When Will It End?

Like quail in a field, the chirping is quiet. One here's a sound, and the chirping grows louder. A few more join, and then the rest, and then the rest. Eventually it drowns out the work. All you hear is chirp, chirp, chirp. And then, the shotgun gets fired across the field in the form of a manager carrying an empty box. The chirping stops.

We are wary, and the chirping continues day in, and day out. It grows louder and then softens. An email sent at the wrong time of day, and the hunter steps on a dry branch. The chirping grows louder. A coworker gets invited to a meeting and you're not included, and birds a few fields over scatter across the sky. Louder. A manager calls while you're out and doesn't leave a voice mail message, and the brim of an orange hat pokes out from the brush. The sound is unbearable.

I find myself chirping along, wondering when the shotgun blast will come.

Chirp, chirp…Like a crack of lightning, it hits the chair next to yours. The chirping is silenced. We poke our heads out looking for the all clear…chirp, chirp, chirp.

BANG, three cubes over.

All is quiet.

It's safer now. We chirp silently via instant messenger and email. We dare not look up from our work or enter the clearing. No matter how long between blasts the chirping continues and we know that the hunter is out there. Waiting.

When All Else Fails

It started a few years ago. I noticed when I would sit down to do something, it just wouldn't work. It wasn't there.

Was it me? Was it my situation? Was it my environment? Was it one of those terrible combination effects where the root cause can't be determined because there are so many factors in play? Ugh.

I gave up. I was pissed off at myself for it, and felt like a retarded slug. But I gave up nonetheless. It was easier to say that at some point in my life I did something well, and in the end, it just didn't turn out the way I wanted it to. That life, or some other ambiguous thing got in my way. That the roadblocks presented by the day to day were simply too much for me, and that my gift was simply going the way of the dodo.

It was a dark and stormy time. Well, not really stormy…more partly cloudy. Just sitting around, not doing much. Not thinking about much, not looking inside or outside…just kind of sitting there watching things happen. I wasn't even taking notes as the world rolled by.

I could talk about why this happened. I could talk about the bad things that have happened in my life, and how it really impacted my ability to do my thing. But it always sounded hollow. The bad things didn't cut out my frontal lobe; it didn't chop off my fingers; it didn't burn out my retinas or plug up my ears. I was still able to do the fundamentals, but I didn't feel like it.

I'm calling bullshit on myself. I have a damned good life. And here I am moping around about not being able to do this thing. This thing I know I do at a really high level. I painted myself as some tortured suburban pig, hemmed in by a fence of his own creation. I softened to the world, and my ability to describe it softened in the same way.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

I'm here to tell you that there is no money to be made here. There's no peace in putting it all together. There's no way this is going to lead anywhere but freaking straight down. But I forgot somewhere along the way, that that's the point. The point is, in the end, to look around and find that bottom that nobody wants to look at. To point out the stupid, the ignorant, and the retarded by finding those things in yourself and in the people you love and work with everyday. It's a dark thing.

We'll see how this goes.

Repurposing

This blog is being repurposed going forward.