The Controls Are Not Responding

2025 did not go as planned. Honestly, it was mostly because I didn’t have a well-defined plan to begin with. However, the narrative of things going wrong seems more compelling so I’ll stick with that for this blog post.

I started the year by finishing a sci-fi novella. “Finish” is generous here: it still needs lots of love but it has a beginning, an end, and doesn’t sag too much in the middle. This novella was going to be the bulk of my 2025 aspirations.

A few things transpired in my life in April. While cleaning out my Google Drive, I found a paper I wrote in 2009 for my MBA. This was one of many papers evaluating my leadership style through the lens of a framework. This one happened to be a “Jung Typology Test”. I believe by that point in my MBA I had written so many responses to flavor-of-the-week business books that I found clever ways to diverge from the assignment and write papers that interested me. This was a prime example.

I wrote a paper on systems thinking and folded my Jung test results into it, mapping the systems I could influence along with their details and interconnections. The crucial part was my conclusion: if I wanted to have more influence for the good of the world, I should embrace writing because it’s what I’m actually good at and my Jung test results highlighted this with neon lights.

Sidebar: I have written poetry privately for decades. Primarily haiku and senryu. Finding a message from my younger self telling me to embrace it and realizing I'd ignored it for sixteen years was a wake-up call.

With this at the top of my mind, a week or two later I found myself in NYC looking out of the window of an office in One World Trade Center from the 40th-something floor. The pervasive feeling I kept having was this: these are not my people. Thinking of going to a happy hour after work with them filled me with anxiety. I stood there as a person who was valued because I could write code and build things. That is only a fraction of who I am. I knew there was more. I was done denying it.

I flew home and typed up and sent my resignation letter on the Uber from the airport to my house. I had another job lined up, so it’s not as dramatic as it may seem initially. It was more about leaving start-ups behind and seeking out something that fit my desired lifestyle and left me with mental capacity to do the things I want with people I like. When I left that Uber a version of myself stayed behind.

I wrote poetry pretty furiously and, more importantly, I started putting some of my more subversive things about work and life on… LinkedIn.

Why LinkedIn? Why not?

To my surprise, people connected with it. Senryu like these seemed to really connect with people:

employee handbook
didn’t specifically say
naptime’s not okay

and

company vision
is posted in the break room
right by the trash cans

I didn’t stop at poetry. I realized LinkedIn rewards the cadence of authority more than actual meaning, so I started writing technical thought-leadership articles that were actually subversive art.

I published a piece on "Commit-Driven Development" that used corporate-speak to advocate for untested code deployment. I wrote a tutorial on "Understanding Recursion" that was just the definition of recursion looped over and over again. I wrote another article about "11 Super-Effective AI Prompts" that masqueraded as a productivity guide but was actually a linear horror story about a man using ChatGPT to navigate his divorce and bankruptcy.

I wrote “Programming Tutorials” that slowly descended into Lovecraftian horror.

People liked them. They shared them. It was a test of the system, and the system confirmed what I suspected in that tower in NYC: the code is running, but no one is at the controls.

My base assumption had always been nobody wants to see what an engineer writing poetry looks like. Especially if that engineer is obsessed by systems, thinks in systems, and writes… mostly about systems.

But I wondered if I was wrong.

I brushed off things, expanded some long-dormant senryu into longer free-verse forms and submitted them to journals. I was as surprised as anyone when I got some acceptances.

I put together a chapbook, including it in my application materials for an MFA and was accepted… with a scholarship. Everything I loved about writing haiku, senryu and prose was especially intensified by free verse poetry.

I put together a manuscript. The Controls Are Not Responding is, more than anything, the sort of poetry I want to personally read. I don’t try to dazzle or impress anyone with it. It’s just me putting thoughts and ideas into the right forms that contain them.

One last divergence on this origin story and I'll wrap it up. I acknowledge many people want to write. Simply having the urge to write things would not be compelling enough for me to have made these moves. I have a certain inheritance from my dad that I mentioned here in Rolling. You can see this in my LinkedIn examples above: it's an extreme love of hypothetical scenarios. This is the engine behind it all. My dad never did anything with it except pass it on to myself and my brothers. I decided to start writing it down for others to see. I didn't want to be looking back in my last moments realizing I'd squandered this one very unique thing that absolutely makes it all work.

So yeah. That novella? I’ll get back to it eventually. But I have other things going on now.