Kite Flight
Warring kites battle for land, a weapon of string fast in your hand
the Duckstack in the sky keeps on turnin
The first step in getting ready for The Duckstack is meditation. You must center your mind, to get into the right frame, a state of total preparedness for The Duckstack experience. This state is known as “stacked”. Go ahead. Close your eyes1, take a moment, and really try to feel the state of being stacked. Every time you correctly feel that state, make a mental tally mark, to keep track. But don’t make a very deep tally mark, because if you focus on it too much you’ll lose your stack. Just a shallow tally mark, for every time you’ve stacked.
ohmmm
Maybe a tally mark isn’t ideal for you. I can see a few problems with this system myself, since you have to count each individual tally mark each time to remember where you were. Okay, try a progress bar. 10% stacked. 20% stacked. 50%.
ohmmm
okay actually progress bars can be a little bit of a problem too. you have to visualize them and not everyone is that great at that. If your progress bar sucks we’ll need to figure something else out for your meditation. Maybe instead of using your feeble and insufficient mental resources, we can keep track of things in real life? Okay, to meditate, grab a whole bunch of candles, at least a bucket worth, and dump them in front of you. Each time you stack, light a candle. Be sure to keep your eyes closed though, you don’t want to break meditation.
ohmmm
Okay, you have lit your house on fire. You are now truly stacked.
The Grateful Dead
“If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”2
Like all toddlers, my kids are not always perfect at handling their emotions3. We dropped my wife off at walmart to do some Easter shopping while I took the kids to Dollar Tree, a store where everything costs a slightly different amount than a dollar. I told both the 3 and 1 year old: You can each pick 5 items. This is an exercise in discipline and reward deferment, because if they grab everything they see then they won't have slots for things in the future, and helps them to visualize what's most important to them, all within a riotous shopping spree framework. It was a lot of fun- The toddler grabbed a plate for some reason, and then was mostly content to just push the cart around and that was his idea of a good time, and Jethro grabbed some toys and candy. Great.
Returning to Walmart to pick my wife up, Jethro saw some candy stick that must have looked so fun he was willing to throw away his whole life to attain it, and we were like, “no”, because we already just got a bunch of stuff for him as well as Easter treats and all sorts of (in our mind) luxuries and we didn’t want to go back to buy it, and he was like “put them all back so I can have this candy stick thing” which struck my wife as a little bit ungrateful. The stomping and screaming did not help only through an extreme intervention of mercy did he avoid getting neither.
You see, as parents, we want to give good things to our kids, but we also want our kids to appreciate those things, and us them well, and not be used once and then pile up collecting dust, and not get spit on the instant our kid sees some other colorful thing that he wants. Once he started throwing a tantrum, it was like “Okay, now I don’t want to give you anything.” And I wish to impress upon you that God is like this.
God loves to give treats to his children who appreciate treats from God the most. That’s it.
I don’t mean this in a prosperity gospel sort of way- God put you here to live your life and he is not going to exempt you from the toil of it, but there are actually many blessings that God wants to give us, but which are conditioned upon our asking for it, or as the Savior taught, which are conditioned upon our faith. If you are grateful for what God does for you then he is more likely to do more, and grander miracles. This is another way of saying you tend to get more of what you look for, but you need to remember the human element- if you are ungrateful for what God has given you, he will just stop doing so, because you don’t seem to notice its him anyway4.
So when Christ says “consider the lilies” he is advising a perspective shift away from worry, to focusing more on God. If you want to fight and wrestle for everything you gain yourself, so that you can take credit for it, God is certainly just going to let you. But if you want to give him the credit, and have him take care of you, and have him give you stupid candy sticks, then you need to focus very much on appreciating what he has already done for you, “For in nothing is God offended but that man who does not confess his hand in all things5”. The chief “sin” of my son wasn’t in wanting a candy stick6, it was ingratitude. Gratitude to God is a massive ingredient in the recipe for faith, which is nowhere sufficiently taught. Two parts action, one part belief, and four to eight parts gratitude, this is faith in Christ. Knead until thorough, season to taste. Faith isn’t the only recipe that uses gratitude though.
Another story. Missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have strict rules but little supervision, an odd position where you can get some very goody-two-shoes type missionary parings, and also some more we’ll say “shoot from the hip” types, especially since missionary companionships are temporary and switched up every few months at somewhat random. And they’re young too, so you get a pretty mixed bag, and one time the missionary Elders in the city next to me did some really stupid stuff that cost everyone a lot of money and grief. What happened is a couple of missionaries decided to see how far they could drift their (church loaned) car in the church parking lot7. They floored it at one end and managed a perfect 50 meter slide directly into the side of the church building8. This was a suboptimal outcome.
Alma 39:11 Suffer not yourself to be led away by any vain or foolish thing; … Behold, O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw your conduct they would not believe in my words.
There was a lot of trouble, those two elders were banned, the car was an accordion so I assume it was totaled, and it rather dramatically damaged the trust the local members of the church had in the missionaries. I wish to impress upon you that the recklessness of these missionaries was a function of ingratitude9- for their opportunity to preach the gospel, for the car the church had loaned them (most missionaries have to bike!), for the opportunity to hang out at the church building in their downtime at all, all of it was spit upon and sacrificed on the alter of a 50 meter drift. I’m sure it was extremely metal10 but do not do this.
When you are grateful for what you have, you take care of it. And when you take care of things, you work against entropy to refill the societal commons rather than trashing the place. Gratitude may be thought of as similar to picking up litter or returning a shopping cart this way. Any given community you find yourself in will be able to function more effectively, and God will smile on you, as a parent who enjoys giving his children treats, as long as they enjoy it.
Kites: A Review
I don’t think anyone has ever done a review for kites on substack before ever, and I don’t intend to start
Are kites good? I don’t know. It hasn’t been windy enough to test ours out.
HISTORYRY
the history in the sky keeps on turnin
“My brother got a hoop at dollar shop” Dollar tree is dollar shop now
Butchered all the roosters, one after another. It was hard, because we loved them, or most of them anyway, not the mean ones, but like we would rather keep them, but we live in a suburb and roosters are a noise nuisance for our neighbors. They were also a nuisance to my wife, who gets annoyed by crowing. So it was like a festering splinter, and the only real way to remove it was to eat them, which meant we had to kill them. I don’t know that either my wife or I is really “cut out” for butchering- too much heart. It did not feel good to kill them. But on the other hand, it needed to be done, and now that it is done we feel better. There is some grand analogy in here perhaps, about excisive trauma for the long term good. IDK
Jethro has taken to saying “what are you doing here?” when he sees us. Like… I… Live here? I thought?
Easter was this week11, we had two hunts, one around our house, and one at grandmas. One trick my brother-in-law came up with was to color code the eggs to each kid, to keep things fair. But then once the hunt was done he and his wife were like "time for an easter egg hunt for the adults! And he and the kids re-filled all the eggs and re-hid them everywhere, except, you know, a lot more hidden than previously. On roofs and buried under rocks and inside of stacked cinder blocks and stuff. One of the interesting twists we experienced is in the middle of the hunt the kids would go and retroactively move the eggs and re-hide them in places you already looked and stuff, which added quite a bit of, uh, challenge. I lost (2nd place) by conspiracy
“I love you, my sweetie” “Uh, actually you love both of your sweeties.” Child I will take your extremely pedantic affection regardless
All of them
Matthew 7:11
To my 1 year old: Stop being such a baby
D&C 88:33 For what doth it profit a man if a gift is bestowed upon him, and he receive not the gift? Behold, he rejoices not in that which is given unto him, neither rejoices in him who is the giver of the gift.
I want him to want candy sticks. Heck, I want candy sticks
turned out to be about 15 parking stalls
It wasn’t wrong to want to do fast drifts in the parking lot, I want to do fast drifts in the parking lot
metal through the church building
I bet you didn’t know
one time my comp drifted the car but that was out of black ice and not ingratitude