[258] Pick My Battles

Here’s a paraphrased excerpt of a line of “reasoning” I heard the other day.

“We can’t prove or show to be true the things revealed to us by Christ or in the bible to be true. It’s only after we accept on faith that what we’ve been told is true that we can start to draw some conclusions. After we accept that Christ died for us, then we can know that it was because he loved us and it was to save us from sin.”

This still shakes me to my core. How about this: “Once I accept on faith that black people are all about of an African cult, I can draw some important conclusions. They are inferior and dirty. I mean look at their skin, it matches dirt! Clearly God was setting us up to draw this inference and guide us away from this lowly race.”

Why is reasoning to be dammed? Someone explain to me in terms that make sense and not “just because people are different” how you allow yourself to say things so abjectly failing. I literally could not draw a closer analogy to what happens when you just accept some premise, let alone a divine one because it makes you feel good or that’s what you’re used to or whatever else.

The sickening idea isn’t that you want to believe in something; it’s that you simply don’t care to recognize that you aren’t making any sense! The obvious logical person in me asks, how can I get upset that someone who isn’t making sense can’t reason that they aren’t in fact making sense? But it then goes further into how they can draw proper conclusions about ANYTHING and EVERYTHING else less this one topic. As a result, faith becomes deliberate and calculated stupidity. I don’t care if you only feel like it influences a small part or every decision in your life, you are choosing, very scarily and clear mindedly, to go against making sense.

You didn’t get into a bad relationship because a god is testing you; you probably just had shitty role models and terrible ideas about yourself. You don’t deserve anything, you’re acted upon by a confluence of forces that you pray turns out into a net positive feeling that you can surmise your life into.

This is impossibly frustrating. What the hell am I fighting for? If no matter what I accomplish, no matter what example I set, it’s all going to degrade into society collectively breaking down and justifying how to pretend otherwise? I’ve truly never understood super villain reasoning like I do now.

“These idiots understand nothing but violence and fear, us vs. them, so I’ll play by their rules and get them to unite against the only thing that provides them the truth they fear is stained by too much reality.”

“Holy shit! They’ll believe in ANYTHING! I should do any number of the same steps that a cult, pyramid scheme, or ‘charitable organization’ has done to bilk them for every penny.”

“So what if I pollute or kill or steal, most people are too lazy to even state they may not like what I’m doing, and by the time anything gets changed, we’ll all be dead and I’ll have accomplished my goal.”

Deliberate and calculated stupidity needs to be eradicated, not excused. You’re not fucking children. OH wait….

[257] I Want, I Think, I Wish, I Need

I want to speed up so I can slow down. I want to be rich so I can act like I’m poor. I want to get in shape so I can eat like a glutton. I want to be moral to spite the immoral, then immoral to spite the doubtful. I want to control the world and to set it on fire. I want to hit and hit and hit and hit and never get out of bed. Every lesson I learn I want to turn on its head and sometimes I think how nice it would be to believe in things that aren’t there. I need to forget that I judge something as boring or mundane before I get the will to master it. I want to know almost everything, but never seem to care to remember.

I want to teach people how to think while being comfortable with them thinking whatever they want. I want to establish honorable distinctions between child and adult, mature and immature, professional and non-professional. I want definitions to matter more and disappear. I want to have it all and give it all away. I want to organize chaotic messes and then create more of a mess. I want my outside to match my inside. I want implicit relationships. I want to steal from enough sources to look unique.

I think I have an immeasurable impact that walks a very fine line of obscurity. I think I would do just fine in too many conflicting situations. I think it’s dumb to respect the cynic and hate the intellectual. I think too much. I think judging people is important, necessary, and clearly at the heart of every relationship. I think being a counterexample is not the same thing as being a hypocrite. I think people don’t want to believe I know too much about them. I don’t think I get enough credit for admitting when I’m wrong.

I wish that lasting change wasn’t something of an oxymoron. I wish I was surprised more often. I wish I could download information into my head. I wish I could be in a dream state for a week. I wish that I never experienced time going by too quickly. I wish it wasn’t about getting by. I wish my money wasn’t already spent. I wish I could understand how I know there will be a tipping point.

I need external forces to distract me and keep me in check. I need to see strong examples of what I believe in. I need to not be the only one trying to humble myself. I need to loathe idiots. I need to show I respect what’s gotten me here. I need to be an example.

[255] Talkin' Bout My Generation

Inspiration Here

I don’t think we dwell enough on implications and consequences. I think the people that do write things like John Cheese and try to wake the rest of the world up to the often not pretty underlying reality going on beyond your fears and ego are vitally important. At the risk of sounding impossibly ironic, I think the current zeitgeist, not just with my generation, giving or taking a few years, is one of entitled self-important bullshit. Peoples’ attitudes anymore don’t simply disgust me, they frighten me. Any sort of explanation that comes in to make sense of why I feel this way I think deserves a pause to take note.

I hear the words oblivious and ignorant tossed around frequently. I use them a fair share myself. Given that we live in a technology and information driven age, it’s fair to assume that by the day we are growing more and more ignorant of the growing number of things that are shaping our world. The one’s currently investigating are swallowed up in the infinite amount of amateur bloggers and loosely defined “journalists.” The ones who’ve had a chance to look back at how things used to operate are pressured to acclimate or become irrelevant. This new hybrid cultivation I can barely bring myself to use the word “culture” to describe seems fundamentally unstable or at least eerily flawed.

What do I mean? John speaks to it in the article. Human interaction, learning from mistakes, and being brought to your knees by a lot of crippling facts about reality. An entire generation, let alone an overall culture that espouses doing the opposite of these things, is going to have potentially very dangerous consequences. People did use to have to work constantly at dangerous or mundane jobs to ensure the very survival of their family. Now, we treat moving back home or working a minimum wage job as if we were slaves. [More accurate would be indentured servant, but still too heavily connotative :P]

Oh, you have to track your shipment to some unknown location in the mall? Your life is super stressful. You mean you spend a full 4 minutes! Trying to teach an Asian kid how to say “pretzel-dog” instead of hamburger? I wouldn’t trade for that if there were a gun to my head. Never mind the inescapable background noise of high school politics and gossip, that’s a given, but it’s truly a wonder how you survive sometimes under such harsh conditions. You might be quick to point out this is just informal conversation, people are really thinking all sorts of things that just aren’t polite. Short answer; they aren’t.

But that speaks more to the older 20’s and 30’s crowd. The worst are the kids my age or younger. They’re informed by the ones who aspired to be “slackers” or anti-establishment. They are mommy’s credit card holder and “only” spent $150 dollars on a pair of jeans and wrist scrunchies. I frankly dread when they come up to the kiosk because I don’t know any words that can beat pretentious, entitled, oblivious, etc. Maybe it isn’t a surprise they’ve developed this “old world money” attitude. They have been given everything and more their whole lives.

I’m most troubled by the culture of ignorance; one that fears even allowing for the words fear, wrong, or mistake. The one where 13 year olds post statuses about their failing love life culminating to a drunk send-off before they kill themselves. How man missed or failed conversations had to go on between him and his parents or friends in order for something like that to even be conceivable? It’s probably safe to say that neither he, nor his parents nor friends even have a conception of love that makes sense. They’ve never been given or shown an example of a relationship that doesn’t end in some movie-clichéd calamity. It can become the norm to freak the fuck out at every scary thing you’ve never been taught to deal with.

Everything has implications, and anything implies everything. If you download a game, you can download any game, every game. If you learn how to make an excuse, you can make any excuse, every excuse. If you don’t learn or forget something, you can forget or not learn anything and everything. And as much as I hate all-inclusive dramatic language, I don’t think it’s a secret why history repeats itself. I think when you look, it’s not hard to see into what people do when they are afraid, or dumb, or ignorant, and the differences therein.

All I’m saying is I’m going to clean up when all those young whipper-snappers lose all knowledge of how to flirt, treat anything as more important than themselves, and put all of their emotional value and self-worth into something so easily disrupted by a well-placed EMP.

[254] Majority Rules

But it isn’t really about me.

Whatever we are, however you qualify yourself or your personality, however you qualify your intrinsic human rights or moral obligations, whatever goals you establish and evils you denote, even your very purpose isn’t about “you.”

You are a slave to your mind. You are the circumstantial electrical firings of the synapses in your brain. Your idiosyncrasies aren’t a deliberate attempt to be unique; they are triggered, unlocked, and practically inevitable given enough time and enough subjects. Your will power will never outmatch your base animal.

And what an animal that is.

“Real” to me is any intrinsically true statement. So many people claim to be real because, to them, the truth of their feelings or view cannot be any more present. I try to create what is real. To put it another way, as much as I can talk and seemingly get random or very hard to understand, everyone can identify a coffee shop….if only eventually. Right now I’m stagnant. I see the end of the road of whatever business I open. My mind is living in the reality I want to create now, and it’s driving me a tad insane.

I don’t really see the point in waiting. Why wait for permission? Why get held up on someone’s weaker stance or lacking morality? Don’t put it to a vote, fucking act. Apparently this isn’t a popular opinion until shit goes horribly wrong. We’re happy to go along like nothing has changed until we recognize signals from out base animal. We’re hurt, we’re hungry, and we’re tired or bored. This is all I see Occupy whatever as. A ton of basically idiots finally getting too many signals from their environment currently designed to endanger their lives.

But I don’t really want to talk about Occupy. I feel like I’m working to make myself tired. Build build build so I can look back and notice all the shit it’s built upon only to grow so tired constantly turning it over in my head for any conceivable way it could’ve gone and not been marred by shit. But it will never happen. I’ll always have to opt for optimism and put up with time wasting, life draining, undignified and amoral happenstance. I don’t know how to feel about this. I barely think I want to continue thinking about it. As if I had a choice.

I’ll never know what you think; I’ll only see how you act. Nothing I’m doing makes sense to me in the context of you; it only makes sense to me with you embedded in my context. So then from where am I coming? I want to enable the ideas? The ideas are fleeting, assumed, fundamentally prone to failure and scarily easily forgotten. What else do you have but them, though? What if your ideas are rooted in something you can’t even define like abstract notions about happiness or comfort or objectivity and “being on the level?” Do you just chug along until enough time has gone by that you forgot what upset you a few months earlier?

Good luck talking to people about it. You might get the splendid opportunity to hear what they always tell you. Good luck writing about it. You might get the special treat of going in circles or retyping ninety percent of a previous post. All you feel like doing is acting. You want to engage and make things sway. You want to make real what is previously unknown or utterly foreign. You want control. Why? Is the idea of not having it that terrifying? Is complacency a deep root of evil? You assume so for now.

Just be worth it.

[253] Where I'm Going, Where I've Been

I feel like the last three weeks has gone by too fast. Switching from sleeping in and staying up all night and being down for any event at any time to waking up every morning to run a coffee shop has put me in a dreadful routine reminiscent of high school. I need to regroup and remember that even though I’m not finding the time as often as I like, I haven’t lost sight of how and why I’m operating. My thoughts haven’t slowed and my ideas still need to evolve per my environment’s lesson plan.

The more I engage with people outside of my finely tuned bubble, the more I want to retract. My throw away statements about the stupidity or evil nature of people were not conceived upon nothing. Daily reminders of why I’ve managed to think the way I do start to take their toll.

I mean what could be greater than owning your own business? Well, when you own it in the mall, you don’t make your own hours. My goal is to have my time. My time is currently dictated by the mall hours and bills. I assure you this is something I will not perpetuate any longer than I have to. It’s also quite the unpleasant thought to realize just how unpredictable the day to day mall traffic is.

I’m fascinated by the sentiments like “starting a business is hard in this economy” and “70% of business fail within the first year, whatever else percent in the first 3 months.” This to me obscures the point. People fail, not business. I would fail if my first inclination was to get a massive loan. I would be failing if, on the days I wasn’t breaking even, I was in the hole for more than a trip to biolife or a part time job. There are stores in and out of this mall every 3 months, not because they don’t serve the “right” food or the clothes, but because they don’t accurately depict how good or bad an idea it is for someone like them to be selling a product.

My worst case scenario is a small amount of debt that literally could be paid with a part time job in a matter of 3 to 6 months. And, in that scenario I still have a kiosk that can be transported to better places. And, though horribly annoying shit may plague me at this mall; it won’t go on longer than a year. I say this not to brag, but to hopefully persuade people that the only thing separating success from failure, “good” from “bad” is a little common sense and honesty. When you pick a goal that highlights your morality and practicality instead of espouses greed, it takes away all of the alleged stress that’s supposed to come with starting a new business.

What gets to me, what has always gotten to me, are the stupid fucking people. It’s when I’m lied to and being made to play into a corporate game. It’s when someone makes it their goal, their habit even, to take advantage. This isn’t to pretend there aren’t diamonds in the ruff, but I’ve got enough diamonds that I want to work with. Little beacons of advice don’t feel like an oasis, they just remind me of a pattern of subjugation and meager peasant dissonance. There are no more rebels or fighters behind the complaints of the mall staff, than there are students threatening mutiny towards a teacher. At the end of the day it’s just a spit ball.

And what good I’d be doing trying to persuade them that I’m after something different. Yes, I want to pay the bills too, but I’m more after the whole changing the world thing. Or, at least a good portion of ideas in whatever portions of the world I make it to. I need to raise my prices? Because I’m not as greedy as you? Because I don’t understand my bills, or rent, or what? Because I need to pretend that making lattes or mochas is especially hard or expensive? Oh I know! The extra 10 dollars I make over the next 3 days is going to help me more than the good will of people who I’ve told I’m not trying to overcharge.

It just gets old. I see the patterns people get themselves into. “This mall sucks! Instead of joining together and putting some pressure on it to respect its vendors and change something, I’m just going to leave or rely on something else.” “These corporate games suck! I’m just going to give up doing what I think I’d like and resolve myself to something simpler.” Yes, fighting is a risk, but when you all stand against some very obvious and unjust bullshit, you move the risk to the people who were asking for it. Granted, fighting isn't for everyone, but I at least have a personal vendetta against resolving myself and becoming complacent. It also kind of sucks when the handful of small vendors have more invested than the majority of inline stores. :-/

I will move as fast as I’m able. When I had nothing but saved cash, the rent paid, and a good portion of my friends on board, I opted for party house. I wanted a place where people could be free to have fun, be entertained, and be safe enough. Of course it got taken advantage of, but that doesn’t mean I somehow lost my goal or forgot why I did it. I want to do the same in business. Run with what works, grow as I can, be an example for those ready to appreciate where and why I’m coming from. I love hearing about things like Panera with the pay what you can system. I want to get to a point where I can do shit like that, make it less about the money and more about feeding people. Maybe less about the “status” of drinking Starbucks (for the record, I don’t understand that even remotely) and more about indulging responsibility.

Here’s the rub. I’ll give it up if my ideas won’t hold in this society. If most people are somehow against saving money, against fighting greed or being needless consumers, or simply refuse to see the utility of being basically a good person who tries to enjoy their time, I’m done. I’ll go live in a shack and teach surf lessons or something. The mental turmoil of resolving that with living in a world even remotely resembling sanity would not be worth it. The real problem is me thinking this isn’t such an unlikely scenario. Prove me wrong?

But to not end on a sour note. Everyone that does enjoy our drinks, and what I'm doing, and has done nothing but been supportive, thank you, and you're exactly what I'm working for. Yes, this current routine sucks, and the some of my interactions with people in the "business world" have sucked, and days where there's seven people in the mall suck, it's the thoughts of what's to come that keeps me going. Like getting to a place where I can be helpful when you're almost kicked out of school or something ;). And I revel in the idea of being the one to remind you that getting drunk and doing stupid shit with your friends is always going to be fun no matter how old or "mature" you get.

I guess the whole point of this was to say that I know where I'm coming from and I hope it's somewhere the people I'm working for can respect. I'll bitch all day, but I won't forget.