This is my 500th blog over 12 years. I'll wait here while you sound the trumpets. If I'm evidence of even one thing before I die, it's that a lot can go through your mind, and probably most of it you shouldn't put online.
I wanted to write this because, in this moment, I'm not particularly moved by anything. I've also tied my blogger account to a ton of other social media outlets and want to come across even fleetingly normal, if you're a new reader, before you catch something that makes me look like a raving lunatic. I was building the idea of this blog up in my head, and decided to remove the stress by just writing so as to put it behind me. I wanted to provide something of a course overview of what you'd be studying in sifting through my blogs. I also wanted to talk about hate.
I wonder why we create. Lately, I've been thinking it comes from hatred. I think the harder you hate yourself, the more creative you can be. I phrase it as “hating yourself” because of a line I caught on a random blog that said “All hate is self-hate.” This, incidentally, is an idea I can agree with, and have written about in the past. Undoubtedly, the things I hate about life or other people are things I'm guilty of as well.
I find hate inspiring. In fact, most of what I write is a reflection on something I hate. “I” as a collection of hateful thoughts projected about the world, presumably because I think I would do it better or have some evidence in my own life as to the value of progressively differing. Once we move past the word itself you start to unpack the dozen tiny things about a conversation or excuse that bolsters the feeling. You dig up the history and cultural tide that has framed your discussion. With any luck, you start to engage with people who aren't going to blame you for the hatred you're feeling, and then will try to understand where you're coming from.
I started writing because I hated how a boy was treating a girl I liked. I continued writing because I hated what I was learning about religion and how people spoke to each other. I found mountains of hatred exploring how “loving” family and friends treated the offerings and people in their lives. As I get older I get to hate what I used to have and changes I can swear are making us worse off. I don't know if I'll ever stop hating silence and excuses, be it for hangouts and texts or how you treat something of greater consequence. I once described myself as always feeling “on.” It may be stated another way, that I'm always aware of what I hate.
That awareness begets need. I need to write. Whether I pat myself on the back for 216 followers on one profile, from hearing admissions that you like to get drunk and read my stuff at night, or from some other form of emotion or connection you've found in me, I'd still have to write. It's why I've always struggled to consider this “content” like I sat down and formulated some plan to keep you engaged. Like I wanted to perversely promote as much as genuinely share how fucked I was feeling. The utility I've found in putting it all “out there” to be scrutinized line by line verses being a ball of stress and confusion is incalculable. Detailing where you're coming from and hope to go, even when you can see how it can fail, isn't mindlessly stumbling through the dark needing to fear the unknown.
Any line can ring a bell. That's something I consistently overlook in my criticism of the amount of “content” coming in from self-promotion junkies. In a significant way, you are what you're beholden to. If you're controlled by deadlines and desperation, before I care about some product you're hocking, I see you selling the value of deadlines and desperation. I feel like I'd have to stop writing if that were me. Lying, if it's not to save my ass from something terrible, is torture to me. This is where the blowhard ironic bad boy goes, “Yeah fuck these shoes, but they're paying me, so buy them. It's part of my shtick to shit on things before I sell myself out, so they're cool with it.”
I'm after the right kind of attention. I don't want to Kim Kardashian my way through Twitter “impressions” and delicately staged Instagram photos for likes. Popularity is a dangerous tool we seem to lunge after without a second thought. Why achieve “celebrity” status when you actively attempt to reduce yourself to something wildly unworthy of being celebrated? How attached do we become to our “brand?” How hard are we fighting to keep the pleasantries up by tailoring ourselves to what we think people will like?
I'm different. I don't throw up my middle-finger and scream I don't give a fuck in a socially irresponsible way. I just know how I feel when I feel it and talk. And that, I wouldn't mind getting more popular. There's reality television and professions of “realness” abound. I stand in contrast. I invoke only the small lens from which I can see the world. My persistent ask is for other people to do the same.
Within this reintroduction, I hope to promote the idea of change. I hope to always change in significant, but not arbitrary, ways. I was a fairly picky eater, and loosened up. I've made countless statements with regard to my shallow nature, but am fairly acquainted with alcohol. I ridiculed Candy Crush and Miley Cyrus and eventually had to admit they were not the enemy. I used to believe in what I grew up with, be it about family or love, and I can honestly say I'm better for having reasoned through many terrible assumptions that I think we are still culturally strangled by. I think the human mind needs the idea of progress even when the universe suggests indifferent balance or eventual obliteration.
So hello to new people I'll be courting through a more active sharing, and hello again to old readers who never or rarely do or speak to anything I ask, and wonder why I've found a new rigor for self-promotion. I hate much about the world, therefore I must hate much about myself, and I need it to be talked about like I talk about it.
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