[684] Wine Interlude

Would you blame me?

The reality of my situation is one of indulgence yearning for more. My most “altruistic” sensibilities are still predicated on a certain measure of wealth and comfort for myself first. It's a measure that's perpetually illusive until a problem presents itself to my immediate moment. I draw up budgets and plans and work until I fear for my health and mental well-being. I have a story as to why and for what. But, for what?

Every single person I meet seems to be “content” where they are. They aren't, but they're “adult” about it and chug along without persistent complaining. I don't know how to do this. I wish I did. Or, I wish that I had the practice under my belt that I could “turn it on” when times feel desperate.

Could I possibly state a point to this one sooner than later? I want to know why I can't “just sit.”

That was the question I had for myself after I drew up another 30 day plan predicated on everything going “well-enough” besides how I considered how I was spending my time. Why can't I, just like when I had all of my study money, sit and slowly spend, and work the day or 2 a month I need to keep things paid? Why can't I justify the plane ticket and weekend drinking with Hatsam until I have “more real shit” done first? My friendships aren't real? Most of them, maybe sure, but I like Hatsam and he's ride or die. Should that be postponed indefinitely until I can shit more comfortably in my field?

Do I even know what I want anymore? When I posited that I should just call people at random to kill time throughout the day, I got hung up on the idea of “killing time.” I never want to kill time. I'm already old and dying. I want my time to be valuable and useful. If I'm calling you just to distract myself, I'm disrespecting both of us. I'm aware of my motives, and I want to call you because I want to talk to you, not use you. It sounds stupid maybe? But far be it for me to be the one that pulls us both into the superficial joke ass realm of existence.

What do I want? It might be easier to ask what I wanted. I wanted money, for nondescript ends. Life experience says I don't want my parents to end up in a situation like my grandma's. I don't give much a shit about expensive “things” in and of themselves. I don't want to be surrounded with sycophants and overgrown children. I'v said it too often that I want my time, I want to create, I want to experiment, and I want to cultivate an environment to cultivate and grow “my” type of people.

I guess I'm still working towards those goals? It's just, building up to them a half bathroom at a time keeps them at a level of abstraction. At any point in the last half year I've spent “quasi-homeless” I could have taken off on “vacation” somewhere or bought some random new toys. All pointless. None speaking to the bottom line. I want to be able to travel and not think about anything else. I want to be able to make money and know it's not immediately about to disappear. I want a mental security blanket that some couch in their relationships, I've opted apparently for what I can provide on my own, which is lacking.

I'm tired of talking. I don't just want something to do, I need it. I need something that matters, even a little, even if my initial reaction is “that's fucking dumb” and then the next second we go about it with all the enthusiasm available to us. I don't need to adopt a kid or become a big brother to pretend I give a shit about helping at that level either. I will not be pacified with donations to poor areas or volunteer hours. I need an extra set of hands to “the cause,” whatever the cause that we see fit is. I'm not selfish enough to sit here for the next 6 months playing video games or watching TV, slowly accruing funds at the most comfortable pace. But I'm also too selfish to gain any sort of satisfaction at “the little things” and the idea of helping “just one person.”

Goddammit. I don't have real problems, which I guess means I'm destined to never figuring out how to feel like I've solved them.

[683] Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

I feel as though I've been corrupted. There's a file in my operating system that's degraded and broken into little pieces floating about the rest of my body causing problems. There's a statement I've made often enough that I truly believed. I write for me. At the same time, what started as a build up of feelings and confusion I had no grasp of was, from the beginning, an appeal to the outside world to help me better explain. As much as I needed to get it out, the sentiments often lived or died by whether or not they were challenged or reinforced. Talk about women in abusive relationships? Easy enough for people to get on board. Make sweeping generalizations about sex or the utility of school, people feel the need to chime in against.

That is, they did. There was a point in my life I could count on some measure of feedback whether it was a “I didn't understand this at all,” or “Hey, you know, you put that in an interesting way.” There were 3 and 4 conversations going on across each other back when you couldn't type as many words into comment boxes. People seemed to feel things with a measure of intensity. They seemed to care, at the very least, about putting their view out there even if in their response a qualifier like, “I know this will get jumped on, but” existed.

There's no denying the difficulties of having a conversation at any level. Text removes all the extras conveyed in person. Language is fairly ambiguous by default. Sensitive topics cause people to respond to their feelings instead of the point raised. People go into conversations with different agendas or may not see the purpose to engage at all beyond a kind of bored antagonism or devil's advocacy. I can't tell you the number of times I've been met with, “but the implication!” of something I've said that acts like a springboard into wild conjecture and anger. Considering how often I attempt to connect or make the appeal, you'd think I'm a glutton for repetition dying for a different outcome in service to insanity.

I thought I wanted to write last night, and then I second guessed myself and tried to sum it up in a status. I was annoyed about the different snippets into the past I had read. There were segments I barely knew what I was getting at. There were fights. There were all of the enthusiastic, “This is what I'm gonna do!” statements, and the day to day realities that cost obscene amounts of money and time. One thing I will give myself credit for, I do try to capture the moment, and I do feel the brunt of what I was getting at remained as true then as it does now.

The problem with not writing last night was a sort of anxiety I felt about saying too many of the same things at too close an interval. The idea that, “I write for me” would be worried about alienating a crowd that rarely if ever still reads, let alone responds, seems to betray the sentiment. I have more to say. I always have something to say. I should be able to write about it every day if I want and not think it's some undue burden for eyes I'm not forcing to be there.

There's layers to this picture though. At a ground floor layer, writing is like eating. I have to do it. I literally will start developing chronic headaches, will actively chase people away from me, and likely slip into what's perhaps been a persistent depressive state reminiscent of growing up. The next level up is my persistent appeal to try as often as it strikes me to get a conversation. It's not “only” attention seeking. It's not meant to be exhausting. It may function as both and it may never register as anything but in the minds of some, but honestly, I'd rather just be in an ongoing conversation. It's how I conceive of the best relationships. We can crack jokes and relate our troubles and give the benefit of the doubt that no line was meant to sound like screaming condescension, if we so choose. The final level is a kind of insidious, kind of experimental one. It's to track the changes in people I know have read me, but refuse to acknowledge they've done so besides indirectly. Even knowing this fact, you won't be able to help yourself.

I have what feels like a giant list of reasons that people wouldn't respond that range from innocent to a measure of what I'd deem, “life threatening.” Every time I think to type it out I wish to push for a greater point about the times and places we inhabit and why instead. I've said a number of times that I can put myself right back in the center of a past fight. I can catch a whiff of elation at the awesome party moments. I can inhabit the deadness of staring at all things as equal measures of pointless, guiding me nowhere, but existing nonetheless as a description. I suppose a positive view of aging is the idea that you can give this sensibility to people by default. I don't actually believe that, but I think it's a comforting cliché of de facto wisdom via time spent, and given the small amount of “rewards” we might achieve in life, everyone stands to feel gratified that they actually matter a little more, if only eventually.

What constitutes a relationship seems to be as much your own understanding of yourself and what you bring to the table, as what exists between you and another person. I've argued for both sides of how life plays out, calling it extremely personal, in that you always retreat back into your own head, and wildly impersonal, in that no one much gives a shit about you and you're at the mercy of incalculable forces. It's two sides of the same coin, but the only way it seems possible to tip the scale in life-affirming ways is to be paying attention. It's to bring your attention not to the circumstances you merely have to survive, but in your shared understanding of a raised problem.

There too, you have layered ways in which you need to speak about “problems.” I'm a fan of saying I don't have real problems. That's more true than not. It doesn't mean I won't call my car breaking down, dead end job, or unhealthy eating habits problems, but it does mean I'm not fleeing for my life, about to get deported, or were born into an era where I would have had to say goodbye to my uncle guaranteed to die from his recent cancer diagnosis now cured.

Keep the idea of describing problems in layers in mind and follow me down another idea. I went into “friendship” as fumbling and naively as I did “love.” I'm Mulder. I want to believe. I want to believe that anyone who meets me at an intellectual level will also meet me at honesty or morality or work ethic levels. I want to believe they know how to get their dispositions best oriented and their time best spent. I figured if we were all laughing at the same horrible jokes the same way, could rally around the same TV shows, could be pushed to do things like climb or hike (in my case) against any real desire to do so besides the company involved, that it signified a kind of “higher” form of being that spoke to kind of the point of existing at all.

So, then what should we ask of our “friends?” I thought, in sharing, in trying to talk, in rooming together, in planning a way to collaborate and save and create that I was doing something “good.” It didn't feel wrong to ask friends to help me throw the coffee kiosk together. I don't feel guilty calling someone to give me a ride when my car dies. I had an open-door policy at the party house and it felt weird if you knocked. Mind you, no one asked me to shed them of their obligation to knock. The first words out of a friend picking me up aren't usually, “Now, where's my gas money?”

Certain things don't really concern us at those levels unless someone's struggling pretty significantly financially or we try to be too familiar with an acquaintance who has a claim for knocking. What about bigger problems? Where does the friend cliff drop off? It's surely not the majority of your old party crowd that would feel obligated to drive you to and from chemo. Maybe you have a cause you support that they'll throw you $20 for, but they're not going to mail out a hundred invitations. We start venturing into how to describe the “problem,” and at what layer people feel comfortable or not contributing to alleviating it.

Say your problem is hard to nail down. Well, then absolutely everyone else is going to be as well. Say they have no regard for their own voice or opinion. Asking for it a thousand times isn't going to make them any more willing to potentially sound foolish. Say you've been painted into a corner of being “impossible” or “difficult.” It's as good a way to be losing before you begin as any.

My “problems” run the whole range of big to small. I have a problem of living in what feels like a dead-end environment. The marginal ways I think I wouldn't is to get into conversations predicated on the things I think about a few pages at a time. No one wants to chime in? Another problem. I have “big” problems in that I want to create a generally large enterprise that, either through conservation and saving, or cornering some market, nets large amounts of money. That begets small day to day problems detailed in past blogs to the problem of rediscovering the underlying truth of what motivates it all after things feel stagnant and oppressive. It all becomes great fun or a testament to human resolve, if you can mange to feel like any humans are involved.

The consequence of having “too much” to say is a level of depersonalization. I have very cold, “rational,” reasons I want the things I do, even if I can feel in real time the comfort that comes with having “enough” to ride it out to the end. Every new pain in a muscle or joint says lay down. Every broken “friendship” over something stupid suggests choosing malicious shortcuts. Every small attempt to assert the dignity of an evidently stark-raving truth of how to respect the individual and time met with censorship and excuses shovels more on the pile of hopelessness.

But if you have a friend. If you have something behind the reflex that likes likable things, then you have a reason. Then you have a plan with a better likelihood of success. Every blog is a reflection of me back to myself. There's only so much “new” I can put in from the media I take in or comments I catch from people I'd otherwise never speak to at length. That was why I started being more deliberate in picking you. That's why you have the chance, nay, the opportunity, to be at the ground floor of anything we may create together. And yet, so far, that seems to only speak to that measure of my initial naivety.

I think the story of why the conversation died is pretty straightforward and alluded to in a few of my recent blogs. “Kids,” with their protected environment and enthusiasm in college just became “adults.” They reverted to “people” who've been developing their capacity for excuses and throwaway placations for centuries. It hurts to dream. It hurts enough to live from paycheck to paycheck without thinking about all of the things you'd rather be spending your time or money doing. I'm struggling to cope with not having a bathroom yet! Well before we begin on my musical or entrepreneurial aspirations. But I think people have humbled themselves with regard to what life has provided. The growing list of their responsibilities hijacked them like it hijacked their parents, like society let itself be hijacked into the emotional out of control roller coaster that begets fascism.

Did that feel like a leap? It's layers though, right? For everything you're paying attention to, there's an infinite amount otherwise you're not. If you don't incorporate the “negative” aspects, the suffering, and the inevitable death of all things into that, it's easy to flow on that river out to sea, dead in ways you never saw coming, that left before you got the chance to fix them. That's why when I'm fed and comfortable watching my favorite show I get anxious. That's why when I can count on both hands almost 3 times! how old I am, I'm constantly reevaluating my time-schedule and peeking back into my old blogs about just why exactly it is I'm not a millionaire this moment. Even in documenting my capacity for change, there's plenty to miss.

The pragmatist knows that if I never get another comment, I can still probably mostly rely on a handful of people for larger order problems. I know that the conversation is always going on in my head if nowhere else. I know that no matter, if likely in spite and in fact because of how jaded I can be, it's still immediately easy for me to never play the game that uses words like you don't like. You remember, I always get invited back to the after party before I decide to start in on my target. I know that as long as my very being, the one who basically always has something to say and is stuck focusing on the things that don't make him nor anyone else happy, I'm not going to have very many “friends.” And given my enthusiasm to jump into things and live out the consequences one layer of skin at a time, the experiment has at least provided another thick callous.

I also know that I haven't lived up to that vitally important aspect that I've called out in the past. I haven't provided the environment to plug people into. I didn't get movie moments at parties or girls to think I was cool by doing anything less in the cultivation of my environment. With this in mind, I always find the accusation that I “think I can control things” odd. Of course I can. I controlled the environmental layer, so people got drunk and naked. I push away from people who hand their feelings over to me because I find it highly irresponsible and immoral to pretend it's your place to exercise that amount of control over people you profess to care about. I control my own proclivities to name call and insult when I see after 3 words you're not pleased I decided to chime in on something you shared. I control whether the conversation exists in the only way I can walk away describing it as “going well,” or one of a dozen ways it would register as fruitless despite my efforts. If nothing else, I retain control because I'm actually trying.

Here, I wonder what you're actually trying. It's not to respond to me. The only “kind of” goals I've seen documented are different trips to the tops of mountains and rocks. I'm sure you're plugging away at your jobs or something. But I don't really know anything about you. You know by the dollar amount and day of the week when I might have something less fatalistic and bitchy to say. Or, if you were wondering the information is at least readily available. Is it useful even in a small sense of solidarity? We all get fucked by surprise things. We're all kind of struggling at least a little, right? But I still like hearing when a friend is paying out the asshole for insurance to keep on her meds. Maybe there's more to be mined there about “our” societal next collective push on a referendum regarding healthcare. Maybe more personal testimonies will push over the edge what needs pushing.

Only once has someone told me how little they think the “average” person reading me is feeling regarding the circumstances of their life to change. They don't feel this moment is precisely the one to start an important conversation. They don't think the idea they had has any value. They don't think the problem they're currently trying to surmount may ever be overcome. Then again, I have to ask you, what are we doing being friends? What are you afraid to ask of me, at what layer, may I be able to contribute? Or, why don't you think it's important to describe why you think I have nothing to offer? I'm certainly trying with regard to you.

I'm a big believer that it's the small amount of radicals of any ilk that are tending to control things. And I think that's a problem. My voice, no matter how persistent, shouldn't be the be all end all, and I know this, and I ask for it not to be. Radical tea-bagger oligarchical ideologues steering an entire country into the ground are making sure things get pretty goddamn shitty before you pussy-hatted bitches decided to wake the fuck up and get into the streets. There are profiles of the actually psychopathically monied and motivated dismantling each piece of what's brought us to a relative stability and civility today. Shouldn't we be talking about those things every day? Shouldn't we be probing for creative solutions, even conversationally, in how we understand the perpetually shifting landscape?

Or, do we return to that being too high-level of problem to ask of your “friends?” It's too much to talk. It's too much to read. It's too much to care. It's too much to challenge. It's too much to think. Black out, live and let live, cross your fingers and pray all those someones out there have a healthier and proactive response that will save us all. If it hasn't been stated, we can make sure it is now, but if you don't have the words to describe how we relate to each other, I'll reduce it to something simpler, something “negotiated” and conditional. Every positive memory and emotion I've ever felt towards you can be corrupted. It's absolutely not the direction I want to go, but I'm compelled by my otherwise empty and selfish environment. I'm whispering to myself and a handful of chat boxes.

It's funny that after typing that I had an immense momentary calm. I always come back to that “cold” baseline. Once I get the excuse to go into robot mode, it gets easy. It doesn't hurt there, I'm not angry, I'm not empty, I'm not hopeful, I'm just “do.” I like to just do. There's a significant point and measure of irony in the description of being driven there by my environment and circumstances. I have to acknowledge the new conditions under which I'm to regard friends, but I didn't create them. To achieve the calm, my “choice” was to observe what I conceived as the best alternative. It's why I will always and forever be fascinated with what you're observing in your own lives. It's why I comfortably say I don't think you're thinking when you've nothing to say. It's why, as long as I try, as long as I see and introduce those sights, I'll retain a kind of control you've dispossessed yourself of.

It's how I can see any number of futures for myself, but a primarily shitty one “in general” as the consequences of impersonal forces describe what's happening to us across problem layers. At the level of the individual, what's that? Phone zombie? Polarized and distracted ignorant wage slave? The environment? Dying, flooded, getting literally exponentially worse in mass-casualty categories. The law? Still in “white-lash” mode, doubling down and dismantling what got us this far. Interpersonally? I find people arguing against their own interests and discover piecemeal my college cohort barely interact or regard each other as people; my ego thinking I was the only one :,-(. The stats on where wealth is going? Horrible. The future of the jobs that still exist? Nonexistent. The numbers to care for the sick and dying? Inadequate. The funds to at least attempt keeping things from falling apart? Drying up and stolen. Consequences for the worst actors? Not even the memory of what those look like. One metric after another begets more and more shit. It's not your job in this moment to provide reasons for optimism. It's your job to acknowledge and consider fixes at different layers. The work of your job should take place in the form of a polite discussion between you and your friends.

I suppose I take a fair amount of comfort in what I've heard described a few times recently as “having a chip on my shoulder.” There's people who never achieve enough, destroy enough, fuck enough, or whatever else. No amount of awards appease them. No praise will ever live up to the ideas they conjured about themselves. If there's a “different” qualifier about me, that's one I jive with. I shouldn't be guilt-tripping myself for having too much to say. I'm responding to the world that isn't saying enough of what I think needs to be said. I'm playing games people aren't. I've expectations that I've only scratched the surface of meeting. Consider, I actually did want to be “retired” by 30 when I was 15. I won't have a pension, but then I consider neither do the people who worked for 40 years and then got fucked by Wall Street and their “representatives.” If my car could stop breaking down, owning my own house to one day die in, and the land it sits on, at 29, are still feasible. It's leagues away from not knowing who my roommates will be every year, or living back with my parents, or renting from extortionists, or donning a 30-year obligation to show up to a job I hate for the mortgage.

If my shifting, invisible, fake as shit interpersonal layer is gone and my work setting is “independent” employment, I seek to fix the problem of my personal environment and set it up for the potential to grow or save my ass when things get pinched even harder. We're all “entrepreneurs” now. I like to believe my acceptance and understanding of the world at 15 speaks to my position and behavior now. And I think at 45, you know, after the consequences of the “tax reform” bill, partisan gerrymandering, or the 2 or 3 degrees rise in the planet's temperature, that my designs on off-grid sustainable living will prove to have been worthy of concern over the details today. I hope all of my worst predictions for how I've seen my “friends” respond to their lives, problems, and our conversations won't spill over. I really do hope that. Points for paying attention if you know what I think about “hope.”

I feel like I ask for so little. The catch is that I'm asking for attention. I'm asking for detail. I'm asking for something you have to work to even discover you have and is at the mercy of your disposition and various stresses in life. I worked 3 jobs and would come home in the 5 hours I could sleep between them to write about how more fucked than anyone cared to think working a job like Kroger really was. I'm writing this at midnight after I drove my car from the mechanic basically straight back to work until close. I'm not even reading nearly as much as I used to, but I snuck in several hours of lectures, interviews, and podcasts on my forced days off. I've habituated the burden of keeping up on things I profess to care about. Maybe you have too, I just never hear about it.

[682] Fill In The Blank

It's another late night and I've done another round of skimming and sorting of old blogs. Concurrently, I had a Jordan Peterson lecture on in the background. It's to the point where I've heard enough of his lectures I no longer have to zero in on each line that so initially captivated and motivated me. It's an apt analogy.

Writing is a reflection of “my burden.” Whether I describe that as an “obsessed” mind, “sociopathic,” an exercise of “honesty,” or you want to sum it all up as a string of incoherent “rants,” it arose because I didn't have the words for the pain in my head and heart. That there are so many religious traditions that try to capture the sort of “inevitable suffering” that's supposed to account for the essence of existence I find incredibly telling. My head has adopted different but familiar methods in trying to deal with it.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, people used to talk under my blogs. They talked a lot. Acquaintances talked. Friends answered questions. They wrote their own little blogs under mine and we discussed things over hours or days. People called me out. They questioned shitty analogies and words. They were comfortable saying, “I don't know” about things I wasn't sure of either, but there was a cooperation and show of solidarity in the mutual thoughtful effort. It eventually trickled out.

I can only speculate, but I think that happened for a number of reasons. Socially, the group dynamics shifted or degraded. In real time people were moving into more advanced classes and starting to contemplate “bigger” things than whatever the crazy guy at the end of the hall had to say. There might be a measure of boredom and feeling it's all been said before. I could have simply exhausted a finite well of goodwill that was willing to engage with my “combative” and “intimidating” positions. Tellingly, I was considerably more actually shitty with people back then, and they still stuck around to talk or fight back. For any whiner today who thinks anything I've written in the last several years is “too much,” let that discrepancy testify to a deadly weak defensive skin.

If I write something I'm working out, or think I've stumbled into some insight, it stands to reason I'd want to defend it. You watched the thought unfold. You might have ridden along the last few blogs that anticipated a new conclusion. Whomever decided that any back and forth or disagreement was automatically an untenable and impossible “fight,” I have no idea. I genuinely wonder if the silence and shoring up of “sides” of our political trends aligned with the precipitous fall of anymore feedback. What I can be sure of is that I'm not just confused or angry about nothing, and under what I'd today consider a “worse” capacity and willingness for civility prompted the kind of exchanges I couldn't beg you today to contribute towards.

I think that's scary. Something else brilliantly clear about those days is that there are always a gigantic amount of problems that not enough people are willing to talk about. Would you have guessed that I was worried about net neutrality in 2008? I didn't realize it either until I stumbled across that blog. Would a conversation that organized and accounted for my concerns have potentially steered us in a better direction today? Not that I'm a community organizer, or seem to exert much power over anything but the destruction of my social life and car, but the point is simple enough, right? It makes me think of how many friends said they wished they helped me create a Bitcoin mining machine when I offered the money and we both had the time.

Is there a ton of redundancy? Absolutely. Well before I had the patience to ignore, or even had the term “ideological possession,” I had all of the complaints and problems with “stupid” and “irrational” Christians and lamented ever having to experience the depravity of a Dinesh D'Souza dozens of times. But I have to think each time I was moved to say something, either a step was being taken, or a chip was breaking off. They remain invitations as well as doorways into the past. There are versions of yourself perhaps so compactly stuffed beneath what you're doing right now, behind the eyes that are reading this, maybe you've lost something important. Maybe it takes addressing, and then readdressing, and then doubling down on that thing, whatever it is, before you hit pay dirt.

I had one friend noting a trend of people becoming “increasingly fake.” You'd think that would be something I would say, but now I get a dimension to consider if that idea ever crosses my mind. I used to get a ton of encouragement with people calling me “deep,” or suggesting I compile and try to sell a book. I think about this in how quickly I was able to get 200+ followers on a new, now defunct, blogging site with old thoughts paired with a picture. I also bring it up to say none of that shit was what motivated me to write then, and reading it back now, I don't feel some positive feeling for being praised. I'll always want the work of your input over the blow job.

A section of the lecture in the background that did catch my ear was when Peterson started discussing playing different games at once. You have many iterations playing out over time, and you have to consider them all in trying to account for how to orient yourself in the world this moment. I think about this with regard to my level of “activism” or “morality” that I didn't engage in in the past and don't get up to today. I know it's the cliché, but I've never once considered volunteering my time to help the “less fortunate” in something like a soup kitchen or clothing drive. More than that, I'm often the first one to point out some paper or study that shits all over the efficacy of those individuated, what I called selfish, acts.

I don't know that I've ever tried to compile the amount of “most pressing” games I'm running in one place. I know that a huge motivation for pursuing things entrepreneurial was the abject boredom and hatred I had for school. I know that I want no scene even remotely adjacent to happen to my dad or stepmom as what happened with my grandma. I know that if I'm destined to have primarily superficial and harmful social relationships, I'd rather be home and drunk during them. I've adopted some concern for being familiar with our abundant media landscape. And while I'm reading and watching and arguing, I'd like to believe that the same tools I've exercised to gain what I have in life could be adopted across different problems in the world.

Less interesting to me are the vagaries of how that all fits together and the degrees they need to be altered or sacrificed in order to appease the present moment. More interesting is how many games are you running? Have you completed any? Have they changed over time? Have they been materially altered as you gained experiences or heard back from your social circles? Because this is something I think is vitally important to help explain some of my underbelly. I get precisely no feedback. It wasn't until I specifically tagged every girl remaining on my friends list who I'd ever had a remote sexual encounter with, and offered the concession that I was a sexual assailant, that garnered more than a “like,” let alone a conversation.

I have to wonder, did people stop thinking?

We can put up an endless list of other reasons they aren't responding, but I think they'll miss the point. Just to scratch the itch though, maybe facebook's algorithm makes sure only the same handful of people see when I post. Maybe I literally am just “hated” and “taken for granted” enough to be ignored. Maybe everyone is so busy and distracted they couldn't be bothered if they tried. Maybe every single thing I've said over the last several years has been so intuitively obvious people almost feel sorry for me that I bother to keep talking. Maybe “snowflake” isn't just an indication of someone's derivative condescending alt-right predilections, but a social condition that's infected and paralyzed. Maybe what got people talking initially had nothing to do with me and I wasn't aware enough to preserve whatever it was. Maybe we really are living in impossibly dangerous times where the devoid intellectual landscape has so altered us, we couldn't understand the origins and consequences of our silence until it killed us.

There's plenty of talk about the reasons we got Trump, and echoes of our misunderstood and ignored history that could lead us into actual nuclear war. There's talk with the buzzwords of the day regarding which direction we should heave the country after we wring it from the cold dead hands of our oppressors. There's funny signs at marches. There's tweet storms. And to be sure, there's a string of intellectuals and lecturers trying to put a box around what plagues us and provide hope and objective means for moving forward. But I can't get my “friends” to talk to me? What does any of that popularized polarizing mess at the top mean if I can't get intelligent conversation down here in the mud? What does it mean that as I've gotten more patient, more deliberate, and more respectful of my potential impact and responsibility, the conversational waters run dry? The problems got bigger, my views got more nuanced, now, nobody's interested. I must point out, this isn't entirely true. A roommate's girlfriend invited her brother over the other day. He's 20, low-status, and epitomized a white entitled mediocre opinion. He had “plenty” to tell me about how Japan's isolationism in the 1800s is a model for how the U.S. should conduct itself today. This is what you've left me with, people.

I want even the smallest grasp on the largest trends. The technologies that will materially alter your life started with that one article you caught 8 years ago. A bill or foreign policy decision will ripple throughout the rest of your life. How you talked about your feelings or plans for the people in your life have an immense deal to tell you about why your relationships look the way they do today. Literally, go to my blog and you can take my words that came true. If instead you adopt a complicit filter that decides all that's important are the inches in front of your nose, you're at the whims of it all. You'll sway the wrong direction and bring us all down. Don't talk back for my sake. Do it because it's literally the only way we can orient ourselves in the world that approaches a practical life-affirming sense. Do it because I'm telling you how cold and lonely I am, all the time, and if you have a drop of “friendship” left in you, you'd bother to understand what it means to do so.

Run the game where you challenge or argue with me on top of all your others. Hit the redundancy button until it breaks and the pieces need to be reassembled into something new. Help me remember that really cool thing you read about that it behooves us to check out more. Act like this magical means of connecting with any idea and any person can be used for more than positive feedback loops of arbitrary hatred and goofiness. Do it because you don't want to. Do it because it's hard. Do it because it takes time. Do it because you're afraid of what happens to a person like me if he loses too much of how to orient himself in the world. I don't actually care why you do it, but that you in fact do. I know nothing about you but my last fleeing memories of our time together and your cultivated online personas. I haven't known what I'm doing for so long because my context erased itself.

[681] My Conservatism

Months ago, I watched a video of Jordan Peterson explaining 12 rules for a new conservative movement. I don't recall most of them, but his explanation of borders stuck with me. Borders distinguish. You don't need to have a negative opinion of refugees or be racist and afraid of being “taken over” by migrant workers to want to respect what the things around a border you've drawn represent. In as many years as I've been hearing about “sides” regarding politics, a “principle” of the conservative side was never been explained to me like that.

For the longest time, I've never felt particularly aligned with any camp, let alone the implications of being forced to pick between the democratic or republican ones. I think I know what they used to stand for. I know what they campaign on. And I know that all evidence points to the only real party being that which money dictates. Those with the resources create the conditions to protect or expand their influence. Whatever else may be said of greed and the stark ignorance and disconnect policy makers have with regard to the poor, the powers of wealth merely described can remain independently true.

I've seen a theme across a number of different thinkers lately. It's a call to be more specific. The campaign slogans promising “hope” or “greatness” are designed specifically against this. The person who gives themselves over to the narrative subjected to arbitrary ways in which it unfolds. People still love Obama not because they have a position on drone strikes and wiretapping, but the short-hand representative intelligent black man substitutes for their own responsibility to adopt similar qualifiers.

You can try and zero in at different levels of distinction. A border is a familiar and easily rooted for idea. You push or defend borders. You get to make claims about what happens in your backyard. This distinction is lost on some extreme leftist groups who think there are no implications to putting pockets of ethnically minority people in an area. Many European neighbors can attest to what happens, as well act as a lesson if you attempt to do it half-assed. The distinction of course isn't “that” they're different, or there's some inherent evil or malicious intent to them, it's “but they are” different. To the extent you want to weaponize those differences is a measure of your personal folly.

The picture grows more complicated when you consider potential ideological possession. You don't want clusters of Nazi's anymore than you want actual believers in Sharia. First, I'd challenge you to accurately define what it is you think you're afraid of, tellingly when you can't, you've got your first clue that you're ideologically possessed. It would still remain foolish to pretend there is no difference between demanding women cover up their bodies or resorting to stone-age punishments for improprieties as “no different” than differing opinions on what it means to live well. And hey, maybe take a plate to the Pence's of the world.

I think it becomes increasingly hard to make distinctions when you're unwilling or unable to grant yourself any. I think this speaks to my frustrated and perhaps hatred with “meme speak.” A disarming chuckle shared 50 thousand times isn't any one of those individuals being funny. The ability of the meme to become infections speaks in no way to its truth or its audience's ability to understand it. You didn't create the meme, hoping to arrange your individuated thoughts in an interesting or intelligent way. It's a way to try and take credit for a joke just because you found yourself laughing.

Small recap. You can distinguish at the level of normative tangible examples, like a border. You can distinguish at the level of too-compelling words as they pertain to your personality. Or, you can forgo the exercise of distinguishing, and be a go-between for every incidentally infectious idea that scares you or makes you smile. We're in the throes of the second Women's March. Whatever individual reason each person is at their respective rallying point, the consequences of a larger generally malicious ideological position are being felt. To the extent you want to blame “patriarchy,” may suggest a measure of your own possession.

I try to do distinguishing things. I try to live my life in accordance with what I've come to relative conclusions about. I'm often at the mercy and whims of things like my car or job or depreciated social construct, but I nonetheless have a considerably more complicated answer as to what I'm doing, or where I think it's taking me, than “it pays the bills” or “that's just how it is.” I belabor examples of my past because I've found it incredibly hard to create the conditions of mutual safety and opportunity that a paid-off college environment provides. I no longer have the enthusiastic zest to exhaust myself at a job that doesn't appreciate me. I've allowed myself the leeway to learn how I can or can't rely on people.

As such, I've found myself growing more persuaded and comfortable with a kind of “conservative” posture. I really do want to protect what I have that, over so long of a middling existence struggling to achieve even a basic mutual acceptance of a shared goal or responsibility, the fight for it seems considerably more prolonged, dramatic, and important. I want a second front opened in service to things getting better, but the bit that has survived that's allowed me to even get this far feels as worthy of praise and protection. I struggle to demonize broad “capitalism” and don't think I'm a complicit cog in predatory patriarchy.

A lot of things still work. If you have too hard a time figuring out what they are, it suggests there's something more wrong with your broad skirting conception of your identity politics first. I no more bow to a man than I do his ideology. I think the work of critical thinking and collecting evidence are flirting with being relegated to a new dark age. I'm always going to blame the individual populist before I mindlessly swat at the air of ideas.

[680] Think Twice

I don't know the first time I used “sociopath” in a blog. I don't know when I discovered the word and felt it had anything to do with my personality, or, I guess, lack there of. Every time I use it, much to my own betrayal, I feel it is incomplete. Never have I been “unfeeling.” Never have I been unable to “understand where someone else is coming from.” Not once have my nicdecisions been blind to a kind of “inevitable fallout.”

Tonight, I did what I've done in the past. I chatted up some people, got myself invited back to their house, drank a little more, sang a few songs, and found myself one on one with the host after his friends left. Notably, one of his friends drunkenly expressed how she desired this man to be the one to hear her unload some troubles she was dealing with. She wanted him to point her in the right direction, be the one she could unburden herself with, and just fill that space that “the one who seems to understand something” should.”

I immediately did me. I asked what he thought of the power he had over his friend. He took immediate offense. He doesn't conceive of his place as a kind of power. He reflexively read all sorts of negative connotation and implications into my question. He was as quick as anyone to “rephrase” what I said into something more reflective of what he felt instead of what was actually said. Each attempt I made to ask him for a better way to phrase the question, a “better” line of questioning, or to switch roles and have him ask me questions that he considered “beyond the pale” went unanswered or argued with.

I honestly don't give myself enough credit for what I've learned. Nobody listens. People hear what they feel. This is not a fact that is lost on me, no matter how much you'd like to insist I don't get it. What you fail to understand is that I refuse to let my capacity for dialogue fall to that level. Yes, a number of times in our “conversation,” the word “condescending” was dropped. I will die “condescending” if the measure of that judgment is me asking you to be more specific. Literally, the point when I left the room was when I asked him to ask me a question. Instead of doing so, he started with some judgment, some unnecessary confusion and complication, as to the nature of the task.

If what I say is always and forever “wrong” and “condescending” and “inappropriate” and I say, “Hey, let's role reverse. Ask me anything, especially the questions you think aren't 'appropriate for someone else,” and your only response is to huff and puff and proclaim my inanity, I'm not the one who is wrong.

People think, I assume, I'm okay with losing “friends” because of some up-my-own-ass conception of intelligence or self-righteousness. At least, this is what is most often forwarded to me when I try to ask people sincere questions and am instead met with, “HOW DARE YOU!?” defensive and ridiculous behaviors. No. I'm okay with losing you because you aren't an individual. You're not thinking. You're not willing to do the work, so when I ask you something like, “What does it feel like to have measure of power over your friends?” You say I DONT' THINK LIKE THAT, FUCK YOU!” instead of something sane and thoughtful like, “I think it's a great responsibility, and I worry everyday I might say something that sends them on the wrong path.”

See, in my world, one of those answers shows an awareness and responsibility for the reality of your social dynamic. The other is vehemently afraid of dealing with the idea that we don't exist on equal playing fields. Just because you have the capacity to manipulate someone doesn't make it wrong by default. In hippie bullshit theory we all start with a full deck and trade accordingly. When you answer me with some version adjacent to that sentiment, I think you're a superficial piece of bullshit.

I've never felt bad about my awareness. What does that mean? I've never felt guilt, in and of itself, that I recognize what it takes to get to one end or another. I've noticed plenty of girls who've been attracted to me that I let be. I've seen how I could climb the ranks in job situations that I forwent for someone who was more suited. I've no guilt about the time I tried to share with my friends or the feelings I expressed in my relationship because when my sociopath devil on one shoulder said, “You know how to make her happy,” I simply replied, “I'm not going to manipulate the person I want to be with.”

It's a choice. It's always a choice. You can look, or you can lash out. You can deny, or you can acknowledge. I don't believe that gopher looking queen doesn't understand the pull he has over his friends. That he would be offended that I would even bring it up is not a measure of my “cold oblivious sociopathy.”

I really do struggle with people who think I just don't know or just don't “get it.” I get it too well. I still overwhelmingly feel. I make different choices instead. When I ask you to ask me a question that's “too much,” I already know what's going to happen. I'm already the comedian who says nothing is beyond joking about. There is no way to get the truth out of you without an attack. Every time I ask you the stupid question about how to phrase something better or what's the “right' kind of thing to talk about, I'm just fucking with you. You're not a comedian. You're not honest. So the answer is always some version of, “You're fucked up for even thinking that way!”

I'm not. You've no argument that's persuaded me that thinking is fucked up because it happens. I'm not immoral because I'm aware of something you choose not to be. I'm not “unfeeling” because I respond to adrenaline and pain and fear with words and questions instead of accusations. People never tire of being the cliché. Please, attack me for my polite question, it's almost like you're the first defensive empty asshole I've ever talked to.

I went out tonight almost by accident. I came home and had a beer, then a shot, then a mixed drink, decided “fuck it” and ventured out to my favorite bar. I ran into people I recognized, I chatted a bit about law, and then I closed out the night challenging the host on his awareness. I did it because I want nothing less. I'm not gay, so we weren't going to hook up despite the Disney and Phantom of the Opera songs we sang together. His fat girl friend and wildly insecure child friends figuring out how they were going to fuck later were the opposite of interesting. So I looked for what I do. I probed for an aware person. Not a “smart” person. Not a “sympathetic” person. Just someone honest and aware enough of their own mind and place in the world. And, per usual, I was denied.

If you ever act so idiotic as to start calling me “condescending” because I ask you a question, just get out of my life now. If you ever feel the urge to substitute words I never said for your “brilliant inference” about what I actually said, get fucked. If you fail to see the irony of trying to school me on how bad of a communicator I am while you do everything in your power to morph me into some easily trashed and shit on bastardization, consider ducking, as I'm considering starting swinging. Nothing is off limits. Your offense is YOURS. It's not right, it's not justified, and it's nothing to do with whatever I said to you. We're nothing and will never be anything if that isn't true. If you don't know that by now, there's no hope for you.

[679] Sexual Assailant

I am a sexual assailant. I don't know who it was. I don't know what it was. My classification as a sexual assailant is the reason provided for why a, maybe friend again one day?, decided he should no longer be friends with me. I did attempt to learn who the person was, but he was tight lipped. I swore not to contact her, but no avail. If you ever want someone to protect your identity, this is the man to seek.

I figure I should go about this in two parts. There are things I absolutely know I've done. There are things I will absolutely never know. So, let's start with the things I've done.

I've fished boobs out of shirts. I've sent too-insistent invitations and messages to fool around. I've slapped a number of asses, girl and guy. I've let my hands get exploratory on topless tequila Thursday nights or with girls who've been quiet, but certainly were not telling me, “no.” I've awkwardly kissed (not like lunge with a tongue out). I've certainly been drunk enough with people where neither of us would pass the test of what constitutes “consent” as far as college advisers were concerned. As a teenager, I've definitely parked somewhere publicly “private” and eagerly tried to get sexual.

As an adult, working backwards, I could better understand a girl feeling trapped in a car scenario. Mind you, I wasn't picking girls up off the side of the road and was pursuing what was already a flirtation or previous mutual dalliance. I've recognized dozens of girls who were in no position to have sex, and then proceeded to not have sex with them or let anyone walk off with them. I'll do the thing where I draw letters on your arm or leg or peck at a cheek or neck, and I'm certainly comfortable stopping with considerably less than a desperate push or kick to keep me off of you. I've at least tried to follow up with girls who, on the off chance the night was less “fun,” and more “ewww,” if that was indeed the case, and been met with indifference, confusion I even remember that, or the assurance that things were in bounds. The guy who sends the texts, mindlessly hitting up every cute girl he's ever talked to while drunk, is just an asshole, but I struggle to think that rises to the level of assault. And when titties came out, it was usually right in the wake of having just hooked up, or a hook-up happened about 5 minutes later. You try to read the room.

I've had some form of sexual relationship or interaction with 50+ women, and certainly made advances or were tangentially entangling well over a hundred in the party exploits. There's a lot of room for potentially shit behavior to take place. I created those conditions. I allowed people to get drunk. I padded the hookah room so my friends could tumble around topless making out.

The most important thing, the extremely vitally important thing about every single one of my sexual or otherwise interactions is that they were not predatory.

I don't have that weak or insecure man thing that needs to control or dominate women. I've caught myself speaking over them, but I also think that's more a function of my loud and obnoxious social circle where we all kind of do that to each other. If I thought something was shady, I've followed up, or apologized. If something is brought to my attention, I'm willing to admit it, or talk about it, or do what it takes to try and make it better.

What else is there? The current situation is one I do not remember, with a person I was not given a name for. The act wasn't described. It clearly didn't click with me that whatever happened rose to the occasion to keep me up and move me to reach out at the time. So I'm supposed to do what?

I'm the best candidate you're ever going to get to accuse of something. Yes, I admit it. It's my fault, now what? For someone who's habituated feelings of being responsible for things, you might think this sounds kind of cheap. Well, do you really feel you did something wrong? Can you possibly understand the feelings of your victim? According to popular discourse, of course not. I'm the unfeeling, remorseless, constantly trying to justify his actions asshole, right? If you give me credit for being human, and if you concede my efforts in the past or my ability to regard self-respect and dignity fairly important in the pursuit of honesty, then while I probably won't be brought to tears about, likely drunk, behavior in the past, I'm not proud or condoning or wishing to end up making someone else feel harmed in the future.

I can understand wanting to remain anonymous. I can understand not wanting to revisit or hurt yourself with something you can't resolve. I can't understand the person who hears your story and then decides the person you're accusing should be defined by that moment. I don't know who else is willing to take notes on their own shitty behavior, list things nobody asked them for, and then asks you to direct them where to go from there. I'm not afraid of the shittiest things I've done. I'm under no illusions about the grand chasms between people's experiences of the same moment. But is this a situation that gets better? Or is there a fundamental default and persistent flaw in me that I'm just gearing up to hurt someone else with later? Can you admit to sexual assault in advance? I don't plan or mean to, but have you read about my sexual history? I clearly play it pretty fast and loose.

What I absolutely do not know, and can never know, is what it feels like to be a woman, or a drunk woman, or a girl at a party, or whether I'll ever achieve a level of acceptance of an apology or redemption with the person. I can't control my memory, or lack thereof, of the moment, which I'm not saying is an excuse, but as a person who has found himself literally unable to let go of anything he's found wrong in life, please believe the playback button for an obsessive mind isn't broken. The only reason I can write this without a fear-based adrenaline rush is because I was actually offered a conversation to pick out where this incident does or doesn't fit into whether we have a friendship going forward. I don't know if he'll get back to me. I don't know who else might read this and find me too far gone from their circle of giving a shit either.

I don't know what else there really is to say. With the #metoo movement we're now starting to see self-smug videos mocking the people who overstep in their claims against “entitled” or “awkward” men that don't mind read either. I still think everyone should lay their shit on the table and sort through it. I still think you know at the center of your being if you've done some fucked up shit in bad faith. And I also know that whatever you've done, if you're open, and listening, and willing to change, you don't have to walk around like every worst thing you've done is all that you are or will ever be.

I don't think you should treat your friends like that, and I don't think whether it's your son's murderer or sexual assailant that they will get you to a place to resolve your experience within yourself. It doesn't mean you're wrong, it doesn't mean you shouldn't speak up, it doesn't mean your feelings aren't valid, and it doesn't mean you have to believe a word I've said, but it does mean it doesn't get better than this. I don't have an empire or career to crash, and I might literally not even remember the incident, but I'm a wide open target with a list of things you can throw in my face and beat me over the head with. Is that who you think I was when I was trying to have sex with you? Is that what you watched me do with your friend but were too scared to say anything? The floor is yours



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Anonymous friend: Hey! I just read your note on Facebook. I wasn’t tagged in my notifications but i received an email saying you had tagged me and I found it that way.

I don’t recall an instance where I have felt assaulted or victimized by you. For me, I was in those situations with you knowing whatever happened would happen and that was fine because I felt safe with you and believed I had the space to say no. But I can say I have been in situations with people I thought were friends who I didn’t feel like I could say no to, or who would try to talk me out of it so hard that I gave in just so I’d be left alone. There were also times where I vehemently said no, but not before someone shoved a penis inside me when I was sleeping after I had said no while awake (yes that happened and it really pisses me off). Another thing I want to say is that I think most if not all of us have been perpetrators in some way. I can recall a few moments where I tried to push the boundaries and pressure people into some kind of sexual act with me. For me those moments are few, and the person remained steadfast in their position so nothing happened, but looking back I see how problematic my behavior was. For me, what is telling is how we handle those moments as we reflect on them. We strive to do better. That being said, there are people I’ve cut out of my life as a result of someone’s story because I didn’t want to be associated with that person and/or was afraid I would become a victim too. But those were acquaintances. people who have been closest to me that I’ve cut out of my life have been the ones who assaulted me. I guess I’m saying all of this to say I’m sorry you may lose a friend over this, but your awareness and reflection, I think, is the most important part of moving forward

Me: I really appreciate you saying that. I think a big part of my approach in pursuing sex things was influenced by the huge amount of fucked up things we talked about that happened to you in high school. I find discussions like these important and practically sacred as far as understanding and maintaining friendships are concerned, and I really don't know what more there is to be done than lay it out there.

Anonymous friend: Ha nice way to describe my life. If only I could say that was all the terrible shit that happened. But yeah, I agree. It’s hard to do that, but I think it’s so important and for me is very telling about who you are as a person. I’ve tried to tell men when I believed they did something inappropriate, and they would just argue with me about it as if listening to how it made me feel or to consider how it may have made someone else uncomfortable is just impossible. You listen, think, reflect. Maybe push to hard for clarification in some moments (I know I’ve felt frustrated trying to explain things to you) but you try, which is more than what I’ve experienced with many others.

Me: I didn't mean to like, throw your life under the bus lol, I just mean in my old blogs railing about how girls are constantly being fucked with, it was a clear and present line of behavior that I wasn't down with. Being sexual or overtly comfortable with it is wildly different from being sexually predatory or forcing yourself on someone, in my mind, and so I've never had that difficult a time facing how I may have made someone feel or talking about something I've done. Usually, as long as someone is there to talk it out, things get "resolved" to as good a place as you can hope for.

Anonymous friend: Lol no worries. I’ve honestly forgotten a lot of it because it’s too hard to remember and have it sneak up on me, so I’ll trust that your word choice is appropriate.

I think the trouble is that it’s so hard for women to talk about it to the perpetrator when they feel victimized. When you’ve been hurt by someone, it’s hard to go to that person to voice that hurt. I think too that, at least some women, think about what they did to put themselves in that situation and if they had only done this thing differently it wouldn’t have been an issue. It’s really hard to unpack that stuff and not place blame, shame, guilt on yourself when really something happened to you not because of you

Me: I totally agree. I think as far as the guys, it's a pretty impossible to thing to try and deal with if you're not sure where the girl is coming from and "all road lead to rapist" kind of thing. That's not my concern personally, but the narrative is overwhelming one that seems devoid of subtlety and so even approaching the topic is going to scare a lot of people away from facing their impacts big or small. It's hard enough getting people to talk about the stress of their work or financial lives, let alone sex lives. And who's to say the friends you might lose as a result aren't significantly more important to your mental stability and happiness than you're willing to gamble with

Anonymous friend: Yeah. Life is complicated. Or rather we make it complicated by struggling with our feelings and effective communication to help navigate and overcome whatever is going on. You’ve still got me as a friend, though. I know it can be hard to think of that in the midst of losing someone else, but I’m still here

Me: I try to tell people as often as I can, I don't have 54 now, friends on here because I want to consider you guys accidents or incidental
It's conversations like these that I cherish and are a defining measure of why I think a friendship matters and is important to me.

Anonymous friend: Agreed. You’re one of the few people I can talk to after some odd span of time and it’s like our conversations pick up where we left off. There isn’t that awkward “hi how’ve you been?” thing that happens with other people

[678] Problem Child

With the amount I've written in the last day or two, I don't even know if this needs to exist, but since I don't feel empty, hopefully I can sweep up and throw out the last of it by the end.

I've speculated that I might have some kind of mental illness. There are a lot of people that crave a diagnosis, and particularly in our landscape of over-medicating and normalizing recreational pill usage, you're a hot second away from claiming an anxiety disorder and working to build a tolerance. I never settle on anything because I even-out fairly quickly. My emotions are one long string of being “mildly perturbed.” Then I get excited adrenaline shots when I get pulled over, or, as tomorrow will bring, I get an opportunity to talk to a real live person about something I'm apparently doing wrong as it pertains to women.

What would it look like to be “going crazy” though, or to be walking some such path of mental degradation? Would 4 or 5 blogs in the space of 24 hours count? I mean, I think writing thousands of pages of fiction is borderline insane, and I don't care how often they call it a “gift” to either be able to read or write 100+ pages of technical jargon, those seem worse. I feel focused on an intense discord. There's a pit that needs smashing harder. My mind is forming words, and they're all pressed up against the inside of my forehead.

I think about the worst thing I ever did in college was to let my guard down. Immediately stop and erase anything your mind linked to some “neckbeard” or “nice guy” sentiment. My thing is not about some inherent valuable thing I am that nobody can recognize or appreciate. My thing is about my practical cynicism. The only time I employ cynicism to describe myself is with the “practical” qualifier. I let myself believe in the “simple” narrative offered by television and facebook picture montages. I took it for granted that a kind of “pact” was made between people who drank that much together or were part of the mass text to do something. I let my “friendship goggles” blind me to all of the things I knew already I hated about people.

I did this for a number of reasons, not least of which, they did seem like some pretty baller people. I was having fun. I felt myself growing closer. I also wouldn't be a proper scientist if I didn't at least run the experiment that tested my preconceived notions. It's why I started drinking. It's why I stayed in a relationship I said how and why it would be left by her the second night we ever hung out. To be sure, they probably are still pretty baller people, but the keyword in that sentence is “people.” What I saw as individual persons who complimented each other and seemed to accept each other for who they were reverted to “people” the more time they spent apart.

People don't sit with their friends and have heart to hearts. People unfriend and forget you like a bad day at work. People gossip not to figure out a way to bring their concerns and make something right, but to diminish whatever narrative doesn't fit snugly into the one they've cultivated. People watch. People sit back and watch the show, because the world is reduced to a place of mild bemusement, like a former friend contemplating his own capacity to break down, as they opine on how they saw it coming or that he never sat quite right in the first place. People can't be bothered. People are busy. People are irreparably damaged by things they used to do by the dozen.

Well, I've never gotten along with people. My best friend is a mirror-image sociopath who shows me how I would have eventually started treating all of you. I guess, how I'm comfortable letting you know where I've retreated once again. It's not personal, I just don't know what it means to be your friend anymore. You're still invited to the party, but when you do people things to me, I get to respond differently than if you're a friend. It's an idea that makes me sad, but that will pass.

I also sometimes wonder if I function like that show you “love to hate.” I'm told people don't have the focus to read anymore. If you don't have an eye-catching freeze frame for your 2 minute video cut together to give us the impression you don't breath, you've lost them. It helps to say things people already agree with I hear as well. But if you read my blogs, and especially if you hate doing so, have you considered how fucked up you are? You know, I'm pretty familiar with what I write. I wrote it, and then I read them back dozens of times. I know when you've read something and then use it to shit on me. Instead of a friendly conversation under the blog inquiring about things you didn't understand or explaining what you disagreed with, you took your angry impression as ammo to muck up an interaction weeks or months later. That's what people do. Always looking for something to fight back with, because they exist on the defensive. Sociopaths do it to, but it's called planning, not kicking and screaming.

I hate that I love to say it, but even if you followed your dreams and figured something out, in terms of sheer material and potential, I think there's a smidgen of jealousy. This unremitting asshole complains about the stupidest shit. Oh you have to drive too much? You're so stupid you fell for meth head scammers? You claim to have figured some things about life out, but can't seem to persuade any of us to give a shit, genius! But not even deep down, you know. You know I know how to turn it back on and sway a dozen new assholes. You know I'll have a small pity party for myself and burn things in a symbolic letting go of what I thought we once were, and then I'll fuck right off and continue on with the rest of my life. You have to hate that, right? Did you believe in our connection back then? Because I wasn't the one who worked to break it.

I know what's going to happen to your relationships. I know the forces that come out in full force against me can be turned in any direction. I know what excuses will sound like when you're fighting in private. I know how you'll try to negotiate. I know how long different Band-Aids last and about the number of things that have to keep going well so “things” keep going “well.” I know about how long two people can share a dream, or how often the more forgiving and understanding one can carry water. I know that the lessons of our parents and grandparents happened over age-groups most of us haven't even reached yet. And I'll get to hear about it, from that friend of a friend who didn't start treating me like shit for no reason and thinks the past amounts to something more. I'm not rooting for failure, but I know what's going to happen.

I know that the day I start creating and achieving again, when my statuses are just about the things I'm accomplishing and happy to be engaged with, I'm gonna start popping a few people's neck veins. When I start popping up in strangers pictures at different locations. When I start taking pride in what I produce and I'm no longer stuck turning over the TV shows and parking lot time in my mind, the labels and “obsession” I seem to have with contemplating who I've let into my life and who's left will feel like the joke it is. I'm still dreaming about humanity-level impacts. I'm still (naughty word) “hopeful.” I still dream in spite of whatever condition I'm harboring that I refuse to take pills for. If I'm better for a hundred “ghostings” or labels along the way, so be it. If my memory is that of overcoming you, hey, I get to pick my delusion like you get to pick yours.

[677] Me First

I left my stupid job to come home, take a shit, and write this. Let's hope I don't manage to take another one all over this.

I was listening to the authors of “When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir” on “Democracy Now!” this morning. The stories told involved dealing with a brother's mental illness and incarceration, personally being arrested at a young age, visiting the house of her family's slumlord who couldn't be bothered to provide working appliances, and the difficulties of organizing around an identity that is perpetually vilified by your neighbors, the laws and courts, and devoid of basic needs you're not even aware aren't being met.

Dave Chappelle is full of wise words. He suggested that the “Me Too” movement should perhaps not be conducted within earshot of black people in general. His question, “When has anybody ever given a shit about how you feel?” Minorities and the poor are out-of-hand completely disregarded at every possible level, their outwardly imposed conditions are blamed on them, they're dealing with often literally poisoned living conditions, schools turned prisons, basic help becoming means tested, and completely inadequate access to healthcare. By the numbers, they literally have to work 2 or 3 times harder to get half as much.

Dave Chappelle isn't telling women not to speak up nor is he condoning sexual violence. He's trying to shed light on a pattern across victimhood claims. He wants to address the irony. He wants you to be prepared for the fallout and backlash. He wants to explain something more fundamentally broken about humanity than pay discrepancies. In the spirit of Chappelle, please keep in mind I'm hoping to do the same thing.

I felt an immense solidarity with the author. I didn't grow up that poor. I'm not a minority. I'm not a woman, or gay. In the modern era, I literally have everything working against me, outward identity politic wise, to the point where I'm not even really allowed to use or seek the word “sympathy.” I know this, and it's not what I'm seeking. I'm hoping for you to understand a more broken underlying quirk of humanity that I see happening to me that resonates with hearing what's happening to others. It's a point about identity and people's reticence in hearing it. It's a point about accountability and responsibility. It's deeper than any one claim of personal pain, and it's not meant to be abused in a false comparative narrative of “who's problems are worse.”

Minorities, particularly black people, have been considered default criminals by America's white history. They've been inhuman, animals, work horses, ignorant, and lazy. They have to deal with these labels no matter what evidence exists to the contrary. The statistics don't play. I've had someone literally claim to be a math major who didn't understand proportionality when I showed that as a segment of the population black people were getting shot and killed at double the rate of whites. If white girls smoke weed in the bathroom at school, it's a youthful indiscretion, the black or Latino kid gets their first strike on their way to a life sentence. I read a survey recently that showed Mexicans work the most each week compared to every other ethnicity, and yet there's someone this instant swearing by his “lazy job-stealing wetback” sentiment.

Our identities are this incredibly complex thing. We all grow up with a certain blindness that strikes us when someone new enters our world and makes a comment we've never heard before. For the author, it was, “I didn’t know you lived like this.” She went to a primarily rich white school while residing in the poor neighborhood, and made the mistake of inviting one of her friends over. For the racist making comments about the work ethic or values of a group he’s not familiar, before the internet, he might never have had any real opportunity to have his ideas challenged, and of course as with any tool, could use it to embolden his position and find more like-minded assholes.

Identity is also incredibly fluid. You do the wrong thing around the wrong group of people and you can be forever labeled by that moment. The default and forever criminal defined by an indiscretion in youth. The segment of your identity group that commits violence bleeds onto you. You can grow up and find yourself dealing with new social and sexual dynamics that you find confusing or difficult. You can have a tragedy rip people from your life who you failed to appreciate how much of yourself was rooted in them being there for you.

You have this immensely complex and fluid thing and you’re forced to make decisions with it and assess the moment. You’re put to a vote. You’re meant to pair up and fall in love and pick a direction for your career and future. In the past, where you might be defined by your job and being able to provide for your family, now it’s not just the poor single mothers of four working 3 or 4 jobs, you and everyone you know is “gigging” it while you’re fed platitudes from the owners and managers who profess to care. An identity has been foisted upon you by the era into which you were born. You lean in more or less the direction of the examples you’ve been exposed to or found the most compelling.

There are endless gains that can come from playing along with the narrative prescribed to you. If you accept that you’re a “good and normal” person, you’re particularly blind to the kind of harm you’re causing. You wish to be held-harmless for the endless list of problems in the world. You’re “just doing you,” whether that’s skirting about the country taking in the sights, or keeping your nose buried in the books. You don’t need ambition, to be funny, to challenge the structure, or even really advocate for those less fortunate because, after all, you didn’t do it to them. You’re wrong and have a very small-minded conception of the impact you have, but it’s also the narrative endorsed by the majority, so you win by default.

There’s honestly too many angles that are informing why I needed to get this out right now. I want to pause and dump at the same time. The next few lines will just touch on those angles. I watched “The Fabric of the Cosmos” and got to thinking about all of the social implications of proven mathematical realities. I find myself unable to escape the term “white fragility.” I caught a radio host talking about all of the things “the media doesn’t want you to know and won’t report on,” despite literally opening with the caller talking about what the media had reported on. I’m going to tie the attacks on my character to the larger psychological underbelly that enjoys an easy target and eschews irony. I’m going to talk about how you don’t get more secure and comfortable as time goes on, and it causes the failings of thought and the work that hasn’t been done to corrupt the rest and accelerate your demise.

Let’s see if we can go broad and eventually get specific. According to the science, not a single particle in our body much cares or is aware of the passage of time. Time can, for them, go backward or forward and still make sense. What this means to me is that there’s no time like the present. The past and future existing as a set of probabilities means it behooves you to try and create the conditions that resolve things in your past and tend towards a better future. As such, within those impersonal particles that comprise every ounce of “good” and “bad,” you can figure out a way to observe them in a way that comports with the greatest amount of well-being for all. You can acknowledge an endless amount of experiences that don’t amount to your own, and work until you can lay eyes on why that person’s story was important. You can figure out how to make other people exist in a way the things you’re born of aren’t necessarily concerned with.

In that probabilistic existence, it occurs to people to start saying things like “systemic” problems. You hear a lot about “toxic” cultures at work or between men and women. The way we’re organized, in our language, in our institutions, ensures with a greater probability that disproportionate subjugation and oppression can take place. Part of that is deliberate, like in crafting racist laws, part of that is simply because there are inherent differences in society that are exacerbated or suppressed under different conditions. This is why both old white guys and girls might shrug off an inappropriate, but no more and no less ass pinch, while someone in their 20’s might write a 20 page blog equating it to “rape culture.”

The terms “snowflake” and “white fragility” speak to that asinine blog post. Before we had a concept of “middle class,” life was considerably more death centered. We weren’t entertaining ideas of curing all diseases. You might need a dozen kids to help as labor to live in squalor. While we have some reason to believe “in general” the world is coming out of poverty and conditions are improving, we’ve all but obliterated the “human narrative” about what it means to be always confused, always oppressed, suffering something, and dying with little fanfare or acknowledgment. That’s a burden that, until you’re face to face with you see no practical reality in addressing. For now, the text message to duck and cover from the incoming ballistic missile is a false alarm.

That ignorance, denial, avoidance, excuse making, pawning off of responsibility, and inevitable attack from feeling cornered is why you need The Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter. You are the likely Nazi prison guard, just manning your post and following orders. Your inability to look your prisoners in the eye is not their fault. That you were born predisposed to following orders isn’t yours, but once it’s been pointed out, there is no avoiding your responsibility.

This is what annoys me about people who seem to be pretending on getting immense joy from doing “nothing” but vagabonding around the country or “working their job” as long as the money keeps coming in. I’ve known no greater joy than in feeling responsible for things. Whether it’s the things I create or the relationships I wished to cultivate and celebrate, I’ve persistently spoken against “incidental” friendship because you happened to grow up next to each other or “falling in love” because neither of you is leaving your dead-end job or willing to expand your list of hobbies.

How those avoidance mechanisms manifest are varied, but are most easily seen in “conservative” batshit right-wing media. It’s the inability to, it’s literally a blindness, see irony. The world, while traumatic and offering an array of things to be afraid of, instantly becomes manageable when there’s someone to blame. What they’re guilty of isn’t the point. It doubles as a way to feel “better” about how wise you were in the choices you made. “Hey, I may just be doing my job, climbing rocks, or touring national parks, but I’m not hurting anybody. Maybe if more people could just be as chill as me, things would get better. The world is not something I can fix.”

Here, it’s difficult to want to give inches and avoid conceding miles. No, “the world” will never get fixed. Every day the next baby Hitler is born. What’s the probability you can do more to stop him distracted and denying in your own little world verses paying more attention and getting involved? The best defense at this point is to say you don’t care, you’re selfish, and to please leave you alone. But then you have to stop pretending. You need to shut up about the things you say you care about. You need to admit that your efforts so far have been superficial and you don’t know how to be more effective. Instead, you try to have it both ways. Your contributions, from facebook shares to a small donation, are morality points just like organizers or people who do the work figuring out the details. Your “sacrifices” you believe rise to the level of the occasion.

You become an insecure shell. You attack people who try to speak to larger truths that minimize or negate the comfortable reality you’ve created for yourself. I can’t think of a much better explanation as to why I’m frequently the target of so much bullshit. I write. I write what I’m going through. I qualify my place in the continuum of different experiences. I insist I’m wrong. But, after months of little to no contact, I can get a “I don’t like how you treat women. [blocked from responding] ” message? First I’m hearing of it, but sure. If I bother to say I feel bad about the dying species and futility of my efforts, why shouldn’t the conversation end with me being called generally full of bullshit and told to fuck off? I’ve learned how to actually feel bad and touch the suffering at the center of my being, and the reality of that threatens the act that dictates how “normal” relationships are formed.

Now have it as bad or worse than me. Have it built into your identity culture. Have it legally sanctified. Talk about your suffering to those desperate to protect the facade. March for your rights under the gunfire from those trying to “protect” themselves and “stand their ground” while exercising their “constitutional rights.” My perspective has been forced. I’m open-enough to start the journey, but relative “poverty” was forced upon me. I played by the rules too and still had to find a cheat in taking drugs and getting my spine tapped to get an existence barely resembling what I envisioned for myself. You need to force your own perspective to go farther. You need to be able to empathize without dismissing. You need to be able to hear without accusing. You need to figure out all of the terrible horrible things about yourself that make the world and how you relate to it this general mess that you feel “above” attempting to discuss. I shouldn’t feel that close to my polar opposite example in life but for where the prevailing power structures have put us respectively.

The reason it will never get better and only worse faster is the same reason, if you’ve read this far, you feel exhausted, put-off by something I said earlier that blacked you out until now, or have been hotly disagreeing and tallying the reasons it’s all so much simpler or not as bad as I’m depicting. It will always be easier to “fight” or ignore or pivot. It will always be safe to accept the conclusions you come to about me, about “the other,” or about how just and proper the place you inhabit in life really is. Why adopt the precarious place someone else might inhabit? Life’s too short...but long enough to not want to deal with some things for ANY length of time, let alone in perpetuity, acknowledging the problems never go away.

You can consider me an advocate for myself. I’ll always force the issue. I’ll hand out flyers, in the form of blogs, telling you to vote for thought, for patience, and for the digging up of your buried identity. I’m selfish too. I don’t think I can fix the world. I think I’ve simply adopted tools that have helped me save myself. Your world, your words, and your behavior are the only things that have made me flirt with suicidal ideas. Who wants to live in a world where you’re always denied? Who can live with themselves when nobody finds a reason to listen to or accept who you are? What’s the point of struggling alone? For nothing. For the satisfaction of those who crave your pain. For the sad bullshit story you tell yourself. Is it really that confusing when lone extremists lash out in violence? You think Nazis in the streets and brazen incompetent demagoguery as the president are aberrations? They’re self-destructive tendencies, probabilities, the inevitable consequences of forces we pretend don’t exist within ourselves. I only feel suicidal when you’re proud of how you’re killing yourself. My suffering is yours. I’m just willing to talk about it. I’m willing to try for something better. I seem to learn every day why that something better isn’t you.

[676] Mind Rape

Where to begin, and what can be possibly said that hasn't been said before?

Again, I'm “unfriended” for what is what I would say an unfair characterization of my behavior, and am subsequently blocked from discussing it further. Once again, something that's so egregious it can't be talked about unless I'm either being called names or are never allowed to explore where the assessment is coming from. Once again, I'm bitten by the bug of immensely shady liar “friendships” that pull ranks and fan the flames of the little demon amongst you, no longer merely “annoying” or “combative” in his approach, but now presumably sexist and beyond redemption.

So, again, I need to do the work that no one else bothers to do, and offer explanations and counterfactuals, and ask the difficult questions of myself to hopefully shed light on this irrational destructive curmudgeon that has wedged his way into the darkest recesses of his former friends' hearts.

First, let me make a prediction. It's only going to accelerate. Anyone super keen to be continually showing up in pictures with where I'm absolutely sure this demonizing gossip started will find their own way to ice me out. So I expect to lose at least another 3 or 4 “friends” because of something something Mean Girl Politics.

On to the meat. As with these things, it's usually precisely the opposite of the truth that's happening in real life and real time that I'm accused of doing. The charge is that I “treat women poorly.” The full text is as follows:

“Hey man, I removed you from my friends list. You haven't done anything explicitly to me but I don't like how you treat women in general. (I'm trying to do better with that myself.)
Good luck sir and I hope your living situation improves, I know it's been rough."

So, it's either true or not. There's either examples or there aren't. I either have the conscience and honesty or I don't. He offers nothing but that sentiment, making it hard on it's own to accept at face value. Let's explain why.

One, which women? I've spent the better part of the last year or 2 on a couch or working. The less than 5 women I've talked to for any length of time weren't conversations or interactions that even bordered something a shady night out drinking might suggest. This leads me to believe it's a trumped-up extrapolation from the conversations-gone-nowhere with falling away friends over petty disputes.

(Full disclosure: Precisely this moment I got a text from the person responding to my invitation to discuss things, and we're set to do so Wednesday night. I'm going to continue this as if he hadn't texted back given that he immediately blocked my message on Messenger asking “How do you think I treat women?”)

I like to assume I'm always in the wrong. It's been insisted often enough. So maybe the joke was out of line. Maybe I got too handsy. Maybe there's an amazingly shitty disheveled person who's done more in his power to be self-serving and delusional than God's most ardently faithful. Fine. I'm willing to entertain these realities. I have to think, with so much coming my way, usually out of the blue, that you would revel in the opportunity to lay it on me and hear me admit it! Isn't that the point?

I have my own version of what I think constitutes “treating women poorly.” See if your list matches any of mine:

Beating them.
Talking to them as if they're inferior. (You dumb blonde.)
Paying them less for the same work.

Taking away their rights to their own bodies.
Condoning people you associate with routinely calling them “bitches.”
Body shaming to their face .(Because, we all shit on everyone for superficial reasons, not just because you're a fat girl.)
Lying to them about how you feel.
Recognizing their feelings and playing them against one another.
Forcing them to cover up their shameful bodies

Rape

Feel free to chime in any time, as I'm sure women are feeling the weight of things I'll never create an exhaustive list about on my own.

Here's the important part. How much of that behavior do I condone or engage in? I don't want to suggest like I deserve a special star or anything, but my money is on none of it. You can disagree, I'm open to hear about your experience. Tell me, tell all our friends, tell our parents.

The BEST kinds of arguments if you want to get shots in on me are that I've certainly attempted to initiate different sexual advances that didn't go anywhere, and I can only in retrospect assume they were taken as tactless or wrong. And mind you, I'm not talking I slipped half a digit inside and then had the grand epiphany that the tears and “No's” were my first indications.

You might also get away with the idea that I treat “everyone” terribly. This too would have to assume I've got some list or demonstrable persistent behavior that is harmful or destructive to those around me. I'd have to hear from you, one, because I don't hear from you. We don't interact. We're barely if at all “friends.” As well, I don't do anything or meet anyone new anymore. So my sample size of roommates and the occasional roommate child friend or girlfriend who, I don't know, don't seem to harbor an underbelly of resentment aren't going to give me the widest lens.

I'm tempted to “but I still have women friends!” my way an explanation, but, on the off chance they're as frightened or ashamed or consider me as implacable as everyone else who's thrown out a character bomb and ran away, why drag them into it? I can always attempt to discuss my behavior with them one on one and report back later.

Are we done with the straight-forward part? Have I missed something basic in human interactions here?

Now we can move on to what I suspect. What I suspect is that my “Please be patient and acknowledge what I've actually said” tone online has spilled over into elevated conspiratorial gossip regarding my character. I think before the conversation that kicked that off, I made 2 other girls in that group uncomfortable. One of them, I tried to engage about relationship issues, which was arguably one of the worst decisions I could have made. The other, I attempted to contact about hanging out, and not knowing how to say, “I didn't care to hang out with you” put her on the defensive trying to pawn off the responsibility on the group she was hanging out with who apparently don't like me. Let the, “...and you know what else about him!?” spiral from there. Mind you, we're talking a year or so gap of zero or next to zero conversation or time together besides whatever negative aspect they took away from our last interaction.

I think that also given that I'm not prone to too many random texts or Skype calls, not just because I'm bad a faking I like to hear how your life isn't moving any faster than mine, the friends who do engage in those things get to join the gossip train. We're all self-assured shit-talking assholes. I'm under no illusions I've kind of cult celebrity status on the tongues of the people I've apparently wronged. And given that fact of getting older and life not resembling what you thought it might, fodder like me is prime eating.

You can combine those social factors with the sheer amount of whoring around I did in school, my advocating for open relationships, and the, what I'm sure are beyond terrible interpretations of what me, the monster, did to lose “the most sweetest most beautiful and caring girl in the world.” I'm not using the quotes because she's not, I'm using them because she's not a fairy-tale character I tried to enslave.

Let's also keep in mind that to every single one of these girls, I've attempted to apologize, even for things that weren't my fault. You can see how that unfolded in some blogs somewhere. Like, I've apologized for trying to hang out with a friend who came to town. That registered as I was doing something wrong. I've apologized for asking people to explain themselves or give me an example that wasn't an open and shut door “you're this” kind of statement. I followed my last ignored apology with “I don't expect her to want to be friends or anything, but just know I don't hold any anger or think that conversation reflects what I generally think of her.” Props to an entirely different girl friend years ago who actually responded to my apology for poor drunk phrasing of hurt feelings with understanding and an apology back. It can happen.

I won't forget, when it seems bad, it's only gonna get worse. I'm genuinely excited for Wednesday to see just what it is I'm missing in my character, particularly towards women, besides the patience to accept damning character assessments on their face. But I ask you, fawning yet shy public, where were you? How did you let me get so bad? Why are we still friends today? Do I ask too much of you? Am I like all the other boys who behave in terrible ways you hate, but I have that annoying habit of asking for feedback and conversation so it just makes me the worst and you can't be bothered to deal with it anymore?

You're sick. We're sick. There's something so broken about how, well frankly, I'm being treated, when I hear NOTHING, or am BLOCKED, or am in some form or another dragged through the mud for someone else's reality based on I LITERALLY HAVE NO IDEA, or a bad conversation online. Is it my guilty consciousness that would sell tickets to this shit show? Or is this so mind-bendingly painful and absurd, I can't handle it alone? You're not going to get better than me. You're not going to get someone asking for it. But you have to give something in return. You have to be a better friend. Well, you don't have to be, but it's not going to be me mourning your loss when the reality and regret start to sink in. I'm already there. I mourned when the first domino fell. Now I'm just incidentally depressed and angry, but still patient, and still honest.