[327] Just Be In The Know

I feel like before I die I should ever be striving to convey what I consider to be the truth of my disposition. Foremost because I think it has longstanding implications for your disposition. I don’t want people to be confused. I don’t want you to read my other despotic or seemingly judgmental blogs with the wrong back drop. There’s just a fundamental state I maintain that I think needs to be celebrated.

I have no problems. I don’t hesitate to type it. When I’m bitching about your relationship or life or some confusion, it amounts to “existential angst.” I cannot complain. Another idea I’d like to beat into the ground and restate in everything I ever write; I have peaked. I’m healthy, fed, and intellectually quelled with a roof over my head. I do and always remember my place in lieu of the rest of the world.

The problem is in how people perceive this. You get a lot of jealousy. Like, “why the fuck do you think you’re so happy!?” And I think this has everything to do with missing the point. I call life a game. It’s an exercise. It’s a learning experience. It’s the consequences of cause and effect. It’s not about me, or you, or any one thing you want to base you pathetic conception on. I have fun with it. I play with it. I know that if it were over tomorrow, I was playing the game I wanted to play.

It’s what I hope to change when I get more influence. I want more people to realize that no one is like you. Your perspective has something important for the world at large. No one is going to sound like me. While there are business leaders I idolize and comedians that speak so closely to what I would say on stage, nobody says it or does it like me. Therefore, my message and method is important and has consequence and can impact in potentially significant ways provided I’m speaking to what we all know and think, but speaking to it in my way.

I wish you would think of your life as not having problems. It’s such an unnecessary burden to bog your day or psyche down with bullshit that doesn’t speak to anything. Like, if I feel anxiety, it’s about how I’m going to react to something. Do I beat the ever loving fuck out of you or make a smart ass comment or maybe just shut the fuck up and turn away. I’m not genuinely worried about anything. I’m more concerned with the message I sent and the conception I’d have to defend about myself given a scenario.

I just can’t wait. I really can’t wait. Provided I don’t up and die randomly in a car crash, I cannot wait for the stage. The opportunity to be me or speak me or lay it out like I’m desperately waiting to hear it be said will be a fucking thrill. And I hope I have you laughing. I hope the mother fuckers that know me are like “haha I bet he..OH SHIT HE JUST and are cracking their shit up while the world spends their time judging and re-characterizing. I’d get off on the idea of confusing the fuck out of people or rattling the cages of those not in the know.

It’s around the fucking corner. Get excited.

[326] Right In The Feels

I want to be right! It’s the only thing I want besides all those other things. I want to know when I say something it carries weight. I want to see the consequences of my actions. I want to have a grasp on the situation that sees 10 ways out when all you’re looking at is the gun. It’s insatiable. I’ll never be right about enough things. When I get something right it’s like a drug. It’s the power of understanding. It can surprise you! I love the idea of potentially being right about things I can’t even be consciously aware of yet. Right is right. Wrong is wrong.

There is a right way to convey information. When you pick an end, you can tailor the metric by which that information is heard. Peoples’ perception of your tailoring will claim you are wrong. They aren’t aware there is a right way to listen. Maybe your joke didn’t land; that doesn’t mean you don’t know how to tell a joke. If the joker cares more about the laugh than the message, he can learn your language. If you don’t need to laugh in order to grasp what he’s saying, now you’re getting somewhere.

We’re forced to deal with consequences. It becomes harder and harder to claim it was a joke when you’re addressing a crowd whose language you ought to understand. That is, any reasonable person doesn’t stand up to give a commencement speech at a black college and toss around the word nigger genuinely expecting people to give him a chance and just listen a little closer to the innate hilarity. He’s downright desperately wrong in his acceptance of the consequences of words under specific circumstances.

It’s in the consequences, the science of cause and effect if you will, that I want to be right. Socially, I want to be generally right, pragmatically I want to be calculably right, and personally, I want to be infallible. Clearly, we should define what that infallibility would look like. I base my life on rules that were hard-fought and hopefully overtly rational. For one of them to change, it should be quite the argumentative spectacle.

For example, who’s lining up to persuade me otherwise that people should be healthy? Of course, someone will play the small mind and say something to the effect that “healthy doesn’t quite mean healthy.” And we’ll merrily skip away from the point. Someone will say “look over here at my mentally-challenged brother, which my family loves unconditionally!” Seemingly unaware of the slighted mockery they’ve just made of the situation. No doubt we’ll hear from way left field something to the effect of “if people don’t get sick, how are they supposed to die?”

Along with my premise of peoples’ health being a “should,” an “ought,” and a “go fuck yourself if you could possibly think otherwise” there are natural tie-ins related to what that idea rightly means. It means we should not have poisonous food, or poisonous water, or poisonous air. It means that there are consequences that overwhelmingly people don’t like when they get sick. It acknowledges the reality, ubiquity, and severity of sickness unchecked. It’s as obvious as it is accessible and relatable. That is, if you accept the right definition of healthy.

I think, the blanket statement “people should be healthy” is a right one. “We’ll eliminate suffering due to illness” is a wrong statement. I point this out because people begin to expect outlandish and over-reaching things. To advocate health is not to cultivate a God-complex. But that’s what people will think you are doing, and then it will become about everything besides health.

So try. Shake me from my premise with a brilliant argument and I might change my mind, just be careful the moment I do I’m not dropping the vials of Ebola I’ve been juggling. If you, as a reasonable person maintained on my friend list, were persuaded after the first line and think this is carrying on far too long. I AGREE! But this cumbersome joke of a conversation we get dragged into by long-winded bloggers with more opinions than hairs on their head is why nothing changes. There are, in fact, lawyers that argue health doesn’t quite mean health. There have been people, at a microphone in public, who’ve asked if we perfect technology and can keep people alive, how they’ll ever be expected to die.

It’s hard to be right about something. It’s respectable because it takes work that you can’t fake. People don’t contemplate a bullshitter, they suffer through what’s been forced into their heads. If you’re the victim of a “brilliant” ad campaign and have genuinely longed for some piece of something and it made you sad not to get it, you’ve suffered a bullshitter. If you’ve “never found the right person” because no one can live up to what it takes to understand you or make you feel like a princess, you’ve suffered a bullshitter. You’re no more a man because you drive a big American truck than you are because you shave with 5 razors instead of 1. I hope to be contemplated, not suffered.

There is a right way to think about being right and wrong. Black and white doesn’t exist, but blacker and whiter become clearer the more specific you get. An individual pixel doesn’t tell you this word is white.

Yes, we live in a complex ecosystem with trillions upon trillions of externalities no matter what corner of the existence you want to look. All of it has a history. All of it lives or dies by ideas. It is right to accept the consequences of history and ideas.

One time a guy thought we should get rid of all the Jews (and a few others). This is a patently ridiculous idea that actually made The Holocaust and has been mirrored towards different sects around the world through to modern times. Why? We try to understand it in daft terms like “one day one guy wanted to kill Jews.”

It’s right to analyze political structure, and human psychology, and economies, and incentives, and fear, and opportunism, and every little thing that contributes to a big picture. You have to remember those things don’t go away. An argument from a textbook or quote from “touted smart fuck Ph.D.” does not negate the many windows you can open to let in common sense.

I get tired of feeling like a forlorn fan-girl when I hear people speak, rather eloquently, about shit that’s just obvious. I don’t need a doctor to tell me we should save seeds or a Harvard professor to explain all the bad things that can happen when you don’t hold people accountable. There is no legal argument to be made that makes me believe my vote should amount to how much money I make or that I’m still in a representative democracy.

It’s like we can’t just be “human” anymore when all I know how to do is rightly discern the implications of acting like one. You can’t just live. You can’t just eat and drink. You can’t trust that people will do what’s best, because what’s best has nothing to do with humanity and everything to do with indulgence and predation. We’re too big. It’s not just the litany of ideas but the overwhelming inability to understand what they’re doing to the world around you. It is right to think there are many things wrong with our circumstances. People have done, are willing, and are currently doing you wrong and I don’t even know exactly what it’ll take to change it. And would you look at that, I found my own good argument to feel sick.

[325] Talkin' Bout My Mo-ti-va-ti-on

Let’s talk motivation. Say you’re interviewing a psychopathic killer. If they worked for the mob, their reasons to kill can range from “he pissed me off” to “I was getting paid.” There isn’t an emotional component; it’s simply about what they were expected to do or what they were going to get out of it. But, say your killer is the Iceman, who has a clear emotional attachment to his family. He can choke a guy out over his back and not bat an eye, but the idea of not being with his family while in prison makes him tear up.

I want to know why people are so pushed to go places in their heads. Why is the brain so segmented into seemingly non-overlapping parts? Where did I go and why did I choose to be so motivated to learn about something in the past? How and why does that motivation change with new information, and are those changes good, bad, or arbitrary?

I’m dreading the idea of getting a normal job and working all the time despite my bigger motivation to make and save money. When I look at my capacity, I’m not allowed to doubt myself. Now, I understand Jay-Z believes it ain’t about where you been it’s about where you goin, but if I start pretending I know where I’m going, things are just going to get messy. I’m a conditional being after all, with maybe the worst case of presumptive intentional ego and free will that can exist.

It’s just the clarity with a goal in mind is unmistakable. You don’t read, you search and prepare an argument. You don’t talk, you persuade. You don’t suggest, you order, and people listen. It’s brilliant. I think what might put me back in that mode is currently a goal that feels out of reach. At least, out of reach if I’m to go about getting it while also adhering to a set of conditions that tend to bode happiness and are fairly easy to defend. Let that shit go and I’m practically a slave were it not for all the money I’d be making.

The “emotional” component to my motivation is more of an invigoration. It’s not “this makes me happy.” It’s cycling through the laundry list of implications and potential and never being able to shut it off. It’s something I know I can use to motivate or educate other people. It’s the precursor disposition for what’s needed to dramatically change someone.

Is it worth it to “mock” that for something that simply isn’t worthy? By what “right,” if we’re to believe in such things and maintain a semblance of order and respectability, do I subject that or ignore that or hand it over to the highest bidder? No one will value my time like I do, so why should I play along? I think I might just have a big problem with a limited perspective on ANYTHING else I could do to find a work around. Problem being, everyone else seems to be out of ideas as well. There’s a million ways to make money and spend time, there’s like a handful of ways to do it correctly.

How you define what’s correct is all about what you decide to obligate yourself towards. If killing people equaled a paycheck, sure you got what you wanted and didn’t get caught, but it’s hard to say you got the money in the right way. Is “killing yourself,” or at the very least suffocating or ignoring ideas for money, worth it? See Wall Street, or lawyers.

My concern is the realm of ideas, and I’m supposed to knowingly trample on mine and expect people to find good reason to stick behind theirs? I’d have a kill switch against anything I’ve ever advocated for at the level of mind. Talking myself into a shitty situation is not the same thing as acknowledging “how things are” and it is likely better to consider something as beyond the reach of my circumstance than capacity.

The clichés don’t work. Persistence is most likely to get you somewhere, it’s not guaranteed. Every one person you see loving what they do, there’s thousands who didn’t know what else they were going to be able to. It’s not enough to be smart or motivated. It’s not enough to be nice or genuine. There’s a whole world to contend with. The day I “get my shot,” which is a horribly small way to state it given the circumstances I was born into, it will be because someone with a little (or lot) more money sees that I’m a workhorse or have thought a lot about something. I’ll be only and just as good as when I threw on ankle weights to run through and clean theaters.

And then what? I do something that catches on and I run the media circuit? Two idiots in Colorado get to put all the tv channels on their budget web page because they’ll cook you a burrito and clean up after a party. Brilliant entrepreneurs? I bet you’re dying to look up their interviews on Youtube this second. Or maybe I just do something personally gratifying. Let’s cross our fingers I’ve got a moral core in tune with what will also logically and calculably account for the positive change I bring the planet. This, just so it can inevitably change again. Because who knows if we’ll ever decide to cement things like honesty or accountability into our culture for good.

I can’t seem to find those middle ground people. Ones who start with a philosophy but don’t ignore what may be required practically. You either get hippies or whatever it is “normal” people say and do. Or you get people with excellent advice if we pretend they didn’t have a giant backdrop to suggest, provide, and work in for their “insight” that isn’t always readily available or scalable to your problem.

Keep in mind, I’ve all but signed away everything but the memory of a flame on the candle I hold in my heart for humanity. That could change, but it doesn’t seem like it will any time soon. It’s only the sheer weight of demoralizing sadness with the idea I can’t shake off. Lucky me.

[324] Is There Anybody In There?

So it’s not so much about pursuing happiness as it is about avoiding suffering. To avoid something is to put it outside of your mind or turn it into something different. Avoidance typically plays out in some form of denial, but when it’s projected, it’s dramatically trying to shape the context to fit some form of twisted logic. I think you only do this when you are haunted by your logic engine of a brain. Every time you turn your key and expect your car to start or pick your nose ever assured you’ll get a booger, your mind is using that logic. Cause and effect is always in play and you can recall familiar circumstances.

Denial serves a purpose; it has much utility. There are a million different things at any one time we’d like to think are not true. We know what it looks like. Maybe you have a parent that refuses to accept something fundamental about your personality. Maybe you have a friend who’s in a ridiculous relationship under the hypnosis of superficial bells and whistles. Maybe you reassure yourself every day because what other choice do you have?

I’m a bad messenger. I have something that I, capital K, Know about everyone. It is the only reason I, when I try, always get what I want, it’s the only reason I know how to make you mad, and it’s the only thing that’s ever given me power over tear ducts. I just can’t seem to convince everyone that they know it too.

What I Know makes me cynical. I know relationships are conditional, often convenient, and not a fairy tale. I know how good you feel, I know what questions are struggled with; I know what things you should be doing and saying and feeling in a good one. You do to.

I Know what it’s like to try to believe in God. I know what it is to question, resolve myself to fate, and be afraid of what I’ve done or said. I know what it’s like to want to fit in with a “chosen” crowd or having some kind of divine understanding. I know I’ve never heard or seen a sign, never felt the love, nor have been moved by some other-worldly force. You do to.

You know what’s likely and unlikely. You know enough about human psychology and different ways people feel or expression emotion. And if you don’t know, you know Google exists and friends who have been there exist, and every day you spend not addressing or thinking about something is a lost opportunity.

I feel like in the event there is no hope for humanity, if we’re patently too dumb and too populated to enact any real form of change or longevity, I want to ride it out on a wave of honesty. And if it isn’t yet honest, I want the idea to be pursuing the honesty. 

This plays out in different ways. It’s someone asking me “how ya doing?” at work and I say “not terribly well working here!” Only to meet a disappointed face because I acknowledge my job is reinforcing poor peoples’ alcoholism. It’s conversations with friends where I’ll double down on a ridiculous statement or mean sentiment because it’s infuriating and hurts to see things change for stupid reasons or to struggle on behalf of dismissing stupid comments as any well-adjusted and understood group of people should be able to do. I really do blame my friends if they go home sad or angry that I called them a pussy for something as trivial as not drinking. We clearly need to better understand each other, or we’re clearly not really friends. I think it bugs people I don’t mind pushing it. If I was upset by something, I’d bring it up with the person. The onus is on me.

But to care about friends is to suffer. To want the best while you watch them be too human, too much like the rest of the world is painful. It’s worse when you recall moments or nights when you were on the brink of something new. When you remember the first time you thought to yourself, “you know, I kinda like you, I think we’ll get along alright.” And it isn’t just about friends. It doesn’t matter what you care about, you’re asking to get hurt, and you’re walking a fine line regarding how you define and relate your situation.

I prioritize things very deliberately. It’s the only reason I ever hold my tongue. It explicitly dictates where I spend my time. In order to do this, I have to be more than comfortable defending the reasons I laid things out in that order. I need to be principled. I need to have rules that, when shaken, still speak to the overall intent. It’s why I’m overly concerned with the idea of “circle-jerking.”

You could argue that life is fundamentally a circle-jerk, and you’ll probably see my nodding along for most of it. I’m not referring to circumstantial jerking, I’m talking about choices. People get together because they’re horny meat sacks intrinsically programmed to not feel bad and get fucked circumstantially, but you choose to stay in a, not-quite-right, situation for longer than you needed to learn your lesson.

For me, it’s an exercise thinking of the myriad of things I could potentially do to speak to my ideas. If I care that we have homeless people, I could work at a food bank. Have I really done anything beyond self-gratifying? A trained monkey can put food on a tray and I arrest my perspective and motivation between an apron and hairnet. Do I hand out eco light bulbs because “every little thing counts” no matter how much I know it doesn’t? Do I go back to school and get specialized degrees because “a specific amount of money will guarantee something” even though it absolutely won’t? It’s circle-jerking.

I don’t need to be loud over a microphone because I’m so fly or so different; I need to by saying something. I don’t really care about your day unless your day made you think about all your other days and what it might do to your days in the future. I don’t want to argue because I don’t care and I don’t want to defend because I prefer to stand and clarify instead of cower. I’m not “passionate” about anything that doesn’t speak to how things actually work and I want to learn how to breed novelty so it can inform a perspective. I need to prove myself right, and I need to know that the language in which I do so you are able to translate.

I didn’t feel like I was circle-jerking in trying to keep my schedule open to hang out with friends. I wanted memories. I wanted shared experiences and to keep replaying the best parties and to allow people to keep being “kids” for as long as possible. Part of me feels like I failed, but another acknowledges that I didn’t go out of my way to manipulate. It just feels like there would be something to regret in washing my hands of these people, but I’m not positive that “something” is universally acknowledged or felt.

I legitimately believe the world is doomed. I don’t want to believe it, but I do. I think it has nothing to do with people being evil, but I do think it has to do with them being in a bubble. In a bubble is where you can deny. In a bubble is where you can disavow. In a bubble you can paint anything you want on the inside to obscure what’s happening outside. I think “smart” people are easy to lose in their mental masturbation and interpersonal anxiety. I think dumb people are fundamentally overgrown scorned children who society gives license to unleash their demons after 18 short years. I think the distance you experience with any person or them to any topic is the bubble inflating. It gets bigger and bigger and only deflates when they honestly acknowledge they’re suffocating.

Lately, it’s been really hard to breathe.

[323] Picture Perfect Perspective

It’s important for me to know my priorities. Your perspective shapes everything. This is really an idea that I can’t belabor enough. It can change as quickly as your environment or it can remain as steadfast as your “thoroughly” thought out ideas. I have religious friends who will believe in God, despite all evidence or reason otherwise, and it shapes their attitudes and behavior seemingly as dramatically as a clear and present danger. They are entirely different people because of one idea. But that’s the thing. I don’t think they really are. I think your perspective is rooted in something deeper that gets hijacked. I think when you are aware of this hijacking it’s hard to take any one view about things overwhelmingly seriously.

I think there are main-stage ideas that pull off a hijacking better than others. These include being beholden to the ideas of your parents, getting into a relationship, believing in a god, extremism in any sense, and falling victim to present hedonism. It’s the last one I’m concerned with because it seems to be the setting of the “phase shift” that all of my old friends are going through. It’s a shift I warned about in however many blogs ago.

It can certainly get old. Whether it is doing certain things or spending too much time or thinking too long, a craving to change takes root. There’s something of a psychological need when it pertains to happiness, there’s a hedonistic want that shapes your decision to change as the “right” one regardless of how you came to that conclusion. It’s the thing where the excuses come from. This is where the lapses in memory reside. I certainly understand this want. I mean, who’s more presently hedonistic than me?

I don’t mind or care if people want to split up and travel around the world or seek certain kinds of jobs. I practice a certain kind of detachment from things that doesn’t make me message or text every friend that’s moved away to remind them of my undying love and affection. Not that I don’t appreciate hearing from someone who’s been thinking about me. I just don’t want my point to get confused when I go further. I don’t mean to force together some idiotic hippie love nest theoretical future model of togetherness. I’m not trying to be deliberately naïve to the wants and needs of other people. I just want to lean on an idea that there are significantly more options when you allow them for yourself.

I picked, for example, to live relatively cheaply, work a form of denigrating job just enough to not go crazy, try to make it to every hang out time and party, and fill in the free time with TV shows, reading, music or other practices. Whether intentional or not, I’ve talked to people who would frame this as “rotting away” in a college town trapped in a sea of retarded college kids. My perspective tells me that I will remember almost every day I spend at the park with my friends in a way that I won’t stacking beer in a cooler. My perspective has informed me of the amount of money I can potentially make when I sacrifice all my time towards some goal, and I’ve learned that I don’t want to spend that much time unless I have to or am thoroughly enjoying whatever it is I’m working on.

My perspective is also shaped by too much news and too many conversations. It really does, as odd as it seems to come across to most people, always weigh on my mind just how much I really have in comparison to the rest of the world. If I rotted away for the rest of my life in this town at a shitty job engaging with infuriating people, it would still be one of the best lives that anyone who’s ever existed has ever lived.

This doesn’t mean I don’t want “more,” I mean, I’m American. It just means I don’t feel a level of angst or maybe sadness when things don’t go my way. Of course I’m not just happy to sit and wait, but there seems to be some form of existential trauma going on with people who didn’t get into grad school or who can’t find the perfect job.

Why I advocate so heavily on behalf of keeping the relationships or surrounding yourself in friends is because that’s worked for me. If I manage to feel something it’s on those “perfect” days or perfect parties or hilarious string of jokes bullshitting with friends or breaking in new personalities. I understand relationships change and people grow apart, but that’s different from forcing yourselves apart to power through your individual forms of hell.

How much of what you expect from yourself comes from “you” and how much is beaten into you by society or some comparison to someone else?

If no one told you that you had to be a certain level of “smart” what would you be interested in? If no one painted a 2 story house with attached garage and a dog as an American Ideal, would you be dramatically upset about not having something resembling it? When I think about doing things to “better myself” it’s in better understanding my relationships. I understand that other people have other metrics, but I promise you, no amount of things I own or far in advance I pay my rent will ever speak to how I conceive of my capacity.

It’s for this reason that when I see relationships failing or being redefined in negative terms for no other reason than distance, I’m skeptical you are doing yourself any favors digging your heals into your new environment. It’s the same skepticism when you get into a relationship because you’re desperately lonely. It’s the same skepticism that tries to keep these blogs indirectly direct so that if you feel something resonate, I didn’t try to tell you how you feel, but hopefully I’m actually speaking to what you feel.

We’re constantly trying to prove things to ourselves, but doing so without keeping in mind the environment we’re working in seems to be destructive. This doesn’t mean to work up the best excuses using a “modern times” theme to arrest action, it means when you send out hundreds of applications and get 2 call backs to less than ideal jobs or schools, it really has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the shitty infrastructure you’re working in. It means when I don’t do them same thing as you and don’t meet the same kind of disappointment, I was sold on how little was out there earlier and it’s shaped my choices.

I just want you to know why you’re moving away. I want you to see every detail for why or if a relationship has to change. I want you to really feel what the difference is when the balance between friendships and money or time spent in different environments has shifted. I say often that I’m not terribly interested in traveling outside of the novelty and social experimentation because I know wherever I go, damn there I am. And who am I without my relationships to reflect it back?