[247] Domestic Abuse

You’re boring. I love you.

You tawdry fiery fiend.

I’ll have a bite. I’ll cut you.

I’ll eat you piece by piece.

You’re so mean yet debonair

Eyes go wild but locked in stare

Take me by my fucking hair

No you dolt I shall not share!

Sex and violence, one more round

Bounce it like a trampoline

A laugh, a tear, what’s that sound?

Take it bitch, it’s time to scream

What’s wrong with you, you sick sad freak?

All she wanted was a peak

Another body you made leak

Another soul gone, mild, meek

Time it better sugar daddy

It’s no time to brag

Grind her up like burger patty

Chores are such a drag

Getting late, must move quick

Click clock, tick tick tick

Such a heavy little prick!

Lake or dirt, take your pick

A drink it is, goes down smooth

Showed you how it’s done

Something stuck, oh my tooth

Indigestion

[246] Winging It Like A Boss

In the face of uncertainty, I want to prove that doing what’s “obvious” or moral will more often than not result in a desirable outcome.

I’m not exactly “winging it” with this coffee shop, but I’m kind of winging it. My entire problem solving process goes like this: “Hey, this is a problem…Oh, that’s what I have to do to fix it?...I did that thing so now the problem is fixed.” Scene. I believe in objective reality. This means that I bank my decisions on a common language and common perception of cause and effect. If history is anything to learn from, (it is) I’ve been lucky enough to be born into a world where lessons that take some people their entire lives to learn are neatly laid out in Cracked articles.

I want to spread the wealth around. I’m a dirty “Socialist” for all you idiots who have no idea what you’re talking about. I live an embarrassingly good life and remind myself of this every day. Spending money sucks, and fixing problems that should never have been problems sucks, and not sleeping sucks, and always feeling under-prepared sucks; I still live within the means and in a society that lets me try. I have an opportunity to make an investment in that society and in myself. What’s good for the people that help me with that is obviously good for me.

I have no idea why some people find this so hard to understand. If I was a billionaire, you could take 99% of my wealth and I’d still be better off than most people, let alone 90% after my first 10 billion. Yet, this is the paradigm we live in, where even the idea of enabling people to work, instead of sit around and wait to rebel, is met with anathema. It really makes me wonder how society is going to mold my ideas about business. Of course I started a business to turn a profit. I want to be self-sufficient, efficient, and personal. If those ideals can’t sustain me because the laws in place are designed to generate profit through exploitation and complicated legalese, where’s my place?

Of course I’m willing to try, given my half constructed kiosk sitting in the mall. I’ll kindly ask for patience while I make a few sales and then buy an espresso machine. I’ll try to engage in mutually beneficial advertising campaigns with other small business owners in town. I’ll use the eco-friendly cups and as fairly-traded coffee as possible. I’ll even start paying all of my taxes one day when it’s shown to me the money is actually going towards infrastructure and environmental care. But alas, I’m sure I’m just a naïve idealist with my little shop. I have no idea the minds of the big kids and how things are actually supposed to run. (The “asshole” way)

I’m genuinely concerned and confused by a dumb society. My ideals go out the window when you can’t get past feeding or housing people. And that’s certainly the state of many places in the world and for a growing number of people here. I need a good portion of people to be better in the same way I’m trying to express what I can show to be better. Otherwise, you literally will be a drag on other people.  I don’t want to just succeed in making money; I want to succeed in generating value. I want to excite, motivate, and make people smile. I want to teach and idiot proof things. I want things to be learning and growing opportunities instead of looming risks attenuated only by the fervent “good luck” sentiments of your friends.

If anyone is proud or happy for me, don’t forget or pretend that you don’t impact what I do. You teach me, you challenge me, and you motivate me, usually more often than you frustrate or scare me. My friend circle is part of society-at-large. I hope that I can affect you back in ways that let you stand for the ideas you know will make the world, if only in your circle, better.

[245] Plotting

I want to talk a little about how I plan to take over the world.

The first thing to be done, as far as I can see, will be to draw a map. If you’re going to correct or change the nature of something, you should understand how its pieces fit together. Problems are interrelated. Poverty exists because somewhere someone is profiting from someone being poor. While it isn’t a horrible idea to start a homeless shelter or something comparable, it isn’t really addressing the core issue. We start wars that have everything to do with energy. We have ridiculous fiscal policies that are directly related to misunderstandings and failures of our legal system and privatization. If you can explain where the money goes and identify who is profiting, you can then know how you need to move your chess pieces.

Luckily, we live in the information age. My only hope for humanity comes from Google. Let me explain. Because information can be stored, copied, compiled and manipulated with clicks of a mouse, significant amounts of it can be distributed very quickly. This is very important for a number of reasons. One, it makes it hard to pin down where and how something started. The number one concern I have is for the safety of myself and the people I care about. If I can get the information working instead of making myself a target, I succeed where many fail when they invent or try to change something.

Secondly, if it is to be believed that people are getting less and less likely to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes (of this I have many doubts) it allows you to understand things in terms that can stand against even the most vigorous Colbert interviews. You can make qualiasoup-esc shorts for Youtube. You can make inforgraphs. You can compile all the links and resources in easily researchable and clickable ways. Surely, I shouldn’t have to sell you on what the internet is capable of, but I think it’s important to lay out some of the specific ways of outreach.

I want to act like a virus. If you’re going to change something, why not play by the rules that are already getting a response and shift the tides without causing too much of a fuss? When religions were trying to take over the one that came before it they adopted the myths and gods of previous traditions into their own framework. I think I might have enough sense of the American ethos to spin an idea that would make sense in couch-potato terms, or over-worked and under paid terms, or “if only I had the time” terms. Expediency and convenience are a lot of peoples’ guiding light. It’s unrealistic to blow up or boycott gas stations, but if you give each consumer a tool to manipulate and get the most out of the gas they inevitably have to get, you’re winning.

I have a hunch that the more you teach and trust people with, you’ll be “surprised” at how well things can actually run. What’s the alternative? We keep killing the planet, we keep funneling money to the top 1%, we continue to lament all the time and effort lost, and ideas for real change stay firmly locked in documentaries. It gets really old hearing the potential disaster scenarios by enabling and trusting the public. The current state of the world, as my one friend Chet pointed out, is that we have weapons that can wipe out all life on the planet. Explain to me how it gets much worse if we’re talking in terms of potential. Here’s a clue, no matter the state of the world you shouldn’t trust anyone or anything implicitly. Luckily, I don’t play by the rules of trust and forgiveness and stick to results instead.

With my map, I want to identify the clogs in the system. Where will a little information or a little money get things running smoother? There is no end to the problems people face, so how can you fix all of them with the least amount of effort? What I’m learning is that you have to do the Googling for other people. If one can’t recognize or care to acknowledge a problem, you can’t argue or expect anything from them. I’m also trying, with much effort, to learn the amount of informed and willing to fight people that are simply waiting to be enabled properly. A shared burden looks less and less like a problem over time. A ton of people all fighting the same battle from their computer screens is important, but not the kind of impact I’m looking to create.

This brings up another strategy of mine. I will make acts become visible while remaining invisible. I want to be the billionaires of today you’ve never heard of without the burden and anxiety of protecting my empire. I want to have my representatives in the media. I want the “small” changes and adjustments I make around the country or world to make the news. And from what I’ve seen of the news I should be accomplishing this accident let alone with the plans I’d lay out.

Power is simply the control and manipulation of resources. Living in an age where information can reach around the world and back in seconds means the old power paradigm is dying. What are considered to be “resources” will shift and someone will move in to commoditize it. In my view, nothing is more powerful than workable information. This is something that costs arguably nothing. Well before we started making fumbling economies and playing with numbers we don’t understand, our goals were to eat, sleep, fuck, and stay alive. I don’t think the world has to burn over and over again for people to start forming a better perspective of what they are doing with their time and information. You don’t care to wage war when everything you need is available.

For the record, big bubbles on my map will be health/food, education, the environment, and poverty/income disparity. If you or someone you know thinks themselves informed or passionate about one or more of these issues, I’d like to hear from you. It needs to be more than merely teaching people. Getting hands in the dirt is the only long term practical solution in my view. The alternative being us staying perpetually misinformed or disenfranchised being passed around by corrupt corporate ethos. I’d also like to state that this blog exists so that when people say “I never saw it coming” or “I didn’t realize Nick P. was actually serious” we can still get the required amount of irony life so obnoxiously demands.

[244] It's All About The He Said She Said

Watching Morgan Spurlock’s old show 30 Days is arousing many a thought in me. What I can state right off the bat is how bad…terrible…atrocious people are at arguing. It truly boggles the mind how little someone can know about something and then passionately rally in favor of their opinion. (Insert irony now.)

In case you don’t know, 30 days pits one “I hate this or that” kind of person and puts them in the middle of whatever they hate. If you’re a minute man, you get put into a house of illegal immigrants; an atheist gets housed with Christians etc. What you get is 25 days of arguing, and usually about 5 where the person opting for the experience finally appreciates that other people are human and everyone wants the same things.

What kills me is that it’s the exact same problem that all of these people face. They all get passionate and start yelling the same catch phrases over and over. Then they get exposed to more and more reality, and they leave, still pretty stupid, but with the confused look a dog gets on their face when they really thought you threw the ball.

To me, it shouldn’t take 30 days of yelling stupid things back and forth to get people to understand something. Call me naïve, I must be. What kills me is that most of these candidates that volunteer themselves for the 30 days aren’t even just kind of passionate about their hatred for the other side, they’re pretty ill-informed about life in general. The christian living with muslims doesn’t know what wasabi is, the mom who binge drinks to teach her kid a lesson doesn’t know what a roofie is, and the straight guy who takes his shirt off in a gay bar doesn’t understand why some of the guys might get the idea to hit on him.

If I really want my ideas to take over the world, I’ve got my work cut out for me. I somehow need to act as dumb as everything around me, yet engineer the words or the situations to play out in my favor. This could be as easy as implementing public policy, to as hard as learning about the specific backgrounds and dispositions of a specific group of people. It’s doable, but fuck.

What bugs me the most is that I don’t necessarily consider myself special or somehow more privy to knowledge than the middle class people I yell at on the idiot box. Why am I able to read, google, take time out of my day to humble myself and be honest about what I do and don’t know, and these people can’t? It’s not like my parents had long intellectual-esc talks with me growing up. I didn’t kick it with the wise janitor in high school. What allows me to seek and respect ideals that, while obviously selfish, simply exist beyond my ability to get pissed off and whine about how I feel? Maybe I can put it in pill form…

For as willing as I am to argue or spend time writing these blogs, I more often than not just shut the hell up. I don’t actually like to look foolish, which is why I try to stick towards saying things I can defend. How do you teach shame and humility? How do you stop people from feeling so damn entitled? No matter how many times you scream “It’s my human right! This is absolutely true!” You’re still wrong. At the very least, you should be honest about your ability and likelihood of being wrong.

It really is a war of ideas, and if you can actually be made to see the state of the world, look at what they reap. It’s apparently the best idea to be a screaming child your entire life, completely unaware or scared of reality, getting by with your fingers crossed that your meager existence will be rewarded because you feel good about yourself right before you die.

You’re only entitled to death. You don’t really own anything. Every single idea you’ve ever had is influenced by something previous. Maybe if you weren’t so entrenched in your hateful ideas, you could flow into a place of understanding without everyone looking this stupid along the way.

But hey, majority rules and if stupid’s in, it’s here to stay. And less we forget; it’s not like you ever had a choice.

[243] Bcuz It's Ez

It’s been too long. Check It

“God.”

When I hear people say this word, I literally have no idea where they are coming from. No, I don’t feel like I’ve been forsaken or am somehow “spiritually bankrupt.” I’m not inexplicably stricken deaf when they utter the sound. I’m simply flooded with the torrent of meanings that have ever been associated with the word. My mind flashes to every incoherent story or scary justification I’ve ever heard. If I’m a person who seeks even a meager understanding of things, it’s words and concepts like “god” that lead to nothing.

And that’s why I’m an atheist. I hesitate to even say atheist because of the weird instance in our language that allows for a word to exist denoting an absence. I’m also an asantaist, afairyist, etc. More importantly I think it’s important to talk about what you are over what you aren’t. Who cares what you don’t believe in? You’re hardly going to act in the name of it, justify your actions by it, or ever think a harmful or helpful thought as a result of it because the “it” in question isn’t even there.

I shy away from the entitlement people try to claim from words like “rationalist,” “bright,” “intellectual,” “humanist,” “free thinker,” “gnostic,” “agnostic,” etc. These seem to be incomplete and can be used as something to hide behind when you don’t understand something. Or, it makes another point of “us vs. them.” It’s as if somehow they’ve reached the end of their understanding and now this semi-arbitrary title suits them until they can’t help but think again.

I’m human. Even if you and I don’t know every detail of what that entails, you can at least draw a stick figure. I represent something. I’m made of things. I have intentions and act upon the world. All of my power or knowledge to do something comes from simply being human. Everything about the world, or at least “my world,” is contained in my consciousness at any given moment I choose to recognize it. At times, it seems like this concept is harder for people to understand than any abstract notion of a god.

The simple idea is that there are rules. It’s a game. If I don’t feed myself and wipe my ass, I’ll die smelling of shit. If I want to achieve a different end, I’ll play by the rules. It’s at this point a religious person might say something like, “I have rules too, and if I don’t follow them, I won’t get into heaven.” There is a simple, ever so simple, reason why this isn’t a counterpoint. I didn’t make the rules I have to follow. You, or someone before you, did. In the realm of pragmatic objectivity, nothing you think matters. You still get to die if you don’t eat, you still get to smell if you don’t wipe. Every story about before our existence and after our death is made up.

But people are so insecure. How could I live with myself if I thought I was so insignificant? Here’s a thought. Try it. See how long you really go thinking you’re nothing but shit and that the people you care about don’t matter. See what happens when you think you’re actions have no consequences. I’ll literally put money on that not lasting a day. I don’t feel comfortable with excuses. You either do something or you don’t, and while there are a million ways to describe it, few of those ways actually speak to what happened or didn’t. Distinguishing what makes stories relevant is of the highest importance to me.

I speak of patterns. When I question someone’s beliefs, I hear the patterns. In fact, peoples’ response patterns are so prevalent, you will see them throughout history, in every “rage” thread whining about how illogical Christians are being, and you can even predict what someone will say if you know even a modest amount about their background. I think it is patterns that destroy the world. When we get into habits that “feel right” or that we’re used to and just carry on until something bad happens ever wondering why and how it did.

I think belief in god is a bad pattern.

I don’t need, nor want, nor justify for someone else an external excuse to do something. I cannot deny what harm comes from disassociating yourself from your responsibilities or decisions. Do you feel the urge to defend yourself? From what? Are you special and different? Does your conception of an Almighty Force trump literally everything that came before you? I doubt it. You’re not even in the above video :P.

I am humbled by humanity. I get to be reminded every day how little I understand or know. On the other side of the coin, the things I’ve worked at, the consequences I enable, tend to go as expected. I get to slowly shape the world, piece by piece, into one I find more agreeable. I get to think about death in a way that makes me appreciate life more than fear what happens when it’s present. Most importantly, I get to remain internally and externally consistent. If I woke up tomorrow with just a hate filled rant about gay people, or thought oil was our ticket to saving the planet, or volcano ghosts where going to take over Los Angeles, hopefully, you’d be confused as fuck.

We let kids believe in things that aren’t there because we empathize. We understand the need for companionship and how crappy it can be to feel alone. We understand being afraid of questions and the unknown. My refusal to treat people like kids puts me in the “most distrusted” group in America? My insistence on developing a consistent language for our shared human experience is the worst thing you can conceive a person doing?

Eh, it’s not like you have a choice or anything so I’ll just keep doing my thing and I guess you’ll just keep doing yours.