There are events that you look back upon and realize that they were “events”. Then there are events planned for the future. For instance the Oscars, or a vacation. We know they’re coming.
My existence has been one of living SOP (Seat of Pants: “done or made by using your own judgment and feelings without planning, preparation, or help from others”1). Planning and planning to plan are just more SOP operations. Things hit me and I go. Or I fall into the thing in front of me, or the web page, or line of code, or Facebook.
Fortunately my judgement in the moment on the thing in front of me is decent as is my base of knowledge and experience. Whew! I’ve been able to “survive” this life by digging in, resolving something, and then setting and forgetting (Like really forgetting, don’t ask me about any long standing deals I’ve made. They’ve left my head long ago. If they’re not captured somewhere, they’re gone.) There have been plenty of times when my flurries or forays all end in a big nothing.
Sure I’ve got checklists. I try to look at them and refresh my memory of all those things I really want to have done or accomplished. Many of them get done eventually as necessary. I’ve learned when getting something off the plate is important, at least at work, where I have some structure, and a chain of dependencies, and people depending on the flow of the job, that I can deliver, in my little world.
But personally? My desires overwhelm my capacity by an order of magnitude. I want to do everything and I want to do it now. But to do even one of these things means to sacrifice others. I’m looking at three books in front of me that I want to read. I’ve got two more waiting on Kindle. I’ve got this blog where I’m supposed to spend time grounding myself that I haven’t touched. I read a previous post I hadn’t remembered without looking at it. And I just did the same on this very post I’m revising from months ago. I think about a family friend who’s known me since I was born with her obviously eidetic memory which she calls “a curse” and it just hurts.
I have managed over the years to work very diligently on my own projects. I spent decades not making enough money and spending it (even my mom’s money) on those projects that still sit in my brain like ghosts, haunting me in their amorphous strength and transparency, unseen by the world, unknown and lost in time and impact. I could whine on about them and how they’re still awesome and also “stolen” aka “reinvented” by those that got the job done. And the ideas keep coming, or coming back. I’m wrangling with one of those right now and it kills me.
It all boils down to “what do I do right now”? I thought yesterday how I must make sure I “leave everything on the field” because if I don’t, I’ll just forget it and it’ll be lost. In other words, that junk drawer of my past (See: Realizing and Owning are not the Same Experience) is simply not reliable enough to provide the substance and momentum of sustained long term pursuits.
What am I trying to get to? The clock is ticking. It doesn’t stop. Ideas keep coming, and going. Some I write down, some are uttered as jokes in the middle of conversations, lost forever in time and space and the molecules of air that no longer vibrate. Will I even find what I wrote down? Sometimes. Sometimes I can’t even read it.
I know these things. I did take some action recently to try to again wrangle with my own “fan-out”. Countdown. It’s to try to face those future events that are coming with more clarity. For instance, the fact that January 6 anniversary is coming. And from this point in time the world has no idea what is going to happen.
We don’t know what will happen on November 5th, or whenever the vote tally is complete. Whether we’ll have another Al Gore fight in some battleground state, or whether it’ll be a landslide. It’s just not life as usual. Just like the day Hitler became a chancellor. Or the (one) day Trump would be a dictator.
It’s worse than a fog. It’s fucking Schrödinger’s Democracy. The way I see it, when the results of the election are finalized, like really finalized, that will be the instant in time that the “box” is opened, and we’ll find out whether or not America will remain a nation of laws or of fear.
The uncertainty about the human race, the whole planet, is totally in the forefront. Last night I watched Charlton Heston scream to the sky how humans had “really done it”, blown it all to hell. That’s one way we’ll go huh?
It’s the wave form before it collapses into a particle. In one case we’ve got a living breathing nation, in the other one, the biggest most dangerous country on the planet going the way of Dr. Moreau, the virus finally taking over the people.
It’s hard to think about. It’s not just about Trump. It’s about people all over the planet regressing, parading to the right, back to a time where nationalism and xenophobia take the driver’s seat as those that got comfortable in peace fell asleep at the wheel.
Will we crumble under the delusion of the cult, or will we fight back, again and again and again, to make civilization better for all? Will the entrenched take us down?
The days keep going and there is only so much time.
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