Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive
Oscar Wilde
It has turned chilly here in Central Ohio. And windy. But the skies are clear and blue and that makes the day just fine. Two of my dog walks are in the dark. One at 6:00am and one at 6:00pm. I also try to sneak in a mid-day walk or two, depending on work schedule.
I’ve each day been getting up earlier than usual and reading through the multi-page applications for scholarships we are offering through Namib Futures. We are offering 15 scholarships for 2026 and we have 23 applications. I go right to the bio’s after verifying some basic information. That’s where we see who they are. What are their dreams. What hardships they’ve overcome. What have they learned in their first two decades. These are all MYO alumni, which makes it even more special for me.
Occasionally I have a follow-up question so I will send a note to the student on WhatsApp or email. I do not know them, but they know of me due to my affiliation with MYO. When they respond, they address me as ‘Uncle’ which I find endearing. It makes me feel like I belong and have a presence in their lives. It feels like a privilege to be treated as they would treat someone from their culture.
When getting on a long plane flight, I’ll drink my weight in whisky or wine –but I’m always scared to take the recommended adult dosage of two sleeping pills.
I’m afraid they will cart me off on a stretcher and I’ll wake up 3 days later in a 6′ grave, screaming and scratching to get out. Or, they won’t see me on the plane when we land and I’ll wake up in turkey. I was raised in the age of Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug ads and I guess they worked for me.
I went into a shop in DC with Brittany and her brother once and we bought some CBD and I spent the next 30 minutes looking over my shoulder, waiting for DEA to roll up in black vans with guns and swat gear.
Black Dog Ridge feels more like home now than any home I’ve ever had. And I’ve had plenty. Or perhaps, just plenty of houses. Only a couple actually felt like home.
BDR is different. I designed and oversaw every aspect of this sprawling compound. Upgrading the tiny Amish hut to a real house. Closing in the little garage and building an outdoor kitchen complete with pizza oven and fireplace. Now a 2.5 car garage, doubled the size of the basement, added a fireplace in the living room and a 440 sf bedroom that sits 20’ above ground in the canopy and accessed by an elevated walkway.
Like all my big projects, I kick them off with a grand vision but no detailed plan to connect the beginning to the end. I figure it out along the way. This was how MYO got started and Senang and College Market and so many other things. I have faith the answers and money will come. That is not to say the projects are free from anxiety. There is always work to do and things to worry over. Money, frustration, time, reliance on others. My projects tend to be complicated and can be maddening. But hard work and persistence usually carry the day.
At BDR, it’s been a great partnership with Kenny. He does the actual work. We collaborate on design and materials, I pay for everything and he assembles everything. Each week a big pile of lumber, steel, fasteners, glass and all sorts of other building materials are piled up in the drive. By the end of the week, the pile is mostly gone — all those things having found their permanent place in the world. When I am here, we have a beer after work some days to admire the progress and discuss next steps and design decisions. Kenny is best in class — not just as a builder, but as a friend, family man and all around dude of dudes.
TOOM is another project that started with a vision and is now slowly taking shape. Each week we get closer to a functioning app. We still have a technical challenge to solve with our FIN App and payment processing platform and lots of bugs, but we are narrowing in. TOOM will come to life in 2026. Hopefully.
It’s near impossible to exist in this moment and not be haunted daily by deep rage. But I am trying. Lord knows I’m trying.
I’ve decided to lean into positivity on Trump’s destruction of the East Wing. I believe the big beautiful ballroom will never be built because Trump will be impeached or dead. We will then choose to build a beautiful new space dedicated to anti-Trump themes like diversity, inclusiveness and tolerance. And, it will be built by high paying union jobs with contracts going to minority owned businesses to make up for the fact the original White House was built largely by slaves.
That’s my happy view of that situation.
Marti is outside howling at the sky. She does this when the city siren goes off. There are few things that make me more proud of her. She is expressing her heritage. Following genetically encoded orders that no one truly understands. She is letting her ancestors know she is here and ready to be called to action when the big pack needs her. She is standing by sirs.
But it also makes me feel a little lonely for her. We love our dogs and they love us. But they should be living wild and free. Sleeping with their own kind, hunting in packs, taking time to play and to teach the next generation. Alas, the modern domesticated dog has evolved past that now I suppose. There is no going back. Their fates are now tied to ours.
I fear we will never get the satisfaction of seeing Trump behind bars. He has too much money and too much support from the poor ignorant folk who are dumb as fence posts. Bless their hearts. That is crude, I know. But I don’t know how else to characterize it. Perhaps, more charitably, we will just say they have been inducted into a cult and cannot see things clearly.
Besides, and this is important. If you prop up and embolden and empower a racist and sexist ignorant lunatic, then real people get hurt. Millions will die due to our curtailing efforts to address climate change. Hundreds of thousands have already died due to cutting US AID. Tens of thousands of human beings are being hunted and arrested and taken from their families and treated with indignation. And there are so many more being hurt by this lunatic that I can live with the mean-spiritedness of calling people dummies if they voted for Trump.
I am hopeful, with this Epstein mess, which is beginning to resemble the Whitewater turned Monica Lewinsky investigation, that this sticks to Trump like flies on a decomposing corpse in a Louisiana swamp. That might be the best we can get. Maybe analogous to Bill Cosby, recently deceased, who spent his last days isolated and alone in his darkened NY home. Let’s hope that Trump’s so-called friends abandon him as easily as they attached themselves to him because they thought they might pick up a quarter or two, and he also dies bitter, defeated, and alone.
I don’t generally feel good about retribution and vengeance, but Trump occupies a special place in my heart. A dark place. A place where I shove all the anger and hate I hold for the injustice of this cruel world. If we can’t file away these horrible realities somewhere, they will consume us.
I am in Akron for work. There is an excellent old school Italian restaurant just next to my hotel, which has an inviting bar. I will be here 6 or 8 days a month for the next 18 months or so. The bar bill be high. Incidentally, my per diem for the job nearly covers my bar tab, with nothing left for food. I will either lose money or lose weight. We’ll see.
In 2000 I was living in London, but had to travel to San Francisco once a month for a global team meeting. This meeting was meant to be all day, but more often than not it would get cut down to 3 or 4 hours because my boss was disorganized. A couple of times he cancelled the meeting, but only after I was already on a flight due west. In addition to this meeting, I was on flights all the time, all over Europe. That was just the way shit was done back in the day. The company (Siebel Systems) was growing like crazy and I had carte blanche to do whatever it took to hire and train people and keep bringing in new business.
It was pretty heady stuff at that time in my life. But it was also exhausting and eventually I started to develop a kind of disdain for the whole scene. It seemed at first like I had made it to some sort of club level that I thought I wanted, but once I was there I realized it was all a bunch of bullshit. Mostly boring, uncreative people doing meaningless tasks made to resemble valuable input. Posers. The real art and intelligence and soul in the world exists outside of this community.
Between airfare, hotels, meals etc, the monthly meetings in San Francisco usually cost the company around $30,000 or so since there were 6 of us that came in from various parts of the world. This was about the time that I started thinking about chucking it all in and moving to Africa. The corporate excess was just too much. I kept thinking about what someone (or a corporation) could do with $30,000 besides waste a bunch of people’s time listening to each other ramble on about inane corporate nonsense. It wore me down and soon after I did quit and moved to Namibia. I never really recovered from that initial revelation.
I still dabble in this balderdash to pay for my fun and MYO and all the other shit I have going on. Quitting and moving to Namibia I guess is a younger man’s game. For now at least, I am beholden to these fuckers — at least until I can pay off BDR.
Checking out of society is harder than people think — and the cost is steep. Not just financially — it’s a massive lifestyle change to live on top of a mountain and survive on bare subsistence income. No more basking in the sun on the beaches of Spain or flying to Singapore for a rugby tournament. Also, no more propping up charities, so there is abandonment of my duties there.
But it’s still an attractive proposition in many ways. Being close to the land and the animals and less time with people who suck the life from us and provide nothing in return. Grow our own food. Read more books. Write and create art. Learn to whittle.
At the Akron Children’s Hospital gift shop I bought two bracelets. Each is a symbolic reminder of two wild animals that I paid a little money to sponsor. The money (hopefully) goes to conservation efforts for endangered animals. I also get access to an app that shows the exact location of my wolf and elephant since they are wearing radio collars.
I check on them once in a while and pray they are elusive and evade men with guns.
2323M is a young red wolf who was recently reintroduced into North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Lchurai is a young female African elephant belonging to the Acacia Family Group and currently roaming around the Ewaso River in the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya.
I’ve only become involved in their lives since yesterday but I already love them.
Humbly Submitted
Robert Myres – Portneuf Valley Rugby Football Club, Flanker (ret.)
The Martini Tales 