Something that remains a source of
perpetual unease or perhaps just confusion for me is the affinity I
have for bombastic depressed hilarious characters who've either
committed suicide or were driven to some level of social isolation or
insanity. Any time I start to think of myself as “smart,” I have
to remind myself I've never been so smart as to have driven myself
properly insane to a level that I admire so dearly or get so much
entertainment from. For all of my bluster and emotional
roller-coasting in blogs, I never demonstrate some genius level
aptitude that has netted me giant sums of secret cash or access
(although, often neither did some of my despotic heroes) and I'm
constantly trying to reevaluate my circumstances in ways that can
possibly speak to perspective more than any appreciable measure of
intelligence.
As I think about why I admire these types, it's often because I hear myself in them. Easy enough assumption, but sometimes when the words aren't just taken from your mouth, but dictated as if someone was reading the book of your life, you're more drawn to something deeper than that particular individual. You've accessed a perspective that is often and persistently lonely or exhausting to most people. The idea that there's another rambling deeply interested and dare I say respectable soul you discover in the hoards who are not of your daily life feels immensely gratifying. Luckily, at least so far, the significant point of diversion I take with these people is the part of any genuine plan or constant desire to kill myself.
Suicide of course is one of those all-encompassing topics. This may go on for 3 or 4 more pages, and at some level you're going to have a brain that zeroes in on that vague discomfort that the word conjures up in you and the rest will get obscured. Often my allusions to suicide are in the abstract; you've killed your fun-loving childish soul from school or your optimistic view of the world, or you've slit your throat and bled out over a meager pile of money and on the directive of someone barely worth looking at let alone listening to. There's an extremely frequent theme from the people I admire who off themselves that has to do with the fall of man or degradation of society. And for all of their bluster, I can't find myself moved to agree that we're any better or worse than we've always been and constantly lie on that razor's edge of civility and society, literally praying, hoping there won't be a disaster.
For me, it doesn't take a particularly agile mind to see, claim, or accept this. Whether you look at instances in your own behavior that have made you scared or ashamed of yourself or you're more a fan of pointing at your favorite atrocity from history, we're not even days let alone generations away from unimaginable horrors committed on people, willingly, for often the most irrational and outright malicious reasons. The daily delusion that it doesn't affect us is what we, rightly depressingly so, qualify as “life.” The further you are from either the head or heart to take it all in, the sharper that edge we're laying on feels. The harder comments from me register. The more likely you'll be to snap or fall, perhaps for the rest of your life, into a kind of forgone depression and conclusion about your fate. The more your decisions will register as “fuck it” and “that's life.”
And you wouldn't be wrong. That's the scariest part I imagine from most people who hate talking to me. It is that bad. Your depression or anxiety are totally justified. We're horrible to each other, to ourselves, and it's absolutely the moment you need someone to step up and be there for you that they'll pull the shittiest move of their entire life and place it at your feet. The irony of the lonely jovial and powerful soul to string together a barrel of assholes only teaching them how to be even bigger assholes when they die was certainly a large enough wrench in my system watching the fallout after my grandma's death. The daily mini-rallies and blinders I have to put on to not verbally berate everyone who not only talks dumb, if at all, but fails to even bother borrowing from my example to contribute anything but the bare minimum. You need what, at times, feels like a perfectly magical disposition to deal with it.
And yet, writing isn't magic. Organizing a cloud of thoughts into 1's and 0's that you can pick to acknowledge or dismiss is a practice well before you might claim any skill. Picking goals that are hard and abstract are decisions, even if compelled by circumstances, decisions nonetheless, that you can pursue earnestly. I legitimately dislike, if not outright hate, “just paying the bills.” It's empty and cold and inhuman. To the degree that you've organized your life like this, I feel sorry for you, as much as I feel the pain of being straddled to the sentiment well beyond my will. It's a powerful ache and an endless sorrow.
Long pause as despite my mind being a flurry of thoughts for the last 5 hours, I hit empty.
I got off my last shift at Kroger. I survived about 2 months maybe 20 or so hours a week (while working 2 other jobs). I listened to I think 7 or 8 books, including 45 hours of It, and the Maps of Meaning Jordan Peterson lectures. I was determined to stock the bottom shelves from a crouched position so as to improve my balance and flexibility. I stole my fair share of drinks and candy. I only fleetingly “wasted” time spending an extra few minutes in the bathroom or walking the aisles instead of putting products on the shelves and pulling them forward. I never complained but to state once how unjust the expectations were when we were understaffed and severely underpaid on maybe my second day after someone opened the conversation first.
What I haven't decided is whether or not I picked up anything “new” besides a greater distaste for fiction. It's a huge point of desperate sadness to think about how sincere and hardworking everyone around me was. For one reason or another (contented?) to do this repetitive job quickly, nightly, and in the case of the night manager, for 31 years. This woman who told me in those 31 years these last 6 months have never been worse or harder on her. When I sit and ruminate about how slow-going my life feels, it's going to be the thought that she's worked this job, that might actually bring me to consider suicide in a real way if I persisted too long, for 3 years longer than I've even been alive that, not so much tempers, but chokes me.
To the degree that you would point to any one thing I might say and call it whiny, entitled, or judgmental, I feel very much driven to the descriptors I employ for an important reason. Merely referring to job situations like Kroger where “hard-workers” “achieve company goals” at the behest of “managers” and within the “constraints” of the budget, bound together by a “union” is to so underplay the reality that you're all but murdering the idea of any possible help they may need or you could offer. These people are exploited, as I was exploited. These people are lied to, as I was lied to. These people are handled by the lazy and inept, blind to their own hate-ridden judgments. Their union is all but a joke, and their State actively attacks their capacity to organize or improve their circumstances. And they have bills and responsibilities and are trapped. They don't need my indignation or scholarly condescension, nor do they deserve it, anymore than the extra dollar an hour for a quarter without incident lazily offered by some brain-trust at the top too inspired by a carrot and mule.
But to attempt to help them is to attempt a system level change. And we feel ill-equipped to attack the system because the system is dying. If you are an even remotely intelligent individual (which, I assume you are, but it has to remain an assumption so far) you can't look at the election and subsequent firestorm of destruction and think we're on a path to anywhere...maybe even survivable. I would have a hard time arguing against you if you took up that suicidal posture and made a thousand page exhaustive list of every dying species, failing piece of infrastructure, decay of culture, and everyday instance of your own life that spoke to a measured and calculated pull of the trigger. I get it. Bon voyage and I'm only a bit jelly.
In my view, it's also the only respectable way to approach the game once you've adopted the perspective. It's not that I don't see any value in “the small things” like taking pride in your, in my words “shitty” job, or in being generally nice and agreeable and knowing that smiles are infectious so you employ them as often as you can. They just have nothing to do with me or my picture of my place in relation to the larger game. You can hate me. You can judge me. You can avoid talking to me and see the scowl and hunched shoulders. You can read the crazy blogs. You can be hurt by my dismissive tone or attitude. You can find me immature and repulsive. You can slowly jog beside me from time to time when your mind reaches that dark place, and this is often the only time you want to talk to me, and you just know I'm the perfect one to talk to about this. Ultimately, my task is to literally create from nothing an approach to information and society that I can plug people into that subverts or renders useless the slavery and inhumanity that characterizes our existence. To the degree you understand or agree with my goals and perspective is going to heavily influence whether or not you think I'm insane or something nicer.
Were my goal less concrete, were I merely trying to show off how much thought I can pack into a paragraph that I hope trumps what you may have hoped to put in a book, I feel I would go properly mad. Were I to couch my disposition unbearably in my need to be positively judged or have someone to invest my emotional baggage into in order to keep it together, I'd never be able to measure in any quantifiable way progress to my goal. If in between illusive bursts of inspiration to talk for as long as it takes to be done writing I was hiding myself away, drinking too much, cutting, or otherwise resolving myself to objectively objectionable behaviors, I'd have a reasonably hard time listening to anything I say.
I'm lucky to be anchored. “I'm not making any progr...well, I haven't even developed the land yet or advertised it fully.” “I'm getting old as fuck still living with roomm...well, I could afford something else, but not if I want to keep progressing with my experiments which mean more to me than clean dishes or a conventional living room.” “How can I find myself working delivery jobs or at Krog...well, I left after 2 months, immediately jumped to a gig that not only pays me double for less than half the work, but allows me to dip my toes back into doing studies.” “All my friends are fucki....they've stuck with you this long and are significantly more dominated by the system you want to destroy than you are. Hatsam showed up every day and night. Schroeder played many free shows. Corbin gave you his car. Mike babysat Dave. Wendy bought you baller hair product. Amber and Brandy check up on you when you sound particularly bad...and the rest of your friends are all shit.” In a very real way I am certainly still alone. I'm always angry and anxious. I'm always more prepared for the things you're going to do and say to fuck me than I'm ever going to find the ability to genuinely trust or rely on you, but I'm not the habitual inmate. I'm not the victim to any degree in which I didn't bend over and spread wide. Inordinately, I feel I'm the one making choices to spite my circumstances, not to perpetuate them.
It's clear to me what a proper and healthy environment and relationship we should have with each other should feel and look like. It's not small talk. It's not penciling in years from now. It's not likes. It's not bullshit congratulations for meager existence masquerading as anything but time spent in service to half measures and making-the-best-ofs. Many times I rail about what I expect out of you or at least what I expect you to be thinking about if you're going to bother to pretend to be friendly with or to me. Maybe you can make demands too. Maybe the initiative shouldn't always come from the infinite well of motivated mood-swung vitriol pocked with furiously flapping points. Maybe I can't achieve my goal without you and you're just watching me slowly burn out as I hop from excuse to excuse bending every pointed finger back until they're all broken mistakenly relying on you to tell me to stop.
I don't know that you'll ever describe the world or feel as bleakly as I do about the future. I also don't believe you even remotely see yourself reveling in the spoils of the success of creating something that violently and swiftly alters your current status. Treading water isn't decision making. Silence isn't safety. Blindness is a choice. Short-term politicking is a hacksaw to your knees. One-off cliches will do nothing to author the kind of book that each of our existences should sound like. Be anchored in something larger that let's you take it all in. Do more math behind the bigger risk. Help me stop writing because I've gotten too busy engaging with a life worth living. Save my suicidal heroes.
As I think about why I admire these types, it's often because I hear myself in them. Easy enough assumption, but sometimes when the words aren't just taken from your mouth, but dictated as if someone was reading the book of your life, you're more drawn to something deeper than that particular individual. You've accessed a perspective that is often and persistently lonely or exhausting to most people. The idea that there's another rambling deeply interested and dare I say respectable soul you discover in the hoards who are not of your daily life feels immensely gratifying. Luckily, at least so far, the significant point of diversion I take with these people is the part of any genuine plan or constant desire to kill myself.
Suicide of course is one of those all-encompassing topics. This may go on for 3 or 4 more pages, and at some level you're going to have a brain that zeroes in on that vague discomfort that the word conjures up in you and the rest will get obscured. Often my allusions to suicide are in the abstract; you've killed your fun-loving childish soul from school or your optimistic view of the world, or you've slit your throat and bled out over a meager pile of money and on the directive of someone barely worth looking at let alone listening to. There's an extremely frequent theme from the people I admire who off themselves that has to do with the fall of man or degradation of society. And for all of their bluster, I can't find myself moved to agree that we're any better or worse than we've always been and constantly lie on that razor's edge of civility and society, literally praying, hoping there won't be a disaster.
For me, it doesn't take a particularly agile mind to see, claim, or accept this. Whether you look at instances in your own behavior that have made you scared or ashamed of yourself or you're more a fan of pointing at your favorite atrocity from history, we're not even days let alone generations away from unimaginable horrors committed on people, willingly, for often the most irrational and outright malicious reasons. The daily delusion that it doesn't affect us is what we, rightly depressingly so, qualify as “life.” The further you are from either the head or heart to take it all in, the sharper that edge we're laying on feels. The harder comments from me register. The more likely you'll be to snap or fall, perhaps for the rest of your life, into a kind of forgone depression and conclusion about your fate. The more your decisions will register as “fuck it” and “that's life.”
And you wouldn't be wrong. That's the scariest part I imagine from most people who hate talking to me. It is that bad. Your depression or anxiety are totally justified. We're horrible to each other, to ourselves, and it's absolutely the moment you need someone to step up and be there for you that they'll pull the shittiest move of their entire life and place it at your feet. The irony of the lonely jovial and powerful soul to string together a barrel of assholes only teaching them how to be even bigger assholes when they die was certainly a large enough wrench in my system watching the fallout after my grandma's death. The daily mini-rallies and blinders I have to put on to not verbally berate everyone who not only talks dumb, if at all, but fails to even bother borrowing from my example to contribute anything but the bare minimum. You need what, at times, feels like a perfectly magical disposition to deal with it.
And yet, writing isn't magic. Organizing a cloud of thoughts into 1's and 0's that you can pick to acknowledge or dismiss is a practice well before you might claim any skill. Picking goals that are hard and abstract are decisions, even if compelled by circumstances, decisions nonetheless, that you can pursue earnestly. I legitimately dislike, if not outright hate, “just paying the bills.” It's empty and cold and inhuman. To the degree that you've organized your life like this, I feel sorry for you, as much as I feel the pain of being straddled to the sentiment well beyond my will. It's a powerful ache and an endless sorrow.
Long pause as despite my mind being a flurry of thoughts for the last 5 hours, I hit empty.
I got off my last shift at Kroger. I survived about 2 months maybe 20 or so hours a week (while working 2 other jobs). I listened to I think 7 or 8 books, including 45 hours of It, and the Maps of Meaning Jordan Peterson lectures. I was determined to stock the bottom shelves from a crouched position so as to improve my balance and flexibility. I stole my fair share of drinks and candy. I only fleetingly “wasted” time spending an extra few minutes in the bathroom or walking the aisles instead of putting products on the shelves and pulling them forward. I never complained but to state once how unjust the expectations were when we were understaffed and severely underpaid on maybe my second day after someone opened the conversation first.
What I haven't decided is whether or not I picked up anything “new” besides a greater distaste for fiction. It's a huge point of desperate sadness to think about how sincere and hardworking everyone around me was. For one reason or another (contented?) to do this repetitive job quickly, nightly, and in the case of the night manager, for 31 years. This woman who told me in those 31 years these last 6 months have never been worse or harder on her. When I sit and ruminate about how slow-going my life feels, it's going to be the thought that she's worked this job, that might actually bring me to consider suicide in a real way if I persisted too long, for 3 years longer than I've even been alive that, not so much tempers, but chokes me.
To the degree that you would point to any one thing I might say and call it whiny, entitled, or judgmental, I feel very much driven to the descriptors I employ for an important reason. Merely referring to job situations like Kroger where “hard-workers” “achieve company goals” at the behest of “managers” and within the “constraints” of the budget, bound together by a “union” is to so underplay the reality that you're all but murdering the idea of any possible help they may need or you could offer. These people are exploited, as I was exploited. These people are lied to, as I was lied to. These people are handled by the lazy and inept, blind to their own hate-ridden judgments. Their union is all but a joke, and their State actively attacks their capacity to organize or improve their circumstances. And they have bills and responsibilities and are trapped. They don't need my indignation or scholarly condescension, nor do they deserve it, anymore than the extra dollar an hour for a quarter without incident lazily offered by some brain-trust at the top too inspired by a carrot and mule.
But to attempt to help them is to attempt a system level change. And we feel ill-equipped to attack the system because the system is dying. If you are an even remotely intelligent individual (which, I assume you are, but it has to remain an assumption so far) you can't look at the election and subsequent firestorm of destruction and think we're on a path to anywhere...maybe even survivable. I would have a hard time arguing against you if you took up that suicidal posture and made a thousand page exhaustive list of every dying species, failing piece of infrastructure, decay of culture, and everyday instance of your own life that spoke to a measured and calculated pull of the trigger. I get it. Bon voyage and I'm only a bit jelly.
In my view, it's also the only respectable way to approach the game once you've adopted the perspective. It's not that I don't see any value in “the small things” like taking pride in your, in my words “shitty” job, or in being generally nice and agreeable and knowing that smiles are infectious so you employ them as often as you can. They just have nothing to do with me or my picture of my place in relation to the larger game. You can hate me. You can judge me. You can avoid talking to me and see the scowl and hunched shoulders. You can read the crazy blogs. You can be hurt by my dismissive tone or attitude. You can find me immature and repulsive. You can slowly jog beside me from time to time when your mind reaches that dark place, and this is often the only time you want to talk to me, and you just know I'm the perfect one to talk to about this. Ultimately, my task is to literally create from nothing an approach to information and society that I can plug people into that subverts or renders useless the slavery and inhumanity that characterizes our existence. To the degree you understand or agree with my goals and perspective is going to heavily influence whether or not you think I'm insane or something nicer.
Were my goal less concrete, were I merely trying to show off how much thought I can pack into a paragraph that I hope trumps what you may have hoped to put in a book, I feel I would go properly mad. Were I to couch my disposition unbearably in my need to be positively judged or have someone to invest my emotional baggage into in order to keep it together, I'd never be able to measure in any quantifiable way progress to my goal. If in between illusive bursts of inspiration to talk for as long as it takes to be done writing I was hiding myself away, drinking too much, cutting, or otherwise resolving myself to objectively objectionable behaviors, I'd have a reasonably hard time listening to anything I say.
I'm lucky to be anchored. “I'm not making any progr...well, I haven't even developed the land yet or advertised it fully.” “I'm getting old as fuck still living with roomm...well, I could afford something else, but not if I want to keep progressing with my experiments which mean more to me than clean dishes or a conventional living room.” “How can I find myself working delivery jobs or at Krog...well, I left after 2 months, immediately jumped to a gig that not only pays me double for less than half the work, but allows me to dip my toes back into doing studies.” “All my friends are fucki....they've stuck with you this long and are significantly more dominated by the system you want to destroy than you are. Hatsam showed up every day and night. Schroeder played many free shows. Corbin gave you his car. Mike babysat Dave. Wendy bought you baller hair product. Amber and Brandy check up on you when you sound particularly bad...and the rest of your friends are all shit.” In a very real way I am certainly still alone. I'm always angry and anxious. I'm always more prepared for the things you're going to do and say to fuck me than I'm ever going to find the ability to genuinely trust or rely on you, but I'm not the habitual inmate. I'm not the victim to any degree in which I didn't bend over and spread wide. Inordinately, I feel I'm the one making choices to spite my circumstances, not to perpetuate them.
It's clear to me what a proper and healthy environment and relationship we should have with each other should feel and look like. It's not small talk. It's not penciling in years from now. It's not likes. It's not bullshit congratulations for meager existence masquerading as anything but time spent in service to half measures and making-the-best-ofs. Many times I rail about what I expect out of you or at least what I expect you to be thinking about if you're going to bother to pretend to be friendly with or to me. Maybe you can make demands too. Maybe the initiative shouldn't always come from the infinite well of motivated mood-swung vitriol pocked with furiously flapping points. Maybe I can't achieve my goal without you and you're just watching me slowly burn out as I hop from excuse to excuse bending every pointed finger back until they're all broken mistakenly relying on you to tell me to stop.
I don't know that you'll ever describe the world or feel as bleakly as I do about the future. I also don't believe you even remotely see yourself reveling in the spoils of the success of creating something that violently and swiftly alters your current status. Treading water isn't decision making. Silence isn't safety. Blindness is a choice. Short-term politicking is a hacksaw to your knees. One-off cliches will do nothing to author the kind of book that each of our existences should sound like. Be anchored in something larger that let's you take it all in. Do more math behind the bigger risk. Help me stop writing because I've gotten too busy engaging with a life worth living. Save my suicidal heroes.
