Sooo much.
Maybe I can address this by doing what I think hasn't been happening. I'm writing to try and explain different manifestations of intelligence. I'm writing to anticipate and search for how I might approach more efficiency in conversation in the future. I'm writing to try and draw a line between what I think people have claimed about me and their feelings about my style of communication and what I'm currently up against and what it's prompting me to react like. There, so if something seems oddly phrased or too personal and you had to be there, it probably fits well-enough into one of those three categories.
I could have gone the other direction. I could have started with the first thing that came to my mind or one of the dozens of topics that created infinite rabbit holes of conversation between me and my partner I've found to help work the land. She's warned me that her brain doesn't shut off, she remembers practically everything from childhood (besides names and numbers), and that it's never about just one thing no matter what topic. She's said that her friends' most often offered comment is, “I'm exhausted” when they get to talking. I had to pull that card and say I was exhausted too.
I think a hallmark of an intelligent individual is their ability to be able to juggle more things in their minds at once. It's how you get crossover innovation between fields. It's the genius level expression we see in art or math. You have to be able to take the endless stream of any and everything you might ever have encountered and put it down into something workable or relateable. That's going to vary between people, but my suspicion is that most prefer a kind of step by step guide or an idea of the end game to a topic. Surely we've all been on talking benders that lasted all night and went across every topic and it was just about vibing with the room and maybe being distracted from the rest of your life. But what if every conversation you had, all day, were those kinds of talks?
I write blogs so I can find the point. Overwhelming myself with information just no longer fits with my psyche and approach to achieving a goal. I know there are infinite details that can be considered. I know there are rules, and zoning, and confounds, and maybe big government will roll through and proclaim imminent domain. In a very important sense, to me, absolutely none of that matters if you don't have an answer to how you're going to get the grass cut. And then once you have an answer on how you're going to get the grass cut, yes, there are 10 other ways we could do so, all things being equal, what's preventing us from just picking one and moving on?
I think it's backwards to believe that intelligence constitutes or predicates philosophy. You can have an approach to life that castrates various potential manifestations of your intelligence. Your philosophy is what will help your mind choose what's going to be more or less representative of you. That philosophy can come out of a torrent of horrible experiences. It can be forgone conclusions about the nature of your brain and attitude about it's ability to change. It can be a patchwork quilt of different prejudices and pop culture implications that you'll never wise up to.
My philosophy is rooted in attempting shared experience. Of course we'll never know each others' full stories. Of course we won't be able to see the web of thoughts and reasoning that brought you to a particular conclusion or phrasing moment to moment. Of course YOU always feel like there's a point to what you're saying or your good intentions will come across. It takes something more. It requires better definition. Even if you get along across many metrics, there can always be another bridge built. Getting to what that bridge should look and sound like is as diverse as the people building it.
The shortcut is to just feel. The shortcut is to scream or cry with the crowd, tap into your lizard brain, and speak the language of the masses. It's to tell me again that people hear what I say in a negative way. It's to tell me again that people hear what I say in a negative way. It's to tell me again that I'm a negative thinker or person who doesn't seem to care that people hear what I say in a negative way. It's to take this as your clue that if there's only one thing I know about me, it's that I know that many people hear what I say in a negative way. Because they're not concerned with me or what I said, they're concerned, solely, about what they feel. But this blog has generally less to do with that and more to do with how we choose, if we're really choosing, to communicate with each other.
I write a certain way for a certain crowd. I write for me, but then for friends and a handful of persistent strangers. I hope that when I speak it doesn't seem like I'm attempting to take you to school. I try to relate one idea at a time, hopefully in service to a theme or three. If I approached you with 20 different things that could happen out on the land, you're not going to feel particularly comfortable investing or giving me money when I've found 20 ways to not answer how it's going to be spent. This sort of feels like my dilemma that, after enough semantic clarification and yellow brick road skipping, works itself out over the course of very long explanations.
With luck, a short example. One problem with the land is weed control. We've posited goats. My neighbor's been willing to mow with his tractor and bush hog. We'll spray weed eater all over the place if we have to. She came up from Kentucky premised on the idea that she would “van camp” out there and walk around and get the lay of the land. Well you can't really walk around in all that bullshit, so that plan died. While we've discussed dozens of different avenues and how to be proactive in approaching zoning or getting things done “now!” on “go!” We failed to execute even showing up to our first board meeting on time or being able to walk the land because, per my perspective, we never even bothered to answer or plan around getting the freakin' lawn mowed. (We'll merely allude to the email and phone complications that got in the way, and the 6-8 hour delay in even leaving the house for shiggles.)
I'm not feeling bad. I'm not feeling stressed. I'm not disappointed or have any fundamental doubts in my partner. I want to make that clear. There is much good news. She does have many good ideas and connections and after a 20 minute rabbit-hole of an explanation of something we may someday do some time, come to what I've figured was full circle and spoken to something we hadn't found a solution for yet. She's given me the task of selling, for a commission, these heat pads that she gets for free for life because a former company tried to screw her and a judge was on her side. She's suggested paying to get the moving van fixed and flipping it into a drivable tiny house we could charge enough for. She's talked about kicking the coffee van back in gear because she has a way around expensive insurance and knows nothing like it exists in Louisville. All potentially immediately profitable lines of income, and manifestations of all this acquired potential, I can't pull off by myself.
In no way shape or form do I not value that she showed up. I'm not moved to talk shit or criticize how her brain operates. I just don't want to be a terrible or rude partner trying to get my “one line, I get it, what are we actually doing now though” across. There's people who can talk. And then there's people you're not sure how they're taking the time to breathe. With my inevitable ability to make people feel “negative” (a topic she and I discussed several times at length, of course) I don't want to have a mission creep of instances where I just had to pull a full stop add up and suggest I'm not listening, don't understand, or don't care. For those of you familiar, this is what I'm constantly being accused of (because questions are the devil), but now we're talking long-term investment money and day to day operations management. Translating me was always the job we were going to give to Byron.
I feel like much of what we'll accomplish will be like in the anime Golden Boy. This bumbling kid gets himself into scenarios that are awkward or seem way above his head, and by the end of the episode he leaves everyone in awe with his sheer brilliance in how he completed the task or navigated the personalities, and it's hard to say he ever explicitly planned to do so. It's a short fun anime, but it's also anime. I can at the same time disavow the business school prescribed 5 year speculative joke of a business plan and still think we should be able to line up a dozen things to do for each of those dozen ideas we discussed that allows the shape of the future we're trying to build resemble each of our halves responsibility to it. Two thunderous thought clouds need to combine and rain down on flowers we picked and planted, not a field of weeds.
I feel like a wish has been granted, and it never happens like you think it will, no matter how carefully you thought you could phrase it. After 2 days of practically nonstop communication and ideas, it's not that I don't understand or recall much of what we discussed, but we're still pretty-well relying on the good will of my neighbor to himself mow or let us borrow his tractor to keep the grass down to, not even the true height we'd really prefer. Or, to my mind, we still don't know how we're getting the grass cut.
