Love this

I loved reading your experience, there’s a flip side that I’ve been experiencing in my life recently.

I have always been a minimalist and an anti-materialist, never really attached to “things” very much.

Late last year I decided to start getting into electronics and to do that, I would buy only broken things for the cheapest dollar, and then deduce and figure, and educate myself on how they work and how to repair them. It’s a great way to connect to the memory of my grandfather who grew up in the depression, and taught me how to make things from nothing.

Anyways, a couple of critical things happened… I was out buying a $5 TV and as I was bringing it home, I saw the exact same TV in the dumpster next to my building. I took the one I purchased upstairs, and I couldn’t escape the thought that I just bought something that I could have dragged out of a garbage can. So I did something I hadn’t done before, and I went and picked it out of there.

That was a very educational moment because it taught me immediately that even two very similar televisions, from the same year, from the same manufacturer, can have different inverter boards and connectors and pinouts and everything’s just a giant FU to hobbyists and the whole right to repair concept. It’s sort of blew my mind coming from a place where I built PCs for decades and really had the PC mindset not general electronics.

That put me more into a salvage mindset, where I figured if I was going to learn how to cobble things together, I was going to have to get a variety of things, and deepen my understanding.

And this sort of addiction, I can honestly say, started to form for salvaging and scrapping discards. I started to make a point of passing by dumpsters on my way back from grocery. I started to drag all manner of electronics and shit out! Record players, amplifiers, stereos, speakers, fans… What the hell I thought to myself, there’s just free junk everywhere?!!

I started to repair and have so much fun, and I guess I succeeded with my plan of just gathering crap to learn the hobby! Most of the things I ended up working on and fixing and playing with weren’t even the stuff I planned on, but it expanded my horizons so much.

On I go lol…

Eventually I crossed the mental threshold of going from hard plastic and metal electronics that really couldn’t have pests on them, really just dirt…, to other types of materials and things I would never have considered even touching next to a dumpster. All of a sudden I started to realize so many things that I paid money for, were literally just sitting there like dressers, shelves, carpets, lamps, quality cookware, all kinds of stuff!!! And I am not talking about some beaten-to-rat-shit stained piece of garbage, I am talking about new items that you cannot literally understand why anyone would dispose of.

Some items are notably filthy, like the brand new Xbox that had banana peels on it, guess they didn’t know you could fix an HDMI output. They live a block or two from me and they pay $4,000 per month rent for the exact same square footage I pay $1,000 so I guess there you go. My point is, not one thing enters my zone before being cleaned within an inch of its life because I’m aware of the potentials. I have other routines as well that are not germane to this comment. It needs to be said though, because if anybody’s taking inspiration, you need to be deadly serious about pests.

I just got a $600 Dyson vacuum because they didn’t know you could clean the motor filter. $4,000 of solid wood furniture because the posts fell out of the shelving and they couldn’t be bothered to just stick them back in or glue the ones that were loose. A boombox that makes the new gen Bose SoundLinks sound like talking greeting cardaf rom Hallmark by comparison - by this point I’ve learned enough electronics that I added in a Bluetooth board from a salvaged shower speaker, powered by lithium ion batteries salvaged from disposable vapes, and now this thing rocks my block! It’s all garbage!!

I found a painting that I’ve discovered was once “worth” $4,000. My apartment is filled with the most beautiful Italian glass, people pay for it on the local boards upwards of $80 per piece and it’s just laying in garbage cans. All the art on my wall is classic record covers and sleeves when people move out they just leave their collections and boxes. Today I got a fire extinguisher new in box and outer wrap, a NIB powered precision screwdriver set with tamper-proof torx bits, a NIB 1 lb camping propane tank full… It’s lunacy my friends.

I started to just give things away. I collect things just to take them home, clean them, and give them to the next person so they can give me something cool back.

I don’t ever feel the need to go out and buy anything other than food now.

I have realized that literally every single thing that I need in the world can just be picked up by walking over and getting it. It requires a different mindset which means you have to have a continual mental list of things you need, and you just have to know that the lottery machine of life is going to pay off and you just mentally took them off as you grab them.

So it’s been a way to have amazing stuff in my life for the first time ever, not feel attached to it and feel like I can throw it all away right now, and just get it all again tomorrow if I want. I never have to put my stuff in boxes and move again, it’s just going to go in a heap.

No matter what I pick up and salvage, I find something better a week later. I now have a four 55-in televisions and I do not even watch TV. I literally do not ever turn them on. Unless I need to watch a video on how to fix a TV like the one I just turned on. An Xbox, a PlayStation, a Nintendo handheld, a Harman Kardon complete amplifier system, a complete surround sound set, a complete karaoke set. It’s an absolute embarrassment of riches from garbage. That’s not even half of it.

Yes … Note 1 = listen

Nice post, looking forward to this now

Why do people hate this man’s music so much

Never get up votes on the links, and this one is the first I’ve ever had downvoted

The guys a genius - I don’t get it? The live version of Pastel Mornings is one of the most rocking jazz tunes in history too

Everybody has their tastes, I literally just don’t get this

TRVTH

… Mind- and heart-boggling …

So sad the posted album got pulled.

Pastel Morning in this slams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxE8znWw9Wo&t=663s

There is soooooo much I don’t like, but I listen anyways, and I frequently find that initial discomfort gifts me with expanded range.

This is groovy.

I’m rocking the full album right now, great share!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBABFJyRNrg&list=OLAK5uy_lW46D3PtAk2nY_k-fpuTfGkbkysQJhrG4

Careful. Most of what “we” are taught is complete horse-shit, or at the very least a severely simplified and perverted version of underlying reality. Many people, even those who work with electricity daily,are going to go cross-eyed hearing this notion. It requires real understanding I’m afraid.

Edit, I mean you guys can downvote me all you want, but I’ve only spent 30 years doing this shit lol … Remember, if you’re going to talk to somebody that you hold in esteem re your unfamiliar topic of electromagnetism… Remember that they aren’t holding pioneering knowledge in their minds… They’re hooking up wires, checking voltages, plotting circuits, making sure telephone interference isn’t present, and that’s it. It doesn’t matter how well versed one is in electronics or electricity, 99.99% chance ones’s not thinking about these deeper subjects. I know a hell of a lot more than I let on and if you can’t see that, you need help lol

I think he was just intuitively good at seeing what exactly is the portrayal of electricity and magnetism. A unique genius with a certain insight.

I sometimes feel that there were many businesses concerns that grew around his early research and they were so successful that his newer research must have been a threat to that.

Through all the mystery, half-truths, and frankly magical thinking people have with this man, it’s really hard to know what he was up to in his final days of work, before he became a homeless bag-man. I somehow feel, without making any kind of declarative statement, that he was working on transmission of energy with longitudinal (vs transverse) waves, and discovering methods of conveying and extracting electrical potential from and through Earth.

Inline Edit: To expand on the above paragraph: The Earth doesn’t really “absorb” electrons like a pillow absorbing a ping pong ball. The energy in the negative charges that the Earth grounds must move in waves, therefore they’re grounded but now the waves are bouncing around in the Earth; that energy still exists and may sum with other waves in an additive way. I believe, again without making a declarative statement, that Tesla recognized this and was pioneering research on how to transmit energy via, and gather momentum from those waves. There were successes transmitting energy and encoded information through Earth which can be repeated today with garbage dump salvage electronics. I believe he was discovering a few dangerous things as well: Harmonic discharges of electrical devices to ground could be captured (think telecommunications and military); and he was conducting novel elemental research on tapping Earth to harmonize and extract force(s) - what these things portended led to his complete scientific alienation.

The word “free energy” always obliterates any form of rational discourse. But there was something to it in a way, but to clarify, not in a literal way. Not in the sense of violating fundamental laws of conservation, rather seeing the “other side of the coin” that if the Earth is effectively infinite Ground then it’s also effectively an “infinite” source of power if harvested.

I’ve never really “researched” the man directly but what I do know comes from quite a bit of my casual STEM self-study over decades.

Imagine disregarding the entire domain of Tesla’s work - changing the entire world as we know it with his research and innovations - and the comment they need to make for online points is some virtue-oriented pat-me-on-the-back-im-ethical blorp about random social norms of the time. lol but cry.

I probably have at some point, but may I suggest you post it to the community

Oh God it’s so hard to read that kind of stuff yeah I agree.

Personally, when we are touched by genius like this, I would never dare call anybody’s character into question, they can be whoever they want if they produce this kind of thing and change the world!

Yes it was something to do with insanity or philosophy or mindset or… then the producers decided, apparently from what I’ve read, to name it this to set expectations. Who knows, probably a lot of what we read is half-truths in the realm of jazz

edit: I actually like this title, as I feel it resonates with the way I feel when I hear it

edit2: Yeah, it’s actually quite audacious to call it such a thing. But then they delivered the goods. So that shuts a person up lol

I mean… this is just wild. The second half, honestly, felt very challenging to me but so rewarding in the end.

No, what is happening is a lot of hot wind is being expelled and the word quantum computing is being thrown around.

There is nothing actually concrete that has been realized, or will be realized.

It’s a huge fucking investment sham.

A wonderful idea that should have been pursued, immediately revealed to be garbage, it’s never going anywhere.

Hey I mean it’s fun to make snappy comments, but it’s a joke. There is no merit to the underlying principles in quantum mechanics, it’s a giant shell game, and it’s all about investments and the PhD machine. It’s all phony, take it from somebody who did 30 years of game development and comp sci. It’s fucking nonsense.

I’m not sure where I’m at with this one. I like it, but it feels like bananas and lime. Things I like that don’t work together.

Like all Ornette Coleman albums, I couldn’t be doing another thing at the same time, the music demands my attention! Lol

I just want to talk.

I made it big. Huge. Motherfucking huge. I bought and paid off my house in 2 years, was taking 5 major trips a year, had all the bullshit.

Wasn’t ever a materialist and was frugal, not cheap. Tried to take the lessons of my grandfather who grew up in the depression with literally nothing, and where he taught me over many years that everything is priceless and worthless at the same time. He was 1000x the father to me than my booze-bag sperm-donator male called my “dad”.

That piece of wire on the ground might save your life. It might just be another piece of shit. One day you go and buy some wire for $11 because you need it, other times you walk past $11 of free wire laying there because you have no immediate need or want for it. I was too spoiled and precious to get it. I want my meat packaged on a Styrofoam tray and there needs to be cartoons on things. No you shouldn’t make me a home made metal detector out of a broken FM radio, lacquered wire and a 9V battery because then I won’t be cool.

Through my life and path, I discovered no matter how much material stuff, no matter how lovely the accouterments of my life, no matter how many “freedoms” and experiences I had stemming from my financial wherewithal, there was an underlying thing at the core, the kernel of my being, that had been neglected my whole life. For I was never taught to see it and know it. I hated myself and hated my life and refused to look through the telescope to see that.

I didn’t really find any of this out until I had a humiliation that provoked the beginning of my thoughts of personal transformation. I later heard Miles’ Kind of Blue for the first time, by myself, in a separate bed from my pill-popping wine-guzzling wife, wearing Bluetooth headphones. I had smoked a grain of cannabis, my first return to it in about 20 years. Something touched me and I cried. One photon of light hit me somewhere and I couldn’t unsee it.

I later arrested my rage-drinking, or demon-drinking as I sometimes say. When the magical fairy wand didn’t dispense the fairy dust on my life and render everything into utopia, I intuited my power-drinking was a mere behavior and really had effectively nothing to do with the underlying issue. Or perhaps it did in the same sense that water in a boat isn’t the issue, it’s the rotted holes and splits in the hull.

I aimed myself at discovery and self-transformation and opened myself to anything from which I could take something useful and apply it to my own perspective. After getting into 5 years of heavy therapy which I pursued with vigor, something happened. I connected to that thing that I didn’t know existed.

My life exploded, I effectively went insane, but not insane enough to lose sight of that photon. I lost everything because I was not able to care for myself. I ballooned to 135kg.

I had $280,000 in my chequing account at one point, 100K of random investments, and I was living in my car and eating at shelter. I was fucked.

Anyhow.

Now my shit is together. I have 1BR apartment and I will never ask or take more. I refuse. I pull things out of dumpsters, clean them, use what I can and give away the rest. I repair electronics and sell them to survive in part. My community is Harkness Station, a bus shelter in the freezing cold snowbank called Winnipeg, where people live - many suffering addiction and abandoned by humanity. These are my friends and I bring them home-cooked food, water, tea, sugar-laden 3am coffee, hygiene, relief of all sorts. My friend Alex who did 4 years hard time for an armed-robbery he set-up, spoke to me about getting sober 2 days ago. He’s heard my story but I’ve never heard those words on his lips before.

Hear what I’m saying please.

I got an inheritance from my sperm-donors estate and gave it away. There were more than 5 zeroes digits on it.

I am moving to Zen. All of the problems in my life are my own creation.

My grandfather gave me something priceless. My new community at Harkness showed me you can live with nothing.

We put all of this together and I can say with confidence I’ll live in a car (which I don’t have anymore because I gave it away), eat at the “missions” and be happy as a motherfucker. Whatever bro. I’m happy inside, I can care for me, and I need nothing but basic elements of mechanical survival. edit: How silly of me. I forgot the most important thing of all, perhaps so intuitive to me it needed not be said, but I think it should be said. I also need the love of humanity and connection to community for we are all one. And where I have no community I will make one because I also need that.