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.
