[601] Show and Tell and Tell and Tell

I’m hoping this wraps up what’s apparently been a muse-induced spat of writing the last few days as I’m in danger of falling victim to the problem I’m aiming to speak about. I’m attempting to communicate, right? I’m trying to turn impressions and vagaries and electrical and chemical impulses into lines you can read, walk, or snort. You don’t start reading me and think I set out to repeat the same words over and over repeat the same words over and over repeat the same words over and over and expect you to sit there on autopilot for several pages. You’re gonna perk up if I use certain trigger words that may speak to a pain or emotionality I’m doing a terrible time explaining like a proper robot.

Every single utterance or move we make is an attempt. You cry in all directions until someone figures out if it’s not time to wipe your ass or feed you, there’s something deeper going on that requires the insight of a doctor or seasoned childcare veteran. You extend your arm to shake hello, wave goodbye, or say, “Hey, I’m a douchebag on a bicycle about to cut you off, I dare you to run me over!” Big or small budget films relay your small-town sensibilities or a complex array of thoughts regarding timeless philosophical constructs. Your many professional consultants contributed their lines towards an authentic dialogue.

Then we make it weird. We claim “meta-narratives.” We talk of “subversion.” We “appropriate” and “genre-bend” until enough people are so confused or elated new princes get a papier-mâché crown of the thousand and one “with-it” gospel pages and apologetic trite.

In ignoring our basic humanity and capacity to communicate, we invent ever-”complex” narratives striving for a personal identity. Is anyone really capable of dressing “post-grunge?” Why hide behind “camp” when you’re just feeling silly unless you couldn’t figure out your confusing feelings towards John Waters. Instead of learning how to act isn’t there more dignity in hyper-attention to detail in your local theater production and wafting condescension towards those who simply can’t appreciate your steampunk take on Bye Bye Birdie?

For me the most jarring is in dealing with comedy. I hate apologetics for comedy shows that don’t seem to make anyone laugh. As if “comedy” is this supernal demon hanging in the air that we aficionados can just recognize because a famous enough name has appeared, so bask. I can certainly appreciate different styles of comedy and respect when and why certain jokes or topics don’t hit everywhere all the time. But to ignore whether anyone’s laughing? Even anti-comedy seeks out the ironic smirk or to be creative in how dead you can really make a joke.

To that end, I ask the same things of every piece of music I listen to, every article or book I read, and of every show or movie I watch. Do you have a message? If not, why the fuck am I engaging with you? Do you have a metric by which to judge whether it got translated? Comedy, therefore, is simple. Did you laugh? Did the audience? No? IT’S NOT FUCKING COMEDY. It’s not about mass appeal so much as it is about some form of a+b=c, not someone leaning on the A on a keyboard for an hour and claiming to “subvert” music.

We live in such a diverse pool of implacably bizarre and random people, you will always find an audience. So will the Nazis. Do the Nazi’s have a point? Are they maybe just lazy and stupid and it’s a really long and boring road to discuss how sexually appealing you find their uniforms to be? The worst movie in the world may well in fact be directed by a Nazi, for a Nazi, and no doubt there will be some film historian who notes how this “little known gem goes wholly unnoticed by the mainstream” for its capacity and willingness to brave the judgment of uncritical minds too weak to wrestle with the Nazi that lies within all of us. You know, because the message certainly isn’t about the irrational eradication of a minority population, it’s to make pansy moviegoers squirm…

This is part of the reason I heavily try to emphasize I’m speaking to YOU. Me, to his friends and people who seem to not go out of their way to run rampant with what I’m saying. I’m not trying to get you to “interpret” whether or not I’m suicidal when I decide to take up the topic at length. You should know by the end or I’ve done a terrible job. That’s not to say everything I talk about is always straight-forward or easy to follow, just like I rarely dig up the specific meaning of lyrics or care to go to Comic Con and bug a writer about whether some character is a strict representation of some Freudian concept. But it does mean that if you have a question or seek to challenge something, I’m obligated to get more specific, find better words, or concede I was talking out of my ass and didn’t notice.

That stems from a personal responsibility towards seeking out and hopefully discovering “truth.” The truth in the moment. The truth of my perspective or feeling. The truth as it’s been dictated by forces before us. As many layers as seem interesting and relevant. The all-consuming Truth that allows for the endless ditches we can dig to bury our opinions and lines of connection tying our experiences together into the fabric of “culture.”

As such, it becomes something of a contradiction, or simply non-starter of a sentiment, when you “seek subversion.” Subversion is handed to you. Dress like a “weirdo.” Talk like me. Opt for honesty. You didn’t invent black because everything around you seems blindingly white.

It feels very foreign to me the idea that I am acting like me when I write or speak. When people describe me, that’s all they do. They just say, “He just is so explicit!” Nothing follows. Not condemnation. Not support. “He’s just so himself all the time, can’t he just be normal?” Again, not disbelieving in my ability to order coffee without a Kafka-esc comment or attend a performance proving unable to allow the attention to get away from me. But something important is translating and it’s making them uncomfortable. Though, I sincerely doubt I’ll be paid the fawning deference of altering their consciousness and subverting their conceptions of themselves.

In the search through media and mediums, if the exercise isn’t about finding ways to identify parts of yourself or frame things explicitly not to do with you, what are you doing? Lamely dragging your ass into a faux subculture that absolves you of a real identity. Watch out nostalgia addicted Pokemon playing gamer nerds trading in the meme economy looking for every excuse to work in a reference to Rick and Morty. But even they’ll take a backseat to the people who put up real money to wax poetic about their “different eyes” regarding the countless pieces of art they’ve consumed.

I make it a point of pride to reorient and explain away as much as I can when I get an “overwhelming” feeling. I’ve watched my reasoning degrade into what may as well have been literal shit I futzed about with in the yard. As a society, it’s how we feel about each other and the things we engage with the world that is our shining light. It’s the feeling of justice, not the DNA results. It’s the impassioned speech! that dictates your moves, not that you should have left the building when they introduced themselves as a “Neofascist with communist leanings.” They aren’t interesting, just convoluted and confused.

It’s in the glory glory hallelujah of Feeling that we constantly pretend to get the message. I feel the Lord wants me to become...I feel the LOVE for my...I feel the hatred from so and so....I believe in our cause because otherwise I’d feel hopeless, and if you feel hopeless, well, no one really knows, but it’s bad, trust me. We felt our way over a cliff in the election. We’re feeling around in the dark for the next Enlightenment. We’re terrified of ever truly feeling anything real again because we feel we’ll only be able to cope as well as the endless queue of our depressed and anxious friends and everywhere we look is someone trying to betray or deny JUST HOW FULL OF FEELS I REALLY AM!

And the cure, so simply, is to pull your head out of your feeling-laden ass. Actually attempt to communicate. Stop acting like you’re part of a brand management company hoping to keep your friends and family buying. You know I literally give zero fucks if you decide I’m no longer worth your time. That’s important to me. That’s called mutual recognition and respect. And you know it because I almost can’t help myself from reminding you every time I get bug up my ass about how widely we’re failing as a society kissing the ass of the loudest feelers. Every time we apologize for shitty translations and wasted opportunities. Every time we’re silently riding the ignorant populist wave that carries the wrong asks for our attention.

It would feel less dramatic for me if people were at least honest about it. I’ll probably make reference to it until the day I die, but reading how the creators of Lost were like, “Yeah, we just did shit at random” was such a stark point of betrayal to all of the useless dialogue and speculation and fervor that show stirred up. As an audience you have a responsibility to at least try and respectfully listen, but on both sides of the equation it was idiots throwing shit on a wall and reading the hidden messages. All but condemning the idea of effective deliberate communication reducing the medium to rattling cages.

Whatever my message may be at any one time, it’s not for the people who can’t laugh or who can’t be patient or who can’t concern themselves with details. That’s why I speak to YOU. That’s why I make jokes and comments I’ve seen you laugh at. Whatever piece of me you take into the rest of your worlds, I can’t translate for them. When I build up my business ends or research tools, it’s for people who can appreciate them, not for ten thousand upvotes on /r/dataisbeautiful or to be distributed freely to any twat with an ignorant agenda I’ve just helped make more efficient. I like YOU, not how I feel about you. Because it’s mostly endless frustration you’re not throwing your lives away to help me make a field in the middle of nowhere the coolest place to live ever, and devoting yourselves to blogs once a week so I can even pretend to know who you even are anymore.

[600] Can't Get Fooled Again

I start more sentences with the words “I don’t understand” more than I do with “I hate.” In both instances, the phrasing leaves much to be desired. Hate takes a kind of motivated energy I rarely have about the topic beyond the moments I’m engaging with it. And to say I don’t understand betrays the many times I’ve seen the exact same circumstances play out in wholly predictable ways. I still don’t find myself having a mode of properly accounting for it, nor have I persuaded myself to capitulate to the “better” outcome of lying and playing along in a return to exploitative ends.

Perhaps we start with a note on exploitation. I don’t know why it’s so often forgotten, but when someone is playing with you, they don’t make reference to it. It’s a very weird myth that the “master manipulator” is one who wears their heart on their sleeve and somehow makes you dance in complete spite of yourself as they giggle and you cower in submission. My whole exercise of writing is a giant “fuck you” and rejection of my willingness to deliberately manipulate those I consider friends or friends-enough. If this point is not understood, then any and every single time you think our relationship has broken down because “you’re a cog” or “you know I’m a manipulator” you don’t simply have no idea what you’re talking about, you’re going the extra mile to shit on the thousands upon thousands of words I’ve devoted to you. I won’t be shedding tears in your absence.

The reason then I may start so many sentences with “I don’t understand” is because I work so hard to step outside of the “normal people” speak and level of interaction. This is not to say what I do is “abnormal” in that it’s somehow removed from our general capacity, it’s simply that people are unwilling and dishonest, and this triggers the draining of my patience. So, yes, little self-centered neurotic overgrown child who needs an hour to make a 5 second decision, I do understand you. I do not have an hour for you. You are not that special.

The evidence I put up as understanding people has to do with the relationships that last the longest. The people who I often refer to as “putting up with me” despite having nowhere near the disregard for my person as I make caricatures of what they must be thinking about me. I call it tongue in cheek, others might choose shameless disregard. I never win, but I can make the case anyway. I get along with adults. I meet adults, make the same jokes around adults, offer my pearls of insight or opinion on something I read, and they love it! They love it sober or drunk. They remember me even if we meet years later as “you’re funny!” or “you’re the smart one!” They simply do not have the time and energy to be as far up their own asses as the people who turn me into their nightmare.

The friends that are my age that don’t give me shit also happen to be adults. They get adult jobs and concern themselves with personal enrichment or the betterment of others. They read a lot of the same things I do. They have the ability to make the same dark jokes. They relate to their mental struggles honestly and openly. I’ve said I don’t take pride in the idea that people only wanna talk to me when their life has blown up, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an appreciation for the ability and willingness to engage their own psyches in that manner. I’m not saying “go fuck yourself I don’t want to hear it,” I’m just annoyed it takes so damn long for them to figure out we’re on the same side.

On the list of things I understand, it must include all of those “hidden” under-the-breath procedural or bureaucratic things, or I wouldn’t be the one shaping Byron’s public pronouncements. I wouldn’t get enlisted to write the personal statement for his mom’s military station with the nice weather. I wouldn’t be more than prepared to never get or revel in too much limelight once enough people scan my blogs and find instances of “nigga” and “nigger” used in ways that will absolutely derail any fleeting point I may have been getting at in the particular piece. I’ve made my bed and made peace with the idea that I’m shooting for a very select few of listeners/readers that I can roll with.

I also understand all of those shitty confusing and desperate emotions that move you to say and do all sorts of horribly contradictory and hurtful things. They are precisely what drove me to start writing in the first place. I understood them so well, in fact, that I could write up a kind of “star chart” based on your behavior and interactions with family and friends that would describe where you got in life and how and generally how or why we would or wouldn’t get along. Me and Byron actually still play this game and test ourselves in our capacity to “guess” things right after looking you up and down! Of course, nobody’s perfect, but I’d at least find it in me to shut up if I kept finding out I was grossly off the mark consistently.

I understand things to the same degree that fat girl knows she shouldn’t message and flirt with me on Okcupid. She doesn’t really know if I don’t have some secret fetish or a severe lack of shame, but the look on my face and the tone on my profile tell a flashing red light of a story you can choose to pay attention to or not. All of our lives work like this. Your desperation, often intelligence, are worn on your face. I know thoughtful brows and eyes. Your judgment and priorities are reflected in your clothes. No one I know personally dresses half as bad as the absolute train-wrecked sack of potatoes man I saw leaving the bar this evening. I know when you’re trying too hard to look smart or dumb or healthy or crazy.

What would you do if had this “power” that’s actually a habit that anyone can learn, but don’t for reasons tied mostly to things I say in blogs? Would you jump into 1001 bullshit friendships? Would you stoke along people’s terrible ideas about their partners and families and ability to deal with their particular ailments? Here’s where I get to call you out. Yes! Of course you would. That’s what you do! All you fuckers have hundreds or thousands of “friends” that you want to be in dozens of photos with and to shower likes and “love” and yada yada. You’re normal! If not still at least outlier adults. Your lives are invested in the cultural mythology and procedure. It’s not that I don’t understand this, it’s that I’ve pulled out of it. At least, am pulling until my hands are raw.

You understand this. You respect and I suspect quasi-envy it a bit. But you’re also wise enough to know that the grass is always greener and if you haven’t laid the kind of foundation psychologically or interpersonally, my style of living has to look positively insane, unforgiving, lonely, and very very angry. All of course contributing to the underlying ironic pulse of all existence. Because I could never hate more than when I’m lying to myself, or to people I wish to respect. Operative word, wish. When it happens, it’s literal magic. You people are magic adults.

Why do people say one thing and do another? They have no grasp of what they actually want and are terrified of feeling truly responsible for the outcome of their lives. Taking responsibility for the sheer depth and reach of consequences is almost suicide inducing. No one will call them out besides assholes like me, so there’s nothing to lose in reinforcing their posture daily with ritual sacrifices of language and conceptions of self-respect. Why don’t people care about the things that would make their lives actually better? Your brain doesn’t care how you trigger your reward system, just that it’s triggered. Pain makes people feel good and special, be it their own or someone else’s. They’re not even fundamentally wired to give a shit about more than 100 or so people over the course of 30-40 years. You think an impassioned news article or speech is going to traverse that void?

I understand so well that I know how to drive you into places that you’d think you worked on pathologizing all on your own your entire life. Arguably the worst thing about me is that I don’t know if I’ll ever grow out of the temptation to want to do so. Not arbitrarily, of course, but enough pathetic 30-something children who treat you like an angry god who’s somehow maliciously acting in the shadows in between bored drunken escapades, movie watching, and crossing his fingers he’ll have enough money next week to build a fucking shed...DEAR GOD THE SOCIOPATHIC MASTERMIND TWIRLING HIS COGS ROUND AND ROUND!

[599] Carry On, Wayward Son

This is a familiar theme, but enough instances have arisen lately that it’s sticking in my head. The sheer inability of people to match their words to what they hope to achieve in the world consistently wears on me. 

I catch a line as I’m making one of the worst decision of the last year, to decide to “just listen to the radio” on the drive from Evansville to Bloomington. It goes, and I’m paraphrasing, “Just look at Deuteronomy! How many times does it tell us to get wisdom!?” You know because “wisdom” is just one of those things you pop into the bible for and after a few short passages you get to level up.
Every time I hear Paul Ryan speak makes me want to throw something through my TV. “We’re going to move through these scandals and get back to fixing the American people's problems.” Yes Paul, we’ll do that by denying them healthcare and pretending math isn’t a thing when we propose budgets, you soulless fuck.

I follow this bombastic though health challenged and apparently intelligent person who I caught at random sounding creepily like me. He complains about the same politics I do. He makes references to history and all the reading he and 5 other people on the planet care to do. He makes drunk threats about applying his special skills to some form of attack or retaliation for the circumstances that keep him and his loved ones in perpetual misery. He mostly just posts too often, ends up hosting open mics, and then playing with hobbies for a spell.

It’s meme-i-fied on every other Hitler 2 supporters’ page this mythology regarding the accomplishments and “jokes” regarding their old angry savior. Screaming, racism, threats, terror attacks, etc. are “true American values” and the “real threat” is anyone who’s different or acts like they’re smart. They have as much a religious fervor for their god here on Earth as double-speaking believers do when they say things like “that’s not my interpretation of pick-you-fable.”

The conviction. The absolute certainty. As if anything is ever as You understand it. The all-blinding darkness and surety. “I’m Muslim but I voted for Hitler 2 because ISIS! Give him a chance!” “I’m Christian and am peaceful but gays are an abomination!” “I’m a republican who BELIEVES DAMMIT, so bust out your guns and your pipelines and your bigotry, it’s time for you to respect this big waving dick as it crashes into your helpless impoverished world.” The irony compounds when the people who have reason to be the most convinced use their skeptical posture and habits to doubt themselves into complacency. “Now now, we can negotiate with these terrorists.” “Everyone deserves a voice and to be heard.” “It’s not all bad, look at this singular positive instance against the flood of general bullshit. Isn’t it nice?” If we turned it into a math equation, we have a hard -5 actions from general idiots threatening overall survival and well being, then we have a +1 -2 from the do gooders pretending their little victories here or there speak to the whole.

I read plenty of history. I know there are historical precedents and big egos and wasted money next to piles of bodies we can scarcely imagine. It’s with that window into our heart that I genuinely ask. What do you think we’ve actually gotten right that speaks to our lasting legacy of a species? Different past cultures have been perfectly happy to have more equality and respect for gays or women that “the greatest country” can’t figure out. Other cultures have had significantly greater respect for natural resources and animals. People used to distribute things based on need, not if you had collateral and could sure up your needs with interest. Tell me, what is it about “modernity” that is such a shining beacon on a hill of progress, depth, and understanding?

I feel you get answers to that question proportional to your general ignorance of the world before you. You don’t define “slave” so you don’t conceive of yourself as one. You haven’t seen your water poisoned, yet, so every instance “over there” is surely an isolated incident. You’re sold on the extravagances of wealth and arguments between pundits from birth and therefore can’t retain a capacity for what “fair and balanced” even means.

There’s a line in a David Wong article about our brains not being wired for modern life. We didn’t have “jobs” when we hunted and gathered. We didn’t have thousands and thousands to entertain and appease at all hours constantly pushing our brand or comedy. We had our little family, we shared, we processed our little worlds in the here and now before we likely died before 40. Now we have “big data” attempting to codify and predict you like your mental machinery hasn’t been finely tuning that for generations. Your entire being is a data point to be coddled and exploited. It’s a world where it becomes, quite literally, impossible to figure out who you are.

I can’t begin to describe how lost I’d be without writing. I’m a month away from being “homeless” with land in the middle of nowhere and I’m more relieved than I’ve ever felt? My “rent” for the property is already paid until the spring of next year. Most of my shit is in a moving van already. I’ve got the tabs lined up with sustainable communities I’m gonna try to check out or piggy-back on. And the road to getting here has been anything but a straight line. It’s been me trying to anticipate closing windows and levels of compounding disaster.

I didn’t think when I got out of college I’d be living through a Hitler 2 presidency. I didn’t think that it wouldn’t just be a hobby I’m pursuing with my website, but potentially vital to getting a survivable grasp on the sheer amount of destruction stomping its way through our legislature. People are already being attacked and dying. Animals are already going extinct at unbearable rates. And we have what? Isolated reports from Joe Reporter about another scandal, attack, and threat to your life that you can’t do shit about. One after another until you scream your little scream and rev your motorcycle mentally prepared to get nailed to the cross of your ignorance.

You have to dig out what drives you. You can’t even just “live through it” regarding your convictions as there are endless examples of people who would kill or destroy and go right on doing so and feeling great. The great goal of the 21st century shouldn’t be lording technological progress over people who can’t afford it. It shouldn’t be spending huge quantities of money on things that keep us constantly distracted. It should be a commitment to doubtful introspection bolstered by a sea of information at our fingertips. The fact that we even have data-backed definitions and precedents by which to judge how stupid we currently are is our only chance in its mass distribution and understanding.

Unlike commercial enterprises, there’s no limits to the ways you can experiment with in how to teach something. I can sit in a field in the middle of nowhere and piece together my articles and map and arguments and seek out video editors or pick up the new skills to distribute across mediums. I can attack the big problems I have with existing at all by using my brain and making my sacrifice the allegiance to a kind of living situation that isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be anyway. It’s never been that “I don’t want a boss” or “I don’t want a job.” I don’t want a stupid boss. I don’t want a meaningless job that literally costs me my life for negligible and fleeting gains. There’s always plenty of work to do, we’re just habitually and conditionally focused on the wrong kinds.

[598] A Bug's Life

I'm sick. I think Byron brought back whatever his dirty poor kids carry and it's in the house again. I hate being sick. I hate being even mildly sick, which is what this mostly constitutes. There's a bit of a scratchy throat, a weak cough every hour or so. I haven't managed aches or a runny nose beyond what moving and airing out my dusty ass basement did to me yesterday.

The last week or two has been an experiment of not using the air conditioning. It's an experiment I ended 20 minutes ago when I decided I'd have enough of “roughing it” whenever I get my tiny house built. I'm about 85% done packing my shit up with the rest basically ready to go with minor disassembly and an extra hand for the bay glass window and dresser. I threw my back out wrangling mattresses, of all things, and am wary about pressing my luck. The 4 hours I spent delivering today helped make up for the eating out too much and Saturday drink prices.

I'm now full both figuratively and literally and can't settle into something that matters or I care about. My extra computer screens decided to flip out and it's a problem I don't have the patience to be plugging and unplugging wires for hours. Sickness always gets me psychologically regardless, so I'm contending the “bleh” of bothering to exist today at all. I'm hoping I'll manage to slip into what's been on my mind regarding “celebrity” and “meaningful contributions.” I stared a little too hard into the void yesterday contemplating my behavior towards bugs.

I kill bugs at random. I save bugs at random. I have no overall philosophy regarding the life of bugs that makes me even attempt to treat them “fairly.” I have no consistent driving ethos for why some spiders I trap and let outside, and some I smack as quickly as I can grab something to smack them with. Not every bug on my windshield gets a nice shower to shoo them away. Certainly every ant and centipede I've come across I've attempted to kill. Yet there's a handful of giant male mosquitoes I've let rest on my wall indefinitely.

My own indifference and inconsistency felt really rather dark. I thought that if I were so callous and disregarding, it was easy to sense that underlying lack-of drive that motivates society. Some days you invent a story about the timid driver who's been in accidents and is driving slow. Others you lay on the horn and flip them off. They're bugs. Maybe they drive a car you think is pretty or have a bumper sticker you identify with and they disarm you, like a butterfly. Maybe they're billowing smoke and waving a Confederate flag and were we not a polite society you'd chase them down with a giant electrified flyswatter.

I watched a bug crawling along my window and get to the edge. It paused and scanned back and forth, and proceeded to walk along the edge. Is it dumb to ask about its relative agency? Does it intend to seek food or a mate on my window? Is it intrigued because it's used to walking on gravel or dirt so now it's out for a stroll just taking it in? Is it more likely that it's a lost, confused, ignorant spec of incidental bullshit “inspiring” another lost, confused, ignorant spec of bullshit to talk about it, like previous incidental pieces of bullshit have managed to do so in the past? I like that third option.

Into this void is where I recognized my general source of motivation. Sheer and utter futility that causes you to overflow sporadically for brief emotional sentiments. Because there is no facade to keep up, there is no pause, no shame, no allegiance, and no expectation. For a brief moment I watched myself shuffle something around my living room and felt like it was precisely where I needed to be. I wasn't worried about where I'll go once the truck is totally packed or how much it'll be to tow it. I didn't worry about figuring out how to get the engine rebuilt or how I keep meeting people I want nothing to do with who also want nothing to do with me. I wasn't lost in whatever show or song was playing at the time. I was just able to feel my hands clasp around a feather of contentedness before it floated off moments later.

In watching all the shows I do and catching the bands I've seen, I think a considerable amount about “celebrity.” I've tried to read a handful of quasi-scientific explorations into it that felt too obvious and cold. I think of the thousands of actors I could place in a match game fashion to their shows and movies or the stream of lyrics that pop into my head sometimes, quite creepily, summarizing a blog I just wrote with the perfect title. What it is to be recognized, internalized, and shared. A fluidity we try to capture in retrospectives and documentaries. The seeming unpredictability of “forces” that paint periods of your life and emotionally tie you.

I think that's one of the things that bugged me about looking into the void. The mass consumption of “media” I engage in heavily depersonalizes is. Scale that up with life in general. How many first dates can you go on? How many times can you ask the same tired questions? How many times can you hope things will get better or something is going to pop up and surprise you in a good way? I consume shows like I consume cereal like I consume articles about the world. Is it a stretch to think that's what I do to people?

I think about when I'm moved to push my limits. When I know I shouldn't send that next text but do anyway. When I know if I keep pushing it my back is going to fuck me back. When I've gotten home and proudly stated my no good reason to keep drinking until some angry yet desperately hopeful hood nigga voice comes out in a status I delete halfway through re-reading the next morning dizzy and dehydrated on the toilet. When I seek attention, I try to take all of it. And with my piddling voice stretched across vague-enough entrepreneurial endeavors and practical concerns, I'm sure I'm wasting it.

Yet, because the void knows no pause, shame, allegiance, or expectation, I kick the record back on and play the same song until someone stands up and rips the cord from the wall. I play bug to your general indifference. Occasionally, I sting you on the nose and try to crawl in your ear. Regardless of my intent you'd slap and dig and try to kill me. Helpless little meanderer with the power to become a point of all-consuming focus and frustration, if only for a moment.

The idea of always needing the lights and camera on me sounds exhausting. Life is superficial enough without institutionalizing it even more deliberately. The lyric “A real thug is a thug that's HUSH.” Irony is lost on the demifamous.

It goes the other way though, because I often let a particular interaction or person take over my head until I can find myself angry and disgusted enough to move on. I don't like that it always has to be anger or disgust that “fixes” me though. Or, rather, I don't know if that's particularly healthy or a long term strategy for improving my general relationships. I can look at a picture of my ex and feel nothing but a scowl. Does she deserve that? Do I care? The pithy pissing matches with a few acquaintances don't keep me up all night, but how many times will I be dragged into them before I just find someone else that's “cool?” How many tens of thousands of people have I met to get to 50 or 60 I'd ever bother to speak to? Just the most fascinating bugs?

The motivation I feel to climb a mountain hungover, which I can't cum in service to its beauty to, is what I seek to celebrate. The process of making up and looking forward to things grants you celebrity status. I don't write 5 pages exploring the psychological profiles of television characters and the intricate details of a plot I'm sure you missed not being a “proper nerd.” I want to unearth the heart of what moves people to substitute their lives with the glamorous illusion. I want to strip away as many unnecessary illusions in my own life as possible.

There's plenty of room for struggles without the self-imposed consequences of denial. If I were lonely, I'd say so, for example. But people force themselves together and play the pleasantries and relationships games constantly. Their focus is on the friends list or number of followers and perfect pictures. They're worried about what their family will think. I certainly need to be “distracted” or “engaged,” but I don't need to do it at the expense of you or my self-respect. It speaks to why random bar hook-ups lost much of their appeal, not all ;). That Key and Peele sketch about the non-stop party comes to mind. Here though too, you can be incidentally jaded and self-pitying or recognize what's actually capable of motivating the party.

I'm sick. I'm a sick little bug. I'm a sick little bug who's confused and lost and unmotivated were it not for his endless drive to find noses worth stinging and ears worth crawling into.

[597] First Principles

I'm anticipating this being all over the place.

I watched “The Red Pill” where a former feminist small-time actress decides to interview MRAs and figure out why their crowd and her crowd can both be concerned with gender discrimination yet can't seem to get along. It's a well-made documentary that happens to highlight why I have a love/hate relationship with documentaries. No matter the topic, each “side” is framed with their own set of statistics, buzzwords, and unbearably frequented caricature of the other person. They don't even notice.

One guy might well up with tears talking about a father who shot himself in the head because the State took his daughter from him for trumped up reasons. Another man will talk about how he was tricked into having a child and how the mother would constantly insist to his son that he was terrible. She insisted the son be obese so he'd identify more with her and despite the father's attempts to document the weight gain and emotional turmoil this caused the son, the court ruled for him to stop documenting. 2 minutes later you get a very “artsy” woman calling these men women-haters and all they believe in is beating women or subjecting them to the kitchen.

You don't have to go out of your way to see how these people aren't talking about the same things. I'm frankly getting bored and sick of seeing the same shit across so many topics. Some pissed off fraction of idiots loads up their parrot-phrases and goes to work on the “toxic” “demons” and “trash” who resemble so superficially your alleged grievances. Even I have the self-awareness to appreciate that my neighbors have offered nothing but help and shown solidarity barely knowing me in “cousin fuck Indiana,” whatever comments I might make regarding their prominently displayed Confederate flag.

What happened to First Principles? What good did it do anyone to start “genderfying” the language and demonizing the fluidity of power? It's females who sexually select the species. Whatever bullshit you have to say regarding “patriarchy,” guess what, the vast majority of you want to fuck and reproduce with precisely what you have now. Yes, most men can beat the shit out of you, but you can end his billion year line of successful progeny on a whim.

We ignore that having a place, any place, can be useful and feel good. People will accept their slave status in a bullshit job before they'll entertain the idea they aren't being “forced” to take care of children? We think there's some larger identity to be gained in fracturing ourselves down into these pissed off little groups. I've read all of the “New Atheists'” books, and what many people well before them had to say regarding religion. I certainly agree with them. I also don't think most people in most places having their feet kicked out from under them would spell a generally better circumstance. To their credit, I don't think they would say so either, but no less they're “The Four Horsemen” ready to kick start the apocalypse.

I have a kind of First Principles approach when I write. I'm looking for the theme that comes up more times than I ever cared to find it. Communication is fundamental to me. We're all basically pretending to have a grasp on ourselves let alone other people, so if you're not in the business of understanding the language and playing field, literally everything you do is fated for very dumb shit first, lucky dividends a distant second. Personal responsibility that allows you to both see your roles big and small and actively attempt to mitigate the potential emotional fallout. Great, you got the message, but then you still found it perfectly reasonable to blow some shit up and act like the world is moving your hands and mouth for you. Common sense is something I don't phrase that way terribly often because, well, I don't think many people have a concept of it anymore. My insistence that there's an appropriately explicit manner in which we ought to be relating to each other has me impressing upon what I gather is some new form of the concept. (Various text behavior, “appropriate” jokes and mannerisms)

The world gets easier when you let it. Dig up what a word is supposed to mean. Rediscover why more strident rules of the past might've been preferred to the ping-ponging of attention and faux-decorum of today. I'm not a feminist or MRA or democrat or even “male” if we find ourselves believing it's my god-given birthright and duty to die in service to a country I don't believe in as part of some sort of draft. I'm not any smarter than that line that got away from me. I'm not angry at what you want to assume I'm angry at. The better I find myself in the slurry, the more I wish you'd dive in as well.

And I know I push it. I know I have a better memory for some things and a freakish voice that switches from drunk hood-adjacent mother fucker to manic depressive to unbearably confusing and meandering over-thinker. I know I'm as likely sometimes to push your buttons on some topic you apparently care passionately about or opt to lay on some flirty text well beyond it being cute or flattering. I betray my common sense and shake off the personal responsibility to communicate better. But even still, I usually have to be pretty drunk to eschew the game entirely. My general day to day sense lays about a more respectable couch.

Maybe I'm just feeling like the oppressed being constantly referred to as more weird or questionable than you. I don't want to feel like I'm identifying with people who's message is so jumbled from disorganized pain. I don't want to flood my head with distracting divisive messaging because you took it literally, and impress upon me the severity, and I'm just oozing redundant satire. What if you die never getting over yourself? I find the thought terrifying and disgusting. What's taking you so long to be as bored as I am? How hard does the world have to push to get you oriented better?

[596] If I Die Before I Wake

Sometimes I look at my life as if it’s the granting of a wish by a genie. I didn’t need to be the most beautiful person in the world to catch more than enough eyes. I didn’t need to be born into millions of dollars to find myself relieved at having a month to slowly move the sheer amount of accumulated wealth I have. I’ve never won athletic awards, but never felt myself unable to hold my own across varying playing fields. I don’t have a particularly special brain that “automatically” recalls or does equations, but manage to retain self-respect in calling myself smart. I go out of my way to alienate the vast majority of people I meet, but I’m confident I have some of the closest friends, plural, yes in spite of how much time we spend together or talk, than when I hear about how other people describe who’s in their lives. I could write what complete and utter “perfection” my life has amounted to on paper by more metrics than I’d ever care to do as an exercise.

And yet, because it was granted by a genie, I’m always starved for “more.” I’m not contented to have “my youth” amount to fading memories from college or grueling experiences in school before that. It’s not enough to have the bills paid, clean water, and reliable enough electricity and internet. I’ll never see enough boobs. I won’t hear enough new songs or repeat too often the ones that have made me slow my car down or crank my head to lean into. I won’t play enough instruments or finger them fast enough (ha!). I’ll keep watching shows and movies well past my capricious fast-forwarding auto-pilot that sees the end and mocks the tropes.

I don’t think life is about “enough.” The entire universe, as far as we can tell so far, is physical reactions. It’s governed by impersonal laws and explosions and energy made of particles popping in and out of existence. That’s “enough” for it. Quarks don’t know they’re called quarks. Supernovas aren’t angry they exploded. Black holes aren’t thirsty. Reductionist materialists like to pretend like all we are is waving about in the same kind of impersonal sea, apparently in complete spite of the evidence we have of the shit we’re made of just doing things at random. If you wanted to speculate your “soul” was the smallest of the small particle only as capable of the same things we observe in nature, I think you’d find yourself terrifyingly liberated. You get a choice.

Ever since we developed the capability to completely end all human life, I think there’s been an ongoing referendum on our responsibility for the capacity that society has in no real way tried to cope with. How endlessly compelling it feels to cover your own ass and look out for those you care about. How superficially it rides to be the vagabond flitting about existence without a care in the world. How desperately noble it becomes to beat your chest for your god or country and lord what meager existence you’ve managed to scrape together for yourself. Once you submit yourself to the physics, it doesn’t matter the language you use to make your place in life seem justified. There’s a passably rational story behind how people end up the way they do.

It’s the word “rationalization” that I was bugged by earlier today. Some say they look to the bright side. Some say they lie to themselves and hide behind a few examples to negate and avoid the myriad bad ones. I find it has a mostly negative connotation in line with fooling or protecting yourself from the true consequences of your actions. It seems significantly easier to rationalize when you keep yourself choked. If you never voice what’s on your mind, you can let a little more light in on the positive things happening in your life while the negative remain unattended. This would help explain why you never speak no matter how many times I ask. You might actually start to sound like me. Eww.

But say we take it back to our infinitely small particulate “soul” with a “choice.” Do we even have to bother with a “why?” I know I often ask why enough regarding my decisions, but something that truly does feel well-beyond my control is a compulsion towards a kind of “sense” and “order.” The smallest of the small living organisms figure out ways to adapt and survive or protect each other and reproduce. They grow in spite of themselves and without regard to other things that want to do the same. At least for them, they don’t know any better. They don’t have “balance” in their vocabulary regarding ecosystems. They aren’t a “population” that needs resources intelligently distributed. They just are. They just do.

Lately, I’ve heard that idea expressed enough from a few people my age. “Just let me BE,” they insist. Let me stop pursuing the dollar. Let me wear my makeup or funky clothes without giving me shit. Let me love who I love, fuck who I fuck, watch what I watch, and please go over there and do the same. I feel this is incomplete. We’ve been given, “just being.” I’m being all over the place in blogs, infecting your minds, translating sounds and shocks in your head with whatever you choose to call “my being.” I find it perhaps the essence of life to exist as something that wonders what I’m becoming. Who am I after the next book? Who am I with better goals and wiser priorities? Who am I after years spent in service to an ideal larger than what I incidentally achieve before I die?

In order for me to “just be,” I need to defy that genie. I need to take every absolutely perfect thing in my life and transform it into something to step on, or step through. I think if I’m ever going to glimpse some end game that’s actually perfect or contended evenness, it’s not going to happen if my goals are less than what I can actually see and believe need to come true. I’m not full if someone’s still hungry. The argument isn’t over if no one translated the message. I can claim my life as my own but is it a big and glorious celebratory cake or something I take one bite of and claim to be full? Do I puke it up ashamed and sick at the idea that I even deserve cake?

Before I started writing this I just sat in silence and looked at my disheveled living room as I Tetris my way through the moving process. I’ve been energetic and motivated all day and never found my stride. The texts I sent went to the busy or out of town. There’s nothing particularly invigorating about shuffling furniture. I grabbed food and had a few beers with Byron. And it’s still not right. I still haven’t discovered the gig or technology or person that keeps me plugged into the world beyond the fleetingly tipsy judgmental ass people watching in the corner. As much as I wish I were better at getting everything I wanted by myself, it hasn’t been a secret how much I know how reliant I am on everyone else. But their goals are different, if they have them. Their lives aren’t as perfect as mine so it’s impossible to entertain what I’m talking about.

I’m not even angry enough to do something rash. I’m not desperate enough to sell myself on GoFundMe situated next to the dying children and funeral provisions. I’m not sad or pathetic looking in a way that provokes sympathy outreach and investment. I’m certainly not successful enough to have people beating down my door to lick up table scraps. I’m just perfectly able to keep going in the direction I choose even if I’m perfectly unable to move left and right like I’d prefer… like a cosmic bobsled. Maybe I’m just naïve to the consequences of having more control or responsibility. Maybe I’m just living out the karmic in/justice from a past life and don’t deserve anything more or less than I do in any moment. Maybe I really could have just used a good party tonight instead of another dive into the ever-shallow waters. I don’t know how to end.

[595] Stop Scratching

I’m already hesitant in thinking this will come off cunty. I don’t even know if I mean for it to, or if there’s just been enough examples back to back that feeling annoyed has had a chance to grow into mean sounding sentiments. I’m pretty-well sick of people “trying to help.”

My first observation with regard to helping is identification. If you don’t know the problem you can’t contemplate a fix. Many times we invent problems to alleviate boredom and protect our egos. “The flowers MUST get planted on Thursday or I’ll have to move my hair appointment!” I’ve seen situations as petty and simple as that blow up into a fight because someone stepped in to say they’d drive so the appointment could be kept or they’d volunteer to plant the flowers. Little did they know that comment has nothing to do with hair or flowers as the idea of having something to even live for has now been threatened! Gasp.

Much of the confusion simply boils down to having no appreciable grasp of other people. I’m sure there’s room somewhere in most things written about the folly of man how to get to hell with your intentions. In the vast majority of cases, it’s a totally justifiable confusion. Who the hell are we? Why do certain activities or friends or projects sound and feel so amazing right before they completely blow up? Why do we find ourselves incapable of maintaining a terribly positive or stable view of ourselves and place? Who’s trying to blame me for being as confused and lonely as the next person?

So our advice comes from self-help books we don’t admit to reading until later in life. It’s passed around in memes from celebrities or clips from an impassioned speech. We “like” and “heart” when someone has made a power claim of overcoming adversity or sticking it to some judgmental jerk who stared too long or made the wrong comment. We’ve built into our reflexive language, emoji and otherwise, the presumption of “help.” Upvote it. Share it. Express yourself and go viral. Put out good vibes. Connect your disembodied voice to the void and get sorted out.

Our conception of problems gets degraded. Some over-hyped dorm room of “influencers” makes a hashtag trend for a day or two and we get to routinely overuse the word “outrage.” The self-imposed problems of poverty and school debt wreak havoc as we muster the courage to stand up for a Gorilla longer than an entire race still routinely referred to as monkeys by a large portion of the population. We think it’s a problem to not get our brands launched or that our choices have become so blind and selfish our gut reaction to “the other” in any capacity is insecure xenophobic hatred, which one third to one half of many “developed” countries see no problem in at all.

It just feels like a giant liar’s game. I bring up often enough that no one wants to talk to me until they’ve reached some level of existential dread or desperation in their own life. I hope I’ve never relayed this as some kind of point of pride. It simply generally reinforces for me you’re either not really in my boat or you regard my efforts as fundamentally broken and in crisis and thus registering as the only time you can identify with them.

I watched a discussion about social justice warriors. One of the speakers said outright that these people who get angry and weepy about shit that makes them uncomfortable are simply immature and insincere. When you’re “outraged” on behalf of another race or culture when no one gives a shit about the costume until you threatened legal action. When you’re mind has opened so far it’s fallen out, unable to cope with mere criticism or even newly discovered facts that might poke at your conception of yourself. Because that’s always what it boils down to. How do you think about yourself? How deeply are those ideas rooted into your behaviors, or of more interest to me, what you choose to avoid?

It seems to me the truth is that we’re not helping, nearly ever. It’s a condition of existence that we’ll mostly not know about most things, and so even speaking on them as if we do muddies the water and tilts us towards eventual disaster. You care about sick or disabled people? Or you care about looking like you care about sick and disabled people? If I were to ever say I cared about sick and disabled people, it would be accompanied by a giant breakdown of the services we do and don’t offer, why, and what we should specifically do tomorrow to change our conception of sick and disabled people. So, right now, I don’t care about sick and disabled people, and to pretend otherwise is only going to get in their way. A more deliberate way to go about the same sentiment is to say I’ll certainly care when I become sick or disabled, so it behooves me to not let my heart bleed too fast or for too long without figuring out how to get my ass covered by a more comprehensive system and someone more qualified than me. Because I could call a number I saw on a lawn advertisement and be in your home in less than a week.

It seems like big dumb ego. I cross my fingers I’ll get a chance to persistently support and reshape the tools I think are necessary, but I’m not saving anyone. I’m no revolutionary. I’m assembling a puzzle. I’m rearranging pieces that were laid out before me into something I think will make a better picture. I’m not trying to help anything but my head. I listen long and hard to what keeps me up at night and keeps me writing blogs. I’m not even trying to help you. I simply want to see parallel examples of people growing, experiencing, and trying independent of intrusions from me.

Constantly “trying to help” is a recipe for resentment. Who’s going to believe you? How hard it was for you to say or do whatever it is you did. Who could possibly recognize the depths of your compassion and intelligence? Hey, we tried right!? Three cheers for indiscriminate failure as long as WE BELIEVED! It’s a giant trap. I fully expect myself at some point of getting sick of “starting over” as some 40-something 18 year old with a dream that I’ll sell off my shit and piss off to a moderate climate somewhere and focus on reading or music. That is as real as something I could ever believe as I do in the consequences of me getting my current path right. The only thing you could say I’m perpetually doing well is in owning and believing that fact. I’ll be okay regardless.

I’d prefer you were learning. I’d prefer you were striving. I’d prefer you were dreaming. Experiment. Talk. Budget. Stop trying. Stop acting like you know anything. Don’t feel destined to be anything more or less than you are in every beat of your words. Because you’re not helping. You’re certainly not helping me. I’ve known less than 10 even in the ballpark with any idea of what it looks like to help me. You don’t want to help and you don’t care, anymore than I’m going out tomorrow and reading a book to an old person in a bid to stave off their dementia just one more day. I want to hear your reasons why. I want to feel your compulsion to truth, not middle-income image masquerading.

[594] Help Me Wipe My Ass

I hope this sticks with you like it will me and Byron.

As we do, we were discussing how our lives have been shaped by our jobs, parents, and choices of pursuing The Larger Goal from opposite ends of the spectrum. Byron is fundamentally political, a bureaucrat. I can barely stand to look at people without a scowl. Byron gets first hand knowledge working within the State systems from prison guard to child protection services officer, and gets appointed to community boards. I buy 5 acres of land in the middle of nowhere and get pants-shittingly excited at the prospect of packing everything I own into a moving truck until I can figure out how to make it a livable productive commune on poverty budgets without killing myself over-working.

The horrible word “passion” that drives us both has little to do with accolades and money or even weak egotistical conceptions of pride and personal values. It would even be a stretch to think a fair number of morals wouldn’t get thrown right out in service to what needs to be achieved. The unifying drive that resolves our styles and aligns the stars can be boiled down into a simple sentiment. We want you to help us wipe our own asses.

Life is shit. For reference, have the balls to pay attention to everything besides the statistics on overall poverty. That shit stains. That shit flows. That shit needs wiping. When you live with roommates, your shit mingles and can get to smelling bad enough for someone to speak up. You know how to wipe your ass, but you don’t always choose to. You get used to the smell, no one else does, and it’s up to the more responsible or simply fed up one to keep buying the toilet paper.

That’s where this metaphor came from in fact. I had a roommate who felt they weren’t contributing enough and offered that they should be the one to put more towards dish soap, trash bags, and toilet paper. That isn’t precisely what happened though, nor would it have spoken to the last year or so that he never felt the need to express that desire.

When you room together, you’re both sharing the same shitty circumstances. You don’t have a place to just walk around naked and rub your butt on things or listen to your music too loud or decorate in any way you see fit. It’s even worse for people who room with me with having a large house’s worth of shit I’m constantly trying to pack into smaller spaces. Shit needs wiping. So you maybe negotiate a chore wheel or buyer’s guide of shared resources. You hit the shower or do laundry before they go to bed. You take the less than convenient parking space. Or, you throw in extra cash to keep your asses wiped.

The wide and significant difference in all people across all things and industries is whether or not you buy the toilet paper or talk about how you feel bad for not doing so. Do you help people wipe their ass? Do you respect the degree in which people are helping you wipe yours? That’s what your parents are doing if they’re smart. They don’t talk about changing your diapers without the implicit conditioning that you better get prepared. They aren’t putting you through school so you can’t afford to give them a proper ass attendant in their old age.

In my world, you accept the struggle and uncertainty of creativity, expression, and growth. That’s the shit of an entrepreneur. You don’t get the language of long days, nagging bosses, and stupid coworkers. You’re either in it because you feel more than anything what it should be like, or you flounder with the rest of the “middle.” In Byron’s world, he has to hold meth head mental problems and abuse junkies accountable. His ass generates a ton of shitty paperwork and arguments to keep you with your kids. You want them back? Help him wipe his ass. He wishes he could give you the benefit of the doubt, but then you did the drugs. I wish you respected the focus and intensity with which we need to pursue a better culture, but then you pull me into your stress and judgment.

Different cultures have different methods, but the idea remains the same. There’s a moment when the youth dies and the man emerges. Whether you’re dropped into the middle of a cave and told to face the complete unknown and find your way out, or you’re pitted with something that forces you to face death and survive at all costs, that transition is, until recently, a sacred and important human accomplishment. In sticking with this blog’s analogy, it’s when you not just learn of your responsibility to wipe someone else’s ass, but that you can do things like wet the paper for an even better and more appreciative approach for the consequences of a crusty ass.

We don’t have those cultural signifiers anymore. You’re an amorphous blob defined by your Snapchat pictures and likes. You’re a brand. You’re a demographic. You’re a fan. Your examples of who to look up to are simply the most noisy, not the most wise, accomplished, moral, intelligent, healthy, or remotely clued into the idea that you even have an ass let alone they should be the one wiping it. We don’t recognize, let alone respect, who’s plunging down our backs without hesitation as we kick about spraying shit everywhere.

This is what I mean when I say I need adults. This is what I mean when I say I don’t give a fuck about your feelings. This is what I mean when I say you are not safer or more secure lying to yourself for the sake of looking “normal” if it’s only causing you to be depressed and anxious. We have a larger responsibility. We have the capacity to build and maintain perfect attentive ass-wiping machines that ensure none of us will be forced into such an indignity! but only when we adopt the responsibility to claim the asses as ours to wipe in the first place.

Byron can go on for as long or longer than Kristen ever did about the people they work with and the fucked up circumstances or decisions that brought them to the doors of our mental and social health “professionals.” The difference as far as I can see it, is that some people steep themselves so far into their “good deed” after persuading themselves “they care so much” that they forget they shit. The meth-head mom will give you stories for the rest of your life. Are you your handful of meth-head moms’ crazy stories? Are they helping you be a better you who’s focus is on the system that created them? Or have you let them step in for you? Are you preparing to settle for being a “better than average” or “better than that last asshole” administrator 20 years from now still plagued by a system that can’t be bothered?

I want people in pursuit of transcendent truths. I want your insights and priorities to give you infinite wells of hilarious ass-wiping metaphors. It’s why I know my problems aren’t fixed with money alone. It’s why Byron knows the world’s going to shit all over his eventual Senate seat. Working at the margins in a way that suppresses the kind of life-affirming infusion of motivation and joy won’t cut it. You’ll survive, sure, diarrhea plagued. You’ll get your ass wiped, but it still stinks in here.

This is what I’ve been constantly thinking about when I genuinely will need people to help me sustain, let alone grow. Who showed up? Who showed initiative? Who sacrificed? This is why Hatsam is a forgone conclusion as someone who I emphatically and desperately need in my world and will get more chances than you. This is why you’re in that pool of 70 people I ever choose to talk to. Am I “crazy old Nick with his land and random gigs” or perpetually on the verge of spilling over into something I’m going to need real adult ass-wiping mother fuckers to help me with? And whatever you’re doing in life right now, do you honestly believe it’s an either/or? Or maybe better stated, do you understand what aspects absolutely need to be attended to in an either/or fashion?

I care that the ass gets wiped. Getting this moving van was an expensive shitting ass. 40 moves at rates lower than those offered in town is 40 shitty tasks to be wiped back to breaking even, and then 41 we can afford marginally better paper. The 30 boxes of books are heavy shits that echo the kinds Amazon had to figure out how to wipe first on its path to cornering the market on everything. If we’re working together and every dollar counts, you’re not smoking, I’m not eating out (unless you ask nice, zing!), and we can’t get a dog yet. We have to attend to the stream of shitty asses you lunatic! They’re coming right for us!

I ask you to consider your life in the amount of assess you could really be wiping. If you’re smart enough to invent the machine and you’re not, you’re not who I want working with me. If you’ve got enough money to buy everyone the Chinese smart toilet and you refuse, if it doesn’t come with a detailed explanation of the cultural hurdles and norms in rural India you plan to fix first, you’re not my kind of person. If at any point in life you genuinely feel and think your ass is in the most need and you have a dozen reasons the system is to blame, your parents are at fault, or I’m the negligent nurse of your nightmares, I have a dark and dangerous cavern you must be plunged into. If you can emerge covered in shit, but alive and wiser to how you’d go about better wiping, we’ll be on the same square.

[593] Just Keep Swimming

I'm growing increasingly unsettled by how much of my life constitutes a form of circumstantial spite.

No matter how old I get, I feel what I've been bred for. I'm as white working-class middle-income cliché as they come and had every expectation drilled into me about how to do even better. After pushing 29 years, I'm some form or another of what a non-discerning author has to say about “Millennials.” If you broke me into parts, the easy boring way to say something about them would be about how the past shapes us and we couldn't improve without mistakes. Snore. I find that I've taken my repulsion impulse and crafted a borderline extreme alt-personality that plays up everything I ever thought I wouldn't be or didn't want. There's something to be said about “maturity” and personality changing over time as memories condense and life becomes familiar, but it's more deliberate.

Attacking head-on will bog me down, so maybe I can just point to instances and behaviors. I'm old enough, and have had it be a problem long enough, that I know eating like shit or right before bed burns a hole through my stomach. In a forgone conclusion about my inevitable death anyway, I still make the same shitty decisions on a regular enough schedule to warrant mentioning. That approach to life and my body is a learned behavior. Eating like shit as a kid was ignorance and the environment (parents and grandparents encouraging norms). Eating like shit now is like my version of smoking.

I think about how I learned to be so “mean.” Often I borrow a line about the amount of people who've been abused or grew up in shitty households that don't turn into the kind of monsters that raised them. It's a grand celebration of my mother's cruelty every time I get a phone call or visit from police for something obscene I've said. In the same breath, I don't know what situations warrant more vitriol than when I'm actually moved to spew it. But the “coldness” I have towards all of the emotionality I'm accused of not understanding used to be out-of-control compulsion easily taught by and inherited from the pro.

I think about doing studies. I can't think of a more opposite approach to how I envisioned my “work” life than to discover how to get paid for sleeping and watching TV. I never shake the anxiety about all of my “wasted” time, even if I'm reading or doing something I enjoy. Underneath me is an inexhaustible work horse. The path to the most money required taming it. And unlike 16 year old me who could work 2 jobs, one running the entire shift, and then march in band, when I dip back into that overdrive, I come home needing the massager to work out the mounting kinks. I made $450 in 3 “days” with ClusterTruck (most of it spoken for and just getting back to “even” after my car shit the bed again) but still feel guilty when I'm home if there's a chance to pull in just a little bit more by staying on for 10 or 11 hours instead of 8.

School used to define me. I absolutely thought my road to anywhere I wanted to get in life was going to be through my approach and love of learning. I visit the grave of my strangled joy at being in college almost daily. I was so unbelievably saddened by the reality of “higher education.” Probably no singular experience shaped a kind of “fuck everything” attitude than slogging through it and getting my degree. I love the train wreck in slow motion imagery as every piece of my working future had to get replaced as it tumbled off the track in a violent blaze and cacophonous rancor.

More molding came upon the chance to do the coffee shop. It didn't matter that we made money. All that matters is that forces who don't care about you will conspire to fuck you, and even when you've attempted to account for everything, one or more of those things is a lie you had little choice but to rely on. The first opportunity I got to do something, finally anything, (that wasn't partying) that could potentially and aggressively speak to me and my values and ability, and it was no less subjected to a will and circumstances much greater than I could contend.

It's not my intention to simply write off everything I've experienced as some massive ball of negativity. Nor do I think every important lesson I've worked into my being I'd be better off without or want to learn an even harder way down the line. I just want to be careful that I'm not “stuck” in a kind of “opposite autopilot.” I mean, I'm attempting to move and build on a plot of land in the middle of nowhere in a state I absolutely hate. How much potential do I really see? Is it possible I've driven myself to a kind of crazed loner who's only shot at peace is as close to isolation as you can get without getting lost in the woods or desert?

I wanted to be a cliché. I wanted the program as it was sold to me. I didn't want to have to look at the one or two friends doing something resembling what I wanted and think I look like some crazy mouthpiece to over-intellectualized despotism; too blind and ferocious to notice the froth and beard resemble more mangy dog than wizened priorities and resolve. I wanted the “safe space” for my brand of over-achieving and smarm. I would have reveled in the usual praise and accolades with my picture on the wall or extra nod of acknowledgment for my insight about the last quarter. I would have been one of my uncles, owning too much hobby shit, while living somewhat modestly, and finding more room for innocent alliances through sports or gentleman's clubs.

To say it out loud makes me think like the disembodied soul attempting to write my story. Who'd want to read that shit? They could just pick up my uncles' books, right? “He worked non-stop” is the same simple way to describe scores of Asians who end up dead each year from overdoing it. “He did well in school” doesn't even get me Ivy League credentials or a claim to valedictorian status. I hear stories almost daily of 8 year olds raped by multiple family members, kids O.D.ing on mommy's Aderall cocaine mix, and babies getting their dicks punched...and while it's fairly disingenuous to draw a comparison between abuse and its effects on children, I'm willing to concede none of those things happened to me so I probably lost some kind of excuse battle there.

There's still a very large and very compelling sense ingrained in me that draws pride from the credentials or the cash. It's not in a “make it rain” or “I insist you call me Dr.” sense either. It's that I started to play a different game when I saw how easy and, well, sad, it was to compete at that level. Growing technology and trends only made it look all the more unpalatable. Paris Hilton makes money from being dumb and looking pretty? Funny and intriguing when you're young and it's new. An entire generation raised on turning cameras onto themselves being obnoxious or wasting their time completely changes the concept of “earning money.” Every year the smartest professions are being replaced by new algorithms and machinery that render all those years of struggle in school mute. Why kill myself to become a doctor when even if I were the best in the world, my very humanity would bring a higher probability of your death than your latest super-smart phone tracking your vitals?

I never got to close the circle on that “normal” conception of my capacity or where I fit. There was a time I used to be as pretentious about the shows that I would watch as I was when I thought a peanut butter and honey sandwich was an appalling affront to decency well-beneath me who's certainly not poor and deserves normal jelly! My embarrassing mindless mother just forgot to buy me another meal ticket! (I could be a difficult child) Now, of course I'd put honey on most things and watch more shows than likely nearly all the people who get paid to write increasingly pointless reviews for Rotten Tomatoes.

I have no sense of “normalcy.” Nothing is consistent. It's probably more that nothing has ever really been consistent and I'm just more attuned to it, but still. I don't know who I'm living with EVERY YEAR for the last 10 years. I don't know how much money I'll have month to month, let alone year to year. I don't regularly practice just one instrument, let alone one or 2 songs to get them to a point of mastery or performance worthy. I haven't worked the same job for longer than 3 or 4 months, besides doing studies or the coffee shop, in those years as well. My “social cohort” moved all over the country. The online world grows increasingly younger and inane. Value is measured in commodification and trending hashtags. I can't even live modestly and make nearly no money without inviting problems from the IRS or greedy rental companies. I don't even eat or sleep at the same times each day.

And I got confused about the appeal of a large stable quiet field away from it all? It's a wonder 200 families and friends depicted on screen draw me in to familiar worlds I might hope to anchor my thoughts in? Shit, there's what 5 years of a relationship was probably speaking to as well. If only we'd played on each others' heart strings and opted for manipulation games instead! I could have avoided my motivations and shock from the 3^rd rail labeled DESPERATE FOR STABILITY.

I've done my best in trying to document what about me has declined or grown, be it in my descriptive capacity or actions. In that sense I feel lucky for as concrete as one could imagine, without numerative quantifiers, relative shifts and what motivated them. It's hard to overstate the components and impact of a genuinely stable foundation and what it takes to build something lasting and real. I'm a fish without a school. In a sea of words I've found myself drowning. My leaky boat made of an “expansive perspective” being rowed with an “inexhaustible will” is supposed to get me to shore in a contest of my own invention. I see plenty of circling beasts counting on me not getting there.