[514] Full Stop

It's getting very hard not to have any problems. I'm not hungry. I'm not in bad health. Even if I've lost my youthful sheen it's hard to conceive of myself as ugly. I have way too much stuff from instruments to electronics. I have enough time to watch 60 TV shows and read several books every week. If I can keep the lie going, I make and manage friends very easy. I've got a college degree. I've been able to experiment as an entrepreneur. My dad looks out for me.

I can still make it sound like what plagues me is the worst place in life to be. I don't even have to cheat and claim depression or anxiety. My "sense of being" is one that fixates on whatever is wrong. I don't believe this happens because I enjoy getting worked up in some kind of emotional fervor. In fact, it mostly just sets in as a sort of added house guest in a space meant for one less person. This is in contrast to anxiety. It picks at you like maybe your best friend might who spits on your arm while they talk, and yeah it sucks, but after 20 years you kinda just wipe it off down your pants and move on. It's the thought out of nowhere during a nice dinner with your spouse or closest friends that you're all gonna die one day. You're going to immediately laugh at the next joke, but fuck your dumb brain, right?

And what if it's not just an errant thought? What if it has become a way of life? You impress upon yourself to approach most everything and everybody in life from that sort of high stakes place? You might even call it a form of desperation. There's thirst, and there's dehydration. You crave opportunities to be awash in life-affirming and honest interactions because for you, the drought is real.

I think people like to believe their perspective is their savior. They assert it when dismissing each other. They lean on it in claims about their happiness. They draw from personal wells of wisdom. To flash the badge of your perspective grants you access to every level of human coping ability. I'm doing it now. I usually rush to diminish or disqualify my perspective because I recognize it as one part to a whole. I reinforce that I acknowledge writing is my coping or "shit" or "very small window" into the world. I don't want you to think I believe I have special license. I don't want you to find something about me compelling or convincing to tragically and ironically leap right over actually thinking about how I feel.

Are those the words to help me discover a problem? People peeking their head in, having a particularly insufferable time given modern conditioning of our attention spans, and glancing at, dismissing, or abusing my ideas for inappropriate or opposite ends? Are my ideas like guns? There's no clearer definition of an object than a gun to efficiently kill someone, but the language of protection and "rights" is endlessly appropriated to keep it polished as something else. Now so shiny we can't really see it anymore but for the bodies it leaves behind.

It's one thing to have an extra house guest that keeps to themselves quietly reading in the corner. Unfortunately, this one is very chatty. Has a lot of opinions. One might say is unable to help himself from blurting out how cramped it's getting. And you know what? The others tend to agree. But what are they going to do? They invited him. He can usually be pretty fun and engaging if you know what you're getting into. Certainly no one is suggesting murder...

I gave my perspective up. I forsook what I used to argue fairly convincingly as not really having any problems. I left it up to friends. I turned my back on it as it drowned in pools of horrifying news. I begrudged my confidence and short memory for the institution of time-honored words and their bottomless capacity for undue connotative pride. It's where people love each other under a ceaseless deluge of timeless positive qualifiers, or "because." It's the place where your "best effort" and "latest attempt" become synonymous. It's an ethos of "overlap" because the tricky and incomplete nature of, if perhaps sometimes philosophically unsound, scientific discernment causes too many headaches. Who cares if facebook says we're friends? We're friends! Keep calm and click along.

We rise to the capacity of our tools. Why have the bomb or guns if we can't figure out how many people they can really kill? How can we be sure we've the capacity in our emotional magazines to appreciate hatred unless we're given opportunities to fawn over increasing numbers of the dead? Aren't we learning our lessons? "These are problems! These are problems! But alas isn't it clear!? We get to have problems! Purpose! Something to fix, and it's not us" If it's not, you, then who? Pick your scapegoat.

I still get blamed for things though. It's very clear that other people feel capable of informing me how many problems I actually really do and truly have. My style sucks, how I talk or don't care to dress. My disposition is all over the place, but mostly wrong or inappropriate. I don't do enough. For all my words, what have I fixed? What am I working on? Whose life have I made easier? Couldn't I donate more of my time? Aren't there things left to sacrifice in service to each other? Isn't the world burning down somewhere? Are you even human or don't you feel connected to the rest of it?

Now we turn into a whirlwind of confusion. Is being confused a problem, though? I have these words, these weaponized perspectives, aimed squarely at me. As a general rule, if I'm professionally unsure about much of what I think, just how far should I run with their ideas? Do they want contrary examples? Experience shows to offer those at your peril. Are they just trying to help? I mean, did they even consider that I maybe really don't have a problem?

It's many more questions than answers, right? That's the nature of that extra guest in a space meant for one less. The only way you ever get to feel comfortable is engaging and accepting the guest. You might find yourself lost in the good way in conversation. You might find the space feels larger as you become drawn to each other. Eventually, with enough practice, you might become so self-aware that you realize you're fictional people in one asshole's ongoing analogy.

I think stabs at genuine friendship are invitations to that guest. We only tacitly accept them again at our peril. It's why I'm generally willing to burn the whole house of cards down that many of my friendships take. I'm a very confused and talkative man in the corner rarely finding the company willing to discuss how cramped it truly is. I'm a party to your happy homes and c'est la vies. It's perfectly uncomfortable.

If only to defy myself, what problems might I invent? Maybe I can discover one by poorly framing ones that I could adopt. Here's one, I can't make people try. Whatever would have made me think I could? I've carried on about my capacity to "manipulate" for years. You certainly don't discover you don't have problems without it. People get cheeky or the giggles recalling someone who could always talk their way out of or around something. Angling yourself for achievement or safety in the world isn't categorically wrong. So then maybe the problem is that I have a few bad ideas about people, their capacity or definitions of trying, or have turned the word manipulate into something too obscure. Well now we're just pulling philosophical word play games and that's as easy to fix as a slap to the face.

Maybe a problem could be that I want to be understood? That's hard to really qualify as well. When were you more terribly feeling than under the abuse of your mom or under the confines of love for someone in high school? In very important ways you certainly got over those, right? Your mom is insane and can't understand really anything. The girl certainly didn't empathize with you and hindsight speaks her wisdom and or luck. Do you really give a shit if you're understood? You don't discover that you don't have problems unless you knew there were people that perpetually seem to understand you. Why do you need one more? What happens then? They devolve into the cycle of asking nothing questions to no one in particular like you?

What if it's a problem just to want at all? This is tricky. Something insists. In an undefinable sense, I want you to feel, I want you to read, I want you to try and see things. The first half of each sentence betraying the second. Why do I want, let alone want you to take responsibility? Why do I want to see my effort reflected back?

AHA! The problem is that I'm selfish!

I feel betrayed when I'm not recognized. Why did I bother coming to this plain of existence and start using your words to embed myself in all layers of your problems and perspectives if you've got no time for mine? What am I alive for? The problem dictates that I can't know without you. As long as you don't think of yourselves as not having problems, then I must resolve myself to looking like the fool to be poked, judged, or impressively ignored. Giving up on what I, at least once, saw in you as ideal or powerful or intriguing about us, is giving up on something that allows me to claim a problem free life. Perhaps in my selfishness I've been willing to give up too much too often or perhaps the wrong things entirely.

It's really hard to say. I've carried on about the wrong and right kinds of selfishness before. My perspective, though small, I've fought very hard to find. It won't go down in one blog and would certainly need the failure of more honest and fluid friendships to harbor greater insecurity. But at least we've maybe stumbled into a more illuminated problem I might adopt. I selfishly want for you. Should I stop?