And so it came to pass that today, I went out for an afternoon walk. It was exceptional, and when I came back, I was inspired to try drawing. The image got more developed over time as I went further down the page, and what started out being quite rudimentary became more subtle over time.

Thus, for my own amusement, I thought I would record the first thing I’ve drawn in about fifteen long, disinterested, repressed years… I’m quite pleased, to be honest.

Partly inspired by a whole host of reading, and partly by the amazing and hyperbolic blog Badass of the Week, I’ve been thinking about badasses and their place in the modern world.

The Definitive Badass

Badassery is ill defined, but worth achieving nonetheless. Traditional badasses have made themselves known by slaughtering their enemies with conspicuous bravado and balls-to-the-wall machismo (of course, lady badasses still have these metaphorical balls). Whether it’s punching Nazis or wrestling leopards, there’s always something for the badass to do.

As time passes, and more and more of us grow up in urban jungles rather than the dense, untamed jungles or yore, there are less opportunities for us to test our physical mettle against nature’s finest. There are still plenty of dangers in cities, of course, but it’s harder to go toe-to-toe with a drunk driver or pile of carcinogens and come out looking pretty.

Nevertheless, within the urban environment and somewhat less random lifestyles that most of us have these days, there are still plenty of opportunities for badassdom, regardless of the position that one starts from. The trick is to both approach this process consciously and deliberately.

For me, the goal is not to become the world’s most stupendous badass. I recognise and acknowledge that this isn’t possible. Hell, I live in a household with three other men who could beat me to death with one hand tied behind their backs. I’m 6 months off turning twenty-five. I don’t think that even the most heroic of training schedules will get me there.

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the young-ish hero has an epiphany. He realises that there is a point in a young man’s life when he becomes innately aware that he can no longer become the world’s most stupendous badass, that there is someone else out there who is bigger, more dangerous, more lethal and more skilled than oneself.

Let’s think about the concept of stupendous badassery. Neal Stephenson talks about it in his books, Snow Crash specifically, when his protagonist realises that when you turn 24 or 25 that you are incapable, or that it is no longer necessary, for you to become the world’s most stupendous badass. Someone else is going to do it.

Up until that point, you may think to yourself, ‘Well, if something truly monumental happened, if my parents were killed by Ninjas, or if a drug cartel kidnapped my daughter, then I could go and run up and down mountains and would learn all the skills I needed to, and emerge from the experience being the most stupendous badass in the world, or at least very close to it.’

For that reason, the idea that it can be safely put off until later, many people do not become the most heroic badasses they could possibly be. Because after all, running up and down mountains and squeezing rocks and everything else that goes into hardcore training is fucking exhausting, not to mention totally impractical for most people. That’s why badasses are badasses; it’s because they’re so much more extreme than your common-and-garden proletariat.

So, the theory goes, you’ll reach this point in your life when you realise, actually, no, that’s not the case, there’s somebody else who’s already done that. There is a bigger, badder motherfucker out there, someone who’s got a nuclear bomb strapped to their backpack and linked to their heartbeat, so if you defeat them, you’ll get taken out with them… Or someone who’s been working out all day, ever day, running through Russian forests punching bears and felling trees with their forehead since they were twelve, and is now a literal unstoppable killing machine.

In some ways, this realisation amy be a bit of a disappointment, because you’re like, ‘Crap! Now what am I going to do?’. In other ways, though, it can actually be quite a relief: ‘Thank goodness! Now I can let go of that feeling of someone looking over my shoulder, saying “Hey, you’re letting yourself down because you’re not a stupendous badass..”’

So, for me, when I had that realisation, it didn’t come about in any one particular moment. Instead, it was a series of downing realisations over a period of time. For me, the sensation was a relief. Instead of worrying about achieving some difficult-to-quantify ideal state, I was able to focus more on the process than the end result.

Badassery and the Narrative Theory of Adventures

The first question is: ‘Badassery: worth it or no?’. This is worth thinking about deliberately, because if your answer is ‘no’, then you can essentially stop reading now and continue about your life as it currently progresses. If you’re entirely happy with who you are and how your life is going, then the effort spent in becoming more badass will be wasted and certainly annoying and strenuous.

So what is the case for badassdom?

Most people will agree with me when I say that having a life filled with adventure is strictly better than having a life devoid of adventures. If you go through your life and have daily routines that don’t have any variation, and your daily routine isn’t something that other people would consider badass in and of itself*, then you are probably missing out on a while lot of fun.

(*Hanglider, shark taunter, pyrotechnician, etc)

For example, for the last five years I have been employed by a Federal Taxation Office, and my job involved answering people’s questions about tax. It is not a particularly exciting environment to work in. The worst thing that can happen is that you have an angry or aggressive client, but even in those limited and unusual circumstances, it is unlikely to lead to anything that you would consider drastic or totally unexpected.

Most jobs are designed to be like this. Adventures are unpredictable, they are difficult to control and rein in, and are not conducive

So you can see that within placid, routine environments, particularly office environments, there is a distinct lack of adventure. Now, people have differing approaches to adventure. There are times in your life when you may want more or less, but I strongly believe there should always be some element of at least potential, otherwise you start to wither and die as a cognitive human being.

Now to counteract this, because I was starting to get bored with this feeling of withering, I started to cultivate, quite deliberately, experiences – and I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing them – and I’ve ben cultivating these adventurous experiences more and more until now, at the start of 2012, I have reached a point where they make up a significant part of my entire life.

What is now clear is that what I was doing was cultivating a series of experiences that were, in fact, adventures. They involved an element of risk, travelling into the unknown, meeting new people and experiencing new things. Many specifically consisted of meeting people with particular sets of skills that I found attractive towards my preconceived notions of what my sense of adventure held. For example, I started to travel with people who were into extreme and adrenaline sports, who liked nightclubbing and exploring the nightlife of new cities, and who were comfortable being in countries where they didn’t speak the local language.

By associating with those people, I was able to highlight for myself how I wanted to be living. This also showed me what skills I wanted to develop. For example, I started associating myself with more successful writers, both in person and by reading their stories and biographies and blog posts and so forth. I picked people who are well respected and looked up to in the writing community, and those who spoke with an intense, personal voice.

I’ve started hanging out with people who are significantly fitter than me, who can drive, who have experience in forms of physical combat, martial arts, sword fighting, dealing with law enforcement and so on – what I think of as practical skills that can be applied in extreme situations. At the same time I have been nostalgically drawn towards the experiences I’ve had earlier in my life that, had I continued down those paths, would have led me to the skills I am now actively trying to cultivate.

The people who have these skills in sufficient quantities are badasses, and these are the people who both have the best adventures and survive to recount them. They live the stories that the rest of us dream about, by shaping their personal narratives to more exciting channels.

Narrative Flow and Adventure

Stories can act as far more than enjoyable diversions. They present a framework of looking at the world that I’ve found increasingly useful over time, and I like to think of it as ‘narrative flow’. If you consider your life as a story, then what you may find is that things slot neatly into a series of vignettes. There will be periods of repetition and normalcy that could be summarised in a few short sentences, and then something happens and things suddenly get interesting.

When I look at my life as a narrative or as a series of flowing adventures, there are some stories that strike me as particularly attractive. Personally, those are near-future speculative fiction novels like those of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson.

The common denominator that I notice in the characters in the stories is not that they are necessarily stupendous badasses in the physical sense: they don’t know kung fu, they don’t carry guns around with them, but they do either:
a) associate with people who do, either voluntarily or involuntarily
b) Have particular sets of skills – ingenuity, the capacity to adapt to rapidly changing situations, usually some form of highly specific technical skill that has been honed and is unique to them.

What these particular characteristics achieve, especially when combined, is to increase the likelihood of something interesting happening in your life.

If you are instigator of an adventure, you don’t necessarily want companions on said adventure whose skills are generic. You can get those people anywhere. If I want someone who’s 10-15kg overweight, who are in unsatisfying relationships, if they have a mortgage they’re stressed over, eat unhealthy food, go on holiday where their travel agents tell them to… Then I can pick someone out of a crowd entirely at random.

If people don’t live their lives consciously, then they tend to take the path of least resistance and become essentially formless as individuals. They may still be inherently nice people, but there is a difference between ‘nice’ and ‘worth having an adventure with’.

Normal people can have adventures, it’s just less likely. There is a familiar storytelling trope where a seemingly normal person has an adventure thrust on them, and then they go off and experience it. In reality, as you would imagine, the likelihood of this happening is extraordinarily low. I haven’t lived long enough to judge, but I suggest those thrust-upon adventures will only happen less than a half dozen times in your life. Even those thrust-upon adventures will mostly involve situations you have little control over – car accidents, strikes, blackouts, acts of God, and so on, and what adventures one does experience are likely to be extremely challenging and probably unpleasant.

There are an infinite number of adventures out there in the real world, happening all the time. You can go and have an adventure right now, or start one, anyway. You could walk out, go to a bar, meet someone, and go ‘Hey! You know what? We should get drunk, and pick a destination at random, and get all our money and go to the other en of the world and wrestle Siberian tigers, because, fuck it, why not?’

But the likelihood of that happening is quite low as long as you are unconsciously living a normal life. It’s only when you deliberately, consciously make decisions to accept new experiences into your life that this sort of narrative begins to manifest itself.

The ideal for myself at the moment is to continue to deliberately shape what I’m doing into a lifestyle and a lifestyle narrative that gives me the most options for adventure, while simultaneously preparing myself to have the greatest capacity to enjoy and accept those opportunities and adventures as they arise.

For me, some of the things that I want to do whilst adventuring is be more physically confident. I have had a long term injury. Several years ago, I badly injured my wrists and hands, and they’ve been fragile ever since. So for many years I had to give up fencing, badminton, social dancing and so on, and couldn’t fight, pick up heavy things, and so on. It was quite debilitating and put me in a framework of fearful rejection of potential adventures.

Recently I’ve realised that this is unacceptable. It’s more important that I take active steps to deal with the remaining injuries, become fitter, become more competent, both technically and generally, and do things like:

• Get a drivers license and do defensive driving courses
• Learn how to handle physical aggression
• Learn how to handle firearms
• Become more confident in my physical abilities in unusual situations
• Learn how to engage an urban environment in unconventional ways, i.e. parkour, freerunning
• Medium to advanced first aid.

These are skills that are necessary for extremely adverse situations which can, but not necessarily will, arise. We don’t want to necessarily seek these circumstances out, but it’s important not to live an adventurous lifestyle without being able deal with the challenges that will, in necessity, arise along the way.

You can’t have an adventure without overcoming some sort of adversity. People overcome adversity all the time. Right now, I’m overcoming poorness. I’m overcoming boredom. Those are adversaries that are… Relatively low on the adventure scale, and they are relatively uninteresting. You will probably have similarly uninteresting limitations in your life that prevent you from having all the adventures you want. Dealing with them can be annoying, expensive, painful and time-consuming.

You do, however, have to get them out of the way in order to go have those big life-changing experiences.

If you don’t, then the consequences can be unpredictable.

When you do go and have those adventures, they may not BE as stupendously badass as you were wanting them to be. It’s important to get those fundamentals out of the way. For example, previously I have travelled to Japan for a month or two at a time, but have had to curtail some of my activities due to a lack of funds or having to return to Australia to go back to work.

Now, my situation is different. Because of a great deal of hard work, I can reasonably expect now that within a year’s time, I could travel in Japan indefinitely, because the money I will be earning through non-location-specific work will be enough to support my lifestyle regardless of where I am, giving me ever-increasing freedom to do what I want.

This increased freedom has already led to opportunities arising that I was not able to take up before. For instance, I now have the freedom to go to Denmark and go to the Roskilde festival, and then immediately afterwards travel to Japan for the Fuji Rock Festival. I would not be able to do those things and have those adventures if I was limited by a traditional office job and associated trappings.

More Badassery and Adventures To Come

This article in its original form is quite long – about 13,000 words – so what I’m going to do is leave this first instalment here. In the next article, which I’ll post shortly, I’ll look at the difference between universal and specific skills that apply to adventures, and badassery in general, and how to intelligently go about cultivating those skills.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated, because I’m still developing these thoughts for myself into a cohesive framework.

Cheers;
Pip

Listen to my rambles, children!

Welcome to 2012, everybody! Are you as excited about this year as I am?

Good.

2011 was an intense year for me, and one of fluxion, too. I’ve started 2012 with a fresh outlook, a whole set of goals, some plans on how to reach them, and a commitment to getting there. PipHunn.com languished as a placeholder for me for several years, holding my email (pip@piphunn.com if you ever feel like shooting me a missive!) but little else.

Well, that’s going to change this year. I have several projects underway:

Warped and Spineless: I realised in late December that it’s somewhat iniquitous that I can’t draw. Hence, I’m going to spend 20 minutes a day before bed doodling in a scrapbook I’ve brought myself, and in late February this year I’m going to finally start putting ink to screen (you know what I mean!) and putting some doodles up both here, to go alongside my essays, and also in a semi-regular webcomic I’m now sketching out ideas for, tentatively titled Warped and Spineless.

Hyper-Critical: My review website, Hyper-Critical, has been unloved and un-updated, much like a 15-year-old’s diary. Not this year. My goal is 100 reviews and interviews this calendar year, both to force myself to read all the books I’m buying and also to hone my literary critical skills. Watch out there for regular updates.

Essays: Man, I’ve got opinions coming out the wazoo. I feel like the Internet is an appropriate place to store most of them, both for the public’s entertainment (I do tell ribald stories on many, many occasions). I will be posting two essays, blog posts, rambles or stories here a week, and will pimp them out if I think they’re appropriate for human consumption.

Short Stories: I’ve committed to 26 short stories this year, one a fortnight. I’d like to get at least one of them professionally published this year, so we’ll see how that goes. I want to both re-find my voice as a writer, get some professional editorial feedback, and start down the path to being a full-time writer. With that in mind, I’m actually resigning from my day job in five working days – the 25th of January 2012 will be my last day, which is wildly exciting.

Website Writing: My alternate sources of income, apart from doing paid coverage work for the excellent Magic: The Gathering website, mostly involve my business partnership with Ash Cartwright, technicolour-haired poker playing extraordinaire and all-around Electric Gentleman. The income from these ventures should, hopefully, keep me from starving to death while I’m achieving everything else.

Measurable Goals

One thing I’m consciously doing this year that I’ve failed to do previously is be precise in my goals. As Steve Pavlina would gleefully point out, there is little point saying ‘I want to be fit’, and a great deal of points to be earned in saying ‘I want to weigh 47kg with sub-15% body fat’.

Some of my goals are private and are to do with my relationships and personal life, but many of them are not. So what I’m going to do is post the goals here, sans-explanations, and then check back in on them at the end of each calendar month and see how I’m progressing on them.

I’ll try and find a way to separate posts about my personal life from ones designed for entertainment or spreading in order not to bore and confuse everyone. I’m sure that WordPress has the capacity to do that… In case it’s not obvious in my business relationship, I’m the Beard, and Ash is the Suit.

My public goals, as they stand:

• Pay off my house. I start 2012 owing $120,000 on it.
• Make $2,000 in one day in partnership with Ash.
• Weigh 90kg with 10% body fat or less. I currently weigh 74kg. Take photographic evidence
• Finish a novel and have begun the process of publishing it through an agent. No self-publishing!
• Finish 26 short stories, make at least 1 professional sale.
• Review 100 books on Hyper-Critical. Interviews to count as a review.
• Write 100 non-personal blog entries / essays.

So there we are. Some stretch goals, but there’s no point in aiming for comfortable, measurable things. Good luck to me, and to you, in all your endeavours in 2012!

Cheers;
Pip