[669] Perfectly Acceptable People

Perfectly acceptable people start out their day with one asking the other, “So, what do you want to do today?”

What follows is a perfectly acceptable day with perfectly acceptable goals, with accomplishments and tasks that happen in no specific order. Perhaps a visit to the winery? Should we walk the dog? Let’s prepare meals, and make sure to work out, but you said you wanted to shower and shave, and don’t forget to remind me to run by the house before we hit the mall. There’s a party, but no one’s going to be there until 9, but so and so hasn’t text back.

6 hours later, food has been made, a shower and shave have occured, and for the fourth time the same piano song has been played while the goings-on in the kitchen continue to go on. There’s no rush, there was no real plan, and there’s no harm and no foul. These perfectly acceptable people have time to kill, are basically on vacation, and have most of their monetary concerns covered by rental properties or parents.

Perfectly happy people laugh about their teenager friends and their weird comments or decision making. They run the dishwasher or start the blender to match, practically on cue, the second a noise comes from anywhere else in the apartment. The kitchen, despite the dishwasher running, will not be clean the next time someone returns to it. While one perfectly acceptable person continues to play, interrupted only to change into “let’s go” clothes, the other decides instead of going, better address taking the dog out instead, leaving the player to go back to playing.

It’s perfectly acceptable to have a lack of urgency, a delay in your intention, if agency at all, or to have no idea what you truly intend until you happen to find yourself pouring over something new like a thick slow glaze applied to a donut. It’s perfectly acceptable to not worry about just what it is you’re doing and how you are or aren’t responsible for it. To be perfectly acceptable is to just do, just laugh, just play, just make some noise and repeat yourself, never forget to repeat yourself.

Given that I’m not perfectly acceptable, every waking moment feels like a scene in a tragedy. I started going through a course on website creation, and then my predictions came true. In fact, the moment I started, so did the piano. If a confusing section came up, that’s when the blender started. It’s perfectly acceptable to play piano, to cook and use a blender, and it’s not theirs or my fault that on my forced day off in this tiny space is at once the time for their activities and mine. But it doesn’t work, and it can’t last.

You’re either happy, along for the ride, blindfolded and securely fashioned, ear muffs snug, tongue dry and crusty flapping in the wind, or you’re terrified and unhappy leaning over the side attempting to straighten out the rail and keep the bolts tightened so you all don’t die in some horrendous fashion. I see personal problems I can’t address but for the passage of time and sacrifice of my body. I see big whole-life issues I can’t even pretend to begin to address in any form of timely fashion. As far as everyone around me is concerned, that’s perfectly acceptable. It’s acceptable as Wheat Thins open and on the counter for weeks, because it’s a counter, after all, it holds things. Remaining open makes for easy access. As long as the Wheat Thins don’t fall off or through, everything is fine.

With the perfectly acceptable people out of the way, not without one last piano piece, I can finally pretend to have the focus and resolve to complete another pithy introduction into something I won’t have the time to understand or experiment with for a while. I’ll eye the book I’m not going to read when I’m done. I’ll hesitate to start one of the movies I planned to watch. I’ll think a little bit harder about the bottle of rum, but mostly, I’ll be perfectly unacceptable, by myself, doing everything in my power to find a reason that it can be regarded as perfectly acceptable too.

[668] Swan Song

If I had a plan, it might include the following things.

I'd use my next 2 days off to learn how to build a website that forms the basis of all the things I'm trying to do at once. The purpose of this website would be to organize and give me a landing page to promote what I seek or create in the real world. I'd find a better website than Udemy, which, the first course I paid for, managed to show itself not to be up to date and buggy. I'd attempt to utilize a domain name and hosting I keep alive, at an arguably completely unnecessary expense so far, and put out a “bad” beginner conception of what I'm after. I'd do all of this from my screen in the living room where undoubtedly the time I wish to use to focus and learn will be interrupted by slamming kitchen drawers, the same piano song practiced for hours, and the shouting of “ball, ball, ball, ball, ball, ball, ball, ball” for several more hours.

On this site I would list things I have for sale, things I need to get accomplished in order to make my house livable, a daily goal list, and integrate my hobbies. I've thought for a while about having something more personal and reflective of the integrated nature of the mind as something to market for people, with a lesson plan on how to alter it as they change and grow. Myspace was good about letting you change the code and integrate things to make it personal. I want you to feel like you can actually connect or help me without having to rely on you catching the right status at the right time of day. Though you’d as well ignore it as earnestly given you’re your own graves to dig.

That would be the first half of the plan. The next parts involve having money I don't.

My problem is a feeling of general helplessness. I don't care if that's overstated. It's still “the holidays,” which means even while I'm working, the numbers coming in are less than reassuring. Say I were bored and wanted to do more “little things” like sapling removal, the weather has made that impossible. I'm starting to again get headaches like I had when I was growing up. They're reminiscent of the “constant stress” that you take for granted is normal until you're old enough to read about and better define emotional abuse. I'm starting to get the impression that “existing” is becoming a problem again, though I know it's partly that I have few outlets for real discussion, and partly because the harsh annoying reality of my situation is bleeding into others' in too real a way.

I think I've expressed this to some extent in the past, but the issue is that I'm not confused about what I want and need. I know exactly how I'd spend my next $10,000 were it available to me. I know that, if I had nothing else, I was willing to take the floor and my tablet, and now coming home hoping for the couch and my TV are registering as an overstep. I feel like the dad who comes home from work, and his wife doesn't bother to cook dinner. Except here, the wife doesn't just not want to cook, but hogs the TV, runs the laundry in the middle of the night, and let's the dog shit in my boots. It's like the more you're ignored for your effort or that even the smallest amount of your needs aren't being met, it's not just getting more frustrated or angry, you just don't want to exist. I don't know what to do or say that won't end up in a fight. I don't even know how to experiment with making the situation better.

I knew all along how terrible “normal” working conditions and expectations were. All of the time I spent alone reading about the world was it's own kind of depressing for sure, but at least there, I could just look away. Things got better when I stopped shaping my mind with the horribleness of the world. Here, it's the more active physical participation in your own demise. I'm not building anything of value for myself by sitting in the ClusterTruck parking lot. I'm scraping together cash at the expense of literally my whole day if I rush to get chores or errands done in the morning and plan on less sleep. “Multi-tasking” in marathoning TV even feels cheap. If I didn't have the car beeping at me the entire time, I used to just find myself driving in silence, catching my reflection in my tablet looking disheveled and blank.

I paused the 3^rd installment of “Atlas Shrugged” the movie series to start writing this. To be sure it, like the other 2 movies, are pretty terrible. No matter your shorthand opinion of Rand, I still can't shake the impression her books left on me and think I empathize with the general sentiment expressed in her philosophy and lines from her characters. You need an individual mind behind things. You need people who are capable and willing to excel. You need to respect the degree in which the contributions literally power the world. Her characters were actual creatives and geniuses. They actually built things and understood their crafts. They weren't bestowed cash and donned smug smiles claiming to be the best after political worming and exploitation. Lesser-evil Paul Ryans exist in her world, while the heroes provided, and took pride in what they made.

I'm my mind first. My “labor” is as replaceable as anyone else with a car and the ability to refrain from screaming “fuck you” at annoying customers. If I can't get my mind right, I have nothing. If I can't be “happy” or “understood” in what I'm doing, how it feels, or how long it has to take, it's game over. I consider it a problem that I can't persuade myself to fit in more “good” behaviors to try and combat the “bad” of constant exploitation. It really would only cause more stress to try and be “fit” in the middle of the night after work. I might punch a trumpet through a window if I felt like I was making progress only to be interrupted by a stupid conversation from someone knocking at it. Is this me being “negative,” or another attempt to find peace and clarity? Go on, insist.

If I were less ambitious and found myself unable to part with more money for what is certainly information just as poorly related for free as it is “structured” in some online class, I'd finish the last half of this 3^rd volume of The Runaways comics, and maybe power through more Civil War. I'd compile and condense the information I've saved on reddit for years into action-plans going forward. You know, there are dozens, DOZENS, of solo-entrepreneurs with great niche ideas that just followed these 3, 5, or 12 steps to go from 0 to 100K within a year with barely the money or know-how before they started. Maybe I can discover how to be as smart as them. I might pop over to the land and see if the tarp I laid out has blown over or if I can find what happened to my Bioshock and Borderlands games. If there's not a noble reason like those, it'd just be a waste of gas.

If I discovered I actually hate myself more than I'm letting on, I'd just marathon shows with subtitles and recent movie releases. Then at some point I'd hit Wal-Mart to pick up the handful of ingredients to make 3 types of meals I'd prepare for the next week or two. I'd consider heavily on drinking about a 1/5^th alone and seeing if that motivates me to wander the bars in search of more poor decisions. None of this could begin until I had fully realized the first goal of pretending to be asleep well into the afternoon.

Time is moving too slow. I'll be lucky to feel barely comfortable by 30 at this rate. I'd have to find a way to shake off the psychological and physical damage of too much work. I'd be praying the entire time that I only have to pay for the bills that already exist or I can see coming. Every single day is going to be the same conversation about what “more” I could be doing and how my head is hurting or what I'd rather be doing. I was prepared for nothingness and monotony when the weather was good and I thought I was making progress on the house. Now I'm just digging myself out of tax holes, freezing and waiting, and begging for a mental “reason” my efforts were turned into thievery and destroyed supplies. I'm making stupid mistakes and oversights because I can't be bothered to add another layer of bullshit.

The only reason I'm even awake at 6 is because it's actual alone time! I used to like to stay up all night, it felt natural, before I realized how quickly that wasn't going to be compatible with working all day. Now I'm just risking throwing off my rhythm for the sake of some quite time. The noise is 3 paragraphs of me bitching earlier. Hours later I can bother to start thinking again. My whole life feels way too noisy right now.

I'm going to finish this movie and then go to bed. Spoiler alert, the heroes will return, and the motor of the world will start back up. Her characters got to run to a secret escape in the mountains. They got to live in service to their, in the movie, very poorly worded and fundamentally naive ideals. I've been reading along with it about how Rand alienated so many people who didn't understand or jive with her philosophy. I wonder if “my philosophy” is doing the same thing to me, except, I don't have one that isn't a kind of value for critical thought and truth that sees me catching shitty consequences or silence. You tell me, should I not be talking to you? Should I accept or better appreciate the level I currently inhabit? I'm only kidding, I know I have no one to talk to. I know you think all sorts of deep and private things that I'm not allowed to speak to. I know my whiny contempt is the heart of all my problems and none of the “objective reality” raining fire.

Let's see what tomorrow takes.

[667] Just Shoot Me

I fully expect this to be a disjointed bitch-fest, so if you’re dumb enough to read it, take things in turn.

My job is even more bullshit than I suspected. They attempt to get kitchen staff, we’re talking undocumented immigrants and teenagers, to sign away rights and secrecy pact contracts. If you work every single hour they’re open, you’ll average $9 an hour, calculating nothing for gas, insurance, or car troubles. When I get done working I get to come “home” to people, and now the dog, occupying the only ten square feet I ever spend my time, mostly sleeping, on the couch. This is 2 nights in a row now, the first with everyone collected together to watch Black Mirror, the thing I was excited to come home and start watching, sending me back to my car to freeze for another 3 hours, after an 11 hour shift, until they were done. No call, no heads up, no invitation.

I had my 2 day exploration into trying to embody the opposite of my “presumably correct” way of being. What if I actually behaved like what people mislabel me as? Turns out, I’m shit at it. I don’t have enough energy to pretend I want to be providing “content” anymore than the mood strikes me. I’m not going to prepare a speech for the proper viral video. I never feel more suicidal than when I see your memes pretending to be insightful and creative. It’s just wrong. It’s just obnoxious. It’s just insecure and loud and boring as fuck. I can’t do it even when I barely try. I even wanted to disconnect from facebook, and then it occurred to me I can’t get the piddling amount of important information I need from my job if I don’t have my account.

I don’t know how to win anything. I don’t know how to fight against the sheer wall of inconsiderate bullshit that is my living situation. I don’t know how to ally myself with the idiots that will fuck me down the line. I got to thinking about how I ended up here again, and it brought up all the bullshit about not being told I wasn’t going to have roommates by the leasing agency wondering about paperwork. All the lying meth heads that pushed back my ability to get into my house. The lies and “handling” from my shitty job who don’t have any more respect for “labor” than the next asshole. I literally have nothing I can win. I don’t belong anywhere. I can read too much or watch too much or take a bunch of random online courses and spend to “learn” too much, then eat out too much before I sleep too much. That’s of course if I’m not at work way too goddamn much. My entire fucking life is an empty joke. I thought this would be longer, but it’s more than enough.

[666] Better Half

Where's the mute button for your brain?

My computer fans hum. I have an incredibly fast computer for the relatively little I put it through, but I seem to have missed how to make it not sound industrial. They're a great analogy for my head.

I'm back in “the grind.” I spent the whole 11 hours at work basically comfortable. It was not because I packed enough or adequate food. It wasn't the solid tips and mostly shorter runs. The weather ensured I'd start feeling frozen if the car was off too long. No, what gets me through brain dead monotony is the week leading up to it where I reinforce the idea that it's what I want or need to be doing.

I greatly admire Derren Brown. If you don't know who he is, you're not British. Derren demonstrates in the greatest fashion how suggestible we really are and the lengths someone can push you to. While I doubt someone's taken a month to program associations into me, I can feel the urge grow a little stronger to eat the same food someone's brought in or catch the latest movie getting all the buzz. Just because I fundamentally disagree with “everything” (even when I don't) doesn't mean I don't experience the pull.

There's no stronger pull than the story I give myself. If I can convince myself that the next month or 2 or 5 is a part of a massively liberating life lived with reckless abandon story, I can shut up and marathon The X-files and brush off waves of non-tippers. If I “really really really” want to see something I think can be accomplished quickly happen tomorrow, like were it not for the snow maybe my solar panels set up, it's hard to make it another 5 minutes. I mean, I've only recently been introduced to the wonders of credit cards. Foolish me for almost 30 years thought if you didn't have the money now, all hope was lost.

I have a problem keeping a consistent narrative about myself. Anymore, I feel I mostly consist of a very specific general impression I wish to espouse. If that doesn't sound like it makes any sense, it's because it's a series of completely easy sentiments that don't have a word to describe them all at once.

For example, I never want to be told to turn the TV or my music down. How many places or circumstances on Earth does that exist? I want to go a step further though, and be able to play instruments whenever. Practice constantly and never piss someone off or have to travel somewhere special. Once I have those things, I'll feel really good. I also want to work for a weekend, and spend that money on literally anything. Whether I make $50 or $500, I want to know that I won't have a second thought about the drinks or the trip. As long as I still have to pay off my house, I can't quite be there, but even still, the remaining balance is less than 2 years rent at where I stayed for the last 7.

That's the floor. When the floor is there, I want to get into the specialty things. If I get a business and have employees, I want to be able to compel people to adapt to me instead of the other way around. If I want you to write, you will, or you won't get paid. If I want the job done today, you will, or you won't work with me. I want to compel people to act as efficiently and reliably as me so that I can insulate myself with people who's words I can more or less trust. Trust, insofar as I've conditioned the trust into them.

Bringing up trust makes me think of this line in the Christmas special of Victoria. “Men don't give you their hearts, they only loan them.” As I've watched nearly all of my relationships, friendly or otherwise, dwindle into informality, I can't help but to think of this kind of relating to people and that which good parent's seem to espouse. What keeps a parent pot-committed or “hodling” longer than the most wizened bitcoin enthusiast? Or, what's the glue that makes one person become your “best friend from childhood?” The rest relegated to wherever those people go.

Is it just a story as well? Another line from that special was when a gay character asks a woman who knows he's gay to marry her where he says, “There's different kinds of love.”

I've wanted to write something better about those terms that seem all-encompassing but retain a certain pragmatic use and undying cultural relevancy. I've said before there's as many kinds of “love” as there are people. If love is as much a function of that story-telling tradition and spell of a compelling narrative, it stands to reason the “deepest” and “longest” loves are those who's story isn't about the pain and precariousness of the moment as it is about who they want to be when they die. Things like “honor” and “freedom” make considerably more sense that way.

Perhaps that's what got me over the hump of expecting anything from anybody. I don't want to be the angry lump on a hill recalling the money you stole or the lies you told. It doesn't mean I'm not going to keep you safely boxed away while I'm alive, but my worst feelings and reactions to you are not who I want to be. And truly, they're not what I mostly conceive of you as.

Maybe it's here I've discovered what the first half of this has to do with the second. I'm still “forced” to work, like I'm “forced” to reevaluate and tear down unhealthy social dynamics. I'm this automaton who's tasted the freedom and good-life, but got dragged into being a reactionary force. My good builder didn't appear until after I'd wasted time and effort with the idiots, so poof goes money I thought might be a modest savings. One disaster after another with cars makes it so I can't even reliably get to doing the thing I don't even want to do in the first place. I put myself out there to try and learn from or rely on “experts” who leave me hanging. The healthiest and most uplifting conversations I get into are resolving some conflict in my dreams with people who I'll probably never talk to again.

Seems a simple difference after all. You get into a relationship with yourself expecting everything to be as terrible as it can be or as amazing as you wish, then you can keep your head on. You extend the same courtesy to your friend or spouse, and vice versa, you stay together forever. You find a story about your job that takes you beyond the demeaning and exploitative power dynamics, you can stay there for years as your mind keeps occupied by what truly matters. Are you lending your heart to a fleeting infatuation? Can you write your way out of the corners you've been shoved into? It's the difference between the active acceptance and resolve, and reactionary pain. I wish every moment my capacity didn't feel up for grabs.

[665] Jingle Bells

It’s 17 minutes before Christmas, and all through the house, two creatures are stirring, each the size of a mouse.

I feel the buzz of the holidays. (Christmas, for you non-heathens). I can feel people trying to loosen up. The radio station is blaring the “wrong” version of the Christmas song I thought I knew better. Being in The Region, I’ve gotten to contend with a perfectly timed snow storm ensuring the whitest of Christmases. Of course, the setting is right, the food is delicious, and the company I don’t care to talk to is just as happy to not talk to me either. It couldn’t get better.

In the spirit of the holiday, let’s try excruciatingly hard to write with that upbeat contented smile you see from all of the family pictures hitting the feed. If I want to get into a “sensitive” or “negative” topic, I’ll take extra care in showing that it’s not so bad and there’s a way out. Just because I want to write, after all, doesn’t mean you need to suffer. I won’t grab the back of your head and beat your face against the screen until you’re paying the right kind of attention, like I did all those other times.

When you cut out the magic sky baby stuff, I believe the spirit of the season is about giving. Just because we’re living in the throes of the Republican cult giving your future away to big business, doesn’t mean you can’t devote your time and attention to people and causes worse off than you. With so many simultaneous things going wrong though, it can be hard to figure out just what it looks like to be an effective giver. To care so much, or to try in earnest, can get exhausting. Rarely are we given the tools, or prone to the discussions, that see our best efforts become manifest.

Historically, I haven’t been the best at accepting gifts. People being nice to me feels...off. This doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate them. This doesn’t mean they are wrong for doing so. There is nothing inherently bad about buying gifts for someone or feeling yourself compelled to get me one. But, I have everything already. I can think of no greater gift than to be listened to and understood and to see and hear your thoughts in how or whether they motivated you to get involved or speak up. I want what is rarely on offer and I mostly tend to ask for it in blogs. I, of course, need extra hands for the dirty work, but if wants aren’t particularly forthcoming, needs slipped out the hole in a back pocket.

Not everyone is as simple as me. Very few people will genuinely believe themselves if they say, “Don’t get me anything.” Well, perhaps it’s easier to believe it when you’re older and are sick off all the crap you’ve accumulated. Slight difference for me personally too, I can always use money, and it’s why that’s always been my gift since around the age 13. But still, simple. Not everyone is in a position to always know what they need either. You can genuinely surprise a child with a toy they never knew they wanted. The clothes they unwrap might be their favorite thing to wear one day.

What about bigger scale? What about the giant donations to impoverished areas? What about the money being slipped into the boxes with jiggling elves? These are opportunities to give back and feel good. These are a show of solidarity to the underlying caring human spirit that always has a little change to spare. Considerably more is known today about which charities actually turn money into well-being for who they’re advocating for so you don’t even have to feel guilty if you skip right past The Red Cross. Much has been studied about the impact of cheap clothing donated to areas who eschew a local economy in anticipation of the U.S. scraps.

I can feel myself getting all over the place. That’s sort of the point. The “spirit” of the time of year isn’t any one song, one present, one dinner or favorite movie. It’s not in the passing deference to the Jews or jokes about Kwanzaa. It’s not the snow and other assorted imagery. It’s the overwhelming all-at-once force of culture that wraps up the willing in a comforting blanket of warmth and positivity, and pushes the lonely and the suicidal over the edge. It’s the power of a collective narrative. It’s the spell of togetherness.

There’s so much talk about the “divisive” age we live in. I think this, as with most things, is precisely backwards. When a “side” manifests, it’s precisely because people are rallying behind something. The energy they don’t know what to do with rallies in spite of themselves. As such, it can work in service to things that actively harm themselves. You cheer for sports teams where none of the players are from where you live. You fall for TV shows for their hype and meme-ability. Christmas and Hanukkah aren’t in competition, dividing up the faithful. One “side” just doesn’t bother to care enough about their immortal souls.

No narrative wins until it gives people a focal point. After that adoption, it can spiral off into the myriad ways people personally interpret everything. I’ve asked before, what did Obama’s “hope” get us but the chance to ignore the millions willing to vote for Palin in any capacity. It was truly the re-reading of the “argument” I got into about Twin Peaks, and the seeking out of a few other negative reviews, the pushed me over the edge to start writing this. My biggest issue with the show is its fundamental lack of coherent narrative that makes it incredibly boring. The hardest core advocates turned disenfranchised make passing praises to the initial mystery and individuality it had in 1991, but don’t have any more a clue than I do why it continued after the narrative wrapped in the middle of season 2. People keep seeing what they want to see.

The hardest core continuing fans, like those most in love with Christmas, like the intimately familiar with fighting injustice, prop up their preferred narrative. It doesn’t have to be completely devoid of reality, and it doesn’t mean there’s no utility in doing so. But you have to recognize it’s a narrative. It’s a spell just like any other. It’s the same spell that makes me “negative” before we ever start talking or you recognize anything I’ve actually said. It’s a spell that knows every quarter or dollar you drop into the box is going towards helping someone and not corrupt leadership or advertising. It’s undying faith in your team colors, because nothing about how they make their money erases the fun you had attending games with your dad as a child.

I wish that everything you give or get can be done in earnest. I don’t want holidays to be taken for granted anymore than any other day. I don’t want you to rate your time together like a show designed to trap mindless dupes who’ve invented a 10/10 narrative to supplant the soupy malaise of incoherent writing. If you want something, ask for it, work intelligently towards it. If you have nothing to give, don’t force it, keep yourself from sacrificing your truth for a worse story. If you don’t know where you reside, in your family, in life, start talking and asking questions. Give yourself the kind of gift that Santa can’t bring. Be a charitable force of time and attention. In my experience, it’s the only thing that’s kept me remotely sane or bothering to carry on in spite of my overwhelming capacity to complain or break things down. It’s also the only force I see that we can rally behind in trying to piece back the fabric of reality that’s been obliterated by our access to so many competing narratives.

[664] Crawl Tall

One of the things I used to pride myself on, and still do to a certain extent, was the ability to get things done fast. I didn't just want to get an A, I wanted to be the first one done. I'm still the guy who cuts through parking lots to save time driving places. I'll risk my back to transport more than I can reasonably carry 2x16s so I can make less trips. There's always this push to not just get it done, but get it done now.

I know people like Elon Musk have the same sense. You don't get to Mars thinking to yourself it's time to wait around for the funds or technology to catch up. For those of us with less specific ambitions, I wonder if my “now” is speaking to the “let me help stave off a nuclear holocaust” sense or “there's starving people now, lets feed them all” or “somehow, literally no one is tracking this important number.” I mean, I got a tattoo that symbolizes, for lack of a better explanation, inherent evil, or maybe rephrased, evil inherent in us all, and that's an all-the-time right now kind of thing to be contending with. Every good decision suggests you could be doing the opposite and vice versa. I should probably go to the gym every time I pick fast food instead.

Just like if you overdo it with shitty food you'll get fat, if you keep stepping in service to what's easy or “evil” or less than you wish for yourself, that's where you'll end up. You'll remove the “now” from your sensibilities because there's always time to be self-indulgent. There's always time to employ a selfish excuse for your behavior. It's a solid way to connect with the world around you, as everyone else is waiting for their ideas about themselves to catch up to their day to day reality too. You'll fit in.

I think it speaks to the reason I'll watch old or uncomplicated shows sped up. I want to experience more, now. I just got the extension on my house completed, and now I can feel myself raring to go insulate it, but the weather is shit and the work to turn it into a bathroom requires more money than I currently have. I've had patience imposed on me for several years at this point, and while I know how long it takes to get what I want done, I don't know what my money situation will be like or if the car will implode. I have to temper myself, constantly, or I have all of this energy that just turns into pure and needless frustration.

I feel as though some people would say, “Turn that energy into something else productive!” To me, it's not enough to simply have the energy, you have to have the focus and time. I still mostly have to work most of my time in order to move forward and stay ahead on bills. I think a lot about the rich white “geniuses” that discovered so many things in science. You might stumble across a few fundamental truths about the universe if you had your entire lifetime to kill searching. In less than 10 years I've seen whole schools get constructed, businesses turnover, apartments and condos flood the landscape. I need a day or two here and there. I need the thousand dollars, and the week I can feel comfortable not working. It's, of course, precisely when I can't get into drug studies now I have all of these things I could be occupying my time with besides television. I still feel my stomach sink and heart flutter at even the thought of attempting a screening.

I suppose what's hardest about having this volatile and excited energy is the constant pressure to pause it. It's not anymore healthy to be manic than it is depressive. But I crave the flow of constant creative production. I'd love to wake up early each day excited for the work to do, go home exhausted, and start up doing it all over again, always seeing the larger goals getting closer and closer. It's why I don't hesitate to spend my savings to finally get something done. My goal isn't to have an extra $1000. It's to have a place to shower and shit and store things I don't want in the house proper. I want my own place to live. I want to know that all of my money is going towards paying it off, and getting the little things done while I'm out there like sapling removal and trash burning. I want to blast my music or shows at all hours of the night.

I feel like I say too often how close I am. I'm as close or as far as I've ever been or ever will be. It's hard to exercise the idea that there's only “now” when now doesn't look like what you want it to. I want that meal plan and personal trainer, that schedule to get lessons and rehearse music, that time in the greenhouse, the conversation about the next step in the map, that scheduled time to get furniture moved, and that weekend fire party now. I want it now, and tomorrow, and the day after for as far as I can see. And when that itch is scratched I want the next thing. You can't do it out of order or pretend otherwise. Or, I can't.

I'm never finding the 100K a year job, hell, the 50K a year job. The jobs once professionals are clinging to are about to be taken over. “Benefits” are never coming back. The oligarchy wins. So I need, more than anything, to be able to ride it out or escape it. That means off-grid super-cheap living situation. To occupy the privileged place of business speculation is hard enough as it is if you don't want to simply lie and hustle your way through dozens of things you're not interested in or are barely qualified for.

I don't even know if I had anything to say in this. I just feel awake. I feel like I should be buying insulation, cutting drywall, and pricing plumbing parts. I should be doing piano scales. I should be compiling and organizing the best journalism and maps to tell different kinds of stories. Or I should be learning how to afford the outsourcing of what I want with as little money thrown to dozens of Indian men at random as possible. But I can't, yet. Not really. I can half-ass and try to give myself a story. Be half-paying attention during a trumpet lesson, overpay for parts in service to expediency, or barely glean ten words from that in-depth look at what's about to fuck humanity for the next 20 years.

I want to explode in the best way. I want to pursue like college never let me. I want to build as extravagantly as I imagined when I played with blocks. I want to celebrate like nothing matters but the party in the moment, and I want to wrap as many people up in my world as are worthy. And I want to do it right now. Every little piece that falls into place suggests I'm still on the path. If I could blackout and wake up a year from now, presuming things went well or were tolerable, I would. That seems like a weird thing to say if my concern is time, right? But if I could just have an even floor, I could run faster. The cuts and scrapes of crawling through the woods aren't helping anything.

[663] D.O.A.

I'm in a weird mood, so let's see what there is to say about it. I'm not negative. I've managed to persuade what is formally a group of friends that I am. To my knowledge, “negative” means that I speak to things that are less than fun or exciting on too frequent a basis and it affects their mood. I'm assuming there is no distinction between saying negative things and being a negative person for the purposes of their description.

It's worth noting, this isn't a charge I hear routinely from anyone else I spent as much or more time with. If it's shared across my relationships, this emboldened cache decided to build up the significance of my impact into a pretense for no longer talking to me. Something important as well, this is a group of people who say things like, “I completely agree” or “I totally understand” before hours later finding themselves cursing at me or name calling.

I know it's not just about them. I hasten to remove their names from any digressions I go into picking their words apart. I know it's not just about me. No healthy individual, in my view, should be so moved to end all contact with you for being methodical and polite in trying to ask questions or explain where you're coming from. There is no other option for people to relate at all, let alone well, unless time and patience is taken to listen close and try to empathize. When that makes you blindingly mad, it's just not my fault.

I love that this has been a problem long enough that there's a discernible pattern, and I'm so relieved that clinical psychologists, of course including my favorite Jordan Peterson, document this behavior as well. The first 5 or so minutes of this speak explicitly too it. I don't have to rely on my own selfish motives in protecting my ego or oversell their example as something indicative of a personal greater moral or intellectual failing. They aren't special. With respect to the world at large and the things I choose to talk about, let alone how, neither am I.

I find it at the base of the reasons I think I'll feel genuinely more relieved than scared when it's my turn to die, provided it doesn't happen in some dramatic and painful fashion, that every little joy or proper expression of dopamine I manage in a day is extremely hard fought. If this is me negative, I hesitate to spend too much time mulling over where my head was at under my abusive mom. I struggle to place where the teenager prepared to blow up cars and shoot up living rooms (with paint balls) fits in the greater “negative” story of my life. To label someone harkens to wearing an A on your chest in that abortion story I'm not going to bother googling. You're forever and only this one thing for how it makes the people around you feel.

When I think about the list of things that I've managed to make people feel bad over, I see confounding results. Offering money and drinks has garnered shit-talking, resentment, and fights. People feel inadequate or poor. Offering places to stay has never motivated a person quicker to seek an escape route. The idea that it's my couch or living room registers as a certain kind of pain. I once made a girl cry for asking a question about her ex-boyfriend. Certain people practically snarl when I offer an explanation for anything I do, let alone try to describe a feeling. It's rarely if ever physical intimidation that even garners a flinch. I can string together a list of profanity, and people take it more as a joyous parlor trick.

I know what the conflict is. I know people feel fundamentally inadequate. I know I surrounded myself with those cliché “smart” kids who got too fat or comfortable or old and pay lip service to a handful of figures that made it to the top. I know that people are scared about how little they feel or how their feelings change, and they don't have the words for dealing with them any quicker than I might find them over the course of a dozen blogs on the subject. I know that the language we do adopt to describe ourselves is overwrought and impossible to live up to. It's deliberately misleading and manically hopeful, so the more we presume to know what we're talking about in adopting that language, the more we spiral out of control. I know people are jealous of other people's facade. No matter how much I bitch, ten seconds later I might be talking about an OKCupid hookup with the sexless depressive. No matter how many times I tweak my back or overspend trying to make my land a cool place to be, it'll be mine, and no one will feel they have a stake in it.

It's the kind of problem described when people run through de-cluttering self-help books or when someone offers a dozen reasons they never learned an instrument. “Talented” musicians are most often obsessive-compulsives who put that tick towards their instrument. They started young so the years and years of class or instruction get summed up as “cool piano player” in the eyes of everyone who proclaims they wish they could do the same thing. Do you? Do you want to play the same dozen notes several thousand times over the course of a few years? No. To want something in earnest is to want the journey and the work. They opt for the grind of an RPG or rungs of their corporate ladder. They hold their job in their hands, ask if it brings them joy, and default to ideas about benefits and free lunch to aid in throwing out gnawing dreams.

What confuses me is that, in our own minds, I think we all work “as hard.” This could be me giving them too much credit. At the very least, I know people are tired and disenfranchised. I know they have about 2 minutes of conversation before the story of their debt appears. I know they still manage to make that god forsaken one time a year base touch with all of their “loves” and “friends.” But they don't want to get anywhere together. They want to struggle alone and pretend their shame is hidden. They want to keep playing into the personal identity story they were maybe sold on as children.

For my part, at the end of my 80 hour week, I need to believe that sooner than later, I'll never have to do that again unless it's in service to something I'm infatuated with. But for them? Garnished paychecks, growing health issues, scared of the wrong catastrophe hitting at the wrong time of month? To kill yourself at a job and not see the future would be unbearable. For my purposes, if it is unbearable, if you are suffering, if you are tired, if you think you're doing too much or care so hard, why does that need to become my fault? I don't substitute my “I feel like death” sentiments with me smiling in the park on a snowy day, so I'm negative?

However bad I'm feeling about any particular day or my place in the world, it doesn't get better when I try to pretend otherwise. I've watched myself, or been too blacked out, as I lash out. I start to act like you. It's why I tend to forgive and forget drunk nights that bring out the sober heart in you. Your sober self can be sad as fuck or irrationally angry, you just might not really find out about it until you decide to drink.

I want people to do better by themselves more than I want to insist they stop calling me negative. I'm not crumbling under the weight of its truth, I'm just aggravated and bored with the people so lazy and disrespectful that they've sacrificed their voice. They're running from their responsibilities and losing opportunities for growth and understanding. They stopped paying attention to who they wanted to be. They stopped seeing what roles we could play in each other's lives. To me, that's death. That's the ultimate negative thing. You can carry on about the moral and intellectual disgraces coming out of the era where a democrat barely beats a pedophile, but you've left it to those people to be the last ones with any capacity to truly believe in something. Wins have to “surprise” you so you perk up for a day and decide to call your Senator. You're always looking outside for the validation and excuse.

Maybe I just hit on something there too. These kids all grew up getting the good grades and praise. There's always been some outside affirmation of what they were doing. Their major was correct by default. Their hobby was interesting or their relationship was cute. Perhaps there's been a massive uncontrolled positive feedback loop that ensures any “negative” introduced into it needs to be washed away. I live in a world where things aren't inevitably getting better. I live in a world of subtlety, contradiction, and nuances. I try to work in my impending and hastening death into my reasoning to do anything daily. You can't meaningfully tag that to an Instagram picture.

I don't really morn the dead. My relationships were good enough for the drunkeness or jokes, but these were never the people who wanted to do the same kind of work, or they'd be here with me. They wouldn't resent me. They'd be able to recognize my efforts and ethics and how long it takes before you can savor any satisfaction from the riff you've been rehearsing for years. I can't decide if they know they're dead. I can't pin point if it happened before I ever met them, sometime in the middle of knowing each other, or crystallized when we came apart. I do know that the fights and “innocent misunderstandings” are inevitable with people like that though. I know there is no proper approach or right way to speak. The valuable commodity is maintaining your identity in spite of it all, and you can't expect them to recognize you when they haven't been paying attention to what they've become.

[xxx-12] I'm The Best - Inspiration

This is gonna be weird. I want it to do a couple things at once, and I’m hoping in my attempt to do so I don’t just muddy everything up too badly. Let me explain each thing.

First, I want it to be a procedural breakdown. My character has been attacked, again, so I want to pick the words apart here as opposed to continuing a comment thread I know the person wants dead.

Second, I want to explain what I think is going on in the person's head as they say a particular line to me. This will be difficult not because it's impossible to know what someone else is truly thinking, but because we have multiple motivations for how and why we say things, and I want to account for the most relevant ones. [He'll never understand me!] I'll use brackets for their voice.

The lead in explanation of this saga has to do with what started as a modest back and forth under an article about that starving polar bear. I expressed how I felt, my first sin, and then in expounding on the reasons for that feeling provoked the trigger “you're negative” charge I hear so often to describe my being. The conversation is posted in the comments.

Never alone, I'm also whiny, seeking attention, trying to stomp on your desires, go on “tirades” with too much “bullshit,” and simply don't give a damn. You may be having flashbacks to my entry Character Assassination . You may also recall previous exercises like my Deconstructive or Petty “Exercise.”

First, go ahead and just read the end of the exchange out of context. The brunt of this has little to do with the specific, if you can call it that, points being addressed.

1. By "bullshit" I mean extra, unnecessary stuff you add that distract from your point, not necessarily untrue. I apologize for unclear wording.
2. I still stand by "tirade" because you like to browbeat people in any discussion until there is no point in continuing.
3. It's not that you make people feel like you called them stupid. It's that you get upset when people don't comment properly or haven't been paying attention to what you're posting about. Saying "nobody cared before it was cool" is ridiculous.
4. Yes you're more likely to have your eyes opened if you're already available for it, but you never know what will crack that door open for someone else's mind.
5. You probably won't see me in your field, because I'll be busy enough in my own.
6. Unless there is public outcry, nothing will get done. What are the other options? Violence and coup. I get it's not he quickest form of enacting change, but it's better than sitting around bitching and moaning without making an effort to communicate wants and needs. I'd agree that every level is broken, but that isn't going to just fix itself.
7. We don't chase ourselves away. You chase us away. You consistently push buttons and claim it's for or own good. But it really just feels like some way for you to play puppet master in a world of your making where you know more than everyone else about everything and could never possibly be wrong. Much of what you say comes off as pessimistic and fatalistic, when maybe I just don't see that is comes from a place of despair created from unfulfilled hopes. I do apologize if I hurt you with that. It's frustrating to see and hear a lot of negativity coming from one person.
8. Your first comment to my post came off as super whiny. It seemed like you were upset that people weren't on the same page as you from the beginning. You can't expect that. That's also what made it seem like you don't actually care about the issues, but care more about people paying attention to you and your efforts.
9. Maybe you were attempting humor with the hominid thing, but I'm gonna go with you're wrong. Read up about human evolution and the use of tools.

“By 'bullshit' I mean extra, unnecessary stuff you add that distract form your point, not necessarily untrue. I apologize for unclear wording.”

Things like this I find impressively annoying. I was accused of writing bullshit. I didn't ask for her to define “bullshit” as a concept. It's a complete and utter blindspot in the mind of the person emptily criticizing me when they don't even realize they can't quote or acknowledge what I say in the first place. Which part is bullshit? The bullshit parts, of course! I don't think I was adding bullshit, but then, it's not about what I thought or actually said. It never is. [Oh he knows what's bullshit...EVERYONE KNOWS.] I don't. You refuse to show me.

“I still stand by "tirade" because you like to browbeat people in any discussion until there is no point in continuing.”

The exact same thing. I asked what part constituted a “tirade.” Why bother quoting or pointing something out? It's much easier, and serves the purpose, to re-assert. [I believe in what I said. No, you didn't hear me, I REALLY BELIEVE IN WHAT I SAID. So there.]

“It's not that you make people feel like you called them stupid. It's that you get upset when people don't comment properly or haven't been paying attention to what you're posting about. Saying "nobody cared before it was cool" is ridiculous.”

People are experts at latching on to my “throwaway” comments that are often explicit cliches. If I wrote ten lines about the deteriorating environment and ended them with “and the horse you rode in on” I'd be told they don't own a horse. [You’ve been asking me to quote! So I did! Why can’t you ever be happy!?] The idea that people don't “comment properly” is interesting because it's correct, but not because she knows what a “proper” comment would look like. At this point, anything that refrained from personally attacking me would constitute proper. I was attempting to make a larger point that there are always canaries and Casandras and that's not what society pays attention to. Instead, I'm painted as desperately trying for attention and too “above-it-all” to consider anyone else's efforts. The irony, again so heavy, being that I never argued against sharing articles, like she does as well, and still continue to do so.

“Yes you're more likely to have your eyes opened if you're already available for it, but you never know what will crack that door open for someone else's mind.”

I agree. See, easy enough. Say reasonable things and we move right along.

“You probably won't see me in your field, because I'll be busy enough in my own.”

Here, I tried to make a slight diffusion of tension to suggest that, hey, I still like you, we should hang out when our dreams pick up and can start chugging along nicely. Instead, pissing match. Why have anything to do with me or sharing ideas or being mutually inspired by each other? Well, she doesn't have a field. Until she spoke up defensively, I wouldn't have thought she doesn't see herself getting one either. [What do you know? At least I have friends who wold LOVE to have me spend time on their fields.]

“Unless there is public outcry, nothing will get done. What are the other options? Violence and coup. I get it's not he quickest form of enacting change, but it's better than sitting around bitching and moaning without making an effort to communicate wants and needs. I'd agree that every level is broken, but that isn't going to just fix itself.”

This is the most entangled bit. Public outcry can have consequences. Notably, at the local level or where the power leverage is more obvious. With or without public outcry, there are always people with considerably more power who could get things done, likely of greater consequence, but instead of identifying or discussing them, let's make it an either/or in order to dismiss where she's pretending I'm coming from. Irony screaming again, I'm not just bitching and moaning, as anyone who looks at my life and what I'm working towards must concede, but again, it's always easier to make up things about me or what I represent than try to contend with how you don't live up to my example. I didn't argue things would just fix themselves, and if you agree with me, what's got you sounding so fatalistic and angry?

“We don't chase ourselves away. You chase us away. You consistently push buttons and claim it's for or own good. But it really just feels like some way for you to play puppet master in a world of your making where you know more than everyone else about everything and could never possibly be wrong. Much of what you say comes off as pessimistic and fatalistic, when maybe I just don't see that is comes from a place of despair created from unfulfilled hopes. I do apologize if I hurt you with that. It's frustrating to see and hear a lot of negativity coming from one person.”

What does a person do when without pause or fail, in response to anything they say, hell, in response to literal silence, they're referred to as “negative” or “pessimistic” or some other damning and draining sentiment. You do that to kids and they grow up fucked up for life. If every time you talked to me, I prefaced anything I said in response to you, “Oh, that was bitchy” or “Huh, decided to spinkle on your cunty talk again?” Would I not be begging you to dismiss me? These people who are so concerned with how I make them feel love to pretend I'm incapable of feelings. If the fleeting ones I do have are only and forever having to defend myself and feel shitty about your dishonesty, I'm happy to flip the switch and antagonize or piss you off. You fed me to your internal wolves first. Also, for the record, I’ve literally never even said the phrase “for your own good” knowingly or without irony, let alone would adopt a sternly Mr. Roger’s take about engaging in conversation with people my own age. (A google search of my writing tag and that phrase quoted confirms it hasn’t shown up in a single blog.)

I can say, in literally every blog, prefacing every single sentence, “You know, I could be wrong” and it WILL NOT MATTER. To people who feel perpetually wrong, or who refuse to do the critical thinking work that exposes how they're wrong, they only know how to express the idea, “Well, you just think you're perfect don't you!?” That's how you feel. It's wrong. I'd rather talk about it. You'll see as well, that it's never even on the table that what I say is “accurate” or “honest” or “useful” no no. The only other option is that I'm full of despair from all of my unfulfilled hopes. Seriously people, this is what I'm told. My opinion isn't needed nor will ever be consulted. Yes, I have so far unfulfilled dreams. No, they are not why I think pussy hats and shared articles mean nothing to the agenda capable of subverting democracy. Those are the overwhelming negative forces, not me.

“Your first comment to my post came off as super whiny. It seemed like you were upset that people weren't on the same page as you from the beginning. You can't expect that. That's also what made it seem like you don't actually care about the issues, but care more about people paying attention to you and your efforts.”

My first comment on her post she said she understood and could see where I was coming from. Again though, judge the comment, don't say, “Hey, sucks you feel that way, hope it gets better.” Judge instead, use it to set up the next line of judgments. That's what friends do for each other. I didn't mean to whine. I just said I practically long to be a casualty just like the polar bears. I do in fact feel that way. I behave differently, but when I express how I feel, it has more power. It means more than I recognize or contended. And I need to suffer the reckoning of your reaction.

Notice as well the use of “seem.” Holy hell do I “seem” sooooooo many ways to sooooo many people. It's a nice cheat for actually respecting what I am or what I'm doing. “Well, you seem like a dick.” This is useful information if I'm trying to emotionally manipulate you, you know, because depending on the scenario it might be useful for me to seem dickish, or whiny, or whatever, but when you're just trying to express how you feel or discuss something with an alleged friend, it's best not to seem. It's just a shorthand way to lazily assume.

“Maybe you were attempting humor with the hominid thing, but I'm gonna go with you're wrong. Read up about human evolution and the use of tools.”

What would a “this is me preparing to cut you out of my life” speech be without one last condescending jab that robs me of my attempt to be funny, make a point about people's reactions to what's new or different and challenging, and then one last stab into the topic I've arguably read or watched more about than any other singular topic, human evolution. I couldn't write a better script for pathology than examples like this. It's like they're following a road map and truly makes me question whether we live in a fixed and fated universe. It reminds me when the black kid screamed at me, “What the fuck did that get ANY of us!” with regard to the efforts made by Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights movement.

This is the most important thing when you're dealing with lesser-order animals you might want to consider friends. They are death. If you treat them as anything less than death, you will grow blind to what's being killed within you. They are the death of reason. They are the death of honesty. They are the death of truth. Their struggle is not “the struggle.” Their words you should liken to the noises of a distressed farm animal. They will kill your esteem. They will kill your desire. They will make you forget that the best exists and ensure you forget what it looks like. No invitation to hang out, no dollar amount, and no magically tightening around your cock pussy is worth giving yourself over to them. They are not your friends. They are not your family. You've been duly warned.

[662] I'm The Best

There is no way to state this but plainly. I'm actually the best. I'm better than you. I'm better than people you know. I am the best, and it's a burden, but it's been true for a very long time, and I think it underwrites a good portion of why my life looks the way it does, good and bad.

Let's get the classics out of the way. I was the best at work. No one else ran around. No one else could easily demand promotions or stave off plots to get me fired. I was so good at one job they told me to slow down and taught me things only the managers were supposed to know. I got so much free food and random store items, I couldn't use their ticket incentives fast enough. I threw the best parties. I utilized every physical and mental inch in what I created and who I invited to keep them (primarily) safe and memory-makingly entertaining. I had the best car. It wasn't the most expensive, but it got the most looks, most people talking, and got the most attention. I wasn't the valedictorian, but I did school the best. You have to have something figured out when they let you drop a whole class from your schedule and fit 3 band periods into your senior year, right? I got an entire semesters worth of work done in less than a week after my computer got stolen in college.

Keeping it going, I had the best girlfriend. Girls surely compliment each others' looks, but no one garnered the attention and comments like mine. She was, as I'm learning more and more over time, genuinely the best person in that little circle-jerk thrown together by school. I've got the best hair, the best teeth. I dream the biggest, take on the biggest tasks. I give people that over and over and over again fuck me or lie to me chances and make room for them in my, often personally referred to, “sociopathic” sensibilities. I work harder and longer at things you pretend to care about or be interested in. I account for the details in the lives of the people I care about like taking the dog out or trying not to wake you when I come in the door. I read the most. I watch the most. I contribute the most energy or jokes to make sure the party isn't a bust.

This thought train isn't empty yet, because I'm the best at turning my shit circumstances into living like royalty. My perspective is the best because I know, believe, and assert constantly that I don't have real problems. I take and work with my stress, talk about it, and attempt to connect or diffuse. I take difficult conversations and generally refrain from name calling, throwing your entire being under the bus, or ignoring any questions you may have. I pay attention to the details. I make plans to incorporate or help people who don't even know they're on my radar. I treat everyone with the same courtesy and honesty that I treat myself with, and while it's rarely appreciated, in the liberal fantasy land dream where we're all equal, you have to meet me in order to see what that really feels like.

As the best, if you don't meet people who are also the best, be prepared to die. They don't have the balls to actually try and kill you, they try to tear down your conception of yourself. They make no distinctions about those who are the best and those who can only claim to be the best. They make memes romanticizing their good grades and awards growing up only to have melted into a pile of self-involved nihilism. They start speaking too happily about whatever job they've fallen into or mediocre friends that have one interesting thing about them they've clung to their entire lives.

You, as the best, by contrast are sad. No, really, you are, they insist. You're sad because you're lonely and mean. You're sad because you insist that people actually acknowledge and speak to you instead of call you names and judge you. Who are you? They scream, to suggest their thoughts, opinions, and feelings are wrong? Where do you get off? Talking about their happy lives or hobbies as if you have some secret they don't. They get together and gossip and create feedback loops and adopt their cliches because even the thought of you is an abomination! All without irony.

The most fun you can have with being the best is seeing every scathing detail of where a conversation, or likely fight, is going. You know why every line exists. You can see the need for them to turn towards pissing matches. You can feel their sadness. You can see their inner-child's lip quivering at the thought of saying that perfectly stupid thing that I'm going to pounce on and turn them inside out with. I'm the best at body language, tone, and word choice because I've spent an untold number of hours thinking about how I used to be less than the best in how I exhibited them. It's never an accident, I knew my earnest desire for truth and honest questions would piss you off, but I chose to “lose” my way and not with a temper tantrum you wanted to see.

The best does. This is an extinct concept in modernity. I do what I say. I create, I try, I work, and I scrape together every inch of the perfect picture I dream of. I will make you hate me when I'm tired of your cowardice. I will make you, oh you, little “nice” accommodating fucking dog shit liar, bust out the “fuck you” after I've decided I'm tired of your bullshit. My instincts are the best! Why don't you listen? I knew it was a lie. I wanted the distraction, the option to maybe fuck around with down the line, not a right and proper friend. I knew you weren't capable of that, but I played along. For you, for your deceit, I gave you a chance. I got wasted words and effort in return. I get told “fuck you” because I don't roll over and say, “You're right, I'm roasting in my own personal hell, everything I do or say is wrong, I'll just go over here and die now.” I don't accept your lie anymore. Feel free to keep thinking all sorts of terrible things about yourself, but you're not hijacking my mind.

You have to think, any expression of being the best, with Trump as president, has to make your stomach sink, right? Ego and narcissism are wrong by default. They're going to march us into World War III applauding and cheering. But this is only a distinction lost on people who aren't the best. I'm not at the mercy of my conception of myself, as my relationship to anyone less than me testifies. I'm not addicted to empty boasts about things I haven't actually done or don't actually believe. I don't want attention for attention's sake. I want 5 minutes with any, literally any, real person. Overwhelmingly, that absolutely is not you. It never was.

I have the best friends. It's not because they're sociopaths or social manipulators. They're actually them. You know why you don't mean anything to me? You know why I'm comfortable “brow beating” you into a whiny lashing out pulp? You're pushing 30 and can't engage the bratty child in your gut that still dictates your decisions. You can't make the insecure crying tween in the mirror happy. You only know how to respond to reality by pulling back, hiding behind, and biting. I'm the realest you're ever going to meet, so I get bitten the hardest.

Real. This concept that's reduced to a black people twitter meme picture of a hood rat mouthing off about the dangers of the street or who's about to get beat down. Real is that life was never, nor will ever be, this shining beacon of achievement and love on a hill. No amount of paint you use to cover up the shit stain of your being is going to erase the hint of a smell. Real is that you don't matter. Our relationship doesn't matter. We're inventing it every moment, and when you or I die in the plane crash or car accident on the way to see each other, no one will blink. Only you'll die a liar and afraid and full of regret for how you've squandered all that's been given to you.

To feel all of that at your core and still refrain from treating you like the husks and cunts and disgusting lazy creatures that you are? To be disrespected and disregarded and made to swallow the black holes at the center of your being, sucking everything into your crushing hell. How else do you bare it with a smile and resolve to keep going unless you're the best? You can't live up to me. You aren't even you. You're the recycling of a broken culture and nonsense words you'll never bother to learn how to use. I no longer wish I cared. You're up here, as the best, with me, or I'm literally going to attack you. You ready?

"I'm The Best - Inspiration" excerpt:

This is the most important thing when you're dealing with lesser-order animals you might want to consider friends. They are death. If you treat them as anything less than death, you will grow blind to what's being killed within you. They are the death of reason. They are the death of honesty. They are the death of truth. Their struggle is not “the struggle.” They're words you should liken to the noises of a distressed farm animal. They will kill your esteem. They will kill your desire. They will make you forget that the best exists and ensure you forget what it looks like. No invitation to hang out, no dollar amount, and no magically tightening around your cock pussy is worth giving yourself over to them. They are not your friends. They are not your family. You've been duly warned.

[661] Goo Goo

I'm sure half of this headache is sitting in my car for the last eleven and a half hours, and half the stupid “conversation” I got into, but I'm still hoping to feel better after explaining it anyway.

All at once. My body reacts all at once to people or phrases or conversations. A dozen lines of what's “wrong” or “right” flood my head, and I mostly react with a scowl, chuckle, or blank expression (meant to convey I'm about to explode). It's exciting and anxiety inducing and altogether hopeless.

Someone complains about delivering food across town. It's a complaint I've made to some degree before. I was written off, “politely handled,” and then ignored. So a new person brings up the complaint, I offer a comment that was tantamount to the same one I got. “We're going to look into this to make sure we know how to fix it right.”

First, his problem is a simple one. If you spent 30-40 minutes on the road and are dependent on the goodwill and tip of your customer, often you're coming back to the kitchen having made $4.50. A scoundrel's rate if there ever was one. You're missing out on the orders building, you're getting a line of cars now being added to the queue to keep up to contend with, and every minute you're out on the road is one where you could be hit, pop a tire, or be subjected to the problems of what are generally poor condition cars.

I chime in, yes, like an idiot. I tell him that I've grown resolved to viewing this job like all jobs. We're “independent contractors,” after all, so we have no expectation of a reliable wage. The company didn't want to worry about health or car insurance, why would they be that sympathetic to your gas and time? There's a line around the block for other poor people who are happy to lap up what the company is serving. Keep in mind, customers think they're tipping you, but it's actually helping the kitchen not have to pay you as much. My, purely speculative, suspicion is that if you get out of line or start to disappoint as a driver, they tweak the program to discourage you from working with them further as “being annoying” isn't cause enough to simply fire you, like they've done to the last people of any influence who whispered about paying drivers more. It's not like we could form a union and compel higher wages.

Do you think I got a good response to that? Because the answer is no. Instead of taking the ideas away that, “Huh, you know what? Why don't we try for a union!?” or perhaps, “It was shady they got fired or shipped away!” or, “Why don't they just actually pay us out our tips the customers think they're paying?” or, “A pooled insurance or gas incentive would help out a lot!” Nope, I get, “Wait, 5 minutes ago you were on my side, and now you think they're actively trying to discourage me?” You know, because if you didn't zero in on the speculation, why would I bother speaking?

I informed him we're on the same side, said it was a losing one, and then asked him how he'd like me to help after he said “with that attitude” of course we're on the losing one. He didn't respond.

The real problem, more of course, isn't that you can get stuck delivering too far and not get paid enough. The real problem is that, in the aggregate, I can work for 80 hours a week, average 10 an hour, and still be struggling to pay for things like car repairs. The real problem is that we're not unionized or have any expectation of health or car insurance. The real problem is that it takes an idiot helming the complaint who will swallow an idiot's “fix” that will amount to dodging everything truly important. Whether they pay a little more or simply decrease the order radius, none of that will speak to you putting your ass and time on the line indefinitely if you want to get anything from this, or any other, job.

As is always the case, there's never room or time for referencing some labor struggle from history. It's never going to be worded correctly all of the other little things that would make life working easier as long as the issue raised demands too much yet simultaneously faux focus. They'll find what amounts to a duct tape fix, and we'll keep driving, and they'll keep expanding, and life will go on just as precariously. All of the energy and curse words and empty, “BUT WE REALLY DO CARE ABOUT OUR DRIVERS!” will get eaten up and echoed until we find our next resting state until a new person pops up about something else that won't really be fixed.

Meanwhile, if anyone dares address me, it's with the sunken shoulders and dead eyes a mother with an endlessly crying child might. Empty, exhausted, screaming, “WHAT DO YOU WANT!?” as if I don't articulate it. These people exist in that feeling-laden space that every ignorant tyrant abuses to hold themselves harmless for being completely oblivious to the harms they perpetuate. “I want to get paid more.” We're looking into it. I've worked 80 hours this week for no bonus or incentive. You can always just sign off. Deflect, excuse, and outright lie. They're a tech company first, trying to zero in on the perfect pain point that can keep a driver feeling rewarded just a bit more than hurt so they keep driving. If they could pay you $4.75 a delivery instead of $7, they would. Chris Rock said it best.

You can't fix labor and wages anymore than you can envision the entire country being able to fix things. We're morally bankrupt, uninspired, unintelligent, and more willing to eat our own than find the patience to recognize what's actually been said or the reality of our own circumstances. My job sucks as much dick as anyone else's, they've just hidden it behind a kind of lottery and lies to the customers who aren't going to ask questions. They at once want to mine us for answers and good ideas, and provide nothing in return. My biggest takeaway from each shift is the season of TV I get through, not that someone understands my plight or is looking out for me and my interests.

I deleted everything I said on the comment train. I know that this is the extent of my voice, and every time I venture beyond it I'm going to overstep, over-speak, and alienate. I'm going to watch people adjusting the mirror and debating its cleanliness while the car is on fire about every topic until the day I die. As long as I'm going to work alongside them, I need to accept their terms and burn along with them. Or, you know, suffer a fate worse than death and get called pretentious and get posted to /r/iamverysmart for my deep and pressing concerns and knowledge regarding the underprivileged working class. Because you're never allowed to just suffer one death.

[660] Panic Trip

Without warning, and for what is most assuredly “no reason,” and actually during or right after “things” feel “complete” or “perfect,” a mild to severe panic sets in. Thus I had to stop what I was doing and start writing.

I've said before that I can see the rest of my life. Reflexively, the urge is to laugh or scowl at the little kid who's pretending to have figured something out. But I don't mean in a specific sense like predicting I'll die at 90 in the south of France. I mean in the sense of a feeling. I've gone 29 years with a sense of comfort and stability no matter the degree of “problems” I introduce into my life. It isn't hard for me to imagine 29 more. I can live in a way that less than a week out of the month is required working. I'll always have food. I have about 4 years worth of movies and television personally downloaded that I haven't seen yet. Simply, it won't take much beyond exercising the habits and expectations drilled into me since birth to float along this path until I'm dead.

I do not find this reassuring.

The comfort of this moment, the only moment, then registers as a trap. I'm comfortably full. I've got exactly what I want to be entertained with in front of my eyes. I'm even the right temperature. The other side of the equation over the last 2 days has seen my car die twice, in the most convenient places I could have asked for, and my phone get cracked, solely on the back in no way affecting the functionality. My “bad” isn't even that bad. It's been the perfect analogy for basically my entire life. I'm perturbed at the prospect of buying a phone case, replacement solar lights, and a new car battery, which I can afford because I work my at-will job that allows me to watch TV all day, all day.

I think the panic registers as a form of guilt. I think it speaks to everything more I'd like to go more right than it currently is. I think it's the reality setting in that I'm just as “nothing” comfortable loner with his TV shows as I am quasi-impractical impulsive romantic dreamer. I can hear the dad-speech in my head about how “living the dream!” I am that you'll find on /r/redditforgrownups. The hours I work don't register as me “deserving” this, or any form of comfort, until I'm able to work on what I think really matters. I don't want to use all of my time for the resolved sigh of relief as I “comfortably” buy a replacement car battery.

There's a distinction here too I think between what I'm feeling and simply being ungrateful. My broken car is a replacement for my significantly more broken car, given to me, as all my cars have been, by my dad. If I didn't run them into the ground working with them, I'd feel I have more to atone for or make even. I was recently called a “mooch” because everything in life is currently in opposite land. A charge which might have some staying power if I didn't pay rent and a “mortgage” to occupy this couch guilt free and keep months ahead on my garage.

To go along with this sense of panic is a line that's been trapped in my head, “It isn't about you.” I think I may have written about it before, but it's taken on a new kind of significance as I feel myself sliding into my remorseless brazen ego. I think I remember why I was persuaded by the idea. I wanted to help. I wanted to help the “ignorant masses” back when I was learning about religious stuff. Stuff I only bothered to learn because I was head over heals for a girl I wanted to be all about in high school. I've taken the examples of my dad and grandma who showered everything they could on the offspring so they could be happy or comfortable. And yet, I'm constantly watching TV.

That is, I'm battered with “stars.” I'm watching thousands of examples screaming every week, “No no, it IS about me!” It's the celebrity endorsement that gets money sent to a cause. It's the “new comedic voice” that gets greenlit. Sexual assault gets to trend and be of consequence after the rich white ladies have had enough. If it isn't about me, then it can't be about you either, which would contradict the whole exercise of picking friends or family. No matter how many giants' shoulders you're standing on, it's a select few that get the prizes and recognition. For all of the talk of sheep and shepards in biblical tales, they still dignify a soul! Even if the followers are predictably ignorant in the ways they choose to acknowledge and apply it. We relish hero tales, while the background regular people barely make it through a season.

For all of the faux-humility coming from...fuck, where is it even coming from? One-off misquotes from the bible about rich people having a hard time getting into heaven? The meek inheriting the Earth? The wave of, “Look at me!” has been going on for quite some time now and every modest civil servant is being roasted over the coals of the savages who take charge.

The task then seems to separate “celebrity” from “egomania.” I could stand to be something worth celebrating. I wouldn't mind recognition for my creativity. I still actually like getting likes even if people still only feel comfortable telling me they read and agree with something months or years later and mostly after they've been drinking. I've gone on enough digressions about the different kinds of “selfish.” The dread I feel is from finding the wrong kind of selfish too compelling. I need to keep the engine primed to work in service to a new direction at a moment's notice. The snug and comfortable blanket will get too hot and make me sweat.

[659] Adjust In Time

I think going to the gym is stupid because it's making me think “clearer” and have more and more to say before I'm able to go to sleep. Fuck, this is annoying.

The avid reader knows by now that I write for me. My head is a mess with words, and it's not like I'm writing a well thought out point by point case for something that seems particularly focused. I can already feel the waviness kicking in already. My head doesn't discriminate. The information or annoying thought or catchy song are just in one big puddle to be splashed into pieces. As such, I don't expect you to find the kind of utility or meaning in something I say that I might. I read these things over and over again over years. Different lines stick out for different reasons, hopefully because I learned something or stopped a bad habit. Things I wish I would have said creep in between lines that are 10 years old.

In approaching life, we either actively engage with and acknowledge that soup of confusion and competition, or we play along. It wouldn't be good for me, but it is within my capacity to just ignore the hamster scratching the back of my head trying to eat its way out. When you can't find the words, you try for a feeling. It's not hard to understand shit relationships, addiction, and every level of comfortable denial to keep away the sheer dread of it all.

I consider myself lucky for having the kind of disposition that always wants to shit on things. If I feel myself pulling away or doubting myself, I immediately think that's what I have to do. I'd just be an irrationally afraid pussy otherwise, right? The spite in my disposition isn't nihilism or pessimism. It's that I'm a soft stupid animal who's place in life grows more precarious with each day. Literally, I'm lucky enough to have been born to reach my “peak” as we're debating how “the greatest country on Earth” kills everyone for no reason and brings the rest of the planet down with them.

I'm always looking for inspiration. I want a line from that semi-popular TV show in the 90's to spur the next blog. I want to know how the books compare to the movies compare to Broadway. I read the forums where 18 year olds are claiming to make 4K a month “marketing” and “consulting.” It seems so easy that were you to pluck a “generalized goal” I've claimed to want to achieve in the last several years, I'd just copy their playbook. I'd just dropship, cold call, and freelance until I conjured my own little success story.

The thing is, I've been paying attention. I've watched my priorities change 3 to 7 blogs a month. I found my ability to retain interest in certain things completely empty. Something akin to, I don't care if there's an old millionaire too dumb or lazy to post cookie-cutter ads to facebook and is willing to pay me $20 an hour to do it, there's more at stake than the dollar amount. The nature of what I want to put into the world and how has changed. The reward is less and less about the dollar amount with every passing moment.

It's how I figured out how much I care about time. It's why I'll practice the trumpet or drum rudiments in between delivering food. I have a job where I retain the freedom to just leave when I get bored or start to feel bad. It's why days feel like months and why I can turn a few months of “no progress” into an ongoing saga of the drama and desperation of my intractable circumstances. My approach to my means, money, and motivation broadened. I'm not going to exhaust myself blindly in service to whomever I'm working for. I'm not going to pretend like my life has looked that different whether I had $500 or $15,000 in the bank. Work smarter, not harder. Or, figure out how to not make it feel like work.

It occurred to me that, given the amount of things I experience, it almost feels like a special feat in how much I'm able to ignore. I'm not plagued by the people making more money doing “easier” things. I'm not stressed out or jealous of the people who can play their instruments better than I can. I can attend all of the fake boardroom meetings in my head that I want, introducing something new I've read or want to experiment with, but the fantasy is a straight path through more delivered orders and more yard work than has currently been achieved. I don't want “a business” anymore than I just want to drink or go to “a party.” I want what I did to make the parties special to me, if no one else. I want to incorporate every little insight and every thing I've ever been fucked over by into the next thing. Everyone wants to tell you how it's done, no one invites you to work alongside them.

And that became a thing that consistently killed me. I don't need a life coach, your book, your TED talk or self-congratulatory story. I don't want to talk of “workers” and faux metrics of “well-being” with regard to the people I incorporate into my creation. I want partners. I want mutual taking up of responsibility. I want to provide you the chance to act as forwardly and intensely as me, and if that's not for you, you to choose and position yourself in a supplementary role or somewhere else. Anyone can get paid to do anything poorly. Showing people a path to believing in the same things you do is the real magic. You can do that with one person tinkering in your garage, or a billion dollar company trying to get to Mars.

I don't know if or when I've written about it, but I know I've talked enough about a sense of “inevitability.” While I certainly feel myself being passed between different universal dicks I wouldn't have otherwise chosen, I'm nowhere near as far away as anyone less than me might be. I remind myself everyday. I have land. I'm not looking for it. I have it. I'm still healthy. I have all the time people complain they wish they had when they were young and in their 20s or 30s. I don't have that much time, as you can see how quickly it escaped them, but my days feel like months. And I try to pack them full of experiences like I'm running out.

I think the importance of paying attention, the importance of right now, this moment, the one I'm writing in and the one you might be reading in, is that it's the only real comprehensive and most enlightening thing. Everything you do and don't understand becomes this sentence. Every hope or dream you've ever carried closely follows, but all existence at once in the same moment as well. Who you want to be, how you want to feel, memories of longing, aggravations, your grumbling stomach, itchy face, and sweaty balls are all right here. And you can do anything you want about it. If you don't feel that, if you're not paying attention, there isn't a single thing in life you could be doing that will make up for it. It's the only way to not get so persuaded by your distractions and obligations. It's how you can always be to blame and take responsibility. Your willingness to adopt the power of the moment is the closest you'll ever get to glimpse your eternal soul.

I don't believe you even truly have to bother with “figuring it out.” What have I figured out in pushing 700 blogs? To keep writing blogs. “Love” found me, I didn't dig it out of the pages, I screamed it back at itself. Responsibility for what I say and do reflects back on me, it doesn't bind me to unremitting law or morality. “My” words, way more frequently than I get credit for, are a parody of what I'm hearing or is rubbing me the wrong way. You're not “woke,” no one is actually “toxic” like poison, and if you could please tell me ad nauseum how I retain most if not all of the world's supply of “power,” I'd love to stop writing and be off somewhere being more useful. Seriously, I'll stick a battery up my ass, I don't care. What's it take?

I think this obsession with the moment speaks to my greediness. Why I want all of you, in one way or another. I'm giving my whole attention or choice over to things like work or the gym (particularly insufferable when every bead of sweat, piece of riding clothe, or stray hair is a bother), so I want everything in return. All the money I can make. All the hours of “pec” flexing. Let's party all the time, fuck all the time, be working together all the time, or drill down on getting the whole of media consumed, because we're right here. There's nothing else, this is everything, let's take it all in, all the quicker and happier together, because all we can do is reflect. When the world at large is a glaring dumpster fire, use a smaller mirror. Pay attention to each detail until they're perfect and deserve to be reflected in a larger way. That's you. Every inch you've fought for and fashioned into a badge people can see themselves in.

I want you to see the eternal flame of the moment. I want you to know, as fiercely as I do, that fortunes change in this moment. I can scream, “I'm stuck!” until I'm blue, and it will never be the truth. I'm where I need to be; not this couch, not this town, but on this line, in each breath, paying attention to what it is I really want and what it needs to feel like as I pursue it. Thankfully, right now it feels like I'm allowed to go to sleep.