A Voice in the Dark

I’ve been away a while.

Those of you who know me - if anyone who knows me actually reads this blog; for that matter, if anyone at all actually reads this blog - know that I am generally a pretty stalwart individual. I keep a positive attitude and an optimistic outlook pretty much all the time.

This is not always an accurate view of my mental state.

I have been so drastically and deeply damaged and distressed by the end of my association with RDA, that (alliteration aside) I am not sure I will ever be the same person again. It’s been made clear to me that working for anyone, anyone at all, is simply not a secure arrangement. In the span of two days, I went from being frustrated but optimistic… to being unemployed. I have not recovered. I may never recover.

I have seriously contemplated suicide.

The level of despair with which I have struggled after the events of April 15th cannot be described. I am simply unable to fathom the reasons behind that day. I don’t blame anyone; there’s no conspiracy, no coalition of people who were “out to get me”, no malfeasance or stupidity behind it. It was just not the right place or the right time, I suppose. I wish it had been. I love RDA. I loved working there. I loved all the people I met there.

Now they don’t even respond to my emails. Would they be willing to provide a reference in my job search? Evidently not. I’ve been abandoned. Shunned. The only community with which I felt any real connection over those eight months has decided I’m no longer worth their time.

I’ve lived in Washington state for ten years. I have no real friends. America doesn’t provide much of a framework for adults to make new friends. You’re supposed to get them through your job. As a business owner, I was never a friend, but a boss. As a Microsoft contractor, I couldn’t be a friend, because I wasn’t really one of them. And as a former employee, the friendships I thought were forming simply evaporated once I left the fold.

I’m not one of them anymore. The friendship was not a real friendship; it was conditional. It was false.

There aren’t enough Jews in Washington state. I can’t find a good synagogue. My son needs to learn about his Jewish identity and what it means and how to be a Jew in the first place. He needs to meet other Jews. He needs to see that we are really out there, and it’s not just some weird thing his dad made up. He needs at least two or three Jewish friends. Eventually, he will need to have some Jewish female friends, so he’s only confronted with the choice of intermarriage - rather than being compelled to intermarry by circumstances.

I can’t support my family. I can’t educate my son. I can’t even find a friend.

I look back on my time in the Seattle area. I cast my eyes back ten years, and I find the white paper I wrote just before moving out here from Virginia. “I Am Not A Kook”, it’s titled. May 12th, 1998. Days before I left everything and came 3500 miles across the country to meet a woman I’d only ever known online - a woman with whom I have had two beautiful children, even if they don’t know what being a Jew is all about, and with whom I am still deeply and passionately in love. Even if we have an open marriage.

That “paper” (only ever posted online) ends quoting Marilyn Manson: “When I’m God, everyone dies.” Several months after posting it, someone mailed me a Chick pamphlet and admonished me in their handwritten note that “no man is God, ever”. I guess I hit a nerve.

I’m still the same person who wrote that white paper, fundamentally. I still like Marilyn Manson, although his latest album - “Eat Me, Drink Me” - was a little too self-important and pussified for my taste. “Golden Age of Grotesque” was okay; the “Doppelhertz” DVD with it was just plain fucked up, but I sort of expect that from him. I still read Nietzsche, and Kafka. Not as much… but here and there.

I still don’t know who I am or what I want or where I belong.

I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

And that’s okay, in a sort of cosmic sense. Maybe I’m not really supposed to know. Maybe I just have to shut up and keep going and see what happens. I don’t know.

But there is something powerful and profound in realising that over the past ten years, you have really not changed all that much. There is some sort of cosmic validation there.

These wounds won’t heal, this is my sin.

Filed under: Business, Microsoft, Philosophy
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