[692] Shout, Shout

What if I don't actually know my own voice?

Consider, what's the first thing people do when they hear themselves recorded for the first time? It's often a cringe or insistence it be shut off or even that it isn't them. How many “humble devil's advocates” are nothing but the asshole at the office? How many failed “trying to be funny” types have cast themselves into a pit of aspersions they'll never climb out of? How many pathological professions of love so routinely reduce the feeling to pain and combat? If you never know you're screaming, your answer to why people are crying and running in pain will always be incomplete.

There's a number of lines clashing at once that made me raise the initial question. Kevin Smith just said at the end of the episode of Comic Book Men that it's always fun watching movies, but way more so to be making them. Recently as well, I read an explanation for why The Walking Dead decided to kill Carl. And I've been thinking considerably about the message I profess on my road to self-sufficiency and the excuses I've offered as to why I don't engage in something like stand-up, movie making, or really anything I don't particularly care to suck at.

Maybe first we should talk about the consequences of not knowing your voice. It speaks to many of my old themes. You're a parrot for the times. You're forgoing the requisite thought to take control of your identity. Your ideas become open for manipulation and exploitation in ways that had you a consistent and deliberate message would make such things considerably harder. We take the concept, the individual nature of our own voice as for granted as any other part of our body, despite it surely being of greater implication than your tongue in its physicality.

When it comes to any kind of artistic expression, I hate it when it's done for its own sake. I'm with the pretentious art critic who doesn't really believe AI algorithms making pictures is the same thing as a person putting in the work. I like the genuinely depressive and desperate comedian who's been in pointless feuds and is in recovery considerably more than the 19 year old who can match the pace and set-ups. I'll give them credit if they're funny, sure, but “they” aren't going to stick with me like the comedians and stories of my favorites have.

Writing is really the only example I have of something creative that I do on any sort of regular basis that I bother with people seeing. First, a few pages that I may come to regret are a considerably easier time, money, and effort investment than what it would take to drag people to an open mic or pull together the resources for a film. Second, I tend to only write when I really want to explore something or think I have something to say. If I don't want to write every day, I don't. If what I'm saying I think is more important than how sad it might make you feel or how far you may question what's left of our relationship, I'm putting me before you and telling you to take responsibility for how you perceive me.

That's basically the thing I wonder about everyone who puts together a movie or thinks the world needs to experience their art. Are they doing it for the right reasons? Is it truly the group of friends writing and shooting Clerks who's voice is so powerful a group of Irish guys want to make a movie about that friendship? Seems a huge sign that Kevin Smith is embedded in the right world for the right reasons. Why do certain directors make hit after hit after hit, and they all register as some degree of timeless or quality, and others are Michael Bay?

In the episode of The Walking Dead, the creators explained that they needed a reason for a transformation in Rick. Rick's “voice” as dogged leader who survives and keeps people together tragedy after tragedy, now pushed to the edge of all-out-war having blood feud has been a long and complicated one. What would prevent Rick from killing Negan? “His” voice would have to shine through as his love and commitment to his son. The spirit of what kept the group together is what's needed to keep even the concept of humanity alive in the storm of constant raining shit. At which point does Rick know what he's supposed to do? Is it the thick of it all as the guns are blaring, or in the memory that flashes before his eyes as he refrains from doing something that would betray it all?

People are loathe to defend the show anymore, and I think it's because of the same “I don't want to persistently think and evolve” mindset that plagues the modern era in general. A show comes out and excites you about the prospect of death, the lingering wish at the back of every fat desperate “millennial” mind and child not knowing if they're making it home from school. Now the show wants to speak of humanity and redemption as we're entertaining the idea of arming teachers and hearing that God wants the EPA destroyed? The Walking Dead is going where people might one day be again, but it's certainly no longer where they are.

I woke up to see the first article on my phone telling me that Kevin Smith had a massive heart attack. I read about how after facing his biggest fear, he realized that he had a good run and found himself oddly at peace if this was really it. He had his friends who he's still creating with. He created a family he's crazy about. He's used his underlying love or all he gets involved with to propel him across platforms and into so many worlds. I don't think that happens merely “because he made a movie.” I think it's because he made his movie. And if you never remember a line from it, you'll remember how it made you feel like he feels about his life and friends.

I think that's what I tried in the party house. I think that's why I'm willing to sever ties when the conversation has died and “life” has substituted for your life. It's why I bother to make appeals at all in writing. I feel confident enough that my voice is all of the blogs. If I adapt them into something else, then at least it came from a place I thought only I could speak to in my way. You don't need to hear my record, you don't need to see my routine, you know my motivation. I want to report on what I don't see enough of or where I see weird things connect. I want to create because I have to, not because I can. I want to know that if I get my heart attack well before I or anyone thinks it's due, I can have that same feeling that I did what I could as I thought I should, and how it looks right now is okay.

Maybe I don't want the “workaholic” narration to be so loud. Maybe I don't need to denigrate exploring what other people have created, even if that only involves a screen. Maybe my voice is better for all the people that no longer need to flavor it. The ideas wouldn't bring me a tinge of happiness if they were out and out wrong, right? I wouldn't bother to write if I didn't think my voice existed in the first place. But I'll never know the totality of what I'm saying. I'll only be able to look for how to respect why I said it. That's the voice I hope is in every blog and touches anything else I might think to create in the future. That's what needs to live so that I can die happy.

[691] The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers

Let's channel my inner 12 year old and start with the basic question. What makes something “unique?”

When we go to our smallest scales we can differentiate atoms. We break those up into even smaller particles and start describing forces mostly understood in theoretical terms and quantum fluctuations. In going the other direction, I initially thought of an ocean. A collection of those particulars filling up a hole to create a distinct ecosystem. What's unique about one or the other spans endless fluctuating categories.
 

Every time you try to discuss the “thing-ness” of an object, or body of water, or person, you're going to run into the same problem. I know it's a thought experiment that's been done a thousand times, but not by me. Am I my hand? Am I me without my hand? If I experience phantom limb pain, my nervous system is registering real pain in a part of me that's gone. Am I now merely a memory of pain? Is it possible to be both the memory and the experiencer of the memory at the same time?

What we might intuitively understand as unique is hidden in the last paragraph. I chose to run a tired experiment and potential chain of questions again. Stated differently, the idea that there was some reason or insight to be gained in doing so occurred to me. If there can be infinite versions, infinite pieces of the words and pixels and potential paths for the thought to have traveled as my brain lit up, this one now uniquely exists among them. It's there insofar as I, or you, are able to perceive it.

There was a point in which I had seen every Netflix show. Overnight, it seems, Netflix exploded into hundreds of new avenues I likely won't keep up with. It started as this unique and different take on how to approach and distribute media. It's now a sea of “content” competing for as many “unique” views as any major player ever has. It's introduced more voices that “the mainstream” probably isn't familiar with including ethnically diverse comedians and original anime series. Over time, Netflix retains it's unique place as the best example of “what it's doing” even if what it has become resembles a mindless flood plain of millennial baiting inclusiveness. It set the pace for other big media players to copy.

There's the cynic in me that is frequently disappointed when I think I can see the calculation under why something grows or gets popular. An “alarm bell,” if you will, was hearing that Adam Sandler was contracted to put out 4 movies exclusively on Netflix. In a second, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and Waterboy were reduced to “Those approaching or just breaching middle-age irrationally love this guy!” What made watching those movies enjoyable, be it a combination of youth alongside what makes Adam Sandler unique, became washed away by the “comedy sea” that every platform knows it needs to stick its feet in. You hope the actors they enlist still believe in what they're doing and are working from the place that was born for the stage and screen, but then as each new thing they create comes out, you try to ignore how it makes you feel like you've died a little for having watched it.

I talked about my “taste” in the past and being mostly disinterested with most things media, music, or food related. I think the walls that established those tastes were, in part, breached because it just became so easy to engage with everything. There was no pilgrimage to the movie store and debate with the family about what to pick. You tried something new by chance or got the chance to be pleasantly surprised when your first choice was gone. You got to build up anticipation in a way only Marvel and Star Wars movies announced years in advance manage to conjure today.

Your unique relationship to the story, to the actor, had it's own story as well. American Pie, for me, wasn't an “immature college sex movie in a series of 15 with the American Pie brand.” It was this ultra taboo media circus I only got to watch at a friend's house whose mom didn't know mine had prohibited me. You talk to someone today about the pie fucking scene and they'll show you a Youtube video of a guy who's fucked 100 pies for the “pie fucking challenge” and has no idea who Jason Biggs is.

Am I trying to romanticize pie fucking? Is this my version of back-in-the-old-days syndrome? It's more that the movie, and that scene, transcended their unique root and became not just a personal story of mine but embedded in the culture in ways younger people have no grasp of. While there are plenty of references to the first white and black kiss onscreen still happening today, the uniqueness is born from the story around it, not because we generally find kissing anymore ostentatious than a kid who grew up watching beheading videos is going to care about pie fucking.

There seems to be a danger of being washed away by the sea. Is Black Panther “ZOMG THE MOST AMAZING THING JESUS CHRIST THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BETTER MOVIE!?” Or is white guilt desperately trying to avoid its apprehensions regarding racism? Both Get Out and Black Panther were great, but might not single-handedly reshape race relations or define new genres. The story of why we need more representation seems individually lost to the sea of praise and we're quick to establish new tokens of “wokeness.” Kendrick Lamar doesn't stop my black DCS worker roommate from getting asked if he's looking for the child support office when he's there to meet with the head of the department about a case.

Sometimes I'm flabbergasted when I learn someone is paid an exorbitant amount and getting interviewed for their views against something like “the while male savior narrative.” They teach at an expensive school, they consult on movies and books. But in the modern era where messages go viral and influence in ways we can't begin to comprehend, I get why so many are obsessed with narrative. A voice that's “living it” or “doing things” that you had to engage with while developing your own has all been reduced to arbitrary “influence peddlers” who respond to surveys and weak temperature gauging of the cultural climate. “He has over a million followers!” No, not really. He's triggered the “follow” button for a moment from both child and bot alike and has cultivated “his voice” to rise towards the upper end of a system.

I worry that voices and influences I used to shape who I was are all fated to become mockeries and propaganda. People aren't brands. “Rebooting” a TV show is simply zombie-fying something that had reasons for its death. The voice that was doing things, speaking to something, relevant and important to consider in the future, died. So you have to create something new. You have to incorporate and move on. You have to find a new way to live the lesson or tell the story, or you don't really have a reason to exist. You're a phantom pain in a limb your remembering brain can't control. And that's only if you can bother to give your brain a reason to remember.

How you work is unique. It's how I watch “everything” and attempt to relate it to you and back to myself, not “that” I've seen everything in a series or under a brand. The cycle between my saddest soul-crushing blogs and acutely aware or attempting insight pieces is the unique story, because each one only dies or is put to work in service to the next one. Unique is a process, and as a process it takes energy, and in order for that energy to not explode or dissipate it takes a perspective relative to all else. That's what I want to see captured. That's the tool I want to work with on the next thing. That's the only energy truly mine to give or take while every other endless force tries to turn me into something else.

So is your work of the kind only you can do? Is your struggle one worth preserving and passing down? I think it's much easier to conceive of our uniqueness in our capacity to suffer alone than it is to praise what we know we're capable of creating. At least, I know I never stop bitching no matter how good I have it, and I suppose if I stopped, it'd truly be the death of me.

[690] Dead Men Tell No Tales

I have to get this out as I am haunted and bothered and I've tried 3 times with increasingly dumber words and given up before I managed to feel better.

Let's start nowhere. I was driving and thought again about how relieved I'd be upon death. My face relaxed. I got a little more chipper. “This,” whatever the fog of wasted time and effort that I exhibit while working, fighting back the head or back ache...”this” dreadful thought that as I get closer and closer to achieving one of my goals it will leave me as empty as anything has managed to in life...”this” absolutely engulfing deadness behind who I'm basically forcing myself to be when all I'd rather be doing is sleeping. “This” gets to be over one day!

I put it out there that I might recently start traveling and bullshitting with friends. Just throw it on the cards, come back and work it off. A pattern I could keep up for a spell, but it's not like I'd be taking them back with me to work on anything together. It was suggested to me recently that I needed a vacation. I think that idea is backwards. I need to feel like I matter again. That's been the missing piece in all of my efforts. I don't matter, but for the oft fondness someone might find for me in a scan of my facebook world.

That is, it has nothing to do with friends and getting a chance to get drunk with them. It has everything to do with my incredibly dark and empty feeling I never know how to direct into something that isn't some level of obscenity. When I want nothing else, all I want to do is argue and make jokes. That's my bottom. Unyielding darkness and emptiness, hardly even “depression” or “anxiety” at that point, and the first thing I want to do is lament that I'm not a student so I can't even count on a bullet coming my way soon enough.

The problem is that I've stopped believing in myself. Are my goals inching forward? I mean, I don't have rent anymore. That's a big deal. My job, while bullshit, I still manage to abuse for more money than the people out saving your kids and yet still for considerably less than I feel I'm worth. It's a problem that I'm barely even motivated by spite anymore. I'm pissing in the wind, and it leads me to decide last minute to keep ordering drinks until I'm asked to leave the bar for something I'm not even aware that I did. I both absolutely could give a shit who I managed to embarrass myself in front of as much as I think it's worthwhile to consider why I'd ever think that's even occasionally the thing I “want” to be doing. Drinking is still fun, sure, but alone? Ping ponging between tables because you're starved for someone new to talk to? Desperation driving decision making isn't decision making at all. 

So am I going to double down and spend hundreds of dollars to try something similar with friends? Is it not more important to get the rest of the house completed? I don't even know. I don't know that I care. I just know that when I have to suffer through a hangover day or 2 and the idea of death brings a smile to my face, I need to rip out the sliver of insight that's not making its way to my conscious mind fast enough.

I've been asked on several occasions at this point, by older people, why I don't have a girlfriend. I talk about the hours I work and they opine on some of the diatribes I've written regarding respect for time and effort. I'm a poster child, in their mind, for that young go-getter guy who's supposed to be setting some example for kids or doting over his girl. Leaving aside that my longest relationship was doomed to fail from the beginning and only lasted as long as it did because of a combination of her choice and financial considerations, I've never seen myself with anybody in my imagined future. I envisioned a more flamboyant “man of the world” type scenario. If I had the ability to create my own fun or distractions as I went along, I figured I'd get along well-enough. 

At the same time, on the small scale, I can see that's a fucked up plan. “Broke,” I can manage to be a drunken asshole, hell, not even asshole, but certainly too much "[redacted" that at least pisses off one door man. I can spend waaaay too much that didn't even amount to a day's worth of effort. Imagine if I got thousands or more coming in with as pithy an attitude about how it might be spent. It's not my default mode of being to waste, to be sure, but I find drunk mind sober heart examples telling. Throwing money at drinks and food to escape my mind and essentially beg strangers to bother with me is not a good look, no matter how often I'm making you laugh or numbers my phone collects. 

I had the thought too that I wonder if I'm scared of success. It's an old idea that I've never entertained seriously, but then, I've never really succeeded without so much failure it's always just felt like some form of inevitability. Like, I don't have rent, it's worth restating. That was always in the cards. You show up to work, you cook your own food, you live modestly, you can afford that in “no time.” I've been living the reality of no rent for a few days, but mostly I've had the feeling since I decided I could live in a tiny house after all. The things I can bother to bitch about morph in real time. Okay, so no rent, what's next on what will go wrong with my car? How many more surprises do I need before I get power? How many embattled conversations is it going to take before I feel the thousands spent on a website were really worth it?

I can come up with goals. I can keep applying myself to other business things. But, I don't want to be blindly chugging away at ideas simply because I've held them the longest. I want security, not an endless list of obligations. If I get security making candles, then I'll be a candle maker. If I prove to have a knack for growing my own food, we'll see where that takes me. My problems are now in terms of days. 4 more days of work, I've paid off my credit card, got a little nest egg, and could kinda do nothing for a month. 2 more days of work my “couch rent” is taken care of and I've paid for a day's labor from my guy. 6 days buys me a new truck engine. 2 takes care of my taxes, (talk about an oversight there, if I wanted to get fucked I could have just stuck with Turbo Tax.)

But what about day 50? Day 100? When I'm still alone, still begging Craigslist to find me a friend, after I've exhausted my weekends away, bought everything on my Amazon wish list, insured my existence in a way that almost begs for the unexpected fire so I can upgrade. New problems and things to achieve will always present themselves, but as these things have been presented to myself and I find no rush or vigor in achieving them, why should I believe the next things will? When I make some blanket statement about what I'll do or where I'll go, who cares? Oh, you've got the money to travel? Here's a stupid picture me in front of some fountain the proves I can take a plane.

The big hard goal is what I want done with the website. In order to reasonably spend the amount of money that will take, I'm still, say 14 days at least from a comfortable living situation. Even still, I'll figure something out, I'll pour months of my life into it, I'll present it to the idiot masses, and it won't really mean anything but to me and my ability to now argue more effectively. Still sounds fun, but who am I kidding? I don't know that I care to “change the world” anymore. Maybe I want an average looking bitch and retarded kid who cling to me out of mutual fear and desperation and we can all pretend together that “everyone old enough figures out this is what it's about eventually.” Let me be the fat happy-go-lucky movie-goer commenting on how every preview is in fact something I do or don't want to see. Let me get the kind of fat that has me making the jokes about greasing my high school gym doors at the 20 year reunion with all the confidence of someone who's given up years ago.

It's these damned hangover days, I'm telling you. They remind me that there is an inescapable blackness at the center of my being too, and so much of me has been sucked into it. I'm only reasonably afraid of death insofar as I'm not keen on pain. I’m only just so anxious about saying the wrong thing to a coworker at the bar or remembering what got me kicked out. I'm skipping enthusiastically along that border between chaos and order, and in working so much and losing all regard for nearly every social interaction, the chaos has been dying for an opportunity. At best, I feel like Buzz Lightyear. I'm falling with style into my future. It's probably not a style anyone else wants to wear. I'm certainly not flying.

[689] Hide And Shriek

Within the last few weeks, some of the news outlets I follow have been lumped in with a few “alternative media” bloggers and platforms which I decided to follow as well. They lean considerably to the left, and while they have a general “anti-establishment” message, I'm finding myself in familiar gut-feeling territory in how they choose to approach attempting to tear down their “oligarchical oppressors.”

 

One thing that seems hotly debated is whether or not a handful of super-rich people are to blame, or just the influence they're able to administer via AI algorithm and the dissemination of information. Here, I think the buck stops at the audience. If your website gets less traffic, which the evidence suggests many left-wing sites are (though no corollary right wing statistics are quick to follow), the people looking to be best informed dig that information up. It may mean they have to dig harder. It may mean a good portion of the pieces adjacent to the actual news have a significant enough bias and bullshit factor that your site no longer belongs that high up.

 

Here, I envision an ardent left-wing blogger describing me as shilling for my masters. Why would I defend the censorship of ANY ideas! Let alone from the sides I would proclaim to agree with? As with most things, I'm not about censorship, but I am about doing more work than anyone seems to want to bother with. And if you have the self-righteous dignity of being “more right” in your side-leaning views, it's your responsibility to piece together your view from considerably more sources and examples than any one algorithm should be capable of deterring or dissuading you of. You can, for example, read a book or 10.

 

I'm not a believer that combating extremes makes for a reasonable middle. I think the middle is bred from struggle. I think to take an extremist position is to shield yourself from a kind of criticism you're either too intellectually inferior or afraid to deal with. The most ardent defenders of The Truth like to use as many vagaries and catch-all words that sound good on paper as anyone else. Someone truly struggling to be impartial borrows sentiments and couches them in something outside of the rhetoric, like history or statistics. Mind you, not the “easy” history of a Texas schoolbook that whitewashes slavery or the “statistics” of metrics both outdated and designed to obscure what they're speaking to.

 

That's the depth of what's been lost on most of our cultural conversation. Cite GDP ten thousand times over the course of an hour on a “mainstream” media platform. If you don't know or care what GDP really stands for, what it's actually counting and what it's not, or if you trust Rachel Maddow implicitly to not invoke it mutually ignorantly to bolster a point, or if you can't trace back your narrative talking point as one literally listed on the agenda of the Cato Institute, your lock on the truth is faulty. I'm not scared good information will be suppressed. The ones who don't know how to find it barely know how to process it when they do, and even more rarely bother to take action. “Alternative” and “anti” media want the same victim status as someone saying, “No one is listening to me!” as they testify before The Supreme Court or make their rounds on the talk show circuit.

 

Yes, our basic structure of how to distribute power is flawed and broken. Yes, wealth is concentrated to overtly deadly degrees in the wrong hands. Yes, we need to overhaul and hold people accountable. That doesn't happen with whiny blame games. You have to get involved. Create your own algorithm. Promote your Google alternatives. Compete. Use your money smarter to personally affect people door-to-door in a way the Koch's never will whether they spend 4 or 40 million to influence your election. These tools have power, but they also have as much power as you're willing to offer them.

 

I think you should be able to read any piece of information and have red flags going off. “Oh, that's not what this book said,” “Hmm, I saw a great refutation on that in this documentary,” “Wow, every other word is an example of this logical fallacy,” “I know the author they cited, he's a known charlatan,” “Look how they've related that statistic to undervalue the degree in which black people are getting killed at twice the rate of whites.” If you can't do that, you don't know enough and you're probably incredibly dishonest. 

 

The Truth, as far as I can tell, doesn't even lie in “the middle,” it barely exists at all unless you're actively working. It speaks to the tentative truth of science. It speaks to the growth and “maturity” you can achieve over time. It's the only undeniably manifest thing that any one of us is contending with at any moment. You work to create something or you're working against what someone else has. If you'd bother to work harder, you'll cry less in the face of the slurry of facts and opinions you don't understand and environment that isn't as conducive to your happiness to which you feel entitled. The phrase, “Capitalism. The worst of all economic systems, except for all the others” comes to mind. In the same vein, I'd no sooner abolish the military and intelligence agencies, or even the idea that we should ever intervene, than I would welfare or dismiss ideas of a universal basic income. If you bother to read enough about your target, you can comfortably say the CIA shouldn't have fucked about in South America, but they also have prevented an insane number of disasters. They're a mixed bag with extremes, like every human and human endeavor. You can call for more accountability and transparency without calling for their heads.

 

What I can tell you, is the more you try to hide behind your IQ, your expensive and prestigious degree, your “personal experience” having been targeted or generally lambasted, or think because someone was willing to give you a platform or money for your view, you're probably playing more obscure ignorant populist cards than you'd like to admit. Popularity on its face isn't concerned with truth. Your own message contends the corrupting force of money. “Smart” isn't synonymous with “wise” or “thorough.” And no matter how compelling the anecdote, it's one feeling or impression in a sea of billions. 

 

The truth of existence includes the smallest atom out to the ends of the accelerating universe, and you have a blog that's seeing some extra attention lately. There's always room for more context.

[688] Part In Particle

What is it called when perhaps the worst things about you become what differentiates and makes you popular or successful? Because you remain steadfast in your beliefs you become a darling of some political or identity movement. Because you're fairly ruthless and dead inside you rise to the top of your company. Because you've no capacity for introspection you bring the same scorn and enthusiasm to your 365 hour length videos ready to tell us all how it really is.

I think about the characters in life that have stayed with me for how annoyed I've been with their being. Dinesh D'Souza kicked in off in offering the same tired, refuted and deliberately misunderstood and mischaracterized arguments against atheism. There's a ton of political talking heads from Ann Coulter to Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck. My own mother managed to increase her crazy as time went on if you'll recall her accusing me of studying witchcraft in college.

In their own ways, they thrive. They make money and publish books. They get protected bubbles that reinforce their ideas nonstop. I want to say that they inhabit an entire world that I'm not privy too. I don't get the privilege of that degree of self-delusion and self-confidence to put forth impossibly easy to dismiss ideas with such vigor that I make a million dollars or always find someone else to blame. They're always going to have a village, and even the one's who don't subscribe to their lines of bullshit will succumb in some form of self-sabotaging guilt that protects them from deeper consequences.

My hang up about this “bubble world” built on undue confidence stems from a pattern I see in conversations online. There's a million and a half reasons to never bother commenting on something you read, but if you're as dumb as me, you might notice that, without fail, there will be a move to put you in your own little bubble. If you open with a comment about how you think it's lazy and dishonest to write a character assassination piece instead of sticking to a deeper history and facts, particularly from a publication that seemed to pride itself on doing so, the people responding will move to speculate on your tone and disposition. They'll conjure the idea that your words are coming from your cult-like worship of the magazine's target. They'll tell you “DUH, it's a socialist publication!” But they won't agree or disagree with your words. They'll create a you in their image and then proceed to barrage it with decreasingly sophisticated obfuscations.

I worry about this. It happens often enough that it seems to suggest some pretty damming things. Either I'm perpetually that confusing, incoherent, “too angry,” or just beyond redemption when it comes to getting a point across, or, we're literally so blind and broken in our capacity as a society to talk about things that the idea and suggestion to focus and retain the point of what's been said is simply gone. You can have your trolls and your earnest stupid people. But what do you have when either “side” is trying to diagnose the other or armchair life coach on communication skills in between called names and condescension? It's every single thread. The smarter each person thinks they are, the dumber the conversation gets.

I retreat to the relationships and conversations I've been in where there's never been that degree of, “YOU'RE JUST A BULLSHITTING TIRADE OF INCOHERENCE!” levied at me. It's not all people all the time in my life, in fact, it's practically never in person or with some serious adult aimed at conveying something. There are no arbitrary interjections of demeaning and irrelevant pontifications. That doesn't mean conversations can't get a little random or work sideways, but it does mean there's a common thread. What that thread is supposed to look like or why it never seems to manifest online, I have no clue. I don't know if it's the lack of noise and facial signals. I don't know if it's that the internet is like a dog whistle of mere reactions competing for space. I don't know that there's a way to combat the problem short of significantly more people shutting up who are the most prone to talking.

As it pertains to me though, when I'm presented with the idea that my ideas are just too disjointed or arbitrary, I'm never asked a question about one of those confusing lines nor do people even pretend I had something to say at the onset from which further ideas came forth. They seem to be turning me into my own conservative talking head. I have this idea, according to the “win or lose” camps and barking dogs there's one way to explain myself and one way only, no one will tell me what it is, and unless I've gotten more likes than them on the comment train down, we'll all know who lost.

I still retain a fuck ton of doubt. I ask questions. I very much do lead with an explicit stating of what I see as a problem, or a fix, or my feelings in relation to something. Did I miss the year we decided that the words we use don't actually mean anything and it's up to us to figure out how to relate to an infinite number of interpretations all at once? If you call someone a moron, and they ask you what you mean by that...don't you have a responsibility to put that person out of their misery before you attempt to answer the question and thicken the conversational fog? I recently said that people become micro-Nazi's about all sorts of things. You lose the battle before you begin if you attempt to discuss something with ideological possession predicated on magical books or racial bigotry. If talking is fundamental to survival and human flourishing, and now you fail before you ever begin, doesn't that only leave us with war?

For my part, I'm running with my anti-matter theory with how to relate to the rest of the world. If you're regular matter and collide with me, we'll both annihilate. I've had this idea growing with me for maybe a year. I'm the person to blow things up. I'll immediately list the reasons it sucks, it will fail, and you're impossibly lost and stupid. We'll both glean everything we need to know about each other with what comes next. You can blow me off and earnestly attempt to pursue or defend yourself. You can hate the shit out of me and proclaim to all your friends you get why you were warned in advance about talking to me. You can consider what I said and incorporate what I've pointed out in an effort to improve your current model. What you will not do is affect me in any sort of manner that turns my anti-matter nature into matter.

I think this is a more forgiving and accurate representation of what people have deemed as “negative” about my personality. This negative guy is fat and happy well on his way towards a life with no bills and all the time in the world to create. Something about it is working, just not for you. I've said a number of times how much “communication” is a concern of mine. I've been thinking too small and linear. I can communicate a thousand things talking or otherwise. I'm fated to be misunderstood. The people who I admire the most for communicating the best get thrown under more buses than I've tempted to run me over, and what do they do? They keep talking anyway. They keep showing. They keep selling. They can blow up your mind and ignore or refute the endless stream of lazy stupid reactionary bullshit, and so can I.

I'm mostly looking forward to having a flash of an inspiring person hit me as I phrase something in an “angry” or “bizarre” way. I look forward to “trying” to explain myself or my position on something and it only amounting to me saying fuck too often and showing what my words look like as consequences in the real world. For someone who has to write, I really am sick of talking. The reasonable people already agree, the crazies will never get it, I'm not patient or forgiving enough to translate or dumb down, and frankly, I don't think we're going to make it, nor deserve to, anyway. And if I feel that as earnestly as I do and ever have, and still figure out some way to help people in the world who actually need and appreciate it, it'll be one more “fuck you” for every character assassination piece you write about me and my motives and my incoherent struggle to figure something out or propose a fix.

I choose to engage with myself in a way that makes sense to me and seems to suggest I've got more of life figured out with regard to my happiness and ability to contribute. You choose to resent that. I actually want to understand the Coulters, Becks, and even Arrow fans in the world, even if they make my skin crawl. You don't want to understand me, and I'm nowhere near the level of bullshit and abstraction that would start chucking aliens or conspiracies at you as an explanation behind my reasoning. But that's not where the vast majority of people are. They don't practice being open, pausing and asking, or having any doubt. Therefore, I hope every time we meet, things blow up.

[687] Poof

I don't really want to write right now, but hopefully that means I can make this quick. After listening to the latest Joe Rogan podcast with Jordan Peterson's 3rd or 4th appearance, I find myself moved again towards a kind of epiphany regarding my own motivations and where they came from.

I think I've been viewing my problem with other people incorrectly. I've also stated my place in more explicit and less forgiving terms. If we're on our own individuated trails, and those fall along quasi-predictable patterns, it appears like in my tendency to accelerate processes, I've gone and begrudged people too quickly. I liken it to blaming a child for not knowing how to do calculus in 3rd grade. At a grander scale, if humanity in general is still in preschool, what a stupid thing to do in approaching them academically.

I'm not so much forgiving as I am understanding Peterson's point about you always have little tribes you're apart of, from your family, to your school, and then you venture out on your own, until finally you figure out how to bring back something important to hopefully improve the groups you choose. People my age barely figure out where they fit, and I've given most of my shit to people younger than me. When I point out how weird it is to get married, my ex points out I met her when she was 20. I've adopted the posture of a whorish 70 year old contending with variations on the person I wrote myself away from for years.

As such, while I don't think it's particularly acceptable to be merely “entertained” or “achieving goals” based on your budget or ability to isolate yourself, I've decided to give people more time. My concerns heightened when I thought they were part of my tribe. They're not. I think I have goals that could matter to humanity. That doesn't make their tribe bad. It just means they aren't in mine.

As well, while I'm driving through traffic and trying to put myself in the seat of random people's cars, pretending to empathize like that not-good show, I'm reminded that they're part of the millions who are feeling the effects of the ripple when the right words catch an accelerant. We're all subject to larger waves. It's part of the reason I'm such a stickler for how I speak and my attitude towards people who try to bullshit me. The wave stops here. But it also starts here. It's why I've tried to direct most of my words over the last few years to a smaller and smaller crowd. You can still have an important voice in all the noise, and it's important to find it at the end of the day when you're tired and sore and just failed to cook chicken long enough to prepare meals in advance.

Maybe the beginnings of a better and positive cultural wave are starting to come around again. Maybe now that society has been reminded of the naked face of evil and destruction, you'll feel it as earnestly as the earliest warnings tried to express. Maybe a sense of urgency will put us on the same time frame and give us an appreciation for how quickly it's burning up.

[686] Manageable

My head is either chasing or running from something, and I want to figure out what it is.

There's been no greater impact on my perspective than time. Everything you could ever want to believe, when subjected to enough time, comes out the other end very squishy. You never lose aspects of what you believed without gaining something else. When things don't pan out the way you think they're supposed to, it feels considerably less like a “loss” or “wrong” and instead like you've completed some circle or ridden through a kind of divine punishment.

I don't know how else to explain my ability to still talk and grow anxious and cheerlead for the ideas I've had since I was a child, while finding an extremely mild “peace” at the thought of “the grind.” I don't know how vital it is for my unconscious actions to be flavored by my experiences of not getting what I want and when. With my deeply rooted focus on trying to utilize time efficiently, I pack a considerable amount of bitching and fear mongering and angst into what may realistically be a 2 week or 2 month or maybe a year saga. At the same time, I don't know how else it could go.

It's most apparent while I'm getting something I wanted. Well, now there's new things on the horizon that shift as quickly as the money is or isn't available. And then I think about all of the things I don't prioritize that I wish I could. It's hedonism competing with itself at every level. Do I get my bathroom, or my vacation? Do I get my shed paid off, or maybe slightly better car? What I want to be doing is having the kind of community impact that stems from feeling a part of something and contributing an individual take. What my environment provides is a persistent mockery of any potential level feeling fulfilling.

I'm still in basic survival mode. If I was born into a society where it was my job to fetch water and cut down trees, I might find myself with a ton of time to dance and sing and enjoy the sun. But I'm born into a declining empire of psychologically arrested and exhausted laborers. Indulgence just doesn't feel right. Something underneath needs to be addressed before I road trip with reckless abandon. I can't bring myself to praise flitting about existence.

That I wish I could is me trying to be empathetic. I wish I could drag as much happiness out of the little things that go right in my life and feel the same for you. It's not that I don't feel joy. It's not that I don't want you to be happy. But there's more work to be done managing our terrible selves that went awry. That's a kind of new deliberate use of language I'm about lately. We need managers. We need people who manage their emotions, hold people responsible for breaking important rules, and have the wisdom and subtlety to accept things as they are without subverting what they could be. I don't expect to “fix” anything in life, but I can manage.

[685] Credit Dues Blues

♩ I said they always got me working, got me working all day long. ♩

Let's start by expanding on a status I posted earlier regarding your “work ethic.”

I find it funny that there are terms so duplicitous in their ability to sound and function explicitly while retaining a world's worth of a hidden underbelly. Don't we all know what is meant by work ethic? It's how hard you're willing to work in order to achieve your ends. It's the extent to which you push your body and mind. It's the amount of respect you carry for yourself and those who are also putting in the time. It's as striking an entire code of ethics as it is common parlance regarding something we're all expected to do in order to earn our place in society.

Given my complicated relationship to work, I'm frankly aghast I haven't explored this in great detail already. If, and you might as well for this digression, you take the above paragraph as more or less true regarding our conception of work ethic, there seems to be a gigantic story involved with how we get there. Rarely does it seem people are keen to discuss “ethics” at all until they're nodding along at the punishments bestowed from cops or a judge on TV, but one can only strike the bell of our cultural folly once again and move on.

Personally, I used to work a lot. I say that after my last 6 months of working primarily 11+ hour days and taking 5 or 6 off a month, usually only because my car died. Before that I had 3 jobs I worked most of the day and night on. Before that was 2 years of needing to stay basically sedentary to refrain from screwing up my blood work to get into drug studies. I've experienced prolonged periods of both extremes. I tend to function in extremes for reasons I don't have the best explanation of. Increasingly, I feel the imposed conditions of my experience have taught me lessons you only get from suffering through them. Patience becomes a virtue when the alternative is to be driven mad. A naive full-throttle go-getter spirit is not an endless well of energy.

My ideas about work came from stories about my grandparents and seeing what my dad has been through iron-working. Mind you, it wasn't until relatively recently that my stories and molding got to interact with what I was learning about the world and the diminishing power of the dollar. If my grandparents could work 9-5 closer to home and raise four kids in a nice house in a safe neighborhood, my parents had to commute an hour away, one gone a good portion of when I was younger, in a modest house in a neighborhood on the verge of white-flight. My brother and I either lived with roommates, or still do, or had to move back home, only in our late 20s flirting with distorted versions of the kinds of things a newbie family in the 60s or 70s might get right out of high school, and definitely with a degree.

As the times changed, as the pressures became varied and the dialogue about how to understand it flooded from the internet, we never took the time to examine where we were going or why. We never bothered to ask anymore what “the good life” or what “middle class” stood for. We let the people born into wealth scheme to keep it from “trickling down.” We adopted self-destructive narratives of self-sufficiency. I'm telling you, read the comments on facebook under plans for a universal basic income or articles about the minimum wage. Without fail you'll get the nastiest judgmental, “WELL WHY SHOULD I PAY FOR YOU FOR ANY REASON!?” Somewhere along the way we forgot that we're beholden and rely on each other. More than that, we built up an entirely new working ethos that appears to be aimed at destroying even the memory of empathy.

If there's anything my work ethic has taught me, it's that I'm not shit. It truly is worth mentioning, a lot, that you can work yourself to literal death or passed out exhaustion, and you can still live in poverty. You can still go hungry. You can humble yourself and take the “lowest of the low” positions, you can take 3 of them, and people will balk and call you lazy and entitled and smug as you explain to them why freezing your account over back taxes might as well drive you to suicide. The situation is dark. But the only dialogue you tend to hear is the most ridiculous shit about the stock market or one-off company raising wages while pretending they're not laying off thousands or destroying the environment.

Consider, I still feel guilty about taking days off. I wait until several points on my body are throbbing and I've gained an extra 10 pounds before I think it's okay for me to cook for myself for a week and take a walk on the climate change induced spring day in February. That's a bad work ethic. I don't want to die of a heart attack delivering idiot children their food. I didn't want the majority of my memories from my last year as a 20-something to be of TV shows I watched while driving my car.

I posted an article this morning about how neoliberal ideas presenting “gig economy” jobs as a “lifestyle choice” are robbing people of the ability to recognize the power of organizing and being members of their society when they're not working. I've never felt so understood. I genuinely can't remember the last time I was a person. I don't recall when I was doing something fun or immersive for me, and not as a desperate escape to masquerade as someone more free than he feels. That scares me. I'm not making this sacrifice for kids. I'm not seeing some humanitarian effort manifest at the end of each exhausted day. I'm trying to stem the bleeding of payments set up in exploitative interest schemes for my tiny house garage. I'm trying to break even with back taxes. I'm trying to keep my car running. I'm trying to start more work with entrepreneurial gigs I hope can net equal or more without me needing to spend every waking hour doing them.

Every dollar that stems the tide of the poverty plague speaks to what the land represents. Really, truly, by the numbers, even if I'm throwing the IRS $95 a month to leave me alone, I'll be able to be as “bill free” as you can reasonably hope to be in life. And for all of the hell that it took to get there, I'm afraid it's going to feel like a cheap imitation. I'm still going to be doing things alone. I'm still going to have to circle round and round or make bets in trying to work out something that grows large enough to compensate for the ongoing cultural decay. I'm still going to cross my fingers I can mentally exhaust myself enough to mock my anxiety to death in order to get back into studies, after I stick to salads and a treadmill for a month. I'm still going to be obligated to the cultural work ethic that keeps me as tied down as everybody feels and despotically praises.

Right now was when I was supposed to be “living it up.” I was supposed to take my brain and work ethic to the top of something and revel in the glory. What am I doing repairing a car every month and delivering food 11 hours a day? It's the incidental “lifestyle choice” I'm making to try and put out fires I never started in the most efficient way. It's a job that at least allows me the option to dip into protecting my mental health verses forcing me to sit through a 6 hour presentation on how to organize cans. It doesn't promise the world and then expect free labor. It's a new kind of exploitation. It's an algorithm that has a number for your psychological breaking point. You see, the ethic evolves to meet the pathology of the times.

The difficult part is feeling stuck either way. I like feeling like I can progress on my house. The immediacy of my, in some form or another, perpetually suffered moment is pressing. When I can black out and wake up to a dollar amount high enough to accomplish something, it's a nice higher ride in a period of otherwise self-immolating wretchedness. I realized that I've been trying to trick my brain into tying what I'm doing that day to something happening on the land. I'll try to plan for when he's going to pick up supplies before I leave, so that while I'm working I can connect in real time each dropped off order with a pipe installed or hammered nail. If I take time off, what am I doing? Hanging out and talking with you? Seeing a movie by myself? Spending too much on restaurant food? I don't have a life any way you slice it. Explicitly, I don't have a reason to live that isn't on credit. To the extent I believe my own hype about what I can accomplish or who I want to be for the people in my life I care about is it.

In being forced to sit and save with studies, I started to feel a certain sensibility take hold that speaks to what I'm feeling now. It's summed up in the phrase, “It's all part of the plan.” I had to start couching the “shit years” in a larger context of the story of my life. When a comedian gets on Colbert and exclaims, “Do you have any idea how long it took to get here? 25 years! I've been doing comedy.” What's 2 years of being poked and prodded and a year delivering food in the face of that? What's a few extra pounds and assorted pains if you spend 30-31 actually going to the gym consistently and eating better? You'll be able to afford it, after all. Why am I stressed out I can only drum so fast and barely play my first scale on a trumpet? A good weekend's wages will pay for lessons for a year. “The moment” of your suffered circumstances becomes next level compelling, and the boss battle at the end is your capacity to accept it.

That's perhaps a funny and horrendously sad thing as well. I can feel myself accepting it. I don't work as often or hard as I do because I accept anything less than all of the shit I'll need to drag into the future I desire. What I struggle with is knowing what any form of balance looks like. Again, I can see friends taking off on trips or seeing shows, certainly having saved up during the same months I have. Is it back to the grind when they return? Does it ever really get “better” or does the shit just stir in more or less shitty configurations? If I saw all the shows I wanted and took all the trips I flirted with, I might not have my land. Were they worth the sacrifice if every other week from 31-32 I can travel nearly anywhere in the world? My standards, my comfort levels, and my goals are apparently fundamentally different. The only people I engage with at length about them have the ignorance and arrogance to disregard waking up an hour early to even bother discussing making something work.

There's a scene in Vikings where Rolo is freaking out about his place in Ragnar's shadow and seeks guidance from the Seer. The Seer starts laughing. If Rolo only knew what his future held.