The Church In West Palm 2025 – 100% AI Free
Mediocrity Is Not An Option!
~ Steven Swenson
First, i trust everyone is safe.
i recently read a book on one flight called “Nobody Is Coming to Save You: A Green Beret’s Guide to Getting Big Sh*t Done” by Lt. Col. Scott Mann.
It is a self help book of sorts. The main import of the book was that it is ok to talk about things that have happened to you, not in a victim mode, but what you learn from the situation. He was a Green Beret in Afghanistan, dealing with the same “humans” that dealt lethality to the United States of America, which continues today.
i wasn’t going to write anything today; just send my thoughts to those whose lives were severely affected on this date.
It has been twenty-one years today.
i want to tell you something about the counting. i do not mark this date on a calendar. i have never had to. i knew people in the buildings. i knew people who made it out of the buildings. i talked to people in depth who were the first responders as part of my work. i know people who were in the Pentagon when it got hit.
Recently i was driving back with a new work aquatience who i beleive is kindred spirit from the 250th American Grand Prix. We had parked at the south entrance of the pentagon. We got in the car and he drove off and pointed to the fence and said we used to just walk up and hang out there now we cant due to one event.
Today is when belief systems in several areas ran completely amok.
Somewhere in the last days of August my body starts keeping the appointment without asking me, and then a week or so later my mind catches up and says oh. That is what this is. That is the thing that is happening. Every year. The body files it before the head has a word for it. It’s built on a couple of things that are clockwork. One hurricane season in the Southeast; Halloween is right around the corner and today.
Twenty One Years.
Twenty-one years reduces. Two and one make three. Three by three makes nine. Nine is where i am going to stop, and you will see why.
Sven was in his office at One Infinite Loop with his back to the door and MacsBug on the screen. I walked in and said a certain code word, “the crew,” was to be used at a certain time, which for him meant, “Hey man, you ready to get that boat?”
He pushed back from the desk, picked up his backpack, and said okay man, i just pushed back, where are we going?
i said hold on, i meant the boat, not right now.
He said why the hell not, let’s go.
He got the boat. A forty-eight-foot Beneteau. i captained it once, he insisted. Then he did the part nobody tells you about, which is that he trained himself and he trained his family in seamanship, martial arts, technology, and programming because he was not going to take people he loved out onto the water and be a tourist about it. He did it right. He did everything right. He was never content with mediocrity and despised stupidity.
In addition to the boat he also shaved his head. Well many of us did in a ritual when we left apple and started executing a plan in perfection.
When he had his head shaved i rubbed him on the head hugged him, and said to him the famous quote from Fight Club:
Like a monkey, ready to be shot into space. Space monkey! Ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good.
~ Tyler Durden
The last email i ever got from him was July 28th, 2005. He said it was awesome talking to me just now. He said if his last couple of sentences got garbled (via the satellite phone he had), he would send me the telephone number for that catina he called me from whenever he could get it.
Then he said: say hi to Thomas.
That is the last thing he ever wrote to me. My son’s name.
September 11th, 2005. Costa Rica. Northern Pacific coast, near Ollie’s Point and Witch’s Rock, which is where a man goes when he has worked out where the good water is.
He was doing exactly what he loved with the people he loved. He did not want a funeral. He wanted a party and a lot of rum, and that is what he got, and i think that is the most Sven thing about the whole business.
At the party his mother put her hand on my face and told me i was the closest thing she had left to her son.
His brothers came up to me, separately, and thanked me for transforming him.
And someone sent me a line in an email that i will not reproduce here, but the sentence was that Steve felt like i was the only friend who really understood him.
Twenty-one years and i have never once figured out what to do with any of that except carry it.
The sea was not finished with that family.
Last year 2025 i helped put his son Gage back into ocean. Gage was better at the math than his father was, which is a thing i am allowed to say because i knew them both. Acted just like him. Same everything.
There is no lesson in this paragraph. Some years the ledger just gets longer.
But before that, i did the only useful thing i have ever done in twenty-one years of this.
i took Roma Dawn (aka Good Lookin’) freediving.
The woman whose husband died on a breath-hold, back down into the water on a breath-hold, on purpose, with humans who love her and know what they’re doing next to her.
You do not get to make the water safe. You do not get to make it anything. What you can do is make sure the person you love does not have to be afraid of it on top of everything else.
That is the whole job, as far as i can tell. You carry the fear first so the people behind you get to go in clean.
So here is where i stop, on nine, and nine rolls over to The One.
One breath.
That is all any of it ever was. He went down on one. His boy went back to same water. His wife went back in on one and came up. My oldest daughter, My Son, and my nephew now “go down on one” for fun now, and come up laughing, and they have no idea what that cost or who paid it, and they are never going to, because that is what the paying was for in the first place. The_Infinite_Human_Do_Loop
Twenty-one years, comrade. The boat was real. The plan was real. You pushed back from the desk and you went.
To every sailor the gods have given a comrade
While one sleeps the other keeps watch on the bridge
When one doubts the other gives him his faith
When one falls the other discovers the oasis of ice for both of them
When my comrade loses faith I laugh confidently
When my comrade sleeps I keep watch for him
When my comrade falls I fight on for the both of us
Because to every sailor the gods have given a comrade!~ Blood Axis Song of The Comarade
Stay deep.
With my love always to Roma and Leif
MUZAK TO BLOG BY: Rome — “We Who Fell in Love with the Sea.” Same as every year. Some things do not get a new arrangement.
#iwishyouwater
EverForward,
@tctjr