#gratitudeNow: I'm down with OTC, yeah you know me.

So I got to go on the Off The Cuffs Podcast about a month ago, and the episode just dropped. It was a blast. Dick, Max, and Gwen are fun, awesome folks who really do an amazing job.

I really appreciated the chance to go on. Both Dick and Max had special sauce that mixed well with my own. Max himself is an ageplayer, and Dick has a thing for behavior charts.

These are my people!

We had this fun, filthy, very thinky conversation about ageplay, about discipline, and about WeMinder. I really dig their podcast. I only discovered it myself a few months ago, but I love it enough that I decided to join their Patreon, too.

One of my favorite things about OTC is that they treat ageplay as a first-class citizen. We get to sit at the table with the big folks or something, just like any other fetish. They’re very matter of fact about it, in a way that’s super refreshing.

#gratitudeNow: No. Two Zen

“Pottybot”

It seems I’m on a theme here. Because this post is about the intersection of mindfulness and… cat poop. It’s not the first time I’ve spoken of this, either.

So this would be my, er, “number two” post on the subject.

So this morning I woke up rather grumpy. I’ve just got a few heavy things on my mind.

First, of course, is that our piece-of-shit President has eight days left in office. He’s done a laundry list of terrible, immoral, illegal, unethical things for which he needs to be held accountable.

And yet, a number of GOP folks won’t. And yet, a whole lot of my fellow citizens don’t see it that way.

Which makes me despondent, and grumpy.

Then there’s tomorrow. Tomorrow is not just the day the Democrats will impeach him again. It’s also my fiftieth birthday. I am weirdly conflicted about this. On the one hand, it’s a milestone to have a fiftieth birthday. On the other, it’s just another day. I know what I wanted to do for my fiftieth birthday. I wanted to be spending it in Florida, at a paramotoring school, and lift off into the air to celebrate. The pandemic, and other life circumstances made that just not possible.

It’s okay.

I am going to do that. It’s not an IF, it’s a WHEN.

Okay, so what’s this all got to do with cat poop. So that death-star-looking-thing by my stairs, that’s my cats’ robotic litter box (seriously), “Pottybot.” (That’s the box’s name, technically speaking it’s a Litter-Robot 3 Connect.).

Well, I’m downstairs, feeding the cats and the fish and myself breakfast. I get the fish fed, get the cats fed, and then good ol’ Pottybot messages me (because, as I said, it’s a robot) that its drawer is full.

Joy.

I immediately stop the process of putting together a bowl of cereal, blueberries, and milk for myself, and go empty the drawer. Which really, is no big deal. It’s an incredibly fast process that is made as pleasant as possible for you by the machine. You open the drawer, draw up the sides of the plastic bag liner, twist the bag shut, knot it. Then you shake open a new liner, pull the edges of it over the four retaining hooks in the drawer to keep it open and taut, and replace the drawer.

It’s like a 4 minute thing, end-to-end. But here’s the thing: when it’s time to do it, it is 100%, no fucking around, time to do it. Leaving the drawer in a full state is what Colonel Joe Bishop in the Expeditionary Force books would call a November Golf, a no-go. The potential cat-poop-calamity that would likely ensue for not doing it is… horrible.

I was glad to do it. Not at first, yeah. But really once I had embraced the necessity of doing it, I was just fine, happy even.

That was when I found my zen. The taoist concept I’m tip-toeing around here, albeit with a gross example, is called wu-wei, the “action of inaction.” It’s the principle of doing only that which you must.

Which really has two sides to it.

First, there’s the not-doing-needless-things-part. Like, my being grumpy about Trump isn’t going to make tomorrow’s impeachment get here any faster. It isn’t going to change that some people are just not good people. It isn’t going to magically rewrite time to make me be in Florida right now, kiting a Paramotor.

But second, there’s the do what you must part. All that expectation-holding-nonsense gets in the way of meeting necessity. When Pottybot told me what I needed to do, it felt really, really good to be able to see that it was vital, and just go take care of it.

After I got Pottybot all taken care of, I washed my hands and made myself that breakfast, and sat mulling all this over. I realized I needed to write this post. And then, while I was doing so, Yang got in the box, and did what cats do in their litterboxes. And then Pottybot took care of it, without a problem. All three of us, just doing what’s necessary.

#gratitudeNow: Garbage Zen

So this morning, I did something quite happily. I was on my way into my home office, and getting it ready for the day. That means turning on the lights, opening the blinds, booting up, all that jazz. I also looked out the window and saw that the garbage service had come, and our can was sitting empty at the curb.

This thrilled me. We’ve had a backlog of garbage piling up in the garage. This was due to the holidays, to our lawn guys dumping several ginormous bags of lawn waste on our stoop, and the steady yet relentless flow of used cat litter we generate. (Well, it’s pretty much exclusively my cats doing the generating, but you get the idea.)

So I hustled out to the curb, retrieved the can, and brought it into the garage, where I then filled it with said backlog.

At the time, I was still somewhat inside my daily mental space for contemplation. Today my focus was on being mentally supple.

Being present makes you more mentally supple., more bendy. Instead of staying angry about your circumstances, or overmuch celebrating them (and thus attaching to them) you sort of “surf the moment."

I had this lightning fast integration of gratitude about the garbage. I had been hanging onto some lingering anger and annoyance over the backlog in our garage. But I saw at once how fortunate I was that it had been pretty cold, making the several week backlog palatable. Plus, it hadn’t been TOO cold or icy, so I was safe putting the garbage out in little dribs-and-drabs, one canful (plus recyclables in the blue can) at a time.

Additionally, now I knew how the rules had changed around lawn waste, and what to more sensibly do about it in the future. (I know where the landfill is, and driving a few bags over while they’re still dry is no big deal.)

All this in turn gave me another lightning fast moment of gratitude and enhancement to my practice. One of the truths I work hard to integrate into my thinking is that Tao is neither learned nor taught. It is experienced. And it’s experienced everywhere and anywhere, in each moment. So yes, you can find it on a mountaintop in Tibet, sitting in front of a monastery. But you can also find it at the end of your driveway, inside an empty garbage can.

Happy New Year, my friends.

#gratitudeNow: A glimpse of the past

So long before onlydoing was a thing, I used to have a livejournal.

I haven’t written in it for about seven years. But it’s still around. Periodically I go back to it, go “dumpster-diving” through old entries, old memories.

The other day I stumbled across the very beginning of one of my oldest, dearest friendships.

Vanessa, also known as Shokolada and I did indeed become the very best of friends.

Going on almost 17 years now.

What a wonderful thing.

#gratitudeNow: An Agency Position

So WeMinder’s been live for 42 days, not that I’m counting. (Of course I am.)

It’s gone pretty well so far. The number of subscribers is growing. I’ve had a few departures, found a few bugs I’m working on, and had some truly great things happen because of it.

There’s this thing I’ve become very, very aware of, related to having my own software company. I have a yet further, deeper understanding of the concept of agency.

Agency is one of those tricky meta-concepts. It means both “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” as well as “an establishment engaged in doing business for another“.

Put more plainly, in a very real way I am WeMinder. It does things because I coded it to do them. It has customers because of my efforts (or lack thereof). It improves because I improve it. Any issues or problems it has, it has because of me. Any solutions to said problem are squarely on my shoulders and no one else’s.

That is a huge deal. It’s good in many ways, but it is also a profoundly difficult thing in some ways I wasn’t expecting too.

I remember over two decades ago, building my own Windows PC with a friend. We bought all the components at a couple of different places, including the case, the hard drive, the logic board, the memory. Over a weekend, we put it together, installed the OS, all that jazz.

When it booted up for the first time, I was so damn proud of myself. I had a fairly powerful computer, and had it for a fairly reasonable cost.

A few months later the damn thing started to have issues. I lamented to my friend Nullmoniker, who helped me build it, that the huge downside of what I’d done was that when it was super flaky at 10pm on a Sunday, there was no one I could call to help me, that I was on my own.

There are aspects to owning, to being WeMinder that are like that.

But, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve said for a while now that part of the process behind WeMinder’s evolution was that I had to emotionally mature as a person. There are aspects to being in relationships I understand so much better in my late 40’s, than I ever did before.

Today as I’m sitting here fixing a WeMinder bug, I realize that maturity thing has to do with being a technologist and a businessperson too. I see that one of the ways I’ve matured is that I’ve embraced the concept of practice.

When you begin a practice, you commit yourself to well… practicing it. You embrace the concept that you’re doing a thing, but that there isn’t any done per se. There’s always going to be a bug to fix, a feature to add, a place to promote the app, someone to tell, something to improve. The joy isn’t in being done with the whole thing. There is no done.

There’s only doing.

Which makes me laugh, because I’ve been studying that particular truth for a very long time now. And there’s no end to that in sight, thank goodness.