[1174] Work Sucks, I Know

Before I let the day get away from me, I very much need to write.

For about a month, I’ve done a handful of gigs from Instawork. They’ve involved being “event staff” for Taylor Swift concerts and, last night, Bands of America, where I dutifully manned an escalator for 7 break-less hours.I also broke down and loaded equipment after an international food-cooking and awards event. The displayed hours you’re supposed to work haven’t matched up once. The job descriptions are woefully incomplete or misleading. The pay is never higher than $18/hr, but more likely $14-$16. I live at least an hour away from the companies utilizing the app.

At the event breakdown, we were initially tasked with wiping down greasy, milk-spoiled heater rack containers, outside in the cold, with a handful of rags and sanitary wipes, and no running water. So, those didn’t really get clean. We mostly moved things like tables, boxes, mats, banners and poles, and cheap furniture from one side of the convention space to the other. There’s no formal leadership structure, so an emotionally unwell obnoxious guy who can’t help but to drag from his cherry cigar every few minutes might be “in charge” because he’s familiar to the client.

Now, you can be on your feet the entire shift, 8-12 hours. You can have no idea when/if you’re getting a break or be on break longer if they can’t proceed with something, say, because the union members need to complete a task first. You might have 5 to 10 not-really bosses who will pop up and question what you’re doing in any moment, like I did when, “I can’t have you sitting here on your phone” guy clashed with the girl who literally told me 2 minutes ago to go on break 2 hours into my shift. They might ask for volunteers for a position and then find out, because of the population they’re employing, 2 got fired an hour in, 1 is too high to work, and a family emergency pulled a supervisor back home, so can you shift over to another thing instead? Thank you for your help. (As though you’re not getting paid.)

I don’t know how other people feel, but I feel like trash. I feel like the left-overs that a company is trying to collect off plates and call a meal. It’s an entitled class-based feeling. The things I observe in these environments are typical of low-income work. It’s a tense, brooding, barely-contained chaos at all times. The expectation is to repeat, “It is what it is” and, “I give it up to God” ten thousand times until your shift is over.

As I was putting down a set of tables, a shelf edge hit the bridge of my nose. As I was walking with a large box, I shin-kicked a big black electrical device. I mangled my shins on a few other things during the warehouse gig. I wore callouses into my pinky toes and had sore feet for days after walking around in my only black shoes well past their expiration. I had an old-man hunch reminiscent of my grandfather when he used to go on walks.

Part of what informs feeling like trash is the lack of communication or clear expectations. When I first arrived at the Taylor concerts, they had us standing around for up to an hour after when we were supposed to clock in. That means you show up early enough to park 15 minutes away, walk to get there early, wait around for an hour, and then think you’re not getting paid. Yesterday, the clock-in supervisor explained she clocks everyone in at the shift-start time regardless of when we actually get out and start working. The missing clarity on this foments frustrated comments from others waiting and contributes to the overall poor-person angst.

The next is the details like being given a jacket you're not convinced was washed after last shift. It's them providing a hole-in-the-wall “break room” that’s a pass-through storage and large-equipment moving space, which, last night was left open to the cold so band equipment could be moved through.There’s one elementary-school seating table, the ones with the 8 circle attached seats that fold and roll, and maybe 15 people will be on break, so you can sit on the concrete, stand more, or chance an electrical box is sturdy. It's finding your own jacket on the floor after your shift because you had to leave it on a rack of everyone else's who can't be bothered to care or pick it up when they knocked it off.

You can feel each supervisor’s general exhaustion. The largest one had a conversation with someone that went like this,

“Are you already checked in? Why do you have a uniform on if you’re not checked in?”

::mumbles, silence, blank stare::

”Were you here earlier? Did you take your uniform home?“

::Points in the distance, mumbles something about someone who checked him in::

”Okay, but how do you have a uniform?“ ”Are you from the first shift?“

::Mumbles::

”Were you working earlier today?“

”Yes.“

”Okay, we need to get you checked out, go down there and turn stuff in.“

It was longer than that and the questions were asked several more times.

Then, like far too many things in modern life, you’re constantly being rated. If you show up early, do everything asked of you, but slip in any way or just rub someone the wrong way, you might open your app after an exhausting shift to find out you got a ”1-star“ rating, mocking you in the face of your otherwise 5-stars. You don’t know who it came from, why, but it’s an invitation to micro-analyze your every interaction with coworker and supervisor alike. It’s also a not-so-subtle suggestion that your job is eat shit, like it, and ask for more, not have any reasonable human expression about the conditions or chaos. To what extent these ratings have any real impact on whether a shift is offered to you or an employer is willing to hire is unclear, but you have no reason to assume the best.

Gig work is akin to “scabbing” to me. Each shift you’re undermining how your culture might otherwise approach labor, time, or what to do if you break your nose or ankle working for someone. You’re essentially constantly begging for mercy. You hope the tipper is in a good mood. You hope the spot you’d otherwise stand in for 8 hours has a chair. You hope you don’t get too hurt or looked at like a “problem” who can’t hang and deal. You hope that ambiguous 1-star rating won’t haunt you indefinitely. As such, you look for little reprieves.

The first day of the cooking competitions and awards, they were still taping while we were tearing things down around them. You, broke, having driven an hour and 20 minutes for maybe* $120, get to scrub spoiled-milk smelling containers, then pass by the scent of the best-smelling food all day. On day two, when filming is done and the cooking competitors are wrapping up their make-shift kitchen areas, if one passes you a world-class brisket, you’re going to eat it, and in my view, deservedly so. Of course, you’re then going to illicit a shitty comment about the “time crunch” (mysteriously absent until now) we’re under, and, “You’ve already had breaks,” from the also-gigging guy pretending to be in charge. What would the under-class be without petty internal squabbles about who is or isn’t really working* as they resent that you took 2 minutes to enjoy the luck of your cold scraps?

Each shift, I find talkers. I generally get people talking, so I’m willing to believe it’s a me thing, but each person comes with a large backstory, opinions, and way in which it really sinks in why this is the kind of work they are doing. There’s sometimes a baseline class-indicated short temper and aggression. It’s stories told through crooked or moldy teeth and bad breath. It’s lengthy theories and explanations for “the system” which, you know they haven't spent any real time or effort building a case for, but is on the back of personal experience, rumors, and cultural truisms.

I’ve been told cancer isn’t a real thing, been schooled on vaccines by someone who was adamant about their capacity to google. I learned of a gentleman’s chronic strained testicle situation that the military offered to pay to fix, but he was wavering because of how much he enjoyed smoking weed. I think I got him to understand how scary and consequential chronic pain can be though, so he might actually choose wisely after our talk. I heard a story of someone raped, ignored, abused and labeled, and forced to engage with her attacker every day for years afterwards. She now plots revenge and finds the strength to barely keep it together. There’s the guy who was retired from administrative work who just likes interacting with people and doesn’t want to sit at home. There’s the guy with, allegedly, 20 properties across Indiana and Ohio, some worth more than homes in Carmel, but for reasons I can’t discern was stuck, just like me, waiting for the endlessly self-congratulatory Avon marching band to get the fuck off the field and go home.

The handful of women, in particular, who could see the less-than enthused look on my face as the night dragged on who said something like, “Thank you for being here! I know it’s a long night!” I think this is what pissed soldiers off who get “Thank you for your service” lol. If you cared, you’d be polite and leave. If “The system” cared, it’d have me off at the stated time. If “society” cared, I wouldn’t resent having my time bled because I’d be getting paid enough and live close enough to where I work that I wouldn’t be getting home at nearly 3 AM. I would have had a break and snack in a basically acceptable space and not been left adrift indefinitely on no information. If you’re the kind of person to thank the tired or grumpy gig-worker after you’ve overstayed your welcome, you’re rubbing salt in the wound.

I’ve referenced several people with what I would consider debilitating conditions, in one form or another, from which I don’t suffer. I’m not sick. I’m not proud of what I don’t know or understand. Teeth aren’t rotting out of my mouth. I haven’t been raped, labeled an addict, and treated with naivety or ambivalence for years as I beg for help while my abuser mocks me in real time. I’m not even, necessarily, married to the nature of a gig style or environment, as I start back in towards my white-collar 40-hour space early tomorrow.

My goal, is never, to merely complain or lose perspective. If sitting around and waiting or driving late as though I don’t prefer to stay up all night, is the worst thing that happens to me for $150, no one’s crying for me. Therefore, my goal is to hopefully paint a picture of the nature of our cultural narrative disparities. The people at the bottom of the income, neighborhood, options, or general capacity to be much beyond frustrated meat to be shuffled around occupy an entirely different universe of expectations, language, and ultimately values that guide their decision-making.

If you ever presume to be “well-meaning” or a “problem-solver” or from a place, like Avon, where your band has more spent on it in a week than the person who helped you to your seat will make in a year, where would we even begin to bridge that gap? You don’t “fight for $15,” you demand $30. When you’re auditing, well first you bother to audit, where tax dollars are going, you’re investing in schools and healthcare. When you’re organizing, you start local with simultaneous lines into a broader federal or cultural vision. Then, you stay on that message and effort for decades.

I’ve been offered a dozen opportunities to view myself through the lens of the culture which breeds gig work. I’d be reasonable in walking away with a conclusion that my time doesn’t matter. What I know or whether I’m competent at my role is secondary to occupying the space in service to a performative agenda. Regardless of who I’m working with or where they are coming from, I will need to accept their “rating” and live in fear of unfair scrutiny and punishment if I get out of line. And the way to cope? Chronically engage in it, like you’re addicted, until you normalize the self-abuse. Silence and shit-eating become wise moral virtues. Criticism, not genuine criticism of an operation or “the system,” but of yourself, your others in your small ilk, becomes the self-corrective.

It doesn’t take some mastermind evil cabal to orchestrate things this way. Attention is limited in every human brain. Rich people are doing rich-people shit, not slaving away over how to cut you 1,001 times when 2 or 3 normative language strokes or business practices will set you to task cutting yourself indefinitely. It’s the same reasons and forces that find normative balance which undermine my faith that people will change or fight or better account wholesale. Trump got elected. People want to blow shit up. But Trump isn’t going to blow up the systems that keep them oppressed, just more of the extremely fragile things that barely contribute to keeping them going. Fuck, maybe ironically this is what provokes a proper revolution? I doubt it, but one can dream.

[1173] Workin' On The Railroad

I think I recognize a point of major confusion when someone is attempting to explain the “reason” they did something. We tend to think that a choice is discreet, or that one thing naturally follows to another. I choose to hit the cue ball into the 8 ball. Incidentally, we have an idea of the physics that will cause the ball to fall into the pocket, but it’s not predetermined. There’s an underlying chaos and probability matrix seemingly calculating indefinitely in real time.

I read once that to accuse someone of being a hypocrite was one of the weakest forms of both criticism and argument. The reason being, no one ever, ever, feels like a hypocrite. The moment a personally gratifying or sense-making opportunity is presented, a deeply personal choice gets made and the seeming contradiction is resolved by the new embodied person. You can see this during interviews with killers, or Daily Show maga man-on-the-street interviews. This is what every “modern religious” person does. It’s how I can “resolve” being a hyper-focused go-go-go-type person who maintains the capacity to sit around all day watching TV. We’re complex things.

This, I suspect, is where the wisdom of “hate the sin, not the sinner” came from. When we choose to be, we can be as discerning as we wish in painting a picture of the many things that influence behavior. You can love people in your family, it’s said, while you hate everything they do during the heights of their addiction, perhaps. I’ll refrain from speculating and dismissing the messy or haphazard definitions of “love” one might adopt there, but the superficial contradiction and hypocrisy are no less highlighted.

We have evolutionary systems that, one way or another, need the world to “make sense.” That is, you would not be here if your nervous system confused the sensations of pain and bleeding out with the taste of honey. So much of your being is attempting to resolve that sensibility with the abstract nature of language and ever-confusing nature of your experience.

I think I got considerably better as a thinking individual when I adopted an “all at once” and “yes, and” mentality about my power, motivations, intentions, and potential. It started with learning how to shit talk. You can’t become a good shit talker if you’re not observing the things about you that you would use on someone else to cut them down. If I didn’t know I had a receding hairline, big ass, or serial-killer beard when I don’t shape things up, it’d be really hard for me to make fun of you if the second you responded with one of those things I broke down.

No one or ten things you can pick out about yourself or someone else’s looks make the whole person, and the seasoned genuinely comfortable shit-talker knows this. They know it’s attractive to be funny and laid back. They know it’s cool to project power and intelligence or wit. They know that any deficiency they may have will pale in comparison to how someone next to them feels about themselves and what’s wrong with them.

Comics understand that trading barbs is a show of love. In a different context, with someone who doesn’t understand the culture and language, you might make someone cry. To them, you’re being mean, even if in your world you’re not even in a mean ballpark and are genuinely trying to connect. If you try to defend yourself and say, “No no no, I like you, that’s why I said your tits were saggy so be careful they don't get caught in the door jam!” Who says that to someone they like? You’re going to look like a hypocrite who claims to like someone, but says mean things to them. It’s entirely a product of a superficial understanding of where either person is coming from.

To me this feels like an area that’s both extremely personally familiar, but one that many people still misunderstand with regularity. I think the problem has only compounded with characters like Trump in our minds.

The comic who makes fun of you isn’t lying about where they come from. Someone like Trump is lying about everything all the time until it’s a transaction that personally helps him. And then, he’s still lying about whatever feeling he may express about you. He’s not gratified to know you, he’s gratified he got something out of you.

But what’s a frequent defense you hear from Trump’s apologists? “He’s just joking.” You have someone like Jordan Peterson trying to liken him to actual comics and claim they’re making the same kind of jokes. Absolutely not. One class of people are making jokes, professionally. When they step off stage they are normal-enough people with standards of conduct and a shared reality. It’s part of what allows them to reach the heights they do. Bill Burr hasn’t cut down and destroyed everyone in the comedy world like Trump cuts down and destroys everyone who doesn’t service him.

When you don’t want to accept the basic reality, you shift the conversation. You let the words mean something else. You move the goal posts until new norms of behavior and connotative baggage can be shaken or adopted.

There’s several thousand posts trying to explain why Trump got elected. The ones I caught, none avoided the trap of equivocation and nice, neat, or indignant summaries of familiar talking points. One person, Tressie McMillan Cottom actually and accurately spoke to the feelings that drive people on The Daily Show. The equation looks something like this:

Clock vibes –> Create excuse –> Call it “reasons” –> Passionately double-down –> Clock self-fulfilled prophecy vibes –> continue cycle indefinitely.

You know why the whole country moved towards Trump? We’ve been gagging on those fumes for almost a decade. No kid who grows up under that is going to fear fascism. Fascism is the new norm. No media that never learned how to cover or convey information in the first place is going to be a protective 4th estate. Our “norms” have only recently evolved to try and get used to surviving past our 30s. We can devolve into a considerably more ambivalent and blood-thirsty version of ourselves almost over-night. That’s the vast majority of our internal infrastructure.

I don’t want to drift too abstractly. You can stop the cycle at any point by just adopting better questions. You have to ask them of yourself and whomever you’re desiring to connect with.

Do you feel some kind of way when you’re discussing whatever the topic is?
 If you can’t recognize or own the feeling, it’s saying everything for you.

Can you recognize and accept whatever the last point I made was?
 If you are unable or unwilling to quote someone and recite back what they  said, you’re not talking to each other. You’re not sharing language or some  version of reality.

I suggest ceasing any conversation that can’t establish these two conditions if you’re genuine goal is to get somewhere useful and actionable.

One of the digressions I read from someone trying to front that they’re a “reasonable” split-ticket person criticized the border bill because of one out-of-context line about how many people it would allow into the country a day. To this person’s mind, they’ve got a reasonable criticism and wouldn’t vote for a bill that has that in it. The huge but, all bills are going to have things in them that one side doesn’t like. The fact that one came together at all, and was ready to be passed, and was deliberately tanked by the person you voted for says an incredible amount about how “reason” fails.

For that criticism to make sense, I would need that person to answer yes or no to a series of questions about the nature of my reality and perception of what a monumental accomplishment the bill was altogether. I’d also want to know their awareness of the history and context of our immigration issues against what the rest of the world is experiencing. What I’d discover within 2 questions is that this person has no idea how immigration works, what details needed to be negotiated, what future bills others were aiming for once there was a floor, etc. I’d also discover that they were not interested in those details fundamentally, because they’re engaged in backwards apologetics trying to justify a bad decision, not look to build reasons into one they think is good.

This kind of “reasoning” and behavior is something you see in social work constantly. I remind my clients often that there’s a huge difference between living in fear and avoidance, and living in an affirmative and accountable way. When they tell me, “I just don’t ever want to think about using again!” I tell them that’s building failure into their expectations. They’re going to think about using again. They’re not, yet, necessarily going to grasp the nature of their power not to do so. They’re not going to have an understanding and awareness of how their environment and self-talk and daily practices inform or impede their ability to reach years-later goals.

So it goes with everything we do. We live in avoidance of the psychological pain of superficial contradictions and difficult conversations with the forces that, having become too abstracted, we don’t respect as killing us. Fentanyl will drop you dead the first time you get the wrong dose. Rage? You’re not even angry…you claim. Fear? You like scary movies! You assert while I’m trying to talk about the consequences of you escaping an abusive dynamic. Faith? With god, all things are possible. Conveniently, “all things” in my head are something positive and not a global flood.

I’ve thought about taking as many posts as I can and sorting them into the categories of excuses, linguistic gymnastic rhetorical bins, and fallacies. It’s what I used to do back when I was “debating” religious ideologues. It’s the exact same mechanisms regardless of the topic of conversation. That’s what kinda kills and yet excites me, because it feels understandable and teachable. Michael Shermer has his books, but I don’t see enough people wrestling with the conversations in real time. I don’t see us as competent to both recognize and know how to redirect or call out in a way that keeps an exchange on the rails. Like, we don’t have a concept of the rails broadly.

I think for my purposes I need to continue speaking mostly to myself and my fleetingly small audience of people who aren’t reduced to reactionary pedantry when they pretend to understand what I’m talking about. If I can refrain from unironically engaging in the errant pissing matches as I’m searching for a compelling way to convert errant pissing matches into something useful, that will serve me best. We need more people demonstrating the value of methodically and purposefully approaching conversations while maintaining expectations for the nature of the exchange. This is incredibly hard to do, not least because I’m unsure how even most of the smartest and well-intentioned have the ability to recognize the problem.

[1172] Ooo Ooo Child

There’s a strain of rationalization that’s coming from the most “polite” corners of the “What really happened!?” podcast universe, TV hosts, and pundits I think is worth highlighting. Not because it’s more or less correct than any of the dozens of reasons that are somewhat true. I think it’s worth highlighting because it shows how bad we are at talking broadly or framing things in terms of genuine personal accountability.

The shorthand versions will sounds something like, “People really do vote on the economy.” Or, “If you tell them a man can now compete in girl’s sports, that really puts the fear of god in them.”

There are “obvious” indicators of what pisses people off. It doesn’t take long for a normal average person to think they don’t want a trans woman competing against their daughter. That’s throwaway simple for anyone but the ones who were in power and with the microphone. But, the issue isn’t the “real” issue. The issue is we are really really dumb when it comes to discussing or understanding what the science, if it has anything to say, is at all.

This happened with covid. Instead of saying, “We’re constantly collecting more data and will update you on what to do next,” they came in and mandated things catch-all style and then downplayed the consequences of the downstream effects. The problem wasn’t our “covid response.” The problem was an unwillingness if not sheer inability to message honestly and effectively about how the scientific process works and the reasoning behind an informed decision.

You know the problem isn’t the problem when old talking points still make their way into the excuse grievance narrative. People were still complaining about gas prices, for example. It will never sink in that presidents have nothing to do with gas prices, but even when they’re low, “gas prices” turns into “eggs” or the infinitely broad “economy.” “Inflation” is invoked, as though it’s not a global phenomenon and self-confessed consequence of opportunistic greed.

If you want to lay claim to the fleetingly small “rational” part of the human animal, you can’t dismiss the linguistic context within which they are operating. People do not know how to articulate what they do or don’t feel, think, like, hate, etc. The smart people don’t, the dumb people don’t, it’s just not a thing we do well, at all. This is how children of immigrants will vote to have their family members deported. This is why poor people will vote to have their taxes increased. They “feel” desperate and angry and are genuinely victimized. They glom onto the avatars of that. That’s not “rational.”

People “really” only vote on their feelings and impressions. There’s roughly a dozen people who will methodically calculate the policies and implications. I’ve felt, my entire life, at the ass-end of shitty republican policy that makes it hard to get assistance when I’m super poor, fucks with how much I should be paid for my time, increases my taxes, destroys the ecosystem, and endangers the lives of my friends. I don’t “feel” that, that’s their stated mission and regularly acted upon agenda. My new governor of Indiana was as complicit in the insurrection as they come. The Christians, the fascists, the ideologues of every stripe want you under heal.

This includes the oft-caricatured “radical Leftist.” The infinite sea of irony is that “the media” or the “proud” ones on the Right who own and make a show of that shittiest of all behaviors get to be viewed as more “honest” and “telling it like it is.”

NONE OF THESE CUNTS ARE TELLING THE TRUTH.

Worse than that, when you hear someone in the media say that exact same sentiment, or you get it reflexively from the no-information non-voter, they won’t be using it like I am. They aren’t going to be implying that we’re all scientifically and historically illiterate. They aren’t going to have a list of psychology and rhetoric resources for you to start gaining insight on your behavior.

I think back to economics classes. They literally presume a “rational consumer” who is going to make decisions about what to buy based on simple and boring calculation. They have the balls to then develop a whole mythology around this that you can major in, and then they wonder why people on the outside don’t trust their “expert” analysis of why prices or goods look the way they do. The theory behind democracy and having an “informed populace” suffers the exact same issue. There’s not simply too much information, it’s that to be “informed” you need to be able to trust the information altogether, do so for long enough to see and carry the consequences over time, and have a basic respect and defense for discerning truth and evidence in the first place.

We don’t have that. “The media,” wants clicks, not genuine information connecting and motivating informed behavior. “Public intellectuals,” personalities, influencers, and moralizers want money, attention, and to feel as special as they’ve always knew they were with their big brains and big hearts and ability to heard sheeple. As individuals, we’re not expected to live up to any standard beyond the ho-hum stupid fascism of our friends and families. So, what on Earth would make you think there’s a desire to “preserve democracy?” You don’t put any of your ideas up to a scrutinized and informed vote, except maybe occasionally where to go to dinner.

I already can’t count the amount of empty generalized platitudes the “adults” are offering to the people who are scared, desperate, and confused. We’re more prepared this time? Cool. We know what to expect? Right. None of us can individually cure a cultural psychosis. We’re all drinking from the same stupid language Kool-Aid. Our visceral instinctive reaction to any truth about the actual work and the descriptions and directions of where we need to go garners a doubling-down attitude.

Hey man, if you wanna stop doing that drug, you need to surround yourself with people who have many sober years and mindsets.
   Okay, fuck you, I can do this alone.

Hey man, if you want to connect with “the other side,” you need to recognize that your bleeding heart vibes have not once been curious as to the detailed Israeli operations.
   Fuck you! Genocidal maniac!

Hey man, when you don’t understand the science of fetus vs zygote vs embryo…
   ALL UNBORN LIVES MATTER!

The onlookers and “reporters” and pundits will remark on this dynamic as “People are deeply divided and have personal views they vote on as their one issue.”

Except, they’re all united by how unwilling and unable they are to process and parse information. We’re all very, very dumb and using superimposed narrative impressions to do the actual work for us. The language of modernity is our Suboxone or methadone. That is what we get when we go to our feeds and favorite “news” outlets. We get the script to not do the work.

We get the excuses so we don’t have to believe that every word we use, every disposition we bring into a space, and every thing we share or choose to stay silent or opine on matters. We don’t want that responsibility. We haven’t been taught how to wield it responsibly if we did. We don’t have the patience. We don’t see the point. “We” aren’t “me,” so what do you know? In the immortal words of a Surrounded idiot Trump supporter challenging an equally unhelpful Destiny, “Were you there?” Somehow, your infinitely limited, incomplete, and incoherent experience alone trumps everything, forever.

[1171] Kill Your Pets

I don’t know if I’ve tried this approach. I get heated. Like, I get taken back to childhood levels of dramatic emotion and readiness to break shit when I’m watching something that’s inverting words. If you were to take a quote from MLK Jr. or Nelson Mandela and slap it on a Nazi poster to somehow suggest they were on Hitler’s side, it’s that level of absurdity that still manages to get my blood boiling.

Academically, we’d talk about exploring “rhetoric.” It doesn’t matter if the words are true, just that they’re persuasive.

One of the major motivators that got me started writing was waking up to the nature of manipulation. I was into a girl who was in a typical bad relationship with an insecure boy that did all of the insecure boy shit that imposes guilt, intimidation, and control. As well, I looked at myself, and the relative ease with which I was able to navigate the world through smiling, jokes, or being generally cute. I’m also dispositionally a leader. It’s something people pick up about me immediately and is why I’m constantly asked to teach others, take supervisory or managerial roles, or am capable of maintaining order in a group counseling session.

Another way of stating this, say, even if I was a terrible leader, is that people are eager to thrust the responsibility of things onto me. This can look like blame for the worst things that might happen in a party environment if it's "my" house with 5 roommates. It’s, I would estimate, 99% of the emotional reaction I might illicit from someone after I’ve explicitly stated my assessment of their being if it's less than flattering. I’ve been told, as early as I can remember, some version and at some level that it is always and forever “my fault." Your perception of me is my fault, and as many consequences as you need to feel correct.

Now, this is absurd. We’re all to blame all the time, but that’s a specifically incomplete and unhelpful framing meant to equivocate instead of investigate.

There’s a way in which I would be extremely to blame, though. Let’s play out the thought experiment.

I recognize vulnerability. I know how insecure people are. I know how lonely people are. I know they’re looking for excitement, direction, novelty, and acceptance. They think they’re “weird.” They think they’re the only one who is going through their personal story of hell. These are all things I know explicitly and have watched play out in thousands upon thousands of people in one form or another. I don’t care about your job, title, friends, upbringing, I will locate what breaks you almost immediately. It made me an incredible DCS assessor and also lends itself to counseling because I know where not to step too aggressively.

What might I want from someone? Money? Sex? A bubble that affirms everything I say or do? Does it even matter what I want? Is it not already enough to consider me a terrible, evil person by just clocking what I know and finding the comfort and license to let the cards lie as they may?

So you can look for the ones that kind of like you or are intrigued by you. I catch more looks from chubby middle-aged women than windows do from window-shoppers. I make more people chuckle with my turns of phrase and random commentary than I can count. Now, I have your attention. I could ask 1 or 10 questions about you, and elicit months of ways to build rapport. I could innocently start inserting myself into your life, doing favors, picking you up when, again, you’re facing a problem that you and only you have ever encountered ever. And you need me to validate.

We don’t need to really share or talk about our dynamic. It’s something special. It’s crazy how we even found each other, right? Who knew that someone could see right through to your soul and become such a huge part of the directions you can start to see yourself going.

This, mind you, is how I witness a large majority of people’s “loving relationships” playing out. If you look closely at the details or listen to your mouthiest friend, he’s an emotionally abusive child and you’re a codependent internally-ever-crying mess. But damn if you don’t look passable taking a picture at the top of a mountain! The bible of cliches that lend themselves to a “happy marriage” is stapled to your tongue.

Okay, weirdly, we’re still only at the first few stages of how depraved this gets. You don’t really have someone until they’re not just doing things for you, but subverting their entire self in service to anything they even think you might want. That’s proper mind control. Do you want to go to your 9-5 every day? Of course you do, you have to pay the bills, feed the kids, keep your health insurance. Wait, why can’t you get those things any other way? You’ve been bred to follow a certain set of rules and order, so before you’ll learn anything about taxes or blame a billionaire, you’ll get a second and third job.

it’s not large accomplishment to get someone emotionally invested in you. That’s why it’s so cheap and easy to pick out the ones, like a cult leader, who will fuck you first and groom your future child brides. We’ve never established what the goal of doing all of this is because that’s also what makes it so nefarious. The goal is self-gratification and “because I can.” People who do this like this just wish to embody the fact that they’ve done it.

If you own a pet, you can snap that pet’s neck right now. You’d also probably get away with it. Why would you do that? It’s evil, unnecessary, ridiculous, you love it yada yada. Well, you’ve never done it before, and maybe you’re at a point in life where everything feels ambiguous and arbitrary, so, snap? The world doesn’t end. You don’t have to tell anyone. Your other cat doesn’t even blink.

Now, what if you did it because I told you I don’t really like cats. It doesn’t even live with me and I never see it. You’re just so in love with me, so convinced by the narrative we’ve been sharing together, and the emotions are so true and compelling. Is it even really a cat? Does it matter? Is there even a remote chance that I might notice your clothes have less and less cat hair over time, and that might make me happy?

If this feels far-out and gross, as far as I can tell, this is a 1 to 1 correlation of what apologists and con-men and ideologues are doing with every breath.

Who is to blame in this scenario?

If we have healthy minds, we’d instead be asking, at what point can you claim responsibility. When is the above scenario my responsibility? Well, I wrote it. From the jump. If the next time you see me and I’m missing a cat under suspicious circumstances, I can’t blame Trump, or my god, or some level of depression and existential angst. I choose to keep the little fuckers alive, and recognize and respect my capacity otherwise. If I don’t have robust, reliable, good reasons for keeping them alive, I guess all you can do is pray for them?

We’re going to spend, at least, the next 2 years trying to find anyone but us as individuals to blame for what may be the stupidest fascist takeover in history. Who killed my cat!? We will scream at anyone willing to listen. You did, bitch. You looked it dead in the eye, noted how soft its fur was, and with the smallest twitch, cracked that little bone that separated you from the monsters.

Every intellectual who’s out there lending their same awareness that I have to make excuses and apologize for Trump is killing cats left and right.

They aren’t doing the work of killing them though, you are. You tear down our ability to be safe, coherent, accountable, and human. You adopt their hyperbole in tern, you dutiful fulfill  your roles, real and imagined, that you think will service the dear leader.

Guess what, at that point, my work is done. All I have to do now is see how long I can last until I eat myself alive or someone capable of bringing consequences shows up. But, I’ve already established that people are incredibly and endlessly eager to thrust responsibility onto me, didn’t I? No one’s coming. If I don’t stop, it doesn’t stop. And why would I stop?

[1170] Chew Chew

I don’t actually trust, The United States in particular, but humanity broadly, to protect what got us this far. Few things highlight this distrust more than the Surrounded “debates” where online flame-wars get personal representatives. If Crossfire signaled a precipitous decline in how we conceived of meaningfully disagreeing, Surrounded seems to have found extra gasoline for the fire.

Let’s start broad, and try to grasp what it means to “share reality.” This is an ongoing foundational fight where we invoke the consequences of information silos from the internet, the language of academics versus “real America,” and where you exist on a dispositional spectrum from staunchly authoritarian conservative to adventurous brain-fell-out level of open-minded liberal. In a world that flirted with making sense, you could make the reasonable argument for both types working in concert in their respective lanes. But that no longer exists.

Surrounded presumes the same folly of the rest of our conversational landscape. It presupposes that everything can or should just “simply be debated.” It presumes a degree of good faith, capacity, and understanding. If 30 seconds into an hour-long series of increasingly incoherent exchanges you’re already dialed up to 11 and “I know you are, but what am I” or “Why won’t you answer the question?!” You’ve chipped that much more away from establishing a shared broader reality that isn’t the endless errant bickering and self-destruction.

I don’t trust us to protect what’s important because I’ve been in social work and regularly watch people commit self-righteous suicidal acts. Your body can absolutely become dependent on a substance, but I promise you what unites all addicts has nothing to do with their drug of choice. People who huff Trump are doing the exact same thing as those who downplay their meth use. Incidentally, so are the people who refuse to parse the word “genocide.” So are the people who refuse to act morally without consignment from their sky-daddy. So are the people who use smarmy pride to indefinitely avoid. If you read this last paragraph and felt yourself uncontrollably react…guess what.

When you kill your capacity to choose, opting instead to obfuscate, scapegoat, destroy, or ignore, first you kill yourself, then you kill the rest of us. This simple recipe can be enjoyed thousands of times a day. Every inflammatory picture that whizzes past your eyes. Every disconcerting interaction with someone not on your level. Every detail of the story about your victimization. You will have a permanent shit-eating grin massaged into your face, a dumbfounded brow, and a tone dripping in ravenous excuses.

Every high-minded concept like “democracy” and “rights” will be perpetually humbled by the human animal. It’s why your sky-daddies magically conform to the norms of a given era. Ramy Yousef gets to say in a stand-up special he doesn’t care if you’re a Jew…today. Jesus gets turned into a white guy. We’re gonna always default. I think those of us who can stay aware of this should find a kind of reassurance and simply build it into our models for trying to survive, if that in fact remains the goal.

Do I need democracy and rights if I can meet my needs other ways? This is at the heart of every rich person’s attitude and calculus when they’re co-opting a “populous” message. Bear in mind, you’re as “rich” as you are imaginative about your options. Can you make it to Colorado to have an abortion? Most people I know, sure. So, how important is bodily autonomy really? Do I live in a flood prone area? No? So, do I give a fuck if Florida drowns?

People are reluctant to say these kinds of calculations out loud, but again, they’re making them 1000 times a day, landing, roughly, and what they feel in any given moment. In a population that’s perpetually aggrieved, feeling victimized, angry, and proud of how stupid they are, you’re always going to land somewhere close to “Fuck them, I got mine.” What you have, more than anything, is a personal narrative of how correct and righteous you are. The hostility you’d adopt against that analysis? Perfect hostility, absolutely required. The only thing more perfect was Trump’s phone call looking for votes.

We genuinely have lost the distinction between what makes a plane fly and what gets your heart racing. I don’t think a species incapable of separating those two things will survive. I just don’t. I don’t think it is foundationally trustworthy, anymore than I trust my animals to stay out of the trash.

Our ship sailed when we lost the distinction between “expert” and “I saw it on facebook.” We jumped right over the cliff when we ignored the power brokers for the narratives they literally served us. We dug an inescapable hole when we refused to defend even basics of civility, accountability, and common sense. The game has been over for so, so long. I can’t count the amount of posts bragging that they voted for the first time this cycle after such and such pretend-reason.

I hate to say it, but I’m feeling more or less content to let it die. We’re built on a skewed-enough narrative about what America really stands for, and we’ve only invited an infinite sea of incoherence to continue bathing in. It’s just reaction against reaction against reaction against reaction until it all falls down. We don’t believe in anything. Those who do believe in something do so on no evidence besides feels and vibes. They feel like they want the power. They feel correct. They feel justified. Back and forth.

You’re not thinking. You’re not even trying to think. You’re not on a team or part of a coalition. You can’t name the game. You do not, fundamentally, at all accept the nature of life and death. It’s all a series of personally gratifying abstract concepts that fuel your self-conception. You do not actually give a fuck about anything else but you. That’s why Trump is your president. You will not, under any circumstance, concede and sacrifice what you must to wield the kind of power that de-fangs excuse-ridden authoritarian behavior. Now, again, you get to experience how it makes you pay.

[1169] Chugga Chugga

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel satiated in reflecting on the dumpster fire that is my country, but in the meantime, the thoughts continue to flow.

I see a lot of parallels in my daily life map onto the broader culture. I’m someone who pursued his dreams. I did so while engaged in conversations with people who never intended to, but said otherwise. When my friend group got drunk together in college and talked about trying to build off grid or how we would respond to an economy that was not hiring nor paying adequately, I saved the money to buy the land. I didn’t know how much I was taking for granted, for years, as I entertained the idea of a future where we would work together, stay close, and certainly drink less, but keep the good times rolling.

The first thing I took for granted was that people meant what they said. I’ve often maintained something of an outsider status, usually as an outgrowth of my “blunt” assessments, comments, or expressively shared perspective. I genuinely thought I had a tribe for the first time in my life. I thought, “Oh, this is how normal people get together and accomplish things or support each other.” I thought what made us friends initially, kept us partying together each weekend, or what ensured it was cool to wander between our houses or apartments without knocking was robust and reliable.

I don’t know that there was any way to really grasp how far down a “words don’t mean anything” rabbit hole we existed at culturally during that time. My cohort discovered and was bored by 4chan by sophomore year. There’s no way to measure the amount of insincere detached irony that I suspect must have glazed everything. Sophomore year was the first year we were introduced to Sarah Palin, who I’ve always considered a harbinger of doom and too-telling about the nature of the country.

As relationships got strained, and the frequency with which you had to prevent yourself from gagging when someone said “adulting” increased, it became easier to feel how things were breaking down. Each event or invitation was either sparsely attended or turned down. “Secret” conversations and resentments built up. “Real life” was kicking in, I guess, and all of the workshopping and noticing during college resulted in unnecessary suffering of the ongoing consequences. Most people found under-skilled roles, rented overpriced places, used pets as surrogate children, and stopped even pretending to care about what you were up to.

I’ve listened to my dad talk about his sense of community growing up in the harbor and East Chicago. Neighbors helped each other and talked all the time. My grandparents supported single mothers, sent the kids to do chores, and bonded through the church. I’ll listen to older comedians and actors allude to their upbringings that ring similar bells of community, consistency, and support. It seems that anyone who’s gotten somewhere appreciable had a village.

Almost everyone my age that I knew had divorced parents. Almost everyone was tens of thousands in debt in order to go to school. Almost everyone waited until their 30s to have kids.

Let’s not skimp on parallels. There’s a reticence to actually solve problems. When you have an issue with someone, gossip, don’t bring it to them. Don’t weigh evidence. Go to the extremes of your emotion, assume, and carry on in self-righteous indignation for the bogeyman you’ve built.

I witness a “silent majority” all the time. It’s a majority of people who are too afraid to unionize. It’s a majority who throw up their arms and say “it is what it is.” It’s a majority who are literally silent upon every invitation to share their actual truth about how someone or something is hurting them. The majority believes in the performance. The majority wants to “help,” by virtue of saying, no, seriously, just how much they really really do. We are fundamentally not accountable, dishonest, and in denial about how much we hate and aren’t helping - at all.

I’ve talked endlessly about how many things I hate. I don’t do it blindly. I pick hate for things I think are worthy of hate. “Hate” is an approximate word and sensibility that combines a lot of negativity towards things that destroy my sense of self, ownership, potential, and dignity. I hate getting paid so little. I hate when people who profess to be friendly or truthful disappear or tear me down and take advantage. I hate excuses. I hate people who will, always and forever without irony, use demonstrably untrue and ignorant examples in their dance to justify their own hatred. That is, I don’t need to pretend or make anything up about the things I would point to to hate.

I live in one of the shittiest states, Indiana. I’ve watched them close schools and healthcare options. I’ve watched hundreds of clients who need life-saving care get neglected and saddled with impossible scenario after impossible scenario year after year. There’s “jokes” about how polluted The White River is. Our “senator” was part of the fascist coup and just became governor. We have incredibly shitty roads, almost no public transportation, were the poster-children for meth (although, so many states compete for that title), we’re a right-to-work state, we have the attorney general who wanted to criminally pursue the doctor who helped abort for the raped little girl who came from Ohio.

I submit that any and all horror stories going forward are blips in the sea of the poisoned ocean of our cultural zeitgeist. We don’t get better until we actually get better, or enough of us die that something new can grow. The ambivalence is also a symptom. The fact that you can say, proudly, always so proudly, that your vote doesn’t matter, that you don’t care, or that it doesn’t concern you tells someone like me that the game was over long ago. There is no “persuadable” battle because you’ve converted into a religious hopeless ideologue. You preach a certain gospel of complicit absurdity.

Every for-profit healthcare and addiction counseling company does not care about you. They care about keeping your insurance tied to their automatic billing. Thousands and thousands of people will tell you otherwise. You, desperate, lonely, addicted, exhausted, will burst through the doors and testify to how a company like Groups Recover Together “saved your life” by teaching you how to depend on them and Suboxone instead of heroin. You’ll be alive, but will you? You’ll say the things you’re supposed to say, but will they mean anything? How do you “reduce harm” for someone actively on fire where a discussion of water doesn’t exist?

This is the failing of government. Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, NAFTA, Citizen’s United, The Supreme Court capture. The actual solutions to these things have only been flirted with by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and a few members of “The Squad” when they’re not busy apologizing for religious zealotry. You don’t combat the proud seizing of power by “debate” and “negotiation.” The Nazis and the Japanese needed to be bombed into oblivion at the time. You are currently up next to suffer similarly if you refuse to understand why.

When you’re “fighting for $15” when the wage should be $25, you’re a fucking moron. When you’re wallowing in despair, instead you should be organizing a learn-party who tries to grasp what it means to be at the mercy of religious conviction that would march for 50 years until it could overturn Roe v. Wade. When you feel yourself getting smug and dismissive, it’s your first clue you’re missing a piece of the perspective puzzle that will unlock a way to meaningfully change something in a better direction.

I’m as annoyed by If Books Could Kill’s treatment of Sam Harris and Steven Pinker as I am Peter Boghossian of caricatured leftists. I think Bill Maher cozying up to hateful ignorance has the same downstream effect as Tony Hinchcliffe and Andrew Schulz normalizing the facade of “we’re all friends here” and “both sides.” We all pretend we’re as rich and famous as these people who will, in no way, suffer the reality of the decisions. You think the vast majority of celebrities and “intellectuals” weren’t the first ones out of Europe as war loomed?

We’re not all friends. It’s not what we should be normalizing. We don’t all have the same standards, or any standard at all. You’re not speaking to who you think and they don’t understand what it takes to preserve and protect and celebrate. The disconnect is as real and wide as it could possibly get. We’re in a sea of fanatics with their own isolationist infantile grasp of the playing field. Even if they’ll never choose to accept or understand that, they’re all smug. They’re all proud. They’re all hyperbolic in their language. You can adopt the heuristic that remains extremely skeptical and on guard when you meet people who are performing that act.

I don’t know how much has to die. It certainly feels like so much, but perhaps it’s not too much. Perhaps it’s just a necessary conclusion on the road of infinite revolutions. Maybe the water needs to be so poisoned the only ones who live will be those who choose an AI-generated inoculator. Maybe a third of the population needs to grow up in their parent’s basement, sexless, tiki-torched and decked out in camo before you’ll discover how to fire back. Maybe your best friend or sister has to die during perfectly preventable pregnancy complications. I don’t think any of it will work to clue you in, because it’s not about any given perfectly foreseeable atrocity. It’s about you, and you’re perfect just the way you are.

[1168] All Aboard

I'm really struggling to believe in anything. This is a fairly longstanding tradition, but it manifests as anxious butterflies during what I perceive to be key inflection points. I’m familiar with being constantly, chronically, fucked with. I am intimately aware of what it feels like to feel absolutely helpless indefinitely. It taught me how to become a bully. It showed me I can functionally black out and numb all pain during a violent reaction. It rendered everything worthwhile and good about me as something to pick at, ridicule, or resent. I’ve teetered on the edge of ending up in prison or hospital before I figured out how to put words to what was happening in me.

None of us can predict the future. I don’t think anything is predetermined, nor do I believe in fate or karma. I might invoke them jokingly or colloquially, but I think at bottom, so much of the best and worst things that happen to any of us are a direct result of choices. They might be choices made under duress. They’re almost certainly choices made with so little information it’s hard to conceive how it’s appropriate to invoke “choice” at all. A choice, by definition, is going to be a binary proposition. You affirm, or you deny. You bring into your awareness, or you eschew further contextualizing. Our brain automatically shortcuts most information in service to this process.

I can tell an extremely damming and deliberate story about how I’m in a decadent 2024. I can point to instances from history that kicked off the degradation of “the middle class,” our education systems, our sense of civic duty, etc. I can point the finger at the internet and the technologies we can’t wrap our ape brains around. I can cite heart-wrenching story after story of the consequences of being intellectually lazy, personally indignant, and in denial about the depth of hatred and fear. I can blame. I can explain away. I can hedge. I can intellectualize and attempt to stomach how all of the stuff “out there” isn’t really what we are or who I am.

And it would all be a lie. It would be a lie that others around me would be eager to celebrate and expand upon. It would be the kind of lie that would keep me divorced from the nature of how I utilize my hatred and my exhaustion in service to taking less accountability than I could. Because my shock and horror are too intense or morally righteous, when I condemn, when I seek to destroy, it would be okay. This is the mind of a fascist.

It’s 12:30 AM on Wednesday after election day. Again, millions of people have sat out. Millions of people have celebrated rape, racism, greed, pride, indefinite 4chan-esc detached irony, and the wholesale lack of accountability. It’s the rot everywhere. It’s the one thing that truly unifies us all. We’re all correct. We’re all entitled to our tears, our hatred, our means of acquiring whatever we want in whatever way we discover. Steal? Why not, I’m just smarter. Kill? Negligently ignoring something is soooo many syllables.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the women who have already died from the abortion rollback. It’s peak insanity. It’s peak Christo-fascist power and control. The smartest, most empathetic and best-equipped people and healthcare tools sit idle as those in power threaten prison and fines for helping. It doesn’t get worse. It just gets more frequent. That’s something I don’t think really sets in for people who wish to point at any individual tale of woe or absurdity. It’s already, right now, as bad as it can get mentally, in how we talk about it, and how we aren’t approaching fixing it.

I remind myself regularly to not be a reactionary. I don’t want to just sit in my fear and pain and speculation. That’s what was happening as I watched the country maps turn red. As I watch the numbers in support of detached yet vigorously hateful and spiteful ignorance march its way forward once again. Pride comes before the fall, and I can think of no one more proud than the people who apologize for belief systems and representatives that mask and hide the broader reality of consequences.

Van Jones famously said Trump was a “white lash.” I think he was dead wrong. The whole country was denying the story of how their needs weren’t being met, denying themselves a chance to own their complicity, laziness, hatred, and insecurities. You’ll hear often about “the extremes” of “either side.” I would put to you that you exist as an extreme of what those people put into action. You can be extremely lazy and feeling intellectually inferior. You can be extremely entitled to your “small town” views that don’t concern themselves with anyone but you and yours. You can be extremely angry and indignant that something didn’t go your way. The story of how your extremes manifest are as individual as it gets.

If we need a heuristic, you can look at voting. I’m the kind of person that can literally never justify endorsing Trump. Him as a person is antithetical to everything I try to be. I don’t want to be “rich” like him, slap my name on everything, sexually abuse women, fuck my family, lie with every breath, provoke and incite violence, pretend to be ambiguous about my relationship to explicit hate groups, cozy up to dictators, find myself getting supported by people like Ben Shapiro or any sycophant building their brand on the right. The “reasons” people use to vote for him are overwhelmingly incoherent lies. He is their representative.

I mention Shapiro because he’s the fanciest dancer claiming to support Trump’s policy independent of everything he’s ever said or done otherwise. This, again, is how fascists, apologists, extremists pretend to think. Provided there’s something “bigger” or “practical” or “the real goal,” everything, your death and ruin included, gets sublimated in service to it. Why protect the planet when Jesus is on his way back? Why quibble over poor people having rape babies or women controlling their bodies when we’re gonna return to the ways of God? Why trust the science of vaccines when I have a right to kill you when I’m in power? This is the conclusion, the unyielding ambivalence in service to selfishness.

We get Trump because we deserve Trump. We’ve been trying to have a mythical future that refuses to directly combat the forces that broke our government. We’re suffering the fissures of recycled propaganda. We don’t teach in compelling ways. We don’t hold people accountable. We don’t model behavior. We don’t reign in our worst impulses. It’s all wish-fulfillment. What was Kamala going to do with a broken Senate and wholly corrupt Supreme Court? Trump faced no consequences for encouraging people to kill people. What do you think is really and actually going on in your country? You haven’t conceded what’s really been lost anymore than Trump did the last election.

Hope is fickle. Change is arbitrary. We’ve only demanded the performances of each other, not the work. We’re all addicts at the group meeting carrying on like its fun and games and our lives are going so smooth since we found each other. 5 seconds after we leave we’re screaming at the people in our lives, crying over our circumstances, and building more chronic conditions for which to seek an addictive fix.

You hate as deeply as any fascist Trump supporter, as any “Christian,” as any “religious” nut job talking a million miles an hour like Shapiro constantly justifying justifying justifying because the fact of their limited, scared, irrational beast at the heart of their behavior can’t be contended with. They don’t own it anymore than you do, it’s just their time to be attaching language to the nature of the self-destruction. What did the Left do? Reacted with DEI, defund the police, and trigger warnings. They didn’t figure out how to get Bernie in charge, they looked for the next coolest victim narrative to attach their identity to.

It’s hard not to feel like we deserve it. We deserve to keep dying for no reason. We deserve to keep talking in circles with fanatics. We deserve to eat the scraps of oligarchs and submit to wage slavery. We are addicted to the grind, consumption, excuses. We want to hear the same story every day and feel proud and confident in each recitation and share. We want the awkward, evil, rich bullies to win, because those are our gods. That is who we wish to be in a world that’s treated us so unfairly by asking for anything accountable.

I’m not giving myself to the fear, ignorance, and hatred no matter how often it’s on offer. I own the hatred I have for fascists of any stripe and era. I will never be okay with the patterns of thought and behavior, so, so smug, and confident that bring nothing but shame and embarrassment and death. I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand or feel like they do. I’m going to take what I feel, and choose to operate like someone knows his power and responsibility, even in the maddest of worlds. Maybe in a generation or two, if I last that long, my example will mean enough to be of better consequences than the ones I’m suffering.

[1167] Players Gonna Play

I’ve been wanting to write about my experience temping for the Taylor Swift concert at Lucas Oil Stadium since the moment I arrived. It’s Monday, after 3 days of walking the perimeter and collapsing lines in the world’s worst shoes. It’s a little after 5 PM, and I can honestly say for all of the thoughts I wanted to explore about class, privilege, and the specific conversations and interactions I had, the loudest thought right now is still, “I’m tired.”

My first job was in a movie theater. This role brought me back there. Crowd control is the same, as well as the clothing requirements. The, extremely soft until a cop shows up, power to move people around. The ones I worked with ranged from groups of, what appeared to be high-school, but maybe college, athletes to people with the kind of standing aggression and swagger of growing up in lower-income neighborhoods. There’s the grungy white guy with dreads, varieties of neck tattoos, and snap-to-attitude when a moment highlights the nature of their underclass status.

The first day, it was chaos. You enter the stadium area via escalators at the end of a large hallway and convention center. Another long hallway connects to a staging room where just beyond you either enter the grounds, or go up into the main lobbies. There were over a hundred people milling about, either temping through different agencies, or part of the previously mentioned athletic groups. There were regulars who were scouted and picked out of the crowd to join teams with supervisors who liked them. One younger gentleman got called out by the fattest and looked-most-in-charge guy who aggressively said, “You got white shoes man, those ain’t gonna work!” He was subsequently still hired on for the day.

The Insta-work app portrays the role as being from 2:30 PM until 2:00 AM. You’re expected to show up early so you can clock in on time. I learned our particular temp agency was the lowest status step-child. This means everyone in that room got checked in, their credentials, shirt, and walked to their positions before we were allowed to. This meant if I got there at 1:45 the first day, I stood in place until almost 3, or just after, each day, before I was officially clocked in. These kinds of things are the first cuts in death by a thousand.

The “attitude” of the space stuck out to me. I’ve been decently white-collar for the last few years. There’s an, often enough disingenuous, light touch and politeness that I’ve come to take for granted in those spaces. I noticed my “pleases” and “thank yous” and “yes ma’am or sirs” existed in isolation and felt mildly “wrong.” When I smiled and softly said to teary-eyed scammed hangers-on that they needed to leave from meandering about the gate, behind me was my supervisor, literally yelling, “Get up, keep moving, get off the premises!” Often, they were moving and readily compliant, and still met with his approach. The generalized complacent exhaustion of people consigned to their roles in life blanketed every moment.

Leaving aside the quasi-self-imposed pain of the wrong shoes. the job is extremely easy. You’re either standing scanning in tickets, or saying the same handful of things over and over about where something is located. At first, no one told me where anything was located, so I misdirected people as to where the floor seats entry was, along with a large portion of the other staff. Before we ever got started, we were expected to just literally stand around and hang out, in total for about 2 hours before we had any kind of task to carry out, lending itself to the story of why they wouldn’t bother to clock us in on time.

Now, I’ve heard as much as anyone about Taylor Swift and her concerts. Beyond perhaps a larger portion of people willing to dress up, in general it felt very normal. I got some bracelets. The people were mostly in good spirits. But, there is a dark side underbelly that weaves its way through the sea of synchronized claps and “There’s a lot going on right now” T-shirts.

Dozens of people got scammed. The stories all involved tickets that were sold twice, obtained fraudulently, or bought from “Stubhub, or, not Stubhub, but facebook Stubhub,” which, of course, isn’t a thing. I heard the bemoaning of lost dollar amounts from $2,000 to $9,000. Girls pretending to flirt with me. People offered cash for my jacket. A couple wanted to get loud and fight and “see the policy” that said they had to move from lingering outside. One girl broke down, fell to the ground, and had a seizure when it was clear they were scammed and not getting in.

Incidentally, as I was walking to my first shift, one of the loading pages for When We Were Young festival said I was in. Two years ago, I had 7 browsers open that took 2 hours or more for one to allow me onto the page to buy a ticket. I planned to do the same thing this year before I took the shifts. So, because obviously, right as I’m about to go in, I have to navigate what is often a stressful, time-sensitive, and buggy-as-fuck process from my phone. I fail 3 times to pay for the tickets, and think I’m fucked until they announce day 2. I manage to still select the 4th tier, more exploitatively priced, tickets, and throw them on layaway. The show isn’t until October of next year.

Taylor might almost be more popular than every band that will be at that festival combined, if only because they all get 2 days, she got 3 just in one city. These people are such big fans and willing to be desperately crying and wandering the premises that they haven’t looked for a ticket or discovered the fraud until now? The nature of Ticketmaster and reselling hasn’t made it’s way into the broader culture knowledge bin yet?

I think it’s incredibly important to set the stage of both I, and every Taylor Swift concert-goer’s environment. We’re, extremely, decadent and privileged. I’m working a temp job, but I still feel well within my rights and capacity to spend a few hundred dollars on a trip, and capable of paying off debt. These people paid $1500 minimum for each ticket to fill up a football stadium. The ones who looked for and found tickets up to 2 or 3 hours into the show, paid anywhere from $2000 to $6000 for a half hour or hour from the worst spot on the floor or random nosebleed. Does anyone have that much sympathy for anyone willing or capable of throwing that kind of money around like that? They certainly don’t project it towards me and my debt or indulgences.

I can only speculate what it’s like to live a life like that. I’d be drawing on my experience of yelling, “You can go to any line, even if you have a bag, disregard the sign” directly into someone’s face, and they, after having locked eyes and nodded along respond without hesitation, “But what if I have a bag?”

I feel like you must have that, I want to use the word “impossible,” lack of self-awareness and attention in order to operate at the level that doesn’t think twice about spending thousands for a ticket, that you never tried to get well in advance, hundreds more on merch, alcohol, and maybe a limo ride to the stadium, and when presented with clear loud instruction…what? What is it you’re doing besides responding like a barking dog with no grasp as to what’s happening around you? But the sign! BUT THE SIIIIIIGN!

Many people laughed and responded quicker when I eventually discovered saying, “The sign is a lie!”

It only took until the end of the first day for the people in charge to recognize what I bring to any role I take. I was assured I would work the next two days regardless of my “technically” “paid backup” status. A supervisor picked me out of the crowd on day 3. The importance of what I take for granted as “the basics” get highlighted in those environments. Are you basically decent in your disposition? Did you follow the, albeit woefully incomplete and slightly changing or contradictory instructions as you were given them? Could you be trusted to not look painfully bored and distracted even when there wasn’t that much to do?

Taylor concerts are long. As someone who’s been to 170-something in the last 3 years, I had a lot of them to compare the crowds to as they were leaving or leaving early. This quasi-religious event mostly seemed to exhaust people. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have fun, but it does mean I felt myself feeling suspicious about the motives and headspace of the many fans. Broadly, you wouldn’t necessarily think someone who’s way too into a band or artist is particularly mentally well. But Taylor has a culture built around her that reminded me of The Dead. It’s gross to dance barefoot in unidentified moisture, and makes me uncomfortable when everyone around you carries on like it’s cool or normal.

There’s a lot of normalized pathological behavior and attitudes that come with wealth or just too much money for you as an individual to know how to utilize it effectively. That’s baked in to the “joke” written on the T-shirts about how much dad had to spend for tickets. I started saying that you’re either living in a way too comfortable place, or way too darker than we wish to imagine place in being part of that crowd.

I say this as someone who has spent, at his peak, $1800 for 4 days of “Owner’s Club” at Rockville last year. Back then with my job, that was about 1 paycheck, and I don’t have kids or more than $5000 a year in must-pay bills, so I understand how enough people can arrive at a place where the high cost still makes a certain kind of sense in their life. It’s harder to understand if you have rent, a mortgage, or “keep up with the Jones’s” kind of life. I’ve never had a crazy-high end paying job, so I’m sure there’s plenty wiping their ass with thousands I could barely imagine.

You just kinda realize that it’s not about her? These people didn’t look or sound any happier or “better” than the people I’ve been around at $15 shows. It’s generic to say that people want to belong to something, and even trying to frame it in terms of “people” doesn’t distinguish seizure-girl from out-of-touch mom from 20-something daddy’s-girl who clearly doesn’t appreciate where the money was coming from. If the tickets were 1/3rd of the price, and that money went to paying everyone on the grounds double, and people who were fans who could never afford one currently were as prevalent as hedge-fund children, like, wouldn’t “the world” be better off? Why do we have to swallow Ticketmaster monopolies, subsidized and greedy sports-stadium practices, exploitative temp agencies, and the general aggressive resentment yet ambivalence that comes with knowing, deep in your soul, and with practical penalties, you don’t belong in the bowl.

I envisioned poor kids sneaking in and peering through cracks at a coliseum while I was there. You never see, at least in movies, someone coming over and throwing the kids off the wall. Today’s kids might be a touch more dangerous, but I think there’s something to the notion of music and an alleged community built around it doing as much as it can to foster and expand. I know in Seattle she set up a whole system so people could watch from the parking lot who didn’t have tickets. I know she gave her whole crew major bonuses. How do we get more of that from everyone everywhere who has the power and money? If we’ll never be able to matter-of-fact expect them, when will we get around to compelling?

[1166] Bye The Numbers

When I was a kid, my mom was shopping around for a church. For a few weeks, we’d try different ones, some we literally couldn’t stop laughing and making fun of as we sat in the pews, one that felt like a YMCA with the different activity rooms and mega-church-wanna-be vibes. I wandered into what was a kids playroom and those vegetable cartoons were playing on the TV. “We are the pirates, that don’t do anything.” I’m 36 years old, and that line still bugs the fuck out of me. It feels like a summary of the several books I’d need to write explaining my problems with “religious” thinking.

Whatever one wants to accept in regarding the modern era as having a “meaning crisis,” I think words still mean things. I think pirate means something. A pirate was my school mascot. Pirates of the Caribbean is a franchise so popular it can be bled for attention and money indefinitely. You can get a grounded and historical view of pirates and how Thomas Jefferson handled them. What pirates aren’t, are shitty lyric-singing entities that “don’t do anything.”

Religion is a process that is designed to turn Truth, into truth. It gives you a personal truth. It let’s you invert words. It lets you empower your feelings and create substructures of reality that do the heavy lifting where you’re unwilling or unable to find the personal responsibility. A pirate is a rapist, murdering, thief who has no business in being associated with children. The caricature and theft of the word “pirate,” can go anywhere at any time for any reason, like becoming my school mascot.

Now, I’m someone who understands and does not have some kind of visceral emotive reaction every time a concept is seemingly misappropriated. I don’t care in some kind of aggrieved nerd way about protecting IP or cannon when it comes to cultural expression broadly. I care about the ability to recognize what’s happening when you do so as a matter of habit across different contexts. I care when you get stuck in a “religious mindset” about something, oh, I don’t know, like one that wants to obliterate the word “genocide.” Or one that habitually downplays the spirit and nature of fascism.

I’ve heard a lot recently, from debates between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson to discussions with Peter Boghossian and what sounded like a brilliant and articulate scholar and yet horrifying Christian apologist Wael Taji Miller. It’s the notion that we’re “all Christian,” in the broadest sense of Western values. You’ll get soundbites of someone like Dawkins “agreeing” even as he’s trying, hopelessly, to keep the conversation grounded in “yes” or “no” answers to things like “Was Jesus born of a virgin?” No one should have trouble answering that question, yet, in the obfuscating equating substructure of religious apologetics, “was” “Jesus” “born” “of” “a” and “virgin” all mean something so convoluted and contradictory to match the mores of his individual sense of self, Jordan has to pause, answer with a another question, belabor the mythology, etc.

This is something I think is most damaging and painful to think about when it’s literal scientists who practice the same behavior. You won’t find a better explainer for some highly complicated topic like gene expression or chemical bonds, and then they’ll wedge some sentiment about god in there for …antagonistic effect?

There’s a lot of problems when it comes to how you market and teach information. They don’t get easier when your motivating principle is the one like social media has adopted of “engagement.” How you engage, for how long, what content, what it’s doing to you, none of that matters. Religious thinking was our first attempt at creating a social media company. *Have you heard the good news? Now you can connect with anyone, anywhere, and be united forever if you just sign up and follow these rules that violate your autonomy, privacy, and capacity to think freely beyond emotional manipulation.

I think, literally, you can’t even recognize what I’m talking about unless you’re someone hyper-concerned about things like “rhetoric” and “apologetics. For your average person, I don’t think those are words they’ve ever used, let alone can define. Unless I’d fallen down the “new atheist” rabbit hole as a teenager, I doubt I’d have many occasions to use them in spite of my academically-inclined disposition. You don’t go to church to hear about the “reasoning” behind “love thy neighbor,” it’s just more or less demanded of you, in spite of your actual, practical, ability to do so.

And here’s the most confusing and insidious layer, because actual, practical, abilities of money, group-think, and cultural influence manifest explicitly for people. When “the church” helps you rebuilt after a fire, you give zero fucks how many little boys they want to rape when you’re back in your bed and so thankful. When “the church” runs the food bank, it may as well be Jesus personally stuffing the nearly-expired food down your family’s throats. The cultural zeitgeist and landscape, therefore, gets considered “Christian.” You’d think we were the only species to share food.

I think everything good and contributing to our survival is derived from evolutionary, reactive, processes, and as our intelligence grew to protect us from deadly consequences, we’ve let narrative arcs supplant harsher forms of natural selection. You want a girl basically pledged to you since birth? Stay in your religion. “Women’s rights” aren’t really a thing, because “rights” aren’t a thing, because “your right” is whatever “you are right about” within the confines of irrational-yet-(co-opted concept)rational religious behavior.

Religious thinking always wants it both ways. They want the excuse, but to claim the responsibility. They want the reason, but the infinite sea of irrationality that justifies. They want the power while claiming victimhood. They want to be of consequences at all costs while maintaining they’re just following the rules.

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg

The section below I wrote a week or so ago and never completed. It was what was bubbling for me to arrive at the above.

If there’s one thing I wish “we” as a “culture” would learn how to do, it’s quantify.

I think about how much gets lost in the weeds of rhetoric and emotional appeals. Why, ever, in a modern environment would we be so compelled by a “strong man” or any narrative that is explicitly disinterested in context? Personally, I’m so rarely moved by emotion just as a probably-autistic person that I’ve watched my entire life situations compound and explode utterly baffled by why no one was willing to even nod in the direction of the greater reality or circumstances.

I do think this is an outgrowth of the psychological apologetics we engage in to protect religious thinking. When your faith claims come in the form of “absolute truth” instead of “practical necessity,” to my mind, literally anything goes. Up means down, wrong means right, just like an animal reacting in any instinctive way to circumstances it doesn’t understand. I see nothing more reliably consistent than this across environments. “Smart” people do it. “Rich” people circle their wagons. Any time you get two people together who desire to feed off the other’s excuse-making energy, we default to our basest animal that justifies compounding deadly sin.

This is where things that aren’t complicated get to be played at indefinitely as though they are complicated.

I’m not a thought or word police person. I do think, fundamentally, comedians like Tony Hinchcliffe get to say bad jokes as often as their career can handle. I don’t think jokes, in and of themselves, and especially coming from professional comedians, are the thing that “pollutes” the public discourse or “harms” and “endangers” people. That’s not what a joke is nor the function of a comedian.

The massive, under-stated and under-appreciated problem, is when you adopt fascism. Fascism is religious fervor played out in more directly and practically implicated ways against a particular group. Fascism empowers an individual to double down on deadly sinful behavior. When you “just do you” next to or in service to fascism, you’re no longer what you were the moment before you made that choice. Every one of a fascist’s generals were otherwise “normal” people with held-harmless jobs and lives until they started playing into and normalizing the depravity. The ones that survived immediately tried to return to that normalcy, some being tried at The Hague decades after because…you don’t get to.

We entertain an endless stream of disingenuous and completely vacuous conversation around what is or isn’t “dangerous” and “harmful” that doesn’t count things. We even pretend to count! In forming a narrative around our particular oppression, when in context, tells the exactly opposite story. We just don’t count the money and what it does. We don’t count the people getting directly negatively affected by a policy. We don’t count the time it does or does not take to engage someone and persuade or inform them. We don’t break it down into a cold and useful calculation like an assembly line does for man-hours-to-parts anticipated.

I don’t think we even barely grasp the conditions from which we’re starting, and we have no idea where we want to go, so we don’t even entertain the idea there’s something to be counted or approached in a more deliberate and methodical way.

The broader view that can approximate how many people are dispositionally fascist is about as close as we can get. The one that shows us how often we’d rather disengage and isolate is on full display with the amount of people who don’t vote. The long-term impacts of legislation and cultural narratives get hijacked to every end and supplant the graphs that depict republicans bankrupting institutions and enriching friends in spite of children. Before we had any data, we had what used to be compelling stories about the nature of greed, gluttony, and pride.

In fact, we don’t need religious dogma to witness “sinful” behavior in nature, but you’d think it was all invented wholesale by religion. A series of chronic inescapable conditions for which we all must be constantly redeemed. That’s convenient.

[1165] Bottom Feeding

Whether it's a book, or a YouTube series, there's something about argumentative patterns I'd really like to explore. I've noticed, for as long as I can remember, these habits we get into when we're trying to sound reasonable. We presume it's "the following list of reasons" we offer that "make sense" or "justify" where we're coming from. From what I can see, it's the exact same internally emotional places using language in a very particular way.

My sensibility was kicked into overdrive when I listened to a Bari Weiss podcast where she's interviewing 3 people who switched from voting democrat to Trump. They were all deeply political types who march, volunteer, run for things, etc. These aren't the arbitrary "undecideds" who can't spout a book-length answer to questions. If you have the patience to strip down the extremely feverish rhetoric, it's hard not to see that they're each just hurt or confused emotionally, and there's choice phrases and redundancies that clue me in.

And here's where I get to be disappointing because I don't want to re-listen to the podcast right now and pull them all out.

What I can do is provide the process and mechanism that people use to justify breaking their capacity to reason.

One has to assume they are coming from a "first principles" place when they make a declarative or moral statement. Something, at bottom, has to be "true" or practically assumed for anything else to follow. Whether that something is coherent or consistent is an extremely open question.

It doesn't matter what the issue is. That's the key thing to keep in mind. You can't understand how the mechanism breaks if you listen to someone's line of reasoning down the track they take alone. If someone tells you "I don't like her answer on foreign policy!" That's not the operative information. What matters is that they feel a certain level of fear, despair, exasperation, and/or other things that emotionally persuade them to start carrying water for what was previously unacceptable about the opposition.

It then becomes exceptionally easy to write-off literally anything you need to. You also get stuck to a handful of reasonable-sounding reiterations.

I've learned that it doesn't matter how "smart" you are, or how quickly you speak, or how many references you can make, you are at the mercy of your feelings until you choose not to be. A "first principle" that is conjured by your feelings is neither first, nor a principle. It's the needy, hopeless, ridiculous child of insecure instinct and ego that is constantly begging to be appeased.

You can see a snapshot of this articulated brilliantly with Ben Shapiro as a person in general, but especially when he's talking to(at) people at The Oxford Union. The clash of alleged first principles is on display explicitly from the people arguing against him. They operate under the working assumption that Israel doesn't have a right to exist in the first place. Ben, to his credit and seemingly only in this area of life, manages to ensure this is brought to the forefront of the "debate" they're trying to have over history or who's "more genocidal."

As to the "true impact" of religion? That's going to antagonize Ben's internal irrational animal, and he'll speed-run his mountain of apologetics that are perfectly unpersuadable. I don't believe he, or anyone, needs magic sky daddies to come up with moral frameworks or good reasons to tow certain lines because I have a first principle about the nature of pain and consequences. If I can see something coming or don't want to get fucked up, the universe "magically" shows me the way to keep my hand out of the fire.

You know when a comedy show goes into a crowd of radicals and starts on-the-spot questioning? The loops people go into. The honest ones will betray their emotions and state explicitly they don't know something they're allegedly angry about. The rowdiest ones will return to their catchphrases or megaphones. Well, "intellectual" people will do that too, but they'll use a particular interview or quote from someone with the right letters and credentials. Both demonstrate that, what's at bottom, is how they feel, and literally nothing that comes out of their mouth is the kind of truth they wish it to be.

To develop a first principle you have to believe certain things about what it is to exist altogether. You have to ask yourself, constantly, what your individual responsibility is to that existence. If you don't develop that belief system, or don't defer to a falsifiable metric in your attempt, nothing really matters. It, in fact, can't matter, because it's not rooted or defined. It's a constant abstraction of your feelings, dressed up in so many words or justifications. This is why we're so hungry to "just accept" religious doctrines, and celebrate "faith" because they pretend to do the work of that first principle formation for us.

This is where you'll find every level of equivocation, precisely without irony. When someone exists as anything they need to to get away with anything they desire, without even realizing it, they will offer you the format of technical and philosophical "bullshit." It's an attempt to persuade, without regard to the truth. The target of persuasion? The person touting the bullshit themselves. They're searching, infinitely, for the words to match their emotional truth. Emotional solidarity and polite looking the other way becomes the only currency.

Of course, they're never going to define their emotional truth as an irrational screaming child suffering a sense of betrayal and disorientation. That would clash dramatically against their self-conception as a Harvard graduate or community organizer delegate, or serious person who memorizes pivotal historical dates like a preacher does bible verses. But, the truth, as far as I can tell, is they are, like most of us, screaming, scared, irrational animals first.

I think mental murder is achieved when you pretend like "all politicians" anything. You have not even the remotest first principle about the definition, importance, history, or purpose of "organizing" as a concept. Why would you? It's not taught in school. Your day to day life is provided. Your road to "serious person" with appropriate title was laid out clear as day. When you pretend to care about what a politician "lies" about, you're not literally counting lies and saying, "By the numbers, I'm going with the democrats because Trump lied 30,573 times over 4 years." That would be too dispassionate and grounded.

When you pretend to care about lies, you're elevating your token issue. When someone is "incomplete" about how they'll "support the Jews," they will exist in that state indefinitely until you've gotten your emotional revenge. One way you can be extra sure this is where someone is psychologically is when they can't stop repeating some hateful label about what you are or what your beliefs mean. When challenged, they'll just repeat themselves and say something like, "Why would I talk to an (x) altogether?" Tried and true strategy in maintaining a stupid bubble.

A first principle around communication with the "other side" would be capable of developing a tool for discerning a troll versus partner in conversation. It would concede more alikeness than difference if only because you're human or sharing a language in spite of its many connotative conceits. It would remain sensitive and qualifying when it moved to make a caricature or assumption about where someone was coming from. There's a soft pedantry for the sake of clarity. You're not trying to "gotcha" when a colloquialism or fair-enough sentiment betrays a dictionary.

If I could ever get paid to do like "take down" videos parsing out conversations and podcasts, that'd be fun. I appreciate those with like advanced degrees who refute, with deep technical prowess, morons. I know there are plenty of logical fallacies and psychological terms related to everything I'm talking about, and I think it's a lot harder to see just how quickly and fluidly they manifest in what otherwise presents like a reasonable adult or professional conversation.

I get the jarring experience of listening back-to-back Left and Center-right podcasts/people which helps inform how I see the pattern too. The dismissive quips offered by the If Books Could Kill and 5-to-4 crowd feel irksome when they're doing exactly what they'd accuse a Bari Weiss of with regard to a given author or "deeply personal" subject matter like Gaza or trans activism. It's funny to see how earnestly Anthony Scaramucci prioritizes a piece of Tim Walz on the debate stage versus how the Pod Save America guys do. The "secret" value statements of their class and character pop out.

To my mind, I've listened to them all sound not-batshit and agreeing on what I would consider my first principles, but their emotions don't allow them to say so. I've heard both If Books Could Kill and Bari Weiss podcasts say, for example, that the science around trans stuff is incredibly sparse, and there are meaningful reasons to be skeptical about the DSM and implementation of diagnostic criterion. Why not start there and have a conversation? Why, ever, introduce the language of "mutilated children," like the increasingly myopic hyperbolic rabbit holes of Peter Boghossian's universe where he "can't find anyone on the other side" to talk to." Coleman Hughes manages to, somehow. Neither side wants to mutilate children. Neither side agrees on the number who have been. Those seem foundational for coherence.

Like me, I think people who vehemently argue for anything are implicitly trying to synthesize. It's very disorienting to be fielding a constant stream of information and never feeling like you land somewhere. It doesn't feel right to be rooted in dispassionate skepticism. It doesn't feel right to use your emotions as one, relatively small, informer of your overall viewpoint. It doesn't feel right to find common cause with something "disgusting" or "hateful" or hellbent on "erasing your identity." It's nearly impossible for most people to accept that that's precisely what they are and where they're speaking from. It's nearly impossible to accept because emotionally defaulting to black and white thinking, either/or, in-crowd out-crowd, is the default.

I'm disgusting, hateful, and trying to erase self-conceptions all the time. That's not something I "admit," it's just a true series of things. Devoid of context, the hundred other things I can say about myself, they'd carry all they needed to for anyone disinterested in understanding me. More to my point, they won't understand themselves. Then, hours and hours, and often lifetimes, will be spent trying to fill something that was never a wholly conceived capable-of-being-filled "thing" in the first place.