[450] Add-Block

I hate advertising. The idea of “crafting a message” is no less intriguing. In what area of life do you allow the exact same message to beat you over the head 30 times over the course of a few hours? And maybe the annoyance or effect is massively amplified when you don’t have cable, but my god, I understand why people would write off all television if they were submitted to the dialogue of the background show when you press On Demand.

The contrast is what is lost in these messages. It’s not really “on demand”, is it? It warns you the fast forward is disabled, making your time dedication to advertising mandatory. You get the last few episodes available to you before they disappear or drop behind a paywall. You know, so you can pay on top of your bill.

Beyond the ordeal that is Comcast you get the suggestion a dozen times that you’re sick or perhaps not sick enough and need to start asking your doctor for prescriptions. Again, doesn’t health boil down to food most of the time? No, you either need this pill or must suffer your malady which I guess everyone at the office and all your friends are talking about. The insane levels of insecurity you must reach to actively pursue these measures must be terrifying.

You’ll get told your character traits which dispose you to a certain kind of car. You’ll hear allusions about the household you run and your relationship to your co-workers. It’s really freaking the shit out of me how many times I heard the term “binge watching,” how good tv makes you feel, and how much pride you should take in the amount of time you spend listening to its messages. I tied #yearofbeingboring to my TV activities and tried to pair it with using a treadmill. There is no amount of pride one should derive from merely sitting on their ass.

Isn’t the idea of “selling yourself” underneath much of our psychology? Why I can find useless person after useless person who knew how to talk and show up to the first meeting and then falls off the planet. Why the words “best” or “fresh” or “unique” have lost all their meaning. The driving force of any “social” media profile. Gotta “pump up your resume” to mask your sheer inability to really do what’s being asked of you, in service to things you don’t care about, that may in fact be directly tied to your general demise as an individual.

This strikes me as kind of old news. But then that’s kind of another horrifying idea. That I haven’t had cable for 8 years and the difference between then and now is CBS turned into a social justice warrior. Don’t bully, don’t kill yourself, and don’t be mean to the gays. Not that the messages aren’t on point, but it starts to make a little more sense if this is one of the most popular places that people come to unwind why we’ve pushed ourselves into an era of overt sensitivity.

There’s a large presumption. Probably more like several presumptions, but we’re keeping things fairly superficial so far. It’s the idea that through our effort or design we can change ideas. Because of the pretty colors, familiar music, and celebrity face, you’re going to root positive feelings about something. It’s less about whether or not consumers have the money, what the effects of whatever is being sold actually are, or whether it’s necessary or useful. When you get the money are you going to, in your gut, reflexively reach for Tide now that you’re “better than that bargain brand crap.”

I like to think about arguments in general. Nobody changes their mind from an argument. They change their mind based on how they feel about the argument. They change when they feel the intensity of one side’s feeling coming through the words. If they changed based on “logical arguments” you’d never have wasted as much time as I have on people who are religious. You’d never see the mind-numbing back and forths with climate deniers. Change takes honesty. People aren’t honest. Even agreeing about what the word “honest” is supposed to mean takes responsibility and a certain effort.

It’s the fluidity of language where all the murders take place. “Faith” and “evidence” are certainly wide words when you tackle religion. “Of course climate changes” and “consensus” are oddly used to summarily dismiss the books of consequences while patting yourself on the back for seeing so obviously what others can’t. It doesn’t have to be this way, but the emotional investment can’t be dealt with. You have to flood their house or kill their spouse to even introduce the idea of doubt. And then, make sure they’re not a Republican who wants the government to get its stinkin’ hands off their Medicaid.

For the record, I hope you don’t think I’m on some sort of crusade or ever actually believe what I say gets anywhere. I speak out because I see harm, not because I believe in your capacity to change anymore than mine...to cope. I have to actively attack my ideas for years. You might be doing that in secret, sure, but I think the time for significant change has sort of come and gone.

But let’s not lose the message that the message is already lost. You can gain a kind of awareness that makes advertising literally begin to cause you headaches, but certainly it’s easier not to think too much about it and think of it as “normal.” Hell, even “necessary” because who else would pay the bills? Not everything can be prime-time cable, right?

How long does an “appropriately sized” message about messaging really have to be? I’m just one more voice in the ether. “Uppity” “wise” “rants” are my “brand.” Now go wash it down with a refreshing Miller Light, you deserve it. Especially if you enjoy Miller Light.

[449] Show Me A Hero

I don’t know how to feel considering how much better I feel once I listen to a story or read about the history of war. It’s such an informative subject across so many boards. The characters and personality types. The “rationality.” And depending on how deep the account goes, the forced perspective is unbeatable.

Man is a bumbling animal. Every dramatic and heroic account of our atrocities as depicted in movies or as related through the winners are impossibly removed from living the horror. You can’t describe what it’s like to have enough bombs constantly over-head that it sounds like a drum roll. You can’t understand inhaling chlorine gas for the first time and it altering your conscious state until you’re holed up in an institution for the rest of your life. The depth of what the word “duty” meant so heavily laid on that when you abandon your post you willingly accept the firing squad having full empathy for your commanding officer in his need to set an example.

We try to account. We attempt to take thousands of personal tales and weave them into the “most complete” conception of what we’ve “learned.” But, if we’re lucky, we’ll never have to learn the same lessons in the same ways. The kind of knowledge of doing it first hand, of running the experiment, of beating into your genes a kind of patience or plan that epigenetic studies can only begin to hint at.

What grips me is the sheer horror of it all. How genocide is normal. How concepts like “rules of war” and “human rights” are as gallows-humor as the soldiers hi-fiving a hand sticking from the ground on their way to breakfast. What is the real influence of their struggle? We can study military strategy and history and easily see how drones are practically sent by God when you consider the alternatives. We can look at foreign policy and understand deep-seeded thousand year grudges that predictably knee-jerk to violence when they have to start contending with oppressive language and policies.

I fear the reality of how quickly we abandoned all the pretty things in service to war is immediately and almost deliberately lost with current technology and growing distractions. What I’m torn about is whether or not a pacified and pussified population is worse than one with a thousand year old grudge. Maybe I want everyone in front the of the TV instead of shoveling each other into trenches.

But that’s a gross over-simplification. What prompts people to give up their craft or thoughts of ever again reading poetry is not one particular grievance or point of fact about the horribleness of the other side. Life is fundamentally situated for atrocity. Man is an extension of the universe dominated by entropy. The old testament has god constantly calling for genocide. It’s as “holy” as any hypocritical stance the righteous would like to claim about the “modern man,” be it the relationship to their god in heaven or ghost in the machine.

To that end, any confusion regarding “group psychology” seems to blur into one resounding fact underlying the nature of existence. People laughed on the battlefield. People downright enjoyed themselves, if not to the level Churchill might’ve expressed. Same experiences, different awarenesses. Even the bravest of the brave having their momentary lapses in sanity when the bombardment simply became too much.

That was an account I felt wonderfully pertinent to my mental state lately. I’ve said before I’m not allowed to freak out like other people because I’m always right here. I’m always turning things over and unpacking and challenging. By the time I lose it, there’s gotta be so much bombardment I literally crack without even becoming aware of it until it happens. I can’t wallow in my favorite Nietzsche passages or beckon a depression on Schopenhauer's suggestion before considering forgotten passages from Hume or the Buddha. But I can get drunk for a few days while going into reminiscing and future dreaming overload while reading the exact wrong things about the world, and combine it with a fucked sleep schedule and some minor bee sting-esc annoyance that jams the blender in the on position.

Listening to a talk with Snowden and Tyson I’m prompted by the idea of how interesting it is to ask questions we don’t even realize we need to be asking or will be able to ask. How “boring” what we already know is and the idea of experimenting and integrating a trial and error sensibility into your life can be profoundly consequential. This feels like my very pulse. I want to experiment in business. I want to see what pops up when I combine the right people in the right conditions. I want to organize the soup of spreadsheets and articles I read into something perhaps coherent, marketable, and teachable in a way a half drunk rant about the environment we’re working in will never live up to.

It sort of woke me up that I’m not really doing much experimenting anymore. I’m just taking in various memories or pieces of information. I’m not playing with new technology, attempting to get bored with some new subject, nor even seeing how new interactions play out. And that is as important or integral to what’s going to make me happy as is having good people around or being able to access and work with the information I do have. I want to play more in programming, architecture, and music for example, but I’ve been viewing them as distractions and not ends. They are things I’m supposed to do after I get the real shit established.

And frankly, I don’t know how to talk myself out of that without constantly thinking about how nice it’d be to play scales as opposed to living among rotten bodies and piles of shit wondering when my head will be blown off for standing up. If I had a top ten list, reaching “nerd level” about one or more of the topics above would be in the bottom five, particularly when I consider I want to break capitalism and catalog information at such a specific level it revolutionizes politics practically overnight.

The idea of “staying on message” pops up. Bernie Sanders talks about a ton of things. When he’s addressing his biggest forums, you hear a lot of the same biggest fundamental ideas regarding fundraising, income inequality, and health care. I fear I’ll start to lose myself in “distractions” that require a kind of detachment and dedication that makes what’s really on my mind end up marginalized. Black Lives Matter and wise immigration policies are extremely important, but much of what undermines their goals are influenced by our monetary policy and mindset that comes with it. No matter how good I get at an instrument, it won’t be the grind of the 100 programmers who will promise too much, fail, and waste my time that I’ll have to go through to start building the emotional place in which I’ll be able to take pride in my time spent playing.

I’ve asked before from where do we get our wisdom. It seems just as important to ask how we go about preserving and building it into our systems of knowledge. Is our opinion a thousand years from now about war going to be romantic accounts from preserved 20th and 21st century movies? Are we going to use new machine learning or energy technology as catastrophically as we experimented with new war toys? Can we ever expect to finally and fundamentally circumvent the place of such degradation and horror as to provoke the embodiment of ironic laughter? Can the god, Pain, ever be tricked by an animal who so fluidly embodies his nature and sets the foundation for his home?

I think I begin to feel good when I perceive or hear other people speak to a kind of unity. If The Holocaust was an isolated incident, I’d be genuinely afraid and confused by the Germans. If Rwanda wasn’t old hat, someone would need to start testing Hutu blood. If we couldn’t produce a new movie or documentary every week highlighting someone in power across all points in history who gave the directive to “rid the world of those mother fuckers over there,” I’d have to think violence was random and untameable. That humans were fundamentally flawed in some metaphysically “sinful” way the faithful relish; for how else could they be redeemed and get their eternal reward?

Even if everything is always changing at all times, we can discern patterns. We can correct the tempo and sync the drums. And despite our technology or philosophy, we may still not even know how to begin asking how to do so. But methodically, purposefully, and honestly, we can seek out and record the pulse. We can try to discern the true nature of the animal while it’s still alive. And maybe that’s why the universe would keep playing itself over and over again until it figures it out.

[448] Drop

The longer I’m awake
it pushes from my stomach’s depths

The wider are my eyes

I wish for rivers to spill forth

The more I’m forced to see

ever slumber speaks in earnest

The more that I can’t stand
I bite until teeth break

Poetry is but a farce
for the violence lay crippled
by intention naught pursued
for when consequences laid bare
speaks all darkness and indulgence

There is no end
The is no beginning
This is you suffering, your moment
Your poor reconstruction
Press your eyelids
Hope and wince and rebel

Go out as you come
indulgent whaling for the unknown
Loose grip on common cause
Redundant redundancy
Just die
Just accept

Move over or move on

[447] Slipping

I think I'm slowly slipping into a depression. I consider "depression" one of the most overburdened and misunderstood words, particularly in a forum like reddit, so take it as you will.

Practicing awareness seems to have backfired. Instead of granting me some kind of peace, I'm just constantly aware of what isn't working and why. I'm always locked into perpetual problems that seemingly don't need to be problems. I take an opportunity to see friends and feel the need to escape back home because the thought of not seeing them again for several months starts to overtake the last day of jokes and hanging out.

I don't know if I can be depressed when it feels extremely sad. At least it's feeling, right? I'm sure it's horrible to be lonely. I'm sure it's positively terrible to cause yourself physical pain or have someone attack you. The pain of loss is as bad as I get to have. To have the people you want in your "village" to introduce your kids to as they grow up. To have the people who never fail to get the joke.

And they're not around because the world sucks. Because Indiana isn't the mountains of Colorado and the bills need to get paid. Because they have to take what they can get as much as you do. It's not individuals out saving the world drawing from an endless stream of fulfillment and empathy and it's practically unreasonable to assume their responsibilities to the world and campfire. It's handling angry idiots who think they're going to sue your cell phone case company. It's "being really excited to be apart of a startup" with all the enthusiasm it takes to gloss over how hollow a sentiment that often resounds, particularly in the modern era.

People aren't working for themselves. They're not able to have the world reflect what they're actually worth, be it monetarily to what they mean to other people. The opportunity cost is never calculated. The conversations lost. The forgone hugs, jokes, and campfires. The consequences of the impersonality of facebook chat. The consequences of being too busy or too tired to learn about who to vote for...or when. What happens when you, so afraid and so saddened by the thought of what's being lost drives you into the arms of someone else? What happens when your relationships are extra pointless crutches because you've thrown away your medicine?

Then it gets to compound. Then you get to ask yourself why you get to be sad that you don't have a community when Syrians are flooding borders. Why does your "selfish love" of spending time with good people and cracking jokes trump what they're doing, where they want to go, or how they feel about their circumstances? Because of course it doesn't. There aren't "sides" and no one's "winning."

It's a question of why isn't everything a co-op. Why isn't your effort behind a grill, taking an order, spending all day on the phone, or exercising your particular skill or aptitude yours? Why is it "capitalism's?" Why is it presided over by a billionaire? Why does the system design us to be "trainable," sick, and exhausted? My selfish desires exist; I can't escape them. But why should I? The real problem is huge, it's emotionally crippling.

I even have money now. This informs why things would still feel terrible. It's easy to blame your life on lack of essential needs. I'm not paycheck to paycheck. I'm not utterly stranded in some small town. I can do next to anything by way of distraction or entertainment. I'd still rather just be bullshitting with friends. You know, until I feel like I'll provoke my first ever panic attack unless I go home, because I don't know how to express how deep the problem goes.

I don't like that I've been conditioned or persuaded to think that what I want should be regarded as "selfish." I don't like to consider myself smart and have no idea how to get the time, get the place, or get the system. Think Bernie Sanders is going to fix that? Maybe we can finally go to the doctor and get free school, great. How do I flush from my bones the idea that "not working" is automatically equal to "lazy" or "undeserving." I don't personally think that's true, I no less feel a "cultural obligation" to even work on things I vehemently hate or disagree with "just because you're supposed to." As long as people get paid to do what they love, that should be the standard of how we regard our effort. I'm not paid to learn about the world, but my face is glued to reading and writing about it. Where did I disappear to flipping burgers?

I feel hopeless. I don't want to set myself up for relationships I cling to a few times a year maybe a few hours at a time. In one sense, real friends and real people stay with you. In another, in my view, more important sense, who is really choosing to actively separate themselves from a kind of life force? You don't get married and then proceed to move to different countries and wittily text and catch-up for years. Why would we be able to make such good friends if we're to treat them like a familiar bar tender or obscure aunt?

And fuck your cliches about growing up. Growing up for whom? There aren't cultures where you stay practically glued to the people you care about? It seems a kind of disease of the mind to suggest that in a period of unprecedented wealth and opulence, we can't even just exist around people we like or just work and learn for the sake of it.

At this point, I almost want the depression. I want to feel as bad as it deserves. I want whatever part of me is quantumly entangled somewhere else to feel it too and see if there's something to be done on its end. I want to feel the zeitgeist pulse from my dejected words and trembling expression. But then, sometimes I can't even tell when I need to take a nap, so here's to my potential capacity for a mere tantrum. It's easier to write it off when you think about it that way.

[446] Solo Act

I find that I’m positively useless alone.

Now, I knew I wanted that to be the opening line as this has been on my mind for weeks, but I’m hoping in the recesses of my brain the various details surrounding it haven’t been forgotten. By saying “useless” I don’t mean in effect that I can’t do things. It’s more a lack of spirit until I hit a particular wall. I may clean the house on a whim, for example. I may decide that the next 8 hours should be dedicated to my guitar. This is “doing things” for sure, but it seems a step removed from purposeful or fulfilling.

I think I’m in constant “seeking inspiration” mode. If I’m with a person, I’d almost certainly rather be following along with whatever they’d like to do simply because it’s an option. It’s stupid as fuck to wander around Wal-mart when you’re bored, until that’s what you want to do, and now we have a mission. It can perhaps be described as a disconnect between my capacity and motivation with my sort of “logic” about my situation. I rationalize to a defaulted generalized comfortable state.

That is, there’s nothing like having your back to a wall. I’ve done everything in my power to demolish the wall. I don’t yet avoid bills, but could I have discovered an easier way to pay them well in advance? From a stress standpoint, this is magical. As a person who’s had his blood pressure taken well over a hundred times in the last couple of years, there’s little to freak out and lock up about, according to my numbers. From a “what I’ve done in the past” view, the contrast seems striking.

We often talk of potential. I like to focus on environment. I sat in for class in the Gary school system and wondered what I’d think about the world if that was the kind of system I came out of. I was the oddball who was constantly reading, constantly pushing how quickly I could get work done. What would I do in a place without workbooks? Without instruments? Would you and I be proud of my ability to manage in community college and maintain the kind of dwelling I currently reside in?

Is it a matter of disgrace that I don’t have “more?” Or perhaps phrased, haven’t accomplished “enough?” After all, isn’t someone who reads like me, writes like me, and talks like me supposed to have an Elon Musk kind of drive to win the Whole World game? Or would it be better for me to shuffle off to my basement and never comment on my state or reasoning again? You know, so as not to bother people by my insolence or ingratitude for my circumstances.

It often amazes me how or why my thoughts have shifted about things. I remember complaining about always being the leader and always taking responsibility. Everything under the house roof was my fault or responsibility, justly or unjustly. Every aspect of getting the coffee kiosk going fell at my feet apart from some of the cash. You feel important and empowered by taking the reigns, don’t get me wrong, but everything is a give and take. You put yourself wholly into something, it starts to wear on you in particular ways.

Like, I want to be “efficient.” I like to believe that for all the time it took for me to get the kiosk up and running, me and like 3 people who could have helped me efficiently could have done that same thing in a week. Machines are poised to take a ton of jobs so, perhaps learn the language of the machines right? Oh, there’s constantly evolving and new languages as the machines grow more complex. Your codecademy course hardly seems responsible to list on your resume. Be apart of enough start ups or read about enough peoples’ journeys and you start to realize that sheer force of will for your idea over months or years is a really dumb thing to have if you could have spent an extra hour or two on Google figuring out why you were bound to fail.

I’m stuck on overt skepticism. I’m so turned off by the common story and conceptions I spend hours listening to hippie Alan Watts types explain that “everything is as it should be,” or, perhaps better said “is” and “is balanced” and that’s just the way it is. To which, you know there is no science to back up the yin yang, but it goes down nice when you just want to take in “culture” from TV several hours a day. Because holding your conflicting, often contradictory, views about society is really hard when you opt to work within that society.

I suppose I don’t want people to believe in me. I believe in me and that’s basically always been enough. It seems like a weird thing to say. Like, I wouldn’t take pride in being called a “writer.” I’m a blogger. I’m a well-read teenage girl in her diary, endlessly redundant and self-indulgent, but thinking I’m going to find the love of the quarterback by the time I reach the back cover.

Watts talked about that moment when you’re doing without thinking. When you embody the “impossible” task of being instead of thinking about being. Not letting the devil know your intentions. I’m constantly letting the devil know what’s up. I tell him about diet and workout plans. I tell him about building things from a house to various businesses. I tell him about whether or not I’m in a mood to be a particular kind of person at the bars. It always leaves me preferring to be on the couch.

But when you get to be in the moment...When you just start cleaning and now the house looks magical. When you just move the furniture and realize in your past life you must have been a feng shui master. When you’re just in the middle of a party or conversation blissfully unaware of phrasing. I paused tv because I felt too much of what I originally wanted to say was going to be forgotten. If I had planned to write this tomorrow night or something, it probably wouldn’t have been done.

It’s not that I don’t have an “itch” to “do something more.” It’s just nothing like the itch that made me get good grades, start a party house, or open a business. It’s a “take it or leave it” sense that isn’t offered much but distractions or facts. It’s “of course I’ll help you right now and for as long as it takes,” but damned if there are projects or opportunities worthy. I’m not a child taking 50 selfies in my utterly pointless band class kind of arbitrary, but telling me to step in and turn that class into something meaningful for the kids without instruments isn’t a fix for either of us.

I deeply empathize with the joker. I understand taking the game seriously, but not too seriously. Like, politics matters, but Donald Trump winning the election won’t stop me from leaving the country. Again though, arbitrary act of selfishness that doesn’t speak to anything but my capacity to take a plane. I could resolve myself and say he’s part of the whole. He exists because he’s supposed to, just as he is, just as I am, and go about my day. Doesn’t that feel like a lazy cop out when you’re seemingly confident in your explanation of literally all existence? Isn’t it more life affirming, more pursuant to “truth” to strive to overcome those compelled to needlessly “balancing” the scale?

I’m sorry, I’ll just end with this would have been better a few days ago. But it fell through. Today, tomorrow, what’s it to me?  I suppose I’d rather know, what’s it to you?

[445] Bad Explanation

I remember the day that it happened.

I was walking around the Lake County Fair, and I passed a booth with necklaces and rings. I literally stopped in my tracks. The symbol “spoke to me” as any kind of mythical higher being tome is supposed to when you're writing about it. The yin yang. The black and white. The balance.

I feel like I've been fighting a very weird battle. Like I'm supposed to be struggling towards some sort of purpose or goal. Like, the very fact of my existence is supposed to speak to something “more” than who I am or what I was born into. It's terrifying. I'm unbelievably scared that I was born to a kind of expectation. Like I'm supposed to figure something out before I die or I've done something wrong. Like I've been given all the resources, and been born into an age of the best circumstances anyone could ask for, and all I did was pop experimental pills for money and rode it out until I died.

I consider my worst character trait to be actually believing in shit. I think tomorrow can be different. I hold a candle for friends who haven't talked to me in years. I don't have a conception of history on some sort of positivist determined path where we'll all be where we're supposed to be in the future. I think it can change. I think it can change now.

I don't believe in purpose. I don't believe in fate. I barely believe in “trying.” I think you observe the world you want and you observe the world you're due.

I already know I'm going to die full of regret. It's not going to be because I didn't accomplish something I knew I could have. It's not going to be because I wasn't brave or didn't voice my feelings. I'm going to die of regret because I never figured out how to get you on board. I never figured out how to translate; how to fix the communication problem. I'm going to need another trillion to the trillionth power rounds of practice before I see in you what I barely understand but believe in in myself.

It's just hard being alone in theory. You get it. You know what little things you can do. But I don't have a mechanism in place that validates the idea you have license. I get to watch. I get to drunkenly stumble about the words “endlessly zeroing in” on some conception that's been both figured out and played out infinitely before I got around to shitting all over it.

That's enough. Fuck me, at least I said something.