75 Days to Ultraman Mexico

August 3, 2025 – 75 Days to Ultraman Mexico

Back-to-back social weekends are done. Now I’ve got three days to reset—work, clean, pack, and get my head straight before flying. On the checklist: another 13 hours for Korbin, bills paid, a bank run, and money set aside for Milwaukee. I’m nervous, but I’m also excited. Once I get through this trip, there’s nothing but Mexico on the horizon. Work. Train. Write. Race fucking Ultraman.

This weekend was horror-movie heavy. Zach, Renee, and I ran through Insidious, The Conjuring, their sequels, plus Insidious 3 and Forget Me Not. The Conjuring still hits as one of the best horror movies I’ve seen, with Insidious right behind it.

While watching The Conjuring 2, I started reading about Ed and Lorraine Warren. What struck me wasn’t just the ghost stories but their business sense. To me, they were artists as much as investigators. They pulled timeless strings—fear, family, faith—while anchoring themselves in the insecurities of their era. Suburban isolation, fractured communities, Cold War paranoia, the desperate clinging to “traditional values.”

Their real genius was validating people’s fears and then presenting themselves as the authority with the solution. The kicker? They framed the solution so that people felt empowered by participating in it—when in reality that “power” only existed in opposition to an enemy the Warrens themselves defined. Classic authority move.

And this isn’t unique to the Warrens. It’s a core feature of being human. Life is uncertain, totally free in the present moment, and that freedom comes with no guarantees. The thinking brain can’t handle it—it scrambles for certainty, for survival assurances it can cling to. But the present doesn’t provide proof, because the present requires letting go of the past and its ideas. So we chase certainty in the only place we can hold it: in our minds.

That’s where authority comes in. Religion, nations, ideologies, institutions—they’re all external answers to the unbearable openness of freedom. Most people don’t even realize that’s what they’re seeking. It’s the most valuable market in human history: selling security to the insecure. The authority defines the threat, offers the cure, and convinces you your survival depends on both.

But here’s the trap: the cure kills freedom. It numbs us into false security, shielding us not from threat but from the raw experience of being alive. And maybe that “threat” we’re always trying to escape isn’t a threat at all. Maybe it’s life itself.

Freedom offers no guarantees. Security offers even less.