The Cloud Gate

Status report, current projects, and reading the rainbows

The note on my office door was unequivocal: get out. To remain there meant I was acting against Christ, according to the Elder.

Having no other place to go, but not wanting to bring further grief to the abbot, I drove out to the edge of the large property. There was a cozy little camping spot in the lee of a small copse of trees. I’d once seen a bobcat slinking into the woods from that copse. I’d seen skunks and raccoons there, and just across the strip of field from the copse was a wild forest where I’d seen the biggest buck I’d ever seen in Oklahoma. Maybe anywhere. I’d always wanted to camp there, and since that was likely one of my last nights at the monastery, time was of the essence.

The rain began immediately after I’d slid into my sleeping bag. So, instead of sleeping under the stars, I got no sleep on my back seat under a dome light.

I thought about what I was going to do next. My vision of the future was as dark as the forest outside, although just as the flashes of lightning revealed ominous shapes in the forest outside my window, I could imagine some monsters on the road ahead.

I took a walk the next morning. Technically I wasn’t supposed to be there, and technically I’d given the impression that I’d already left by hiding my truck overnight (with me in it), but I’d been walking my path every morning for the last two years, a cup of coffee in one hand, and a prayer rope in the other. Old habits died hard.

The sky was doing weird things. Post-storm, the clouds made epic constructions that could easily have been the abode of Titans. Towering, multi-colored cumulonimbus clouds that caught the sunrise from their pinnacles in the stratosphere, all the way down to Oklahoma.

This is what I saw when I rounded the corner of the monastery, facing the west gate:

I laughed when I saw it. Then I wept a little bit. Then I did both. That’s a portal, I thought, loudly.

It didn’t take much imagination to “read” the “sign.” The Elder had made it abundantly clear that it was time to move on, regardless of my (or anyone else’s) thoughts on the matter. Some questioned his methods or pronouncements. Others will swear his decisions are God-breathed. Some call him a heretic. Others call him a living saint. A mystic.

At that moment, I thought he was deranged, but I couldn’t deny the spectacle in front of me. It was easy to believe he had some kind of foresight It was time to go, and...it was going to be okay. I had, hopefully through grace and time, reached some new milestone.

These are melodramatic thoughts, I know. They’re my attempt to clothe immaterial, sentimental spectres in some roughly stitched animal skins for better visibility. They’re private thoughts. Don’t tell anybody.

I’m talking about this now because I just got kicked in the teeth. And to ensure the message was received, the messenger added a few hob-bailed boot kicks to my groin, and then pounded a sign into the ground on which I writhed that said, “Here lies Nancy.”

I can’t talk about it, but it’s related to my Situation. Maybe someday I’ll be able to. For now it’s only important to know that it foreshadows imminent future hits. The hell of it is I delivered most of the hits myself.

I was trying to process this, as they say, the whole remaining day after the beating. In the late afternoon, my son K came through the front door and beckoned me to come see something outside. This is what he wanted to show me:

Another rainbow. Another “portal” moment.

My whole body felt heavy, as though I had been sentenced to walk the earth under a hyper-localized extra G of gravity made just for me. Nerves buzzed. My eyes felt like they’d inflated by a couple of Pascals.

Nonetheless, I laughed. The meaning was undeniable, even to me, who can look into the sun and question its existence.

On both rainbow occasions, I thought of the “Cloud Gate” in Daniel Suarez’s very re-readable novel, “Freedom (TM),” where the protagonist Peter Sebeck is unwillingly tasked with finding a justification for humanity’s freedom. A psychotic game developer unleashed a daemon on the world that wreaked a lot of havoc and threatened to reorder society in the service of daemon. (A “daemon” is a program that runs continuously in the background, executing processes without user interaction, but it’s pronounced just like “demon.”)

It’s a believable story about reality becoming “gamified.” Sebeck is given a “high quest” in the game. He, like everyone else, has HUD glasses that augment reality in various ways. For Sebeck, he sees a long illuminated path in his HUD. He’s supposed to follow it to certain milestones and learn what he can in order to inform his big decision at the end.

I thought about that both times I saw these rainbows. They’re milestones. Portals, I suppose, to the next level. Seeing them in moments of maximum anxiety, in relatively quick succession, sends a message I’m eager to believe: It’s all going to be okay.

---

It’s been awhile since I last wrote, I know. I don’t know why it’s harder to write in summer. Current circumstances don’t allow for all the fun summertime stuff. No vacations. No road trips. Maybe a little pool time.

I work, I come home, I work, I go to my day job, I work, I come home, I collapse. The Situation generates malignant situations, single (impoverished) fatherhood is no joke, and praying that my truck stays on the road for just a little while longer takes up the rest of my time.

The writing on the wall is less like script and more like a living room wall-spanning jumbotron:

“YOU CAN’T DO ALL THE THINGS.”

This is distressing, because the remaining things are the distilled remainders of high ambitions. Things I believe I’m called to do. But here’s a lesson for all you creative and artistic types: Before you can do the Noble Things, you need to get some basics down first. Things like survival.

This has been a harsh lesson as well.

It’s been a busy summer.

So, of the remaining three projects I’ve been juggling, I’ve had to prioritize a side hustle that has the most immediate promise. Nothing else has the potential to close the gaps like this one thing. So, I’m all in on it.

It’s the engraving thing. It was never intended to be an income-replacement hustle, and it still isn’t, but for the time-being I can go from idea to sale in a fraction of the time it takes to, say, build a subscriber base.

I’m relaunching a couple of ecommerce sites. More on that soon. Here’s a snippet of what I’ve been working on:

I’ve lost a few subscribers over the last few months. A couple of them paid subscribers. I don’t blame them a bit. In fact, I want to tell all my paid subscribers that if you don’t think you’re getting any value here, my feelings won’t be hurt if you downgrade your subscription. I would.

Actually, really quickly on that point, a word: I don’t actually know what I’m doing.

When I started this publication, it was during Separation 1.0. I hadn’t yet taken it seriously, the problems in my marriage. Smashed on self-improvement blogs, men’s rights issues, and hustle culture, it seemed smart to catalog and isolate all the issues that led me to this place. “I can help other men!”

What a laugh. Even after the monastery, that substantially aged and theoretically wizened mission kept creaking along. However, I regret to inform you that mission has passed. Maybe someday it will be resurrected, but for now, I can’t keep up the act myself. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Here’s what I can promise, though: I’ll publish at least once per month. The marketing plan for the engraving biz involves a lot of social media work, so I should--if I can slay the fears that keep me from doing it--be publishing a lot more notes here. (Notes, as in this platforms version of X/Twitter). It’s literally life or death for my ability to provide for my family, so...you know, I should do it.

That’s it for now.

--Chris

PS--I hope this didn’t sound morose or depressed. I’m not going to lie--I’ve been in a better place--but I’m alright. Just tired. Very, very tired. However, I know it’s going to be okay because, hey, rainbows.