[585] Poor Dad Poor Dad

There's a concept I've only ever brushed against that in my exceedingly tired state having just gotten off a half hour phone call with the IRS just to schedule a meeting a month from now I feel like speaking to more explicitly. That concept is “privilege.”

Mostly of my concerns are the white and male privileges that are supposed to be afforded to me. I get to pat myself on the back for my ability to walk around at night and not habitually think I'm going to get raped, yay! I command respect and attention just by virtue of opening my mouth or stepping into a room. People don't automatically think I'm going to steal something or follow me around stores. I have access to a secret treasure chest of loans or money not afford to the regular person. My oppressive ignorance is to some degree or another significantly contributing to the downfall of your subset of society and the power I command is so unquestionably strangling society I could never dare to be woke enough to adopt my inbred savior complex to do anything real about it.

I find descriptions like these that often attempt to scapegoat and cast wide nets unhelpful for obvious reasons. I too can look at a picture of the “freedom caucus” and see ignorant old rich white men and conclude there's something wrong in Whiteville. I watch the videos of black dudes getting shot for no reason and absolutely don't feel the same way in my interactions with police. I've sat uncomfortably as I've seen the girls in my life get railroaded or spoken over and explained for. What's not in question are certain cultural or behavioral ruts society has adopted that I fit more snugly into than others.

What descriptions that attempt to scapegoat what I was born as fail to do is account for the larger trends that unite us and undermine their indignant posture. I've been, albeit the failing middle-class version of it, poor my entire life. Several times throughout my upbringing my family has been on food stamps. It was 6 or 7 to a cheap apartment at times. I still recall being exceptionally uncomfortable in middle school when we were allowed to buy what was an essentially a new wardrobe from the outlet mall. As if a degree seems to matter in modern society, I wouldn't have one nor have stayed in school were it not for the many years struggle and settlement my dad got after nearly having his arm ripped off at work.

The thing about being poor or “working-class” as it tries to take the stigma off, is that it instills a kind of value system with horse blinders. It is believed that all you have to do is buckle down and get to work! Without irony or the word “dystopia” finding a way into the conversation, the sacrifice of your time and back are supposed to mean your salvation. The rich are to be practically worshiped, emulated, and hoped for. Your approach to money is always needing a bit more than you have, never thinking it's going to last, and spending it in little indulgences here and there or else it's just going to go into something like fixing your shitty car.

I've never spent a day feeling guilty about the opportunities afforded me either because of what I was born as or the support systems I have in place. I look at people crying about their circumstances and insist not that they need to work more, like old rich white people, but that they're being fucked by the same things fucking me and they're making all of us poor people look as bad and stupid as they are by distracting the conversation. It's absolutely nothing to be proud of to work 3 jobs. It's not only inefficient, it's suicidal. It's also what I started doing practically overnight when my study-life came to a screeching halt. I didn't go to school and fail out or skip class even while I was calling to complain to my parents how much time and money I was wasting. I didn't phone it in when running a business required being there every single day after 22 hour days to keep the rent paid.

People are ashamed to think they deserve things. I'm not. By the numbers and hours spent, I not only try to run ahead of the circumstances afforded to me, but try get a jump on learning the actual conversation happening underneath that perpetuates why we're all fucked. I even modify my goals to try and achieve that basic minimum required to live any kind of life worth expressing. If I'm lucky to make 20K a year, I find a way to live on 5 or 6. I might be able to “indulge” in something a little expensive every 6 months or a year, and it likely has to have a dual function, like getting a new phone compatible with an app I need to work a new job. If I got a new car, it'd be for transporting food or people in it all day.

What exhausts me is not seeing a way out. I can't just go into debt by going back to school and crossing my fingers an advanced degree would mean anything more than the one I have now. I have other motivated and intelligent friends who picked up more certifications and tried more “adult” jobs who found their own outlets for getting screwed. They deserve a fuck ton more as well. I don't see a place in the world that valued much beyond fame or endless sacrifice to power brokers and money managers. I can fuck up my sleep, my body, my car, and my finances to try and scrape by and it's not enough. I can talk about it, share the pertinent articles, discuss the nature of the problem with union leaders and representatives, and absolutely nothing hints like people are capable of changing, let alone accurately voicing the problem.

Ultimately, you don't get privileges when you're poor. You're obliged to obey, wait, pay, and die. If you pretend you're doing anything more than that by “deeply appreciating all you have and how others have it worse,” you're going to stay fixated on the wrong things and keep us all down. If you can't respect yourself as deeply as society expects to exploit you, you'll get to spend your entire life playing catch up. I have no special “faith” or “hope” in my ability to keep charging through and trying to figure things out. I have nothing but a deep and unyielding anxiety about everything I've tried to get in front of that has in one way or another kept me down. Every day is the longest day. Every turn is an opportunity to learn why I don't matter. Every piece of advice or offered empathy an echo of the slave ethic and ho-hum shoulder shrugs offering a “relaxing” drink or vacation. I want none of it. I'm fucking done with the distracted excuses and useless conversation, and I'm going to be ruthless in pursuing an exit.

[584] Say Anything Else

I suppose one of the things I find more frustrating about persistent intellectual posture is how easy it is to ignore where and how it creates cramps. I can bend and balance boxes of 2-liters for hours and inevitably will start to feel a little knot form or a wave of pain. You sit down all day and need to lift your arms above your head and roll your neck or swivel side to side. An intellectual posture allows you to say the same thing over and over again, and instead of setting off a warning sign that there's a need to stretch or get a massage, the neural pathways you've created to work yourself into that position get reinforced each time you assert it or you hear that someone agrees with it.

As infinitely complex and confused perceptual beings, we're blind to the “true” nature of reality. I don't believe we will ever find the words, run the experiment, or dig up “42” in an act of cosmic comedic justice. This isn't what we want though. We want the explanatory power that infects and translates or gives us the groundwork from which to build. The more you understand about quantum systems, the cooler the devices you get to take pictures of your dick with. Find the evolutionary ingrained model for social being or mental pathologies, turn your abusive parents into categorically immature and unintelligent narcissists with oedipal complexes and mood disorders; the more adjectives, the easier to swallow and maybe cope with or develop a strategy for combating.

We want the story because whether we're particularly adept at articulating it or not, we want the story to mean something. We want it to reflect our values, what we've worked or sacrificed for, perhaps what many members of our tribe have died for. The problem being, there's no end to the amount of things any one person may find valuable or ways in which they'll choose to try and approach them. So you get extremely specific scientific disciplines arguing so minutely that maybe 3 or 4 people in the entire world even have a shot of knowing what the hell they're talking about, let alone be able to discern the truth of either one. The other side of the spectrum gets you an endless ethics debate regarding the relative imperative to behave in accordance with the tenants of the really peaceful religion.

Here I'll note a reason I approach writing the way I do. There's a very specific and infrequent utility I get from truly picking out the individual lice of insight on the infected head of some topic I'm exploring. 99 times out of 100, absolutely no one wants or cares to read the book I read, or the Jacobin article giving you the ten page history of why your modern union sucks ass, or the Guardians of the Galaxy comics so you can appreciate how disappointing I felt the first movie really was. They want an impression of my approach to whatever it is that concerns them. They either want someone to mirror and add, or swallow. 1 in 100 want to genuinely talk or debate and perhaps learn something new. It is true that I find details interesting and vitally important depending on your task. Details aren't going to give you an impression of “me” and my process, they're going to reduce me to a pedantic research paper “wowing” you with my capacity for citations.

Another way to state the above paragraph is that there is no point to how I write but to try. It has set with me for a long time the psychopath (and I use that term technically) who attacked the very idea that I would even bother at all when so many better philosophers have said it before. It's like an archetypal ignorance. I couldn't possibly phrase intellectual and cultural suicide better. Every morality story you hear in church has been passed down from “already figured out” sentiments our ancestors learned from fighting the environment and each other. Every step forward, be it technologically or in terms of morality, builds on the breaking down and reiteration then reorientation of models and experiences that, say every 40 or so years, 1/3 of the population hasn't necessarily experienced. In 2 years, how many younger obliterated freshman during Little 5 are going to stop and remember to make a reference to 9/11?

It seems stories about tragedy, war, and mass death are turning into failures of retaining and translating the meat of why they happened meaningfully. 9/11 will get a commemorative stamp. Someone will put a statue up memorializing the Pulse nightclub victims, naively inspired by a little girl staring down a bull as a statement regarding intrinsic value or consequence. What to do with the details, when they matter so so much but are often so many and so complicated they get lost to the lazy symbolism or furiously debated into pieces so small you can't really pick them up anymore?

I think you have to learn how to orient yourself in relation to those details. You have to get a higher consciousness perhaps about the nature of what it means to hold something as a distinguishable entity. Say at the level of the neurochemistry of your brain, it can't differentiate between the positive rush from coffee verses cocaine verses the best sex of your life. But you're not just your brain, at least, you don't act like it, so you impose a value and relative utility in how you choose to get the channels flowing. You can look for the hidden orientations of your mind with digressions like these. You can surprise yourself by stumbling forward into manifest value.

It's something of a confusing and seemingly perfectly arbitrary process. Why write...just anything? Whether I want it to or not, my brain is working. It's taking my experiences and matching them against my expectations of the world and of myself. And it's doing it with more (possible) neural connections than there are atoms in the universe. That I could distill a single sentence is a miracle. That I might give you an impression or insight by peeking so far into my mind I'm actually in yours is an act of God.

And you don't like that. Not one bit. And you don't like that because to take on the burden of what it means to be God is infinitely taxing. It's an obliteration event. You can't be “you” if you're God, as it's understood in modern terms. What an act of ignorant pride! You don't know everything! You are not everywhere! You are not the underlying Truth of MY morality! So you learn pretty quickly how intellectually deficient an ideologue is as they summarily dismiss you and often condescend to pray.

The issue being, you are God too, incidentally, the angry destructive one that no one seems to understand but keep sacrificing for. Surely one needn't know everything to know a significant amount about that which they are and how it tends to behave. Not a single person on the road deemed it practical or necessary to drive on the wrong side and cause an accident today. In all of my Godly wisdom, without ever saying it out loud, I predicted as much and it came true! How does one know the future if not by divine right? As to the morality of not running your car into others deliberately, how'd you learn not to do that except by the normalizing factors of your culture? Of course I'm your truth, because you haven't killed me off despite the murderous intent I can see in your eyes. A murderous intent that happens everywhere and in everything where Gods like me attack lesser Gods like you in manners like this.

We don't say our goals out loud, so we're constantly disagreeing about, literally, “nothing.” The goal of a “productive” conversation is to get the point of what the person is telling you and see if it has anything to do with how to better orient yourself later. When you get into an argument, and you assume it's about “winning,” it seems more a misfiring of your threat systems. Your goal isn't to escalate until you get a divorce or kill the other person to defend your opinion. Your goal is to be understood or achieve some form of reciprocity, when all you've done is offered a baseless proposition floating in the might-as-well-be-empty head-space of your mind.

This comes out with the phrasing of things like, “I was only trying to help!” Help what? Help who? Help how? You have a very vague feeling and notion of what constitutes “help,” and by not parsing it out, you're throwing yourself in to drown along with the person you think is trapped under water.

So you can think about this when people, in my view, very ignorantly attack the idea that science can't speak to human values. They point to the tenuous assumptions in science that the observable universe is fundamentally capable of being understood to the point of absurdity. It doesn't matter if we get to “42,” it matters that it's irrelevant your opinion of clitoral castration, for example, it's an unnecessary harm inflicted on vulnerable women where it should be obvious there's a meaningful reason to eradicate the process objectively. Science, the study and approaching-more-accurate accounting of the material world in which we operate, can help dispel the empty-headed idea that vilified genitalia. (Empty insofar as to what we understand today as it is reasonable to conclude much of our ingrained attitudes and relationships are influenced by the complicated dangers regarding sex as we progressed.)

Of course we're all flailing about in the infinite waters of confusion and entropy. But more of course our very capacity for, not just perception, but motivated and reproducible perception means we need to adopt a mode of starting from a shared place and stating a goal AFTER we've done the work like this to bounce around the universe of our own mind to figure out just what it is we're even bothering to talk about, worry about, or set out to fix or achieve. There's a very large list as to why that doesn't happen, presumably the confusion or frustration you might feel trying to follow a blog like this and immediately concluding, indeed mylinating, the “no point” circuitry top amongst it.

I get very dismayed when I hear spot-on heavily tested and investigated stories for either my own behavior or something I've noticed in my family. If I were to try and “bring this home” as it were, without hesitation you can rob yourself of your identity, and therefore responsibility, by couching your understanding too convincingly in any paradigm that relies on your capacity to make an ill-informed “truth” claim. It doesn't matter the doting mother scared of being alone provokes her only son to overcompensate, and indeed run far away, in EXACTLY the manner as has happened between my second cousin and aunt. My degrees of openness and conscientious thoroughly predicted I'd be writing this thought digression after 17 hours of practically nonstop work. But that doesn't remove my responsibility for what it says or choice to write it. It's one blog, one piece, of all that is me, I have been, or am trying to be. Like every detail, it informs, but it's only the Truth to the degree in which you want to deify me, which you don't want to do. But how many other ideas from other deities are you doing that with right now? How many variations of other people's hells are you roasting in? And can you articulate why you chose them, if you chose them, and if there's a way out? That's the kind of story that's meaningful to me.

[583] Can't. Believe. Nothing.

Another 5 hours, another decompression and deconstruction of Jordan Peterson lessons. If it hasn’t caught on by now, I’m in love.

I thought I might start this blog out doing what Jordan said Dostoevsky did in writing his fictional characters. To truly be thinking, it is contended, you can’t just go around talking to people who say what you already believe or seeking out information you find agreeable. The truest form of thought is to take up a position you don’t believe and give the argument in favor of it as thorough an explanation and defense as is possible. Avoid all caricaturing and make it the actual man you need to attack and leave the straw at the door.

I was going to do this with the word “love.” The problem for me is that I don’t take my arguments or explanations for anything more than they’re worth to me in my organization of the world. I’m not convinced there is no love because it’s a fundamentally fluid and arbitrary construct I attack from the vein of how it is abused. I don’t dismiss your ability or utility in adopting the word for the informal discernment of your place in society or your relationships. Fundamentally, your defense of the word is equally valid if you suppose it’s a good thing to placate the details and carry on well enough, perhaps echoing the pragmatists.

So I’m not going to write a lengthy defense against something I don’t even fundamentally believe.

This speaks to another way I thought I might start the blog. What do I believe? I think part of my basic struggle is having rooted myself so deeply into a point of open skepticism that I barely know how to behave. My dithered capacity to build or recognize a construct I respect induces a sort of paralysis. Of course I still get up, go to work, engage in routine-like things for the “normal functioning adult,” but none of it seems to really matter to me. Or, I’ve moved so often or so quickly through experiences that are no longer novel that my life might as well be taking direction from random choices from a hat.

It feels this way because of my leaning towards behaviors and environments I never thought I’d be attracted to. How many times have I referred to my plot of land as “cousin-fuck Indiana?” It’s many. Yet I feel like I could spend all day painting a fence or digging a pool out there because it represents a kind of “idea ownership” I’ve lost in my regular day to day. I can perhaps rediscover important things about me that are being repressed in my daily life. I can rediscover the capacity to believe in something.

Something that underlays my confusion is how I react, or don’t, to stressful or traumatic events. I’ve accelerated the phases to acceptance. If I do it fast enough, I turn it into a kind of sycophantic game. I got tagged by an IRS lien two days ago. I go from $1200 in the bank to $1. I call the people up, look for a way to negotiate and am flatly denied. After a fair amount of yelling at the person on the other line about their capacity to be a human being and the immorality of stealing from the, literally and technically, impoverished, I get moved up the chain after a few passing references to the pills I might as well down or neck I might as well slit because they’ve practically killed me in taking away my resources to live. This got me a call from the police department asking if I was indeed going to kill myself.

Now, I’m sure this is going to read like “typical crazy person” to the psycho who “checks up on me,” but I think there’s a deep moral failing and cultural blindness here that is at bottom why we’re going to destroy ourselves. Not everyone can survive it. The manager actually argued with me about “just how poor I really was” and how I should find someone to borrow the money from. It’s an infinitely sick thing to do. It’s like putting someone in a fighting arena with broken arms and saying something akin to “you can always kick you idiot!” This seems about the posture we adopt to poverty in general as we deny how many of us actually live in it and demand drug tests, work hours, and austerity in the face of abundance and greed.

I’m lucky enough to have been born in a cohort and country where poverty looks different than it does globally. I have a handful of resources I can tap into that means I’m not automatically in the street even when my money goes to zero. I still have 3 jobs with paychecks coming in suggesting an anticipatory capacity that acknowledges the potential likelihood of “tax lien-esc” occurrences from the results of my behavior. I don’t routinely allow things like this to happen to me, but I’m certainly smart enough to have tried to mitigate it sooner. The problem seems to be that it’s an issue that bumped right against something I genuinely believe. I think it’s unbearably immoral for people in my position to pay a quarter of my earnings, which qualify as poverty even before we act wise and discuss inflation, to the state, particularly in our current political environment. So I danced around for as long as I could.

I play a game of tradeoffs. I would not have my land if I paid those taxes. I would not have been able to satiate some other need at the time is likely as well. While it was a shock to the system to see my funds depleted, my gamble paid off in the long run, and it taught me something else I need to do to not get pinged the same way in the future. A point Jordan Peterson often brings up is that you don’t grow or transform unless the world hits you in a very real way and you pick yourself back up after the disorientation. It’s a much bigger issue than the simple question, “should you pay your taxes?” And then answering in the affirmative to avoid the obvious foreseeable consequences. How you answer depends on your goals and perspective. Mine is to live a life approaching independence and freedom from slave systems. That’s closer to happening with land and zero dollars than it is no land and a few hundred or thousand even.

What you fundamentally believe carries you through trauma. I can think about breaking up, as Peterson who sees many clients dealing with divorce or poor communication will often reference. It was within days of knowing my ex was falling for me that I told her she’d end up leaving me. And this didn’t come from some condescending, hateful, or fatalistic place. I was trying to prepare myself and remain compassionate and aware of our fundamental differences. The idea that I still think I did and would do work to try and remain friends or see us together years from now isn’t me trying to be a creep who won’t let things go. I still believe in communication. I still believe I liked her for her. I still don’t respect sex to the degree that our instincts about it shouldn’t be fought harder against. I believe them so much that I wouldn’t sacrifice them to be back together when I know they’d only cause her harm.

For as paralyzingly open to new experiences and feeling like I’m on a desperate search to unpack some corner of my mind or discover some enabling person, my beliefs shine when something dramatic brings the world into focus. Maybe a problem then is I haven’t found a way to induce a significant enough shock to trigger the necessary focus. A terrifying thought really when combined with a propensity for compulsive decision making. Is the flirtation with the idea enough to satisfy and stay my hand? Or do I keep doing petty teenage things like continually throw around the word suicide and arbitrarily flirt with the truth as a faux exercise in control? Honestly, I’ll probably keep doing those for shits and giggles and because I employ them on people I’d kill and eat if we were jungle dwellers.

Peterson talks a lot about how the brain figures things out in dreams. You can interact or discover constructs that can’t even take verbal form, and depending on your awareness lucidly question your bizarre circumstances. I feel like I engage in writing to take the perpetual day-dream I experience and try to tie things together. Tonight I listened to him for 5 hours, but it’s 4 or 5 things that made me think “I could probably expand on this” or “this fits in nicely with an idea from earlier.” I also do a lot less interpreting of shapes or environments and can say explicitly what does or doesn’t come to mind and whether I feel a particular way about it. I think as a consequence of the sheer amount of self-reflection I’ve stifled my capacity for wildly creative and abstract dreams worth interpreting. Usually they just revolve around sex or that frustrating feeling of not being able to run or punch something. Not hard to infer.

Something that’s starting to creep up a little on me is what happens when I finally find someone or something I vigorously want to investigate or listen to. I learn what it is or what they have to say, and then I don’t have to anymore. I’ve heard the same analogies. I recall the gist of the story. I anticipate the “Piagetian construct” and why it’s fundamental in understanding the way behaviorists think, and then I get distracted and bored. Something a week ago (well, I discovered Peterson years ago, but haven’t decided to exhaustively investigate until recently) that took my mind completely away from the menial tasks of my bullshit job becomes this plodding feat of concentration and wishing for him to speak faster. It’s part of the reason I read so much across so many topics. I need to believe there’s something to look forward to in digging up the details, because when I decide to, that shit goes up quick as a fire to dry leaves.

This makes me think about the non-relationship I have with the district manager of Kroger who’s perpetually blown me off. I know I’m better than him. That is, I know I’m more motivated, intelligent, creative, and driven. He knows it too. There is absolutely nothing in it for him to ever speak to me again. Thus we ask ourselves if I “learn” (already knew) from our interaction and massively downplay myself to wriggle into a bureaucratic structure somewhere else. Do I seek that realm of “stability” in order to fund my creative ends and perhaps free up some time 10-percenting it around a bunch of comfortable fat white old people? Just because I theoretically could doesn’t make it feel right or worthwhile. It doesn’t mean I won’t try either.

Generally speaking though, my life lacks meaningful structure. I sit nowhere conducive to my demeanor or capacity as far as dominance structures are concerned. I’m not the center of attention to any consistent enough group of friends. I’m not running a project or team. I’m not mastering new skills or information in any sort of way that garners recognition or participates in competition. I don’t take particular pride in the mere ownership of material things, so parading around looking good or talking about some purchase registers nothing. I hold practically no respect for anyone and feel myself perpetually on the brink of burning bridges I never wanted to cross in the first place.

I’m paradoxically lost because of how rooted I actually am. What to do in a system fundamentally designed to decay well before belligerent hateful greedy ideologues molded it to actively attack and kill you quicker? What to seek out in relationships when you’ve exercised your best, and empirically backed, methods for engaging in the most healthy ways, and can’t find anything but pathology to ignore, scare away, or play with? What to seek in business when even if you got 99 things right, 1 underlying truth is all it took to undermine you or that others will focus on? What to create when it starts to feel like a burden bred of desperation and guilt instead of focus and inspiration? The world is not designed nor even remotely focused on the things I’ve discovered or tried to practice to function as the hero of my own story. And as a social animal bred to mirror and assimilate, I’ve essentially conditioned myself into a form of perpetual suffering, leaving well aside what your favorite stoic or nihilistic philosopher might have to say on the matter by the way. What a fucking moron.

[582] Required Reeding

I, rather desperately, want something to say, which, of course, does not guarantee I’ll find it. Much as I search for the jungle of reasons that might explain my decisions or personality, I’m hoping the mere act of focusing these words will bring ones to light that are worthwhile.

I’ve spent 10 or so hours the last 2 days taking in Jordan Peterson lectures. It occurs to me that while I want to shed undying affection for his capacity as a story-teller and the brilliant explanations and analysis he offers across domains, much of what he says is from the shoulders of his chosen giants. I then ask myself if I’m thankful for him, his focus, his story-telling, or something deeper that he, his predecessors, and I are all accessing in contemplating and sharing ideas.

One of the things I find interesting in wrapping myself up in learning about psychological literature or experiments is how calm I get. Things pop into place. I take all my experiences with deep emotion or affection and plot them on the wall that fits nicely into the well-studied and documented phenomenon that characterizes me too well. I take the embarrassment or not-quite shame of drunken sentimentality and hear how the roots of what’s driving me to talk in such a way go so far back and are so poorly understood, by what intellectual or personally responsible right do I have to get so far up my ass for being compelled by them? My passion begets the essence of life! So to speak…

Or we can dive into the political realm and reliably predict how people will vote based on how they respond to questions regarding their agreeableness or sensitivity to be disgusted. The wonderful thing about listening to these lectures is that there’s this unyielding depersonalization in the statistical models or historical underpinnings that he then re-invigorates with the sheer humanity of our hero stories and perceptions of value. You can’t be a predictable cog without living and breathing a respect for the very idea and existence of a cog!

Time and again lately I’ve thought about the relative misfortune of my circumstances, which overstates both my circumstances and how I actually feel about them. Because what I lament rarely has to do with singularly small selfish conceptions regarding what I might deserve as what I speculate people say about themselves. I try to account for all the forces that restrict honest creative expression and connection. Peterson points out that often it’s not that he treats people in his psychoanalytic practice who have genuine brain disorders, they just live in pathological circumstances or have adopted modes of thought they don’t know how to get out of.

That’s my general assessment of “society at large” as I see fit to complain about it. I think that while we can reliably fall into camps and habits, I just don’t know what to make out of utilizing free will and making choices. Just because mathematical curves account for how money is distributed or grading on a curve can try to account for a particularly hard course doesn’t mean we can’t structure our society in ways that actively combat these tendencies. I don’t know that Peterson has argued as such per se, but he has critiqued ideological liberals who think they’d govern better or create some form of utopia if only they had control of the resources. Peterson’s point is more absolutely bad underlying philosophy corrupts absolutely.

Here I think this speaks to the utility of writing and just general productive conversation and interaction. I found myself surrounded by a group of half sober, half-drunk 20 year olds the other night. One of the children thought we were bullying the only person to find me the next day to friend on facebook. I would argue the PC wave of liberal naivety is strong with the girl who offered that tidbit, but enough interactions of watching outgoing men who like to drink together might soften her attitude. There’s a generational divide, sexual divide, and whatever 19 more I’m sure she could list that get bridged, at least partially, in interactions like that.

And so you can think. Is it possible to not only enjoy, but “properly” engage in both drunken bacchanals and polite discourse digging into the minutia of presumed behavior and identity? Sure. What strikes me, and I’ve said this before, is our weaponization of our viewpoint to demonize or destroy who we don’t want to hear. The weapons can act like silent farts though and sneak into our interactions poisoning in ways we’re not paying attention to. I ask you 10 questions attempting to understand you; you accuse me of not listening. I attempt to restate your position in a way you agree with, you take my attempt as a jeering indictment and branch off into an argument about the argument or my character. You’re a vicious proponent of your view in your corner of the online world or your diary, but in the moment you foment quiet resentment and airily dismiss all you saw was wrong after dismissing yourself early from the gathering.

One of my favorite things about me is my ability to seemingly and completely shit all over something, and in the next breath, espouse its virtue. I want my worst thoughts and opinions to be wrong. I want you to know your beard looks mildly pubey, but that I also don’t, and couldn’t possibly, genuinely give two shits about your facial hair and that should be liberating and respected. I want you to know that while I think you’re often a deeply afraid and confused ignorant race of monkeys that are hell bent on finding a way to kill me in ways that can only be understood in their capacity to transcend irony, I still think you have the capacity to make choices and change the script. You may not be able to stop your physiology from responding to me or my words, but your approach is always yours. Your thousand word response to my behavior or perspective will go miles and miles with me as I think my words have the ability to go with you.

I’m still not convinced the problem is me. Another way to state that is that I don’t believe I shy away from taking responsibility. It’s not just about risk tolerance or creativity, it really is about responsibility. If I had a million dollars tomorrow, I’m confident I wouldn’t destroy my life or that my social interactions would be much better or worse than they are right now. I think that only because I can already over-indulge and don’t. I’ve already had the ability to sit-pretty and wait it out and get comfortable. I watched TV and tried to pay for the means to create and live sustainably. I gave money I barely had that was singularly won away to friends and family. In service to my great ask, “Somebody keep talking!” I submitted my reading and lectures and inspirations.

My problem is Western Civilization’s problem. I’m without a larger story or context. God’s been dead for a long time for me, but then again, was never really there to begin with. At least I believed in school or the direction from my parents. At least I used to look forward to meaning something to someone, anyone at this point, that isn’t symbolized incidentally in family. The disembodied voice digging around my head for direction or ideas wasn’t supposed to encompass how you all remember or think of me. My conception of that larger context is the one that drives me to 3 jobs in order to even attempt to thrive. It’s the one that elected Hitler 2 with nothing but apologizing rationalizations and bent-over bullshit to explain it away. It’s the snow followed by a mild summer day. We need to tap into how we can save ourselves. We need to remember just what it is we are responsible for, what we are to ourselves and each other.

I’m lost. If you’re not, I don’t understand you as I orient myself in relation to you. You still seem broke. You still seem tired. You still can’t answer questions or find the time. You’re still quiet or rehearsed. I think you’re wildly irrational or stupidly optimistic to not be afraid. And we don’t talk or barely visit. We’re not working together. We’re not sharing ideas. We’re not challenging each other. We’re waiting, decaying. We’re choosing the daily distraction and grind because it’s all we can imagine.

I chose to listen while at work, get off work and search. In 5 hours I’ll be back to work where I’ll practice and read. Then if I don’t pass out I’ll sow the seeds for some new endeavor I want to grow or experiment with. Every affirmation shores up the last. Every choice defies my aching feet, back, and eyelids. You know you can do more, but do you know why you ought to? Can you harness the power of your swirling violent nihilistic disarray and your chipper thoughtful moralistic inner child to conceive of a better, comprehensive, and honest way forward? Or is it really just me feeling this way? Am I the only one spinning his wheels, stowing the cash and licking his lips until the day he can afford healthcare and a better car? Is it just time to settle into the constant pat on the back for being born at the top of human achievement, enjoy it while it lasts and revel in the dividends of those refusing to capitulate to the dismay? How dishonestly lazy.

Who am I kidding? I can’t even persuade you to talk.

[581] Smash Complex

I'm so filled with rage. The perfect time to talk about it is when you're not teeming with anything in particular that has set you off. My rage is that of The Hulk's. Mark Ruffalo's, “That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry” rings true in too real a way. While writing has always proven a way to express my hatred toward any one particular thing, I don't know that I explore enough the basis from which all the hatred flows. I've quoted before some line I picked up in a blog that said, “all hate is self-hate” and while I think I agreed with it at the time, I'm more under the impression my hatred is significantly external. The School of Life video on how not to be angry all the time has a certain truth to it and it will be underlying much of what I have to say I'm sure.

Did you notice that? I just caught myself. I immediately equated “hatred” with “rage.” To line things up properly, it is perhaps best to say an unrelenting rage provokes hateful sentiments. I suppose then rage and anger are close enough for my purposes to still rely on that video.

So why ever be angry? As with any feeling, there's a presumption that it is justified. You deserve to be angry. You sometimes deserve a pass if you say or do something that goes beyond the limits of generally acceptable behavior. I think of a bereaved parent who kills the murderer of their child. That person isn't normally a killer (at least, not any moreso than anyone else generally is) and there are few who would desire that person to suffer a life in prison or be put to death for their action, terrifying and morally complicated as it was. Less dramatically, you've probably said something terrible to someone you care about in the heat of a fight. You knew it would be terrible, and yet it felt so right in the moment, even if the proceeding moment threw that elation immediately into question.

Like normal people, I get angry when my expectations aren't met. Unlike normal people, I seem to have higher expectations and aspirations than the norm. This is a dispositional disaster. In a sense, it means you can never let up on yourself, and in practical terms, it means people are failing you literally every second of every day. You're failing yourself. You've missed something or haven't played the game right.

Consider what just happened between this paragraph and the last. I get email notifications whenever someone posts under the “free stuff” list on Craigslist. Someone posted a ton of free books. There's a pile of free books stacked up in my living room right now, I go to pick up the rest at 2. I expect that I can catalog and throw up a basic seller site either under a domain I own or through a place like Ebay. I said “yes” first, picked up the books, and opened a door of opportunity that cost me a few trips across town. Eventually I'll need a shed, but if your problems can generally be fixed with $50-$100, man hours, and a disposition that looks forward, it's hardly a problem. And if it seems like a fruitless waste of time, burning books has come back in fashion these days if I can't re-gift them to a better equipped seller.

A sense of anger comes from knowing I'm constantly in transition and allowing myself to morph and fold to my circumstances while I watch people pretend like what they're presenting is all that they are. Moreover, they get defensive and accusatory when you push, or they get lazy and full of excuses when you option them an opportunity.

They say the struggle is real. The problem is that it's a struggle for the wrong reasons and affects the wrong people. I've been looking for a foothold for what feels like forever. I want one thing I can rely on that allows me to then sell books or coffee or create websites and research. I want to have the mental time and space to play instruments, not sneak in expensive lessons on my day off while I'm thinking about other obligations. I want to have one day where the news isn't 400 things that have gone wrong and an incidentally unsustainable piece that looks marginally okay.

The rage stems from a deep appreciation for the general “problems” and watching people fail in their daily lives to address them. I'm too poor too. So I picked up 2 jobs immediately, am gunning for 3, once an app gets fixed on my phone that let's me do another one I'll have 4. I don't need 4 to pay the bills, but I need 4 to live a life that resembles the one I grew up with and in order to develop my land.

This is a ridiculous situation, and I'm a ridiculous person. Compounding this circumstance is that I don't really have any help. I have people who would definitely sign on if they had something specific to do or were handed the keys to the candy shop, but it's me who has to pursue the extra jobs and synonymously maintain a quasi-normal happy-enough life to get the ball rolling. It's me that did/does the drug studies in order to buy the land in the first place. It's me who has to transfer things to the land, pay for the gas, replacement tire, etc. to hopefully form the basis for creating something larger later.

To that point, it's less about whether or not I ask for help. I can cajole someone into helping me transport boxes of books or fencing to a storage shed. What I can't do is engender people to do “I'm pursing 4 jobs as well”-esc behaviors. I don't have a pool of saved Biolife money to address a shared goal. Why? I brought it up, but unless I sometimes physically drive or daily remind my roommates, they're not going to go. I feel like a girl “I want you to want to do those things with me!” As my last 4 paychecks sitting in the wings can attest, my problem is less to do with a lack of money than it is commitment and shared energy.

I also constantly put myself out there. I took the basic-bitch stocking job and spoke with the district manager about doing something intellectually worth my time. He gave me his email. He hasn't responded to the 2 I sent him after telling me to “give it a month.” He neither recognized nor respected what I had to say or what I could contribute to the company. I didn't expect him to. I tried anyway, and still need to have a more explicit shooting down before I step away from the matter.

I see how scatter-brained most start-ups and franchises are run. It's exceedingly hard to find organized competent people who can juggle scheduling and money in a way you can trust. I pitch it to people, let me help you. I'll work on the cheap. I have management experience. I'll be your little outsourced person for small tasks here and there. Let me get my foot in the door in a way you feel most comfortable. Resounding NOPES.

People crave that struggle. It's a kind of entitlement. “Hey! I'm the MANAGER of this little corner of the world, no one is gonna tell me what's what!” We're so generally socially and mentally insecure that we feel compelled to protect our ever-meager and precarious standing. Someone comes in presuming to be smart or motivated and it's best to run or forget or diminish and attempt to keep them humbled or harassed. We ignore how much of our lives has been dictated by our associations and deleterious sacrifices. The smell of our own farts invigorating to a point of delirium.

The shorthand lazy way to discuss my rage is to say something like, “I hate stupid people.” What we would agree makes someone stupid I think would massively diverge. I think it's stupid to get comfortable. I think it's stupid to find happiness in ignoring the underlying problem. I think it's stupid not to define the underlying problem. The pursuit of those definitions are something people run so hard and fast away from. They won't even discuss it. They won't answer questions regarding their own words. They won't concede when they've contradicted themselves. They literally won't think.

The parade of non-thinking never ends. They don't think about when they'll get sick or if disaster strikes. They don't think about how their shows of solidarity, backed up by the same ignorance and fear that got them into the street, will continue to be their downfall the day after. They don't think about every day they spend away from the people and circumstances that helped form the best things about themselves. All the books they read in high school they'll never touch again. All the sports they played they'll never find the time for. All the friends they used to talk to, resolved to adages about dying with a handful who actually give a damn. 

I hate that I have a desire to thrive while the world just wants to hang on. Or, what I feel even more, that the world wants to die. The only people who want to live are those who feel directly threatened in that moment. And when the problem can't be fixed quasi-immediately, they in turn resolve themselves to die. My battle isn't with bill collectors (fuck you IRS), annoying homeowners associations, district managers at Kroger, or the growing amount of problems I'll have to navigate by loading up my house with free shit. My battle is with a society that pretends it wants to live. Society pretends it gives a damn. And everyday we don't actively feel bad about it, remind ourselves, or say something, we give it license, and it kills us.

It doesn't get fixed with a march. It doesn't get fixed. That's probably the deepest truth. It's not going to get fixed, it never has progressed. Every baby born is as capable of being nothing more than as ignorant or susceptible to every horrid thing about life as our species' first iteration. And I fucking hate that, because for the first time in existence, we're actively choosing it. We're choosing “the struggle” “the title” and “the ignorance.” Every day that isn't some form of bliss is a societal decision to kill each other and thus ourselves. Every stupid “how ya doing!” at work when you know I fucking hate it and now I fucking hate you for asking. Stop talking to me like an idiot, strike, read, form a meet-up group to discuss change. I don't want your joke about how crazy you have to be to work here with what they're paying you.

Arguably, my habits and disposition are maladaptive. You could comfortably say I'm failing my genes by concerning myself with a kind of growth/sustainability that fundamentally hates the pool from which most of society is based in. I'm writing myself out of existence. I'm “yes, and-ing” over a cliff. It's not that I can't knock someone up, it's that I refuse to raise a kid where the only thing they know of the world is what I can't provide them and their suicidal culture fills in the blanks.

The only time it will ever get easy is when I get that baseline. When I can filter through the jungle of monkeys calling themselves people and stick 5 in a room, virtual or otherwise, who operate like me, I'll be able to rely on things happening in ways people don't think exist. Right now, all I have is “Nick P.” this array of complaints, formless, tired, full of hatred and rage, angling to add “book dealer” to his range of experiences, on a whim, because nothing else feels more or less likely or worthy than the last thing.

I read and watch so goddamn much. I read what the billionaire CEOs say about success. I read the entrepreneur forums. I've heard the same advice, same start-up struggles, same energetic enthusiasm for ideas, character descriptions, market conditions, cliches, contradicting strategies ad nauseum. Whatever I'm missing, I'm actively looking for. The problem, in a sense, it has to be handed to me. I need the keys to the castle before I can defend it. I need an opportunity to shine for more than my “go-getter spirit! Huzah!” or ability to forget the details of the endless strain on my disposition for a time long enough to keep going. What's worth deeper consideration is that we all need the same thing.

I don't plan to work my businesses with employees. I plan to have partner-owners. I don't expect anything out of you more than myself, and I refuse to perpetuate the myth that you're anywhere more or less than you choose to be. If you don't want the responsibility, then I'll take a bigger cut. If you're willing to have your phone on day and night, come with me to pick up free stuff, and just generally maintain a mindset of killing it all the time, that's yours. I refuse to take from you as much as I feel has been taken from me, from my generation. I refuse to perpetuate the myths that protect greed and mock what grandiosity actually looks like.

I hate that the people paying me, the people I have to ask for permission, the people I have to interview for, and the people making the rules don't think like that. I'm watching legislation get passed that I know will cripple the nation indefinitely. I know enough history to not believe it's getting better. I can't forget or ignore. I can't put my “faith” in crossed fingers and petitions. The burden has only grown and the only way out is something that doesn't exist yet, or in such a small capacity its message is suffocated by the larger picture. If you don't believe that, you don't believe in me. You don't think I'll make it, you “hope” someone like me gives you an excuse to feel good about “things” because “someone” will step up and course correct eventually. I don't have a hero complex. I don't think there's much worth saving.

[580] In Short, Supply

How long should it take? How many examples should be provided? Will a deep and methodical explanation ever lend itself to the problem being fixed?

With the vagaries aside we can start by pointing to the ironic heart by which nothing could exist otherwise. We think we’re saying something and are terrible communicators. Stop. Right now. Slow the fuck down to a stop and prevent yourself from taking every cliched road your head was going upon hearing that sentiment. It has nothing to do with all the answers you just gave yourself.

Increasingly, I think communication is about empathy. I don’t mean you have to cry as someone is crying or spiral along with someone else’s depression. I think we feel what people say. I think that happens because we’re too stupid and lazy to formulate our own thoughts and therefore find the capacity to understand someone else properly impossible. We take in words like a punch or a song. We pay lip service to pretending we know what they’re doing.

Empathy is a form of responsibility. To be able to not simply claim you understand how someone feels, but return to a time where you can feel it as well is a mindful skill. To then take that feeling and direct it into something constructive is practically an act of god. We’re not a species or culture that puts much stock in taking responsibility for our feelings. To then suggest or pretend that incapacity is going to translate into progress socially is more than a bit naive. Again, look who we elected.

I know I wasn’t born a woman because dealing with the amount of condescension I do already makes me flirt with prison in what I want to do in retaliation. It’s a condescension bred from emotional incapacity. A stagnant immaturity that prevents someone from seeing you as anything than they feel they can emotionally deal with (manipulate) at any one time. “Mom” will always be mom who you can scream at like my 40 year old uncle used to do to the sweetest woman who was my grandma. Wear the wrong uniform or costume and people will reflexively treat you like their deepest conception of your place in the social hierarchy. How quickly we seek to call someone a child and dismiss their feeble brain for suggesting something so “immature” and off-putting.

This inability to communicate uses very deliberate and EXCESSIVELY FUCKING FRUSTRATING language that permeates every menial level of life. It’s one thing to go around calling people names. It’s an entirely new and elevated level to say something like, “I’m absolutely willing to talk with you about things so we can work them out.” First, it suggests that all problems are fixable. Sometimes the customer isn’t right. Sometimes you don’t have the answers. Sometimes you should move on and not try to nitpick details in a situation you don’t understand. Second, it’s a lie. You don’t want to talk, you want to head off a potentially bigger emotional outburst you won’t be able to control. You want to avoid being blamed, but mostly you want to run from the idea that you have any culpability well in spite of your accommodating words. Finally, when the situation gets dire, you’ll say things like “I feel I’ve been receptive, I’ve tried to listen, had it not been for what you said or did perhaps things would have gone better.” These are the last gasps of a drowning man. These are bait they want you to chomp down on to give them license to throw the entirety of the whole of their inflamed existence in your face.

To some degree they don’t know any better. People are flatly ignorant of how often they’re not saying anything. They’re not helping. They’re not being thoughtful. They’re not the proverbial shoulder or emotional support. They’re either punching bag or boxer. The unicorn embodies that genuine exchange of emotion or ideas. And unicorns don’t exist unless you really really believe.

To a greater degree, they’re making poor choices. It takes effort to be accusatory. It takes deliberate persistent wrong thoughts to chase something around the room you wouldn’t know what to do with if you caught it. Your manager doesn’t bitch at you because they have to, they simply have to believe in themselves, which they don’t. Republicans know trickle-down economics don’t work and it’s sinful to deny people healthcare. Your emotionally abusive family or spouse knows hitting you or yelling doesn’t make them feel better. Keep choosing the lie, the linguistic house you’ve built to keep your excuses cozy, denial warm, and immorality immortal will have the deed passed to those you’ve emboldened indefinitely.

What compounds the problem with communication is that we’ve made it a brand of “wisdom” to consider these placating apologetic sentiments as actually true. “Well, he said he wanted to help didn’t he! Acknowledge and reciprocate or it’s your fault!” It’s like we’ve all gone through some kind of horrible training to engage with each other in platitudes that transcend the basic utility of informal courtesy. “Don’t use such hateful language!” “Can’t you hear the sincerity!?” No, I can’t, and I hate you. We’re not getting better acquainted by dancing around that. We’re certainly not breeding long term health or heading off problems. The longer you run from experiencing how much I hate you, it’s all just going to come to a head in a more dramatic way neither of us needs.

That’s the point of intrigue about which blogs do or don’t hit home. What are you feeling that you can finally see in what I’m trying to express? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Or did you see your entire life burning up in front of you because the heart of my sentiment rang true in an impossibly frustrating and life altering way? How many beyond stupid conversations or obligations have you allowed to rob you of your time, not just killing you by their audacity, but in their disregard. That well of ignorance and pettiness that kicks you in and never lets you hit the ground.

I wish I was just tired. I wish it was as simple as, “Well, you’re’ just too rude!” I wish that consigning myself to “normalcy” for the time being didn’t mean the death of words, the death of self-respect, the death of decency and common sense, and the sublimation of the already meager spirit that keeps me bothering with each day. You may have already gotten used to it, but I refuse. Things made sense with my TV shows and books. Things make sense when I’m out digging on the land. I’ve genuinely thought to myself over the last few weeks that perhaps I’d do well to learn more “survivalist” techniques so I can live out there regardless of how long it takes me to build a proper structure. I need to pull out of whatever you’re calling this kind of life. It’s not worth it.

[579] And The Horse You Rode In On

Another “friend,” another retrospective. 

It might strike you odd, but I do have friends. I know what facebook says about us, but I’ve had doubts about its capacity as a witness after the election fiasco. And contrary to the opinion of what was apparently one of your experiences, I don’t get anything from you you’re not offering. A smile doesn’t crack my lips as I methodically deconstruct things you say. I don’t wake up and think, “Who can I antagonize today?” I don’t enjoy you shying away from or deliberately avoiding “sensitive” subjects because you just know it’s going to get a rise out of me. I don’t think it’s indicative of our friendship to be forcibly “handled” by some exhaustive exercise on your part. 

As I’ve come to understand it, I’m exhausting. It’s a very peculiar and deliberate word. I find I like it because I don’t think it’s a bad thing, even though when it’s deployed it’s meant to make the case that the other person doesn’t have the energy to “deal with me.” Surrounding the sentiment is often dishonest assessments of my tone or speculation of my motives. It’s an inescapable pattern. Mind you, it’s an inescapable pattern I’ve chosen for very deliberate reasons. And while I’m willing to argue exhaustively about why, it should be sufficient to say there’s a genuine moral claim and behavior underlying my decision. 

There’s nothing like disagreeing with something to get the words flowing. Your brain can conjure a glut that needs to burst forth and shower your rage or reasons upon the person who misstepped. I understand the quiet ones have their own coping mechanisms, but I doubt the internal dialogue and feeling is much removed. As such, as my blogs often clearly dictate, when I have a few pages of something to say, I likely perceived something I saw as wrong. If all you ever knew of me was my blogs, you might think I was either insanely depressed, unbearably angry, or maybe that internet habit of trying to diagnose me with some personality disorder would creep into your thoughts. 

To “obsess” on a topic could certainly mean some kind of disorder. Nowadays people revel in being a nerd knowing all the ins and outs of some topic. Obsessing over oneself could be a destructive form of narcissism. There’s any number of ways to be too involved with details or to an extent that your normal functioning life is grossly affected. I suppose the rub is when you have the ability to be “obsessed,” or maybe it’s just time management, and it grants you a perspective that alienates people. It’s not some “super intelligence” or something either. It’s adopting a mode of speech and information management removed from “common courtesy” if you will. 

To that end, my ongoing investigation of “me,” I comfortably state isn’t unhealthy, and has allotted me methods and behaviors that help cut through the bullshit. I use them because they help. They help me feel better. They help me discover genuine relationships and real people. They help me move on from difficult times in my life. And they help me focus on what matters while people are crying and scowling at me. It takes a lot of time, perhaps a lifetime. I’ve had to get exhausted with myself over and over again to maybe squeeze out a drop of wisdom or quote or idea that carries me through. In a very real way, I expect some measure of my effort taken in service to myself to happen with you. 

I’ve said previously that I know you don’t want it. You don’t want the responsibility to deal with all that you are and all that you aren’t. I get how big of a target I am. The difficulties in communication or criticism of my style is laid at my feet constantly. Trust me, that’s exhausting too. What I don’t think you understand about what I know is that I already anticipate why or what will push you over the edge. If you have that lie at the center of your being, I’m basically just poised to pick at it. If I can ever be your problem, I will be. It’s like a physical law. I’m a bowling ball in free fall, and when I crash into your head, you’ll blame me for standing under. 

This is what happened with the person who could no longer stand my “typical” response to something he wrote. This person who rarely if ever took a quote or idea that I expressed and spoke to it. Like every high-minded cliche he went after his perception of my tone and finally decided I get more from our interactions than he did. He reached into my head and told me what I get, weighed it, and decided it was more than he was willing to give. 

Interactions like this are what I call “peak irony.” It’s the basis from which I think everything exists. The piece that kicked off his eventual defriending? About how important it is to talk to each other. Talking will fix things like oppression and subjugation, it thought. A premise I found easy enough to disagree with. Can words have a certain kind of “power?” Sure, with any broad enough phrasing and wide words, they can power us all the way home to our chosen conclusions. Did they have the kind of healing and explanatory power he was espousing? Not even remotely. 

Here’s where the moral kicks in. If you treat people pushing 30 like children, they’ll continue to remain as children. They’ll justify their views like children. They’ll contradict themselves, sometimes sentence to sentence, but definitely paragraph to paragraph. They’ll tell you how deeply they believe in their justifiable cause and what that belief does for them and who they inspired. You see, these people know something you don’t as the contrarian. They know how to talk to people and get along without bitch bitch bitching all the time. Their mature and measured responses are what we should all aspire to. 

They’re dead wrong. These people have no power. Their actions are often wildly selfish and fruitless. They have a story for their lives that runs on repeat that they can’t even hear anymore because they think that feeling in their ears has always been there. You’re not going to fix how men view women by getting men to talk to each other. You’re not going to fix racism by seeking out someone a different color than you and nonchalantly asking for their thoughts regarding their oppression. 

If you think that’s how those things work, I don’t just think you haven’t thought about them, I know it. I know it because I ask you questions and you get angry at me. I know it because instead of exploring other options I give you as to the roots of what you say you care about, you run, you say you’re too busy or adult or tired. You encourage your friends to pile on with weak jabs about all the hate and anger you’re reading into my words. Conversations didn’t pass The Civil Rights Act, and news flash, altruism and moral fortitude didn’t either. Get every man to bend his knee and vow to worship women and you’ll never change their size differences or biology, which act as a perpetual middle finger to people who think “equality” is somehow ideal or possible. 

All you can ever do is set conditions for behavior. I set conditions for conversation. You either get adult about it, find the fortitude, crack the book, quell the urge to cry or yell, or get the fuck away from me. It’s that simple. And I do it because you can’t get anything done, you can’t “save humanity” or intelligently discuss history or politics when what you feel blinds you to how it actually works. And the world works much like a well placed “fuck” where you don’t want to hear it. The implacable impersonal “world” doesn’t give a fuck about you, and to the extent that you’re under the delusion that it does, I don’t give a fuck about you either. Shed your naive armor, and then you won’t feel like you’re carrying so much exhausting weight when I choose to enter the ring. 

Consider that what I do isn’t even particularly hard nor intelligent. If I quote you and ask a question and you accuse me of starting a fight, the fuck am I supposed to do with that? If I put two things you say that contradict each other next to each other, why am I the bad guy because you fucked up? You can always add more words to clarify. You can retract. You can admit you’re wrong. Oh, except you can’t. I’m the enemy. You said you believed in conversation, but I actually believe in conversation, and that world exists beyond the realm of common courtesy. I don’t feel anything about talking to you, I wait, patiently, sometimes years and years, for you to come to the same conclusion I did after methodically picking apart how I irrationally felt or ignorantly initially described something. That’s it. 

With every year that I get older and still see this behavior out of people, the more I’m convinced we have no business surviving collectively as a species. I’m not exaggerating. It feels like death by a trillion trillion cuts. Every dodge to avoid “the conversation.” Every lame criticism. Every jumbled mess of sounds you think is an “argument” not more a swarm of bees violently bumping into each other looking for something to sting. You don’t make sense by default. You’re not correct because “it occurred to you.” I’m going to point that out, as often as I can, until it kills the part of you that wants to sound so stupid. It’s friendly. It’s moral. It’s at bottom of how anything works or survives that isn’t zombified. 

Is it not true you can live indefinitely with HIV today? There’s a cocktail that will let you maintain a “perfectly normal” life. Shitty words and untouchable feelings are HIV. They’re still going to slowly kill you, or humanity eventually, but you’ll carry on every day until you barely notice the injections or pills. Registering with a database so you’ll be convicted for knowingly transmitting your disease to someone else is just part of the process. What else are you transmitting by letting people skirt by talking like helpless idiots? What important decisions and policies are crafted around your inability to stick up for or respect the difference in how we go about engaging in conversation? I’m exhausting? After 3 or 5 or 10 pages on a subject I might have just read a book about? After a few hours and a few paragraphs back and forth of you dodging questions? Maybe you’re best suited for a coloring book with all the pages getting half-filled. 

In an important sense, I can’t get exhausted. I’m no longer digging for the basics. I’m not “surprised” when a fundamentalist says some crazy shit and doesn’t understand what evidence or science really are. I’m not in awe of your relationship, or even mine for that matter, and why it turned out the way it did. I’m not riding some wave of hope about our future because the ACLU got record donations last month. I broke “hope” out of my words I give a pass to. I stopped pretending a fundamentalist was fundamentally more human than animal. I stopped imbuing my life and your facebook pictures with everything I’ve ever seen in every movie ever. All of it took a lot of time and a lot of thought. It took repetition and exercise. I read and re-read and compare to where I’ve been in the past. How complete a description could you give of the differences between yourself now and you at 16? I’ve written the book. 

Just know that I’m not going to stop. You’re not worth, nor ever were, being my friend, if you’re not a person willing to work on yourself and your perspective. I literally want nothing to do with you and don’t consider you human. I say this for your benefit. You should want to be human. You should desire not sounding like a fucking moron. You should suspect that your impact is first and foremost wildly destructive to you and everything around you and it’s going to take a lot of effort to mitigate the fallout. I’m not going to cry or care when you smugly explain to me, as if you believe you’re the first one, that what I have to say isn’t so much wrong, it’s just...harsh, man, and you’re not about it anymore. Good luck saving the world chiding your friends over jokes you find offensive and marching in protests that get water-cannoned. I’ll pretend quietly with myself in the corner there’s an intelligent way to learn about fixing your problem. Maybe when the world has made you as exhausted as I let it me, you’ll figure out I’m not the enemy.