5_A fools guide to saving the world

Pre-Production Document

We interrupt this very important broadcast (to absolutely no one) to make this very important announcement. I am here for the money. You heard me. The money. Your money. To increase my viewership and engagement and statistics and reader profile and subscription base and so I've followed Substack’s sage advise (I’m really grateful by the way Substack, this place is fun) and honed in on a niche I can exploit and added a flashy title to boot - 'A fools guide to saving the world'. Oooooh. Aaaaaah. It’s so beautiful you say. Why thank you kind human. I came up with all by myself. I really do aim to please (more in the about page)…

I was never in on Facebook. Well, there was that one time, when I was stalking my now-wife’s best friend who her and her husband at the time (he was a close friend before he was a real dumbass) were trying to set me up with because I had been single for seven years trying to win back my first-wife. I know, it’s complicated but short-ish story of gore, grace and love. So I have a profile in there somewhere, Mark’s evolving Metaverse, one I can’t delete because I forgot the password long ago. It didn’t take long for me to leave though, because of moments like this. The icky kind. Where I felt I was suppose to dance like a monkey is a fez and entertain and pose and then use all their tools to increase my reach while tracking performance, iris dilation and pivoting just a bit for likes, likes, likes, likes. But Instagram I’ve totally given myself to. There’s around two thousand photo with my name on them locked up under a carefully guarded profile with just twenty humans who can see the real me. I treasure it deeply and scroll through the memories I’ve had to travel to the moon and back a few times to make to remember why I am here.

But irony abounds. The money I live off I make by selling things online. Business. Schools. Beverages. Humans. Selling them is my job. I create delicious Trojan Horse’s people gobble down so my carefully constructed soldiers can invade their hearts and do what I want. It’s a grisly business. I try be responsible. But sometimes I compromise, I’m not going to lie, I sell stuff I wouldn’t want my mom to buy because the larder is running empty and I don’t want to dig into my mortgage to have to pay for my share. But here, on SubStack, with you, I don’t want that. I don’t want Trojan Horses, or hiding in gloss that is easy to swallow, or unanswered questions, carefully constructed arguments and the fake bullshit we all put up with day after day after day after day. I don’t want that for you because I don’t want that for me. Ever.

I want to love. And to be loved. To be seen and challenge and hope and grow in the wonderful mess that is my life. I’ve made so many foolish choices, most of them have been fueled by service. That strange desire to lift more than I leverage, and so I’m here now. Here, still serving, still living downtown in a dump because I don’t believe in the spatial realities the geniuses who set in motion apartheid thought I would never be able to break. I’m writing, in hope, still, twenty years later. Creating with playful, innocent anticipation that someone might just read it. I’m still serving one of the poorest, most colorful, F’d-up communities in the whole of South Africa because it is just three kilometres from my home. And so yah, if I am going to share anything credibly it is probably all that mess. My mess. This fools guide to trying to saving the world one clumsy step after the next. Snippets of my insanity lived out I hope with integrity.

Unraveling expectations is still there too, a title I can’t quite figure out how to delete, but I’m glad somehow. It’s still a good idea. Expectations are life. They are happiness. Yuval Noah Harai says it best. ‘Happiness is less about our objective reality and more about our subjective expectations’, and I do want you to be happy (and me of course) even though I wish I could live without all that presumption and fluff. I do want you to find meaning and purpose and hope and a calling and joy that is lasting and rich and plummets the depth of your soul and sparkles even brighter than Gimil’s Glittering caves. I do. I really, really do. And I think love, of the foolish kind, might, I repeat might, be a way to get there because sometimes I seen it for myself first hand. So consider this a re-brand. A discovery. A refocusing of why we could both be here.