[331] It's An Acquired Taste

I’m going to run with the idea that it’s all perfectly arbitrary. There’s no reason someone should be pent up with so much rage for longer than a day or so. Therefore, it is necessary and important that I find a way to become happy again.

My difficulties awaken when I start to make judgment calls. I’d say the sliver of wisdom, and it’s only a sliver, in not judging a person is a clearer path to happier thoughts about them. I’m currently weighed down by the idea of responsibility. Really, truly, the idea of responsibility is causing stress. This begs the question, responsible for what?

The simple answer is “life.” It’s being responsible for what you do and say, who you associate with, what your hobbies are, projecting, if you have one, a message. More specifically it’s a responsibility to awareness. For example, I can comfortably say I’m an idiot just like all the other idiots save for one thing, I know how to acknowledge and admit it.

This one little difference is generally what sets me up to like you forever or constantly insist to myself that you sell not just our relationship short, but yourself in everything you do. If I didn’t think of myself as an idiot, I wouldn’t constantly write things that are rife with opportunity to get judged, picked apart, and potentially thrown back in my face. I’m asking for the controversy because I don’t want to remain an idiot.

Right now, I’m an idiot because I have all the time in the world and I’m here, writing about how I have all the time in the world and it’s not quite as I remember it. Maybe I’m languishing on thoughts about my friends, maybe I’m just not as excited to scrape and spend to get back to work, or maybe I’m too plagued by my generations’ late 80s early 90s birth window and focusing is a thing of the past. I don’t really know.

What I do know is that I’m definitely not only or specifically angry at myself. When I think of that dammed responsibility it’s a vague enough construct to apply across the board from a friend to a newscast to a very poorly worded retort on a facebook comment. It just seems like everyone (read “everyone” as the majority of people in my experience thus far, there, now I never have to say it again) is making the same error. Everyone prefers to hear and see what they want and respond in kind. They refuse to take the actual point, and do the work, to figure out what and if there is a proper response.

I can raise a concern to a friend, they can respond with the brilliance of their long term earning potential. I can watch a newscast about Treyvon Martin and am offered the reasoned and appropriate expertise of Nick Cannon. I can offer an opinion on a “funny” article online and am only met with the learned and insightful point that different people find different things funny. I sometimes feel like my head must exist in a fairy land where I expect something to make sense so often, and am so often denied, that maybe I’m just a well-functioning psychotic. That would make a handful of you people crazy too; or morbidly encouraging.

How I want to be responsible does not match up in how I currently am. It’s not to scale. That doesn’t mean I don’t hold true to me or maintain a kind of demeanor, but I know I’m failing, I know there’s more room to work than I even have words for. It makes all the little things disinteresting. Part of the reason I was so motivated to learn everything I could about science/god stuff was the mission of going out and trying to celebrate reason and evidence and see about changing a lot of bad ideas. But it doesn’t just have to be your faith that you’re intractable about and there is no persuading the persistent fairy tale teller.

My cynicism or mean jokes is the “best” way I’ve come up with to express just how darkly I see the world. Your happiness, to me, is a selfish trip doing the best you can to forget that you don’t really have a functioning country, people die all the time for no reason, you don’t really give a shit and the hopeless feeling you get when you have to give a shit propels you ever farther towards what feels good. It so often gets characterized as preachy, but thinking about this shit really does start to fuck with me! Shocked?

Not only can I barely do anything about it, I’m seemingly the only one who’s frequently plagued by it. I’m the only one who can’t allow himself the kind of reckless abandonment that marginalizes things until they *somehow* get better later. I feel like I see people cheating. It’s too easy. They adhere to a construct for stability in a world unstable. They adorn laurels of praise and reinforcement from people who never expected otherwise; as if there’s dignity and wisdom hidden away in repeating the same failed experiments.

In one way, I’m not trying to shit all over your happiness, but in an increasingly depressing manner I really really do want to shit all over your happiness. I find myself envying not what people have, but their ability to put what I can’t aside. Oh what it would be to have the ability to focus on one small thing like a lover or job. If only I was content to be Joe Blue-Collar or even Burnout Benny, everyone’s favorite druggie friend!

I can’t get the conversations I want because just referencing the topic generally makes people defensive. I can’t get the solutions I want because they either take a fuck ton of time and/or money, and a lot of speculation and chance regarding the future. I certainly am not “happening upon” an intense and intelligent debate about any topics, let alone one’s I may have something to contribute to. It just gets old. Of course I could find a corner of the internet to satiate any flatly intellectual itching, but it’s not enough. I’m not just a fact reader. I don’t understand things merely as a collection of web pages or scholarly articles.

The only way I find myself being able to justify anything is to accept that it’s all perfectly arbitrary. That it simply doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, outside of what you do or don’t think about it. There’s no moral imperative, responsibility is funny, and to stress out and think about anything besides the lengths of your self-determination is the height of folly. The only glaring problem with this is how it makes zero sense if you want or have kids, or friends, or find yourself enjoying the endless spoils from those you’ll never know. It’s simply, even if you can’t do much, you can at least think and talk. It can’t just be the responsibility of the “activists” or “smart people who will figure it out eventually.”

I crave a kind of feedback that hints at tearing down peoples’ worlds. They don’t like that, because after all, look what it does to me. I guess it’s time to draw up a lengthy analogy about the taste of beer.