Today's post title comes from an old favorite album that would reverberate in my high school truck. I played Aerosmith's Big Ones way too loud as I drove way too fast. And what a kind of guy drives shirtless?

I had a momentary relapse: I was ever-so-tempted to design my own Wordpress theme, a bit more of a project than casually coming up with my own HTML/CSS combo to run in Jekyll. As I'm retooling...revamping...organizing—well, whatever you want to call it—for 2023, it makes little sense to hold onto an older approach.

I like Jekyll. I like saving each post in its own text file, not lost in some database. I even like writing in markdown as I tag "**"'s and "##"'s. And rendering those text files into HTML code is an efficient process as it leaves behind a snappy website; the geek side of me just drools over this! But, 2023 will not be about the technical machinations that grow no fruit. It's not about the short and clean bit of CSS code that no one reads. Unbeknownst to the visitor, every tour to my place stamped these words onto their computer's cache:

Try to be best
'Cause you're only a man
And a man's gotta learn to take it
Try to believe
Though the going gets rough
That you gotta hang tough to make it
History repeats itself
Try and you'll succeed
Never doubt that you're the one
And you can have your dreams!

And while I do enjoy weaving this wizardry, why do I do it in of itself? What's the net? It made me think: I don't want to spend 2023 engrossed with the technical over the substance. While there clearly is the tactical is a critical function to support, it is the strategic that's really in play. Or in my case, I just want to be more creative—not slather myself up and launch into a papier-mâché'd hot dog sort of nonsense, but creative in the entire sphere of my life!

The other night I was working on a spreadsheet replacement for my beloved GNUCash, software that I've run for over 11 years. While I don't have a clean solution (yet) for its double-entry accounting aspect, I look forward to creating a system that more readily gives me projections rather than tossing a history tome.

I ask myself, "How should I invest my resources? What is my objective?" Once our air, water and food needs are met (I don't buy into the distinctly separate shelter rhetoric), how do we best address the attainment of those unlimited desires in the context of a limited supply? Setting parameters to desire is critical—the chase has no value; I don't want to live the "Betcha can't eat just one" life. I do NOT want to be Tom Brady as dissatisfaction and entropy overwhelm him.

We don't really treat money as a resource...and add to it, we don't treat TIME as a resource, at least not on a personal level. Maybe we just forget because of their liquidity? I don't know if we think in terms of how these resources are most effectively used to reach our objective. We just..ballet pirouette into a ball pit, slap-happy drunk.

Then again, there are moments when for effect, we apply our resources toward achieving that which...has all the value of a carefree stumble down a cotton-candy-and-fruitcake staircase. Mark Rober's attempt of dropping an egg from space immediately comes to mind. While his optics may be that his subtext is something different; it has nothing to do about eggs reaching terminal velocity, but everything to do with showing kids (and me) the value of learning physics, mathematics and engineering (then there's that whole click thing). Clearly, no one has asked for an untracked egg from space. But, I suspect the payload aspect comes into play for future colonization. It's not the destination. As Aerosmith sings:

And how high can you fly with broken wings?
Life's a journey, not a destination
And I just can't tell just what tomorrow brings

OK, admittedly the journey bit is a cliché, but I find the line above it to be rather haunting...or at least underscores the value of parametric expectations...and the third line just comes off as Cast Away to me.

What are our eggs—do we even have an egg? Why? And why (and how) do we launch (then drop them) if we do?