[578] Worst Person in the World

What if you are the worst person in the world?

“It’s an absurd question!” you protest. “I never killed anybody! I don’t steal! I even returned a wallet, went to church, and helped a duck cross the road!” A growing list of examples continuing to flood your head as if you’ve grasped the point of the question. The worst person in the world could have simply done one less good thing than you by your math and method. We’ll let aside how we’d disagree about your church attendance, and refrain from speculating if the duck you helped was a cousin of the one you ordered at a fancy restaurant.

In order for the question to make sense, as we reflexively take for granted does or doesn’t happen based on how we feel about it, we’d have to agree on what a person was. We’d have to try and do a moral calculus that spoke to perceived goods and bads and multipliers given specific acts. Then we would proceed to imagine the consequences of being the worst person and if they even mattered. It’s because I ask the question about myself I bother to ask it of you. It’s my brazen acceptance of its premise that makes me wonder how you’d rationalize accepting or rejecting it.

I’m, of course, the worst person in the world because I “waste my potential.” When I could be learning, often I’m not. When I could be helping, I’m happier to pass along the article or, maybe...maybe click a donate button. I can argue away the value of my contributions as easily as it suits me to justify time on my ass or time sacrificed in services to exploitative ends. I’ve broken people’s trust, including my own. I’ve lied with the fluidity of the most pathological. I’ve charged headlong into the most petty and immature woods to provoke police responses and maybe soon a judge’s as well.

In my imagination, the worst person in the world is a standing betrayal to what they presume to know. For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought of myself as something special. Hardly thinking I was born that way, I’ve merely received “extra” attention or “different” comments regarding my behavior. I speak wrong. I take too much pride in how I allocate my time, somehow without irony if you read the last paragraph. I assert almost daily, now that Byron is vegan, that I’d absolutely shoot a cow in the head or cut off a chicken’s in order to own my complicity. My murderous soul placated with a layer of cheese and side of fries. And while I’ll never claim jokes are necessarily malicious, I rarely hold any regard for how they make you feel.

I’m a sex maniac! I can use someone like an object and feel nothing but the ingratiation of a special meal. Hell, the meal might even register as better. I spit in the eye of even the most humble of your gods. I litter the temple of my body with sugar and alcohol and let my muscles atrophy as I wait around in front of the television until the next party. I viciously attack my microbiome with products that soften my hair and dry out my skin. I pick and dig at every bump on my skin until I look like a child who had parents that put cigarettes out on him.

Petty, superficial, judgmental, animal-killer, non-believer, tactless, self-harming, dishonest, lazy sociopath. “What a mouthful,” she said. It’s a wonder what I’m even doing here were I not a hopeless despot on top of it all happy to call myself an accident of naive self-indulgence. What a depraved and black ego it must take to prop up that mess of horrifying circumstance and derive any sense of worth or responsibility. Whatever you want to make of life, it certainly dictated my cancerous malaise traveling through the bowels of existence eager to be excreted into oblivion.

There’s a but coming, right? We’ve been playing a game with a theoretical question. Well, the question exists, but every answer can only be inferred or inductively reasoned to conclude I am indeed the worst person in the world. Do I need to know everyone or what they’ve done or think of themselves in order to falsify the conclusion? Do we have to agree on a dozen moral premises for you to trust my assessment? Asking too many questions would be to miss the point, because I am the worst person in the world.

But what if you were instead? Would you contact me and brag or insist I add one more adjective to outpace you? Should we start a club and sew .000000001%-er patches on our jackets and explain that we’re not super rich, but part of an even more elite club? Maybe we could get together and trade pills to help us cope with our subconscious that always seems to betray the braggadocio of elucidating such fine details of our positions in the hierarchy. I got it! Suicide pact in the spirit of the last and ultimate act of defiant irony, ridding the world of our cosmic stain in the bedrock moral act that shifts the universe back to a new positive trending energy. I can see the headlines, “Worst People in the World Save Humanity!”

I suppose the question would be easier if I even knew what it meant to be human. “OH THE HUMANITY!” is constantly thrust in front of our faces. Resilient! In the face of endless, historically insisted upon, oppression and exploitation. Violent! In defense of its ideology and resources. Depressed and anxious! If surveys and pill sales are to be believed. Loving! Per dose of Hollywood or artistic cliche. Idiotic! From the vaunted mouths of pop stars, athletic babes, and leaders of superpowers sans heroics.

It seems to me we’ve done next to nothing in figuring out how to agree on what it means to be a person. Sure, philosophers yada yada and science says you’re 50-65% water blah-didly-blah. What’s a philosopher’s words in a language we can’t understand? What makes us water worth drinking? We stopped standing with Standing Rock. We’re flooding Florida and islands only VICE seems able to discover. We’re drowning in debt. Wave after wave of lies come from our highest offices and representatives. Awash in celebrity culture we wipe away the basis from which to form a fundamental opinion of who we are, in spite or relation, and whether we’re the worst person in the world.

So are you? A person, that is. Because we have a lot of work to do on getting to which of us is the worst.

[577] A Day Out The Life

The blogs where I don’t have a rush of thoughts and anger to unload I never feel are that great so I’m warning you now this will probably meander.

I have no life. I got off of my nonsense job at 5 AM (after much conditioning to get used to getting off at 8:30) and I still managed to listen to the whole of Consider the Lobster and got a deeper appreciation for the reasons David Foster Wallace killed himself. My feet were sore, but less so, throbbing on my living room bed as I refreshed my Trakt.tv page and made sure it properly recorded instances of what I’ve watched. I took in a condescending or demeaning comment from reddit as I probed past fights and future plans for litigation. I ate half a bag of Cheetos, not because I was hungry, but because it was there.

I proceeded to fall asleep to the last half of a TV show I only started watching because people in my demographic remember and enjoy 3 of the main cast members from cult series of the past. I even saw Ron Funches perform in person once. Twice now, before even reaching 2 paragraphs, I’ve been re-opening a “case” with facebook in an exceedingly feeble attempt to get my old page back that was locked down for initially unclear reasons, and then likely kept that way after my intransigence at sending them a picture of my license. This has been a saga transcended only by the years long poking wars of old. In front of me is a white board (because all serious and thoughtful people need to splay their ideas out on a white board) with quasi-arbitrary lists and words the speak to all sorts of “things” I’d “like” to “do.”

In a fit of motivation I returned a faulty car jack only to learn the money would still be subject to be spent at Wal-Mart despite my questions and protest. I stole a pack of nails (while buying 2 more identical ones) because. I proceeded to drive downtown, as the weather has been, in the words of a friend “terrifyingly beautiful” for February in Indiana. I wandered down the sidewalk making extra effort to ignore how this day brought out the goofiest looking people and bizarre homeless. Making it to the library almost felt like an accomplishment as it spurred my memory to return a book I forgot in my car. I bought 3 books, 2 of which I probably won’t read. I went back to my car and sat there with my leg out the window reading a few articles and texting a person I’ve no business pretending to be friends with.

The sitting in my car waiting around scene played out again in front of another friend’s house as I waited to hear back from a woman offering free firewood. If man can be judged by their texts alone, I have my suspicions about this woman’s ownership of a high school degree. Our poor communication has me trying again tomorrow to take a few stumps for my future fire plans. I came home and put on a random “guitar play along” playlist where I strummed easy chords to songs I don’t particularly care for and sang super loud in what I hope is a passive aggressive ploy that annoys my shady neighbors. I finished off 3 different kinds of tea and a beer, all the while putting off a shower I genuinely wanted to take a long time ago.

I pick at my skin until there’s pools of blood that spot my shirts and sheets. I rehearse the same verses of a handful of classical songs in between picking out the dirt that gets trapped under my nails grown out in service to the task. My eye is raw from something getting trapped under my contact I generally can’t be bothered to take out for a month or two at a time. I primarily defaulted to a state where if I’m not hungry, I’m just confused. I don’t know why I’m listening to the audiobook or reading the article talking from another detailed angle I already know enough about. I don’t know why I’m learning songs I don’t care about while I hear something on a long drive that has me itching to get home and start up, but rarely if ever do. I’ve eaten 3 foods I don’t even like over the last 2 days I think to just give my mouth something to protest.

On a random page of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of the 3 books I bought and likely the only one I’ll try to read, there was a line about which facts tend to stick with you and why. The facts that sit at the nexus of who you are and who you are becoming are what you remember. If I’ve now immortalized this day does it then suggest I’m becoming even moreso this wandering lonely hobo-adjacent layabout? Or am I just dropping it off here because I’ll be forgetting this day and all I happened to be involved with so quickly that any lesson or resolve I might glean from it would be fleeting? Somewhere in my mind is the belief in having the ability to make choices, but knowing I again have work at midnight and my mind is leaning away from seeing a collection of townie bands, I’m sensing circumstantial victimhood.

Tomorrow I’ll have a life. Tomorrow I’m going to get another job and pick up tree stumps and 2x4s and get a shovel fixed and see if I can make a solid spot to stick people I’m not convinced even really like me around a fire. Then I can dream about misremembering some of these recent songs I don’t care for, try to unload 3 or 4 extra containers of salsa that were ignored at the last together, and create another memory centered around my, apparent addiction, to gathering people together. I didn’t call a friend to shoot the shit. I didn’t clean the kitchen or continue taking inventory. I didn’t watch more videos related to straw-bale building or pouring concrete. I’m not learning to code better to organize all of my Mystik related activities. I’m a day tripping Sunday driver who’s convinced himself carrying on like this will eventually get me everything I ever want. Slightly over-simplified, but I heard Elon Musk schedules his days down to 5 minute increments. Guess I’m not a Martian.

[576] In Search of Lost Rhyme

I don’t know you must stop asking
In nose too deep or stocking stacking
As thoughts carry and weigh in turn
A flame to candle’s hope does burn
Hands black with dirt now close resembles
A past ‘ner left new world assembles
Depleted brow and shoulders sunk
Do flowers mock repugnant funk
Ideal so far a heaven’s breath
Knelt down befallen inspirit death
Were cotton not privy to common knave
Emboldened your stature as modern slave
No amount may charge or sound
The writ of sale for souls abound
Choice as faux as whom to fight
Wholly swallowed eschewing bite
Scheme so standing in mock protest
Body and mind each tolled egress
Ashamed to recognize a face
To look upon the feral base
Arch and step in service too
Consumer force produce and moo
It matters not asleep awake
Sagacious pride dismissing cake
Taken back unsettled scores
Laid bare insipid salacious whores
Gave up a scream in silence whispered
As boiling lobster denied its Mister
A still not cold nor true and true
Take life in turn of what kills you

[575] Kro-No

Let’s talk a little about my coworkers and working conditions. Apparently, you can run out of worthwhile podcasts after a mere 24 or so hours, so I’ve found myself having interactions with them that are proving perhaps the wrong kind of thought provoking.

What rides the surface of every single one of them is how unhappy they are. There are no real jokes. There isn’t a genuine sense of camaraderie. You have people swallowing shit for a living and the only way to get through it is with dozens of, “Having fun yet?” questions that never need to be answered.

Even with an extremely limited amount of words or time spent truly interacting but to point out where something might be located, the internal drama and politics are alive and well. So and so resents so and so. “Well who is she to say that?” I almost feel like a record has been broken for the sheer deficiency in the amount of words exchanged that could still provoke conflict.

The smell. Someone has it figured out that you can shit on company time. I’ve never gone into the bathroom, no matter what time of day, someone isn’t either shitting or just taken a shit. You’d think to yourself, hey, at least it smells like shit where it’s supposed to. The floor just smells like cardboard and food right? No, it does not. Not if you’re working with 2, yes 2, gentlemen who on more than one occasion have smelled like wide open ass with every pass.

One of those gentleman considers himself a multi-faceted tradesman who is worth at least $25 an hour to do things like remodels, which he does on the side. The other wears all of the hateful things he thinks about you on his face, his tiny tiny face, and doesn’t even respond to the most basic of acknowledgments that you are in the same space.

The chatty gentleman is not an intriguing, but illustrative, example of the types that seem to find me endearing. I listen to their 3 or 4 stories I’m positive they have no memory of telling me already, in our total 10 minutes of conversation over 2 weeks. He’s a good God-fearing man who paid for people even poorer than him’s Thanksgiving one year when he heard they only had $5 for bologna. He’ll take cash under the table so he can keep cashing his social security. This job isn’t good for him, just the 20 hours a week to keep him off the street is what he’s after.

I’m not the buy you Thanksgiving dinner type. I can look at his example, and mostly think to myself a pure sense of generosity isn’t so much talked about as it is felt. But he’s an extreme example of how much of the world operates. They get stuck in a particular narrative about their place or worth and recite it ad nauseum, even and until they don’t bother with proper ass wiping as if to really sell the nausea.

The last coworker he got into it with sprouted an important line. They asked him if he went to college, to which he played it off matter-of-factly and claimed Harvard. They bought it. In his explanation of the argument to me he said of course it wasn’t true, but who are they to act better than him? They’re right here with him stocking shelves or checking people out through the line. And, in a sense, he’s absolutely right. I certainly don’t feel “more worthy” or “better” in pure human terms to such a degree that I won’t take the peon job, even in limited fashion, to keep my head above water. The idea that either side of a Kroger employee battle would feel so emboldened to protect their pride, either through ridicule and or lies, is where I see the difference in people.

I won’t lie to you about why I’m there. I won’t pretend I have some special knowledge or access to something I don’t. All of my entrepreneurial goals have been described as experiments and trying to provide myself the freedom to “fail forward.” All I fundamentally know is how to budget. I haven’t grown anything, let alone tried to sell any of it. I haven’t engaged marketing campaigns and fucked around with analytic software and email lists. I’ve read a ton of books, I know I work hard, and I’m unbelievably pretentious. It’s a recipe for success eventually, and at the very least, I’ll be able to relatively soon piss off into a field and pop my head into the working world when I want to afford some indulgence.

My story isn’t different because of the ideas I have, money I’ve made, or things I own. My story is different because the same one I’m telling you is the one I’m telling myself. The term “wage-slave” was invented by people experiencing much closer to slavery conditions than we are. I know I’m exploited. I know most of the world, including the ever-decreasing size of the one I care about, isn’t particularly prepared for a shock to the system. I know we’re all worth what I want to give you and we’re all shelf jockeys in a world that does not give a fuck about us.

I just urge you not to fake it. You don’t have to be obnoxious or feel borderline about to get fired like I do, but every bullshit smile, every cliche about another day, every turn away from some glaring problem you know is going to hit is just going to make you smell like shit. You’ll have your own self-congratulatory story about who you really are as you dissolve in internal tears. I can’t wait until the robots come to take the stocking jobs. I can’t wait until everything you ever need can be printed at home. The page we’re on is with stunted people in suffocating circumstances, and I feel like a proper nutter exclaiming as such, were I not privy to what they actually say and do while I’m there.

I suppose I’m persistently struck by how “together” a huge pile of presumptive failures can really take something. The middle-management is all but useless. The guys at the top were both required and willing to give several hours of explanations about how to bring items to the front of shelves and move carts out of the hallway. Hours people, I’m not kidding. Someone spoke for literally hours about how to line up crackers to the edge of a shelf. His privilege for 15 years of service and climbing the ranks, still made to hold up his hand with the store manager and pledge to follow through with promises made to the backroom he subsequently defaulted on immediately.

I sympathize with trying to hold onto and protect whatever little world you’ve made for yourself. I get why you’d never want to leave school. I get why you’d think to yourself it’s better to try and “help people” when your experience of the world primarily consists of interactions with your “average employee.” I might be provoked from some recent Hardcore History podcasts, but anymore if we’re going to claim “progress” is still being made as a species, we can’t keep playing along. The damage old white men and frat boys do by holding seats of power cannot be understated.

Anyway, if you’re wondering what the path to no longer hating my life is feeling like, you’ll probably be getting a lot of that for a while.

[574] Hope Floats

I'm hoping that by approaching old themes I can find better wording. Immediately, “hope” is on my list. The only podcast that made me exclaim out loud was a “This American Life” story about trolls bragging about getting Hitler 2 elected, so I need to talk about “truth” and our approach to language. My current work setting being very...simple, allows me to adopt a sort of zoned-out zen that gives me pause about how I consider myself in relation to the stories I'm hearing or the dispositions of the people around me. Of course, in some convoluted and generally hard to describe way, I feel it must be significantly connected.

The only thing I can say about my relationship to “hope” is that I see it like the yin yang. I don't have it as much as I do. In the darkest moments I still crack a joke. In my “most hopeful” thoughts I see mountains of shit and doubt. I wish I could do away with the word altogether. The only reason I can't is because of how often people keep employing it to describe how they feel. They hope Hitler 2 will save jobs. They hope “someone” is going to save them in the background when shit hits the fan. They hope the boss will give them a raise. They hope they won't get sick. They hope they'll find a way to reorient their life if they get deported. They hope the system won't break down or that power will be checked.

I'm starting to equate hope with ignorance. I find it a cheery way to mask either hard truths or uncomfortable degrees of what you don't know. If you hope, what you're saying is that you don't know, but based on (blank) things may get better. It's like secular prayer. It's employed so often and so fluidly that we don't have a remotely negative conception of it. It wins presidential campaigns until people decide hope isn't as great as great. This side stepping of knowledge is like a billion tiny cuts a day. You disassociate the consequences or truth of any one thing and couch it in a lazily dressed up phrase for your feelings. I'm going to try and do a more deliberate job of avoiding the word. I think or I feel, but I don't really hope.

It's almost become my mission in life to break apart or criticize language. Hitler 2's “Muslim ban” neither banned nor identified Muslims. It couldn't even be honest in adopting that title after it was attempted. “Saving jobs” is another ridiculous conception. Any and everything you do can be considered a job. Your very existence contributes to the whole in countless ways. Until you decouple your job from a basic premise of the dignity and value of humans, all roads to special dignity for sacrificing time in service to capitalism is a suicidal act. A billionth of a cut for every hour, every inflamed lower back, every paycheck that makes you slump, and every word you offer that tries to make it go down better.

The whole “polite” exercise of taking and running with shitty language is at the heart of why “things” never get “better.” You're not paid more because your language suggests your place in the hierarchy. Your very spatial plain of existence is lower than that of your monied masters if any skyscraper is any indication. People are literally embarrassed at the idea of asking for more money or striking even after you tell them a plant worker in early America, high school education or less, would make $30-$50 an hour for the same sorts of tasks you're getting $8-$12 today. These morons who then grow up without learning the word “inflation” berate you in service to their ignorance. The real sin being, you swallow it.

And so how do you fix that? If you're one of those over-read college grads finding yourself rubbing elbows with the nicest, humblest, hardest-working...simple...people, do you have a duty? Should I be printing off fliers from Kroger's CEO exclaiming the ridiculous amount of money they're paying him and record profits the company has from eating up all of its competitors? Do I follow up with the union rep and say waiting 2 years for another shitty contract is no way to behave as someone allegedly more informed and sensitive to what “right-to-work” has done to the state? Because honestly, my thought is no.

I've felt myself growing resolved to not “fixing the world” for a long time. I figure with amount of hatred and criticism I embody, the world is lucky as long as I refrain from letting too much of what I say or wish to do really get out. I also encounter so many levels of different kinds of ignorance so routinely that there's extreme practical considerations in whether or not leading a peasant revolt could be expected to work. I'm not naïve enough to hope people would get on board. And I feel like my obligation to a fight like better wages or the teaching of that history of labor or struggle transcends singularly politicking that store. This begs the question, what does that struggle look like?

Thus I retreat to why I'm there in the first place. Get enough money to secure living conditions that allow me to pursue creative or contributory ends freely. My job is to give my brain leeway and allow myself the rest of my time to do with as I please. Once I can offer that option to others for them to freely accept or reject, I'll know how to better guide my actions that can be considered “in service” to them or not. I'll be able to identify who's willing and capable of helping themselves. Important caveat, to truly help yourself is to do it in a way that should help everyone.

So then on to the trolls. I don't believe they think they're helping anything. They'll argue they're “making a point” that by elevating hate speech and fear mongering, something something PC liberals and “they just want to talk.” It's an endless sea of naïve rationalizing bullshit. I find it so intriguing because where they flirt with what could be an important point, again, the stupid incomplete language takes over to reduce everyone to whiny judgmental ends. Consider the criticism of the “PC” crowd. As someone who makes horrible jokes and is flatly dead inside to inflammatory language, I can still distinguish what makes a joke or comment with a racial slur work verses advocating for the coded (and not so coded) language that emboldens people who would commit violence. Trolls make no such distinctions. Arguably, ignorant inflamed liberals don't either.

As I can go back and take responsibility for the times I've acted like an immature troll or used abrasive and ignorant language, the exercise of doing so takes not just a shrug and excuse for my behavior. I don't feel particularly good about the idea that people feel genuinely hurt about something I might say. At the same time, I expect a certain level of maturity and discernment. I've never found Hitler 2 funny. It's like making fun of the mentally handicapped. It's exceedingly easy and hilarious, were they not carrying the fucking nuclear codes. Then and only then can I agree with the phrase, “There are some things you shouldn't joke about,” which I feel is often a snobby prick's nuclear comment option regarding humor they don't like.

Much of it boils down to a persistent “truth” claim. If you say you hope that Hitler 2 does something positive, is that even a true claim? You felt something, so you can say it's true you had a feeling. You like positive things, so you can say something positive would illicit a good feeling. But what do we make of your hope? How do we conceive of this sentence as anything but you saying “I want to feel good?” And? When the pathological waterfall of lies that comes out of the White House beats you over the head, what's your response? Bad jokes? Crossed fingers? I think it's only sane to revolt! I think you have to shut it off. I think Saturday Night Live is ill-equipped to save us no matter what its ratings. Instead of hearing what you hope or how you feel, we need a revolution in what you read that wasn't shaped by the idiot at the top.

Truth doesn't exist without discernment. Well, it's pure physics at that point, but for an intentioned aware mind that doesn't want to be the wagging tail of a feral animal, we need specifics. We need the hour long explanation of the court decision so we don't scream or cower in the face of nuance. We need new reflexes that check ourselves automatically. That comes from a particular kind of leadership and awareness. One could go so far as to say it's science and expertise. It's what I cling to in the dirt and toil of manual labor not in service to something I care to build or own. It's counting instead of judging. It's an honest pile of information, not an honest opinion. I don't write to “tell it like is,” I'm trying to get underneath the sea of all that isn't. The top layer of this fog of words and cordial interplay retains no respect, no coherence, no direction, and no way out.

I don't think we'll get better. I don't hope we will either. When I'm only as smart as my circumstances suggest, down here in the mud with any number of cliches for someone my age with my habits and tastes, you can expect a resentful anger-induced response to most of what you're offering me. You can trust I will be cold and manipulative and “above it all” even as I'm standing next to you. I'll petition and campaign and toot my own horn for a place a little higher, but my true stature and worth you don't know how to talk about. You don't even find the language for yourself, so I don't expect you to empathize with me. You don't see your place in context, discerning your details, in spite of the corners your insecurities, your families, your language, your friends, or just your general culture puts you in. I can't fix that.

I find it unbearably depressing to consider everyone on a kind of equal footing. How to assess the sheer amount of deliberate tragedy we inflict on people simply because we forgo that burden? How to account for every “soul” without pawning off the responsibility to a god? How to speak in a way that people can't ignore or dismiss because their “interpretation” was different? How do we avoid the sheer tragedy of the mind that was all for Bernie Sanders, but picked Hitler 2 once Sanders dropped out? That's the disconnect. That's the damage of false equivalence. That's missing literally every detail. As long as we remain primarily prone to that, I guess we'll just have to pray about it.

[573] Sweatpants

My prevailing thought for the last week or so has been that I’m too tired to write. Having picked up a few jobs and managing to schedule them stupidly, I haven’t been sleeping well and find myself with enough back and foot pain to throb for hours. Only part of it is the physical exhaustion though, as the tasks I’m engaging in for money are such old news and so familiar that I was bored with them 10 or 12 years ago let alone after my reintroduction now. It takes no extra undue besmirching of general labor to hate the culture, the people, the dialogues, or the vapid power games exerted on you through spite and insecurity.

I’ve always thought I could make more sense of it. I’ve always thought that while I may be consigned into slavery-adjacent tasks, that was never who I was. I’m choosing routes that I can option into other things. I’m choosing settings where the expectations are low, ignorant, and petty. I don’t enjoy these things or refuse to expect more out of myself. When asked, “Having fun yet?” I don’t even give you the courtesy of sarcasm. Fuck no I’m not having fun and you’re stupid for asking. “What do you think of the job?” It’s a job you fat propagandist.

What’s persistently scared me about humanity is that we don’t want to get better. Hundreds of thousands of television shows and millions of books or short stories highlight individual characters with their roles to play, but no matter how many people ever manage to be born, there will only be a relative handful whose stories will truly stick out to me. That doesn’t mean it’s defaulted to the rich or famous. It’s those with an awareness that they’re in the story in the first place and are doing everything they know how to make it theirs.

Because what do you hear in the normal world? “Yeah, I told them about it, but it’s been broken for years.” “You know, daddy didn’t raise no fool, I’m just doing this job here because it keeps me off the streets.” “Me and my husband have worked for this company for 17 years, and while they don’t have a spouse-covering health care plan, it’s a wonderful and caring place that truly wants you to love working here!” “Hey, at least I got to live my dream for a few years before I ended up here!”

It’s the most evil and ridiculous person, according to the rules, who would point out that excuses and ignorance are deadly and vicious and they’re not going to play along. I don’t even know what to call the face of the person who can’t handle or hear the truth. Indignant comes to mind. They’re taken aback. Under it all is fear though. You went right for the words they can’t deal with and now they’re afraid of you and prepared to lash out. What did I do to deserve my lot? I tried to account for it accurately. In hoping to hold myself more accountable than you, I ride the rocky waves of your emotional oceans. I’m crippled by your fears because your fears dominate the landscape.

That it’s not even hyperbole is what literally kills me. I say, “Teach me this thing you’re into Friday, I’d like to try and expand it.” Your response, “It’s just a hobby. Yeah it’s fun. I’ve been so busy lately. I don’t know that much about it.” I say, “Oh, you have this particular skill? What’s stopping you from surmounting your circumstances and doubling down?” Your response, “I know a lot of people in that world. I was real good at what I did. I don’t actually have a car right now. I’ve put my time in already.” I was making solid enough cash with drug studies and bitch more in ten minutes about the regular working world than I hear out of you in years, and it took me all of 2 weeks to adopt 3 jobs in service to my goals. I. FUCKING. HATE. EXCUSES. The only real business I’m in is to rip yours from your cold stupid hands.

Do you hear me praising my “work ethic?” Fuck no! I’m being exploited, like you’re being exploited. I’d be wildly wasting my time if I wasn’t using it to synonymously listen to Radiolab, Dan Carlin, and books on tape. I’ll set up my tablet to keep watching my shows while I deliver food. I won’t let myself be consumed by my added obligations. As I’ve stated before, I’m going to take what you do or what you expect or claim and make it mine. Jobs aren’t yours to give me, they’re mine to create or take. Money isn’t my god to be worshiped at the expense of my body or self-respect. It’s the thing I’m incidentally accruing while I watch TV or learn more about the world.

I have a friend who said it brought him so much joy to see me in uniform slumming it restocking shelves. This friend who I’m working to save up the money to build him a place to stay that he can live in for free. This friend who I want to build a garage as well so he can independently have a place to exercise his skills fixing cars. It brought him joy to see me as a peasant. This is sad. This is damaged. Just because you’re doing it too or understand the pain and frustration doesn’t mean you should opt to revel in an odd selfish solidarity. It would mean something to me if it pissed you off that it caught back up to me. It would mean something if you saw me and were emboldened to more actively pursue your goals. Don’t fucking tell me it brings you joy to watch me kill myself.

I may be tired, and angry, and full of demeaning and depressing quips, but I’m not dead. Having to walk among them and fend off bites is just the added bonus of inserting myself into the drudgery. Right now absolutely sucks. Right now feels like condemnation and waste. Right now is a struggle to barely exist tagging between worlds that have swallowed everyone around me. Right now I’m practically nothing. When I get through, not years from now, then you’ll hear about whether I’m having fun. You’ll hear how my approach to your struggle will have nothing to do with enjoying it. No matter how long I have to live in this world, your complicit psychosis won’t become mine.

[572] Una Cosa

This is probably going to be loaded. At the same time, just like everything I’ve written, it will just be one blog. It will be one thing among hundreds of things I’ve written that speak to a feeling. One feeling comprised of random thoughts and influences or struggles throughout my day. It’s usually one line or one article that prompts me to finally spit up the flow that surrounds a solitary idea that needs significantly more than one word to express.

Maybe your idea is about love. Maybe however you feel and barely think about love is what provokes you in most of your actions. An inability to see how it’s been tarnished gets you into bad relationships and keeps you abused. Maybe it’s one memory from your childhood about how your parents treated each other that sits at the base of your being. Maybe it’s your favorite romantic movie or the memory of a lost loved one. I think if most of us were pressed, we’d be able to center around the one person who showed us what it meant to be there for somebody or worthy of respect and affection.

I say it’s often about fear. Your fear of death making you scream louder and louder at refugees or terrorism. Your fear of feeling inadequate or picked on making you rush to forward your propaganda and ignorance with brazen scorn for fact checking or consequences. How afraid the liar is about their looks or friends or accomplishments. Most animals don’t walk up to you and let you pet them, opting instead (as if it's a choice) to bite or run, even into traffic. We’re no different.

As my dreams and ideas about my place in the world get beaten to death by the word “humility,” I search in desperation for the “one thing” each day that’s supposed to keep me going. I look for an off-shoot of my original idea and see if I can comport myself with the reality of my circumstances as well as the realities of my past or capacity. I can dream about a big house and a dozen entrepreneurial gigs all I want, but $400 bucks in the bank means deliver food and stock shelves to avoid eviction. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve repeated to myself, “at least I have the land. If everything fails, I have the very basic condition from where to start to keep surviving.”

That one idea keeps me, the word I want to use is motivated, but it’s also not at all the word I want to use. My motivation died with the election of Hitler 2. I can’t even fake it. There is no safe place. There is no workaround. Our “leaders” are complicit and have been for a long time. We’re a generally very tired, very stupid, very intimidated and drug addled and depressed population. We’re no different from our predecessors but for our ability to accelerate our demise. For those of us like me who think they can shuck and jive around the impending carnage, there’s a certain calm and relief that life has gotten remarkably simpler, survive, but I’m hardly motivated like I think my impact is bound to really fix anything.

That “one thing” idea can belay your attitude towards any topic. I try to root mine in the wisdom of others. I have “one idea” about sex, and that’s that it isn’t going to define me or my relationships. This allows me to focus on building and speaking towards what I think actually matters. I have “one idea” about what I refer to as “magic thinking.” It pollutes everything. People are going apeshit about the Muslim ban. It’s unconstitutional and racist and ridiculous. I won’t hesitate to call Muslims as ridiculous as Christians in their ability to justify bullshit on faith. At bottom, that societal propensity has much more to do with why we’re all fucked than any one offshoot version of the dogma.

You can only arrive at “one thing” ideas with a capacity to differentiate. You have to be able to separate your ability and responsibility from what’s being perceived about “society” as it’s being sold to you. Can you talk objectively about the quality of a TV show without appealing to season number or popularity? Can you approach traditions with an eye for objective harms they may cause? Can you explain instead of justify?

The whole exercise of writing is about that distinction. I don’t need you to feel good about my drunk blathering or recent switch on how I decide to refer to or talk about “friends.” I need as many words as exist to speak towards the feeling. I’m not trying to persuade you of the danger we’re in living in this country now, but maybe one line will stick with you or the tone of one blog will resonate with something you were feeling as well and something more sincere and helpful can come about. We’re being swallowed by the rivers of bullshit and opinion and fear. My one thing is learning how to sustain so I can escape.

Look for your own thing. At bottom, why do you eat what you do? Why do you have your particular friends? Why did you go to school or pick a certain major? What do you fundamentally believe about your place in the world that keeps you going? What one lyric, or one author, or one movie keeps beating away in your head? How do you explain being trapped? Because that’s what we are. We’re trapped by incidentally infectious ideas and anxieties, and our only choice is to pick an idea that lets us escape. I hope I see you on the other side.