[656] Watch How I Soar

I'm really tired and wanted to sleep, but I found myself writing a paragraph into an excel sheet so I wouldn't forget, and now figure it's better just to get it all out.

We want to believe we have standards. We want to believe we have OUR ideas. We want to have a story of our morality or ability to achieve or the reasons for things beyond our control. It's convenient to ignore the subconscious machinery. There's too much history to try and contextualize and make sense of it all. Find the slogan, find the partner, find the subject in school, stick to the narrative.

I want to speak to one of the longest relationships and narratives in my life again; I watch a ton of TV. Sometimes I forget just how much TV I watch until I'm looking for a show and type in “Netflix shows” only to discover I've seen every episode of 95% of them. As my docket grows and amount of things to watch sped up in tandem, I find myself often skipping over the “why.”

I used to think I had standards for TV. I used to think the shows I picked were the good ones and it was a giant waste of my time to watch anything else. I used to have a “why.” My time was valuable, after all. I wanted to show a level of respect and appreciation for writers and directors and actors that worked the hardest to make me feel. I couldn't imagine my standards and likes were shopped around focus groups for months or years. I couldn't possibly be a demographic that would watch some 24 year old starlet in next to anything as long as she's most often in next to nothing.

I started reading reviews. I started opening the window the let the bluster of other peoples' wind blow into my opinionated house. They hated my favorite character. They thought the plot didn't move quick enough. They never found enough representation for women, black people, or the disabled. They, seemingly unanimously, agreed that things really went bad during the 7^th episode of the 5^th season. As if I had just lost what was becoming a good friend from a prolonged period of acquaintance, I started to get sad.

“My show” wasn't my show anymore. It was at the mercy of the mob. It was being up and down voted for a million reasons that had nothing to do with my investment. The whole was getting swallowed up by a clumsy line or bad shot. The meaningful worthwhile message it was sending or positive feeling and suspense were just cliché tropes. I could pop over to an ad on a movie website that would teach me how to review them like the professionals! “Another Cop Show” premiers to roaring applause with your favorite actors from “The Last Family Drama.”

Then you add the sick dose of modernity that over-exaggerates hype and jumps to commercialize nostalgia. WHAT DOES THE DAD DIE OF!? Who fucking cares? Shut up and watch the fucking show. Learn how to enjoy the ride. Have you read the rules for watching “The Room”? It's like the new Rocky Horror without all of the artistry, sincerity, or joy. You know what I want when I go see a movie? A bookmark with instructions. That's way better than picking up the cues from the room after the 12^th time I've seen it.

More often than not, “why” is a difficult question because it gives you the opportunity to learn that you don't know anything. Why did I go see the shitty movie? In my case, I have too much time, too much money, and no one to help me do anything meaningful, so I do a lot of dumb shit under that umbrella. Also, it was free. When I question why someone hates so much something that I feel has fairly objective means to not call it shit, in a way, my entire world is thrown into question. As with most people in that scenario, it's a lot easier to invent reasons I can remain correct, or resolve to the cliches, than ever persuade myself to feel as angry at Mad Men for not being black enough.

Modernity seems to suggest that if you have a medium, it's your job to speak to everything at once. You're a white man living in a white man's world? You better have colorblind casting in writing the script about your upbringing in 1950s suburbia, or at the very least force in sympathetic ethnicities. Why? Because there's too much of you already. We've heard your story and begrudge you your trope. You're boring, you're basic, we're the marginalized dreamers who've salivated too long at the prospect of dishing as we've received.

But art lives or dies by its ability to form a relationship with the audience. That relationship is influenced by a hundred different things changing in real time. Trends and complimentary needs rise in tandem as superheroes complimented war efforts. The death of the nuclear family has dozens of happy upper and middle class white people renewed indefinitely. The vigor for fantasy and space isn't nerds winning more than it's the rest of the world feeling as sad, lonely, and depressed as the nerds did in trying to escape their worlds.

Part of what I'll always find fascinating about TV is when you don't realize you're in that relationship. There's a hard and fast change that happens when you start watching a show sped up, and an even more jarring one when you choose to slow it back down. It's different when you're mid episode and notice the show's been on for 6 years but you and your friends are still quoting the first season.

Here I want to jump into how any relationship forms the same way. You don't pick your dorm neighbors or roommates, and yet can have some of the most influential memories and foundational claims of your sense of self in relation to them. You don't pick your family and work into your skin whatever insecurities or attachment disorders they gave to you as early as they could. You're tuned into the “Fucked Up Story of My Life” and didn't notice 25 seasons in that your relationship to it has gone through so many changes despite looking basically the same. It doesn't seem very often along the way people bother to ask why.

I find it a point of desperate sadness that I'll always find it easier, and be proven right more often, in my predictions and assessments of different people than I could ever be about the plot line of a TV show. People who claim to know where a show is going or who've seen it all before aren't actually talking about the show anymore than somehow who waves off “women” is talking about your wife or girlfriend. People stick to their habits and lessons as a default. They can't escape them. A writer anticipating getting canceled or a showrunner who catches a mild stroke can devote an entire season to the joys of shark jumping.

If you're willing to ask yourself why, that's when you set yourself on the road to genuine appreciation for different styles, personalities, or even truly and perfectly bizarre creations. If you ever manage to land on a constant in spite of the whys, now you've got a voice and a story that might be worth telling instead of selling. I picked up the habit of watching a ton of television because I felt myself losing literally everything I might have shared with anyone. If they didn't move, they stopped going out, they stopped caring about discussing the things we used to, they stopped texting. But hey! They mentioned this anime or this new show was one of their favorites, so I'll check it out too. Jesus Christ, that sounds pathetic.

As with everything, over time, it changed. I need to keep my mind even marginally engaged or bad things happen. I started to discover more and varied tastes I never would have explored otherwise. I found myself compelled to write reviews or argue with people on the quality of something. This imaginary supplementary world evolved into a rich medium with rules and expectations worth talking about. I've entertained ideas about writing screenplays, or at least laying out basic plot points. Lines from Jordan Peele like, “I wanted to make my favorite movie I haven't seen yet,” start to ring a little louder. The reviews matter! Following the hole in your being that needs to see THAT can be not only profitable, but proud and life-affirming.

I'm always trying to speak to a w/hole. I tell people I'm after what I thought I've already had. No amount of growing resentment erases the fun I had at my parties. No amount of forlorn and crusted over memories have me confused about why I've gotten into the relationships I have or attempted the friendships I thought worth it. The vast majority of stories I watch or read I've no intention of seeing again, but I keep them stored away. I know they could mean different things in different eras. I know they could be a point of connection with someone when everything else has been lost. They occupy some space about some thing in my memory I'll want to hunt down again one day.

[655] Fourced

I want to tease out a few probably disparate ideas, but have all become stuck in my head at once.

1. On an episode of StarTalk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson says something like, “What if you wake up as a completely different person, would you ever know it? You'd have all their memories, mannerisms, etc.”

2. Considering the inability to think something that never occurs to you. And closely aligned, the idea that you can keep making the same mistake.

3. The idea that, “you should pick the ones that pick you.”

4. Looking up to “cool” people.

To the first idea, I initially thought of claims regarding the “collective conscious” and the title of the new show “Wisdom of the Crowd” kept flashing by. If we presumed a collected conscious, then, in a sense, every day you are waking up as any or everyone else. “Their” memories are only as good as they can remember and relate them. “Their” quirks or habits presumably things you could work yourself into. Or, maybe better said, at the level of experience, maybe you can't hit a high A note above the highest C ever sung on stage, but you can experience the same nonchalance and calm with regard to one of your own talents or capacities.

That same consciousness could possibly, only be so conscious. In the sense that if you take an opinion poll from all of the same type of person or demographic, you'll get a skewed answer. The crowd may be able to provide some larger insight some of the time about a few specific things, but there's little reason to believe much of what they say or do lies beyond the confines of convention and norms of the era. Science, then, as a set of processes to remove the biases of that consciousness, in it's interpretation can also only be so conscious of its conclusions. To the extent you let the conclusions breath independent of your opinion speaks to its efficacy and survival as a viable means of interacting with the world.

I don't personally think there is a collective consciousness, and I think if you had an exacting and comprehensive method of accounting for how and why people transmit ideas, you'd narrow down the harbingers of the next waves of good or bad ideas, much as if you had the computing and recording power to better predict the weather. I think that would be a pointless goal and shift too quickly in real time to provide any real insight, but I don't think the transmission and evolution of ideas is fundamentally magic or hard to understand.

Waking up as someone else, shifting your life laterally perhaps, could simply be an exercise in extreme empathy and imagination. It'd be utilizing the part of our brain that grew to run the thought experiment so we wouldn't have to risk our lives to figure something out. Your specific interpretation of whatever the subject matter then becomes mute. I can envision myself as a rock star. I can play the instrument, I can sign autographs, I can run from paparazzi. At the smallest level, while I won't be “culturally interpreted” as deserving of the Hall of Fame, no act of any band member is beyond my doing or feeling. They incidentally get swept up by the winds of chance that begot fame. My winds, while ignored, blew just as ferociously as forces in my own life.

Here seems like a good time to talk about idea 2, being unable to think something that never occurs to you.

Say it never dawns on you that you could ever pick up an instrument, let alone develop a “talent” for it. Given the innocuous nature of whether or not you play an instrument, no one is going to bother to blame or shame you for that. There's a million roads you haven't taken that no one would bat an eye about. But then force yourself to think of criminal behavior. It's immediately easy for us to imagine why we wouldn't spend our time kayaking or becoming a lawyer, but somehow our brain shuts down imagining getting into elevated levels of trouble. We affirm a “be anything you want to be” posture and completely forget we can be absolutely terrible. We can desire destruction and aberration, and yet even acknowledging that seems lost on our “collective consciousness” no matter how many war documentaries get produced.

I think this happens because of an idea often forwarded that “people are fundamentally good.” It's that people don't normally want to be be bad, or suffer the social repercussions. People aren't good or bad, they're people. Any and all behavior that strays from the echoed, presumed, or televised “norm” triggers bad feelings. This creates a condition where you don't allow yourself to play with just how “bad” you actually are. This is how “weird” fetishes and taboos get created. This is why self-righteous religious hypocrites accept things like pedophilia and rape. It never occurs to them they're bad. Never. Meanwhile we blame the “intellectuals” and “left” for not speaking their language and not being understanding. It never occurs to them, irony weeps, that someone else's brain never had the same ideas occur to them.

Take an easy example, like being gay. How do you know you're not gay if you've fundamentally barred your brain from ever asking the question? You don't just “never find the words,” you reduce even the hint of discomfort into derision or violence. Similarly, you don't care how science operates or at what stage a nervous system develops if, in your mind, you've never not known how to have a thought where “soul” came first. Not the simple word, “soul” but every feeling, memory, positively and defensively reinforced ounce of care that soul has meant to you your entire life. It never truly occurs to you that “accidental life” is even on the table. You don't have a real conception of “cell,” “life,” or even “accident” because what they mean isn't your hard won parsed perception and description, they're a jumbled mess of righteousness in need of defending.

I think this speaks so much to why I try to read and watch “everything.” I've heard a number of times back to back how the study of philosophy or constant pursuit of knowledge just keeps informing you of the different degrees of your ignorance. You can get insanely technically proficient at a handful of things, and you can create a thousand new questions regarding a new topic that grabs your interest. I don't know what I don't know. The things I do know, and the way I've oriented my life, I start to lose sight of how long it took me to get there. It doesn't occur to me that habits I've built or fought long and hard for can be, in a more specific sense, forgotten. Habituating doubt is great for breaking prejudices, but dangerous when let out of the box of context.

So onto “choosing those that choose you.” On its face, it sounds like a terrible idea. Anyone could choose you. A gang member chooses you for your desire to impress or balls in dangerous situations. A self-destructive lonely partner sees you for the beautiful, amazing, strongest person they've ever known and equally as afraid of being alone or disappointing their parents as they are. Ash and Pikachu took a minute to get on working terms. It makes me think of the fatalistic yet cheerfully sung, “Love the one you're with.”

The same could be said for topics of interest or compulsion made by society or family. Get a STEM degree! They scream, as you ignore the statistics regarding a glut of cheap engineers coming from India. Kim Kardashian! As you join in the chorus of, “What does she even do?” and peep the price of her new perfume. Marketing chooses you. Schools choose your family for their money, not because IU feels a stately obligation to educate the Midwest. The army chooses you to stand for your country, even if it knows you're only there because you couldn't afford school or were caught up in the romanticism of dying in service to “freedom and democracy.”

A less insidious interpretation could be at the level of an actual healthy family or friendship. Choose to engage deeper the friends that bother to occasionally text or call you first. Choose to engage the ideas like the ones I listed above because they couldn't go away and try to figure out what you really see in them. Maybe you want to get all mystical and say “chance” chose you to engage and perceive the life you're living, so choose to just generally pay better attention and offer the level of choice and engagement that your eyes and brain seem to lock you into whether you like it or not. I can't help but think I've tried to have the best of all worlds in picking back the girls who've been happy enough to sleep with or cuddle up to me, but here the failure of the idea seems most easily manifested when they haven't picked each other...

Finally, the idea of looking up to “cool” people. Part of looking through endless streams of information is the search for people I want to be more like. For a while, I caught the idea that I wanted to be “nicer” and worshiped, in a sense, the friends of mine in college that seemed to have these “pleasant” or “delightful” dispositions that attracted more of the same types. Easily argued, that's not me, but I admired, and still kind of do, the ones who can pull that off. The mean part of my brain calls their behavior mostly a well-rehearsed lie that they suffer indelibly for and lays at the ground of why we often part ways for stupid and insecurity-screaming reasons, but that's just one interpretation, right?

I've found fictional characters cool. I thought the “new atheists” were cool. I've had a handful of teachers I admired for their dispositions or hilarity. I think my dad is cool. My grandma and grandpa were cool. I have a handful of friends so wildly outgoing and individualistic, no matter how absolutely weird they absolutely are, they're stuck at the coolest level I could imagine.

You think of people as cool because you want to be more like them, whether you're always comfortable admitting that to yourself or not. A big reason I “hate everyone” isn't because I can't make a case for why they still deserve a place on the planet, but because they don't have a single thing I want to be more like. I don't want to be a bureaucrat deferring to the rules to perpetuate stupid exploitative ideas. There goes my life as the voice on the other end of a “help” line. I don't want to be a single-minded gamer or stoner. I don't want to be “middle-class,” pulling in just enough to keep paying the bills as I salivate about the week vacation I'll get maybe a year or two from now. I don't want to crawl up the ass of one of my hobbies until I can black out the rest of the world. I don't want to force conversation because you're scared we won't be cool if we don't see each other for a while.

The last person I genuinely thought was cool was Jordan Peterson. There's many many people I certainly admire, don't get me wrong, but what I recognized in Peterson was an infatuation and enthusiasm with his chosen material that I felt I at one point had and missed about myself. He had a moral and intellectual compulsion to fight with difficult and horrible ideas until he could shake out solid foundations. Him having the ability to articulate and move my thoughts into realms I didn't know I didn't know how to think about was, still is, immensely gratifying. I want to be that for other people. I find it unimaginably motivating and cool when I get the opportunity to explore new territory someone has opened up. On my horizon is a field and an open-ended mapping website. I want to create the conditions for my own motor running in service to discovering the unknown.

It'd be great if there was a way to tie it all together right? I mean, these 3 or 4 pages now exist as one new thing. It's another little chunk of me to add to the pile. I think it's cool. Until I wrote it, only those four thoughts at the top occurred to me, against my ability to escape them or anticipate them getting stuck in my head. I picked the idea of writing about them after they picked me. And if you read this, or re-read it, and then “forget” about it, and then one day spit out a line exactly as I said it, maybe it could be said you woke up as me and never would be able to say so. It would never occur to you my impact or what my consciousness did to our collective one. Or maybe I'll get ignored and taken for granted, and different forces will fill in for what mine might've done. Could I blame you?

[654] I Can Still Pretend

Sometimes I view my life as a giant bowl of water swirling around and around. From the top is a pitcher that continues to add water as some of it inevitably splashes out along the edges. The swirl is a sea of potential. No single point on the bowl is more or less likely to have the water splash over it. You knock on the bowl from one side, water will fall just past the opposite side. You keep knocking on that side, more and more water will slide over and splash below.

It is unknown how large the pitcher supplying the total amount of water you'll ever get in your bowl is. The water can symbolize your life or maybe just your attention. Always swirling, waiting to plunge over a cliff into the unknown. Certainly, amused with the colors the water reflects or the shapes the water creates, the bowl can't be left alone. People are constantly trying to pick it up, play in it, or knock it over, spilling everything that you could or will ever be in any direction.

Some people turn their swirling bowl of water into a carnival game. They circle the bowl with other containers to catch the drops that fall. As each container fills up, they win obnoxious prizes that require wall spaces and guest bedrooms. If they bought the same containers or cups from the same store as their neighbors, they each raise them in a toast to their mutual prosperity. The cups come with titles and perks that float to the top as they catch more water. The game's difficulty comes from never being sure when the cup is overflowing.

I think of the water like my attention. When I watch too much TV, I can feel it in my eyes, my shoulders, budding headache, or in the growing patience to adopt a new frustration like the delay my keyboard is experiencing in trying to type this. My TV cup runneth over. The same happens when I spend too much time reading about how dumb the world is or talking to a 20 year old about “soulmates” or “the government.” Kids splashing about in my bowl like needy actors screaming, “Look at me!”

I think about what has taken the largest portions of my attention. Being a lovesick child was a solid portion that rolled over seamlessly into a years long love affair with the “science vs religion” discussion. I'm clearly obsessed with myself. I tried to be overly-concerned with my friendships or the formation of a “chosen family.” And I can usually manage to work most of the day, every day, for several months before the kind of pain there is no words for starts to scare me a little too sincerely.

This question of my attention though deserves more. I consider it a modest source of pride to be able to name the dozen regions of the world having a considerable worse time than me. I watch myself greedily suck down an above average amount of red meat each week. I look for reasons to focus on my small and selfish desires when the people I think might give me a call absolutely won't. I pretend late night talk show hosts and the newest generation of writers are taking my mind off of the horrible time I'm having at the gym. I pretend there are ten minutes in the day I'm not trying to write myself out of the tight little room behind my eyes.

Attention increasingly feels like something that needs to be shared. Everyday we seem to live in mockery of that idea. Upvotes, likes, shares, raised consciousness, “woke,” viral, Snap, Insta...different words that all spell distraction. I don't think it's innocent. I don't think we ever bothered to find the words before we worked so hard to work them out of existence. To share your attention is a work you take for granted when you don't have other options. But today? You have infinite options. Not, in reality, but in how your lack of attention can be labeled as something worthwhile, meaningful, or normal.

My attention is fixated on a specific kind of feeling. To the outside perceiver, it usually only registers as contempt and discord. I crave, bottomlessly, a kind of security and self-expression I've only gotten the smallest taste of. I imagine someone hearing that and thinking the “security” of a good job or loving spouse sounds glorious, and they'd be in a different universe than what I mean. I want that security that provokes you to step over the line, but keeps you wise enough to not do so. It's the money to always be able to pay off the ticket or repair, but not enough to provoke you into 200 mph. It's the suave and self-satisfaction to endear yourself to countless women, but never give yourself over into thinking they're anything more than human. It's filling the void with endless creativity, but never allowing yourself to believe it's anything more than what it is; an exercise in maintaining sanity and a provocation to death.

I find TV a pretty amazing analogue the more it occupies the majority of my waking life. Thousands of shows, millions of hours uploaded daily. So much “content.” Saying...what? “Look at me.” Look how crazy, look how funny, look and buy, look at my version of this recycled plot, trope, and structure. Look how many hours I put into making the dragons look real. Look how much I clearly am just writing for this show until Tina Fey discovers me. Look at my latest attempt to root myself in this world as an actor, as someone, no, as an artist, whose story deserves to be told and needs representation. Look at me begging you, I'm not ashamed to say it, begging you to attend to my commentary, my perspective, and my short time here on Earth. I live for the applause, the awards, but dare you ever step beyond telling anyone it has anything more to do than with my passion!

Different shades of desperation march along as self-confidence and hard work. That doesn't mean people aren't confident in what they do. That doesn't mean they don't work hard. But the desperation comes first. The fight and the spite made the biggest splashes. Taming the waves into something “personal” or “Emmy worthy” we force ourselves to believe is about the individual more than the machine. We need the “standards” of stars and heroes. We need to flaunt the idea that our attention was spent in the same ways theirs was, be it in allegiance to products or preferences. We want to belong to what everyone is paying attention to, because if we don't...

I see the rest of my life, so I'm already dead. I'm maybe seeing people I cared about once or twice a year. I'm always months behind on something that literally only takes 2 days. I'm scrambling to fit in weak stabs at eating better or working out in between shows I can barely distinguish and exceedingly lame get-togethers with Byron's child friends or the ballsy acquaintances from online social groups. I let the little push to write something long and ridiculous for birthdays die. I get doubly good at saying “for sure” for the amazingly empty conversations I've gotten so good at I don't die inside joining anymore. I don a permanent headache and scowl I'm way too enthusiastic to put away whenever I'm called out on it. And I watch, every minute of every day tick by as I save money to get nowhere for no one as all the things that require more attention than I can give happen instead.

And I'll write. I'll write like I'm the most forlorn and tortured soul that's ever existed. I'll watch more of my hairs turn gray, and ponder the deep questions like how a fun sized Snickers can add 2 pounds. I'll scroll through unanswered texts and check the date showing last year was the last time we both reminded each other we were working a ton. I'll forget whatever it was I thought we had in common. I'll forget to even bother texting on those drunk belligerent sentimental nights. And I'll hear through the grapevine that you like your new job or partner or your parent got sick and you're helping out. Then it's off to bed, something important to do in the morning, but it was great catching up. And none of it will mean anything to me. I'll erase the idea that anything ever had or should. From my just-right middle-class amenities and armchair, I'll reign.

[653] Blame Game

Jordan Peterson related a line I heard today about why you're motivated to do anything. Discerning what you actually care about instead of what you've been compelled to can be incredibly hard. He emphasizes how important it is to have a framework from which to see the world. Be it religious or personally constructed, you can't operate without a set of values and means from which to judge whether you're in line with something. He relates Carl Jung who said the present self is the future self trying to manifest. Somewhere deep inside you view yourself as less than or incomplete, so no matter your explicit effort to lay in bed all day, whether your motivation is simple like getting fed or a form of lofty ideal and recognition, a reason manifests.

The friend who was recently angry at me for relating the “blah” I've inhabited for too long asked me if I finally figured out that I should live for someone else yet. I took her to mean more in the form of becoming a Big Brother or earning to give sense than hand myself over to the whims of someone else. I don't know what to make of the idea. In one form or another, you could say it's a godlike conception of ourselves. Jesus died for you, after all. The source of clearly all of my inspiration over the last few years, again Peterson, cautions against doing someone else's work for them. Surely he doesn't mean don't be a mentor to a child, but the stress is on the idea that people need to come into their own and take responsibility.

I feel I'm a super fan of blaming myself for things. I dig myself into holes. I chase people away. I stick to my rhetorical guns. I bite off bigger chunks than I can handle. I own every schizophrenic voice. I take immediate pride and shame at once in whatever I've chosen to share. I'm responsible for my own little hamster wheel. Long period of despotic bitching, celebratory day or two when something productive or unexpected happens, maybe mild period of contented contemplation, back to bitching. I still maintain a level of respect for myself over what I might hold for most people. I at least admit I don't like myself or circumstances, and whether you believe me or not, I don't have any creative or motivated fixes.

The word I can't escape these last few weeks, or maybe it's days but it feels like weeks, is “victim.” The string of sexual assault accusations, the anger I drew from my friend, the pleas from legislators and late night hosts about guns, and the millions of people who will be hurt and killed from the violent disregard for health and the environment all make a swirl of numbed panic. We've managed to normalize the idea of roommates into retirement, never getting married, never owning annoying, massive debt, underpaid jobs, broken social scenes, and the fleeting memory of animals we saw as children at the zoo. The world has disregarded our president insofar as they cross their fingers he won't start another war.

I'm thinking that part of that U.S. “you're special” narrative has done a fair amount of work to dismantle the care and respect you should have for the victim. This seen no more obviously than the stories of women in the past who were blown off or fired no matter where they turned, and what's been instantiated across industries today. If you didn't grow up feeling like you owned and ran the world, you might have a predilection to make the circumstances better so that people don't get victimized. I frequently disavow any claims I might have to victimhood no matter the blows I take nor yet for my growing concern over my mental state.

I wonder if victimization could be reduced to a numbers a game. So many points for having what are currently considered “privileges” weighted against instances or institutions designed to keep you stuck. This a game so delightfully perverse I'm sure I just made an ardent post-modernist cum in their pants. I don't want to play it, but I think the relative nature to oppression and means to fix it would be loud and present immediately. Don't just march, women, 90% of you go on strike like they did in Iceland. Peaceful protests are one thing Black Lives Matter, but the Panthers were a nice touch.

It wasn't so long ago we emboldened the Nazis to start marching again. Think they're screaming and chanting because they feel empowered and capable and worthwhile? No no, they're victims of the immigrant hoards and other incoherent babble. Purely at the level of using the word “victim” though, no one would want to be compared to an insecure Nazi. If that Nazi were human, then his actions might make more sense and there'd be some common ground. If he wasn't so filled with hate for his environment and how it makes him feel, we might be able to shuffle him into a reeducation camp until he's gung-ho about officiating lesbian Jewish weddings one day.

Victim seems to stem from an inability to go tit for tat. A girl is a victim because she can't fight back without risking further harm. A minority is a victim because they're outnumbered or denied access. Children are victims because they don't know any better. Animals are victims of the forces of nature to begin with before tinting that nature human hues. This could speak to why a word like “equality” has such a poignant ring for many people. This seems to speak towards the gun-lover's fever dream of fighting off a tyrannous government. This is the resentment the rich feel for “moochers” and “entitlement.”

Each case is slightly different, but they all require a certain blindness. Whether that blindness is imposed or faithfully adhered to is going to depend on each person's level of personal responsibility. The idea of being like water just popped into my head. Does the girl really want to take on the greater risk of fighting back, or can she flow into another form of exercising power and resistance? If you're black in the U.S. is your community destined to fall into disrepair and violence without the tax base, or did efforts to stay organized and informed leave with the money? I feel perfectly blind to how I'm going to achieve my goals in a manner that doesn't keep me glued to my car delivering food or some otherwise demoralizing and uninspired labor, and the stress of how to flow around that hurdle is constant.

This is the only way I know how to try and understand why people don't get anywhere. This is rough. This is sad. This is lonely. I hate it. I hate myself. I'm not a victim, but that's a statement bread from hopeful denial of the list of things I'd lose my breath trying to say all at once. I'm forced by my own conception of personal responsibility to always acknowledge, but downplay, the negatives happening to me. I have to keep inventing new options, exploring the smallest chances, and shaming every moment I can't get it together. I've fashioned my life around something like, “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.” Me doing everything I know how to the degree I'm capable needs to put me in the parking lot before the building opens, if you want to discuss my idea of “early.”

So now, I might try to claim I'm a victim of my own mind. I've habituated a delusion. I've condensed every conclusion into some flawed metric by which to judge my value or place. And I can't shut it off. Everything I do that isn't in service to “what matters” is by default on a scale from boring to harmful. Worse than resenting other people's happiness, you don't even recognize it. What does a kiss on a mountain top have to do with me? Why do I get the impression your nightly prayers are for your cats or dogs to speak English? How fondly will you regard your vacation when you're 70 and still working without a pension or 401(k)? I don't care to be bothered by matching someone else's happiness, I want them to match my concern. I want an acknowledgment of our collective victimhood with regard to our avoiding minds and get-used-to-it biases.

My future self isn't trying to get everyone to quit their jobs and just get drunk in a field with me indefinitely. My future self is one who never has to bitch because he's gotten to the ground floor of problems that can actually be fixed. He wants to give a shit about happiness. He wants to think it's worth bringing kids into the world. He wants to spend as much time tripping balls or on morphine as it takes to forget he's on his way out, and when it's over, no one will have to use his death greedily and fearfully. My future self is creating and exploring not out of desperation, but because new details and new technologies will require pioneers. Does anyone reading this feel like that? Can you remember when or if you ever have?

I don't seek to make it sound so dramatic, but we get absolutely nowhere alone. You don't get a title or a dollar amount and then finally time to start on your dreams. I didn't do the coffee shop alone, the party house, picnics, acid trips, or ice skating by myself. I didn't get all fucked in the head about relationships and friends or get to be better than average at Super Smash Brothers from steeping my nose in preteen novels and watching Twitch. I didn't even get a single task done correctly on the land over 3 months and 4 thousand dollars until my dad drove the 3 hours to knock out a 2 day task in 2 days. Whatever you think about the path you're on, if you have some specific conception of yourself that you've hung over the fence surrounding your job or convenient social structure, it's dead in the water. That's why you grieve for your lost loved ones whether they've physically died or not.

Why not? I'll ring it again. I want help. I need help. I need presence and the smallest enthusiasm with which to run with. I'd settle for someone to talk to while I'm digging a hole big enough to burn 80 yards of carpet in. Do I deserve it? I'm not a lonely kid or hungry veteran. You probably only want to help the real victims, piecemeal, in ways that make you feel like you're contributing. You're not a victim in lieu of them, right? The battle you can win? You're right on time.

[652] Long & Hard

I think the one hard and fast rule I need for this blog is to never sound like a kiss-ass. You know those lines that start out with awkward fawning over something or citing a dozen caveats to show you're actually in the know? A year after #Oscarssowhite you break your back bending over to thank Denzel Washington, somehow up your own, yet popping out of your ass. What I am going to try to do is state as many approximating truths as I can back to back that should be wrapped around and compliment each other. This method will make any one line sound absolutely terrible, but those in the game of removing context can find ways to do that with everything.

It might be easier to start with a word that runs in parallel with the sexual assault reveal movement. Feminist. I'm not a feminist. There are as many ways to define it as there are people to claim it, so I don't claim it. It is subjected to the same rule as any other word we employ to mean everything, yet also something deeply personally specific. If you ask me if I believe in equal pay for equal work, I say yes. Of course women should have control over their own bodies. And yes, despite super cunts, most aren't lying when they claim to have been assaulted.

If you ask me if we should have equal representation across all domains, I ask what you're smoking. Do I think men and women are equal? No. Even in general? Insofar as they are human, sure. But the concept of “equality” has taken on a majestic or holy status that wants to rip it out of any coherent definition. It currently, out-of-hand, demonizes differences and distributions in service to an unromantic caricature of shifting power dynamics. To that end, to be a “feminist” who believes in “equality” is to adopt the hashtag and the chant relating your general perception of injustice, but to do absolutely nothing but confuse ever settling on a means to fix it that isn't the incidental runoff after the mob washes over.

To drill down further, I don't think inequality is in and of itself a bad thing. Everyone is different. Some people at some levers of power fixed the game to ensure “unfair” advantages. Keep in mind, you can only claim fairness with a shared conception that socializes and grants equal access to resources. We can't agree everyone even deserves to live in this country. Take that level of mental deficiency, and then think about how smug and defensive real estate developers would be with their red pencils. Here we begin to bleed into a conversation about avaricious souls and manifest corruption. To me it's the beginning of the real conversation; it's the place of what constitutes a human soul and what it has done throughout history or will conceivably do when conditions look the same.

I wrote once about how “rape was the name of the game” and cited how much of the current world's population is in some way related to Gengis Khan. I was arguing that things have gotten better. In order to understand how they got better some like to employ “capitalism” or “ women's liberation” or “science.” Fundamentally, it's too large of a claim about too many things. I made it before I stopped much believing in the “objective” means by which to judge huge periods in history. It's easy to say it's a good thing people aren't dying from easily curable diseases. It's another to allow them to die of starvation or war 20 years later because you never got the heart of the real issue.

And so, finally, we can start talking about “sexual assault.” Do I think you should make “unwanted advances?” Often enough, you find out they're unwanted precisely the moment after you've made them. As a person too comfortable with his body, there's a fair amount of women who could grab my ass or dick and I'd probably giggle, smirk, and thank them. Are you immediately reeling? I just betrayed myself right? Because I'm a guy, so it's different, right? I'm missing the power dynamics. I'm missing the perpetual fear women live under. I'm known to be “too much” in the perv realm or with my sexually charged comments and inappropriate jokes.

So is your offended and betrayed gut just being sexist? Just because I can theoretically beat the shit out of a woman who chose to violate my temple doesn't mean that option is truly on the table or really what I'd deign to pick. Perhaps you're quick to point out that it's often young people that are preyed upon, to which I'm wondering why you're quickly shifting away from what I'm getting at to lazily suggest I'd defend fucking with children. Maybe you get it, you're not offended, and you think it's just as egregious that I might have my ass slapped or grabbed, which has happened, and, dammit, well, SOMETHING SHOULD BE DONE!

I usually try to apply this method every time I'm bitching about my own life. What's the realistic alternative? The easiest one is speech, for me. Should you tell some girl you're attracted to you want to cum in her hair and suck on her feet, perhaps on your coffee break? You're probably courting disaster, but at the same time if she, or the mob, reflexively suggest that anything ever that any man says under any circumstance that creeps out or offends or “makes you feel threatened” should be banned and punishable by social and financial death, things have gone bat shit crazy. And I wouldn't say it that way if I hadn't at times heard it reflected that way. Leave aside the totalitarian bent of policing speech and just think about how many holes you'd put in the concept of communication as a whole. What's a realistic alternative to never hearing from a creeper or someone who insists too heavily that doesn't scream hysteria? What if, and this is the hardest thing apparently, some guys some of the time are going to rise to that level of terrible or annoying or inappropriate, and life went on?

For me, because I don't get sexual advances as often as I hear the pretty and not-so-pretty do, I have to invent a world where I'm hearing something I don't want about my body or what you'd want to do me, say at least half a dozen times a day. (I’ll pretend I never saw Jessica Williams walk down the street in New York) I can dip into my childhood and draw from the banks of the shit my mom said about me, but that feels unfairly biased by my youthful inability to deal with bullshit. I suppose I'm also a terrible case study in this because if when it's not a girl I'd hook up with, I'm still flattered, and I know this because I've referenced with pride the amount of gay guys who've been into it. Hmmm, let's consider this paragraph a bust and leave it to the audience to one day create the conditions for me to experience the proper empathy.

Moving on, another way to state “life going on” is that, I can conceivably accept a world where the “worst” thing we do to each other is offend or get offended by sexually charged language. That's like 1st layer Mormon heaven on Earth. For the sake of argument, say no one gets raped, no one gets beaten up, and every instance you've interacted with semen has been by choice as well as every naked picture of you online signed off and approved. We're always going to be as bad as “human.” If terrible, horrible, violent, rapist humans manage to contain themselves to words? Time to start counting those blessings.

But dammit, we have to deal with violence. We have to discuss entitlement. Our deepest rooted religious institutions vouchsafe the subordination of women. They've trained us to idolize the female form in ways that stupefy the nudist and his furrowed brow. The asexuals just look on with a pallid density that seems to betray their very existence.

What should we do!? Ironically, while I want to semi-mock hash-tagging things, it is important to talk things out in order to shift the landscape. There have been consequences. The right kind? The “biggest” kind? The lasting kind? I don't know and mostly doubt it. But consequences nonetheless. But again, and I find this a facet and problem with “celebrity” in general, we're glossing over the ugly human underbelly and making it about who's got the snarkiest comment incorporating a pun from the accused's previous work. It's cheap and lazy. Repeat ad nauseam that Weinstein is ugly and disgusting and Kevin Spacey is aggressively handsy. You'll never get to the greed at the heart of all men's souls. You compound the sin by not seeing yourself in it.

When I got to college, for example, at some point in the introductory videos and discussions, it was relayed to us that if ANY amount of alcohol was consumed by you or your partner they were COMPLETELY UNABLE to grant consent. They said literally everything but, “If you drink and hook up, you're all rapists.” While I doubt this had the intended effect of instilling the fear of God in the incoming class, I think it's an example of that over-correction self-righteous beat only concerned with fortifying their childish utopia. Either literally everyone I know or have ever partied with is a rapist, including myself, or people drink and hook up, and some very shitty and dangerous people drug or take advantage of others in no position to remember or consent. If you lose that distinction from the get-go, I'm not convinced you know or care to talk about anything real.

This is coming from a guy with a vested interest. I've been the overly-enthused or insistent in coming on to any girl that showed even the smallest interest, particularly as a teenager. Was it my best or most respectful behavior? No. Was I one step away from holding someone down and playing with their tits or fucking them against their will? Apparently, given the landscape, that's wholly dependent on who you ask. I quickly and comfortably say no, but I can see immediately the fear someone might experience trying to talk about their questionable drinking escapades or youthful indiscretions (talk about a dangerous phrase) and it opening the path for a lynch mob.

There's a difference between the power of the mob and the power of speaking out. The mob can get things done, rarely with anymore tact or appreciation for what's happening than the accused. The power of speaking out gives you an opportunity to join in solidarity and go on that search for meaningful change. We seem to conflate the two as quickly as every #metoo piles on the same pile higher and higher. It seems a measure of our deeply misunderstood relation to power that underlies the energy of these movements more than anything. And that's the tragedy of it all. It's fireworks on the surface of a world you think needs to implode.

For my part, I've called or messaged or asked people if and when my mind lingered on whether or not I was being too “fresh.” I've apologized and been met with, “Meh, we're cool.” I think it's dangerous to paint half the population as this violent predatory monster and use previously understood social norms, with notable pitfalls, as a stand-in for what's really going on. We can't forget who the players are. I don't believe the media circus is where “our” human power lies to fix cultural norms. I don't think hash-tags or celebrities are going to save the next one.

In bypassing your obligation to dig deeper, you have to decide to be a victim first. You have adopt the language of the oppressed first. If you'd rather poke the heart of the matter, put together that picture of what is realistically possible given where humanity is in that heart and cultural mind. Maybe you'll shift your energy from vacuuming up character assassination articles and ruminate on how we educate our children, how we talk (or don't) about sex, or who we're taking our cues from with regard to the, hardly agreed upon, abhorrent behavior. You think “grab her by the pussy” is President because the problem is just men?

It's easy for me to recall instances from what's been called “toxic masculinity.” I've been offered high fives over the number of black girls me and another friend have slept with. Both wildly racist and sexist at once, and yes, I turned down the high five. This same gentleman seems to reflexively refer to girls as bitches as well. Like, hey feminism, you missed a generation. But guess what, he's also not a rapist, and has been accused of being one for, I'm not kidding, having no sexual contact whatsoever with the girl in question. Something is seriously broken, and it's not our resolve to believe girls like that. For my part, even if I don't conceive of women as a flock of bitches or take special pride in what races I have sex with, if the worst thing that comes out of me and this friend's relationship is me telling him his bitches comments are crass and uncomfortable, that seems like an acceptable realistic standard for our dynamic. I can accept that kind of “locker room talk.”

Life is a threat. Every day something is angling to kill you. People on The Hill do it with “The Women's Health and Safety Act” that guts all funding for birth control and sex education. “Capitalism” shoots up the cost of luxurious tampons and diapers if only to kill via eventual exhaustion. “The mainstream media” has so degraded our concept of shared institutions and knowledge we're actively chasing the demise of even the illusion of democracy. You want to talk sexual assault, or perhaps racism, or maybe you find it wise to stick to numbers and the environment. But you don't bother to recognize the enemy. It's not men. It's not white people. It's not “climate skeptics.” It's you. You don't organize so you don't recognize so you can't share and build on the underlying mechanisms for change.

Again for effect, you don't organize (your thoughts or otherwise), so you don't recognize (nuance, aberration, or a path to deeper truths), so you can't share (anything but a hashtag) and build (matching institutions that have been writing policy and subverting norms for decades) on the underlying mechanisms for change.

You don't call greed, pride, wrath, sloth, envy, gluttony, and lust by their names, leaving you to only whine in concert about your feelings. You only speak when it doesn't matter, when you want to join the mob and lynch a rich person, or when you feel safe your catch-all cliché or pithy parlance will get retweeted and loved. You're the threat to everything you're pretending to care about. And it's a tragedy when you actually do care. And you'll never bother with the work of figuring out why.

[651] The Real Real

I acted like a normal person today. I called around about different places to take music lessons. I spent money I rightfully earned on whatever struck me as a thing I wanted. I ignored appeals from The Man to go into work because I don't need to yet. I grabbed lunch. I went to a movie and actually got things from the concession stand. Then I went to renew my gym membership. Normal, right? Pro-active, grabbing my life by the horns and making initiating steps into a resolved flow and future.

The alternative to my day is the story actually in my mind. I “missed my chance” to get pinged on first and stay on all day working. I “wasted” money on a massively overpriced hot dog and Snickers bites. I'm “distracting” myself by introducing an obligation not to waste my money at the gym when running, though bad for the joints, is free and I sold my free weights before I moved. $17 per half hour for lessons? Aren't Youtube and Google a thing?

I think it's reasonable enough to assess my head as generally my enemy. It has a contrary posture by nature. One might argue it's growing more conservative. My car will blow up again. I'll maybe hurt something. One day someone will actually call me back and be prepared to get work done on the land. So, naturally, every penny at all times should be reserved for the Prime Directive goal. Or, so my shallow brain wants to believe.

I feel there's been a dangerous confusion going on lately about my disposition and what I am or am not asking of you. I hope to address this now. The first paragraph is who the world wants me to be. The second who I am. The first describes the work I do to stay “grounded.” The second is the nag that provokes comments and blogs. The less we see or know each other, you’re gonna reflexively crave the first, while online I’m only going to be offering the second.

I expect nothing of you. When you do something that seems in line with what I like, I'll try to show it. That's about it. I'm not someone who seeks pity or sympathy. I try to state things as I see them or capture the moment when I'm managing to feel. That's it. We can grow apart. We never talk. We can belabor misunderstandings until you justify whatever it is you need to about me. I'm already over it.

Eminem's line, “God sent me to piss the world off” has been ringing in my head. I'm suspicious of the idea that it's in line with my “purpose” to slowly alienate nearly everyone I've ever known. There's the dumb acquaintance or friend who chases everyone away because they got way over their head into a pyramid scheme. There's the one who actively changes into a vicious ideologue or increasingly fearful spite monster that chases people away. I've learned that by simply talking and asking questions, I piss off LOADS of people, more often than not at random, and I could claim to have never seen it coming but for the previous years of our nonexistent relationship.

When I was burning the candles of “friendship” and “family” too hot, this concerned me. It no longer does.

I mostly think to bring this up after a facebook friend got angry at me for, what I can only try to sum up as not “doing more.” My capacity for stating the obvious and “not thinking hard enough” about what to do next really frustrated her. If I'm getting her position wrong, I think none of us will ever know. Either way, without rehashing what I don't think is the point, I still have concerns regarding doing for the sake of doing and have impressed upon you many times how we should better constitute “more.” Her contention I feel had little to do with what my statement was about in the first place, but nonetheless, I got a mini exciting little exchange out of it.

Along with Eminem, after that exchange I had Shia LaBeouf's “JUST DO IT” screaming in my head the rest of the day as well. So often am I encouraged to just do things to whatever end, I decided to take the advice. Did I spend more than I wanted? Who's pretending I even know what I want!? I just did it. It was mine to do.

I think it's important to keep in mind that a large portion of my being is about identifying opportunities for restraint. Are any of you under the impression I have a problem “doing things” or saying yes to myself and my desires? Because if you're angry at me for “wallowing” in my free time and money, you've missed the point so hard the league should consider banning you from playing again.

I want that real real. I want that sense that drives and motivates and cuts out the right time and can be sustained and be taken pride in. I want it any and every chance I can get it. I have half a dozen fat girls on OkCupid that are as equally excited and free to go bowling as I am, but that's not that real real. I could recount my time taking in media and movies as me being some aspiring critic or nuanced aficionado, but that doesn't have shit to do with the point or brunt of what I'm doing or why. It's why I don't like most of the shit you post. It's why you don't see or don't bother with most of the shit I post.

I'll tell you right now, I don't care how old you get, how comfortable or resolved, or how much you think you've really figured out. I know, it's a time honored tradition, that the real real of nailing down definitions and digging up the roots of feelings and parsing out difficult language isn't your bag. I know the very core of my being pisses you the fuck off. Life's hard enough, you don't need me getting rooted in your brain against your will. I'm a “catastrophe friend.” I'll be there when you're in the dark, and until then, I'm only going to make your world darker if you're not like or accepting of me.

This I feel I've finally come to terms with. I'm a lock, in person. I turn on the charm offensive, I make you laugh, I help you cross lines, and I shower affection and cash to smooth over any rough parts. But on that trip home? Oh no no no, what did we do? What did he say? You know, he's always been a bad influence. Have you read his blog? Dude's a psycho! Life could be so much simpler if he'd just let it. I've got my partner and hobbies and I work to keep myself involved. Why can't he just find his own corner of the world to disappear into?

Fair assessment or not, all I have is speculation. You don't talk. Maybe more specifically, you don't talk to me. Again, no blame or shame or pity party, calm down, it's just a fact. I have friends who talk to me, don't worry, it's just not you, and I'm not that unsure of why. Egomania does me no favors, but neither do appeals and quips and random check-ins, so I default to what's easiest. Oh well, normal people have to be loved at their worst for you to be allowed their best! I think my soul just threw up a little.

It's only in the real real that one is willing to concede their joke of an existence and nothing worthwhile posture. Do you want to say that about yourself? Fuck no. But if and when you can't say things when they're true, what good are you? I'm just as quick to toot my horn when that beautiful sound is due. Let me say it like this, if you were having an incredibly hard time finding meaning or direction, I wouldn't tell you to join a failing union and to stop bitching. First, I'd probably invite you to lunch, and then I'd start asking a dozen questions.

That's a tell, by the way. When you don't know something and remain incapable of asking questions, you make your position on the other person increasingly their fault. Now they're not just annoying or whiny, but hopeless and combative or defensive yada yada because you got incensed by a line you might not have understood. It happens fluidly and all the time. It's the only way I know how to not take it personally either silence or a bit of a fight. If I was easy to understand, I wouldn't be on my 651^st blog. That you would have anything less devoted to your ever-changing existence is what perpetually scares the shit out of me. That is, because you seem to generally have all the answers, somehow, even when your favorite answer is silence.