I don’t know if I can describe it well, but there’s an uncomfortable place I reach when I think I’ve come to “the end” of something. It’s in letting something that pushed me forward die. It’s cutting out a habit or an argument I might have used passionately for years. When people describe profound changes in who they are or are becoming, I think it centers around these kinds of emotional pivots in how you’re willing to engage with your world.
One of the first times it happened to me was reading The Will to Power. The concept of exhaustion struck such a cord that I experienced a wave of calm and just put the book down and nonchalantly went about my day. How I found myself reading that book was a long emotional story that started with falling for a religious girl. After I’d written the whiny blogs, argued until I could pop, could quote the bible and prominent scientists and philosophers, and this well past when I felt so compelled to be with her, here’s Nietzsche talking about all the effort and time and what it amounts to and I was able to just turn it off.
Without diving too far back into memory lane, I started to feel it again right before starting this. I was watching a Frontline episode chronicling Obama’s presidency and the divide that’s grown in this country. The endless nauseating illogical ideological bullshit from people screaming in the streets and over the airwaves has to cultivate that same exhausted sense in any thinking individual. Compound your initial reaction to a lunatic chanting “death panels” with thoughtful breakdowns from an aspiring “rationalist” who says your approach to conversing with that person needs more nuance than “you’re batshit and stupid.”
They’re right, but I think they’re also more wrong in your approach to that person in general. A body loaded up with terrible ideas that will obstruct or kill you is just that, a deadly and dangerous vehicle you need to control or avoid. This isn’t my lazy stab at defending an offshoot of communism or authoritarianism. I’m trying to zero in on the psychological implications of being ceaselessly berated by the incoherent and angry. I never feel more changed, and for the worse, than in contemplating the hoops one must hop through in order to “appease” someone who wants you dead.
Part of the issue is in feeling like you’re alone. This is why we see these rallies and marches. Silently suffering alone people need something, anything, to suggest they have allies as the narrative swirls around polarization. A fetal heartbeat later the pro-life feminists are arguing with the main event organizers and black women wonder if wearing pinks hats at the BLM meeting will cause a fight. Everyone feels like their particular insight or soundbite is loaded with extra wisdom. If someone does in fact have more wisdom or insight, it can’t be recognized by any shared metric of value or truth. You want to think the details matter, but the more people start to rattle off what they consider details, you can no longer bring yourself to listen to any more.
This is why I take long periods off from reading. I’m not learning anything new. I’m seeing humans do human things over and over again and pretend like they’ve learned anything. You understand how naive and foolish leaders can be. You see the same froth at the mouths of past opposition as you see in the streets today. You see brilliant minds with brilliant analysis and analogies herding us all together into treatises someone will assuredly accuse you of not reading close enough. Inevitably someone else will come along and group the various thinkers into categories and offer short-hand digestible bits of their work that most align with the ways in which they remember them, and thus new shortcuts, cliches, and errant quotes are born. All of it for what? To me, just to speak the futile struggle with being human.
I’ve been so bored with myself for what seems like forever. I’m tired of my lack of story. I barely watch the shows I put on. I can’t bring myself to read another article about how Hitler 2 is destroying something I hadn’t thought about yet. I can’t express myself through music and while there’s a fleeing chance you might get something out of what I write about, I keep seeing the same things showing up more palpable and worse worded. When I’m “done” elevating over and assessing the mess of existence and just need to “do” things, what’s afforded me is minimum wage bullshit like stocking shelves or delivering food. It’s not depressive or incorrect to think of yourself as not mattering on those terms.
Again I just want to sleep. Watch me just drop whatever I’m holding in the middle of a night shift stocking episode and stoically walk out of the door. Watch the weight of the futile struggle bring me to my knees and the relief I’ll feel just being able to bow to the pointlessness of it all. I’m so tired.
Monday, January 30, 2017
Friday, January 27, 2017
[570] No Ragrets
I’ve been thinking a lot about regret. It didn’t sink in for me that that’s what I’ve been stuck on until I read a series of tweets from people claiming to vote for Hitler 2 and then saying how embarrassed or ashamed they are now with his executive orders. I don’t really know what to make of them. I haven’t known how to approach the snowball barreling towards a cliff as I conceive of the country. I’m hoping to discover something by approaching it via things I may regret.
In truth, I rarely regret things. It’s hard to say whether that’s more a strength or weakness. I don’t regret my harsh words. I don’t regret most of the money I’ve spent. The times I do regret it had less to do with the money and more to do with the potential fallout. I suppose as well I should distinguish regret from being sorry. It’s really very hard for me to even form many thoughts regarding regret because I’m rarely caught off guard as to what I’m doing, why I’ve done it, or what I hoped to achieve by doing so.
Maybe the last line there is the operative condition. That insidious “hope” rearing its ugly head again. Your expectations failing again to match the reality as you pretended to have a solid grasp on reality. You voted for Hitler 2 thinking you’d “shake up the system” or some such broad catch-phrase. You lied to your spouse to “keep them happy.” You thought if you kept pursuing the degree or title, the debt would start to feel worth it. Across topics it feels like there’s room for obscurity. Maybe the debt for one profession is more justified than another. Maybe withholding information from a crazy spouse prevents abducted children or physical harm. I’m not going to pretend there’s a benefit to voting for Hitler 2.
One issue seems to be that the people who are most convinced have the least reason to be so. How anything they say can be trusted is anyone’s guess. They don’t even know, so they bring their inability to the voting table and pick something that represents their not-quite-hidden nature. This speaks to why many people are literally impossible to talk to. They aren’t using words correctly. They’re conception of coherence is “I’m alive, therefore” period. Conceiving of themselves as a piece in a larger puzzle is off the table. Engaging their empathy systems for what are phantoms to them doesn’t work. They need to be forced.
The forceful exacting of one’s will leads thinking individuals to regret. They believe so much in their own capacity for change and personal responsibility that it blinds them to what level other people are at. It goes a degree further and provokes shame. How dare you conceive of people as sheep!? Allusions to their biblical mythology aside. I had someone jump down my throat for calling people dogs that need to be trained. No one wants to be responsible for leading someone down a path that doesn’t work out. Troops need to be trained to charge into certain death. Generals need to stomach it’s their job to get them killed.
People can be forced by less than ideal or thoughtful intentions. The bluster of the “strong man” forces your brain to engage the world in a specific way. Your fight or flight kicks in. Your in-group out-group flares up. It’d be one thing if Hitler 2 even understood those forces, but he’s controlled by massive insecurity and pathological forces that befall celebrities. None of this shit can be stopped because we don’t even appreciate how and why it’s in control. We’re not talking about curtailing psychological forces, we’re gearing up our own in marches, lawsuits, and donations. We don’t regret our approach to “fighting back” anymore than he does signing away our ability to inhabit the planet.
They say you regret the things you don’t try verse the things you do. Think of how wildly destructive that can be. How many shitty relationships you’re willing to give a chance. How many drugs you’re excited to experiment with. How much money you can spend in service to idealism. I’ve said as much about myself already, right? When the time comes to abandon this country, will I want my money tied up in land? The ideal is to live cheap and sustainably. The practical reality of thousands of dollars can’t be denied. What did I get from staying in a relationship I could have “negatively” called doomed from the start, but instead of stopping it, let it carry on for years? A chance to lose a friend and even more strained ideas about being open or honest with someone new.
We’re all endlessly susceptible to not believing what’s happening right in front of us. I could have steered my ex away, but I wanted to do better than my worst ideas about relationships, and then I get to rediscover why I got those worst ideas about relationships. You want “change” in government, and you could steer the ship towards more inclusive and thoughtful people, but settle for blowing things up, reigniting all your despotic claims about government. Aspiring to something “more” than what’s being offered suggests there isn’t enough already there. Whether it’s enough of what you need or want is up to interpretation, but that’s all there is.
Control can’t be exerted by those that don’t take it all in. It’s not about finding a balance between “liberal” and “conservative.” It’s not about “freedom” or making things “great.” You have to know that things aren’t great, but they are as well, and can be better. You have to know that for every one thing you actually know, there’s millions of things you don’t. You have to go into your world of reactionary dogs and train them, or pet them, or sometimes throw a shock collar on them. Does your dog find you condescending? Does your dog know a slap on the butt not to run away or jump on people is for its own good? We need more reflection that provokes regret before the disaster strikes. Dogs can feel regret.
I would regret not struggling to be recognized.The idea that there’s this “forgotten” class of people struggling in the drug-addled small towns while an entire sex and different races and religions have been under boot significantly longer. Recognized is different than heard. We heard you, poor idiots, but all I see is a group of poor idiots. You can “hear” whatever voice you want in my writing, but I’ve only wanted to be recognized for trying. Trying to find the words. Trying to surprise myself with some insight or analogy. Trying to show you what the work of coping looks like. Screaming in the street has never done it for me. Burning the world around me down in a selfish fit of rage doesn’t work either. Sitting in the middle of how or why I might regret something is the change I want to see in other people.
In truth, I rarely regret things. It’s hard to say whether that’s more a strength or weakness. I don’t regret my harsh words. I don’t regret most of the money I’ve spent. The times I do regret it had less to do with the money and more to do with the potential fallout. I suppose as well I should distinguish regret from being sorry. It’s really very hard for me to even form many thoughts regarding regret because I’m rarely caught off guard as to what I’m doing, why I’ve done it, or what I hoped to achieve by doing so.
Maybe the last line there is the operative condition. That insidious “hope” rearing its ugly head again. Your expectations failing again to match the reality as you pretended to have a solid grasp on reality. You voted for Hitler 2 thinking you’d “shake up the system” or some such broad catch-phrase. You lied to your spouse to “keep them happy.” You thought if you kept pursuing the degree or title, the debt would start to feel worth it. Across topics it feels like there’s room for obscurity. Maybe the debt for one profession is more justified than another. Maybe withholding information from a crazy spouse prevents abducted children or physical harm. I’m not going to pretend there’s a benefit to voting for Hitler 2.
One issue seems to be that the people who are most convinced have the least reason to be so. How anything they say can be trusted is anyone’s guess. They don’t even know, so they bring their inability to the voting table and pick something that represents their not-quite-hidden nature. This speaks to why many people are literally impossible to talk to. They aren’t using words correctly. They’re conception of coherence is “I’m alive, therefore” period. Conceiving of themselves as a piece in a larger puzzle is off the table. Engaging their empathy systems for what are phantoms to them doesn’t work. They need to be forced.
The forceful exacting of one’s will leads thinking individuals to regret. They believe so much in their own capacity for change and personal responsibility that it blinds them to what level other people are at. It goes a degree further and provokes shame. How dare you conceive of people as sheep!? Allusions to their biblical mythology aside. I had someone jump down my throat for calling people dogs that need to be trained. No one wants to be responsible for leading someone down a path that doesn’t work out. Troops need to be trained to charge into certain death. Generals need to stomach it’s their job to get them killed.
People can be forced by less than ideal or thoughtful intentions. The bluster of the “strong man” forces your brain to engage the world in a specific way. Your fight or flight kicks in. Your in-group out-group flares up. It’d be one thing if Hitler 2 even understood those forces, but he’s controlled by massive insecurity and pathological forces that befall celebrities. None of this shit can be stopped because we don’t even appreciate how and why it’s in control. We’re not talking about curtailing psychological forces, we’re gearing up our own in marches, lawsuits, and donations. We don’t regret our approach to “fighting back” anymore than he does signing away our ability to inhabit the planet.
They say you regret the things you don’t try verse the things you do. Think of how wildly destructive that can be. How many shitty relationships you’re willing to give a chance. How many drugs you’re excited to experiment with. How much money you can spend in service to idealism. I’ve said as much about myself already, right? When the time comes to abandon this country, will I want my money tied up in land? The ideal is to live cheap and sustainably. The practical reality of thousands of dollars can’t be denied. What did I get from staying in a relationship I could have “negatively” called doomed from the start, but instead of stopping it, let it carry on for years? A chance to lose a friend and even more strained ideas about being open or honest with someone new.
We’re all endlessly susceptible to not believing what’s happening right in front of us. I could have steered my ex away, but I wanted to do better than my worst ideas about relationships, and then I get to rediscover why I got those worst ideas about relationships. You want “change” in government, and you could steer the ship towards more inclusive and thoughtful people, but settle for blowing things up, reigniting all your despotic claims about government. Aspiring to something “more” than what’s being offered suggests there isn’t enough already there. Whether it’s enough of what you need or want is up to interpretation, but that’s all there is.
Control can’t be exerted by those that don’t take it all in. It’s not about finding a balance between “liberal” and “conservative.” It’s not about “freedom” or making things “great.” You have to know that things aren’t great, but they are as well, and can be better. You have to know that for every one thing you actually know, there’s millions of things you don’t. You have to go into your world of reactionary dogs and train them, or pet them, or sometimes throw a shock collar on them. Does your dog find you condescending? Does your dog know a slap on the butt not to run away or jump on people is for its own good? We need more reflection that provokes regret before the disaster strikes. Dogs can feel regret.
I would regret not struggling to be recognized.The idea that there’s this “forgotten” class of people struggling in the drug-addled small towns while an entire sex and different races and religions have been under boot significantly longer. Recognized is different than heard. We heard you, poor idiots, but all I see is a group of poor idiots. You can “hear” whatever voice you want in my writing, but I’ve only wanted to be recognized for trying. Trying to find the words. Trying to surprise myself with some insight or analogy. Trying to show you what the work of coping looks like. Screaming in the street has never done it for me. Burning the world around me down in a selfish fit of rage doesn’t work either. Sitting in the middle of how or why I might regret something is the change I want to see in other people.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
[569] Pencils Down
I can’t say precisely when it changed. All I know is that I can talk about myself now in terms I’m not sure existed when I was younger. Certain core ideas about myself remain true, but the approach became modified as my experience kept slamming hard into the reality. It might be described as life catching up to me. It might just be something more thoughtful people figured out before me.
I like to repeat stories. Sometimes a situation in your life feels so indicative of you at some point in time that you can relive it like you’re there again. I can still feel myself in my first job running up and down the aisles with a broom getting looks from customers and employees for two explicitly opposing reasons. I’m on the dancefloor or porch of my old house talking about everything with a dozen random strangers. I’m racing to get my homework for the day done before the bell for first period rings in grade school. I’m still fuming from a couple fights and cuddled up in some romantic nights.
The conversation about how to describe ourselves often comes with the word “discovery.” People wake up and explore their sexuality. People figure out it was the emotional insecurity and abuse from their parents the whole time! They discover a topic in school they previously had no interest in that became their career or “passion.” The examples above I never had to figure out. It wasn’t after a long contemplation or errant misstep that I figured out it can be invigorating to fight, surrounding myself with people who will dance and argue is the best, and making people annoyed at how quick and expertly I achieve my goals, even if it is just to clean a theater, speaks to something at the heart of my being.
Part of me will forever try to be something of a goody two shoes. I was a scared-straight kid. Better stated, even when I didn’t know I was doing something wrong, I could be beaten for getting it wrong. I was rewarded for good grades. I had no desire to smoke or drink. I didn’t steal. Of course, in kindergarden me and a couple friends pantsed a kid on the playground who still wore diapers, so I was certainly an out and out dick and bully as well, but we’ll leave the reasoning and psychoanalysis of 23 or so years ago to the professionals. But even that example, I’m not a person who delights in humiliation, and I’m not sure I truly was then either.
Don’t let me forget or talk past what changed. I guess I was bolstered by a genuine belief that as long as I kept getting the praise and doing things that excelled past others, my shit was made. For all the “kids were told they were special and got rewards they didn’t earn yada yada” so often thrown around, well, I did get the best grades. I did the next grades homework. I completed the work tasks faster and didn’t complain. I stayed out of trouble. I was putting on the loudest show of what you weren’t.
Something started creeping in. I kept getting the grades and cash, but the money started going towards things like gas instead of video games. I could still absolutely murder my job, but I found myself working for someone who didn’t appreciate it. I got to college reading almost a book a day for fun, and they told me I wasn’t allowed to take classes that I’d already read the required reading for the entire semester. By that point, most of my “friends” were associates or lackeys at best, so I didn’t yet have to deal with the identity crisis of incorporating others’ intentions or perspectives onto my being. My world was no less getting corrupted and punctured.
Eventually, the loudest message I was hearing wasn’t about how smart I was or what I could achieve. The thing I kept hearing until my heart had to stop fighting was that I absolutely didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if I was smarter. I didn’t matter if I could keep calm. I didn’t matter if I still had the energy to run and the better plan, I no longer deserved the recognition or praise. Now, there are always people around to be “encouraging,” but seeing through pleasantries isn’t particularly hard. An entire series could be devoted to how that message translates in attempting friendships and relationships, and certainly there are blogs to that effect, but alluding to them with this line will suffice for now.
So part of me really truly believes it. Part of me is Nietzsche on a bad day towards the end of his life. I went from kid who didn’t drink to person who “won” his shot club party with 32 or 34, where the only important thing that all involved remember is that I won. I went from sheepishly trying to take 2 suckers from the bank to at one point being unable to look around my room without pointing to something I stole. I thought I could be blissfully and magnificently gallant and in love with a crush from high school to turning into a right proper whore who’s said more words to his mailman than some of the people he’s hooked up with. That last one isn’t so much a negative as it’s there to sell the contrast.
Maybe the change is that I stopped believing in you. I still envision getting my party house back and having a movie screen living room. My heart still races at the prospect of putting on the kind of show from before as I see my dreams come true. When I can stave off how depressing it can be, I still barrel through books and articles looking for insight and details that can move the conversation. You came into the picture when I started partying. When all the, I guess fake, love and affection was passed around. You got fat or had too many kids. Your ideas sounded stale, your reasoning naive, and your goals very small and selfish. You got depressed. You got busy. You got tired. You embodied that thing I felt creeping, but instead of it mellowing you out, it became you.
What changed is I had to stop thinking it could just be me. I was solely responsible for my grades or pursuing a promotion or raise. We created a party setting movies are made of. Me and Hatsam killed ourselves getting exploited for the coffee shop. I felt the desire to subvert my goals and even perversions in service to what I thought my life could be with my ex. Every time I talk about the land I bought I’m insistent that people know they can and should be a part of it. I’m not gonna lie and say I even really feel it. I don’t actually know how to get you back.
It won’t just be about the money or having the ability to travel and escape this sinking ship. It’ll be about each shared day going forward. It’ll be whether or not you can put yourself next to people who felt as connected and alive to what was really them as I did. It’s not an “all hope is lost” sentiment, but the sadness kicks in when you so want for someone to be there that doesn’t want it for themselves. I’m on the playground, I’m in the theater, and I’m getting a little reckless. Where the bad jumbles with the good I still know how to speak to what’s at my core. It’s a place that remembers, but forgives, both myself and you. It’s a place that refuses to act as old as people younger than me try to. It’s a place that looks to receive and give recognition when it’s due. I stopped believing it was about some concrete goal as much as about a feeling. I want to give off a holistic impression that me and mine are doing it better. I’d love to go at the speed I’m most comfortable with.
I like to repeat stories. Sometimes a situation in your life feels so indicative of you at some point in time that you can relive it like you’re there again. I can still feel myself in my first job running up and down the aisles with a broom getting looks from customers and employees for two explicitly opposing reasons. I’m on the dancefloor or porch of my old house talking about everything with a dozen random strangers. I’m racing to get my homework for the day done before the bell for first period rings in grade school. I’m still fuming from a couple fights and cuddled up in some romantic nights.
The conversation about how to describe ourselves often comes with the word “discovery.” People wake up and explore their sexuality. People figure out it was the emotional insecurity and abuse from their parents the whole time! They discover a topic in school they previously had no interest in that became their career or “passion.” The examples above I never had to figure out. It wasn’t after a long contemplation or errant misstep that I figured out it can be invigorating to fight, surrounding myself with people who will dance and argue is the best, and making people annoyed at how quick and expertly I achieve my goals, even if it is just to clean a theater, speaks to something at the heart of my being.
Part of me will forever try to be something of a goody two shoes. I was a scared-straight kid. Better stated, even when I didn’t know I was doing something wrong, I could be beaten for getting it wrong. I was rewarded for good grades. I had no desire to smoke or drink. I didn’t steal. Of course, in kindergarden me and a couple friends pantsed a kid on the playground who still wore diapers, so I was certainly an out and out dick and bully as well, but we’ll leave the reasoning and psychoanalysis of 23 or so years ago to the professionals. But even that example, I’m not a person who delights in humiliation, and I’m not sure I truly was then either.
Don’t let me forget or talk past what changed. I guess I was bolstered by a genuine belief that as long as I kept getting the praise and doing things that excelled past others, my shit was made. For all the “kids were told they were special and got rewards they didn’t earn yada yada” so often thrown around, well, I did get the best grades. I did the next grades homework. I completed the work tasks faster and didn’t complain. I stayed out of trouble. I was putting on the loudest show of what you weren’t.
Something started creeping in. I kept getting the grades and cash, but the money started going towards things like gas instead of video games. I could still absolutely murder my job, but I found myself working for someone who didn’t appreciate it. I got to college reading almost a book a day for fun, and they told me I wasn’t allowed to take classes that I’d already read the required reading for the entire semester. By that point, most of my “friends” were associates or lackeys at best, so I didn’t yet have to deal with the identity crisis of incorporating others’ intentions or perspectives onto my being. My world was no less getting corrupted and punctured.
Eventually, the loudest message I was hearing wasn’t about how smart I was or what I could achieve. The thing I kept hearing until my heart had to stop fighting was that I absolutely didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if I was smarter. I didn’t matter if I could keep calm. I didn’t matter if I still had the energy to run and the better plan, I no longer deserved the recognition or praise. Now, there are always people around to be “encouraging,” but seeing through pleasantries isn’t particularly hard. An entire series could be devoted to how that message translates in attempting friendships and relationships, and certainly there are blogs to that effect, but alluding to them with this line will suffice for now.
So part of me really truly believes it. Part of me is Nietzsche on a bad day towards the end of his life. I went from kid who didn’t drink to person who “won” his shot club party with 32 or 34, where the only important thing that all involved remember is that I won. I went from sheepishly trying to take 2 suckers from the bank to at one point being unable to look around my room without pointing to something I stole. I thought I could be blissfully and magnificently gallant and in love with a crush from high school to turning into a right proper whore who’s said more words to his mailman than some of the people he’s hooked up with. That last one isn’t so much a negative as it’s there to sell the contrast.
Maybe the change is that I stopped believing in you. I still envision getting my party house back and having a movie screen living room. My heart still races at the prospect of putting on the kind of show from before as I see my dreams come true. When I can stave off how depressing it can be, I still barrel through books and articles looking for insight and details that can move the conversation. You came into the picture when I started partying. When all the, I guess fake, love and affection was passed around. You got fat or had too many kids. Your ideas sounded stale, your reasoning naive, and your goals very small and selfish. You got depressed. You got busy. You got tired. You embodied that thing I felt creeping, but instead of it mellowing you out, it became you.
What changed is I had to stop thinking it could just be me. I was solely responsible for my grades or pursuing a promotion or raise. We created a party setting movies are made of. Me and Hatsam killed ourselves getting exploited for the coffee shop. I felt the desire to subvert my goals and even perversions in service to what I thought my life could be with my ex. Every time I talk about the land I bought I’m insistent that people know they can and should be a part of it. I’m not gonna lie and say I even really feel it. I don’t actually know how to get you back.
It won’t just be about the money or having the ability to travel and escape this sinking ship. It’ll be about each shared day going forward. It’ll be whether or not you can put yourself next to people who felt as connected and alive to what was really them as I did. It’s not an “all hope is lost” sentiment, but the sadness kicks in when you so want for someone to be there that doesn’t want it for themselves. I’m on the playground, I’m in the theater, and I’m getting a little reckless. Where the bad jumbles with the good I still know how to speak to what’s at my core. It’s a place that remembers, but forgives, both myself and you. It’s a place that refuses to act as old as people younger than me try to. It’s a place that looks to receive and give recognition when it’s due. I stopped believing it was about some concrete goal as much as about a feeling. I want to give off a holistic impression that me and mine are doing it better. I’d love to go at the speed I’m most comfortable with.
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
[568] So I'm Already Dead
I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide. People commit suicide because they’re depressed or in a desperate situation. A person of excessive honor might commit suicide out of shame. Assisted suicide is praised as an end to suffering and a respect that a person has a right to how they choose to conduct their life, even if it’s their final choice.
Suicide is a major taboo today for a host of reasons. The idea that life is “sacred” goes through many cultural or time period variations. Spirited, yet woefully ignorant, religious types make their contradictory pleas for purgatory bound eggs and sperm, only obscuring our capacity and conversation about what constitutes life. Invariably, though not forcefully, suicide gets regarded as selfish because of the effect it has on everyone around the person who chose to do so. In fact, the fear of it is that we’d be persuaded to do the same thing.
Depending on how broad your perspective, you’re always killing yourself and others. It’s rarely phrased that way. Your attitude towards taxes takes food out of others’ mouths. Your guilty consumptive pleasures ensure death in overworked and exploited countries. Your “inevitable” choices are heating up the planet. You’ve killed your capacity for empathy and reason in your anointment of fascism. This point stressed by either your actual vote or your silence.
What should never be lost in any despotic description of what it means to be alive is the idea of a choice. Whether you commit “social suicide” and never bother to engage with the outside world or “spiritual suicide” and forsake tenants of humanity that might hold us together, you are choosing to do so. If you don’t know why things happen, it feels like a scary force of nature that can take you over. Standing at the edge of a cliff isn’t scary unless you don’t trust yourself not to jump. Well, I have shitty balance, but you get it.
I like to describe the layers of my being in thinking about which of them I’m killing. Any trait that you’ve taken pride in or has served some utility is on the chopping block. Can I kill my pride? In an important sense, that’s been dead for a really long time. Can I kill my sense of responsibility? That basically needed to be reduced because it was simply driving me mad. Can I kill time? This one’s particularly complicated. If you run out of time, in a sense, all these problems solve themselves. If you spend your time wanting your time to end, what motivates a decision to keep going? For the individual, it’s anyone’s guess, but I speculate fear and probably a few genuine emotional ties. For society? Whatever myth is marketed the loudest.
Why keep persisting in a capitalist mindset? You’re a commodity. You are your labor. Profit is what matters and the base ethic is “adulting” and sacrificing for a world that barley includes you. If you’re not selling, you’re wrong. If you’re not tired and jaded, here’s the violins for whatever you think constitutes your plight. When you make dramatic professions and analogies to suicide, tone it down there creeper, the world’s not all bad, check out these pictures from my recent excursion. If you enjoy your job or normalize your circumstances, I’m every ounce of whatever off-putting judgement you can employ.
And yet, the prospect of achieving the kind of lifestyle that takes care and fosters and promotes ownership remains appealing. Where to put the idea that you can work because you like it or like people or have a mind that runs nonstop? These don’t have to be dreams or privilege. They take active resistance to what feels normal. I talk about some horrible news in the world or give people 10 articles to read, they either ignore them, throw me a like, or feel that much more depressed and hopeless. I post a status about a movie I watched or show I went to? Conversation and questions for days!
If I’m so wrong for wanting leisure or work that matters (like so many people my age on their pills and shifting job landscape) why the ever-loving hell can’t I get anyone on any page that can change things for us? A line in a song I recently heard said, “If you’re not getting good answers start asking better questions.” So I take it to you random sporadic audience. What are the better questions?
We don’t save together. We don’t live together. We don’t hold weekly brainstorming sessions. We don’t read the same things. We don’t have a leader. Do we even really care? Is that the operative question? Have we always been mostly acquaintances more than anything else? Are we actually okay with different levels of suicidal behavior, letting nature take its course in a way, so just go to work and shut the fuck up? What’s it gonna take?
I think I’ve been thinking so much about suicide because that’s what people's’ attitudes and sentiments reduce to for me. There’s not engagement, thought, respect, or conversation. There’s getting dismissed at every turn. There’s empty praise and inane sentiment. Just shut up Nick. Just shut the fuck up. We get it. (Even though you don’t) You’re so much smarter and better. (Even when that’s not what I’m saying). You can’t fix things either. (Even when I’m actively trying or proposed a dozen things we could start for free). No one wants to hear how miserable their lives are. (Actually, no one has the balls to believe or responsibility to realize how good their lives could be).
You should be sadder than you are by getting exploited. You should want a change. You should provoke conflict. You shouldn’t mock me for describing my choice to pursue as many hours as my body can take to keep forwarding my goals as a form of suicide. It is. I’m killing the person who would rather read and think and play his guitar so I can make an impersonal monolith with no care or responsibility to me survive in spite and damming tradition. And on the verge of this pursuit and decision, I’ll get to be asked for a spare $2 while getting gas in the morning as my life is nothing but a source of irony, because where’s your mockery for people who beg?
You’re closer to them than me. You’re begging for someone to save you, advocate for you, take the bullet, be it from a gun or the details you don’t want to learn. You beg for pills. You beg for recognition as you bury what’s worthy of being seen. You beg for my silence so you can forget what it looks and sounds like to want for something deeper or speak for something meaningful. I’m actively trying to choose the life I want to see instead of stave-off reasons for suicide. How creepy. How little deserving of sympathy.
Suicide is a major taboo today for a host of reasons. The idea that life is “sacred” goes through many cultural or time period variations. Spirited, yet woefully ignorant, religious types make their contradictory pleas for purgatory bound eggs and sperm, only obscuring our capacity and conversation about what constitutes life. Invariably, though not forcefully, suicide gets regarded as selfish because of the effect it has on everyone around the person who chose to do so. In fact, the fear of it is that we’d be persuaded to do the same thing.
Depending on how broad your perspective, you’re always killing yourself and others. It’s rarely phrased that way. Your attitude towards taxes takes food out of others’ mouths. Your guilty consumptive pleasures ensure death in overworked and exploited countries. Your “inevitable” choices are heating up the planet. You’ve killed your capacity for empathy and reason in your anointment of fascism. This point stressed by either your actual vote or your silence.
What should never be lost in any despotic description of what it means to be alive is the idea of a choice. Whether you commit “social suicide” and never bother to engage with the outside world or “spiritual suicide” and forsake tenants of humanity that might hold us together, you are choosing to do so. If you don’t know why things happen, it feels like a scary force of nature that can take you over. Standing at the edge of a cliff isn’t scary unless you don’t trust yourself not to jump. Well, I have shitty balance, but you get it.
I like to describe the layers of my being in thinking about which of them I’m killing. Any trait that you’ve taken pride in or has served some utility is on the chopping block. Can I kill my pride? In an important sense, that’s been dead for a really long time. Can I kill my sense of responsibility? That basically needed to be reduced because it was simply driving me mad. Can I kill time? This one’s particularly complicated. If you run out of time, in a sense, all these problems solve themselves. If you spend your time wanting your time to end, what motivates a decision to keep going? For the individual, it’s anyone’s guess, but I speculate fear and probably a few genuine emotional ties. For society? Whatever myth is marketed the loudest.
Why keep persisting in a capitalist mindset? You’re a commodity. You are your labor. Profit is what matters and the base ethic is “adulting” and sacrificing for a world that barley includes you. If you’re not selling, you’re wrong. If you’re not tired and jaded, here’s the violins for whatever you think constitutes your plight. When you make dramatic professions and analogies to suicide, tone it down there creeper, the world’s not all bad, check out these pictures from my recent excursion. If you enjoy your job or normalize your circumstances, I’m every ounce of whatever off-putting judgement you can employ.
And yet, the prospect of achieving the kind of lifestyle that takes care and fosters and promotes ownership remains appealing. Where to put the idea that you can work because you like it or like people or have a mind that runs nonstop? These don’t have to be dreams or privilege. They take active resistance to what feels normal. I talk about some horrible news in the world or give people 10 articles to read, they either ignore them, throw me a like, or feel that much more depressed and hopeless. I post a status about a movie I watched or show I went to? Conversation and questions for days!
If I’m so wrong for wanting leisure or work that matters (like so many people my age on their pills and shifting job landscape) why the ever-loving hell can’t I get anyone on any page that can change things for us? A line in a song I recently heard said, “If you’re not getting good answers start asking better questions.” So I take it to you random sporadic audience. What are the better questions?
We don’t save together. We don’t live together. We don’t hold weekly brainstorming sessions. We don’t read the same things. We don’t have a leader. Do we even really care? Is that the operative question? Have we always been mostly acquaintances more than anything else? Are we actually okay with different levels of suicidal behavior, letting nature take its course in a way, so just go to work and shut the fuck up? What’s it gonna take?
I think I’ve been thinking so much about suicide because that’s what people's’ attitudes and sentiments reduce to for me. There’s not engagement, thought, respect, or conversation. There’s getting dismissed at every turn. There’s empty praise and inane sentiment. Just shut up Nick. Just shut the fuck up. We get it. (Even though you don’t) You’re so much smarter and better. (Even when that’s not what I’m saying). You can’t fix things either. (Even when I’m actively trying or proposed a dozen things we could start for free). No one wants to hear how miserable their lives are. (Actually, no one has the balls to believe or responsibility to realize how good their lives could be).
You should be sadder than you are by getting exploited. You should want a change. You should provoke conflict. You shouldn’t mock me for describing my choice to pursue as many hours as my body can take to keep forwarding my goals as a form of suicide. It is. I’m killing the person who would rather read and think and play his guitar so I can make an impersonal monolith with no care or responsibility to me survive in spite and damming tradition. And on the verge of this pursuit and decision, I’ll get to be asked for a spare $2 while getting gas in the morning as my life is nothing but a source of irony, because where’s your mockery for people who beg?
You’re closer to them than me. You’re begging for someone to save you, advocate for you, take the bullet, be it from a gun or the details you don’t want to learn. You beg for pills. You beg for recognition as you bury what’s worthy of being seen. You beg for my silence so you can forget what it looks and sounds like to want for something deeper or speak for something meaningful. I’m actively trying to choose the life I want to see instead of stave-off reasons for suicide. How creepy. How little deserving of sympathy.
Monday, January 16, 2017
[567] Know Your Knot
It’s not a very grand or complicated idea, but you’re wrong
about how to fix things. It’s not a problem that you are wrong, it’s a problem
that you forgot how wrongness dictates your life. That is, while you’re working
on something you think is going to help and fix things, the problem is shifting
in real time. The only way to avoid constantly pursuing the fleeting problem is
to suss out constants. Despite what we’d like to believe about ourselves
blossoming into beautiful individuals, what can be said about us that remains
true should be the operative way we approach anything we’d like to call a “fix”
for something.
You need to eat. You need to be protected from the weather and disease and animals stronger than you. Without an appeal to Maslow, merely existing should almost be a throwaway concept with our access to these means. There’s an economic fervor underpinning our warped morality with regard to who gets access and why. To my mind, the extent that you persistently appeal to the economic incentive, you skip right over your basic animality let alone humanity. One does not improve an environment that disavows the animals that inhabit it.
As such “society” is not something to be fixed, but something to be accounted for. As long as one person is still starving, you’re employing the wrong method. The ethics can presume to be there, the practical reality does not manifest. An impersonal monolithic conception of society and what any one member’s “quantified effort” amounts to betray your ripping your bread in half to feed your compatriot. It also obscures the repercussions if you found yourself, or others found out, you were unwilling to do so.
No matter individual personal testimony, efforts in vain to help remain in vain. If you dove into a pool and nearly drown holding one child’s head above water while you watch dozens around them drown, are you going to feel good about yourself? I’d ask who threw all these kids in the pool in the first place or at least who gave them the ability to kill themselves. Why was no emergency valve in place to drain the pool or nobody watching them? In reality, when you’re piecemeal addressing cases of abuse or mental illness, even if you mean the world to a patient, what’s the world really look like that you’re both operating in?
By asking these kinds of questions and insisting on a kind of futility and mockery about our caring souls we can move into a realm where we could do more. Is it enough to lobby? Is it enough to hold meetings with the Committee on Finally Kicking Ass and Taking Names? When you see some ineloquent bleeding heart artist tell you to “fix yourself” they’re making the same empty mass appeal that makes their conscience feel covered, but doesn’t lay out the rules for doing so. They don’t say, “Shame yourself.” They don’t say, “Read these ten books first.” They don’t say, “Be like this thought leader.” They say we’re sick, keep coughing until we get over fascism. Like and subscribe and share and then we can begin to change the world in the comments.
I need people who’ve gotten over themselves and their bad idea of ethical behavior. I’m willing to fight about it. Sometimes, you just really don’t know anything and shouldn’t speak. It’s a moral decision to waste your effort and impose your guilt and sense of inadequacy on someone else. If you don’t know the story, don’t feel prompted to offer “fixes” that just get in the way. To this end, if that speaks to the reason I don’t hear much feedback, then I appreciate you. At the same time, feel ashamed and learn more. I think a big reason we’re in this fascist mess has been spoken about with regard to the road to hell and your best intentions.
I don’t like that people think it isn’t work to be genuinely moral. It has nothing to do with how you feel about yourself. It has to do with your approach and appreciation for your circumstances. I don’t think I can save the world. I think I can account for my animal in a way all animals require. I don’t require hundreds of ignorant opinions or arbitrary validation or condemnation. After I’m fed and housed, I require thought. I require honesty, trust, and loyalty. These are practically myths online. You choke on what people are offering by way of judgment or “assistance,” or else. Then, true to their nature, they get angry when they haven’t fixed you for all of their heart and circumspect sincerity.
I sense no general trend toward addressing the failures of our descriptions or capacity to recognize what it is about us that needs fixing. Everybody wants to rule the world, even if that rule is “that’s not my problem.” I see it as a failure of recognition and counting. I see it is as big dumb ego. Have you been paying attention? Did I tell you to fix anything? Did I claim to be moral? Have I identified anything convoluted to account for no matter when or where you’re born? Would you be helping the conversation by screaming, “People need water too, you didn’t say water!” If you’re listening close enough, you’ll hear how much of the discourse reduces to inane anger-worthy input like that. Then, closely follows, “What asshole, I was just trying to help!”
You need to eat. You need to be protected from the weather and disease and animals stronger than you. Without an appeal to Maslow, merely existing should almost be a throwaway concept with our access to these means. There’s an economic fervor underpinning our warped morality with regard to who gets access and why. To my mind, the extent that you persistently appeal to the economic incentive, you skip right over your basic animality let alone humanity. One does not improve an environment that disavows the animals that inhabit it.
As such “society” is not something to be fixed, but something to be accounted for. As long as one person is still starving, you’re employing the wrong method. The ethics can presume to be there, the practical reality does not manifest. An impersonal monolithic conception of society and what any one member’s “quantified effort” amounts to betray your ripping your bread in half to feed your compatriot. It also obscures the repercussions if you found yourself, or others found out, you were unwilling to do so.
No matter individual personal testimony, efforts in vain to help remain in vain. If you dove into a pool and nearly drown holding one child’s head above water while you watch dozens around them drown, are you going to feel good about yourself? I’d ask who threw all these kids in the pool in the first place or at least who gave them the ability to kill themselves. Why was no emergency valve in place to drain the pool or nobody watching them? In reality, when you’re piecemeal addressing cases of abuse or mental illness, even if you mean the world to a patient, what’s the world really look like that you’re both operating in?
By asking these kinds of questions and insisting on a kind of futility and mockery about our caring souls we can move into a realm where we could do more. Is it enough to lobby? Is it enough to hold meetings with the Committee on Finally Kicking Ass and Taking Names? When you see some ineloquent bleeding heart artist tell you to “fix yourself” they’re making the same empty mass appeal that makes their conscience feel covered, but doesn’t lay out the rules for doing so. They don’t say, “Shame yourself.” They don’t say, “Read these ten books first.” They don’t say, “Be like this thought leader.” They say we’re sick, keep coughing until we get over fascism. Like and subscribe and share and then we can begin to change the world in the comments.
I need people who’ve gotten over themselves and their bad idea of ethical behavior. I’m willing to fight about it. Sometimes, you just really don’t know anything and shouldn’t speak. It’s a moral decision to waste your effort and impose your guilt and sense of inadequacy on someone else. If you don’t know the story, don’t feel prompted to offer “fixes” that just get in the way. To this end, if that speaks to the reason I don’t hear much feedback, then I appreciate you. At the same time, feel ashamed and learn more. I think a big reason we’re in this fascist mess has been spoken about with regard to the road to hell and your best intentions.
I don’t like that people think it isn’t work to be genuinely moral. It has nothing to do with how you feel about yourself. It has to do with your approach and appreciation for your circumstances. I don’t think I can save the world. I think I can account for my animal in a way all animals require. I don’t require hundreds of ignorant opinions or arbitrary validation or condemnation. After I’m fed and housed, I require thought. I require honesty, trust, and loyalty. These are practically myths online. You choke on what people are offering by way of judgment or “assistance,” or else. Then, true to their nature, they get angry when they haven’t fixed you for all of their heart and circumspect sincerity.
I sense no general trend toward addressing the failures of our descriptions or capacity to recognize what it is about us that needs fixing. Everybody wants to rule the world, even if that rule is “that’s not my problem.” I see it as a failure of recognition and counting. I see it is as big dumb ego. Have you been paying attention? Did I tell you to fix anything? Did I claim to be moral? Have I identified anything convoluted to account for no matter when or where you’re born? Would you be helping the conversation by screaming, “People need water too, you didn’t say water!” If you’re listening close enough, you’ll hear how much of the discourse reduces to inane anger-worthy input like that. Then, closely follows, “What asshole, I was just trying to help!”
Saturday, January 14, 2017
[568] Soup Chicken
I think the game is lost. The problem doesn’t really concern how I think though. I feel it is lost as well. In order to make that sentiment coherent we need parameters.
I look at my relationships. They’re virtual. They’re “polite.” They’re old and tired in their 20s. It’s not about judging them as “bad” or “good,” it’s simply that they’re not as human as they were. They’ve been lost to however you want to describe modernity.
I look at work. It’s exploitative. It’s superficial. It’s unhealthy. It’s precarious. The immense pride and entitlement that previous generations learned growing up during a fluke period in history didn’t just slowly decline, it was sharply cut off.
I look at the environment. It’s running away. It’s flooding and starving people. Literally, we’ve figured out how to make the planet attack us in ways one struggles to denote as “natural.” Animals are going to be memories or pictures from books we read growing up. Wars might be fought over water.
I look at what’s popular. Memes and videogames and self-indulgent immaturity with millions of views take top marks. Pills and bad music glorify zoning out and dying young. TV produces more to watch a season than entire generations would have consumed in a lifetime.
I look at politics and my left hand fights my right hand to put the gun back on the table.
I get accused, any time I make the mistake of engaging online with someone past a single line, of being crazy and hating my life. I get told, in odd passive aggressive ways that people aren’t afraid of me...yet, but that I clearly need help with my “obsession” towards speaking to things accurately and exhaustively. I get told I’m denigrating people and am too harsh or abrasive in how I talk literally following lines of insults, speculations, and mischaracterizations. It’s enough to drive you mad.
Attempting to account for people’s behavior, I’m wondering if you can be human if you haven’t felt suicidal. If you haven’t stared so hard at some intractable travesty that you think it’s better to end it now than to keep suffering this moment. I phrase it that way because you’d think that’s the choice I’m giving people. You’d think that by asking them to accept and define fascism, their next decision has to be to kill themselves. I can’t conjure anything but mortal fear in my desperate, and they truly are desperate, attempts to get people to hold themselves accountable.
You can’t imagine what I go through. That must be the only way to say it. You literally can’t imagine it. You can’t imagine being always and forever the bad guy. You can’t imagine having to be your own cheerleader and grasping around in the dark for a kudos from one of your smart or empathetic friends from time to time. You can’t imagine going into detail about how not just some social faux-pas was your fault, but the whole world too. You don’t know what it’s like to have people constantly react to what you have to say as if, “Why do you think that way?” is the same question as, “Why are you an impossible cunty fuck head?”
You don’t know how desperate I am to believe in something. I’m losing even the capacity to believe in myself, but I can only feel it. My thoughts remain each line trying to grasp the words for how endlessly hollow and alone I feel. For every one person that understands, there’s thousands or hundreds of thousands actually in power or who don’t. For every 100 lines you’ll find yourself nodding alone in weepy solidarity, one will get lifted to paint me as a boar or jackal muddying or thrashing your disposition as if I were literally massaging your brain.
I don’t hate my life, I hate you. I just wish you hated you. I wish you knew what an impossible fuck head you were and then you’d learn how to talk to me. I wish you knew that you are so violently mean that you’re killing everyone around you. I wish you knew that the words you’re not saying are so much worse than the one’s you’re pretending I am. I wish you knew what responsibility for your actions felt like and it gave you pause and caution before you opened your mouth or let your fingers fly.
I can’t do it anymore. I can’t be made to feel like even when I apologize, it’s not good enough. I can’t cope with the idea that I need even the bare minimum and it’s too much. I can’t call you worth my time and sacrifice. I can’t believe you deserve my thoughts, effort, or consideration. I need to let you die. I need to escape. It’s impossible to exist in a place where your pain isn’t real. It consumes you. It changes you. I can’t become like you and forget how to recognize myself.
Here I thought it was a dangerous game to consume so much media, but it turns out it’s my lifeblood. I’d rather be in campy revamped Cory Matthew’s New York studio than in the seat next to you. I’d rather fight for my life against zombies and A.I. than hear about your day. I want to feel like I could fall in love with two dreamy actors playing and replaying the same old story because that version of love is the only reliable thing. You’re gonna rally together and chant on January 20th? I’m going to wish there’s an asteroid coming we haven’t accounted for.
I can’t get rid of my anxiety because it’s not mine. I’m a reflective individual who can’t make you stop standing in front of me. I’m being forced to accept my own death well before I’m ready to go. I’m being told I don’t matter, I’m not thinking correctly, or that my decision to try is everything but. And so I don’t have a choice anymore than I’m allowed a voice. I can defy the silence at my peril. I can stare beyond the horizon as the light burns my eyes. I can feel my heart dying to get out and look like everything else that’s dead and rotting before it.
We’re too far gone. We can’t keep living under the delusion that if you’ve read this and understood and liked and empathy-d until your lungs have given out that there’s anyone but you and me who’ve done so. The rest can’t. The rest are trapped in a death spiral polishing their wings. They’re drowning and reaching for a glass of water. They’ve slit their wrists and told you not to be afraid for them. It’s time to listen.
I look at my relationships. They’re virtual. They’re “polite.” They’re old and tired in their 20s. It’s not about judging them as “bad” or “good,” it’s simply that they’re not as human as they were. They’ve been lost to however you want to describe modernity.
I look at work. It’s exploitative. It’s superficial. It’s unhealthy. It’s precarious. The immense pride and entitlement that previous generations learned growing up during a fluke period in history didn’t just slowly decline, it was sharply cut off.
I look at the environment. It’s running away. It’s flooding and starving people. Literally, we’ve figured out how to make the planet attack us in ways one struggles to denote as “natural.” Animals are going to be memories or pictures from books we read growing up. Wars might be fought over water.
I look at what’s popular. Memes and videogames and self-indulgent immaturity with millions of views take top marks. Pills and bad music glorify zoning out and dying young. TV produces more to watch a season than entire generations would have consumed in a lifetime.
I look at politics and my left hand fights my right hand to put the gun back on the table.
I get accused, any time I make the mistake of engaging online with someone past a single line, of being crazy and hating my life. I get told, in odd passive aggressive ways that people aren’t afraid of me...yet, but that I clearly need help with my “obsession” towards speaking to things accurately and exhaustively. I get told I’m denigrating people and am too harsh or abrasive in how I talk literally following lines of insults, speculations, and mischaracterizations. It’s enough to drive you mad.
Attempting to account for people’s behavior, I’m wondering if you can be human if you haven’t felt suicidal. If you haven’t stared so hard at some intractable travesty that you think it’s better to end it now than to keep suffering this moment. I phrase it that way because you’d think that’s the choice I’m giving people. You’d think that by asking them to accept and define fascism, their next decision has to be to kill themselves. I can’t conjure anything but mortal fear in my desperate, and they truly are desperate, attempts to get people to hold themselves accountable.
You can’t imagine what I go through. That must be the only way to say it. You literally can’t imagine it. You can’t imagine being always and forever the bad guy. You can’t imagine having to be your own cheerleader and grasping around in the dark for a kudos from one of your smart or empathetic friends from time to time. You can’t imagine going into detail about how not just some social faux-pas was your fault, but the whole world too. You don’t know what it’s like to have people constantly react to what you have to say as if, “Why do you think that way?” is the same question as, “Why are you an impossible cunty fuck head?”
You don’t know how desperate I am to believe in something. I’m losing even the capacity to believe in myself, but I can only feel it. My thoughts remain each line trying to grasp the words for how endlessly hollow and alone I feel. For every one person that understands, there’s thousands or hundreds of thousands actually in power or who don’t. For every 100 lines you’ll find yourself nodding alone in weepy solidarity, one will get lifted to paint me as a boar or jackal muddying or thrashing your disposition as if I were literally massaging your brain.
I don’t hate my life, I hate you. I just wish you hated you. I wish you knew what an impossible fuck head you were and then you’d learn how to talk to me. I wish you knew that you are so violently mean that you’re killing everyone around you. I wish you knew that the words you’re not saying are so much worse than the one’s you’re pretending I am. I wish you knew what responsibility for your actions felt like and it gave you pause and caution before you opened your mouth or let your fingers fly.
I can’t do it anymore. I can’t be made to feel like even when I apologize, it’s not good enough. I can’t cope with the idea that I need even the bare minimum and it’s too much. I can’t call you worth my time and sacrifice. I can’t believe you deserve my thoughts, effort, or consideration. I need to let you die. I need to escape. It’s impossible to exist in a place where your pain isn’t real. It consumes you. It changes you. I can’t become like you and forget how to recognize myself.
Here I thought it was a dangerous game to consume so much media, but it turns out it’s my lifeblood. I’d rather be in campy revamped Cory Matthew’s New York studio than in the seat next to you. I’d rather fight for my life against zombies and A.I. than hear about your day. I want to feel like I could fall in love with two dreamy actors playing and replaying the same old story because that version of love is the only reliable thing. You’re gonna rally together and chant on January 20th? I’m going to wish there’s an asteroid coming we haven’t accounted for.
I can’t get rid of my anxiety because it’s not mine. I’m a reflective individual who can’t make you stop standing in front of me. I’m being forced to accept my own death well before I’m ready to go. I’m being told I don’t matter, I’m not thinking correctly, or that my decision to try is everything but. And so I don’t have a choice anymore than I’m allowed a voice. I can defy the silence at my peril. I can stare beyond the horizon as the light burns my eyes. I can feel my heart dying to get out and look like everything else that’s dead and rotting before it.
We’re too far gone. We can’t keep living under the delusion that if you’ve read this and understood and liked and empathy-d until your lungs have given out that there’s anyone but you and me who’ve done so. The rest can’t. The rest are trapped in a death spiral polishing their wings. They’re drowning and reaching for a glass of water. They’ve slit their wrists and told you not to be afraid for them. It’s time to listen.
[567] Liftoff
As I gear up to potentially waste gas and money screening for another study, I'm searching through Youtube videos on anxiety and de-stressing. A constant theme be it from mediation videos or self-help and advice advocates is a contemplation of just how small we are and how little we matter. Think of the vastness and blackness of the universe. Think of how long it took us to get here. Think about the billions who have come before and the few million that will make it out before Hitler 2 causes a nuclear holocaust.
They go on to encourage you to take your idea and watch it. Watch it move to the front of your mind and then watch it slip away never really aware of when or why that happened. They say consider how petty and pointless your concerns are. They say focus on your breath and when everything seems like it's burning down around you, at least you'll have the calming reassurance of your breath. Be it the background noise of the ocean, the rain, or someone leaning on a keyboard, you're supposed to occupy a space that transcends your ego and just lets you simply exist in this vast sea of wonderment and confusion.
Bullshit.
I don't know if that kind of shit helps you, but it never works on me. I've tried in good faith to practice meditation well beyond the simple point of finding it boring. I try to breathe and relax. I've tried sensory deprivation and to go somewhere else in my mind that my fickle excited ego couldn't reach. You know the only thing that ever calms me down? This shit right here. Bitching about stupid shit that doesn't work and asserting my ego as often as it's screaming to burst out of my chest like the movie Alien.
My concerns aren't petty. I already feel dead, so there's nothing reassuring in constantly asserting how small I am. I'm not gonna come back from my ego escape, at least not sober, and think the implications of a Hitler 2 presidency are any less scary. I'm not going to be any less concerned about securing the lifestyle and funding that allows me to survive independent of the swirling stupidity around me. I'm not going to relax the intensity I feel about my goals be it the website or just in what I hope to bring to and get out of my relationships. I'm not irrationally worried, despite my body irrationally acting up at the operative time to just be fucking normal.
Even now, if you could take my blood pressure, it'd probably be lower than it's ever been. I can't feel my heart in my chest or neck anymore. I can't see my hands sweating or shaking the whole drive up north or bring myself to care about my dwindling bank account and my future as a pizza delivery driver. Right now. Right as I'm bitching about real shit that I have literally never discovered any better coping mechanism for. I think I'm writing this so I can read it back to myself this same time tomorrow morning when I'm in the room ready for a spot of panic for no goddamn reason.
Part of it is that I don't feel if I'm not worried anything will ever get done! I've said as much before. No one's coming to save me. There isn't even a flicker of hope I see from on high. The irony of buying this land was that I as hoping to avoid this exact kind of stress in reducing my goddamn bills so far as to be a joke. I wanted more leeway to pay. I wanted time to establish checks and safety measures so I wouldn't be up against an entire lifestyle and timing change in order to do what I want to do. Bloody hell.
The plus is that I have any a number of people showing interest in the land at least. So, after all the failure is all out of the way I might still be able to hobble together something that keeps the bills paid for a minute, but my plans involved me getting into plenty of studies, even on top of each other, in order to move much more quickly. I'm still not sold on this patience is a virtue thing. I think patience is for people who don't recognize the amount of things incoming to fuck them.
Ugh, I don't want to dwell. Hopefully reading this and then re-reading it and then doing that a dozen or so more times while I'm in the lobby I'll switch back into what I need to be. The fact that I've been trying to figure it out and spoken to so much shit I think underlies it and I still haven't managed to get over it yet is bugging the shit out of me. What am I missing?
They go on to encourage you to take your idea and watch it. Watch it move to the front of your mind and then watch it slip away never really aware of when or why that happened. They say consider how petty and pointless your concerns are. They say focus on your breath and when everything seems like it's burning down around you, at least you'll have the calming reassurance of your breath. Be it the background noise of the ocean, the rain, or someone leaning on a keyboard, you're supposed to occupy a space that transcends your ego and just lets you simply exist in this vast sea of wonderment and confusion.
Bullshit.
I don't know if that kind of shit helps you, but it never works on me. I've tried in good faith to practice meditation well beyond the simple point of finding it boring. I try to breathe and relax. I've tried sensory deprivation and to go somewhere else in my mind that my fickle excited ego couldn't reach. You know the only thing that ever calms me down? This shit right here. Bitching about stupid shit that doesn't work and asserting my ego as often as it's screaming to burst out of my chest like the movie Alien.
My concerns aren't petty. I already feel dead, so there's nothing reassuring in constantly asserting how small I am. I'm not gonna come back from my ego escape, at least not sober, and think the implications of a Hitler 2 presidency are any less scary. I'm not going to be any less concerned about securing the lifestyle and funding that allows me to survive independent of the swirling stupidity around me. I'm not going to relax the intensity I feel about my goals be it the website or just in what I hope to bring to and get out of my relationships. I'm not irrationally worried, despite my body irrationally acting up at the operative time to just be fucking normal.
Even now, if you could take my blood pressure, it'd probably be lower than it's ever been. I can't feel my heart in my chest or neck anymore. I can't see my hands sweating or shaking the whole drive up north or bring myself to care about my dwindling bank account and my future as a pizza delivery driver. Right now. Right as I'm bitching about real shit that I have literally never discovered any better coping mechanism for. I think I'm writing this so I can read it back to myself this same time tomorrow morning when I'm in the room ready for a spot of panic for no goddamn reason.
Part of it is that I don't feel if I'm not worried anything will ever get done! I've said as much before. No one's coming to save me. There isn't even a flicker of hope I see from on high. The irony of buying this land was that I as hoping to avoid this exact kind of stress in reducing my goddamn bills so far as to be a joke. I wanted more leeway to pay. I wanted time to establish checks and safety measures so I wouldn't be up against an entire lifestyle and timing change in order to do what I want to do. Bloody hell.
The plus is that I have any a number of people showing interest in the land at least. So, after all the failure is all out of the way I might still be able to hobble together something that keeps the bills paid for a minute, but my plans involved me getting into plenty of studies, even on top of each other, in order to move much more quickly. I'm still not sold on this patience is a virtue thing. I think patience is for people who don't recognize the amount of things incoming to fuck them.
Ugh, I don't want to dwell. Hopefully reading this and then re-reading it and then doing that a dozen or so more times while I'm in the lobby I'll switch back into what I need to be. The fact that I've been trying to figure it out and spoken to so much shit I think underlies it and I still haven't managed to get over it yet is bugging the shit out of me. What am I missing?
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
[566] Human Faces
I try to look deep. That is, I try to
pick up on things beyond what they initially show or say. I look how
your face and body move as you're telling a story. I notice little
changes in the tone of your voice and come up with reasons you might
be getting angrier or happier. I watch your posture or mood shift
over time and infer things about your relationship or job. I try to
classify the stories you're willing to tell or what people are
willing and quick to say about you. If I ever get a writing sample,
then it's like part of you has been put under excessive flood
lighting. I can literally watch where your reasoning starts and stops
and pick out your particular word choices I might have skipped over
in a cordial conversation.
We're born, to some extent, to be able to do this naturally. Just as most people can see, taste, and smell. You can get a job tasting, smelling, or spotting forgeries because the very senses you take for granted have more layers than you might discover on your own. You can then take it a step further. The reason there are FBI profilers and body language “experts” (as that field I hesitate to say has the required scientific uniformity of reliable replication) is because with enough practice you can start to see trends, pick apart particulars, and often see reliable-enough information into the future about who a person is, is becoming, or is trying to be. Absolutely it's not perfect and people can opt to be perfectly random or be thrown off course by unforeseeable circumstances, but the point is less to argue for the strict scientific basis of my claim, and more to talk about the practice.
Band taught me that “practice makes permanent.” If you hold yourself to bad standards and ingrain bad practicing habits you'll subconsciously move into those spaces you've carved and synapses you've strengthened. The malleability of the brain is such that you can reinforce or degrade these proclivities, but the earlier you start and learn something and the more you replicate it, that's often what will stick. This is the heart of learned prejudices and poor stress or conflict resolution strategies. This is irrational fears and insecurities that play out as the most confident and intense people you'll ever meet. This is why when conversations all degrade the same way I'm not surprised, because through our families, cordiality, and the media, we've all been trained to deal with information we don't like or understand the exact same ways.
Now I'm caught running with the thesis that we're a society of extremely bad social habits. I can repeat that to myself as many times as it takes to become convinced. I can make it harder for myself to see the arguments in favor of the social games we play and how they beget more cohesion or happiness. Every single supposition I take, by virtue of “it came to mind,” I can argue in the light of criticism, damnation, or depression. Precisely at this point is where we can either do and say what I just did or carry on like we're perfectly unable to recognize our ideas and what they may be translating. When I write, I don't particularly feel unduly or unfairly critical, like I'm damning the world to hell, or that what I say should make you particularly sad, but how often do my words get the kind of reaction that would suggest I'm doing anything less?
My habit is to dig. Digging has its problems. When I dig into people, they stop looking like people. They look like forces. They look like habits. They look like parts of every poorly done psychological test on biases and highlighted parts of the brain from an FMRI. Anymore, I apply the dig to the “bulk” of news articles and look for trends or styles in the information. Is there a general voice of bloggers and newscasters beyond, “Oh fucking shit?” Can you put your finger on what the public is digesting and sharing and wishing when the well of commentary is the actual place you should look if you want to see unfair criticism, depressing sentiments, and general damnation? Is there more to Hitler 2's cabinet picks than the simple observation that opposite day will be in effect indefinitely?
I got the jolt to write this because of an article that pointed out one of Hitler 2's picks plagiarized their PH.D. Can it be anymore on the nose? Someone who's gotten to such an academic level that they're even writing a PH.D suggests a whole world unto itself. Then you go and corrupt, or celebrate depending on your view, the notion of advanced and specific education by cutting corners at the top. You want the letters, not to be what they're supposed to represent. You want the authority without the work. You want the respect that you've never had for yourself and you want the empty fame, or infamy, to keep you hidden in plain sight. You'll take your fake credentials and no-comments to the highest places of authority and accountability in the land, and you'll get in anyway. You, and hundreds of your closest inadequate, lazy, and dangerous friends.
I'm forced to look at the deeper picture. I'm forced to comment on “people” when that many terrible ones are glamorized as worthwhile and capable of being leaders. It matters as long as I don't choose to commit suicide. In precisely this moment you have to understand that when your larger picture is as corruptible and fickle as the human animal, it is not rational or helpful to rely endlessly and needlessly on the artifice of this faux leadership. It isn't hard or unexpected to practice bad habits until they feel normal. It speaks to why I have to constantly write and pick apart what I'm doing in life. How much of me feels so normal that's actually beyond destructive to those around me and my long-term feasibility as a human? If you're willing to look, your mind can be a picture of emaciated squalor that nobody had the perspective or bravery to inform you about.
The work of paying attention is hard. I rail against cliches because they skip over the work of identifying why they're true. To be in the moment can be to suffer, and suffer a lot. It can be anxiety and depression. It can be always throwing down a wall of judgment and doubt between you and the people you meet. And it's why you have to habitualize recognizing how you're practicing doing so. Am I writing to beat myself up, give myself excuses, or try too terribly hard to convince myself of something stupid I refuse to find better words for? Am I repeating myself for effect and stress or because that's all I have to say? Am I truly frustrated at “the world” and what it's constantly doing to me, or that after another groggy night of television and big dreaming, I'm still freezing in basketball shorts writing this, instead of seeing what I want to come true beyond my living room? It's not always clear.
Something I do notice too often is how the words never match up with the actions. That's how I get to employ the word “superficial” more than any one word should ever be employed. That's how I get to bitch about all the “friends” I never see or talk to who are perfectly happy to agree with you about your ideas or plans, and would love to see something like that, but are actually more happy in their game servers or work station or classroom. That's how you see all the “informed” and insistent commentary that tells you what's wrong with the country lamenting how far we've fallen, but if I tell them, “Live free, right here, just put me on the phone with someone with the resources to get us started” nothing still happens. The deeper truth, the fundamental things about us are what is shining through, not that I believe you believe anything about what you're saying.
I like to think my world reflects to it's best ability what I actually think and feel. I believe I can run a general food or service establishment as good as anyone, so I tried. I believe my future is perilously threatened if I don't learn more about being self-sustainable and connect in a more informed and democratic way on a smaller scale, so I bought land. I think the overwhelming amount of conversations I get into and criticism I get is so beyond the pale unfair as to border on abuse, so I ask you to explain yourself, get genuinely angry when you don't, and am more sad than I'll never get credit for in knowing when and why we can't be friends anymore. It wasn't because I blog. It's not that I'm too confusing. It's that you're not willing to admit...anything, ever.
Our daily practices aren't about who we want to be. We're practicing who we are. When we're “innocently lying” about our circumstances, that should bug and scare you. When we're able to overlook and downplay ethics, literally just general ethics, you need to bring that reality to the center of your being and figure out what it's done to pollute how you operate in the world. If you're not sounding as “crazy” as me, why? If you're not worried about the day your town becomes Flint or New Orleans or someone wants to privatize and bankrupt or kick out your neighbors, it's not that I sound too critical, you're a lying person who's dead inside. It feels so normal.
The keys to respecting our station and relationships to each other aren't just dangling in front of us, they're perpetually thrown right between our eyes. In order to not make yourself crazy with the joke and stress of just existing at all, you have to do the work and be honest. If you can't account for your outside life in honest terms, I can only suffer in thinking about what's going on internally. Here, another brilliant opportunity. Do you believe I'm suffering? If not, you're broken, because you can't even recognize what it's doing to you. You're not looking as deeply at your face as I am. Are you unwilling or unable? Are you going to say out loud how much you don't care what I think or if I die? If not, I'm only going to keep doing what I do and tell you what you're actually saying. I'm going to work around it or throw it back in your face. I'm gonna keep suffering your face trying to look and talk like something deserving while you plagiarize and kill even the memory of what the real work looks like.
We're born, to some extent, to be able to do this naturally. Just as most people can see, taste, and smell. You can get a job tasting, smelling, or spotting forgeries because the very senses you take for granted have more layers than you might discover on your own. You can then take it a step further. The reason there are FBI profilers and body language “experts” (as that field I hesitate to say has the required scientific uniformity of reliable replication) is because with enough practice you can start to see trends, pick apart particulars, and often see reliable-enough information into the future about who a person is, is becoming, or is trying to be. Absolutely it's not perfect and people can opt to be perfectly random or be thrown off course by unforeseeable circumstances, but the point is less to argue for the strict scientific basis of my claim, and more to talk about the practice.
Band taught me that “practice makes permanent.” If you hold yourself to bad standards and ingrain bad practicing habits you'll subconsciously move into those spaces you've carved and synapses you've strengthened. The malleability of the brain is such that you can reinforce or degrade these proclivities, but the earlier you start and learn something and the more you replicate it, that's often what will stick. This is the heart of learned prejudices and poor stress or conflict resolution strategies. This is irrational fears and insecurities that play out as the most confident and intense people you'll ever meet. This is why when conversations all degrade the same way I'm not surprised, because through our families, cordiality, and the media, we've all been trained to deal with information we don't like or understand the exact same ways.
Now I'm caught running with the thesis that we're a society of extremely bad social habits. I can repeat that to myself as many times as it takes to become convinced. I can make it harder for myself to see the arguments in favor of the social games we play and how they beget more cohesion or happiness. Every single supposition I take, by virtue of “it came to mind,” I can argue in the light of criticism, damnation, or depression. Precisely at this point is where we can either do and say what I just did or carry on like we're perfectly unable to recognize our ideas and what they may be translating. When I write, I don't particularly feel unduly or unfairly critical, like I'm damning the world to hell, or that what I say should make you particularly sad, but how often do my words get the kind of reaction that would suggest I'm doing anything less?
My habit is to dig. Digging has its problems. When I dig into people, they stop looking like people. They look like forces. They look like habits. They look like parts of every poorly done psychological test on biases and highlighted parts of the brain from an FMRI. Anymore, I apply the dig to the “bulk” of news articles and look for trends or styles in the information. Is there a general voice of bloggers and newscasters beyond, “Oh fucking shit?” Can you put your finger on what the public is digesting and sharing and wishing when the well of commentary is the actual place you should look if you want to see unfair criticism, depressing sentiments, and general damnation? Is there more to Hitler 2's cabinet picks than the simple observation that opposite day will be in effect indefinitely?
I got the jolt to write this because of an article that pointed out one of Hitler 2's picks plagiarized their PH.D. Can it be anymore on the nose? Someone who's gotten to such an academic level that they're even writing a PH.D suggests a whole world unto itself. Then you go and corrupt, or celebrate depending on your view, the notion of advanced and specific education by cutting corners at the top. You want the letters, not to be what they're supposed to represent. You want the authority without the work. You want the respect that you've never had for yourself and you want the empty fame, or infamy, to keep you hidden in plain sight. You'll take your fake credentials and no-comments to the highest places of authority and accountability in the land, and you'll get in anyway. You, and hundreds of your closest inadequate, lazy, and dangerous friends.
I'm forced to look at the deeper picture. I'm forced to comment on “people” when that many terrible ones are glamorized as worthwhile and capable of being leaders. It matters as long as I don't choose to commit suicide. In precisely this moment you have to understand that when your larger picture is as corruptible and fickle as the human animal, it is not rational or helpful to rely endlessly and needlessly on the artifice of this faux leadership. It isn't hard or unexpected to practice bad habits until they feel normal. It speaks to why I have to constantly write and pick apart what I'm doing in life. How much of me feels so normal that's actually beyond destructive to those around me and my long-term feasibility as a human? If you're willing to look, your mind can be a picture of emaciated squalor that nobody had the perspective or bravery to inform you about.
The work of paying attention is hard. I rail against cliches because they skip over the work of identifying why they're true. To be in the moment can be to suffer, and suffer a lot. It can be anxiety and depression. It can be always throwing down a wall of judgment and doubt between you and the people you meet. And it's why you have to habitualize recognizing how you're practicing doing so. Am I writing to beat myself up, give myself excuses, or try too terribly hard to convince myself of something stupid I refuse to find better words for? Am I repeating myself for effect and stress or because that's all I have to say? Am I truly frustrated at “the world” and what it's constantly doing to me, or that after another groggy night of television and big dreaming, I'm still freezing in basketball shorts writing this, instead of seeing what I want to come true beyond my living room? It's not always clear.
Something I do notice too often is how the words never match up with the actions. That's how I get to employ the word “superficial” more than any one word should ever be employed. That's how I get to bitch about all the “friends” I never see or talk to who are perfectly happy to agree with you about your ideas or plans, and would love to see something like that, but are actually more happy in their game servers or work station or classroom. That's how you see all the “informed” and insistent commentary that tells you what's wrong with the country lamenting how far we've fallen, but if I tell them, “Live free, right here, just put me on the phone with someone with the resources to get us started” nothing still happens. The deeper truth, the fundamental things about us are what is shining through, not that I believe you believe anything about what you're saying.
I like to think my world reflects to it's best ability what I actually think and feel. I believe I can run a general food or service establishment as good as anyone, so I tried. I believe my future is perilously threatened if I don't learn more about being self-sustainable and connect in a more informed and democratic way on a smaller scale, so I bought land. I think the overwhelming amount of conversations I get into and criticism I get is so beyond the pale unfair as to border on abuse, so I ask you to explain yourself, get genuinely angry when you don't, and am more sad than I'll never get credit for in knowing when and why we can't be friends anymore. It wasn't because I blog. It's not that I'm too confusing. It's that you're not willing to admit...anything, ever.
Our daily practices aren't about who we want to be. We're practicing who we are. When we're “innocently lying” about our circumstances, that should bug and scare you. When we're able to overlook and downplay ethics, literally just general ethics, you need to bring that reality to the center of your being and figure out what it's done to pollute how you operate in the world. If you're not sounding as “crazy” as me, why? If you're not worried about the day your town becomes Flint or New Orleans or someone wants to privatize and bankrupt or kick out your neighbors, it's not that I sound too critical, you're a lying person who's dead inside. It feels so normal.
The keys to respecting our station and relationships to each other aren't just dangling in front of us, they're perpetually thrown right between our eyes. In order to not make yourself crazy with the joke and stress of just existing at all, you have to do the work and be honest. If you can't account for your outside life in honest terms, I can only suffer in thinking about what's going on internally. Here, another brilliant opportunity. Do you believe I'm suffering? If not, you're broken, because you can't even recognize what it's doing to you. You're not looking as deeply at your face as I am. Are you unwilling or unable? Are you going to say out loud how much you don't care what I think or if I die? If not, I'm only going to keep doing what I do and tell you what you're actually saying. I'm going to work around it or throw it back in your face. I'm gonna keep suffering your face trying to look and talk like something deserving while you plagiarize and kill even the memory of what the real work looks like.
Saturday, January 7, 2017
[565] Lights, Camera, Cut!
One of my favorite things to think
about is the media. We talk a lot about how much we're saturated to
the point that we're strangled and cut off from what it used to mean
to be human. We say that the Golden Age of television is bringing us
world class art from all walks of life and allowing for voices to be
represented that never were before. We don't really know what to feel
about it all because it moves quickly and everything about how we
develop is slow and reactionary. We at the very least think that it
speaks to the ever-obscure idea of “we.”
I've criticized the idea of “we” before. I usually state that “we” don't do shit, and that it's a small group of intentioned or riled-up individuals who enact changes with sometimes lasting consequences. “We” is often the scapegoat for when we didn't show up or put in the work. That's “we's” psychological utility. You know it pretty explicitly with your experience towards sports or maybe your allegiance to school or perhaps you're fairly patriotic and subconsciously have really taken in the ooo-rahs and chest beating of your native country. The mystics and homeopaths take it a step further and transform the we into things like a “collective conscious” that gets all sorts of powers as it gets “raised” or wishes hard enough.
In areas of moral ambiguity we rely on we. It doesn't have to be asked where the behavior came from or why it started, we're all doing it, so it's cool. One of my favorite observations of monkeys was them training new members in their group not to do something that no monkey in that current group ever experienced first hand. Say they'd get shocked trying to climb a ladder to grab some bananas. The first group sees the brave monkey get hurt enough times, spreads the word, it's now common knowledge. Slowly remove the monkeys that know and replace them with one's that don't, sooner or later, before a new monkey even tries to climb the ladder, the others will step up and slap him down.
When you think about the evolutionary origins of man and the endless amount of experiences species go through, it's a marvel that we ever coalesce into relative agreement at all. Me begrudging “we” when no two brains look alike but for the physical properties of the matter they consist of seems inadequate by itself. Of course, when and where there's reason to celebrate what “we've” accomplished, we should. It's shared goals that brought us our largest wonders of the world and allowed us to explore what's beyond it. And it's right there you come up against the important ingredient for whether or not “we” succeeds or fails.
You have to have a goal.
Despite what motivational posters or inspirational memes might try to allude to, a goal in and of itself isn't de facto a good thing. The angry tea-bagger's goal was to get you to suck on their angry nuts, and we're sucking away. The goal of the whole movement that “looked past” the magnificent show of bigotry, hatred, and incoherence was to appease their nerves and ideas precisely like a child will scream...and scream...and scream...until someone engages it. A constant refrain in the news right now is that democrats have “lost touch” with the “regular people.” One might muse about their increasing coziness with lobbying groups, or their smug bubbles of the kind of entitlement those happy white family shows that go on for way longer than anyone understands why. Their goal simply had little to do with a “we” that actually included those who felt they could play the game.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TV absolutely fascinates me. I don't see just wildly creative and nuanced depictions of life in every episode. I don't go through the best kind of existential crises that allow me to celebrate while reevaluate all of the fictional influences in my world or how they mock up against the real people in my life. It fascinates me because I want to keep watching. I want to see thousands of people come together and tell a story. I want to see fundamental truths about what it is to exist get filtered through Police-Doc-Lawyer-Firefighter drama. I want to see bravery in the face of dragons, murderers, and pregnancy tests. I want to see someone reliably do just what I knew they were gonna do, and I want to be shocked when they deviate. Before it's some medium that seemingly secludes and depresses us, it's a story box.
Maybe the problem with TV is less to do with there being too much of it, but that there's nothing else available instead of it. It's filling an immense cultural void. It's a void I constantly talk about in my angry finger-pointing about friends not pulling together to create their own show. How could they? Who's buying them the cameras, the lights, the food, coordinating the rehearsal dates, schooling the children, keeping sets clean and consistent and out of the hands of crazies and thieves? Who's the actual job creator and not just the brazen figure-head credited with endless empty lip-service? That's always who I wanted to be. It is my base desire to set the conditions, if I often fail at the standard, and watch the show of my dreams play out. And I've been absolutely stuck for what feels like forever.
I've criticized the idea of “we” before. I usually state that “we” don't do shit, and that it's a small group of intentioned or riled-up individuals who enact changes with sometimes lasting consequences. “We” is often the scapegoat for when we didn't show up or put in the work. That's “we's” psychological utility. You know it pretty explicitly with your experience towards sports or maybe your allegiance to school or perhaps you're fairly patriotic and subconsciously have really taken in the ooo-rahs and chest beating of your native country. The mystics and homeopaths take it a step further and transform the we into things like a “collective conscious” that gets all sorts of powers as it gets “raised” or wishes hard enough.
In areas of moral ambiguity we rely on we. It doesn't have to be asked where the behavior came from or why it started, we're all doing it, so it's cool. One of my favorite observations of monkeys was them training new members in their group not to do something that no monkey in that current group ever experienced first hand. Say they'd get shocked trying to climb a ladder to grab some bananas. The first group sees the brave monkey get hurt enough times, spreads the word, it's now common knowledge. Slowly remove the monkeys that know and replace them with one's that don't, sooner or later, before a new monkey even tries to climb the ladder, the others will step up and slap him down.
When you think about the evolutionary origins of man and the endless amount of experiences species go through, it's a marvel that we ever coalesce into relative agreement at all. Me begrudging “we” when no two brains look alike but for the physical properties of the matter they consist of seems inadequate by itself. Of course, when and where there's reason to celebrate what “we've” accomplished, we should. It's shared goals that brought us our largest wonders of the world and allowed us to explore what's beyond it. And it's right there you come up against the important ingredient for whether or not “we” succeeds or fails.
You have to have a goal.
Despite what motivational posters or inspirational memes might try to allude to, a goal in and of itself isn't de facto a good thing. The angry tea-bagger's goal was to get you to suck on their angry nuts, and we're sucking away. The goal of the whole movement that “looked past” the magnificent show of bigotry, hatred, and incoherence was to appease their nerves and ideas precisely like a child will scream...and scream...and scream...until someone engages it. A constant refrain in the news right now is that democrats have “lost touch” with the “regular people.” One might muse about their increasing coziness with lobbying groups, or their smug bubbles of the kind of entitlement those happy white family shows that go on for way longer than anyone understands why. Their goal simply had little to do with a “we” that actually included those who felt they could play the game.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TV absolutely fascinates me. I don't see just wildly creative and nuanced depictions of life in every episode. I don't go through the best kind of existential crises that allow me to celebrate while reevaluate all of the fictional influences in my world or how they mock up against the real people in my life. It fascinates me because I want to keep watching. I want to see thousands of people come together and tell a story. I want to see fundamental truths about what it is to exist get filtered through Police-Doc-Lawyer-Firefighter drama. I want to see bravery in the face of dragons, murderers, and pregnancy tests. I want to see someone reliably do just what I knew they were gonna do, and I want to be shocked when they deviate. Before it's some medium that seemingly secludes and depresses us, it's a story box.
Maybe the problem with TV is less to do with there being too much of it, but that there's nothing else available instead of it. It's filling an immense cultural void. It's a void I constantly talk about in my angry finger-pointing about friends not pulling together to create their own show. How could they? Who's buying them the cameras, the lights, the food, coordinating the rehearsal dates, schooling the children, keeping sets clean and consistent and out of the hands of crazies and thieves? Who's the actual job creator and not just the brazen figure-head credited with endless empty lip-service? That's always who I wanted to be. It is my base desire to set the conditions, if I often fail at the standard, and watch the show of my dreams play out. And I've been absolutely stuck for what feels like forever.
I've been trying to understand what it
means to be a “high anxiety” type of person. Like, I know I'm
cool, but I've never been the cool kid
so to speak. Those people who's blood-pressure you might take while
their house is burning down and while their heart pumps at an even 45
they use the flames to light a cigarette. Not me. I'm cursing myself
for not having bought insurance and then the line of circumstances
that ensured I never really had the money to buy insurance, even if I
did, but it's a predatory industry, and the one time I tried it bled
me dry and yada yada yada my brain takes off.
That lack of cool though has never really held me back. I'm not afraid to stand up for myself, even if being a large and tall person helps. I take calculated risks like trying to run the coffee stand, or get 100 kids drunk under my roof, or spend the cash to buy land and figure out how to build a house. I keep making the inappropriate jokes, dance like no one's watching, karaoke the fuck out of songs I don't know. I whip my Deva Curled hair back and forth and I've ran around naked in public on more than a few occasions. You never get to see how slow or fast my heart is beating. If I am in fact a high anxiety type person, it shouldn't or doesn't matter.
That is, until now. Now I caught the feedback loop of anxiety about my plans and future and tied it to my cheater method of obtaining cash. Now, because my day to day is endless lounging and binging I have nothing that rips my mind away from my next screening appointment or thoughts about disaster back-up plans when I can't get it under control. In the most important sense the stress, the danger, and the consequences are all as fake for me as they are for a character about to get eaten by a dinosaur, but you'll watch someone get chased and worry about them every time even if you've seen the movie and know dinosaurs don't exist. My brain doesn't care. It's reliving the drama of the first episode of “Nerves” like it's stuck on repeat and someone locked the door to leave.
In that way, my brain fascinates me as much as any TV show might. Why are you watching? There's a significant argument that says I don't really have a choice. I don't begrudge myself for the amount of media I consume because the alternatives are to freeze, wander around, or adopt any of the behaviors one might associate with the awkward loner guy who's way too into conversing with you at the bar. I try to put in a fair amount of caveats when I'm harping on you to change something about whatever life you lead for analogous reasons. The difference is the imagination for the goal of alternatives.
Certainly there are actors that take roles to keep the bills paid. The millions of terrible movies you've never heard of that exist for that reason, and it's why you get to make fun of “tough guys” from a classic blockbuster who appeared overseas hocking candy in a colorful outfit. It wasn't a discussion about whether the role would help them understand themselves or inspire other thespians. It's still a business, you gotta eat. The problem is thinking of yourself in purely business terms. You can't just be a commodity to be priced and dressed and positioned for some insidiously obscure notion of “maximum effect.” By all means feed yourself, but keep going to auditions because you know there are rolls that we will talk about for as long as we survive.
Right now, my story may involve delivering pizzas or learning to be a bank teller. I may stock shelves or wash pets. I need to keep the bills paid, and if my brain wants to watch a stupid show instead of let me walk in and pick up a check for a few thousand and move on, then so be it. In my imaginary world where I get to create elaborate sets and cast brilliant inspiring people, I never wrote that it would happen without the montage of everything demeaning and distracting in between. The main character can be relatable for any number of reasons, but who says the negative aspects won't prove to be the most compelling?
And really, it's no more or less frustrating than the last forever years I've been resigned to my television screens. I know the story I want to tell. I know my goal isn't malicious or nearly as naïve as any singular profession or decision I make in service to it might suggest. I know how expensive it is to buy all the cameras and how much time it takes to set up the lights. The rest of the crew, cast, writers and producers though, seem to be on strike. Why would they want to watch my show? What about it couldn't they pull themselves away from? It's not even paying the bills.
I have a lot to prove. I still need to be much bigger and louder than I've ever been. What I expect out of myself will never die donning the “wrong” outfit getting paid more and less than anyone ever deserves. It won't taste any less sweet in my thirties than if I get it by next year. People won't need it any less whether they feel too old already or haven't gotten here yet. And I want to be able to feel the sense of pride and accomplishment that any show-runner must have to create a hundred episodes of something you think is absolutely terrible. Without that mission, that shared conception and goal, we're not even extras, as “extra” implies there was enough of something there to begin with.
Anyone got a better show in mind than mine?
That lack of cool though has never really held me back. I'm not afraid to stand up for myself, even if being a large and tall person helps. I take calculated risks like trying to run the coffee stand, or get 100 kids drunk under my roof, or spend the cash to buy land and figure out how to build a house. I keep making the inappropriate jokes, dance like no one's watching, karaoke the fuck out of songs I don't know. I whip my Deva Curled hair back and forth and I've ran around naked in public on more than a few occasions. You never get to see how slow or fast my heart is beating. If I am in fact a high anxiety type person, it shouldn't or doesn't matter.
That is, until now. Now I caught the feedback loop of anxiety about my plans and future and tied it to my cheater method of obtaining cash. Now, because my day to day is endless lounging and binging I have nothing that rips my mind away from my next screening appointment or thoughts about disaster back-up plans when I can't get it under control. In the most important sense the stress, the danger, and the consequences are all as fake for me as they are for a character about to get eaten by a dinosaur, but you'll watch someone get chased and worry about them every time even if you've seen the movie and know dinosaurs don't exist. My brain doesn't care. It's reliving the drama of the first episode of “Nerves” like it's stuck on repeat and someone locked the door to leave.
In that way, my brain fascinates me as much as any TV show might. Why are you watching? There's a significant argument that says I don't really have a choice. I don't begrudge myself for the amount of media I consume because the alternatives are to freeze, wander around, or adopt any of the behaviors one might associate with the awkward loner guy who's way too into conversing with you at the bar. I try to put in a fair amount of caveats when I'm harping on you to change something about whatever life you lead for analogous reasons. The difference is the imagination for the goal of alternatives.
Certainly there are actors that take roles to keep the bills paid. The millions of terrible movies you've never heard of that exist for that reason, and it's why you get to make fun of “tough guys” from a classic blockbuster who appeared overseas hocking candy in a colorful outfit. It wasn't a discussion about whether the role would help them understand themselves or inspire other thespians. It's still a business, you gotta eat. The problem is thinking of yourself in purely business terms. You can't just be a commodity to be priced and dressed and positioned for some insidiously obscure notion of “maximum effect.” By all means feed yourself, but keep going to auditions because you know there are rolls that we will talk about for as long as we survive.
Right now, my story may involve delivering pizzas or learning to be a bank teller. I may stock shelves or wash pets. I need to keep the bills paid, and if my brain wants to watch a stupid show instead of let me walk in and pick up a check for a few thousand and move on, then so be it. In my imaginary world where I get to create elaborate sets and cast brilliant inspiring people, I never wrote that it would happen without the montage of everything demeaning and distracting in between. The main character can be relatable for any number of reasons, but who says the negative aspects won't prove to be the most compelling?
And really, it's no more or less frustrating than the last forever years I've been resigned to my television screens. I know the story I want to tell. I know my goal isn't malicious or nearly as naïve as any singular profession or decision I make in service to it might suggest. I know how expensive it is to buy all the cameras and how much time it takes to set up the lights. The rest of the crew, cast, writers and producers though, seem to be on strike. Why would they want to watch my show? What about it couldn't they pull themselves away from? It's not even paying the bills.
I have a lot to prove. I still need to be much bigger and louder than I've ever been. What I expect out of myself will never die donning the “wrong” outfit getting paid more and less than anyone ever deserves. It won't taste any less sweet in my thirties than if I get it by next year. People won't need it any less whether they feel too old already or haven't gotten here yet. And I want to be able to feel the sense of pride and accomplishment that any show-runner must have to create a hundred episodes of something you think is absolutely terrible. Without that mission, that shared conception and goal, we're not even extras, as “extra” implies there was enough of something there to begin with.
Anyone got a better show in mind than mine?
Wednesday, January 4, 2017
[564] Easy As Pi
As my conception of “progress” has been obliterated, I now turn my eyes to the word “success.” If progress falls apart because its reality is already realized yet not acknowledged, then success fails in how it highlights and celebrates all the parts we’re not willing to pay attention to. Adversity ill-defined is often necessary or equal parts what made up the shimmering successful whole. You only need to think about how we delight in stories where the winner finds out things aren’t always as good as they’re chalked up to be.
I try to conceive of a successful conversation. As of late, I primarily disavow the alleged utility or purpose we may claim in engaging with them. For me personally, I can draw a lot of personal insight or maybe develop a new tact for engaging with different kinds of people. This blog starts out picking apart a singular word after referencing another singular word I’ve devoted a few blogs to picking apart previously. The details matter, to me. Taking all the time it takes to diffuse the inflammatory connotations, quell the beating heart, or disperse a headache will almost always be the one-sided therapy session.
This is how I can confidently claim that I never have won nor will “win” a conversation. I win by writing blogs instead of putting holes in walls or drinking too heavily. Another way to state that is by coping with stress in ways that don’t result in physical damage. Who knows the toll it’s taking on my brain, but at least the outside world can still look pretty enough.
The reason I don’t win is because I zero in on topics people do not deal with and I do not concede points that aren’t explained. You can’t just call me a liar, you have to quote me. You can’t just sidestep answering something and claim nothing you offer is good enough. An answer would have been good enough. You can’t constantly strum the refrain about something you think is wrong with me if you’ve no ability to maintain the topic at hand. This is all crap I’ve stated many times before, if we need even more evidence that there’s never been some measure of “success” I’ve achieved in trying to talk about this.
Take the rationale out into the world though. You can have “successful” lobbyists who dismantle protections for the greater population. The groups with the most money are celebrated. Say you get the high paying job while everyone beneath you gets fired. Mind you, this isn’t me pivoting and arguing for equality. We simply measure success as superficially as anything else, or not at all. Is it success when you convince people to adopt your dogma? Am I a “successful friend” or perhaps “mate” in allowing my relationships to flourish on harmful lies?
Yes. For most people, the answer is absolutely yes. They’ll say everyone has their thing, it’s no more or less harmful than someone else’s, for the sake of sanity and togetherness, yes. That’s good enough for you, it isn’t for me. I don’t suffer “loneliness” by needing someone in my life to fawn over or in needing them to fall madly in love with me. I suffer a loneliness of spirit. That spirit lives and dies by its ability to recognize and work and perhaps semi-obsess over discrepancies and details. It’s a scientific ethos. It’s never going to be 100% and the more often you insist that’s the position I hold, it’s only your fault for thinking we’re getting nowhere.
Maybe you’re familiar with Less Wrong. If not, and you’re patient, you’ll find the kind of people who do like I do and maybe you’ll stop feeling so defensive when someone approaches how you speak like a case study. We’re collectively, blissfully, angrily, unaware of how little we’re saying. I try to warn you, if what I’m saying cuts you and what you’re saying is “never good enough,” try acknowledging there’s a knife.
I try to conceive of a successful conversation. As of late, I primarily disavow the alleged utility or purpose we may claim in engaging with them. For me personally, I can draw a lot of personal insight or maybe develop a new tact for engaging with different kinds of people. This blog starts out picking apart a singular word after referencing another singular word I’ve devoted a few blogs to picking apart previously. The details matter, to me. Taking all the time it takes to diffuse the inflammatory connotations, quell the beating heart, or disperse a headache will almost always be the one-sided therapy session.
This is how I can confidently claim that I never have won nor will “win” a conversation. I win by writing blogs instead of putting holes in walls or drinking too heavily. Another way to state that is by coping with stress in ways that don’t result in physical damage. Who knows the toll it’s taking on my brain, but at least the outside world can still look pretty enough.
The reason I don’t win is because I zero in on topics people do not deal with and I do not concede points that aren’t explained. You can’t just call me a liar, you have to quote me. You can’t just sidestep answering something and claim nothing you offer is good enough. An answer would have been good enough. You can’t constantly strum the refrain about something you think is wrong with me if you’ve no ability to maintain the topic at hand. This is all crap I’ve stated many times before, if we need even more evidence that there’s never been some measure of “success” I’ve achieved in trying to talk about this.
Take the rationale out into the world though. You can have “successful” lobbyists who dismantle protections for the greater population. The groups with the most money are celebrated. Say you get the high paying job while everyone beneath you gets fired. Mind you, this isn’t me pivoting and arguing for equality. We simply measure success as superficially as anything else, or not at all. Is it success when you convince people to adopt your dogma? Am I a “successful friend” or perhaps “mate” in allowing my relationships to flourish on harmful lies?
Yes. For most people, the answer is absolutely yes. They’ll say everyone has their thing, it’s no more or less harmful than someone else’s, for the sake of sanity and togetherness, yes. That’s good enough for you, it isn’t for me. I don’t suffer “loneliness” by needing someone in my life to fawn over or in needing them to fall madly in love with me. I suffer a loneliness of spirit. That spirit lives and dies by its ability to recognize and work and perhaps semi-obsess over discrepancies and details. It’s a scientific ethos. It’s never going to be 100% and the more often you insist that’s the position I hold, it’s only your fault for thinking we’re getting nowhere.
Maybe you’re familiar with Less Wrong. If not, and you’re patient, you’ll find the kind of people who do like I do and maybe you’ll stop feeling so defensive when someone approaches how you speak like a case study. We’re collectively, blissfully, angrily, unaware of how little we’re saying. I try to warn you, if what I’m saying cuts you and what you’re saying is “never good enough,” try acknowledging there’s a knife.
Monday, January 2, 2017
[563] Escape From New York
What do we make of a voice that can’t be heard? Already I start off, “if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” But what is the hard and fast reality to our reaction to voices that aren’t heard? Or what if it’s one of your many voices that you didn’t even realized stopped talking?
I saw a heat map of schools and their performance on the SAT in New York City. The poor neighborhoods looked abysmal, the rich shiny and bright. A map like that isn’t really displaying performance though, is it? A map like that displays our cultural attitude. You already knew the poor, likely black, areas were going to underperform. You intuitively can exist anywhere in the world and infer correctly any number of things about the populations.
We pay so much lip service to being smarter, moral, or caring. We prefer the abstractions of hope and change as opposed to the work. I’m not putting down this computer to rush over to New York and figure out a way to move the money around. In fact, I have no control over that even were I to try. You’re watching the extent of capacity and impact. I can talk about it. I can tell you I don’t think it’s fair. If you gave me a petition I might sign it. If you marched on Washington, I’d try to make it. But you, and I, would have to be voices that were heard first.
We elected Hitler 2. We did it because people only know how to speak in the language of anger, fear, and distrust as the default. They knew their voices didn’t matter anymore than mine, so they optioned for burning everything to the ground. This also isn’t a joke. Climate change is burning or flooding somewhere in this moment, and our “leaders” pretend otherwise. There’s the feeling that if we can’t get what we’re due, no one should. What we’re due of course still predicated on our mythology regarding how smart, moral, caring, hopeful, and capable of change we are.
I know my best hope in life is to go down swinging. I don’t think “we” do anything nor will save ourselves. I think the handful of people with access to underground bunkers will do their best to populate space or keep the memory of this species alive until it can fully integrate with computers. I think our fundamental irrationality about our place and specialness will proudly work in service to our undoing. It’s the weirdest kind of crisis of identity to try and have a voice in such a noisy and disorienting mess.
I can always point to the superficial nature of my existence. Say I genuinely never figure out how to get back into another study. I’ve oriented my life so that 10 hours a week making what I did back in high school still pays my bills. Mind you, that’s my worst case scenario. As long as I’m still healthy I’ll keep referencing that. I haven’t been so motivated as to get cash advances or start selling my shit. One way or another I’m going to find 1 person in the 350 million in this country who will pay me to farm my land. Despite this, none of my presumed security and planning is really living yet.
What is the language of a friend group that only exists online? Who are we to each other in popping in and out a few times a year? I call it an old cliche, but it is a choice. It’s a statement about what’s more important than hanging out or banding together. For me, the sacrifice is to eventually put that ability at the forefront. I’m not working a dead end job so I can safely proclaim lack of funds and time over and over. I’m not traveling this year so I can afford the land that hopefully lets me travel indefinitely. I don’t talk about maps that speak to how we routinely don’t give a shit about the poor or minority groups unless I genuinely try to support the effort to better account for and help them.
Because again, what is a like and share? What other part of your nature gets silenced to the routine and box you’ve been put in? Are our anxieties even ours? I always say I’ve been driven to things like drug studies. Many of us got the degree first, I tried opening the business, I tried working for a number of start-ups, I tried working multiple jobs on top of each other, and while the experience is certainly indispensable, the reality is that many forces larger than me are making it extremely hard to thrive.
Thriving is the operative metric for humanity. To thrive suggests an underlying health and reassurance that simply doesn’t exist without planning and accountability. As long as business moguls wince and cringe at the idea of putting money into the system they endlessly exploit, neither can thrive. Superficially you’ll hear boasting of stock prices or lines around the block, but in the real world it’s a brain and spirit suck to a suicidal degree.
Am I the same person who can run up and down theater rows for an entire usher shift? Can I spend 6 months with one other person showing up every day to sell coffee and then almost every night to flip burgers? Will I cobble together thousands of sources into something actionable and coherent and not just an opaque mess of “data?” Will I ever find myself in a position that affords people license to dream and experiment in a way not unlike a compelling movie? As far as my conception of myself is concerned, that’s what it is to thrive. Byron adopts charges not to just power trip and tell them what to do. It’s the ability to wake them up to an instilled mindset about their capacity and worth that’s only handed down in a corrupted form from the wealthy and reinforced by the poor.
I can’t get over the idea that with better collaboration or group discussion, real or big things could have been moving already. Nobody wants to take risks. Better, nobody recognizes the true degree of the risks they’re taking already. I don’t want to see another market crash and half my friends end up jobless. I don’t want to see the health effects of demoralizing work and strained relationships. I don’t want to see every wildest dream and necessary struggle to get us to a place that’s safe and sustainable be subsumed by insecure nihilism masquerading as strength and maturity. And who cares about my voice that can’t be heard or that that’s all I believe is in store? Strike that, the smartest people in the room who track and speak on these things routinely can elaborate on why that’s in store.
I get so conflicted when I read entrepreneur forums that have some millionaire talk about what they managed to pull off in 2 years “with a few hundred to bootstrap myself initially.” No matter how pretty the post looks or details they fill in, success like that is contingent on so much more than working your ass off. Every trip you take across town is gas money. Every friend you nonchalantly asked for help someone else may not have. The “niche” you carved out wasn’t niche and you didn’t carve, you just had access. It’s not even enough for me “just have land” as I’ve been on the phone with every organization remotely related to farming trying to identify and stockpile people who’d know what to do in an instant. If things ever worked as straightforwardly as success stories proclaim, theirs wouldn’t be the 1 post in several hundred or thousand that gets so much attention. If I ever get to a point of lofty comfort and ignorant proclamations, see my writing history about how many shitty desperate and confused days my success really cost.
Sorry if this didn’t amount to much. I don’t really know what I should be doing. I’ve made the calls. I’ve got another screening lined up. I don’t have anywhere to be that isn’t going to just be a rather pointless waste of money. If I could escape this moment, I would.
I saw a heat map of schools and their performance on the SAT in New York City. The poor neighborhoods looked abysmal, the rich shiny and bright. A map like that isn’t really displaying performance though, is it? A map like that displays our cultural attitude. You already knew the poor, likely black, areas were going to underperform. You intuitively can exist anywhere in the world and infer correctly any number of things about the populations.
We pay so much lip service to being smarter, moral, or caring. We prefer the abstractions of hope and change as opposed to the work. I’m not putting down this computer to rush over to New York and figure out a way to move the money around. In fact, I have no control over that even were I to try. You’re watching the extent of capacity and impact. I can talk about it. I can tell you I don’t think it’s fair. If you gave me a petition I might sign it. If you marched on Washington, I’d try to make it. But you, and I, would have to be voices that were heard first.
We elected Hitler 2. We did it because people only know how to speak in the language of anger, fear, and distrust as the default. They knew their voices didn’t matter anymore than mine, so they optioned for burning everything to the ground. This also isn’t a joke. Climate change is burning or flooding somewhere in this moment, and our “leaders” pretend otherwise. There’s the feeling that if we can’t get what we’re due, no one should. What we’re due of course still predicated on our mythology regarding how smart, moral, caring, hopeful, and capable of change we are.
I know my best hope in life is to go down swinging. I don’t think “we” do anything nor will save ourselves. I think the handful of people with access to underground bunkers will do their best to populate space or keep the memory of this species alive until it can fully integrate with computers. I think our fundamental irrationality about our place and specialness will proudly work in service to our undoing. It’s the weirdest kind of crisis of identity to try and have a voice in such a noisy and disorienting mess.
I can always point to the superficial nature of my existence. Say I genuinely never figure out how to get back into another study. I’ve oriented my life so that 10 hours a week making what I did back in high school still pays my bills. Mind you, that’s my worst case scenario. As long as I’m still healthy I’ll keep referencing that. I haven’t been so motivated as to get cash advances or start selling my shit. One way or another I’m going to find 1 person in the 350 million in this country who will pay me to farm my land. Despite this, none of my presumed security and planning is really living yet.
What is the language of a friend group that only exists online? Who are we to each other in popping in and out a few times a year? I call it an old cliche, but it is a choice. It’s a statement about what’s more important than hanging out or banding together. For me, the sacrifice is to eventually put that ability at the forefront. I’m not working a dead end job so I can safely proclaim lack of funds and time over and over. I’m not traveling this year so I can afford the land that hopefully lets me travel indefinitely. I don’t talk about maps that speak to how we routinely don’t give a shit about the poor or minority groups unless I genuinely try to support the effort to better account for and help them.
Because again, what is a like and share? What other part of your nature gets silenced to the routine and box you’ve been put in? Are our anxieties even ours? I always say I’ve been driven to things like drug studies. Many of us got the degree first, I tried opening the business, I tried working for a number of start-ups, I tried working multiple jobs on top of each other, and while the experience is certainly indispensable, the reality is that many forces larger than me are making it extremely hard to thrive.
Thriving is the operative metric for humanity. To thrive suggests an underlying health and reassurance that simply doesn’t exist without planning and accountability. As long as business moguls wince and cringe at the idea of putting money into the system they endlessly exploit, neither can thrive. Superficially you’ll hear boasting of stock prices or lines around the block, but in the real world it’s a brain and spirit suck to a suicidal degree.
Am I the same person who can run up and down theater rows for an entire usher shift? Can I spend 6 months with one other person showing up every day to sell coffee and then almost every night to flip burgers? Will I cobble together thousands of sources into something actionable and coherent and not just an opaque mess of “data?” Will I ever find myself in a position that affords people license to dream and experiment in a way not unlike a compelling movie? As far as my conception of myself is concerned, that’s what it is to thrive. Byron adopts charges not to just power trip and tell them what to do. It’s the ability to wake them up to an instilled mindset about their capacity and worth that’s only handed down in a corrupted form from the wealthy and reinforced by the poor.
I can’t get over the idea that with better collaboration or group discussion, real or big things could have been moving already. Nobody wants to take risks. Better, nobody recognizes the true degree of the risks they’re taking already. I don’t want to see another market crash and half my friends end up jobless. I don’t want to see the health effects of demoralizing work and strained relationships. I don’t want to see every wildest dream and necessary struggle to get us to a place that’s safe and sustainable be subsumed by insecure nihilism masquerading as strength and maturity. And who cares about my voice that can’t be heard or that that’s all I believe is in store? Strike that, the smartest people in the room who track and speak on these things routinely can elaborate on why that’s in store.
I get so conflicted when I read entrepreneur forums that have some millionaire talk about what they managed to pull off in 2 years “with a few hundred to bootstrap myself initially.” No matter how pretty the post looks or details they fill in, success like that is contingent on so much more than working your ass off. Every trip you take across town is gas money. Every friend you nonchalantly asked for help someone else may not have. The “niche” you carved out wasn’t niche and you didn’t carve, you just had access. It’s not even enough for me “just have land” as I’ve been on the phone with every organization remotely related to farming trying to identify and stockpile people who’d know what to do in an instant. If things ever worked as straightforwardly as success stories proclaim, theirs wouldn’t be the 1 post in several hundred or thousand that gets so much attention. If I ever get to a point of lofty comfort and ignorant proclamations, see my writing history about how many shitty desperate and confused days my success really cost.
Sorry if this didn’t amount to much. I don’t really know what I should be doing. I’ve made the calls. I’ve got another screening lined up. I don’t have anywhere to be that isn’t going to just be a rather pointless waste of money. If I could escape this moment, I would.
[562] I Want It All, I Want It Now
I may have just stumbled into a bit of insight about myself. Now on something of a mad dash to leave no stone unturned in finding someone to rent or farm the land, I discovered several pages of people looking for different farmland related properties. A divorced dad wants a place for his daughter to be able to play with her horse. A family wants to get away from their shitty school system. People want to raise all kinds of animals or build something reminiscent from their youth.
In the “click every link” strategy you find all of the poorly laid out after-thought websites that act as classifieds. From the page you’re sure hasn’t been updated in 12 years, but you still post to just in case, to the page that’s probably the standard bearer despite being clunky and buggy at best, peeking into everyone’s world caused me a moment that happens so rarely, I decided to try and speak to it now.
The current crisis is the “irrational” anxiety that has my blood pressure and heart rate skyrocketing. I’ve been searching for a way to approach it or describe it so that the next time I get a cuff put on me, it’s the last thing on my mind. Obsessing and manipulating my body for artificial fixes proves unhelpful. I switched to actively searching to do or think about anything else in order to push the thought to the back of my mind. Something I’m historically bad at, so I figured in the spirit of practice, no time like now to try.
While that had some effect, I still test myself to see if the feeling arises when I get reminded about the impending fateful moment. While I could feel the tension rising, I started to read an ad from a woman who wasn’t interested in considering small plots, had money to burn on any improvements the land would need, and just carried a tone of possibly justified pretension. By the end of her post, for a moment, the rest of my life with the potential to be like her set upon my chest.
I felt being so rich and so direct that nothing could excite me anymore. She can’t possibly feel like her whole life rides on anything. She’s playing with numbers and refining her attitude. And for a split second, I felt like her, and the tension immediately dissipated. I got bored with myself. I saw what happens after I’ve traveled everywhere, put my hand in every honey pot, and still didn’t manage to save the world. I looked at my rich friends and knew there was little we could do but hunker down or move if Hitler 2 ruined the country. I felt old and tired and set.
It speaks to the tricky nature of anxiety. Will that moment reassure and save me when the time comes? Even writing this I struggle to feel as desperate as I did. What was I really scared of? That I actually mattered or had some awesome individual storied life to lead? Who am I the day years from now I’m writing the post “No little guys need apply, prefer to only spend 250-300 thousand, will supply own alpacas.”
The anxiety is tied not to monetary concerns, but the idea that I’d never be useful or perhaps something different. Farming isn’t different. Having more money than you really know what to do with isn’t either. Different seems a commitment to using your ideas and resources to bettering the environment for everyone. The idea of being stuck terrifies me. The idea that I could spend so much time exploring what’s on my mind, digging up dreams and expectations, excelling at whatever task was put to me, and then because of my stupid heart rate I have to force myself to start considering some form of “normal” life at a slave-adjacent job again?
Of course there’s always options, but I haven’t faced any pressing ones in years. I’m at the same time reintroducing a bit of a time crunch to the genuine prospect of being on the precipice of long term financial security. As far as my body’s concerned, I’ve just got the world on my shoulders and tried developing this habit of dropping it.
These kind of moments are worth talking about because it’s the same kind of thing that has happened when I’ve gotten over (well-enough) heartache. I just got fucking bored with myself. I read enough posts that could have been written by 16 year old me. I got tired of hearing how unbelievably special everyone’s spouse was and how they could possibly do whatever they did to turn horrible. The best thing for me would be to listen to a bunch of complaining and failed dreamers. I suppose condescending rich people might be easier to find and would work as well.
While it’s not just “poof!” and gone (just like any proper heartache), this is the first time I think I’ve found footing on reinstating my generally normal state with regard to getting my blood pressure taken. I suppose we’ll see if the feeling can last or be reinforced. Or, perhaps, lack of feeling. The goal is to become a cold profit-driven actor who seemingly tries to fix the world with his experiments and investments. “The world” and the people in it will ultimately have to save themselves, because there’s plenty of money and cliched brains out there that aren’t doing shit but getting by. That infinite well from which to draw resolve will hopefully suit me in the short term.
In the “click every link” strategy you find all of the poorly laid out after-thought websites that act as classifieds. From the page you’re sure hasn’t been updated in 12 years, but you still post to just in case, to the page that’s probably the standard bearer despite being clunky and buggy at best, peeking into everyone’s world caused me a moment that happens so rarely, I decided to try and speak to it now.
The current crisis is the “irrational” anxiety that has my blood pressure and heart rate skyrocketing. I’ve been searching for a way to approach it or describe it so that the next time I get a cuff put on me, it’s the last thing on my mind. Obsessing and manipulating my body for artificial fixes proves unhelpful. I switched to actively searching to do or think about anything else in order to push the thought to the back of my mind. Something I’m historically bad at, so I figured in the spirit of practice, no time like now to try.
While that had some effect, I still test myself to see if the feeling arises when I get reminded about the impending fateful moment. While I could feel the tension rising, I started to read an ad from a woman who wasn’t interested in considering small plots, had money to burn on any improvements the land would need, and just carried a tone of possibly justified pretension. By the end of her post, for a moment, the rest of my life with the potential to be like her set upon my chest.
I felt being so rich and so direct that nothing could excite me anymore. She can’t possibly feel like her whole life rides on anything. She’s playing with numbers and refining her attitude. And for a split second, I felt like her, and the tension immediately dissipated. I got bored with myself. I saw what happens after I’ve traveled everywhere, put my hand in every honey pot, and still didn’t manage to save the world. I looked at my rich friends and knew there was little we could do but hunker down or move if Hitler 2 ruined the country. I felt old and tired and set.
It speaks to the tricky nature of anxiety. Will that moment reassure and save me when the time comes? Even writing this I struggle to feel as desperate as I did. What was I really scared of? That I actually mattered or had some awesome individual storied life to lead? Who am I the day years from now I’m writing the post “No little guys need apply, prefer to only spend 250-300 thousand, will supply own alpacas.”
The anxiety is tied not to monetary concerns, but the idea that I’d never be useful or perhaps something different. Farming isn’t different. Having more money than you really know what to do with isn’t either. Different seems a commitment to using your ideas and resources to bettering the environment for everyone. The idea of being stuck terrifies me. The idea that I could spend so much time exploring what’s on my mind, digging up dreams and expectations, excelling at whatever task was put to me, and then because of my stupid heart rate I have to force myself to start considering some form of “normal” life at a slave-adjacent job again?
Of course there’s always options, but I haven’t faced any pressing ones in years. I’m at the same time reintroducing a bit of a time crunch to the genuine prospect of being on the precipice of long term financial security. As far as my body’s concerned, I’ve just got the world on my shoulders and tried developing this habit of dropping it.
These kind of moments are worth talking about because it’s the same kind of thing that has happened when I’ve gotten over (well-enough) heartache. I just got fucking bored with myself. I read enough posts that could have been written by 16 year old me. I got tired of hearing how unbelievably special everyone’s spouse was and how they could possibly do whatever they did to turn horrible. The best thing for me would be to listen to a bunch of complaining and failed dreamers. I suppose condescending rich people might be easier to find and would work as well.
While it’s not just “poof!” and gone (just like any proper heartache), this is the first time I think I’ve found footing on reinstating my generally normal state with regard to getting my blood pressure taken. I suppose we’ll see if the feeling can last or be reinforced. Or, perhaps, lack of feeling. The goal is to become a cold profit-driven actor who seemingly tries to fix the world with his experiments and investments. “The world” and the people in it will ultimately have to save themselves, because there’s plenty of money and cliched brains out there that aren’t doing shit but getting by. That infinite well from which to draw resolve will hopefully suit me in the short term.
[561] Evacuation
I’m either too high or not high enough to hit you with what the opening line originally was.
I think a lot about acting. I think about how sometimes no matter how hard I look I don’t know if I can tell the difference between good and bad. I think about method acting. As if faking it real hard is as real or more real than faking it sorta. I think about what motivates an actor. Is there some deep relationship they have with life they feel better portraying verses actually living? Or is it much simpler? They want to be seen!
The person starving for the limelight wants every bit as much to be seen as the 19th assistant programmer wants to be listed on the credits with dozens of film studios that added glossy to droids on the latest Star Wars. Stand and be recognized. To put on the show of human emotions must be evidence of one’s capacity to feel them, right? Or to make them into the be all end all grand celebration! Endless love! Noble heroes! It’s the mythology; the lifeblood.
Whether we talk about it coherently or honestly, we’re always pressed to mock ourselves up against “ourselves.” I have as much a mythology about “Nick P.” as you might. I’m still influenced by the naive child with a new internet connection reading about what Leos are like or people born in the year of the Dragon. I remember that my name means “victory of the people.” I mean, I have a mane.
And even while you’re sitting right in the middle of it, it can be hard to tell who you are. I took some very old acid earlier tonight. It had/has me tweaking out just a little bit, but enough to know that I shouldn’t have stared too long at myself in the mirror. Yet, not enough that it had me breaking the glass so I could use a shard to cut out the crazy person behind my eyes. So we can call it a win.
In the midst of my doozy I’m watching art. I’m taking in, what in some circles, could be considered the very pinnacle of human achievement. To conceive of and tell a story that’s entirely “fictional” yet oh so real. Can we only access ourselves ironically? I’m searching for a way past my anxiety about never getting into another study and wasting money on land in a dying country and I can approach it “rationally” all day that I should “just show up and take the money,” but I genuinely find the more productive course of action was to see what the acid could tell me. Truthfully, I only regret it wasn’t a more powerful dose.
Just like the actor, I want to be seen. It’s not enough to just call me an egomaniac, as I’m fond of referring to myself. I want to shine for all of my character flaws. I want to be scared first by my eyes before I show them to you or try to tell you about them. I want you to feel my heart pounding every beat through every hesitant breath trying desperately to figure out a way to calm the fuck down and just handle business. I want you to feel as scared and alone, even when the danger isn’t real.
I don’t understand it. I clearly barely even know how to approach it. But I know I have to. I know I have to either combat and subdue this change or construct a new mythology to cope with it. I need to stand and be seen as someone trying as he doubts it’s worth it. I need to be so convincing at acting it out you can’t tell if it’s real anymore. I need to feel like my star on the walk is worthy. I need to know I’m contributing something only I can to the roll. I need to be absolutely sure I’m not gonna get recast by some fobish bloke.
Alas, we can’t be miscast or ever denied the part. Every flop registers as loudly if not moreso than every hit. I don’t know why I’m picking so many bad roles. Who’s casting this thing? Tell that guy to go back to the good old days when things were easy and my mind was elsewhere. Back before I had any illusions I could be a star and was just kidding around with some friends. Just hit reset and let me play that again.
I think a lot about acting. I think about how sometimes no matter how hard I look I don’t know if I can tell the difference between good and bad. I think about method acting. As if faking it real hard is as real or more real than faking it sorta. I think about what motivates an actor. Is there some deep relationship they have with life they feel better portraying verses actually living? Or is it much simpler? They want to be seen!
The person starving for the limelight wants every bit as much to be seen as the 19th assistant programmer wants to be listed on the credits with dozens of film studios that added glossy to droids on the latest Star Wars. Stand and be recognized. To put on the show of human emotions must be evidence of one’s capacity to feel them, right? Or to make them into the be all end all grand celebration! Endless love! Noble heroes! It’s the mythology; the lifeblood.
Whether we talk about it coherently or honestly, we’re always pressed to mock ourselves up against “ourselves.” I have as much a mythology about “Nick P.” as you might. I’m still influenced by the naive child with a new internet connection reading about what Leos are like or people born in the year of the Dragon. I remember that my name means “victory of the people.” I mean, I have a mane.
And even while you’re sitting right in the middle of it, it can be hard to tell who you are. I took some very old acid earlier tonight. It had/has me tweaking out just a little bit, but enough to know that I shouldn’t have stared too long at myself in the mirror. Yet, not enough that it had me breaking the glass so I could use a shard to cut out the crazy person behind my eyes. So we can call it a win.
In the midst of my doozy I’m watching art. I’m taking in, what in some circles, could be considered the very pinnacle of human achievement. To conceive of and tell a story that’s entirely “fictional” yet oh so real. Can we only access ourselves ironically? I’m searching for a way past my anxiety about never getting into another study and wasting money on land in a dying country and I can approach it “rationally” all day that I should “just show up and take the money,” but I genuinely find the more productive course of action was to see what the acid could tell me. Truthfully, I only regret it wasn’t a more powerful dose.
Just like the actor, I want to be seen. It’s not enough to just call me an egomaniac, as I’m fond of referring to myself. I want to shine for all of my character flaws. I want to be scared first by my eyes before I show them to you or try to tell you about them. I want you to feel my heart pounding every beat through every hesitant breath trying desperately to figure out a way to calm the fuck down and just handle business. I want you to feel as scared and alone, even when the danger isn’t real.
I don’t understand it. I clearly barely even know how to approach it. But I know I have to. I know I have to either combat and subdue this change or construct a new mythology to cope with it. I need to stand and be seen as someone trying as he doubts it’s worth it. I need to be so convincing at acting it out you can’t tell if it’s real anymore. I need to feel like my star on the walk is worthy. I need to know I’m contributing something only I can to the roll. I need to be absolutely sure I’m not gonna get recast by some fobish bloke.
Alas, we can’t be miscast or ever denied the part. Every flop registers as loudly if not moreso than every hit. I don’t know why I’m picking so many bad roles. Who’s casting this thing? Tell that guy to go back to the good old days when things were easy and my mind was elsewhere. Back before I had any illusions I could be a star and was just kidding around with some friends. Just hit reset and let me play that again.
[560] Keep It Together
This will likely consist of contradictory, disconnected yet redundant, accusatory, self-indulgent whiny blathering half-truths that only suffice to round out the immensity of the dread, stress, and sadness I’ve felt all day thinking about my life.
I failed another screening. For those counting, that’s 4. My blood pressure read 171/92. I’ve never come close to that number before. After relaxing for 15 minutes, I got it down to 154/78. I went online to learn how to keep your heart rate down. The thing that seemed to work was engaging the core and acting like you had to shit. Upon relaxing, low and behold, my heart rate slowed down. Tensing your body up as if you have to shit does you no other favors.
Studies are me cheating. I’ll be old and echoing how I don’t want to be taken advantage of at a minimum wage anything job again. I hate being recognized with faux-appreciation for working harder and smarter than those around me. I hate sacrificing time to someone else’s bottom line. So I cheat. Or, increasingly it looks like I used to.
Now that I got the land, it’s like there’s been a signal shift. Like I’m not doing enough to profit off of it, whatever’s controlling my body realizes that, and it refuses to let me walk in and out with a cool few thousand dollars anymore. So I’m taking my environment’s advice. I’m going to be out there hand-sheering 5 acres of weeds and digging up roots and digging a hole to burn it all. I’m going to make part of it look presentable and drag out salvaged wood and whatever else I can find to create “anything” in the meantime.
That must be where I belong. Dicking around in a field exhausting myself because I can’t afford the proper equipment. I have no other plan. There’s no other signal. Across all areas of my life, I keep getting told the same story. The best actors in my life get dealt the same kind of misery.
My dad and step mom take care of my grandma, could use $1000 for a couple months, my aunt who has $500,000 cash for a new house and car scolds him for daring to ask her. My uncles use the utilities and eat the food, don’t contribute, for 7 years. They steal my grandma’s house when she dies, live in it rent free, screw the rest of us who were supposed to divide up the sale of the house. Lesson, care for your dying mother, everyone in your life shits on you.
If I hadn’t looked out for people over the last few years, I’d be sitting on an extra 6-8 grand depending on how you want to slice it. Am I big rich baller who just throws money at things and people? Certainly not. So when time comes to make the big purchase and years go by and people can’t pay back debts, you can’t help but feel like your generosity is a recipe for disaster when you had 5 years security, and now it’s a struggle to get back to 6 months ahead.
I was with someone for 5 years and it ended abruptly with the sound of the last fart of a deflated balloon. I’ve watched nearly every one of my friends in long or longer term relationships fight as much every month as we might’ve every year. I’ve played marriage counselor for months if not years for some of these people. I’ve watched people STILL figure it out or fight it out or at the very least recognize and want to protect something good. But someone weasels their way into my goddamn head and makes me beg to give my time, money, and attention to, that’s the situation that’s the hopeless one. Makes sense.
Everything I’ve ever experimented with I’ve done under budget and never gone in debt. Does that bode any confidence in your surrounding family to help support you? Family that can spend thousands and thousands on clothes and weaponry that they literally use to hoard, but not even a small time loan to build a house? Your “family,” your motivated, intelligent, respectful, hard-working, hasn’t become an alcoholic or had a nervous breakdown yet nephews are as dismissable as the poor examples their older cousins have set. Again, makes sense. I’m entitled, after all, I lived with my parents...never, after school while one uncle stayed until his mother died.
You’d think I just wanted to take advantage of people. You’d think I just want money and opportunities so I could...I don’t know...sit around and watch TV all day and brag about how my bills are paid. You’d think I haven’t done everything in my power save literal begging to fund and create and fight back against the amazingly ignorant and depraved atmosphere I know we’re all suffering. You’d think I dropped out of school or worked out my insecurities by picking you apart in hateful ways. You’d think I woke up everyday and prayed to a real God to throw every possible fucking barrier that exists in front of my capacity to just be a functioning basically moral and helpful fucking individual.
OH! I’m reminded that it’s often as well that when I do fuck up, PEOPLE REMEMBER THAT SHIT! Got too drunk? “I mean, I know there was a little heartache, but come on man.” A comment about a night I probably should have been in the hospital given my failure to cope at the time. Was my behavior fucked? Probably somewhat. Should I expect a deferential tone TO ANY FUCKING THING I’M EVER FUCKING GOING THROUGH ONCE! God fucking forbid.
Talking to these people is inviting the constant threat of being judged and gotten angry at for having any question or working through a bad example. The feeler and finger pointer garners all the necessary support and “wins.” I think of the different random other entrepreneurial things I’ve worked on for other people. The ones who extorted the project and paid for bullshit get to lead the way and if you opine on the terrible job they’re doing in private, you get the lecture and dismissed when they put it on blast. They’ll take all your time, all your good will, any extra effort and summarily throw it back at you the moment they feel the threat of their insecurities or poor planning.
I shake off or excuse soooooo many peoples’ shitty behavior or “quirks” or “that’s just thems.” But, somehow, when the time comes for an ounce of leeway, pick the worst fucking time about the worst fucking subject and wham bam thank you ma’am FUCK YOUR FUCKING FACE WITH IT NICK! I find more respect and connection with random hookups from OKCupid than I have with some of my “friends.” I don’t know if that’s a “people over time” thing, or a you thing.
I’M EVEN TRYING TO BE POOR. In an important sense, I’m trying to revel in and celebrate ingenuity and recycling and sustainability, AND I CAN’T DO THAT! I need half to a third of my well below poverty wages and income for the last 3 years to finally not have extortionary bills breathing down my neck. On the verge of this, I have the blood pressure of an over-inflated sex doll.
And then I try to learn. I try to read damn near fucking everything. I try to watch damn near fucking everything. I look for every connection. I get random certifications and credentials. I talk to all different kinds of people. I post across dozens of forums. I have a dizzying array of appeals across income and age levels. NOBODY’S THERE! Oh, they’re in the streets “protesting” and pretending they’re helping. They’re behind their desk “adulting” away waving me off as an eccentric. They’re lonely and sad as fuck at home or in the ghetto compromising. They’ve got their own mental health issues, lack of funds, or body part that didn’t used to ache until now.
I’m almost relearning how to be sad. Most shit pretty much rolls off or doesn’t matter. Now it’s all just sticking to me. It’s every insane stupid person. It’s every condescending or indignant look and comment. It’s every blown off lunch or drink date. It’s every non invitation because, I’m not on your mind, why am I letting you occupy so much of mine? Every dream that gets pushed back another few months, then a year, then maybe if I ever come across...whatever. Every hours long trek through traffic for the opportunity to sell my body for, if we’re talking hourly, about 12 bucks.
I don’t belong anywhere. I shouldn’t be at the bar, because I’m in no mood for fun and lately definitely don’t have the money. I’m not supposed to be hanging out with you, you’re too busy or, more simply, never thought of me. I don’t belong with the “working poor.” NO ONE DOES! GET THE FUCK OUT! I’m not the happy downsy kid at the checkout just happy to be involved. There’s no seat at the table for me. I’m not a couch surfer. I may literally throw my couch off my back porch as if it did something wrong. It doesn’t matter what I know. It didn’t matter what I want to create. It doesn’t matter if I see the future for the next 100 years.
So I’m going to go to a field. I’m going to cut, and freeze, and dig, and burn, and freeze, and cuss, and just try to exist doing those things. There’s nowhere else for me. I’ll pretend to know how I’m paying the bills past March. I’ll desperately cling to the idea that one day, maybe when I’m like 50 or 60 and enough people have died in my family to leave me some final pity, I’ll get to humbly and with no aplomb embark on what’s passed me by years ago.
Is a dark sense of humor really that hard to relate to? You think it’s an accident that the world feels indifferent and we obviously mean nothing? When you try, you are punished. When you know nothing, you also get to be so stupid you don’t even realize you know nothing. The selfish win. The ones who hate themselves the most get the most opportunities to piss away. Those who have too much are given more money and more access. There’s nothing in it to give a damn. There’s nothing in it to try. I get why you don’t.
I failed another screening. For those counting, that’s 4. My blood pressure read 171/92. I’ve never come close to that number before. After relaxing for 15 minutes, I got it down to 154/78. I went online to learn how to keep your heart rate down. The thing that seemed to work was engaging the core and acting like you had to shit. Upon relaxing, low and behold, my heart rate slowed down. Tensing your body up as if you have to shit does you no other favors.
Studies are me cheating. I’ll be old and echoing how I don’t want to be taken advantage of at a minimum wage anything job again. I hate being recognized with faux-appreciation for working harder and smarter than those around me. I hate sacrificing time to someone else’s bottom line. So I cheat. Or, increasingly it looks like I used to.
Now that I got the land, it’s like there’s been a signal shift. Like I’m not doing enough to profit off of it, whatever’s controlling my body realizes that, and it refuses to let me walk in and out with a cool few thousand dollars anymore. So I’m taking my environment’s advice. I’m going to be out there hand-sheering 5 acres of weeds and digging up roots and digging a hole to burn it all. I’m going to make part of it look presentable and drag out salvaged wood and whatever else I can find to create “anything” in the meantime.
That must be where I belong. Dicking around in a field exhausting myself because I can’t afford the proper equipment. I have no other plan. There’s no other signal. Across all areas of my life, I keep getting told the same story. The best actors in my life get dealt the same kind of misery.
My dad and step mom take care of my grandma, could use $1000 for a couple months, my aunt who has $500,000 cash for a new house and car scolds him for daring to ask her. My uncles use the utilities and eat the food, don’t contribute, for 7 years. They steal my grandma’s house when she dies, live in it rent free, screw the rest of us who were supposed to divide up the sale of the house. Lesson, care for your dying mother, everyone in your life shits on you.
If I hadn’t looked out for people over the last few years, I’d be sitting on an extra 6-8 grand depending on how you want to slice it. Am I big rich baller who just throws money at things and people? Certainly not. So when time comes to make the big purchase and years go by and people can’t pay back debts, you can’t help but feel like your generosity is a recipe for disaster when you had 5 years security, and now it’s a struggle to get back to 6 months ahead.
I was with someone for 5 years and it ended abruptly with the sound of the last fart of a deflated balloon. I’ve watched nearly every one of my friends in long or longer term relationships fight as much every month as we might’ve every year. I’ve played marriage counselor for months if not years for some of these people. I’ve watched people STILL figure it out or fight it out or at the very least recognize and want to protect something good. But someone weasels their way into my goddamn head and makes me beg to give my time, money, and attention to, that’s the situation that’s the hopeless one. Makes sense.
Everything I’ve ever experimented with I’ve done under budget and never gone in debt. Does that bode any confidence in your surrounding family to help support you? Family that can spend thousands and thousands on clothes and weaponry that they literally use to hoard, but not even a small time loan to build a house? Your “family,” your motivated, intelligent, respectful, hard-working, hasn’t become an alcoholic or had a nervous breakdown yet nephews are as dismissable as the poor examples their older cousins have set. Again, makes sense. I’m entitled, after all, I lived with my parents...never, after school while one uncle stayed until his mother died.
You’d think I just wanted to take advantage of people. You’d think I just want money and opportunities so I could...I don’t know...sit around and watch TV all day and brag about how my bills are paid. You’d think I haven’t done everything in my power save literal begging to fund and create and fight back against the amazingly ignorant and depraved atmosphere I know we’re all suffering. You’d think I dropped out of school or worked out my insecurities by picking you apart in hateful ways. You’d think I woke up everyday and prayed to a real God to throw every possible fucking barrier that exists in front of my capacity to just be a functioning basically moral and helpful fucking individual.
OH! I’m reminded that it’s often as well that when I do fuck up, PEOPLE REMEMBER THAT SHIT! Got too drunk? “I mean, I know there was a little heartache, but come on man.” A comment about a night I probably should have been in the hospital given my failure to cope at the time. Was my behavior fucked? Probably somewhat. Should I expect a deferential tone TO ANY FUCKING THING I’M EVER FUCKING GOING THROUGH ONCE! God fucking forbid.
Talking to these people is inviting the constant threat of being judged and gotten angry at for having any question or working through a bad example. The feeler and finger pointer garners all the necessary support and “wins.” I think of the different random other entrepreneurial things I’ve worked on for other people. The ones who extorted the project and paid for bullshit get to lead the way and if you opine on the terrible job they’re doing in private, you get the lecture and dismissed when they put it on blast. They’ll take all your time, all your good will, any extra effort and summarily throw it back at you the moment they feel the threat of their insecurities or poor planning.
I shake off or excuse soooooo many peoples’ shitty behavior or “quirks” or “that’s just thems.” But, somehow, when the time comes for an ounce of leeway, pick the worst fucking time about the worst fucking subject and wham bam thank you ma’am FUCK YOUR FUCKING FACE WITH IT NICK! I find more respect and connection with random hookups from OKCupid than I have with some of my “friends.” I don’t know if that’s a “people over time” thing, or a you thing.
I’M EVEN TRYING TO BE POOR. In an important sense, I’m trying to revel in and celebrate ingenuity and recycling and sustainability, AND I CAN’T DO THAT! I need half to a third of my well below poverty wages and income for the last 3 years to finally not have extortionary bills breathing down my neck. On the verge of this, I have the blood pressure of an over-inflated sex doll.
And then I try to learn. I try to read damn near fucking everything. I try to watch damn near fucking everything. I look for every connection. I get random certifications and credentials. I talk to all different kinds of people. I post across dozens of forums. I have a dizzying array of appeals across income and age levels. NOBODY’S THERE! Oh, they’re in the streets “protesting” and pretending they’re helping. They’re behind their desk “adulting” away waving me off as an eccentric. They’re lonely and sad as fuck at home or in the ghetto compromising. They’ve got their own mental health issues, lack of funds, or body part that didn’t used to ache until now.
I’m almost relearning how to be sad. Most shit pretty much rolls off or doesn’t matter. Now it’s all just sticking to me. It’s every insane stupid person. It’s every condescending or indignant look and comment. It’s every blown off lunch or drink date. It’s every non invitation because, I’m not on your mind, why am I letting you occupy so much of mine? Every dream that gets pushed back another few months, then a year, then maybe if I ever come across...whatever. Every hours long trek through traffic for the opportunity to sell my body for, if we’re talking hourly, about 12 bucks.
I don’t belong anywhere. I shouldn’t be at the bar, because I’m in no mood for fun and lately definitely don’t have the money. I’m not supposed to be hanging out with you, you’re too busy or, more simply, never thought of me. I don’t belong with the “working poor.” NO ONE DOES! GET THE FUCK OUT! I’m not the happy downsy kid at the checkout just happy to be involved. There’s no seat at the table for me. I’m not a couch surfer. I may literally throw my couch off my back porch as if it did something wrong. It doesn’t matter what I know. It didn’t matter what I want to create. It doesn’t matter if I see the future for the next 100 years.
So I’m going to go to a field. I’m going to cut, and freeze, and dig, and burn, and freeze, and cuss, and just try to exist doing those things. There’s nowhere else for me. I’ll pretend to know how I’m paying the bills past March. I’ll desperately cling to the idea that one day, maybe when I’m like 50 or 60 and enough people have died in my family to leave me some final pity, I’ll get to humbly and with no aplomb embark on what’s passed me by years ago.
Is a dark sense of humor really that hard to relate to? You think it’s an accident that the world feels indifferent and we obviously mean nothing? When you try, you are punished. When you know nothing, you also get to be so stupid you don’t even realize you know nothing. The selfish win. The ones who hate themselves the most get the most opportunities to piss away. Those who have too much are given more money and more access. There’s nothing in it to give a damn. There’s nothing in it to try. I get why you don’t.
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