SF Chronicles: The Wisdom of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
A quote here, usually attributed to Mark Twain – who got so many points right, and not always with attribution….: “Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.” Says Mr. Twain.
It is a good quote, applicable to a myriad of situations. At least I thought when I read it. I read it on a card. It was a card for my son´s birthday, which now – today. And it is a card for him, the 21 year old.
“This is just to set the blogpost off!”, I wrote when I read the card. And I continued: “It´s by far finished. But I´m sure I´ll think of something.”
Evening: The above is what I said right before we headed out to a restaurant. We headed out in the early evening on this wonderful day in Berkeley, to a restaurant on the Bay, with a view to the Golden Gate Bridge. We planned to spend the evening there. And now we have. It is evening.
— And in fact I did think of something: As it turns out, when we came out of the restaurant we found our car window smashed in. A thing like this never happened to me before. It thought when I saw the littered ground with glass pieces from a fairly expensive Volvo that this is the sort of thing that leaves you with a rotten taste and a tremble. Someone has done something to you. They have not wished you well. You have been violated. It does not feel good knowing how somebody smashed into your life just to make a few easy bucks. It makes you feel even less good knowing that there was a computer in a backpack on the floor of the car, and that that computer is now gone.
The morale of the story
So the moral here? Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.
A bit wiser, we now know enough to respect the restaurant sign saying not to leave valuables in the car. In the future, we will be wiser. It was a bad call, and we know. But then again — think about how much smarter we are — now after that experience. If it had not been for that bad judgement, how dumb would we not be just now? Just a few hours after a bad call, we might now even qualify for the World Championship in Chess, or a free ride to Harvard, a place at the Table of the3 Saints, or something. If good ol´Samuel Langhorne Clemens was right: We´re now a smarter bunch.
So you see, I did think of something….thanks to Mark Twain.
Signing out — I´m done; and by the way — the restaurant was worth the visit. Skates on the Bay, it is called. You will find it on the Berkeley Marina, overlooking Golden Gate. Nice view. But still not worth the view of a broken car window, you say? It depends on how smart we got, most likely. Wits are hard to come by these days. And if you´re smarter than us you might notice that the parking lot is kind of dark, and also that the spot where we chose to park was on the edge of a forest, dark enough for the thieves of the night to hide their hammers — or whatever they use to smash car windows.
The computer has an active homing device in it, but we´re all globalists now; so where in the world is home?
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