One Week in GVL
As Toto's mom would say, "There's no place like home."
I’ve done jack shit.
Also, where am I? What is this random spunky suburb hours between Atlanta and Charlotte? I hope the town’s single Tesla Supercharger by the “downtown airport” has power to juice me up after this apocalypse winter storm.
My friends have been wonderfully kind hosting me in their guest room. They worked every day from 8am - 5pm like clockwork in their respective home offices, making the world go ’round. I lounged mostly stuffing my face with cookies and beer, growling at the dogs to please stop being barking lemmings.
Highlights include
board games,
soupy hipster birria at Sawdust Coffee in the meditation floor cushion corner,
$10 (Christian?) coworking trial at Harbor for 2 weeks,
Chinese food at the grocery store restaurant (which I will surely visit again),
arm 20% on arrival to 65% now as I self-administer peloton PT post-surgery, and
philosophy debates birthing this new substack!
<begin sidebar> In a riveting conversation starting with the question of to what extent Roark rapes Dominique after making eye contact in the quarry and busting thru her window for delicious silent violence, we progressed to shout at each other in the kitchen (well, mostly me shouting i guess).
The question on our minds: in an Ayn Rand utopia of extreme laissez-faire-ness, how could we give kids more freedom from rigid rules but simultaneously deal with hypothetically pedophilic parents?
My initial reaction was to try defining the diverging principles and ideals. I said, maybe there’s two ways to go, total parental freedom or government responsibility. But that’s not quite what i said haha. It was more like…
You could commit fully to the pro-abortion argument on human rights grounds of the mother, and say “well, if parents own a kid’s decisions up thru 18, then maybe we can let them abuse the kid as a sex slave or kill the kid off if the peanut allergies are getting annoying on the 5th birthday party cuz as a parent i honestly want to get peanut fudge ice cream cake goddammit! P.S. are kids in China well behaved cuz they know they will literally get the ax re: one child policy?”
This is the same argument I usually make as to pets being slaves. You own them. If it’s “for the pet’s own good, and they like it” then… umm… well…
Or the government can certify parents’ competence to parent. I guess this aligns with pro-life, but I am stipulating God isn’t providing for us enough*, so you need a government prepared to do some serious work. As an orphan, I can tell you that foster systems are not a good solution at present. And that includes well-meaning family who might even “try their best” to care for someone else’s kids.
*side-sidebar: when i lived in the mountains of Ecuador my cute peasant neighbors told me “dios te vacuna” lol their cow milk was yummmy, also Wisconsin where my argument buddy and i grew up has roughly similar numbers of cows to that country, fun facts.
Once parental certification is out of the way, everything else is easy and you have a lot of resources to focus on solving other problems efficiently. Dismantle the wasteful trillions of university tuition, student loans and the entire ED, implement school choice vouchers, etc.
There’s a market-based solution to the vetting process too, because who is the government to say what a good parent is, right? Community corporations you could opt-in upon buying a home (this is perhaps some programmatic tokenized utopia) or maybe just general contractor firms (in a non-broken oligopolistic Gurley-style regulatory captured morass) can certainly handle all these kinds of thing in the Future. </end sidebar>
Before arriving I asked, “what’s the maximum amount of time I can stay before you kick me out?” They thought for a moment and gave me 3 months to start with no fixed end date. We would “see how it goes” and I insisted to pay $500/mo for wifi and me stealing their cheese etc, which they grudgingly accepted.
Tomorrow I get the keys to my new apartment. I toured a few spots, like Riverside Apts and Rivers Edge on the swamp rabbit. The best was Lofts of Greenville, where I paid $80 application fee and $300 admin fee because I believed in humanity then I saw the google reviews and found out unit 429 might not be ready for a month and its secret mysterious reasons that cannot be told to me include cockroaches and roof leak last April.
No thank you. Hope I get those moneys back, somehow?
I guess it was a productive week after all.
On the way across the country from Jan 7 departure to arriving on the 18th, I got to reconnect with my sister in Phoenix over a couple coffees. Magical that we healed our bond as well.
Hold on to your seatbelts folks… this may be a gloriously bumpy ride! Smash that subscribe before i make you pay.
