[223] Midnight Madness

It isn’t until the wee hours of the morning I can be creative. And of course by creative I mean deep enough in thought to forget who I’ve stolen from. I don’t think there are any answers. Only stories, methods, and tendencies. You’ll take only what you’re capable of from anything. It’s terrifying to think you have to lose so much in order gain so much. What could be a more deconstructive process? If who, what, and when is so ready and capable of shifting. You’re always in flux. Or maybe you’re not, but everything about you and your environment is, so why not “you?” What is it called when you maintain during endless flux. Self? Observing? Collapsing? Your particles are shifting, connected to things you can’t ever know. Your decisions constantly affecting and controlling what is and isn’t. What happens when you realize you already have ultimate power? You don’t want it. You don’t qualify it as powerful, just a matter of fact.

I connect with characters. They are the dramatic portraying of what actually goes on, and yet they feel more real to me than much of my day to day. It’s easier for me to imagine getting on in an episode of skins than in life. Or maybe it’s just simply appealing because it isn’t my life. Because a story is in place, one I can kind of rely on. Characters resolve, generally. The story can’t die. It can be relied upon. They play with death, drugs, and emotions. They speak to ideals we wish we saw in others. Love. Bliss. Trust. And we’re made to believe that even in a world we’d never want to actually imagine these things exist.

I have a corner, but I want a corner. I don’t want to make sense to people can’t make sense. I wanna be OCD, if not just obsessive. I want cohorts. Losing the attachment makes you inhuman. I wonder what it feels like to have an emotional component to being completely understood. I don’t respect isolated emotion. It’s too easy to get angry, it can be just as easy to be happy, if you want. I don’t necessarily think you lucky if you are disposed to “falling in love” with people you are desperate to connect with.

I can’t help it. The danger coupled with infinite opportunity to learn. To tell a different story. A compelling story. One that changes you before you can dictate how.

How can you ask that of someone? To get lost in them. To understand. You can’t. Unless you both can appreciate just how quickly it can change. Mutually reverence for the moment. Amplify the observation. Make real infinite potential.

I should play more.

Do I stay up to prove to myself that I won’t run out? That I have more control when I really try to. Sleep is a condition, a compulsion, but not what controls. Do I abstain out of fear or respect? Have I already tasted what it is I’d be losing? When I stopped loving I stopped feeling such a ridiculously driving force I allowed it to control me. Control is important, no? There was a time that she didn’t have a hold on me, other than being the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. But I wasn’t dramatic. I wasn’t prepared to lose myself happily. I wasn’t prepared to think of anything but myself under the spell of love. Maybe I find myself too convincing. I got too many ridiculous ideas and have trapped myself into them because I’m too sold by how they made me feel. Is it just because it was the first time? I find myself obsessive because it was a sole incident? Am I looking for the next one? The next one would have to be a completely different flavor. What does that say about the original? What does it say about the feeling? Do I behave in reaction to what I’m not feeling? Comparing all others as if there is a standard. But of course there is, her individual person, something you can’t “logically” compare across people. I won’t be a slave.

How am I so unable to stop thinking about the same things? And what the fuck is it doing to my mind…

Punctuated moments of sincerity. Save your tears for when they matter. So many loose ends.  

[221] Recalibrating

I feel I’ve made an error in my use of the word passion. I have made a habit of saying people should live for their passions, taking for granted that passion comes first. Surely many people have “found their calling” after happening upon an opportunity and pursuing it. There isn’t necessarily some incessant blinking light in our heads that we actively ignore as the truer inclination from what we’re currently doing. I guess it’s at this point it is important to really nail down how you define your passions. Not all are going to need to manifest in the same behaviors.

If I were to recall times I felt passionate. As a kid definitely; playing tag, kicking ass at tetherball, stringing together curse words like a boss. Go all gaga for a damsel and that will get the blood rushing. Arguing with creationists and learning about the whole god thing was the source of much time and energy. Learning the guitar, not so much playing it every day anymore, but the initial learning I was up to around 8 hours a day. When I got the house I was looking constantly for ways to keep making it cooler or change things up. The initial starting of Mystik, the meetings, stencil, research, form organizing, website planning etc. was a constant pursuit.

So according to my old understanding of passion I should be someone who learns how to play instruments, falls for girls, fights all the time about god, and owns little kids at their little games…I fail to see the profit potential. Well, this simply means there has to be a different set of words that you should probably go with before passion. This also helps me justify my ever increasing role I’m giving to circumstance being a gigantic player in why things play out as they do.

The question seems to become how to manipulate yours circumstance. Depending on the degree this can be a pretty…fucked up…game. Worse is when you’re passionate about manipulating circumstances. Like there is a line in the sand or something.

I like controlled randomness. I don’t want to be on a random couch every night desperate for my next new conversation or perspective. I do like throwing parties for example because alcoholic ingredients and friends can play out any number of ways, most of them not dangerous.

Gonna drift away now…

[220] What's Your Problem

I think there is a problem when you try to solve problems.

Say I go on my initiative to collect as many college stories about the wasted effort, bad teachers, useless information and so on. I spend years compiling stories, edit the videos together, create this massive chain of anecdotal evidence that at the very least speaks to peoples’ subjective views about the utility they are or aren’t receiving while in school. What if I garner enough attention? I get to sit down, express my views to the university president. Maybe I am allowed to sit on a board of reform. It is at this point I think you would start to see the pageantry start to outweigh the utility.

Who still has the money? Who owns the buildings, pays the teachers, and is making money from some convoluted structuring that is more than a few steps removed from your ideas about Spanish class? The problem with fixing problems is that people are immediately resolved to negotiations. After you invest the time, get the attention, and are made to believe are moving in a positive direction, you have to find a way to actually fix something instead of just creating a debate around it. When too dramatic a change occurs too quickly, old angry white men get fearful for their profits or positions of power.

Sometimes I feel like I shoot myself in the foot before I begin. I am always the most gung ho for my ideas and the biggest detractor. This digression seeks to explain why.

We start with a lot of bad ideas. People are self-sufficient and totally responsible for their own well-being. Everyone is equal. Your entitled opinion should be allowed to be represented as fact. It’s someone else’s problem. Nothing will change. Who cares? If I can’t understand it, it must be wrong. Let’s assume they had the best intentions. So and so will protect us. One day, by some nondescript method, they will finally realize something or get what’s coming to them, even if only after they’re dead.

Everything I think, or read or try to work on, once it is put “out there” is affected by horrid ideas like these. A gun is a great method for killing something until you try shooting under water. And the seas of ignorance, despair, and irresponsibility flow mightily. If there are a hundred men marching with spears at the ready and you decide “fuck war” and start marching in the opposite direction, you will be subsequently stabbed and trampled. Our ideas, I think, have an even more powerful flow than the direct impact of marching into a spear. If you pit a sea of bad ideas against the riled up and passionate detractors who specifically act in oppositional ways, their effort seems even more desperately meager than before.

I want to act in ways that aren’t exceedingly wasteful and extravagant under the guise of accomplishing something. I can write a blog, attempt to clarify my ideas and connect with someone on an intellectual level. It doesn’t cost anything but time I’m happy to spend. If the simple idea being my ideas and time can positively affect someone else’s thoughts, then how much more can I do at that level? Is anything lost or gained by taking big risks and trying to accomplish “more” with money and power? Do I need to “leverage” (go into debt) my assets against my best guess as to what I’ll make in return with a business. What lessons are best learned from other people’s mistakes and what do you need to screw up on your own? You can find just as many horror stories as success stories about what happened when someone started a business. If you get a real good talk, you’ll hear about the fifty failures before the person stumbled on the thing they are there to talk about. I don’t want to fail on principle. It’s clearly inefficient and seems more than a bit unwise.

I think it is truly the mark of million dollar households when someone said “of course that’s what we’re gonna do” when the opportunity found them. I do not think it is the case that most successful people are living the life of the immigrant who started with sheer uncertainty and will and simply fought extra hard to be the best and most profitable. Yet these are the stories we tell. Maybe one of the best kinds of success is to truly grasp all ways in which you are failing. The best companies choosing to redesign and conserve instead of expand. The best people choosing modesty over pride. A description of the life of something that includes the bad decisions and feelings of uncertainty if there were in fact that many bad decisions and underlying feelings.

I think in order for more people to find the mindset to make those “of course” decisions we need a better human philosophy. It needs to be centered on something that literally has nothing to do with or ability to be hurt by the worst kinds of ideas. I clearly advocate the scientific method for this reason. Billionaires shouldn’t block legislation that levies an estate tax in Maine, of course. We should do even the minor improvements to our roads and bridges because we don’t want them to collapse, of course. When are we going to set the course and leave the debating and fighting for people who don’t belong on it?