[1255] Default

I’m not even a little tired. Had I any focus, I’d do something “productive,” like grade terrible papers or build something out of wood. I want, more than anything, to return to vibe-coding in the endless, almost compulsive, way that generated enough of a site to show people and set up some meetings. The reason I want to keep working on it goes so far beyond the site though. I caught my old spark. The person I think I am and the otherwise mess of my brain was, very slowly yet quasi magically snapping into focus one tortured exchange with an A.I. tool at a time.

I say it a lot because it’s vital to understanding anything about me, but I don’t fit. People instinctively think there’s something “off” or “up” with me. I put them on guard. They play it off, but body language isn’t hard to discern. When I was a kid, I described it as, “You’re either on ‘the level,’ or not.” I glorified a kind of observational or detached space. I thought thoughts and feelings weren’t intertwined. That framing made less and less sense the further away I got from traumatizing forces in my life. The closer I paid attention to what was racing through my brain or gut helped too.

Lately, the disconnect looks like dozens of innocuous conversation hiccups. I went garage-saling with my friend and her family. Her parents are the kind of ho-hum fascists that have lazy faux-news talking points to support their views, and simultaneously are typical caring normal suburban aging white people. As basic as it gets. They have 2 daughters, my friend and her older sister. We’re in the backseat and ADHD older sister is pinging between each thing exciting her, and she mentions data centers.

Part of my project is trying to take complex issues like data centers and personalize them for individual actions in individual areas. This means I’ve learned a lot about them. I shared a sliver. The car took a familiar pause as I walked us into a familiar chapter of my life. I share something about a real issue happening right now where they live, that will not just coast them money, but threaten things they care about from schools to the environment. But that’s a “real” conversation. That’s details. That’s work. She was just throwing “data centers” out here with the same passing enthusiasm as she did the Banana Ball mascot being a pitcher.

I’m not angry at her. I’m not blaming. I don’t feel “above” or “smart.” I feel alone. I feel like unless I’m drinking, I’m physically incapable of finding whatever “normal” page most people are talking on most of the time. And if I point it out or press the issue, another predictable set of outcomes to choose from. Now, I’m either manipulative, cold, or a target.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between what I think and feel. I’ve spent much time differentiating “need” from “want.” I legitimately try to speak as closely as I can to what feels and sounds like the truth, as I feel it, or don’t, or can explain and discern at the time. My friend wants to do something about her bedroom trim. I can’t begin to concern myself about the concept of trim, and am waiting for her to decide if I’m going to help her install new trim or rehab her old trim. This thought can plague her for weeks. I add it to the thousand examples of how neither I, nor anyone I know, seems to have real problems.

But, of course, we do. We live in a horrible state that does everything in its power to kill people and bleed them dry. Health is always a concern on some level, even if mine has been generally good most of my life. There’s always a bill coming due. My friend’s wife getting hit by a car and taking 2 years to get back to like 80% definitely constitutes a real problem. I’m thankful to only be in debt to family any more. More than needing a reliable higher-paying job, I need somewhere I fit.

I fit with me, and in and amongst my stuff and desires. When I have the money, I buy the things I want. I go where I want to go. I eat what I want to eat. I watch my shows, create at random, and work on my dozens of projects around the land. I fit when I’m hanging with friends or my dad, but I still need to stay somewhat alert to the ways in which my nature can violently crash into normal sensibilities. At work, I fit at the top, removed from the discomfort I conjure in people who tell me things to do without the same sense of genuine authority they feel from me.

You might read this wrong and think I want to be in charge or in control. I insist, I just want to fit. I want to show what happens when you move step by step and organize. I want to manifest the truth of words used correctly. I want the space I’ve created for myself in order to get oriented or practiced and specific to work its way deep into you as well.

I think part of the reason I find myself here is because of the work I’ve done. I don’t want to needlessly suffer. I don’t want to have a headache because I’m so confused or my being is so contradicted I can’t think or see straight. That’s why I started writing. That’s why I spent years exploring the conversations and fights around the nature of existence. That’s why I try and fail as often as I can find opportunities to. The alternative is unbearable. I have a choice, but if it’s suffering either way, it needs to mean something.

I respect the power and purpose of self-destruction. I learned how to drink. I text and drive. I stay up way past my bed time and eat like my grandpa never had heart problems. I take the realization that we don’t get out alive to choose the little ways I want to die. I want to die at concerts. I want to die with a burger in my mouth. I want to die halfway through the coolest things I could ever think to create or work on. I want to die with even the vaguest memory of as much art and story-telling as I can fit into my brain.

I think in normal people terms, it comes out as “I don’t want to die.” There’s a fundamental denial and fear driving a familiar narrative around saviors. There’s an array of gods to worship depending on which propaganda pipe organ is blaring the loudest that day. Are people living, or running? Are they “having the conversation,” or orchestrating generation after generation with a wholesale inability to even conceive of “the conversation?” When you listen to some guru tell you to “wake up,” what do you think that means?

I think for longer than I’ve had the words for it, I’ve been stuck “awake.” I don’t claim enlightenment. I don’t claim special privileges or awareness. I claim “noticed patterns.” I noticed the emotional patterns from my abusive mom so I could anticipate whether or not I was going to get beaten, something I cared about destroyed, or could be safe-enough that day. I noticed people’s relationship patterns and dancing words. I noticed how people exercised or squandered power. I noticed how people responded to me when I presented the same information in different ways. I noticed how I felt before, during, and after writing. I found more words. I found patterns that couldn’t be found any other way.

Naturally, I alienated myself that much further. My goals and desires so diverged from normal, I moved away. My whims so freely arbitrary sometimes I’m cruising too-rich neighborhoods in a too-expensive truck with “Little Boxes” playing on repeat in my head as unironic fascists fail to figure out Google Maps. A normal person would tell you about how they’ve invited me to dinner and always been polite, because that’s what’s important when you’re thoughtless and complicit; you’re still part of the team.

My witnessing of consequences for corrupt and incompetent uses of power feels more caring, thoughtful, committed, and truthful than whatever “love” ties most people or families together. My effort to learn about messy complicated things and attempt to break them down into something actionable or workable is the language I want reciprocated. I’m not operating on a default setting no matter how often I adopt normative ways of getting alongside.

That’s where I am. Next to you, if and when “you” show up. If I get a return text after I send 10. If I can wait patiently for the exact right window to say something that won’t register as my otherwise burdensome invitation. Pause for a second and resist the urge to read this as “woe is me.” I’m not sad. I’m not describing a pitiful existence. I’m just alone and don’t really fit. I didn’t “do that” to myself. I’m not choosing it like some fancy martyr. I’m only the kind of alone in that I’m writing, and you’re reading, and I’m never going to get to read about you in the same way.

[1254] Turn Baby Turn

Today is a good day. Most of my days are good, but today is an “official” good day where one of my longest-standing problems, a pending bankruptcy ruling, was resolved. I’m back to normal broke instead of under the heel of predatory debt service. After much otherwise stress and increasingly frantic emails with the law firm, this little chapter is done.

I wanted to compound my day. I’ve been thinking about my former “best friend” and our dynamic. He tried to get into politics. He made a lot of connections that, ultimately, didn’t seem to really serve the goal, but practically speaking might, remotely, serve mine. I’m building Civic Mirror. The handful of local organizers I’ve started talking to are getting jazzed and throwing out more and more names of people they want me to talk to, perhaps present to, and we’re exploring ways to get it funded so I can focus on the vibe-coding and not have to spend a week door dashing in order to afford the ability to do so.

It’s been…maybe a year or more? since I last said anything to my former best friend. But I was feeling inspired. I wrote what was mostly a dunking-on “fuck you”-esc message about how embarrased he should be about his lies to his mother, the police, and the aunt of the kid he’s pretended to adopt. I told him I resented him using my work and time against me (to rehab a house that, when flipped, only cost me money, making him and his parents even.) If you don’t know, this prison-destined child pulled a gun on me, who he lied to the police about what happened. It was the nail in the coffin of our dynamic that had been deteriorating for a couple years.

Predicatably, he did not take my invitation to support the project at $200/month in tax deductible donations. He didn’t like the poetic justice I was seeking in the idea that he’d be working or sacrificing anything in service to my goals, ironically politically. He didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that his behavior in any way needed to be materially accounted for or met with any standard of truth or humanity. What’s tragic about it, is that it was predictable. When you become as broken as people like my mom or uncle in that I know precisely where you’re stuck and how you will respond, that’s the special kind of death.

I’m an idealist. I believe in trying to maximize potential, even if it’s explicitly cold and caluculating. Him, as a person, means nothing to me anymore, and didn’t the moment he picked his selfish lies over our 25 years of a dynamic. Would I turn down a political connection? I’m not under any illusions about his capacity for guilt. I’m not looking for him to validate my effort, apologize, or admit anything. I wanted $200/month to keep working on a thing celebrating what he forsook. He even gave me an awkward political brush-off in the text lol.

We can’t have nice things because they don’t exist unless you bring them into the world, protect them from the people who will destroy them as reflexively as a reactive cat, or as methodically as a hateful, still reactive, supreme court justice. The value, the goal, the practice…they all have to exist outside of and independent of any story you impose. It’s not about titles like “best friend.” It’s not about years spent. It’s not about any given despotic detail you want to offer about your dismal interaction. It’s about right now.

Right now, can you be honest? Nope, lol. Right now, can you see the harm you cause? Nope. Can you be bothered to expand your perspective to include things that don’t make you feel good, but are no less true? That will tell you the story of every corrupted heart up and down chains of power. That will tell you every story of love and loss. When your romance, your idealism, your “hope,” start to get the better of you, make a prediction. I didn’t think I was going to walk away with $200/month on top of my good news today. I thought a selfish, stuck, ugly no-longer-an-individual was going to keep up his act.

What you need to understand is that so will whomever has been on your mind as I’m writing about him. He’s not special. They aren’t special. They’re the banality of evil bred through neglect and denial. You can choose to play with them, play off them, or get played by them. You can choose to practice a different set of values and exercises of your time altogether. Me, also kinda psychopath-y, probably autistic if not, pokes my head in from time to time to, in a manner, emipircally test my biases. Do people change and get better? Maybe 1 or 2, little by little, over time. Ones who lie, dance, and lie again? Never. People are animals. You gotta protect your individual.

I imagine dying a lot. Of old age, of course. But getting to a point where it really does start to feel appealing. After I’ve outlived everyone I give a shit about. After I’ve accomplished basically everything I set my mind to. After I’ve watched everyone and everything I care about die in 1,000 ways before they ever actually die. This is just part of that rotation. One more cliche spoke on the wheel that never made it anywhere.

[1253] Howl At My Ass

I don’t think I trust democracy. Take a really deep breath, because I can already feel your assumptions overwhelming the many different points I’ll be attempting to make that usually aren’t heard anyway. I certainly don’t trust any authoritarian. What both have in common is my distrust of people.

I don’t meet many people. I, generally, spend my time navigating reactive animals. I don’t meet many individuals. I don’t hear many novel insights. I’m mostly stuck, awake, trying to “survive” the circumstances launched my direction while trying to stay in touch with my own sense of being, values, motivation, and perspective.

That’s a lot packed into 2 little paragraphs already. My first line was shared by the founders of The U.S. A constitutional republic is not democracy. We gloss over this colloquially. Our historical, baseline disposition, is one that was shaped by the horrors of our behavior towards one another. We have good reasons and instincts to hate our neighbors, fear invaders, and protect whatever we’ve established as an adaptation that got us this far.

Widen your lens a bit and think about where trust actually lies. I, more or less, trust processes. I don’t “believe” in them, I get to regularly account for their consequences and add up stats. The process of evolution by natural selection trumps your opinion of what looks or feels best-suited. Scientific processes of concurrent independent verification and falsification are more trust-worthy than vibes. I trust people’s timeless inclinations to be greedy and selfish, so the consequences of capitalist expansion and exploitation are predictable.

I think people understand intuitively they need structure, tyrannical or otherwise. A cell needs a boundary to exist. You’re made of atoms. Your energy is itching to “die” and diffuse everywhere.

Is it unwise to seek a resolution to that tension? When you’re “exhausted” or “overwhelmed” by “politics,” are you just adopting a cliche and fundamentally empty sentiment about the nature of being altogether? What could you trust when you’re fated, in a sense, to be stuck with a fundamentally unreliable, inconsistent, and often extremely dangerous “choice” of who to surrender a meaningful amount of power over your life to?

You need a process. You need a regular exertion of your energy that reconstitutes a reliable enough structure to keep surviving, and hopefully not just so. Part of my process is writing. Another part is creatively expressing through wood work and music. I try to structure my life so it is fundamentally “open” to new experiences and allows me to speak truthfully and consistently to the powers I’m often at the mercy of. 

Have I “failed” in having 20-something odd-jobs over 22 years, working often less than a year at each or not working for months or years at a time between them? The alternative is eating away at what I think it is to be human. I could make excuses. I’m better than “good” at any job I take. I could cash the checks, keep quiet, play along, and then in no uncertain terms I might snap and actually kill myself when I can no longer even see where I exist.

The stakes are pretty high for me. It’s real life. I can come up with all the fun analogies and “game” language about what things are like, but at the end of the day, I respect and fear my power to destroy as much or moreso than I do to build or protect. I’m fundamentally tense and angry. I’m fundamentally exhausted and overwhelmed by all the stupid. I’m fundamentally and desperately overflowing with hatred for what I know intellectually is akin to millions of dogs barking, but as an individual, refuse to believe they don’t have a choice.

It’s a tyrannical idea that lingers over everything I do or say. I make choices. If I’m going to claim that, I don’t have a choice in whether I believe you have that same capacity. I don’t get a choice if you don’t. I don’t get to dignify and explain my conscious experience if you’re an NPC. The weight is nearly unbearable.

Why? Well, I want to live. I want to live well. I want to live abundantly. I want to create and express and speak the truth. I’m choosing those. When you’re not, I’m literally under attack. I’m drafted into a war I did not choose. I can’t just live like I want. I have to carry the weight and implication of your lies, your policy, your grift, and your mythological story of your power and importance over me and to my life. I have to suffer you whether I want to or not.

I grew up in an abusive household. My mom was the tyrant. Her irrational emotionality ensured I lived in constantly aware fear every single moment. I developed months-long headaches. I spent years in anhedonia. I became an avatar and extension of her cruelty. I wasn’t making choices, I was embodying reactive subjugation. I was at the mercy of forces that are incapable of mercy. I was dressing it up as pride. I was a bully. I was ambivalent to how you felt because I could no longer feel.

I’m still a product of that. I’ve, technically, spent more time under that spell than I’ve been an actual adult. I still don’t feel much beyond visceral anger, occasional happiness or joy, or kinda nothing. It’s easier to feel with a few drinks or under a hallucinogen, but whether I’m actually autistic or broken, I’m absolutely something different than a “normal” person. I have distance and dialogue that either interrupts my reactivity or accompanies it in real time. I’m watching. I’m recording. I’m checking. That I’m narrating my experience at all is “weird.” Animals don’t do that.

I trust that if I maintain my sense of truth or honesty and demonstrate it like this, I will have something reliable I can return to when I’m lost. If I wasn’t doing that, this wouldn’t help. If I can’t see the flow and path of where my thoughts are taking me, then I’ll arrive at consequences I probably don’t want and remain confused and upset about what’s happening to me. It’s work. It’s work every day to pay attention and try to dig out a real and persistent answer to “why.” And now you’re bombarded with algorithm assumptions and answers to keep you “engaged” and infinitely disconnected.

My sense of well-being, rightly or wrongly, is often tied to my sense of financial security. Even if people never care to nor develop the capacity to really see or understand me, money talks. Money buys their reliable complicity, silence, or movement in my preferred direction. Any rich person can functionally treat your will like an Uber. That’s why they focus on paying off and forcing NDAs on your “representatives.” You, little one, can kick and scream all you want, but your predictable helpless reactivity is already built into the equation.

This is the threat of violent revolutionary moments. It’s not what anyone prefers, but when all outlets for the expression of power or grievance get blocked, the most truthful underlying process makes itself known. One, or both of us, will die. If you’re chronically under an abusive dynamic, that doesn’t really matter to you. You don’t really care if you live or die because you don’t have the capacity to care anymore. It’s not that you can’t do the math or see the future, it’s that there’s no emotional resonance for either better or worse.

I think culturally we’re in the same space I was growing up. How you felt didn’t matter. What you want was decided upon in an arbitrary or predatory way. Your closest allies or theoretically most trusted friends and family are weaponized against you. Your logic rebuked. Your honesty, or, especially as a child, your inability to regulate criminalized and you’re basically told you deserve to be tortured and every level of suffering that comes with the reactions to your behavior you’ve earned. I think we’re in psychological hell. I think it manifests physically and socially. I think that because I can reliably predict the reactive dismissive nature of basically every online interaction or forgone conclusion sentiment from nearly everyone I ever meet testifies to the extent of the damage thousands of times a day just in my own life.

Maybe I’m lucky that the pain of trying to be human is less than the pain of playing along. My anger at myself and the confusion about how I should best conduct my day pales in comparison to the “I’m going to get arrested” energy I have in response to the absurdity, complacency, and excuses of people I’d otherwise wish to get along with, if only practically. I’m not a forgone conclusion. That’s an important space for me to protect. There’s a real chance I burn down and contradict the things I profess are the most important to me in maintaining my identity as an individual human. I can’t claim to be making choices if that isn’t true.

You, though? Do you feel that in any sense whatsoever? You fit, right? You belong. You know how the bills are getting paid. You know what power you do or don’t have. You know how accessible the irony and detachment can be deployed. What are you if not judge, jury, and executioner? Do you feel attacked by my abstract invoking of “you?” Who do you think I’m talking to?

I don’t think “it” or “things” will “get better.” I don’t know that they’ve been as good as they are often described. I think, objectively, we’ve coasted on the backs of a relative handful of technological breakthroughs and incredible insights of individual thinkers, researchers, or conquerors. I think we live in a kind of runoff space. It think we’re the residue of efforts “we” will never constitute of our own volition. A small sliver might create something that reconstitutes what it takes to survive for the briefest moment, and “the masses” will do as they do.

What’s my individual responsibility to that thought and how it makes me feel? Ride it in a self-justified way until I die? Weaponize it and excuse my capacity to exploit how I know it makes you vulnerable? Sit alone and pretty in my space doing whatever it is I do? All I can do, all I should do, is trust the process. Keep watching myself and seeing if that thought or feeling changes as I inhabit new environments. Keep looking for the words I didn't know I was going to type until I typed them. Keep expressing what anchors to me independent of me feeling like I had any choice in the matter, and then choose to reconstitute my brain matter.

But, my god, there’s just so much fucking barking.

[1252] Won On One

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to “feel” like my life makes considerably more sense within an “artist” frame. Whenever I caught the movie about the group that made their secret mall apartment, it kicked on a light that I’ve been unable to dim. I listen to Joel Madden discuss the work and mastering artistry with other creative people. His insights track with my experience and desires for how I conduct my life. I get hung up on what I might be a “master” of, or what I’m attempting.

I can say with confidence I was a master at the religion vs science space for a couple years. That was a very tangible, count the number of books read, citations I could put behind anything I wrote or argued, bring up questions in class that stumped the T.A. level of “mastery.” I’ve mastered individual video games. I’m extremely adept at persuading cats to like me, but we all know they can never be mastered. After 2 years I think I had finally just started to be considered masterful as a DCS assessor.

I’ve always been a smart kid, though. The kind of smart that knows how much you don’t know regardless of how much you may have learned. In a deep way, I don’t know that it’s possible to “master” something in the colloquial sense. I think you can practice. I think that’s why they call it practicing medicine and martial arts.

So much of my focus I think appears superficially on myself. I’m not that complicated though. I’ve had to navigate as many ridiculous, arbitrary, and confusing things from ignorant places as much as anyone. I write because “things,” rarely, “make sense” to me. In order for something to make sense I think you have to care. I think you have to feel consequences. I think you have to really want something.

I care about my experience of my life. When my brain is flooded with stupid shit, fascist posturing, or edicts and power attempting to put me in my place, I revolt. It’s very straightforward. It sounds a lot like, “Fuck you.” I care about having to experience the consequences of people’s stupid behavior. When they wield power irresponsibly or from an entitled place, people die. When they project their religious mythology onto reality, they don’t just die, but those who killed them feel deeply that they deserved it.

The things I think I’m good at both took practice and also took nothing at all besides a decision. I learned how to be more patient, even if my insatiable instinct for “now” is as volatile as it’s ever been. I choose to tell the truth. That can be the truth of my feelings, confusion, hatred, or ambivalence. I can feel when there’s a shivering child tempted to lie, and choose differently. I’m serving myself, not a catastrophic vision and set of assumptions about what that truth will negatively impact.

I don’t fit in. I don’t think I look very “adult.” I don’t pass in the minds of most people I meet as the kind of thing that will just let them carry on in whatever manner they are. It doesn’t mean I don’t accept them or that my head is flooded with negative judgments. It does mean I will almost immediately catch the point in which you’re hanging your self-conception on excuses. I will, begrudgingly, accurately, see where you start and stop, and you’ll know that I know.

I’m a fan of saying a reason is something that brings you closer to the story of your responsibility for something. An excuse is something that puts distance between you and the thing. They function very differently. I like to claim a lot of reasons for my behavior, whether it’s to leave jobs, “friendships,” spend money I don’t really have, or pick some number of months to engage in what seems like “random” projects or tasks. Again, I think it looks indulgent. I think it looks immature. I think it looks like I just can’t be bothered to find someone to settle down with and a job to keep me “secure” or “humble.”

I’ve been chasing the life I want to lead my entire adult life. Lead being the operative word. I’m often given the responsibility, but only a few times have I been able to play lead. The house parties, the coffee shop, and what I still hope to accomplish on the land. Ok, sure, I was the head of “The Gs,” our little lost boy troop of friends in elementary and middle school, but that hardly counts.

What does it mean to lead in today's world where corruption wins? Where racism reigns supreme? Where complacency and complicity are as thick as the air the EPA is probably no longer allowed to scan for pollutants? For me, it’s looked like a ton of interpersonal sacrifice. I leave jobs that pretend to be concerned with the well-being of their clients. I stop talking to people who talk so much in service to one conclusion, “It is what it is.” I take chances with people my gut tells me are “doomed to fail,” and then time proves it.

And then I return here. I examine. I look for things I might have done differently. I see if the pattern has repeated. I arrive at the same conclusions, now with new flourishes and details. If I don’t own it or it’s not really mine, it’s not safe. If I can’t enforce the discipline or rules I’ve set for myself, they don’t exist. If I’m spending the majority of my time emotionally wrought about any individual, the past, or some personal failure, I’m taking too long to learn what it is I needed from that situation and probably need to shut the fuck up and get back to work, or eat something.

It’s been a struggle to write recently. I’ve had nothing to write about. “The world,” is still trending towards fire. I’m still first-world broke. I’ve found vibe-coding, and despite my lack of knowledge, money, and the competition for my time, I’m on a new track of meeting people and exploring the potential of having given my life over to “what could be.” I’ve worked incredibly hard to get my website to where it is and see where I wish to push it. I didn’t let my criticism and cynicism of AI prevent me from noticing and running with the opportunity it seems to be providing. It’s important to me to be that pliable and capable.

What is that? I think about it like the fluidity with which comedians shit on each other. The hate isn’t hate. When I’m picking something apart or poking holes in an official story, it’s an exercise in curiosity. I want to know how we get to a place of shared reality. That’s where the real work, potential, and magic happens. I can’t just believe you like you believe you. I don’t just believe myself. I see what it would take. I speak as though I’m trying to get what I wish to happen. I don’t know that many people who operate that way.

I think that’s part of why it’s been hard to write. If I’m disoriented, who’s orienting me? If I’m perfectly oriented, who’s validating it? I’m not looking to be reassured or celebrated for their own sake. I want you to actually like the things I’m trying to build, find utility in them. I want you to actually feel the sense of ownership or relief and possibility that I do when I talk about the land or how we might work together. There’s a reality I’m experiencing that I don’t register from almost anyone.

That is, I feel their obligations. I feel their responsibilities. I feel their “adulting.” I feel the infuriating intransigence of their memes and vague-booking. I feel everything that they claim they can’t do, don’t know, or won’t try. I feel how impossible it is to do everything I both want to do, or demonstrate in perpetual spite, practically every day. I just took a temp job where I likely pissed off 15 people who wanted the task of applying stickers to calendar misprints to last another 4 hours. I wanted to be home, and I work quickly. We got done at 11 instead of 3:30. To me, a fool thinks we got paid less, because I got my time back. Time I’m not watching obnoxious lower-class people “joke” about how slow we should go.

The reality is that we live in a stupid culture if we’re concerned about paying 15 people over the course of several days to waste time and resources covering “Decmember” on a wall calendar. You have the money for that task, Staples, but not to pay your employees a living wage? You, poor person gig-worker, think the solution to your problems is an incidental squeezing of their stupidity for an extra $100? I don’t have the kind of brain that can “check out.” If I’m not working as well and as fast as I can, I’m in pain. I’m angry. Not just at my circumstances, but at you in your childish blindness, and ever-abstractions of systems I’m ill-equipped to alter while being consumed by them.

On some level, it absolutely sucks to know what you’re capable of. That memory persists. Whether or not it’s going to antagonize or reassure is news to me each day. There’s a story I could tell of my grit and genius that’s managed to figure out things in weeks most couldn’t in years. There’s a story of my entitled indulgent desire to be entertained and own “pointless” things like black T-shirts while I go bankrupt and build half-assed fences. What makes either true? I know neither, by themselves, is true enough. I’m not one framing of my behavior. I don’t “feel” either is true. I can see the arguments for the extremes and every step between. I want to protect that. I’m not indecisive nor a devil’s advocate. I just understand how the spell of a story works.

I can see the story because I’m writing it. I can feel what feels like mine versus what’s been imposed. What feels like it desperately wants me to believe or go along or ignore the implications. Your stories are inconsistent, at best. Lies, often. Unflattering, unhelpful, and deeply uniformed. I want to be nothing like that I hear and navigate. I want the deeply personal evidence on display truth. This, again, whether an “artist” framing feels helpful. Biggest band in the world, or “merely” paying the bills, you’re either singing your songs or you’re not. I don’t sound like you, and I never want to start.

[1251] Earth Turns Slowly

What does it take to "genuinely believe" in something?

We hear things all the time. We say things constantly. We've developed entire systems of law trying to parse how much we "really meant" to do the bad thing. We claim "deeply held beliefs" reflexively and defensively.

I consider myself a deeply skeptical person. There's a deep and abiding irony about that, because to a lot of people I come across exceptionally arrogant and sure of myself. To my mind, they're reacting to a scrutinizing methodology more than accurately diagnosing me. At the same time, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be skeptical, and the curiosity I lead with often registers as a threat.

I ask questions. I ask a lot of questions, first of myself, and then about the world around me. I get very few answers, but the ones I do tend to be consistent in their character and patterns. I don't land on "right" and "wrong" very often, but if I do, it's because it feels like the answer starts to exist well beyond my opinion of the situation or my feelings. Racism? Wrong, full stop, all the time. Not jokes, actual racism. Actual discriminating behavior based on innate superficial differences is an artifact of our fear-based animal natures, not some defensible thesis to be debated indefinitely.

Yet, you see how I allow for racist jokes in my reasoning? Surely, I'm aware that modern discourse pushed heavily to regard words as violence. "Normalizing" probably popped into your head. And slowly, but surely, the drift starts to happen. The ambiguity of words, intent, and primacy of our subjective experience of the cultural landscape takes over.

Think of the implications! The slippery slope. Am I so dismissive of your lived experience!? To me, we arrive at several answers to several questions in this moment. People will assume your intent. People will react. People will draw dozens of conclusions in a catastrophized vision that summarizes your entire being and the state of the world. Do they genuinely believe in these moments? I don't think so. I think there's real consequences to contend with and behavior they'll engage in that can't be ignored. But I remain skeptical that your reactive self is your believing self.

I think we under-appreciate and are not that aware of how often we're reacting. It's why we feel helpless so often. That's a real reaction to circumstances that haven't been articulated. We haven't seen, heard, or felt our power, so as a consequence we start to believe we have none. We're abused children, battered wives, or otherwise cogs in abstract machines and isms.

I've felt decently politically helpless my entire life. I live in Indiana. No one has cared about the environment here. No one cares if there's money for a good education and teachers. No one's bothered to pressure businesses to pay workers fairly or make healthcare accessible. This state has nearly criminalized labor organizing entirely. I'm pushing 40. My whole adult life is hearing, "It is what it is," about every problem under the sun. You put your head down, work harder, focus on the little things, and move on.

That's psychologically insufferable for someone like me. I don't accept your flaccid reaction. I don't accept that I can't find a way. I want to fight for what I know does or can exist all the time. I'm stuck deeply skeptical that "the world" will bother to stay together moment to moment, let alone conform to your typical cliche truisms at the mercy of your uninterrogated perception. You didn't even ask what could be.

Whether you read one or 100 self-help books, they will boil down to "act." Do something. Move in the world, little by little, consistently, and you will start to see, hear, and feel something that contrasts with how you've been conditioned. Take the small walk. Deliberately smile. Put on the show you enjoy and consciously sit down to take it in for that 20 minutes or hour of your day that can actually feel like it's yours. Agency takes practice. To practice agency, you need to recognize and concede how often you're not acting like the agent of your own life.

Conservatives take this sentiment too far. Liberals, not far enough. This is why both are necessary in active healthy debate over debatable things. I can't decide tomorrow that my job, any job, should pay me enough to live like the middle-class lifestyle of my parents. I'm not rabidly inclined to hoard my privileges or legacy because of my poor preferred judgment about poor people.

I'm someone who likes to employ the words "first-world poor." I have a lot of stuff. I'm healthy enough. I have a degree. I'm fed. I have a support system. I indulge and try to invest at "my level" of, technically, poverty. What do people believe about me when I'm dropping off their DoorDash order? What does "society" believe of someone who is unmarried, chaotically organized, and boasts of watching every episode of thousands of TV shows?

Catch the framing drift? Catch the assumptions?

I'm society. DoorDash is an inelegant solution to several systemic and practical problems. I can count on one hand the amount of marriages I'd consider flirting with "healthy." Does it matter that most of my TV watching has occurred between 9PM and 5AM at twice the speed and often while I'm doing other things simultaneously?

The agent that is me is choosing how to spend his time, and often choosing differently than the defaults the moment they become viable. You call me to hang? I'm out the door. There's a show in Chicago? See you in a few days, cats. Something needs built? I work until I physically have to stop.

I've been as critical of A.I. as anyone. I've played with it here and there, thought it was shit and over-hyped. It got better. All of a sudden, in spite of what I feel is still derided as "vibe-coding," I was able to create things in my mind's eye that had practical application to my life. I've tried to get my music organized for literally decades. I built a music organizer that 15 different ones haven't been able to accomplish in a couple days. I wanted a better way to track the 200 or so comedians and musicians I've been following for the last 5 years. It became real. I have calendars based around where I live or if I'm around Chicago that show me every pending show I could go to. It's not "hard" or that "complicated," it just didn't exist yet how I wanted and needed.

What I learned in creating those I started to apply to civic-mirror.com. It's my latest bid to demonstrate what I think. When you're someone that asks a lot of questions, you can create a lot of problems for yourself. When you plug that process into "politics" as a broad catch-all idea…well, good luck to you.

I know, from my own life, the power of my agency. I've built my own home. I've started businesses. I've gone to 439 performances over the last 5 years. I can, and do. That agency is betrayed often. It doesn't matter what I can do, I exist along with other people and in environments that undermine it. The distinction is real. I don't let myself off the hook. I respect what's fucking me.

A.I. is the latest testimony I have of what happens when what I think I can do is functionally unrestrained. It has cost me more money than I realistically have. It has resulted in me feeling light-headed and "behind" or like it's never "enough." But it's a real living example of me trying to fix what I think is broken created, exhaustively, the moment I found the path to try and do so.

There's a significantly painful thing about being someone who does things or tries to create things. "No one," seems to appreciate the struggle or what it has "really taken" to get as far as you have. I'm going on 3 months of almost constant "tending." Learning how to navigate the A.I. drift. Learning the back-end infrastructure to make the features I want work. Finding ways to pay for it. I had it print a list of "problems solved" that is several hundred entries long, mostly forgotten, because there's a hundred more staring me down. I've worked on it while door dashing and eating Easter dinner. It's working right now as I type.

Another answer I find in a regular patterned way is, "Oh, cool," or "that's nice," or "you should…" or "why didn't you…?"

Even if, presumably, people have felt like me, can see the utility, can flirt with the hope of a meaningful difference or change, they still don't access their agency. There's a distance. There's an instinct and a reflex that they are already too-taxed, too-tired, too-busy, and this, too, is more than they can handle or deal with. Do they truly believe that? I don't think so. Anymore than I think they can't afford to come with me to the $10 show, that they haven't in 5 years. Anymore than they don't have the time to watch the 20 minute episode.

What you do, or especially don't do, becomes who you are. You are training yourself, every moment of every day, to believe that you don't matter, can't choose, and can't manifest what you think and feel needs to exist. In woo-woo land, I think "anything" exists precisely because of whatever you may wish to describe as that creative force. For "spiritual" people who want to terminate at an undulous and diffuse "god," why not? For excuse-ridden ideologues who bemoan the concept of "god" to judge and replace personal responsibility? Go fuck yourselves.

Because none of us can ever know what someone else "truly believes," we're left with what they do. I build. You can't argue with that. I try. You pretend there's a real "you" in their playing devil's advocate and picking stupid fights to some discernible end. In reality, as far as we can share it, you're defensively lying and reacting in lieu of exerting your own agency.

I see this in addiction, whether your problem is work-a-hol or alcohol. I see this in your sentiments about "politics" or "the world." I see this in the reticence to try and fail and sacrifice. I see this in stuck ruminated narratives about obligations and standards you hold to such an extent they become weaponized against you. Maybe your "care for a family member" is at the heart of what's destroying you. Your "work ethic" is ripe for the exploitative capitalist preying indefinitely on your nature. Your "exhaustion" has nothing to do with the nature of your tasks, and everything to do with the inability or unwillingness to figure out if you're really choosing, or would really choose them altogether.

I sacrifice a lot of otherwise "comfort" or "normalcy" in service to what I believe in, which leaves me often alone or feeling alienated. I can usually recognize a good parent from afar when it's clear how much they give up to ensure their kids are in as good a position as they can make them. I can feel that, "What the fuck is up with this guy?" in practically everything I do or say about how I live or what I think. But I can manage because I'm just navigating reactions, not hearing what anyone genuinely believes. I find this incredibly sad and a lonely place to be.

Thankfully, it's not "everyone" and it's not "always." I have people I care about and they care about me, and they don't just say so. I have people who are thoughtful and intentional, sometimes, often, or more often than not. I have examples they've set and histories I can rely on when my own story starts to feel acute or wobbly. Do I genuinely believe they care about me? I don't have to, anymore than I have to argue about what is or isn't racism. There's a transcendent reality I feel and appeal to that doesn't waste time reactively undermining what's consistently demonstrated.

When my "best friend" consistently undermined my trust in increasingly escalating ways, I stopped engaging. It wasn't a faith-based relationship. It wasn't, "But 25 years!" It was, you stopped holding your end of the bargain, and changed your behavior. He, unlike a lot of people, knows better. His relationship, truly, didn't change towards even "me" per se, it changed towards the truth. I'm not going to sacrifice myself in service to people who unburden themselves from telling the truth. You can be confused about the truth. You can wrestle with the truth. But you can't forgo it entirely if you're going to get anything from me. There's no "But my subjective experience!" sympathy over here. Did you start with a lie? Yes? Cool, go fuck yourself.

I'm the kind of person who wants "the world." I want "everything" to be "better." I want to clean up the trash in the drainage ditches along Cline Avenue because it's there and I can and it should be cleaned up and the dozens of people who threw trash out of their window are wrong and lazy and ridiculous and will be for the rest of time. But also, that we don't have a system that reliably pays someone a livable wage to clean up after those cunts is a problem. It's easy to say, see, and understand. It's apparently fucking impossible to get people to feel and act as though that's the reality.

The excitement over A.I. I think is rooted in the people who've suffered experiences similar to mine. I don't need your permission to do and fix and manifest. I don't need to field your excuses and navigate your feelings. I don't need to court your reaction. I don't need Reddit irony. I need my will and creativity and persistence clawing away each inch of achievement that hopefully speaks to people as willing and capable as I am. If I'm a business-owning tech guy, do I need Jim Banks's racist tropes about non-English speaking truck drivers? Or my autonomous fleet? Do I need hillbilly opinions about water use? Or pay off 7 city council members?

In comparison to, and hopefully unlike those who've been corrupted by power, mine is relatively muted. I don't fear or shy away from my capacity to build or destroy, but I also don't pre-emptively look for the excuses and license to do either. I had the idea first, so it's right to do and how I'm doing it by default? I had the money so however I spend it is fine? I suffer delusions of being the best, smartest, most just, etc. therefore…? I'm willing to entertain and believe the idea that I'm catastrophically wrong. It's why I write. One of you, one day, may actually think along with me and go, "You know, this was really fucked up right here." Polymarket puts that at less than 1% likely.

I could see civic-mirror turning into "the" tool, like our shitty social media environments have turned into "the internet." I could see it going nowhere but being fleetingly useful to me and a few nerds. But the point is that I actually see it. I created it first. I demonstrated what I believe about myself and the world I want to live in. In what obfuscating arbitrary universe can that be regarded as "failing?"

[1250] The Writer's Room

 I’m going to take a deliberate pause. When I tell you that I’ve been in something akin to a “blacked out” state for about a month, I want you to hear that as the complicated road leading to it, the time spent in it, and the means of coping/escaping it I’m hoping to find here.

I’ve been “adrift” for the last few years, at least. My jobs have all been exercises of walking fine lines between complicit negligence and practical necessity. My friends have generally either fallen off the radar or are so reliably busy or overwhelmed you start to feel guilty and disingenuous reaching out and inviting at all. I’ve got hobbies that are mostly solo or cost money I don’t really have. The shining light that has beamed through my otherwise years of living like this is a friend from high school who moved back to the area we grew up. We’ve been to dozens of shows together and spend plenty of time getting food or drinking and hanging out.

I’m perfectly happy to indulge. I like squeezing as much joy out of the things I like as I can. I don’t need to drink myself stupid every night, but that does not mean I do not want several refrigerators stocked with every good beer or wine I’ve ever tasted. At whatever point in time in my life that I pivoted towards prioritizing having my time more than money, I’m “happy” to spend that time “doing nothing” because it’s my nothing. I’m not assigning myself arbitrary tasks nor letting my attention get hijacked by selfish chaos actors known as “other people.”

My whole life I’ve struggled with wanting to be seen and get a certain amount of attention and recognition. I don’t know how much of this is my born-in disposition. I don’t know how much of it developed as a coping mechanism as a means of keeping myself safe in my mom’s abusive household. I do know that somewhere deep, when I’m doing something “good” or “big” or “smart,” that it provides a level of satisfaction and sense of security and being that doesn’t compare to anything else. I say this even in the face of the love and attention and care of those in my life who were not my crazy mom. People looking out for you is a different kind of thing than you figuring out what you need to do for yourself.

At the same time, some of the most romanticized periods of my life were from college. It’s when I thought I had a team or friend group that I could rely on. It’s who I thought I’d be trying to visit and party with in the future. It was a moment in the sun of a level of community and connection that I have not been able to find nor reproduce for 15 years. No one’s stopping over to eat dinner together, if they’re even responding to texts today. No one’s liking and sharing on dying, antagonizing socials.

When you spend as much time on your own as I do, you might be a gigantic consumer of media. I’ve watched 45 movies, mostly terrible comedies offered for free on YouTube, while I do this coding project precisely because they don’t need your attention. For as generic and awkward as they might be, they are a kind of persistent reminder of the collaborative effort it takes to manifest that kind of creativity. They’re playing. They’re contributing their pieces. I often have no sense as to what I’m contributing, or come to understand what I thought I was is something worth shaming or judging me for.

At work, I’m an authority figure. I’m discussing complicated topics like addiction or abusive dynamics in accessible and open or friendly ways. I’m often speaking to what I practice that allows me to stay on the straight and narrow and not let the moment-to-moment excuses give me license to treat myself and the people around me poorly. It never ends until you die. There are infinitely ignorant and evil forces that will kill you without blinking; they’ll be proud about it, and they’ll shape the world you inhabit until you think you deserve it. You’ll be betrayed. You’ll waste and miss opportunities. You’ll fail more times than you can remember. And if you can’t find a way to enjoy it, that joy will not arrive on its own. If you keep your head down and try to power through it, by the time you look up, the tour date will have passed, the friends will have died off, and the “If I could move like I used to” statements will flood in.

When you’re hyper-focused, time slows way down, but in a way that doesn’t feel antagonizing. It’s living potential space that you begin occupying. You can paint the future and implications. You can see yourself occupying and explaining your role. You could be perfectly delusional, but in the moment that’s not seriously considered. Things make too much sense. You can naturally see what you can or should do next. I describe it as a kind of mania, but mania I’ve ridden in the past to create many things I enjoyed or am uniquely proud of. It’s knocking on the door of compulsive. It’s begging for what I imagine the license someone like Steve Jobs took to treat people like shit. It’s an attempt to immortalize something about you that runs deep in a way that can’t be argued with.

That doesn’t mean that by itself it’s good or bad. It’s just the nature of the force at work. If you recognize a force in you, then it’s your job to try to account for it, not glorify, weaponize, or deny it. I want to be consumed by meaningful work. I don’t want to be eaten alive until there’s nothing else about me worth talking about.

A.I. is giving me the opportunity to feed this space indefinitely. It costs more money than I can pay for indefinitely right now, but also that means I see weeks-straight of time that I can capitalize on. A.I. also does a terrible job of maintaining context and not catching drift. I get a concurrent goal/task to learn how to keep the playing field and rules from falling apart as I try to build the big complicated thing altogether.

Meanwhile life is still happening around me. I have bills to pay, so naturally I took a computer stand/arm and found a way to position it in my car so I can run my laptop from my phone’s Wi-Fi and plug into a jumper battery and code between DoorDash orders. That’s normal, right? That’s safe? That’s reasonable? That’s not a story of a desperate need to matter? That’s not being punished by anxiety-driven “my life’s clock is running down” sensibilities regarding efficiency?

I’ve thought, good and hard, about leaving this chair for days. I made cursory preparations like heading into town for food and errands and that experimentation as to whether I could feasibly code from my car. I can. The desire to sort of melt into my environment and this work is very real and very powerful. It’s close to what I felt as a child in what might’ve been described as a budding addiction to video games. I don’t have the same kind of desperate and furious rush, but the world I’m occupying right now is very sticky. It feels “wrong” to do anything else besides maximize my output. It feels like I’d be missing an opportunity window that I’ve been raging at in the rear-view my entire life.

[1249] Can't Catch Me

Sometimes I forget that not everyone has to read, and if I'm preempting what I want to say for fear of it sounding "whiny" or indulgent, I'm defeating the purpose.

I just got out of my bankruptcy hearing. It's been psychologically taxing for month and a half as I got everything together for it, within hours of things being requested. I've sent polite emails regarding my questions and concerns, all mostly gently and persistently dismissed. I've been reassured that my filing was straight-forward and I should know by the end of the hearing whether the petition was successful. I'm not writing because I got good news, but because again I am in limbo and stewing about what feels like negligence and disregard.

The trustee asked for Door Dash's address. I want you to know that so you can get an impression of how boxed-in her world must be if she's not aware of how food delivery works.

I got drilled on the value of my, closed, business during January. These are numbers I submitted to my lawyer, who did not say a single word while I was being grilled. When I opened the bank account and read what the amount was for the time in January when I informed my lawyers about the business closing, it seemed to just hit her as "not good enough" and she pivoted to my lawyer and said, "I think you know what I need," to which the lawyer agreed.

I was in the room for the last person's session. She "grilled" him about the process for self-publishing a book on Amazon in a way that made me think she was interested in writing one herself. I don't know if she liked him because he's married and has a kid with autism, but she found his case in his favor before the sign-off, so someone's in a decent mood right now.

Barring getting sick, sitting in psychologically tortuous limbo states is as furious, panicked, and dramatic as I get. I don't sit and spin in silence. I try, earnestly, patiently, persistently, to get people to engage and address my needs in a way that is respectful to them and myself. I am forever, routinely, denied. I am subjected to the whims and arbitrary judgement of people who can go through motions, but not be expected to show any real discernment or accountability. And I have to wait, at their behest indefinitely, pinging between crises, either financial or interpersonal.

I haven't written in a long time. I've been immersed in vibe-coding tools for making local politics more accessible and transparent. I've been spending 15-20 hours a day refining rules and codes and learning how to get things hosted and parsed. I've been, always glimpsing, at what I've been desiring to my whole adult life. I've aspired to throw myself into problem-solving in creative and engaging ways. I'm happy to do it at the minimally viable means available to me. It's why I live in a shed. It's why I have so many things for their "potential." It's why betrayals and humiliating questions or accusations penetrate beyond the mere annoyance or absurdity offered by an individual playing their part.

In what feels like a cosmic ironic nod, I wrote several paragraphs I felt like they captured the feeling well, and in spite of hitting to save, several times, they disappeared quicker than they arrived.

I caught a video talking about Mamdani advertising $30/hr for people to sign up and engage in emergency snow-shoveling. Everyone showed up, the snow got shoveled. The statement from the girl in the video was, “We’re not used to this,” and “You mean paying people a living wage motivates them to work?” Idiot-proof instant accountability from both sides of the equation is not the world I’ve grown up or worked in.

Are there bombs going off? Are their Epstein survivors recalling their PTSD for decades? Never will the greater atrocity prevent you from suffering your antagonists first. They’re a product of the same forces. It’s another’s ego and neglect they’re meant to suffer. It’s undue pride for privileges and access that have been systematically denied. What about their stories suggests you’ll find any justice for your own? It’s girls in tank-tops and skits getting told “you asked for it.” It’s Iranian protesters matter-of-factly told to “rise up.” Good luck! Yeah, fuck you too.

There’s a temptation to claim there’s a “lesson” here. Like all the suffering is worth it or adds up to some grand takeaway you couldn’t achieve otherwise. It’s just a fancy and convoluted way to make an excuse. There is no deliberate and conscious effort for something to be taught. This isn’t about a grand narrative of redemption, finding solace in the persecution as some Christ-like figure. Isn’t that why he’s so popular? “Why have you forsaken me!?” And then just don’t think too hard about not really being dead, and it’s YOU who sacrificed you, bro.

If “we’re” going to pretend to have learned anything over the last decade, it’s that there is no bottom to the amount of humiliation and depravity. Your reasons and story doesn’t matter. That you dance subjected to power’s will is all that’s fundamentally being demanded. Every time I show up in earnest, I feel like I’m being puppetted. Every time I try, I learn why I get to fail, fail alone, and should have thought about why I had the hair-brained idea to try in the first place.

Where do I get off being so entitled!? To my time and to be more or less left alone to decide how to spend it? That’s fucking crazy. I need to work to death for people who will die never having seen me. I need to sacrifice, not just the idea of an indulgence, but every remote joy to combat the narratives about who I am or what I deserve. And I continue to refuse, so life continues to string me along.

I’ve jumped into many hundreds, maybe well over a thousand, people’s lives regarding the drama of their terrible families, addictions, or child abuse allegations. I’ve felt the second-hand stress of trying to figure out how I would handle or escape their “impossible” circumstances. It’s made it abundantly clear the difference between the places you’re stuck and the places you stick yourself. Many can only make a terrible or slightly-less-terrible “choice” that amounts to hanging on and waiting to see.

Simultaneously, often in the next breath they’ll feed the excuse narrative. “It is what it is,” like the cunt who would decry the “lesson” of suffering is that life is, in fact, suffering - not it’s mitigation, sublimation, or incorporation. The first and worst experience is the rule and reactivity is the key to unlocking a win. Seeking a savior is always the answer, and he’s always on his way, or deny the nature of things altogether.

I feel like me at my worst isn’t what I observe from most people at their best, and it means nothing. It might mean something to a handful of friends and family. It might mean something if there’s some cosmic karmic bean-counter. I’m severely doubtful. I think I’m trapped in a tabloid. I fear I’m going to lose the capacity and desire for a just and reasonable existence because it just gets too exhausting to keep fighting and spite isn’t sustainable.

The sense of injustice and arbitrariness I feel is part of a self-reinforcing loop. Once you feel the string and trap of being subjected to it, I think most turn into a force for taking advantage and punishing the next person. Overzealous prosecutors of faithfully executed consequences. When all you've ever known or been made to believe in are ones that happen for no reason or bad reasons, why not? What else is there? Actually follow your Jesus and forgive? Ha! Find the power and choice to weigh things more scientifically or accurately? Way too much work.

[1248] Not Nothing

I’ve watched so many people behave in such persistently disgraceful and ridiculous ways for so many years. I feel acutely disoriented sometimes when I think about it. I wonder about myself. I figure there must be something to be done at an individual level. I look for creative fixes and load-bearing narratives that balance my perspective. I do, genuinely, try to be better than what my feelings play as torturous blasts of bad unskippable music.

I believe I have the right answers to most of my questions. I give myself credit for thinking things through and arriving at actionable plans as more habit than struggle. I literally put that process on display. It is a lonely process. It is an isolating process. It is a forever incomplete and functionally every single person who I invite into the process rebukes it in their own way.

The dismissal of my process isn’t about me. In fact, it’s not even “my” process. It’s “the” process. It’s the practice of accountability when there’s an offer of an excuse. We know what excuses look like because we know what children are. We know what accountability looks like because it hurts. Most of the work of being accountable can be done for free, alone, and with enough reflection. It’s impossible work to do if you can’t be, or don’t know how to be, honest.

We live in an extremely dishonest series of worlds. We’re dishonest linguistically. We’re dishonest in our video performances and pictures. We’re dishonest in our memes. We’re dishonest about the particulars of our struggles, hatred, and insecurities. If there is one loudest song I hear out of most people, it’s the dishonesty beat. It’s the thread that ties so much of my sense of dread and discomfort together. It’s why I can’t keep the jobs I’ve had. It’s why our politics is trending towards fascism. It’s why no story of personal accountability will ever scale.

I’ve been using the word “crisis” over the last week or so to describe my feelings and behavior. I’ve been filled with the kind of dread I haven’t really dealt with since high school. I didn’t make it into the drug study that would have paid me solidly. My heart rate and blood pressure spiked, as they did 10 years ago, and I was screened out. I wanted to loop a damning and hopeless narrative. I’m a smart guy who graduated, works high-stress jobs, builds things, is creative, etc. and I’m hearing begging to be shot in the stomach for $9,000? It’s absurd. In the moment of truth, where the numbers won’t lie, the depth of that absurdity and drama raging in my core manifests.

This underlying reality that informs everything I do is there - all the time.

It doesn’t get to be ignored if I care to meaningfully and comprehensively address whatever my issues may be. This is why support from friends and family always feels “wrong.” They aren’t fixing the real problem anymore than I am. We all need reliable land to stand on, not be clinging to buoys thanking the gods for the right to keep breathing.

I don’t want to feel like I’m gambling with every moment. I don’t want to impose guilt for not being “productive” or “performative” enough. I just want basic accountability and responsibility for what I have, need, or hope to accomplish. It’s not more complicated. It’s not a secret. It’s not all of the excess emotional labor that goes into converting that project into something a fascist or feeble mind can agree with and meet halfway.

None of this protecting pedophiles posture surprises me. I was (will always be) a DCS assessor. I saw the “leaders” in my office who made the job about them and their power more than any desire to protect children. I talked to the parents who routinely denied the physical and emotional abuses they carried out every day. People protect their egos, power, and story of themselves first. Pedophiles say things like “the kid came on to me,” wholly unironically.

The persistent underlying truth will inform everything. The numbers speak while your words and body poorly cope or try to lie.

How many pedophiles did you indict? 0.
How many murders did you investigate? 0.
How much richer did they get? 1.5 trillion.
How much debt did you drive up? 8.4 trillion.

I’m 37. My net worth is approximately $25,000, according to my bankruptcy filing. I have a degree. I’ve had over 20 jobs since I was 15 from delivery driving and hoarder-bathroom scrubbing to counseling hundreds of clients and literally “saving children.” I have NEVER been paid “enough.” I have no savings. I have no health insurance. I have the kinds of cars that flirt with costing more to fix than they’re worth. I live on a rural road in the middle of nowhere. If I sacrificed everything fun or “extra” I’ve done for myself over the last 4 years, I might have $5,000-$10,000 in the bank, as I did in the past when I did nothing, went nowhere, saved everything, and worked 15-18 hours a day or actually got into drug studies.

I’m as manager as it gets. I’m a quick a study as you’ll ever find. I have ZERO desire to lord power over people. I’m running for county clerk. I don’t want the position. I want a fucking system where I don’t have to worry that the clerk is complicit in fucking fascism. I was raised to believe that the world was mine for the taking. I got the grades. I make people laugh. I speak, explicitly, often, and loudly about what I value and why to the people who slam consequences down on me for doing so.

Occasionally, someone chimes in that they appreciate the example I’m setting. I want to scream. Bitch, we all need to be setting the same fucking example so I’m not your poster boy for the kind of resistance from that fucking Black Mirror episode. I don’t want a slightly bigger crazy-making cage. I don’t want your attention for it’s own sake. I don't’ want to perform like this shit makes sense or that I want to fit in like you are. Fuck your appreciation, I don’t trust it. It’s not real. You do not demonstrate what I need to see independent of your reaction to me. You’re a dog pretending you can’t bark until the others around it start.

So I feel paralyzed. What’s out there for me? A poorly-paying job I’ll likely have to drive an hour away for. Coworkers who are leveraged, afraid, and full of empty sentiments they repeat like catch phrases. “It is what it is.” Do I just continue to buy stuff? Watch stuff? Accumulate experiences? Yeah, probably, for their own sake. Just like any project I do on the land or around the house. Because there’s nothing left. There’s nothing bigger. There’s nothing together. Sure, we’ll like, share, and subscribe in solidarity on the social media BUT IT’S NOT REAL.

It’s real like how your brain can’t differentiate, but not real like what you would be doing under reasonable constraints and conditions. We’d be dumb to think we exist unbounded or like “freedom” is coherent on its face. I don’t trust what binds. I don’t think you recognize it for what it is or how it operates. Hint: saying “unalive” as if we’ve just discovered people kill themselves, and maybe for reasons we might too.

Musicians never stop writing music. The feelings can only ever be captured briefly before they evolve or disappear. A song might make you cry or give you chills, that moment, and then never again. The truth it was speaking to persists. The math behind it will total the same sum long after you and artist are gone. I need to live in that truth, and it makes me sick every moment I watch myself do anything less, even if I don’t puke.

[1247] Mondo Duke

I want to create an exhaustive list of everything that I can recall which sparks anxiety, annoyance, anger, or dread. I want to do this so that I can clarify for myself whether or not there are "simple" or "patterned" reasons that I cannot seem to transcend these feelings. To be sure, I'm only "so" anxious, angry, or dreadful, but they are still "too much" or "enough to be annoying" as to conjure a desire for a better mastery over them. I also want to get better in how I construct my goals, what I fight for, and how to situate new information as I search or build.

I think it needs to be expressed in a kind of meditative flow of run-ons, incomplete, and redundancies, so if you're gonna try to follow along with this next bit, think Ulysses more than Da Vinci Code.

ICE. ICE near me and get-yourself-killed "hero" story. Debt. Treasurer fuckery. All republicans. Complicity. Feckless democrats. Nazi Braun, Rokita, Banks, Beckwith, Spartz. Every bill aimed to destroy education, the environment, bleed me dry, take away rights. Data centers. Provoking attacks from under-appreciating or allowing radicalized ideology. Helpless people dying and disenfranchised even more. The futility of "helping" and my social work jobs. My cramped and sore back, shoulder, neck, and arm muscles. My dry mouth and cold home. The cost to fix my water. The cost to make my home "presentable" and "comfy" instead of merely livable. Disaster hitting my home. Inability to maintain/afford insurance. Scam artists and grifters at every level of otherwise polite society. Every mercy rescinded. Every thing you think you're paying for shifted to you to do yourself. My cats being left alone for a week. The fact that the moment I join a social media site, it begins to die. The general lack of recognition, support, or effort to anything in a sustained combined way. Wasted time in a.d.d. hazes. Whether I get into a study altogether. Drives. the next fight I didn't know I was invited to over nothing or someone's dressed-up psychosis. Unreliable or inconsistent business partners. Getting another miserable job. Not getting another miserable job. Door dashing in my truck. Truck repairs. Getting scammed scrapping. The time and cost to scrap properly. Equipment repairs. Consolidating white trash yard crap. Creating political information roadmap and reporting tool. Gaining any real attention or traction for my writing or tiktok videos. Reconnecting with friends to find out connection as superficial or fraught as presumed by lack of contact all along. All the dust and hair. Cost to get drums in order. Cost of shows I want to get to. "Something" happening to cards before I get them all sold. Inability to ever feel "safe enough" be it either in a mobile living situation or in my shed. "Oh we forgot to tell you…" kind of bullshit from my lawyer. Neglected icy roads/ramps. Desire to confront people who have betrayed or royally pissed me off. Jaw clenching. More sober-house people relapsing. Letting former skills atrophy. The bad guys show no signs of not winning. The most violent and irrational routinely getting their way. Rich fucks who don't tip. The snow/cold. Cost to repair instruments. Brain rot inherent in any amount of social media use, facebook and reddit in particular. Voice suppression. Nerds yelling "shame." Instinct for violence. The idea that the shameless ignorance that endorses things like trump or fascism will never go away and entropy is on its side. Lifetime guarantees that require more steps that its worth. $400 bill for cat bite. No health insurance. Devil's advocates. Non-existent customer service. Predatory "services" in debt consolidation. Knowing people wake up every day motivated to carry out actions in service to things that will kill me and everything I care about. Knowing far more people will sit and watch them the entire time. The oscillation between endless energy and motivation and and void scream to be left alone indefinitely. the unorganized wires. The still leaking parts of the roof, somewhat mitigated. The incomplete porch. No redundant heat. Poorly manufactured and too small heated blanket. No amount of organization of tools ever feels enough. Too many podcasts talking in circles. Overall sense of fakeness and futility. Uninteresting, unhealthy, and redundant meals without high investment. Knots. Oily skin, hair, nails need cut. Cats picking wrong moments for attention. 40 out of 45 games not holding my interest. Ugly/corny jeans. Knowing even when I get the money fundamental cake I'm baked into is made of shit. The depressed, old, complacent and avoidant attitudes of those around me. My hateful family members. Past injustices. Lazy media. Empty cliches. Forced humor. Opportunistic daisy-chains of attention for its own sake. Ill-fitting expensive clothes. Spam. Unroll.me. Grant money that was never really up for grabs in the first place. Gambling as though nothing needs nor is worth the money. AI slop, cadence, redundancy, drift. Corruption normalized. Begrudgingly employing the language of "sin" to best encapsulate level of depravity.  People wasting my time because they can't be bothered to communicate, text back, or use a calendar. Automatic features that can't be silenced, uninstalled, or erased entirely. Performative anger voice. Being boxed into titles and designations I did not ask for like "digital creator." Being a "content" mine to be exploited indefinitely. Every high-profile Nazi and tech nazi. Pride in general. The fact that I've had good reasons over horrible ethics and practices to leave every job I've ever had. Having to spend anywhere from 20 minutes to weeks bringing someone into a world of shared language and reality, if it's ever actually achieved. Headache. Eyes ache. Untrained unsecured neighborhood dogs. The last several lobbies of mechanics I've been in smelling of smoke. The lack of genuine opportunities in the face of a waterfall of condescending cultural normative propaganda otherwise. Watching people with "more important" or "adult" jobs get squeezed and exploited as much or more than me. Retreating to selfish cliches about each's own individual suffering to eschew solidarity or change. Cutting off more than bringing in. Unnecessary pending status. Repeating to me something, sometimes several times, that wasn't complicated to begin with nor needed as many words as you used already. Things working just long enough to give you false hope. The amount of ways I could severely hurt myself doing something routine and how long it would take for anyone to notice. Dependence on money. I always think I'll be better or "things" will be okay with enough money. They kind of are, but then it's never figured out how to sustain the money in a way that isn't otherwise destroying the experience of what the money was for. No amount of money or invites has  has enticed  people to hang that weren't already. Actually likely to be relatively extreme in a.d.d. and/or autism while they became "cool." Stomach acid. Lightheadedness from general sedentary status. Every.Little.Thing like even free tax filing taken away or targeted. Former "heroes" devolving in embarrassing and literally step-by-step trackable ways. Seriously never-ending battle with dust and hair. Cost of everything, but filters in particular in this moment. The sheer amount of things I would do, prepare, and work on in a day or two with the right amount of money, time independent of, but especially with, a team. Discovering the infinite amount of things I do not know with each new things I try. Comedians who genuinely think they're edgy. Ignorance of history. Ads. All fucking ads. Overpriced unpersonalized education courses. Any story of tragedy shared for clicks and not paired with the direct action you can take in response to it. Reliably and consistently knowing how someone is a piece of shit based on a few consistent key details. It's incredibly demoralizing to either betray evidence in service to some ideal or carry what feels like a bias with always incomplete information. No amount of stretching, pummeling, or prodding ever enough. Bleeding the heart of franchises dry. The temptation to do the exact opposite of what I "should" in a feeble attempt to exert agency. Bluetooth. Knowing I don't need something until a few days after I get rid of it. Staring at the thing I don't need. Websites with potential to be great that just idle for a decade or more or destroy themselves. Consciously destroying things in service to profit. Subscription models for things that aren't subscriptions. Almost all forms of tipping. Daylight savings time. Nothing living up to the quality of my IPOD to play music with. Nothing that can handle the amount of music and media I have. Getting routinely punished for telling the truth. Not the "hard" truth. Not the "I'm just a dick calling this the truth. Actually just speaking truthfully and it playing out predictably poorly. Seeming resistance or inability to efficiently organize and engage in collective action. Emerging poorly conducted studies reported as gospel. Treating anything as gospel. "anyone watching this today" comments. Almost always, always talking past people. Spotify. Ticketmaster. Amazon. Too-much fandom. Shaving. shitting. The same slop article about old news pushed to me ten thousand fucking times about something I didn't care about in the first place. Lack of direction or sense of purpose even after acquiring necessary tool or accomplishing next step. Proof of ability betrays desire to do more or demonstrate what I already know. Less Joe Rogan or his sphere of influence than the fact that he and his sphere of influence is another manifestation of our default condition. How all of this, at some point in the day, invokes itself every day. Sign ins and account creation for shit that absolutely doesn't need it. That the writing has been on the wall for how fucked and crazy shit was going to be every step of the way and people still act like we should wait for anything ever.

[1246] Bear Minimum

I don’t even want to proofread this. That should tell you whether you should bother with this one. No, I didn't mean "bare."

Everything I’m going to attempt to talk about is complicated by the cold and snow. I need discipline. I can feel too many things competing for my attention. It’s been preventing me from finding the peace I can usually get a sip of from writing. I think I’m going to avoid spending any time contextualizing something for “the random reader.”

I find myself returning to an idea that anymore, I want the bare minimum. My life has swung back and forth between austerity and indulgence. One was a project in service to a sense of long-term stability or growth. The other a reaction to the creeping understanding that I no longer believed I was going to achieve either.

I owe money. Not really, but according to criminal institutions, thieving family and friends, and the capricious greed of former employers and my state. The processes afforded to me in order to discharge debts have lied, wasted time, and are now salivating to squeeze me for every single penny I already don’t have.

You can only exempt $450 in Indiana of money in your bank account. Doesn’t matter if you have a $316 electric bill, $520 due to a credit card, $1800 in legal fees you borrowed, and $650 more you needed thinking you’d get your water running. if your account says more than $450, “It’s complicated,” according to my lawyer as to why actually filing still hasn’t taken place. Gotta make sure those transactions aren’t pending if you’ve moved to pay the bills too. Kentucky? You can have $8,000 in cash. But, I live in Indiana, one of the shittiest states in the country.

But it gets dumber. I’ve been telling my lawyer for weeks how much my “business” is worth. You know, the LLC with no assets that’s renting a house on the back of good graces from one of its partners. Super stable. My 25% stake gets me, anymore, a couple hundred bucks a month, maybe. Less now with a couple relapses and disappearances. This, another hiccup for the attorneys who can’t seem to understand I’m not trying to hide from them a house my business does not own, I certainly don’t own, and I can’t even expect a consistent meaningful profit from.

What are the fixes? Sell things? Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Also, the whole country is aggressively bleeding people dry, so it’s not like there’s too many itchy buyers for your old broken vehicles. I’m trying to get into a drug study. I’m poised to check in Monday. There’s a chance I flame out because my anxiety gets the best of me and my heart rate is too high during the final screen. That’s why I stopped doing studies for 10 years the last time. All I need to do is get to Cincinnati, not be one of the unlucky who isn’t chosen to dose, and then there’s a consistent income for 6 months with each trip back.

I haven’t been able to leave my house for 5 days. My car can’t get out of my driveway. My truck, with its precarious battery, was dead. Why haven’t I fixed the battery by now? It’s one of 20 things I could spend money on that need fixed, and until I absolutely needed to drive the truck, why spend it back then? Did we get more snow in 2 days than has snowed in 8 years? Oops. Now I’m underprepared, again.

The truck is currently, hopefully, being charged, and will retain that charge long enough to drive into town and get a battery that will eat up approximately 25% of my current capital. Then I’ll get some food; sandwich stuff, potatoes, and sausage are the usuasl. This is provided I can navigate the tundra road that is my rural neighborhood. I’ll try not to think about how my truck costs 3 times what it does to drive my car. I’ll almost certainly have to drive the truck to both Chicago and Cincinnati.

My best case scenario is that I’m filed this week, granted access to the study next week, taken to be as poor as I am by the treasurer's office, and in 3 months I’ve paid back my dad, fixed my water, and caught up on other bills related to my credentialing, insurance, and remaining credit card.

In the story my life seems hellbent on trapping me within, I continue to get “Weeeelll, we were talking” hiccups to getting my paperwork filed. I psych myself out of the study, or am not picked at all, making a mockery at that point of whatever I managed to do to reign in my anxiety and heart rate. I’m unable to get my car out for weeks leaving me to be potentially door dashing in a truck. When it’s time for the hearing, I get picked apart or delayed because they want to exercise every "fuck you" move they can. In the meantime I’m trying not to make “too much” money that makes them more powerful. I’m arguing with myself if I can or should try to go to the next show. And that plays out for months until I’m forced into Chapter 13.

I have to refrain from sliding out on what I’m hearing is large amounts of black ice and overturned semis, from what I’ve experienced, as generally negligent road clearing efforts. I have to spend most of my time in between the drives and decision-making from on high in my very cold poorly insulated home that hasn’t had running water for over a month. I get to smell bad for longer because I was showering at Planet Fitness before dashing. Those are 45 minutes away not in snow and ice, mind you.

Moving out here altogether used to be my bare minimum. I’ve been able to go to shows because “the basics” were well enough in place. Now? It feels like my home is not living up to what I need. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older and less resilient. I don’t know if I’m just opening up to more liabilities as I struggle to keep things maintained when they all want to break at once. I don’t know if I’m just tired of fighting the backdrop of constant attack. I can’t get left alone. I’m never “good enough” to just ride my little corner of the world.

I want the decisions already. I want to know what it is I have to navigate. I work quickly because I hate ambiguity for its own sake. I hate feeling dependent on forces and people I can’t respect nor would ever carry myself like.

It’s hard to play your instruments when you can’t feel your fingers. It’s hard to wood work when you’re hotboxing dust. It’s hard to yoga, or sew, or whore bathe. So I sit, write, make tiktoks now, and wait until I get little bursts to get up and pee, eat, or fuck with the 10-steps between me and starting the real also-complicated, also-annoying process. I still have to go check on the battery. What happens if I can’t get it to start? Which of my neighbors do you think wants to cart my stank ass into town? My friend that lives in town is in Florida for 3 months dealing with problems that make mine laughable. My next closest friend lives an hour away.

Can the cats go, perhaps a whole week, unattended? I think the most I’ve done is 5 days. If the power goes out and their water freezes? I can’t even sit here and think about what to say next without my foot freezing over. The cold shows me how poor my circulation is and what areas of my body are poised for arthritis like my dad and grandpa.

What do I even want to do? Nothing. The bare minimum. I want to feel, again, like there is absolutely nowhere I have to be, no one knocking, no disaster needing cleaned up, no hand reaching its way into my pocket. I want to do that for so long that the next thing I do after that registers as the best thing I’ve ever done.

But I need to get back to being broke. I need to get the bills paid a year or two in advance. I need to be the friend who’s able to buy the tickets, dinner, drinks, parking, and tickets to the next thing between sets or intermission without blinking. I need to be able to decide I have the energy to do a little bit with a hole and concrete, so let’s capitalize on the moment and not weigh the $40 in materials against the gas prices. My life needs to more consistently feel as good as it actually is. I can’t feel better or good until I’m meaningfully distanced from all of the forces I clock as wanting me under heal or dead.

I’ll then scroll through reddit and read stories, maybe true, of people pissing away, winning, or making more money in an hour than I’ve ever been in debt, ever made a year, or would even be worth if I sold everything I owned. I’ll compare my laments to the people with health struggles, ICE’s fascism, considerably more invested-in and more respectable roles and lives than I’ve managed and I’ll self-impose a “go fuck yourself” sensibility. I’ll type in circles. I’ll go back to TV. I’ll click between windows. I think it’s about time to get disappointed by the battery again.

[1245] Call Me Maybe

I think this is going to be decently self-indulgent. If that’s not the headspace you’re in, please avert your eyes. PSA: Fuck ICE. General strike now. This digression has little-to-nothing to do with those topics, even if everything, in some way, does.

I’ve never been that good at being “one of the guys.” I’ve been told since I was very young that I was a leader.  Well before I had any conception of what that meant, it worked its way into my expectations and approach to life. I’m the roommate that finds the roommates, pays the bills, and throws the party. I’m the group project presenter. I’m the one at work who gets promoted to supervisor or manager. You know how at fast food places there’s a 22 year old managing 30-50 year old rough-looking line-cooks? I was that 22 year old, dispositionally at 15, and actually at 18.

I’ve had friend groups. Every time I reflect on them, they’ve felt less and less like they should be described as such. I’ve had people I’ve spent a majority of my social time with for at least a couple year periods at a time. I haven’t spoken a word to 95% of any individual from any of those groups in at least 5, probably 10 or more years. There’s passing glances on what they may post to social media. Many stopped using it entirely. One just declared he’s exhausted by the hate on “both sides” and said to reach out individually before he deactivates. I liked the post and declined to do so.

As “mental health” became a popular buzzy thing, a lot of people started asking questions like, “Does this person serve me?” They started conceptualizing their life in terms of “needs.” The “toxic” and “gaslighting” narratives were getting examined and the locus of “power” reimagined. A lot of people, at least superficially, appeared to be waking up to the power they have and the nature of their choices. That’s, broadly, a good thing.

What was hidden in that newfound awareness was a perfect selfish self-justification narrative. When you’re concerning yourself with your needs, perhaps for the first time ever in a meaningful way, you’re not going to be open to challenge and contradiction. Probably, when it’s new, rightfully so. But once you’ve made some obvious readjustments, there’s a temptation to think the work is over. Like, once you get dunked and saved, you’re going to heaven, right? You don’t have to actually practice your faith provided you believe in earnest. Don’t get hung up on, “faith without works is dead.”

My instinct is that I’ve been Marie Kondo-ed out of many lives. It’s incredibly rare that even tipsy I’ll bother to message someone I used to hang with or call a friend. What did I serve that person back then? Maybe they laughed. Maybe they liked the party environment. Maybe we had good conversations. Maybe they liked to fuck around. But, as we grew up and priorities changed, increasingly you start to register as just a kind of annoying bag of opinions. You don’t fit the narrative of what it takes to look after a family or succeed at work. When you’re reminiscing it registers as a kind of exhausting and pathetic appeal to what no longer exists.

I’m not a trapped in the past kind of person though. I’m a student of history. I’m also deeply investigative about why right now looks and feels the ways it does. Your “past” brain and all its memories exist today, morphed every time you access them, and signaling as safe or dangerous to entertain. To the extent that I’ve caused psychic injury, it might as well have been yesterday, and I think it goes a long way to explaining the disingenuousness of reaching out or trying to “stay connected,” if we ever really were.

I also know the power of lore and gossip. I’ve been a genuinely mean or ridiculous person in the past. I’m inclined to argue against that being my default setting or indicative of my broader project bent on hurting people. I’ve got a couple acutely dramatic and damming stories that I’m certain have made their rounds and would disincline most from hearing my perspective. At one level it’s perfectly understandable. At what I think is a more important and reasonable level, it’s the precise kind of unreasonable we unironically crave and claim in service to our “joy” or “mental health.”

I’m someone who struggles to conceive of “forgiveness.” I’d rather be understood. I’d rather there exist a series of things we can both point to that show contrition, change, or evidence we’re moving towards some mutual aim. When I was younger, almost every time I was asked to apologize for something, it just conjured resentment. I wasn’t sorry. I couldn’t understand the reason to be. You want me to lie? I used to get viciously beaten for lying! Certainly as a kid, I wasn’t coming from a place of personal responsibility nor grasping the impact of my words or actions. Apologize? But YOU MADE ME!

I’ve heard it said that forgiveness is about you more than the other person. If you can forgive, you drop the weight of that resentment and judgment. This selfless act regarded as the pinnacle of Christ’s love is actually a selfish tool to let yourself off the hook in learning how to cope and conceptualize your pain. You can adopt that methodology an infinite amount of times, sacrificing as many relationships, narratives, or responsibilities as it takes to feel like your needs are finally being serviced.

I’m an antagonist. If I were the villain in a story, I would be regarded “simply” as the necessary component to a compelling tale. No one is cracking open a book to read hundreds of pages about people just hanging out and living their lives without conflict. They have to conquer the monsters. They have to overcome the dramatic tragedy. They have to forge a new identity and unlock powers they never knew they had.

I’m not a monster. I am, but it’s a capacity, not a hard and fast sole and coherent designation. I’m not a monster because you say so or because you can point a finger. I’m not a monster because of the pain I’ve caused and will take responsibility for. I’m a monster because I’m not actually “human” or “a friend” in the mind of most people first.

I find this ironic because we’re living in some catastrophic fascist times where people I’m more inclined to understand as “animals” or “as monster as it gets” are shooting people in the back and face. There are people murdering us in the street, kidnapping children, and lying for millions of dollars and more license to destroy literally everything that made our society what it was.

Would it be overstating it to say that I’ve felt a kind of coldness and anger that’s been more consistent and resolute than I’ve ever heard former friends or partners voice about what’s been happening over the last 10 years? I don’t think so, and that feels properly insane to say, but I don’t feel like I’m lying. Is that not more evidence of my actually monstrous and conceited nature?

I work in counseling. I’ve worked for DCS. I’ve been a general case manager and social worker. I’ve worked in prison. I’ve been face to face with people for years who have fucked up in ways you can’t imagine for yourself. They have been fucked by details that don’t show up in the most dramatic of TV shows or movies. None of them feel like monsters. None of them feel like people it’s not worth talking to or teaching. None of them feel beyond the capacity to be redeemed, so to speak, even if it’s unclear or unlikely the confluence of core wounds will actually resolve.

My professional life has added considerably to my understanding of how and whether people actually practice their humanity. It’s not clear to me most people are inclined to treat each other as real human people. For the longest time I wanted to personalize that. Blame my argumentative and explanatory style as “too much.” But while that can certainly be annoying and tuned up or down, what’s happening first is people want to be appeased and agreed with, regardless of what they’re doing or saying. Your value is directly proportional to their internal calculation of your capacity to do that.

Doesn’t that sound like the instinctual unarticulated practice of asking out loud whether something serves you or brings you joy? Does it look like we’ve just repackaged our animal nature into something that sounds more polite and professional?

I think there’s a direct line through the alienation I’ve experienced to the sense of helplessness about what’s happening culturally. I think people’s inability to truthfully discuss the painful details and work within the practical confines of what it means to do something meaningful is why they can only increase in their suffering of that condition. You get cancer, you say, “Thinking about this sickness doesn’t serve me.” You jettison the thought. The cancer grows regardless.

It’s not true to say that I want people who were friends to be friendly again. The truth is that I want people who I thought I saw evidence of what they were or what we were together to see the same thing I did. That’s a very different kind of longing or desire. I don’t just want to be accepted or tolerated. I don’t want to wear you down or conjure pity. I want you to feel the same kind of patience, affinity, respect, and hope that I have in working with people in earnest. I want you to be as discerning in your decision to never talk to me again, where the conditions for that to be true rise beyond gossip or incidentally hurt feelings.

I cut my mom off, for example, because 30 seconds into any conversation you’re transported into a world of mental illness, racism, religious dogma, and victimhood that’s beyond parody. I’m regularly setting the example of patient parsing and question asking. I’m making choices. She’s rabidly barking. It’s bizarre to be treated with the same tool or like we’re the same kind of bad thing. It’s, thankfully, hard to feel like you’ve been iced out when you start to recognize that you were maybe never seen in the first place.

I then wonder about how deep or whether it’s always been true that “things” or “culture” has been so superficial. I watch my dad seemingly pretty regularly interact with friends he grew up with on facebook or sometimes they’ll show up to a funeral. If I died tomorrow, I don’t know that I’d get to 20 people outside of immediate family. I cared too little? Fought over the wrong things? Crossed the line too many times? I’m not pitying myself, I’m seriously curious. And I kinda think I’m going to go the rest of my life never getting the answers.