[927] Always Antagonize

 I'm at the start of repeating another pattern.

I find it amazing the amount that can be done in so short an amount of time. I've watched the campus I walked and downtown I've drunkenly partied in turn into building after building. I sift through old blogs and see how I made a miserable month feel like an eternity before I turned less-so miserable months into my sitting-pretty posture of basic needs being met today. Entire generations are separated by wholly unknown technology and hopes for doing things like scrubbing arteries or uploading consciousness. We are racing through time, breaking more than necks in our wake.

I used to run pretty exclusively on nervous and anxious energy. It pushed against all of the things I didn't understand or thought I wanted, and I didn't have a great means of releasing that energy in any other way. I “spun,” repeating certain lines I found salient or energizing in their reiteration. I ranted. I used it as an angry place to judge people independent of the otherwise harmless or considerably more shitty things I could have focused on and reoriented around. I was ravenously hungry, with no articulation as to what for or how to go about getting it.

I started writing. I think most of what I write is almost atrocious. It's the chaos provoked only by the line before it or pit in my stomach. It's the racing heart and aching brain trying to move my poorly circulating fingers fast enough to catch up to what I'm dying to say to you, to myself, and to the miserable universe always provoking me. There are things I was literally incapable of discovering until I started writing. There were lessons I would never have had without the ability to look back and ground the impulse into something I could watch unfold in a a manner that was consistent and deliberate in a way that my mind and behavior is not.

I started to work what I began to understand into my behavior. I actually try to work and demonstrate the things I believe in and trust more than the things I simply think. I try to not reduce myself to the worst things I've ever said or done. I try to build context. I try to find a piece of my infinite narrative you can share. I look for ways to convert endless hopeful, nervous, angry, confused, or fearful energy into the next conscious step into the abyss.

That's all.

When I write, fight, or ask a question, I'm trying to repeat that pattern until I observe in both myself and maybe you the things that indicate we are moving in the “right” direction. “Right” for me is “deliberate” or “specific” exercises of my time. Maybe that exercise is hanging out or watching TV. Maybe it's one of a dozen menial tasks in service to one or a dozen goals. Every single time, it is the same process. Define the goal. Define the reasons it is in fact the goal. Watch if the work and behavior is achieving the goal. If there's a break in that observation, you need to pause, reevaluate, and ask more or better questions to inform your work and words you're using to describe it.

Every time, every subject, until you're dead, you will succeed or fail by your willingness or capacity to engage in the above. The dipshit racist who assumes people “trespassing” aren't just “lost” finds the license to kill and witch-hunt because he won't do the above. The racist doesn't have a goal of “doubt” or “we're all in this together,” so you get the ongoing compounding consequences of racism. The project manager who wants to be everything to everyone will be committing the same sin. You need to define and refine the aim by bothering to ask questions in the first place, and dare to make them more and more specific until the answers begin to move you in the required direction. You can be deliberate about natural selection and improve what you are fitted for.

My learned habit...antagonizes. It's a threat to the status quo. It's designed to provoke and push and make you uncomfortable in a way that you can manage and direct. The alternative isn't peace and tranquility. The alternative is stagnant cornered angst and hostility that compounds disorganization and stress. You can drag a great many achievements along the way through that mess with your enthusiasm, money, or on the back of concurrent ignorance held by your players or of your playing field. That doesn't mean what you're doing is sustainable, healthy, or artfully negotiating trade-offs between efficiency and robustness. You don't want to be stuck nor be mainlining poisonous habits.

As is perpetually true, I'm currently being paid to be inefficient. There are discussions about how to hire more people into the inefficient system I'm plugged into. There are meetings that aren't held on time. There are softball questions the leadership finds it hard to define. There are realities of intention in no way matching what's appearing on my calendar nor manifesting from my lack of work or direction. I've created a series of questions I need answered. Many have not been, but a good faith effort has begun. I've reached out to who is supposed to be monitoring or working with me and told them the holes. I've offered myself to any and all tasks. I've spoken to my willingness and ability to even get paid LESS, only covering my utilities if necessary to assist another team member. It's pushing 1 o'clock, and I've watched TV, typed this, and been on an accidentally interrupted phone call.

I'm not trying to be unduly critical or shitty. I'm not entering these conversations nor questions with anything but the spirit to resolve and work and grow together. I know all about “start-up energy” and the endless negotiations you have to make in order to be creative, make enough money, and still flirt with living in service to the ideals that drive you to be a certain way altogether. I can't let you off the hook if you're not going to use the tools in front of you. I can't play pretend with you if I don't want to start pretending with myself and the goals I have independent of what we may be doing together.

I've been asked a few times what drives me or why I wish to be doing whatever it is I'm doing. This. This drives me. Articulating, with consistency. Defining ever-more deliberate goals. Recognizing the spirit of forward-looking honest feedback and maintaining a desire to contribute in any recognizable way. Knowing the nature of what I'm prepared to sacrifice and why or whether it would be worth it. Believing all of the players involved are smart, sincere, and hard-working as well and wishing to treat their time with the care and attention I try to provide my own.

We're all probably working too hard at something. Pause. Breathe. Ask the first worst questions. Start the pattern that takes control of the antagonism. Follow it until the world around you looks like your wildest dreams. I'm telling you to do this from my shed-home, that has air conditioning, water, power, 30 in-progress projects, and an exceptionally low monthly bill obligation it took me many years to achieve by repeating and working in service to the best patterns I know.