My first job was at a gas station.
I earned $4.50 an hour. My motivation for the job wasn't the money.
It also wasn't the desire to learn the unusual skill of removing squished grasshoppers off the windshields of customers in fancy cars. No, the real desire, my ulterior motive was access to the Hydraulic Lift in the vacant mechanics bay that was attached to the gas station.
This empty bay you see, would allow me to work on my Truck project, my 69 rusted out chevy with a in-line 6 and farmer 4 speed with a posi-traction rear end that i planned to turn into the fastest off the line machine this side of the river.
Not only was I surrounded by parts that I needed, fan belts, greases, oils, you name it. I was also able to tap into a vast array of automotive intel. You see because on the weekend, Dudes with real horsepower (my mentors?) would show up to work on tweaking the Blower on a 357 Chevy engine, or rebuild carburator on a Holley Double-Pumper.
The best part was the girls that hung on their cars wore frayed cut-offs, tight rockstar t-shirts from the latest god knows what 8o's rockband that was the summer lovin hit. The mix of aerosol WD-40 misting in the summer air combined with revving engines and the high pitch whizzing sound from a well tuned high performance engine were vivid memories.
The rat-a-tat of an air impact wrench as a kid in coveralls removed a tire on a hot-rod and replaced them with Aluminum centerline mag wheels was background noise as I was running back and forth to fill up cars.
I learned the skill of where to locate the dipstick on every make of engine over a 4 decade span of automotive history.
This skill, would impress the new hires, who struggled both to get the hood open and to ever find the hidden location of the oil dipstick before the customer would lean out of their window un-impressed and wail out instructions in a derogatory tone if you couldn't perform fast enough. The most money ringed out was when a seismic crew of 15-20 trucks would scream in and throw you a white fleet card and say fill em all with diesel, top up everything give us $200 in snacks and smokes and put a nice tip on their for yourself.
On long weekends, I could earn 4-5X my wage selling fan belts, washer fluid or premium oils which could supplement my vinyl record collection or go into truck parts.
Little did I know, how this vocation would later give me such a unique insight later into the world of energy transportation, refining, production and macro economics of global energy picture. Couple that with bolt-on energy technology that shifts the sweet spot of who earns the right to set the price for being able to deliver on command and you get the feeling you are onto something.
You're one of the lucky ones, by reading this far, you don't have to necessarily draw blood from your nuckle trying to find a dipstick in the dark on a 67 Corvette Split Window Coupe to learn what i had to. You don't have to get your face splashed with oil replacing an o-ring at a pipeline truck terminal performing a water-cut to calculate how much oil the company is going to get paid for this week. You don't have to crawl inside a Benzene infested fractionation tower 40 meters in the air suspend in nylon belts wearning a scott air pack and hot sweaty safety gear. Nor, do you have to climb on top of a rig shack that is slipperier than stepping on melted ice with flat soled leather dress shoes, while a -55C wind is pelting your back as you fight to balance a satellite antennae so you can send the downhole data of your real-time drilling back to the big wigs known in rig speak as 'downtown clowns'.
You need not smuggle yourself into a bankers conference to get an edge on whether the Montney or the Permian is going to attract the most exploration dollars. You don't have to fly in a rusted gutted out plane that smells like a febrezed hockey lockey room while you careen down in the middle of a mountain makeshift runway while they are shooing away wild buffalo off the runway.
Instead, you get to ride on the coat-tail of my coveralls for the cost of an upvote whatever that might be today. My 80's self could not have imagined a 2018 world, no more than my 2018 self could ever stomach listening to an 80's rock ballad longer than 15 seconds. Times change. People change.
Yet the natural laws, the mesh of animal psychology and market dynamics of percerption of scarce resources and the desire to obtain them to 'get the girl in the frayed cut-offs with the Hotel California T-shirt on' doesn't change, it just shifts form. Perhaps now my taste is a librarian looking redhead with meticulous simple appearance. One who stares at you with such determined focus - you know you are dealing with someone who has read "Swan's Way" by Marcel Proust and actually understands the spectacular gravity of why he started the book in the middle of a sentence, and then ended the book in the middle of the same sentence.
We are living in a cosmic ending of a known cyclical time loop that has been cycling for an infinite period of passes by. This time though, its different, very different. This time, the final clue just like Proust signaling that time is an imparted property placed upon us like a blanket over our lives - that is not any more real than a reflection in a mirror, but mimics the inherent properties of reality so well that we are duped again and again with the same hucksters distractionary tricks.
These cosmic time loops, these record grooves of life history spinning at 33-1/3 revolutions per minute are about to get the proverbial record player needle "bump" that the slightly impaired girl in the cut-offs nudged the table playing the music and is now going to draw undesired attention to her faux pas. Yes, when the vibrations that you memorized and are waiting for skip a beat, the moment that the music changes you are going to see everybody jerk their head a little and focus in, in silence as to what was the cause of the interruption to the house party.
In but a moment, the music will change. It always has. It always will. Yet that won't soften the moment that is unexpected and comes with a jolt.
What am I talking about? Hang on a bit, i'm getting there. If you re still reading i've done something right so grab a coffee and sit back down for a read.
A very big thing is happening. In space. On the ocean floor. On a granite mountain. In the volcano crater. In the consciousness of the office tower accountant and in the forest fire lookout tower. On the ship passing somalia's coast line, in the design department of the new natural gas engine. On the stage of the folk festival, in the fishing department at the sporting goods store.
Each thing described is experiencing its own "bump", its own shift in music, as the tune that was being played is re-shuffled and finds a new groove with a different pattern of vibrations.
Energy at the sub-atomic level of invisible is changing the practical real world energy of the visible and we, are all caught in the record groove crossfire of the needle about to be bumped into a new groove. faster or slower, harmonic or not, the individual will have to adjust their dance moves to the new beat in commerce, business, life and energetically.
If you are near the 3 o'clock mark of the needle you will feel it faster, if you are at the 9o'clock mark you get to see the reaction of other before adjusting your step. make no bones about it though you are going to feel the bump and you've just got get used to that reality before hand.
I may not be at the 3 o'clock mark, but I likely got hit before you did, so take my conversation for what it's worth and resonate on whether you want to tune into what I am bringing here.
Venus is a ball of energy that has its own track on the record play list of the cosmo's greatest hits album. When she orbits the cycle she does so precisely. Earth that 3rd rock from the ball we call Sun is a strangely tilted fellow who breaks many logical ideas how he anchors himself to a single side of the moon and cannot answer why he tilted his axis 23.5 degrees the same way to all people living on his coat. When the teenager takes grandmas silver spoon and touches it too a pink plasma ball and create an arc of blue lightening they mimic the true nature of the sea of energy our own sun is floating in as it absorbs infinite plasma and re-directs its life giving radiance.
Each ball of energy in its own groove has a story, but together they combine forces to play cosmic music the best this universe has seen. When the character who skips the cosmic music returns to perform his elliptical curve extravanganza each planetary player regardless of how long he has been uninterupted in his groove will have to take heed that even though he wasn't on the guest list he's here and we have to deal with his presence and adjust our tune or face scratching our record we have been grooving on for so long.
The nature of ellipses is thay aren't circles and the bump is going to have an interval that hits the earths record table not once but twice. Each time has the potential to readjust the harmony of the energy fields that penetrate the deepest ocean plate, the tallest granite mountain, the smelliest crater, the bubbliest thermal vent. As the flows of ocean currents readjust and the clouds re-think the moves they make our climate must adapt to a thesis quite unthinkable that is so contrary to what we know for sure that simply ain't so.
Cooling concerns will replace overheating concerns after the first bump hits. The time between bumps will be full of dismay as each player interprets how this event adjusts the perception they had of whats really going on. As reality sets in the competition for post-bump #1 world, the focus will shift to what is due after bump #2. By that time the deal on the music table will trade and shift from the harmony felt before the bump. The post bump, has pretty significant adjustments on the table from a geologic, geophysic and climatic perspective. We can't know all, but we can know some and that preparedness is no different than a safety kit in your glove box. Something to be aware of as good practice.
Resources are weird, they have inverse investment correlations. When the price goes up, people want some of them more than when they were reasonable. When the price goes down, some are abandoned to the point they can't restart where they were at for a long long time due to lags in how the industry functions. Our adjustment is going to most challenging as we have to wipe clear the whiteboard in our heads and let go of many equations, ideas and forms of thinking that are simply not so anymore in the post-bump world.
Creative thinkers with adaptive personalities will far out perform ridgid my-way-or-the-highway thinkers who anchored their world view to what-they-know, that just-ain't-so. A brand new playing field could emerge where titans are skirted to the sidelines while naked people storming center field with no resources but lost of attention distract the confused referees who simply don't have training or guidance as to what to do here.
Now some of the naked fans storming the field will just be all enthusiasm and no game. A few though, will dance, outmanoeuvre and overall impress the crowd inspiring more to try running the field and try a new idea that is out of the comfort zone, until the tipping point arrives and the stands have a few remaining fans while the field has become over filled with individual nake people dancing to the tune of themselves in a odd harmony of organized chaos from the bump of one notable player who skipped the beat first and made the transition more comfortable for the rest of us.
If you want to learn more and have this story see Part 2 continue upvote this post and i'll add the rest.
Thanks for reading and have a sensational August.
Preview;
Venus morning
Alaska bump
Hormuz breeze changes weather
Oligarch gets bad milk and leaves table
Energy giant doubles down
Borders now meet ocean floors
Game rules have no rules when board gets bumped
The debt you owe me is now my cousins problem
I know a guy who says that chicken laid a boiled egg in betweeen two regular eggs
The stuff i thought yesterday doesn't work today
What book was that in again
How come the natives knew that at the same time
Can i tap into this too
You are saying this is really happenning
Okay now thats just not going to happen
Cool, this is cooling and its good news
So what do I tell my parents
The new record player isn't understandable yet
Music to my ears and my wallet/
Sweet
Catch you on the flip flop.