Carl Setzer

My team is reading Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Just read a line about young SEAL leaders in training who "often try to develop a course of action that accounts for every tingle possibility they can think of".  I get stuck in that thinking, too.  Besides creating a exceptionally overly complex plan that's very hard for everyone to understand, I found that this comes from a place of fear with me. I develop these mammoth plans as I try to build a counter for everything my fears percolate out. Faith and trust in the mission, for me, has always built the simple plans.

Half this year... We're moving into the middle of the year. Striking to me. I know it's a trope But time seems to pass by Faster... ....Far faster .......Than before With that, I'm thinking of returning to Blogger, at least for a while. Recapturing my roots, I guess. As well as simplifying things. My life became overfull, with so very much slipping. Quality; so very important to me, failing. Quality and Mr. Pirsig, my main take away from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . Blogger's not as clean as WordPress. There's more work to getting the site just right. I'm curious to see if I can be satisfied. We shall see!

My parents might need to be brought up on child-neglect charges: I had not heard of Leo Lionni until my son insisted we buy some of his books. Laughably, I assumed that Leo Lionni was a character, much like Junie B. Jones (consider the alliterative). I’ve learned otherwise. The recent purchase, “ Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse ” has been a delight to read. Exploring the art, I expect Eric Carle’ s art was inspired by Lionni’s. As I delight in literature, I wonder why I’ve never encountered his name. Then I wonder if I haven’t. My journey as a father is laden with discovery. Discovering so much that I would expect to have known. Perhaps my mother read to me from Lionni and Carle every night. I do not remember. I do remember such seminal works as “ Harry: The Dirty Dog ”, though. Strange thing, memory. I delighted in Dr. Suess , too. I wonder, at times, whether too much has been lost from my childhood memory. The loss of my mother took with it so much memory. Those moments that w...

I just finished up “Greasy Rider”, by Greg Melville . The premise captured me: two guys (dudes per the cover) driving across the country (from Burlington, Vermont to Berkeley, California) in a veggie-oil powered car. That, to me, sounds awesome. A nice book, more than just a travelog. Melville takes a pretty good (if not in-geeky-depth) look at the alternative fuels industry, it’s players and their motivations. He also side-trips, so to speak, into other areas of the green-movement (such as green building). He has one observation that I agree with wholeheartedly: America, as a society, has lost (to a large degree) it’s ability to sacrifice. People do seem to want their solutions handed to them, in pretty packaging. Those of us who try to see things at a larger level, who try to live with some kind of higher calling tend to be regarded with ridicule and contempt. The greatest irony is the worst of the contempt-mongers delight in cloaking themselves in a shroud of morality. Sad, dist...

At a bookstore I wondered about the books I held. I'm not drawn as strongly to the big titles, best sellers or well known authors. Sure, I buy them from time to time, but they aren't the ones that it's painful to walk away from. I love the books from smaller voices, voices that don't have the million dollar marketing campaign. Those books are hard to leave, for they often don't come into my life again. They are gems, hard to see wrapped in earth, and shameful to leave behind.