Cry Havok

My eyes water a lot more in my 40s.

I'm fleetingly aware that my emotions have been out of whack for most of my life. I'm still not sure what emotional health really looks like; without a model, I'm unclear that I'm doing it "right."  But the depressions are shallower and briefer, and I like to think the mood swings have improved as I age. (Although they started surfacing again a few months before Player 3 was born. Maybe they were more untriggered than resolved.)

Another sign that the terrain is shifting though, is how much more frequently I tear up at music—compared to the "never" of my youth.

I have a long-standing love of Bill Mallonee/Vigilantes of Love music. A few years ago, I noticed that just the opening chords of his song, Nothing Like a Train, make me moisten around the eyeballs. When I hear them, I relax. It feels like everything will be OK.

"Irrational" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and feelings are almost by definition irrational. But there's no reason for me to feel "OK" about this song. It's a sad song. I just do. A couple of Dar Williams ditties do it to me too, and a tune by the Weakerthans. Something in the folk/rock makeup that turns the spigot, somehow.

Most recently, I've noticed it at church. The community we're settling into in Austin, Servant Church, does hymn standards much more often than my beloved Circle of Hope.

Circle's DIY ethos extended all the way to worship music. They wrote a lot of their own songs, and cribbed a few others. That was fine.

But hymns have been winnowed. You don't generally hear crap hymns. Since most hymns are more than 20 years old, there's a clear consensus on what the good ones are, and there's a nice catalog of them. You can sing the good ones on a rotation, and it takes a long time to repeat.

These old, tested songs, I did not know how deeply they had burrowed into the masonry of my heart. "Immortal, Invisible" is not what you'd call a tearjerker, but that thing unpacks majesty. Somewhere in the second or third verse, once it's good and warmed up, I need a tissue.

Will this phenomenon intensify? I imagine embarrassing myself as I get older, turning weepy every Sunday, more frequently dashing to hit skip on a shuffle play because I don't want to cry right now dammit.

I don't like that I've become this way. But also, I love it. I spent a bunch of years in a Cold War with emotion. Like an arm slept on, I can expect some prickle as this limb awakes.

1000 Pieces of Paper

Tonight I emptied a box labeled "1000 Pieces of Paper". I filled 1000 Pieces of Paper some time after college, before I moved away to work for TSR. It was full of college papers and notes and things I wrote.

 A whole lot of it got recycled tonight and a little of it got kept and winnowed into a smaller box.

We've been on a throwing-away kick around here lately. Player 3 has a proliferating amount of his own stuff, and the house has only revealed three dimensions for storage. 

It is a solution of cleansing and sorrow to do this. Saying goodbye to things is more than the things. It is saying goodbye to the person you were or wanted to be when you decided to store those things in the first place.

I've often thought that I'd be happier if a storm blew through our house and destroyed all my stuff. I would miss it, but not much. The DIY version of this however, requires you to bring the catastrophe. You must eventually destroy yourself if natural disaster won't oblige.

In the intervening 20 years, I've changed out some contents of 1000 Pieces of Paper. But it still contained a lot of mass from the mid '90s. Mass I've hauled across the country twice with a few extra tour dates added.

Looking through it tonight was a date with shame. Zippy was an ok dude. Fun at parties. But his interior life was confused and frequently depressed and ohgod so immature. I doubt I could look 24-year-old me in the eye.

A big part of the loss was realizing how terrible a thinker I was. Shallow. Dim. My philosophy notes were nonsensical. My writing had so little perspective. Now I have to put that down. I was never brilliant, and I'm probably not pulling it out in a pinch. I cannot be who I wanted to be; I have to be who I am. It's grounding, but palpably disappointing.

Here's some brightness: I saved nearly everything to do with role-playing games. A bunch of really dumb ideas there too, but the Russian judge was easily ignored as I reviewed those. Half-formed hopes about your future are disposable once you collect the courage and/or wisdom to do it. But creativity has no shelf life. You never know when something you made can be remade. Can't throw that away, however dumb it was.

I failed to grasp most of the Theological Perspectives on Modern Literature class I took in 1990. I don't need reminders of that. But as I storm middle age in 2014, I want every gun I ever drew on a church bulletin in my bag. I've got some personal demons to fuck up, and that cartoon with the surprisingly sophisticated perspective is probably a better tool for the job than a 5-page paper circumscribing my precise failure to grasp Camus.

Regret is easy.

I easily fall for those Deathbed Epiphany trains of thought.

• No one wishes they had spent more time at the office.

• You regret the things you didn't do more than the ones you did.

• If only you'd known that consequences for being true to yourself were so minor.

Here's a link to a nurse revealing the top 5 deathbed regrets.

I am deeply interested -- vested -- in doing it right the first time, because there is only a first time. And by "it" I mean life. And by "life" I don't know what I mean.

Today it occurred to me that no matter what you do or don't do in life, you can have regrets. It's not hard.

That's the problem. Regrets are so easy, so common, that they're meaningless. They're the dust bunnies of convalescence.

Life is big, and if you're careful and fortunate, long. At the end, you are likely to have a major regret. Maybe two. I tried guessing what my major regret would be when writing this post, but how the hell do I know? If I die today, I could name you one. But when I'm 80? That's a half-life away from here. I'll be an entirely different human by then. On a cellular level.

Make your peace with the fact that you will grimly fail at something important in life. Do it as early as possible. Then accept the forgiveness you will need. Accept it ahead of time, and go do the thing you want to do.

Efficiency is inefficient

If you're going to be efficient about efficiency, you need to be willing to be inefficient about it.

The readiest, most efficient people you know are the ones who live it, efficient at all times, in the smallest things, even when it comes to things that no one but that person will see or interact with. Organizing spice racks and watch collections and papers in stacks and such.

These small organization efforts are secretly, quietly done from force of habit, or, (more gently) for the pleasure of order. They're not done for any serious attempt at precontemplated efficiency gains. And these small efforts take an extraordinary amount of time.

The payoff for putting that much effort into practicing efficiency is that you're ready to organize larger things at any time, appearing very efficient in front of other people. But so much is spent being efficient in matters that don't really matter. There's a diminishing returns, a Planck's Constant of efficiency, below which, any more efficiency actually becomes less efficient.

But efficient people do it anyway.

P.S. This principle also works to anything else you want to be good at.

Tales of meta-change

Tomorrow I start my new job.

I've been working at Circle Thrift for six or seven weeks part-time as a way to stave off unemployed anxiety. I sorted clothes and ran the register and behaved cheerfully toward customers.

I loved it. The situation was unsustainable, but if it hadn't been, I would consider making a career of it. There were colorful characters and bizarre goings-on every day I worked. I could have told a story every day.*

So at first it seems strange to me that I didn't. Didn't write or draw or sew during this time. I composed blog entries some days, but they never left my neurons. I didn't even track the movies I watched last month. (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and some other stuff.)

Instead, I volunteered. Since July, I've further embedded myself in responsibilities among my church. It's been surprisingly non-creative. Attending meetings, returning phone calls, head down, concrete, task-oriented, unreflective. Combined with a hang-clothes-handle-money retail job, there was lots of do, little doo-dah. Not my style or strength, but there kept being one more thing that needed doing. So I kept doing it.

Now I'm starting a new job, a shift from anything I've ever done professionally. Not writing. Not editing. It involves mental health clients, so I don't know how much I'll even talk about it here. Probably lots of stories, but discretion will be at a premium.

I'm also starting to read tips and lists and crap that I won't link to about blog posting. I'm spontaneously looking at new ideas for monsters. The YA novel I lost track of a couple months ago has wandered back in. Creative ventures seem to be re-emerging.

Things are changing around here. That's probably the takeaway. I'm excited by recent prospects, yet for all the change, it seems like no relief from the pinball life. The categories of change seem to be the things changing now. My change is changing.

I think I'll have more to say about that soon.

*Slumming it is underrated. A job you exceed grants a marvelous attention surplus.

Frogmarch

For over a year, I've been trying to get hired to write for computer games professionally. This is one of the harder things I've ever tried to intentionally do. There are many people vying for a very few jobs, and I'm not ideally situated to act on it.

I'm doing it anyway.

I've dithered on whether to include my "game professional" blog link here, because these sorts of new ventures are fragile, and can be killed by premature exposure.

However, my definition of "premature" is often equivalent to someone else's "adolescent." I don't like revealing things until they're basically done. The elephantine problem with that schema is that I seldom have the resources to do something completely by myself. So the half-baked thing is either revealed as half-baked, or worse, never revealed. So I'm kicking this one out while it's still young. It's rough, but I'll try polishing in public and see how that works out.

To further my streak of mixed metaphors, let me add: My good, old friend Tom Briscoe used to say, "If you don't execute your ideas, they die." Most of my best ideas expire before they make it to the executioner's stand.

This is one more halting attempt to get one up to the guillotine.

At your leisure, peruse Dire Curious, my "breaking into the game biz -- again" blog. DC serves several purposes for me.

1. Professional development: You don't have to have a gaming blog to get hired on gaming, but I'm not knowledgeable or well-connected enough (yet) to skip it.
2. Personal marketing: I'm terrible at this, and I need the practice.
3. Experimentation with Wordpress: So far, I prefer Blogger, but everybody says it's great. I need to find out if it is or ain't first-hand.
4. Disciplined writing: I know I'm a more capable writer than I ever show anyone. I can be better. I have to do it more to make it real.
5. Another try: This attempt to "do something" may get left by the curb in a few weeks like so many other projects in my life, and I'll feel the same sort of sickly shame I always feel if that happens. But I'm pretty sure I believe the truism that you have to try a bunch of things and see which one sticks. So this is the next one of the bunch.

I'll keep a link to DC in the Ventures sidebar, but I'll probably never link back. On this blog, I give myself permission to appear neurotic and lazy and unhireable. Those traits don't belong where I'm trying to behave industriously and professionally.

Dream boat

Couple nights ago I dreamed I was guest starring on a 30 Rock episode, and between takes, I was driving around with Judah Friedlander (who, in the dream, was being played by Seth Rogen) in an old beater car. We were driving along a river, when huge sinkholes opened up in the riverbed, sucking down whorls of water.

It happened twice before one opened large enough to swallow the road and the traffic on it. I had the window rolled down, and as we fell into the river, I saw that we could swim out of the car, grab onto a rock, and climb up from there. Pretty easy. Seth Rogen was freaking out, said he couldn't swim, so I said, "Hang on to me." I grabbed him, and went out the window as water filled the car. Then I woke up.

Normally I don't write about my dreams on my blog, because dreams are boring to read. But it's encouraging to have one where you're clear-minded and confident, so I thought I'd point it out.

Consignment

Every once in a while, someone sees something you got and wants to talk to you about combining your thing with their thing. Maybe they want to hire you, or perform with you. In college, the student ministries director thought I'd be perfect to preach in Guam for a summer.

These propositions are a little magical. They mean someone looked at you and saw merit and wanted to risk a little something on you.*

Historically, I stumble all over these offers. I get self-conscious and either back away thinking I can't live up to it (cf. Guam) or freeze up when called to produce (cf. lots of other things).

But this year, I told myself the next time one of these offers came I would grab it with both hands.

At Art Shop this year, a consignment shop owner, Square Peg Artery near Rittenhouse Square, was cruising the aisles looking for talent. We talked, we traded business cards, and she followed up.

It's not a big opportunity, but it's big enough to start with. I'm learning marketing with my bare hands, and this is another round of class. Get the product out there. Make money if you can, lose it if you must, but get eyeballs on your goods.

I'll try real hard not to fumble this one. And if I do, I damn well mean to learn something from it.

The picture, by the way, is of a monster available at the Artery. Swing by their store at 108 S. 20th St and take a look around while you're out xmas shopping.


*Precluding scammers and the deluded. Those types are usually easy to spot if you're doing due diligence. I'm talking about the genuine article here.

Who you know

Realized that there's a large-ish pool of good-enough writers in the world, of which I am a member.

After that, it's a matter of who you know and who likes you that determines who gives you what work.

There's a whole other stratum of high quality writers who get work according to merit and notoriety and making their own damn luck. But guys like me, it's about who you know.

I've been using this principle for a while to get the work I do get, but my network is small. Feels a little deflating it took me this long to come to that conclusion consciously. Maybe I need to start caring more about Media Bistro.

Update: Media Bistro kind of sucks for Philadelphia residents.

To do: Stay busy

I've got some freelance I need to be finishing, and I'm coming off a cold, but goddammit, today was the day my professional-painter next-door-neighbor had an open spot, and it wasn't raining, and it wasn't too cold, so today was the day he and I waterproofed the stucco on the side of our house.

Tonight I was seriously going to get something done, but tonight is the night that my friend with the new house and the brand new 2-weeks-early baby needs staples pulled because the floor sander comes on Friday and he doesn't have as much time to pull staples as he thought he would, and man, listen, regular Wednesday night Bible study is just going to get done later. My wife is taking them dinner, and I am about to go help pull staples out of the floor.

Other friends and acquaintances of mine are having problems which I will not go into here, and to the best of my limited ability, I am helping. I am being helped and I am helping.

Being busy is ok business. I like sloth, but basically busy is better. Jeff out.

Pixar, stickin' it to the Man!

I wrote the skeleton of this post a few months ago, and forgot to post it. During Blogaday though, nothing goes to waste.

How is Pixar stickin' it to the Man?

By not caring about the Man. That is the very best way the Man gets stuck:

Perhaps Wall Street would not care so much if Pixar seemed to care a little more. The co-director of “Up,” Pete Docter — who also directed “Monsters Inc.” — said in a recent question and answer session with reporters that the film’s commercial prospects never crossed his mind. “We make these films for ourselves,” he said. “We’re kind of selfish that way.”

John Lasseter, a co-founder of Pixar and now Disney’s chief creative officer, routinely says in interviews that marketability is not a factor in decisions about what projects to pursue. Instead of ideas that feel contemporary, he aims for stories that are rooted in the ages.

“Quality is the best business plan” is one of Mr. Lasseter’s favorite lines.

I don't know what my takeaway from this is, but I like remembering and posting things about creative ventures that inspire me. And really, who doesn't Pixar inspire?

Interesting article: How to Set Goals When You Have No Idea What You Want.

This is a larger problem than most productivity gurus seem to understand. In my experience, when I know what I'm after, I don't have a problem taking the steps to get it (implicit in those steps is the grail of "goal setting"). Even if it's a multi-step process, even if it's a years-in-the-making multi-step process, I'm cool.

For instance, one of the current things I'm after is a return to full-time work in games, and ideally I'd like to work as a writer at BioWare in Austin. Pretty specific! I know what I want. Goal setting is, therefore, commensurately simple.

The thing that makes me surf the Web all day is a failure to discern what it is that I'm after. I'd like to write comics, but where am I headed with that? I dunno. I've got some ideas, some places I've cast around into, but no real goal yet. I don't know exactly what I'm after yet.

I'd like to be internet famous, but there's a whole lot of unknowns there, so I spend more time dreaming about that than goal setting.

This article is (necessarily) vague, but it's the kind of place wandery people like me need to start. We don't need a roadmap. We need a destination.

Finding that is something that "8 Tips to Organize Your Workspace!" will not help to discover. If you're lucky, that kind of "productivity" junk is just noise. If you're unlucky, you start organizing your workspace and think you're making progress.