Every Name Called, Every Account Settled

There are men in this business who believe that noise is the same thing as presence. They pick up a microphone and they fill the air with whatever passes through them -- chainsaw talk, hot dog vendors, bazookas aimed at moons -- and they mistake the volume of the room for respect. I have worked too long and too carefully to let that confusion stand uncorrected.

Ethan Locklear, you said the name Plaintalk on a public stage, and you dressed it up in the same sentence as goats and diapers and whatever theater you perform for an audience that has come to expect very little. I heard every word. What I did not hear was anything that resembles a reason for me to be concerned. A man who defines himself by the hardware championship of chaos is a man who has already admitted he cannot operate inside a disciplined worksite. You are not a threat, Ethan Locklear. You are a weather event -- loud for a moment, then gone, and the ground beneath my feet has not moved.

You called me nutless. I filed that away. The ledger is open.

What each of you fails to understand -- and I include every man in this building who has let my name pass through his teeth recently -- is that this territory has a floor and a ceiling, and I have spent considerable effort mapping both. I did not inherit that map. I drew it myself, one contest at a time, on a worksite where the only honest measure is what you can take and hold when someone equally motivated is trying to remove you from it.

I am not here to preach. I leave preaching to men who have nothing concrete to offer. I am here to work, and the work, when it comes, will be the only statement I require.

The account is open, Ethan Locklear. I collect what is owed.