Author Archives: nwfries

“No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

Heraclitus

“To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together.”

-Tony Fadell, Build

-Heraclitus

Sunshine brings the day

Shoes pitter patter, on wet pavement

Heel, then toe. 

Sailboats move silently through the glassy harbor

Seals bark, a bull horn blows

Above the water, clouds rest between snowy peaks

Baked in a cool, hazy mist  

Countless ripples, one flow. 

_{Seattle, WA
12/2/2023}

An excerpt from Anthony Kiedis’ Scar Tissue

One of those jams would lead to the breakout song on the album. I was off on one side of the rehearsal studio, working on lyrics, while the band was jamming as a trio. Sometimes they’d be serious intellectual craftsmen, trying to intertwine their minds and come up with specific parts, but other times they’d rock out in a very joyful manner. 

On one of those latter days, Flea started playing this insane bass line, and Chad cracked up and played along. I was so struck by Flea’s bass part, which covered the whole length of the instrument’s neck, that I jumped up and marched over to the mike, my notebook in tow. I always had fragments of song ideas or even specific isolated phrases in mind. I took the mike and belted out, “Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now.” 

That line had come from a series of conversations I’d had years earlier with Nina Hagen. Nina was a wise soul, and she realized how young and inexperienced I was then, so she was always passing on gems to me, not in a preachy way, just by seizing on opportunities. I was going through her closet one day, looking at all her crazy clothes, when I came upon a valuable exotic jacket. “This is really cool,” I said. 

“Take it. You can have it,” she said. 

“Whoa, I can’t take this. This is the nicest jacket you have in there,” I said. 

“That’s why I gave it to you,” she explained. “It’s always important to give things away; it creates good energy. If you have a closet full of clothes, and you try to keep them all, your life will get very small. But if you have a full closet and someone sees something they like, if you give it to them, the world is a better place.”

I had come from such a school of hard knocks that my philosophy was you don’t give thing away, you take whatever you want. It was such an epiphany that someone would want to give me her favorite thing. That stuck with me forever. Every time I’d be thinking, “I have to keep,” I’d remember, “No, you gotta give it away instead.” 

When I started going regularly to meetings, one of the principles I learned was that the way to maintain your won sobriety is to give it to another suffering alcoholic. Every time you empty your vessel of that energy, fresh new energy comes flooding in.” 

I USED to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere—usually in Las Vegas.

– Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman

If you wish to build a ship, do not divide people into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them all to long for the vast and endless sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Roosevelt trod a tightrope between radical reformers and trust kings. He had a clever way of delivering sharp, sudden blows against business, then following with conciliatory speeches. By nature, he was a political hybrid: Strident reformers brought out his conservatism while stand-pat businessmen brought out his crusading zeal. 

Much like Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, he introduced regulation in order to save the country from social unrest and forestall more extreme measures. He was accused of appropriating the policies of William Jennings Bryan, much as Franklin Roosevelt was later said to have undercut his left-wing critics by appropriating many of their policies.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller – Ron Chernow

As Rockefeller instructed a recruit, “Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.”

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller – Ron Chernow

A corporation ages like a person. As the years go by and the founders die off, making way for the bureaucrats of the second and third generations, the ecstatic, risk-taking, just-for-the-hell-of-it spirit that built the company gives way to a comfortable middle age. Where the firm had been forward looking and creative, it becomes self-conscious in the way of a man, pestering itself with dozens of questions before it can act. How will it look? What will they say?

The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King – Rich Cohen