What's Up - Late June 2022

 "Everyone prefers belief to the exercise of judgement." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Career Autobiography part 12 - Hermiston Generating Plant

 "Adapt yourself to the life you have been given; and truly love the people with whom destiny has surrounded you." - Marcus Aurelius

Dead Pool

"We are mad, not only individually but nationally.  We check manslaughter and isolated murders, but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?" - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Career Autobiography Part 11 - Elk Hills

 "Don't let yourself forget how many doctors have died, furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds.

How many astrologers after pompous forecasts about other's ends.

How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality

How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves.

How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they themselves were immortal.

How many whole cities have met their end: Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others.

And all the ones you know yourself, one after another.

One who laid out another for burial, and was buried himself, and the man who buried him - all in the same short space of time.

Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.

To pass through this brief life as nature demands.

To give it up without complaint.

Like an olive that ripens and falls.

Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on." - Marcus Aurelius

Living a Lie

 "But when you are looking on anyone as a friend when you do not trust him as you trust yourself, you are making a grave mistake, and have failed to sufficiently grasp the full force of true friendship." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Tonsils and Three Albums

 "As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.'  But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself?  He ever follows himself as his own most burdensome companion.  And so we ought to understand that which we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Career Autobiography part 10 - La Paloma

 "Whether you are shivering with cold or too hot, sleepy or wide-awake, spoken well or badly, dying, or doing anything else, do not let it interfere with doing what is right.  For whatever causes us to die is also one of life's processes.  Even for this, nothing is required of us than to accomplish well the task at hand." - Marcus Aurelius