Drafting The Narrative

Towards A Better Tomorrow

Let’s start from the very beginning

(It is a very good place to start.)

Some content that means everything to me, and perhaps nothing to you:

In the course of recovering from a fated marriage to a monster, I have turned my ‘passion project’ obsession energy fully towards politics and current events.

I have lived a socially isolated life for many years. During this time, I have largely devoted myself to mindfulness, my own identity, and monitoring a select few political blogs - Digby’s Hullabaloo (formerly with an avatar of Howard Beale), a bit of Lawyers, Guns & Money, and most intimately, Eschaton. The emergence of Substack has allowed this last pursuit to bloom more fully.

I believe that social media is toxic. And stemming from that, I believe that focusing on the perspectives of individual people or small, sustainable communities is a much better means of both informing oneself and of having a healthy relationship to a nation in moral and psychological decline.

I’ve recently departed from a job at a technical company that, though it is very welcoming and tolerant on its face, sometimes falls prey to the Silicon Valley mindset of pursuing infinite growth at the expense of employee agency - and would forbid me from running a passion project like this with paid subscriptions available. I have recently found employment at a firm that, though likely home to more political conservatism, has no such restrictions on my leaving my workplace at work, and in general allows me the dream of being as unnoticeable as possible until I can better serve the end user with breakthrough deliverables (ick).

This Substack is in large part an attempt to keep the forces of my life in balance. I just emerged from an illness that struck my whole family as I was starting my new job that left me sitting on the toilet for 40 minutes, unable to control the overwhelming dread that I had compartmentalized through the work day. This Saturday morning, I am back to visiting the toilet 5 times in my first hour awake, as became my ritual while finding my physical and psychological limits of imaginary work during 2020 quarantine.

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Thank you for reading all that backstory🙏. If you’re skimming/scanning, feel free to skip to the substance below:

My educational background and extensively demonstrated philosophical acuity has left me attempting to find ways to apply the cognitive twists and turns that are second nature in my work in software to political, and sometimes cultural, analysis. It doesn’t really resolve the dilemmas and double-binds that are borne of existential loneliness, grief and angst.

But it does help me feel like I am able to do something to make a better world for my son, my relatives and those who are or one day may be part of my chosen family. This wave that my writing rides is meant to help my young son become well-adjusted - to be able to best decide what to think about.

I think that I have important and useful things to share based on synthesizing the cherished resources and ideas that have gotten me this far in life. Most importantly, I have passed my ‘internal review’ of whether or not I am in a position to assume a position on my own soapbox, and communicate seriously without resorting to child-like misdirection and the identity politics of one:

"You see how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understands them at all, he accepts them as his own – for he cannot conceive of any other except himself – and plumes himself upon the variety of Its Thought as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this god of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction."

It is against this last black hole of human qualities that I write, something that I suffered from well before anyone else in my social spheres due to neurotic aspects of my past and present that I will not be discussing here. I assume that the Netflix show Black Mirror does an excellent job of conveying the sentiment well (I prefer the Arcade Fire version). I will leave it simply at that I can still look upon my “well-worn copy of Middlemarch”, to quote Niles Crane of Frasier trying to define happiness.

This Substack is meant to serve as a disability-friendly means to cure oneself of political conservatism that is easily read but extensively sourced. The tentative theory as of this writing is that all political conservatism is a mental illness emergent from ‘the identity politics of one’. My goal is that my writings will take the form of your calm inner voice, you will be able to find more empathy towards others whose experiences differ from yours without undergoing the conservative trope of only caring about the suffering of others once it comes home to roost.

All that I ask in return is that you consider supporting my future in Democratic politics, as I cannot shake the idea that I have the goods for running for elected office at some point in the future.

(Repetitive comedy sketch regarding ‘having the goods’ here.)

I hope you will join me in reflection, discussion and resistance to the spiritual tragedy of the commons through which we are all living.

Thank you so very much for reading.

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