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American Love Affair – Non-Tech Writing from a Tech CEO

Other Side of the Coin

Posted on 5 min read

  May 5 In my dreams the compulsion reveals itself: Unless I’m constantly doing, it doesn’t feel that things will be ok 6 It always seems to come back to surrender… or the middle path… or self acceptance… or fear 6  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow reminds me that I wanted to write novels. Some people can balance the creative role with their profession. For years I tried to as well. But it feels like a bridge too far. 7 Watching the wind moving over an open field feels like home. Tall grass moves like water. It looks and sounds the same to me as the wind blowing across the …

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Consumption

Posted on 4 min read

This morning, I did something I hadn’t done in a long time: I put on a CD and hung out in my office. It’s The Eraser album by Thom Yorke, which I hadn’t listened to in a long time. As I’m sitting and reading, a feeling of comfort spirals out of me. And then behind the comfort rolls in a realization. It feels small at first and then opens up until I’m looking out at a vast landscape. This realization touches almost every aspect of my life: I have become a being of consumption.  There’s a lot of discussion about consumption, and this usually revolves around the consumption of natural …

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April 23 – Survival, If You Can Call It That

Posted on 3 min read

1 Landed from LA and repacking my bags for a turn to Germany. It’s been 3 months since I’ve seen my daughter. A little longer than usual, but not nothing compared to Covid. I feel scared and nervous. It’s been hard to reach her lately. Is this the inevitable teenage distance people tell me about? I’m at breakfast when tears start quietly rolling down my face. What are you feeling right now? I don’t know. A lot. Once it passes I realize the cause is the table sitting behind me, a father with his daughter who looks about seven. It’s the ambivalence of anticipation in seeing my own daughter and …

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2022 – In Review

Posted on 2 min read

I’ve been told life moves in seven year cycles. ‘How strange’, I thought back then. In the early summer of 2015 my daughter moved to Germany. That began a period of my life that I stumbled my way through like a fork caught in a garbage disposal. For nearly seven years I thought I had hit rock bottom time and time again. And maybe I did. Rock bottom, over and over. But I don’t think rock bottom is enough. It’s not enough to scream in the mirror, “I want to change! I want to love myself!” It’s in daily behaviors that I show respect for myself (or not). It’s what …

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Religion

Posted on 2 min read

I’ve been going to church the past two weeks. It’s been 20 years since I’ve gone to a church of my own accord. I’ve thought about doing it many times, but never actually dragged myself out of the house on a Sunday. The church is within walking distance of my house (even on frigid slick mornings). The church itself is a beautiful sweeping Luthern church. Austere by Catholic standards, but still ornate compared to the Lutheran churches in Northern Minnesota, which were all heavy wood and sharp angles, and intimidating like the mountains. The sermons were about compassion and self-love, respectively. They both touched on the inherent trait of doubt …

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The Work

Posted on 1 min read

Sometimes during the beautiful and loving moments with my daughter, I feel an anger and sadness come up in me, that I struggle to control. Anger because distance creates scarcity. I lost so much time. It feels unjust that she lives 5,000 miles away. To love someone so profoundly and then to be separated from them. It is the most desperate kind of heartache. For seven years I’ve wandered in that desert. I searched and sacraficed, until I finally arrived at ‘self’. And a new view of the circumstances. Maybe this has been preparation. A costly but valuable lesson. If this had never happened, would I have been able to …

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Driving

Posted on 1 min read

Today is a long drive to Omaha. There was a time after coming home from Prague (for a 2nd time) that I used to drive for long hours for work. Five hours a day through rural Illinois and Wisconsin. At the time I remember feeling nothing but impatience. Now I look back and see the creativity that came out of that boredom and the freedom of being alone. Sometimes I have this urge to get in my car and drive. Just drive for hours, days, weeks – not because I love driving, but because of the spontaneity and autonomy that it provides. Because that time in my life represents freedom. …

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2021 – In Review

Posted on 1 min read

It feels like a full year. And for that I’m grateful. I’ve come to realize don’t need things to feel perfect, or even ‘good’. I just need them to feel full. I’ve heard people say that the perception of time speeds up as you get older because each year is a smaller fraction of the whole. 1/36 being naturally much less than 1/10. There’s an elegant logic to this. But I don’t think it’s true. It doesn’t explain why 15 months in Prague or Madrid feels like a decade, but my years of high school loneliness have merged into something indistinguishable. There’s a different theory regarding time: that our perception …

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Dialectic

Posted on 1 min read

If there’s one drum that my therapist beats over and over, it’s the dialectical. And I find it as grating, as I do, true. Given that much of my innate nature tends towards the extremes. Take even something like judgement. ‘I shouldn’t judge’, (a statement with it’s own self-contained judgement). I often find myself believing this statement. And yet, there are times when I do need to judge. I need to judge to determine if I’m safe or if I should move forward with a business transaction. But it can also be blindness. You start to see things not as they are, but through the lens of your dream. And …

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Dog Days

Posted on 1 min read

The dog days of summer. The leaves are finally beginning to turn. And only now at the furthest places from the ground. It reminds me of the gray hairs I find around my temples. As cliché as it is, I can’t help but see my own fate in the changing leaves. Optimism and energy in the spring, contemplation and curiosity in the autumn. I feel on the cusp of something. But what, I have no idea. Maybe that’s why it’s so much easier to pretend that nothing changes when you’re in a warm season-less place. Not matter the age, we’re young, shallow, and joyful. That’s probably envy I feel. Maybe …

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