May 2026

I have to say how thankful I am to have as much help as I do around me. My poor mom acts as a volunteer employee helping run errands in the city that is 4 hours away where I do a lot of art business. Then the homies I work with in fire coming in super clutch when I am doing a bad job trying to organize a forest wide chainsaw training while I am away on a fire assignment with no cell phone service. Then my wife, who is patient and helps me find my head when it feels disconnected. And that is just this month!

After a month of lackluster books in April, I was happy that May was a month of good ones. The mountain is you by was a great one about recentering and self exploration. We don’t find inner peace; we make inner peace. It’s a look at how we tend to “I” and “my” random events, even if it has nothing to do with us. We create an opinion or assumption, and still somehow for ourselves into it. Besides that fact that we are not being present and distracted with an internal monologue, it becomes more distracting when the lense that we use to view these random events is blurred by past trauma, habits, and beliefs that all form what could be an inaccurate account. Anyone looking for some wise words about self actualization and how a clouded lense can be cleaned, this Zen book was great.

I’m the same idea of creating inferences and assumptions, Fooled By Randomness is a book about odds, random events, complex systems and of course how human nature influences our understanding of risk. The book uses an example of 10,000 people being entered into a coin flipping contest where the last person standing will win 1 million dollars. If 50% of the individuals flip tails (the rhetorical odds in a heads and tails flip) and are then “out” at the end of each day, after 13 days there will only be one person. This person will have won due to their pure luck of not flipping tails. Soon this person will go on to make TikTok and YouTube videos telling you “how to make 1 millions dollars in 13 days”. Fooled by randomness.

The author discusses how people draw patterns and default to what “normal” is, as a way to save on computing power and to make sense of our place in it all. We don’t worry about once in a lifetime or rare events because they are so infrequent it is easy to exclude them when thinking about risk. But sometimes a random event like a market crash, a war, a hurricane, illness or a flip of a tails can expose those “who are not wearing a swimsuit when the tide goes out.” The author is a fund manager so the ultimate aim of the book was to discuss what makes a good manager versus a lucky one, with the great equalizers being time and randomness.

Ok enough theory,

I am always beyond humbled and appreciative when my work finds a home. I was trusted with painting a Father’s Day gift. This was outside of my normal scope of work but Bonafide Bison is a wildlife painting that is a tribute to their father and his bison ranch. Max the big boy, the two calves, the albino, the mountains, a cross and the train were important symbols to have in the painting for the family and the ranch. I am extremely thrilled with the work, and hopefully on Father’s Day, the family will be as well!