The War of Attrition
Not every campaign ends in the decisive afternoon engagement,
some of them are settled in a decade of arrangement
where the side that persists past the point of mutual exhaustion
takes the field by simply being present past the point of question.
The war of attrition is the war most men walk away from,
it does not have the glory or the single hour to stay from,
it is just the daily pressure and the daily reappearing
until the other side concedes because you never stopped adhering.
I fought one once against a competitor with deeper pockets,
they outspent me in three sectors and fired arrows and rockets
of capital and advertising at every position I held,
and I just kept showing up, kept building, would not be felled.
The war of attrition is the war most men walk away from,
it does not have the glory or the single hour to stay from,
it is just the daily pressure and the daily reappearing
until the other side concedes because you never stopped adhering.
Two years in, they reassigned the executives who ran it,
three years in, they abandoned the sector and planned it
as a write-off on their annual report, a clean divestiture,
I was still there when they left, that is the attrition literature.
The war of attrition is the war most men walk away from,
it does not have the glory or the single hour to stay from,
it is just the daily pressure and the daily reappearing
until the other side concedes because you never stopped adhering.