How a Paper Airplane Ended My Career
I knew it would come to this. I'm getting fired tomorrow. I've been pushing the envelope of the work-from-home culture, and now it looks like I'll have plenty of time at home to work on my own projects—which, admittedly, I’ve already been doing.
Looking back, it maybe wasn’t as lucky as I’d thought to go viral with my home-based business. Honestly, it probably could have been okay if I hadn’t repurposed so many office supplies.
The last time I made a fool of myself was on the radio, promoting my harebrained scheme of paper-airplane-based media. Yes, the idea is outlandish, but it was starting to work. I was building a fleet of messenger planes and recipients in our mesh network.
But when I was on KUTX promoting the scheme, I froze. I couldn’t say a word. My mouth was opening and closing like a dummy without a ventriloquist. The interviewer, Laurie Gallardo—who was a friend of mine—was trying to guide me toward something to say, but I was dumbstruck.
I’ll never apologize for what happened next. I was so mortified, so anxious, that my mind descended into an abyss lower than I ever remember going—far lower. The deepest, darkest black. Soundless. Without any trace of light. Nothing bouncing, only being swallowed into nothingness.
I caught a glimpse of perfect stillness that I’ve since sought, and have never come anywhere near again. I’ve tried meditation, qigong, heated yoga, tantric sex, auto-asphyxiation, all kinds of drugs. I’ve tried getting tattoos in painful locations I hesitate to reveal. Nothing has gotten me close to the nothing.
I’m tempted to break my own rules in revealing this secret experience. As a rule, I don’t tell people about it—or even try to remember it myself. But I trust you. Maybe there’s something dark inside you too. Maybe you can relate. Maybe you long for stillness—for that fine line between the entire cosmos and the black hole engulfing it all.
And maybe you have a twisted sense of humor, or just the right amount of gullibility. I wouldn’t recommend taking the same path I took, and I certainly can’t go down that road again myself. But there’s a type of ultimate failure—a premature death of the ego—that shines, even as it blots out memory, time, and existence.
I’ll invite you to stop listening, to stop reading, to wander off in your mind. Detach from your concerns, from the need to show me you care about me or that you’re a good person. Be still. Embrace humility. Hold in the breath as if it’s your last. It might be, if you do it right.
This practice of death-in-life is maybe what mystics and shamans—not the shaman from January 6th, mind you—bring from parallel dimensions into ours. It’s crazy.
I had written a poetic form of the story I started telling onto a paper airplane, and as luck would have it, it landed on my boss’s desk. I don’t know who forwarded it there, but he wasn’t ready for it. It didn’t help that it was—like many of my fleet’s hulls—made from company letterhead.