I drove my vehicle into the ditch on Tuesday. Not for real—I don’t own a vehicle anymore. Metaphorically, the circuit breaker in my brain flicked off, and I had to take a couple of days to better understand what happened. I was dealing with the regular amount of harassment from my dedicated stalker, but also the increased levels of fascism from not just the current administration, but the technology sector in general, as well as the remaining voices in the API space. I snapped and found myself immersed in my old ways of thinking from a much darker time in my life, from which I know there is no return, so I quietly pulled the vehicle over and parked it safely in the ditch so nobody would get hurt—-including me.
There isn’t a lot of caring in the world right now. This former version of myself I found myself wallowing in on Tuesday is a reflection of this timeline we currently find ourselves trapped within. However, I made a choice in 1998 to never go back, and because I have three beings on this planet directly connected to my heart strings at this moment, I know there is no going back. There is only forward. I want to be the care we need in the world right now, and not the alternative we are all having inflicted upon us. But if I can’t find my way forward at any given moment, and hateful, fascist, automated forces would rather push me backward, my brain is trained to flick the circuit breaker and just sit there in the car until I find my way forward again. I learned alongside the freeway in Illinois in 1997 to not keep driving, and I am better off waiting until my head is on my shoulders again. Otherwise I can make some pretty dumb-ass decisions.
First, there is no way I can take the toxicity of thinking about my stalker on a daily basis. I thought I could. I can’t. I blocked him again on LinkedIn, and fuck it if he is DM’ing people, and talking shit about me across LinkedIn. That energy is on him, and the people who listen to him. I was making it public to help others, but that clearly isn’t needed from many of the conversations I’ve had. I will just stay within my domain and operate via networks where I can block him. I can’t absorb his hate along with everything else going on right now. I just can’t maintain enough mojo to keep moving forward at this moment. If I have to think about that piece of shit another day-—I’ll revert back to my old self.
Next, there is just too much worship of the machine in the current tech sector for me to be out there in the open absorbing that shit daily either. There is some seriously craven energy in the world of APIs for scale, automation, and squeezing out of the humans–with a complete lack of ability to connect their work with what is happening in Washington D.C. right now. There are very few voices left advocating for people in my industry. The community is gone. The stories don’t exist beyond pandering for whatever the machine wants at this moment. It is overwhelming if I remain tuned into it daily. I can’t worry about likes, page views, subscribers, or any of the other metrics out there because they are all in service of the machine, not us humans. All of this makes it very hard to operate a business.
I will need to retool a little bit to keep myself producing and on track. I just can’t be available for public conversations every week—the toll from this exposure is too high. The appetite of service providers, coupled with their lack of empathy for people doing APIs within the enterprise, bundled with most enterprise people just believing they are the smartest people in the room and have all the answers, when they might be smart, but they are also very isolated. Leaves me existing in a mind bending vacuum, which I think Jason Harmon described well as a noisy silence. I would level it up closer to a black hole sucking where your soul is ripped apart, and nothing is given in return—-leaving everyone just fighting over whatever scraps are left.
I am determined to not go away. I am good at what I do. I have my finger on the pulse of this cybernetic layer between the humans and the machines. APIs are key to what is happening, and have a role to play in helping us make sense of things. The master’s tools won’t help us tear down the master’s house, but it can still provide us with access to making the master’s life very problematic along the way. If I don’t completely meltdown and lose it along the way. I didn’t melt down this week, but the signs were there, and I was all too familiar with the sign posts all too well to let myself go back down that hole again. Anyways, I am idling the car, and feel like I can get back on the road. I’ll do about 5-10 MPH until I get back into the garage this weekend, but I’m fairly confident I can get back to things next week. Fuck this timeline, but I have to be out there. I can’t let these fascist hateful fuckers run me off.
