I was more annoyed with myself that it'd taken me to this point to realize he didn't give a shit about me. Then again, why should he? I'd been writing code for a couple months and he'd been flipping companies, or whatever you call it, in his VC portfolio -- the impressive metrics of which he'd supplied earlier in the day but which now escape me -- for at least four times as long. And he was probably three years younger than me. The breakfast conversation had consisted largely of he and his friend (who'd been invited on the pretext that he was looking for developers for his startup but had presumably detected within the first ninety seconds of being seated at the table that I wasn't what he needed) trading name-drops of tech moguls, restauranteurs, fashion bloggers, and trendy technologies I'd of course not heard of. Throughout, I'd felt a creeping sensation of being out of my league -- but it wasn't until he addressed me by a name that was not my name that my irrelevance hit me square in the face.
Fuck it. Back to the comforting abstract (unpaid) vacuum of code. My prowess in staring at and occasionally writing code perhaps slightly exceeded that in professional networking; any hope that one might obviate the necessity of the other in efforts towards revenue generation had long since been dashed by their concurrent mediocrity. And somewhere between the calibers of these two abilities fell that of whatever it was I'd done for the six years and two weeks prior July 25th, when I'd left my job doing whatever it was I'd been doing and embarked on a failed cross-country road trip. Those six years and two weeks now seemed like a far-off blur, a decaying flip-book of scenes and sensations whose pages had been ripped apart and reassembled in estimated order and upon which I now sought to superimpose a professional narrative. Did I regret not making the jump to where I was now sooner? It didn't matter -- I was starting to doubt even hindsight was 20/20. Any sense of control I felt over my life, I'd recently realized, was illusory. Which I'd also found delicate to articulate professionally.
I was still a ways off from discovering what I could be the best at. Not best at -- the best at. Towards the tail end of the flip-book blur I'd been dropping soundbites like, yeah, I don't need to be the best developer in the world, I just know it's something I can enjoy and be pretty good at. It had seemed true then. But once I'd smashed through the concrete ceiling I'd sworn to be a mile thick and emerged, victorious, into some stratosphere I'd hitherto envisioned teeming with dazzling clouds of never-ending possibility, the reality of things had set in. I'd found myself amidst a drab fog, and not five yards above me was another concrete mass at least a hundred times thicker than the last (which, it was now clear, was not nearly as thick as it'd felt on the way up). I was still David, and The World was still The World.
As I waited in the rain to cross 6th Avenue I looked down at my shoes. Adidas Sambas, almost three years old. Hoping my fellow diners hadn't noticed, as I had noticed their stylish boots, I recalled a brief story I'd written a couple years prior about how I'd utterly bombed a karaoke rendition of "Young Americans". The point had fallen in a general category of uplifting rationalizations that assert our mistakes and failures define us just as much as our successes do. I was far from the best -- but at least I was failing as David and not succeeding as Dan.
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