Lets try something different, why I do this?

Now, that is a good question!

And honestly I'm not sure either, maybe I'm just bored and a bored engineer can be a dangerous thing all by itself.

I like to believe we will get to some conclusions here together, but if not, I would like to try and convince you that we are creatures that dance.

Recently I finished reading a book called "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

Despite the title (fucking incredible title!), it's not a book that is trying to sell you Zen Buddhism or mechanical wisdom, it does not have a point at all. It really put some stuff into perspective for me, how dangerous it is to see what others don't, how close to madness the road to wisdom and self awareness can lead us... questioning reason itself is dangerous business after all.

Or how I found myself thinking today, as I washed rice for dinner, how I may look like for not owning an electric Japanese rice cooker.

The strange looks I get when I tell people I like mending my clothes or customizing my jackets.

How bizarre and peculiar it sounds when I explain I like studding new things even though I have well passed my graduation years and wish I could have took more care about it.

Things like mathematics and music and electronics or carpentry!

How useful it is to know how to properly sharp your kitchen knives on flat stones...

And to make bread...

How insane it looks like to write your own artisanal code while faced with the inevitability of Large Language Models (I refuse calling that shit AI), in a field that already has good and well established solutions for every taste and need.

The thing, you see, that most people miss, is that life is not at all about having rice.

It is, actually, all about cooking rice!

I always placed my life experiences in the light of philosophy, science and martial arts. Life itself was exclusively an intellectual experience, even the martial arts part, which I still dedicate myself profoundly.

It seamed to me, that was a powerful combination and there was something about me and my friends that was quite off. The questions we made, the answers we found, the games we played, it all looked so outside of most people experiences. Of course, although that was very authentic of us, it had nothing of original and teenagers will gladly grab any distinct traits they can find and hold to it for dear life.

That didn't last very long.

Authenticity is a word I really like. It resembles so closely the mad hero's Quality in the book (with capital Q! not ordinary quality at all), as he roars through the United States back roads in a motorcycle, chasing his ghosts. Originality is also a good word, I too now wonder if I "had any original thought in the last 20 years".

I found authenticity when I stumbled on Existentialism! And oh how much authenticity I have to show for myself!

At this point I had already given up on my professional carrier, tried becoming a chef and ended up becoming a great cook, tried working with coffee on a street market, changed cities, tried that chef thing one more time, worked as a barista for a wile and that was fun until it crashed and burned, started a backpack business that went no where but people still use and like what I built for them, translated some books on the topic of martial arts that nobody seams very interested in.

I gave a chance to parkour (the one that normal sane people do, not the YouTube kind), found some vikings training in the park, started my own historical combat studding group, found Karate again (which I still practice), gave a chance to Muay Thai...

Faced with the absurdity of living, finding no meaning for the torments of ones mind, we can hardly be blamed for completely throwing away the essence that was given before we were living for the essence that we found along the way. None of that however was meant to last either, a life in constant contemplation is a life hardly worth living. Existentialism, it seams to me anyway, ends abruptly, leaving one in an eternal liminal space of potential, paralyzed by all the variables as we ponder our authenticity and the Quality that it carries.

What happens next is of no short of wander! The hero of this history, the protagonist that talks to you right now, he finds his way into a professional boxing gym, into the hands of a very professional boxing trainer, who seeing the pathetic (but very hardworking) shell of a man in front of him, offers the only kindness he knows, in the form of a good old slap to the side of the head!!!!

How absurd to be conscious of it all.

How absurd it is to pay to dodge jabs aimed at your face for 3min at a time, with 1min in between (how gracious of them!).

How absurd of an experience, to try and pay back in kind and be thanked for it in the end.

And that... that was also not meant to last very long...

In a interview by David Brancaccio for NOW (PBS) (7 October 2005), Kurt Vonnegut, a man I not even knew existed but seams a really nice fellow, he is quoted saying:

"[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope]

Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?

And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore."

Apparently he is a very quotable person: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut

I still don´t know if we learned something here, I am one of those computer people after all.

If you still don't understand, go ride a bike, or dance, or just cook rice.

[TooOld2Rock'nRoll - Octuber 2025]