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.
