The Montauk Catamaran Company Chronicles, 12/18/14: Surge Pricing and Broken Dreams
(The Montauk Catamaran Company Chronicles is an ongoing series of posts detailing the construction of Mon Tiki Largo, a James Wharram Designs Pahi 63 MkII. The author’s current boat is the catamaran Mon Tiki, a JWD Tiki 38, which he built in 2012 and currently operates as a day-sailing charter in Montauk NY. You can see all the posts in this series by clicking here.)
The fourth of six akas (crossbeams) clamped up. Two more to go!
My friend Dave couldn’t make it today so it was just me and my wife, which is enough, but goes a little slower because you don’t have one person feeding fresh epoxy to the two who are laying up the work.
Yesterday’s highlight was Dave telling about when he decided to introduce hand-lettered special occasion birthday cakes at Montauk’s landmark John’s Drive-in, a burgers, fries and shakes joint he owned and ran for about 25 years. Amy (my wife) fed him prompts while Dave recounted his mother’s incredulity that her son (not a pensman) was going to be lettering “Happy Birthday Sally” on cakes. I guess you had to be there. We also talked about surge-pricing, fear, and missed opportunities.
Today Amy and I talked about Matthew Crawford, who has a new book coming out about the (?) modern crisis of attentiveness. The question I posed to Amy was whether or not the (apparent) fact that Crawford couldn’t actually pay his bills as a motorcycle mechanic changes the meaning of his book Shop Class as Soul Craft.
My wife’s initial position was no, it doesn’t change anything since everything is bullshit anyway, but her eyes narrowed a little when I added that Shop Class was offered as philosophy, and Crawford as a Philosopher/Motorcylce Mechanic.
Bringing this back to yesterday’s post about James Poulos and fame, one of the things that’s always been important to me is to test myself and my ideas against the market. For me that’s “walking the walk”.
What does that have to do with fame?
Well as James and I have had many discussions about, fame is a necessary tool in any artist’s kit. Without some measure of fame there are certain chances you will never get. It’s a sort of a chicken end egg thing, but if your ambitions are high enough, you have to want to be famous, because you need fame to serve your ambitions.
To a certain extent letting go of these higher ambitions is what has let me settle in and begin Living the Dream. Just what that dream is I will elaborate upon in a future post.
Also I forgot to include the bongos in yesterday’s picture. In addition to everything else, there’s also pair of bongos…
