Dispelling Delusions Of Adequacy
It's getting warm out. Things WILL get hot.
I’ve deposited about half a million words here, much of it focused on how you, constant reader, can avoid some of the stuff I’ve had thrown at me over the last fifteen years. My Bluesky profile lacks pronouns, instead I’ve got adverbs: autistically, puckishly. I’m going to try to set these aside and speak simply and directly today.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Cancer, COVID19, and heart disease have aggressively thinned my Rolodex the last five years, striking hard in the last five months. I’ve got enough material for two books, a literary agent, and even so … I’m not sure I could have told the stories that matters, without endangering still extant fellow travelers. Now I think the time for that may be in the past, and I don’t imagine I’ll still be here when the dust settles enough to try again. (Maudlin old man alert.)
Penance:
I was a public menace from the start of my teens till near the end of my twenties. Having come to see the cyclical nature of dependent arisings in my middle years, most of what I do, seen and unseen, is done with the intent of paying down those debts.
There are some specific things that trouble me. A late spring day in Boston, thirteen years ago, when I should have let my laptop go, and walked away with the other one instead. A document from 2002 that I didn’t read until 2019. Mentors I could hear only in retrospect, people who shared treasure beyond price - their memories of having successfully done the things with which I struggled.
This is why I sound (and act) like an NCO in a unit stuck on a hilltop in Kandahar. The hypervigilance, the constant watchfulness, it’s just … the way things have to be. The stories I can’t tell are punctuated by mistakes, by opportunities to change the course of things that slipped through my fingers.
The title of this piece is a nod to a long suffering mentor. Sorry, mate, I think I get it now.
Reality Check:
We are, all of us, children of humanity’s golden age. Only for a bit more than a century has it been normal to know one’s grandparents. A childhood friend nearly died of uterine prolapse with her first baby - and that’s it, just one woman I know who was ever at risk. Nobody I knew died of an infectious disease until I had an AARP card. But now we’ve got Secretary Brainworm …
Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia are on the verge of boiling over, the right wing populist governments in Europe are all paying for Trump’s rise. Romania avoided trouble. Europe is unifying. Europe is shifting to a wartime economy. Patton wasn’t entire wrong here when it comes to Russia.
"I had never heard," he wrote to his wife Bea, "that we fought to de-Nazify Germany—live and learn. What we are doing is to utterly destroy the only semi-modern state in Europe so that Russia can swallow the whole ... “
Things have been tense, but peaceful for the most part, for industrialized nations. The End of the World Is Just the Beginning is a good read if you can’t see clearly what’s coming. The United States, the source of Pax Americana, is gone. The Collapsing Bulkheads are echoing. Mahmoud Khalil is not our Mohamed Bouazizi, but we’re one wrong move away from the first of a long stream of martyrs.
Dispelling Delusions:
Every day I spend some time on readiness. Evaluating and updating hardware and software. Trying new things. Trying old things, making sure they still work. Checking those around me, far more gently than I check myself.
I do not feel at all prepared for the oncoming storm.
About the title - we were discussing things years ago, back when I still expected people with whom I shared methods and objectives to be as focused on getting it right as I am.
“You understand they’re suffering from delusions of adequacy, right?”
You, constant reader, your character, your education, your understanding of the dire condition we are in, I expect that some of you 500+ subscribers are about to become activists. This is not a career choice, it’s not a thing in which one dabbles, people do this for the same reason that NCO wakes before and sleeps after the rest - because causes and conditions demand it of you.
When I look at what’s become of my peers - getting fired, getting divorced, losing custody, getting sued (often frivolously), getting prosecuted (often maliciously), fleeing the U.S., having their lives cut short by the stresses they endure … and all too often opting out before their time is through …
Don’t expect your path to be quick, clean, glorious. Maybe have a look at what the Syrians have been through the last fourteen years, and the dance their new government is doing in order to keep the fragile peace they have won.
Final Advice:
Do not assume things are going to work; test them as best you can.
Things change, swiftly and without notice, so you try it before you buy it.
You’ll be moving on a profoundly tilted playing field, seeming leadership will often be a compliant psychopath doing someone else’s bidding.
Winning isn’t everything, it’s often well out of reach, so concentrate on just not losing.
Modern life has skewed your sense of time, things often take longer than you expect.
Modern entertainment has wrecked your expectations, making a single coherent story of the fragments you can see blinds you to reality.
Conclusion:
In the absence of planning and preparation, keeping a goodly supply of strange luck handy will be vital. How you manage that is a very personal thing.
Well if they tried
Maybe they'd see
It'd do a little good to let the world be free
Handshake and a smile
Gets you on through
Then turn it all around with a suicide move
But you know it's not fooling anyone but me
You gotta make yourself see what you want to see