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.
