[367] Fatty Fatty Mo Matty

I keep reading about fat women.

Overwhelmingly, it seems like there is this push in the media or in the “independent blogger sphere” to start advocating for this kind of utopia. It's a magical place where people aren't made fun of. It's where you can be comfortable in your own skin. It's this loud drum beat of “respect” for people who are “different” from you. Apparently, being part of the moral aware elite is a place where we all just carry on like there isn't this giant insidious part of our natures that isn't an all-inclusive loving hippie.

I kinda hate everything. It's why I joke endlessly. If I can't laugh, I'm just going to be angry. I don't really care what the atrocity is, what the taboo's about, or how you feel about it. If I was making a joke, hopefully you got it, hopefully it won't be held over my head for as long as you're capable of holding a grudge. I think it insanely more wise to “write off” what I say as insensitive or maybe naive and go about your day, instead of trying to cut out this place for “the other” as if we don't conceive of it as the other.

Fat is easy. I have “fat” friends. Whatever it's supposed to mean. As if bodies don't have different shapes and sizes and as if I've cataloged everyone and decided upon a mean unto which I'm to judge them abnormally far away from. You know what's the least interesting thing about them? HOW FUCKING FAT THEY ARE! It means nothing to me. We're not trying to outrun a predator. If they're fat, if they feel bad about it, if they think I have something to say about it. IT MEANS DICK.

I'm semi-obsessed with the idea that I don't get “too fat.” This provokes me to play frisbee with people who will outrun me the rest of my life. This makes me spend half my food money on green leafy things that websites tell me will help me live longer. This makes me spend money on a gym membership that I fairly consistently try to go to. If and when you are doing less than those things, maybe you just don't give a fuck that you're fat. Maybe if/when someone is making a joke or “marginalizing your being,” you kind of asked for it.

Regardless of what you think about the people experiencing fatness, it's universally understood as not the ideal health wise. Whether it's the amount of stress on your body is caused, the kinds of diseases it disposes you to, or the general perception of the public being “not interested,” it's in the same vein of “stereotypes exist for a reason.” It's not out and out because you hate fat people or what they represent that provokes jokes or a “lesser” stature as far as what society is to perceive. Even fucking kid cartoons like Wall-E make an example of how “fat is bad” in the midst of a robot love story!

But I think this speaks to something bigger. The idea that we shouldn't point out or ridicule or be able to talk about what's “different.” Yes, different to you. No one is taking on the whole of humanity's perspective.

I think, if you can do it like a comedian, if you can do it like me, then you should be saying to yourself “who the fuck cares?” I don't actively discriminate or try to make people feel bad because of who they are. Do you think that's going to stop me from making the race, fat, or sexuality joke? Fuck no. I don't think it's more respectful or politically correct to pretend these differences don't exist or don't make you feel a certain way. How you come to the table relating the kind of feelings you have upon engaging with those differences makes all the difference in the world.

To me, it boils down to blaming people for how they actually feel. Instead of digging out what they think about their feelings, or what they can be made to uncover about the roots of those feelings, we take an instance and paint a picture. Like, who gives a fuck if Donald Sterling is racist? Especially if he's racist in his living room! I don't want an old guy who's easily assumed to be racist already have to kiss my ass because of how he thinks about black people. We don't get anywhere in our demonizing of him. We're, in a sense, trying to blame him for “all racism” as if it exists solely within the confines of old white men. It's disrespectful and ignorant of the real “problem.” I'd probably call it more “the nature of the human condition” before I offer it up as something that can be “fixed” or "punished."

My perspective is from the “top” of the food chain. No one is making fat jokes about me. No one is profiling me. I'm not ridiculed and kicked from my house because of who I like sexually. I'm not broke or from a group who's been historically oppressed. But you know what I did have? A bully. I had a totally fucking cunt of a mom who didn't just make fun of or give me shit because of something superficial. I got her every day carrying out her own insecurities on my childlike psyche in ways that continue today in how she influences my brother.

What's my excuse? Why can't I blame her and explain that I'm the victim and I should be able to explain how meaningful and loud I should be about my experiences growing up? I'm a fucking adult! I'm not a fucking bitch! I make decisions and have the capacity to recognize my feelings. You're picked on now? You think you have a better or worse idea of how to escape it or get over it than a child? And even if you manage to find enough gumption to figure your shit out, you think it's ever going away? Might it be wise to approach the problem from a way that respects the idea that there will always be bullies? You'll always be different. It doesn't matter whether you're a fat fuck or gay or whatever.

I hate “random” bitching and cries for help. Imagine we live in a world where most people don't give a fuck about you. And even the one's that do, can only do it to a fairly superficial extent. Stop pretending we're all going to one day hold hands and chant hymns of love. Stop thinking that someone's going to look out for you in a way that you're not capable of looking out for yourself. It wasn't so long ago that we had no objective means by which to judge anything. Do you think the evidence we have so far speaks in favor of being a sad whiny bitch about yourself or place in the world? As if we even need the numbers! Get the fuck over it.

[365] Swing Swing Swing

I suppose one way to say it is that I'm after “the drum beat” of culture. If we think of a university setting. Even with thousands of kids from all walks of life, whether you join a rally, run a naked mile, quietly do your homework, or network your way into a lucrative future, the underlying pulse, purpose, and utility of a university is to set kids up to “do better.” It's the place to learn academically and hopefully about your roles socially or in the realm of personal responsibility.

Now, arguably, what the modern university has become given the costs associated, the little reason to think you'll find work when you're done, and the corporatization of once essential public rights and goods, the needle has moved away from that underlying logic and expectation, but for the analogy, pretend we graduated before the mid/late 70s.

If you're constantly looking for culture, it feels natural to gravitate towards big institutions. “Corporate culture” is certainly a thing that ranges from open plan utopia-esc tech firms to Dilbert hellscapes. But you still manage to see hundreds or thousands of people plugged into a system where they start to act and think alike, to varying degrees, about the nature of their work and their role in it.

Religious institutions tend to have straight forward enough agendas. Those that want to quietly worship or believe in something garner their small flocks and maybe never step onto the world stage beyond a bake sale or charity event for a sick member. On the other hand, huge swaths of tea-baggers and evangelicals actively shut down women's health clinics in every spot but one city in the entire state of Texas...

But I only pick these to try an contrast the Bigger Conception of culture I'm after. I want the Human Drum Beat. I want, to as best as I can measure, the actual likelihood or possibility of getting the future I'm after. I know there are millions of people that I would describe as “bat shit.” But, I don't know for sure there aren't millions + 1 who could stand in opposition and “win.” More importantly, win in a way that sustains objectively positive and life-affirming changes beyond the whims of the bat-shitters.

Eventually, most retreat to the realm of anecdotes. I have as much a “Bloomington friend group culture” as much as I have a conception of “most people my age I've engaged with culture.” They both provoke me to say something about what I think the world would look like maybe 30 years from now if this is the level of circumstance and discourse I'm generally presented with. If my disposition is any clue, it's not simply less than reassuring, it's almost explicitly the opposite of what I think needs to happen in order for things to change for the better.

I've stated previously things to the effect of “I don't have hope” or “If I have hope, it's in the endless void of information and potential I have no real way to quantify yet.” What's notable about these statements is that they aren't deliberately trying to avoid snippets of positivity and potential I see every day. They come from staring into the void. They come from the struggle of trying to rip out of people something more resembling what I want.

Immediately I want to say, “It's not about what you want.” But if it's not about what I want, then who's it up to? I can draw a pretty clear line from many things I didn't want that I nonetheless have to live out the consequences of. I think my reflexive response is a symptom of the sickness of our current invisible culture. So then, it seems more appropriate, if not obvious once it's pointed out, of course it's about what I want. Perhaps, in a very important sense, that's all it's about.

So then I become intrigued by what other people want. Surely, I can't hope to achieve what I want without assessing their variables and seeing if there is a mutually beneficial plan or path of least resistance to getting there.

And here is where I run into the difficult music of the current drum beat. All I think I'm hearing is “main-tain, main-tain, main-tain.” You need to keep doing what you're doing to keep the bills paid. You need to buckle down and power through school. You need to keep certain discussions off the table because the sliver of happiness or expectation you've cut out of life is paramount. On the surface, this seems so taken-for-granted as not a problem, it's almost flatly ridiculous to even point out. So why do I think it's exactly the reason we're going to lose the game?

People want to “be happy,” no? I'm to call their happiness wrong? It's my place to pretend I know what's best for someone else? My advice, my perch, my street cred in the realm of thinking and bitching truly accounts of the nuance of all human behavior?

I'm going to skip over unpacking all that. It's simply the typical gut-reaction or classic kinds of responses when you talk of overhauling a system. For those who can't see through the superficiality in asking such questions, run along and play.

While I don't try to go out of my way to be an emotional bitch, when I do feel things they tend to swing rather dramatically. I'm still really confused about nights where I'm having an amazing time only to, in the last ten minutes, feel like I need to hit things and write something angry. My initial speculation is about how I tend to think of “the game.” Part of the reason I tend/ed to run so selfishly is that things become extremely simple. But what happens when you invite complications?

Say I wanted kids. What planet am I leaving them? What lesson about “politics” do I hope they get to fall asleep with at night? How soon do I want them to learn that “things just are this way” as if they would “just be” had I not made a decision to bring them into the world? The advice can't be, “hunker down and ride it out. I brought you here so you could feel desperate and cut off from your fellow man. I thought, when the world starts to burn, you'd get a kick out of how high the flames really got.”

Look at “climate skeptics” aka ignorant deadly cancers to society, if you want to see what happens when you Maintain at the expense of everything else. These are people that can't be persuaded to read a thermometer, or that ice melts. As you'll learn over and over again, they're “happy” to believe in their god, their “facts,” and carry on promoting their ideas because, after all, in their not-so-humble opinion, “it just doesn't seem right to them.”

Less dramatically, I think about the level and nature of conversation or discourse. When you maintain what you like to talk about, and nothing else. There are as many consequences of that waiting for you psychologically, financially, or otherwise as well. It's not the planet running out of oxygen, but I always, somehow, can find people who eventually notice it's getting harder and harder to breath about something.

I think it's increasingly unreasonable to assume, unsustainable, unacceptable to pursue, and unlikely to be achieved “what it is you want to do” at the expense of something larger. I recently heard something to the effect of, “show a man that he's part of something more, and he'll realize he's capable of anything.” I don't get the sense that people do things in service to the larger picture. Or if they're trying, it's not sufficient. I think there's great utility in even burdening yourself with things you don't yet know how to fix as opposed to “not caring” or “moving on.” It's like stepping in shit and then leisurely strolling through your house pretending not to notice the smell.

And here's the next point of “hope from ignorance.” In one on one conversations, sure, you get people who have read a lot. You get people with a cause. They use their anecdotes or their classes and have this motivation to step out there and change something for the better. It's where the most insidious facts about their effort lie. A burning building isn't quelled one bucket of water at a time. You need a fire hose, or ten. Sometimes, you have to let it burn out and build a new structure. The fire cares not about your good intentions, your personal resolve, moral certitude, or stress-reducing novel philosophical take on fires. It's just going to burn.

[366] Trying Too Hard

If there was a symbol for irony, I'd probably get it tattooed. (I googled it, there is...)

I'm lucky to have a personality and thought pattern that is bred from trying. Because not only are habits learned, but you can learn from your habits. Writing is a fairly significant pattern I adopted when I realized “sitting and thinking” alone wasn't doing me any good. What's interesting, even when it's in small doses, is the range of responses to it.

It's important, for this blog anyway, to lead with “I first write to help me think.” This means sometimes I say things in ridiculously abstract ways. Sometimes I have some theme on my mind that closely resembles a talk I just had or after I've contemplated some friends' life. It's generally not appropriate to air everyone's dirty laundry or to arrest my focus with arbitrary judgments I may have about the situation at hand. Even and especially if it would “help” me sound clearer.

Understandably, the facebook crowd has had more occasions to hear me write, bitch, explore, and ramble more than most. You already have something of a context for maybe a religion blog or thoughts on how friend groups and dynamics change. I'm not sure what to conceive of the weight that may play into how “understood” any one piece is.

I've lately been posting to reddit as well. Here, you get to be “scrutinized” by every teenager, internet troll, and wise old janitor...if you submitted your post at the right time and don't get down-voted to oblivion immediately. Of the different responses I've gotten, the one that confuses me the most is “you sure seem to use a lot of words to say an awful lot of nothing...what is your point?”

I hesitate to immediately believe I was writing for “no point” if only to qualify what I said above. I also think it fairly impossible to not take even a single sentence and maybe put it in quotes and say something like “what does this mean, or why did you phrase something this way” before you present the idea that I basically had nothing to say. I suppose I'm sensitive to this kind of criticism because it's not really criticism. It's simply how we out of hand throw away what someone else has said.

I choke on irony not only because I say things like “I'm looking for feedback” and get the oddest, dullest, least helpful kind you can imagine. I also say things like “I'm looking for a conversation” and get the oddest, dullest, and least helpful people as the most eager to come to the table. Now, I'd be easily convinced that maybe I just speak in arbitrary and unhelpful ways were in not for, essentially my small facebook friend crowd. Not in how you respond to blogs, because that's not so much people's style, but when we manage that in person digression thing.

The problem is in knowing how to fix some of the problems. I talk context. I can't get the old vibe I had at parties without the kinds of things I could only fit into a house. Also, I need a house. I talk about changing the nature and purpose of conversation. I don't yet have the data to make it look and sound like what I want it to. I understand there's a marketing problem in how I relate my “relative solutions” to things. So I explore how I would potentially talk about those things to the average Joe who literally doesn't give a fuck about me or care to understand where I'm coming from.

It's not always an argument. It's not like writing chapters in a book. And it's definitely not for people who aren't adept at sussing things out or willing to pursue clarification. I understand what I'm asking for and how I've chosen potentially less than wise avenues to get there, but if it weren't for the array of feedback I've gotten over the years, I wouldn't know that there's room to get meaningful reactions and conversations regardless. Or in keeping with another theme, in spite of the ignorant assholes.

[364] Crusading For Crust

This may go a little bit of everywhere, but there's a lot on my mind.

Working backwards. Kristen and I were reflecting on the last episode of Vice. It makes me think a lot about the conversations I don't have but with a few specific people, at least semi-consistently. What bugs me about this is that I know other people are thinking, or trying to think, about the massive world of issues, but they don't speak up. I know that even if I have some voice or corner of media I basically respect, they're not saying things like I think they need to be said. Not completely. They're not having the conversations I feel are needed within my crowd.

Things that wish to be taken seriously are often presented “flatly.” It's a line, and the author or reporter, I suppose, crosses their fingers that what was just depicted speaks for itself. It's a general habit of good reporting to try and not be biased. You want to reflect what it is that's actually happening, not necessarily the sheer amount of emotion you feel towards the subject matter. I think by and large this is helpful when you have an underlying presumption of credibility and truth in reporting. I think the world is currently polluted the idea of how and when to rely on something as credible. Moreover, I'm not really hearing how they reflect on the information presented.

It then becomes really hard to digest the fuck ton of information. What if I told you I cared about failing schools, gun violence, a fundamental right towards health care, financial regulation, space exploration, healthy and accessible food, addressing an outdated prejudicial justice system, corruption and oversight, and most importantly environmental degradation? You'd probably simply say, “okay.”

Where would we start? What impact could I really have on any one of those things? To me, this is why I want to be in the data business. There's a million things to be said about all of these issues. The picture I want to paint first is the one that ties them all together. The one that defines and promotes the language underpinning when they go right, but understands the amount of hands involved in how they go wrong. There's a psychology, a humanity, the underwrites them all. It's why I say I'm after culture. My “worldly” culture is failing me. It's failing you.

The things I feel myself thinking time and again are how astonishingly simple problems are. It often becomes hard for me to respect or label them problems. Once you identify what's wrong, and the causes and effects that perpetuate the wrong, you address them in a line. You make a list and check off the things that need to happen for it to look differently. The thing is, you have to make people feel like they have a place at the table. I think if you are really concerned about reforming the financial sector, and you've read a million books and joined every local facebook page, you're doing just as little to actually do something about the problem with a megaphone outside of a building as the “angry hippie” who's standing next to you out of solidarity. After all, where did Occupy go?

But why does that happen? The dialogue for how to fix these things puts the idea that civil protest like that works. The dialogue is about how personally pissed off you are or how self-aggrandizing you can look in all the information you've become a basement expert on. The people in power have cultivated an environment that made sure when you got pissed off, you'd do it with a megaphone and not from the board room or shop floor. Not in your understanding or arguing of law, but with your shaking fist. And it's not like you had much of an opportunity to reflect on just how much you were or weren't doing. School certainly didn't teach you any differently. Ever wonder why?

I'm frequently astounded by testaments from service members. Ones who did exceedingly well or were promoted to some level of “we kill things” standard. In my mind, I wonder why it took personally killing whatever number of people before it “clicked” that if it were your family, or you were written off as collateral damage, you'd probably want revenge too. I wonder how many people had friends or heard reports of PTSD or losing more soldiers to suicide than war engagements before they thought “maybe I don't want that for myself.”

But this frames the issue wrong. Why do people join the military in general? As far as I can tell, they tend to have nothing else. It's a cost-benefit analysis. The psychological toll not yet realized is not the benefits of having school paid for, a reason to get up in the morning, or a structure in which to feel like you're accomplishing something. People who claim they're "defending freedom" or some offshoot, I'd ask to reflect a little deeper on what that really means. The military is a compelling culture, and that's what people are arguing on behalf when they advocate for it. It's not a bunch of roided up blood-lust killers who believe in wanton destruction of different nations. This isn't to absolve the military of indoctrination or lying about what they do or what real damage they cause. It's to distinguish the individual head space from the fall out of joining a specific kind of culture.

And that isn't a conversation we have. We don't talk about what's happening in our minds. We complain. We sensationalize. We add drama and make a scene. This to only speak to the dramatic underlying irony of what damage is caused. Damage from juggling the various problems in life, and the consequences of discussing them poorly or never becoming aware of them altogether. We also double down into one of our “passions” or interests. The deeper we can steep ourselves in a microcosm of our choosing, the less we need to concern ourselves with the big bad world out there, right? So damned if this isn't the coolest video game I've ever played or you wouldn't believe how much I love my "whatever" more than anyone else.

There is a problem that comes with knowing how simple things can be. It's simple to understand why someone would train to blow themselves up and think “death to America.” I get revenge. I get indoctrination. Think about growing up poor. If you don't know, poor people can be persuaded to think they're only as good as what's available. To me, our culture indoctrinates us with this idea. They didn't work enough, they're not smart enough, they don't deserve what the rich folk have. If every day your environment reinforces specific ideas about yourself or place in the world, it's unbearably obvious that you're going to hear the same things from people in the same kinds of situations. How they attribute their losses or gains. How they do or don't fit.

We're “lucky” we get to demonize the culture we cultivate around the world because of how “different” it is. We get to umbrella all kinds of people under a nice target for a drone. We get to obscure a real conversation about religious ideas and principals by demonizing a monolithic idea of Islam. It makes it really easy to buy a lot of bullshit. It's like riders to a bill. You have to take all the small points of corruption to make sure the overall bigger issue gets handled. Instead of asking why or micromanaging the details, we're complacent about "how things work." We don't insist on a culture that doesn't employ back doors infinitely accessible to corruption.

I see perhaps the biggest problem in the selling of this complicated message. To some degree, I'm not humble in my capacity to read and reflect on information. It's partly how I conceive of my identity. I like to be good at it. I want to know that if and when I'm saying something, people feel obligated to listen. So what and how am I selling? What does it look like when I try?

I'm selling a conversation. I'm selling a new, but really old, oral tradition. Before you get bogged down in insisting on labels to make sweeping generalizations and monsters out of some opposing force, bother with the details. Take as much time as it takes. Go to bed worried about the things you haven't fixed and role you might play in helping yourself sleep. I'm selling this by talking. I'm selling this by trying to set an example of what I want talked about by, no way, talking about it. It's not about looking dumb or waiting to find the right words. It's, at this point, just opening your damn mouth.

But the feedback is less than reassuring. I don't want to see a spark of a conversation. I want the conversation. I'm glad you know about the topic or read something on it too. Now follow that up with how or why it hit you. I understand that trying to talk about “everything” seems like a great way to be actually talking about “nothing” so start with just what's on your mind right now. Because that's all I'm doing, and it inevitably puts me in a place where I think I know how to better manage how and why I do and think about things. Things get simple when you recognize the degree of cause and effect upon doing them.

I suppose the worst thought I have is thinking that even with my best effort, it could still all be for nothing. The best and brightest are where I think I get my information from. When they say the planet is fucked in x,y, and z ways, for the next 500-1000 years no less, how do I translate the idea that “I heard you, now what can we do about it.” People reeeeallllly seem to not give a fuck at that point. And this is assuming that they're willing to take on “whatever cause you're into” (their perception) on top of what feels like is their dramatic life. How could I want you to reevaluate or engage with your ideas regarding the military industrial complex and what it does to fuel religious zealotry when you've got depression, are finishing school, have an alcoholic parent, and can barely pay for food and rent each month?

It's more than a tall order. Add the idea that people already feel like they're contributing from their corner of the world. If you join the Peace Corps, surely it means you give a damn, right!? Right?! I mean that's a name and cause with a positive connotation and I read the hell out of their Wikipedia page. What else would you have me do, Nick? And then I see the dialogue confused. The message encumbered by what I never intended. You now have to walk the sensitive line regarding peoples' feelings in relation to their perceptions of their contributions. How many people privately donate to charity with zero idea how the money gets used, not how it's advertised to be used, actually used, and how many don't even need to know to still feel good about it?

We promote ourselves as personally satisfied or living this kind of idealized self that can be framed in every Instagram picture or witty facebook comment or tweet. What we cultivate is a mirage. We promote our insecurities and uncertainty right along with our dinner, we just do it to the full extent you could possibly appreciate the word “indirectly.” And because there are so many of us saying so many things we think we're saying, we'd like to be saying, and we hope others are understanding, as one really pissed off German eventually responded to a joke I made he considered in poor taste, “sometimes it can be hard to tell the bad guys.” The back and forth, unkind, messy, frustrating, “pointless,” disjointed pissing match that took thousands of words and a few days, that ultimately resulted in his apology and some common ground, is the kind of example I want people to set. I don't want another metaphor for 20-something cultural malaise.

Talk about what's helping or hurting. Talk about your role in it. Identify when you're complicit to every degree. I've said plenty of times. At least I'm talking. At least I'm reading. At least I'm recognizing when I get it wrong or when there is more work to be done. At least I know why I can persuade myself to keep up the fight even if it certainly feels like I just jump from one losing battle to the next. There's still an endless amount of opportunities to fill the uncertainty. There will always be time to exploit the lengths of your potential; it's in every idea and every step into the unknown. But are you exploiting it, or being exploited? Are you standing up, or quietly consoling yourself? How well do you own that the problems exist just as much “out there” as they do with you, with us. Take the reigns of your culture.

[363] The Hardest Part

They say patience is a virtue, but I'm very tired of waiting. It's occurring to me that as I sit and wait, the list of things I'm conceivably waiting for seems to be growing. Some of those things are as concrete as getting an email from one side of town to another. Some are simply semi-abstract opportunities that spring up as dividends from leading my envisioned life. So I'm asking you, what are you waiting for?

It's a common theme when you read about business. Entrepreneurs in particular. Inevitably, some 30 or 40 something decided that feeling terrible every day at their job and having no time for their family wasn't what they wanted anymore. They think, what an epiphany! What have I been waiting for!? Then long digressions of the many fears they had to overcome or times that they failed follows.

I kind of habitually don't wait. I'm the one driving through parking lots to get where I need to be 5 minutes faster. I'm quick to unload whatever is on my mind in a moment. I started the coffee stuff kinda while I was still in, but immediately after I got out of school. I'll marathon several tv shows. I'll read all the books available on the topic.

Waiting seems unnecessary and a waste of time. It's not the same thing as delaying gratification. I can plan for the future and not blow every penny on indulgences. But it's still really hard to be stuck by things I can't control. It's immensely frustrating to even try and account for little things I could control and then get no cooperation from the other party. I want the idea of buying an “I called it” button to keep feeling unnecessary, but damned if people don't keep letting me down in reliable and predictable ways.

Don't get me wrong, I'm mainly speaking to the utterly rude and dismissive and unappreciative of my time attitude from the paper-shuffling types. This isn't a blog about “you're making your parents' mistakes!” Even though you probably are.

I've had a van ready to go since about October and a combination of things that have nothing to do with my ability to start a truck and advertise has had me on my ass waiting out the processes of offices downtown. On top of this, I get, I'll call it lied to, about how much and when my funds are supposed to come in from the drug study. This makes it hard to budget and insure myself with a rainy-day fund, and potentially sets me back even longer.

Albeit via my grandma dying, combined with learning about studies, I got this opportunity to do more of the groundwork required to start accomplishing things. And it's sitting right there, neatly on the windowsill so I can keep admiring it's potential. No one in the Public Works office cares what I'm really trying to achieve, so ten minutes of paperwork taking 3 weeks can become business as usual. They're still getting paid.

I'm waiting to be able to do even the simple things like visit friends. I can afford plane tickets, but I need to see if this truck can get started. Most things I could do that aren't in service to that are kind of a waste of time at the moment. And it's not like I'm just trying to avert boredom. There's plenty of non-spending-money activities I can engage in. I'm just stuck. How bout you?

[362] Off World

Star Date: 2.343.2126

My journey hasn't been easy. Upon landing, not only did I have to become a quick study of the customs and language, my skin is not used to a planet with a sun so close. My on-stem chip worked fine and I managed “English” which is how I will proceed in my reporting and translating back upon return. I did not anticipate the strange times ahead.

They're everywhere. No one tells you in the academy the lengths they will go to inhabit the land. The ingenious methods devised to either pack as many into a small place as possible, or combat the elements that would surely kill them quickly. Why? One of thousands of times I'll ask the question.

It's not just their presence, it's their likeness. If it doesn't have a face they insist that it needs one. Their talking television device is an endless loop depicting conversations, I've quite honestly, still not been able to discern the purpose of. It's almost as if they're all in on some kind of secret. I think it may be beyond the scope of my task to figure out what it is.

My first month was the hardest. As you well know, back home, you plug into A-HEAD and you join in the oneness of our shared identity. Here, it's a higher stakes game. They're personalities reach to shape everything they touch. It was quite the task to gather enough data on a few of them to begin long term engagement. I felt, lonely? I think is their word. It didn't make sense, you can't escape them if you try.

I set to task crafting my personality. I didn't have to understand their television box to gather that it may be imparting clues. If they were all watching, so should I. The various ways in which these groups engaged is a subject onto itself, but I think I managed to obtain a handful of optimal metrics to move things forward.

Smile. Gesture your face in a way that makes them do it back. It mostly always works. I learned how to structure their jokes and tried to match the styles of clothes I saw. I attended their sporting events and joined in their pageantry.

It was a process to get started, but I had a moment where I thought this was going to be easier than I previously feared.

I did feel wise in my choice of location to land. Some of the images I saw depicted sprawling cities with a million noises and distractions. I feel I wouldn't find the time nor patience to try and recount even the, meager by that standard, amount I've endured.

As an explorer to a foreign land, I'm used to be an actor. But now I almost feel like a double agent by distrusting myself. There's been something changing in me, and I don't feel it's all good. I wish to submit this report in good faith that the directors will pull me out if it sounds too disconcerting.

Over time I developed an attachment to some of my subjects. For as utterly baffling as they can be, they still seemed capable of perceiving that I was “from somewhere different” and sought to make my time easier. It's an emotional intelligence of sorts, but very situationally specific. Given that we've perfected GLOVE, because it fits! Their version, love is both ironic and reminiscent of a weaker form. In practice, it seems to defy the idea that I would refer to them as emotionally intelligent.

I must confess, it was around this time I felt myself getting lazy. I had a mission, but the overwhelming sense about this planet is to, as one drug induced acquaintance said to, let it ride. Upon first hearing it I was shocked. It felt like anathema to everything I've ever know. For Christ's sake (I'm told he was important to their history and needs to be invoked in times of turmoil) I'm here simply to learn!

I was in crisis. Was this person telling me that things were simply pointless on their planet? Could I have spent years at this point watching and recording, only to have missed this important nugget of the underlying truth of my effort?

I took solace in a pack of humans that had taken up shelter near me and we migrated together over time. Surely it is the true brilliance of our technology that allows for such a direct mock up body to fit in without detection. The only drawback is that I appear to be subjected to a degree of emotion much higher than was first anticipated Even the idea that I would be here long after they had grown and died left me feeling hollow. These, for lack of a better word, perhaps interesting pets, if we were to ever bring a few back.

I feel the reporting in my 8^th year began to become compromised. Every new bit of information I took in pulled me into vastly interesting, but ultimately defunct worlds. The humans had this drive it seemed to corrupt or destroy information. Every time I thought I was learning, it turned out to be the same terrifying message. Of course we've known strife. I've no recollection of ever wanting to seek it out, until now.

I invited it in. It became impossible to sit and watch and report. One of their females took to liking me. I engaged. I let wave after wave rush over me and I thought little to nothing about what my small act of defiance would breed.

I provoked. I knew that the humans baseline seemed banal if not oblivious, but I quickly learned their preference for violence. While it was generally talked about in terms of strategy, I can't help but think they didn't know what they were playing for. I sought out fire with a few shots of my own.

Here, the social bonding became ever-more nebulous. My cohort maintained contact for significantly longer than I had anticipated. Most eventually fell out of contact. My human partner, I, regrettably, probably pushed too far, and will likely take solace in my departure.

In a sense, things did become clearer in the ashes of my wake. There was something intoxicating in giving up my control. I became part of their story without having to account for a word.

I hope this brief introduction goes far enough to endear you to the impossible situation I found myself in. As I scour the memory banks I will try to elaborate on the various Incidences I refer to throughout the report. If my language feels encumbered, it's because that's what it's become. I look forwarding to plugging back in after the debriefing.

[361] Nailed It

“How do you practice an innate wanting attachment to things when you are infinitely prepared to let them go?”

Thank your god for me that I've previously written lines that speak so heavily to what's been on my mind for what feels like months. I think there's something to be said about your previous experience being “too informative.” In the way that the old misogynistic white guy can't keep his hands off the secretary's ass kind of way. (A problem we all wish we had amIrite?) Or your upbringing drilling you with moral imperatives that follow you all the way to the therapist's office and pharmacy counter.

I remember vividly a time where I had no clue. That is to say, all I had were my instincts, and my instincts were complete and utter shit. I didn't know whether I was “supposed” to fight or break down crying. I didn't know whether something I was doing was really right or wrong, I just knew I might get away with it or figured I could handle the fall out. All I could do was react. It's what drives the first time you ever punch a wall. You don't punch walls? Well, whatever the girly equivalent is.

Everything carried the potential to become an emotional tail spin. To some extent, given the physical nature of memory, things still do. It's the hope that the reasoning gets better and the under-developed self-control parts of the brain kick in. Before you can consider yourself in terms not resembling a big ball of emotions, your “thinking” is reduced/raised to the level of those feelings. The mission is to provoke or allay whatever your gut says about what becomes an increasingly zero sum game.

At least for me.

I became bad at “love” language and thoughts because of the Tilt-a-Hurl place they put me in. It's amazingly easy to find as many stories as you want to resemble yours. The case against peoples' claims of love, for me, is practically incontrovertible.

I'm not the only one with a “mom” whose claimed to love me the days before and after chasing me around the house with a spatula or after gutting a stuffed animal. As in, that's my specific case, but plenty of parents skipped over the part in the manual that explains the depths of emotional trauma. I've watched my grandma love and care for her family until her stroke. When things go bad, or said like I say it, when it counts, I get to watch for years how her example was thrown in her face in ways that compel me towards absurd religious language like sin. And I know the train came from an equally disastrous station and will chug along into someone else's experience at the next stop.

The “purest” heights of what people call love seem to come explicitly from naivety, adopted or circumstantial. Children simply aren't aware of the problems we'll insist upon them we have, so throwing different colored ones on a playground isn't going to spark race related issues. The opposite extreme is the bleeding heart. Whether they're aware or merely think they are, at least one thing has to be sure. Either their effort matters, or the world is just, or something tantamount to" God will save us" allows them quite the privileged place.

I am not reassured.

I am lucky to be able to read the dramatically unreasonable places I've been. It's reading history you don't have to interpret. I can take the conflict of the truth I absolutely felt and plant it alongside the truth I'm constantly working on.

I habitually seek to downplay feelings. They rarely seem to be that helpful. If they're too compelling, they arrest the moment. If they're not compelling enough, they might very likely undermine what you're after. I'm writing because I need more specific language or better analogies. I'm confused, not emotional. I'm addressing things I've touch many times, but not quite like this. (My dick looks on enviously.) I don't want to get it wrong.

I don't want to lose “the moment.” I don't want a promise. Not unless that promise is carried by each moment. I don't want to be loved unconditionally. I want to be tested when I tell you to take something about me for granted. It should be as real to you as it is to me. I don't want to dictate how to understand me or our relationship. I want to give you good reasons to suspect that what you believe about me is correct. I can say anything, in fact I feel like I say everything, but I'm rarely given chances to mostly act like I mostly want to be. How is the coldest and meanest amongst you the only one on the phone trying to save your life? Let's keep telling that story, but maybe less dramatically.

I think this helps underline my distrust for authority. A good leader compels what's already there. They set the example in a better light, not arbitrarily new one. Lists of rules inevitably get dismantled once enough holes have been shot through them. I'm to believe someone died for my sins? I certainly don't feel like dying for anyone's...what'd you call them? SINS? Right, sins sooo...message not received. You command me something? Well I command you to follow your own damn rules. Wait, who the hell am I even talking to!?

A “loving” example seems like a spinning plate on a stick. It's a show. Look at this feat of focus, patience, and practice. How long can you keep the plate spinning? It's going to fall, but how long can you go? Why are you even trying? And when it does fall, what do you do with the pieces?

I hate ending things on a question.

[360] With My Freeze Ray

“A point in every direction is the same as no point at all.”

I can't escape this idea. As someone who is constantly taking in a ton of information, feelings of pointlessness are familiar and persuasive. Not necessarily about what I'm doing, but I speculate on the reasons the information I'm taking in exists. You see similar stories, hear similar excuses, and watch the patterns play out and you can't help but think, if you wanted to look and sound like everything else, what's the point?

Everyone's on Youtube. It's part of the reason I stopped going there. When the guy who used to make pretty good videos against religion realized there was less and less to talk about, he switched to showing us how good he was at guitar. Not why I signed up. Everyone is part of some collective or video making group or has a very meager sponsor. Everyone wants to sponsor someone! If you're a comedian for longer than a few years, you bet your ass you have a tv show or a podcast. Ever hear of this thing where you can self-publish books!? New York Times best seller, here we come.

The world feels gray, cheap, convenient and abundant. I don't often know what to trust unless I've spent an inordinate amount of time sifting through it all personally and then comparing it against each other. As such, when it becomes too much, or it just seems I can't relate to it with anyone, I see myself getting “generally frustrated.” It's easy to lump in different problems and positions into an overall “why the fuck is everything fucked” kind of umbrella.

As such, while I stand by my anger towards simple and passing slights, because they're somehow malicious in their ambivalence, I want to refrain from out and out hypocrisy by recognizing my capacity to glance over the details. Because sometimes it's just easier to feel angry and speak from anger.

But there's the issue. When your culture feels arbitrary, do you blame it because it's wrong? Or do you ignore it because it is in fact arbitrary? As someone with an agenda, it's hard to believe the latter. I'm mostly lost for figuring out other peoples' agenda. Surely some of them have one. But how can I tell? Everyone has a voice, especially when maybe they don't need one. Everyone's famous. Words just are. Hop on the train to the national stage of public opinion. The fact that you're talking is quite enough.

I just want people to be saying something. Not, I'm bored so I get drunk a lot and cook. Sure, that one episode was funny, the 112th means you have a real problem. Because you can pirate pro-tools doesn't make you a producer. Because all you're friends voted you easiest to talk to doesn't mean you're the next Dear Abby.

That's why I write a shitty blog on shitty websites. That's as far as my voice needs to carry until I'm saying or doing something more worthwhile than depicting the various ways in which the world blows. The only real reason I volunteer it is because I don't know how better to talk to myself.

[359] Hazard A Guess

I think I'm in the mood to be mean.

The funny thing about this idea is that, the less you know, or care to know, about me, you'd assume I'm always mean. It seems like a recurring habit of people as a whole to ignore all the time between “incidences.” It doesn't matter the good natured gestures or professions of happiness or friendship, especially when it fits your present agenda, let's write off the moment or person in the simplest manner.

I feel like this shouldn't have to be constantly beaten into people, but here goes. What's the worst thing you could say? What's the most inappropriate? What's the smallest-minded, utterly disgraceful and disregarding load of shitty drivel opinion or idea you could ever hold? Welcome to my mind and where I make comments come from. “Isms” are easy. Shitting on the recipe of someone's free food they were willing to cook for you is so obviously ludicrous and disrespectful, how in your ever loving fucking mind could you think someone would or could honestly come from that position? Thankfully, the cook gets the joke.

It's one thing to not find something funny, it's another to deliberately mischaracterize where someone is coming from. I feel like I've been getting hints of a character assassination, and it's fucking pissing me off. Sure, there are things I don't like about my friends or can get caught up in a shit talking moment. I certainly don't try to insist upon my other friends that they should or shouldn't think something about someone else. I can explain history or speak of an incident, but the “so and so is this” is different from “this and this happened involving these people.”

I'm not just a dick, and if you were worth half a damn as a friend you'd care to understand why I relate to the world the way I do. And don't get me wrong, this isn't me pretending like I'd ask you to.

I think this happens when too much fake shit and fake talk starts to creep into interactions. The word friend starts to get blown up and conflated with too many things and people don't know what to take for granted or when to be left to their own devices. Score another under the general reasons I like to be the fuck alone.

Sometimes, frequently lately, I think I just need an entirely different social setting. Being around the “pretty cool” or “hot enough” or “smarter than the average bear” crowd is proving stressful. I'm desperate for more people like me. Utterly desperate. Ones who want to dominate information or create ways of interacting and relating in the world that are rarely or weakly seen. I want to spend no time on misconception and empty professions and just work. I want the exponential gains of people on the same page.

And, not for nothing, but trying to account for the vastly overwhelming amount of people, friends, who are depressed, anxious, or have threatened or tried to commit suicide, you'd be a little fucking jaded and find it hard to emotionally or terribly sympathetically relate. I then want to take it a step farther and shit on all the “likes,” “good vibes,” and “prayers” from the 50 odd people who didn't call the police department.

How many people are literally born with fucked up brain chemistry or have been through immense trauma? Plenty, and this isn't shit on those who have. How many are victims of and co-conspirators in the dialogue and culture the drama-fys not just the condition but our response to it? Every time you're persuaded not to pull the trigger hardly looks like that bright when a single dominating moment allows you “win” the game in spite of it all. To me, the joke is only funny when you acknowledge the genuine horror it's speaking to.

If you're curious what it sounds like when the jokes stop, keep asking.

[358] Effective Text Message

If I can communicate the 20 different angles I’ve considered approaching this blog from in a meaningful way, hopefully it will serve to amplify the theme, which is in fact, communication.

Information is always being conveyed. No matter how much you’d maybe like to hit pause or hide away, your very status as a person is telling something to somebody. It’s not just that you talk, it’s how you talk, who to, and what about. No one cares that you have hair until it looks like you spent time making look nice or are relaying a message about just waking up. The trick seems to be creating your own message verses allowing people to hear only whatever it is they’re telling themselves about you.

I, rather frequently, state my goals. Whether it’s monetary achievement, personal gratification in different kinds of friendships, or forcefully asserting ideas about conversation and awareness of various things I consider problems, my agenda is rooted in more than leaving you with an impression that I may be a hippie because of my hair. And, while I don’t always act like it, this leaves me with a concern over how, if, and when I try to communicate something. The why is obvious, because in theory, if I’m effective, “things” will get “better.”

So I’m immediately drawn to people who I can talk to. People who don’t flinch at how I say something and actively pursue the reasons I said it. People who can step back and help prepare the word soup without threatening to drown me in it. People who aren’t afraid to put any and every idea they may hold dear on the table to be scrutinized. This fundamental principal, this habit, I think is a prerequisite to anything even resembling “progress.” Some might say it’s to be scientifically minded.

Well before you start to bother talking to other people, you need to be aware of what you’re telling yourself. How that dialogue gets started and the reasons you develop to preserve it can be vastly complicated. Even as someone who puts out what he thinks, generally sober minded and after much forethought, I can still find myself burdened by previous ideas, habits, or ruts that I dug myself in the past. I have to go back and read my own reasonable position to refute the craziness I’ve allowed my head to go in the moment. To change an automatic overtly compelling response like that is incredibly, if not impossibly hard.

So then my dialogue about that response has to change. I have to better identify which feelings or thoughts are worth reading into. I’m starting to play in that stupid emotional realm again now, so when I get jealous, am I really changing my ideas about sex overnight and looking to protect some societal notion of integrity about relationships? No, even if it seems like it would feel really good to fix the shitty feeling in the moment. It’s acknowledging, not irrationally capitulating. You don’t fix a car spinning out by frantically turning the wheel the opposite direction. It’s prompting me to think about where the butterflies are really hiding.

And it takes practice. A lot of all the time daily awareness to when you’re overselling yourself on a story. Doubt is an uncomfortable place until you realize the things you’re basically sure of came out of a healthy skepticism about them. Your reasons get stronger and can stand up to deeper scrutiny. Your goals get a little more polished. Your analogies become leaves on the wind; watch how they soar.

I understand that if it can go wrong in me, it can do the same in others. I will forever be embarrassed by my first violent blood bath stabs at writing or conveying a message. Naturally, if I conceive of most people as the incorrigible dramatic miscreants that I so glaringly resembled at sixteen, I understand why they might take my words, meticulously etched upon my family’s finest parchment, and want to light them on fire. Change is hard, but sometimes it’s only as hard as you’re willing to make it. Incorporating a new idea doesn’t always have to feel like life or death...of your personality, character, or credibility.

There is the context of your mind. The one ingrained in you by virtue of being human, the one bombarding you with advertising and social cues, and the one you cultivate with your inner dialogue. And they’re all competing. We’re still fight or flight mammals but with little reason to generally fear for our lives. We’re tapped into an infinitely growing list of “everything” with a point and click and are prompted to decide something about it all. This very independently of whether or not our opinion is needed or necessary. It can be more than a little distracting and destructive to try and build a mental or social framework to fall into while getting swallowed up by this hole. It’s like an animal that keeps growing more and more hair until you can’t cut enough to identify it’s a dog. Find your inner dog.

There is a social context. There are still plenty of terrified atheists and gay kids who don’t want to get the shit kicked out of them for swimming too hard against their family or society’s current. You wouldn’t consider it a good thing for them to, upon escaping that climate, retain ideas about their deserving of hell or them being evil and disgusting. But that happens, in less extreme, but just as compromising ways. I constantly poke at and speak against religiosity for this reason. The hair’s a knotted mess. Those tangled webs of arguments and empty definitions are where my concern for effective communication came from. And no, it’s never private or personal, you’re always saying something.

The fact this is a blog changes how I write. The fact that it’s geared towards people who (should) know a ton about me and might have been privy to a conversation or ten that provokes blogs slants the message. I think it’s important to know how to write cited detailed analyses rooted in history and evidence. I think it’s just as important to power through lines of reasoning, however potentially absurd, and find the true heart of how and why a message will resonate with you or how and why you’re going about explaining yours. If you’re not appreciative about the prospect of being wrong, when it’s the prerequisite for learning anything worth knowing, how do you respect yourself? How could I take pride in what I do, or call what I write work?

It’s lucky for me that the loudest messages are, not coincidentally, the easiest to hear. We all tend to react in predictably angry or fear based ways if our foundations are rocked. I know when you’re going to fuck the girl you shouldn’t to spite your ex. I know how you’re going to deflect or blame me for picking at your faith. I’d bet there’s an arsenal, conscious or unconscious, that you’d be dying to enlighten me about my ideas or behavior if I pursued something about you too aggressively. This, the glorious fight/flight entanglement both to fend off the present threat and then to flee, perhaps in breaking the relationship, so as to never have to deal with such an unpleasant line of thought again.

I say let them run. It simply communicates to me your hapless and likely hopeless, circumstantial existence. The mountains of ideas you move and impact you hope to have on the world will be helped by those left behind. All 5 of them.

[357] Balancing Act

This should be brief, I mean, I wrote the title before the blog.

I just finished an article about the "used-to-haves." The people who had a basic job and could pay the bills on time. This woman took vacations and got pedicures. Now she's living paycheck to paycheck and feeling the desperation of not knowing what the future holds. She says there are many like her and they won't forget. They'll use their education and ensure their kids understand that they're not meant to live like the poor. She calls what's happening not a recession, but a theft.

I wear a yin-yang symbol every day to beat into my head the idea of balance. Every time I want to cause a scene or go on some shitty rant about the things I hate, it helps to keep in mind that I'm doing it from a pimp ass computer. Likewise, when things look rosy and amazing, there's probably someone shitting in your cereal. As a result, when I hear her message, part of me thinks her and her kind had it coming.

There are any number of things you choose to be persistently willfully ignorant about under the guise of keeping it together. How many times did she ask herself what it meant, beyond making her bosses look good, for her to work at that company? Whether she rode the slow burn to poverty or it happened “all of a sudden” would depend on how thoughtful she was about the idea that getting fired happens. An unpaid mortgage is firstly unpaid and your middle schooler hasn't graduated college.

One of the first pieces of advice from SCORE, the old guys who've owned businesses in town and now disperse their wisdom for free, was to get a loan. They said “leverage” was the way to get open and start doing business. Until you're open, after all, you don't have much of a business. I decided to stop going to them for help. I want to be in control, balance my ability and effort against what I stand to make. You can't do that from a hole.

But that's something easy like finances. What happens when you dig yourself a psychological hole? What happens when you're stuck on a loop about “the American dream” or “the importance of a degree” and you fail to see the reality? I think that plays to why we don't see a huge revolution. I think people are trapped, concerned with how it should be with no attention or capacity to understand their role in it. I was told “get a degree” and heard instead “waste money,” “pursue a job structure you don't agree with,” “impress people who don't deserve it,” “consign yourself to the idea that this is the best way to learn.” Lucky for me, I appreciated what I was getting into and balanced it against what I got out of the house.

The reality as it seems to me is that much of what we engage in is done for arguably “no reason.” It's what was already there. It's something to presently focus on. You're actually trapped, or feel trapped, and what you're doing distracts you from that realization. It's killing time. It's framing a “respectable story” to tell your parents and friends. It quiets you with a false sense of predictability. Desperation claiming noble sacrifice. Complacence struggling daily to look like allegiance.

As a result, the consequences are taken for granted. We don't see people standing for much anymore so, holy shit! That's why no one is standing! Your cog self in the wheel of the machine didn't care what the machine was making. You simply had your place. And your place afforded you comforts and entitled you with an opinion on what to expect. How you spin or why you spin don't matter as long as you're spinning.

No one bothers to expect exactly the answer on the other end of the equation.

[356-3] Ding, Going Up

As with most things I write, there's ample opportunity to get more specific. This will likely make more sense as a third part to a trilogy in line with the last two things I've written.

The idea of having “no rules” in a relationship sounds retarded, at first. It comes from a point of shared selfishness. If you want the other person to do as they do and that's what you like about them, what's the point of undermining that by dictating what they should do? It seems unfair and petty. You can do a lot to suppress the feelings you have about their behavior, because after all, it's your problem as a result of your mutually agreed upon no-rules understanding. But, at that point, it's likely not healthy and not really what you had in mind when you said “no rules” in the first place.

At the intellectual level, everyone just “is.” There is no intrinsic specialness other than what you choose to feel about yourself and your happenstance existence. This isn't a very constructive or human place to come from if you seek to form social bonds or convey “real human messages.” And, arguably for most of my life, that's been perfectly fine for me. The handful of times I allowed “emotionality” to guide my rationale or actions, they went remarkably bad. And lest you think I only reference my small window, the reports from others are consistent, to one degree or another, with my experience. It's significantly easier to “trust” people to simply be their degree of cluster-fuckery, and navigate those waters as they rise and fall.

So you develop a language to accompany your behavior. I adopt a lot of terms revolving around coldness, distance, detachment, being mean, playing games, sociopathy, and brazen disregard for the emotional states of other people. It's a well-rehearsed, and constructive for my purposes, set of conditions you'd do well to understand what I mean when referencing them, if we're attempting to get along.

At the heart of it is a reflection of superficiality. It's the overt impression I've gotten from overwhelming examples of asking about and getting more than I bargained for. There's not been an experience where it's been worth “trusting” people or looking vulnerable. So why would I pretend I'm concerned with opportunities to engage in those behaviors? Why would I consider your emotional appeal? I can't argue from a position where things have gone well when these things were at play, so I'm intellectually locked out of the kind of conversation you might be trying to have. I, in times of emotionality, have been met with recurring themes of dismissive, taken for granted, or abusive responses; you eventually learn to find a way to “shut it off.”

Now, I still don't necessarily regard this as a bad thing. Lucky for me, I really like being “mean.” It's fun and fulfilling to explain things in terms or have an understanding of the world that either delights people in how dreadful it sounds, or turns them off so completely I learn quickly they aren't worth bothering with. Yes, while selfishness can evolve and mean many things, the bad kind doesn't go away completely. I'll take those opportunities to be personally gratified.

Here's where things get tricky. What happens when you're not super keen on being crazy selfish all the time? What happens when it's not about you it's about us? Emotions in and of themselves are not bad things, but I've thought for a considerable amount of time they should inform, not dictate, how you behave. So what happens when I don't want to play the cold manipulative game, and am being informed from the guy everyone forgot worked here, that something needs to change?

I certainly have a construct, a set of ideals or relative rule structure in which I conduct my affairs. It stands to reason that if they've served me well, rules in and of themselves are not a bad thing. Appreciating the rules is different than seeking to use them for control. And self-imposed rules hopefully come from a place of deep appreciation for why you conduct yourself a certain way. It's why I'd rather detach when I have too long periods of “fuck everything” verses continuing being around and making it people I like's problem.

Certainly the underpinning philosophy behind open relationship things is a sense that you have more to give, or recognize what others offer, on top of, or in conjunction with, what you have. It's greedy for the right reasons. Some people are just sluts, I truly empathize, and make it more about sex and “spreading the love” that way, but to me, that seems fundamentally hollow. Others have a deep pull towards different people or personalities and want to play those feelings out wherever they take them. And there's any number of degrees in between. Regardless of the motivation, you've missed the boat if you're not communicating what you feel and what you want. Hopefully, having that backed with an underlying trust. Expressing, not excusing.

And I think there's a shaky ground in that “between” realm that doesn't get enough acknowledgment. I think having built a pretty big network of “people I get along with to one degree or another” when something happens that seems to undermine what I thought that relationship looked like, it helps justify the lack of feeling or investment even further. Everyone seems to be out for “the idea of The One” and anything you had gets swept under the table because they found a proper title. It's humbling (is that how you spell humiliating?) how people you've spent nearly every day with for months can express how lonely they feel.

It should be clear by now that it's not “trust them to fuck up how you expect” or “communicate what you want them to hear.” I've, until relatively recently, found little to no inclination to do anything but those. I didn't know how to appreciate the kinds of places “emotional” people were in, in the same way. Or if I had, I didn't give it the weight required for a change in the decision making process.

It goes back to previous themes I've mentioned. What matters is your being intentioned. What's on your mind and why. What example you want to set and what kind of behavior you want to reward. Can you see, do you feel, the utility and perhaps meaning in actually trusting or actually communicating where you're coming from with someone else. Is there something about together that better informs you about being alone. I'm not using question marks because they feel more like directives.

I think having experienced a hint of how it can work has at least made me a tad more sympathetic. Ultimately, what gets you to the other side is being able to struggle through the words and feelings, hopefully with someone who doesn't betray your process. Who are you shoveling shit with when it inevitably hits the fan? When the pains of jealousy, doubt, or existential nihilism subside, did your mind go back to “I wish they were here lying next to me watching this movie.”

And it's not fair. That's almost exactly the point. Picking someone or adhering to new rules for someone else's sake is to prop up and celebrate that us example. Presumably, at least for me, because you advocate for what it means and feels like, and not so you can look down your nose or garner false pride in clinging to something that staves off crippling anxiety and loneliness. It should perhaps also not allow you to forget or ignore what else you have or want and why those still mean something to you.

If you're brave enough to talk yourself over a cliff, you'll be able to appreciate what survived after the landing.

This is part 3 of a series: Part 1 & Part 2

[355-2] Totes Jelly

I don't think I've devoted an entire blog to jealousy. I should get on that now.

With the foundation thoughts for ownership in place, jealousy seems to follow rather naturally. What is jealousy then? I can tell you the most recurring theme in talking with people about their relationships is some form of jealousy standing vigilant looking for any and all excuse to leap forth and take action. Whether it's your creepy boyfriend looking from across the room or your list of rules about who to text or hang out with, everyone seems to have some form of rules they want their partners to play by to help dignify the specialness of their relationship. No, they don't all have to take some creepy or overbearing form and there are plenty of people who find jealousy endearing, but I think there's a deeper story.

Now, turns out, I tend to think you have a hard time reaching a kind of “ground floor” of a personality or individual nature when you're adhering to rules. A Christian who is virtuous for fear of hell holds no more water for me than a faithful spouse who simply doesn't believe they know how to get away clean with cheating. You need to develop your own reasons. You need to actually feel the depths of your “soul” (icky word) and then start trying to honestly recount your experience. I think you should find the most ground in the idea of things changing, and then put yourself to task figuring out why.

So, as a rule in relationships, I don't deal with rules. No matter what my potential feelings on a matter may be, I let them happen, yet what makes the most sense to do is my decision. This allows jealousy to be kicked in the balls, in a sense. I think unlike sadness or anger, jealousy has a terribly “personal” character. You can externalize the others. I'm mad at you, I'm sad they died. Whatever you may be jealous of harps back inevitably to something about you. Given that I've lost practically all capacity to be insecure, let's see if I can describe what feels abstract.

I have a hard time describing how and why I feel jealous or when it kicks in. I've been jealous about damn near every person I've “hooked up with” as it's crassly understood when they get a boyfriend, for example. Why? Is it like an intrinsic man thing to fundamentally feel some kind of claim on women you fool around with? And, even if I make it “go away,” it usually has everything to do with the distance or the distractions of the present moment. In a sense, it's like there's always a lit candle. It may just have something to do with taboos and struggles people tend to have when it comes to that realm, and the idea that they decided to get with you, it's like, awesome no way!

The romantic in me, (right? It's struggling to work it's way back from the grave) likes to tell the story of the endless amounts of people I hate and find ugly as sin. The idea that there are even a handful of opportunities to find people who are mutually attractive and versed in interesting things to talk about is like a godsend. It would be quite a shame to think they would get with someone “lesser” or who would not sort of feel the same things about them if and when their situation changes. Like, I do a lot of work trying to figure out where I'm coming from, some lost boy pining for the pussy I find it hard to be compared to even figuratively.

I think there's a huge part of me that doesn't want to respect or acknowledge other peoples' feelings. Let me explain. For as emotionally retarded, quick to insecurity, anxious and fear laden declarations of “love” I've come across, I've all but lost my capacity to believe damn near anything people say about their relationships or where they're coming from. When someone “woos” one of my friends, I'm immediately defaulted into thinking “the worst.” And it's not just because I'm mean, it's because people are normal. People are polite. People want to believe. Even when they know they shouldn't.

And when I say the worst, I mean shitting on ideas I had about my friend. In that, “how the fuck could they not see this this and this” and I have to sort of choke down new little negotiations of how they're going to register in my life. I've seen friends go after other friends out of spite, and “win”. God could that be unpacked for days but this is no time for pointing fingers. I've seen a sense of pride across faces in recalling their “number.” And I've seen so many girls after years of finding typical guys start to develop a lot of demoralizing habits and ideas about what they want from their next partner. Certainly not in every realm, but in very important ways, whomever you're with, I shouldn't be able to say that I would be (am?) a better friend to you than they are a boyfriend.

I think it's partly a pretentious thing. I think that I hold myself and our relationship in such a high regard, that if I can't stomach the other peoples' personalities who you like, it's like an affront to what I thought existed between us. It's like, I'd rather be treated like a whore-ish dog than be persuaded that there's something more between the people I fool around with or call friends. And there's a world of confusion as to how I understand how you understand your relationship with someone else. Yes, I'm pretending it's even my business because I had some naïve thoughts about the level of involvement friends might offer their perspectives.

What's interesting, is that jealous feeling goes completely out the window when I like the guy. Or, perhaps better said, basically know where he's coming from. Granted, this is damn near impossible to understand about most people most of the time, so I'm always gonna be stuck making shitty comments from time to time. And it's not enough to simply say something like “well, he makes me happy.” Happy is a fickle and cruel joke played on relationships. Happiness is a trick. It's the easiest set of causes and effects. Identify things you like, do said things in varying intervals that provoke happiness. I want people in your lives that make you work, think, and you both come out disfigured with the battle wounds of being human, not “happy.” For my sake, if I may beg, please be specific.

I've always considered jealousy important for the amount of information it can prompt you to think about. It's why, while I'll always lament it, I won't let it dictate rules. I won't pretend I own anything, I won't pretend it's going to stop me from treating or caring to the degree I do. What I need to do is either figure out how to better respect where people are coming from when they engage with what I would consider, let's put it politely, hopeless-where-it-matters types. I know that it isn't fair to friends or even the ideas I have about them. It's my cut-and-dry attitude of how I engage with said hopeless types that bleeds over into undue expectations of friends.

I suppose I find others' sincerity shallow. If they manage to be sincere at all and aren't outright lying to get by or get what they want. I'm sure there is no intrinsic difference between me and anyone, hopeless or otherwise, that people are choosing to relate to. I think I just find more value and meaning in calling out all the ways it can be bullshit. I see a lot of emotional thieves looking for the language and the payout without the work. I hope to cast a giant shadow of doubt. It lets the people with real things shine.

This is part two of a series: Part 1 & Part 3

[354-1] By The Ones We Think We Love

I'd like to talk about the idea of ownership. It's embedded in our language and culture. Certainly one of the first things children learn how to say is “mine!” You have your family and I have mine. You have your things and your clothes and any number of ideas that are yours. You own them outright. Right?

A recurring theme in my childhood was hearing my crazy cunt of a mother say things like “you're my boys, I brought you in, I can take you out.” Now we also got read to us that book with the kid playing in front of a toilet that said “I'll love you forever, my baby you'll be,” so it was a mixed bag. But the ownership theme still carries. All this really did was confuse me growing up. I didn't really focus on what my identity was, I was just whatever emotional state I was put into. I'd argue I was, not with her intention as she's not that smart, conditioned to continually focus on me in relation to her. This opposed to what it meant to be the obnoxious little kid I was.

I think her sense of ownership over us made her feel a sense of power, as little else in her life she could control. My mom's fat. The handful of times she tried dieting, all I remember was the week it was a bad idea to steal a chip because she was actively counting them. When she gave up trying to control that, it was back to stealing chips without a slap or pissy mood the rest of the day. She worked for one of Chicago's top attorneys as a legal secretary for like 10 years and was dumped the second that attorney got appointed as a judge. She also grew up with a shitty abusive background if you're looking to sympathize because god is it easy for me to continue a shit stream and start losing the point.

She loved stuff. She had a closet the length of a wall too packed for the clothes to move and shoes along the bottom to match. If you didn't get her a diamond or Swarofsky crystal for Christmas or her birthday, she would find a way to be angry for weeks. To me, she built a little empire of things that she could reflect on and try to find value in. She had no control. She didn't even know how to begin defining or practicing control. So she added to her external environment and developed overbearing and borderline (ha) abusive relationships at home and with her friends.

Did not expect to run with that for so long, but it's so explicitly easy and spot on.

So think about what you think you own and why. All of your things, all of your friendships. Are they yours to even have? There's the idea that we allow ourselves things to the level at which we think we deserve. I think this can be illuminating when you reflect on your life. The types of personalities you contend with. The amount of stuff you've accumulated and why. What does it mean to you? What does it feel like to take on all that you've projected into something, or someone?

For an ego maniac, I've a hard time considering myself special. My cold analytic mind breaks myself down into the sum of it's part just as I do other people. My thoughts are an amalgam of the books and shows and music and interactions that I've had. All as particular as they are to any person, but cultivated within a set of boundaries. Often, my “novel take” is your ignorance of a previous influence. The only thing I have is my deliberate intention. Even if something accidental happens because of me or to me, I can't call it mine because I didn't even know it existed until it screwed something up.

So how much of what we own did we deliberately set out to? When did we want to feel that sense of power or pride and not just happen upon how good it can be when it falls in your lap? How hollow our achievements that fall like dominoes.

I love my stuff. I take as much joy out of using it and flaunting it as the next person. But it's stuff. It's stuff I can't make, barely understand, and if not for the utility, it'd be relegated to wherever pogs went. My ownership of said stuff is weak. It doesn't matter. It's a terrible measure by which to judge someone or metric by which to judge yourself. It's not that you own a guitar, it's how you play it.

But what about people? If someone tells you “I'm yours” what do you do? ” Is it the same thing as pursuing the person of your dreams and capturing their love? Is it a sense of pride, power or listless exhaustion that makes you throw yourself into someone else's arms and claim game over, you're theirs?

I wonder if the other person is even capable of taking “it.” Your love, your devotion and promises. I don't think it's their opportunity; it's not theirs to take. In a real sense, it doesn't exist for them. They feel what they believe about your love, not “your love.” It's not a thing. You have to be doing it for you, even if, if not especially because, they're the one in mind.

It's not that fateful moment you decided to declare your intention that sums up and rounds out the rest of your life. It's the moments every time you keep a promise. It's the ones you make every time you say that stupid word love. I don't know how to give myself or own someone else. All I know how to do is decide and spend my time. If I said marriage, if I said “I'm yours,” (as I've described it), or made a promise forever, it'd feel not just like I'm lying, but lying without purpose, for the sake of it.

You're not my friends. We share perspectives and ideas and I'm lucky to have found you. Kristen isn't my girl, she's simply who I'm going to pick over you. It isn't my family (not everyone, obviously) that I'm ashamed to look at, it's a crowd of people I spend next to no time around, circumstantially sharing some genes.

Of course it could be argued I'm flatly ignorant of the emotional heights and interpersonal achievements of you “normals” and it's all a very simple equation involving birds and bees.

This is part one of a series: Part 2 & Part 3

[353] Not An Optimist

What's your impression of our [US] country? I ask in earnest because I'm about to offer mine. This will be heavily characterized by my thoughts after watching “Inequality For All” by Robert Reich.

If you want a history lesson of inequality, this is a movie for you. You will learn how and when wages stagnate. You will see parallels from the 1930s to what's happening now. You will get every number your heart could ever want regarding GDP or value. What you won't get is really anything to do about it. This is unfortunate because Reich knows his shit, is data backed, but most importantly, he's in the minority of anyone who seems capable of fixing things.

This doesn't mean he doesn't know how. Many people know how and I'd argue that he's one of them. But his method isn't rooted in what appears to be the actual state. His version for fixing things is to rise up and realize that we make the laws. We create the government that structures how free enterprise works. If we would only take it upon ourselves and remain optimistic, because history is on our side, things will eventually play out for the better.

For my part, I'm in no way an optimist. I don't acknowledge that we have a real government. I don't know how you can have a Supreme Court with justices that rub elbows with the Koch brothers. I don't know how money or corporations are people or can speak. Gerrymandering exists. Lobbying exists to the tune of investing 150 million to make 1.2 trillion the next year. We can't change the laws because we literally don't have people who speak for us. The best we are is an angry mob in the streets.

I really want to drive home how unhappy I am that the “optimist” attitude seemed to be a selling point from the film. Reich travels the country listening to peoples' stories of hardship. Working 2 and 3 jobs to pay the rent and barely feed the kids. People shacking up with friends or back home. He knows that technology and cheap labor over seas means that there is no new jobs just waiting over the horizon. These people have ideas about starting families or one day finding a better job to maybe afford a house or better car. These people should be rioting in the streets. Optimism in this context only serves to slow things down.

India and China are emerging markets. Both have a massive amount of people that want the same crap Americans want. Do you think companies care about getting you a job so you can afford their crap when several billion people are hitting the scene becoming engineers and doctors so they can live up to the example we set? Things will not get better here. Legislation is dead because it's bought and paid for. Unless you find a way to subvert the current paradigm, you're absolutely stuck suffering it.

His point about history being on our side strikes another kind of chord. My perspective of history shows that there's very human things that go wrong at any time well before we decide to be responsible about the free market. Not to mention, in a global economy, we're still contending and negotiating with plenty of areas of the world who don't think as “progressively” as we pretend we do. If anything, history is teaching us that no matter how angry a group of people gets and does something to reform, with enough time, money, and influence, the rich will get their way eventually anyway, as if they weren't all along.

To me, we ignore an overall philosophy. We don't appreciate that greed, is in fact, bad. People are fundamentally selfish. Even if it's private and they don't try to justify it with bastardized interpretations of social Darwinism and Ayn Rand. When you stop talking about human capital and consider yourself to be wealthy because of your manipulation of law and percentages of pensions, things go to shit. I don't know why we pretend that this is not what's happening. I don't know how people forgot to be human. I know the internet is distracting and poverty in this country looks different than in others. But why did we volunteer to be so stupid about it?

Reich's movie isn't going to do anything more or less than a Michael Moore one. A few people will learn a little more about how we're getting royally fucked, but it's not prescriptive. It doesn't identify bad guys because it doesn't believe there really are any. It's just “capitalism's” fault. It's our fault because we haven't crafted the correct amount of laws. We're talking about the Secretary of Labor under Clinton with all his information and influence and practically zero ability after 30 years of the same mantra able to shift the underlying tide. So what, we put one person like him in Congress and cross our fingers?

I look at all of my broke friends and their debt. I look at the ones who even with jobs are making what a teenager at a shit job would make even if they got “specialized” training. How many of you are just around the corner from a white picket fence and a kid? I look at the laws that have track records of keeping the country perpetually screwed over many years. I look at the smart people who aren't doing it any better than the next smart person.

This is why I think we're fucked. Just because your county or town does something a little different or manages to find a small piece of pie does not mean anything about the overall system. It doesn't mean people are smart enough nor inclined to figure out how to call out the real people making real decisions that take real food out of their mouths and really cause a lot of harm.

I live in the now generation. I don't even want to talk about things like gay rights or abortion because it's tantamount to discussing the merits of slavery. We shouldn't have let them go. I don't need pundits telling me tired, broke, and word for word arguments from 30 years ago that don't work. I think fuck them, stop giving them a voice, fix it and move on. Just “be happy” and wait for history to take over doesn't work for me.

And fuck pretending that everyone's an innocent bystander. You can listen to Jaime Diamond explain that Wall Street is STILL doing the same things that crashed the economy in 2008 today, in front of Congress, and nothing gets done. He gets to stay rich and his bank lives and we'll be the ones living the consequences of it for, if we're lucky, just under the majority of our lives.

Finally, economists have this habit of talking about growth. We need growth. We need people to buy buy buy. If we don't the economy slows down, people don't buy, we don't have taxes, we don't invest in infrastructure, everything starts to go to shit because it's broken and people are dumber. Granted, this is how it's worked since the 70s, but I think it's because people haven't figured out how to subvert power. When I hear growth, I hear pollution. When I hear buy, I think back to when I learned that the idea of an identity being wrapped up in what you buy being crafted by companies back in the 50s. I think of mental health and priorities when you attempt to “Americanize” billions of new people to repeat the process.

Maybe we look at what it could be like if we pulled out. Maybe we create things independent of shitty decision making from rich assholes who deny you the right to be educated, healthy, or even basically functioning. They only win that game if you allow yourself to play it.

I'm not happy nor optimistic because I don't know anyone who really experiences what we have in this country who is. Maybe I should just get more rich friends?