[252] Peek-a-boo

I’m going to argue against me being an actual sociopath.

I write this enraged. See. But my rage is stayed to my beating heart, accelerated breaths, and flying fingers. People throw around sociopath like it’s an insult. They pretend it is synonymous with not caring. They think that if they can make it true in their heads then they can get away with volleying too horrible of insults that they themselves could never be capable of if it wasn’t the fault of that person over there. I’d venture that a top reason some people find it so easy to dislike me or flip a switch to hatred is because I won’t let them be the victim. I have no sympathy if you want to wallow in self-pity all the while pretending you’re even trying at getting better.

You can say and you can do. You can think and feel. You can act. I don’t play pretend. Your feelings will never overwhelm me. This isn’t because I don’t “feel the same” it’s because I’m done feeling the same. I don’t need to cry, scream, or name call. I don’t expect you to be exactly like me, but I do expect you to respect yourself enough to not lose control. I fight for control. I can’t begin to explain how persuasive I can be in justifying not giving a fuck. In breaking down to a take no prisoners attitude. I have to constantly work to not let what I know to be harmful be used in spite and anger like you so callously use on me.

I won’t feel guilty until I’m making the decision to hurt you. I’ll never persuade you. I’ll never teach you. If you want to fuck the same things up time and again, that’s your fault. For every one person that might have severe mental or chemical impairment there’s a million whiney bitch ass niggas who need to grow the fuck up. I won’t suffer your stupidity, your hatred, your stress, particularly via means of your pious scorn or guilty conscious. You have the capacity to harm in mind shattering ways. It’s only because you’re too fucking stupid to understand that I abstain from making your miserable world any worse.  

[250] I Wanna Sex You Up Baby

I’m amazed at what people will tell me they do or don’t understand when I explain something. Well, they never actually grant me their understanding; that seems to be reserved for after they’ve broken up or when they’re alone at the end of the night wondering how I can just be so backward and weird. Without much surprise, I’ve found sex to be one of the most hot button and contentious issues, and I’m positively dumbfounded as to why.

First of all, I’m a big believer in relationships. I don’t think that word gets to be hijacked by monogamy. It is logically sound to say I have a relationship with each and every one of my friends. For a relationship to matter for me, it involves two individuals. They need to be people, with perspectives and reasoning skills and personal feelings about things. No shit 101. You’re not exactly like anyone else, your history is your own, your thoughts and decisions are yours to make. I try to respect that, foster that, and be an example of that.

Sex is a game. Sex is serious. Sex is potentially dangerous. Sex can be emotional or not. It can come easy or be one of the biggest issues in someone’s life. Sex is fun, fairly simple, and enjoyed by practically everything that’s ever lived. I don’t know why some people have a hard time believing that it can be all of these things or that I somehow don’t grasp all the things it can mean.

When I talk about sex, it’s usually in jest because it tends to err on the positive side of things I think about. It isn’t to belittle it or demean the different circumstances in which people are having it. In the same vein, I’m usually met with people who say “I just don’t understand you!” or “I don’t agree” or “How can you do this or that, doesn’t it mean all these things I’ve just put into your mouth?!” I secretly hope someone ever tells that last one word for word.

Classically, I hear one of two things; sex is important because it denotes someone you love or that fact of your love or, it’s just “different” or “special” than anything else you do. It’s used as a separating device apparently.

Here’s where I take issue. Sex fundamentally is a reward system developed in order for things to propagate. Any moral or emotional flavor that your sex life has is injected by you. If you want it to be dramatic, you can make either/or statements about its significance. You can equate it with love. You attach the feelings you get from it to the flurry of memories and interactions you’ve had with the person you’re having sex with. I don’t regard this as a bad thing, necessarily. What bugs me is when the opposite of this process is regarded as “bad” “naïve” “reckless” “empty” and assumed about people who don’t describe their sex lives in romance novel terms.

I’m one of those people. I think sex can be important, I understand it’s like a pinnacle for some peoples’ relationships. I know how it’s been used to fuck over and manipulate a number of my friends. Yet, I somehow persist in my venture to be turned on and sexed out. I don’t play with people’s emotions. I don’t lie about where I’m coming from. I don’t base my relationships or regard them in the amount of sex I’m having or not with someone. I don’t really understand how anyone could.

“But Nick, you’re an emotionally crippled and cynical bastard, how could you possibly have soul enough to truly empathize with the plight of my feelings for the one I love and choose to make my only sex partner?” This frankly is horrendously condescending and mean. When I’m mean to someone I identify something they care about and try to reduce it to something that I actively try to make them feel bad over. I genuinely care about my relationships and when depicted as the kind of person above, it’s more than a bit annoying.

Your feelings exist in the vault that is your mind and body, but that doesn’t mean feeling is somehow reserved for when you are experiencing it the most. I would love the chance to defend my friendships or relationships or fuck buddies or whatever the fuck else that I’ve worked on creating in my life. It’s because I base those things on principles and ideas that come before sex; honesty, happiness, comfort, intellectual stimulation, fun, trust. You know, things that healthy relationships and friendships are based on. Whether sex comes into the equation or not, if you don’t have those things, you’re doing it wrong.

“But Nick, sex is still ‘special’ and ‘different’ with the person you love.” Then explain to me how! I get that you get a rush or are more emotionally involved with that person at that time, but explain to me how there is this edict about life that “special and different” make any sense beyond your personal attachment. When I hear this it’s like someone telling me that animal rights are more important than gun control. When asked why they think this, they simply respond, “Animals are special!” “I think about them differently!”

I’d rather not have sex with someone who thinks it can only be about getting off or being a one night stand. When asked the point of one night stands, if your answer is anything more than “to get off,” you’re doing it wrong. And if you don’t understand getting off, what is this ever growing queer (not gay) nature of the loving sex you’re allegedly having? If you can’t have fun with it, regard it as spending time with someone you’re attracted to, or respect it as something you don’t engage in with “just anyone at any time” then I don’t want you having sex with me. That’s fucking weird. Try masturbating to a paper towel roll, randomly, not even when you’re horny where it might work. That’s basically how I feel about trying to engage in sex for the sake of sex alone.

People are attractive for any number of reasons, not all of which solely reside in them. If you can call two people hot or funny or whatever then you have to understand what I mean. For the laundry list of cool things I can say about me, I know other people are funny, cute, relatively not fat, and potentially intellectually stimulating. This doesn’t invalidate or diminish who I am or how we relate to each other. I can think of nothing worse than thinking of our friendship sacrificed because there wasn’t room for you to figure out why you find two people cool or attractive. Jealousy in a scenario like this serves a purpose. It means you give a damn! It doesn’t mean you hate or are willing to hurt someone, it just means you recognize what you have matters. It should help you protect it and prompt you to raise any concerns you might have, not send you spiraling out of control.

I have been, can be, and will probably go on having emotions. They’ve been, could be, and probably will continue to jump in a fairly familiar realm that yours can dwell in as well. I don’t enslave myself to them, which doesn’t make me cold, it makes me an adult. I don’t make excuses for them, and I don’t like to pretend that my experience with them hasn’t given me at least a modicum of helpful or useful advice when it comes to sex or relationships. Yes, some shit you have to go through by yourself, some people will remain ever interred by their first or parent’s notion of sex, and some people will continue to use it in all sorts of odd or manipulative ways, but stop pretending the conversation is between two extremes. And stop pretending you don’t understand me or my position when I so clearly lay it out like I laid your mom, who “loved” it.  

[251] Philosipheyes

What matters?

Your perspective? Your will? Your obligations? Your sense of morality? Your struggle? Look at me, starting so selfishly; my bias might be showing a bit. Is it really my bias, or is it just symptomatic of subjective reality?

“If one tethers one's heart severely and imprisons it, one can give one's spirit many liberties.”

-Nietzsche

I think I imprison my heart with ideas of objectivity. I wait and see, watch for cause and effect, then play accordingly. My “spirit” therefore is free to simply do whatever it takes for me to draw a desired effect. But does that matter?

I’ll never know explicitly what someone else is thinking. Even when I exhaust my words people don’t even believe they know what I’m thinking. I can’t account for the probability of something going wrong, and I’ll always be using incomplete information when I make an assessment. To what degree, in what realm, to whom does it concern where and why I do things? I think even pushing yourself to hint at asking those kinds of questions is perhaps a fundamental role people’s gods fill.

And why not? Does it necessarily feel good to think that you’re unstable? Is hovering doubt a comforting a feeling let alone message to espouse? Perhaps not. Should you become arrested by your ideas then? Be unable to even qualify the word unstable or respect the notion of the ever small “you” amidst the noise? I chalk it up to intellectual stimulation. When you go to the top of a building and look over unable to help yourself from thinking what it would feel like, look like, or do to other people if you were to jump. Do you really want to jump? Not if you’re reading this.

And I think that’s what I do. I let my mind go to scary uncomfortable and downright despicable places simply because I can, or it does, or I can’t pretend to know of a reason or method to stop it. Having not gone insane, majorly snapped or hurt anyone, nor with any plans to do so, I just keep on thinking like a so-self-described sociopath or psychopath and carry on business as usual.

But why? What keeps me able to focus or respect, to even a marginal degree, others’ feelings and my position in society? Why do I recognize and try to exploit and grow opportunity? What capacity for positive feelings do I have that overwhelms a general proclivity to destroy or play with to the point of absurdity? Why are my rules, my chains, or my tethering ideas the ones that remain at the top? Maybe because they aren’t mine? Another argument against free will?

If it all boils down to feeling, then why bother with intellectual exercises? If you feel a certain way and you want to feel that way, the only “logic” you care about is the one describing your capacity to do so. Not very helpful for the rest of us, but someone will pat you on the head and send you on your way because they have feelings too and know just how rough it can be. Yay…If it all boils down to logic, you shoot yourself in the foot. You don’t know anything, technically, and what you do know undermines your very being well before said being begins to use its logic. In comes the all-important context.

Maybe I just need to overcomplicate things in order to make them simple. I’m opening a business, right? I have these weird dreams and prospects. Does it matter if I die rich? If I became a notable humanitarian would the lives I influence amount to something “meaningful?” Be it 2 or 200 years after I’m gone, if some problem I rallied against in life is still rampant, how much respect am I supposed to give to my influence or ideals? For evil to prevail all it takes is that good men do nothing. But I don’t believe in evil! I believe there are things that destroy and hinder goals. Goals I have that can be described as fostering well-being or happiness in this species. But, my goals are, technically, arbitrary. They’re assumed in light of my context. Whether I want to help the poor or cure cancer, it’s all stemming from some primal urge to not feel bad. I can’t destroy my mirror neurons, nor can I forget what it’s like to fear or be angry at some injustice, so I’m hijacked to keep an eye out for “evil” as it manifests.

What happens when I put myself in a context that no longer fears or is angered by what is “supposed” to trigger me? What kind of people are the ones that don’t fear death? Martyrs, who can then do things like crash planes into buildings because “logically” it gets them and their extended family into heaven. What if you can no longer get angry at people for their proclivity to injustice; your empathy literally running out? Are you now lazy, uncaring, or maybe just exhausted and in need of a new cause?

We’re clay. We get molded by our experiences and the environment we’re subjected to. Maybe my mind goes to “dark” places because I know it is other people with minds exactly like mine that can do the things I haven’t been moved to. Maybe in order for things to matter they need to be shaped by your understanding of the symbiotic relationship between your thinking and feeling. Maybe I’m just stream of conscious-ing myself away from the point, which is to keeping putting things in the context of “what matters.”

I can have all the positive hopes and dreams for the world that have ever existed, and be working to enable them every day, and to the people who don’t understand, agree, or care that doesn’t matter. If I’m working for them, why am I qualifying it as something that matters? Because I’m so moral? Because I was put in such a gratifying position until it spilled over into not-so-heavily-masked compassion for other people? But I don’t believe in morals! I believe in means. So I just need to expand my context. I need to identify more squares on the game board. I’m just playing a game where those kinds of people exist and those kinds of problems can perhaps not be problems or not infect you and your style in the way they’re designed to. But again, that perspective, primarily, if not only, matters subjectively.

I think my biggest anchor resides in ridicule. For while these seemingly random and stream of consciousness blogs help me sleep at night, it’s way more fun to look back and go “you asshole, shut up and watch tv.” It just feels right to genuinely be interested in helping a problem, have it go on too long and switch gears, make fun of it and myself for my role in it, and then move onto the next one. I can only take myself seriously to the extent that what I say or do has perceivable consequences. The harder they are to see, the bigger I want to act. Maybe this is why I find it so hard to take others’ problems as seriously as they appear to be taking them. I just see someone who’s usually got good friends, good eats, and a place to live, and they remain locked in a mental battle. I see myself as someone who, if not immediately resolves an issue, finds peace with it through writing or discussion, while they make an issue the center of their life.

So what matters? My ability to make a big show and validate the idea that things happen and happen for reasons if that reason is only me and my intentions? A person’s center-of-their-universe problem, and their endless digressions analyzing every conceivable angle of it? At this point, it just seems like the very act of anchoring your mind in something is all that really matters. Quell the crazy by rooting it in less crazy. Or over-intellectualize and obfuscate the burden of denoting and defining crazy. Either way, you’re certainly doing as you think and feel while abstaining from what you “agree to disagree” (grrrr) about. It’s kept you safe enough so far.

[249] Overflow

I don’t want to live believing in things that aren’t there. I have too many ideas and dreams to count for my life and how I want to live it to leave any room for the mounts of shit that gum up the works. If we have a bullshit friendship, I’m either going to end it or marginalize it to the point of forgetting it until someone brings up your name. If there is no hope for my psyche and the business world to coexist, I will drive myself insane making sure that’s in fact the case.

I have a scarily dark view of this world. I use the word scary because it sometimes genuinely scares me the things I can argue, fairly persuasively, in favor of. I say dark because I sincerely feel like a cloud surrounds my head at times and gears all thoughts into a swirling chaos of irrelevance, uncertainty, and hopelessness. While I’m hardly dominated by these modes of thinking, they are never really hidden, ignored, or non-compelling.

I’ve said in the past that I don’t want to live in spite. I want instead to espouse ideals more than simply be the black to the white. Maybe I’m characterizing it wrong. Maybe my spite is the necessary “balance” to the shit I’m willing to take. Maybe my hatred isn’t me manifesting some personal evil or forgone conclusion about how my finally insane brain will need to express itself in order to prove a point or send a message. Maybe the “struggle,” as I’ve so characterized it, is the only way for things to ever really be.

For as much as I like to think I know, sometimes I don’t even give myself enough credit. I know people, who you pay money for a service, should do that job well and respect your time. I know they should answer their phones. I know you should find out the truth of your employees actions before you try to sweep their responsibility under the rug. I know that whenever you try to make your burden someone else’s problem, you disrespect their very life. Somehow we’ve enabled people to feeling entitled to continually pass on the responsibility.

I can’t take thinking I’m to blame for everyone’s fuck ups anymore. It’s not my fault the electrician put the electric box next to the plumbing system that may one day decided to clog and flood after explicitly telling me that someone coming to inspect the kiosk would “freak out” if they saw that. It’s not my fault for trying to like and trust in someone who with the flip of a switch can turn passive aggressive and adopt an “oh well” attitude. I do not need to take on the responsibility of feeling shitty when I’ve been trying to pursue a path that enables and celebrates instead of exploits while only having the pathetic tools (read people and policy) the world at large has given me to play with. My response to self-loathing indulgent bullshit is to try and calmly and deliberately dictate where and how things can change and then do everything in my power to show what the fuck that change looks like.

Fuck you for perpetuating a world that facilitates me getting like this. Fuck me for letting it in if even for a few hours. I’m not going to stop hating fucking idiots. I’m not going to stop railing against shitty work, shitty leaders, and shitty ideas. I know so goddamn much that it includes the source of what would drive me insane or psychopathic as well as what will always talk me down. You don’t even know how to respect yourself enough to give a damn. You don’t create, you don’t contribute, and you better fucking trust that one day I’ll make it so you won’t matter, and at the very least it won’t be at the exhaustion of my thoughts.

[248] Empty

Let’s see how I can jumble all of my thoughts tonight.

I don’t always mean to come off as dismissive. I’ve adopted a particular nature that seeks the taboo, the novel, the perverse, the “morally ambiguous” at times. I feel I am a direct result of reacting to my environment in a way that doesn’t put ridiculous amounts of stress upon me, and direct statements or rules about how and why I’m going to behave certain ways. Many times these rules are established after perhaps years of a mental battle or struggle that finally “resolved” into an aspect of my disposition.

I have the conflict of wanting to be understood without making myself easy to understand. I don’t think that everything can simply be explained, despite how brilliantly it is laid out, and another person will go “okay” and forever their life is changed. At the same time, I hate to think, and am frequently annoyed by, the notion that so much time and pain need to be spent in order for some things to be figured out.

It’s not so much that I think I have any one person so well figured out. I would never presume to be explicitly in someone’s head. I do like to show how there are ways of dealing with things that have proven to help others can help you as well. More often than not, they’ve helped me. At the very least, I like when people are able to actually put words to what they think is an actual problem. The odd thing being, hardly one is ever clearly dictated.

There’s always a problem. Something is always wrong, be it with your money situation, your relationships, your grades what have you. Your perspective on the very word “problem” flavors all of it. I have a problem, a potentially serious one with my plumbing in the kiosk. I genuinely want and am capable of going to the plumber and saying “You mother fucker, how can you justify setting this up a certain way, any idiot can tell this could flood, fuck me, cost me money. Not only are you irresponsible, you never pick up your fucking phone and your stupid fucking wife, regardless of how sweet she can sound on the phone, is so far up her own bullshit agenda is writing me off making it all the more difficult to get my shit up and running and pay my fucking bills.” And it feels that way, and I feel angry.

These are people I’ve paid $1000 dollars to. If they aren’t satisfying what is clearly reasonable to assume as their responsibility to do a job that doesn’t put me at undue risk, what am I left to do but get angry? How do I respond to someone who puts up their hands and goes “I don’t know what to tell you?”

I don’t think people have the best intentions. I so very rarely “focus on the positives” I could literally bang my head against a wall at points until the throbbing and utter disgust overwhelm me past the point of thinking anymore. Every step of the way is a battle. It’s not the fight I hate; it’s the fact that it’s unnecessary. It’s the fact that I genuinely don’t want to be filled with this practical and pragmatic calculating hatred, and yet people “ever so accidentally” give me every reason to maintain it. Everyone plays dumb or innocent.

It’s this shadow of blatant stupidity and denial I want to be rid of. It’s this passive aggressive “polite” conversation that spits in the face of reality. It’s these empty platitudes you get served and swallow so that you can gain an inch. How much shit I’ve had to take just to sell coffee? Should I really be humbled by the pursuit of running a business that no matter how much you’re willing to work, literally other people’s “busy schedules” and callous treatment of your time will dictate your success? Unless you physically compel them or pour money at their feet, nothing gets done in any way resembling a smart, correct, or efficient manner?

It’s more than sickening; it’s demoralizing. It literally sucks my will to put any effort into caring about shit. I understand the game, I’m playing the game, but I can’t sustain myself on this game. I need to change something or remove myself from it. More than I’m averse to pain, I’m violently hurling myself away from feeling hopeless. Whether it’s talking about friends opting for long term mental turmoil and significant emotional scarring or every “too telling” interaction I have with someone I have to cut a check to, the hopelessness is just…

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Money. Not even what it does, just the emotional gratification it imparts. It doesn’t matter how much you have, all that matters is what it elicits in other people when you use it. My manipulative nature understands this and compels me to put up with too much bullshit in the name of what I see myself doing with money. Do I think I can buy people’s moral servitude? I already know what they’re willing to put up with, what they’re capable of, what I’ve been capable of putting up with. I must know it for certain. I can achieve any end. I can calculate, specifically to the last dollar, how much it will cost to run an agenda. And as quickly as the money shifts, when the emotional tit has been sucked dry, it’ll be on to the next ripest bosom.

We aren’t moral creatures. We’re creatures. A creature will put the electrical box next to the plumbing which might have reason to clog/flood over time because another creature doesn’t really care or (if the benefit of the doubt is to be given) never learned that drains can and always do clog. Creatures will expect your rent due despite a full understanding and appreciation for the extenuating circumstances having nothing to do with your negligence or laziness cause you to open late. Creatures will try to pawn off the blame of their employees for damaging your property in the face of said employees admitting to your “mere speculation.”

As my struggle with definitions that put anything “human” into humanity carries on, I’ll always think back to the relationships I’ve built and work on. My warning sign will be when I go into isolation and want nothing to do with the only things that ever pull me out of these horribly fucked up sadistic empty shithole places. I fucking hate everything; including the shit I’m under the impression I “have to” do in order to keep pretending I’m capable of changing any of it.