Rich Man, Poor Man. Beginning. End.

My life has taken a turn for the better. I always said if I ever made it - the first thing I'd do is get organized. Slowly things are falling into place. A nice fast new machine. And some semblance of organization.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to think the only thing you can to attain peace is to first make a million dollars and then you will have peace and joy. The truth is that once you get a million dollars you'll be on all these J-Curve purchases (you know, the ones where you think you really want it and then it just falls off what you dreamed all about) and taking care of stuff is a job in and of itself. Stuff never brings peace.

Peace comes from within. You can even be at peace, while you're watching a really surprisingly awful movie. My daughter and I stuck it out last night for "The Dark Crystal". Its amazingly bad, for a dark fantasy muppet movie. The evil skeksis have characters who sound annoyingly like Fozzie the bear. How can you be afraid of something that sounds like Fozzie? hmm...

And then they had these scenes - I swear it looked like they were dressing up dwarves - where the 'character' looked like a puppet backpack, their head lolling from side to side as the 'horse' galloped away.

But there were some interesting things you can take away from it all. One thing was a line - that I remembered. It was a quote from the Augur - who said "Beginning. End. All change. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. All change. "

Thats where my head is at today. Beginning. End. How much of all of this do we actually control? The snow is falling quietly outside my office window. I remember a scene from 'The Road' - where the snow fell quietly. All the trees were dead. And then one of them fell over. How fragile is life.

And the world we live upon. It is a rich world. A water planet. But you have to wonder with two earthquakes in the last month - and the last one a magnitude 9.

My uncle said something about California. We were talking about the San Andreas fault. He said - what he likes about it - is that it has a levelling effect. It doesn't matter if you're rich, or poor. To the earthquake, it's all the same.

He spoke of how the land is new. And how the earthquakes seem to help everyone keep perspective. I honestly believe that if you lose perspective that money holds some special vehicle for status - you end up gaining the perspective that helps you make it. Catch 22.

I'm nervous. Last lunch meeting I had - I won every point I was trying to get and ended up with platform licenses. This one is more important.

I sense a beginning. And an end. And a cold coming we will have of it. Just the worst time of the year. My car galls, refractory - in the snow.