It’s 8:45 am. I’ve been up for 5 hours.

Throughout the sixty-some-odd years that I have been alive, there has been and explosion in what might be called “substitutes”. First, it was things like margarine (substitute butter) and saccharine (substitute sugar), but it rapidly picked up the pace until we find ourselves in a world with substitute society (social media), substitute advisors (artificial intelligence) and even substitute friends and other intimate relationships.

However, there is as yet no substitute for sitting outside on a chilly hillside watching the November sun come up, which I did this morning.

There are, of course, no real substitutes for any of things I mentioned before. There are only things people want us to buy from them to use as substitutes. None of these things is better than the originals, although some of them arguably aren’t worse either; they are just new things, with new sets of tradeoffs involved. If, for instance, “social media” sites like Facebook or Instagram were still called “message boards”, their actual use would be clearer. This isn’t a new society, it’s a way of passing messages around; “society” is a much more complex thing.

I use an iPhone to take pictures of the hills. The phones of today are often people’s go-to in complaining about people’s over-reliance on technology and addiction to constant interaction (particularly among the young), and there is something in that, of course. However, constant interaction has its predecessors, like the teen of my youth who would spend hours a day on the house phone with friends, or the teen of an even earlier generation who had to constantly be at the skating rink or mall or soda shop or drive-in or wherever the teen action of that time was. The fact that young people are extremely social creatures is not new. We older people who’ve seemingly forgotten what it felt like just think it is.

None of the pictures I take are quite good enough; the one attached to this post is from a Ukrainian photographer, and is of an entirely different part of the world than I am in. This is part of the fakery of the modern age, where even when trying to tell you about something that actually happened (like watching the sunrise), there is some element of deception involved.

Being phony comes naturally to me, sadly. I didn’t need the modern age to do it, I had been doing it for some time before that. The actual me is pretty dull, and my habit of making everything I ever did sound more interesting than it actually was has been a long time in the making. It comes in handy when you have a blog, I guess; anyway, a dry recitation of what actually happened in personal situations seems beyond my ability. I embellish, therefore I am — or something.

One of the things that makes my life dull is that it is a fairly happy one. The primary source of fuel for what is interesting in modern life seems to be discontent, and I used up a good portion of mine years ago. I now have a wonderful wife, a good job, great kids, great grandkids, and a great extended family, and all of us at present are more-or-less healthy.

Poor health and death await us all of course. But this doesn’t rob life of its value, it makes the time we get that much more valuable.

One part of life that adds to overall happiness for me is sports. Or at least, it can. When my teams lose, it detracts from happiness. But that’s part of the way sports works. Learning to deal with failure has to be one of the top 3 things anyone in life can possibly learn, and probably the top thing no one ever learns to do perfectly. So there are always lessons there.

The stream pictured above is in honor of what has turned out to be a “stream-of-consciousness” essay.

Yesterday and today were the first two cold days we’ve had here in Georgia this Autumn. I enjoy cold in ways only someone from a warm climate can. People I know from cold climates get so much of the cold that they can scarcely even remember what it felt like to experience its novelty. This is kind of how I’ve become when it comes to getting excited about politics: it is very difficult for me to do, given that it seems like I’ve seen it all before about a 140,000 times.

But each of us must experience life in our own way from our own perspectives, and I understand the high feelings attendant with politics.

Another thing that has soured me on politics over the years was the dawning realization that I could barely manage my own life, and that perhaps I wasn’t the person best suited to tell everyone else how they should live. Now, people who follow politics are no more likely than average to power/control freaks, but the majority of people who actually go into politics as a profession are somewhere out there on the power/control freak spectrum. You have to believe you know better than everyone else how they other people should live — which seems messed up to me.

It is 9:45 am now, and my “timed write” is over. Happy November to all of you.