[MD] Sweetland Bypass Effect

[John Carl]

There used to be a town near where I live,  called Sweetland.  It's gone now
and the town that remained, North San Juan, is right on HWY 49 where
Sweetland road meets 49, a forked off dirt road of many potholes leads to my
shack teetering on the edge of the old diggins,  the knife edge of
wilderness and civilization.
When you live on the border of something, you get to choose more easily in
which land you dwell.  I can walk out the front of my house, and be in town
within 5 minutes or I can walk out the back door and be in the wilds within
5 minutes.

Choice is a heady drug.  You start imbibing, and you just want more.   I can
choose my environment,  I can change my environment through choice.

So I do.  I choose to live in Sweetland, rather than North San Juan.

This is the opposite of the Cleveland Harbor effect.  In the Cleveland
harbor effect, you want to know where you actually are and strain your
sensory inputs  to match what you think ought to be.

With the Sweetland Bypass effect, you choose where you want to be and strain
your sensory inputs through a filter which rejects those that don't match
your choice of environment.   I'd rather live in My Sweet Land than "North
San Juan" - named so by militaristic miners with fond memories of kicking
Spanish ass in the war and wresting Puerto Rico away -  although the name is
sorta apt in that we have a very nice mild climate matching their memories
of San Juan, Puerto Rico.  But I prefer Sweetland.

So I choose it.


Don Quixote chose to be a heroic fighter of  giants rather than a passive
observer of empirical windmills, and we make fun of him for choosing a
reality different from the one we'd already agreed upon.  But I say he was a
genius.   When somebody writes  or comments pejoratively "tilting at
windmills", I disagree with the denigration.

Tilting at windmills is a lot smarter than taking on real giants.   Real
giants can kick your Spanish ass, whereas windmills go 'round and 'round and
'round predictably, smoothly.

If your timing is off, you will end up on your ass, but you won't get
stomped into the dirt.