I've been pivoting too much.
My life keeps telling me to pick one thing and get good at it. My life has also taught me how to pivot.
I think I've talked before about how I took the lessons of Taoism to heart – making myself as a stone in a river and letting life pass me by. I wonder whether (or really how many of) these lessons aren't aimed at a significantly older audience.
The Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history, namely the 6th century BC – during which time Laozi, quasi-legendary founder of Taoism and author of the Tao Te Ching is said to have lived – was an interesting time in human history. And even if he lived two hundred years later during the Warring States period, that's not really what I want to talk about.
What I want to talk about is how Kong Fuzi, founder of Confucianism, was writing to an audience first of men in their 50s, then the earlier generations. And I wonder if Laozi, who was either a contemporary of or reactionary to Confucius, wasn't writing to men in their 60s and later.
Maybe not.
Maybe this is one of my own biases. So let's unpack my assumptions about the world and why I might think that and see where it takes us. Because I'm trying to figure out how to stop pivoting so quickly; and the only way I know how is to search out the roots of the problem.
I have lived with no – let's say – dominant father figure. That is not to say that I do not have a father who would dominate my life if I allowed him to. That is to say that I have had few positive male role models – none in the father category. I have known many positive grandfatherly figures. A few good uncles.
That would be a terrible movie.
From only having access to my actual grandfathers' television and video games for entertainment – little wonder when I was a boy I would hang out with my female cousins and grandmother – to the nuggets of advice that have come to me from retirees and greybeards, the majority of the wisdom which I've received has been that of the sage – The Giver, and the grandfather.
It is not a young man's place to allow life to pass him by. To not react to the evils and... why don't we have an inverse word for evil? What is the highest good? Initial caps Good. That's unacceptable to me. We should work on that, friends and readers and passers-by.
Anyway, it's not a young man's place to allow his life to pass him by. When I was a young man, I couldn't wait until I was old enough to participate. My entire generation is plagued with this frustration, but I was aware of it – and the futility of speaking up where my opinions were unwelcome – at a much younger age than my contemporaries. That's why even this, recording my own private thoughts for myself and maybe your entertainment if not your enlightenment – look at how dumb he is; life is really much easier than this, bro – is such a struggle for me. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.
I managed a gas station for some three years. It was a job I'd always wanted to do – experience I've always wanted to have – so that I would be more prepared to pivot once I had it. There was always a vague plan in the back of my mind that I would become a vagrant if I could get my hands on a car. And there's always work at gas stations – and no one cares where you're from or where you're going in that industry; just that you show up on time.
I worked with a guy in his 60s for a while. I know that I look like I'm only 22. But I am indeed 34. At the time I was 32. This customer, also in his 60s, starts talking to my coworker, and he's bitching about how he doesn't want to have to mow his grass. And I laughed, and said, “Yeah, that's why I live in apartments—“ Before I could get to my punchline: I'm not paying more to rent a house just so I have to mow the yard, too, he literally tells me to be quiet and that, I'm "too young to know anything.”
Everyone has experienced this at some point: some stranger telling you that you don't know anything about your own experience. I'm not here to articulate my particular outrage. I let him know how I felt about that. But the casual flippancy with which American men in their 60s regard anyone younger than them taught me something of the way the world works which my contemporaries still have not: a long life as father and then grandfather has taught old men that young people are fucking stupid – because the young people they raised are fucking stupid.
Because they are, indeed, fucking stupid.
No one taught me, as they so commonly say.
But that's still not my point. I'm emotionally illustrating a picture of an uncaring world. Of why allowing life to pass you by is advice for these men: grandfathers and elders who are as jaded as so many of those whom I've met along the course of my life – whom I was destined to become, perhaps, if not for Laozi and his words.
So many old men feel what I have felt for so much of my life: frustrated. Disabused. There are a lot of directions I could take this. A lot of ways that our grandfathers and our father's grandfathers and our grandfather's grandfathers have betrayed the generations after them since the first forefathers of civilization. It is, indeed, what Robert and I are trying to do.
But rather than shaming them or blaming them or skipping so far ahead of Robert that there becomes no point in reading his words, what I want to do is empathize with them. I know that my Twitter followers are made up by many men in or approaching their 60s. Maybe what I'm trying to do is reach them, remind them to open up and observe their world with – not fresh eyes – but eyes experienced at identifying what they are seeing.
Change is inevitable. There was a time not so long ago that the machinery of change worked slowly. 100 years ago, it could take 100 years for a new idea to enter the cultural milieu. 200 years ago, it could take 200. This is not a directly proportional thing, but there was a time where change of any substantial sort took generations, not decades, even years like they do now.
Example: my brother is four years younger than I. Homophobic slurs were the favorite of the males of my class; by the time he graduated they were a no-no. By the time the elder of my two sisters graduated – she's eight years my junior – being gay was not only okay, now, it was cool. Fifteen years later, if you're not at least gender queer and bi-curious exiting high school with a college prep education, you're not hip.
Old men know the danger of change. They understand Chaos better than we do – better than the young, better than the idealist – better, even, than the True Believer and Ideologue. Most men, by the time they're elderly, do in fact understand the world – if not its technologies. They understand that a home falls apart if too many outside elements are allowed to enter it. They understand, even, that a mind might fall into disarray and madness if too many ideas are allowed to enter it.
It seems like a good idea to include everyone. And it is. But it is also an impossible task. I began to write earlier that the machinery of the universe is not one of perpetual motion and its engineers are not working to improve it; what it is is a mill grinding out human suffering, and its engineers... I don't know. This is why I let the metaphor die, then, too. That an Rob talks about it and you've got to be tired to me referring back to Rob like he's some authoritative voice. Argument From Authority, much?
And an authority you probably think is fictional, at that.
Rob says he knows who they are. And he won't tell me. I can't accidentally spill the beans and steal his ideas if he won't tell me them. As he says: never tell anything you want the credit for to a writer.
As far as I can tell, the people who rule the world are trapped in their machinery and milled for their misery to a greater degree than we are. If Fullmetal Alchemist is right and TheLaw of Equivalent Exchange has any bones, then there is a material sacrifice to “success” by whatever metric that can be measured.
Maybe that's why politics dominates our lives, now - the Powers That Be are trying to grind as many souls for as much suffering as possible. If that's true, then dropping out really is the only solution. I say it all the time and people think I'm stupid because I don't know what the result will be - but protest the vote. If we don't show up at all, we will, at least, know who is voting for these motherfuckers.
There's a material sacrifice in simply engaging with the machinery of society. It even has a name: student loan debt.
But I've wandered far, far off-base. Which is okay. Because this is the start of a new page, and that's kind of how I'm trying to pace these things – back on track at the start of a page. And now that I'm halfway through it, let's re-evaluate.
Old men are naturally conservative. If you didn't know, I also write about the NFL. I'm interested in the NFL for the many of the same reasons I'm interested in military history, and they doesn't matter – except as a preface for talking about Bill Belichick. There is a clear divide in his football philosophy since he got “old”. He's just more conservative. There are no two ways to say it. But why?
Is it because old men have more to lose? Yes and no. Old men have more invested. Because we have allowed ourselves over the course of the last 200 years to measure our society and our place in it by returns on investment – which I'm not even mad about; it's a quantifiable way (a Material way) to measure reality – that isn't sort of, it is our popular worldview.
Allow me to give some examples.
I have had friends tell me that because they have “invested” in my life (using that very word) they should be allowed to have actionable input in it. That sounds reasonable, but what it means is that because they've shared their privilege with me they should be able to make decisions for me. They should be able to tell me what to do – to boss me around. I think this is what people refer to as “with strings attached”. Tit for tat, quid pro quo, right?
Treating other humans like commodities – like they are a business or an IP, and if you “invest” in them, you should be able to return a profit.
But that... that isn't the way that human relationships work. That isn't how the world should work, either. But shoulds and coulds and woulds never did anything, as my grandfather used to say.
I say a lot of his axioms.
Maybe that's where this thought comes from. Reconciling the massive asshole that my grandfather is with the wisdom in his observations. I don't know anymore.
I'm not sure this is moving in the direction I wanted it to. That isn't to say it has been unproductive, just that I think I'm exploring why I feel like the world isn't invested in me and why I've felt like I need to stay quiet and to keep to myself. But that hasn't been working, so I'm pivoting to trying something new.
Pivoting to something new. That's what I wanted to talk about.
I never learned to attack the stone wall of life with a spoon. That's what early adulthood is about. It's about struggling and stacking wins and learning how to achieve things. I have instead stacked losses. And boy, do pseudo-motivational speakers not like it when you ask what to do with your life when it repeatedly hands you losses. So that's what these PLogs are about, right? Practicing writing and publishing and trying to flesh out ideas I haven't fully thought about – all so I can say I'm stacking the wins of doing the thing.
So that's kind of where I'm at with this piece. I don't feel like I've come to any resolution. But there doesn't have to be resolution in every piece, at the end of every day. Life isn't actually a television show – it isn't actually a movie or a novel, or even a perfectly cromulent memoir. That's the lesson I've learned today: sometimes an observation is just an observation.
And sometimes observations need to be made so they can be bandied about for discussion.
I need to learn how to do the things that I want to do even if there is no reward, material or otherwise. Sometimes it's okay to just do the things you like. It's okay to invest in you.
Magickally, the universe keeps promising me that if I just do the work I'll get what I want from it. But that's what my grandfathers taught me – that if I just do the work I'll be rewarded with stability and an income enough to support a family and a life. And that was a bald-faced lie. So I just have to focus on visualizing being discovered by a grandfather figure who sees an adequate pupil in my thoughts.
Or something like that.
Or maybe I just need to trust one of the wisdom traditions that have tried to capture my imagination.
I don't know. I never learned how to visualize the future. So many things I have to learn – and that's kind of why I'm obsessing on my penchant for pivoting. How do I knw how much time to spend on any of them – how do I know which of them is a dead end? I don't know. The grandfather in me is telling me to get a job and shut up. The child in me is telling me my dreams are bigger than that.
And I really don't know.
But I've run out of space and time. So thank you for making it this far. It means more to me than you can know. I'll talk at you soon. I have so much work I've allowed to logjam behind me by sitting in my life and letting it pass me by the last couple weeks. A choice I made and which I do not regret – but which I am struggling to process adequately.
We'll see what happens.
Also – I think my Trickster is getting more powerful. I think He touched my girlfriend when she was alone outside – I still feel it standing out there at night when I'm alone. And I've been finding phantom scratches on my arms lately. Maybe it's nothing... maybe I'm approaching a magickal breakthrough. I don't know. I do know that I'm tired and I'd really just like my momentum to carry me for a while. But I abandoned all my momentum.
Sisyphean is a great word.
Thank you again. Until next time.
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