( ...cut for your protection from the ranty and swearing... )

More seriously, and without the troll-baiting, congratulations to Jason Morningstar, for Grey Ranks, and to Wolfgang Baur, for the Open Design project. Awesome, guys!

I was having a difficult time falling to sleep the other night -- I usually do when I am working the morning shift the next day, since I am not used to going to bed so early -- and my mind was spinning along like a roller-coaster half-off its tracks as it also usually does. Somewhere in the midst of that mental bedlam, I stumbled over one of my usual concerns, and something I often focus on: how can I get my ass in gear?

The illustration contract gave me something to do, and it felt good to be...meaningfully productive. To accomplish. To meet set goals. And now I feel rather adrift, because I don't have anything my attention is forcibly focused on. Sure, there are things I should be doing or want to be doing, but I'm not being pushed or encouraged to do them.

But still, I have this list in my head of things I should be doing and should be working at: scheduled creative writing, guitar practice, studying a language, microfiction for athas.org, gaming with the kids, cleaning up the basement, self-teaching math and physics, and so forth.

In the wake of the Neoplastic contract, what occurred to me is that I always find it easier to keep on-top of tasks and finish them if someone is checking in with me on them and encouraging me.

I'm betting most people are the same way. I'm betting most of us have things we want to do or should do but aren't doing (quitting smoking, losing weight, exercising more, reading War & Peace), and I'm betting that for most of us, having someone else there who knows we should be and reminds us they think we should be when we don't, or tells us it is great when we do, would go a long way towards getting and keeping our asses in gear.

It's just harnessing the in-born human social behaviors that exist in the species. And it doesn't have to be much:
"How's the goal coming?"
"Man, don't keep putting it off."
"That's great! Keep it up!"

My big idea, then, the one that kept my brain spinning when I should have been trying to get to sleep was to harness the modern social networks we all use to help us with those goals. Of course, my brain started asking all sorts of questions and trying to make it more complex than needed for the moment.

( ...the big plan... )

Hrm. This might work better as a community, with a centralized hub that mods could post weekly or bi-weekly "ass in gear" reminders and encouragement and such. I just need to give it a good name: for now, let's use "assingear". Go, join, post.

Why is it all the good stuff happens to other people? Seriously. I can work my ass off, be incredible at something, have all sorts of contacts and glowing references and valuable experience, and when it comes down to making any important career-movement I'm either not noticed or completely ignored by the powers that be.

And yet I watch others around me who do one fucking thing and suddenly they start receiving incredible offers to do incredible things, people who have put in way less time crawling through the shit to earn recognition and opportunity. And I can't help but feel both jealous and utterly defeated.

Why can't I get recognized? Am I not DUE some recognition? Haven't I done everything RIGHT? Am I somehow not GOOD ENOUGH? What's WRONG with me?

I know, I don't believe in the American capitalist fantasy that says hard work, intelligence, and skill rewards you if you just do all the things they say you need to do to be successful precisely because I see almost everyone getting screwed over by buying into that, many of whom continue to believe in it despite the evidence of their eyes and experience...so why am I still buying into the entitlement fantasy?

Knowing the lie doesn't make it hurt any less.

I realize the Buddhist thing to do is to realize the nature of desire is to create suffering, and that my unrealistic desires shaped by cultural programming of expectations, supposed needs and identity are causing me suffering. But that's harder to do than to say because my brain still craves recognition, opportunity, being useful.

I should focus on the truth:

Trying to attain the American Dream is like being a trench fighter in WWII: it doesn't matter what your rank is, how old you are, how good you are, how smart you are. You're crawling through the mud with bullets whizzing by your head, watching people around you die and knowing that your survival is entirely out of your hands: "There but for the grace of God go I."

They tell you to "keep your head down and crawl forward" as though that will protect you. But it has nothing to do with you. What they don't say is that focusing on the crawl does nothing but keep your mind off the bullets, it won't keep you safe or guarantee that maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones who isn't shot. Nothing you can personally do will increase your chances of surviving.

Your survival is a function of the chaos of the battlefield and the choices of thousands of other men you have no control over--from the guy who made the bullets to the guy picking out his targets to the guy who crawls in front of you at just the wrong moment and eats the bullet that had your name on it--and the vagaries of physics--maybe your helmet will be just enough to bounce that bullet off, or maybe not.

That's how capitalism works. They'll tell you (and if they're naive maybe even believe) that if you keep your head down and just keep crawling forward you'll make it. But whether or not a bullet finds you has nothing to do with your head or crawling. Making it to the other side is pure luck, and that advice didn't help anyone who didn't make it, nor did anyone claimed by a bullet do it wrong.

That's the fairy tale we tell ourselves to avoid the insane truth, to rationalize the chaos, to stay sane in an environment we can't comprehend, predict, or control. We try to put rules to it, predictable patterns, survival strategies.

I know I will "get" if I'm lucky, not because I do the proper things. So perhaps the answer is that I just need to stop crawling through the shit, or at least stop expecting the crawl is giving me any greater privilege or notability or chance than anyone else.

So this is a war I don't have to fight. There's no need to crawl towards the goal if I'm not trying to attain it, if I simply stop believing in its reality, its necessity, its attractiveness. The bullets of inconsequentialism can no longer do any harm once they stop being bullets. I can't fail to succeed if success is no longer a goal to move towards, if I simply disobey and ignore my American cultural programming that success and recognition is what life is about.

But my mind starts fighting with itself: if I don't desire to do anything, what will I do? I won't want to accomplish anything because I no longer need to, so I won't accomplish anything, and I want to accomplish something, but the point is to divest oneself of wanting to accomplish, of hooking the ego upon accomplishment. I'm still programmed.

But at least working it out on paper helps.