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.
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.
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.
