted for the other PIIGS (Portugal Italy Ireland Greece Spain) may or may not happen. If it does, this may or may not push the world over the edge. But the United States itself is what worries me even more than these European countries now. Our debt as a percentage of GDP is on par with several of the PIIGS countries, our fiscal policies are out of control and our monetary policy is just as ludicrous. Healthcare costs are rising much higher than the rest of the inflation rate (17% last year, if memory serves me) and this is at a time when we are transitioning to a system of government healthcare that has been bankrupting European nations. We pay off our debts by taking out newer and larger debts. When this debt cycle finally begins to cascade downwards, the entire world system will be shaken to its core. Will a downgrade by a credit rating agency cause it? Will government reform lead to this calamity? Will a natural disaster push us over the brink? I don’t know yet. I see a collapse and rebalancing as inevitable but cannot predict the moment when this will take place.
I say dreams of freedom (see the opening sentence) perhaps because after years of being tied to a school (either as student or teacher) I have some money, some wanderlust, and plans to combine the two along with a change of location. Individuality is something that I value (which I owe to my cultural education) on a personal level but at the same time I prize stability, regularity, and safety. Freedom is for most of us now, financial freedom. With enough money, we can live where we want and how we desire. We can do what we please and move freely. Money buys the rights we maintain too, in a way, in our modern corporatocracies, though very rarely is it our money and it is usually our freedoms being sold rather than bought.
I want to create. I want to make. I am to move and change and feel secure while I do it. I want to be in control of my life. I want to be respected. I want to be loved. I have noticed that my sentences begin with “I want”. It is the mood I am in tonight: self centered and full of desire in all of my musings.
If I move to Colombia long term, I will begin a personal blog of my experience and this blog will tend to be more impersonal (and at times, abstract).
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