interesting history, in a few different manners

Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. This being the progenitor of night every self-directed work from the 1930s on, I could certainly see where everything from The Secret to everything less popular got most of their stuff. Or, one might argue, they're all just speaking to universal principles, I suppose. In the same vein, the yogic texts of yore obviously came thousands of years before the 1930s, and they contain much of the same gist of things. All that said, this book is particularly interesting in my mind because, one, the sheer passion of its author - if the history textbooks that spoke to the same subjects (in some chapters of this book) spoke with the same verve and vigor, I would have become a history major come college time. And two, the manner in which the book was written, which was by true life experience, and interviews with some of the most historically prominent and successful people the time, ie, the richest people in the world.

It's funny, hearing a story from a friend at work about his brother-in-law getting in a fight with a bunch of Arabs after a road-rage kind of incident (I'm talking a literal fistfight in the middle of Alvernon), and then later finding the group's car and baseball bat'ing their headlights, I was reminded of a sensation I had often in working at the hospital, but rarely feel now. That is, that I am damn lucky to have the life I have. Remembering people I spent hours with at the hospital, I don't have theft as an everyday occurrence in my life (including people walking into your apartment and literally taking things out of your hands), or getting mugged, or just jumped for no reason at all, or get hit by a car and then left to bleed by the side of the road. I could go on. But for the majority of people, everyday existence is defined by massive, weighty debt, by omnipresent danger, and by utter despair at not only feeling stuck in that situation, but not having the slightest clue as to how to get out of it. So fuck it all, right? And so, in those moments, I feel a bit irked at myself in my everyday assumption that everyone has a life as peachykeen as mine. But, that's a good kind of upset, in the end, I suppose.
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"Eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside." Mark Twain