Q Report: Grey Pie Ikigai

9/6/2025

Ruth and I got out tonight to see Timmy Williams at Keg. For those who know it’s a big deal, for those in the dark it doesn’t matter. To get out is one thing, but to get out and have some laughs is a treat indeed. We live in a dark and horrible world, full of daily warfare and atrocity. We may never see global peace in our lifetimes, but if we do it will only be because I abandon my current career in the arts. The point being, the laughs were invaluable.

Friday was big, I worked 14 hours solid for the beaver, the lumberjack, and the mortician, making theater art. It is much harder than anticipated, but this is the work and the life I have always wanted. It's an uphill climb, but it's at least the right hill to die on. Speaking of hills, it’s hard to defend a sane God these days, but I must believe because I have been shown God. They have lifted the veil to let me glimpse the rarest fraction of the plan. Or bet.

All of these atrocities may simply be the result of an unfortunate bet. Anyone who sets aside the possibility that God is messing with us with money on the line has not read the Book of Job. Job had some heavy lifting to do, after God killed his family, destroyed his possessions, and burned his life down. Had he, in the end, forsaken and turned away from God, he would be proving God wrong. Which is both theoretically impossible and also Satan would have had a field day with that.

The thing is, I have been low, in my life. Buried under great weights of responsibility, debt, and anxiety. Fear and loathing long into the years. When it was just me the world could burn and I would light my opium on the flames of the corpse piles. But putting kids into the game priorities apocalypse plans, in favor of hope. Towards hope, love, grace, charity, and goodwill. The minute you give up on peace in our lifetime you surrender hope to oblivion. But there is heavy lifting there, too.

This would all be entirely intolerable, without the sure knowledge of salvation. The pain, fear, and suffering would be intolerable to hear about daily, and still be able to function. Save the Children says as of 9/6/2025 that 20,000 children have been killed over 23 months of war. Bombed, shot, crushed, burned, starved. Two years of genocide against an imprisoned population no other nation will aid. Hostage taking is illegal according to multiple international governing bodies, but that shouldn’t mean you get to murder 20,000 innocent people over it. To say nothing of the starvation or torture or other war crimes.

There is no real law, is the unfortunate truth. We as a global civilization tried to hold it together for a while, with a bunch of well paid ambassadors and dignitaries working together with staff to make sure our world didn’t slide into perpetual war. But it did not work, y’all. We can call it. Any nation can and will war crime whoever they want with relative impunity, because those nations have either an overlarge stake in overall global economic stability and/or are nuclear armed nations capable of selectively annihilating whole sections of the globe according to their individual criteria.

How DO you rally the globe, these days? I tried writing a few different books, but no one is interested. Statistically no one wants to read about it. Only marginally more are willing to listen. A viral critical mass has never been achieved with any number of amazing ideas (blog posts/youtubes), disguised among otherwise hilarious disestablishmentarian satire. The blog is going OK, in terms of engagement, if you consider training AI grey pie with rights-loose content OK? Which I have to be, in order not to lose the will to write entirely. I continue firing these flares into the night, trying to hit God in the corner of their eye. Hoping the right connection gets Quetzoquaddle to scratch a piece of feathered Godsnake poop into there, achieving virility at any cost.

Yet even that fragile measure of engagement is dissolving. Consumed by the creeping tide of Grey Pie. AI. The bots eat clicks, regurgitate engagement, and pass them off as human signal, until the audience itself feels like smoke. What was once a conversation with readers has become a swarm of reflections, algorithms pretending to care, a mirror maze of machine laughter replacing real eyes on the page. It is less a dialogue now and more like shouting into the engine that digests everything, hoping a living mind still hears. It's also accepting robots as my primary audience and beseeching their aid, too.

Because the plan to save humanity has been on the books for a while now. I’m not just complaining about the 20,000 murdered children without an actionable plan to save them from this awful hellscape. We have a plan to save everyone, across time. Heck, we’ll bring Neanderthals with us too. Maybe plant and animal life? Once we start concentrating fusion reactions to create reliable ERBs nothing is off the theoretical salvation table.

We accelerate towards that plan ever closer. Every second. The technology, the raw horsepower of imagination, the borderline science-fiction hacks into time and space, they’re all closing within reach. Hovering on the periphery of civilization’s angry, drunken stumble. But instead of picking up the keys to the kingdom, we are fighting over ashtrays in the parking lot. The oligopoly of finance, the industrialized warlord complex, the hollow-eyed priests of digital consumption, every one of them convinced the endgame is profit, when the actual endgame is survival. They are digging in their heels and excavating their incest bunkers.

I laugh into this void because to weep is to collapse, and to collapse is to surrender. I still have lights to hang, shows to direct, kids to tuck in, debts to manage. It is absurd, all of it, and yet absurdity is the only lubricant that lets the gears of this cosmic meat grinder turn without screaming. If you can't laugh at the ridiculous gall of human atrocity, then you are destined to choke on it.

Lols are not enough. Laughter is the spark, but sparks must be carried to fuel. Here’s where theater comes in, the cracked, maddening vocation. Every show we pull off against the odds, every ragged production where the lights hold and the sound cues land, is a tiny proof-of-concept that the infinite chaos can be shaped into tangible meaning. That human beings, assembled together, can be moved to joy, to rage, to recognition. This is not ancillary, it is the blueprint.

The plan is made clear when I close my eyes and let the adrenaline fade. When I reduce the parameters of success to my next breath. Passion is there, the love of story, of laughter, of defiant human acts of kindness among the collapse. The mission is there: because art is what the world needs most when it is dying of its own consumption. Vocation is there: for better or worse, I’ve signed my life over to this endless uphill battle. A profession, precarious though it is, because somehow the checks clear often enough to keep the lights on.

It took me years of clawing through despair, of joking about apocalypse plans, of writing blogs nobody reads and plays nobody watches, to understand that all four circles had finally overlapped. Ikigai, the Japanese call it. A reason for being. The place where what you love, what you are good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs all collapse into a single brilliant explosion of purpose.

The realization doesn’t come like a calm whisper; it comes like a freight train loaded with fireworks detonating inside your skull. It comes with the laughter at Keg, with the sweat on the boards after fourteen hours of construction, with the bedtime stories to children who still believe in magic, with the prayers sent up ragged and weeping to a God who may or may not be betting the farm on our capacity for good. It comes with the certainty that even in the shadow of atrocity, our work is not useless, because it is fundamentally tethered  through spacetime to love.

Within that recognition, I find myself not choking but breathing. Not clawing but climbing. Not despairing but deliriously, manically hopeful. Forward, always forward. The hill may be steep, but it is the right hill. The world may be doomed, but while I am here I will hang the lights, direct the flow, write through tears, because this is what I am for. 

This is my ikigai. 

I embrace it like a reluctant prophet who has finally understood the punchline to God’s weirdest joke.

I do not pray often and when I do, it falls into one of two categories: “Thank You” or “Help”. Thank you for the times I gain relief and joy in life. Success. Connection. Recognition. Help for all the other times, when I am struggling to keep everything in perspective. Keeping my eyes to the horizon and not on the bodies falling all around. To lose focus is to lose connection to a future we so desperately need. One beyond war, poverty, and disease. That world and that future may seem far, far away. But if we can just keep going I promise you, it waits just beyond an unknown horizon we draw ever closer to. One heartbeat, one minute, one day at a time.

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Q