[394] Very Bad Opinions

I've been lacking a certain honesty. I need to just shit all over a page.

I don't really care that I'm "wasting my potential" as the cliche goes. I think I'm often too informed by my previous accomplishments and they reassure and cripple me. I'm every bit a classic anti-hero trope. If cliches are bred from experience, then I could analogize myself to anything. Strip myself of responsibility. Trace every small aspect of my personality back to a character or cultural bias. I don't know if I'll be able to start caring again. I'm not looking for motivation. I'm not sad. I'm just no longer terribly concerned with much else beyond my own well-being. I'm also fairly certain that as long as this behavior persists, I can extrapolate if it's the majority opinion of most people about themselves, we will not last as a society in any kind of healthy or prolonged capacity.

I've always tended to get along best with people just a little bit older than me. I don't think I've been particularly "mature" by any means. For some reason, people who are a little older maybe feel a little wiser and like to be engaged with their "bestowed knowledge" in an intelligent or attentive way. Your peers write you off as no smarter than their dumb asses. People younger than you seem to resent you. But if they're older, you can put them at ease. They can claim a kind of "time spent" authority that doesn't make for your perspective to feel too threatening. That, and any brash or "Nick P. thing" I say can be written off as youthful indiscretion. Surely that window has to be rapidly closing.

I don't understand how I'm in such a good relationship. I still very much don't know how to get out of my own mind and really "be anything" for someone else. I can be nice, buy things, talk, watch movies and going dancing, sure. I don't think that I really deserve anything. I'm mean. I'm bitter. I'm comically self-destructive if only I could make more people laugh about it. And then here comes this other person who basically refuses to either see just how fucked I conceive of myself, or may think all sorts of terrible things about herself that means we can commiserate in our mutual esteem issues. This is a profoundly odd idea to me because I don't have esteem issues. Nor do I think hers extend any further than whatever the normal "all girls kind of hate themselves" range. Maybe it's Maybeline.

It's the part about not feeling anything unless I make myself. I design reasons and habits to provoke me into getting jealous or angry or whatever else. I really have not figured out how to "just be this emotion" unless I'm drunk. It's even wrong to say I'm bored. I always have something to watch, play, or do. I can kill time like it's my job. It might be closer to say "I'm not convinced." I'm not convinced about anything. I lack conviction until some profound wrong is flung square in my face. An opportunity to wield my truth. I feel infinitely conditional.

A good illustration is to again look at my relationship. I honestly think we've been so good at it for so long, the reason I empathize with the married couples in old movies is because you just sort of look for drama. To say "fight" wouldn't make sense because I'm on the side that's confused more than I feel I ever need to stick up for something. I've already won by having the relationship I want. I take no joy in back-and-forths picking apart accusations. I'm not "testing" to see if she really likes me. I'm not looking for a bad excuse to not be together.

But all the time in the world spent "just being cool" together is never as powerful as when someone likes to pretend we're not together. When the open relationship is used as a kind of excuse generator or the "it must be!" reason for anything that goes wrong. I'm fine if you have questions, but I don't like my integrity questioned. I don't consider myself "open" in any real sense anyway. I'm just perverted and this nice lady over hear decided "that's cool, sometimes I"ll be perverted over here too." This unbelievably old and insanely easy to understand concept, gaining momentum in culture, still beaten like a poorly behaved horse for any number of "insights" into the nature of my relationships. Oh well, not like it's hard to stop talking to people.

And why is that? Why is it so easy to not give a fuck about each other? It's always felt very feigned. Like, surely I like my friends, but I've had people I've spent as much or more time around that I'll maybe never talk to again. I can help with something if needed. But, it speaks to this not invested feeling. I can't gauge my impact until I get feedback. I don't know what I truly mean, so I don't get much to work with. I enjoy feedback on blogs and people assuring me some insight got them thinking. But that's kind of garnish on a meal I needed to prepare anyway.....keep commenting though.

And I always feel at risk for saying that "one thing that went too far" that ends it with someone. I'm pretty sure some comment I made about rape is why an old roommate deleted me from facebook. I know that making bobble-head jokes about beheaded journalists who, for some reason, the terrorists decide to kick in the head as they're bleeding out onto the pavement, are a particular kind of taste. I don't mind feedback and comments, but I'm still not concerned with the emotional responses. I think sometimes my friends think I hate them. Or they think I hate myself and it shows up drunk sounding like it hates them. These are both very wrong, but I'm stuck with the language available.

I hate "unnecessary" drama and stress. I hate complacency. I kind of hate expectations but not more than I hate acting like you don't have a care in the world. I don't care about your "spiritual awakening" that made you more comfortable with death after burning man. Should I? Can I? I hate the people I like moving away and it taken for granted that that's "just what adults do." I hate my family for how they've treated my dad. I hate that I've learned pity in how much I hate my mom for being insane lol. I hate feeling "on the cusp" of everything. Whether it's cussing out that family and burning their lives down, or disavowing some unhealthy friend I've reduced to being a caddy gossiper about, or starting some new organization or project that's no less prone to the problems "these kind of things inevitably face."

So I'm just filing my time. I'm just playing guitar. I'm just marathoning 80s movies (I guess to appeal to that slightly older crowd?) or reading the arbitrary recommendations of some enthusiastic blogger. I can "waste" more money hiring people to program things. I can run all forms of under-the-table and quasi-legal businesses. I can frame my accomplishments in any kind of positive or enthusiastic light, if only to not spread some "depression meme" across facebook. And who's it serving? Where's it go? Into your mind? Where you can ask yourself why if I have so much time or messy ideas I don't get up and do something more already?

It's that I don't care and I'm not trying to. I'm even at best. I'm "in a bad place" once I've gone well out of my way to spice up my week. I'm happy when I find something as glorious as Dr. Horrible and lucky to have caught the right amount of sleep. And it's weird. It's meh. It's blah. It's available for bar mitzvahs on weekends.

Hey, at least I don't hate myself, job, or life right? The part where people start to feel like they should die always seems a little overkill, no? I'm comfortable knowing that whatever purpose I'm supposed to give myself I've already conceived as being bred from innumerable forces independent of my insatiable will or unfaltering ego. Even if it was "moral" or "dignified" it would be subject to all the rigors that my mind puts ideas through, and reduce to that many more words and circumstances to stumble through. Wipe wipe wipe wipe