Unquiet Desperation

To say that 2009 was a year of many lessons for myself and my family is like the ocean is deep or that outer space is vast: the simple sentence doesn’t really capture the magnitude of the underlying intention. I’ve long held that there are parts of a person’s life that they will spend the rest of their days working to understand the changes wrought during that period. 2009 was one of those periods of time for me.

What I Learned In 2009

• It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there: Yes, Los Angeles. Everyone who knows me is sick to death about hearing about this by now, but it is worth marking the lesson learned. There were a number of good and bad things about the move to and from L.A.  We still miss the scenery, the weather, and the friends we made out there. I miss my team at Mahalo, and the challenge of the work at the company. I do not miss the long, long hours, the constant conflict between work and family time, watching my children struggle in a school system riddled with major problems, living in a shoebox, and watching cops chase armed felons through our housing complex.  This leads to the next point…
• Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home: Being back in Cleveland is a relief, a joy, and terribly  frustrating at the same time. We love being back with family and old friends. We love the familiar places, but with returning comes the familiar problems, the things we disliked enough to try moving to another city to escape. The entire family has felt it, and we’re working through dealing with them day by day.
• Thing that change you do not change others: We went to California as one group of people, we returned as another. We learned, we grew, we changed. But…for folks back in Cleveland, we were not gone all that long; how much could have happened?  Just because you change, don’t expect that others will understand or even recognize the changes.
• All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy: Not long ago, I ended nearly all of my personal projects. This was liberating. I’m able to concentrate on my family, and not on who needs what from me out there on the Interwebs. There’s no pressure to constantly be checking email, Twitter, message boards, etc to get ahead, make a name, swimming upstream ceaselessly. Projects are only worthwhile when you are passionate about them. After that, they’re just baggage. Best to leave them to the passionate people, and move on to new vistas.
• Disconnect: I ditched my G1 (Android Phone) this month and went back to a normal phone. I’ve stopped tweeting other than when I post a new entry on this blog. I read my email once every couple of days. Living offline is much more interesting and vibrant than constantly watching a screen, be it on a laptop, television, or cell phone. The reality is, none of you need to know every 140 character thought that enters my brain. I’m not promoting anything other than asking that you make time to be out of touch for a while this year. The “social” part of the current Internet vibe is more than a little creepy. There needs to be room for silence, isolation, contemplation, and introspection. No one needs to know where you are at all times. Relax. Cut yourself loose.
• They aren’t here to make your life better: Think about how much information Google and Facebook and other sites know about you. Google, for instance, knows what you are searching. If you have Gmail, they can read all your email. If you use Google Voice, they have your voice mail messages. If you are using Android, they know your contacts and their information, and depending on the apps you use, they can know where you are, where you’re going, what you are listening to, and who you talk to the most. Now…I admit I sound a little paranoid when I talk about this, but is it really a good thing for any business entity to know that much about you?  If it came out tomorrow that the government was keeping track of your calls, eavesdropping on your email, and monitoring your web searching habits, would you be pleased with it?  Why are we so trusting of a business, which has less oversight and less accountability that the government? The simple truth is this: a business is not providing services to be nice to you. It is not trying to help you. It is trying to find a way to make money for its shareholders. That’s the point of a business: making money — maximizing value.  Ask yourself, it if were suddenly in Google’s best interest to build a map of your life using the data they have and sell it to a third party, what would stop them?  Or, more interestingly, how comfortable would you be walking into a mall and having the billboard change and address you by name, because they could read the RFID in your ID or credit card, then hit a database service exposing data about your searching and buying habits, creating a custom message just for you?  Perhaps I’m just getting old, but I find that incredibly creepy, and since I take a dim view of marketers to begin with¹, I want no part of it. I’m opting out.
• In the silence, there is Truth: One of my favorite stories comes from the Old Testament of the Bible. From I Kings 19:11-12, when Elijah is looking for the Lord:
  

  And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still, small voice…

  After this tumultuous year, I have taken time away from everything. In that silence, I have found parts of myself I thought lost. That is what the New Year has brought me: the voice in the silence, reminding me than I am more than the code I write, more than the sites I create. There is that stillness in all of us, reminding us of the important things, giving us creative vision that spawn great passions, leading us to places we need to go to grow and develop as healthy human beings. I have spent the last decade chasing technology. The silence reminds of what I loved before the tech, before the storm of activity that carried me to where I am now. The silence shows me that now is the time to revisit these older things, to rekindle fires which once burned brightly.

Unlike past entries, I will not venture to say what the next year holds. The best that I can do right now is hold fast to what I have learned this past year, to make it part of myself, and then to move on, one step at a time.  Just like you, and just like the rest of the world.

I wish you a Happy New Year. May you find what you are looking for.

-Chris

1. How can you trust anyone whose job is to create a false need where none currently exists?  Isn’t that just…dishonest?  To convince people to buy thing they don’t need?[back]

WInter in Ohio, 2009

Originally uploaded by Codeshaman

A little something that reminds me of how beautiful winter can be in Ohio. Taken at Chagrin Falls after the first real snow of 2009.

Way back when the Internet was young, in 2006, Chris Miller, Kris Johnson, Mur Lafferty, and P.G. Holyfield put together a podcast consisting of writing tips and tricks for the valiant souls participating in National Novel Writing Month. They repeated the series in 2007, when they got other authors, like Sam Chupp, Phil Rossi, J.C. Hutchins and Seth Harwood to wax poetic on the craft of writing a novel in thirty days.

Then, the NanoMonkeys went silent, the domain was taken over by one of the less savory outfits on the web, and the podcast passed into legend, never to be heard again…

…until now.

Starting on 10-31-2009, The Secret Lair will present encore episodes from those original shows, releasing one a day for the month of November. Subscribe to the main feed, and you too can join the madness.

For more information and to subscribe, visit The Secret Lair.

Just before I left for Origins, the poster you see off to the right was delivered to my home. It’s an artistically-lettered print of a poem by Neil Gaiman, entitled “Before You Read This.”

It’s a wonderful poem, and I deeply appreciated getting it. But there was no note. I had no idea who sent it.

It took a little while, but I found it was my partner in crime, Kris Johnson. I wanted to thank him publicly for being such a swell guy, and for getting me something because, in his words, “I knew you’d like it.”

The great thing about the poem (which will be framed and placed over my desk in my office), is that it invokes more images than it describes. What I mean is, as you read it, it pulls ideas to the forefront of your mind, and so far, I’ve found that it jumpstarts my creative process. Like a meditation.

If you want to have a little fun, follow the link and read the poem from the end to the beginning. To twist things, read some of the stanzas as “Before You Write This.” It takes on whole new meanings.

Buy one for yourself from the talented Todd Klein.

In this episode of of the podcast, I talk a little bit about coming back from Los Angeles, the state of my various projects, and go into some details about the fiun had at Origins 2009 this year. Also, a bonus rant/ramble about why people like me are the Game Vendors’ Worst Nightmare:

Links for this show:

• Pinax
• Origins 2009
• War, Season 5 of Heaven
• Fluxx and Family Fluxx
• Are You The Traitor?
• Necessary Evil
• The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia

Names dropped: Kris Johnson, Jim Van Verth, Mur Lafferty, Ken Newquist, David Moore, Erin Moore, Natalie Metzger, Andy Steigle, John Cmar, Laura Burns

Download the show here.

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