End of a Chicago Summer

We are just slowly winding down from what I think of as "the sweet spot" in the Windy City.

This is a period roughly between the middle of July and the last few weeks of August when Chicago gets an uninterrupted succession of seventy and eighty degree days, which makes up for some of the months of miserable, grinding cold that sends the well off and less physically hardy, running for the coasts or the sunbelt. I have been distracted with other writing and doing some preparation for a long, cold winter so, no posts here.

I do want to post a top five or ten list of the best fiction books I've read over the past three months and I might have a good reason to increase what I post and when now that I am much less busy hunting for projects?

What I have done is make a commitment to at least another year just living and working in Chicago with a focus on developing my own fiction writing and then we'll see what things are like near the end of 2017?

"H4ppy Tr4ilz"  

The Past Three Months, Q2, 2016

This post is sort of a follow on, now that I've arrived at a more stable schedule. In part, this is also to encourage accountability from myself in terms of what I've been dealing with and working on?

I'm also going to get into some of my reticence and a sense of the ambiguity of full, un-censored disclosure in a later post, but for right now, I want to establish a format where I post one of these every quarter or so and update goals or just explain why updating here has been erratic or what exactly is going on?

First off, it is probably fair to address the fact that this blog's url is "urbanengineering" and is written by an erratically employed Engineer with Engineer in Training (EIT) Licensure in the state of Illinois.

However, (yechh pardon the grammar choice) this blog rarely deals with specific engineering or science topics and is more a repository for fiction or writing projects that don't fit anywhere else and sometimes has more to do with philosophy and culture.

I have a plan for creating another blog, possibly in Fall or Winter of 2016 that is going to deal more directly with science and philosophy of technology, but this project is strictly in the planning stages and might be deferred to my "hold" or "wait" lists until 2017, depending on how or if my employment situation changes?

All that having been gotten out of the way, the past few months have been busy adjusting to a new schedule, getting research reading in order for the rest of the summer (maybe even the Fall) and doing planning and initial note taking for some fiction stories. Rest of my time is divided between looking at employment, interviewing for jobs and trying to bootstrap a chunk of my old thinking on real world testing of emerging machine cognition theory into something more complete?

I may get to that in a future post here, but for right now, that is what I've been working on. You can get a closer look at some of my more recent thinking by following me on twitter @GregStaskowski or search for most of my previous work just by typing in "gjsengineer" into the search engine of your choice?

I don't expect this blog to have a significant audience anytime real soon, but for those of you who do check in from time to time, I expect my posting frequency to go up possibly targeting five to ten posts a month depending on what specific posts seem most useful or relevant?

"Happy Trailz"

The "mild Frustration" Post

Might as well, get directly to the "point." The past month and a half, my work in this medium has really not met my own, somewhat unrealistic standards and for that, I offer a sincere explanation, if not an excuse?

Partly, daily events have a way of exhausting my internal resources and also in part I have this sense or image currently of "a fallow field" waiting for new things to grow in terms of daily writing?

I can only remain optimistic and hopeful that a more productive summer will come and additional inspiration will arrive in a timely manner?

Plans for an additional web log focused more on technical aspects and engineering continue apace, but I really do not expect to have the design and focus complete until very likely August or early September? In short, "stay tuned" from time to time.

Ta

-GMB

Sunrise

Still cold this morning, but much less frost in the grass compared to yesterday. I found myself enjoying the sunrise as I sat in Lillacia Park. An egotistical conceit, I suppose, but I felt that somehow the park and the warming morning was "all for me?"

What I was considering was this idea of a seeming impoverishment that seems to overtake the "beingness" of daily life when all life consists of is ones labor? Is this not a terrible bargain where one is provided with all the benefits of advanced society and warmth and relationships, but only so much as one's labor is of high quality and high value?

Should it not be so, well certainly, keeps everyone honest in the economic game, yet I found myself focusing on "not thinking" and simply "being" in that Park at seven oclock this morning.

Is it not enough, simply to be alive? Breathing. Conscious and engaged with the world?

Why I "disappeared"

I left what could be considered a "normal" 9 to 5 mediated, planned and middle class existence in roughly 2014.

The reasons really aren't that interesting. I'm no Thoreau.

I could probably look at my written journals up to that point and reconstruct the thought process, days leading up to and problems of identity, free will, social disruption and overwhelming sense of nausea and disgust, but that would take a very long time and have very little significance beyond my own personal viewpoint.

To sum up, I was terrified of compromising what is left of my life based on the need to make x amount of money for the next thirty years to service y amount of debt while working less and less on imposed and pointless problems in artificial ecosystems devoid of integrity, value and meaning.

Thus, isolated and deeply frustrated, I left.

There has to be another way?