[623] Drug Fix

What I like about drugs, particularly hallucinogens, is of course the mishmashing. I like the words bleeding together and the free association of random ideas. The visual stuff is certainly cool, sitting out watching waves or having the woods pop out at you, and being impervious to the warmth of the sun or the potential itch of a dozen plants you can’t identify is certainly a level of connected empowered freedom. Hiking is great when you can’t feel yourself huffing! Why? Who wouldn’t want to traverse this cliff when your feet are pillows!? There’s that, and then there’s finding yourself getting caught in a feedback loop because your brain is telling you something happened that absolutely didn’t. (Curse you noodles not making it to my mouth! I felt so full!)


I don’t find drugs “illuminating” in any more of a sense than I feel particularly brilliant at the right amount of drinks. I can recognize that certain points of my perception are floating well beyond my control and I need to stay hydrated even if swallowing is…sideways. But, while the trees and the lake and the sun shine a little, well a lot, brighter, and the sensory input is wholly unrealistic about the amount of sun damage I’m accumulating, there isn’t anything “more.”


I also think that I’d have it no other way. People describe the idea of “bad trips” as these maddening descents into hell or weird visualizations. Nope. For me it’s the idea that I might not really be getting my fork to my mouth. I can put that food down and try again later. Bad trip moment over. It’s been brought to me often enough times that “maybe drugs don’t affect you the same way” and I’ve never been able to make much sense of it. I still have all of the same receptors and I’m plugged into the same space and time as my cohort. Why shouldn’t my head give me some form of “revelatory” insight or fun and freedom that they relish? Or maybe it’s crave?


I think for me, I’ve accepted, or at least done a lot of work to keep up the illusion, that I’m a magical dream-like figure free to piss off into a field in the middle of nowhere or occupy a “normal” state of existence around insufferable white people already. The woods aren’t my escape. The drugs aren’t my connection with the eternal. I don’t need to be anywhere, particularly when it might endanger the people I’m tripping with. I know who I am and where I exist even if it’s only in these tortured lines. I know I’m my work and sacrifices and self-pitying story for every inconsiderate asshole I’ve ever tried to look after who only managed to find resentment. My “trip” is always happening. I’m always discovering some new “crazy” dimension of my being and shit I’m willing to put up with or have to learn how to fix. And I’ve known that for a really. long. fucking. time.


Drugs just remind me that I’m exuberant and hopeful and intrigued and motivated and full of energy and ideas all by myself already, and it’s as isolating and desperate sober as you look being the only one tripping balls in a setting not designed to house you. You’re my bad trip not because of anything in particular you’ve done to me, but you’re bringing down my high. One can only take so much responsibility for their disposition without considering the environment they’re plugged into, and I feel I’ve been identifying all of the parts of mine that don’t work well enough for quite some time. Drugs don’t make them better. There is no “escape.” Maybe you feel like you’re doing something, but you’re not doing the work.

[622] Just The Tip

I’ve been thinking a lot about reliability. What does it take to be reliable and how does it manifest? How closely associated is it to responsibility? Is it more a local and incidental kind of phenomenon or can you simply manage to embody it from a nominally abstract constant flowing around us at all times? Is it morally neutral or something of an imperative?

I think about reliability because, more or less, my life is fundamentally so. I tend to fuck up in pretty consistent and reliable ways. I tend to inch more and more towards goals I set out to achieve long ago. My assessments of the people in my life tend to stick to my reliable predictions of their behavior and how it will impact me. I navigate the unexpected with about the same vigorous bitchy enthusiasm muddied with too many words time and again. I can always access my most boarish and antagonistic personality traits and I’m every inch of overt alcohol provoked sentiment and sexuality that’s every ounce of too much. I traverse the darkest days the same ways and extinguish the highest highs before they become too persuasive.

I don’t know that other people, in general and in the majority, understand themselves to the degree in which I do. This speaks to one of the roots at the heart of all of “my” problems in life. It is 7-9/10, no exaggeration, my experience that when you say you’re going to do something or feel like you’re in a particular state, that is not what manifests. And it’s mostly in the little things. You’ll call me at 4? No, you’ll call me if I text or call you, maybe a few times, leading up to 4. You have my back? No, if you’re having a good day and discover a little extra cash you’ll find my problem or situation tolerable for an indiscriminate amount of time. You want to help? No, you want to see me succeed or create, which, cool, I guess, and in your experience of not feeling supported yourself don’t want to look guilty of behaving the same way.

Maybe you’re not that bad, but then you’re particularly egregious when it comes to the big things. Then, you’re the kind of person with huge dreams and a million ideas, but then while I’m harping at you about joining me in the field to cut the wet grass and sweat and dig ticks out of our legs, all the motivation you had last night or maybe a week ago got lost somewhere in transit. This is the class of people who are also very specifically or deliberately contributory in ways that, very maybe can help, very maybe. I don’t know how else to speak to that which doesn’t denigrate, but speaks to the level of haphazardness.

To be reliable is to have and meet expectations. Or, it’s begrudgingly my entire life from the moment I decided what I should expect from myself. In order to adopt that kind of posture, you need solid definitions of what that looks like. If I carve out what “friend” means and how I need to behave towards one, we’re talking a relatively involved long-term process. If I try to personalize it for your being, I’m often setting you up as more of a utility, like turning on the water and electricity. Yes, sometimes they get polluted or go out, but having access or paying for them is undeniable. If I just like who you are or what you’re doing, then I make it about whether or not you’re achieving the expectations of yourself. It’s like 3 or 4 or my friends are doctors right now? These people have the right stuff whether they want anything to do with me the rest of their lives or not.

I like that I can rely on me. I like that I know my thresholds for exhaustion or mental pain. I like that when I’m finally tired or bored enough of playing in ignorant feeling-laden realms, I can turn back on the Nick P. from my childhood that born the fury as it’s become manifest today. It’s the utility of being able to observe and shift. It’s the capacity for shaking off naive regrets. It’s keeping the larger goals as perpetually in the moment as I do death. Nowhere to live? I guess the car looks cozy enough. Reality of minimum wage and place in political and social history kicking in? Well, maybe these godforsaken ticks in the middle of nowhere will start to feel preferable. At an introverted nihilistic dead-end in your thoughts and actions? Holy shit does that reflex to crack jokes and be goofy work incredibly hard to keep you talking and expanding and connecting. When you fail me, when you fall out of love, when you innocently, I guess, kinda lie to me about what I can rely on you for, when you get too sad or too fat or too angry and judgmental or too old and complacent or too scared and conservative, I’ll be doing me.

I like it because it speaks to an inevitability. I hate it because it leaves me never with an excuse. I like it because “me” is referenced in hundreds of blogs over years for me to search for a road no matter how far off into the woods I’ve wandered. I hate it because it makes me think considerably less of you in general. I say often enough that “I don’t expect anything of you than to be yourself.” To the degree that I’m confused about who you are, which is usually your fault for being confused about who you are, things in my mind about you tend to go to shit. You’ll garner significantly more praise and smiles from me the less I expect from you. Like a dog. Lay down, I’ll rub your belly. I was gone too long, I understand why you shit indoors.

If you’re not dogs, then everything's your fault, at a minimum, to the degree in which I think everything is my fault. If our friends see each other but once a year, maybe, and it’s filled with bullshit platitudes and cliches about the good ‘ol days, that’s on you. You stayed holed-up in your small world blowing up your small problems to encompass your “life.” You stayed selfish and allowed your conception of “personal growth” to mean significantly more than it does with regard to your responsibility or what people might rely on you for. When you want “our” world, instead of yours, that’s what you pursue. That’s what you sacrifice for. That’s what measures your tolerance for risk and reward. This is why I need categories of friends and family. The vast majority of you are in no way willing or capable of being a Hatsam or Byron or my dad, as far as levels of reliability are concerned. (Even if one of them has sacrificed me in service to placating a fuckwit at the moment.)

It’s important to note that I’m only talking “selfishly” about myself and to the extent that anyone believes or cares that I’m trying to work and create for the benefit of more than myself over the course of the rest of our lives. I already had a fuck ton more money than most of you and I spent it all on space that could comfortably house, entertain, and potentially sustain you if “shit” gets even more “real” as the groups of people smarter and more specialized than me seem to suggest it will. And at least you fuckers at least like camping or going outside. I understand that in people’s lives they may have their own “I’ll always be there for you!” person they’ve never brought up to me or exhibit their proclivity and capacity in myriad other ways from donations of time or money across all of their interests and concerns. Cool. So how long can you, and you alone, sustain it? I started writing this after pausing in the middle of another beyond brilliant lecture of Jordan Peterson’s. He has so many intellectual heroes and absolutely amazing book recommendations, and I’ve gotten to the point where I hear a lot of the same analogies or stories and examples he likes to use across lectures. I’ve discovered some of his patterns. He points out that in order for something to be called “true,” as good a method as any is to see how and where what you’re claiming exists across time or disciplines. That some of his heroes managed to come to the questions and conclusions in their eras or with their limited scope but for imagination and intellectual rigor is mind-boggling for Peterson. Their answers are reliable. Their truths are transcendent. Their work reverberates throughout time into Jordan’s mouth and, often and scarily enough, as echos of things I’ve expressed at one level of abstraction or another over the years as well.

The more often I watch this phenomenon play out, it helps convince me there’s a right way to express the truth. There’s infinite ways to describe it or approach it, but the reliable and correct way has a signature. It’s someone’s “individual brilliance” that shines the brightest light on your own. It’s an articulation that wows and assures and pacifies all at once in its grandiosity. It’s the place at the end of the day that you recognize you’ve done an incalculable amount of work to understand in your own way as that person understood it in theirs. Is your time spent working on those truths? Are you surrounding yourself with people who provoke you to push your boundaries and expectations? Are you feeling motivated and creative? There’s a fundamental reliability in dreaming and knowing you’ll find a way. I want to do it with you, but mostly anymore, I’ll be fine simply showing you what I was getting at this whole time. *Bonus Blathering* The Edge of Chaos and Order I love talking about relationships. It is a source of perpetual intrigue to consider how two entire worlds of different people navigate each other, and then discuss the magic they create or disasters that befall them. I like when I get to learn peculiar and specific things about the players involved, but I also like to practice and rehearse things that I've figured out regarding my approach to relationships, and how they may parallel with the other person I'm talking to.

One of those well-rehearsed examples is the idea of honest communication. No matter how many times I stressed it in my own relationship, my ex wasn't honest with me. My "ideal," which should be read as a practical approach attempting to account for reality, was to have an honest relationship first, whatever baggage and connotation you put into "girlfriend" or "open relationship" second. What I'm learning is that this simply doesn't seem to be a skill you can learn without a considerable amount of work or, presumably self-respect.

A reason I used to spend a considerable amount of time trying to define "friend" was that I took it for granted that people who stuck around for so long or related to the world in similar ways had not just the capacity, but willingness to keep being honest. I misled myself. Of course, because other people are fickle, "we grow apart" is as taken for granted as any other cliche. And it's not because there's an honest pursuit of respectable prospects at the opposite end of the human experience spectrum, what we're doing is substituting a shorthand for, "I just don't really give a fuck anymore, but I don't hate you and don't know what else to say."

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I’m that person who people pay attention to when they’re feeling a little lost or hopeless or reckless. They spend enough time with me to remind themselves why they’re not dating or marrying someone like me. They get a horrible thought or do something wrong, and they want to draw up a comparison to the craziest shit I can say or my morally blank assessment of their situation. I know this because I can recognize other people who serve as that kind of person for increasing levels of strangers. I play into a self-loathing cultural fetish that I attempt to force into becoming something real or personal. That isn’t really why they signed up.

It’s one of the truest statements about me, and next to no one can seem to figure it out. I’d rather have an honest “anything,” but the word is usually friendship, than a dishonest relationship. I just value honesty. If we need to separate, okay. If you don’t want me to come, tell me. If you need something I’m not providing, test me on whether I can do better with all the necessary information. This only happens with my most sociopathic or disinterested friends. Anyone with “too many feelings” always thinks it’s better to lie and create a bubble to burst later. They think tinkering with your capacity for trust and understanding is preferable to a difficult conversation. They are wrong.

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The stakes have just never felt that high. Tonight, I apparently talked too long or said or did something that got someone to get the doorman to tell me I should stop. I wasn’t wasted. I don’t think I blacked out. I engaged in a number of random conversations, and I honestly couldn’t tell you which one I did particularly poorly. I even asked the doorman what I had done so that I could avoid doubling down on the mistake as I wasn’t even sure what he was referring to. But situations like that feel a specific kind of hopeless. They make you feel like your “even” or “natural” state that just wants to talk and drink is wrong on its face. Will whatever I did haunt me for a week and prevent me from carrying on in life? Not really. What will happen though is I’ll be a tad less enthusiastic the next time I’m feeling social because, perhaps I’m missing something dire and important that needs better paying attention to. Building that resolve of “fuck it” though is a double edged sword. I’ll still find myself at the center of a group of strangers chatting them up. I’ll still, occasionally, text the absolute wrong person, though that desire was entirely nonexistent tonight. Overwhelmingly I think, who cares? So I managed to accidentally piss off another person. So I got in a polite conversation with a door guy who immediately shifted to my “side” when he realized whatever they were complaining about, it certainly wasn’t my oblivious inability to be coherent or polite. I don’t want to marinate in a “fuck it” approach to life, but I’m getting precisely zero insight as to why my [style?] isn’t a proper way to engage with the world. I’m mostly just focusing on the 1 out of 10 random conversations that didn’t seem to go right.

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I have this weird in-between feeling where I don’t want to die, but I’m kind of tired of “doing life.” I’m tired of getting into interactions that just leave everyone uncomfortable. I’m tired of putting myself out there as “whatever” be it chatty and friendly or stoic and quiet reading in the corner. I’m starting to detest what I’m writing about because I’m not even sure if it’s about anything. For some reason there’s been a number of Seinfeld parodies or allusions lately stating the “it’s a show about nothing” idea, and it’s reverberating in my head. I’m a show about nothing.


I don’t know what to do. I try to work all the time and always see the money disappear into repairs or the next expensive piece of living on the land. I try to sit around and watch TV and just feel guilty. I had to stop reading again because it all just piles up as a wave of sadness and problems I can’t fix. I feel lost. It’s hard to orient myself. Just as I stop doing one stupid thing after a night out drinking I pick up something different that I can’t really account for. My underlying psyche wants to embarrass or compel me. To do what, I don’t know.


I wonder if I’m in a lot of pain and just don’t know how to access it. So I “feel social” and spend a little too much trying to force any semblance of “normal functioning person” who can just have a conversation and move on before the light of conscious acts flickers out and I’m being asked to leave. I’m antagonizing. I don’t want to be. I want to feel like I belong somewhere, but that somewhere is always on the verge of having me alienate myself from it. Hour long conversation with your dad in the middle of the night? Clearly, I needed some stability.

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The fact that this is written in little semi-relevant to each other blurbs I think speaks to the fractioning of my mind. I think I recall that my grandmother on my mom’s side of the family was institutionalized for a spell. There could be some genetic “crazy” or sadness lurking in my mind that’s only exacerbated by my fledgling conception of my place in the world. It feels the most hopeless when I can’t even work. When the things I identify as important to me are always frozen. When opportunities for cash are closed off because I’ve become a mental case. My old shitty car acts old and shitty and I can’t even sit in a parking lot with the air conditioning on. I need to stop drinking in public, and I need to never be awake for hangover days.

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I’m stuck in time. I don’t feel progress. I can put myself into moments that happened years ago. Where did I go? Who did I become? What changed so dramatically that I can’t get the same kind of results? Or have I remained so stuck as the world managed to change?

[xx-13] Details

This is not normal, not worth reading, and is something of a meditative exercise I thought would be good to do, for unknown reasons, around 12:30 p.m. today. It seems that pushing 12:30 a.m. seems oddly appropriate and full circle. You won't want to read it. It won't be thoughtful. It won't provide insight. I'm just trying to remember.

I woke up at 7:45 a.m. and made myself available to work for the delivery company.
I made a dreary-eyed swipe through facebook and then rolled over and proceeded to go back into my half-asleep half-awake state that carries me until close to 11 a.m. when the company opens for business.
As has been his habit, Ike, the dog, spent a portion of that sleep time also asleep nestled against me.
11 a.m. comes around and I haven't been pinged on.
I find this frustrating, mess around on my computer, and begrudge my phone to go off with the familiar sound that signifies they need me at the kitchen.
I decided to download and transfer some show files to my tablet.
I get tired of waiting and decide to drive to the kitchen regardless.
I park next to the queue and pull out a clarinet which I practice for a half hour before getting pinged.
I continue to play, confused by why the A has a resistance the lower notes don't.
For Saturday around lunch there's 3 drivers and it's fairly slow.
I watch an episode of Friends from College while delivering 2 orders.
While I'm waiting on my third order, I get a notification that an item I posted on Ebay sold.
I did not think that item was ever going to get sold, and my day took an entirely different direction.
Now I was concerned about what had happened to the item, heat wraps, because I was sure they had gotten packed and mixed up in the flurry of moving recently.
It's around 1 p.m. and all I can do is try to imagine where I last saw the heat wraps.
I had one pack of hot wraps, 1 pack of cold wraps, and I thought I had made special pains to put them somewhere fairly easily accessible in the off chance they actually sold.
I look through my car and take things out of my trunk.
I attempt to visualize if they were somehow in the apartment I'm staying in and I just lost track.
I decide until I explore every corner where I suspect they might be, I'm not going to be able to relax.
I decided to sign myself off of work and drive to my plot of land and garage.
First, I had to drive back to the apartment and grab my van keys in case I left them in there, and I also had to check in on and lock Ike up.
I put Ike in the bathroom with his food and water because he hasn't shit the last few times I took him out and I think his crate is too small to be trapped in for too long.
I leave the apartment and get halfway through the parking lot before I realize I forgot the key.
I return and grab it while scolding myself for forgetting the exact reason I even bothered to drive back to the other side of town in the first place.
I start driving to the plot and start another episode of Friends from College.
The ride felt like it took longer than I wanted, but the mission came first.
I parked my car next to my van and went to search it for the wraps.
The sun is out and I'm immediately drenched in sweat.
I begrudgingly marvel at my body's ability to retain water as I wipe sweat off my sunglasses, which have a habit of sliding off my face already.
I walk to my shed  and proceed to rearrange and pick through some of the places I thought I would have put them.
I find my refrigerator magnets and decide I want to finally put them on the wall that separates the back from front in the van.
I walk to the van and arrange them after a fruitless search does not turn up the wraps.
I decide to open the garage door and stare ominously at my moving truck.
Part of my general list of tasks is to move house things from the truck to the garage and storage shed things to the broken moving truck.
There is a chance the wraps are in one of the boxes at the back of the truck.
I decided to open the truck, and find that the bay glass window at the gate has shifted just enough that I can only open it about 6 inches.
Proceeded to pull up and down until I've splashed too much sweat on my glasses and start really feeling the heat coming down from the sun.
I think maybe I can jostle the window forward by lunging the moving van and hitting the breaks.
The van does not really run, inches forward and dies.
I grab a mop and try to inch the window back a bit.
Much to my surprise, it works and I get the door up most of the way before it catches on a table that has also shifted.
I grab the pills and stuffed animal bags I used to buffer the window and throw them in the shed.
I take the last 2 pillows and put them on the ground as I rotate and place the end of the bay glass window onto them.
I walk the window from each end to the garage door and hoist and push it into the shed.
I take the mini fridge, white boards, mattresses, and table from the truck and put them into the shed as well.
I open the toy chest, which didn't have the wraps, so I put it aside.
I open the freezer, which had scattered tools and things I kept behind the bar, but no wraps.
I take out the black gutter tubing I found for free on Craigslist and lay it on the ground next to the garage.
I take out the bar stools I said I'd put at the counter in the apartment.
I glance at the back of the van, one of my stadium seating platforms laid on top of other things my path to them.
I shuffle along  the platform feeling all of the vehicle keys and lock for the back of the van in my pockets.
I learn how hot the top of the moving truck is.
I decide to take a break and go back to my car with the bar stools and sit in the air conditioning for a while.
I pick ticks off my jeans and flick them back into the weeds.
I swap out my better looking ill-fitting glasses for poorly colored better fitted ones.
After a solid portion of sweat dries, I walk back to the van and continue the search.
One by one I do a bad dismantling of the boxes that I think the wraps would be in.
I pick up rope, video game controllers, and my drum pad, but no wraps.
Literally everything I own is now in these two "rooms" and I can't find them.
I'm tired, hot, and incredibly uncomfortable with the amount of ticks accumulating on my body.
I decide to pack up and leave. I close and lock the doors on the shed and start walking back to the car.
Forgetting my drum pad, controllers, and rope, I turn around and retrieve them.
I sit in my car and take in the air conditioning for 2 minutes before I decide to do one last sweep of the van.
I open the driver's side door and see a line of ants crawling in the crevasse.
I use a napkins to sweap them out, concerned they had discovered the flavoring I leave in the van.
I open the side door and pick up each mildewy cushion and stack them on a counter, despite knowing I had just done as much a week ago when I used them to protect solar panels.
I confirm there's nothing, lock all the doors and return to my car.
I make it 100 feet down the gravel-ish path before a tick falls out of my hair onto the back of my neck.
I do another tick check and find 2 more, all of which I use a quarter to saw through on my dashboard.
I continue to drive, scratching at my head hoping to dislodge more ticks I cannot feel through my hair.
I spend the first 20 minutes of the drive humming songs I can't remember to myself and poorly belting out Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" which has been stuck in my head for over a week.
I decided to start another episode of Friends from College.
I eyeballed several McDonalds as I drove home as I was craving a Coke, finally attempting to stop at the one in Elletsville only to find the service too slow the the drive-thru as long as the previous one's I skipped.
I left the McDonals without ordering anything and decided to go to Wal-Mart for anti-tick help.
I took the wrong exit and had to take a back road to get to 2nd Street.
I was stopped in traffic by a train.
Upon arriving to Wal-Mart, I proceed to the garden section and contemplate buying 2 bags of bug repellent, but settle for one, and then find the Deet containers which I slipped 2 of into my back pocket.
I walked to the front of Wal-Mart past 8 aisles before finding a cooler than held the Coke.
I pay for my bag of bug-repellent dust and Coke and leave.
I get back to the apartment and realize I've forgotten to buy a replacement heat wrap to send to the buyer on Ebay.
I go back to Wal-Mart and find the heat wrap.
I pay with a store-credit card I've forgotten to use the last 3 times I've been to that store.
I return to the apartment and attempt to access the shipping label from Ebay.
I retrieve my printer from the closet and borrow my projector cord having misplaced the ones that didn't fit securely in the printer during the move.
I attempt to set it up to wirelessly print with my chromebook.
I learn a half dozen ways why my model of printer will not work with my chromebook and I individually put in the wifi password twice, scrolled letter by scrolled letter, because I didn't realize it could differentiate between capitalized and lowercase letters.
I grab my other broken screen laptop and plug it into the TV.
I plug the printer into the laptop.
Not being set up on the wifi yet, it doesn't download the printer drivers.
I connect to the wifi and download both the simple and complete version of the drivers for my printer.
The simple do not install.
The complex require me to run into my settings and enable something I don't know how it got disabled.
I install the larger package and reset my computer.
I re-open the pages with the shipping label and pay for and print it.
I make myself available to work again.
I put my bowl of previously cooked tater-tots in the microwave, 20 seconds after which I get pinged on to work.
One of the roommates enters with his girlfriend.
I let the microwave finish and bring my label and and heat wraps with me.
I arrive and run inside to grab a Sierra Mist.
I get back to my car and watch Friends from College and finish off my tots.
I make two deliveries, one in the same apartment complex I'm staying in across town a half hour before close.
I decide to go back to the kitchen just in case for any last minute orders.
I go inside for a Sierra Mist and Mountain Dew combination drink and talk and joke with some of the kitchen staff.
They start to clean up and I return to my car.
I sit there finishing an episode as no further orders come in.
I return to the apartment.
I search my clothes for a complete set and realize I'm out of clean underwear.
I grab my normal clothes and a pair of swim trunks and take them to the shower.
I examine myself in the large mirror for more ticks and take extra time brushing my fingers through my hair and scratching my scalp.
I get done, dressed, and take to the couch to start writing this.
I engage in small talk with a roommate
A little later the roommate's girlfriend comes in and inquires if I'm to be here tonight.
I explain my circumstances but also take the hint.
I put on shorts and proceed to the bars.
On the drive I realize though I just got out of the shower I forgot deodorant and used the emergency cologne I keep in the car.
I park in the garage around the corner from The Back Door.
I hear the music from the street, walk in and pay the $2 cover, and proceed to the bar.
I order a PBR because it's the cheapest thing on the menu and tip $.50
I watch the different groups around me and catch a girl do a lean to check out if I'm hot.
She concludes I'm not to her friends and retort in my head that she has 2 years left of wearing shorts like that.
I drink the PBR before going to the dance floor.
I dance for 4 or 5 songs, sometimes next to one girl in particular, but not with her.
I return to the bar for another PBR and wipe down my face with the bar napkins.
An acquaintance walks in and does not like my cold peace sign flash to his wave as he heads to the bar.
We banter a bit about the proper kind of introductions in the future.
I head back to the dance floor for 2 more songs before I decide to head outside to the porch.
I stand against the railing for a few minutes and check my phone before wandering away mouthing the words to the song playing.
I walk around the corner to the taco truck outside of Atlas.
I accidentally obscure a couple checking out the menu which I was looking for as well.
I order a $3 chicken taco and make a circle around the cook standing in different places as I wait.
A very drunk mid 40's hair stylist notices and compliments my hair.
She stumbles up to me while her friend tries to reign her in.
I let her play with my hair and tell me how she thought I might be someone her sister recently started dating in town.
Her friend thanks me for letting her play with my hair and corrals her back to where they were standing.
I get my taco, a fork, and a napkin and start to eat and wander around again.
I cross the street to where the other Taco dealers were and continued down past The Comedy Attic.
I decided to sit up on a small wall the separates the parking lot and street.
I hear music from The Root Cellar and contemplate popping in for a second.
The light above my head goes out.
A drunk-enough guy walks up to me and says he's putting out the word that there's some seriously messed up drugs going around in town after asking me if I was from here.
He explains he's seen too many good people die for no reason and that he doesn't judge what I might do, but just to be careful.
I tell him I've seen the lights from all of the recent overdoses, but I don't do those kind of drugs.
He says he doesn't either and we fist bump and he leaves telling me to take care.
I walk back to my car in the parking garage and am tempted to steal a city ladder laid in the level below it.
I drive back listening to the DJ mash-up of the most popular radio station.
I get home and continue to write this.
A roommate comes out of his room, grabs laundry, places Ike in the crate, and goes back to his room.
I flirt with closing my eyes for the night and lazily scan for a place to add more unnecessary detail.
I add a few more and decide I can return to this later despite feeling it has served its purpose; a purpose I still cannot define.
I adjust my way too old and irritating contact lens, scratch my chest, end this sentence and click publish.

[621] Imperialist Inch

I think I'm perpetually in the wrong. I don't mean in the matter-of-fact way of just being a small-minded human who doesn't know anything. It's more that my perspective seems to lend itself to whatever is exactly wrong about any given moment, and then I find myself drowning either from my own blindness or, of course, small-mindedness.

I've complained about it for a while, but I never know what to make of it. I'm not over the top "woe is me" about my capacity or number of friends, but I do feel as though were I to stop insisting on being so "active" in sharing things I've read or writing bitchy blogs, it would take a rather long time for any of them to reach out to me for a drink or for lunch or to check in if I was okay.

I don't know how to feel about that. One, I haven't run the experiment, though I'm writing this here and not on facebook because I think it's about to commence. Two, I don't know what I, or why I, bother to expect anything from them anymore. It's like, for the purposes of remaining sane, I need to "calm down" and "remain normal" and just do stupid shit, share stupid pictures, and make every conversation about ingratiating ourselves towards some time passing activity. Hear that? I might finally be able to see the cum-your-pants beauty of the mountains after all.

Of course ironically, when I feel I should just shut up and be watching, I can't seem to clean out my head. I've written every day for like the last five, and I don't think any second of it has sounded particularly happy or suggestive that I'm living under anything but outright hellish conditions. I don't have a mind that lets things go easily. So when I get an idea and can't see it come to fruition, it eats at me. When I make a statement about who I am or wish to be, and can't see it manifest soon enough, I feel like a total fraud.

In reality, I'm significantly more concerned with "life in general" than I am myself though. The only reason I feel so dramatic is because I genuinely believe and expect people to be doing better than they are. I expect them to communicate. I expect them to follow through and be honest and real. It can't be "naive" or "stupid" or "pointless" to expect these things of people, despite, and perhaps especially because of these trying times. But I just get silence. I get likes. It takes a friend flying in from across the country to get 4 people in the same room together having drinks or watching a movie. I didn't see a ton of side eye and angry comments directed my way. It's not something stupid like, "Well, they just hate me!"

It easy enough for me to conjure a dozen reasons "no one would want to hang out with me." I rarely express an interest in the things they like. I just don't care about Rocket League or whatever the newest Halo-adjacent game is. I'm sorry, but I stopped caring about those things when I got a car. My opinion hasn't improved nor is my head stimulated. I can't rejoice in the office politics of the job you all share. I can't empathize with the drama of wasting my time around people I hate for less money than I'm worth. I've moved on from that level of connectedness. I want more to come from my money and effort than stress and cliches. I don't ever want the motivated edge to ever really be taken off. I want to remain guilting myself every day that I didn't inch forward. That's no fun when all you care to do is get-by and have a meager escape on the weekends.

But I watch myself too. I recall when we went to Colorado. I had one of my friends reflexively say I thought everything we did sucked or said something negative about the trip. I hadn't, and I specifically and deliberately hadn't because it's not a secret that I'm not spending most of my time wandering up mountains or getting eaten by bugs in the woods. No one needed to hear that, and I had a significantly good time just being around friends, which is usually my only point of seeing them. But just the fact that she reflexively thought and said that was telling. She retracted when I called it out, but still. There's a, not necessarily helpful cloud around me even when I'm doing nothing to contribute to it.

My concern for myself is the feeling of being trapped. I don't always want to feel stuck. And it really is stuck. I can do the math that says I can create a quasi-livable place in my field in a month or two where I'm likely still shitting in a bucket and waking up every hour to the sound of dueling banjos in my dreams. But every day I don't get pinged on to work, is another I'm literally waiting around to get pinged on to work. I can "research" things I'll have to look up again anyway. I can read soul-crushing world news. But it's mostly wheel spinning.

People say that when they have overwhelming anxiety or depression, it's like they aren't even them. They lose a certain kind of control. I have that same sense about me without all of the chemical fuckery. I haven't felt like me in a long ass time. I've felt like a bunker version of me. I've stockpiled a pragmatic philosophy and enough solipsistic proclamations to sustain me indefinitely, but what does that have to do with "me?" How is that living? It's not enough for me to get by or simply achieve. I excel. I crush it. I do it the fastest. I try insanely hard to never simply talk about it, but be about it.

I remember a final test in one of my psychology/history classes. I'd spent most of it like I usually do, dicking around on my computer and taking a handful of bad notes. I'd managed to spend the entire class doing this and gotten by well enough. The final comes along and I decide to actually study. I line up all the names we had to know and the things they accomplished. I played little memory games and made associations. It took maybe around an hour. The next day in class we sit down to take the test and I burn through it. I burned through it fast enough that I thought I had done something wrong. This was a 400 level class my senior year of something within my major, there were plenty of smart, engaged kids who were still working and not nearing the end. After looking around and doing a quick once over, I turned it in and felt like I did in elementary school.

The point of that story is only to highlight that school doesn't set the conditions for you to excel and that test wasn't particularly hard; I did get an A. It's that the feeling of being first, of finding the "cheat" to better remember something or do the work or put exactly the amount of time required without wasting has been a staple of my being since childhood. On paper, I'll look like that cliche "smart kid" "who just gets things easily or faster than others." No, I've played a game of wrote memorization my entire life. It's not enough to quantify whether someone has the capacity to be a wise or productive individual.

But moments like that make me look like an outlier. They make me feel different. No one else treated the class as callously. When I was in class, no one else even picked up their fucking heads and looked around the goddamn room. That being a phenomenon that still scares the shit out of me. You're in a room with 40 to 200 people, and over the course of an hour, sitting in the corner looking back at them all, not a single one will catch your eye? How does that not make you feel fucking weird or "outside" of something? I know there are hardly proper definitions of "normal," but I've ran that particular experiment in dozens of classrooms and haven't found the other person looking back.

Part of me feels like a giant portion of my life is a total accident. I found drug studies by accident and managed to accumulate more wealth than, at least what the statistics state, most people on the planet let alone my cohort despite all of the useless soulless jobs everyone barely survives. I found a job that let's me take indefinite amounts of time off and pays more than any delivery job should. I have the framework for my own completely owned livable space that costs me next to nothing that will allow me the freedom to explore my interests. Part of it feels like an accident, but a larger part feels like it's from my intense relationship to "reality."

It was real for me that I wasn't going to get that "normal" job and be able to save and create on the weekends. It's real for me that I don't want to watch my dad suffer like my grandma in my living room one day with mounting idiots and resentment piling on around me. It's real for me the utility of people who listen to what I say and mutually invest in ideas. I have concrete dollar amounts. I have concrete time frames. I have practical failings. I'm not a dreamer. I try in spite of myself every single day. I choke down the "wasted" time and "self-indulgence" of media. I poorly practice instruments and pray my car won't die. It's real for me the rot that sets in when you give up on being extraordinary. It's real how much faster I can still operate while the rest of the world doesn't want to even lift their head up.

And it hurts. And it's insanely lonely. Even the ones who believe in me and would cheer me on aren't "there." They aren't next to me. They aren't budgeting to help. They aren't weed whacking. I'm the "hands off creative A-type personality" that's either too intense or too guilt-inducing. Again, even if I go out of my way to avoid any suggestion of being as such. I don't know where I exist in the social space because I always have to either be inserting myself into one or find myself lamenting no one cares to invite me into the seemingly most obvious ones. I do have friends that come out and invite me to things, of course. Never let those kinds of sentiments ring too loud.  I think it's that we both know I want more than a beer though.

A big part of it is that I don't feel I contribute. I want to provide and no one wants what I'm offering. Moreover, I start appealing to "the masses" and they take what I have and find every way possible to denigrate it or me or reconfigure it to something not worth their time. That part gets so fucking ridiculous. I know it's a small portion of people who ever choose to open their mouths, but why does it always have to be the angriest and the dumbest? If you're not willing to translate what you're saying into "reddit speak" or "humble braggart" no one seems to understand direct explicit speech. Or, they don't want to understand it because that would betray the times. That might obligate them to take responsibility for the wrong "interpretations." The world is such a clusterfuck of ill-defined words and teeter-tottering between truthful self-respect and entertainment, how many people exist like me who just give a shit about accuracy and accountability? 2 politicians?

I don't want to be so pent up. I don't want the headache. I don't want to resent my circumstances when every other minute of my day is reading about someone else's who are dramatically, so dramatically worse. Again, it's not "me." It's not "my life" that is the problem. It's my audience, or lack thereof. I'm a comic whose constantly bombing, not because the jokes aren't funny, but because the audience is high on the fumes of social decay. They're in their smartphones looking for another distraction, not an opportunity to be bothered about all it is they aren't doing to fix it. And given that's all I seem to be able to offer myself, and you can rate my capacity to keep hanging on by reading the last 5 blogs or so, what sheer hell would that cause a "normal" person?

Part of the reason I persist is that I think I'm magic. I think consciousness is the most intriguing thing. I think the capacity for language and the ability to create are inexhaustible and undefinable until you capture then, somehow, in words, in dance, in music, and in the interaction only you can have with the people you surround yourself with. So every "arbitrary" day waiting around is me watching the magic die. Every moment I have the motivation to run into my next project or fixing an obvious issue, but can't, I feel helpless and crippled. Every fucking moment. This is the drama of my mind. All of this bullshit about "be in the now." I AM! I'm too in the now. Right now I want to be making the garage livable. Right now I want to be drunk with a dozen friends. Right now I want to be in a music lesson on one of my dozen instruments. Right now, every day right now, and instead I have to sit for 11 hours and take rich people their over-priced food, averaging $50 a day that in 2 months will set me up well enough to still have to shit in a bucket, provided my car doesn't explode, I don't get sick, or some other bullshit life thing kicks in.

It's never been about "can" for me. It's always when. When is it my turn to shine as bright as I can? When do I get to set pinnacle examples of what's in my head? When do I get to work efficiently and methodically until I'm lost in the task having exhausted any further thought or tweak to it? When can I stop writing because I'm doing such a damn good job doing? When can my statements stop being these tepid hopes and dreams and again return to actionable consequences. "Would you, maybe, kinda, like to come out to a fire sometime?" Fuck that, I've got this dope ass fire everyone should be at, fuck you if you can't make it. That's how the party house was. That was the pride I took in creating the coffee shop. That's the rush I'm using to cope with picking ticks out of my hair and the foreign landscape that is a field in cousin-fuck Indiana where I'll be able to build any number of things and experiment indefinitely.

Why am I the only one that finds that exciting?

[620] Please Provide

I don’t particularly believe in karma. While it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that if you create a shitty environment or continually make bad decisions things will have a way of catching up to you, karma to me has come across as a kind of equation. To the degree you engender value and truth or “good works,” you’re setting yourself up to get as much in kind, and the same goes for acting like an asshole. If that’s the technical definition or not, I’m less concerned with given that’s how it’s used colloquially and what I’m most speaking to. I bother to bring up karma because I feel I must have something terrible I have yet to account for that is working its hardest to convince me karma is real and my circumstances are overwhelmingly my fault.

I have a superpower. I have a number of superpowers, but the one that’s most prevalent is the ability to say something true, in that no one disagrees with it, it’s bolstered by independent minds across different levels of experience, it’s perfectly capable of being contradicted and updated, but for all pragmatic intents and purposes, it remains true; upon saying something true, I transform into my supervillain alter-ego “The Enemy” and I force you to do everything in your power to mischaracterize and poorly judge not only what’s been said, but me as a person saying it. The special caveat for this power is that it goes into overdrive when I’m attempting to doing something “good.”

It plays out like this. I offer someone who lives out of their van or camper a practically free spot to park indefinitely if they’re willing to help me mow some grass or start some project. In response I’m mocked for being naive by “not saving enough and wanting someone to pay for your goals.” Did you feel the childish malice burning at the heart of my offer? I’m open to being wrong, but I’m not wrong, and it wasn’t malicious nor particularly naive. I wanted to do something nice, create, and attract someone who might be able to help.

It also plays out like this. A conversation is difficult and I ask earnest questions hoping to understand someone. They tell me I’m not willing to talk, don’t care how they feel, and have, no exaggeration, a dozen character flaws as to why I’ll never be worth talking to. Now, I thought when you’re trying to understand someone you ask them questions. We constantly talk over each other and use our ignorant judgments and poor perceptions. But again, in asking how to better relate or better understand, you know, do “good” by the conversation, we hear the engines rev on my corrupted mortal soul that would dare commit such treachery.

It plays out like this as well. I work extremely hard. I work hard enough that I throb, that I pass out, that I drench myself in sweat, and smell, and hurt things that I never want to risk hurting any more severely than they have been in the past. I’ve turned “bullshit” teenager jobs into opportunities to shine. I’ve risen in ranks. I’ve gotten the good grades. I’ve always kept the rent paid. I’ve cleaned up after other people’s messes. I’ve given freely of my time and offered money I kinda-sorta but not really have. In my gigantic life of setting these kinds of examples I’m met with silence and disdain. No matter what I’m willing to sacrifice or bring to the table, it’s never good, certainly never good enough.

Now, I don’t pretend I don’t know why this is. What scares me is that I don’t know why I continue to advocate or try, in a sense, in service to people. As long as he remains relevant I’ll keep bringing him up, but if I understand how to “walk with the Lord” like Noah, as Jordan Peterson explains, as god washes away the infinitely corrupted soul of man that has killed off it’s ideal, and build the fucking arc, how should I understand you not wanting to be on it? I want to know how anything less than striving to be the most consequential being possible is preferred? Aren’t you guilty? Don’t you feel helpless and full of the kind of questions that can’t really be answered? Don’t you feel lazy? You’re not annoyed with yourself with your pats on the back and fake ass associates?

It will always bug me to know how, again explicitly, but truthfully, I can be wrong or the bad guy, and the only thing people are concerned with doing is tearing down, ignoring, or reformulating my best efforts into something patently stupid or malicious. Recall, me and Hatsam made around 3K a month in something I started in 4 months under horrible exploitative conditions. If even 1 or 2 people in key positions had my back in a real way, that money would have been what fueled a land buy or the coffee van or that fund that makes sure every friend can fly out to every wedding or vacation spot. If I were to tell that story to the infinite well of shit that is reddit though? “Well, sounds like you didn’t think about x, y, and z, idiot. Personally, I never would have done like you!”

I keep asking, “What am I doing wrong?” It could be the wrong question. It could be worded incorrectly. It could have an easy answer I don’t know how to understand or accept. But I only know how to approach my place in the world by asking questions about it and situating myself in the process of addressing my answers.

“Do you ever want to end up stuck by a dead-end job or poverty?”
No.
“What have you done to avoid your fate?”
Opened businesses, kept my expenses low. Worked nonstops or learned new skills.
“Is that enough?”
No, business takes more capital and time than is allowed for when you’re obligated to other means of getting money. Life requires breaks.
“What is your response?”
I took my savings and moved towards a less than ideal living situation, but it makes my expenses dirt cheap and allows me to take practically any job and still have the time and money to move forward.
“Move forward on what?”
I care about, arguably, too many things. I want to contribute to a smarter political system. I care about the environment and sustainability. I care about healthcare. I want to feel safer from unnecessary war. I want to learn a ton of skills and instruments.
“Do you think you can really do all that?”
Yes. I see problems as interrelated, and I have a method for combining root causes that could create a general wave of necessary fixing consequences in better accounting for how things go wrong.
“What’s stopping you?”
I don’t have anyone to help me. I can only make so much money on my own time. I’m getting older and can feel it. And apparently, no matter what problems I can state in my life regarding achieving my goals, every single person around me is dramatically more hard up and busy.
“Can you fix that another way?”
All I can do is keep asking, and be met with the vitriol, or have the patience to do it all by myself and then offer it to people I anticipate will only resent and ignore me further.
“Why bother?”
If I go bad, I go really bad.
“This seems like the part where I tell you either ‘good luck!’ or ‘you’re fucked!’ whatever goes down easier.”
Definitely the being fucked option. I’m going to choke the next person who thinks what I’m doing is primarily about luck, passion, or enthusiasm.

I think I figured out that catch-22 when something I'm doing is called "naive" or "idealistic." First, what are we to make of a "naive" person? They have hopes and dreams that outpace their perspective right? They want to run a business but don't know if they're capable of the hours it takes. They want to rent a building, but didn't know real estate taxes and liquor licenses can be a bitch. They want to fall in love! But didn't realize bitches be crazy and the deluge of modern conditioning that directly contradicts the biology and history. To call someone else naive is to at once claim your own brand of wisdom and dismiss what they desire as unrealistic.

So when someone wants to call me naive, I have to wonder what they pretended to read with regard to what I want. Surely, it's not naive to want to live in a sustainable way. It's not naive to think I can count and quote and arrange the information I read in mapable and argumentative ways. It's not impossible to relate to someone open and honestly and work together in mutual sacrifice for more than you can achieve alone. What part of my being is particularly naive?

My revulsion to this caricature is to reference the waterfall of reasons things go to shit. Well, this costs money and that costs more money, and when you even try to account for this, that guy is going to fuck you, that girl is going to lie to you, you're going to be picking ticks out of your hair for hours, you'll get sick or hurt, and did you see all of that bullshit looming over there? THEN I'M CALLED NEGATIVE! MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MINDS PEOPLE! Am I too inexperienced, too stupid, or just too down on myself that's at the heart of all my problems? Is my ability to do math that severely under question? "No one wants to work with a negative person, gasp! No one wants to work with pie-in-the-sky dreamers not grounded in reality, bleh!"

And news flash, YOU'RE NOT FUCKING SAYING ANYTHING HELPFUL. You don't fill in the blank with the gaping hole in my perspective. You don't offer anything enlightening or uplifting. You just label. You just judge. You just haw and caw and gab like you're capable of doing shit but barely keeping your head above water. You "like" and say "congratulations!" at every fragile inch that took an unnecessarily long amount of time.

I wish I ever heard of you having goals. I wish I could put on my balance sheet $50 or $100 a month to send your way so that it could be thrown in my face while everyone else on board with you deserves thanks for their contributions. It's because it's me right? Something about me is what makes it dirty or wrong or resentful. Or worse, you don’t even have goals. You don’t actually care about anything but yourself. And instead of saying so it’s my job to slowly morph into the same spiteful resentful animal as you. No doubt, you’re winning.

[619] Ventricle

I'm exhausted. First my eyes hurt, then my back hurts, then I think somewhere between my lungs just beneath my heart oh does my soul ache. My head is too heavy. The terrible food I eat has decided to stop going to my ass and stomach and instead has clogged my brain. Trust me, I got my degree in psychology, I know that's how the brain works. Over time your neural pathways can't handle the gunk of ranch dressing and cheeseburger grease and you end up having a stroke. Sometimes your heart, ever the romantic, is stricken with grief watching what's happening in your head and panics, sometimes accidentally killing you sooner, with no ironic situational awareness.

Your heart can be too sincere like that. It can cry so hard that it floods your body. It can pump so fast it pops right out of your chest. It carries on in earnest without a second thought as to what it should be doing every moment of every day and night. It doesn't stop to ask how you're doing. It's the heart! It already knows you're running on its effort and enthusiasm! Whatever's looming can be bypassed. If you're feeling blue, it'll make you fresh and flush again in no time. It has a purpose, so you do too. Keep pumping.

The rest of your body cries out in protest of this tyrannically cheerful vessel. "If I pump like you, I'll snap in two!" The muscles shout angrily. "If I pump too fast, my neurons are out of gas!" The brain and nervous system screech. "If I pump like that, you won't walk about only worried for your mother's back!" The spine crackles. The heart, undeterred, sends the same signal each time to their shock and dismay no heart thinks it will experience one day in a trauma bay.

The heart was born and raised to be a belief engine. It sprung from the beliefs of hearts previous who would bleed until empty to see it succeed. The heart needs to only know one thing. It will sing the same thing on repeat replete that it is not just meat but a gushing of meaning made manifest by belief. Therefore, it believes. It believes fast and slow, but always in the go, go, go. In the flow and the swell and glow on your skin when it's called to step in. It's spent time in your guts and taken over for your brain and, on occasion, held those muscles together in ways they recoil and call insane. It knows the power of belief and is keen to rev its engine and be seen.

If only the heart were not so single minded! Surely it knows that the blood with which it flows needs the rise and fall of the lungs and jaw. It must realize it's situated between pheromoned pits that spit at twits who let it get jittery and lit. It can't even produce spit to fit the food it takes to garnish its two-bit posture. It's not even half of what it takes to make a man as a chorus of skin and phalanges squeeze and twiddle in the breeze. "Even a sneeze requires more faculties than consist of your ideology!" The throat gurgles over curled toes.

The heart carries on as though without ears to hear the snarled slights of its peers. The heart can't be bothered to pump out such jeers or raise up in fear like the hair on your rear. It's got more than busy work to get through while you whistle and woo about the importance of what it is you do. The heart knows how you work, as it sends you the tools, you jerk, so stop twerking and learn how to just keep working! A heart is only as patient as the oxygen within, and these blow hards can be quite a strong wind. How does one find you can breathe with ease when given enough room they'd equate you with knees! Please let me pump in peace, it thinks, no closer removed from its core esteem.

An engine of steam with fire eternal. A kernel unpopped despite all the heat. A spark and a squeeze, to yes, power those knees and tease those lungs to get choked up and befuddle the tongue flapping lousy as the rungs trying to swing from your monkey brain. The heart knows the chain. Protest in vein that swings round again to the fountain of youth. The heart knows the game of how to throw spades and shine diamonds in your eyes over a prize winning Cloverdale. The heart knows the wit it takes to spit and shit back the halfwit crit from intellecti-bitches who sit stuck humming and buzzing about the latest bull until it makes them sick. The heart has pumped that before, now so assured it can all but ignore the minefield outside its single cracked smile. A heart so divine, defined by the pump when the words are too much and the eyes are too heavy and the back wants to hunch.

[618] Don't Wanna Be

This might be one of the least well-thought out premises I’ve tried to start a blog with in a while, but I have my suspicions I want to see where they take me.

I don’t react to happiness well. I don’t trust it. I have a certain guilt about it. I even make a distinction between “laughing” and “joking” and happiness. I can laugh myself to tears nearly every day. But very little feels at stake. Maybe the joke works, maybe it bombs. Maybe it was the most inappropriate comment I’ve made in the last 6 months, but who cares? There’s a level of indulgent affirmative “joy” in that kind of carrying on, but it’s not what provokes me to search for the darkest of the dark sentiments and behavior to quash happy rumblings.

My first thought is that this seems to make sense to me. Who gets off being happy? The “happiest” times that mostly have been relayed to me have been considered some of the most self-centered delusion dives into Olympic grade contortion bullshit. My “happy” family was filled with selfish children happy to obliterate the examples set by my grandparents. Rarely do I see a “happy” marriage that doesn’t coyly hide behind the word “compromise” or evolve into the “special wisdom” of selective honesty. In fact, the longest marriages I’m aware of had the most egregious examples of abuse a longing heart could ever ask for.

Beyond the realm of what I’ve encountered in my family, I get an onslaught of media that in one form or another seeks out a celebration of some form of “happy” be it the level of comfort terrible characters have with their terrible selves, or the frilly and quaint on again off again couple games predicated on zero perspective and faux high stakes. Attempting to mimic some or all of these graphic depictions are facebook and Instagram where a smile and a laugh carry on for a veritable eternity at what you might remember being the world’s most boring party. And just to interject for the sake of it, I hate that Pharrell song.

Happiness, for me, is a kind of impossibly dangerous and delusional self-assuredness akin to pride. In a way, it’s better for me and you to always be suspect of each other. It’s not to be preferred that I can simply trust you or your motivations. I have to wake up hungover the next morning from what was arguably an amazing night and feel haunted that the only part of it that mattered was some ill-advised come on or text that really mattered. I mean, that’s been my experience too. What was once months of solidarity and drunken fun turned into a silent coup which to this day I can’t account for in terms beyond resentful jealousy.

Happiness as well carries with it what to me feels like a lie. I’m contented beyond all reason. I’m down, I’m prepared, I’m good to joke or work or carry on well-enough. But I’m certainly not happy. I don’t think we do enough work to think of our lives like this. It’s unhealthy and weird when people are too or always happy. We call it manic. We call them naive. They get exhausting and are prone to a very particular kind of self-deception. The more unnecessary celebration, errant clapping, fruitless likes, the larger the wall between combating and digesting your real lived experience, living instead in service to the facade.

What I wish I had better control of was my insistence that I aggressively pursue the wrong course of action to drive my happiness emotion to zero. Usually drunk, I pick up my phone or pull every awkward pointless comment out of my ass to text exactly the wrong people. I’ve been fascinated by this for a while now because it shouldn’t be so complicated where the behavior comes from. It’s like I want nothing more than to prove to myself that my deepest skeptical angry stirrings about my interactions with these people are true, and I’m going to prove it this instant! All of the pussyfooting and cordiality and inconsistency becomes a provocation. Maybe now I’ve voiced it explicitly enough to be bored with it and never do it again.

I’ve never gotten anything but the cold slap of reality in experiencing happiness. I think a solid portion of the word consists of trust. Trust in your relationships or path. Trust that you’ll wake up and someone you were close to hasn’t betrayed you. Trust that whatever candle you’ve lit in your stomach for friends you haven’t seen in forever or time and money you’ve invested in something will come to fruition, even as it takes forever as well. I don’t take a million selfies and with myself surrounded by bullshit smiling faces. I want to see solar panels lined up in a tick-ridden field suggesting the sun can indefinitely power my internet habits until I’ve learned enough to matter to the degree that matches my ego and capacity. That’s the hottest I ever want my “happiness” to burn. I want to be proud of the work to come.

I don’t want to be as bad as those I accuse around me. I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m anything more or less than my most depressing balls-out disconcerting blog. That’s the underlying reality helping bolster my decisions and pursuits. I’m not an “optimist” or “happy” I drive around all day delivering food and it let’s me buy things and pursue projects I should have be able to complete 7 years ago. I’m not happy I sleep on a floor and have eaten barely sauced spaghetti for 8 of my last 10 meals. It’s better to say I can remain “sane” to the degree that I can express the depths of what my environment and decisions do to and for me. Whether or not it will be a meaningful story of the work that takes I’ll only know when bullshit behaviors stop sounding appealing.

In service to past ideas about being a reflection or perhaps have an overactive capacity for empathy that makes me have a shut-off valve for self-protection, perhaps that speaks to my problem with the lie at the heart of happiness as well. I don’t really see and reflect happy people, so what would I be doing? What am I reflecting if not a horrid pathology meant to disguise and run from what’s really going on? Were you genuinely happy to talk to me with your strong handshake and pearly whites, or did you think I didn’t notice you lean a little too hard into referring to your girlfriend as, your girlfriend. From impossible to hide petty insecurities to every forced grin and extra round, you’re not primarily surrounding yourself with “happy” people at the bar.

The bar, the video games, the drugs, the general lazy escapes and deceptions can only get you so far, and it isn’t that far. A great line I heard, again Jordan Peterson relating someone he studied, was, “Be wary of wisdom you didn’t earn,” with regard to the feelings and proclamations one comes to with drug use. Any “extra” layer of deceptive bullshit you introduce into your perspective can do the same thing though. A child can watch the same movie over and over, gratified it can see what’s coming and remain nestled in the familiarity. Do the life lessons and emotional impact of The Lion King really sink in for it though? It takes actually experiencing loss, being tricked by the malicious, and getting bored with and seeing though hakuna matata before being simply enamored by the colors and music starts to change.

As if I needed a reason to be “justified,” in writing, I feel I go above and beyond to earn what little I claim to know. My life isn’t about “getting by.” My example might at times be a horrifying or terrifying one, but to the best that I can speak to it, it will be mine. It will be one I can recognize and respect when you ever need to go there. It will continue to lambaste you and myself when I can’t seem to recognize what’s in the mirror. And anymore, with regard to most people in my life, I’m flying blind. Maybe it’s time to get out while you still can.

[617] Oops There Goes Another One

Like, ya’ll know I know I ain’t shit, right?

If i knew nothing else about this blog, I knew that was the first line. I’m feeling considerably more sickly than I thought I would when I set out to write. Imagine a half digested Steak n Shake burger fighting for its right to party with my dizzying migraine.

In a strict reading of anything I do or claim to be, I do not matter. I take a picture of some solar panels and get likes. Nick’s on his way! But my fucking god people, who amongst you thinks I’m so stupid that I can’t just make money and buy shit? What have I done? Drawn out an inevitable process by way of relative poverty and uninspiring upbringing.

It just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I can manipulate you. It doesn’t matter if I cry out in earnest angst for your empathy. It’s all just an empty pathetic fucking game that I have no interest in playing, Maybe we only got along because I fell deeply in love with how selfish you were. It clicked with my own sense of self and wah-lah friends. Surely I’ve fetishized self interest in the past and considered it the most reliable, but who says Byron has the monopoly?

Knowing how much I can change the world makes me not give a fuck about doing so. It doesn’t matter. You’re not on board. You’ll sign on to all of the opportunity and convenience I might present to you down the line, but it’s not really us. I was born with some stupid “different’ quirk that operates like my dumb ass does, and there isn’t a single reason on earth to pretend you’re the same way. It’s the fucking romanticism in me! Fucking child.

I walked “home” from the bars tonight. I encountered no one. I found myself alone, humming punk rock songs, filling my shoes up with dewy grass. Whatever else I’m doing in life, I’m nothing more than the lone drunk walking his fat ass back to not even his house at 5 in the morning. Every single day I pray to the god of arbitrariness. Bitch all you like about your friends having fun on the weekends and living like they do. What gave you the idea you were capable of friends you fucking moron?

I want you to escape. I don’t want you to be the victims of “choice psychopathy.” Not like I’m about killing a mother fucker or anything, but more like, I’m going to be disappointed in you. I’m going to hate you. I’m going to hate you more than I do for your silence. I’m going to hate showing up at your door with money and opportunities. I’m going to hate being right at the last remaining reason I put any respect in bothering to exist at all in. I don’t want to. I don’t want to create and achieve so I can be met with the inevitable. I hate you already. I hate you right now and I know I’m going to hate you then. I don’t want it to be any more real than it is already.

This feels like the right time to explain what would ever happen if you found me dead before my time. I’m not a suicidal person by any means. I just, from time to time, make rash decisions in the heat of a moment. God forbid you’re the one dealing with my brains blown against a wall, just know, you couldn’t have seen it coming anymore than me, but for these words. It’s a big reason why I don’t advocate for gun ownership. As Jim Jefferies states, “One day, you’re gonna get sad.”

It’s frankly too overwhelming. I don’t want likes and shares. I want friends. I want help. I want to stop feeling so alone. I just kinda want to believe anything matters, ever. Because I don’t. I work in the vein of “Nick P.” as ardently as you cultivate your fake ass persona for your professional world or family. You already know I’m going to get everything I ever want, but you know it’s never going to include you.

[616] Fated To Pretend

Every once in awhile, I like to flirt with the idea of fate. It’s something that has had to grow on me. After a line in a movie or song sticks with you for weeks and then resolves too perfectly in some scenario later. When you start to piece together “chance” encounters that seem to account for a solid portion of your life or expanded perspective. I think about that one in particular with regard to friends and is why I constantly struggle with what to expect from them. I think about the opportunities and “luck” that formed the basis for how I would go about engaging with the world and whether I’m culturally programmed to make my life into more of a story than it is.

The whole condensing of time phenomenon is really coming to a head for me. I feel like I was just at the yearly baseball game my dad, brother, uncle, and I go to but know it’s just around the corner. I’ve been talking forever about my map or some TV show that, when I stop to think, has been in my life for several years. Big emotional sticking points are still somewhat familiar and part of the ebb more than some majestic defining moment! for where I want to point the ship. If it weren’t for holidays or birthdays, I sometimes wonder if we’d lose all sense of time altogether. It’s a less depressing thought than thinking my days are so devoid of meaningful variation I’ve just forgotten them.

“You get what you give.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this line because several, random, people have expressed it in short succession around me. If it’s true, I’ve either given a fuck ton or not nearly enough. The only thing frustrating about the former is that I can feel rather palpably the desire to “give more.” I’ve said I’m not the Big Brother or soup line kind of helper. If it can be done by a naive do-gooder or robot, I hardly feel I’m really giving anything there, and we can never forget, giving is about how you feel. Because how could it not? How else to explain all the empty and failed attempts at “help” and “charity” touted every day? I think it helps account for why I know so many “nice” people who attract all the other people with different resources and knowledge I don’t want to bother talking to in the meantime.

For me, age is about that battle between “incidental” and “intentional.” Do you claim special wisdom by leading with a boisterous, “I’m 40! What do you know?!” Can you instead be the wise one who pursued relationships earnestly, tried and failed dozens of projects, and put yourself in uncomfortable situations that gave you deep appreciable nuanced feelings? I’ve got less than a year and one month to sum up “my 20’s” as more than throwaway comments about youthful indiscretion and bacchanals. I legitimately thought I’d be fairly rich (that is, richer than I objectively already am if we read “Pull.”), by now and...I don’t know, be doing something rich white dudes do to exhibit their control and power. I didn’t really have a humanitarian bend until I started reading Alternet my junior year of college. Dammed sobering maturity.

I don’t really have that sense of reassured calm that takes everything in stride and thinks time will heal all wounds. My dad had me at my age. And for him, I’m sure it was like yesterday. It’s not, and he dropped my ass off into Hitler 2’s boiling hot America. When I’m 2 thousand blogs down the line writing about “the surviving countries” of some irresponsible nuclear war (remember, only a few inches under ground can protect you from fallout, and I have 5 acres to dig into), will I be able to look back and say it felt as real now as it will then? What if positivity wins out and I’m 60 celebrating the adoption of progressive principles in a majority of nations and the longest period of peace the world has ever known because someone introduced the tools and strategies to get along better? Either way, while one certainly feels more likely to me, they both feel real.

For as much as I’ve found, I always feel like I’m looking. Seriously, who needs to watch that much TV? Drama drama drama, will they won’t they, understudy writers here, obvious joke, majestic still computer-ish-looking set, actor I formally had respect for clearly made too much money on last project and picked this new thing for...reasons. But that story. That telling and retelling across ages can never die. The themes and the characters speak to something fateful whether the story seems easy to anticipate or not. Regardless of the shitty dialogue or cheap effects, we’re always looking. TV is also just a catch-all for whether you read, gossip, or make shit up in your own head. You have to see something embodied before you can extract the meaning.

With that idea in tow, I have to prove to myself I can get the better of circumstances I didn’t precisely choose and which come with every level of caveats. It’s not impossible to kill every living thing on 5 acres, it’s just a considerable pain in the ass. I can operate the basic tools to not cook or freeze myself to death, and the slow march to affording each piece $100 or $200 at a time is well within the boundaries of the shittiest of shit paying jobs. Will I be better for the struggle? How many beads of sweat need to come off this beehive haired head before the final concept is allowed to shine as brightly as it does in my head? It’s not a “wish” or “dream” anymore, but an inevitable slog through menial tasks and crossing my fingers nothing catastrophic happens.

Feels a lot less like fate and a lot more like work then. Feels like a yearning to ask for help, even though you know full well it was your decisions and your perspective that brought you here, and is therefore your responsibility. But even if I, in theory, gave “everything” of myself, it wouldn’t necessarily be what people need. I think this is why I phrase what I’m doing as attempting to provide an opportunity to invest in yourself. It’s an exceedingly hard thing to do the more ties you have to “normalcy.” But, if you have the money and not the time, I can do it for it you. If you have the knowledge and not the space, use mine. Maybe you have the time or idea and no one to help you. I’ve certainly fucked myself over with providing my time and attention to many, many people across different topics who in no way shape or form utilized or respected it.

Maybe there’s a direct relationship to my entertaining of fate to the degree I feel it in my bones what I’m willing to work towards. I also pay the passing deference to dying on the highway at random rendering all of my big ideas and haha plans mute. But if I’m allowed to account for the seeds I’ve planted, the trajectory is still a positive one. Whether we climate change hockey stick it or not I think depends much less on my story and significantly more on whether I ever work deliberately with a group. I think a vitally important ethos of that group will be the independent drives and perspectives used to fuel it. I like “perfect soldiers” when it comes to checking off tasks, but I need vision. I need independent musicians working in concert. It’s hard enough to drag my own ass through the tick-ridden field without having to be your beggar or cheerleader.

I’m always one person away from an exponential gain. One mechanic away from a moving business. One basic renovator away from a series of tiny livable spaces. A tractor and free wood chips would give me places to park boondockers tomorrow. If I knew what to attach to an already dug well besides “pump” or an already set septic system besides “pipes” those could be functioning as well. Everything just a bit of knowledge someone takes for granted away or a couple thousand, but more often couple hundred, dollars away. Can you repair TVs? Make coffee? Combine these 10 saved /r/entrepreneur posts on marketing and linking to make a few thousand extra every month? Can you help me catalogue and list these thousand books? Clean up and label these auditorium lights? Help me transport ream after ream of free old old carpet to lay down as temporary driveway? FIND ME A PLACE TO PARK!?

At any one moment I have no less than 20 different things I could use help with that all speak to some kind of investment or knowledge acquisition that will crossover or at the very least get checked off as “anything potentially profitable to do that was practically free to experiment with,” and not a single task would take more than a day. Why does it take me months? Because I need to spend 11 hours a day driving around town for maybe $50 during the summer weeks. Because I can fuck my back up twice in a week. Because the weather sucks and people don’t answer their fucking phones. The other side has you needing to pay the bills and not wanting to spend your sparse free time rearranging boxes of books or a treadmill.

From the outside, everything about me seems a tad scatterbrained and disorganized as I strike familiar chords one day and then introduce a whole new side plot with a partner or goats! Is anyone else eagerly waiting for me to post cover videos showing off how much I’ve learned the 10 instruments I bought that one week? It gets dramatically worse if you consider the $75 worth of dodgeballs I have stored in my trunk that I haven’t found anyone excited to play with EVEN ONCE for YEARS (September 30th, 2013. Thanks, Amazon.) Before I failed to get people excited about quasi-speculative business and salvaging/saving endeavors, I couldn’t even get them to throw balls at each other! AND I STILL WANT TO PLAY TODAY AS EAGERLY AS WHEN I BOUGHT THE FUCKING THINGS!

I can’t shake that sentiment. I’m negative!!!??? I pursue so many positive directions you’d think I’d be dead of AIDS! I keep so many lines of potential and ::ick:: “hope” alive I’m practically drowning. And I still go out of my way to help you do shit like pick up girls or shittily teach children or help you move or drive you to the doctor or to a party. I offer money I don’t really have to pay for the gas or to cover the drinks just to get you out of the house. I called study money an undeserved joke I tried to put towards something useful like getting people back in school or helping prop up their business. I feel excessively cold and distant every time I try to pay you for anything regarding doing something involving me. It wasn’t always that way!

But I’m not a martyr. I’m not a victim. I make the decision every time to be the only one to show up to your poetry reading. I know no matter how much time you’ve been given to move, I’ll be the one throwing out all of the shit that wasn’t mine, and trying to salvage my security deposit never asking for your half because I knew you couldn’t afford it. For as much as fate can be the working slog of plausible inevitability, it’s as much the baggage you’re situated with by the company you’ve kept. A realm where I no longer have to bother “expecting” things from friends beyond what I know about how to tweak and leverage them. The kind of distance and coldness that doesn’t feel. It’s just the math and timing to achieve whatever end. I hate when you put me there.

Time’s running out. Sure, time is an illusion, but you won’t be able to call it one sooner than you think. Where are the people I partied with? Where are the people that wanted to be a part of new things? Where are the ones that can take a hit from a Rhino skin dodge ball, at the very least, who can respect I got the expensive pussy balls because you said you were afraid of getting hurt? Are we ever going to do anything together again besides drink or hike a few times a year? You don’t care about my most rousing food delivery story and I don’t give a shit how big the trees were, so what’s left? What do we both share besides what used to be proximity and the same school? What makes my friends mine? What can I only get from those who I picked that no amount of acquaintances I endear myself to will ever match? I’ve lost the beat.

[615] Pull

Never knowing how to start, let me tell you about a crazy person. Minding my own business, watching my shows, idling my car in the ClusterTruck lineup waiting for an order, a man comes and knocks on my window. He’s a driver as well, asks how I’m doing, and then asks if I’m into “conspiracy stuff.” The list of things he finds compelling includes 9/11 being an inside job, NASA about to release a statement about finding aliens, the CIA inventing the words “conspiracy theory,” all swirling around a general belief in a god that sent a perfect being down here to show us what we can’t yet see because the corporate masters controlling everything are going to ensure we experience eternal hellfire, which he, of course, fears more than death.

I was happy to escape our interaction with an order that came in. I’ve talked to enough crazies and ideologues to be under no illusions about any “productivity” or “conversation” or “persuasion” that was going on there. I use distractions like that to listen to my own calm heart beat and throw out as many not-quite passive aggressive comments about the other person’s ignorance and stupidity in academically sounding ways. I lay out the case for their emotionality causing them to behave in the absence of evidence and parrot back their words to them substituting my “beliefs” and gods and ask them why they don’t find my words persuasive either.

For the last few days, the word on my mind has been “individual.” Perhaps this individual was introduced into my life so I could start off a blog. Perhaps it was mostly random or a set of probabilities that two people with the same job would interact at some point and it was simply my turn. This question of “intentionality” lies at the base of many an existential question. Did the universe conspire to put us in each others’ lives to “teach us a lesson” or “open a window of opportunity?” Good or bad that’s the most reassuring thing, right? The last thing our consciousness ever wants to deal with is randomness.

The story of how the world looks begins to mold around the running in the opposite direction of random. The consequences of the internet and globalization haven’t been a trend for 40 years, (of course!) it’s the billionaires and politicians meeting in bunkers to make us all poor and act under their control. In fact, let’s stick with this example for a bit because it’s easiest to unpack and illustrate.

One needs a pretty myopic view to think their oppressive circumstances are what “the world” gives a shit about or considers. While your household income is predicted to be less than half of a previous generation, there’s billions of people living on a dollar a day or less. When a huge swath of those peoples’ conditions improve because “slave wage” jobs shipped over there, in total global net gain, you don’t garner any sympathy. At the same time, you exist in a very ignorant and petty environment that has “America! Fuck Yeah’d!” you your entire life. So you are experiencing emotional distress. You aren’t prepared to learn or speak intelligently about your place in history. If and when politicians or billionaires pull particular levers of power, you’re not going to see nuance or introduce a level of balance to your view, “everything” contributes to “all” of your pithy worldview.

In this way, even if you have a fleeting point, you wall off opportunities to fix it in any real way. You’re praying while your child is dying of cancer, instead of taking them to the hospital. You’re knocking on my window peddling bullshit, instead of protecting and building the tools for objective discernment. This is precisely why we will go extinct. It won’t be our anger. It won’t be by accident. It won’t even be greed or pride. It will be the persistent pursuit of anti-thinking in blind dedication to how desperately we feel about things we don’t care to learn how to think about.

The habits of the non-thinker are mimicked in youth. You don’t know how stupid you sound when you’re young. (Unless you have it chronicled like I do.) You don’t appreciate that your brain hasn’t fully formed, and at least for me, the sensitivity to condescension was so unpalatable it’s unimaginable I’d swallow your opinion of me. When you’re engaging with a child, it’s counterproductive to beat them over the head with “facts” and “you’ll sees.” They don’t have the psychological substruct. They don’t have the tools or the experiences. They aren’t bored enough to stop pursuing roads to nowhere.

With our general population of adults, it’s hard to discern the difference, at least again for me, in the modern era. “Adults” behave as intractably as children, except now they are functional enough to get jobs and put their money where their mouths are. We put them behind cars and give them anonymous voices online. We put them in charge of huge budgets and levers of control and influence. I mean, my god people, if you truly cannot appreciate what a colossal fuck up it was to put Hitler 2 in that seat of power, you will never, until the day you die, get the depravity and suicidal nature of the human soul. I will forever and ever argue against the idea that it’s ME who views the world as “negative” when the millions and millions of hate apologists not just usher him in, but refuse to take the necessary steps to fixing anything in a real way.

They don’t have the tools, the knowledge, or the experience. They have what they grew up with and the norms of their income level or social group. In post-modernist fashion, by virtue of having an “opinion,” therefore all are equal, just adopt a happier one! Just love! Just share and smile and find the little things! While real organizations who make tangible impacts on the well-being of humanity close their doors, and the heads of departments who grew up caring and trying resign. And we think what? We don’t. Because thinking about it is to acknowledge how beyond terrifying it really is.

I was talking to a friend who got immediately defensive at the idea that he was rich. While we sat drinking a handle of rum, playing a PS4, him not at school nor with a job, living with his parents, with one of those parents making $250,000 a year, he was loud and insistent that was not rich. When even your amazing circumstances can’t be accepted because of some psychological or youthful quirk demonizes the descriptive words and unknown consequences, how are people going to address something actually bad? You’re insecure that even though you’re broke you get expensive machines to play with, leisure activities, and have never known a day of hunger? I complain about being broke all the time, but my worst case scenario is maybe pissing off a friend or acquaintance by spending too much time sleeping on their floor? And provided no one has broken into my shit sitting in the field, I’m in the global 1%.

So my frustration and “negativity” and non-stop bitching is at all of you rich lazy fucks who refuse to be more than self-indulgent children who don’t feel or act like there’s a pull for anything more. Not more stuff. More “us.” More acknowledgment. More work. More cooperation and taking on of responsibility. More writing and burden to create something worth celebrating. That was the power of the party house. I felt compelled to be there with those people not simply partying or being drunk or distracted. I felt it again when Hatsam came to town and the old crew got back together. It’s a real and compelling gravitational phenomenon that happens when the right people are together and focused on the right things.

Moreover, I got a hint of the pull when I started to think about what it would take to drag me out to a tick-ridden field in the middle of nowhere. I already know I have that power. I know what would make the hour drive feel negligible. I know what I’d want accounted for in order to spend the night. I know who I’d want to see and activities I’d want to engage in. And it’s no different than what I did to bring people into my space in the past. I pay attention to my individual to speak to the sense of self in us all. I let as much of the converging world’s smartest opinions act themselves out through me in order to look like “I’m” the one doing anything “special.” I’m just a response and reaction. I’m equally as desperate. But I’m not willing to adopt placating cliches or craziness to quell my bitch-all-the-time mind. It’s not going away.

And as long as you don’t get that, as long as you don’t help, as long as you don’t reach out and play a part or stand up in the same ways about the same things in your life, I, and you, and we will all fail. We will fail harder than we’re failing right now, which is hard to fucking state in its entirety. You’re not undeveloped 20 year olds. You’re not unstable conspiracy theorists. But you are getting older. You are getting complacent. You are getting used to the quasi-stability and habits that have kept your head above water so far. And I’m impressing upon you, not because “they” are out to get us, they are, they tell you about it every fucking day, because you’re not reacting appropriately to it, that’s when the game is over.

Before you go putting your faith and arguments into things you can’t see or never know, just acknowledge the shit in front of you. There are people out there fighting, some dramatically more effectively and efficiently than others. If you can’t tell the difference, they won’t win. There are people who respect their time and money and positions of power for what they’re worth, but if you “hate all politicians,” you may as well swing the axe and scream, “Off with their heads!” There are billionaires who target misinformation to vulnerable idiots at every hour of the day. If you think “the media” is synonymous with bullshit, they beat you again.

The only way you get a survivable collective is the realization of every individual. The only way you get an individual is to comprise one of many other individuals. Right now, most of us, we’re balls of historical consequences and propaganda. We’re talking points and dead-end “reasoning.” We’re excuses and indulgences and uninterested minds. That’s what scares me the most. That I will create something badass that I’ve sacrificed for, invested in, and fought tooth and nail to keep hold of, and even when the invitation is in bright shining letters and includes a red carpet, I’ll be met with the strained “enthusiasm” that I perceive we’re pursuing life with right now.

So what are you learning? What’s your individual effort or focus? Is it nothing? Are you just waiting to die? You just want to do your job and go home? You just want to giggle about the next batshit thing that comes out of the news? The world is your fault. Act like it. Pull us back from the brink and at least chuck rocks at the goliaths destroying everything in their path. It’s not getting better, because you’re not getting better.