[635] Lamb Chopped

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of sacrifice. One of Jordan Peterson’s last biblical lecture series explores the psychological underpinnings and implications of Abraham ready and willing to sacrifice Isaac in order to keep his covenant with God. One idea discussed was that if you don’t know what to sacrifice, looking to what you hold dear is a good place to start. Whether there’s a direct proportionality to what you hold dearest getting sacrificed and then you getting in return something commensurate was up for discussion.

In the modern world, I wonder if people consider themselves sacrificing anything that matters. If you spend all day at a job you moderately are okay with or outright dislike, but your time otherwise would have been grinding a videogame or perhaps getting yourself into some kind of trouble, is your time considered a sacrifice? Perhaps you actually want less time to yourself, less time to be burdened with thoughts that can’t be resolved or to find room to remind yourself that you’re not being everything that you believe you could be. Higher intensity professions and paychecks sacrifice any number of generally considered “human” traits in order to excel if you think high finance and big business. More noble pursuits will have you sacrificing sleep and your health to learn all there is to learn in order to practice medicine.

It seems then, that sacrifice is personal. You know if you’re giving up something meaningful to you in order to accomplish something else that’s more worthwhile. You also know if what you’ve given up means nothing to you and you’re trying to fly under the radar. A recent reddit /r/showerthought post said the first time they learned to appreciate working towards goals was after they loaded Grand Theft Auto up with cheat codes and got immediately bored. No time or emotional investment was paid; no real reward was conjured to be reaped.

I think it’s harder to conceive of sacrifice in the modern era. Comfort is the default. When you read a statistic that says 78% of workers are living paycheck to paycheck, we’re not focused on the part where people are getting paid to do an array of jobs, most unnecessary or flirting with a robot takeover, and are hardly back-breaking. We have the option to be poor in cozy apartment complexes. Before it dawned on us we were living in an oligarchy, they made sure to set the stage to keep us tucked in and quiet. My little over a month of being quasi-homeless has had some points of pains in the ass, but it hasn’t been too hard to recline my car seat and ping pong between different dwellings.

Thus, in my mind, the real sacrifice is your comfort. It’s putting yourself outside what you’re used to. To get anywhere in our culture, you have to keep sacrificing the feeling that you’re safe or moral or smart. You have to challenge your polite relationships and boldly claim the identity that’s willing to contrast anyone who thinks they have the real answer. I talk a lot about my propensity to antagonize. I don’t respect comments, behaviors, or general dispositions out of you that I won’t grant myself. I’m rarely comfortable, and it’s not because I couldn’t conceive of myself sitting playing video games for the next 7 years on the 15 thousand dollars I had saved up.

To me, time is king. The more you pay attention to time, the more you can utilize it to make the perpetual moment approach comfort and approach sense. Coasting on conscious circumstance won’t cut it. We’re incidental first, human second. So even when I made money at studies, that was as much as 3 weeks at a time of my life living in precisely opposite of the terms and conditions I’d prefer. Trust, the pain of a spinal headache you never want to experience in service to your larger goals. If I keep doing the accounting, those previous sacrifices have set me up to live a considerably larger portion of the rest of my life in service to my other goals and creative endeavors. I’m semi-retired at 29 and need to work 2 days a month to keep up with payments on my garage. Often, my most money-making friends have comparable rents to keep them in place.

I don’t want to make the mistake of reducing it all to money either. I know people who absolutely love what they do no matter the hours or paycheck. I’m absolutely jealous of these people. I’ve never had that capacity. I learn quickly, and then I get bored. That’s a strong pattern I’ve never been able to escape. If something holds my attention for 3 months it’s either insanely difficult or a miracle leaving aside accidentally tapping into old obsessive tendencies from childhood. The only metric I have from which to try and assess the general working population is how much their words match up with their actions. I can’t count the number of times the South Park character who says, “I love my work” comes to mind in the plane-arium episode. I know it’s easy for people to turn “making the best of” into “this is the best.”

That’s another important distinction to me. I’m nowhere near at my best. I haven’t been for a long time. I don’t have even a quasi-routine that would suggest perpetual progress or practice. I don’t have as many stronger ties as I think I can foster. I don’t have the free mental space that has me feeling focused and excited to devour the next topic that catches my interest. I’m still on the edge. Having a toilet has become like a symbol for when I think I’ll be in a good place. It’s just hard to brag about your circumstances without a place to shit.

I can, and persistently do, imagine my best. When I have some kind of musical instrument practice and workout regime in place every day, I’ll be harping on my best. When I’m sitting down to watch at least a movie a day with at least one other person, ring the best bell again. The suggestion there is that I’ve either found a dope ass person who’s always down and around for movies, or I’ve freed up someone’s time that they feel obligated to indulge me on a nightly tradition; either way a win. When I can see a project through from conception to finish on a predetermined timeline, look out. I won’t have a mapping website stall for a year because finding an extra $500 is practically impossible for the working poor. I won’t go to the straw-bale house builder all excited with my cardboard and SketchUp models crossing my fingers I’ll find $20K through studies before winter. When I start losing myself because I’m so involved with shit above my societally presumed station, I’ll have peaked.

And that’s precisely what I want for you. We’ve all grown familiar with similar levels of “privilege,” a word I’m growing increasingly impatient with, and finding ways to shake the shit out of our baby, for God, appears to have a timeless transcendent quality if you can find the right path. That’s the heart of all of my frustration and anxiety. That’s my shying away from trying to invest in too many new distracting experiences or people. My environment is my car, Byron’s apartment, my dad’s house, my garage, everything my land can be, and the rest of the world at the same time. 2/3 of those aren’t the most comfortable, and therefore 2/3 of those are what I’m working on and learning about. How do your environments scale? And can you make them better by giving more of yourself than time you wouldn’t know what to do with otherwise or a body you stopped respecting some time ago?

[634] Savage

Fair warning, I can tell right away, this isn’t one you should bother with. I don’t care if it’s the most redundant thing I’ve ever written. I don’t care if it goes on for a dozen pages. I don’t care if you immediately get the sense that the lacking and pitiful voice used to launch this warning remains intransigently smug yet full of woe.

I’ve tried to write this blog before. The one where I state plainly my stupid brain attached to my stupid heart that gets it pumped up and stressed out. I tried to find a context for why it made sense. I tried to explain the path forward in spite of it. I tried to understand it like there’s a reason.

If I get another person to tell me to “just breath” and “relax” and “don’t think about it” with regard to slowing the speed of my heart, I may slowly steer my car into oncoming traffic, making sure to choose a semi so no one gets hurt. I’m not a monster.

There’s nothing even at stake. Progress on my website? A strawbale addition to my garage? The moving van getting fixed? A riding lawn mower? I can, in theory, make half the amount of money in the same time I would have been gone. A month of my life then? What am I nervous about? It’s the wrong question though.

I’m stuck in this moment. I’ve been stuck here since, I think around 14. It’s why I can’t let shit go. It’s why I have to try and understand instead of forgive. It’s why I have the same dreams as an over-eager child. It’s why I harp on the relationships in my life that have lasted longer than a class period. It’s why I read blogs from 10 years ago and find the exact sentiment I needed today. I’m nervous about exactly what got me fucked up from the beginning, my entire life crashing down around me for no good goddamn reason.

The only antidote I’ve found is some measure of progress. Never a simple dollar amount, but a structure or a tool. I haven’t progressed until one of you assholes figures out what it is I’m doing and is working along side me when it’s not convenient. I haven’t progressed until people I admire see something I’ve built and begin to wonder how it can help influence their lives and endeavors.

I’m stuck in this moment, and I don’t want to be. This moment is horrifyingly lonely. This moment doesn’t sleep on a bed most nights of the week. This moment is sweaty basketball shorts and awkward conversations in a parking lot wrought with bees, flies, and the smell of garbage, occasionally interrupted by the world’s most obnoxious train conductor. This moment has my head swelling beyond comprehension at the temples for something trying to get out. This moment is a sunken hole at the dead center of my chest that can’t be breathed away or beared down on.

I spent a little gas money. I ate too much shitty food. I put a little more wear on my torn car. This didn’t even really matter, and I couldn’t get it done. I couldn’t sit politely and calmly for a procedure that’s the dead easiest fucking thing to pass! I used to love getting the cuff put on! As a kid I thought it was cool. After marathoning ER I was particularly interested in what the readouts at the Wal-Mart booths said. To fail one has meant to fail them all, if I can hijack a bad paraphrasing of some philosophical statement someone made.

I said some time ago that I haven’t been me for a very long time. I get hints of it at a house party. I can get lost in the flow of some work out on the land. But it’s few and far between. This money would have suggested I could move faster. Something in my mind’s eye might have been able to take up residence next to the garage. I don’t know, none of that sounds dramatic enough. Or, it’s not the heart of it. I just would have been able to work on what matters instead of work at what’s paying me.

I don’t matter. At least, I don’t know how else to state it. I know I’m one car in traffic in the suburbs of Chicago in all his grand failure glory driving past an infinite array of disappointments and ailments that are a universe away from being a headfucked asshole who didn’t get to nab an extra 5 grand. I know I’m small. While my heart defiantly beats harder and my breath gets shorter I try to persuade myself. Fuck me and what I want to do. Fuck me and what I could create. Fuck me to the degree I believe my own bullshit. Fuck every selfish aim and its incidental potential impact. Fuck thinking you have any control. Fuck blaming yourself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and fucking over and over again. Fuck trying. Fuck visualizing yourself hanging from an extension cord because if your head’s already about to pop, might as well seek a direction that will actually feel like a fucking relief, right?

I’m so tired. I’m so tired of talking. I’m so tired of waiting. I’m so tired of thinking the exact same things because they’re right and worth it and when they can’t be done you don’t get to move on.

Enough times it’s happened where while I’m writing I manage to just knock out of the park a line that sticks with me for weeks. Something like that happens or a calm will wash over me. My breathing will return to normal. My brain will feel less packed. I’ve never been able to do that thinking about this study anxiety. Maybe I’ve talked around the edges of it, maybe not. Maybe I have even the basest understanding of psychosomatic responses, maybe I’m such an inbuilt contrarian I’ve robbed myself of the capacity to change.

The last paragraph was started after I put this down and just forced myself to sleep. I pick up writing again after 13 hours. I had a dream that isn’t exactly recurring, but it’s a similar theme. I find myself in a giant bathroom with many different doors leading out of it. Some are locked. Some seem like they’re going to lead somewhere. Some have people's names on them like they’re reserved. This one had someone telling me about a space I had occupied being taken over by some people who didn’t really have any business taking it over. Someone led me through this giant bathroom that was supposed to act as a shortcut, but only ended up as a dead end. I try every door on the wall on my race back to where we entered and realize I’ve wasted a ton of time not just going to my space the way I knew how instead of following their advice and direction. The last door I tried had “reserved for Elon Musk” which I reasoned harked back to a time when he occupied that hallway or room and nobody had taken down the sign.

As far as my psychoanalytic capacity goes, I find this dream pretty on the nose. I’m anxious over the wasted time. I’m sick of terrible naive advice on how to do something or get somewhere people have no experience contending with. I want my name on a wall. I want to know that were I to leave my shit somewhere it has every right to be, someone’s going to remove the interlopers without me having to make a mad dash to keep a lid on things.

A previous bathroom, again it being large, related to me being unable to find a stall or urinal that wasn’t absolutely disgusting to use. So it was kick open a door, huff, move on, find the layout of another one provided no privacy, find the floor flooded in the next, then 4 loud ridiculous people I knew I couldn’t stand might be ambling closer just beyond eyesight so I move onto the next. Every option shitty.

I don’t take my problems seriously enough. At least I don’t respect them. I don’t know how to perpetually wallow. It gets boring. On the car ride back I couldn’t help but recall things I recognized that made me think of some stupid or hilarious thing my friends and I did growing up. I have a kind of blindness for what things are “supposed” to mean. In the same way that I use words in ways that constantly piss people off for what I consider “no reason,” I don’t know what it means precisely when I don’t get into a study or if I were to get colon cancer, as has just happened to my uncle.

I don’t believe in karma, so trying to play some metaphysical math game is out. I don’t pretend like I know the future, so I can’t rule out my highway tragedy on the day I leave the center, having spent my last 20 days confined to kinda shitty food and odd company. I’d prefer imagining myself with more money right now, but there’s an infinite list of things that might happen in the same amount of time that speak to an infinite amount of potentials, if my head doesn’t know how to drop the anxiety as the cuff inflates, it certainly figured out how to drown itself in the ambiguities that follow.

I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of life. It’s still true. It doesn’t mean I can’t be or there aren’t features I enjoy, but overall, I’ve spent considerably more time as a toy of ignorant forces than I have being anything I’d genuinely like to consider calling “me.” I have no reason to be a fan of that. I have no reason to consider my circumstances particularly blessed. I lucked out. It’s not my responsibility to mask “luck worship” as “deep appreciation” or pretend most of the examples set for me regarding other’s luck are anything beyond escapist selfish indulgence. I was lucky to be born smart, if you ignore all of the mental health risks and social isolation that poses. I was lucky to be born good enough looking if you want to see how fast you can race to considering the vast majority of the people you meet as “unfuckable.” I was lucky enough to have a few solid examples of how to behave even fleetingly morally even as I see what befalls those who bother to give a shit.

I haven’t felt able to enjoy the fruits of what I’ve set up. Sure, the “rent” on the garage is paid up for 2 months, but I still only took a day off a week, and that was usually because I had shit to do errand wise, or really needed to shower, so it hardly felt like a day off. I work all day, at the expense of my muscles, my attention, my car, so I can move faster, not because I have to do anything. I can work 2 days a month and still have a place to sleep. Add another day a year, I pay off that gym membership for that year. Add another, there’s my car insurance. I decided to hang out at my dad’s for another day, because I can, this place has air conditioning and a bed.

I’m living my poor man’s version of the billion dollar deal that didn’t go through to bring a football team to a new city, if you want to consult a recycled plot Ballers took from Entourage. Now I need to piss off to do whatever poor billionaires do in the meantime. Try to make more money they hardly need and look for opportunities to pat themselves on the back for “giving back” in wanton fashion. I need what every fat girl with fatalistic confidence who hit me up on OKCupid needs; a friend or partner to share in the future with who matches my private wit and intensity who can see past the surface and cultivate a life on the things that matter! Now, I can’t do that for them, I don’t expect anyone to do it with me.

So it’s the wrong way to approach the question. What do I really need then? I’ve always had the answer. The attractive environment. I need to be that bird who decorates his nest and puts on a dance. I’m just a horny bird who can’t dance hard enough and who knows the choice decorations are a few miles beyond where my wings start cramping. People fall for the artifice. They cultivate their personal illusions, and yours can’t be any more damming or less inviting than what they’ve rehearsed. Beauty is an illusion? Tell that to a soft cock in a sexual neighborhood it doesn’t belong. What you need is the capacity to deceive and maintain that deception. This explains why at the front of my years of writing there’s so much talk about manipulation.

I’ve found myself pretending I want what others have. I’ll think I want “the regular job” with “benefits” and a retirement account. I’ll act like I want to get up and put on clothes that make me unrecognizable. I want to pretend that they’re getting paid much more than I am or have any more free time or free mental space. I don’t exactly fall for this illusion of “security,” but I know the social animal in me is screaming for an environment that I might fit into without buttoning up my shirt and lips. Baby rape and crackhead jokes fly pretty freely at the local DCS office? Hey, I might fit in where the reality is always considerably worse than the joke.

I know I don’t want what all that entails though. I know it because I’m not there. I’ve never really been one to force myself into an untenable situation for any longer than was necessary. Is that what this moment is? Necessary? Are there forces at work that squeeze the fuck out of my chest that know more about what needs to happen down the line? When you run out of answers, appeals to the unknown unknowns are always tempting. I can entertain the thought, but I’m not that big of an idiot to claim it’s real.

I’m sure here shorty I’ll get bored of sitting here and drive back to town. I’ll line up in the CT queue, start the next episode of some show I’m barely interested in. I’ll make another $100 and then pull my car into the corner and beckon back pain until the morning where I’ll do it again. I’ll try to keep a lookout for any “reason” “the universe” “decided” I don’t require money in an even easier fashion and the “purpose” of pursuing my goals “alone” and “too slowly.” I clearly don’t understand anything, so the idea that I’d even be able to identify it if I saw it is suspect at best.

[633] No Conozco

Obviously he’s going to go down as the most influential person in my life of the last year or more, but it’s the confluence of forces over the last day or so that has me starting this, and not just the dozen or so times I’ve heard Jordan Peterson discuss hero myths or the impact of one person. Concurrent to Peterson’s Psychological Significance of the Biblical Narratives lecture series I’m watching My Hero Academia. A few moments ago I caught a commercial depicting John Cena tearing up as he read thank you notes from the people’s lives he’s changed.

Wednesday I attempt to check into another drug study. It would pay $5500 if I get in. The screening my heart rate was 100 BPM, the highest it can be without either being immediately booted from screening or having to do a repeat. I felt calm the entire time. I feel more calm than not in these days preceeding check in. I have little to nothing riding on whether I get in besides THE WHOLE WORLD.

I’ve been moved lately to double down on the narrative of “being alone.” If I don’t get into the study, it’s back to the salt mines of delivery driving where I calcify muscle knots and move $100 or $200 at a time in the several directions I need to go. Whether it’s erecting a greenhouse, getting water pumped, creating a driveway, or finding the right equipment to keep the grass cut, there’s a hard and cold path forward that encourages my car to not break down and has me sinking into my car seat until we become one.


Part of what kicked off the anxiety and string of failing studies was the unknown reality of what I’m currently sitting in. I wasn’t car dwelling then. I still had rent to pay. I had just dropped a ton of cash to get the land in the first place. I hadn’t worked 3 jobs at once. I didn’t have a structure out on the land or any of my shit moved. In other words, all of the terrible circumstances I was facing, I’ve fixed. The dramatic climax of so many pillars I thought were in place collapsing around me has culminated in me sucking at playing a trumpet in a hot car as I wait to not get tipped by inconsiderate frat boys. Sure, my car can still break down at any moment, but I can afford the tow.

I have the intractable problem of actually believing in myself. I’m not worried about failure in and of itself. I’m terrified I won’t be able to set the examples I preach. How fast I work and how quick things can change is absolutely real to me. The impact I can have, particularly in the viral world, is immeasurable. The only way I can sell that is to give people something tangible to latch onto. They don’t know how to shake the shackles of bills. They don’t practice collaboration. Sustainability is a buzzword of the modern zeitgeist. They don’t even know how to verbalize and represent their real problems. As many heroes as I can read about, as many noteable examples out there that exist, there’s still really only me to try what I’m trying and do what I’m doing.

That is fucking nerve racking. It’s nerve racking because it has nothing to do with “belief.” When I wanted movie moments, I created the environment for them. When I wanted a business, I stayed on the phone and showed up every day to see it through. When I want to create a little sustainable oasis that gives me a platform to dick around across my diverse interests, I’ll do it a few hundred dollars at a time at the “most humbling” jobs imaginable as I collect stories from you about why you can’t reach your goals.

I’m a big believer, in a sense, that you create your own reality. I don’t mean to embolden people who live in outright denial of their failings and take pride in defaulting to misrepresentations in order to protect their feelings. I think when you work to give yourself a frame of reference that can accomplish “anything,” then in the act of making your world manifest, reality becomes yours. I constantly ask people to pay attention to who’s world it is they are inhabiting. Are you perpetuating the dialogue handed to you by those who want to keep you set where you are? Are you completely incoherent because you haven’t even taken a stab at even defining the words you use to base your life on? It’s important stuff. It’s necessary to cultivate your individual to as close to a T as you can.

My individual wants to move fast. I want to attract the kind of people who are motivated and excited to work and experiment with me. I’m the incidental loner. It’d be great to wake up each day to get moving on something together. You’re not the people who are going to do that with me, no matter how many appeals I make. I’d have to drag you. I’d have to account for what I suspect would be an increasing number of expenses as time went on. It’s been long enough that I’m not just blindly crying to myself in the corner about no one willing to play with me. You’re not the playful types, and that’s okay, I used my “hope” and “love” blinders to pretend otherwise.

I’ll never shake the “anxiety,” which I think is the wrong way to think about it, of my responsibility to myself or the world at large. I’ve failed 4 or 5 screenings at what felt like critical times. I’m still trying to see my head back in a stable place and trying again. My last study, which was truly critical, they NCSd (not clinically significant) my heart rate to keep me in, meaning I wouldn’t have had my moving truck or garage. I can’t be stopped. I never let up on myself. And for as long as it’s felt for me to gain forward momentum on things I’m doing, I watch people fade away at the same time. When “the last 8 years” becomes a throwaway line on my story of accomplishment, that’s 8 years you didn’t use to get started or learn or figure out how to stomach failure. I worry that eventually I’ll grow to resent the people around me and not want to contribute to “helping” them with anything if the occasion arose. I think they’d be too far gone to care either way.

I think a larger point has to do with what you practice every day. It won’t be enough to “finally” be frustrated enough or to have a psychotic break and “realize” something I’m doing or talked about was “truer” or “better” all along. I’m just trying to practice what I preach. I don’t have any more of an answer than the things I create and can point at. I can try to relate the headspace that drives me there. I can put a frame around the “crazy” that motivates moves that sometime befuddle me. But I can’t account for you anymore. I can’t pretend you’re anything more than the endless struggle or regrets or sacrifices in service to...well, I don’t know, you don’t talk about it. I know you don’t think you can save the world, and I know you probably feel obligated to keep the bills paid. So I don’t know you.

[632] He Bumble

I want to explore humility and being humble. I find the concepts generally laughable. Usually you should be humbled by your ignorance to avoid some kind of downfall. The lower opinion you hold of your place or accomplishments, the greater the high of wins perhaps? I seem to see people employ it when they want to try and knock someone down for something they’ve accomplished. As opposed to knocking how they said something, the very fact of their statement suggests a head too large or ego out of check. As with a great many things in life, I find this level of irony excruciating and telling.

What does it really mean to have a big ego? How closely related is it to self-esteem? You certainly wouldn’t say it’s wrong to like yourself. You would probably think someone was off if they liked every single one of their own statuses or pictures. There’s a range, and people don’t like the idea that you don’t give much weight to the things about you that aren’t likeable. Aren’t I the complete opposite of this? Don’t I lean in and give a dozen more reasons for why we won’t get along first? The general theme of this being provoked by a gentleman who insisted I “humble myself” after I called a dumb thing dumb.

My ego is flavored by the good and bad. I was having a conversation about helping the poor with my friend today. I often view it as a pat on the back for yourself by getting involved and doing little things here and there. People are exceedingly happy to help “just one person” if they sponsor a child or donate a poor country’s GDP a month. I don’t do anything like that. I don’t claim to be capable of helping the poor like that and considering it help. The poor need a system level change and to be able to define their lives on their own terms. Until I can do that, I’m not pretending I’m helping. I go a step further and say we often cause more harm than we care to realize in our wanton approach to congratulating ourselves.

What do you call simple honesty like that? Is it not humble to say you’re comfortable sacrificing “just one child” until you can figure out a general way to approach poverty comprehensively? Or is having that goal another mere expression of an inflated ego? Who could create something like that? Someone who doesn’t believe they could or doesn’t think they have the obligation to at least try? Or is it that you should be sponsoring children in the meantime? I know there’s a philosophical school of thought that escapes me that would claim it’s immoral to spend a single cent in service to yourself while someone else is suffering. I don’t buy into it.

I don’t know how to “be humble” to any greater degree than I currently exhibit. I work 70 hour weeks. I take responsibility for more shit than I’m ever due. I put my failures on blast and try to wrap my head around them for weeks or years. I’m allowed to use my brain in a more effective way than you might recognize or agree with. I can call you dumb if you’re dumb. I can put aside the things you take great pride in achieving and shoot for exponentially higher levels. I can do it working “regular” jobs and doing drug studies. I can do it in the dirt or the office. I don’t hold any real respect for my “complaints” anymore than I try to surround myself with people giving themselves every excuse to suck worse than me.

How about you be honest. How about you grow a pair and stick by your stupid words and mischaracterizations. How about you keep your insecurities and faux patience and resolve and I’ll keep calling you fucking stupid when you apply yourself to people you feel superior over. I don’t need to be more humble, you need to stop being a lying pussy.

[631] Atom Smasher

If you’re lost in the woods, do a better job of defining your goals. Previous goals consisted of the ownership of a few expensive items, the entanglement of some hot bodies, the completion of goals imposed upon me academically, and the appeasing of my maybe aspergers-ocd-adjacent tendencies by overindulgence of media or books. In one form or another, I’ve, semi-disingenuously reduced most of my goals to dollar amounts. My website is the price of a very specific competent programmer. My living conditions every day’s wages cost of copper wire and the proper lawn equipment. My social goals the ability to attract people who, arguably couldn’t care one way or another, to my environment where I play a Gatsby cliche to their indulgence and escapism.

There’s always the overarching goal of some level or another that can be construed as “world domination.” Finding “help” is a standing goal that perhaps will never be met. I could use people who advertise and charge for their time who will pick up their phones and follow through. Having basically zero problems with myself that I can’t chalk up to psychosomatic unpredictability, my goals naturally extend, and are thus dictated by, ick, the world. 12 hour days most days of the week will do enough to whittle down your brain. Add car dwelling and too many hours of the McDonald's soundtrack and “just google it and learn it yourself” becomes not merely laughable but marginally depressing.

I want to get off the same note. I’m never without at least a dozen things I could do that are necessary and time consuming and important, and yet I sit and roast and get honked at. I’ve decided I don’t like any form of “wage slavery” no matter how easy it is. I want to be able to move. I want to know that there’s ways of increasing my cash or my standing in the off minutes. I don’t have another payment due on the shed for 2 months. If I had the equipment, that’s 2 months of weed killing or hill building or pipe laying or driveway cultivating on and on. I’ve made like $500 in 5 days, but I don’t even know if that’s “good.” I know it’s better than every other job I’ve had in town, but it still doesn’t touch studies. I have the “freedom” to leave when I want, but if you have nowhere to be except an hour away to do work, you just sort of stay in the work pocket that’s paying you.

I miss feeling like there’s a place for me more than I realize. It’s places like China and New York that people feel the most alone where you’re packed together closer than anywhere else. But the spirits aren’t aligned. The priorities shoot past each other. The obligations and goals can’t even pronounce each other. What good is having the world if it’s a cold indifferent hellscape? Why prepare a feast to eat alone? Why make the money only to watch it irresponsibly disappear into the hands of those who consider it more real than you? What is the goal? I keep asking people to a procession of depressed comments and fatalistic pithiness. What is the goal in the face of a world you barely want to occupy in the first place? When mere indulgence is a crying insult and the world in tears begs of you, “What do you want from me?”


I never had a goal of getting a girlfriend or getting married or having kids. I never even really had a dollar amount beyond lazily referring to a million dollars as a standard. I never quietly asked for a best friend or a puppy. I didn’t ask for my car. I want skills and experiences. I want genuine conversations and questions and jokes. I want access and convenience and the level of security and comfort that comes with being thoughtful and prepared. I want calculated risk. I want the truth of sacrifice, and I want to create and build. But mostly I want to do all of those things faster. I want someone to challenge me so that I’m not wholly consumed by spite. I want people to shut the fuck up if they’re not going to help. I want to rediscover the reasons for my friendships besides “solid enough company, occasionally.” I want somewhere to go.

I don’t even know if it can ever be fast enough. I don’t know why I insist it should go fast besides the feeling that I’m 8 or so years behind. Behind my best conception of myself. Behind when I could reason what I want to see was really needed. But I have no way to account for the rest of the world. I have to take their honks and jeers like I do driving for spending too much time in their plain. I’m weaving in and out of their understanding of the world. I’m crashing on the fringes of their concrete. I epitomize the ironic cliche in finding myself leashed to their world convinced too well of my own virtue and capacity, not that it’s all that virtuous, but more than nominally implicated.

Wouldn’t you know it, the dinner rush is hitting.

[630] So So Comfortable

I hesitate to say we need different words. That is to say, I think the words we have used to do a pretty fine job of explaining things. No matter what’s become of them in the modern era, I still think reasonable people find shared understanding through the dissemination of meaning through a shared language. The universal language is science. Most people don’t cringe like me when someone says they love them. And Nazis should almost certainly die.

People are frequently under the mistaken impression that they are “modern.” Their “advanced” knowledge of the world and the era in which they occupy gives them perfect confidence. “We” will cure cancer. “We” will ride the long arc of history towards racial and sexual justice. With enough sun tan lotion and solar panelled air conditioners, we’ll never be burned off the planet. Modernity as a concept is a mask. It’s an opportunity to hide and play pretend.

Everything about “right now” comes out of the array of possible shared experiences. I can invite anyone on Earth to my dinner table and barring some anomaly with their gut, we can both recognize and eat a life sustaining meal. That’s the easiest kind of thing. No opinion in the world can override your stomach’s desire for food. There is no other way to get on with bothering to experience anything without that in place.

Now imagine that what you’ve sat down to eat isn’t precisely food. That is, you can eat it, you can feel full, but it’s just...off. In fact, you can eat it 3 times a day for years and you won’t notice anything is really wrong until your stomach explodes. On the list of things you would probably complain and ask about would be, “Whose goddamn job was it to label this?” Before your quick and very painful death. Your friend ate it with you. Your family fed it to you. It tasted just beneath store-brand level.

You’ve caught on that this food is all information. How you approach every single second of the message you are putting out there can poison and explode you or keep you nourished and alive. Your brain does this sorting automatically. It knows when something wrong went in and will attempt to puke or shit it out quick. Your mind, on the other hand, can decide for its own self what it thinks of your arbitrary name “food.”

It’s one of the oldest patterns I use to annoy people. Vague piety. When you don’t know something you talk in group identity terms. Nothing about the group is redeeming, no individuals are allowed to be named, and closely following words of condemnation follows your own virtue and capacity to transcend their group. It’s “atheists are immoral” it’s “black people are criminals” it’s “Nazi’s should almost certainly die.” I ask you to name “the” atheist, or black person, or Nazi in question. I ask for their crimes. I ask for what their group says about them. I ask how we’re defining “Nazi” even if I’m happy to be convinced with the definition history has given us already.

It’s been going on for as long as I ever discovered a real position on something to completely disavow the details. We forgo the shared experience. We make words exactly the opposite of what they mean, and then we wake up one day to a KKK and Nazi march and are overwhelmed and confused about how it happened or what it means. As far as the modern era is concerned, it means nothing. They trended for a day, then it’s back to the video games. Or have you heard the newest most anti-American and nonsensical thing Hitler 2 said yet?

I consider shit-talking a kind of artform. To shit talk, you need to be discovering truth in a witty and damaging way. It only qualifies if you get to someone. When you’re acting in a way that doesn’t match your circumstances or words, you deserve to be called out. You’ve set yourself to fail and be embarrassed and go back and correct for something. If you haven’t caught on, a solid reason to wear all of your bullshit on your sleeve is that it makes it incredibly hard for people to shit talk you. If you live in the truth, all you see is limp-wristed flails in your direction about your character or circumstances. Often, they try to make something up or purposely distort something stupid just to fill the air.

A bad shit talker is our president. He’s the child who just repeats the first stupid thing that comes to his head. He hasn’t had a grasp of the truth for untold years so nothing he says sticks but for the insisted effort of the virulent mass. It’s often stated that he’s a symptom. He’s a champion of all those high school pissing matches you never won. He’s overcome the fights with your older siblings that made you feel small. He’s proud of his lies and excuses to not do better and expect more of himself. He’s an endless stream of reality TV catchphrases that culminate in losing even the ability to disavow white supremacy.

And we pretend like we haven’t been encouraging that, big and small, every day of our lives. We got so comfortable writing off the behavior of our friends and family members. We got so comfortable with selfish designs and stories about our contributions to the world. We got so comfortable copying the “smug elites” and their dialogue without ever figuring out how to reach the learned and frustrated place it might have come from. We doubled down in our self-destructive tendencies and turned the truth tellers, the fighters, the struggle, and the work into Hollywood cliches and context-free quotes for our walls. We got so comfortable wasting our words and wasting our time pursuing everything and everyone that let us fall a little further and sleep a little deeper on what it means to achieve The American Dream.

Nothing about you is new. The forces that molded the Nazis aren’t even 2 generations from you, let alone the hundreds of thousands or millions of years old structures that you consist of. You are always breaking down and being built up. You are always changing and fighting and keeping a foot in chaos and a foot in order. You are not above it. You cannot escape. You can’t carry a cliche or cartoon to explain away your position and why it is always and forever at the top. You’ve let your words, your body, degrade into nothing and so have forgotten how to use it. It breaks down when you try. It leaves you feeling scarred and scared and wondering how you ever let it get so bad. But you were doing it every day, with every lie.


I don’t mean “we should negotiate with Nazis” when I say “we should kill Nazis.” I respect and accept that I’m always under threat. My words are, literally, used in the exact opposite way that any other reasonable person trying and caring would find to use them. I’ve been met with the obscure posture and line by line memorized pageantry of a “heated debate.” I’ve been denied respect for every single thing I’ve ever put up as a real world manifestation of my values. I’ll never be justified to some people, I’ll never be convinced to others, and I’m so lost in the woods of my ego I could never crawl out and proclaim anything I saw as “fucking stupid.”

You want another reason people kill themselves? The rest of the world exists on a perpetual opposite day. If you apply a skeptical scientific mind to the mess, if you don’t stay specific, you’ll be completely disoriented. Death is mercy! Meanwhile, in opposite land, where words are exactly wrong, every step taken to end one’s life is heralded as a miracle! What reasonable person would make themselves a target by painting a swastika on their forehead? That’s what you’ve done when you chant genocidal battle cries. Why repeat the abuses of your familial and relationship past? Pain cares! It’s familiar! It’s super comfy to be reminded of, not the only thing I’ve known, but the thing I’m picking as the strongest and best impression of what I will strive for.

You surround yourself with liars. You hold nobody accountable to anything. You smile too often and too hard. You talk plans you can’t carry out. You make excuses for groups and circumstances. You become a caricature. You become a long line of Chinese telephone cliches about some topic or another and you don’t care where it came from, what it means, or what it’s setting you up to fail at in the future. The loudest, heaviest, deadliest, angriest, most afraid lazy liars calling out in piddling fashion every loud, heavy, deadly, angry, most afraid lazy liar that pretends to hold some kind of truth that can speak to them! Ha! Have you heard the fake news?

I just want to remind you that it never gets better. You never get happy. You never fix anything. You never change anything. You never go anywhere. You never grow. You never make peace. All you do is die enough inside so that you can pretend to resemble and to have done the work of the ones who actually looked for and found something. You’ll invite the Nazis in for tea because certainly you’re not the one they’re after. You can’t have their sickness or be guilty of the crimes they seek to punish. Not you, good Christian. Never you, nice girl. No qualms for this family man. So centered and objective and enlightened. So comfortable.

[629] Just A Little Bit Special

I really think this is going to be one worth paying attention to.

I know I need to accept it. I’m “weird.” Except, I’m not just weird. I’m “different.” I’m “particular.” I’m “sooo Nick P.” that when you warn your friends about me, nothing really supplements like the real thing.

I challenge people. A more deliberate way to phrase that is I accost people. Very often, I ask them, “What is your goal?” In Bloomington, you meet very many fat white semi-drunk kids at the wee hours, and they overwhelmingly have the same story.

“I thought this, and then I gave up.” “Who are you, drunk asshole, to question me?.” “This was fun until I realized your questions were serious, so here’s the finger in the window as we walk away.”


How many times do I call you special? What amount of privilege do I grant you in opting for you to read between the lines versus writing for a form of popularity contest?

Brass tax, you’re special because I respect that I’m special.

I can’t pretend anymore. Kendrick says, “Be humble.” I can be humble about facts. My perception isn’t just different, it’s actually special. My friends aren’t just circumstance, they beget possibility. My phrasing and pathetic little individual window into the world is a degree of difference that warrants the word “special.”


And fuck you for fucking days, I don’t want to believe it. I’m a student of history. We’re all little ink farts in the story of myriad cliches that came before us. Your god fucking forbid I crawl far enough into my ass to denote a measure of difference.

Except…

No matter what I do, beyond even my awareness, I do it different. I just learned tonight that, even with taking days off, I’m the number one driver for ClusterTruck. I’ve spent more time, made more money, than everyone who’s worked for the Bloomington branch. I did not know this. I did not suspect this. It took drunk dispatchers to hi five and hug me as they explained my position in the hierarchy.

The point of bringing up that example is to tell you it was a mother fucking accident. How the fuck do I get off being number one taking days off? Well, I didn’t aspire to be. I’m accidentally at the top of shit I never even fucking meant to be. That shit has to mean something. That has to fucking matter. Right?

::Break down sobbing for 20...35 seconds::

I don’t simply want to piss people off. But I don’t know what to do. In reality, I’m closer to 50 people I would grant special status to. They don’t respect themselves like that. They don’t believe.

Yesterday, I was talking to another Bloomington entrepreneur. He’s had the extreme highs and lows. He recognizes that he is always trying to give back and prop up and afford the people in his life opportunities they don’t deserve. I feel like I have the exact opposite problem. I have people who were smart enough to get hitched or find the job that pays the bills. They are solidly middle to upper class white and rich regardless. Their dreams and goals are empty, “We should meet up!” sentiments once a year. Broke ass asking for a dollar and quasi-content rich white asshole have the same thing in common. They aren’t going anywhere.

My buddy Andrew’s phone decided to call me accidentally. We talked for an hour and a half. That wasn’t because we’re living terribly interesting lives that need that much time to explain. It’s because Andrew is someone you should always be able to talk to because he’s thinking. He has goals. He’s an individual in spite of himself or his circumstances.That’s what I miss. You can’t “recapture” the past, in some perverse sense, but you can respect the players involved that shaped your perspective about what you want in the world. I want conversations with Andrew, and Amber, and Tony, and Corbin, and Chelsea even if she doesn’t like me, and Brett, and Nick, and Alex, and Smash, and Davis, and Kristen, and Hatsam, and whatever members of their drunken families want to show up to celebrate some dumbass meager achievement together.

Time is running out. To one degree or another I’ve managed to live my preferred degree of “freedom.” But I know I’m a failure. I don’t want to see you once a year. I want to see you when I want to see you. I’m like a solid month away from that, but the point remains. I know when the people in my life have materially changed my perception of myself and my place in the world. Me “struggling” by myself in my ignorant corner “doing the best I know how” is not enough. It’s not right. I’d be broke as fuck being able to joke like I joke around someone before I’d have a million dollars and no one with enough vacation time to enjoy it with me.

My heart is broken. I think about me and Kristen for example. It’s really not up to me why we broke up. Shit was real for me. In her words there was more good than bad. She said she ran. Obviously some random hookup means little in the light of the person you just want to “be” with. But if something that dope and that real can go to shit, who am I kidding about our friendships in lieu of parties and outings? I can’t see you once a year, if that, and think we’re really on the same page. I get why the dynamic would have to change or die, but that doesn’t mean I’d respect it.

You have to conduct your life as if everything matters. You have to believe that you’re taking in words from a balls out special mother fucker who wouldn’t date or fuck with your eyes were you not something keen and different from the world at large. You have to. You have to fucking get it.

What's important for me is that I get it. My life is a series of, “I’ve never heard that before” and “You’re number 1” even without my fucking knowledge or endorsement, let alone my best effort. By extension, the different, the, by the numbers number fucking one, says you need to fucking fix something you defacto different people who apparently only have my ass barraging you.

We get to die anyway. Try. Work. Own it. Scare and surprise me with your enthusiasm. My worst few days is leagues above the rest. Combine fucking powers like the Power Rangers. Play in my field. Own your status and get fat white kids to flick you off in the window on their way out of Steak N Shake after they’ve failed to answer what their goals are.

I miss you hard. But more, I miss who I figured out I was when you came into my life. I miss seeing myself as an extension or piece of a greater whole. I miss wanting to be less Nick P. so I could introduce new people into “my crowd.” The goal remains the same. I’m after a mindset, not a dollar amount. I’m after an atmosphere. It’s impossibly easy to lose.

[628] Cash Me Outside

Now I’m all worked up. I write a nice little diatribe about how much I can’t stand my brother, decide to send it to him, because, other than being antagonistic (you can only antagonize those incapable of introspection), but I don’t really talk shit behind backs and would want to know what people were saying about me. We go back and forth, I get all hot and bothered at the prospect of laying him out like a bitch, now I’m sitting here more excited than annoyed, but contemplating how many horrible relationships I have with people predicated on forcing some dishonest paradigm.

I insist on honesty. If I’m getting too fat, if you think I haven’t noticed, I could stand to have you tell me. If I’ve been stewing in my own sweat for 3 or or 4 days because my car doesn’t have a shower, it’s more okay for you to avoid hugs or pass me a bar a soap. If I’m a horribly antagonist evil degenerate who gets off on making people feel bad, you’re going to be the best gauge of whether or not that is more true or less true. If what I choose to focus and work on is a waste of my potential or too idealistic or some other facet that I’ve proven perfectly blind to seeing, it is your responsibility to help me see it. I’m not saying I won’t argue back, but if anything about me is niggling the back of your head (say, my insistence to use words you disagree with or every single time I move petty) consider it a cry for help.

There are people, in fact it’s most, and this is including friends, where I’ve never had a fight nor issue with. This isn’t because we forced smiles with each other and kept the conversation light. This is either because we’re so self-involved and disinterested in bullshit that it’s a fairly mute possibility, or it’s that we’ve every time chosen to discuss points of possible contention open and honestly and met discord with reason and patience eventually. While I’ve made pains to weed through people and pick the ones I’m willing to experiment with, thus rendering it a majority, this isn’t how life works. Life is uncomfortable forcing it, like at Thanksgiving, or in my life recently, a yearly Cubs game tradition.

I will never not ever applaud you if you’ve just made money. I will never look at you boasting about picking on a homeless man as worthy of my respect. It isn’t the right kind of sacrifice to “choke down” living in Indianapolis verses Chicago. So many times Jordan Peterson alludes to the idea of sorting yourself out, stopping saying things that make you weak, and the truth setting you free. You’re not sorted if the most interesting thing you can say is about nights out partying. You’re not sacrificing, and thus opening new roads to truth, by losing yourself in the details of your preferences. And if the worst things you can think to say about me are straight up lies or horrible misconstructions of your poor capacity to perceive relationships, I don’t need to know anything else about you to want nothing to do with that kind of mental slavery.

I envy those of you who got siblings you can get along with. I envy those of you with parents who both managed to not go insane and make it your problem. More power to you for having aunts and uncles who wouldn’t steal from you. You’re living a kind of truth that my family abandoned long ago. The irony of getting into pissing matches is that I don’t feel weak in expressing the truth of our fucked up dynamics. I feel emboldened. I feel motivated and significantly more likely to shine my light of spite on the godforsaken blight that constitutes my blood. I wear practically everything terrible I’ve ever done on my sleeve, and allude to the shit I still think I’d do, and the best you have is I do nothing and occasionally swap loans with my dad? Come on. How much easier of a target could I make myself?

I like that people like my brother make it so easy though. I like being able to make falsifiable checklists of when idiots speak to see who really has the upper hand in pissing the true straight line. If people are both unwilling to see what about them makes them weak, and those in their life have no capacity or desire to point it out, what to make of the appeal to stop saying things that make you weak? Who are you to decide, or as Jordan says, “What do you know?” if everything that constitutes you isn’t merely incidentally ignorant, but totally awash in a character immune to the outside world; possessed by ideology, religiosity, or the bro code?

[627] Brotherly Shove

I don’t make much of a secret or specific point of it, but I significantly dislike my brother. The root of it is knowing how we grew up and being unable to resolve that with how he speaks and who he calls friends. He’s the shining beacon of insecurity that fell in with your typical monied douche crooning about the money spent on clubbing, clothes, and fucking bitches. He’s slowing morphing into the older 2nd cousin we have whose wife’s pretentiousness makes sure he only makes contact with the rest of the family when someone dies.

I used to say that while he had that crowd he was still basically a nice enough person. He’s a runt and was always the weakling so he retains a kind of piddling sincerity in his goofy or awkward demeanor that people can find endearing. Anymore though, and upon every time I see him, it’s this feeble boasting and lewd stories on overdrive, repeated enough that you wonder if he’s rehearsed them in the bathroom mirror each morning. That “tight little Latina chick he fucked real good” is going crazy because she’s pushing 30 and isn’t wifed up with kids, so has been blowing up his phone. The sentiment in and of itself I don’t mind more than the scummy feeling I get as I hear how he describes it.

Have you heard about his paycheck? Along with some of his friends, who somehow despite the money they’re making are living the Chicago version of what the people I see in Bloomington are. 4 or 5 guys to a house, 60%-80% of their paychecks going to rent. While these guys are gentrifying neighborhoods, pissing off the locals, the only thing they can conjure as worthwhile expenditures of money are various barely affordable indulgences. One of his friends, in a story my brother took great joy in relating, crouched down next to a homeless man to ask about and belittle his experience and then tell him to get the fuck off his corner of the block.

The closest parallel to his and their behavior I can draw is to my own. I’ve certainly whored it up and would love to continue doing so. I’m not a fan of Bloomington’s homeless population anymore than the people who’ve actually been threatened or who have to deal with a dozen overdoses or fights a day. But I don’t feel I insist on describing for no one who asked the intimate details nor approach the problem of homelessness with drunk “wit” and ridicule. This faux “alpha” condescension and pretension derived from pounding the frat bro script is stomach churning.

Now, my brother has resented me for as long as I know. It’s why I’m so good at recognizing, and then antagonizing, the people who think I’m just a measure of socially blind. I was the smart kid picking things up easy where I have memories of him pronouncing “the” as “ta-huh-eh” when he was learning to read. His and my mom's mutual resentment meant that he didn’t just get away with antagonizing me as “the little brother” but was encouraged in a passive aggressive way through my mother. Now, as he’s got his job stuffing rich cunts with cum and his downtown Indianapolis apartment for over $1000 a month, he still resents me. He knows my attitude to my intelligence and life. He knows I’m quicker witted. But mostly he knows that he doesn’t live up to my standards.

Consider that effect in his bro mind when I’m comfortable telling you when and why I’m sleeping in my car. Where does someone like me get off looking down on someone like him? He can’t reconcile that superficiality well before he acquires the introspective tact to ponder how weird it is to repeat, “Wait, she’s 60!? She’s 60? Well, damn, she looks good for 60!” about my aunt to her brothers and me. Because, of course, if your first instinct isn’t to fluidly reduce the world into sexualized ranking, you don’t understand the bro code and language. You think Hitler 2 Trump wants to fuck his daughter because he views her as an autonomous person, or just another shiny pretty object he deserves?

As it is my nature, I pick choice moments to antagonize. I say I’d only go back to school for the joke and the ability to insist that people call me “Dr. Nick” in an allusion to The Simpsons. He got his master’s from Purdue Calumet (which he remembers as simply “Purdue”) and played his role as the indebted, hundreds of applications sending, basement-dweller until finding the in vitro clinic he works at now. He runs marathons with his bosses and relates a story of one of them hoping to venture out into consulting and wanting to bring him along as the business grows. I said, “Now don’t forget about me if you guys get real big! I don’t know the specific lab stuff, but every company has a marketing or back end logistics department!” He got real quiet. Aren’t I crashing in my car? Didn’t I fuck up the coffee shop? What do I know about his privileged place!?

He has a singular story of his worth or place that’s been adapted from a cadre of insufferably superficial and shitty people. He’s so steeped in it that he’ll never figure out that no amount of his “success” is ever going to speak to me like he really wishes he could. It doesn’t speak like he thinks it does to his bros, he thinks it does to my dad (who’s just happy if we’re happy), or to the world at large that is increasingly moving towards sentiments regarding collective survival over drunken chest beating.

I maybe see the the kid once or twice a year. The conclusion of this year’s Cubs game rendezvous had us gearing up to leave. We’re 3 minutes away from my house at a gas station as I get a text from my dad about a key I borrowed that’s still on my key ring. I tell him we need to go back. “Fuck!” He speeds back to our house, I drop off the key, get back in the car, and find him staring at me, mouth agape. 

“What?” I ask. 

“Thanks, Josh! For taking the extra time!” 

“If you didn’t return, you would have mostly just been fucking dad over.” 

“You know, I’ve been going out of my way for you this weekend.” 

“I didn’t even want to come.” 

“I didn’t want you to come! Now we’re taking even more time...” 

“Well do you want to talk about it, or drive?” 

“Drive!” 

I present his steering wheel to him. 

He didn’t care about the 6 minute detour there and back. He’d been looking for an excuse to say something to me all day. About anything specific? Probably not. He bought me a hot dog at the game. He drove, though no one asked him to. None of it out of the kindness of his heart, or because I asked for or needed anything from him, but because he needs to view me as lesser. He needs to diminish the scar on his brain I represent for him. In fact, I know he regrets telling me he never wanted me to come, because a few months ago he drunkenly texted me about hanging out and not seeing me enough; these plans of course he never really had any intention of following through with, but his brain plagued him nonetheless.

So the dislike I have might better reduce to a pity. We’ve never, I mean never, had a particularly good relationship. He’s filled with all the hopes and dreams and sentimentality that keeps him going back to our abusive mother he vehemently hates when I talk shit about. You know, because who am I if not the person who recognizes that and provokes the ever-strengthening of that head-fuck of a bond. The day I have at least as much material wealth as he (which, I’d be willing to pull out the calculator today given the amount of stupid shit he obligates himself to pay for), but it will be a day that he will wither. If I ever get my doctorate and persist in calling my time in school a joke, he might one day get the balls to haul off and hit me! Though, I suspect he knows that he can work out every day and it won’t speak to the anger I carry that would correct for his decision. If we don’t just want to rely on once bigger and older, always bigger and older.

And yet, it’s not even remotely that serious. It’s just a magnified example of the general tragedy that is my family. It keeps the thought in the back of my head that were I to ever have children, they could fall in with the Josh’s and no matter what I provided or imparted, I’d have to figure out a way to swallow (like that bitch he met last week) their path. He could drop the douche guilt and work less on self-aggrandizing and more on self-respect, because the difference is recognizing yourself with respect to the rest of the worlds you inhabit. He’s in his, I try to be in “the.”

[626] Neverlanding

The problem with this blog is that I know I have a lot to say, but I don’t know that the mental dress rehearsal and solid lines I came up with driving home from a screening will come back to me. Let’s just jump into what I remember and try to get empty.

I’m a person who gets an impossible amount of joy out of little things. Maybe it’s a pillow. I remember smiling for 3 days after learning my air conditioning could be fixed with a $4 bottle of freon and it wasn’t actually broken for the, perhaps year-ish, I thought it was. I might have an internal smile about something about you that you do that would be silly to ever bother bringing up out loud. Usually, it has everything to do with arresting the moment and wrapping me up with the staying power of the amazingness I’m experiencing. It’s sooo soooft.

When it’s not about a specific object or person, I’m constantly reminding myself of how good I have it and don’t attempt to oversell my rich white person problems. Sleeping in your car, too full, yes that car you own, in 2017 because you don’t want to be jeered at isn’t sleeping in your car because you were unexpectedly fired or got sick or your house burned down.

In order to achieve even the slightest happiness at the thought or act of anything I’m doing, I need to slide my brain into different “modes.” These modes are as real as anything I can describe. “Work” mode means there is no pain, there is no time, there is only the task and the dollar amount. I’ve practically made myself pass out in this mode, I build or organize or learn things overnight, and I do shit like sleep in my car to conserve money and sort of make a sharper point about where my priorities truly are.

There’s certainly other modes. My relationship was one I didn’t really want to deal with the fallout of, but worked my way into anyway. Making room in your head for someone else, putting them first, the attempts to talk or negotiate and connect are a full time job. You make a leap of faith and trust to start actively rewiring your brain to incorporate this other entity that you have zero control of.

Here I say that the best you can do is learn to trust and rely on yourself. Be prepared for the inevitable failure. Get hurt as hard and as fast as you can and start working coping skills. Inject a level of jaded perversion into things so you can always diffuse and deflect and snuff out any hopeful sparks and immature wishes that things will ever change in ways conducive to your desires.

You have to consider what gravitational shifts in your mind can really do to someone less prepared or introspective than someone like me. I always get into a weird headspace when I come up north and just drive past thousands, and thousands of cars and people in a short number of hours all “adulting” and “getting by” or “living it up” in service to their chosen cliches. They’re just adaptable enough to survive the varying degree of cultural self-harm and consequences of political ignorance and nihilism.

Imagine that “regular” person with their levels of indoctrination and taken-for-granted sentiments and habits. They hit the hallmarks and life markers. They throw in the normalizing forces that keep them alive. Why should you presume anything more about them? They made it here, not by choice, they refrained from killing themselves, and found out their brain can’t help itself but to be caught up in some things over others while a barrage of other influences hope to take their attention and time for rarely less than nefarious ends. Why give them extra credit? Why do we beget their immortal singular soul and personality? Who’s idea was it to classify a hundred thousand smog funneling apes wasting away on a concrete jungle path as worth more than what is presently manifest?

They’re nothing. You’re nothing. Your judgment is nothing without that mental mode, usually a giant lie, that you can couch and orient from. Switch your head into “love” mode and you can find yourself angling to marry or find fascinating overwhelmingly destructive habits and people. I recently watched a lecture about women who tank relationships deliberately when the guy treats them too well because they’re more intimately familiar with abuses growing up or their first and most intense relationship. And of course you can relate to anything potentially horrible for you besides a shitty ex or family.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but I think the modes are a bit like multiple personalities. They’re all in there, but only one can call the shots to avoid a kind a paralysis or mania. I also think it’s important to make a distinction about knowing what you are capable of verses making a claim about who you are. There will forever be wholly compelling social forces that enshrine each of our capacities to be potentially swept up in the next Nazi wave, but, if who you are actually exists in there, and you know how to assert it, that will always trump naive populism.

What bugs me is that I prefer to exist in a kind of mode that “the world” does not like to allow. I want to dispose of words like “hope” and “love” while exercising the most righteous and forward thinking motivated acts as are humanely possible. But you can’t. You’re attempting to do so with regular people and their regular ideas they were born and bred to adapt to or pathologize. To make distinctions, to espouse probably undefinable values, and grasp in a stranglehold opportunities to revel in the joy like an impossibly soft pillow become a kind of tortured exercise.

Hungry to connect you throw out a line. Someone bites. They let you reel them in. You feast on them. You’re full and happy and say fishing is amazing. But wait? What’s happening in your stomach? The fish swims up your throat and out onto the floor. It reconstitutes and violently and desperately flops back into the water. But it was caught! I ate it! I was full! If I wasn’t fishing...if I wasn’t eating? What the hell just happened!? Time for the real terror to set in.


Here, an experienced drug user will float up to you and say we’re all just pictures and impressions in your mind dictated by forces beyond your control, and that there’s no use getting upset or trying to catch and eat the same fish. But the implication remains. How can you ever know if you’re full as long as that can happen? Are there even lakes where there’s fish that are simply contented to remain food? What’s the fucking point of fishing! I imagine it was this level of crisis that drove most vegetarians and vegans to where they are now.


Now you’re trapped. You can’t trust your perception of what’s good or healthy and valuable, but you’re undyingly motivated to keep pursuing them as if they exist. You’re hungry! This, at least, if you’re like me persistently implicated in his own value claims and capacity to accurately predict specific kinds of futures.


Be trapped like that and think about how you relate to other people. Consider the true impact of the wrong “friends.” When Colin stole from me and subsequently ignored texts to pay towards deposit charges, it’s not that I don’t know he’s sad and poor and whatever else you want to include from the category “fat gamer with little female or life prospects.” But I thought I saw something more when he exercised his brain or took on spouts of eating healthy or pausing smoking. I fooled myself. I was locked into my mode that put the idea and obligation to “friend” above his category. His resentment and lazy mishandling of our relationship helped make the distinction of who he no longer is to me very clear.


Here, you can pick a mode that always relies and predicts that kind of failure for “normal” people with their list of damming factors. Can you trust it anymore than the hopes you had for them? It seems, demonstrably and horribly moreso. It’s not up to me whether you lie and steal from me. I can be a more discerning scientist from the sideline and simply do the math. Are you more like the cuddliest pillow or a source of perpetual stress, wasted money, and jaw clenching? I consider this a “scientist” or “professional” mode. It says, look, don’t get angry, don’t cry, just succinctly explain why you can no longer exist around someone that makes you think absolutely nothing matters.

And for me, I think for the better, it really is that dramatic. If you can’t trust, you have nothing. If you can’t appreciate the littlest, you have a negative capacity to grasp the magnitude of the larger greater circumstances you inhabit. I need people, literally need, who know how to make distinctions between incidental pains and problems or inconveniences and who I am and who they are beyond what we’re merely capable of. I need, literally need, to be able to seek out and recognize what it is about me that makes me me that fuels you as well. I’m not normal no matter how many times I find myself swimming in the concrete sea we’ve paved over ourselves with. You don’t have to be normal either, anymore than you have to steal from me or smoke or reduce me to an annoying bee for swatting once you’re burned out on my honey.

It’s how I know that I’m incredibly sad and blindingly angry all of the time and all at once, but I don’t make those my mode. I have to go into professional mode to deal with the adorably lovable children who play with hearts like Toy Story’s Sid played with his toys. I have to go into work mode when the fake enthusiasm and well-wishing drowns out even the remotest possibility that I might rely on someone or something beyond myself. I’ve noted those who can step up, but if and when they fail, new alarms go off and an expanded definition of what I’m responsible for working for gets imposed. It’s never “everything,” until it is.

And it’s very hard, and it’s very lonely, and it’s incredibly difficult to distinguish the work of juggling the emotion and confusion in attempting to relate to those aspects of the world, and the work of espousing your ideals and creating the circumstances for things your recognize and respect to manifest. How long do you hold the candle? To what degree was what you did or said a perfect illusion? So good that were you to hear exactly the right answer, you’d never even realize you were asking a question.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Chester Bennington. I connected with his music as ardently as the next person of a certain age when Meteora and Hybrid Theory came out. He was true to his pain until his dying day. He connected, but did we recognize? I thought something similar about Robin Williams before I heard more details about the particular brain malformation that fucked with him. Isolated depression and anxiety isn’t just for teenagers anymore. (I know it never just was, shut up.)

There’s something wholly more depressing and terrifying going on underneath than any one story of sadness or heartache. That’s what gets to me. When I find even a little happiness, I want to squeeze it to death. When people treat you like you bring them less joy than I get from a pillow…? When “normal” judges you by the metrics imposed on it from tyrannous insecurity? I don’t like how often that I truly feel I understand why suicide makes sense. And even there, it seems rarely the ones who bothered to really figure it out care to go through with it. Leaving another ironic confusing example “normal” people pretend to contend with when a celebrity goes.

I really want to see the next Marvel movies. I really really want to meet more people who like as many little stupid things about me as hard as they can as I do those things about the people I call friends. I don’t want to be the distracting novelty. I don’t want to downplay everything I do and think or how hard I work as anything less than in service to my hard-fought ideals. I’m not your shitty definition to be filed away on your shelf of poorly understood children’s books. Creative honest energy that causes you to suffer and sacrifice is something truer. Suicide in that sense can be a statement about how you don’t deserve to have it. You don’t get to pollute the message for one second longer to its face. Were my truth more heavily implicated by giving half a fuck about ignorant stabs and judgment and validation from husks, I’d be on my way out too.

Luckily, I’m incredibly selfish. I’ll steal your word love when what I feel can’t be expressed with regard to what I want to create and celebrate with you. I choke out hope for the canvas that is cousin-fuck Indiana tick field and the future fires and fun I’ll build, so they’ll come. I’m comfortable putting “friend” in as many quotes or italics as it takes for me to handle or exploit you when you no longer find yourself capable of meeting as revelrous equals. My task is clear and my tangible goals have always, in one form or another, been met. You’re not pulling the trigger, or tying the noose, or dragging the blade for me. I’m crawling in my skin, and these words will not heal. I won’t be afraid to fall, and I’m nowhere near as confused as you about what is real.

[625] Fag Hags

If you’re gay and trying to fuck me, do you have any idea what kind of spectacular specimen that would require? My god, you need to check yourself. You not only have to get over the fact that I’m not even a little bit gay, like looked at gay porn as a test and said, “You give the outside world too much credit with this fluid sexuality thing” not gay. But fuck dude, what about you thinks your persuasive “man of the people” posture is gonna work on my ass? Nigga, I play people. I see your game. It’s not even work with your frontin’ ass thinking a handful of drunk ass endearing comments means shit to me.

Okay, wanna-be hood rat Nick who plays it fast and loose with the word nigga is prancing about. What kills me about tonight is that I’m not hopelessly drunk and managed to find myself entangled with a crowd that not only was borderline arrested, but was having the drunk ridiculous conversation about when and where and why you’re allowed to say “nigga” amongst...friends?

Let’s pick a beginning. The first thing that provoked me to write was not that a dude who really wants to fuck me was way too drunk and blatantly in “try to fuck me” mode tonight. What prompted me to write was his overtly drunk sentiment that, “You have power.” Whatever he thinks of me, not in a kick your ass way, I emanate a certain power that he is rather attracted to and intimidated by. I say intimidated because once when we were sparring he was very worried I would hit him in the face or too hard despite his easy 40-50 pounds on me.

To my mind, he’s right. I am powerful. I draw attention. I do real shit. I actually care and work too goddamn hard to even make mockeries of what I’d actually like to see in the world. He managed to get way beyond too fucked up tonight and pissed off the wrong bar tenders and a friend of his that was all but arrested before he wandered off just in time. And I’m sitting here like, it’s Wednesday. I haven’t been drunk in a couple months, who do I know will be out? The lonely big black guy who has more (old) money than he knows what to do with and is excited to see me even if I smell like shit from car dwelling for 4 days.

These people are serious. They don’t care. They’re of a different class. I’m happy to flop about in the mud with idiots, but my life isn’t really needing to mitigate the fight between two obscenely violent drunk people. I’ll take the suggestion to bow out and walk away. This crowd tonight was not. He’s 32 or 33. I’m 29. I’m not going to be the “old guy” getting cussed out and thrown out of bars to any greater degree than the polite suggestion that I should peace as I’ve engendered in the past.

Ya’ll need to realize though. When I talk shit, I’m talking to you. My small cohort. My little getting by, got enough of a job, doing they shit or getting hitched ass bitches in my world. The sole best benefit of my writing is that you know it’s about You because I don’t keep ignorant company. You have just enough money to pull. You read just enough to be middle-class white guilty. You know we’re in as good, if not the best, position we could ever be to scorn life’s bullshit circumstances. You know I’m not faking it. You know that, as far as I’m concerned, my life is basically half way over.

I’m elated that I’m back. I’m not the forlorn lovesick drunkard who can’t get over the ex that meant the world. I’m not debating what “friend” means into oblivion. Fuck you for days, Nick P. is risen and the shit I was put on Earth to spew is coming fast and loose. Naw, nigga you ain’t fucking me, you sad sack of shit quasi-middle-class white friend are full of self-indulgent shit, and I’m going to do everything my power to manipulate and sell and work you to get everything I ever see needs to be done. Get fucked or get gone if you’re not about it. I don’t actually need you.

And it’s not to be mean. I just don’t have time to waste. If you want to be the gay dude thinking one day you’ll say or do what you need to get up in this ass, that’s your bullshit path to follow. I’ve missed me. I expect everything of you, more explicitly, what I can squeeze out of you that you won’t volunteer. Lucky you! You get to see it coming. Fuck all the little blacked out children talking to the police about their pathetic fucking lives. I’ll give you an hour or two, but mother fuck me, I know my shit and where I’m at. These kids. These ignorant petty jokes on life. Show me you want to be them. Flash it for a second. I’ll cut you down. You got plenty of time to be fuck all lazy ignorant pieces of shit. I’ll sort you out.

[624] Boaring

I often wonder to what degree my life looks the way it does because of boredom. From the capacities or tolerances I’ve developed to the “world level” goals I’ve set for myself, there appears to be a mental thought floor I fall to where everything opens up. I wonder if this floor can do a solid job of explaining the 4 or 5 different strings of thought that have been goading another blog this last week or so.

I see an image of 5 women smoking in the shade behind one of the school buildings, all wearing their red uniforms, hair strewn about, utilizing makeshift seating. You can applaud them for all having jobs. You can dismiss and summarize each individual for their clothing and similar look and age. You can wonder about what they’re talking about and sigh with solidarity as you drive by at work yourself. If you’re ever in the ballpark of inferences you probably know what they’re talking about, what they’ll talk about tomorrow, what complaints they’re engaging in, what kind of friends and family they keep, and that general snapshot of what life looks like when you pursue smoking outside of your minimum wage job with your doppelgangers. It’s a kind of begrudging if not hopeless familiarity.

I think about that as a “delivery driver.” Because, of course that’s what I’m doing, but it’s not what I am. The company logo dons my car, but not my person. My identity, to me, has little to do with my capacity to drive food around town. One hopes that no matter how belittling you may desire to describe a group of people on their smoke break, they exist beyond the cliches of their look and habit as well. I’m not persuaded that’s the case, but you can hope, if you dare. It’s certainly not my experience as I’ve passively taken in pointless and boring commentary regarding heavy drug use from coworkers or one spat after another concerning negligible amounts of money that only found it’s disagreeable center via playing out dramatic heights of irresponsibility in the first place.

I met a girl who’s a self-described “punk rock anarchist, anti-capitalist, yada yada” with punk rock hair and a kid and an even more racoonish nature than one of my friends known for such a nature. Every other comment is about the ongoing “party” that is her life and all the free drugs people keep offering her, often, as an in to try and work out a sexual relationship. She’s immersed in her phone creating memes about all of the weak attempts and ignorant angry commentary people throw her way when they don’t get what they want. She’s fluidly contradictory when she describes her approach to work she does as opposed to the characteristics and behavior she considers makes others pieces of shit. She’s boring.

There’s always a level of irony or hypocrisy regarding our “ideal” selves and to the degree each moment bothers to speak to it. But to work so hard, whether it’s just on your hair or “political beliefs” and to sound so naive, dumb, or petty? I find this a kind of pattern in “lower class” people. There’s always an intricate dialogue about who they are, but if not for their drug use and hours spent at a job they profess to hate which definitely doesn’t pay enough, I’ve never managed to figure out who or what they are. Mind you, I don’t really care either, but it doesn’t spell a particularly good or coherent message about their potential impact on the world.

I think about how this ties into my “lack” of awe regarding the beauty of nature. It’s just a picture. What could happen to it, what’s going on underneath, and how it can be utilized are all vastly more interesting. When I look at the top of a mountain or over the vast expanse of trees from a fire tower, all I can think about is kicking a Syrian child off of it or tree-housing for the displaced. What about my life is so stressful that I need beautiful sunsets and nature to help calm me? The hustle of our exploitative joke existences isn’t what really gets to me. The lack of perspective or work done on it is. Away from a computer or cell signal surrounded by acid dropping naive minds marveling at the colors is the farthest away “we” could get from appreciating the daily utopia. These faux pilgrimages are just rich people versions of religiosity disguised as deep appreciation and solidarity. Weeping over images of their savior, but sure as shit noting the degrees of their own poverty before thinking they can help anyone else.

It seems to center around how you talk. How you discuss your circumstances or your friends. How and whether you refrain from statements that are “judgy” instead of answer seeking. Of course you’re always judging regardless and there’s rarely good answers. But you can always look at your internal response to how people would characterize you. You can have qualifiers in your life as examples of what’s really going on underneath. Are you your hair and what you pray it represents to other people more than you’re actually you? Are you screaming your vulnerability louder than you can act tough? Are your circumstances inconvenient, or dire? Is capitalism “evil?” or matter-of-factly consequential given infinite variables and historical circumstance?

To be clear, I don’t even think we deserve to last as any form of billions in a collective. I don’t think we’ve respected consciousness to any degree that suggests we should keep introducing people into the world like a “pro life” activist completely ignorant of the fallout of unwanted children and completely scornful of the ones alive and ignored already. I think “the world” is for the individuals. The ones who can make demonstrable consequences for “the masses” and manage to survive in spite of them. This doesn’t mean the individual is particularly good or bad either. There are plenty of individuals at seats of power who’ve accumulated millions of deaths on their hands, well-intentioned or otherwise. But that’s the power of taking on responsibility and making definitions of your place in the world. You incidentally dictate others’ lives either because of their refusal, incompetence, or impossible circumstance rendering them impotent.


If you wake up one day and find yourself an anarchist enjoying the bars and rides and drugs, you’re both incompetent and refusing. If you’re minimum wage having the same conversation every smoke break, you’re pretending you can’t escape your circumstance with better words and a desire to seek better information. The world is at once happening to you and because of you. And to me, you’re never more hopeless and negative than when you render yourself incapable of speaking to both sides. It’s insulting. It’s self-destructive. It’s incredibly and mind-numbingly boring. You won’t move on. You won’t learn. You won’t change. You’ll be a convoluted husk taking a complicated world and reducing it to a series of brain farts.

On the other end are people who pretend that because they have some grasp of what’s happening that they are above it all or de facto of consequence. These are the people Jordan Peterson warns about who fall in love with their own intellect and ego. The irony is often that the dumbest of the dumb are persuaded by their own posturing and the smartest of the smart get trapped in overwhelming humility and professions of how much yet they still do not know! Here I tend to default to the sentiments from entrepreneurship. It’s never the “right” time, but you have to start. You’ll never know enough, but it’s your responsibility to incorporate what you’ve learned or fucked up. The world’s leading authority on any subject is still a person with all of the baggage people claim. This doesn’t mean dismiss and disrespect, but try to build, incorporate, remix and inform the different levels of your experience and approach.

We don’t have many people advocating like that though. We have distractions. We have blisses to follow and trends to hashtag. And it’s not like we don’t have the opportunities to work towards something more meaningful and real, it’s that we’re either doing it alone or in the face of an unprecedented cultural doubt and nihilism. Don’t dream, pay the bills. Don’t worry, it’s “over there.” Don’t bother, it’s not your fault. Don’t mess with improving, just be engaged and stressed and worked and that’s more than enough. Why, that’s all those of us bothered to do before you, and look how we turned out! The world doesn’t feel like a calculable accountable entity that can summarily reform overnight, yet that’s exactly what it is. Whether it takes an asteroid or the spontaneous “awakening” of cultural and historical perspectives is yours to decide every moment.