Is my attention actually on the things at hand?
Even now I think. “Eh, I’ll go to the range next weekend.” I’ll do this and I’ll do that next weekend. Someday needs to become today.
I need to follow through on my plans. Life is a gift and I need to treat it like a gift instead of something I’ll “deal with” eventually.
Momento Mori.
Stoic philosophy will tell us that tranquility can be found by trusting that we are generally on the right path rather than listening to the rabble and changing direction based on external factors.
Work has been tough lately. The company I work for is going through some changes and not insignificant ones either. There are a lot of people who don’t like the direction it’s heading and these are long term employees.
It has really concerned me near the end of 2023 and the start of 2024 as a couple of people that I’ve gotten to know have left, sharing their reasons with me. And they aren’t alone in these reasons, there are quite a few others whose justifications sound very similar.
It’s made me nervous, leaving me to question if I should be shopping the market and moving on as well… rather than being someone standing on the deck of the Titanic as it breaks in half before plummeting through the depths to the bottom of the ocean.
I think the wise advice that was given to me was that I have to judge for myself if I am at a place inside me where I need to move on. This rang true at the time and I feel is in alignment with the stoic philosophy that I try to live by. I am not at the same place inside as these other people are, at least not yet.
Will the market become more difficult should I opt to move later? Certainly. However chasing after what other people are doing has left me feeling a lot of anxiety about the present and the future.
I can’t let this derail me.
Time can be fleeting… slipping through our fingers like sand.
It seemingly moves slowly at first, while we are but in our youth. We imagine ourselves immortal, that our lives will carry on without end. Death is a problem for our future selves. Some of us, foolishly, wish for an early end to our lives to end our pain without appreciating the finality and emptiness of death.
The more that time passes, the faster it seems to escape through our fingers. While it was always passing with the same speed, it is relative to our age and hurtles us closer towards our own mortality as it does from our creation.
It’s the facing of this mortality, REAL mortality, that we begin to understand the value of our time. When we understand the value of our time, it’s then that we can start to pay attention to how we spend it. There are a billion ways that we can spend our lives with what we devote our energy to being fought over by people and companies, trying to steal our energy and distract us from the things that we really need to focus on. Detract from us setting and achieving our goals.
Living is a choice. We make choices every minute of every day that can lead us to our goals and satisfaction in our lives, or they can pull us away from them… leaving us for wanting. The road is hard and only hard things are worth fighting for.
To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the seas falls still around it.
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some.
-Eric Hoffer
Concentrate every minute like a Roman-like a man-on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can-if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Why is it that I have all of these great, thoughtful ideas for blog posts when I’m driving home from work but can’t actually turn any of those thoughts into a coherent post once I get in front of a laptop? Why is that?
Cleaning up the SKS really wasn’t so bad after all. I followed some great directions from YouTube for disassembly (https://youtu.be/cRp7qb02bhg), the whole thing went off quite well. The hardest part that I found was disassembling and reassembling the trigger group. There is a particularly strong spring that releases the hammer when you pull the trigger. I don’t own a vice like is used in the video so I needed to find an alternate method.
In another video, a comment stated that the way to compress the spring with the hammer to release it was to use the bolt carrier and press it down. This… worked.
I then soaked all of the pieces in a bath of boiling hot water and mineral spirts for 20 minutes to remove the cosmoline. Cosmoline melts at somewhere between 60C and 85C, the hot water combined with the mineral spirts did a fine job.
Using nitrile gloves, I transferred the parts from the mineral spirits bath to a second tub of hot water… shaking off and straining as much of the mineral spirits as possible. This was further successful in cleaning off the parts.
I then pulled all of the pieces out of the bath and dried them, using some canned air (which was a mistake, it cooled off the pieces rather than letting the heat from the hot water help to dry them out… I should have got my compressor out) but it all dried nonetheless. Then I gave it a spray of aerosol gun oil.
Cleaning the barrel was something that I expected would be… nastier… than it was. The exterior of the rifle was not coated in cosmoline like I’ve seen in many other videos on YouTube. It was quite clean on the outside however on the inside, it’s pretty obvious that there was some cosmoline that needed to be cleaned out. The barrel was much like the exterior, relatively free of cosmoline. I swabbed it out and flushed it with brake fluid which resulted in more black cleaning patches (carbon) than yellow cleaning patches (cosmoline) going into the trash. The rifle had been fired, some cleaning would have had to be done to fire the rifle… hence why there was no cosmoline in the barrel. So, I oiled the barrel and let it sit for reassembly… after dinner.
Putting it back together, per the video… was quite easy. The hardest part of the reassembly was the same hardest part of the disassembly… the trigger group. Using the bolt carrier was how I got it all back together. And then… it was done. It felt like quite an accomplishment for me.
I can’t wait until I can take it out to shoot! I have a couple hundred rounds of 7.62x39mm ready for it!
A person can just sit in analysis paralysis and never write anything. Another method is procrastination passing as quality control, avoiding writing or releasing something until it is good enough or even perfect.
The thing to get over this is to just do it. Just write. Post something, post anything. It may be good, it may be ass… you just need to do something. So that’s what I’m doing. Writing.
I bought a surplus Russian SKS rifle a couple of weeks ago and it arrived last week. I unboxed it and it’s even cooler than I could have imagined.
The rifle I bought was manufactured in 1954, making it almost 70 years old. (My dad is still older.) Russia produced a metric buttload (2,700,000) of these semiautomatic rifles in the early 1950s and then quickly fell into obsolescence, subsequently being put into storage once the Kalashnikov AK-47 was adopted as the primary rifle to be used by the Soviet military.
I’m not sure when in the process the rifles would be dunked in cosmoline however all surplus SKS rifles are sure to have it on the outside of the rifle to varying degrees but for sure it exists on the inside of the rifle. Thus, a surplus rifle needs to be stripped down and all its pieces need to be cleaned thoroughly to remove this heavy grease.
The rifle I’ve received is actually quite clean on the outside however the inside is likely a very different story. YouTube has proven to be a very good resource for educating myself on what I will need to do to clean this rifle. I’ve got mineral spirits, some non-chlorinated brake cleaner, nitrile gloves, compressed air… probably should have grabbed some small plastic containers but there’s still time.
I don’t know what people would have done back in the day, before YouTube to figure out how to clean up surplus rifles….. probably read a book or a magazine article. I know… read a book?!?
de·fen·es·tra·tion
/dēˌfenəˈstrāSHən/
noun
I had a fairly elaborate dream last night where this word featured prominently however, within the dream, I was using it incorrectly. I was treating it as though it were some kind of a defensive strategy word which, perhaps that might be true within a certain perspective… but in the context of my dream it was certainly incorrect.
I am not 100% certain on where I heard the word but I think it was on a new podcast that I started listening to. The first series is about Russian secret police dating way back in history and the episode I was listening to dealt with the NKVD during the reign of Stalin.
While in the era of the NKVD they really preferred to just shoot people in the back of the head rather than toss them out a window, I know he made reference to someone getting thrown out of a window. (Richard Sorge?) So, perhaps, he used the word defenestration and it lodged itself into my subconscious. Defenestration has come more into vogue within the last 50 years or so as a commonly accepted method of eliminating your political enemies in Russia as it can be thinly veiled as a suicide.
The more interesting character (read: piece of human garbage) that I might have to look into is Lavrenti Beria. To summarize him based on the information relayed to me in this podcast… he was a pedophiliac, murderer-rapist that was at the top of Russia’s secret police apparatus during Stalin’s era. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse than Stalin, you come across a guy like Beria. Go communism!