Fire By Sea

Frenemies are people you can’t afford to be enemies with so you fake friendship or friendly terms with them. They may also be people you can’t stand personally, but you both benefit from each other.

However you look at it, they’re better than straight enemies because you can leverage them to get yourself ahead.

First let’s go over what qualifies as a frenemy:

• Someone you don’t necessarily like but have some respect for
• Someone you’d never hang out with unless you had to
• Someone with a skewed or opposing world view than yours
• Someone who likely cares less about the things you hold dear to your heart
• Someone whose personality, habits, lifestyle, manner of dress and quirks irritate the shit out of you

Take the CEO of your company (if you’re a company guy or gal)—they’ve obviously done something right to get where they are, but maybe they’re a fuckface. Instead of defaulting to player hater—which is easy to do but just leaves you miserable and downtrodden—you ought befrenemy them.

Temper your emotions with the potential of personal payoff: what can I do to get this person to help me?

The reason why I’m adamant about frenemies is because at some point you’ve got to get skin in the game. You’re not going to like everyone who comes your way, but it doesn’t mean you can’t work with them. Dealing with challenging people head on is the only way you’ll get ahead in life. Period.

For example, at my last job I was fired very abruptly on my birthday. It was a total below the belt Nazi move and it hurt not just me but my entire family. Instead of unleashing what incidental fury I had, I took the high road and made all the executives at that company lifelong frenemies.

Now I just think of them of people who may or may not help me one day, and they think of me as someone who is a good person and likely won’t spill the beans on the kind of people they really are (not the people they pretend to be hahaha).

Some leaders swear by it. The better ones avoid it. But in all of us it lies.

Just today I wasted the better part of my morning looking into the harsh laws of drug trafficking in southeast Asia (namely Bali). It turns out they’re very ruthless when it comes to convictions—it’s either life in prison or death.

Now just to be clear—I’m not the kind of guy who does drugs let alone smuggle them, so I’m not overly worried. But I’m certainly paranoid about the possibilities of what could happen if I were set up, falsely accused, or an unwitting player in someone’s fucked up luggage schemes.

This paranoia leads to fear—fear of death, of never again seeing my wife or kids. But then that fear is linked to a much grander fear—a fear of everything that could go wrong in life (fear of failure) rather than all the things that could go in my favor.

When you send that node of fear to your brain, it permeates a much larger substrata of your life. It creeps, then and gains momentum like a wrecking ball. This it swirls like a violent typhoon, taking everything down in its path.

The result is oppression. Paralysis. An inability to feel normal, to even want to feel normal.

Because it’s so hard to “snap out of it,” I found the best thing to do is just that—DO. Take action. Set a plan, no matter how numb you feel, then take the steps to complete them.

Remember—the body is a vessel of action, and by using it you are instigating change. Emotions are powerful, but we also have our minds (which can go quick, too when depressed) and our bodies. Forcing even the most minimal of action when feeling sluggish is a corporeal sign to the universe that you care, and you matter.

I’m not naive like before. I already feel it coming. They’re not going to hire me, let alone call me back. I’m not wanted. My resume will go in the red pile.

I accept it though. There is a greater calling ahead. I don’t know what it is but I do know what it’s not: being dead behind a desk and thinking I’m so cool because of it. Seeing people as data points (you know who you are, pencil dick)…

In all fairness, I can’t believe I’m so quick to snap like this. I’d be honored to get an interview, to work at a startup I love and see the world through the cloud machines of Silicon Valley. I’m not being sarcastic, either.

But I done been ‘dere, done ‘dat. Seen what I needed to see. Learned what I needed to learn. And it was a very, very expensive education.

Here’s the sense of where I’m meant to head next:

• Self-employed income while I see some part of the world with the family.
• Build a successful business after we settle down for several years.
• Public service.

In other words: I will follow my heart and let my mind work out the details.

To the average and above-average Valley entrepreneur, I’m a idiotic fool who can never be taken seriously. And until I can break out of this prison, they have every right to feel that way because they’re wildly successful and I am some dude with four kids who’s isolated in Hawaii…and the bitter middle-aged asshole who can’ stop ranting about his sorry little “heyday” in San Francisco.

And even if I do break out of the prison, they’re still not going to care.

Because I know and accept this without shame or remorse, I’m more than ready to move on and face the howling wind in my face. At least this way I can’t hear anyone behind me. Plus I get to write what I want!

And his name is Barack Obama. There, I said it. The President of the United States.

To be honest, I never thought it would be the President. I was never wholeheartedly impressed by them growing up. Admiring—yep, but not moved the way I am now.

The reason why it’s Barack is because there is so much empathy between us. Here’s a guy who not only preserved his moral fabric during his meteoric rise but amplified it.

Usually it feels the other way around: you gotta sell out to get to the top. You gotta learn how to be an asshole and not feel so you don’t feel so bad when you stomp out the earnest little guys.

But not Barack, man. Barack stays true. He made me believe that there is such a thing as America to love and believe in, that honest hard work really does pay off. That the good guy does win.

I tell you, I’ve been through some harsh shit this past year. I have caused and felt a great deal of pain for the sake of progress and getting ahead in the world. Something what most of us call The American Dream.

It’s ironic because that strain of the American Dream isn’t working for me. America is not a bunch of selfish, egotistical, ruthless, greedy corporations. Well, at least not the America I envision.

Barack, you’ve put hope back into life in America. I may be at the lowest point right now, unemployed and barely skating by, broken down on a rotting toadstool of a career, but I actually believe in something good and great again.

Sometimes I like to envision myself as President one day. It guides me to answer the question: am I being as good, fair, just and strong at Barack Obama? Am I?

Watch this video:

So typical of the American go-gettum mentality: take a risk, do something amazing, live life to the fullest. Be awesome.

But consider this: why the hell are we being encouraged to break out of a system we worked so hard to pioneer, serve, protect and defend? Why does it take a rebellious streak to make a mark on the world?

I’ll tell you why: the system is meant to be broken by a few who have the cojones to do so. The others, meanwhile, prop up their mediocre lives with the work of the brave, inspirational shit like this—positive quotes, other people’s stories. It’s a symbiosis.

Nike knows damn well their campaign of inspiration is not much more than an orchestrated, commercialized mirage. After all, let’s not forget that guy was handed a bunch of cash to “make a commercial” and now it’s cool that he took the money and traversed the world and still made a commercial. Oooooohh.

But I ought to be fair, not angry. Say something redeeming. So here goes:

I’m lucky to live in a country that’s stable and educated, where non-conformity is encouraged when its fruits produce good, and inspire others—like me—to go after my dreams.

But because America has no moral roadmap, no state religion, it’s up to all of us to create good in our pursuit to create good. You can’t just start working on a noble project and treat people like shit as you try to hit all those three-pointers. It doesn’t work that way.

So tomorrow I’m going to go out and not only be awesome but also be good. More people will strike out and just be awesome without being good, and that’s a shame.

As for the guy in the Nike commercial—I trust him. It’s a feeling I have.

It’s so bad that I missed my first day of writing, and I just published and back-dated the previous post to say June 1. What a shame. It’s not like I had no time to do it. In fact I had all the time in the world. Jeezus.

Anyway we’re so far down this rabbit hole that we’ve convinced ourselves that we need to go to Bali to live. Reasons are as follows:

• It’s a really bad time to be living in the USA. We followed the rules and the system and I guess somewhere we were supposed to know that if you want to get ahead, you don’t follow or ogle the system—you simple say fuck it and do it your way.
• Bali is multi-beautiful. Warm, tropical, friendly, spiritual. Children are revered. World-class waves. A great perspective on who we are, where we belong, what kind if potential we have.
• Not bad from a cost perspective. We can live affordably while giving (me) a chance to re-build my career from its lowly, sickly state. I’d like to say I feel like Lance Armstrong when he had ball cancer—it makes me feel like I have come back into the person I’m supposed to really be.
• It’s awesome for the kids. Part of the American dream—the new American dream—is to be educated in the ways of the world outside of our borders. Our children would get some serious cred if they spent time in a foreign country.
• The timing is spot on. One out of high school, one a year left to start kindergarten and the others fairly well-adjusted to homescool, even though we all agree it’s not that great for everyone.
• It wil get us out of this town. Nuff said.

Then we get scared (the most common and most powerful symptom of being depressed in this town) and the list of doubts come up:

• We can’t afford to get there or sustain ourselves there. The Indo government makes it super-hard for foreigners to work, which I respect. So that means we need to come up with all the funds to live there for 6 months in icy green cash upfront. It’s about $21,000. Ouch.
• It’s a hail-Mary attempt. Not totally out of consideration, but you gotta ask yourself: really?

Oh wow: the positives outweigh the negatories. Does that mean we should go?

This story has to be told just the way it is.

The scene opens with me getting fired from my job in San Francisco after a heart-wrenching year apart from my wife and kids. I return home to a depressing, dead-beat town where the wind blows life sideways, often punctuated by cold pellets of rain.

I am unemployed and in really bad shape, and so are the people I love. My wife and I take the time to fight about every little niggling detail—from the compost pile in the yard to the correct time of day to start drinking. It’s fucking ridiculous, and sad.

I don’t know what’s going on. It gets so bad at times I can’t even move my body. I can’t even remember how it feels to be baseline normal, to wake up and feel like there’s some sort of purpose to living.

Friends and colleagues call and I don’t respond. The world jumps out at us and I don’t even shrug. This is not the way it’s supposed to be, but it is the way things really are.

The sickening thing about writing like this is that I want to express these feelings on my public blog, but I can’t. I have to put on a charade to appease the corporate world, the marketing world. Nobody wants to hear these problems when they’re trying to sanitize their life.

Yet if I don’t write, I will die and I’ll bring the whole ship down. Watership down. Yet it feels good to do a little stream of consciousness like this—gets the gnats out and the words flowing. It’s so pure and un-marketing like. It’s the kind of writing I buried alive years ago, when I decided that I had to join cabal of copy and marketing and sales and corporations—the art-killers, the money holders of the world. The so-called movers and shakers.

About ten years ago, when web design was all the rage, I wanted to become a web designer. I thought I had what it takes to create beautiful things in pixels. That was not the case.

A bit later in college, I took some art classes out of curiosity. I wasn’t good creating art, but I got to be around people who did, and the experience was unforgettable.

From there I’ve never lost my respect for really good design. It’s not everything—nothing is everything—but I could never ship a project without clean-pitched lines and textures and colors, and the occasional pop.

So when people ask me what my design sensibility is, I’d answer that I’m not a designer but I have a eye for what’s good and what doesn’t work. Design, good or bad, gives immediate sensual signals to the end user, and that counts for a lot.

Honolulu or San Francisco, can’t really decide. All I know is I’m stuck on the Big Island.

San Francisco represents the new frontier, the ultimate manifest destiny for the family. But like anything with a huge upside potential, it’s daunting and edgy. I could get fired again or some rug somewhere gets pulled. With a wife and numerous kids, that kind of recovery isn’t simple.

Honolulu represents a known balance, the old faithful. It’s got a little of everything we love, and we all can quantify and qualify the benefits. But yet we feel like we’re selling ourselves on a quater of a dream.

The Big Island represents WTF. It’s big, windy and barren. And we’re momentarily trapped here wondering when our ship sails. I’ve never felt so strange about a place as I have here. After all, it’s where we put down our roots and for some reason it feels like those roots are way too firmly rooted (i.e. we’re not getting water or fertilizer).

The only thing I have is what I’m doing here: writing.