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Perspective
This morning, I woke up at 7:45. I got up by myself and walked the dogs around the block. I mowed the back yard. At 8:45, I ate a yogurt for breakfast and turned on last week’s Rachel Maddow show for some morning newsertainment. At 9:30, Katie and I had our Monday morning checkin, and then I wrote some code. We’ll go to yoga at noon, and this afternoon we hope to sign a lease on (another) new office space. For dinner, leftover quinoa!
I tell you this as a preface to what follows: an excerpt from an entry I posted to benbrown.com in August of 2000. I was 22. Please keep in mind that most of this did not actually happen.
A few weeks ago, my tiny baby internet startup experienced crib death and the fear that all my coding would yet again die without reaching market stopped being a fear and became a reality. I wake up in the morning and my dead little baby is there, dead. Dead. Dead baby. My baby is dead. Dead babies everywhere. Hey look, I have 500 cards with pictures of my DEAD BABY ON THEM.
This sort of thinking, it doesn’t motivate me to do much.
I light a cigarette. I light another cigarette. I light a whole pack of cigarettes and then have to go buy another just so that I can keep doing something with my hands, so that I can keep myself from wandering about Austin, stalking my ex-coworkers, stalking, threatening, killing.
This is what I’m thinking: I’m a failure, I’m a failure, I’m a failure, I’m a failure.
My father calls up one morning. My father, he says You’re a failure! I’m sitting on the floor of my kitchen in a towel, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. I haven’t left the house in three days. There’s a small pile of ash on the floor where I’ve been putting cigarettes, and a cockroach is swimming in it.
Oh, my little baby. My poor dead baby. The big angry German VC nanny shook my little baby until it’s soft little head just rolled off.
Two weeks after I had no job, which happens to be 8 weeks after the last time I actually got paid, my father and my brothers and my best friend show up on my doorstep.
This is an intervention, they say.
I shake my head.
We’re going to clean you up, they say.
A single tear wells up out of that little corner-bit of my eye and trickles down my cheek. Bryan’s words echo in my mind — I’m going to cry you a river … that’s infested with piranha.
My father and my brothers and my best friend Tim, they pick me up and carry me into the bathroom and pull the towel, which is now sticking to my skin due to a thin layer of malt liquor and ash, off of my body, and lower me, slowly, into the bathtub. Tim, his normally jovial face twisted into a look of sadness/disgust/pity, scrubs the grime off of my body with a toothbrush. Oh Tim, look what I have become! I was once a powerful vice president at a peppy little internet startup, and now, now I have fallen from grace. Look at this poor wretch I have become! OH TIM!
Tim puts a washcloth in my mouth. It would seem not everyone has the patience or the time to pity me as much as I pity myself.
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Tumblr Notes
Liked on Tumblr
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Here’s a few pictures from the test build for the app. Just messin around with it.
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“I am Adam. Prince of Eternia”
One frame closer…
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Heres 4 more backgrounds I made for PixelPix. I guess I’ll explain what it is since I didn’t in my last post. It’s a camera application that lets...
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The Morning GIF: Poor Will Riker, Forever Number 2. http://awe.sm/5f6Mr
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I drew a frogge
