My Time as a Human

When I left high school and headed off to college, there were people who were already spending most of their days working boring jobs and talking about the good old days of high school. When I graduated college any number of friends got married and bought houses in the suburbs and talked about how crazy they were in college. I was in such fear of leaving behind my last chance at intense experience and constant mental stimulation that they had to pry my fingers from the flagpole and throw me off campus. I made a dash for Austin, which had its own adventures in store, and was fortunate enough to luck into an amazing startup company that was competing head to head with Microsoft for top college graduates from MIT, Stanford, etc. I worked with some of the most amazing and talented people I’ve ever met, many of whom are still my best friends in the world.

When that company folded and my travel money vanished with the pop of a bubble, I thought for sure that it was over. Soon, I was certain, I’d be standing over a lawn, dazed, my hand waving a hose slowly back and forth over a flower garden with the vague realization that I was about to retire. But instead I found myself shooting documentaries and traveling the US.

I was in rural Georgia on a former hippie commune with a professor who had been kicked out of Georgia tech for siding against the Vietnam war. We were all drinking wine on the huge old wooden porch that overlooked the river and I turned away from the moon over our heads to my cute mop-headed companion and said, “I can’t believe it. I’m still getting away with it.” In that moment I realized that I had rarely stopped to tell stories about the good old days because I had been too busy creating new good old days. I was supposed to be sitting in a cubicle and coming home to pull kids’ fingers out of light sockets and clean diapers (certainly plenty of adventure for those who relish such things) and yet here I was, getting older and older, stretching out the adventures far further than I should ever have been allowed.

Now certainly there are things I’ve missed living this life. Some people love having kids, and I’ve complained about the lack of a stable love life. But so far I relish every moment that I know I can look back on when, and if, I ever hit that point.

I have a lot of little sayings, and one that I repeat quite often is, “All life is the creation of great stories to be told later.” Whenever I’m considering two courses of action, one of which is safe and sane and the other that is more likely to make for a better story, I know which one to tackle. I’ve embarrassed and challenged myself any of number of times with this ridiculous rationale and I hope to go on doing it until I can’t do anything more than dictate. At that point, load me into a rocker on an old Texas porch and I’ll gladly tell my stories.

The package was tall and covered in brown packing tape which a skinny, bed-headed guy in a corporate polo shirt was applying with enthusiasm. “See, now it looks more like a board or something,” he said, continuing to wrap. The cowboy on my side of the FedEx counter chuckled. The tape was quickly burying what appeared to be two tubes of cardboard squashed slightly flat. Just about the moment I realized that the long item inside was a shotgun, shipping boy said, “It’s not about what you can and can’t ship, it’s what you can and can’t get caught shipping.”

I hate dealing with people who try to get more out of me than they deserve, and so I tend not to ask for more than I think is reasonable. This attitude is, unfortunately, crippling. I’ve had to catch people sneaking into theaters and I know what a hassle it is and how angry I get for having to deal with them. The wealthy CIO of one of my former companies used to sneak into movies all the time. He carried in a used popcorn bucket, acting as though he’d been there all along. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford the ticket or, for that matter, to buy the theater itself, but he somehow thrilled at figuring out ways to get around a system. That’s what made him good at his job. (Actually, let’s use “skilled at his job”.)

Ignorance, a bit of selfishness and a willingness to ignore laws and customs are powerful tools for accomplishing big things. You have to be able to launch into something first and find out later if someone objects. If you move quickly, the thing is already done. You’re already in front of the director by the time the secretary says, “Excuse me Miss…” You’ve already photographed the screaming politician before his aides shout, “you can’t film here.” Your company is already large and successful when someone asks, “wait, are these numbers right?”

A coworker of mine who grew up dirt poor in Houston ignored everything he saw around him and hacked his way through college and into a dot com. If he had done what he was told he would have gotten a job out of high school and been stuck there.

A filmmaker I know shot his first film on a camera he “borrowed” from work and two credit cards. Sure, the story could have ended terribly, but instead he’s doing well and if he hadn’t done a few things that are frowned on long ago, he’d still be working at the post office.

In the personal coaching world there is a concept called, “acceleration to failure.” The idea is that when someone suggests a whack scheme, sometimes the best approach is to leap in and help them reach the point where it fails as quickly as possible, so that they can believe in its failure and be truly open to alternatives. Another similarity I’ve noticed about these people I describe are that they are also excellent at making snap judgments. They will have already failed and tried a second tactic while I’m still mired deep in the process of making just the right choice. Worse yet, I’m wasting time whining at them about the fact that they haven’t thought things through beforehand.

So while my response to many behaviors in the past would have been to call them “selfish”, “judgmental” or even “illegal” and thought of those as negative things, I’ve learned that there is a lot of value in some of these approaches when used in moderation. The attitude that underlies them is crucial to breaking through the many invisible barriers to success that surround us.

It’s not that I’ve never seen the benefits of being an overly fair and, well, nice guy. In college, I missed countless final exams. During one English final, the professor got worried when she didn’t see me, asked the students for my number, and called me to make sure I came in. After writing down the wrong day for a physics final, I went to the prof with my story. Despite dropping his head to his desk, covering it with his arms and groaning dramatically, he agreed to give me the exam personally. (Better yet the test he gave me was the same one from the archives that I had studied the night before.) He trusted me to not be pulling a fast one, simply because I wasn’t the kind of kid who did. Of course, all of that said, in the end I got a terrible grade in the class in some part because I refused to work on homework with other students, which was technically against the rules.

As I look towards my next round of life and what needs to be done I’m more convinced than ever that my tactics are going to have to change. I’m going to have to be more aggressive, less patient, and spend less time looking for the right or accepted ways of accomplishing things. In the end, it’s about what I can get away with while living out the short life I have.

As these digital pages begin to fill it’s time to take stock in this blog and how it’s progressing. In a mad attempt to spice things up I’ve been injecting myself with Hunter S. Thompson, Tibor Fischer, and Hemmingway. Having just spent time with my parents and on a documentary project about suicide, this leaves me producing something like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon — after the quaint little town has been burned to the ground and the poor man has has spent 55 sleepless hours driving cross country with a bitter in-law. The juvenile cracks, counterculture references and sweet tales of times past mix like soy milk, the Hells Angels, and a French maitre d’.

I haven’t done any advertising yet and, with readership still fairly low, it’s hard to justify staring at my web stats like Hillary Clinton at the polls, trying desperately to guess the response to each post. If an Indian kindergarden class is asked to check out the picture of the white guy in a turban my numbers double. So for now I’ll let it evolve and see where the daily writing exercise takes it.

Pictures

I just had a crazy dream when biking across the University of Texas campus and almost Schwinned a student when I let go of the handlebars to exclaim, “eureka”. I’ve been struggling with the problem of coming up with images fast enough to post them along with the blog posts. Asking for permission takes too long, and I’m trying to be good about rights. The solution is clearly to make my own on the fly and I have a number of experiments in the works so stay tuned!

Tools

Warning: geek moment

I have been experimenting with a number of blogging tools and discovered that Textmate has a blogging package. Textmate is the offspring of an Emacs aficionado and OS X and so it has some of the best parts of each. Sadly, “some” doesn’t seem to be quite enough, as it doesn’t keep track of tags as it goes. Emacs, on the other hand, doesn’t understand how to be a useful text editor without a lot of hacking that I’m not sure I want to do just yet, and the blog package someone wrote for it (to make it more like Textmate, ironically!) isn’t quite mature yet. So, in limbo, I have at least moved from my trusty BBEdit (which is still the best at remote file manipulation) to Textmate and if I keep it up for a whole month I’ll cough up the $30 to register it.

Note To Self

Writing takes longer than I think, either because it gets interesting or because it stops cold in the middle of the process and I’m left dangling from the last word like a lost participle. Trying desperately to type, still my participles dangle. I’m still trying to find the right routine that gets blood flowing early enough in the day to fuel my fingers without sending them on an unstoppable rampage that leaves me with a novel and no place to sleep. And so with that, the egg timer chirps and I’m off to hack a few breadcrumbs together.

During the cold war I had Russian friends. My playmates were from all over the world and spoke all kinds of languages. Their parents had come to the U.S. to work on international collaborations at a lab called “Fermilab” after the physicist Enrico Fermi. It was a culture of old Volvos, homemade natural foods, wooden block toys and unkempt hair. Anyone who thinks scientists are stuffy haven’t met the kinds of people I was around as a kid, or spent 18 minutes with Clifford Stoll.

When I first met engineers, and expected them to think like me, I was baffled to discover that they seemed to lack the fundamental curiosity about the world that has resulted in the thrilling death of any number of scientists. I found myself having to explain the basics of how an internal combustion engine worked to an engineering student. This is a guy who drove around in a car every day of his life and, absolutely baffling to me, didn’t seem to care about what made it move! Not only was he uninterested in what I had to say, he was, in fact, in engineering because he hoped to one day design cars. He assured me that he probably knew how to do the math behind it.

Ultimately, the people who most closely resemble scientists are, in fact, artists. Perhaps it’s a mad drive to find beauty through understanding. One half looks at atoms or sheep genes and the other at human souls, but both willingly give up basic comforts to chase that flickering light into the swamp. Fermilab reflected this. The buildings always had a little flair about them, with big orange circles and bright blue posts. There were sculpture exhibits and musical performances. The high rise itself sat at the core, with its arcing sides easing up into the sky and atrium filled with plants and a massive pendulum. Any opportunity was taken to bring in a starving artist and enthusiastically hand them a big pile of leftover pipe scrap and a welder, asking them, “what can you do with this?!” “Can you make it sing when the wind passes through it?!”

In the last few years the winds of change have blown from under our current President’s desk to drift across the land, stifling creativity and innovation wherever the noxious cloud passes. Cutting funding for the arts is obvious enough for a republican, but it seems to go hand in hand with cutting funds for pure science. University and research labs in a wide range of disciplines across the country are struggling. The crazy dancers and biologists and musicians and physicists I love are being pushed away and spread into other countries overseas. I’m not sure a new administration will be able to act fast enough to change this, and maybe it’s not a bad thing. America had its time, and now the rest of the world will have a chance to share the light of innovation brought on by encouraging the unfettered searching by these curious humans.