On Life

So honestly, what the hell is the point of it all? To be clear, this isn’t a nihilistic diatribe about the hopelessness of existence but in actually it is exactly the opposite. At this exact moment, I have so many directions that I could take my free time that I’m more than a bit at a loss as to which to choose. Seriously! Look… right now I could be….

* …downloading, for free, the greatest literature in the history of mankind. Now more than ever the wisdom of the ages is banging on our doors waiting for us to consume it. Best of all, it doesn’t cost us a blasted thing. In years past you would have at least had to go to the bookstore but now the whole of history is here for you. Covet the Library of Alexandria all you want, you still had to unroll the scrolls.

* … listening to the most soul-searing music ever made that speaks to us at a visceral level unthinkable fifty years ago. As with the literature, I can do most of this for free if I choose wisely.

* … making contact with complex and amazing human minds that have a lifetime of experience to add to my own. More than ever, humans are just completely and utterly interesting. Because the world has opened to us, we all have a little something to add. We’re not digging in the dirt any longer, trying to scrape out a simple living. We’re all a part of the larger world and we all have a unique perspective that isn’t rooted in the hedgerows and byways of the countryside.

* … creating and sharing something new (and hopefully interesting) with the rest of humanity. It is boggling to think that 100 years ago it would have been nearly impossible to reach the same audience that is accessible to us today by a simple web page. Every day someone from some far-flung clime reads the random burbling on my blog. That would have been unthinkable a century ago. My tiny voice would have gone only as far as my ability to print and hand out fliers.

All this brings me around to a simple question, however. What exactly IS the point of any of it? We have so much available to us. We can go so far and see so much yet what is really the right thing to do? Should I pursue a simple lifestyle based in making myself as happy as possible or is it really necessary to create something new, to contribute to the total body of work of humanity to have any sort of meaningful existence? Is it enough to toil on mindlessly and promote the position of one’s progeny (by earning enough money to send them to Harvard?) or must one do more in order to be truly meaningful? Why live? What to do while we’re here? Such heady questions with such diverse and fluffy answers.

On Personal Martyrdom and Pretending to be Something that you are Not

I think that sometimes the world, and by the world, I mean the people in the world, think that I’m not paying attention to them.  That the words they so effortlessly spout bounce off the thick and callous exterior of my head and fall unheeded into the gutter.  I haven’t written in quite a while, but for some reason, I’m driven to write today.  Perhaps it’s because someone was so kind as to offer me the voluminous praise of referring to me as a “journalist.”  Whatever the case, here I am.

Two things have caught my attention over the past few months that I’ve not taken time to write down.  The first is that someone quite correctly referred to me as a “martyr” when it comes to work.  Since that time I can’t really do much without thinking quietly to myself… yeah, I’ll be fucked, but they’re right.  It just oozes from everything I do.  Some terribly shitty job to do?  Something idiotic and redundant and no fun whatsoever?  Well hell, Slaven’s practically jumping up and down to volunteer.  What the hell?  While this *SEEMS* like the attitude of a real team player, someone who will do whatever it takes to get shit done, really it’s the attitude of an ass who doesn’t really take proper care of the rest of the team.  While I’m off doing the shit work the rest of the team is flailing for leadership.  Overall, they fucking suffer MORE because I’m not delegating properly and letting the shit work fall where the shit work belongs: with the junior members of the team.  Further, it puts a hell of a lot of pressure on the people at the bottom.  There is a strange solace to the low-level work of any job.  You know quite clearly what is expected and you can measure your results.  Just because it’s crap doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.  It’s an ass-move on my part to take that away from the position where it belongs.  That’s how you prove yourself and work up.  If senior leadership takes all the garbage work then, surprise surprise, junior members of the team are forced to perform at levels they’re not prepared for and feel like shit because they’re not excelling.  They would have excelled if they’d been able to start at the right level of work.  But they couldn’t.  Because someone had to be a fucking martyr and do the job for them.

So the first lesson is, ironically, to be selfish.  Stand up for what you want.  Not just because it’s good for you but ultimately because it’s good for everyone.  There is a natural pecking order to things and on some levels it seems completely unfair.  Why the hell should someone have to do the shit work in whatever it is you do?  You know why?  Because it’s how you learn to do the real work.  I am often harkened back to the tattoo parlor.  There, they have an “intern” who does nothing but absolute garbage work.  He makes people fill out forms.  He sanitizes instruments.  He does all the crap work that nobody else wants to do.  But you know what?  When he finally graduates from that position he’s going to know that shit backwards and forwards.  He’s going to know about hygiene and he’s going to know about the mechanics of not getting the place sued because some drunk guy got stars tattooed on his face.  Add to that the fact that when he finally gets to put ink-to-skin he’s going to appreciate it so fucking much.  In playing the martyr I’ve denied the natural order of things fucked up someone’s career path in the process.  That sucks.  Speaking of tattoo artists though, I need to call Roger.  It’s about time. 

The second thing that’s echoed about my head is a reference to the “Imposter Complex.”  This little tidbit was posited by my gf/fiancée and her father.  I’d long suffered from this affliction but never quite realized it had a name.  Overall, I consider myself good at my job.  I’m fairly in tune with what’s going on at both a low level and a high level but part of me still fears that someone’s going to dig in and determine that I’m actually a total dumbass and have no clue what I’m talking about.  This is, in a nutshell, the imposter complex.  The feeling that you’ll be discovered as not knowing nearly as much as you think you do.  To remedy this, perhaps it’s appropriate that I just come clean and say what I think that I am with no pretense whatsoever.

So let’s start at the beginning.  As a programmer, I’m fair.  I’m the sort of person who would rather write 20 lines of code that absolutely everybody understands than three lines that were effusively elegant.  If you look at the body of my work at my current job you will probably understand it all immediately.  While some programmers will revel in the succinctness of the C# delegate, I’d quietly say that a simple for loop is more than sufficient.  My work is plodding, mundane and uninspiring.  But for the most part it gets the job done.  When I have the chance, I like to cover all the bases and test the reasonable cases for any bit of code but I’m also impatient.  I want the thing to work.  I’m focused on nuts and bolts.  Appearance and presentation are secondary and often so dependent on the browser that I’d prefer that it look like shit than write it once for IE, once for Firefox and once for Opera.  I’m a Luddite in every sense of the word.  At least to the extent that preferring to omit client-side code constitutes a Luddite.

As a product manager, I’m a bit better than fair.  I try to focus on the big picture, am more than willing to say “no” when it doesn’t serve the product direction as a whole and tend to be fairly good at taking product requests and stretching them out to cover not only the current requests but a fair number of future ones.  I could be significantly more limber in this area, but one is only granted so many development hours.  I yearn for a day when development of a product is driven by the developers rather than the sales team but I fear this will never happen.  Such is the sad state of the revenue-driven world.  I understand and only seek to gain a balance.

As a people manger… well, I’m not qualified to say.  Technically speaking, I’m not really the manager of anyone but I hope that those who work with me understand that I really only have their interests at heart.  Perhaps it’s the martyr talking again, but it’s fairly typical for me to suggest that anyone in my group might be happier somewhere else even if it promises to make my life a living hell after they leave.  Ultimately, I want people to be happy in their work.  Even if it totally screws me over.  There was a time when I thought I could offer an environment that provided an optimum mix of product freedom and stability.  That time has passed.  I think I understand what people look for in a job and I hope that I’m able to convey that to them so they can find the best outcome for themselves.  I’m hopeful that I can foster not only some level of contentment in the current jobs of those under me but also help them look beyond the here and now, a facility that I sadly lack.

To summarize, I think the lesson here is that I need to be more selfish.  I need to focus on my needs and my desires and not get nearly so bound up in what the company wants or what my co-workers need.  They’ll sort that out for themselves and the company will certainly look out for itself.  Ultimately one gets only a single life to live.  If one lives it with too many others in mind, one is simply giving away the only thing you truly have.  Martyrdom must cease.  It is time to reclaim again what one has duly earned.

Words, Strung Together, in Hopefully Pleasing Strands

Today as I pondered what I was going to make of the year 2011 (In general, my vocation is far, far too unintellectual to consume my full thought processes, so I find myself forced to ponder many things at once) and enumerating said items, it occurred to me that the one most prominent and important thing I needed to do was to simply write.

While I do try from time to time to divert myself along less analytical lines, ultimately I find that I measure my successes and failures using tried and true metrics that are as qualitatively absurd as they are quantitatively irrelevant. How many books did I finish this year? How many blog posts did I manage to publish? How many places did I go and take photos? On balance, this year was an utter failure in the realm of literature but a vast success if you measure it terms of frozen light and shadow. I look back with derision on my posts from this year. For the most part, they constitute statements of duress and misery, sad testaments to a sad person. That said, what posts I did bother to generate do continue to resonate with me. As riddled with despair as I was, I was not forsaken by the ability to turn a simple phrase into one that requires repetition of perusal just to squeeze out its very fundamental meaning. In short, I retain always my talent for making the very simple into the unnecessarily complicated.

Looking back on the year, I regret that I didn’t draw out in minute detail the events that marked the passing of 2010. I recall with great vividness laying under a Catalpa tree with a newfound friend, the grin stretching provocatively and seemingly without end from one side of my face to the other. Because I didn’t record it, all I have is scattered images and the visceral feeling of jubilance. I can still call it up in my mind, and each time recalled, it improves, but I regret that I have no relic of the day, carved from giddy, bubbling words, to look back on.

Later in the year, I found myself out west. Hundreds of photographs capture the days spent in that dusty terrain. The visuals preserved forever for as long as pixels remain pixels, but as each day passes, the feelings, the gentle caress of the desert breeze, the growing anticipation of a reunion, the energy of rising pre-dawn to find whatever is to be found, the loneliness of a desert road at night… they all fade away because they were not recorded. Someday, they will be lost to me utterly, but today… today they remain.

This is the value of the written word. This is what I have thrown away these past two years by not taking the time to record, as best I can, those things that cannot be summed up in a mere photograph. Though the cliché says that a picture should be valued as a thousand words, those words are ill chosen. Those 1000 words are cast in stone and are words of another's choosing. To really capture a time, a place, a person, you must choose those words and choose wisely. It also helps if you spell enough of them correctly that you can read them later. So it is with this regret, with this sense of indelible loss, that I resolve that I must return to those halcyon days of yesteryear when I actually wrote down what was going on. I make no promises to anyone, save to myself, that anything I write will be of even the most minor interest. In fact, I would find it exceptionally surprising if anyone DID find anything I had to write even the least bit interesting. But none the less, I find that I must write. If for no other reason than to entertain and fulfill the promise to the me of the future, who will cast his mind backwards and wonder what it was, exactly, that went through my mind. I cannot repair the rent in the fabric of my history, but I can at least begin to weave the cloth once again.

One Cup and a Million Draughts to Fill it

It is a basic human tendency to assume that we are all somehow different from everyone else; that within each of us lives a unique spark, a hidden secret need or desire that is ours and ours alone. We’re trained from the age of toddlers to think that we’re special; that there’s no one in the whole entire world who is exactly like us. This thought, no matter how buoyant it may make our youthful spirits feel, is simply wrong.

Every one of us has a cup rattling around inside. Some are full, some quite obviously empty. Some have the appearance of fullness but are no more than illusions tailored to fool the unwary. The cup represents our need to be necessary to the world or the universe around us. No more hollow feeling can smite the human soul than the thought that one’s own existence is superfluous and that nobody would notice if you were to simply vanish one day.

For a million cups, there are a million ways to fill them but not all are so obvious. Somewhere a new mother is holding her son for the first time, hot, bright, pink, vital. Her cup will be filled for a while until she begins to realize he no longer needs her. Somewhere a girl is dancing, lithe, enticing, the music pounds in rhythm to her heart. The lights reflect her fraudulent and inviting smile. Her cup is full as long as the eyes of her audience cling to her like barnacles to a storm-tossed ship. As they slip off into the night she feels empty and alone more than ever. Somewhere a man kneels in prayer, his inner voice raised up to a universe attentive, kind, eternal. His cup is filled as long as he can hold his faith in his God. Somewhere a man struts upon a stage, night after night after night as he labors for the love of his fans. The spotlights form a pillory where his weary soul slaves for the adulation of the masses. His cup is full as long as the lights are on.

Somewhere… somewhere a wiser man than all the rest, looks up at the night sky and realizes there doesn’t need to be a cup. That the desire to fill the cup is the source of the sorrow. That the true joy is merely in being alive. That the million pin-pricks in the dome of the night bring a satisfaction more calming and more lasting than any other.

The Empty Cup

Here I sit, nearly half way through the year, with dangerously little to show for it. My personal projects have all stopped and started in too close a succession to have anything to show for themselves. I find myself wandering, both physically and metaphorically from purpose to purpose, seeking meaning where it is not to be found.

My mind teems with ideas and thoughts, projects yet undone rap at the entrance to my attention unceasingly yet they all ring hollow, mere phantoms which, finding themselves unattended, rise up to haunt me in the months and years that follow their birth. When time admits I make my way into the world and sometimes, for the briefest second, I can capture something of potential. Something that speaks to me months or years later. But like a wisp of smoke on a spring breeze, the inspiration is too soon scattered and inchoate.

I know this feeling. It is the vast echoing emptiness of life. The clatter of a thousand useless journeys without purpose or destination reverberate through the impossible labyrinth of my soul. The hobnail boot of despair click-clacks along the long marble hall ticking off the seconds until death finds us all finally at rest. Potential spent. Burden lifted. Debts paid.

Some say that the ancients built God from the lightning, the rain, the mountains, the epic and unspeakable, those things so far beyond our comprehension. I disagree. God was found in quiet, plodding hours of solitude. God does not live on the mountaintop; he lives in the silent despair of the empty cup.