Travails, time and choices

Cone Man's trusty chariot had developed a bad case of 'chariot flu' (brought on he guiltily suspected by three month's of hard driving to the Great Hall of Wisdom) and refused to get out of the driveway for all but the most urgent of business. Cone Man's trusty heat recovery system had died several months before, and could not be raised from the dead for less than 1700$. Cone Man's trusty hot water cylinder, observing the moment of opportunity, decided to join the wild cat strike and thus Cone Man's mighty endurance was further taxed by cold showers. Cone Man got little sympathy from the sages of the ages: "Do not mortals have hard service upon earth?" the prophet Job dourly shrugged. (Job 7:1).

Cone Man sipped white wine and reflected that he was not without allies at this juncture. Chariot pooling had stood him in good stead with his co-workers at the Great Hall of Wisdom, and he was able to arrange rides for himself for a few days. He was also able to arrange for his chariot to be repaired at a discount rate available to the warriors of the Great Hall of Wisdom. Finally, another friend at the Great Hall of Prophecy advised him of a reliable member of the Lightning Guild who could repair his hot water cylinder for a reasonable price.

Surveying the disparity between his resources and the time and cost required to run his chariot and maintain his man cave, Cone Man wondered how he could close the gap threatening to leave him without a living and a place to live. Costly, time consuming tasks were inevitable, unless he was prepared to tolerate unemployment, homelessness and starvation. The harsh questions had to be faced: How could he find more time and more money?

Pondering these questions, he reflected that all suffered the same inexorable loss of time. "The sands of time wait for no man" Cone Man groaned. Furthermore, minutes wasted today could lead to days wasted next week. Disciplined use of time was the difference between sufficiency or dearth of time.

Cone Man was in truth, a pathological time waster. Passivity, inoffensiveness and misplaced patience had hampered him in wooing cone maidens, and consequently he had merely become an old bachelor with the passage of time. Cone Man, belatedly facing the evil consequences of his relentless navel-gazing, constantly willed himself to be more proactive and confrontational in his dealings, but it did not come easily. He resolved to fight his unwelcome personal proclivities by changing them incrementally, one small habit at a time.

Obsessive gazing at the Palantir of the Silicon Wizard was a wasteful habit to say the least. Simple tasks remained undone, complex tasks were put off, and deadlines became ever deadlier while Cone Man voraciously absorbed the legends emanating from the Palantir. Legends unfortunately, are often myths by another name, so in addition to losing time, Palantirophiles ran the risk of losing their minds as well.

Grudgingly, Cone Man accepted that he must reduce his Palantir viewing to no more than one hour a day. Grimly, Cone Man accepted that he had not yet discovered how to make more money ...

The Son of Peter, the prophet from the far side of the Jordan

The Son of Peter, the prophet from the far side of the Jordan, in the Land of the Maple Leaf Tribe, was in town, and Cone Man paid $147 to attend his lecture, hoping for pearls of wisdom from this supremely sagacious of sages (or at least that was how he appeared to frustrated middle-aged males like Cone Man). The Son of Peter discoursed for an hour and a half in a rambling, narrative, peripatetic fashion, and rehearsed many of the themes Cone Man had already heard, but there were a few nuggets to justify Cone Man's thirst for wisdom.

The Son of Peter propounded the premise that an essay should begin with a problem that the essay writer is genuinely concerned about. All else flowed from that - if it was not a problem of personal importance to the writer, their essay would bore them, their readers, and particularly the luckless sages who reviewed their essays in the countless great halls of wisdom dotting the world. The Son of Peter said many other wise things, but this piece literary methodological advice lodged in Cone Man's mighty cerebrum.

The simplicity of it was awe-inspiring. Cone Man merely had to consider one vexatious problem a day, ponder it, and then write a one page essay about it. Cone Man did not have to know the answer, he merely had to identify and articulate the problem, and if no solution presented itself, he could end with a question and move on.

Happily, sadly, problems abounded. The question was which problems to write about. There already many pretentious prophets writing about world peace and global warming. Narcissistic prophets on the other hand, laboured under the different delusion that others wanted some kind of public confessional about their trivial personal neuroses. Cone Man resolved that he would restrict his prophecies to problems generic to the common warrior, which he had personally experienced.

Cone Man's current generic problem was Paralysis by Analysis. Toxic circularity was the crux of the problem: Cone Man pondered the Sea of Troubles confronting him, then pathetically sat in his man cave, drinking coffee and watching You Tube videos while passively suffering the slings and arrows of misfortune. Unsurprisingly, the Sea of Troubles, being unopposed, merely lapped ever more menacingly around Cone Man's heels, whereupon Cone Man continued to ponder the impossibility of taking up arms against the Sea of Troubles.

The solution, of course, was to substitute continuous action for interminable angst. "Where should I start?" Cone Man wondered. "Clean up your room" growled the Son of Peter. (SEE Peterson, 2018)

Peterson, J.B. (2018). Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. In 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos (pp. 147-159). United Kingdom: Allen Lane.

Cone Man's Day of Blessings

Cone Man drove his chariot to the Great Hall of Wisdom, having no expectation that this Freya's Day would be any different from any other Freya's Day. He was excited nevertheless. "Thank the god of Cone Man that it is Freya's Day!" Cone Man muttered as he motored.

Happily the day proceeded to provide more than a mere interval between Thor's Day and the Day of Saturn. The Cone Force was strong in Cone Man and it was beginning to physically draw cones to his presence from many miles distant - a member of staff said the cones had fallen from the pine tree in her family section, and asked if he would like them collected and delivered to him at the Great Hall of Wisdom. Cone Man's modesty fought furiously with his vanity, but prevailed, and he cone-trolled himself and graciously thanked the staff member for her offer.

Hot on the heels of that surprise, another staff member at the Great Hall of Wisdom was distributing surplus vegetables from her garden and gave him a free courgette! He was grateful for these gifts, but began to notice a pattern of gifts. Two hours after receiving the courgette, another staff member at the Great Hall of Wisdom presented him with a free copy of The daily stoic: 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman.

During the course of the day, another staff member (one that he chariot pooled with) presented him with $15 to help him fight the terrible Commuting Petrol Cost Monster. That night his mother cooked dinner for him, and his sister gave him yet more vegetables from her garden.

Cone Man was grateful to the god of Cone Man for all this relentless largess from other people, but he wondered if the god of Cone Man was trying to get his attention, and if so, to what end? After all, one blessing was merely a blessing, two blessings in a day was a coincidence, three blessings in a day was unusual, four blessings were almost unheard of, and five blessings in one day was a miracle. The spiritual antennae of Cone Man's deeply superstitious mind were on high alert ...

Cone Man cone-siders the contradiction of "comfort"

Having re-constructed his cone box on the Day of Weeping Water, Cone Man continued working on the more difficult and important project of reconstructing himself. Sadly, there was no "silver bullet" - exercise without dieting required massive exertion, while dieting without exercise left a man unfit and pathetic.

Life and history were full of strange contradictions, Cone Man mused. Robespierre reflected  in May 1794 that "Terror without virtue is murderous, virtue without terror is powerless." Balancing contradictory extremes is, sadly, no game for fools and fanatics. Robespierre unbalanced the relationship between virtue and terror in June 1794 by passing a law authorising the execution of anybody by virtue of nothing more than a majority vote in the French National Assembly. As Robespierre had already engineered the mass execution of Girondist and Hebertist deputies in March and April of that year, the surviving members of the French National Assembly understandably lived in terror of who would be next.

Bravery, ironically, is not the absence of fear, but the ability to function when you are terrified, and the deputies found they had the virtues of courage and decisiveness. At least, they had these virtues for as long as it took to use the same law to dispose of Robespierre and over 90 of his followers, after which they repealed the law a few days later.

Health, unfortunately, is not the absence of discomfort, but the ability to keep exercising and dieting even when you would rather rest and eat more. Reluctantly Cone Man mounted the saddle of his iron horse for yet another training ride up to the top of the Hill of the Gods (the gods were never actually named, listed or described, but some marketing officer must have thought the name sounded kind of cool).

The word "comfort" originally meant to "strengthen" (com - with; fort - strength) and not leisure and luxury as it does in modern parlance. Cone Man sadly reflected that if he was to succeed in strengthening his legs and torso, he would have to hold his personal "comfort" in contempt.

Cone Man's Day of Weeping Water

The Day of Weeping Water was a public holiday for the men and women of Cone Man's All Black Tribe. The All Black Tribe was a strange entity, he cone-sidered. The white section of the tribe originated on a group of islands located somewhere above the Equator, and for a thousand years before the Great Oathtaking of Weeping Water, had been composed of warring tribes that happily massacred each other at places with strange names like Hastings, Bosworth Field, Marston Moor and Drogheda. The brown section of the tribe also originated from islands far away, and had likewise been composed of warring tribes that continued to fight each other for over 30 years after the Great Oathtaking of Weeping Water. The chieftain Hobson had boldly declared "We are all one people" but the "one people" had boldly and frequently ignored this declaration.

Remarkably enough, despite their disparate nature and divisive proclivities, the many tribes occasionally managed to act as one people - defending the land of the All Black Tribe from foreign invaders, and even more so in supporting the All Blacks in their perennial battles with the warriors of tribes who did not recognise the All Black god, the worst of these being the Wallaby Tribe and the Springbok Tribe.

Cone Man thanked the god of Cone Man for this respite from his normal Wodin's Day work, but he was not idle, and indeed focussed on the performance of a noble and sacred project. He had filled every available space in his existing cone box and set about doubling the size of his cone box - so that he could continue to collect cones. His humble mortgage holding covered 501 square metres and he could store up to a hundred metric tonnes of cones on this area if he could gather that many. "Is there a problem here?" he mused.

Cone Man's argument with his ancestor continues ...

Watching from his man cave in the sun soaked Land of the Hurricanes, Cone Man was disturbed by legends of death and destruction wreaked upon the Stars and Stripes Tribe by the Mother of All Wintry Polar Blast Monsters, the terrible Polar Vortex Monster! Cone Man coldly cone-sidered that although Antipodean winters were short, they could be sharp, and he set about gathering more cones. "Ye would na listen" sniggered the self-satisfied ghost of Cone Man's long dead lowland Presbyterian Scottish ancestor. "One more bit of spectral spite out of you and I'll send for an exorcist" snarled Cone Man, chagrined at being corrected by an ethereal busy body ...