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Maybe I’m powerful
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This week I was considering what I’m now thinking of as the Triangle of Politics – Power, Money, Ego. My nonprofit, a neighbourhood initiative we started to protect a piece of land complete with old growth forest, needs to go to bat. Again. For over a decade, we’ve ebbed and flowed with the incompetence of our city government. If someone is overweight by their ego or power or money, they like to come threaten our little biotope. When the stupid stands up, so do we. When the selfish try to manipulate, we remain clear-eyed.
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So I was thinking about this Triangle and trying to figure out if you can play in that world, the one where you make the rules for other people, the one where you govern on a large scale, the one where you make decisions that both affects and effects generations, without power, money or ego motivating you.
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Maybe intellectuals and the revolutionaries can play a different game. Maybe if the motivators of money and ego fall away, if they are replaced by a humanist desire for collective well-being, activists can just focus on harnessing power.
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There is always power at play. The people are inherently not a part of the elite circle that is governance, and people are powerful. Even in the face of a complicated global landscape of ego and money, we are still powerful.
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Maybe I'm pretending
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It's not an idiom "they got lost trying to find crushed ice." It's just what happened. But I thought it was an idiom. German does have aplenty, and they are generally, like a lot of idioms, pretty weird. I was surprised when they arrived with crushed ice, especially because in the fifteen years I've lived in Germany, ice has never really been a thing, crushed or otherwise. At least not here in the East. It wasn’t an idiom, but maybe it should be.
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Misunderstandings can be a source of great joy and laughter. Mostly, though, misunderstanding The World™ is not very funny. I try to avoid the actual news, keeping the beat via other writers, friends, people who write, make or tell me things. Somehow despite trying to protect myself from Things Happening™, I still know and thus my insides are all askew (normal).
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Also, it’s November now. The SAD light is on, I’m pretending that I am mostly ok. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind. I truly wonder if there’s just going to be a singular moment when all that I pretend to be falls apart and I start knitting bananas sweater vests.
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Maybe I need help?
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On the weekend, a band invented music for a song off the “pretend” album I started writing called “Nazi in a Wheelchair”. I gave lyrics to another band after the singer asked me for some help with her English. It’s not pretend anymore. Two bands now have a couple of songs I wrote.
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What’s up with you lately? I ask every week, and you’ve been ghosting me. I know it’s because you think I couldn’t possibly be talking directly to you. But maybe I am. Also, is this thing on? Anyway, I hope you’re well.
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