Years of depression have had their effect, their cost
The only thing I don't understand is how I've kept going.

I know that selling out was never an option for me, not really. Anytime I experienced success that wasn't in some way tied in with the emancipation project (Just think "social justice" ... yaa, that stuff.) In those situations I just got more and more miserable, getting into increasingly theatrical self-destructive behaviour, a clumsy way of bumping myself out of that rut.

So it's an awful lot like being discouraged ... I think I could be broken-hearted if I let myself slip into it ... and yet I keep truckin' along, hours everyday surveying the field for systems that might encourage community activity (By The People" at PBS and also at McNeil Lehrer, produced by the Center for Deliberative Democracy; see also the Community Practices Network), hours everyday trying to get something started with my own stuff (see GroundPlane 101 - The Antenna is You).

But always the same thing: careerists and opportunists have their elbows up ... there not the slightest chance that I will ever get a hand of any sort.

Can't talk about the calamity of rush.rush.rush to busy people because they're too busy. Can't talk about the epidemic of closed-minded narcissism to people who are self-involved because, well, they're self-involved.

But over and over I notice one thing: the meanest and most wicked are open to innovation. Oh, yes they are ... they surely are.

I can't help thinking it was foolish for me to have left the monastery in order to carry on with my project. Just foolish.

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p.s. my old cat definitely has buddha-nature!

snoozing while I watch TV

perched on the peak of the adjoining roof