• Skip to main content

penfist

stories are the bones of everything

  • About Penfist
    • Pen’s FAQ
    • Contact Pen
  • Books by Penfist
  • Evolve!

people

Adam Sandler molested me

November 30, 2017 by Pen Leave a Comment

A lot of people are doing a lot of talking recently. They’re talking about something that is long overdue. Non-consensual and inappropriate treatment of females (and sometimes also males) by men with privilege and power.

Adam Sandler didn’t molest me. What Adam Sandler did do, is put his hand on an actress’ knee. Sandler did it without asking. An innocuous and possibly harmless action. It doesn’t rise to the level of many of the other bad behaviors being discussed recently. Why am even talking about Adam Sandler at all? Why am I bringing up this minor incident? I bring it up because of how technology works and how quick people are to notice inappropriate behavior and call it out. Go on Twitter and type in Adam Sandler. Take note of how many people called him out for putting his hand on a woman’s knee.

Conversations about culture are changing. Sandler may have been oblivious to the way his hand made Claire Foy uncomfortable, but the Twitterverse was not. The uproar was immediate. Nearly ubiquitous connectedness is changing the way all of us think and act, to one degree or another. Sometimes it’s for the worse but I think more often it’s for the better. What’s undeniably changed permanently is the speed at which community cultures change. As long as everyone’s connected together this way, there are always going to be new voices emerging out of the crowd chaos, helping the collective grow and improve as a community, sometimes, like now, seemingly overnight. The crowd doesn’t always get it exactly right, but crowds never have. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t collectively changing for the better.

Community outrage and constant connectedness are messy, but I’m all for them if the end result is bringing down powerful, privileged consent abusers, and preventing possible future abusers from spending decades getting away with criminal behavior. I don’t care how rich and powerful you are, it’s never okay to touch someone without asking first, and it’s definitely not okay to pressure them because of your position in life into giving you something they don’t want to give.

The era of non-consensual patriarchy dominating the political and spiritual realms of our lives is dying on the vine. It is dying messily, but that’s generally how entrenched cultural memes go out. Being defended by morons who say they represent the will of various gods, that the old ways are good enough, that they’ve done nothing wrong. Bullshit to all of that, and good riddance to each and every abuser who loses power, prestige, or privilege because of their past behavior.

Ask before you touch. Don’t be a bully. Stop abusing people just because you think you can get away with it. You won’t anymore. That era is coming to a close. We all have a voice now.

Filed Under: Culture, Essays Tagged With: Adam Sandler, change, Claire Foy, community, dying, gods, life, people, pressure

Density propensity

March 28, 2017 by Pen 2 Comments

I was taking the subway home. Like I do every day after work.

I work for an organization that uses technology in ways. Well, let’s just say what I do isn’t considered legal or ethical. In a world where 100 multi-billionaires control 62% of the earth’s wealth, I could give a fuck about what’s considered legal or ethical.

I have a family to take care of, and bills to pay. I use my talents to get what I can, keep my family fed, and keep our quality of life as high as I can. No one’s getting hurt. I just skim money out of the system using my technical and social abilities. Backdoors, phishing expeditions, social engineering. These are my domains. I have a good crew. The operation that employs me pays good bonuses when I do a good job. My kids don’t wear shoes with holes in the soles. They aren’t malnourished. We’ve got mad bandwidth and they can learn whatever they want about the world.

Meanwhile, I’m taking a little here, and a little there. Rich people don’t need that much. So I shave a little bit off, carve a slice out, make a piece of the pie mine.

This world is crazy. It’s people cutting each other’s throats, just like it always has been, except now we do it in a vast ocean of zeros and ones. People don’t have to get dead in the streets and alleys like they did back in the olden days. You know what? That’s alright with me. People get paid, bank accounts get switched around here and there.

Oh shit. Mother fucker just stabbed me. I was taking the subway home.

Minding my own business. Bam. Dude comes up on me. It doesn’t hurt. Just cold. Spreading cold. That mother fucker. My monitor flashes a red warning and I hear a voice in my head. “Biological damage detected. Emergency protocol active. Hibernation mode priority one.”

I can’t see right. Can’t hear right. It’s like I’m in a tunnel going down into the dark and that mother fucker is getting smaller and smaller. Did he just kill me? What the fuck for? I wasn’t doing nothing to him. Oh shit. I’m not going to get to say goodbye to Brianne and Jonas and little baby Paco. This really sucks. What the fuck?

“Tomas. Tomas, can you hear me?”

I realize that yes, I can hear someone talking to me.

“That you Jonesy?”

“No shit it’s me. How you feelin?” I feel someone touching me. Holy shit. Either I’m not dead, or Jonesy and I are both dead and made it across to the after.

I think about it. Run a systems check without realizing that I’ve engaged it. The voice says, “Systems no longer critical. Running full diagnostic. Please stand-by.”

“Brianne called us when you were late.” Jonesy. “She was upset. ‘He’s never late. Never.’ That’s what she said when I took the call. ‘Something’s wrong Jonesy. I know you got him chipped. Go get him! If you don’t I’m gonna kill you.’” They really like each other. She’d never threaten him if she didn’t think something was seriously fucked.

“You know I like her Tomas. You got a good woman. Man, if you wasn’t with her, I’d get with her. You know that shit is true.”

I do know that shit is true. I seen those two looking at each other. If she didn’t love me so much, and we didn’t have them two kids, she’d get with him. I might even be alright with it. If I wasn’t around. Shit, life is short. Too short not to have some love.

I cough. Try to speak. My throat. It’s so dry. Feels like it’s full of sand.

“You found that motherfucker that stabbed me?” I welcome my voice, despite the discomfort it causes me.

“Relax Tomas. Just take it easy. He got you right in the liver. We had to call in a favor with OmegaCorp. They printed you a new liver while you was bleeding out. Hey man! Carlos came down and donated two liters of his blood to keep you from dying man. That Carlos. I know what I said about him last month, but that vato is alright. I take back all that shit I said. You owe him man.”

I think about what I’m hearing. Open my eyes. Look at him through the heads up display. He looks tired. “Jonesy, man. I’m glad it was you. Hey man. I got questions. Was this about the Princeps Corps job?” Jonesy shakes his head.

“No man. This shit is payback for that Russian thing we did last year.”

I close my eyes. Think back. Mother fucker. That guy on the subway looked like he was related to Pavel.  I open my eyes. “You’re talking about the Lisin thing?” Jonesy nods. “I thought so.”

That mother fucker and all those Russian mother fuckers. I have a family to feed. They’re worth more than 15 billion nuEuros. It isn’t enough that we’re on the brink of an environment that won’t sustain human existence. It’s not enough that we fought a world war that extinguished 80% of the planetary population just two decades ago. No, we’re still stabbing each other with metal alloys over fractions of fractions.

“I’m calling in my favors Jonesy. I want all the processing cores I’ve saved. Upload me into the mesh network. There’s hell to pay.”

He hesitates. I can see it in his eyes and I know what’s coming.

“Jonesy. She’s waiting for me to call. She wants to bring them to see you.”

I harden my resolve. Some people just have a density propensity. I’m not one of those. Not me. From now on, I’m a ghost in the machine, and I’m going to ramp up the income redistribution to a whole new level.

Fuck my freshly printed replacement liver. I was just taking the subway home. Mother fucker should have minded his own damn business. Don’t care who he works for. He’s freshly slaughtered meat now.

Is it legal? I don’t care. Is it ethical? Couldn’t give a shit. I have a family to take care of. I’ve told you what that means to me a million times Jonesy. Now it’s your turn. Cause there’s hell to pay and I’m the devil.

Filed Under: Short Stories Tagged With: dying, existence, legal, life, love, penfist, people, Princeps Corps, Relax Tomas, short, short story, war

A year of biohacking

December 18, 2015 by Pen Leave a Comment

Health is on my mind.

In 2016, I’ll be starting an experiment with ketogenic living. I’ve been biohacking for many years but haven’t done anything this extreme. My 2016 begins with the premise that everything I’ve been taught about eating healthy is wrong.

For the last decade, I’ve been operating on the theory my weight and health can be manipulated by counting calories. I was under the impression that if I ate too much, all I needed to do was exercise a bit more to burn off the extra calories. Seems like I may have been wrong. Apparently, the kind of calories I’m ingesting is much more important that how many calories I’m taking in.

I’ve recently been introduced to a guy named Gary Taubes. He pisses a lot of people off by theorizing that a high-fat, low-carb diet is the way to go.  That’s not what the medical authorities teach in the United States or Europe.

His books, Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories, convinced me that most of what I know about healthy eating is completely wrong. I think hundreds of millions of you might be in a similar situation.

The experiment begins on Jan. 1, 2016. If you follow me on social media, subscribe to my newsletter, or happen to be a part of my physical world, you’re going to be going along for the ride. If you’ve tried a ketogenic or some other low-carb diet, I want to hear from you.

Filed Under: Essays, Personal Tagged With: Bad Calories, Europe, Gary Taubes, living, people, United States

Finding god

January 14, 2015 by Pen Leave a Comment

I try to stay away from politics and religion because they tend to be divisive. Sometimes I cannot. There are events that affect us all. They sweep across the world like a fire. Think of the crucifixion of the Christ. Or the death of Muhammad by fever in the year 632. These events are still affecting the world stage today. They have been since they happened. I’d like to say that these two historical figures claiming to be agents of a divine being brought peace into the world but events often disagree. There are multiple competing storylines that fade backwards into human history before the invention of writing. Stories wrapped around history. These affect our psyche in manifold ways.

It is the year 632. The prophet, a self-proclaimed agent of the divine, is dead. He has left no heir apparent. His followers have a difference of opinion about who is to lead the faith. Should it be Mohammad’s companion Abu Bakr or Hussein ibn Ali, Muhammad’s closest living relative? The argument resulted in battles that continue to this day. Ali was killed in one of these battles. He was beheaded. We see this happening still in the name of those who claim god as their own. The new religion split into two distinct sects. They have been fighting ever since, with each other and with anyone who disagrees on the finer points of their version of god.

It is the year 2005. I am a man wearing a uniform in a city not that far from where Ali was beheaded. I am an invader following orders. My days and nights consist primarily of producing war propaganda, hearing bombs going off and worrying about bullets, mortars and rockets falling from the sky and ending me. It is a surreal world full of intense psychic stressors. I live in the palace complex of a deposed dictator. He was a Sunni. I am told we are there to bring freedom to all the Shias he oppressed. I am told we are there to bring prosperity and hope. For some of us this idealistic belief is the driving force. For others the impetus is to bring our society’s values to the backwater country we are in. Still others are there simply because they were told to be. They do not believe in a cause and are simply doing a job.

All around, outside the walls and sometimes inside, people are dying. Horribly. In the name of god and vengeance. Everyone sees god through his or her personal lens and from the context provided by their own past experiences and present circumstances. At the height of my time there, estimates of the death toll in my host city range from 4,000 to 15,000 casualties per week. The air stinks of reprisals, fear and suffering. I feel the bombs going off inside people’s heads and outside the gates. I see the aftermath of the violence. Prepare stories about how we are liberating prisoners from torture chambers. Write about Sunnis being captured by Shias and having their heads poked full of holes using power drills. The Sunnis respond by blowing up open air markets full of Shias. People die for many reasons. Some die for no reason at all. I am entering middle age and at this time and in this place I find myself those around me are struggling to emerge from the events of the middle ages.

I survive 2005 and 2006. So many around me do not. Those who do must of necessity carry away scars that are both physical and mental. One cannot exist in the midst of violence without carrying the echoes of that violence around. The scars of my past contain the many ideas of god within themselves. What is this word? I refuse to capitalize it intentionally because I want to remind my brothers and sisters of humanity of one thing: you do not own this idea any more than I do. Your god or gods are yours to worship as you see fit up to the point where you are forcing those ideas down my throat as car battery acid or into my head at the tip of a power drill.

It is 2015. There are two brothers. Raised to believe in a version of god I do not understand. This god is easily offended. I suspect this god is also weak. This god never speaks except through angry humans who believe that those who disagree with their version of events must be executed in the name of untouchable and intangible ideas that they have in their head. They have rules that include extreme silliness. My god is so important that you may not draw a picture of him. My god is so important that you may not destroy any of his words. They make the holy into the unholy by waging war in the name of something I don’t understand.

What kind of god would need followers like this? Not the kind I can fathom. This could never be the lens through which I see the world. Where all of existence is merely a game of chess pieces played by a being that demands I slaughter others to honor it following esoteric rules made up thousands of years ago and often stolen from the esoteric rules of other gods worshipped by generations past all the way back into the beginning of written language.

There is no one true god. Because each of us has our own version. And this is why we often fight. Over disagreements about what this unseeable, unknowable thing inside us really is. Yes. You understood me. God is inside each of us. Some of us have more than one god inside ourselves. And whether there is only one or there are many they are all the same thing. Because all the atoms and molecules of the universe are connected. All the energy is connected. All the stars send their light across all the universe. It takes a long time to travel that distance.

Which makes me wonder why such tiny beings as ourselves spend so much time and energy fighting about what god is. Wouldn’t it be easier to spend some of these resources exploring everything we cannot see yet. I’d rather do that than to spend all my time living inside books that claim to be the only true explanation of god. Such books often contain wisdom. And wisdom is not a static thing. Like the universe wisdom is a growing, living thing. It does not stand still. It does not use force to control others. It uses patience, tolerance and understanding.

I am student trying to learn. I am a mote that is self-aware. I am a wound that wants to heal.

Maybe all the aberrations I have experienced are there to teach me what god is and what god is not. For myself only. If others want to follow my example or take a piece of it they can choose to do so in freedom and without expectations on my part. Here are words crafted as fragments of my own journey.

I am finding god. God is not a bomb. God is not a bullet. God is not contained inside a book. These things are only tools used to create or destroy. To build or tear down. God is inside you and all around you. God is the fabric of everything. God belongs to everyone. I am not god’s exclusive messenger and neither are you. If you have been given anything worthwhile in this existence it is the choices you make about what you do with all the information available to you. Choose your paths wisely.

God does not act alone. God does not demand. God is not vengeful. God does not become offended and is never offensive. God does not hate. God cannot be drawn.

God is community. God is reasoned debate. God is exploration of the self and of the universe. God is infinite and in everything. God understands love that seems impossible.

Each of us is nothing more than a possibility. Each of us is only here for a few moments. I hope you are finding god in a peaceful, thoughtful way today. If we could all agree to pursue spirituality from this perspective the world would change drastically for the better. I believe it is possible. In the cosmic scheme of things it shouldn’t take more than a few eye blinks. While I wait for those blinks to transpire, god bless you and keep you. May you be inspired in ways that make your journey rich and full of epiphanies, laughter and pleasure. I hope you find your measure of humility, strength and courage. Unto you be granted the qualities of mercy, wisdom and a thirst for knowledge.

I am made of scars and ideas. I am made of love and weakness. I would rather know you than kill you. I am a man who does not believe in anything but the fluidity of existence and the journey. Ideas are not static. Knowledge grows and spawns new wisdom. I am not standing still and neither are you. We are all spinning through space. Together. I try not to lose sight of that.

It is the year 2015. What will you do with this eye blink?

Signed,

An apostate

Filed Under: Essays, Freewrite, Personal Tagged With: existence, gods, living, love, people, rules, stories, time, universe, war

Spontaneous combustion

December 4, 2014 by Pen 2 Comments

Spontaneous combustion is a myth. But something like it does happen sometimes. With the push of a button. For a variety of reasons. People who are there one moment are gone in the next.

Here’s how I imagine it, as only a person who has been close to high explosive doing its awful work can; the truck pulls up to the outer gate. The madman pushes a button. The shockwave ripples outward too quickly for slow human minds to comprehend. The madman, who is probably only a boy really, disintegrates into wet, charred bits of flesh.

Last thoughts irrationally carrying him into the black where his false belief in a paradise that does not exist will simply end. Perhaps that is in and of itself a sort of paradise. When the only world you know is so harsh, maybe stopping the world you know is a form of heaven.

The walls of the compound blow apart a millisecond after the madman’s body flings itself into an orgiastic outward spiral of exploding truck parts. Guards on the perimeter are blown apart as the hole in things expands. This is the work of men whose dreams taste only of death. This is the language of the bomb and of impotence.

Trailers rip apart. It is 4:30 AM in Kabul, a 3,500-year-old city whose residents know the smell of death and shit intimately. The winds here are always full of decay, burning, desperation. In the blackness, fanatic followers run through the new hole and begin firing their machine guns. More of the language of death.

The residents inside this poorly named place are waking up. Some are injured, the walls they felt safe inside proving too weak to keep out conflict. A few died in the initial moments of the blast. The camp, which is a place run by a company named after a character from the movie Star Wars, is what the mavens of war call a secure compound. There is no such thing. Camp North Gate also called Camp Pinnacle, no longer has a gate and does not sit on the pinnacle of anything.

I lived in this place in 2011 and 2012 but was moved away by my superiors and then injured in a moment of banality that had nothing to do with bombs. So I am not at Camp Pinnacle when the suicide bomber pushes his button and blows a deep crater into the ground, shatters the walls, creates an opportunity for mayhem. I am not close to the bomb or the men who run in after with their fury and their guns. People I know and have come to care about are though.

I can only imagine what happened. Piece it together from news reports. Live through it in my dreams. Because I spent many months expecting any given night to be my night of blood and terror I have a deeper understanding of how those moments played out after the bomb went off than you are likely to.

I know war. I have watched mortars explode close to me. Seen rockets fly a few feet over my head and then arc downwards to explode nearby. I have woken up to find bullets that have fallen down around me while I slept.

Kabul has probably not always been a city permeated with misery. I imagine it has known times of peace and plenty. I have not been there during any of those. For me, Kabul will always be a memory of armor, insecurity, fear. For me Kabul will always be complete chaos in the form of a wedding party madly videotaping their joy while a truck full of freshly slaughtered goats careens past on its way to some open air market. Life and death superimposed side by side with the backdrop being a city of tents next to a graveyard full of war martyrs.

The world inside the walls of the place I once lived that got blown up was surreal. In the little store I remember Afghan brothers selling overpriced counterfeit Beats headphones to overpaid, underproductive armed contractors like me. Every winter jacket I bought from them fell apart because the zippers were made of brittle metal. I bought two and then switched to ordering from Amazon.com. In the capital city the winters are cold.

At Camp Pinnacle, most of the imported female workers ended up pregnant and disappeared back to Kyrgyzstan. The contractors call them war wives. No alimony payments are likely to be collected by the state on behalf of those children anytime soon. Surreal. Full body massages with happy endings for the ones willing to pay. You can fuck the Russian speaking hairdresser for $100 in U.S. currency.

Inside the compound is surreal. Outside the compound is even more surreal. At least we have running water and electricity 95% of the time. The rest of Kabul, which is also called Kabol, is not so lucky. Rich people have generators in their dusty mansions. Poor people have dung fires. In this city, the higher up the mountainside you live the poorer you are.

We didn’t have to report graft or bribes by local officials until the percentage was higher than one quarter of the total budget. So, if we gave a police colonel $1 million in computers and he distributed three quarters to his underlings and sold one quarter in the local markets to line his pockets that was OK. The compound we lived in supposedly cost

The little store inside our secured compound sold third rate Chinese electronics, Afghan carpets and for some reason I never understand was well stocked with remote controlled toy helicopters. I’m sure those blew up when that bomb went off. I saw some photos of the aftermath. The building where I lived would have been shaken but my room probably didn’t sustain any major damage. Had I been there on that morning I would have been shaken awake by the bomb blast and put on my body armor while my fight or flight response went into overdrive. My years of experience in that kind of environment would have kicked in. I would have sought those I knew in order to go into what is called a protective posture while the camp guards battled the follow on attackers.

For every misled fool who wants to rush to gain entrance into an imagined heaven that does not smell like dust, shit and misery, there are always companions. These four came in shooting. Reports vary regarding how many were killed on that morning.

What’s certain is that all four of the mad truck bomber’s companions died in a hail of return gunfire from the compound guards. It’s my speculation that the Nepali guards were the most effective at returning fire. The Afghan guards tended to be mostly useless. Collecting a paycheck and praying were their two most reliable features during my sojourn inside those walls now shattered. I was reliable at the first but not the second.

One of the strange things about war is how the statisticians love to collect their data. At the end of your life, if you have been a war mercenary as I have, you might be summarized on a tally sheet as one of any number of KIA (killed in action) or, if you are not completely ended, you could become a WIA (wounded in action). There were more than 100 WIAs from the bomb and its aftermath. There were an uncertain number of KIAs of various nationalities. One of them a Romanian. It made me wonder if he was the Romanian I used to play the video game Call of Duty with. I haven’t seen him on Xbox Live for a long time now.

The people who do the important counting necessary to manage a war often guard the numbers as if they are a holy secret. Reporting in such an environment is almost never completely factual. The statisticians are often also liars with an agenda. I’ll probably never know exactly who lived, died and bled that morning. I know that one of my friends survived uninjured that day only to be blown up inside his armored vehicle another. He suffered traumatic brain injury.

War is surreal. There you are with a rifle and a pistol and body armor. Spending days driving an armored truck through the beggars, drug addicts and religious zealots of Kabul to get from one compound full of corrupt, opportunistic people to the next and then back again. Breathing in the dusty shit air.

Spending nights playing a warrior made of pixels on a projection screen while eating pizza cooked for you by an Afghan who has never known anything but the smell of dusty shit air. Who is trying to survive like you are. Who has an agenda that stays hidden behind fatalistic eyes. And you make six figures while he struggles to make enough to feed his mother, father, sisters and an untold other number of Afghans who are not lucky enough to be a pizza boy in a secure compound.

Was it one of the pizza boys who gave the attackers details on the compound so they would know the best time to do the most damage? If I had been born an Afghan pizza boy I wonder what I would have done. One of our translators, who could easily have been an Afghan pizza boy instead, was stabbed to death in the streets of Kabul with screwdrivers because of his profession. Because he needed to make a living and didn’t want to beg on the streets like so many Afghans do. In Afghanistan warlords siphon off foreign money while the denizens of neighborhoods they control starve and freeze in the harsh winters.

I sometimes wonder what it is all for. The billions of dollars poured into a place on the other side of the world which is also the world’s largest producer of opium. One of the oldest settled places. One of the most contested places. Many empires have ground their sharp teeth into dust in this place where the sound of violence is a normal part of the fabric. But for a missed moment in time I could have become part of that dust. Little bits of me scattered into the wind of a city ringed by hard mountains that always smells of shit. Shit that also provides the sustenance from which I have seen roses growing.

It occurs to me that maybe the manboy with his finger on the button of the bomb was hoping to clear a space where roses could grow out of the shit. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

Filed Under: Essays, Personal Tagged With: Afghanistan, Camp Pinnacle, dreams, heaven, kabol, kabul, KIA, life, living, people, spontaneous combustion, suicide, WIA

There are only two kinds of people

October 19, 2014 by Pen 1 Comment

There are only two kinds of people. I have been both of them at different times. I suspect you have too if you’ve been around a little while.

In my 20’s I loved using the word fag. I threw it around in online gaming forums like free candy. Someone got the better of me and I got fragged. Then my mic went on. “You’re a fag.” Yep. That was my brain to mouth without filters in action. I don’t do that these days. Doing didn’t make me a better competitor. It just pissed off the person on the receiving end.

In my 20’s I loved to argue about everything and I would never back down an inch. I knew what freedom was. I knew all my rights. I knew how to fix every social ill that plagues our planet and our species. I knew that I had a high IQ and I thought that entitled me to being heard and respected.

I wanted other people to hear me. I thought I deserved it. The problem was that I didn’t want to hear them. I wanted other people to learn from me. I didn’t want to learn from them. I already knew everything. I couldn’t have been more wrong about that.

In my 20’s I was condescending. I was arrogant. I loved to argue. I’m in my 40’s now.

I’m still condescending and arrogant inside but the rough edges have been sandpapered. I’ve walked through some storms that I managed to survive somehow. Storms that I elected to walk into of my own free will. I still love to argue but I approach if from a completely different place. I might think you’re a whiny little bitch, or that there’s a double standard about the use of the word nigger depending on what color your skin, eyes and hair are. I might think a thousand different things are unfair, unjust or nonsensical. I might find you utterly boring. It won’t come out of my mouth anymore. Why? Because you don’t ever prove a point by crushing someone or turning up the volume to a point that no one hears any of the words anymore.

Annihilation tactics never turn an enemy into a friend. Escalation doesn’t solve problems unless you’re willing to bomb those arrayed against your point of view or stance into non-existence. That isn’t my go to place. I’m not a sociopath or a psychopath.

So somewhere between shouting out “fag” and creating a bunch of unneeded bad feelings arguing about everything under the sun I had an epiphany. Or a thousand. Here’s one of the most important ones.

I learned that enemies can become friends. To make that a possibility I needed to stop blurting things out and start paying attention to what the enemy was doing and saying. That guy who fragged me all the time knew something I didn’t. He had tactics I could have learned from. He wasn’t a fag. He was a better player than me. If I had been paying attention to what he knew back then instead of flailing around feeling angry about losing I might have combined what he knew with what I knew to improve my gaming experience. Which, at that time, was pretty much the world I lived in and cared about. Priorities change. What you care about changes. What you believe in changes. People usually don’t change. Until they start listening and stop talking.

That’s a lesson it took me nearly 20 years to absorb. You don’t become better at anything by pissing people off. Unless your ultimate goal is to be a world champion douche bag. If you want to be heard you have to shape the message in a way the doesn’t immediately incense your audience or potential audience. I eventually stopped using the word fag. I have used other expletives in the past in attempts to win arguments or save face. Now I just avoid the argument in the first place. I don’t care about saving face anymore because I’m focused on learning from failures as much as I learn from successes.

If you believe that Jesus Christ is the one true path to an eternal reward I’m not going to convince you otherwise until you are ready to consider other possibilities. If you think the CIA introduced crack into American ghettos to keep the black man down then one white guy isn’t going to change your mind no matter how eloquently he speaks. If you believe the moon landing was faked, 9/11 was an inside job or the Tea Party will save us from the downfall of America (whatever that is), I’m not going to change your mind before you decide that other possibilities should be weighed. You have to be ready to hear the message.

What’s the point of writing all this? It’s a message to all the really smart, high IQ, outside the box people who are struggling to be heard. You probably have important things to say. We all have a soapbox that we would like to have an audience for. If you want people to hear how great atheism is here’s a hint: don’t start off by telling them how stupid their current theology is. It doesn’t work. I know from personal experience.

Starting a conversation with “you’re wrong and here’s why” is like trying to pickup a woman in a bar by telling her that you are repulsed by her saggy breasts and the hairy mole on her face. Unless she’s an emotional masochist that approach isn’t going to work. You have a soapbox. You have an agenda. You have priorities. So does everyone else. Take the time to hear them and you might have a chance of convincing them to hear you. If they raise the volume try lowering yours. You’d be amazed how effective it can be to simply wait and listen without taking offense. I don’t take anything personally anymore until someone starts trying to punch me.

I never won arguments in my 20s. I spent too much time getting angry. I sometimes won video gaming contests but my blood pressure and my belly both increased when measured over a period of time. Shouting out “fag” or “nigger” or “I’ll kill you mother fucker” never helped me make a point about anything. It didn’t help me win. It did ensure a few people hated my guts in more than one online forum or gaming den. I’ve learned from those ineffectual years. I’m still learning. Here’s where I’m at in this moment.

Want to convince people of something? Try these tactics:

  • Endless patience. Be ready to wait a lifetime for them to be ready to hear you. Don’t get invested in changing their mind until they are invested in new possibilities. Which brings us to…
  • Understand why you believe what you do. If you don’t know why you hold a certain viewpoint no one else is going to be convinced either. It’s always been that way. The status quo doesn’t mean there isn’t a viable or superior set of choices. Fail. My parents told me so. No parent knows everything. No parent is infallible. Fail. It’s the law. Total fail. It used to be the law that you could own human slaves. The law is a dumb, blind animal enforced by mostly unimaginative people who carry guns to enforce rules passed by more mostly unimaginative people. Which brings us to…
  • Explain your belief/stance/solution/viewpoint from a humble place. Realize that you haven’t walked in the same shoes as your potential friend and convert. They have a different experience of the world and they look through different lenses. That’s OK as long as they are willing to listen to you and you’re willing to listen to them. Never ever start with “you’re wrong and here’s why.” For fuck’s sake you just used up some of that endless patience above waiting for an unlikely moment when they were contemplative enough to hear you. Which brings us to…
  • The point is not to win. The point is to plant seeds. They might grow into something later. They might not. But for most people epiphanies don’t happen in an instant. Most people have to connect a lot of dots before they see the big picture. You on your soapbox on any given day or in any given moment are only one of the dots in that person’s life. Finally we come to the most important part of being alive…
  • It isn’t about you. It’s about wisdom. Wisdom is bigger than any one person. Somehow, through a series of unfortunate mishaps and close calls, I came the conclusion that there are only two kinds of people. The ones I can learn from and the ones I can learn from. I learn things that I want to incorporate into my own life and journey from the first kind. I learn things that I don’t want to incorporate into my journey from the second kind. That means everyone has something to teach me. You cannot be a good teacher until you’re a good student. Spend a lot of time talking with the first kind of people you can learn from. Identify and observe the second kind of people you can learn from. Try to avoid close engagements as they are likely to result in hostility and bad feelings no matter how endlessly patient you think you are. By engaging the first and watching the second kind of people I have improved myself. I believe you can too. In my 20’s I was the kind of person who taught people how not to be and what not to emulate. In my 40’s I’m trying to be the kind of person who listens enough to be worth being heard. It’s not a science. It’s an art form. It’s not a static thing. It evolves. That is the nature of being human. You aren’t supposed to form a set of viewpoints and then spend your life telling other people how great they are.

There are only two kinds of people. The ones who are evolving and learning and the ones who have to be dragged along on the trip kicking and screaming. I’ve mostly stopped kicking and screaming at this point. I’ve started paying attention to my traveling companions. I’ve realized that some of them are magnificent, beautiful souls. I’m starting to understand just how amazing the journey is. I’m less scared of being alive than I have ever been. I see the stars and I want to go there with you.

Filed Under: Dear Reader, Essays, Personal Tagged With: evolving, human condition, inspiration, learning, listening, living, meaning, people

Copyright © 2023 · Author Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in