ARCHIVE

10 August 2000

-|- guilt by association -|- musings of a prod. -|-

the assets and liabilities of being in a group

For the first 15 years or so of my life, I clearly had no part in them. Not that it was any of my choice.

I had never really been a part of a discernable social circle, or clique, if you will. Once in high school, and given a couple years there, I moved to the periphery of a couple groups, groups whose Venn diagrams admittedly overlapped, and had the same social history (almost incestual social history) of the early '90s Seattle music scene (if you can understand the half-italian Babelfish generates). This peripheral social interaction held me over through my high school years, then into college. Then, In the mid '90s, there was chi-de (pronounced chih-deh). It was my first clique. Of course, we didn't know it at the time, but others in my church thought we were being cliquish. It's not the best thing, but looking back on it, it makes me feel a little more important. It was a 6+ member clique, with a few orbiting satellites: myself, Jojo, Richard, Debbie, Connie, and Johnny, with Perry, Eddie, and a small handful of others sometimes along for the ride. Chi-de was every saturday (or nearly so) for the better part of a year and a half, and often other days between. It was great.

And now I'm part of another. But for some reason, the external world has changed... and the internal world is different from chi-de as well. There are complications, and then there are complications. I'm now expected to know the whereabouts of these friends, the ins and outs of their sub-clique relationships. But that's OK. I'm occasionally pumped for information about them, or pick up on rumors. That's OK. One bad thing this time around, though, is that when someone makes a mistake, crosses a line, I'm implicated in the intrigue. Now I'm as much at fault. When there is something secret happening and I know (or don't know) about it, I'm called upon to obfuscate. And I'm not sure that that is OK. In chi-de, something was secret to all, or secret to none. There was no stratification of levels of involvement, of degrees of trust. There were no sentences which one would speak to another aloud, whisper to yet another, and hide from the eyes of yet another. It was public to all or secret to all... and what was secret to all was never known, so effectively, anything important was public knowledge. I am now a part of a group where intrigue (even internal intrigue) is a known and expected phenomenon. It is a complication with which I am not comfortable.

Something big, seriously big is brewing at the Revolution. It's merely a possibility at this stage, so I'm trying to contain my enthusiasm. The (potential) project, you ask? Imagine the coolest project you can think of for a web company, or me, for that matter. Now, either a) you know what it is, or b) you're not thinking cool enough, bucko!