Optimizing Room for Me

 [Adapted from a ERE forum piece; intro was specific to forum, so I replaced it]

I have been thinking a lot about the roles I play in life and “what is missing” from them.  I had bottomed out at one point, got things a little better, and am trying to refine things to be ever better yet.  What happened to cause that initial “bottoming out?” (And yeah, it was bad).

So much attention is required to my child’s needs, my wife, family problems, and a social life that my wife has led us to in the denomination she grew up in (the United Methodist Church) that there just didn’t feel like much room for ... me. Or, really, I should say certain drives.  Yesterday I came up with the following “tweet” for Bluesky:

Three hungers of my soul not satisfied by the day-to-day roles I must play for others:

1. humor
2. intensity
3. curiosity

So that's what "me time" is about.

I have written some about how I have realized that humor doesn’t serve me at all.  But humor only whittles my ethos over time.  It is intensity that ruins my standing with people in an instant. Something that stood out to me from a book I recently read about how to get a job was the line “you can never be too enthusiastic.” Well, I can tell you that is absolutely bullshit.  If you’re even slightly too enthusiastic about the wrong thing, you are fucked. What would be accurate to say is “You can never be too enthusiastic about how you going to make the person doing the hiring money, or save them time if it isn’t their money... But it takes a kind of self-assuredness — sometimes bordering on delusion — to believe you’re going to get your fair share of value you might add.”

And I’ve always been a curious dude.  Maybe the one that causes me the least problems of the three, as people like talking about themselves, but asking too many questions still sends up weirdo signals. And I can’t name you a goal I have in real life that is helped by me sending up weirdo signals.

So I guess the most important thing for me about love is to be able to do it without going crazy. (And I now have more compassion for anyone who has). I am very much trying to do a Jekyll and Hyde/Civilization and It’s Discontents thing here in my life, and I am very thankful that I don’t have violent or kinky tendencies also thrown in the mix.

IT training did quite a bit to satisfy curiosity and intensity, at least while I thought there was some chance it was “going anywhere,” but after it became clear that it wasn’t, I have had to try to find other outlets. So even though I had quit Twitter years before in disgust, I joined Bluesky with two objectives 1) make sometime of my own. 2) stay out of fights. So far, so good on both counts.

... I fed a block of my most recent Bluesky posts into GPT absolute mode and asked it to guess about me and it had this to say:
 

Likely educated, literate in cultural reference and philosophical abstraction. Displays stable domestic life marked by idiosyncratic intimacy. Not performative—uses online space as lateral thinking sandbox, not identity construction. Socially functional but withdrawn from dominant status pursuits. High cognitive surplus repurposed into conceptual play, not monetization or public leverage.

To which I followed up with “In other words, I post like a total weirdo”
 

Yes. But it is principled weirdness—coherent, internally consistent, structurally motivated. Not erratic, not incoherent, not attention-seeking. You post like someone with surplus processing power rerouting through unconventional channels. It reads as eccentric to most because the default bandwidth of online expression is low-context, high-affect. You invert that.

Weirdness here is not defect but divergence—signal of an architecture misaligned with ambient demand.

It may not be much, but it helps to have somewhere that I can take a break from ambient demand.

And After the Grind?

[For John]

I’ve been going on a lot of long walks lately as I am still too heavy for jogging. It was on one those that I thought up this “tweet” for Bluesky:

To Aristotle, our wealthy would be misers.

In his "Nicomachean Ethics", Aristotle emphasizes the concept of virtue as the mean between extremes. When it comes to wealth and generosity, he sees liberality (generosity) as the virtue. Misers fall into the vice of stinginess, while the opposite vice is prodigality (wastefulness). From his view, a truly virtuous person gives the right amount, to the right people, at the right time, and for the right reasons — thus being a magnanimous man.

This liberality isn’t just about what we call charity.  I once heard Ed Cooke say in an interview that I cannot relocate that one of the best ways to be magnanimous was to throw what I believe he described as a “slamming party.”

On another walk, or perhaps it was another lap on the same walk, “magnanimous” became the answer to the question, “what am I supposed to do once I have made myself so employable that I become employed [1]?” So, instead of just being on a treadmill forever, always trying for more employment, I need another goal for my personage, including my wealth. Magnanimous.

Yet another walk, this one for sure at a different location, I imagined a magnanimous act: I should throw a party when I have kept my weight off for a year [2].  I remember the great party I threw at the end of my employment with last place I was long-term.  It was the end of the school year, and I bought everyone their first drink, and it was a great time where I could use my social skills of flitting around and knowing different thing about the people there, connecting, entertaining, being treated as the big shot by the wait staff... I walked on, got pumped (in more ways than one) -- so why not throw a party both when I get to the target wait as well? I do not have current co-workers, but I do have a Sunday school class that I am in, and men’s group within that.  Oh, it’s so on.

It is worth noting that I do not intend for these parties to “pay off” in any economic sense. I am already plugged in enough with the group that if a “friend of a friend” had an opportunity for me, it would have happened already. Also, the school that I left and threw my first magnanimous party for is the same one where the administrator rat fucked me on an employment history check... though I will note none of the administrators were at that party, in spite of being invited. The point is the party itself, and it is money well-spent whether or not something comes back to you from it.

The most eye opening part of "Wonder Boy," the biography of Tony Hsieh was that during the period he was living in a compound in downtown Las Vegas, and called by the media the Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas, he at one point expressed frustration that a music festival he had funded did not turn a profit. This was during the peak of his post-Zappos utopianism, when he was trying to remake not just company culture but actual city blocks according to the principles in his book "Delivering Happiness." And yet, despite all his experiments in serendipity—serendipity being a word he used a lot, sometimes industrially—he couldn’t quite stomach the festival losing money. It was supposed to be part of a kind of social-engineering ecosystem: invest in culture, attract the right kinds of people, spark innovation, happiness follows. Except it also had to "work," meaning it had to scale or feed into some quantifiable network effect.

Sure, he was rich enough for the loss to be irrelevant—and he seemed to genuinely believe in these events as civic good, but could not quite accept that civic goods sometimes just cost money. He tried to write the book on happiness,but his models of happiness and applied social order did not include benefactors giving gifts that would not be monetized, and with great impatience [3].

It’s nice to know I can be a bigger man than that.

==========

[1] I got myself so buried, that it is has been a long process to get myself out. I knew that I could not do any of this in one swing, so to speak, but would only through the accumulation of small improvements. The rough idea has been to be 10% more employable each month, and I think that is basically have done.

[2] After all, keeping weight off is statically the harder thing to achieve.

[3] After Vegas, Hsieh would retreat to another, more closed compound in Park City, Utah. Here he tried another happiness strategy called 10X, where if you fulfilled his whims, you could bill him 10 times the cost. “Get me a soda,” could be worth $20 or more to you. How this is a strategy for “happiness” for anyone but the wealthy person making the demands was no longer the point. Hsieh also got into ketamine, with the God-complex that can lead to. Eventually, since he could no be bothered to move from spaces so cleaning people could temporary occupy them, he ended up living in filth. Whether there was any degree of foul play, or he was just being stupid with fire safety, his end is also part of the cautionary tale.

Mea Culpa on Bookchin

My mistake was honest, but still a mistake, and I also understand how it would have made John annoyed, if not angry, for a bit.  So first and foremost I take responsibility and apologize.

To add some context, I was correct that there is a connection between Le Guin and Bookchin.  Here is Le Guin providing the foreward to a book by him.  And I know that I had heard or read that Le Guin’s book “The Dispossessed” was based on Bookchin.  But that is incorrect. So when I wrote “The Horizontal Mambo,” it was a situation of garbage-in, garbage-out. Le Guin’s anarchy in “The Dispossessed” runs on social pressure in a relatively inaccessible (and resource constrained) environment. But that is not what Bookchin advocates. 

Stepping back a bit, literature is more about ambiguity, and the playing out of tensions, so it may be the case that the society of Anarres in Le Guin's book might have been the way it was for reasons other than saying "this is the best we can do." From a conversation GPT conversation I had on this: 

Le Guin sympathized deeply with anarchism, especially the ecological, decentralized, non-coercive kind espoused by thinkers like Bookchin and Kropotkin. She once called anarchism "the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories." But as a novelist, she was interested less in selling an ideology and more in exploring how it might actually play out—flaws and all.

In that sense, Anarres is not her utopia—it's her thought experiment. It asks: What happens when you try to build a society without centralized power? Can it maintain freedom? What new kinds of pressure emerge?

I still think that pure horizontalism is wrong, both in terms of short-term tactics and long-term strategy, but on the topic of Murray Bookchin, I must admit my ignorance.

Skill-Based Resume

[Not formatted at this point... actually using this as a safe way to send the content to myself to format and print at a public library.] 

Communication Skills.

How can you know I have them?

* Coached speech and debate
* Recognized with award from state speech teachers association (OSTCA).
* Coached state champion (Public Forum debate)
* Led team to District Championship

Quick Learning/Technical.

Proof?

* Self-studied and earned IT credential (A+ certification) from CompTIA (2024)
* Daily Linux user: able to write scripts, modify system configs
* Skilled at navigating documentation, manuals, and new tech environments

Autonomous & Adaptive

How can you know?

    Built innovative middle school debate program —solo
    Passed Oklahoma Speech Certification independently to take over a high school team
    Grew team to largest in state
    Successfully adapted to multiple roles across education

Conflict & Customer Skills

Experience?

    10+ years teaching, ranging from 6th graders to seniors, gifted to remedial classes.
    Navigated high-stress parent-student dynamics with professionalism
    Strong interpersonal skills honed in emotionally intense, people-facing environments


Actually Hard Working.

How can you know I am? (And, yes, I am accusing most people of not).

* Debate tournaments = 20+ hours, on the weekends. 80 hour weeks happen.
* Removes distractions to stay productive (no Google account on phone)
* Highly efficient at clerical tasks.  “Inbox zero,” GTD.
* “If you’re not early, you’re late. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”


They say work harder, not smart, but I believe it is best to do both -- ask me how I do. 

Aesthetics 2: Fashion Quest

[Status: dynamic document where I will keep adding links for my own reference]

My goal is to get through low-hanging fruit of 80/20 principles. My appearance will never be an advantage to me, but I think I will gain a lot by not having being so bad -- at many points a bit of a "fuck you" to everyone.   

On the underlying body front, I will never be buff, but I can be thin... at least thin enough in 6-8 months. (Short and skinny-fat has been a disaster -- the 21 pounds lost now already people treating me better). 

I was already able to upgrade my "walking around" outfits relatively inexpensively, and have wrapped my mind around what to do as I keep losing inches off my waste-line. Likewise, I think I understand a church-wear polo and khaki strategy that while perhaps not optimal, is good enough for a place where we have paid our dues and are accepted (also having a child to draw off attention is just so good; and my wife knows how to keep her looking cute).

Longer term, when I get a weight I like and can stabilize, I'd like to get a suit for the formal occasions of funerals and wedding.  I think gray or charcoal, and I think I am going to schedule days were I take it out and do some writing at a coffee house or something, as I really  have that feeling of panic when an event comes up and I don't know if I have anything appropriate, or that fits... Links for this topic: 

https://lifestylepit.com/dark-grey-vs-charcoal-grey-suit/

https://www.artofmanliness.com/style/clothing/the-suit-ladder/

https://www.thetrendspotter.net/how-to-wear-a-grey-suit/ 

 

All interviews I could for at this point would max out at "business casual," which is a concept I am too autistic to actually understand. Luckily, I only need one outfit right now for interviews, and I'll cross the bridge of how to fill out a work week with it when I get there.

https://www.gentlemansflair.com/business-casual-for-men/ 

 Another idea is a "capsule" wardrobe: 

https://youtu.be/riypX84RlKk?si=3CAsDznd--HJgERC

 

Resisting the Pipe

 John started a blog!  

And in communicating with him directly, reading his post, and following one of the links I see how much of a freak I am... this time in ways I am actually proud of.

Blogs? I don’t read em, so I don’t really manage how I read em (Ran and now John being my exceptions, and Ran is the homepage, so I’m really going to have to figure out what to do to see them regularly).

The piped society? ...  Well, my phone is de-googled and not on any chat app mentioned in the article. When I do blogging, Bluesky, or banking, I am doing so with laptops or Linux desktops.  I acknowledge that not everyone “realistically” can do this [1], with a special, parental nod to the problems here:

Now, your [default] is to be stuck in a forever chat with local acquaintances, many of whom you soon discover have extremely diverse views on life, parenting, and what it is appropriate to say about their (kids’) bowel movements on a group chat with 50+ members (most of whom they wouldn’t clock on the street). 99% of it is verbiage-garbiage, but if your kid is on one of those chats, you can’t afford to miss what passes, and so, if you’re a ‘good parent’, you have to monitor it regularly, or you’ll/ they’ll miss lifts, downpayments, parties, etc etc – and you’ll be seen as an irresponsible, bad, rude parent. Who knew the digital future would be so infinitely-indefinitely banal and hard to escape?

For even this, I have had a solution that has worked so far: I outsource it to my wife. And she doesn’t even see it as a sacrifice (!!!),  so I take no hit to relationship capital...  As this is the place where my freak flag flied (“no my wife’s allowed” it says on the sign in front of the metaphorical tree fort), I want to express how grateful I am that my wife isn’t capable of scheming against me, lacking vision and being quite low in conscientiousness, even though she would like to be controlling.

The article also provides a nice little document that supports a fifth critique I have of using horizontalism and/or trying to build local alternative institutions: people just want to normalize things, and I just straight up think they are wired to defer to people higher up in their social group.

What I’ve encountered in trying to raise this is that almost no one has concern, let alone ‘shares my concerns’. This tone of indifference has a new and specific texture, one that’s different to the fetishist disavowal of the Insta or X addict. With WhatsApp, I am met with nonresponse. It’s as quiet as WhatsApp. Raising something about WhatsApp, in my experience, is like expressing a preference against flush toilets or drinking water: you seem weird, you seem a bit tinfoil, you seem touched. What I can’t say – which would seem weird – is that, to me, this is the nonresponse of people who have internalised the loss of control over their lives and choices that dependency means in the piped society.

We get angry at people online and feel lonely ‘with’ people online – but we never notice the pipe, and, socially, in this culture, it’s almost impossible to have legible anger at its grip on us. If information is a difference that makes a difference, then the current cultural atmosphere is an indifference that makes indifference.

Okay man. Push as hard as you want against how normies think. Like fighting squirrels eating seeds, it’s a daoist trap -- the harder you fight, the more you’re thwarted, the more unhappiness you get. It’d be like trying to tell people to not adopt televisions in the early 1950s. Critique is not how these things end, or even lessen.  It’s not even how sub-cultures get started... Fuck the macro, build the micro, sure. But first make things as good as you can for yourself. Your air mask first, so you can then help others.

If you’re not part of a cool scene from it, there is no reason to be a radical.  AND if you can be part of a cool scene (or a scene that has parts that are cool) without being a radical, you really should do that as a consumer choice.

Blessed is the person who does not need this spelled out. But I had to spell it out for myself, first.

==

[1] Although I guess I am somewhat “committed” to my path of technological disobedience -- but I am doing so for personal comfort rather than to signal I am part of anything.  If I had to have my phone hooked to these apps to function professionally, I’d get a burner phone. As is, I might get a burner flip phone and use my current smart phone as a camera... Or I might get deeper into photography and by real cameras when I have money flowing in.

The Horizontal Mambo

My most frequent reader [1] over the years -- and only regular correspondent -- expressed an interest in Bookchin.  I think that being my reader is worth a lot, so I tried to wrap my mind around some core ideas, and provide something I hope at least is amusing to think about, and find responses to.

So the following is my critique of Bookchin’s horizontalism, written without reading the source material.  It is a true essay; an attempt. If I am in error, I am open to learning.

[Update: looks like I did not refute Bookchin, as much as Graeber and the anarchist society depicted in Le Guin's "The Dispossessed"...]

 
1. the need to exclude.

One of the fundamental flaws in purely horizontalist organizing is the lack of effective mechanisms to exclude bad actors, whether they be infiltrators, opportunists, or even just disruptive individuals. Any movement serious about building power will face sabotage—both from external forces trying to undermine it and from internal dysfunction. The problem is, without some form of structured authority, there’s no way to enforce discipline or maintain strategic focus. Decision-making by endless consensus leaves movements vulnerable to concern trolls, agent provocateurs, and the paralysis of bad-faith actors who can derail efforts from within. True democratic organizing isn’t just about inclusion; it’s about defending itself from co-option and sabotage, and that requires some level of hierarchy. Even if leadership structures are decentralized, there must be clear lines of accountability and the ability to remove those working against the movement’s goals—otherwise, it’s just an open door for disruption and decay.

When I was a debate coach, with about 50 kids in my program, I was into anarchism, and ran my program on as anarchistic lines as you could and still have kids about to show up to tournaments and follow the rules of the games. We had a lot of success, in part because my students learned how to think strategically... by doing (Cp They Hate your Freedom).  But one problem, among many, was that this created a power gap that was filled by some really shitty kids. This bad dynamic would grow to the point of them humiliating and bullying me -- which happened to be after my father had died, so I was not in any place handle that... Oh well, moving on; what’s a week without linking to something by David Chapman, especially that piece on Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths? Bookchin better have real strategies for dealing with this that take into account charisma and misaligned incentives.


2. shock doctrine

Back to the macro-political picture. The right understands that power is not won through moral arguments but through readiness and opportunism. They have perfected what Naomi Klein called the shock doctrine—using moments of crisis, whether real or manufactured, to push their agenda while opponents are disoriented. Historically, before the rise of the modern bureaucratic state, the right was often disorganized, relying on old aristocratic wealth, and frankly lazily constructed mystique, rather than strategic coordination [2]. This gave liberalism and the left (mind, not the same thing) the openings for their greatest victories. But since the Baby Boom, especially in the U.S., that dynamic has reversed. The right has built a network of think tanks, media ecosystems, legal organizations, and donor-backed political machines that allow them to act decisively the moment an opportunity arises. Meanwhile, the left, often stuck in reaction mode or internal debates over process, fails to seize its own moments, allowing the right to dictate the terms of history again and again.



3. Occupy as test case.

Occupy Wall Street was a warning. I understand there is a lot of room to come back with “that’s not real Bookchinism,” and I am willing to learn on that score, but my essential point is still that rather than experimenting with leaderless consensus organizing, that was the moment to have concrete policy demands. It became proof became proof that without a strategy for power, even the most explosive movements can fizzle out. The refusal to articulate (non-process) goals or establish structures for decision-making meant that, despite capturing global attention, Occupy couldn’t convert momentum into lasting change. This really saddens me when I consider David Graeber, with whom I had a few pleasant interactions with on Twitter. He was kind, insightful, and deeply committed to the idea that new ways of organizing were possible. But in the end, the movement’s aversion to structure made it easier for the establishment to wait it out, while the right-wing machinery kept grinding forward.  A “central committee” to craft the party line is pretty damn helpful for leftist politics. Movements that follow the Occupy play book will always be outmaneuvered by those who actually know how to wield power.


4.  “cultivate your garden”

At a certain point, you have to ask: Is this really worth it? Dedicating your life to a struggle that will likely crush you, alienate you, or just leave you exhausted feels like a losing bet. At best, people see you as a weirdo; at worst, you make real enemies who will ruin your career, your reputation, or worse.  And what’s cool, is they won’t even do it in the open...  They’ll fuck you up by smear campaign.  Hell, that’s why I go by "Candide" in the first place. Like Voltaire’s character, I’ve come to realize that all I can do is cultivate my own garden rather than chase grand political dreams that will only drain me. As an autistic person, I’ve also come to see just how unpersuasive I am in these kinds of spaces. Organizing, persuasion, rallying people to a cause—these aren’t my strengths, and if I’m not able to effectively spread ideas, then I’m not a viable link in the chain of political change. Some people are built for that kind of work, but I’m not one of them. And if that’s the case, why spend my life fighting a battle I’m not equipped to win?

==

[1] Well, I do have at least one more dedicated reader. Me. Two metaphors for here: a scrapbook, and a place to let my freak flag fly. I am a mild mannered, church attending family man. But that leaves me craving something that is my own... And this, as well as a lot of hiking, is it.

[2] Watching that mystique slow, veeerry slowly, wear away (and on the flip side, continue to work in situations where to modern eyes it should have been impossible) was one of the more interesting things I gained from my systematic historical study.