Jeffrey Alexander Martin

I remember when I was eight and my father, your grandfather, had a talk with me one night. We were outside of the house on Nichols Rd. in Blue Lake. The firepit was just a little way from the house and made out of cement. When the fire would heat up enough sometime parts of the cement would explode, because of the expanding air bubbles in the cement. We had larger bonfires further away from the house, halfway to the barn, but this night we had a smaller fire by the house. Grandpa Roger explained to me that now that I was eight I was old enough to understand that I was responsible for my life. I knew I had choices, and I knew there would be consequences. A lot of people think eight is too young for that responsibility, but they are wrong. You make hundreds of choices per day about what you're going to work on and what you're going to ignore, how you're going to talk with people, what you're going to think about and plan, and more. So I give you this same advice, realize ...

At nine years old you're halfway to eighteen, so you're half of a legal adult. It's amazing how time sometimes seems to move slow, and sometimes it seems to move fast. When time seems to be moving slow it's because you're not interested in now. Many people spend their days wishing away their days. Wanting one thing to end, then another thing to end. Before they know it, they are old and have wished away their life without having really been there and lived it. You can find some value in anything. Humans are made with that unique ability. Discover what the value in the moment is and enjoy it. And, take that time to think about what you would be more interested in, and make a plan to do that. When time seems to have moved by too fast, remember that everything you've experienced contains an infinite amount of information. Even tiny things, like a piece of sand, have an infinite amount of information. When you look through a microscope at a piece of sand you can see...

This is the fourth time I'm writing a letter for the future. It's an odd experience because there's a chance I'm still alive, but there's a chance that I won't be. How do I compress down some useful insights and maybe even advice. This has been done many times in history. Some of the greatest minds in history have written letters of advice for family members. I've read some of them. All of them are probably useful. I looked some up, they include:  Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca the Younger (4 BCE–65 CE), Pliny the Younger (61–113 CE), William Penn (1644–1718), Lord Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope) (1694–1773), Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), John Adams (1735–1826), Abigail Adams (1744–1818), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), George Washington (1732–1799), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), Winston Churchill (1874–1965), Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Ross Perot (1930–2019), Jeffrey Alexander Ma...

I've been to a lot of events over the last 20 years. I've seen a lot of people work a room trying to get alliances for politics, sales for income, financing for business, employees for growth, allies for various kinds of battles, goodwill for their careers, approval to get hired, interest for dates, and connection to feel human. In observing myself, I'm odd in this respect, which comes as no surprise. I'll give an example to illustrate. This happened a couple of years ago at Acton University in Grand Rapids put on by the Acton Institute, which is a great educational think tank. Main speeches and presentations are conducted in a large room. There are also breakout sessions in smaller rooms, like classrooms. Many of these sessions are filmed to be put online. In the main room there's a professional cameraman. Almost no one talks with him. He's just a function, the guy that runs the camera, almost like another piece of apparatus. Many people are trying to do someth...

My sister has done this letter plan with her three kids. When they turn one you give them a letter to be opened when they are eighteen. It's a good idea. Today Mercy is having her first birthday party. This is my third time doing this type of letter and it's a unique experience each time. - - - - - - - To Mercy, It's odd to write a letter to be opened so far into the future. It's impossible to know what will have happened by then, who you'll be, who I'll be, and what state the world will be in. Right now you're outside walking around on the trampoline on wobbly legs, pressing your face against the mesh, smiling and clapping your hands. By eighteen you've made a lot of decisions. Your life is your own. Maybe you know the direction you're headed, more likely you're searching around. And this is where I'll offer just a few thoughts. One, your natural predisposition is happy and engaged. That's not true for everyone, but it is for you. For in...

A few years ago I went looking for a movie list to both inspire and instruct me about writing and being a writer. There are such lists, but there are no good lists. Over the last couple of years I've made my own list. And, it's good. These ten are perfectly on point, grade A awesomeness. There are a dozen others that almost made the list, but didn't. The Man Who Invented Christmas Charles Dickens wrote 'A Christmas Carol' in six weeks to release it for Christmas, because he was broke, even though he was famous. Also, no one would publish his weird ghost story, so he self-published it. That was 1843. I'm not a huge Dickens fan, but this little book is genius, and I liked seeing the story behind it. Dickens talked about how his characters were more real to him than real people. It's hard to show that kind of creative writing process in pictures or film, and they do it superbly in this show.  Mary Shelley Both of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's parents...

A few days ago I was watching the movie 'Gabriel's Inferno'. In one scene Julianne is fixing Gabriel's tie in a car. It annoyed me that the rich, sophisticated, intellectual was both bad at tying a tie, and that it was a simple and bad looking knot. It just seemed incongruent. So, I paused the show. I grabbed a tie and looked up knots. I learned the notation system, which is pretty simple. I went through the 13 most common knots from the book 'The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie'. I determined that the knots that I think are decent are the: Small, Victoria, 11-3, Nicky, Half-Windsor, Hanover, Plattsburgh, Cavendish, and Balthus. Then I started playing around. I thought I might be able to invent a new tie knot. That's not an easy task to do. There are mathematical academic articles written by physicists on working out all of the different ways to tie a tie. The first knot I thought I invented ended up being number 34 in the 'Encyclopedia of Tie Knots'. I also th...

There are certain situations that approach the limit of what it is possible for us to experience as human beings. In December of 2015 I was laying in a hotel bed in Mombasa, Kenya. I had been poisoned. Then I had my money coerced from me at the beach on the Indian Ocean. Somewhere along the way I had picked up an unknown bacteria that was destroying my entire digestive system. Things weren't going that great. The philosopher Karl Jaspers came up with the modern concept of the limit situation. He talked about four things that can bring it about when taken to extreme levels: fright, guilt, finality, and suffering. The thing is, these all go together. I was going in and out of consciousness. My ability to walk, or even to stand, had left me. I had been vomiting. I remember rolling over and vomiting off the side of the bunk bed I was in, and seeing blood in the vomit. I thought, "That's not good." It's not the only place that blood had been coming out of. I...

My default perspective of people is that they're nice. That doesn't particularly hold true if you compare things to history, or other cultures, or even all of my own experience. I've had my life threatened many times, I've been shot at, had someone try to stab me, been successfully poisoned in Africa, have had money stolen, been lied to and betrayed, been lied about, and I've been conned a few times. I've largely ignored this contradiction because I didn't know how to reconcile it. But, the last 16 months have held it in my awareness so consistently that I need to confront my ideas about the niceness of people. Today is a good example. I decided to go for a walk at Lake Harbor Park to clear my head. It's been a drizzly day, which I like. With an overcast sky blocking out the sun, the park wasn't too busy, which I also like. I took a trail that isn't the most popular. You walk up a small incline of sand, and then turn down a narrow ravine wit...

I recently attended a high school graduation party for the daughter of a friend of mine. Different people choose different ways to memorialize such events. Her older sister had everyone sign a chair when she graduated. It's a cool idea, but apparently there have been some logistical concerns of where to put it since then. So, on this occasion, a book was chosen. I, of course, like books. It's perfectly fine to just put your name down, and maybe a simple statement like "Good job!" or "Good luck!" But, I wanted to try for something that would be memorable and different. Something that could potentially act as a bulwark during those moments when you need such a thing. Perhaps it's too much to shoot for in a graduation book that you haven't prepared for or thought about. Nevertheless, I might have done it. - - - - - - - Life goes up, Life goes down, Life is all around. - - - - - - - When I read this here's what I think. "'Lif...

It's a dangerous thing to read the comments on your writing. It's dangerous to your mental health. We often take comments that we receive online as if it were people talking to us. And, it's different. People are often willing to be insulting and threatening online when they wouldn't be in person. Even if that's not happening, it's difficult to communicate tone and such in writing, so things that would come across differently in person are lost when done in writing. But, sometimes it's great to read comments. I've been debating things online for the last couple of decades. I've benefited from some of the discussions, but being able to ignore comments, or to read them and then not respond, is an even better skill. Public comments are unique because there can be different intentions. Some people are honestly engaging with you and asking sincere questions or making sincere comments. In those cases I try to respond in kind. Then there are all of...

Dave Chappelle came out with a new Netflix comedy special called "Sticks and Stones". Ironically, it hurt some people's feelings. I think the humor is decent, but that's not the most important thing about this. More than the humor, it's the heroic nature of Chappelle's endeavor. Comedians aren't normally associated with heroism. But, let's look at what heroism is. If I search it online I find this definition: a person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. I think that's pretty good, but I think I can get to a deeper and better definition. A hero is a person that makes sacrifices to fight evil. In other words, a hero has to be both strong and good. That is the essence. What is the evil that Dave Chappelle is fighting? It's the politically correct culture that enjoys the tyranny of the mob and seeks to destroy individuals. He mentions that it has become "celebrity hunting season"...