[456] Hiccup

I wish I could provide a summary. I wish that summary was adequate and sufficient. I'm aware it's kind of a stupid wish. I'm positive this is going to sound all over the place.

If the analogies to this reality being a video game are true, then I think I'd be running an experiment on myself. I'd be engaging in a ton of trial and error. I'd have no idea what the “end game” was. I'd never learn anything while being constantly reminded of what I forgot, ironically, now re-awoken to what I needed.

I don't want to have the wrong kind of sympathy. Empathy is vitally important and we need it to be exercised way more often. At the same time, when it goes overboard, the result is abuse. I read old dialogues I used to get into on religion. People were quick to agree with the idea of fear and how you “need” something to believe in. They understood their own fears, so it became license for other people to mask theirs.

I can't tell if I'm habitually “too harsh” on myself and other people. My instinct is to say no. My “harshness” is on display towards myself. My effort remotely quantified. I crave accountability, but I've set it up in a way to make you work as hard as I feel I have to question me. I miss accountability. I miss being quoted and challenged. I miss the discussions my friends in college would provoke.

And I think that idea makes me worried. This time 6 years ago I can see a friend comment about how afraid people are of being alone. A sufficiently haunting sentiment that seems to belay their current relationship trajectory.

I think the isolation of “growing up” became as real as I predicted (reiterated) it would. People used to value “stupid online conversations” that are now “well, I know who I am and what they think, so fuck it.” The active thought and excitement to jump into the fray reduced to background anxiety and “politeness.”

Something very important has been lost.

[455] The American Dream

Stop me if this sounds off.

As it was sold to me, if I learned, tried, and cared I could get basically anything in life. My grandparents immigrated, worked hard, and took care of their four kids. My dad, for most of my childhood, worked late nights for years before becoming an iron worker. Your aching muscles or exercise of your brain was supposed to translate into you not only being able to sustain yourself, but look out for people. The degree was supposed to matter. I was literally told just to get one. I wasn’t forced into a field I didn’t care about for the prestige or paycheck. I can’t remember how many times I was told I could be anything I wanted to be.

I feel this is a common story. I feel like every time I read an article about “millennials” some wayward soul recalls how much they looked forward to the future and how that “social contract” has been broken. I begin to wonder if there ever was one. I think it was easier for people to get on the same page when they didn’t have thousands competing for their attention, but I don’t think anyone signed it. I can’t recall, nor have heard a historian claim, there was ever a period like the one in which our parents or grandparents prospered. FDR and The New Deal are total anomalies in terms of what people could be made to come to expect with regard to their place in life. The enduring legacy of history has been the privileged few and the vast majority of have-nots.

Yet you’ll read that 25% of millennials think they’re gonna be millionaires, at least according to one survey. Even the ones who know they have it bad inevitably know someone who has it much worse. You’ll read that they don’t own anything, are working jobs they don’t care about or didn’t need school for. You’ll read they live everywhere and barely connect, and when they do, those connections look superficial and silly. There’s secret amounts of them hidden from the job market while little to no attention is being paid to what those jobs they’re after would entail, why they’re relevant, and if you can even realistically put the business majors, doctors, and engineers to work on something that will “grow the economy.”

I suppose the degree in which it truly concerns me is the cultural psychological evolution. I want to know the impact of the million tiny conversations you have with yourself that you think no one else has. How you know you’re just in school because you’re afraid of looking unemployed. How you know the expectations older generations continue to beat into you are unrealistic, but no less are as noisy and damming as they can be. Would I be better off with a Ph.D. in something I was passionate about if I started making 40K a year as an adjunct teacher or research assistant somewhere? I could toot my little doctor horn, but wouldn’t I have been, in a sense, extremely existentially fucked?

How often is it mentioned that “the middle class” wasn’t made of proper hipster cunts who enjoyed artisanal beer and whatever the fuck else it is that crowd of people takes undue pride in? Because I don’t think it’s often enough. We’re past the time where we need lug-head wage slaves, though we prefer to keep them on in poorer countries and prisons, but we engulf our dialogue with a desperate grasp for the past. But even that isn’t really discussed. The country prospered on the back of consumerism and waste. Enough articles talk about all the things millennials choose to do without. Like they wouldn’t buy the same crap that stuffed my house growing up with too much money and no concept of what else to do with it.

You need the giant rationalization. You need the pretense. You don’t feel like you exist anywhere else. You need to be excited about your stupid selfies, special beer, or general shitty opinion about something online. You need to file for the LLC with your “online business” that hopes to trick people into thinking your travel advice is the wisest of them all. Your friendships reduced to “chats.” Your obligations dismissed with a swipe. What you own almost and often referred to as “lucked into” by virtue of who your parents were or some job that doesn’t make you want to kill yourself until many months in. The parents and old people need to think of us as lazy. Their whole schtick is up if they’d been lying to us! Even if it wasn’t malicious, it was still a kind of magnificent oversight that speaks to their lack of awareness or caring. To reflect on the dangers of taking things for granted would only deal a double blow against their argument and their current standing. Why start now?

And often enough I hear people complain about how life’s not fair or there’s always a bright side. Or they’re really happy to foist their vitriol at every opportunity onto those in power who’ve exploited and plundered. Meanwhile, they never get their thoughts in order to actually do something about it. We’ll rally behind a Bernie Sanders and blissfully ignore state or local politics. We’re still under an impression he can “fix the country” like my degree would have “got me the job.” We’re ignoring the sheer amount of wasted time and effort put towards things we don’t care about and have nothing to do with our long-term prospects, and unironically feel or claim we’ve been forced by circumstance. What foundation are we setting for our kids? 8 years later and several warning signs about another crash, can you still not define mortgage-backed security? Been too busy? Doesn’t concern you?

The details aren’t just lost in history, they’re lost in our minds. What did Occupy accomplish? To my knowledge, a handful of disparate groups lead by a wealthy 20-something or group of academics all picking away at whatever they think is the problem with little or no evidence it does much good. Pay off random debt? Oops, helped the bank balance it’s books. Care about the environment? Explain to me what your collective thinks about China. Angry at Wall Street? I dare you to listen to testimony about what practices they increased post crash and post protest. We trick ourselves, perpetually. We’re forced to operate under illusions we refuse to acknowledge we’re forcing on ourselves. Illusions about our effort. Illusions about our place. Illusions about our value and grasp as to the nature or scope of whatever’s pissing us off. We’re endlessly adrift anchored only in distractions and self-righteous drum beating.

And it’s going to keep us fucked. People with power have their own illusions. I don’t mean to make this too class-ist. But if there were a divide in people, it’s those capable and willing to constantly hold their illusions up to scrutiny. The one’s who doubt statistical analysis when it’s based on literally arbitrary stipulations of people looking to make a name for themselves. We need people who doubt the utility and purpose of war even if they’ve never known peace. We need the stress of thought, not the tortured convenience of binge-watching. People who actually come over to fuck instead of make the joke like “everyone’s doing it.” You know why it’s not funny?! You’re all fucking lonely losers without friends!

You saw me derail there, right? So probably a good place to stop. And just in case I’m missing something about this underground Netflix sex culture, is it too much to ask that a little foreign policy discussion happens in the pillow talk afterward? I’m not saying every time, but you’re such stud muffins, I have to believe one or two of your conquests likes to read.

[454] You Know We Got Bad Blood

I’m struck by the thought of “exceeding in order to reduce” and want to see where it goes.

Maybe you eat healthy and work out now so you’re not helpless and coughing in bed when you’re older. Maybe you get all your homework done on the bus so you can spend time at home relaxing. Maybe you move the big furniture down the stairs first so the rest feels like a breeze.

The idea of exceeding expectations seems to carry a weight when the expectations are either very low or very naive. Set them too high and you build in unrelenting anxiety and stress. But how do we go about setting them up in the first place? Other than the ones implied or imposed from institutions, I mean, what’s the basis for an expectation to begin with?

At present, it seems like an accident. You decided to read a book a week for a month, now everyone expects you to keep doing the same. You picked up math easy enough when you were young, so damned if you don’t employ your god-given talent towards an engineering degree. We can use the idea of “personal best” to both elevate ourselves while barring anyone from burdening us with “unfair” comparisons that would shift our expectations against our will.

I’ve been looking for the language and argument for giving a damn. I’m trying to persuade myself into a mindset and habit I’ve only taken for granted in the past. Adopting the burden to overload myself. Make the beer at the end of the week feel deserved and not easy. I want to see my effort as a piece of something more or as something scalable. I want to know if I’m the littlest gear or the listless leaf on the wind.

Try to imagine living in an environment where everything is attacking you. You step outside, the wind is blowing you off your feet. You take a breath, the air isn’t all there. You start a conversation, people respond with anger and judgment. You put on a movie or music to relax, the lyrics drag you into memories of your worst days and the characters play out the most dramatic instances of your childhood. Your food is slowly poisoning you. Your friends steal not just your physical possessions but parts of your soul with every engagement. When you need it to work, it breaks down. When you need a hand, it’s swinging towards your face.

Your only way out is to play mind games. Oh blustery wind, how fun it is to fly! before your head hits the pavement. At least it’s not water! as the air struggles to reach your lungs. I know all the words to this one! the movies and music race by. I don’t even gag anymore! then you swallow it down. I’ve been meaning to cut back! on conceiving of yourself as someone more than what people take you for.

Can the heart of explicitly selfish and solipsistic behavior result in a kind of trickle-down self- (humanity level)-preservation? A comedian’s book on The Daily Show of childlike drawings making a “statement’ about mass incarceration still brings it into greater awareness, no? He’s not getting a genius award, but through a habit of stoned cursory glances at the state of the world, the stage is his. Does pursuing attention alone mean you essentially control more of “the whole of attention” as you gain popularity? I’ve listened to the latest Taylor Swift album like 10 times trying to figure out where the “magic” is that keeps this overgrown 13 year old on top. It’s 13 year olds. The lyrics don’t have to be profound, it’s nice when the beat is catchy, but the mechanism to motivate an entire mirror album in a different style, unironically, doesn’t speak to much beyond the power of garnered attention.

I got that recognition early in school. I re-created a medium for attention with the party house. I allowed people to build expectations of me in pursuing things entrepreneurially. We praise the nerdiest of the nerds who go out and advocate for science, or the deepest of the deep in their insecurities who choose to make us laugh over them. You shoot to completely obliterate the self when you take on an acting role, while at the same time hope you can entertain and inform about the most personal and touching instances that define the human story. To find such depth in a character in so completely losing even the memory of the actor portraying them.

What I can’t do is know what’s going on in someone else’s head. I can paint a rosy picture all day about being selfish, but I can only relate how it translates to me and my motivation. I didn’t want to show off as much as I wanted cash for my good grades. I liked knowing that people could loosen up and trust my house was a safe spot to get obliterated. Selfish would have consistently charged a lot more for the alcohol... And in business I want to empower everyone to be owners of their own effort because I’ve done nothing but feel exploited most of my working life.

The environment no-less suggests we should pursue the attention. You’re broke and crack jokes with your friends? Start a podcast! You have no idea what to do with your instrument after high school? Cover the latest songs and throw it on Youtube! Have literally no where and no one to honestly express yourself? Find validation in comment karma and videogame points! Make sure everyone can see where you stand and just how dedicated you are to increasing your score.

It’s a habit of conflation. It’s a reduction of every word and interaction into its most absurd example. You don’t have to care why you’re popular, it’s just that you are, and therefore value. You don’t have to think of consequence, so the spigot runs freely with whatever ignorant thoughts you may entertain. It’s how I can routinely get attacked for thinking. Thinking is the enemy. To think isn’t a linear or concise path like the illusions of order we’re offered, so it must be dismissed as “sophomoric rant” in lieu of your preference, special status, and paycheck.

I feel myself trying to persuade myself into selfishness not because it’s the right thing to do, but because the “fuck you” message I receive from everyone who enjoys it so much is becoming too much. The smugness. The matter-of-fact manner. The pride. The flat and ceaseless denial of any acknowledgment to any degree of a problem. The hair-trigger to what will offed. The tip-toed niceties. You can’t talk. You can’t fight. Your escape rests in swallowing the same pill people are gobbling by the fistful.

Does my writing register as a desperate insecure grab for attention? Can someone pursue a hobby so ignorantly and so selfishly that I’m completely blind to how much I need you to love me!? I suppose only you can be the judge, but even typing that sentence makes me want to disappear to the mountains and never see another person again. As long as distinctions remain lost, that may increasingly look like the thing to do.

I think writing is my fail-safe exceeding of effort in order to reduce. When nothing else is going on, I want all the work of trying to remain sane to be packed in here so I can better deal with how it’ll be received. Make up a character to get lost in. Make a game of looking for reasons to put the bat down and matches away. Find any excuse to claim there’s a reason.

[453] Death, Not!

I forget what the phenomenon is called when you learn a new word and then in the next few weeks you hear it everywhere. As if it was always there and just hiding beyond your awareness. In much the same fashion, I’ll have some subject on my mind, perhaps the opening line to a new blog, and someone will independently and seemingly randomly say it to me.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about death.”

Incidentally, so have I. Moreover, I’m sort of always thinking about death. I’ve explained as much in the past. Death acts like that new word, just beyond your lips, but constantly hinted at, joked about, or depicted in the media. How awful for them, like your number won’t be called.

It’s in thinking about death that my thoughts have taken on a particular flavor when I consider mental health. What is “mental health?” Even someone faintly acquainted with psychology will have heard about the DSM, which attempts to categorize every “aberrant” behavior as a symptom of some condition. Perhaps less a general waste of time than more an exercise in extreme naivety.

We habitually elevate ourselves, after all. What do you call a retarded dog? A dog. We habituate the language of disorder and unequal capacity in order to keep “the healthiest” at the top. We praise pathological thinking when it’s in service to acquiring wealth. It was The Late Show where an entire segment was dedicated to making Colbert and Kimmel’s agent look funny and acceptable. This man so tanned he could campaign for cancer (a similar joke made by Kimmel). He smoked like a chimney. It was “fun” to offer him a bowl of money next to his bowl of cigarettes. And his capacity to brag about his wealth and memberships, as well as drown himself in cologne, knows no bounds.

This is popular media. This is a form of “health” and “well-being.” This is where the laughs go. This is where the fun resides. YOU should want to laugh at this man. Make his habits and being a light-hearted affair. Make his addiction a celebration of character. Make his skin cancer look beautiful in a tailored suit. He manages the people you love! And don’t you love Stephen Colbert? He’s got the quick wit, humility, childlike excitement in his eye, and even espouses a touch of faith in his appeal to the entire world! Hell, his stage is modeled after a cathedral.

I belabor these descriptions because I want to draw a contrast. Now it’s something I keep bringing it up, because no one ever speaks to the reason it happens, but seemingly everyone I know is “depressed.” I go down the line and I think back to the amount of times someone has told me they contemplated suicide. I think about stories of abuse or general fucked up upbringings. I think about how alone people have felt or how endlessly insecure they feel no matter how many friends they make or accomplishments they achieve. Either I have a penchant for attracting these “types,” or in my view, everyone is capable of the lowest lows or suffering from the same fucked up environment, and in fact most people are suffering.

And I think that environment is the one glorified by things like late night TV. I think it’s obvious it’s not healthy or fun to smoke yourself to death and tan like your skin is to be harvested for a couch. But everyone around you, and oh look! you too, are clapping and laughing about it. It’s obvious that vast amounts of condensed wealth are crippling the world and we’re living in unprecedented times with regard to what greed has done to the environment. In something like a month of shows, 7 of the guests have been billionaires. Someone wants you to know they’re human. Someone wants to keep them relatable, because you could be on the couch one day for your “revolutionary” idea of taking a camera and making it smaller and waterproof. Your “brilliance” can match that of developing an app to mask exploitative labor.

To me, that’s what’s worth being depressed over. I see instead people internalize it. I see people blame themselves as if they created the environment. I see people look for some activity, some profession, some relationship, to help guide them to death. Nothing about their environment suggests they should aspire to something more noble than “getting by” with the true goal of vast wealth. Nothing about their relationships invigorate, challenge, or teach. Of course this certainly isn’t everyone, it’s just popular. It’s just millions of nightly views. It’s just tacit acceptance and conditioning. What’s the harm?

Maybe you’re not clinical. I don’t mean to suggest nobody is, but maybe the problem is largely, significantly, deeper than you. Maybe too much of your relationships reflect the darkest interplays of trying to digest and cope with media. Maybe some important decisions in your life have been hijacked. Maybe your feelings have been played, cut up, and re-packaged like a toxic mortgage-backed security. Maybe in wealth’s desperate and insecure pursuit of immortality, it reduces anything “less” to a depressed, depraved, ever-wanting mock version of the “ideal.”

Death then gets to serve a dual purpose. It “fixes” the perpetual suffering while keeping everyone else afraid. It looks appealing not because you’ve had so much of life you understand it’s time to go, but because you’re anxious so much time has passed without you getting what you’re due. It doesn’t provoke you to live in the moment and pursue truth. It causes you to hide behind the attitude of pretense bestowed from lessons by the elite. A mimicry equally shameful were it not done in bleeding ignorance.

The apparatus of our messaging is more condensed than people believe. It’s not just about a handful of companies owning everything. That plays a role, but none like our willingness and ability to conform. It’s easy to have the same things in common and speak of the familiar. It’s easy to empathize in insecurity and depression. It’s easy to lose the time to our labor, which if we’re lucky and work real hard will get us 5 minutes in the presence of our modern gods. We line up behind the loudest and shiniest. We assume the “most relevant” will make it to our eyes and ears in the “most convenient” ways and think we’re doing the cultivating of our environment because...internet?

It’s related, but not what I wanted to focus on, to speak of fame in this vein. It’s fairly recent in history where it wasn’t considered a disorder to want everyone to look at you. Again the idea of immortality. Again the assumption of value and respect. It’s a drop in the bucket when Billy On The Street introduces Chris Pratt to 10 people who don’t know who he his, but it speaks to a larger truth than you’ll ever see get too popular. Because even voices of humility and “background hearts of the engine” are brought on stage and elevated to equal footing.

For this reason I applaud Don Henley and Raury in their performances in service to bumping the bullshit that is Trump down a peg. Effective? When it comes to defining music as a medium for inclusiveness, expression, and the pursuit of a kind of truth you’ll never get out of Trump, absolutely. The problem remains, they all shared the stage. The meat of public debate and value is subjected to the glitz and glamour first. The small dose of medicine, the hint of fresh air, the fading stars amidst the infinite black void.

Popularity and wealth are no more measures of value and truth than Stephen Colbert is a measure for the consequences of faith. If we’re going to allow ourselves shortcuts, why these ones? If we’re bound by some level of intrinsic, wanting, and naive ideas, how long will we remain stunted in our ability to adopt better ones? And if or when we do, will we be able to accept what comes along with it? Perhaps an insatiable hunger that turns death into a gift. Perhaps an unyielding fear to be defied daily. Perhaps the only time in which the word “truth” will resonate so loud as to disgust you at the tone and prescription of online forums and comment sections, and not just say you are because it’s the cool thing to do.

Notably, I don’t think we’ll change. But you can’t say I wasn’t trying to help in case we might.

[452] Move Along

What am I after when I write?

The prevailing answer is usually to blow off steam or get rid of a headache. But surely it must go deeper. I started writing trying to figure out love. I wanted to know why it seemed to be slapped on domineering and borderline abusive relationships. I wanted to know how it was supposed to influence or guide my actions while being tied to butterflies in my stomach. I wanted to know whether it was coming from God. I was after a kind of truth. I wanted to understand.

It seems to stand to reason that as long as I am unable to understand something, there will surely be something to write about. I’ve had ideas about friendship evolve and morph into various forms. I’ve discussed my relationship to work and my idealism versus pragmatic constraints. I’m always down to probe how relationships play out. I like to think that after 451 diatribes I’ve achieved some kind of mental place that would be impossible had I not done the work of digging out the words.

I’m no less concerned about the idea of “truth.” My last blog threw “responsibility” completely under the bus. I’m surely responsible for typing this, but in a significant way living out the drama my environment as provided me. The broader you allow your view as to the pieces that made you, it’s not so much that you want to forgo thinking you have decisions to be made, but they register so small as to feel insignificant. Naive insignificance to be sure, but the feeling is no less prevalent.

I try to start with what were/are staples of my being. No matter what else you can say about me, as a child, I was doing homework grades above the one I was in. I was constantly reading. Before I got a chance to get my stupid adult brain over-analyzing things, I was hungry for knowledge in general or got off on the idea of good grades. I’m starting to reconsider how obnoxious I might have been. I grew up where nearly anything I did wrong could result in getting the shit beat out of me. What might’ve been “normal young boy shit” in my mind might still register as “unruly little bastard who needed to be slapped.”

So then even this could be an exploration of just how well or not I remember myself as a child. How much of that speaks to how I conceive of myself now? Am I a sociopath? Or was I treated in a way that understands when being a sociopath would be better than complicating things with moral ambiguity? Is that question alone not evidence enough? Is the inability to feel significant guilt more helpful or harmful? And in service to what? Money? Helpful. Friends? Harmful. Real friendships? Helpful. Being a better messenger when your concerns revolve primarily around translation? Extremely harmful.

What happens when you get somewhere? What happens when you get your answer and prove whatever it is you needed to prove to yourself? If you can’t divine something else to do, you’re just sort of waiting around to die, no? Once you’ve traveled everywhere, made every kind of friend, maybe made all the money in the world, locked down some hot piece of ass you never thought would be into you. And then what? What happens if you accept things being “boring” or “old hat” or “obvious” and undermine the chase?

I feel like I’m chasing for the sake of it. My biggest impediment in life is just waiting. Whether it’s waiting for old people to die or waiting for the world to spill its guts with the consequences of capitalism on the environment and financial markets. I don’t need to figure out how to believe in myself. I don’t need lessons on how or why I should, begrudgingly or otherwise, respect and treat my friends a certain way. I don’t really have dreams. I have expectations like a train showing up approximately on time.

And yet every time I write, I feel like I’m looking for something new. I’m looking for a voice that never finds itself in conversation. It can’t zero in on a mood or point me in a direction until the transmission of what’s on my mind is complete. I can never define what it is.

I learned how to not believe in god through writing. I learned how to not believe in love. I learned how to break up my disconnected thoughts into little blurbs and paragraphs to suggest coherence in a way giant walls of poorly punctuated text never could. I consistently explore just how fluid and wide words are as I try to employ them in a more solidified form. And so next month, what will I be on? A headache? Complaining about the dangers of Tea Partiers? Baffled by incoherent media? Reflecting on some too-big-wordy philosopher finding out once again how brilliant the world of thought I have yet to explore is because some hippie got to it 50 years before I was born?

I think anymore I’m after the kind of comment I got tonight about being a good writer. I’m consistently hoping to connect with angst ridden, or luckily just thoughtful, people. I’m looking to get what I consider whiny diary writing out of the way so there’s more room for surprises. I want to know my willingness to explore or beat something into the ground suggests you should as well. Of course knowledge can never be complete. But when you’re pursuing it, what’s it in service to? Am I going to figure out how to create a commune-esc situation in which I’ll get to live around all my friends? Hardly seems up to me alone. Will I be able to tie together disparate industries and ideas into innovative “forward thinking” ways? Ok I’ll get rich and still have to wait for everyone I know to get off work much as I do now.

In a way I already feel dead. Like playing through a video game and refusing to confront the final boss. So many side quests accomplished it doesn’t even feel like a challenge. So entrapped by the story you don’t want to let it go. I want to stress that I look forward to the future like I do accomplishing a game I’m already beating the shit out of. And it’s a weird place to be when you’re not so much excited as you are expectant. Maybe in the moment a rush might overcome you, but then you’ll come down and say “well, finally? What’s next?”

[451] Spare

Pride comes before the fall, or so I’ve been told. If there is a more famous sentiment that can’t be passed laterally to “eye for an eye,” I challenge you to find it. I suppose were it not so famous it wouldn’t be worth talking about its nature to hide. You couldn’t break down when it appears or explain what it does to whatever subject has been introduced. And what of the fall? It seems to me we no longer believe in such a thing, but moreso insist it needs to happen faster. It’s not a faint hint of caution or parable, it’s 21st century fascist rallies and cheering austerity. It’s fatalistic. It’s me getting ahead of myself.

I understand what it feels like to be confident in something you’ve done or studied. I believe it was a qualiasoup Youtube video that talked about pursuing your Ph.D, and for all the time that it took you are a bubble on an infinitely growing circle of knowledge. It’s respectable to occupy one’s brain and pursue knowledge, surely at some level to the betterment of humanity in general. In another light, it can isolate you into only ever being able to relate to the world through that medium. “The rest” shrinks and implicitly becomes less worthy of your time or capacity.

Now of course several years spent studying a subject or devoting a standard work day to your craft is not the same thing as being some feral child in the woods. Given the amount of on-the-fly analogies I’m sure to make in this, let’s adopt the habit of not reading into them too far. The idea remains the same. “The whole of life” is a subject unto itself in marrying science and philosophy, the natural and machines, the body and the “self.” To wholly advocate or relate to the world from an even more specific and particular trapping of the imagination, than the limits of our bodies already impose, doesn’t do us any favors.

As I see it, some people chase the white dragon beyond the realm of common sense or courtesy. It’s what makes pursuing goals that don’t rely purely on your own effort a pain in the ass. I look for programmers, I get very serious people who are very professional and busy who could never dare to indulge my fantasy if I don’t swallow their email lecture and appreciate just what kind of standing they hold in the “programming world.” Mother fucker, you’re looking for jobs on Craigslist. I didn’t call an elite firm in downtown Chicago asking for a revolutionary new program to guide a tank with mind control.

But everyone’s got advice. How could they not? One person sent me the equivalent of a “DIY build a business plan” template just so they could better understand what I want is a map that already exists, but needs to display marginally different information. I want to know how rock hard they get when they tell me their hourly rate. I want to know why it’s relevant you programmed an app once that no one’s heard of and several pages that remind me of the alterations I used to make to my Myspace.

It’s riding a wave of bullshit. That’s the most frustrating thing about “becoming familiar with everything” you will ever experience. Everyone is so. full. of shit. It already feels understated and fact-of-life right? That’s because your experience of everyone being full of shit is itself So. Full. Of shit! Crazy right?

Because when you might jokingly write off a teenager’s expression of love, I spent years delving into how or why that love was or wasn’t coming from God. When you are able to write off and enjoy the show of modern day politics, I spent several months trying to put candidates in a historical context that didn’t reduce me to tears upon thinking too heavily about their influence on our collective psychology. It’s a form of suffering, I don’t want you to pretend there’s an ounce of worthwhile pride I’m seeking. I have to figure all of it out, because the pain of not knowing is worse.

And I suppose I don’t know enough people who are the same. I don’t work with people who have an unflinching sense about the standard they hold and what it feels like each second it can’t be met. I have habits I know are explicitly what I’m looking for in other people in order for things to go right. I don’t need trial periods. I don’t need to hold your hand. I’m not in doubt what needs to happen and the type of person that needs to be behind it. Wagging your price tag, burdened by your habit of attempting to school me, hell, even responding with anything but a dispassionate “ok, gotcha” is a dead giveaway you’re probably the worst fucking person I should never be working with.

The world really does operate on this “choice” thing I’ve mentioned in the past. Let’s talk about Oregon students getting shot up. Intellectually, I don’t want to be randomly shot or afraid of the country I live in. Personally, fuck em. I don’t give a shit. I’m not choosing to shoot people nor advocate for their right to be blissfully unaware of how the rest of the world operates around guns. I don’t hold myself responsible for dead people from gun violence. The fence sitters. The Constitution jockeys. The insanely afraid of every bump in the night crowd. You killed those people. And if anyone went down who held the same views, they killed themselves.

This idea of responsibility. It’s a fucking joke. According to your silence, according to my general perception of society at large, according to popular comments online and attitudes from the farthest reaching voices on the planet, I could die tonight and be said to have “won” the game. Don’t believe me? It’s not the awards I could pursue, the position I could hold, or the amount of people I’ve influenced. I have money, time, friends, hobbies, if not only several reasons I’m still keen on waking up tomorrow. I understand power to be fleeting, my ego and time illusory (yet effective), and on my worst day you’ll get something like this and a horrible joke, unless I get too drunk and then maybe a hole in the wall. Small potatoes.

Old people will tell you to appreciate your health. No better time to go out than before the cancer strikes. Pursue your goals and learn things! Leave aside that knowledge alienates and weighs on you. Did you know there used to be a medical condition attributed to people who learned too much? Consume consume consume! I literally have nothing left to buy that isn’t meant to mimic bored upper middle class people. Paycheck to paycheck? Nah, bills paid 5 years in advance and many days I feel I’d be comfortable living out of a van if paying those ever becomes too cumbersome. Hang out with your friends! Maybe a few times a year, and haven’t you gone back to people as cattle? Surely people love you! This isn’t “It’s a Wonderful Life,” they’ll manage as well as they are without my word vomit.

I need to rid myself of what feels like a curse. Something about me needs to die. It is beyond weird as fuck to think my life would be considerably easier if I were a suicidal person. Slow that down and tuck your concern back in your pocket. Objectively, dead people don’t feel the burden to whine, a significantly easier task than finding the words to chase away the headaches.

How easy it would be to have faith! How easy it would be to be fatalistic! What a joy were I a pothead! What grace could a constant flow of rum bestow!? Nay, stretch my athletic machismo and take up boxing! The cure all along a kind of irony only blows to the head could mete out.

I mean, in reality, even the environment I think about cultivating in the future, it’s still not even the greatest proportion of “me.” I think about the last friend hangout. For all the lore of Corbin’s basement. I wasn’t there in the past. I don’t belong in the basement. It can’t be resurrected in the same form anymore than my house parties. It’s almost a freak accident I fell into this group of friends given how little paperwork and zero fees were due. I’m barely athletic, could give two shits about the outdoors. My tie seems to be our capacity to be assholes. Old news? Ever stated explicitly? Does it matter?

In a sense. Because then when I’m complaining or advocating or trying, I’m not really speaking the same language. You’re all smart people. We can obviously discuss things in intelligent ways and that’s a huge draw when you’re cultivating a healthy atmosphere. But I’m not calling you to hide the body. Of course it’s not a knock against you, but it’s more than a difference of hobbies, ya know? A nagging ruthless efficiency isn’t friendly.

I feel I’m constantly dancing around “pride.” I feel like pride is supposed to instill a sense of joy or belonging. Like you’ve staked out your place and feel confident you’re providing something valuable. Perhaps you’re now “proof” of something ineffable. I provide the contents of my ass and every once in awhile it strikes a chord. I debate whether finishing a book or getting drunk and doing trivia alone are going to be more “respectable.” I invite people to constantly talk and think down about me with blogs, in doing drug trials, or in what the average observer would no doubt call “failed” coffee ventures. The only time I felt proud was dashing headlong driven by naivety. It certainly doesn’t matter how old you are. I just feel like I’m constantly bumping into the previous gaps in my perspective exhibited in other people. And instead of informing me what I’m almost certainly fucking up, people can only condescend; if I’m lucky, shrug their shoulders.

You’re not “proud” when someone doesn’t operate like you. You’re envious they can operate like they are. I feel I’m nothing if not capable of bringing people down. Raining on the parade. But it’s in service to, “but fuck everything I’m saying, I genuinely hope it’s the best thing ever.” I can’t just spend money and believe. I can’t just take words for it. I can’t take pride in the words “start-up” or “entrepreneur.” I don’t forget everything I want to do or haven’t done just because I’m surrounded by more relaxed types nor pressured by the unreasonably anal. I’m always just here. I’m just waiting for a cue that isn’t to eat, shit, start a movie, or write.

I don’t want to hang out. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to debate whether or not you can grasp I understand the reasons I’m going about something the way I am. But I really don’t want to fucking pretend. I don’t want the same handful of people constantly come to mind when I think about their habits and how they pollute the landscape at large. I don’t want to relate to the world through facebook chat and pictures. I want to be exhausted, just not existentially. My environment, big and small, is zapping my will. I’m in a drought. Someone turn off the sun.