Contacting Free World Blues
“Yeah, sure, you can, uh, text me, but don’t call me”
Telegram user “Big Sneed” (username identifier withheld in consideration of privacy and absence of consent for disclosure), circa 2022, in reference to, and derivative of, a similar quote by Barkhad Abdi, 2013-09-27.
I write nonfiction because my memory is stronger than my imagination: a man should know his strengths and weaknesses, and play to his strengths, no? The adage “truth is stranger than fiction” is an admission of feeble imagination: one can’t claim, in any universal sense, that the finite real events a given man experiences are stranger than the infinite fictitious events he might imagine – it depends on the man, how strange his life, how strong his imagination. Perhaps I have led a particularly eventful waking life, or perhaps my dreams are particularly dull, but the adage holds for me. I am not Gabriel García Márquez; I am not Miguel de Cervantes; I am not Shakespeare; I am not Jules Verne. I accept this.
The great disadvantage of writing nonfiction, in reference to one’s own life, is that it is seldom flattering. Rare are the episodes in my life where I – or my contemporaries – made wonderful decisions at every turn and treated each other with divine respect in every moment. Vanishingly rare are the episodes which are simultaneously examples of perfect moral conduct and actually worth reading about, or worth writing about, for that matter. More than a decade ago, I worked in the San Francisco Bay, and frequently interviewed candidates for roles under my direction. The majority of the questions I asked were technical, but I also wanted to interrogate candidates’ general business sense, so I asked them the following: “Tell me about a company you find interesting“. I soon had to append to this “— specifically, a company other than Tesla or SpaceX” , after more than a dozen Elon Musk fanboys launched into hagiography, which wearied me over the months. The majority of candidates took “interesting” to mean “successful”, and the companies they mentioned were invariably high-profile, generally publicly-traded, and typically in the technology sphere. Alphabet (then Google), Uber, TheFacebook, and AirB&B were all favorites. Cryptocurrency existed at the time, but was far from mainstream and financially worthless, so at least I was salvaged from hearing young men ramble about CoinBase and Yuga Laboratories. The superlative candidate was a young woman who understood intuitively that an interesting business story – one worth studying – need not be a story of brilliant invention, effective marketing, impeccable decision-making, admirable treatment of employees, honest dealings with shareholders, compliance with regulations, and eleven-figure profits. Stories of squandered opportunities, disastrous planning, insidious corruption, large-scale fraud, and financial ruin are as worth studying – if not moreso – than stories of success, and she told me such a story – several, in fact. She had a background in auditing and valuation, having investigated companies to determine their suitability (or, more often, lack thereof) for investment. She understood what no other candidate seemed to: stories of successful companies are amplified by survivorship bias in the Occupation Media, and far more business ventures meet dishonorable ends than become the darlings of Silicon Valley. Hired. As for auditors, so for authors: the stories most worth telling are those of failure, and when I write from my own experience, I’ve plenty of material, but Brother, writing these memories down ain’t easy.
The great advantage of writing nonfiction, in reference to one’s own life, is certainty of what is nonfiction. The events of my life are, by definition, the only events of which I will ever have first-hand experience: I was there, after all. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been there, but there I was. Someone will inevitably ask: “How can you be certain that the events you remember actually happened? Can you prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are not merely a brain in a vat, overseen by a more-advanced version of Microsoft Tay AI? How can you be sure that you’re not living in a simulation run by concerningly-voyeuristic space aliens? Can you rule out the possibility that you your yourself are an (actual) interstellar alien, your entire life history a hallucinatory vision as you exhale a bong hit of (actual) Kosmic Kush?“. Indeed, I can’t rule out these possibilities with absolute certainty, and I don’t know much about weed culture in the Andromeda Galaxy. Similarly, I can’t rule out, with absolute certainty, the potential that gravity will reverse five minutes from now and fling me into the sky. Yet I choose to trust that physical laws which have existed unchanged for 13.8 billion years will not change next Tuesday, and I choose to trust my own senses, and if I’m wrong about either, I’ll have much larger concerns than discovering that my “nonfiction” was in fact fiction.
“Non-fiction in reference to one’s own life” – Autobiography, then? No – Free World Blues is not an autobiography, nor a memoir. I’m self-indulgent, to be sure, but not that self-indulgent. Not yet. Rather, I share stories of my own life when and where they are relevant. Avoiding self-indulgence is only my third struggle. My second struggle is to find the courage to tell unpleasant stories. My first struggle is to focus on solutions, not problems, for complaining is easy, but does not constitute a path forward. If you pray for me, pray only that hope spring eternal, and within me, and within us all.