Not everything we do needs to have this super-special, universe-altering purpose behind it, especially since the universe could give negative shits about what us sentient specks of space dust do with our brief love affair with consciousness. So go ahead, indulge in a pointless hobby or 10 — play the shit out of your video games, color all the adult coloring books, get that doctorate that everybody spits on because you weren’t born with 35 years’ experience. Just don’t let the pursuit of pointlessness consume your life to the point where actual important stuff goes forever ignored.
If you ever find yourself doing anything like the following, burn it all to the ground, hug your family, and apologize profusely for so coldly ignoring them all these years. If you don’t have a family, hug Mario and Luigi. They miss you too.
#5. Don’t Blow 40 Years And $2 Million Building A Giant Boat, Especially If You’re Landlocked
Dillon Griffith isn’t the first person to build his own boat. But while most content themselves with stitching together a pile of wood and praying to the Sky God that the Tuna God doesn’t whisk them away for a forced marriage to Aquaman, Griffith went and built himself a 64-foot, 40-ton, steel-and-electric monstrosity that he dubbed the “Mystic Rose.” It took him 38 years and cost roughly $2 million to complete.
Naturally, he did it to earn money.
He was inspired to build his own giant boat in 1977, after chartering his first, less-giant boat for fishing trips failed to earn him any money. After concluding this was because his galley was too small to allow for truly hardcore fishing, he set out to build his own, ginormous fishing boat. That way he could charter more people for more trips and make more sweet, sweet mackerel money.
Reminder: He spent $2 million to get there.
He also took 38 years to finish, because Dillon Griffith is not a professional huge-boat maker. What’s more, he eventually moved away from the ocean and into a land-locked area, yet he continued to build his boat. That’s like moving to Death Valley and trying to build your own ice hockey rink. Oh, and the project damn near killed him, and not in the typical “oh, all this hard work is killing me” kind of way. No, more like a crane fell on him once and shattered his body. That kind of killing. Also, an 11-pound cylinder once broke his neck. After that, it was probably less a labor of love and more one of pure stubbornness. He saw a ship that steadfastly refused to be built, and he stared it right in the barnacle-encrusted porthole and said, “Fuck you, thou shalt be built.”
And build it he did — after nearly 40 years of lonesome, dawn-to-dawn work days, the ship is ready to sail. Finally, as Griffith says, he’ll “make money and [he] won’t have to worry anymore.”
Of course, there’s still the issue of getting the boat to sea, since he lives far away from it and all. He estimates it’ll cost an extra $55,000 to have it towed there, but then he’ll make money for sure! He’s set up a GoFundMe to cover these final costs, so feel free to help him if you like. He’s almost there; he just needs a little push over that finish line.
#4. Don’t Waste Half A Century Building Your Own Helicopter Out Of Garbage
Like so many children of the pre-1950s (and post-2020s, after President McCarthy executive-orders all vaccines into the same dirty pit where we stashed those Atari ET games) a Honduran man known simply as Agustin contracted polio. He’s been unable to walk since.
Young Agustin dreamed of being a pilot, so he’s spent the past 50 years constructing a helicopter out of garbage. This despite knowing precisely dick about helicopters aside from “they exist.” And he insists his will fly, despite it never coming even once close to doing so. Ever bet 99 percent of your poker chips on what winds up being a 6 high? That’s this, in weird mutated sorta-copter form.
Agustin started this project in 1958, thinking it would take only three months because what’s a helicopter compared to a soap-box racer or a homemade turkey sandwich. So already we have a grown man cock-sure that he could build a working helicopter, single-handedly, with everything that Oscar The Grouch had grown sick of masturbating to, in three months. He missed that deadline by a mere 573 months, because, according to him, “Things kept getting complicated.” Big flying machines that typically require an entire crew to assemble do tend to be that way, yes.
But still he perseveres, tinkering with his helicopter daily, all by himself. He gathers junk, trash, and spare parts wherever he can find them and assembles them all on his own — even the propeller’s chains are DIY. It’s neat, but it’s also Fallout 4: Saddest-Ever Edition. And I do mean he finds those parts wherever — for years, Agustin used an old, rickety wheelchair, until his friends and family bought him a shiny, new, working one, direct from the United States … which he immediately disassembled for helicopter parts.
If this were simply performance art, it’d be one thing. But Agustin still believes, and will likely keep believing until his final day, that his literal pile of garbage will get visited by the Blue Fairy one night and become a real helicopter. He outright admits that it “looks like a caricature of a helicopter” but somehow doesn’t grasp that that’s exactly why his only hope to fly is the same as ours: Board a plane, get drunk on boxed wine, and let someone who knows what they’re doing help him roam about the country.
#3. Don’t Spend 17 Years Building A Wooden Lamborghini In Your Basement
Hey, let’s watch 1/27th of a movie!
That’s the intro to Cannonball Run, and even non-carheads can see it’s awesome, as is the Lamborghini Countach Tara Buckman zooms around in. Ken Imhoff certainly agrees, but unlike us the film didn’t inspire him to drink shitloads of beer and fantasize about getting coldly laughed at by Buckman if he dared approach her. He was instead inspired to build his very own Countach. Out of wood. And not just some rinky-dink model for his mantel. He was going to build a life-size wooden Lamborghini, engine and all, and he was going to drive that motherfucker.
Maybe he drank shitloads of beer after all.
Like most people who don’t know what they’re doing but confidently stumble through it anyway, Imhoff figured his “Bull In The Basement” project wouldn’t take long — five years, tops. It took him 17, the literal length of childhood. That’s an appropriate analogy, by the by, since he missed much of his kids’ own childhoods while locked in his basement sanding, polishing, fucking up, redoing, sanding, and polishing again.
By 2007, his Treeborghini was finally finished and ready for unveiling. Except, he couldn’t get it out of his basement, since basements don’t have garage doors. So, Imhoff did the only logical thing he could: He paid a guy to cut a big hole in his basement, dig up a gnarly dirt ramp, and tow the car out of the basement and into the light. He would’ve driven it out — it theoretically being a car and all — but it’s a chunk of wood.
and plummet in value or anything.
He eventually powered it up enough to joyride around the block, bring his kids to school, and gather a few termites. But, after five years, Imhoff decided to sell. He claimed the maintenance was too much to handle; all that wood polish sets you back, but presumably he’d also love to recoup some of the “unimaginable [financial] extremes” his Cannonball Pratfall put him and his entire family through. At least we know he won’t try anything this dumb again.
Oh wait, no. He immediately started work on a wooden Studebaker Hawk. Check back with Cracked in about 20 years for an update.
source http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/13/5-people-so-blinded-by-their-hobbies-they-forgot-to-live/
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