[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.

[546] Equal This

I know I'll have to be careful because I'm angry and want to vent. I'm mostly confused and I think "offended." To maintain a basic level of respect or decency, to me, a certain standard of will and expectation has to be achieved. I don't mean that every person must rise to the same level as every other. I do mean, when the allocation of resources presumes fairness or the same access and opportunity are given, pains should be made to distinguish how each actor responded to what was given.

The equitable footing in this instance is my dad's good will and money. I responded by doing well in school, working several jobs on top of one another, getting my degree under protest, attempting to start a business, and now currently pushing to live efficiently, sustainably, and off-grid. On more than one occasion I've offered to pay back any money offered to me in service to my goals. I still feel burdened to pay friends for things they've helped me with or lent me. I've spent money in service to helping my step-mom and her business endeavors. I don't try to squander good will, leave favors unrepaid, nor unduly burden people with ridiculous asks I can't account for or that would leave them worse off.

To do absolutely anything in life takes an immeasurable confluence of forces, and most of them you can't control. You don't pick your parents or their income level. You don't pick how smart you are or if you can access tools for increasing your knowledge. You don't pick the job market you're thrust into once you get out of school. Despite the forces that may hold you back and the frankly ridiculous nature of your screwed up circumstances, you do control how and whether you approach them to try and do something better.

This means, while one minimum wage job is exploitative and unfair, you can acknowledge this and take up another one, or two, as many parents are forced to do when they put their child's needs above their own. This means that if you're living under someone else's good will and graces, you can mow their lawn, do their dishes, shampoo their carpet, and take the dogs outside. If it never occurs to you to do these things until the years of stress of watching you waste away playing Halo finally catches up, your keepers may be disingenuous, I consider you an asshole.

I managed to find that guilty spark. I never asked for anything that wasn't in service to what I genuinely believed would be opportunities to spread the wealth and opportunity. I didn't just want a business, I wanted enough money and time to help my friends not be middle-management wage slaves as well. I wanted to invest in tools that help condense and disseminate knowledge. I still want these things! And I want them before I'm too old to appreciate them, so I pick means of acquiring money that allows me to work on them the quickest.

I didn't go back home and expect dinner every night. I didn't think daddy and step-mommy should do my laundry and have a room prepared with video games at the ready. I didn't throw tantrums about what is or isn't fair in a setting where I didn't pay rent or for my phone or decide to go back to school. That's what the step family did. When I needed cash to complete the coffee kiosk, when I had the money to pay it back, I offered to. I didn't ask for a loan to help me pay my utility bills and then buy a fish tank, that's what the step family did. I wouldn't lie about some life emergency so I could dump my kids off at grandma's house because that's what the step family does.

When I had a marginal amount of extra cash I put it towards securing my stepmom a website for her crafting business. Good will I had thrown in my face when it was put to me that I was someone raised better than to shit on the kind of people my step family have shown themselves to be. Should you take a handful of terrible behaviors and use it to paint over anyone's being? Of course not. Would I pick these things were they not reminiscent of a series or speaking to a perpetual tradition of disrespectful and undeserving behavior? Not if I'm going to remain feeling justified in typing this out.

I hate the faux-equality game. It erases the identity of behaviors that are hard enough to discern, particularly in our modern political climate, let alone in a collective story of civility. It's poor "separate but equal" reasoning that leaves the person advocating for the general layabout piece of shit in terms reserved for the people who genuinely need a specific kind of help or deserve due consideration for their strained circumstances. I've worked hard, demeaning and exploitative jobs for years and never expected anything from anyone but respect for that and what I use my money in service to. The idea that I owe any kind of debt to someone offering less of themselves is sickening.

Here, you should make pains to separate genuine hard work and self-sacrifice from entitled bitching. I don't presume to deserve anything but acknowledgment. I saw through the lie of hard-work = success a long time ago. I hold no water for old white supremacists with no grasp on their lucky historical circumstances that inflate their ego and send them into a rage. I mean there are people out there really trying. I mean there are people out there who make genuine sacrifices and have worked really hard for their perspective and what they'd like in life. I mean there are people who don't even respect this fact about themselves, endlessly and tragically sacrificial, to the point where they welcome the bites from the beasts who feed off them.

I don't kill myself everyday pretending I'm God's gift to the betterment of humanity. I don't act like I've achieved any more or less than I have. But I will not forget those achievements or what it took to accomplish them. When I see that in the people you reward as though they've acted like me, then they might get respect. And perhaps I'll take a few more beats in considering what to make of garnering yours if I'm nothing more than the shit under shoes you invite to be traipsed through your living room.

[545] 3 Strikes You're Out

With the election drawing near, I’ve been thinking a lot about my immune system. Its contradicting name notwithstanding, the perpetual battles it engages to keep me alive is a marvel to behold. Whether processing the air filled with cancerous particles, navigating what accompanies my food, or keeping my spots clotted from picking and popping, it never gets a day off.

It also needs help. I had my shots as a kid so I wouldn’t develop old world diseases. When I shock the shit out of it by drinking too much or otherwise injuring myself, I’m desperate for a pill. My self-imposed guilt of eating poorly has me trying to boost my insides by massive increases in salad and exercising and dialing it back on the crap. 

This wondrous tool which has overcome countless illnesses and trained our human selves in the art of survival will still get overwhelmed. It’ll take on too much crap it can’t get rid of. It’ll miss connections or suffer catastrophic damage or some other competing cell system will find a way to corrupt it. As of yet, we’ve no way to escape this despite the futurists professing otherwise.

Scale it up, and I think of herd immunity. This is my concern for map making. I don’t know if the United States is a breed of animal that knows how to catch fascism and then find the proper medication. I then have to make the global herd appeal. Hitler didn’t take down the world. I wouldn’t expect Hitler 2 to be able to either. But would that kind of presidency act as a booster shot or form of cancer? Both can get you sick, but one in service to training you how to do better. The other taking over and corrupting until nothing we’ve devised can help.

My attitude towards my immune system is a lot like my political perspective. I do things to undermine it. I trust that the general system is still in fair working order. Sometimes I have to remind myself I’m still in my 20s because a minor ache or lesser ability to deal with hangovers can make you think you’re nearing the end by comparison. When I’m sick, I’m not the sickest. But I still have to take care of myself. I have to be mindful of what I allow into my body and into my head which translates into what comes out of my mouth and into my behaviors. You can drink too much, plenty of times. You can’t catch just a little bit of cancer.

I don’t know that we respect the difference. When you truly negotiate it has to do with taking manageable blows. When you’re fueled by ignorance and anger, you delight in destruction. You no longer get to borrow from the well of civilized words to discuss your grievances. People should treat you like dangerous children first, “politically opposed” far away in second, often if at all. Unfortunately and of course, they don’t. It’s because they’re “tolerant” and “polite” and “mature” etcetera. The effect on their health is too slow. Give them a pounding headache and they’ll rush for the pills. Couch an opposing grievance in rhetoric, showmanship, group identity politics, and genuine sympathy for relationships in their own life, they let the headache pound until they can’t see or think straight.

This is pretty old political and psychological news, by the way. A confused and angry population is easy to control. The myriad ways in which the mind is befuddled and tricked is literally built into our tools for survival and representations of the world. Our senses certainly don’t tell the whole story, nor are you capable of being aware of the millions of things that have to continue going right for you to keep acting in the world.

I suppose what bugs me so much is our lack of discernment. Destruction and death and sickness will happen. But why do we choose them so often? And I do mean to distinguish “often” from “at all.” Any glimpse into my inane fights online puts me in the same realms of “idiotic” things to do.

If you want to learn about the world, why pick the name-calling blowhard racist? Why do you trust his opinion more than the people out trying to do the work? Why pick your feelings instead of what actually helps? Anymore, I genuinely don’t understand it. I know we’re moving fast through history. I know we’ve resources our evolutionary history is ill-equipped to deal with. But the hallmark of our place in existence is our ability to adapt. It’s to learn and morph and change our DNA to tackle problems. How long should it really take the herd to learn from 2 different wars that we consider involving the entire world? Even if they didn’t we still figured that’s what was at stake. Just existing at all.

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The Cubs won the World Series yesterday. They did it after doing everything in their power to try and lose it. After the game, people said what an amazing series it was, how it’s one for history, and how people will be talking about it forever. They didn’t talk about whether it was nerves that made the Cubs forget how to infield. They didn’t talk about being down 3-1 and having smaller odds of winning than Hitler 2 becoming President. They emotioned all over the place. They celebrated in the streets. After 108 years, the out-pour, the release and celebration is all that was being offered. Sure, I’m a Cubs fan, and good for them.

I still find sports one of the loudest examples of our terrible discernment. We put so much effort into, even now inventing arbitrary stats and comparisons so long as we can follow them with “and that’s a new world record.” It’s an open secret that the “best” teams are often the ones who fronted the most money to buy up all the best players. It forces us to combine completely unrelated things into a shortcut identity that absolves us of any greater responsibility than to buy a ticket or jersey. I think when it comes to things to think about or spend time on, we genuinely would pick sports over functioning democracy. I find this unacceptable.

And perhaps as an aside, in some utopian vision of the future, I’d love for the worst thing we ever do to each other to be shitting all over a different areas’ team. If we had a hundred thousand more games a year and no war, consider me working to become the best sports fan ever. I’ve watched 3 Cubs games this year and still want to clap at strikeouts and yell at the TV per my culturally ingrained conditioning. It feels good. I get it.

We can’t keep picking sports. We can’t flirt so hard with getting cancer. We can’t keep “respecting” feelings. We can’t play pretend and with false equivalences that think like a child where evil is evil and that’s that so Hilary sucks and Hitler 2 is icky, but I like the slogan! Instead, understand what’s happening for what it is. Don’t be shy. Don’t be polite. You don’t have to be a rabid dog like the examples they are setting, but you are allowed to bite when someone literally threatens your survival. We toy around with the idea of who has the nuclear codes or whether it’s wise to refer to climate change in terms of “beliefs.” It means world war. This shit will kill you. It will kill your kids. It’s already killing others and their kids.

And let me clear, I’m only talking to the regular actual nice liberal intelligent people. This blog isn’t for the person who breaks their TV when their team loses. These words aren’t for people who talk to newscasters in clichés and through their incendiary signs and clothing. It’s for the adults in the room who, even if they’ve been waiting 108 years for their team to win, they still wouldn’t poison the other teams to get there.

I’m not trying to scare you or working to be convincing about the world. I’m relaying and reporting the unyieldingly obvious set of circumstances like a headache you’d take a pill for. And it really does give me a headache! It’s not pain I looked for. It’s not a choice I made like going out to drink. It’s the first stage of someone trying to kill me. Hitler 2 tried to take my thoughts by endlessly reciting his name, so I made sure he’d always be Hitler 2 to me. Greedy children poison water and mono-crop food, so I plan to learn how to garden and filter. We’ve been handed a very complicated and fast-moving economic and social system bolstered by infantile historical perspectives. So I try to share the absolute best materials I’ve read or watched to help cut through the noise and adopt goals that reshape our social and monetary responsibilities to each other.

You need a better grasp on who you really are as a part of the system. I’m a Cubs fan who feels compelled to find out how many of the players are even from Chicago and how much winning really costs. In an ideal world I could find deep connection and respect for my noises and gestures heaved at my symbolic brethren. Maybe the future will allow me to drink every day and remain in peak health! In the meantime, these mean times, I have to moderate. I have to be humble about my limitations. I have to take on even more responsibility for the example I’m setting, because unlike any other point in our history, I can go viral like cancer.

Are we only going to allow ourselves to see the celebration and feel the relief as we bask in the beauty of our collective achievement and identity!?  Or can we point out some peoples’ idea of winning is to scream while they destroy things and set cars on fire. Don’t let them get away with it just because you’re wearing the same human jersey. Your responsibility to the tribe needs to be more than you’ve given them to dictate your emotions and behavior. The stakes are the same every day and every year no matter what story someone tells you about some cursed goat they believe in.