Kin Lane

The Makeup of My Anxiety

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I struggle with anxiety. I have most of my life. I have been able to find balance with it on a daily and weekly basis, and while I am able to function and even move forward, the impact of it in the moment is massive and heavy most days. I choose to find my own way through this jungle, as opposed to a pharmaceutical route, and have developed a number of coping mechanisms. But, as I get older I continue to seek more solutions, and as I roll over 50 years of age I think I have found the most effective tool in my toolbox–creativity. Through lots of journaling, I have been able to identify that most of my anxiety comes from a lack of creativity and nourishment in my days due to work, life, and the world around me.

Let’s see if I can articulate what I am seeing in my head. My anxiety is directly proportionate to the lack of creativity and investment in the human Kin each day. The more I work. The more time I spend online. The more anxiety I have. The more creative I am. The more writing I do. The more art I make. The more books I read. The less anxiety I have. I have weeks, and even years that my anxiety is light. These are the times where I spend the majority of my days telling stories and nourishing my brain and body with creative endeavors. The times my anxiety hits me the hardest are the times I neglect giving myself evenings and weekends, and I invest all of my energy in my work and career, which also involves spending a great deal of time online, outside of the physical realm.

It is so easy to neglect oneself in todays’ busy world. In recent years I have spent a lot of time analyzing my work ethic, career trajectory, and the impact capitalism has on my health and well-being. I am successful by all financial measures. I am no longer living in poverty, and have an extremely well paid job at the top of my field of work. However, with this success my anxiety on a weekly level has increased. However, along with this success I have managed to keep reading, writing, making art, and nourishing my creative side. Granted, I am not doing it to the levels I would like, but it is still there, providing me with the ability to better understand my anxiety, and increase or decrease my dosage of creativity to better manage my anxiety. Through simple experiments, it is clear that creative nourishment is what is missing when it comes to my ongoing anxiety.

The trick now is to properly administer the right dosage of creativity that keeps me on track with my anxiety. It can be hard to remember to be creative in a busy day of work. With a lot of responsibility and work on my plate, it is easy for the day to get away from me. In some cases it is easy to let the week get away from me, and steal my weekends from me. I am getting better at remembering to think about the stories I want to tell instead of whatever work deadline is looming. I find it level setting to pick up a physical book rather than try to read something online. I find it nourishing to get lost in painting or working on the variety of art projects I have going at any single moment. While I would rather spend my days immersed in my stories, art, and reading, but with the realities of rent, utilities, and my other bills, it is about striking a balance that properly manages my anxiety so I can not just get through the day or week, but I actually can look in the mirror and smile.

A List of Books that Helped Me Recently

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Once I began seeing family members start dropping like flies when it came to voting for Trump in 2016 election I knew there was no turning back for me. I’ve long been on a quest to come to terms with my own complicity in white supremacy, and this was the opportunity for me to shift things into overdrive and understand more about why and how I saw the world around me. After Trump was elected i wanted to develop better understand how people I care about could believe in such a horrible human being, and ultimately be so fearful of the world “out there”. Ever since 2016 I have been on a journey to come to t3erms this reality, but more importantly I wanted open my eyes and push myself to be a better human being, and be the change I wanted so desperately to see in the world.

There are many other books that I’ve read that have shifted how I see the world in the last seven years, but these ones have specifically helped me better understand my white family members, unwind the programming I have been exposed to in my youth, and learn to develop empathy for marginalized human beings around me.

	Bunk - The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News - by Kevin Young
	White Trash - The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America -By Nancy Isenberg
	Educated - By Tara Westover - Westover recounts overcoming her survivalist Mormon family in order to go to college, and emphasizes the importance of education in enlarging her world.
	Stamped From The Beginning - The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America - By Ibram X. Kendi
	Evicted - Poverty and Profit in the American City - By Matthew Desmond
	Women, Race & Class - A powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women - By Angela Y. Davis
	Freedom Is a Constant Struggle - Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement - By Angela Y. Davis
	Loaded - A Disarming History of the Second Amendment - by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
	The Warmth of Other Suns -The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration - by Ijeoma Oluo
	Braiding Sweetgrass - Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants - By Robin Wall Kimmerer
	The Color of Law - A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America - By Richard Rothstein
	How the Word Is Passed - A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America - by Clint Smith
	The 1619 Project - A reframing of American history that placed slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. - By Nikole Hannah-Jones
	Mediocre - The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America - by Ijeoma Oluo

After reading these books, there is no turning back. I just put down Mediocre, and the conclusion perfectly summed up this quest I have been on. I get where much of my anxiety comes from and it reaffirms the importance of the work I am doing to reverse the programming I had growing up. Bunk, White Trash, and Educated were very important primers for me. These books mapped to my experience growing up and provided me with the perspective I needed to want to learn more. Then I feel like Stamped from the Beginning, Evicted, and Angela Davis really provided me with the racial lens I needed to keep unpacking my shit, and keep seeking oiut even more diverse voices. But, Mediocre really brought it all home for me this weekend, and provided me with the answers I’ve been seeking.

Of course, this journey will never end. Like I said, there is no turning back. I have to keep reading and filling my head with other voices now. THe gravity has shifted for me and I can never step away from the richness of listening to more diverse voices. Sitting here in 2022, having read all these books, I can really see how dependent power is in this nation is counting on people being ignorant, uneducated, and believing in racial, religious, and class boundaries. I can also see just how foundational white supremacy is to the founding, expansion, and current state of this nation. Knowing more is terrifying, but not nearly as terrifying for me as isolation, ignorance, and continuing to live in a very white-washed reality. I just can’t do it anymore. These books are foundational for helping me in my journey over the last seven years, and without them I’d be much more lost, angry, and without hope.

I Made It. I Survived.

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I turned 50. This is a big milestone for anyone. For me personally, it is everything. As a result of the programming I received from those I grew up with, as I approached being an adult, I assumed I would die by the time I was 30. This isn’t me being dramatic at 50. Me, and several of my friends believed wholeheartedly that we would die is some grand event before we were 30 years old (couple friends achieved). This belief didn’t originate from any single source, but was an aggregate of the bleak, scary, and fearful reality that I grew up in. leave me rolling over 50, a pretty proud moment for me. I made it. I survived.

This moment is all mine. I am sure I can find a few individuals to thank for helping me out, as well as find a few individuals who I could blame for not helping out, but ultimately I made it here because of my determination and belief that this life was worth living, and this beautiful world of ours was worth being a part of. I am really proud of myself. Despite all of the trouble in the world at any given moment, I am committed to continuing to live as long as I possibly can, and for to make this world better in any way that I can. I am love with who I have become, my one biological offspring I managed to bring into this world, my amazing wife and partner in crime, and my joyous Rottweiler best friend Poppy.

One of the greatest contributors to me thinking I would die before 30 was the bleak landscape painted by elders in my rural white community. From my early days I remember hearing stories of how the Russians were going to invade, that nuclear war was inevitable, and the our own government would be coming for us at any moment. When you are marinated in this from any early age, you believe it. Every knock on the door could be the government coming for your guns and the livelihood you have managed to scratch out. Looking back, I can’t help but think about what a prison this is. None of the events foretold ever came true, but most of these people I knew are still spinning the same old fearful yarns about financial and societal collapse, without any self-reflection regarding why these things have’t come to be, or the damage they are causing to young people in their orbit.

When you are a young man growing up in this reality, it can be hard to hold out any hope for the future. Why go to college when the world is going to end? Why have savings in the bank when the government will just take it? You learn to live in the moment, perpetually at your own expense. It becomes a reality that you can never see beyond. Everything out “there” is just dangerous and scary, and probably looking to just fuck you over. It took me a solid decade of being out of this reality, doing the hard work to unpack all of this baggage before I began seeing the light, having hope, and being able manifest positive outcomes in my life. With continued investment and storytelling, I am finding my way not just out of this reality, but putting it so far in my review mirror that I don’t even dwell there much.

I am married, live in the wonderfully diverse and vibrant Oakland, CA, have one grown child, make a very healthy six figure income, and operate at the top of my career field. I don’t own a house, but that is something I’ll fix very soon. I am extremely content. I don’t drink anymore. I exercise daily. I have lost 25 pounds in the last six months. I am healthy, happy, and despite the troubles in the world right now, I have a bright outlook on life. I still struggle with mental health, and Covid has taken its toll, but honestly it was the passing of my wife’s son Isaiah in 2020, and the recent processing and celebration of his passing this last month that has really set the stage for turning 50 with such a positive view of things. I feel like I am solid ground, and I find myself celebrating being alive and making it a half century on this amazing planet.

I am very troubled by much of what is happening in our nation right now. There is a lot of work to be done, and I will continue to actively work to stay aware of what is happening and do what I can, within my ability to influence the world in a positive way. However, I am also not going to let things which are out of my control dictate how I live my life. I can’t let all the terrifying things in the world leave me incapacitated or unable to believe that I have a future, or even worse, that my one child will not have a future. Isaiah found it impossible to believe that there could be a future with him in it, partly due to his father dying at age 12, but also because of the same bleak white supremacist rural fearful reality that I grew up in. Isaiah also found warmth in all of the conspiracy theories, guns, and dark views of government, corporations, and the world around us. It still bothers me that I could’t help Isaiah navigate his way out of all of this like I did, but I do find comfort knowing I spend over a decade simultaneously finding my way out of it, while also investing everything I had for him to find his way.

Isaiah has helped provide me with a powerful lens to look at myself. I first discovered this back in 2016 during our Drone Recovery period, but then I really began to understand the full scope of this during our hike this last month up Kerby Peak. I still question whether I was seeing Isaiah’s death or my own death all those years ago. I tend to have a knack for seeing the future, but almost never understand or have clarity regarding what I am seeing. Regardless, I am using Isiah’s life, along with Emanuel’s, and the pantheon of other soul’s I have lost over the last 50 years to reprogram my reality for the next 50 years. I had zero anxiety about turning 50. None. I am very proud of myself. I am very healthy and happy. I am stable. I am loved. Which in my opinion makes for an amazing foundation to build the next 50 years on. I am really looking forward to what is next, mostly because I understand the extend of my powers of manifestation, and I now fully get the frame of mind required to manifest a world of beauty as opposed to death and destruction.

Processing the Last Couple of Weeks

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I am sitting on the couch at home in Oakland after an emotional week traveling to and from Southern Oregon. Leading up to Isaiah’s birthday and two years after he passed away from an overdose, his mother and I wanted to do something meaningful to celebrate his life. After two years of isolation due to Covid-19, we felt like it was time to get out, and I thought it would be a good idea to retrace some of the hikes I did back in 2016 as part of our Drone Recovery summer. So, Audrey, Poppy, and I loaded up the car and drove up to Southern Oregon and eventually Northern California, which would end up being a very emotional and unexpected set of journeys in the woods, on the beach, and in our hearts.

I have stepped back and thought about this journey in five separate parts, writing about each portion of the journey as it’s own post, but then stepping even further back to consider our journey as a whole, and think a little bit about what it means for the future. While there was plenty of other parts of our journey, I felt like these five areas impacted me the post as we made our way through this challenging time in our life.

Having the Strength to Power on Through - My work is a big part of my identity and focus right now, and has provided me with the few to get through everything we’ve been going through. I am very thankful for my career and the job I have right now, but it doesn’t come without it’s challenges as I try to navigate Isaiah, his mom’s grief, my health, and everything else that is Kin Lane. I entered the last couple of weeks with a lot of anxiety and I am leaving it feeling very confident and on solid ground when it comes to work and what I do as a person.
Making it to the Top - Audrey, Poppy, and I hiked to the top of Kerby Peak this last week, making for a very emotional and physically challenging ascent up the 5500+ feet mountain. The weather didn’t comply and it was raining as we hiked to the peak and made for a very dark and windy summit, but it all just added to the catharsis of the moment. I was very thankful for being able to share this mountain with Audrey, and with Isaiah. It is a magical place, and it makes it even more magical to be able to connect Audrey with her son who has passed.
What are we doing to Our Kids - We couldn’t make it up to the second hike I had planned for Audrey and I due to a forest fire that occurred the summer that Isaiah passed. Apparently the fire lookout station where Isaiah and I spent the day had burned, as well as miles of forest around it. With heavy hearts we made our way back down the mountain to another hike Isaiah and I had done to Babyfoot lake, which had also burned in 2002, but was slowly coming back to life. Providing a strange balance of destruction and healing that was very appropriate for our journey this week.
Stop Taking the Long Way Around - After we left Southern Oregon we made our way to Crescent City in Northern California. A city that I purposefully take the long way around, but found myself re-evaluating years of stories and experiences I had of this beautiful city. We didn’t recreate any hikes I did with Isaiah for this portion of the journey, but spent the time unraveling my own baggage around the small town, while also setting in motion a bright future of walking California’s coastline.
Thankful for My Girls - The highlight of this trip is really all the gratitude I have for my wife and my dog, and how they fill my days with joy and cookies, keeping me working on my own shit along the way. To same I am a fucking mess is understatement, and these two not only put up with me, they keep me in a perpetual state of wanting to unpack all of my baggage so I am a more well adjusted human being. I had so much fun with these two this week, and look forward to what is next.

I went into the last week an emotional mess and came out of in on much more solid ground. My mind is still processing everything that has happened, but overall the time on the road and trail has resulted in some very positive forward motion. There was so much that was unexpected this week, from the weather on Kerby Peak, to Bolan Lake being devastated by fire, but all of the unknown unknowns seemed to be exactly what was needed. I couldn’t argue with anything that unfolded this week, and even the tweaker zombies we saw roaming the streets of Ukiah seemed to be an acceptable part of the condition that is United States 2022.

I feel like I lost some serious baggage this week, but I also feel very somber about the state of this world, country, and Kin Lane. I am on solid footing because I have done a lot of emotional work over the last couple of weeks, on the tail end of a lot of mental and conversational work as part of my job. I feel healthy, sane, and most importantly able to deal with my upcoming calendar, and the state of things in the good ol US of A. Now I am ready for that book project I need to finish, all the various needs of my 25 team members, and to hear the results of the liver ultrasound I had before this journey started. I feel like Audrey and I are properly responding to the current state of things at work and in the world, but also when it comes to our grief around Isaiah.

Kerby Peak very much represents our struggles with Isaiah for me moving forward. It is beautiful, intense, hard, brutal, and totally worth it, which I think sums up Isaiah, Audrey, Poppy, and I very much. Experiencing a week of the “hard done by” life where I grew up this week as I was working to process what happened in Uvalde, Texas, providing what I need to keep fighting this good fight emotionally. The destructive and backwards reality that leads us perpetually to these mass shootings around the country is on full display when you drive through Southern Oregon, and working my way through it with such an emotionally raw heart this week has given me some new energy to use when making sense of all this madness that is so uniquely American.

OK, I am sure I’ll have lots more thoughts out of this weekend, but I feel content about this journey within this moment. I am excited about the seeds that were planted in this journey. Most notably that we will be returning to Kerby Peak to celebrate the kid every year, but also our discovery of the California Coastal Commission and the trail system they are building from Oregon to Mexico (they have an API ;-). I feel like these two seeds are going reap major rewards when it comes to the health and well being of our future selves. I feel like this trip was a major test of whether or not Audrey and I are going to be OK after the kids passing, and not only are we going to be alright, but the future holds some very compelling opportunities for growth, all coming from such a tragic set of circumstances that shaped Isaiah’s time on this earth.

Thankful for My Girls

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000

One of the highlight of this last week, as well as my life in general is my girls, Audrey and Poppy (and Kaia who is in Korea at the moment). As I step back and evaluate the week I am full of gratitude for Audrey and Poppy. They are my rocks. My inspiration. My heart. None of this would be happening without Audrey as my sidekick and I am not sure we would be functioning human beings after Isaiah’s passing without the Poppy dog. I cannot end this week of processing without acknowledging the role these two play in me being a happy and functioning part of society—Audrey and Poppy mean the world to me.

Watching Audrey throughout our relationship has been a massive learning experience, but most watching her the last two years since Isaiah’s passing has been a humbling journey. Watching a mother lose her son, and not just make her way through the grief, but come out healthier, stronger, and more optimistic about life has helped me figure out my own way through this fucked up world. I was balling at the top of Kerby Peak as I took this picture, overcome with emotion as I brought Audrey to the same summit I brought Isaiah back in 2016.

Audrey making it to the top of Kerby Peak was symbolic for me of everything she has worked through as a mother over the last couple of years. I look forward to coming back to Kerby Peak every year with her, seeing how strong she (and me) has become. Like Kerby Peak, the trail for us since Isaiah passing has been full of beauty, switchbacks, rocks, and many other challenges and emotional moments. I am very thankful for being on this journey with such a strong woman, but one that is willing to explore the world with me and make the most of our time left on this earth. I am so very thankful for Audrey.

Alongside Audrey, there is the Poppy dog! This 80 pounds of joy we rescued while in depths of sadness the month after Isaiah passed, only to rescue the two of us. Poppy is the flower that has grown from Isaiah’s overdose, and filters all the sadness and anger we have from all of this into an ongoing stream of joy and adventure.

I can’t articulate strongly enough about how much this dog means to me. She has brought so much joy to our life since Isaiah passed, and she is perpetually teaching us how to live in the moment and find joy in even the littles of things. I hate getting up in the morning, and this dog has me getting up at 5 or 6 AM every morning, even on the weekends. This derpy bundle of love is always excited for a walk, adventure, or just a simple game as we lay on a hotel bed. Like Audrey and Kaia, Poppy dog has a grip on my heart that terrifies me, but also makes all of this worth it, and sitting in meadows and forests with Poppy this week was something I’ll forever remember.

I mean, look at that derpy girl looking so majestic in that meadow. Her enthusiasm on this trip kept me going. After you get your ass kicked day after day from a hike it can be easy to just say in the hotel room, but when you have someone who jumps up expecting a new adventure with every trip out the door, it just keeps things moving forward. Poppy was perpetually leading us in every adventure this week, eagerly making sure she was the first to find whatever ws right around the corner.

Audrey and Poppy are the cornerstone of each day for me, but they made the week so moving and delightful. They put up with me being slow on the trail, grumpy in the morning, and even tolerated that couple of days I had to put in some work on an important project while we work. Accepting that I had to meet other obligations, but then making sure I wasn’t dwelling on work during this important week.

I am not sure that I’d be so brave when it comes to unpacking everything that is wrong with me if it wasn’t for these two (three with Kaia). Audrey and Poppy are why I get up in the morning, and why I got to bed early. The week was extremely thick and emotional, but sitting here at home writing these posts I can’t help but be filled with gratitude for Audrey and Poppy. It scares the shit out of me that I am so dependent on these beings, but in the same motion, they make it all worthwhile. They kept everything moving forward this week, providing the purpose being all the emotional work that was happening for Audrey and I.

I couldn’t ask for two better partners in crime. I love these two with all my heart. They were both so much fun on the road and on the trail, and compliment my approach to living life to its fullest. It is hard for me to go back home and get back to work after a week on the road with these two. My response is to just keep going, but I know better, and I am looking forward to regular hikes and adventures with these two characters. I am most thankful I am able to clear away the brush and baggage around my heart to let these two in, because as much as it scares the shit out of me, it is also exactly what I need to keep powering my time on this planet.

Stop Taking The Long Way Around

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000

We spent the second half of our journey this week in Crescent City, CA, a little town on the coast of the Oregon and California border. It is a town I have a lot of history with, and a town I have literally gone out of my way to bypass for the last 30 years. I was skeptical of spending time in Crescent City, but I wanted to try and revisit some of the trails Isaiah and I hike in the redwoods back in 2016. Like with Isaiah, I suspended by dislike of the town while I was there with Audrey, and try to recreate a meaningful experience during our time processing the death of the kid. But, like many other points along the way, II found that this wasn’t just about the kid, and our time Crescent City became more about me than just the kid and Audrey.

We weren’t able to recreate the hikes that Isaiah and I did in the redwoods because dogs weren’t allowed on the paths. We did manage to find one path off to the side of Jedidiah Smith State Park where we could make a loop through some very beautiful redwood groves, which Poppy loved. Once we completed this hike we made our way through downtown Crescent City to our hotel, setting camp for the next couple of days. When we woke up the next morning we walked through town to a coffee place that supposedly had decent breakfast burritos, and I found myself really grumpy having to walk alongside the highway through town, but as we made our way back we realized there was a formal walking path through the parks and harbor that left me in a much better mood.

The next morning we drove north of the city to a lake area where we walked through beautiful forests and meadows, completing a 4.5 loop through the mouth of the Smith River. This was an entirely new hike for both Audrey and I, and slowly I realized that this portion of the journey would be more about me than it was about Isaiah. I had a lot of baggage regarding this area, and as I began unraveling the why and what behind my dislike for the area, it became clear that it was baggage I could do away with. The hike around the lake, and the new-found walking path through downtown energized me, and the state of processing I found myself in for the week due to Isaiah, once again left me wide open for unpacking and dealing with more of my own shit.

The next day we discovered the Azteca Grill inside the nearby Chevron, who served up very high quality and genuine breakfast burritos, and made use of the walking path to visit the lighthouse, but also tapped into the beach south of the city next to our hotel. Walking the beach to the end and back was about 7 miles providing a very lovely but also physically intense stroll along the beautiful California coast line. The time on the beach gave me a good deal of time to wrestle with why I disliked Crescent City, and the open emotional state I found myself I’m due to our time celebrating the kid left me in a perfect position to peel back the layers of my baggage. Crescent City definitely has its issues with poverty, drugs, racism, and other common rural challenges, but I realize most of my view of it was me, and not the city.

For me, Crescent City wasn’t just about letting going of any single piece of baggage, but making sure that I am open to letting going of large closets full of baggage and realizing how much of my anger, anxiety, and stress from the past is more about me than it is about any single place, event or point in time. I was emotionally open because of the anniversary of Isaiah’s death and birth, being physically challenged on Kerby Peak, and from the destruction at Bolan Lake and healing occurring at Babyfoot lake. It all left me very ripe for healing and change in Crescent City, which was very unexpected for me. But, much of the trip was proving to be unexpected.

I do not think there is any value in my going through everything I’ve experienced in Crescent City that led to my negative views. But there is value in me changing how I view the city, and letting it all go. Additionally, the path we walked on is part of a state-wide walking path being funded and constructed, which is opening up a whole new world of possibilities for me, which is all began in Crescent City. It is amazing to me what is possible when it comes to change once you begin to look more deeply at yourself and the world around you, and I am very proud of myself for being able to unpack things and find ways to lay my demons to rest, celebrate those who are no longer her, while still planting the seeds for a much brighter and happier future for myself.

What We Are We Doing to Our Kids

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Another hike I did with Isaiah back in 2016 as part of our Drone Recovery summer was up to Bolan Lake Lookout. Like Kerby Peak, I found that Isaiah was more alert and aware up at Bolan Lake, and he even smiled for me as we were goofing around at the lookout. After Kerby Peak, Bolan Lake Lookout was the next place I wanted to share with Audrey, so that we could make the place behind this picture a little more real for her.

Bolan Lake was a place I spent a lot of time as a child, and it was a place I was happy to share with Isiah, and now with Audrey. Bolan Lake is a beautiful wildness lake with a 3 mile trail up to the summit where there is a beautiful fire lookout with an amazing view of the Illinois Valley. Well, it used to have all of that, until it burned in the 2020 Slater fire. According to the Forest Service the lookout was completely burned in the fire, and I couldn’t verify what condition the area around the lake was because we couldn’t get through, but the damage we did see broke my heart.

As we drove up from the valley floor, the normally forested road I knew of my youth was scorched and destroyed for mile after mile. When I turned off the two lane road onto the dirt road we immediately encountered a couple of trucks blocking the road, preventing anyone from getting through. They were logging the burn, and it was dangerous to go any further, so we never made it to the lake. As I drove down the mountain I thought it would be appropriate to head across the valley to another hike Isaiah and I did up at Babyfoot Lake.

Babyfoot Lake burned back in 2002 as part of the Biscuit Fire, and while the mountain is scarred, it is coming back to life. There is a huge amount of renewal occurring, but like Bolan Lake it is a far cry from what it used to be. It was too overwhelming for me to see the condition Bolan Lake was in, and the new firs, pines, and flowers covering the landscape at Babyfoot lake was exactly the healing I was needed. My heart just can’t fully process what happened up at Bolan Lake, and I think that will have to wait until next year, and evolve over my lifetime, but never actually getting back to what I knew as a child.

Like the weather on Kerby Peak, I can’t help but feel like the Slater fire of 2020 reflects my overall journey with Isaiah and Audrey, and the flowers we saw along the hike to Babyfoot lake provided some of the color we needed for this moment in time. There were a number of Irises, and other flowers up there, but the Indian paintbrush I feel like provides the color palette we need for the healing required in this moment.

Back in the day I had an idea for a t-shirt that would have the face of a punk rock kid where half their head was forest for hair and the other side was shaved into a clear cut with a logging rig cable to a nose piercing, with words that said — “what are we doing to our children”. This intersection of Isaiah, opiate epidemic, and environmental disaster going on feels like this idea actually coming to life for me. I feel like every one of those blackened scarred trees up there on the mountain reflect a single human being we’ve lost in the opined epidemic. Leaving me thinking, “what are we doing to our children”.

I feel like everything I knew when I was younger is burning. I feel like the environmental disaster unfolding around us is just a reflection of ourselves. I am looking forward to going back to Bolan Lake next year when we return to hike Kerby Peak. I really want to see what is left. Like Babyfoot, I know the lake will be there, but I am really curious about how much of the forest burned around it. I am thinking I will continue to document each trip, so that I can record the growth over my life, so that I can have a better understanding of how long this type of healing takes, and if things will ever get back to the way they were or if it all will be forever changed like I feel right now.

Making It to the Top

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I put the most brutal and meaningful hike to celebrate Isaiah first up in the week. Isaiah and I did Kerby Peak back in 2016 and it nearly broke us. Kerby Peak was one of the few spots where Isaiah became lucid and would talk to me, which was a common pattern I’d see in only the most remote and hardcore of natural locations. The further away we got from cities, the more Isaiah opened up, pulled down his hoodie and engaged in conversation. I wanted Audrey to experience the beauty and hardness of this hike, and see what Isaiah saw as we ascended Kerby Peak, hiking a total of seven miles, but the hike up went from about 2500K elegant to 5500K—making a very punishing hike to the summit.

The Kerby Peak Trail is located in Southern Oregon outside a small town called Selma. The trail starts out pretty simple from the parking area, but then pretty quickly begins to climb out of the Fir and Madrone forest into the older growth Douglas Fir stand. This type of forest is my favorite type of forest, possessing some of the most brilliant colors of green I have ever on this earth. We slowly zigged and zagged the switchbacks through some of the grandest moss covered trees I have seen in my life.

I kept making dumb jokes about each switchback being the last switchback, as we made our way through the lush forest. It had been raining for a couple of days and the forest was very damp and cold, but the climbing elevation kept me warm as I chugged my way up the trail. Eventually we begin to break out of the forest into a more rockier elevation, which at first glance looks like it could be the summit, but pretty quickly you realize this is far from the top.

We kept working our way through the slowly thinning landscape. I needed to make frequent stops to catch my breath and cool myself down, and Audrey and Poppy were very patient with my slow pace. After a quick stop for lunch right before the summit, we finally rounded the rocky summit and made our way to the top of Kerby Peak. The weather didn’t fully cooperate, but it didn’t diminish the emotion of the locating the rock where Isiah was standing back in 2016

I was able to get a video, but as you can see, we weren’t able to stay up there very long. I have to say the experience isn’t what I expected, but it felt like exactly what we needed to keep processing what has happened over the last couple of years. There was a lot of emotion and wind up top of Kerby Peak, providing a much needed cathartic relief from everything we’ve been through.

Poppy led the way down off the stormy and dark summit, taking us down through the rocks, along the trees that are getting thicker and taller with each step we take. We made quicker time getting down, but you still had to be mindful of where you stepped as you wound through the gravel and rocky trails along the ledges.

While the weather didn’t cooperate, I feel like the hike was exactly what we needed. It is so beautiful and hard all in the same moment. I have felt pretty helpless for the last couple of years when it comes to doing things for Audrey when it comes to her grief over Isaiah, and I feel like sharing Kerby Peak with her was one of the only things I could do that would have the required impact—both emotionally and physically.

Kerby Peak was the perfect place to begin our journey this week. The mountain worked us hard right when we needed it the most. We agreed that we would come back each year to do the Kerby Peak hike and celebrate Isaiah. Maybe next year Audrey can see the amazing view that Isaiah saw from the top back in 2016. Regardless, I trust the intensity of the hike, the beauty and hardness of the mountain, will provide us with whatever it is we need. I feel like Kerby Peak is another part of the Isaiah story that Audrey and I can share together. I did a lot of that summer alone with Isaiah, so I am looking forward to sharing as much of it as possible with her, so that we can use it to remember him help her keep him close over the years.

Having the Strength to Power on Through

Fri, 27 May 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working hard lately. It is an understatement to say that I have a lot on my plate. My team has grown to 25, and I have a number of big projects front and center right now. While I have many different projects to think about big and small, there is one particular project that happens every year around this time that has intense deadlines and deliverables that are out of my control, and I am the only person with enough of a handle on the big picture to tackle. I need to be on my game, and it isn’t a time for anything to go wrong, but on the Friday before the Memorial holiday weekend it was clear that everything would go wrong, and I would just have to fight my forward and resist letting everything fall apart.

We had entered the portion of the year between when Isaiah died in May of 2020 and is birthday in June, so shit was heavy and emotionally thin. I had spent the morning of the Friday before Memorial Day not eating so that I could have my liver scanned, had woke up generally grumpy about a number of work related, and was still struggling to process what had happened in Uvalde Texas. I was tackling my regular workday, while also preparing for working 12+ hour days over the 3-day holiday weekend so I could fulfill this annual project before it’s deadline which happened to magically shift right into time I scheduled off to process Isaiah passing, and I felt a strong snap. That mental break that sounds like the sizzle of a desert highway in the midday sun. I’ve seen it many times before, but I couldn’t let this episode own me. I had to find a way to get through the next week so that I could not just finish this project, but be there for my wife during her time of need.

I was laying on the couch, crippled with anxiety and sinking into the pits of a depression. All too familiar territory, and I knew that I couldn’t let things slide any further, and I had to find a way to not just operate Kin in safe mode, but I needed to find some fuel to get him through. I’ve long perfective my approach to using my anxiety for fuel to get me through work times, which ultimately ends pulling me out of the ditches of depression. However, I found that I am also am getting much better at separating out the layers of what the fuck is wrong with me, identify any usable fuel, while also setting aside the things I can’t do anything about, and light the fire under my ass regarding the things I can do something about—resulting in the following layers:

Kin is a Loser - This is a well known fact that I honestly get fucking sick of hearing, so anything in this category goes directly into the fuel category.
Done More for Isaiah - I’ve worked through this one sufficiently and come to the conclusion that I did everything I could to help the kid in his journey.
Is My Liver Failing Me - If it is it is all your fault for drinking and doing drugs, no reason to dwell here to much until we know more—-it is what it is.
I Deserve a Holiday - Holidays are arbitrary social constructs, and I am taking the entire next week off and will have plenty of other time in the future.
Those Kids in Uvalde - My heart just hurts for those kids and families, but there isn’t anything I can do to help them here in Oakland, CA today.
Conservatives are Destroying the Country - This one triggers me because of my upbringing, let’s work on this later, and just use as a fuel for right now.
This Project is Too Much - No it isn’t. You are one of the few people who can tackled projects of this scale, so shut the fuck up and get to work.

Peeling back the mental onion that has me paralyzed on the couch helps me see everything that is contributing to my state. There are a number of things going on here that I cannot control or do anything about, so let’s be honest and set those aside. However, there is actually a shit load of fuel here for me to burn to get me through this project, so let’s take some of this anger and hurt and use it to power through the shit ton of work I have to accomplish over the next week. With this approach, it all becomes much more doable. My entire body still aches and my head is spinning with a range of messed up thoughts, but I am functional. OK, get the fuck off the couch, and get to work! Anything but success here is unacceptable, and I refuse to give in to the world today.

I did just that. I got up off the couch and went back to work. I worked through the weekend and on into the week. I got everything 90% of the way, a week ahead of the deadline, and one day before I was scheduled to take time off work to celebrate Isaiah s time on this planet. I didn’t just do it, I am pretty confident I did a really good job at delivering on the project I needed to get done. I went into my time off work much more confident in my abilities, proud of my follow through, and my ability to be present for my wife as we spent a week celebrating the kid. This outcome is the result of years of experience being a professional “Kin Handler”. Learning to identify early on when Kin has drove things into the ditch, then figure out how to turn that anger, anxiety, and depression into fuel for work. Which to some my seem like an unhealthy way of dealing with mental health, but for me, my career is my savior, and the number one reason I am sane and able to be a functioning human being. I am very thankful my career as the API Evangelist, and have a lot of gratitude for my role as Chief Evangelist at Postman—it is the cornerstone of the amazing life I am leading today, and will be for the next 47.38 years. ;-)

Stories From Our Youth That We Still Believe

Sun, 15 May 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I am fascinated in recent years by the stories I absorbed in my youthful and more formative years. I feel like my 20s were spent figuring out who I was, and my 30s were spent figuring out the world, and I guess here in my 40s I thought it would all be a cake walk, but now I feel like my 40s were about unwinding all the shit I was programmed with before I turned 20. For me, it isn’t just the realization that a significant number of the stories I was exposed with growing up were bullshit, it was also that so much of it is woven in with white male supremacy, and more concerning, what other stories are out there that influence how I see myself and the world.

Learning about the stories I was programmed with while still so young and moldable is fascinating, but it is the quest to find other more deep seated beliefs that I was programmed with in my early is what keeps me up at night. It is easy to explore the surface of this with laughable ones like waiting 30 minutes before I go swimming after eating, or being worried I’d go blind for masturbating, but it is more concerning to think about what else shapes how I see the world that I am completely unaware of. I’d say this is the most disturbing realization I’ve had in my 40s, that so much of my reality is shaped by stories I heard growing up in a predominantly white reality, programmed by movies, television, and the stories I heard from my elders around the dinner table.

The more I learn, the more concerned I get about these realities. There are two existing “effect” theories I learned about in recent years that provide me with a kind of Venn diagram to think about the effect of storytelling on me in my youth, giving me possible strategies for thinking my way through this:

Dunning-Kruger Effect - Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.
Murray Gelman Amnesia Effect - The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is when experts forget how badly their own subject is treated in media and believe that subjects they don’t know much about are treated more competently by the same media.

What would we call the effect of not just realizing stories that shaped you from your youth aren’t false, but that there are so many of these out there than you haven’t discovered yet, and worse, that they might be racist in their roots, or have some other problematic aspects. This is the primary effect I am looking to understand. Not just how I believed in “old wives tales”, but how the stories I believe are so woven into white male supremacy—including that statement. I am fascinated what a slippery slope this type of programming can be. I can go from silly to disturbing pretty quickly, and opening up some pretty scary closet doors from the 1970s and 1980s.

In the world of APIs we have the notion of domain-driven design, where you define a specific set of bounded contexts and you define the vocabulary and other constructs that exist within this domain, and the ones that do not—-you do this to shape and control behavior of your development teams. However, as I shift into the weekends, I can’t help but think about how our worlds are shaped through the stories we are exposed to in our youth. I can’t even imagine what this looks like in an Internet age. I am disturbed enough at what it looks like growing up in the pre-Internet age. Regardless, it is an effect that is keeping me thinking, learning, and knocking on various doors in my head, chasing down the root of why I think and believe certain things, and I am sure will spawn more writing in the near future.

Why I Live in the City - Reason #1 is Ethnically Diverse Food

Sun, 01 May 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I grew up on a steady diet of information programming me to believe that cities are bad, and rural areas are good. Something I regularly see reinforced with memes here on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. To continue de-programming myself, and push back on this narrative, I am developing a list of reasons why I will live out the rest of my life in the city, and while I will always respectfully visit rural areas and the wilderness, the majority of my life will be spent roaming around the urban areas looking for good food. Reason #1 why I live in urban areas, is food diversity, the reality that you will never find this kind of diversity in Chinese food outside of urban areas.

I have spent more than half of my life completely unaware that this level of diversity in Chinese food existed, and now that I am aware, I want to experience (eat) it all. I feel lied to as part of being raise in white dominated rural communities, where most Chinese restaurants were either owned by white people, run by another Asian minority looking to speak to white people’s tastes, or the rare and occasional Chinese owned restaurant that served a handful of dishes from Cantonese region. I angers me that people in white communities I grew up in would celebrate the arrival of PF Changs, but contribute to such a hostile environment for actual Chinese families to put down roots and open up businesses in their communities.

As white people, why do we select to be so ignorant of other cultures? Once I realized how ignorant I was I became determined to change course for the remainder of my life, where many of the people I grew up with, prefer just keep eating Cashew Chicken. I get it. It takes work to unpack all of this and often times means that you will be uncomfortable, I likely will be eating something you may not like the taste of. However, once you find that one dumpling or other dish that just blows your mind, well…I just can’t step back from doing that work. I am obsessed now. White people are dumb. I agree, that there are ways in which white people have food culture, but I am sorry it just isn’t this diverse, and the pure fact that our culture is so hostile to other cultures, speaks volumes about just how dumb (and mean) we are.

This is just the first post in my exploring the reasons why I will live out the rest of my life in diverse urban areas. I am shocked and dismayed by the amount of programming I endured against cities while growing up, and I am not just going to reprogram myself, I am going to put out all kinds of information out there pushing back on narratives that rural areas are superior to urban ones. I know I will piss off a lot of (white) people in doing this, but I am really tired of seeing the mossy cabin in the wood memes about how grand life would be out in that cabin — sorry, NO!!! I have lived in that cabin, and I am never going back. I’ve lived off the grid and grubbed on shitty processed food from a can, eaten venison that I’ve killed, and even cooked with the vegetables from my own garden. I much prefer to eat venison from Wahpepepah’s Kitchen un Oakland, and explore the <a href==”https://www.hungryonion.org/t/regional-chinese-roundup-3-0-sf-bay-area/4640”>diverse regional Chinese food that exists here in the Bay</a>.

Always Defending the Worst of the Worst

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 12:00:00 +0000

It is a phrase I hear a lot from my white friends in response to awful white supremacist speech on and offline-—that you have to protect the worst of the free speech in order to protect free speech for everyone. Up until about 2012 it was a go to line for myself. It is easy to learn and repeat, and doesn’t require much scrutiny or thought. From within your narrow white bubble it seems logical, and you get to feel like you are doing something good for everyone—-at least you’ve convinced yourself of that. In reality, it demonstrates that you haven’t spent any time understanding the most normal everyday free speech issues for minorities and underrepresented people, and actually it is well designed to actually do that opposite of what you think, and is all about supporting the worst of the worst and about diminishing the rights of others.

Since around 2012 I have found myself living in more diverse neighborhoods than ever before, exposing myself to issues that face black, brown, indigenous, and immigrant folk in neighborhoods in Washington D.C., New York, Oakland and others. Over the time I have seen many of my white friends on Facebook defending the worst behavior online with this statement hundreds of times, stepping up to defend the worst of the worst we’ve seen emerge during the Trump administration and beyond. Everyone one of them truly believe what they are saying right and well meaning, and that they are somehow carving out space for marginalized folks with this behavior, when they spend zero time ever educating themselves around how the average everyday free speech of marginalized individuals are being trampled upon, or ever defending even the most well known free speech issues of our day. All of this has left me abolishing this phrase from my vocabulary, and looking at the people I know who do in a different light.

I’ve seen how this phrase is just one of many phrases we’ve been taught over the years to defend white supremacy and maintain our place in the order of things. All we are doing with this phrase is defending the worst of the worst. If you are truly interested in not just free speech, but also diverse free speech, you will spend more time reading up on the free speech challenges of people who don’t look like you. There are numerous average everyday free speech issues where black, brown, indigenous, LGBTQ and people with disabilities face each day–yet you choose to spend your activist cycles on defending people like Trump, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk. Defending these people’s ability to say awful things does not equal magically free space for marginalized folks to speak their minds. It actually does the opposite. You defending space for white supremacists, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ is only about making the world a toxic place, and actually does very little for free speech. This all makes sense in your white bubble, but once you begin seeing the world through a different lens you will begin to see things a little differently, and sadly begin seeing the real reason we use this statement.

Whenever I used to get push back from people around me about saying this I’d get all puffy and respond how important it is. This behavior is something I’ve long since identified as a red flag, not just with responding to free speech issues, but anything that challenges my programming as a white male. Anytime I feel like responding in this way I see it as a signal that A) I should keep my mouth shut, and B) I need more education around whatever subject is being discussed. I wish I could help more of my friends in their own journey along these lines, which is why I guess I write these posts. First and foremost this post is for me to process my own programming and put this one to rest, allowing me to move on to other areas I am programmed by the world around me. Second, I guess I hope that someone else might read and see the same behavior in themselves, and begin thinking a little more deeply about who we are and how we fit into the world. In this moment, I am just trying to better understand the issues that people face in the world around me, and since so many of them do not look like me, and come from very different backgrounds, I have a lot of learning and listening to do before I actually understand the challenges they face with free speech.

Not Manifesting Doom and Gloom

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 12:00:00 +0000

I possess amazing powers of manifestation. I have a strong ability to see something in the future and make it happen. It has been something I became aware of at an early age, but have struggled my entire life with wielding in meaningful or purposeful ways. It can be tough to “see” something clearly enough in my minds eye and plot a course towards this thing or event, but more critically, it can be difficult to ensure that that this thing or event is something that benefits me and the world around me. Powers of manifestation doesn’t mean that what I can make happen will be good, and one of my greatest hurdles to get over in life is my programming that everything in the world will ultimately turn into shit, and all the future holds is pain, suffering, doom, and gloom.

I was raised on a steady doom and gloom about the future. Societal collapse was perpetually around the corner like “free beer tomorrow”. I have made huge strides in the last five years to identify and isolate my doom and gloom programming and work to reprogram it towards a much healthier way of moving through the world. First, I had to stop hanging out with the junkies and conspiracy theorists who had long ago given up, and were just sidecars in my inevitable ride towards the end of the world. There is no way that you can move towards anything meaningful and positive with these people whispering in your ear and dominating your Facebook timeline. This isn’t easy due to the fact that these are people you love and care for, but for your own well being you have to cut them loose to give yourself enough room to breathe and begin to see that a new and brighter world is possible.

Even once you get over the guilt and loneliness of cutting these people from your life, the programming is still there and you have to perpetually remind yourself that bad things do not have to happen to you. This post is the result of me reminding myself this week that my current job does not have to end in disaster, getting fired, drama, or some other negative situation. I am a little over two years into this job, the longest job I have had in over a decade, and I found myself speaking of some unknown event not far off in the future that will result in me having to leave and find something else to do. Why? Everything is going very well. I am doing exactly the scope of work I desire with exactly the people I want to be doing it with. There is nothing to limit the possibilities for what is to come except for the programming I have received in the first half of my life. I have the power to manifest a long and happy career and relationship with my employer, and realize healthy and happy outcomes personally, professionally, and financially.

My heightened sense of self-awareness allows me to pause and scrutinize my view of things and call bullshit on my desire to always blow things up. It allows me to reprogram for success, and not for failure. There is nobody whispering in my ear to tell me I am a loser, a failure, and that the world is out to get me. My belief that my current job will become untenable at some point, and that I am destined for financial failure is not real, and is just the programming of my youth. I make more money in my job than I could ever have imagined. I work on amazingly large scope problems with really smart people across all of the leading companies. Imposter syndrome, self-doubt, depression, and the other gravity that haunts me from my past are within my control to change. I can see a future where I continue to be successful, and are able to further stabilize myself financially and emotionally. Historically I have been able to push away the storm for brief moment so that I could see a bright future, but then the stormy weather would always consume me in the moment. For the first time in my life I can see brightness, with short periods of stormy weather blowing in like they did this week.

My heart will always be heavy with those I have had to leave behind. They like to say I am selling out and chasing financial success, or some elite status that allows me to look down on them. When in reality I would have rather done all of this with them, but they just didn’t have what it takes to manifest a future that didn’t involve doom and gloom. I am not doing this to be wealthy. I am doing this to be healthy, happy, and sane. I enjoy being able to look towards the future and smile. I enjoy being able to manifest joyous and satisfying outcomes that don’t involve so much pain and suffering. I know that these old voices all think that the inevitable distrust in the world and belief everything will collapse is an absolute, when in reality it is just a truth they have constructed. Like me, it is highly likely that this was constructed for them, handed down by those around them early on in life–but once you are an adult, it becomes your responsibility to change this. It is important that we do the hard work to unpack this before we hand it down to our children. This is the work I am doing, and I am very pleased with my progress.

My Work Ethic in a Covid Reality

Sat, 15 Jan 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Times are hard right now. It takes a lot of work just to keep balance during a pandemic. I am thankful that I have a good job in this reality. I have the stability of a regular paycheck, healthcare, and comfortable apartment. Even with this stability, I work hard to find balance in everything I do, acknowledging that I need to keep working, but I also need to take care of my mental and physical health, otherwise I might burnout. I am very familiar with burnout, and have a number of tactics for identifying and addressing what can lead to burnout. I spent the last decade self-employed with no safety net, so burnout hasn’t historically been an option for me, which is something that is still part of my work ethic two years into my employment at Postman.

When I say that I have no safety net, I mean it. I’ve had this conversation with a few people who were confused by me saying this, assuming I was being dramatic. When it is a reality. I don’t have a mother or father I can go to for help. There is no family farm or house to return to. I literally do not have any aunts, uncles, grand parents, or anyone that I can go to and ask for help. I have a couple of siblings I could borrow money from in a pinch, but they are in similar state as me, and doing the best with what they have. So, if the Kin Lane train breaks down and I can’t pay my rent, I have nowhere to go. I live in my car, hotel, or directly to the streets. The reason I left DC while working during the Obama administration was that we were staying in AirBnb because we couldn’t afford down payment on an apartment, living paycheck to paycheck, so when the government shutdown and I stopped getting paid, we literally would have been stuck on streets of DC if my friend at 3Scale hadn’t offered me work.

My work ethic is driven by this reality. I have savings now, and a little buffer between me and being homeless, but the fear of everything breaking down still dictates how hard I work. It pushes me to always be learning something new, working on weekends, and making sure I am a valuable asset at work. I would love to take time off, but honestly I worry that if I don’t keep going, that I won’t be able to keep everything together. Now, I also make sure I take care of myself to prevent burnout and mental exhaustion, but I am constantly monitoring this line, and constantly pushing myself as fast and hard as I can go. Perpetually inventing new ways of motivating myself and lighting the fire under my ass each day, keeping the Kin Lane train not just in forward motion, but heading in the direction I need. Plus, I am good at what I do, and I enjoy my work, which leaves me pretty proud of what I have build over the last ten years, and I am damn sure not going to let it all come apart.

Honestly, my work ethic is one of the biggest contributors to me keeping things together. Work makes me happy. It is intellectually stimulating, and keeps my overactive brain from dwelling in dark ways, and in forward motion. M work gives me purpose, keeps me financially independent and stable, and in another couple years, able to buy a house–all by myself, no assist necessary. Even when taking time off each weekend I spend a lot of time thinking about work, reading about making better sense of our work worlds, and contemplating how my team at work views the world. Everyone on my team is struggling with work/life balance right now, and most of them are sharing this with me as their manager in real-time, resulting in me getting pretty creative when it comes to carving out space for folks and helping them find their way. There is one who holds his cards very close to his chest leaving me unsure of how work and covid is impacting his reality, but for most the part we are all working together to figure things out. Personally, keeping the fire under my ass when it comes to projects and tasks at work makes the covid world much more bearable.

Now, with this said, there is still a lot about my work ethic I am trying to unwind and unpack, allowing me to fix some of the unhealthy aspects of how I approach work. I work a lot, which has taken a toll on my health. I tend to easily ignore my wife when it comes to work. I used work to get me through the overdosing of the kid at the beginning of the pandemic, cleaning up his apartment, and address our mourning afterwards. From where I stand now, I successfully balance this moment in time across work, the Poppy dog, and walks around Lake Merritt each morning at 5:00 AM. I have a lot more to unwind around my ignorance of capitalism, and me diving head first into work after my own struggle with drugs back in the early 1990s. But, I think I am doing pretty good at incrementally working my way through all of this—-recently reading Out of Office, Capital, and other illuminating works. Ultimately, I would give my work ethic in a covid reality a solid A. Now if you expect me to go back to traveling or into the office, I think this would go down to a B or a C, but with the balance I have found I feel like I have everything I need, and my work is benefiting me beyond just paying our bills.

Being Hard of Hearing During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

My kiddo asked me to write something about what it is like to be hard of hearing during the pandemic. They have a class project where they are doing a zine, and they wanted share my experiences during the pandemic for their contribution to the publication. I have 100% loss of hearing in one of my ears from an infection I had years ago, and the other ear has about 30% loss of capacity. Making it pretty difficult for me to understand what is happening in noisy situations, which has only gotten worse with social distancing and the wearing of masks. It isn’t something I have written about, so I was happy to respond with a blog post on the subject.

The reason behind the loss of hearing in my left ear occurred almost 30 years ago when I got an infection while on the road. The loss of hearing wasn’t all at once, and it was something that played out over the course of about a decade following the infection. Over those years I didn’t have very many jobs that provided me with health insurance, and with a generally hectic work schedule I have never prioritized doing anything for my hearing. I have gone into the doctor to have my hearing tested twice with the intention of doing something about it, but the answer is always that hearing aids wouldn’t do much, and I would have to go in for surgery to leverage my good hear and wire it up to my left ear to improve my situation. Something I am always hesitant to do, resulting in my leaving things the way they are. However, the pandemic has pushed me back in to get my hearing tested because it is getting harder for me to interact with people out there in the real world.

Over the last twenty years of losing my hearing I have learned to read lips. I wouldn’t say I am expert level lip reader, but I depend on looking at someone shape of their mouth to know what they are saying in most situations. This practice allows me to extract one or two more words from each sentence, adding to what I think I heard the person say. Allowing me to piece it all together to make sense of what is happening in any situation. Leaving lip reading a pretty critical element for me when it comes to engaging with people in stores and on the street. As soon as the pandemic hit and we started wearing masks, I began to find it near impossible to engage with people in person, and when you combine mask wearing with six feet of distance, it is pretty unlikely that I will hear what someone is saying to me. When you add in a youthful workforce who aren’t always the best at enunciation and speaking loudly, you end up with an old man asking, What? What? Sorry I didn’t hear that? An awful lot. Which I assume is also pretty frustrating for other people, as well as it is for me.

I am guessing there are a lot of people who say something to me on the street who end up thinking I am pretty rude for ignoring them, and the people working at the grocery stores or restaurants end up thinking something is wrong with me. Luckily for me, I do not go to restaurants very often anymore, and the number of times I order takeout is limited to once every couple of months–additionally I am very fortunate that my wife does all of the grocery shopping. Otherwise I would be pretty uncomfortable on a daily basis. In the early days of the pandemic I found it pretty exhausting to have to engage with people, and without being able to read lips I was having to work twice as hard to get anything accomplished. My inability to read lips is just part of it, I’d say that I also depend on a number of facial expressions to know what is happening, which leaves me confused and missing a lot of signals. I do not know any other people who are hard of hearing, but I can only imagine that masks are affecting other people in similar ways, adding to the reasons why we are all feeling isolated and alone in this world that is continuing to be shaped by the pandemic.

The Scary Cities and Friendly Small Towns

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 12:00:00 +0000

I grew up in a rural area of Oregon where the nearest town was 1,200 people, and the next biggest town was 19,000 people. I grew up believing that the country was better than the city and that the country was safe and cities were dangerous and scary. By the time I reached my twenties cities were still dangerous and scary, but they were a place where interesting things were happening and there were interesting people living there. It took me almost 30 years for me to tame my view of what cities are, and as I approach 50 I can’t help but laugh at my increasing belief that small towns are dangerous and scary, and something I work to avoid—-most likely living out the rest of my life in an urban landscape.

Cities were always where the apocalypse would play out, or so the folks around me growing up told me. It is where the nuclear missiles would first strike, where there would be riots and disorder, and you would starve first because there are no gardens and deer to kill. So when I began first going to big cities as a teenager, cities were intimidating. Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, all were very ominous, loud, and borderline terrifying places to be. If they were so dangerous though, why did I find myself attracted to them? There was good music in the cities. There were museums, art galleries, festivals, and other interesting things catching my attention. The libraries were bigger. The bookstores were bigger. There were more jobs. Better food. It goes on and on. Over time I became more comfortable in the city than I am in the country, and because I was able to make a better living, I ended up moving there and staying there.

Cities can be loud and intense. So can the thoughts inside my head. While there are more people and cars in cities, I’ve learned over the last decade that the loudest parts of cities exist within my head. 70% of what is scary about big cities was programmed into me through movies and the people I grew up with. It has taken me living in New York City, Seattle, and now Oakland to see just how much the noise and dirtiness of cities were defined by my programming as a young white man growing up in rural America. I don’t share the details of my views around how damaging white supremacy can be anymore because I have stalkers online who enjoy taking things out of context and making trouble for me. However, I will say that the mainstream programming of television, movies, and the small-town narrative I was exposed to is something I will be unwinding for the rest of my life as I live in a racially diverse urban reality as I possibly can.

I have recently seen more people pushing back on the age-old narrative that things are better in the country. You see these memes on Facebook all the time, where a cabin in the woods is all people want. That terrifies me. I have lived in a cabin in the woods. I prefer a comfortable apartment in a diverse urban neighborhood. I could see maybe a weekend, or a vacation in a cabin in the woods, but I have no desire to live that way for the rest of my life. I don’t want to have to drive 30 miles into town to get groceries. I want Mexican, Ethiopian, and Vietnamese food within walking distance. I want bands to come to play in my neighborhood and art exhibits that blow my mind and make me think in new and exciting ways. Why would I want to just sit in a cabin in the woods? Similarly, sub-urban neighborhoods seem another version of boring and quietly scary to me, where the isolation from other human beings can leave you stuck from ever-evolving or experiencing anything new. I just don’t understand the attraction any more.

There are definitely trade-offs living in the city. Things are noisy. But I am learning much of that noise is in my head. It is a reality that has been programmed and conditioned since the early 1970s. But, I am finding is something you can unwind, and separate the fact from fiction, and once you begin doing this you realize the urban landscape is a lot less intimidating. A lot richer and more diverse. There is a lot of culture in most of that noise. There is a lot of beauty in all that is happening. Also, that there is a lot of fear wound up in my brain regarding what I thought was happening in cities. I am not going to let myself flip the other way and believe that rural towns are dangerous places full of just backward people—-I know better. I am looking, to be honest about the challenges and dangers of both places, but honestly, I find myself captivated by the diversity of cities at this moment. It is just something that doesn’t exist in small-town America, and I have so much to learn from the black and brown people who live in East Bay right now, and living out in the woods or in a small town just seems very nutrient deficient to me. I need more right now.

The Night Herons Letting Me See Them

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Audrey and I walk around Lake Merritt every day. At 5:00 AM we rise and walk around the lake with Poppy, slowly waking ourselves up with all of the human and non-human life that exists around the lake that early in the day. One of the characters you encounter while walking around the lake that early are the night herons, who hunch around the edges of the lake fixated into what seems like an alternative dimension waiting for a fish to emerge. When we began our walks early in 2021 we would see one or two herons in our time around the lake, but this number has grown over the months to where we now see ten or twenty herons spread around the lake and sometimes all together in a sort of heron gathering or meeting.

When we first started walking I wouldn’t have noticed a heron from a seagull, something that was more about me than it was about the appearance of a night heron. Night herons are shorter and smaller than what you might think of when you hear about a heron. They look like a heron that you squished down into a football size bird. With the males possessing distinct coloring and a plumage off the back of their head, with the female looking much patchier and plain. With each morning that pased I began to pay attention to them more, staring at them perched on the edge of barrier in the water, or walking in the shallow edge of the lake looking for their catch. After adjusting my lens of the world to include night herons I began calling out to them, saying a variety of things in their direction as I was walking by, working to make small talk if you will.

When I would walk by a night heron posed in full fishing mode I’d say, “hello, what lures are you using today”? If I’d see one scampering on the bank scavenging for left over restaurant food I’d yell, “shouldn’t you be fishing”!! When I walked by one of their “gatherings” where I would see ten or twenty night herons gathering in “discussion”, and I’d see a lone night heron down the bank fishing, I’d let them know they were missing the meeting. Like the other human beings I see along the path I try to be a social neighbor, say hello, and make small talk so that they know I am a good person. As the months progressed in 2021 I began to see more herons—-I can’t tell if I see more night heron because of the change in season, because I am more aware, or word got around with the night herons that I am a nice guy. Regardless of the reason, I am enjoying seeing more of these beautiful birds doing their thing around the lake each morning.

As I walk by a night heron perched on the edge of the wall they almost always seem to turn their head and make eye contact. While gathered in groups I feel like they pause for a moment to notice me as I walk by. There is still nothing that seems to interrupt their intense focus while fishing, something they do with such precision they seem to vibrate without actually ever moving. I am guessing the behavior of the herons just evolve from season to season, resulting in more of them gathering around the lake, but I like to think they are letting me see more of them. The more I notice and see them, the more they notice and let me see them. Then once I began to connect verbally, they decide I was worthy of being blessed with their presence. For me, it really is one of the magical things about the world of birds that we don’t let into our lives because we are jut too busy to properly connect and notice the world around us.

Having Empathy

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 12:00:00 +0000

I have been captivated by Audrey talking about how we learn empathy as children by reading stories and having stories read to us. Something she learned about while reading Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by by Maryanne Wolf. It is a thought that has dominated my thinking since she shared it with me, and is coloring how I see people in my life in new ways, while also bringing me back to my own writing, so that I can strengthen my empathy and awareness of people in the world around me in new and meaningful ways. It is the new dividing line for me regarding whether or not someone is a caring and compassionate individual, or whether they are self-centered, scared, and angry at the world—-whether or not they read stories, or had stories read to them a small child.

As I ponder the empathy developing powers of storytelling I think about what it is like to develop as a young child with only your voice in your head, and the of the people around you, or maybe just what you see on the television. What does the mean for the development of your empathy? I would say that I fall into the category of not having stories read to me as a child, but I did develop a very healthy appetite for reading once I learned to ready on my own in the 1st grade, but sadly alo conditioned with a steady diet of television. I would say my empathy wasn’t very developed until I left home when I was 16 and began venturing out into the United States, something that got another boost at the age of 40 when I began traveling the world. Something that would have been significantly fast-tracked had I been read to a a young child, had access to more books as a child, and exposure to more diverse voices once I began venturing out into the world.

Stories are o powerful. I continue to be fascinated by how powerful stories can be when it come to shaping our lives. After 40 years on this planet I finally grasped the importance of reading stories from a diverse set voices, and as I approach 50 year I am now grasping the importance of reading and writing, as well as access to diverse stories in the early years of our lives on the planet. It is how we get beyond our own voice in our head. It I how we realize that there are other human beings out there in the world with their own thoughts, emotions, and dreams. Hearing the stories of people of color, people who belief in other faiths, and live in other parts of the world is how we widen the pool of empathy we have to pull from, and without it, we are left with only the thought and beliefs of those right around us, or those that we were programmed with via the television and movie we watched. It really sums up what I feel i wrong with many of the more conservative, or even more privileged liberal individuals I’ve known in my life.

There is something very different about the voice of a young indigenous woman or middle eastern boy in your head as you read a story than even the voice of a young indigenous woman or middle eastern boy on the television or Internet. Having their voice, their stories, and their hopes and dream in your head is so much more intimate and heart opening than something that is brokered by technology or a human narrator. You are reading these words and they are coming to life inside your own mind, which is a process that is able to provide a much more direct line to your heart. Thiss is the difference between writing and speaking for me. I think speaking in person, or even via video can having moving effects, but there is a much richer engagement when one individual read and internalize the word and thoughts of another individual. This is something that doesn’t always translate via television of online video, even if it is the same words and stories told by the same person–the engagement is just different. I will have to think more about how this plays out when it I an audio book read by an author and listened to by another individual-—it feels closer, but still very removed.

I think you can develop empathy by watching movies, I just don’t think it is as rich as reading stories, and definitely not as rich and diverse of a world as books and our imagination provide us as we are forming our view of the world as young children. With this in mind, imagine what we have sacrificed by raising generation of children on purely Disney storytelling through television, or just giving young kids iPads with games and Youtube. It breaks my heart to think about the adults we are cultivating in this world, and how exploitable these individuals will be. It will be easy to convince thesse people that other ethnicities, religion, and cultures are not human because they will have nothing to relate to when it come to grounding their view of thee other human being. It will be easy to demonize a group of people that you know nothing about. For me, this explains so much of the world I am seeing around me right now, where large group of people can’t imagine anything beyond the voices in their own head, and this is because they haven’t heard very many stories during some of the mot important years of their live, and do not have the empathy to truly care for others.

A Renewed Love of My Feeds

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0000

I built the awareness that came along with API Evangelist using my Google Reader and RSS feeds, and when Google deprecated the application I developed my own custom solution for consuming feeds. Somewhere in 2018 or 2019 I began falling out of love with processing my feeds each day. I lost interest in why I enjoyed doing it, and just didn’t believe it was worthwhile anymore. Since then I have had little interest in looking into Feedly or reading news from across the tech sector and beyond. But, in recent weeks I am finding a renewed love of reading my feeds, something that is more about why I do it, over the technology of how I do it, and it is something I wanted to write about so that I could have a snapshot of what brought me back around to working my way through hundreds or thousands of posts each day to find those gems that matter.

Why Did I Do My Feeds In the Early Days?

When I first started studying the world of APIs in 2010, Google Reader was the way that I learned about what was happening. My GMail and Google Reader were open all day and I consumed hundreds or thousands of feeds each day. I would consume the feeds of API pioneers like Amazon, eBay, and Salesforce, as well as the upcoming Github, Twilio, Stripes, and other API upstarts. Then I would write about what I saw in real time, publishing upwards of 3-5 blog posts each day on API Evangelist. This is how I made a name for myself in the emerging API universe, by aggregating, curating, and then distilling down what I saw in my Google Reader, and then published stories of what I thought for others to consume. This felt like a worthy approach to making sense of what was happening, and one that along with Twitter, kept me with a steady stream of readers who were tuned into what I had to say each day, making my feeds something that had a positive impact on my life.

Curating Feeds For Consumption by Other People

Once Google Reader went away I wasn’t happy with the alternative feed readers of the time and decided to build my own. By that time I had a sprawling system I called “laneworks” for profiling APIs, and the building blocks they were using to deliver their API Operations, so it made sense for me to use the same platform for processing the RSS feeds of blog and news feeds I had formerly been consuming via Google Reader. I was able to introduce some significant refinements in my process that allowed me to curate, tag, and organize what I was consuming each day so that I could more easily search across the archives, and I thought, “why don’t I share this with my audience”. So I began taking everything I had curated by Sunday night each week and publishing as a list of relevant API news grouped by topic. I did this for a couple of years, but over time I realized that it had changed the essence of why I was curating information. I wasn’t just doing it for my own knowledge anymore, and I felt compelled to make sure I had done the work every week for everybody else, which ultimately began to consume my weekends. Ultimately I feel this is what led to me falling out of love with the work-—it became an (unapaid) job I had to do for someone else.

Finding Purpose and Meaning in My Feeds Again

Last month I fired up a brand new Feedly account so that I could rebuild my feeds in a new way. This time what I would be curating would be for very different reasons. I wouldn’t be curating articles for sharing as a list of what is happening, or even writing stories (sometimes I might), but this round is about feeding my knowledge and ideas for my new podcast Breaking Changes. I am not looking to have my finger on the pulse of what is happening not so I can meet my daily deadlines of blog posts, or weekly curated lists, it is just to find the most interesting ideas, people, companies, and trends I possibly can. The bar is much higher for what I curate. I am really looking through thousands of blog posts, news articles, and social media posts looking for the gems. The interesting angles. The ideas and topics that aren’t necessarily getting talked about in some of the other podcasts in the API or wider tech space. The dynamics have shifted back to where I am once again interested in clicking through that massive amounts of information, and the outcomes are something that make me feel like I am doing something nourishing and rewarding, not just sitting down at the cow clicker each day—-renewing my love of my feeds.

I like processing large amounts of information. It makes my brain happy. However, I need a purpose. A reason for doing this often mind numbing work. If you aren’t interested you just won’t have the eye for what matters. With my current incentive model I feel I have a much better eye for what matters. A lot of the bullshit fluff posts that you see from tech blogs and startups don’t matter to me. I don’t care. I just mark as read and move on. I am not looking for SEO vomit. I am looking for compelling stories of how companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies are struggling with their digital transformation, and how APIs are shifting what is happening around us each day. Often times I am not even looking for the direct API story, and looking for the stories I know that APIs are behind, but haven’t been cast as the lead character in whatever story was being told. I am looking for just the right person within a large enterprise organization who has the perspective that matters to a story I want to tell on Breaking Changes. Overall, I find this a pretty good place to be, and it makes me happy to be back in my feeds with a purpose, because it provides that volume of information I like to intellectually gnaw on–keeping my brain occupied, but also helping me stay elevated in what I do as the Chief Evangelist at Postman, and in the next wave of API Evangelist. Whatever that is.

A Time to Live

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0000

What an emotional week. Sunday through Saturday of the previous week was the first major trip out into the world where we took care of some important life events while also breaking free of the clutches of the pandemic for just a little while. Our travels took us up Interstate 5 through Oregon to Portland for a memorial for the kid with family and friends, over to the coast to spread his ashes where his dad’ were also spread, then back down to southern Oregon for the funeral of one of my closest friends, then spent some time with my sisters, and then back home by the Fourth of July. Making for a whirlwind tour of emotions and experiences that I needed to spend a little time here on the blog getting sorted out.

First off, this was our first major trip out of the house since COVID kicked in. It was strange to be on the road again. I had taken a trip to Seattle right after the kid passed away, and we had driven to the beach and to the mountains once or twice, but we hadn’t done anything this major since February of 2020-—so, 16 months. We packed all of our own food and ate in parks and rest areas, or our hotel rooms, and engaged with people indoors only when required. It was both a relief a well an anxiety inducing experience to make our way up Interstate 5 through Oregon, and back down again after being at home so much. I would say overall it was a relief to break free of the hold lock down had on us, but also reminded me how lucky we are to have a good job, home, and be able to eat and live as we do in Oakland, CA. While I grew up in Oregon and have both good and bad memories of growing up there, I am definitely a California kid these day, and I am happy to be back home in the Bay Area.

Second, this was Poppy’s first major trip anywhere. We were worried about her ability to pee and poo on the road as she has never peed away from home on any of our day trips, but once she got going she figured things out quick. She definitely had anxiety about being in the car for so long, and visiting new place with so many unfamiliar smells, but eventually she found her groove. She began to really like each new hotel we experienced, and loved sniffing every corner of the room and napping on the beds. She loved all the parks we visited and had a blast on the Oregon coast, experiencing her first off leash freedom on a sprawling beach where she got to run as far and fast as she wanted. By the end of the trip she was a pro, and we dubbed her the adventure dog! I was skeptical that she would be a good travel dog when we left, but now I am eager to take more weekend trips with her around the West Coat, and I am very curious to see how he responds to the different woods, rivers, lakes, mountain, and other places I have planned for her.

One of the central purpose of this trip was to spread the kid’s ashes on the coast where his dad’s ashes are also spread. I wrote a separate post on setting the kid free on the Drone Recovery blog, but this trip marked an important milestone for us in moving on from his death. In Portland we had a memorial in a park with friends and family where we spent the afternoon telling stories about him, and the next day we headed to Strawberry Hill on the Oregon Coast to spread his ashes amongst the waves and rocks. It was so emotional. For me, it was stunning to watch Audrey do this. It is something I will never forget for the rest of my days. Watching a mother say goodbye to her son by spreading his ashes in the same place they had spread the ashes of his father was something I never thought I would have to witness, and was left speechless by her strength in being able to do it. She didn’t just do it, she did it with confidence and purpose, demonstrating a real intent to live life, even after it has handed you so much pain. As I write these posts about our experience I realize the gravity of this moment, and realize the importance of it in helping us get through this moment in time, but also allow us to move forward with our lives.

Another reason for our trip was to go to the funeral for a friend of mine in Southern Oregon. Amy has been my friend for over 25 years, and was one of the friends I had been through so much with that it crushed my heart when she passed. Amy left behind her man who is also my very close friend, as well as three amazing children. We spent a warm afternoon saying goodbye to Amy with a bunch of old friends in Selma, Oregon. I was reminded of how hard it is to make friends like Amy at my age, and how I can’t afford to lose many more friends like this. I saw friends I haven’t seen in over 20 years at her memorial, swapping old stories about our time with Amy and each other. I got to stop and see Amy during my trip back down last year after cleaning up the kid’s apartment–she was sick from her cancer treatments, but I was able to tell her that I loved her. Her memorial was emotional but very positive. Lot of love for her, and for how lucky we all are for having known her. It was very much a reminder for me of how important it is for me to stop in and see the people that matter to me, because you don’t know when they won’t be there anymore, and you just can’t be quite sure how many more days we have left on this beautiful earth. I love and miss you Amy, and will make sure I check in on Geoff from time to time to make sure everyone is OK.

After the memorials and before we left Oregon we stopped at my younger sister’s house to meet with all three of my other sisters. I had seen my two sisters last year as I rolled through Oregon after the kid’s death, but I haven’t seen the other for a couple of years. I miss them all, and it was great to see them. The highlight of the stop was being able to say hello to my niece Maggie who happen to have been born the week before. I got to hold little precious Maggie, which warmed my hard after such an emotional week. As I studied her perfect little face, toes, and finger I was reminded of the full circle of all of this, offering a counter balance to all of the death I have been witness to recently. Life is really a powerful thing. It was a really hard week, but looking at little Maggie, and thinking about how much love and joy my sister, her husband, and Maggie will have helps lighten the load on my heart. For me, it really pointed the needle forward for me, and rather than dwelling for too long on the past, I need to take what I’ve experienced and focus on forward motion into the future.

The underlying message for me from our week was about focusing on forward motion, and this being a time to live. Oregon holds a lot of pain and sadness for me. It also holds a lot of memories that have contributed to who I am today. I have spent the last five years processing much of this, which seemed to come to a head with the pandemic, and all signs for me point to me continuing to learn from everything, but focus 90% on the future, and 10% learning from my past. I learn a lot by studying my past, but it also tends to weigh me down and hold me back if I spend too much time dwelling, and everything about the memorials of the previous week and my experience in Oregon tells me that I need to focus on living and manifesting the next 50 years of my life. Everything in my past worked overtime to make sure I knew that I wouldn’t live beyond 30 years of age, and now that I have, while also losing so many others, it is pretty clear to me that I am not just being challenged–I am being challenged while also being provided a blank canvas to paint any picture I want. I am not going to ignore this opportunity, and will fully embrace this as a time to live.

How Industry Categories Have Been Defined and Continue to Shape Us

Sun, 13 Jun 2021 10:00:00 +0000

I am reading Capital Volume One by Karl Marx (I know ;-). After getting over the hump of the introduction and the first couple of chapters, I am really getting into it. I just finished the chapter on how the work day was defined over the course of a couple decades in the 19th century, and it is fascinating to think about all the forces on both sides of the equation that have gone into defining the eight hour workday, but also the industries we work in. I’ll spend more time thinking about the work day in a separate post, but one thing I am stuck on right now is how much the classification of our industries is shaped by the regulatory, and the opposition to regular forces over the years. How the naming and grouping of our business sectors and industries are shaped and set into stone by government, industry owners, and the workers as they struggle for balance in the workplace.

In Capital, Marx describes the back and forth exchange between factory owners, factory inspectors, and the parliament when it comes to defining the work day. Reducing the length of the work day for unlimited, to 12, 10, and eventually 8 hours, as well as the elimination of night work, and the exploitation of women and children. Amidst all of this exchange, as the laws are written, enacted, and enforced, the naming and grouping of different types of business continues to take shape for the sake of regulation. There are numerous other forces that have gone into shaping how we define our industries and business sectors, but it is interesting to consider how factory owners and regulatory authorities grouped to not just regulate specific sectors of business, but to also accommodate the demands of factor owners. Such as resisting the elimination of night work from mining or transportation, or resisting the number of hours children can work because the lace industry depends on those tiny fingers.

One reason business sectors exist is so that we can apply and exclude regulation to them. So that people in the transportation industry knows that they can still operate all night, despite most other industries being forbidden from operating around the clock. It shows how the factory owners help shaping the naming and grouping of industries so that they can obtain the exclusions they need for their own small slice of the market pie. It’s fascinating to consider how a list of industry specifications are what defines the frontline in the ware between capitalism and regulatory forces, and how the words we use to describe the products and services that we produce are forged in this back and forth. I think largely this evolution of industries and business sectors is shaped by corporate and government forces, and I’d hope that workers have had some influence here, but I am guessing these phrases we use to describe industries are more about the capitalist side of the equation over having anything to do with the human identity of those involved in labor.

I am fascinated by this history. I want to better understand how industry classification came to be now. A significant part of my job today is identifying which business sectors are being impacted by APIs, and the standards which are applied within an industry. This has got me thinking about how the words we use to describe the industry sectors, but also the naming and ordering of the design of the data models and APIs used to access data within each industry gets shaped. How much of these existing data models and newer API standards are shaped by the commercial entity, industry organization, regulatory agencies, or by the individual works and users who operate within each space. Similar to the policy that goes into defining each industry, the design of APIs will ultimately codify how each business sector works. The naming and ordering the bits that are exchanged within each industry in real time around the globe will shape the relationship between corporations, government, and the individuals who’s lives are dedicated to working within an industry, or served by the products and services that come out of each industry. The more I learn about relationship between business and regulation the more of the politics of all of this I can see, and the more I understand how the words we use really matter when it comes to defining how we see the world around us, but how our market driven world ultimately shapes what our reality is or isn’t.

A Sustainable Relationship with Technology

Fri, 21 May 2021 12:00:00 +0000

My world is pretty wrapped with Internet technology. My career centers around it, my mind thrives on thinking about it, but I am also painfully aware how much damage Internet technology is inflicting around the world, as well as how too much focus on the digital world can leave my physical and mental self in a weakened state. I have wrestled with all of this heavily over the last five years as I was forced to come to terms with just how exploitative much of the world I am a champion for has been. However, in the last two years I have found a mew balance that I feel will help me keep my relationship with technology sustainable, allowing me to make a living, have a successful and enjoyable career, but also stay physically and mentally healthy, and most importantly maintain my soul when it comes to being an enabler of Internet technology. Moving forward I undoubtedly will have moments where I will be blind to exploitation around me, as well as moments where I dwell too much on the negative of technology, but this is part of the tides of this relationship with technology I am navigating.

I am good at understanding the world of APIs, the layer beneath the desktop, web, mobile, and device applications we use to operate each day. My brain enjoys thinking about complex technical solutions. It keeps me busy. It keeps me out of trouble. It keeps my overactive mind focused on something that is hopefully positive. However, I also struggle with being online too much. I get caught up in having to work seven days a week. I focus on the negative that Internet enabled technology introduces into the world. It all makes for quite a roller coaster ride if I let it. That is always the trick. How do I dance with technology, but then also still be a well adjusted human being. There is no perfect answer to this dilemma and there is no single configuration that just works all the time. I have to ride the waves. I have to perpetually ask myself if I am making a difference with my work, and whether or not I am living a version of my personal life that I find fulfilling. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. I don’t think my struggle with technology is unique, but I think the little dance I do to squeeze a living out of it, while also fighting so hard to stay human is pretty unique to the condition that is called Kin Lane. I am not just dramatic about it here as I write, this is how annoying it is in my head as each day plays out.

One of the aspects of my relationship with technology that drives most things is that I make a good amount of money doing what I do. I am good at what I do, and over a decade I have managed to carve out a niche for myself. I get paid well, and there is a lot of opportunity doing what I do. I don’t know about you, but I like making money. I like being comfortable. Now, I don’t focus on the money of it to the extend where I start losing my soul. That just isn’t me. That isn’t how I do things. However, I do put up with things I don’t always like because I am paid well. It is the capitalist dance with the devil many of us find ourselves in. I don’t think most folks are honest about the dance, but it is one I am regularly thinking about and always looking for the right moves to make the dance more memorable, fun, and not something I just have to do to make someone else happy. I am not afraid to admit that the money is why I don’t just walk away and do something else. I make good money, and I am successful—-what else would I step away and do? This used to kind of terrify me, but it is also part of the sustainable relationship I have established with technology. I am going to make the most of my success, I am going to ride it, while also trying to minis the downside and anxiety about what I am doing, or not doing. I am just going to do what I do, make good money, have as much fun as I can, while remaining as flexible and adaptive as I possibly can.

One of the reasons you do APIs as a business is that they help you be more agile, nimble, and adaptive in your relationship with technology. I have taken this to hear when it comes to my own personal relationship with technology. I am always trying to keep things small and manageable, while working to reduce dependencies along the way. I don’t get too married to any specific technology or emotional about technology being good, bad, nor even neutral. I like technology when it benefits me, and I am not afraid to criticize or hate it when it doesn’t. I am more than happy to use the Internet to solve a problem when it makes sense, and I am even more happy to question whether technology should be used at all. I am skeptical of Internet technology, but I can also enjoy a regular cadence of blah blah blah about APIs in service of bringing home the bacon. It is a game. It is one that I get paid to play. It is a game like to play in the evenings and sometimes on the weekends to keep my mind active. It is also a game I can easily put down to read a book, go for a walk, or just sit and stare out the window. The secret here isn’t to go all in with technology, or to completely step away–it is about maintaining a sustainable relationship with technology that will take me where I want to go in the next fifty years.

Leaving the Past Behind

Fri, 21 May 2021 10:00:00 +0000

I started this Kin Lane blog back in 2007. For many years it saw one or two posts every couple months about whatever I was seeing online. Then somewhere around 2012 I began waking up more to not just the world around me, but to who I was, who I had been, and I began doing a lot of thinking about who I wanted to be. The Kin Lane blog became my therapist. It was where I would post something that I needed to get off of my shoulders. The domain was a safe place for me to put my thoughts out there in way that would validate the way I was feeling while simultaneously setting them free. Here, in May of 2021, after almost fifteen years of posting here, I would say that I have reached a milestone in my personal development, achieving a peace of mind where I don’t feel like I need to process much more from the past. Sure, I am guessing there will be the occasional topic that emerges from the woodworks, but for the most part I am beyond processing the craziness from my past and I am looking towards the future. With this in mind I am going to reboot Kin Lane, flush the 14 years of blog posts, and begin with a blank canvas. I will keep everything I have written, but will be rebooting this blog with an eye towards what is next and not about what has been.

My writing has saved me. I cannot overstate this enough. This blog has allowed me to peel back the layers of who Kin Lane is and get to the root of so many issues that troubled me. I was able to successfully unwind my past, and to continue the healing process, I feel like it is important to hit reset on my narrative, letting go of what I have found and put all my energy into manifesting the future I want to see. I have achieved everything I had envisioned for myself, and I have wrestled (and won) every demon that dogged me for the first half of my life. I have a beautiful wife, daughter in University, loving and well-behaved dog, successful career, and have found balance (mostly) in operating Kin Lane each day. I have detached numerous “cords” from my past and have the remaining chaotic wire mess of these cords stored here in the kinlane.com domain. There is no reason to keep them on display anymore. I have numerous stalkers and detractors these days, something that will only grow as I evolve in my career—-no reason to give them free ammunition. I am proud of everything I have written, and I have found a lot of value in sharing them publicly, but for me to continue in my healing and evolution I think it is time to organize them, print and bind them, and just put them on a corner of the bookshelf that I visit once a decade or so. All the stories I have told here still matter, but for me to write the next chapter I need to properly move on from everything I’ve unpacked.

What a ride. What a learning experience. What an awakening. I discovered so much about me and how I have viewed the world for most of my life. I developed an entirely new set of lenses to look at the world around me, so I really don’t need this old set of lenses in which I used before–they have some scratches in the lens. Moving forward I will still have the same honesty and tone in my storytelling here on the blog, it just won’t be nearly as dark as my writing up until now. I don’t have so many fearful people yanking my chain anymore. I am not wrapped up in societal collapse and the world ending anymore. I don’t have to defend my daughter and wife from the dark forces of the world I grew up in anymore. I don’t have to convince myself that I am worthwhile and able to be successful. Most of all, I don’t have to save the world, I just have to make it a better place in any way I possibly can. I am not afraid anymore. The world isn’t out to get me. I like this state of mind. It makes the world a much friendlier place, even with all of its problems. With Kin Lane (mostly) figured out I can begin to focus more on the world around me, and some of the worlds I’d like to see exist through my fictional storytelling. Of course, the storytelling will continue to have that Kin Lane voice. I can’t help that. I was successful in crafting my API Evangelist voice, while also finding my own Kin Lane voice, so who knows what I will be able to carve out now that I have a blank canvas.

Our history is such a powerful thing. How we should learn about it, remember it, learn from it, but also understand when to leave it behind. Where is that fine line between, “Ok I have learned so much from writing and thinking about the first 40+ years of my life”, and “thinking about all of this much more begins to give it new power in controlling me and preventing me from moving on”. I think I found that place. I have some new stories to tell and to be able to tell them properly I need to reboot this domain and give myself the opportunity for renewal and reaching entirely new heights. Heights that my previous self may not have been comfortable with, and the people I knew during this time would never allow. With that said, I just zipped up all the posts since 2007 and uploaded a copy to my time capsule and a separate copy in Dropbox. I will make some time to go through and clean house on the posts some weekend in the future, and then see about organizing the most meaningful posts into a self-published book that I can add to the bookshelf. It has been fun. If you have tuned into all of this I would like to thank you for putting up with me. If you are one of the numerous folks who have emailed me to express how you connected with one of my stories I would like to thank you for being out there. Telling stories here on Kin Lane has made the last decade bearable. Posting here has allowed me to maintain forward motion in my life and get through some very rough years, but it has also set the stage for what I am counting on being the most prolific and healthy storytelling period in my life.