[559] Gon Girl

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about “spiritual” exercise. It’s a word I perpetually put in quotes because I think our general working conception of the word is as stupid as our best efforts. I think when I attempt to employ it, it has much to do with a phrase I employ sometimes, “seeing the truth between the lines.” It’s the thing I’m always searching for when I write. It’s that elusive point or theme I chase around the page. It’s putting all the pieces of a puzzle together where the picture is an impression or feeling or “vibe.”

I perpetually look for inspiration. I started wondering what that really means. I already have goals. To the best of my knowledge I’ve employed the most practical and efficient methods for achieving them. The pressing reality remains. Is there not some other way I could go about it? Is there not something more I could be doing? For every action you have to consider the fallout, which has stayed my hand from diving into motivated, but perhaps fundamentally wasteful behaviors I’d be tempted to claim are moving me forward. A random odd job would dull my spirit. I have to seriously consider if knocking on perceived rich people's doors is sending the right message, because I’m not above oddball things like that.

Again though, that use of the word spirit. That impressionable and egotistical “you” hesitantly looking for acknowledgment in the face of cold infinite impartiality so defined by it’s very perception of measurement. One of the reasons I watch so much TV is that I find myself genuinely more empathetic towards the characters and their struggles than I do the lazy hoard of cows “getting by” and “adulting.” I find not just inspiring lines and new tattoo ideas to consider, but a genuine invigorating and wise ethos in a well-crafted show. These characters ask more of themselves in the span of an episode than I think most people do in several years.

Connecting with a “spiritual” dimension is what set my house parties apart. We cultivated a crowd over time. I set a pace. We set the conditions for behavior that people pretend they’re not capable of. Regardless if the bad actors decided to eventually resent everything and tear it all to shit, I can never forget the impact that setting had on my conception of friend or what is possible with the right crowd and right set up.

I suppose it’s merely unfortunate that when people pursue their “spiritual” side or claim they have achieved some measure of it, it’s often couched in smelly hippie shit and pseudo-scientific health claims. I have a friend who’s “practiced reiki” because something something healing energies. A large reason we maintain that friendship is because I’ve learned to bite my tongue better. But I suppose it’s the kind of example that she sets that begins to speak to what makes me so upset about other people’s attempts at pursuing their spirituality. Why pretend that’s what you want if you’re going to start with bullshit?

For the majority of people, life is immeasurably stressful and often terrible. It seems this is the first hard and fast rule before you ever get somewhere worthwhile. In my estimation, literally nothing is better by fooling yourself. What you think you’re helping when you’re lying is poisoning the well. In some small measure, I’m hurting my friend if I don’t even offer a passing comment about the joke that is healing people by playing hover hands. I break windows of self-reflection by playing along at family gatherings I want little to nothing to do with or in inviting myself into homes that have done nothing but invite stress and drama into mine. This isn’t some naive ethic of the loner or child, all you have to want is the truth.

I have a friend I recently blew up on because I got tired of their game. This soft spoken toothy grinned go-getter has all the makings of a future politician. When I complain my friends don’t write, he does. But at the same time, it’s hard to trust any conclusion he’s ever come to. When the opportunity arises to try and be clearer, he avoids it. When pressed to accept the weakness or contradiction of his examples, he ignores them. When his “inclusive,” “polite,” and “reassuring” atmosphere is challenged, he does the exact same thing every other person does, and that’s blame me for being mean and run. After 10 years of talking to someone about religion, politics, or ethics in general, you need to see them crack even once.

But that’s not the reality of the spiritually deluded selfish world. That world creates edicts. That’s a world where I’m forever and always defined as the problem for my style so the words will always get ignored. It’s better to call me confusing than ask about what confused you. It’s better to call me mean, than embody the feeling my sentiment tried to instill in you. When you deny yourself that extra realm of communication, you subvert all capacity to ever truly learn or grow. It’s why I generally hate outward professions around holidays when you know they’re superficial or forced. Checking in is nice, 200 uncapitalized “happy birthday” messages should see you all shot.

Important to me in defining my “spirituality” is achieving again that sense of community. I have to know nothing about consciousness to know it works better together. Piecing together the random thoughts or shows or books and one-liners I’ve heard each week is practice for when I go out into the field and start looking for people to pluck. My “singular” and “simple” goal is to establish a sustainable environment built from my intention, perspective, and will indefinitely. I think the “cultural” approach to our ignorant and life-threatening nihilism needs a holistic approach untampered by naivety and marketing.

Truly, the only thing that keeps me going is maintaining and recognizing the truth. It is sad, sick, and depressing to piss away your youth, so while I have the energy I’m looking for ways to keep my mind and body exercised. Without even noticing you can consign your life to an empty dictum that makes decisions for you and codifies your value in money or “productive hours.” I’m not filled with anxiety or angst because my day to day is on fire, except, it is. Even when I’m fed and marathoning a show, my environment is boasting about a nuclear arms race, going extinct, and melting away. If I don’t think a protest sign or letter to my congressman is going to do the trick, here’s me waving the flag for roundabout maneuvering.

I believe we don’t get along because we’re a society of liars. I prefer to go down alone than with someone telling me we could never drown. I’d rather break the friendship, I’d rather have the fight, I’d rather get you as angry as you could ever get now, so I can drop the dead denialism and not fall into your trap later. The pure joy, and the brilliance of the vision made manifest are what you’re after. You wish you laughed as hard as me or talked as excitedly. I wish you did too. I wish you struggled even half as much to believe in what I’m pursuing as I do with you to just recognize and speak. No, I don’t mean “be happy for me.”

Even the most insignificant side character can be given the time to show how they contribute to the complex story. I find myself pivoting between who I think it’d be coolest to be in a great story. Why don’t I feel that way about the people in my life? Do I blame them or the conditions we were born into? Is it a generally stupid ego driven exercise that just robs them of their humanity, or did they sacrifice it well before I got around to thinking about them?

There would be a real danger if I ever work up and thought I had some kind of monopoly on truth. It’s available to anyone willing to look at it. Independent of your meager perception are habits and behaviors that suggest you’re at least pointed in the right direction. If all you’re doing is acting, I notice. If all you can do is clam up and scapegoat, I don’t trust you. If you devote hours or years of your life to the facade, you may not even be able to recognize how deep a hole you’ve dug yourself. You’ll still feel it when the spit I let drop hits you, you'll just be calling it rain.

[558] Different Strokes

I no longer think I fundamentally believe in conversation. I don’t think it serves the purposes people purport. In fact, I think in a majority of instances, it tends to make situations worse. Despite this, I think conversations all follow the exact same patterns across all topics, and it’s one of the greatest disservices we perpetuate against ourselves to not explore and acknowledge how things break down.

I want to distinguish what I hope to explain from “persuasive rhetoric.” You can take classes that will coach you in polite engagement with your Congressmen who deny climate science. It’s where you go to learn not to assert facts and truth, but instead hide what you want to do in language they understand. This whole game I’m hoping to avoid. It’s not my contention that people can’t be convinced of things or that they don’t operate under “different rationality” that takes into account the protecting of their oil money donors.

I contend that we never start on the same page. The presumption of a shared language keeps the initial ground for conversation obscure. After all, you’re under the impression you read English. These lines are passing by and you’re hoping I’ll get into the meat or towards a point. This is precisely where we screw up first. You have assumptions, unconsciously or otherwise, that you take into reading this. If we know each other, the weight of your opinion about me remains. If we don’t, and this is on a public website, 3 paragraphs in I can already hear Youtube vine compilations calling your name.

Words are not concrete, literally and figuratively. You may it take it for granted that words are wide, but when you use them, you have a pretty definite feeling for what you mean, even if no one else does.

“People can be rational.”

Leaving aside that there are volumes of philosophical and psychological works that deal with that “simple” premise, the gist of it is that we should be able to relate to each other. It’s a huge should. I certainly don’t agree with it as a premise because I carry philosophical and psychological baggage to my conception of rationality. I get picky and say “can” has nothing to do with it. I can take a shit. I can watch TV. I can vote for fascism. So? I would never propose an idea to you that I wanted seriously discussed by insisting “something can happen!”

We’re not on the same page. Rationality, let alone the conscious agent claiming it has it, needs rules. Rationality needs to be contingent on something besides “merely existing.” The neighborhood cat is rational in that it doesn’t routinely dart out into traffic. Does a cat that does run into traffic get stripped of its rationality? Or is the conversation more coherent when you set down rules and reasons for its behavior? The cat isn’t “more or less” rational because of how long it lives avoiding getting hit.

I feel pressed to keep discussing animals, because people like to pretend they aren’t animals. I was literally told that people can’t be trained like dogs. It was never walked back. The idea being that people are “better” or “more rational” than dogs and that by virtue of it being rude to equate the two, there’s nothing else to be said about how they behave. I honestly have so few words for this; if you don’t see how it doesn’t work, just stop reading now and never read anything I write again.

You are not rational. I am not rational. We have incomplete malleable mounds of meat that will happily carry on in whatever direction they’ve been set. Without knowledge, without intention, without understanding, they can just “be” and in a world that needs knowledge, intention, and understanding, that “simply being” is negative. It’s the idiot smiling at the row station when all hands need to move us through the storm.

For one reason or another, I posit undue sympathy, apologists for this lazy and simple non-rower will get very indignant if you’re not happy about their goofy smile. They’ll insist, “He has so much potential!” They’ll say, “His arms are so big! His capacity to row is so great!” The moment you call him a lazy stupid smiling idiot, they’ll attack you! He’s not rowing and they’re attacking you! The storm is coming, we’re going too slowly, and you’re to blame insisting this idiot needs to get to work and they need to stop protecting him.

That barely describes the disconnection in how we discuss things with each other. It’s so needlessly tired to keep blaming me for sounding angry or shitty. Angrier than your fucking fascist President? Angrier than your state representatives who want to bury fetal tissue? Am I shittier than the people who made money speech and don’t believe we share the environment? Because those are the stakes. It’s life and death whether you can figure out how to pull your head out of your ass and recognize those who aren’t rowing for what they are. Dead weight that ensure we’re going to kill ourselves.

I will never feel sympathy if you can’t do that. I will never change my mind if you can’t put the square block through the square hole. I refuse to be gaslit. Because that’s what you’re doing. In service to your own dogma, you refuse to call out what the real problem is. You can’t see it because you predicate your whole window into the world on it. “It’s not my responsibility, God will save me.” “I was taught this way, and it’s the only way I know or respect.” “My feelings deserve to be heard! Especially because I honestly cry myself to sleep each night worried about what will happen to all the white children forced to mix with the little nigger scourge!”

I think I’ve just been lying to myself the whole time. I mean, I was able to stop discussing religion with people. But perhaps it’s for everything. We already know thermometers don’t work when you represent oil companies. Why should this stress me out any more than it seems to those poor thermometers? If they could speak, right? Imagine the smear pieces of the elitist condescending hot heads who just need to understand not everyone’s been socialized to see the merit of discussing things in Celsius.

I’m not wrong. I’m justified in my anger. I’m not going to apologize for being smarter or more informed than you. If you don’t know how the brain works, keep beating your dick to the idea that humans can’t be trained, and trained to do the wrong thing. If you think your definition of “rationality” is all-knowing and perfect and that you’re the only one with the capacity for wisdom, here’s the keys to the crazy pants building, I’ve literally bought 5 acres in the middle of nowhere because I don’t have the mental capacity to deal with you anymore. You’ll spend your entire life watching people live and die by the bat shit proclamations any ignorant monkey who hasn’t had their face rubbed in enough shit can make. The alternative is to run and pray any hitchhikers desperate to get away as well won’t need to be shot before you get somewhere safe.

[557] Untitled

I’m full.
Often it’s almost unbearable.
My head might be packed with ideas or snot.
The veins through my scalp and temples pulse with too much blood.
My throat is clogged with a fat tongue flapping too enthusiastically.
Hot air fills my chest and pushes my diaphragm.
An array of foods with too many calories fight their way through my stomach and intestines.
I’m packed like a suitcase that’s never coming back.

I’m abundantly aware.
I saw what you saw.
I found the loose change as we walked through the mall.
Yet finding the dollars to perpetuate my state proves elusive.
Their state lives on; mine remains a memory.
It’s a memory of what I wanted and how it has had to change.
It’s a memory that dims each year.
It’s a memory constantly under attack from the beat in my head meat.
It plays me like I used to play you. It knows me better than I know myself for it knows nothing.

“I coulda been something!”
I could have been a king.
I could have been awash in luxury.
I could have been a thing.
Yes a thing to be passed around and praised and drank from.
A bottomless well of hope and inspiration.
A thing you could caption and memeify and transmit over the air where I could fly and disappear.
I could have been an abstraction always up for interpretation while the jury’s on strike.
I could have tried.
I could have tried harder.

I lost my stories.
I’m back on the first floor digging the grave I call my basement.
It’s hard work shoveling so much shit up and over.
I’m dirty, but it feels good to belong.
I’m tired, so I appreciate the darkness.
My swollen muscles can relax when I no longer think I’ll be able to climb out.
I lost my heroes.
I sent them on a trip and they came back distorted.
They got the shakes and don’t walk so straight.
They get loud in all the wrong places.
They don’t smile in fact, they barely have faces.
No more revolution.
No justice or league to keep the peace.
No tomorrow.
Just no.

[556] Wait But Why?

I want to discuss a question that I promise doesn't bug me. I want to discuss it because it comes up over and over again with, I can only assume, every one of my friends at one point or another. I don't find it insulting or necessarily hard to understand. I think its roots can be explored and I have a few ideas I think are plausible.

“Why are you friends with Nick?”

To be honest, the best answer I have for anyone being friends with me is because they see an important part of themselves reflected back. I've fashioned myself for a long time as something of an expression of almost pure id. I used to point to monetary benefits when it came to pimping out the house or my access to a car and willingness to chauffeur people around. That stuff is always weak and superficial of course, but for the pragmatist it might be easier to look past my mouth.

Perhaps I should slow down though. It's a question I'm asking just as often to my friends about who they associate with. Say you come home from work and have nothing positive to say about your coworkers, my first question certainly rings with the memory of your frustrations before you hit the town with them. It's easy to blurt out the question of friendship when you've no context for the long history a pair or group might have. At the darkest end you could be asking about the pure emotional or tangible extraction someone is getting out of stringing their prey along.

With regard to me though, I find it gets a little more complicated for the ones asking. Say they asked Kristen. Sweet, innocent, Kristen. Their mental model for her didn't jive even remotely with what they think of me. The confusion, though superficial, speaks to those disingenuous mental shortcuts unthoughtful people take when considering potentially complex human beings. In other words, it's a failure of imagination more than necessarily something insidious. This crowd would make sweeping generalizations about open relationships or draw an uncrossable line that protects their judgment from your explanation. Childish, boring, moving on.

Then there's people who genuinely can't appreciate for a moment my brand of exceedingly dark humor. I make the spousal abuse or cancer joke, they're looking around the room at all the people not up in arms or shuffling me out the door. These are moralizers. They seek less to protect their judgments than to impose and control with them. Flippant or funny disarms those who want to move against you. If they're fuming in the corner and you get even one person to crack a smile, their confusion rests in the disconnect between their pseudo-reality where things are good and make sense, and mine where I guess I'm just trying to hurt people or something. Who could befriend such an untamed beast?

The excessively hilarious one is when they ask Byron why he's my friend. There's almost no words for the level of irony. It's hard to explain knowing someone who basically inhabits your brain. In the deepest possible sense that I've encountered in life, it's like asking why you would bother liking yourself. Our style differences are not brain or disposition differences, but the clean cut politely spoken professional that holds your hand or speaks your language is a jarring contrast from the curly haired ripped jeans despot cursing for what you're positive is absolutely no reason.

Objectively, were I to give reasons for someone to be or not to be my friend, well, pick your favorite drunkest and craziest sounding blog. It's not that I think I'm special or particularly worse or “crazier” than anybody else, but there seems to be a key to my madness. I know my shit.

There's different ways to know your shit, and not all of them are equal. For many, confidence springs forth from their resolve to accept their lot. Whether it's their average or lacking look, motivation, or general mental state. I find it no coincidence that OKCupid matches me highest with every punk rock looking girl with dyed hair and a septum piercing who's rebel attitude and crass jokes make her the life of her small world...if she can be bothered. Smart people in general get a whiff of how they can run something and settle pretty nicely into “know their shit” status.

Then there's bookworm types. They can learn every fact in the world or the particulars of their job, but if you tried to turn them inward you're begging for a substance problem or major depression. The isolated academic types speak a very particular language to a particular crowd and understand the world through an endless stream of books and theories that help shield them from any personal insight that might leak through. Maybe think of Ben Carson. A man who could literally save your life by cutting into your brain, but can't figure out the deadly consequences of playing with fascism.

Then there's that last page of self-help books kind of knowing your shit. When you've therapied to death your past trauma or daily anxieties and you stumble from one realization to the next until you float out to sea on a contemplative island. This speaks to my brand. I'm not just confident in many things I do, I've done or will do a lot of work in explaining the story of how I got there. I'll do it to such a point that you'll start questioning why you got upset in the first place. I sit so deep in my own world that you'll start blaming me for your back pains on the seat you chose.

This is the best explanation I have for people I've know for years or managed more than an acquaintance with who just go radio silent. I was simply comfortable with our dynamic, refused to read minds even when they were begging me to, thus I am to blame. This helps me explain people who actively spoke out against me with, to my knowledge, no if even negative provocation. The girl roomy who re-befriended our other roommate who choked her while disavowing me, who threw him off her, will always be illustrative. She fashioned herself as someone who knew shit, but when faced with the reality, she's just choking against the wall, and how dare someone like me step in and remind her.

The irony of being my friend is that I'm exceedingly transparent and easy as hell to disarm. Well, that is, if you're a person. If you're an insecure husk who's needlessly provoked, I'm a nightmare. If you have an opinion of yourself that you value which allows you to see through my superficial behavior, we get along seamlessly. And yes, this is in utter spite of any and all of the worst shit I can be or have done. I'll always find it odd and unfair that people approach me as if my day to day is setting fires or seeking out people to make cry. At bottom, the reason I'm making you uncomfortable is because you're not comfortable with yourself.

This means that when I make a racist joke, you haven't worked out your relationship to race, so you scoop from your general knee jerk impression of what you think “the culture” would do. If I insult you or your family, you might have deep seeded issues with your big ass ears that even 30 years on the planet never helped you with, and a friendly gathering over drinks is not where you wanted to cope with your thoughts about your dad. To be clear, there is more than a little difference between dark and cold jokes and being genuinely mean-spirited. It does exist. If you don't believe me, you're suffering from something I'm the absolute last person to help you deal with.

Never forget, if you're not laughing (which you usually are) I'm cracking the joke for me. I repeat that shit to myself when my mind wanders and lose my shit days later. I love my humor. I love it so much and it brings me so much joy that I revel in the resentment and anger it conjures from those who think it has anything real to do with them. Of course, when it does, when it feels real, you can take that as a chance for introspection or exploring context, or you can keep blaming me like my joyous coping mechanism will be cried or sneered out of existence. My best guess, it's here to stay, but feel free to slut shame.

It gets deeper though. Because a bad or mean joke is still a pretty wimpy metric for judgment, right? You don't have to know anything to be crass. The dirty part is feeling yourself concede. It's your smile betraying your indignation. It's your stupefied look as my half-drunk comment cuts you in two. You thought I didn't see your look? You thought I didn't notice the tone? You thought my questions weren't a bit leading? Did you think your posture found an invisibility cloak? Did you pretend there was something secret I couldn't figure out about you that I haven't already dug out of myself ten times over? That's when it truly bites.

Then you have no choice but to accept I both understand and legitimately disrespect how you're going about where you're coming from. There is no protest or negotiation. I'm not going to find myself enlightened about how I went about speaking to you. I'm not on your emotional level and that makes you feel bad. You haven't sought out my brand of knowing shit, and that makes me feel nothing about you besides fleeting frustration of a classist air. Engaging with that kind of person then becomes this exhausting negotiation and navigation of the febrile feelings. One I'm brilliant at when I adopt the style you're familiar with on Byron. I still just find it in me to always pick on children.

That's a hefty amount of rationalization there Nick, but why? Why does any of it speak to being your friend? What do you really bring to the table but bad words and explanations I don't buy!?

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, sincerity wins. I don't just dream about the best parties and making movie moments, I build them. I don't pretend to hold you in high or low esteem without having tested our relationship for what I hoped to get out of it. When I say I want the same mental and financial security for my friends that I seek for myself, I get my spine tapped so I can afford the land to invite people to as a refuge or for experimenting. If I call you a cunt, I think you're a cunt, but more importantly, you're probably actually a cunt. 

Whatever you hate about me, you can trust it. When I'm in an out-pour of goodwill and sentimentality, you can trust that too. I'll be dammed if I'm ever as confused as you about how and why I approach my relationships. At least as dammed as you, that is. And I think people like to be able to trust, as I very well know, nothing ever seems like it can be trusted. My worst self isn't some outward display of stupidity or negativity, it's when I stop inviting you in to read about it.

I'm a person who laughs until it hurts about his demons, routinely, practically daily. I put on display as much truth as I can discover in the moment. I work with and engage my contradictory and confusing nature instead of merely suffering it. You tend to learn a lot more shit than people ever want to give you credit for because they can't really see or hear you over their own issues. I might as well have a superpower in my capacity to recognize or disarm them. Why I don't use it to smooth everything over and make everyone happy, like they perpetually fail to do, is somehow baffling. As if I should sacrifice the path to my best relationships to their selfishly small conception of being.

I think there's any number of areas in your life you're wishing you could be a little more like me. So rarely do people give me a reason to believe the relationship can go both ways.

[555] Climate Silence

A series I find wildly inspiring is Years of Living Dangerously. It’s not because it ever teaches me anything I don’t already know. It’s that it takes a camera into the meeting room where climate activists discuss details and field questions from the masses. You can begin to peel away much of the nonsense that obscures why there is or isn’t action taken and the, in my view extremely hopeless, mental pits people fall into to protect their views.

A basic premise I assume when I go into an argument or approach learning about some topic is that everything is connected. When Wikipedia first arrived I remember clicking though every word I didn’t know and being fascinated about just generally learning and reading in no specific direction. To fluidly access windows and doors into worlds I’d never seen before held little utility but to keep me intrigued or distracted, but it’s a shared window that analogizes how our brains work.

A gentleman holds a presentation to talk to Texans about climate change. Their concerns are that “Tax feels like someone’s taking something away from me” and “If the oil companies’ costs go up isn’t it going to cost Texas jobs?” One person pointed the finger at China. The presenter’s father said, “We need fossil fuels” ten seconds before saying he’d absolutely use renewables yet does not have access to them.

Without fail, people think small and selfish yet don’t draw from the larger world to help fix their true concern. You can’t only care about your little farm and your oil industry job. The deeper truth, in the scheme of things, is that your job isn’t secure and the planet you inhabit will eventually force your hand. The gentleman whose conception of taxes resembles that of a child is going to have an even harder time dealing with these conditions because his feelings are always going to be in the way.

I suppose for me these scenarios make me think of hypocrisy. I’m every ounce of an armchair humanitarian. I try to move my mind into spaces that I think might shed light on better ways forward. I look at the motivated and urgent students holding meetings for their townsfolk and think it’s generally in vain. Stupid and insecure people have never been fixed with logical discussion of hundreds of variables to consider. They just have their feelings. In that the presenter brought his family along maybe spoke to his only real impact in that they’re sympathetic to him if not the world of facts.

To extend this further, this is why I always blame people for their silence. Your family and friends are moved by you. You’re responsible for them. When I write, even if I bitch until the day I die about not seeing your impact reflected in the social media space enough, I have to believe you take something with you into the rest of your worlds. In actuality, I could set up a table and grab a megaphone and recite statistics and urge people to care, but I’ve never seen the problem as a lack of that kind of quasi-activism.

The problem is that we don’t concern ourselves with the whole. We pretend one area of our lives is off limits. We think there’s dignity and safety in cordoning off the parts we’re scared or ashamed of. If I think I’m perhaps a hypocrite in how I exercise my time, now you’re hearing about it. If I’m seeing a connection about my concerns regarding fascism, ignorance, laziness, and quickly evaporating time and spirit, you get to know the roots of my disappointing study attempt. By allowing yourself a holistic view of your problems and place in the world, while you carry more weight, it’s also more powerful when you try to swing it around.

Maybe then you’re not just poised for “dumb internet fights” you’re protecting shared intellectual space from complicit ignorance. Maybe you’re not busy and hopeless, but invigorating the mundane with your heightened awareness. For that, I think of the last concert I went to. An hour and a half was spent by most of the crowd waiting for the band to show up. I read articles and listened to a podcast. Yes, it was weird and yes I stood out, but staring at an empty stage for that long seemed even weirder. Much of what I think a person consists of is as much what they’re prepared to do and are aware of that they can do. I can read and listen and then rock the fuck out and then have a salient conversation about ethics on the walk back to the car. The superficially different realms are connected by my agency.

This means it’s always the right time. You can respond to this blog and we can talk for a solid week digging up sources and making plans. You can share this with your more motivated and talkative friends. You can seriously consider in a deeper way things you may feel hypocritical about or afraid of. Every moment, right now, the world is ours to engage with or ignore. If you’re not even aware of your larger obligation, let alone the endless utility you can derive from engaging as such, you’ll be the lowly conservative cliché who only knows how to feel their way about in the dark.

Guilt seems key. Do you wait for something external to force you and then try to cope and change? I suppose it’s anyone’s guess if you invite the pain in now if you’ll be able to alleviate it. I’m perhaps a standing example of that. I’m worried about the conversations I’ll be having with myself at 40 or 50 about my actions or lack thereof. Does my writing ever suggest I’m particularly happy or healthy lol? Of course I am, but I don’t take to the page to wax about butterflies. I think I’m better at coping and continually talking about soul-crushing and harrowing things, if only because of the visceral reactions I get from all the people who aren’t.

Or maybe you are, so do it even more. Maybe you have your own roundabout way of fixing something you see as integral to the general cultural problem, so let me know about it. I’m with Jordan Peterson who says the religious underpinnings, the moral truths and motivations that bound us together have been blown apart and it speaks to why we’re ravenous for Harry Potter or Marvel stories to help realign us. I love the idea of music being disparate harmonies speaking to something transcendent and spine tingling. That’s how I can retain respect for story tellers and musicians; when you tie your work to your honest struggle for an individual voice and perspective that retains all the humanity that birthed it.

Perhaps the myth is that there’s no telling your impact. I’m telling you your impact every time I write. It’s frustration. It’s loneliness. It’s denial. It is pain and death and fear that are hardly hidden by the next celebration. Part of me wishes it would at least be idealism so we could respect that an idea was even represented. If you hate to “fight” and “debate,” then just talk. Talk to your secret followers and admirers. Talk yourself in and out of emotional and intellectual holes. Talk to show yourself that you have something to say or shed some light on why you don’t.

[554] Study Me

I failed!

I failed spectacularly in getting that money. I failed because I don’t know how to control my heartbeat. I failed in forwarding my general existential strife to emulate people like Elon Musk. I failed my paralyzed body as it sat staring out to nowhere thinking about everything I want to do and be. I failed after 2 previous failures that at least had the decency to close the door handily immediately after screening and not let me in the door and into scrubs.

I’ve been mulling over how to approach this the entire drive home. I think it may be best to approach it as quasi-self-contained paragraphs that all speak to some aspect of my anxiety. The tricky thing about anxiety is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be irrational. It could prove to be all sorts of hazardous to be able to shut down your mechanism for being worried about shit. Unfortunately for my brain at least, I’m never just worried about one thing. I can’t just relax or distract myself because you, or the phlebotomist, or the doctor tells me to.

I’m still stuck on the screaming contradiction of my existence. I was in the lobby reading article after article about places Nick Turse has travelled filled with death and destruction. It was a buffet of information about just how fucked Hitler 2 is going to leave us. It was one story after the next of corrupt people, institutions, regression, hatred, and stupidity. It’s happening every moment of every day. It’s worse than you think, and then you realize it’s worse than you’ll ever be able to fully conceive. And my biggest problem in life is getting my heart to beat a little bit slower?

When framed like that it sounds ridiculous. Now home, embarrassed, mildly annoyed, but mostly just returning to my resolved meandering angst, I’m calling another study center tomorrow. My rent is still paid up for a few months. I still own the land that’s worth at least double what I paid for it. As far as I know, given that I didn’t make it to the blood test results, I’m still healthy. My worst case scenario is 4 few hour drives in bad weather; a feat many I know achieve before midweek every week.

But what does my mind do? It maps the delay in my plans onto the entire world. I’m here worried about working myself up and out of studies? What about the myriad travesties that had to take place for me to discover this kind of lifestyle in the first place? This kind of shit is a dozen steps back then haphazard lurches forward when a little luck and timing kicks in. These places were meant to take advantage of the mother of 4 who has to bring her kids to her outpatient visits. These are supposed to be for bored retirees and quasi-homeless people. The first time one of the girls taking my blood called it my job, I practically choked rushing to proclaim the joke of our responsibilities in light of someone like my iron working dead.

It’s only a tinge of guilt when I think it, but it still rings true. I feel so alone. I’m generally at the end of peoples’ priority list. No one is going to be a part of this land until I put up even larger amounts of money. My ideas and experiments won’t be able to be entertained until a half dozen or more studies are saved up for. And I’ll have to keep telling myself over and over that it’s not your fault. I won’t believe it, but I’ll keep telling it to myself because I know how fucking trapped we all are. I know how broke and paycheck to paycheck goes. I know the stress and uncertainty. Despite all the hell, what I never hear is the truth.

You don’t blog. You don’t share anything but pictures or often enough weird memes. I’m painting with a broad brush because I’m speaking to the majority. I see you coping, not thinking. I see you passing the time and spreading likes and congratulations, not collaborating. Every day it’s a reminder that I’m alone. No one is going to save me. If we’re living out the end of the country hurdling as a fireball from hell towards economic ruin and intellectual suicide, there’s like 2 or 3 really laying it out there leaving aside a spattering of writers. If I can’t live sustainably, make a fairly large amount of money, acquire all form of seemingly random skills, I’m going to be severely fucked. On top of that, when I see my friends who are still trying for that “normal job” or habitually avoiding dealing with the true depth of their precarious lives, all I’m going to be able to do is watch.

My heart didn’t really slow down from the moment I woke up. The week preceding this morning, I kept saying “if” I get in. The “if” felt so loud. It’s like I was anticipating sitting here after failing the entire time.  I then invent all sorts of scenarios that might’ve played out to feel better about it. Maybe my blood wouldn’t have had me pass anyway. Maybe it’s going to be a hella storm one day I’m supposed to drive down, so the universe intervened before my impending crash and death. Maybe I’m supposed to be back at that Podunk school teaching marching because some impression I’m to leave means more in the long term. Maybe there are 2 higher paying studies I can do at the same time I won’t know about until tomorrow.

Either way, the reason I’m always anxious and absolutely desperate to give myself options that aren’t dependent on something like my blood or heart is because…the world. The world where I don’t ever see your freak outs or parse through your reasoning and then our connection dulls. The world where we stopped drinking together. The world where even when I get everything I want, I’ll still be offering it to people in no position to take it. The world of fogged over eyes and wretched smiles as we see what life has done to us before we peak over our shoulders looking for a way out. No amount of money I make, buildings I build, or toys I acquire is going to fix that. I can’t make you believe in yourselves. I can’t pretend to know what risks you’re capable of taking.

Most disturbingly, part of me feels like I punish myself because not enough real things go wrong in my life. There’s not enough general anxiety for me walk in cool-headed and knock out studies like I’m not thinking about anything. If I wasn’t here writing this right now, what? I’d just be getting even more money to spend on things that aren’t health insurance or a better car? I’d most likely end up paying too much for a handful of things that get me no further in any real or monetary sense until the next study anyway.

It feels like a dream. I watched myself from afar fail the heart rate monitor. I wasn’t there cheering it on and working hard to pump the blood. It beat hard and fast without my vote. I had to do nothing but show up with my brain that attaches itself to an even more abstract future dream when it can’t even make sense of or control the present one. I can’t connect into a larger world than myself. The ones provided are lies or downright trying to kill me. Think I’m giving it up to a god? Think I sway with your subtle suggestions and encouragement? Think I just want to be distracted or drunk all the time? If all went to shit I’m sure I’ll always be able to find a couch, but in reality, nothing about the world I want and we need is happening without me. I don’t know if you understand it’s not happening without you either.

Is your heart racing?

[553] Not Saying You Should

This is an attempt at rationalization. It assumes the very basics of moral truths regarding survival and an indifferent universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s catch-phrase bids us to, “Keep looking up.” On a planet that feels like it is losing its charm, if not its habitability, the heavens can occupy every waking moment of an intrigued and adventurous yet lowly mammal like the human. We’ve dozens of movies about meeting new life forms or books on the priorities of advanced civilizations. We dream of the technology that might have us existing in some form or another until we either answer every Ultimate Question or reach the end of the universe.

I understand that any and all anxiety that I ever feel is bred from ego. I get that, whether I like it or not, whether I want to be alive today or not, I’m built to be up my ass and keep it protected. Literally every day I can bring my perspective closer towards someone who has it dramatically worse, and my nervous system doesn’t care. I’m arrested by me. I go as far as my genes and my environment and a fledgling desire to believe in the veracity of my will in making choices.

It seems that in order to get along in this world, you have to learn to perpetually let go. You have to let go of your false friends. You have to let go of your poor language that divided them up as such. You have to let go of every naïve assumption that, even if it at some level seems to be keeping you alive or well-adjusted, is wrong and isn’t yours. This means letting go of every animal that’s gone extinct. It’s letting go of ideas that you can protect your health. It’s letting go of everything but the utter burden of your inured existence and experience.

Here’s the important part. You let go not because you should, but because you don’t matter.

Take this blog. Whether you conceive of it as a persuasive argument, an incoherent ramble in the dark, or something in between, whatever your response, it’s not because you should respond that way, it’s that it doesn’t matter. It exists in spite of you. It exists in spite of me. I can’t tell if it’s “good” or “bad.” I won’t know if I’ll like it years from now. The prevailing reason for its existence is because I couldn’t help myself. “My” thoughts, provoked by science fiction and an obsessive brain sought relief so I could go back to watching movies. It’s not that I should write this; it’s that it doesn’t matter.

The tendency is to always scream from our assholes though. You may like this, so you’ll press the button. You may hate it, and tell me to kill myself. Both are a struggle to matter in vain. Because whether I live or die, the words will still be there. Your reaction will have had nothing to do with “me” specifically, as much as it will speak to your poor conception of both me and you in the scheme of things.

Now, I know this liberation of your ego from any responsibility to the world around you is dealt with in different religions. Where they go wrong is in then suggesting what should be done. Giving it up to your god is just a roundabout way of protecting your fragile and naïve ego. In fact, every transfer of individual perspective to a “higher power” suffices as the same thing. Oh humble academic or middle manager whose hands have ever been tied! It’s not that you should spend an hour arguing about a discount code, it’s that neither of you matter.

The true irony of embodying this idea is that we’re angry getting exactly what we ask for. We’re finally getting to die and silence our egos from insisting we should be afraid and sad. Who wants to be 117? Let the cancer take me at 65. Who needs clean air? I’ve been smoking since I was 14. Who gives a shit about polar bears? There’s starving kids in Africa I didn’t give a shit about first. Who needs the oceans? I don’t even like to swim and fish is disgusting. Who needs books? Wait until you see this dude get totally pwned and you won’t believe what this cat did. Who needs elitist politicking and 5 dollar words? We get by just fine on our own.

Deep down we know we don’t matter, so our mass suicide is taking shape in the form of arbitrary violence and nonsense words. We don’t want to live, how could you expect us to believe in someone else’s “right” to? We have nothing to say, so who gives a shit if you end up in prison for using your voice? Oh you think you’re scared? Let me show you my advanced weaponry and rain hellfire down upon you. What to make of democracy? We don’t want to learn or make decisions, Heil Hitler 2! Again, this isn’t how things should go, it’s because it doesn’t matter.

You may want to invoke the children, but the children will die every day like the 107 billion people that have ever lived have died. We’re just a species who got a little too big for its habitat and ran up against its limits. Should you care for your children? If you’re being honest, that wasn’t really your concern before you brought them here. You were just the unlucky end of an unconscious biological imperative that mindlessly played on your fears and disposition. Then all sorts of cultural forces, sometimes literally, forced you to adopt the obligated language and time.

I wish I could tell you what to do, but it doesn’t matter. Donate, or don’t. Escape to the woods, or don’t. Watch television and play video games or climb mountains and pray. It doesn’t matter. Sooner than later you’ll get to shake off all the anxieties about the world you live in, because even if you can’t face it right now, it’ll catch up. Even if you think your plans mean shit, your humanitarian soul will reach just one person, your passion for some activity keeps you afloat, you don’t matter. The universe cares nothing about you. Your god couldn’t save if it switched to Geico.

I’m not saying you should believe anything I’ve said. It just doesn’t matter.

[552] Hungry

There is no good place to begin. I suppose I mostly just want to talk about the fall of man. This fall plays out every moment of every impersonal lie we subject our perception to. Every "joke" you read in this forum speaks to it. It's every "fight" that plays out most dramatically within the confines of your blood pressure more than anywhere to do with the "real world." It's like a forced obsessive compulsiveness given that one way or another, the internet can remind you that nothing goes away. Whether you were dealing with a difficult problem or simply flew off the handle, these cobbling together of words suggest a permanence to your being that overwhelmingly skews negative.

What this does is it breaks down our empathy and honesty. There's a difference between someone like Hitler 2(Trump), for example, who gets a national pulpit to express views engendering racial hatred and the internet troll. Well, in the world of adults with perspective, there would be. One acts on impulse and immaturity, the other is a guiding beacon standard bearer, who, incidentally, acts on impulse and immaturity. Otherwise responsible adults feel bad when they've done or said something irresponsible or shitty. I feel we've crossed over into a world where standard metrics of decency are perpetually up for debate. This isn't because they should be, by any means, it's just we play so fast and loose with our conceptions of power we tend to destroy even a general communal identity structure.

For me personally, reddit will always be a place that I'm dragged back into the worst kinds of habits and arguments. I've had someone dig up my personal information and write an entire diatribe about how batshit they think I am, cherry picking some of my worst experiences I chose to write about over the last 12 years. Think about that, 12 years. How many fights have you been in in 12 years? The handful of mine stuck out and I wrote about them. How many depressed or angry thoughts might you have in 12 years? Mind you, they're formative years as well. Years that everyone rides out emotional roller coasters from time to time, let alone finds the capacity to retain them as mini explosions you see people carry out in their adult lives.

Not only is it a sheer lack of respect for the complicated existence we have with ourselves and how to process it all, it's abusing the wanton nature of influence on the internet. It's not just you who can make me look bad by going through my thoughts and picking the worst. I can do it to. In the same way you can pick apart news sources to turn anything into the worst or best thing you've ever heard or wanted to project. Now, at least for some institutions, there's a vested financial and moral payout for accountability and accuracy. In our personal lives? All we need to do is feel good about it. We don't have to accept basic truths about humanity and complex emotions or thoughts. That person is crazy.

Here we bump into the heart of the issue. We've lost the tools to figure out who's crazy and who isn't. Even if there were a fleeting capacity to diagnose someone from their words, judgments and prescriptions are offered at a blistering pace. One person's boredom and immaturity is another's protective order. I personally draw stark lines between making violent threats and expressing endless streams of bigoted hate speech, but then it's practically impossible to explain away or dial back the time you take a ho-hum attitude towards calling a random person a nigger. It's always in bad taste, that was certainly the point at the time, but genuine fears regarding that person's specific racism are arguably misplaced.

But of course, they can't be. We don't want them to be. It's not that literally everyone is probably what we understand to be racist, unconsciously or otherwise, it's that they've handed you the tool to be the self-righteous hero of an internet beat down. The only context is the voice you're reading their words in your head with. It's not your burden to take your time with their words or be patient with your initial reaction. They slipped, you won. Of course you both lost and you stained humanity, but thus is life with too much time and impersonality.

Let's make it more complicated. What if you're a fiction writer? What if your words are a caricature of how you feel and you blow them up? Like when someone screams, "I'll kill you!" and in any honest world you can be assured that anger isn't going to blow up into murder. What if a strategy for dealing with your life and thoughts is to adopt a character that likes to write. Now this character can shoulder the burden of these troublesome thoughts and put them down and away somewhere. Who's to say? Do we indict the fiction writers for their depictions of soulless or tasteless acts and words? Do we have any idea that these words are coming from somewhere honest and truthful despite endless professions they might be?

It's pretty easy to solidly say "no" on both counts. If I told you I murdered a homeless man in Florida in 1998, it would be not just wildly unreasonable to take this digression to the criminal records division and find a case that matches up. You shouldn't insist on my alibi. You shouldn't do whatever it takes to tie my reddit profile to random sites that may pop up on google and implore my ISP to give you a name. We can leave aside that I would have been a child in 1998, just think about how not even skeptical you are right now in reading this! My very explanation makes you want it to be true. You're reacting to a random thought and the very idea of plausible deniability as if I'm guilty. Does that make any fucking sense?

That's the world we live in now. We look for "moral high ground" as it exists in personal speculation and empty judgment. We don't know things. We don't think about things. We don't take responsibility for things. We don't let things die natural deaths and we prevent things from growing that would displace the feeble ground we've established for ourselves. Someone slaps your mistake to a picture or name and you can be memed. You can get in trouble years after the fact. You can be denied for all the work and thought you put into getting past that moment. Is it any wonder people feel so depressed by staying online? Is it impossible to admit the "polarization" will never go away as long as we don't address the basic assumptions about how this medium changes our emotional state with regard to knowledge and each other?

If you're a little crazy, the online world gives you space to be insanely moreso. If you're a little illogical, someone has taken your doozy and written a manifesto to its defense. If you're a little correct, you'll be able to find thousands of people to give you kudos like you just won a major award! Highest rated comment here I come! I guess reddit likes duck puns! And now your thoughts are awash in achieving such glory again one day. The worst part of this accelerant nature is that it rarely identifies or celebrates the a little bit crowd. The craziest of crazy gets to the top. The hardest to think or cope about gets buried very quickly. The one's who've figured out the empty pretentious "adult voice" that never really speaks to anything but the myth of civility and intelligence prevails as a standing denial and indictment of the reality. It's not all bad, just hide the haters!

You're the hater. You're a person who's capable of as much or as little hatred as you read into someone else's words. You swallow every word like you hope everyone is swallowing yours. It's just a joke to you. It's just you offering your honest opinion. It's just the internet. You find ways to distract yourself and silence the harm you cause yourself and other people. And don't be mistaken that it's just in your words. No no. The words by their nature are a level of ambiguity you try to use to absolve yourself. That is, humans can be complicated and ambiguous, but they can also know when they're lying. The words themselves can't.

Think about that when you're trying so hard to condemn "the other" or "the crazy." If you're working too hard, you're scared of your true nature. If you can't escape your past, it's because it's not in the past. Just like my worst professions of writing. They're there for me to stare at today. They can and will be used against me to hijack my struggles or insecurities and supplement them with yours. You didn't take my words as a process or an honest opportunity to reflect and empathize. You scapegoated. I'm sacrificed on your alter of impersonal depravity as your name and your face have no defense. We're equally as desperate. We're equally as bored. We hurt ourselves implicitly or explicitly. But I'm willing to keep talking. I'm willing to keep working and reflecting.

So I pity you, anonymous voices. I pity you for how much you believe in yourselves and the consequences of your power. If you pretended to have the best intentions, you'd still be doing nothing but destroying. The harder you feel you're behaving in earnest, the farther down an oblivious hole you tumble. The real world fallout is greater than you could imagine (well, presumably before the election of Hitler 2).

I'm so scared, not for my own safety or prospects because of the stupid shit I do online mind you, but because of how few people can even relate to my fear or figure out ways to relate to it honestly. We're still going to go around diagnosing each other. We're going to take snapshots and think they've anything to do with historical trends or the preponderance of evidence to the contrary. We're going to muster the resolve to fight and fear "controversial opinions" instead of actual fascism or personal insecurities regarding the endless series of empty words we use to suit our interests. And then what? We'll keep blaming each other into circles of mental and physical violence. When someone stops and admits it's their fault. When responsibility tries to take a breath, we'll pile on, ravenous.

[551] A Mess

It's terribly confusing and terribly annoying to be such a contradiction.

Yesterday was a day filled with good news and productivity regarding my future plans. I was dancing around or singing most of the day. There was prep for Thanksgiving. I suppose we already need to speak to the annoying aspect of being a contradiction in that it wasn't yesterday, but the day before. Yesterday I literally spent all day in bed sleeping off a hangover. At the last minute I decided my energy needed to be out, as if spending money and random drunken stranger conversation is favored to be a positive.

That setting is probably the easiest when it comes to speaking towards contradiction. There were a group of people who I've probably partied with before, and for what is probably the 5th time I've forgotten their faces. Ironically, they remind me of the old days of getting together before everyone got old and resented each other, but I can't seem to persuade my brain to retain a longer or more appreciative memory of them. The idea of being out together and celebrating with something that ensures you'll forget, or will kill you early in excess, I still can't say I understand. The alternative to being out of course would have been to just stay home, like I usually do. Just watch another movie or 5, sleep in or maybe play around on the guitar. Of course I find it in me to complain about all the "nothing" I do each day and hashtagged a year of my life with #yearofbeingboring.

Let's address just a general list of agitating contradiction to get it out of the way. I talk about saving money and spending wisely and yet manage to find myself in the middle of nights like 2 days ago. I could make my own meals and prepare them a week in advance and save, but nah. I could drink in my house and keep myself contained or entertained. That's not what I picked. I buy land to learn how to live sustainably, but I can't tell you the last time I recycled. I'm writing this and feeling like it's beyond pointless and overblown to explain my feelings...in the face of 550 other blogs over 12 1/2 years. I know I need structure, but actively work against its introduction into my life. I disavow my words and advice as I argue vociferously and secretly hope someone manages to do better with them than I manage. I fall prey to "one day" thinking despite that day literally being today where I get to speak to all that I am trying to accomplish.

I'm sure there's considerably more things, but I've forsaken the idea that this blog will live up to anything too coherent or comprehensive. If you consider as well how long we've been living in a world of doublespeak and emphasis on the faux-gray impartiality we've applied to the circus of Hitler 2, the places one might try to find their footing that exist beyond the befuddled and manic depressive mind break away. "I may not feel great, but at least someone's looking out for me!" No, no they're not dear, I'm sorry.

I'v gotten told a number of times to come hang out in a Blue state and surround myself with friends. While I haven't shrugged off civility, I forget how long ago I dropped the notion of what a friend was or wasn't supposed to mean. I don't seek to find my validation in offering honesty they don't want. (as long as I keep getting likes!) If I spent time traveling to do that, I wouldn't have been able to afford my land. If I didn't generally save and live a boring existence, I wouldn't be able to achieve binge nights. If I didn't open up with the chance that random bar conversation might be fun or worthwhile, I wouldn't have the opportunity to keep forgetting people let alone experience the guilt-light.

I want to believe things aren't binary. I want to think that my friends or family aren't as "whatever" as I might say they are. But then that opens the risk of me treating them like I do myself. Taking highs that have you singing and dancing and dashing them against the rocks of superficial drunk-i-cality.

Oh! More contradictions. I find "heroes" who put out good videos or books and then look for every reason to hate them. I watch everything in an attempt to be "in the know" but can barely recall plot lines or why it was significant. The more I think to myself how cool it would be to bring more people together, I find myself provoked to create more divisions as a sort of "get it over with" band-aid ripping of emotional ties. I honestly don't know if I'm a "miserable" person given that I don't find people like me for which I can make reliable comparisons, but still manage to identify with precision what's eating away at someone else as if I'm perpetually intimately familiar. One might just point to the burden of existing at all as each day marches you towards inevitable death.

Whatever. This was a mess.

[550] One Bite

There’s a feeling I’ve spoken about before that I often get as I’m driving in and around cities or meandering through neighborhoods. I’ve taken stabs at trying to better define it with language that already exists and obscure German words that may or may not exist given how hard they are to rediscover through googling. It follows me when I think about Hitler 2 supporters. It strikes me when I read and hear condescending comments on the feasibility of an idea. I’m awash in it every time I see footage of a refugee talking about not being able to see their family or describing their poor living conditions.

Part of it has to do with the imposition of shame. When I go do a drug study I become a textbook example of “white coat syndrome” in that my heart rate and blood pressure will increase as I think about the implications of both getting into the study as well as failing. I’m not scared of doctors. I’m extremely anxious that several thousand dollars relies on 20 seconds of a cuff that displays misleading activity regarding my resting heart rate. The shame comes in when I wonder how I manage to get myself so worked-up at the pivotal time when people live lives of perpetual woe that face actual problems.

Here’s always the rub though, as people don’t find it particularly wise or helpful to compare yourself to others and their circumstances. “Your anxieties and worries are real and valid!” They’ll profess from friend to therapist alike. “Fix what you can, don’t stress about what you can’t!” They don’t know any more than I do about how to fix something and their lives are often filled with considerably more stressful and time consuming concerns than I try to adopt. So often “life” is to be blamed or “history” or many people are frankly “unlucky.” Working in cahoots with those sentiments is the idea that “change doesn’t happen overnight.”

We’re a species of hypocrites and contradiction. This is taken as short-hand gospel for the dispelling of shame. We can talk about “human rights” till we’re blue in the face and be aware of maybe 2 places where we consider them under threat and would struggle to name a dozen that we’re supposed to be exercising as “free citizens.” We endlessly consume stories about the strength and importance of friends and family as we hunker down in lonely corners of the world and check-in from time to time. We can organize a team of nerds to thread the needle of placing a car-sized rover on Mars, and in the celebration, go in for the high five and miss theatrically.

When it’s our responsibility we want to believe it can’t happen now. When “society” gets invoked, we point to the immediacy of terrorist threats, environmental disaster, and economic woes. We begrudge a lack of budget, will, responsibility, or clarity on what to do moving forward. A story that illustrates this is a group at IU recently delivered a petition to make the campus a “sanctuary zone” for undocumented immigrants going to school. The comments under the article were terrible. Why should THE TAXPAYER be responsible for THESE ILLEGALS! WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY! YOU’D BE CRAZY TO DEFY THE REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP!

This method of viewing the world as it is right outside the tip of your nose I simply hate. I’m not just unable to understand it. I think it defies being human. You carry yourself like a deer sipping from crocodile infested waters, opting for precariousness and being a reactionary because you disavow the other tools you have to dig a fucking well.

I’ve read any number of explanations about people like this. They prefer “order” and strictly defined roles. They have brains that are less plastic than their liberal counterparts. They’re “justified” in their fears, because the fear is real after all, so the things they do in service to those fears need to be swallowed. There are class distinctions. There’s artless apologetics and punditry. Most, if not all of these professions, only serve self-satisfied smugness. As long as you think you have the answer, the waves you send out into the world must be dealt with on their own merits and your responsibility to them dies.

The question on my mind is how do you shame a nation? We elected Hitler 2. We have no capacity for shame. The protests aren’t shame. The myriad explanations aren’t shame. The naïve nostalgia and nose thumbing certainly aren’t shame. How do you force a perspective that isn’t bred out of increasingly horrific circumstances? It’s not just the U.S. It’s the rising right-wing in other nations as well. It’s the stronghold money has on government in general. Our human cultural anti-bodies are in full attack mode against ourselves, and worse, they seem to be growing.

It’s such a stupid giant pendulum swinging from one extreme to the next. WE’RE AFRAID KILL THEM ALL! EVERYONE CAN BE TAKEN CARE OF WE JUST REFUSE TO DO THE MATH! I WANT TO GO BACK TO THE 1950’s! I WANT TO LIVE ON MARS RIGHT NOW! I BUILT EVERYTHING I OWN! NOT THE ROADS, TRUCKS, BUILDINGS, TAX LAWS, AND CULTURAL ATTITUDES, FUCKO!

You don’t speak about protecting a few hundred “illegal” students in terms of the budget when your campus erects new buildings almost every year. You shouldn’t shit your pants about finding the money when you disregard the rise in tuition and student debt. You don’t talk about what’s “illogical” about your defiance of your DEMOCRATIC leadership, if you don’t agree their position qualifies as being a leader worth respecting.  You always have to chase back the problem in order to remain internally and externally consistent. People don’t start from a point of coherence, so the things that come out of their mouths are every ounce of doublespeak they feel deserving of respect and consideration.

Do we even have a “pure” democracy so we can actually attempt to gauge what should be “legal” and “illegal” regarding students and their immigration status? No. Are we insulated from the “tyranny of the masses” that might help explain the electoral college? Absolutely not. Do we spend massive amounts of taxpayer money subsidizing projects that die slow painful deaths and inflate big business coffers? Way more than anyone should ever feel comfortable with. The irony being, if we paid attention, we could not only cut back on waste and government oversight/lobbying, but we could conveniently pay to protect human rights *shrug* and provide an environment where we could raise people to be more informed and coherent at a fraction of the cost.

We don’t for deliberate reasons that you exercise every time you refuse to chase “your opinion” back to something fundamental. I tie us to together with my knowledge about how our brains fail us. I tie us together by your clichéd habits and ideas. I tie us together by mentally putting myself in a refugee camp and thinking “I don’t like this, what do I need?” It’s not even hard to imagine. It’s not some grandiose and complicated math equation. It’s basic shit for basic bitches.

I’m all the more emboldened to learn how to self-sustain. I can do the most good in the world when I create the means for which I can live and translate that to someone else. I think this is the grand underlying failure of modernity. We don’t care to teach so we forgot how to learn. You learn with an open mind and it’s spurred on by a deep curiosity for what you don’t know. It’s the alternative way to seeing positive change when you’re devoid of shame. What a nuclear option looks like to invigorate and encourage, I have no idea, and my chest tightens with the idea it may involve actual nukes.

When I think about my contradictory nature, I have no clue how I could be moved to become as intractably ignorant as the rest of the species. I often talk about being “on the level.” It’s not the highest pillar. It’s a balancing act. I know the worst demons of my nature and I know the best of me that I rarely ever get to live up to. If we’re just mathematical simulations, then I watch my life as it travels and sometimes diverges from the mean. It’s being open enough to not let your mind fall out and conservative in a way that isn’t hoarding. It’s thinking all lives matter and respecting why a minority group’s interest doesn’t lie in agreeing with you. It’s not demonizing people for the actions of a radical few. It’s not getting lost in poorly defined parameters of alleged social acceptability. It’s pursing your personal goals through the window of the rest of the world. It’s respecting what about you has been shaped and when you’re doing the shaping.

You don’t get there without paying attention. You can’t pretend you’re the only car on the road as you complain about traffic. If your favorite movie made 100 million dollars, maybe your interests aren’t that complicated or novel. Maybe everyone is just a different version of you that isn’t having some need met because you remain unwilling to take the time to figure out what those needs really consist of.

You’re never just killing yourself. You’re never just wasting your own potential. And I feel it. I’ve heard plenty of times where I can stick my dreams and ideas. My personal concerns are every ounce of privileged. And yet, all I can do is talk about how broken my community is. It takes my breath away trying to account for the dripping hatred and ignorance we protect. I’m not merely suggesting every single one of you should be writing and imploring each other. It’s necessary for our survival. You have to try harder. You have to fumble over the words. You have to identify what matters and how you’re going about it. It can‘t be private. You can’t be embarrassed. We are ending ourselves because we’re not sharing what matters.

[549] The little Things

A lot of time is spent extolling the virtue and utility of “the little things.” It could be a returned wallet. It could be a smile and wave to the person looking sad. Every few months there’s a video of someone handing out gifts to the homeless or a tale of someone in a tight spot goes viral because people rallied together to help them. The story goes that as long as we are able to identify and draw inspiration from these things we can’t be all bad. In fact, things are “basically good” despite the excuses that try to explain away those who don’t return the wallet, are homeless, or why they ended up needing attention and crowd sourcing. It’s a celebration of personal hardship or charity that society glombs onto to carry on classic conceptions of virtue.

I’ve shaken off my regard for the little things. Particularly in the age of the internet, it’s easy to get lost in saintly videos as often as you choose to run from any guilt about not appearing in your own. With donate buttons we think of ourselves as trickling in streams of goodness that contribute to an overall whole we can be proud of. We think we’re setting an example. We think we’re making a difference. The hallmark statement of this idea is, “If I can only reach just one person then I’ll know my work made a difference.” Of course, the business of protecting and promoting the idea makes sure to indeed find that one person to keep testifying to all the difference you made.

We’re running right up against the problem with it now though. We elected Hitler 2. We chose fascism. Our moral center is orange and racist and, if only ignorant, were it not a pathological liar. Ten seconds on your facebook and you’ll see sad faces, smug memes, typically ridiculous arguments, more fingers pointed than hands to house them, consoling music videos, somber poetry, and everything that comes along with being in shock. People express how much they love you if you’re being targeted. They’re rallying in the streets. They’re hashtag campaigning. They’re searching for every inch of hope and even conspiracy to assuage the fear that it’s not as bad as it looks.

What you don’t see is people identifying the hard moral failings that amount to any kind of proactive accountability or truth. They can’t disavow love; the myth will carry them through. They can’t voice the word fascism because, how would we get WWII if the Germans had Netflix!? Things are different, you reactionary! They know nothing of how charity works or how the money is spent or why the government got so disengaged that it’s charity’s burden to pick up the slack. They don their own empty professions of the real revolution because it takes something as bad as mortal fear to provoke action at all, let alone hints at action that matters.

It’s a swirling steaming pile of the little things. It’s scattered and scraggly Occupy camps running ritual snapping and yelling games to help appease their nerves. I would argue it’s not even in good faith. These people flock from their conservative origins, for good reason, not because they wanted to engage and transform the landscape, but because they wanted to pursue their story in a place where they’d mostly be left alone to do so. They retreated to a cutthroat world of selfishness and celebrity and donned the pretentious and condescending armor needed to survive. They adopted the words “struggle” and “hustle” like the road to Youtube or tech start-up stardom amounts to more than waste and privilege. They thought they could escape to the beauty of the mountains or the sea and put away all complicated communal concerns.

There’s a frequented theme in arguments online regarding condescension. It’s an attitude I’m certainly sensitive to. It’s often the first line of defense if someone fashions themselves as old and wise or part of the “real society” that sees their contribution and raises you their finger. Ultimately though, when one opts to dive behind the walls of condescension they predicate it on a presumed knowledge. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is the tool they use to smash your pathetic attempt to use your voice in a way they don’t agree with or understand. We must be careful here not to assume it is de facto correct knowledge. We must make pains to distinguish “personal truths” when trying to ascertain knowledge. Knowledge in this instance acts like a smokescreen for power. It’s a swing for the fences that, in its mind, knocks you out the park the moment it’s employed.

We can make the analogy a little easier though; it tries to be the gun in the knife fight. The thing about guns is that they don’t usually come preloaded. If we react to the gun’s very presence and shut up or run away, you win. If we call your bluff with our own gun, we lay the foundation of a situation that plays out in a complicated way. That is, if you actually have knowledge and things pop off, it’s maybe a spray of bullets they aren’t going to come up from. It’s maybe a standoff where you trade smack talk and both leave alive and unsatisfied. Or maybe you both get shots in and limp away to address your wounds because, damn, that shit was loaded.

Of course you never have to shoot someone. You don’t have to raise the stakes by leading with often deliberate misunderstanding and overreaction, but how often does it go differently? How often are you allowed to make your point, have it acknowledged, and be offered a counter or subverting idea and given the time to consider it? I know I’m often accused of being the first one to pull my gun. I don’t just start shooting though. I ask why you don’t recognize it’s a water gun. We’re talking patience and etiquette dynamics. Why does it seem so easy to analogize interpersonal relationships and conversation with weaponry in the first place?

And then those questions become the most disarming thing. Because with one turn of phrase you realize the other person is speaking your language. The problems even finding that first page together, I guesstimate erases 90%+ of the positive potential for conversation. It’s much easier to unfriend. It’s much easier to block and down vote. There’s an emotional reward for curtailing your view of the world into a box of likes and frequent searches. You’re willing to indulge and positively remember your own virtue than believe in someone else’s.

They say the little things add up, but no one is doing the math. Maybe you’re marching for civil rights so you dress nice so they can’t call you thugs. You stay peaceful so your aggressors get painted as such. And then what? You get a bill that’s politically expedient. You didn’t change their minds about you. You’re still in danger. You get to watch parts of that bill get rescinded. You get to watch white people invent all sorts of new ways to keep you out of the process. They got to keep doing big things. They determined the long term consequences. The story gets rosier or blood red depending on what type of scale you’d like to measure.

Let’s state it another way. You may no longer be slaves, but humanity has not disavowed slavery. You may not use the word slave to describe your station in life, but if you didn’t maintain it, for most “working class” Americans, there’d be nothing but pain or death. Your simple pleasures and escapes, your faith, your fandom, your indulgences, your retreats, your inscrutable love, none speak towards changing your status. Enough little things certainly do add up, but it’s only to placate your little mind in your little world. It’s the ethics of the slave. You can’t escape so you turn servitude into virtue. You make sacrifice your God. It makes sense; it is survival, if nothing else.

You don’t know the language or the form of Big Things. You don’t know Big Brother peaking over your shoulder. You don’t know Big Business and what it’s interested in. You hand over complicated questions about your direction or morals to Big Religion (although increasingly less so) because you’re learning how to incorporate its big ignorance and assurances onto your little list of self-satisfaction. Big History cares not about Martin Luther King Jr.’s arc. Big Academia will retain the paper from which you should assert your knowledge and worth. Big Paper Money will tell YOU what it’s worth, not the other way around.

You buy in. You make celebrities not just lucky and talented bars to clear, but larger than life Gods to emulate. You transfer the power of your intention and intrigue into what they eat and wear. You follow follow follow follow, like like like like like until what’s left of you is a brief reflection from a screen before your device powers on. You can’t slow down because it’s always updating. You can’t stop to think or you’ll be out of the loop. You can’t learn to engage with it another way because you can’t recognize invitations to and someone in Silicon Valley is designing an app to make sure if you don’t like to read and even Spark Notes is too much for you, the gist of Pride and Prejudice will one day enhance your life in the time it takes to drink your morning cup of fair trade coffee.

You think it will go on and on indefinitely like your online world goes on and on indefinitely. That’s the saga of “infinite growth” when we discuss unfettered capitalist economies. It’s the short-term memory that celebrates greed and mocks the memory and pain of pursing forgiveness. It’s the insecure lashing out at the idea of being challenged or wrong because your bubble is equal to my bubble, let’s put the pins away. It’s superficiality now so normalized the institutional memory of moral truths and deep relationships lay amidst the barren bones of dating profiles. Lost little selves playing in the sprinkler of our abductor’s lawn.

As long as you’re willing to acknowledge your place and go down dancing, I have less of a problem with you. When you start to pretend your little mind with its little ideas and little selfish pursuits speak towards genuine change and care, I’m happy to argue until my head pops. When you think you’re doing a Big Boy job that rests the weight of his fellow man on his shoulders and it’s them, those disgusting others who don’t get it to the point you’re unable to see your shared language and circumstances, I’ll drive a car right through that dispositional living room.

The first step to potential progress is self-imposed guilt. It’s sadness about all you do not yet know. It’s feeling every second of time you’re not speaking to something larger than yourself. It’s blaming yourself for your fascist nature, your lazy complicit lives, and your fearful emboldened ignorance. Then you get to start seeing how it’s affecting others. Then you get the silver bullets in your gun. The alternative is to remain as small and selfish as your martyred idols. They died for a truth you felt and you think you heard, but never found out how to discover yourself. They rose to the level of a Big Deal as far as your little mind could conceive of it.

Power is fluid. If you’re not paying attention you won’t notice until you’re drowning. Your idols are not powerful. Your love is not powerful. Your God is not powerful. Your words without defense and understanding are not powerful. Your protests are not powerful. Your personal truth is not powerful. Power cares not about your opinion. Power cares nothing for your intentions. Power has no morality. Power is something to be recognized. Power is something to be shaped. The exercise of the mind attempting to do so has to come before. The honesty and humility it takes to house and transfer power need to be found in their own right. The ways we’re choosing to go about this election reminds me time and again that you have none.

[548] Heil Hitler 2!

Does anyone else just feel stuck? I mean, there's a reason so many of us graduated and went on to do random ass things after years of searching and moving. There's a reason your job doesn't pay you a living wage and you're still shacked up with roommates or parents. There's a reason you're either holding an ephemeral job or 4. There's a reason I ever persuaded myself to do drug studies.

There is no magic pill that brings back manufacturing as long as China remains a country. There is no trust you can hold about the numbers they use to judge the economy when they leave out the details and the world of betting and fake money is 3 times larger than anything tangible. There's no reason to suggest things aren't going to be as bad if not significantly worse putting an abject lying racist failure on the throne, because that's what we've turned it into.

I don't take kindly to victim status. I'm not any of the classic minorities that got white dick slapped, and I still feel scared and stuck. Not because I walked outside and everything wasn't burning, but because I saw the true colors of sheer depravity and ignorance that "holds it all together." I don't believe there's opportunity. I don't believe we'll be anything but dressed up indentured servants indefinitely. Nothing in my reading of history or human psychology gives me fuck all for hope. Perpetual coping and excuses, sure.

I've never accepted the complacent and complicit slave mentality. I've never taken horrible atrocities and ignorant feelings for granted. I've never hidden behind my ignorance and asked for you to respect it as a "difference of opinion." This is what's going to be fed to you. Politicians are going to try to make you feel good and tell you to believe and look to the small things you can do. It won't help.

We've failed or are currently failing "popular" uprisings. We've flirted with criminalizing journalism. We have a fascist who admires the methods Putin puts in place to garner 90%+ approval ratings. Don't you dare trick yourself into thinking this is normal. This is literally how dictatorships happen. They persuade persuade persuade berate berate berate and then start to punish. It's slow. It appears holding hands with the faces you recognize and admire. They don't know any better than previous societies.

I don't think I've ever felt this bad about our position in life and all I do with my time is read about how bad things really get. I don't know what my next 2 months looks like. I don't know that I want to risk getting saddled with a terrible job that eats my time and makes me miserable. I don't know if I want land in the heart of redneck country. I'm not prepared to cope with the first day pundits are sitting around looking scared after Hitler 2 proposes some restriction on the media or throws out a name of some country to exploit. What are you gonna do?

Of all the plodding and excuses and rationalizations you're going to hear over the next several...forever, make sure you're particularly keen on the false equivalence. False equivalence is your God now. It will tell you we all have opinions. It will tell you to respect. It will tell you to obey laws. It will make you believe that's an inch you can gain in the mind of your oppressor. False equivalency is the moral slave holder. He doesn't beat you, feeds you real nice, and keeps the rape to a minimum, so don't you see? There's hope the white people will come around! Don't lead with the idea that you're a slave first though, that's just going to confuse things.

We no longer have the capacity to judge truth. Well, I do. The most terrified and unable to sleep or shut up people in your life probably do. But if you trust your reasoning, you're not paying close enough attention. The moment I say something that hasn't actually happened, Hitler 2 hasn't actually said, or reference some point in history that isn't well documented and has parallels both today and in other societies, call me batshit. Tell me to be reasonable. Tell me you can't take my exhaustive insistence that we're all insanely fucked. But you're gonna have to wait until I'm out of FUCKING EVIDENCE.

I remember way back when getting pissed the fuck off while getting pissed the fuck drunk with Brett while we were sitting around his backyard discussing who was running. He said he was thinking Hitler 2 because of some of the things his stepdad I believe was showing him. The first thing I said was "Brett, you're not a fucking moron, right?" Because Brett's not a fucking moron. Brett's one of the nicest and hardest working people I know. But Brett is human. Brett wants to believe in and trust his family members' opinions. Brett's subjected to the time restraints of his chosen field and might not be able to spend months and months on research and documentaries about specific problems.

You are not immune. You aren't better than whatever your brain can trick you into. If you're naturally happy, this is a shitty time to be alive because you're going to compel a lot of your friends to not be afraid. If you're comfortable as long as you have your videogames and pizza, every dumbass thing you say is going to confuse or obscure what's happening and whether there's a way out.

You still have that hope though, right? You still feel it like I did in thinking to buy this land. You thought that even if your job sucked or you've grown resolved to your depressed consumer existence, that 30 would be the new 20 and we'd figure out a Renaissance. You still think because your nice friends have yet to be targeted in an attack and your beautiful scenery isn't off limits for environmental reasons that things will pan out. I know you do. I know you want it to carry you.

Every time you lean on it, listen close to what its making you ignore. Pay attention to what it's stopping you from reading or saying. Hear the voice that keeps you up at night because it's there and it's real and you're only as wrong and bad as you allow yourself to be.

[547] All Or Nothing

I think I’ve stumbled into a new way to describe my kind of person.

When I was a child, I knew specifically what I did or didn’t like. I ate the same foods over and over. I watched specific kinds of movies and shows. My toys had to be arranged in a certain way. The videogames I played had to pan out a specific way or risk being reset. It’s a kind of confidence and certainty. It may have sprung up from an offshoot of obsessive-compulsiveness.

I’ve also been very slow to change. The personality traits that had me locked into thinking there was a “just and proper” way to go about my affairs didn’t start unraveling for a very long time. While you were underage drinking, I took pride in being the adult and moderating the music noise level. While the whole group wants to get Chinese food, I’d break off and pick up a burger and meet you a few minutes late.

I applied it to my interactions with people, and certainly to a large extent still do. Either you’re someone I get along with (or perhaps was trying to hook up with) or you’re a stupid pawn to be played with, annoyed, or set to some other dehumanizing endeavor. When I decided to have “friends” the slurry of blogs trying to account for the totality of what the word would mean sprung forth.

If you didn’t know, one thing I used to do as a kid was write down animal names. I got it in my head that I liked animals so I wanted to know what all of them were. I’d go through all my school books, magazines, calendars (What? Oh right, pre-internet), and eventually encyclopedias because more people than you think had a collection of them. I can’t count how many notebooks I filled with every inch of each page inked. If I wasn’t positive I had already written a name down I figured better safe to have it twice than not at all.

Then one day, in the middle of an encyclopedia, I abruptly stopped. It hit me that I was never going to collect them all. I’d never bothered to ask the stupid question “why” was I collecting these names. I wanted them. It wouldn’t have even been proper to call it “an interest in animals.” I was hooked on owning and experiencing all the names. It’s the same compulsion that made me turn in a report on Texas with a list of every city in Texas, despite my teacher telling me not to, because I couldn’t wrap my head around how you understand or want to hear about a state if you don’t even include the cities!

It was all or nothing. My teacher was either going to take everything I had to offer or I wasn’t going to accept her irrational lower grade for not following her instructions. I had to pursue every animal or why should I think you’re going to believe me when I have something to say about them? (One smart-ass friend of my parents doubted I had every bird in some book they showed me so I spent the rest of the night there copying them just to spite her.)

Do I have any idea where it came from? Not really. Does it likely mirror someone else’s odd psychological condition as a child? Almost certainly. What sticks out to me though is how much of it I still feel today and how it characterizes what I choose to do or work on. I’ve spent 2 thousand dollars so far on a tool to account for ALL of the articles and books I might read to make compelling arguments and stories. I read every Guardians of the Galaxy comic before I saw the movie. (Which I don’t suggest you do.) I completed every IMDB top 250 movie and have set my sights on 1001 movies to see before you die. Even with shitty TV shows I find myself compelled to see every episode if I started it so I can get the full, rounded, and proper perspective on it.

It characterizes my relationships. We’re either equitable intelligent and confident friends or you’re livestock. We’re either honest with each other, or I’d rather be alone. It has me thinking considerably harder about what levels it is or isn’t healthy to have, what some might refer to as, “standards” for interaction. I hate small talk, so I don’t do many if any small gatherings with new people if we’re not getting drunk. Hell, with alcohol! If you’re at a party not getting drunk, what the hell are you doing at the party!? Ride or die or stay the hell home. Mom can have a night out at the Lucky’s food court if she doesn’t want to run around naked and puke in the hedges.

If you tell me you’re into human rights and journalism 2 days after Nelson Mandela dies and you can’t opine on apartheid or how you want to approach your stories (true story) I don’t believe anything about you. If you tell me you’re into videogames and are “pretty good” at Halo and you’ve spent 15 hours a day on it for the last 10 years, why aren’t you trying to be the best in the world!?  You cook? BE THE BEST COOK, KNOW ALL THE RECIPES. You’re a fan of some actor or director and have only seen 2 of their movies? You love to read and everything you list comes off a high school required reading list? (I read every book on my 7^th grade reading list at least.) Where’s the push to do more, do it all, or be the best? Where’s your soul clambering to get through and connect with something that sparked your interest?

You don’t see many people whole-assing it. Or they do it in spurts for something like a Halloween costume or DIY project they know will make it to the top of reddit for a day. Or maybe they’re king of the office or queen of the novelty and niche forum. My step-mom crafts, for example. But that’s cheapening it. She sees something someone else has done and makes money off of and she wants to figure out how. You make flowers out of melted down records? Who cares if she can make perfect crocheted dolls that fetch a nice price, awesome jewelry, tapestries, scrapbooking things and so on, she wants that skill too, and then the next thing. An aside, my excitement at an opportunity to invest in and help cultivate that proclivity was recently thrown in my face (not by her).

There’s a plain of existence you can inhabit that just expects more. The dialogue should take weeks or strive to be so explicit people get confused by the accuracy. The reading might take months. The perspective should be yours and contain more than, “It was good, I thought the characters were cool and funny,” “It was just a suggestion; I don’t  konw where it came from, but I guess there it is.” What you’re doing in life can be so broadly comprehensive you can make a case for the moral realignment of society. Your effort and dedication can be a source of inspiration to create and reflect and stand for something real. Or, you can tread water. You can make the excuse, and call where you are “comfortable.” When you allow yourself the responsibility to oversee exponentially increasing implications, I can take a day off from thinking everything’s my fault!

For me, it genuinely helps in getting through problems and deciding who or what I want in my life. Relationship a lie? No use pining the illusion. 1 in 5 of your friends always or merely talking about living sustainably? Better pay what it costs to actually secure the land. Concerned about communication and whether people can even recognize what’s worth respecting and talking about? Opine, share, and reply precisely when provoked and pursue diatribes like these as a form of dress-rehearsal. I’m either giving you all of what I feel or think or I haven’t given you a damn thing. I’ve just shuffled information along like a brain dead zombie because it was incidentally infectious.

Don’t be zombies, people. When I get my house in order and send out the invites 6 months in advance to party and offer to pay for your gas or plane ticket to rob you of any and all excuses, I’m gonna know when you’re too old or bland or dead for me. I won’t be rude and keep inviting you, essentially shoving my energy and expectations down your throat. But I will have a little memorial for what you once were and what was so great about it. I don’t want to learn how to interact with college kids again to find anyone with hope or time. I don’t want people dragging their feet through my life like they do theirs.

So, my kind of person is one that recognizes when and why they’re uncompromising so they can spend the rest of the time pursuing an avenue genuinely and exhaustively. They’ve searched and thought long and hard for examples of what celebrates and extends who they are. They respect all that they can mean to someone else and all the different sources of inspiration and creativity that helped comprise them. Otherwise, you’re the arbitrary compulsion or an insatiable hole. Nothing that will speak to anything I care to hear.