Month: February 2020

There are definitely times when I am aware that the guys who say we have no free will definitely have an argument, even if I don’t think they express themselves quite accurately.

Case in point, most of the no-free-will guys (I’m looking at you Scott Adams) have made quite a pretty penny selling self-help books which depend quite a lot on people’s capacity to evaluate choices and select courses of action based on perceived and understood criteria, and if my consciousness isn’t the thing in actual control of that, if I’m perceiving this process after that fact, then that’s fine. If I’m a robot, that’s fine. There are robots that do things to preserve themselves too. I’m just a very advanced robot with self-modifying biological code.

All of this to say: I spent the weekend doing fuckall and I know I probably shouldn’t have. But I sat there and kind of observed myself doing fuckall, and I knew I wasn’t going to do anything but fuckall, and when I was done with the weekend, and done with fuckall, I knew that today, I would shape myself up somehow, which I did, and the fuckall would end.

Trouble is, doing fuckall has left me a bit behind in some personally tracked metrics, ranging from my weight to my job hunt, and even to that time I posted a response to James Altucher who challenged me to write a book in thirty days, and then I posted what I thought was a clever response, saying “Challenge Accepted” and then did absolutely…well, fuckall.

Hmm. I wasn’t going to drop any more f-bombs in here while I’m looking for a job. Then again, nobody quite knows this thing exists, and/or who writes it, which is me, but if you don’t know who I am, that’s fine, and it’s more likely that these bizarre run-on sentences are more of a turn off than the occasional fuck or kneebiter.

We’re still in the universe where “kneebiter” is the ultimate bad word right?

What? C-Word? THAT? Oh man. I better check my simulation. This sounds like the SARS nCov-2 universe, and that place is nuts nuts nuts.

Anyway. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s interesting to watch what I do and don’t do and it’s interesting sometimes that I just can’t get up the wherewithal to do the things I have to do. Even though I know I have to do these things. What part if me does the knowing? What part of me does the doing? Should they be connected? Is it possible that they’re disconnected?

Is this all nothing more than my perceptions perceiving themselves and creating a strange loop of endlessness that eventually just gets tired out and wants to lie on the couch watching YouTube and eating three-month-old peppermint bark and candy canes, all the while thinking damn I should try carnivore?

You thought there was gonna be more? Nah. Still kinda waitin’ for that fuckall biome to clear out so I can get back on track.

Tomorrow’s entry will better. It will also be…

…Later!

Let me explain. Originally I wanted to have a picture of a car accident with a caption of someone thinking, “well on the bright side, this’ll make a fantastic blog post,” which leads into the topic for today. But since I use pexels.com for my free images (mostly) and because they didn’t have a wide selection of car accidents, I ended up seeing this image for some reason, which isn’t quite an accident, but is an accident waiting to happen – and thus I was reminded of the movie Hereditary, hence the caption. Which doesn’t make sense. Maybe I should go with the anagram Re: Head. I try.

NO BECAUSE THAT ALSO MAKES ZERO SENSE

But what does make sense is what this blog post is now, finally about, which is this. Materialism is good. No, no, I’m not going to sit here and defend materialism in the economic sense (although I consider it to be a myth since the material objects we value most highly are almost always the result of massive intellectual input and development by some of the best minds out there but I digress) – no, this is a different kind of materialism. This is the materialism where, no matter what shit befalls you, it’s just material.

Came up with that one when I was in highschool and it’s served me well ever since. You’d be surprised how much it helps. That’s because it adds value to every single situation. A long time ago I watched a wine show with John Cleese. He said (paraphrasing), even if you’re drinking shit wine, then analyze it and try to figure out what’s bad about it, why you don’t like it. Turns things around a little.

This is like that. If you’re nervous in a social situation, it’s material. Fuck up an interview? Write a blog about it and then everyone else who’s done the same thing (and they will be legion) will read it, and nod their heads and feel better because they’re not the only one.

Anyway, I’m going to apply for a job tomorrow. I would apply today but I want to get my resume together. It’s an internal position. If I get it, I probably get a pay decrease, a technical demotion, but I get to keep my vacation and Christmas is (probably) saved, at least for another year.

And if I get it: I’m STILL DOING THIS. And I’m still branching out and putting my eggs in a variety of baskets so the next time either this company or myself has to tell the other to pound sand, it’ll either be me, or I’ll be able to giggle about it.

I’ll write about this job, and everything, and what inspired me to write this article, tomorrow, on or about the time I hit submit on the job application.

OK then.

Later!

I have an opportunity. And I’m not jumping for it. Am I stupid?

Hello and welcome to today’s little bit of transparency. First, for all you new people: I got laid off a little over a month ago, after fifteen years of dedicated (or is that committed?) service to a rather large company and as I sit here in my chair wondering what to do next, I’m writing out these little missives on life, the universe and everything, at least from the perspective of a guy who pretty much zombiewalked through life up until this point.

Caught up? OK good. So where was I.

Ah yes. Job going bye-bye and no prospects yet, apart from my good looks and rapier wit. And yet – the place I soon am to once have worked at is not exactly without opportunities internally. In fact, I was treated to this email recently:

“Due to the large number of open roles in Information Services, the IS community will be hosting three sessions for hiring managers to promote their job openings and connect with interest [sic] parties.”

Now THAT is a hilarious invite to receive when you’ve just been shitcanned and that’s part of my point. See, I got some karma and probably I could worm my way into something internally. But that guy up there – Buddy Revell – just keeps glaring at me.

“You’re the biggest pussy I’ve ever seen in my life. Didn’t even try. How’s that feel?”

Right? Three O’Clock High. Masterpiece if you’ve never seen it, also nifty score by Tangerine Dream but I digress.

Point is this. If I go for something internally, I’ll never know what I could have done out there. Then again, am I stupid for doing that? Then again, I’m sitting here just assuming I could get something internally, as if they’d just hand it over and that’s far from certain, as is everything else in this life (apart from the global COVID19 pandemic but again I digress) and that is why I sit here just not quite knowing what to do.

I’m not sure what I’m saying here. But I can tell you that a week ago that this opportunity was not on the table and now it is, and another opportunity I had that I thought was in the bag is now also off the table and probably never was, but the bag was in my head nonetheless.

Ah it doesn’t matter, does it? Why should I throw away fifteen years of karma and hard work when I could use it to keep my current intangible benefits and –

…oh there I go again justifying.

I think I’ll take the rest of the day off from thinking about this and just introspect. Dive deep in my mind, find some little gelatinous snailfish and hang around with them for a while before returning to the surface to dissolve.

Later!

Stay with me because I’m going to get all metaphorical and useless but it’s one of those days, gloomy, cold, rainy and drab, with Coronavirus all around us and I’m like well, you know, time for a metaphor.

Here it is. You go to the beach and you dig a hole in the sand. And you go down and down and eventually you hit water, and there’s your water.

Okay, that’s it, that’s the metaphor. What, you want more? You want me to spell it out for you? Sure why not.

(Side note: I say “okay” a lot. I think that’s a form of self-comforting but it’s okay.)

I’ll spell it out. The water is what they tell you you need. The sand is what’s between you and the water. And the digging is what you have to do to get the water.

Get it? No? I’m an idiot? Really?

Let me try again. The water is wealth. The sand is The System. The digging is YOU. Oh snap, I left something out of this metaphor. There’s something you don’t know. You’re at the beach. And behind you, is a noise, a rumbling, a crashing. It’s something you can only keep away if you keep digging and keep getting your little bit of water. Just keep digging.

OK that’s it. That’s the end of the metaphor. A job well done.

Later.

What. You’re still here? Ah okay. Fine. Well let me just bring this puppy home because it’s almost time for me to go to the gym.

Behind you is the ocean. And the ocean is also made of water. And all you have to do to stop digging is get up, take off your blindfold, turn around and walk into the surf. Crouch down, cup your hands, and lift up that water. It’s yours for the taking, and there’s so, so much. There could be people lining the beach forever and still you would always get water in your hands.

You’ll get wet, of course. It may be uncomfortable. You may be far from the water. But if you do it right. You’ll never have to dig again. And you can have much, much more water than you ever would have by digging.

You can look up and down the beach and you’ll see large groups of people all digging, all giving up most of their water to another person who digs almost not at all. And none of them ever get to stand up and feel the surf over their feet or the wind in their hair.

Ask them why they don’t and they’ll say they can’t. They’ll say there’s no room. Or they’re happy with their puddle. They don’t see the water being taken from them because it’s not taken right out of their hands. But the digging makes far more than they earn themselves.

Ask them why they don’t and they’ll say they don’t know where the ocean is. They’ll call you crazy. They’ll say only a few people ever make it to the ocean.

But that’s the secret of the ocean – it’s us.

Every day now, I do two things. I check for appealing job postings to get a feel for the market, to see when I’m ready to jump in with both feet. And I check the status of 2019-nCoV, aka the “Novel Coronavirus”, which literally has the potential to disrupt human civilization at a fundamental level. Kind of like 9/11 but an order of magnitude greater, not just in death toll, but the effect it could have on the way we live.

I know that sounds crazy but seriously, if 10% of the people in China die, and this thing spreads to the rest of the world, and we end up living on Earth, but with a new kind of flu that kills 5% of the people that get it – that ain’t exactly the same thing we had before and that’s my point this morning.

You see, these two things that I do every day, these two topics that are foremost in my mind, neither of these were even on my radar back on the morning of January 14, 2020. And yet, on that day I was laid off after fifteen years and two weeks later, 2019-nCoV became something different from just a weird SARS variant but something that could really strike home.

You just never know what’s going to happen.

Let me illustrate another way. Last Friday, I was alone in the house and decided to take a little time to move some stuff out of my office. Mostly junk. I moved it to the attic over my garage, which is accessible through a spare room in our house. It would make kind of a neat panic room, but still would provide no defense against Coronavirus. Anyway.

Because we don’t relish the thought of people breaking in to our house through the garage attic, there’s a door there that’s perpetually locked, and as I was humming to myself, carrying some old speakers into the attic to die, I heard it click behind me and realized I didn’t have my phone, my wife wasn’t there, and I was now stuck.

Click – and suddenly life’s different. New priorities, instantly.

Get it? I ended up pushing the attic door (one of those floppy wooden staircase access doors) down from the top, and let it slam down, and then it didn’t quite unfold right, so I had to sort of lower myself down, and as I hung there over my garage, trying not to fall and break my ass, alone in a place where I could easily be discovered thirty minutes later dead on the floor by my wife, I thought you just never know what’s gonna happen.

Anyway I dropped down, and everything was fine. I didn’t even bother telling my wife. But there it is. That’s life, that’s the truth of it. We go through our day and just about everything that happens is unprecedented, but we deal with it and then retcon our day so everything appears to have made sense or been part of a plan.

And when you find yourself hanging from your fingertips, looking to see if you can drop on the concrete without gouging a hole in your back by hitting the steps that didn’t unfold properly, you tend to just delete that event from the narrative because it doesn’t quite fit.

What was I talking about?

The moral of this story: live in the moment and don’t worry. As little Jimmy Altucher says, if you’re thinking about the future or the past, you’re time traveling, and no point in that.

Everything is gonna work out fine.

Later!

I’ll write a blog every day. That’ll show ’em! Except when I don’t. And it doesn’t. And right now, I’m not, and I’m not won’t, and I don’t even know how to punctuate that.

How about a little story instead.

Once upon a time a dog learned to dig. Dig dog, dig. The dog dug, and got good at digging.

He found people who said “good dog” when he dug and they gave him treats. He dug for the treats. He noticed that he was digging down and could hardly see over the sides of the rut he was digging, but the people kept shouting “good boy” down at him and he dug and dug.

Then one day he couldn’t hear them shouting anymore. The treats still came but they were stale. Some even tasted like cat treats – you know, fake chicken liver. Yecch.

One day the treats stopped coming. The dog got pissed off and checked his LinkedIn profile for a new job. The wi-fi was terrible down in the hole so he ended up using the personal hotspot on his iPhone.

He found that he had to really increase his social media presence and it would also probably be a good idea to delete all his Tweets praising Rin-Tin-Tin. (And his Lassie fan site.)

Once he cleaned up his act, the offers started flowing in.

Eventually he got another job peeing on things. The pay wasn’t as great as digging but at least he was above ground and he could see when they turned their back on him. He just had to make sure he kept the treats out of the sprayzone.

He thought about becoming a medical transcriptionist to make some extra money on the side but instead settled on a YouTube cooking channel.

He posted a copycat recipe for roasted cat and it went viral. Unfortunately it was demonetized for including a derogatory comment about spaying and neutering.

He fell into a deep depression. One day he left, and was never seen again.

So if you should find yourself next to a deep rut some day and hear a soft whimper or even a bark from the deep hollow beneath – throw in a dog biscuit. The life you save may just be your own.

FIN

I know why I got canned. The people who held sway over my destiny didn’t know me. And they didn’t know me because they didn’t see me. And they didn’t see me because I had been receding into the woodwork, basically for years.

See, there’s no shortage of folks around who are shocked, shocked!, that I’m leaving. But they’re not decision makers. And if they’re management, even upper management, they have not even a tenuous, loose connection to the management chain that looked at my name, and my alleged title, and my salary, and at their budget, and then back at my salary, and then squinted at my title, and then back at their budget, and then back at my salary, and then said blip! and turned all my shit upside down.

It’s all about visibility. Truth is, most people can’t keep track of their own shit, let alone what everyone around them is doing. You know it’s true. And they certainly can’t do it if it’s coming by way of word of mouth, second or third hand, or never.

In my job I have to confess, I cared. I went the extra mile. I left vacation on the table, I worked overtime, I did things that made my knuckles turn white, and I’m not proud of confessing a weakness but I did let myself get so overwhelmed by my job at times that I let it affect my mental health to a greatly negative degree.

That’s caring. But nobody really saw it. Nobody who mattered, anyway. How often do you think about your pituitary gland? Probably not that much. What about your left hand? You probably have had a lot of great times with that hand, even in public, and can think of any number of things that hand does, and can, and will, do.

But your pituitary? You mean the pfftuitary, amirite? What has that done for me lately? Well, just regulate every hormone in your body.

I don’t claim to be the pituitary gland of the place I worked. And in truth I am eminently replaceable, as is everyone at every job that exists (unless they’re in the midst of performing it, as I’ve written before). But I did a hell of a lot of little things here and there. You pick up a lot of baggage and make a lot of relationships in fifteen years and there are going to definitely be some head-scratching moments in this organization when my emails start bouncing back to people as undeliverable. Will the company collapse? Nah.

But what I am saying is that conversely there are people here (notably the dunderhead who fired me) who are 100% utterly replaceable by just about anyone off the street with some management savvy. They run nothing directly. They are technically responsible for nothing. But they’re visible. That’s how they got where they are, and why they’ll stay where they are.

So if you like what you’re doing, be visible. Say things. And say things up the chain. Make sure people see you doing stuff. They don’t have to know what you’re doing but if they see you at the center of things that work and make people happy, they’ll think twice before going, blip!

But remember: that’s only if you like what you’re doing. You don’t want to get stuck in a rut like I did.

I’m still not entirely sure this isn’t the best thing that could have happened to me, ever.

Later!

It’s a blog. By any definition or stretch of the imagination, this is a blog. But it’s not all that coherent.

Some articles I admit, are not that bad. I personally like The 0% Solution, and Petit’s Moon.

But others, you may have noticed, are just kind of spectacularly pointless, or at least, tortuous. (Which doesn’t mean painful, by the way.)

Then again…”tortuous” plus “pointless” can definitely produce a quantum of pain here and there.

My God, this entry is turning pointless and tortuous itself, and that, despite me actually having an idea what I wanted it to be about before I started typing. I must be getting really good at not having a point. But here’s the real point: this is just practice.

I want to write a blog that’s worth reading. I want to extract the stuff that’s been fermenting in the oak barrel of my mind for the last half century and dole it out here and (see what I did) there, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, and as you can see, I got no idea what the hell I’m doing, or what I have to say.

But since I am pretty much 50, and also, pretty much recently unemployed, I feel like I got a little time and so I can use that time writing, to keep the old synapses firing and here we are. To learn, you must do. So I set myself a goal of writing a blog every weekday.

So. What the hell is this? It’s a practice blog. You might find something interesting or amusing here, I hope you do; but don’t take any of it too seriously. Until I tell you to.

And that’s that.

Oh wait, actually please go read Petit’s Moon. I do like that one.

Later.

“Projectionists,” answered Jerry Seinfeld as George Constanza sat on the floor wondering just what the hell he was going to do with his life now that he’d rather abruptly quit his job in a fit of tantrous rage.

I just made up the word “tantrous”. It means “having the quality of being a tantrum”. I also like to put the punctuation outside the quotes. This is from years of writing computer scripts. I guess I could change, but why?

Do they pay people to make up words? Obviously I check my emails and job alerts and I look for things along the lines I was doing when I was summarily executed by people who didn’t know who I was or what I actually did at the organization – that was my fault, I’ll have to write an entry on that at some point too.

But I also find myself, at the start of a long slog of a job hunt with a fairly long severance period in my back pocket, completely rewinding my adult life and thinking about doing other things. Like ANY other things, for a living.

Like the Zero Percent Solution. Remember that? Remember all those people in their Planes Trains and Automobiles, going to who the hell knows where to do who the hell knows what, but whatever and wherever it was it wasn’t where and what I was about to do?

Well, now I’m kinda like them. So I’m like that old Russian Babushka after Gorbachev caved and Glasnosed all over the place, standing in the grocery store blown away by the concept of “store” and perplexed by having a choice of toothpaste and not having to stand in line for toilet paper.

So yeah, I think about crazy shit right now. One thing I can do is cook. Maybe one day I’ll do a blog post about how to make the perfect chaffle (actually that’s bush league, I just wanted to write the word “chaffle”), but the point is, even after a long week of working for people who would eventually spit in my face and call it champagne, I could stand up all day in the kitchen preparing food for guests or holidays or just batch cooking – from 9 to 5 I could basically pull a shift on my feet and smile and be happy the whole time, and I used to think I could do this for a living.

Of course, the emphasis was “I could do this.” See doing that, unless you’re Grant Achatz or Thomas Keller or Gordon Ramsay or Wolfgang Puck or Tom Colicchio or Emeril Lagasse or Rick Bayless or Daniel Bouloud or Eric Ripert or Anthony Bou- oh wait. Well unless you’re one of those guys, running a restaurant may be personally fulfilling but it doesn’t come close to the compensation I got for my previous gig.

That’s because when you run a restaurant, after last call, you’re done for the day. Unless there was salmonella in the spinach or e. coli in the bratwurst, nobody’s gonna call you up at 2AM to let you know your platform is on the fritz and if you don’t get it running, we’ll be losing a million dollars a day – or the like.

But what comes with responsibility is the dollars to keep your ass in the chair where you’re needed – until they decide they don’t need you anymore.

I promise I’ll think out the next blog entry a little better. This one I just had to bang out on a cloudy day. I do like to write these blogs. Do they pay people to write blogs?

That’s a great question, Creepy Tim Ferriss. You’re definitely a survivor though. So I don’t know if I should take your advice.

I guess the point is that I’m slowly realizing the world is my oyster. But it may be a Rocky Mountain Oyster.

Later!

The other day, my wife was playing me a recording she made of the incredibly annoying teenage girls in the same waiting room as her, complaining about their stupid teachers and I remembered the times I would listen to something like that with the smugness afforded a successful middle-aged man who had conquered life.

But listening to it as a fired dude without any job or prospects, just having been cut loose from his gig of fifteen years with no ceremony or respect, it was a different experience. Credibility was absent in my mind, and it’s all mindset baby.

Because I never had any credibility even with my job. At least, my job wasn’t credibility, although I put it in the same mental bucket. If what I thought was true, I wouldn’t have been let go, and I wouldn’t be writing this right now.

(I also wouldn’t have been able to go to the gym at 10:30 and not get back until 1:30 and not give a damn what anyone thought about it as long as I answered just enough emails to continue to qualify for having a severance but perhaps that’s a bit too transparent.)

Anyway. Here’s what you do when you feel like you’re a complete failure: just go with it. It’ll pass. This shit doesn’t come from your mind, and it doesn’t come from your circumstances. It comes from your gut biome.

Seriously. That’s another secret to life I’m giving you for free, right there. Guts cause feelings not the other way around. You know how when you feel nervous about something or slightly sick and queasy and anxious? (If you don’t, then I applaud your sense of mental well-being and fantastic-adjustedness.) What do you usually think about that? Probably you think it’s because of something going on in your life.

Nah. What’s really happening is you feel that way and your mind picks a thing to think it’s feeling that way about. At least most of the time.

When you get fired from your job of 15 years and are suddenly thrust into a world where you again have to worry about the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you’re allowed a little genuine anxiety and a few sleepless nights.

But overall, just ride out these little adventures of the gut biome. Whether you’re feeling negative in a sad way or angry way or just plain nervous. Think happy thoughts. Force yourself. Think of things that are good, like “I’m not on fire right now” or “At least my eyeballs aren’t bleeding.”

Note: if you’re on fire or your eyeballs are bleeding, feel free to think of other things.

And eventually you will find that the bad feeling passes. They always do. The trick is to attach too much importance to when you feel happy and remove all significance from when you feel bad.

This will have good results in the long term. And you can tell Nelson Muntz to swivel on it.

Later!