Death

I probably still fear death, I can’t be certain until I face it but I know I fear it less.  The past few years have sucked and I don’t see anything changing for the better.

I have no retirement, I suspect I’ll have little or no health coverage, and staying employed has been increasingly hard as I get older and more Indians get shuttled into the country.

Women were never much good for me, feminism has infected many, and most my age aren’t much good for sex.   I don’t see why I’d goof with them, which I’m sure is offensive but it’s how I see it.  Problems but no benefit.

The tax woman was hesitant about my contracting deductions and I said, “I have no future now anyway, so there’s not much the IRS can do to me that matters”.   She was a little surprised but said nothing.

It’s true.  What can they do to a man who’s career and future is gone?  Nothing but leave him alone and hope he goes away quietly.  🙂

There’s gonna be big problems when more people realize this.

Resentment

I never knew how people resented me until I became a consultant.

It was probably in previous jobs but the resentment was quite visible in my first consulting gig.   The resenter had faked his resume and was paranoid of everything I did.

I estimate 10% of my co-workers harbored hidden resentment, jealousy, based on nothing I’d done to them.  Sometimes it was there on the first day.  Sometimes it grew over time but I was too naive to see the signs.

Many people are frauds.  More than I ever imagined.  Many have superficial understandings and get by on buzzwords and blabbering.

I never believed I had above-average intelligence until I was forty.  By then, I’d seen surprising stupidity.  I look back and I still can’t wrap my mind around some of it  – Saleslogix employees using credit cards to buy stock during the Dot Com bubble;  Arindem obsessed with 30% growth even as the Great Recession was bearing down on us.  Infosys pissing away contracts by underbidding and over-promising,  while engaging in visa fraud and billing fraud.

What a spectacular waste of time.

Hostility

My fascist government and its respective corporations have created such a hostile work environment that I don’t see how I can survive anymore.   The constant importation of one million Indians rubber-stamped with skill sets they don’t possess (no, it’s not the 90K-130K claimed by the visa proponents.  Ten million Indians have been imported over the past ten years).

And there’s so much dishonesty in everything.  I have to couch previous jobs in this way or that way, minimize this, accentuate that.   I don’t even know who the fuck I worked for anymore, because each job is a chain of  two or three companies.   In this last position, I was hired by Company X, who rented me to Company Y, who assigned me to Company Z, to work on Company Q’s project.  four levels deep this time.

You tell me.  Who the fuck did I work for?  What do I put on my resume?  It’s impossible to maintain a credible resume or even remember what goes with what.

There’s so many lies that i can’t keep track.  $5 Indians working on 1099 because they’re never going to pay Federal tax anyway, and living three or four to an apartment.

And this went on year after year.  I couldn’t get back to a stable, normal place where I could do work.  Real work.  It became so sporadic, each new contract had less real work, and more filler and padding and people who took their cut.

All I wanted was to write some software, get some respect and make some money.   And none of that happens anymore.  But it’s always about me, what’s wrong with me, how there’s something wrong with me.

Mistakes

Mistake #1, Marriage – For awhile, I thought marriage was a mistake but lately I think it was failure to divorce at the right time, which was seven years earlier.  I held on too long.

In 1994 I was obsessed with my lack of marriage, my age, social expectations of marriage.  I felt I should be married and I’d have married somebody if I hadn’t married my wife.  I was lucky I married my ex as we couldn’t have kids.

Mistake #2, Trusting the Mormons at Boise State University – I was far too naive about conspiracies and human frailties like envy and dishonesty.  I expected the Mormons to “do the right thing” and I feel so foolish now.  Perhaps I’ll write more detail later.

Mistake #3, Taking the T-Mobile job – In 2010, after seventeen months of unemployment, I had three job offers in the same week – architect at T-mobile, Endeca at Boeing and developer at a cash-positive startup.

I took the wrong offer.  I chose T-mobile because I was ambitious, felt I could finally get my career fixed, it was more money and status.

The Endeca offer was more technical and the manager warning me off of T-mobile from inside information.   My true mistake was not taking Endeca after a week at T-mobile.  Bu I had to honor the commitment, just like my marriage.

I lost Janet because I chose T-mobile.

Mistake #4, Engaging Lochner in political newsgroups – I don’t regret being outrageous and offensive, the Internet was wild and fun and it was a positive experience for an introvert.  But I didn’t realize what a psycho Lochner was, how he would hound me for a decade, slandering me, blaming me for events that others perpetrated on him.   Beck and the Anarcho Posse unmasked Lochner, exposed him as a fraud but somehow he got it into his demented mind that I did it.  As near as I can figure out.

Mistake #5, Sex – I didn’t figure out sex and women until my forties.  I’m not sure how it could have been different, though.  I lost my virginity at twenty-one and only because a friend hired a prostitute.   I had no real-life experience in dating and sex until I married at thirty-six, and I didn’t know enough to know that she wasn’t right.  It’s amazing my marriage lasted fourteen years.

Frankenstein

I think about Frankenstein from time to time.  I accepted the traditional story at face value but in my forties I finally understood its true intent.

Frankenstein is not about Frankenstein.   It’s about the townspeople, the true monster of the story.

What if I were Frankenstein and you were the townspeople?

What if the townspeople destroyed Frankenstein’s livelihood, his future, his beliefs?

Well, then, it would look a lot like here and now, wouldn’t it?  I think of women who thought me creepy, who slandered me, rejected me with disdain.  I think of co-workers who did likewise.  I think of my brother laughingly telling his son about his “creepy Uncle”.  I think of employers publicly commited to diversity and innovation but privately pursuing policies to filter out misfits.

I think of you.

And I’m angry for a bit.

I think of how things could have been.

Should have been.

But then I move past that, and realize for the nth time that people are what they are.  Some things can’t be fixed.  Some outcomes are inevitable and all things are flawed in some way.

I think about how I was part of the townspeople at times.   Not often, but too often.  I compare my pain to the pain I caused and that ratio is good, perhaps 1:5 or 1:10 but still… I’m unhappy it happened at all.

And then I move past that, too, knowing that all things are flawed in some way.

Experiments

I spent my life troubleshooting.  I fixed mechanical devices (office equipment), then I fixed electronic equipment, and then I wrote (and debugged) software.  So I’m in the habit of experimenting via trial and error to solve problems but after I found the Internet, my scope (and ambition) expanded.

In 1990, I hacked Teradyne, chaining together logins from Agoura Hills to Boston, to Berlin, Tokyo, and back into the system next to me, a remote control circuit routed around the circumference of the world.  And it was so amazing, so much so that I changed careers then, from electronic technician to software.

My website (2004-2010) was an experiment which mutated.

Originally, I wanted to see if I could broadcast ideas and I used the memegraphs as my first vectors.   Later, I discovered that Lochner was google-bombing me so I redirected my site to block his slander, forcing it down below a pile of higher-rated links driven from my site.  I imagine he was quite frustrated at his impotence.

Around 2008, I used to my site to vector and manipulate certain memes, I measured the impact on CalculatedRisk and then broadcast the broadcast to the readers, to show the manipulation, how it easy it could be.  Which was also an experiment.

My journal entries were an experiment.  I wrote honestly, to see how real honesty would fare in this world and now I know.

Poorly.  🙂

I drew inspiration from Dominique, who was running similar experiments, with similar results.

My DEFCON presentations were an experiment.  First, to see if I could actually land a speaking engagement at DEFCON with non-hacker material but also to see how honest I could be, how much truth I could reveal.  DEFCON seemed like the perfect venue and I still believe it was.  It’s the rest of the world, later, that wasn’t.

My most ambitious experiment was to try and influence the outcome of the on-coming Depression.   I tried to leverage the pivot point preceding the Crash, tried to lay down certain mental pathways which would deepen as the Crash deepen, to deflect the likely onset of fascist changes in the U.S., using the 1930 Great Depression and Germany as a potential roadmap, as well as “The Great Reckoning” by James Davidson.

Easy to see the failure in that one.  It was grandiose but I had to try it.  Guantanamo Bay and sanctioned torture were confirmations of The Great Reckoning’s predictions of a fascist future.

It’s a kinder, gentler fascism this time.  At least that’s the public’s perception.  Are death camps worse than killing off people indirectly through lack of income and health care?

Software

I liked doing software.  It was a great career until 2006.  And I still like doing software but the software industry isn’t so much about doing software anymore.  It’s more like high school now; trite cliques, pointless assignments, social blabbering.

I hoped to achieve more in my remaining time but don’t see that happening now.  I put out enormous effort from 1990 to 2006 and in the end, I was resented, feared, slandered and eventually discarded.

From 2006 onward, I focused on why I failed with women and relationships.  And I figured out most of it but in retrospect, I’m not sure it matters.  I would still be me and the world would still be itself.

The software boom inflected in 2001, the Dot Com crash was not a surprise to me, I’d been expecting it for several years.  I knew I stood a good chance of being washed away as information technology peaked out.  I did the best I could to stay afloat, sacrificing my house, my wife, just about everything to keep my creative adrenalin rush going.  But each year and each successive contract just got suckier, with less time doing what I liked and more time in limbo or screwing with stupidity until I finally gave up this year.

My sister’s fate was similar, she was washed out by jealous, petty people over a period of ten years or so.  My brother gave up much quicker, he was washed out in 2008 within a few months of me, and he never got any traction again.

Capitalism is an ironic joke to me now, an interesting deception.

Capitalism’s greatest trick was convincing people that it wasn’t responsible for the wars it incited.