[727] Help! I Need Somebody

I haven't talked about it an length, but now feels appropriate. My finger, in all of the places it may be, appears to be on the pulse. I cannot escape the “real world” manifesting in ways that I generally tend to see coming. I know a statement like that is only as good as the data. I know that for every 1 thing I might get right, thousands will go terribly wrong. I know I'm generally only as good as whatever I make you feel in some moment my persona has trapped you in. Nonetheless, I want to explore more why I could or should ever be right about something, and hopefully, I'll divorce it from the idea that it has anything to do with “me” in particular.

Surely, by now, most of the people that would be classified as “peers” or my generational cohort would feel themselves as having even a fleeting sense of “I've seen it all.” They've had loves and lost. They've seen the realities of the working world. They have young children. They've let their friendships and dreams wither on the vine. They also catch the despotic articles on the state of the world and double down on their hobbies or work ethic to instantiate just how much they aren't the real problem. If you do this honestly, you develop instincts. That is, the habits that have carried you along so far have proven true enough. As far as natural selection is concerned, you're golden.

For me, the thing that kind of kicks off this blog is how early I called Jordan Peterson. I was directed to him by a lightly upvoted lecture posted to /r/lectures on Reddit. It took about 2 years for him to become what I predicted. We have these giant filters like Google and Reddit. The vast majority of the online world is seeing things through these mediums. By the time you can recognize something of special value, you've been exposed to an endless stream of competing narratives. What made that one special? How did you know in your heart of hearts what this one lecturer was saying was special?

When I think about my voice, it's a question like that which keeps me guessing and theorizing. I watch “everything” right? I read everything. I spend doctoral student levels of time picking through ridiculous details 10 people in any given field give a fuck about. I speed through terrible shows so I'm prepared to write a 10 page rebuttal when you want to defend something shitty. I watch all form of random lectures across the ages. I catch up on series fronted by noteworthy public intellectuals and featured scientists. Why did this person stick out? Why am I still able to recognize and respect an individual for their perspective when it should all just register as a giant rushing mess of familiar patterns?

I suspect, the same reason certain “stars” become as such is the same kind pulse I was introduced to. I'm still intrigued by fame, not because how it operates is in and of itself that confusing or intriguing, but because of what you're supposed to say when someone deserves it. They get stats and sales and deference. But what of the existential umph made it them? What node of being were they speaking to in their era? What timeless and transcendent truth were they channeling? How do I get there? How do we all?

You never under-appreciate mastery or artistry when you've “seen it all.” I'm floored by Legion. I can advocate without excuse The Americans, Vikings, Shameless, Game of Thrones, Rick and Morty, Firefly, and Halt and Catch Fire, not because they're “good TV.” Whether we realize it or not, we're always pushing our boundaries. We're using our creative outlets to ask questions and frame issues in ways that aren't readily apparent. Capital a Art speaks to that. It's one thing to get a lens and analogy. It's another to transform the view in real-time via the perspective. A voice is a thing. That's the first step. A real and true individual human voice can be achieved in spite of every monolith sorting and celebrating via algorithm for attention.

So what could I create that's as interesting to me as the TV show that comes out of nowhere? Who do I want to be that I can't see coming? Well, it's whatever may come of the land. I don't know 100% for sure that I can make it what I dream, but I think I have a better than 50% chance, and that's enough. How else could this kind of questioning apply to your life? What kind of relationship do you want to have? What's going to surprise you? Again, the person who's been through the mental shit to arrive on the same kind of plane would genuinely surprise me. I meet plenty of people who can fall for the “art of seduction.” I don't meet many people who actually want me in their life. They want novelty, or something to judge and exert playful cruelty sure. But, boringly, a story I can see coming.

What wraps me up in unmitigated joy and boundless energy, is to take a reference to a philosopher who's already done it in his time and nailed shit perfectly, and blow it up in my own era. When I read some stupid article about how much “millennials” are or aren't saving, I want to point out that (x) amount of cups of coffee or other creations I'll sell in a week will achieve that point. I want to reintroduce surprise and relief. My sense of being has to be felt. I've clearly talked about it forever and no one gives a shit. It's like trying to talk about the parties in college or a joke someone made. You have to be there.

That's the part that kills me the most. I don't know yet how to get anyone to show up. I don't know how to make people try or believe. They get it when we're in front of each other. They get it when it manifests. But a year, 5 year, or 10 year plan? I don't even want years. I want weeks. I want attempts. I want as many failures as it takes. I can recognize what the world wants, where it's going, and it's 2, count them, 2 different billionaires who want to create MY FUCKING WEBSITE in some bastardized form or another now. I can't fucking win.

I never need people to believe in me. I need them to believe in the objective truth that the only truth is change. You can be the arbiter of that change and do the things that result in dramatically different outcomes, or you can keep reading and watching the life you're subjected to. Leaving aside all of the things a morally-minded warrior might approach, there's so much that could be done now, on the cheap, in service to that immensely intriguing ideal that go ignored. I think of everyone who's ever given me props on a blog or what I've accomplished who disappeared back up their mediocre lives' ass when I asked them to actually fucking do something.

I'm Thomas Jefferson trying to abolish slavery and knowing full well that shit ain't gonna fly yet. Don't wait another 60 years. Don't pretend like my perspective is bred from a kind of feverish pyramid scheme naivety. If me turning 30 in like 2 months isn't enough of an indication, the time to be revolutionaries is basically gone. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at 33. He had help and inspiration, and they cut a lot of that shit out. Are you going to sign on? Are you going to recognize your power and wealth and perspective for what it is? You know someone who consistently sees the future. Why isn't that cool enough to play with?

Mostly, what makes it so it isn't about me? What do I have to create with my perspective that absolves me of any personality behind it? What existential spine can I speak to, and in what way, that will strip your reticence and reaction from the ego typing away? That's true mastery. When you're part of the lexicon and no one knows where it came from. Can I be a language? Am I already? Is that the true depth of my voice? I always smirk and feel humbled when someone parrots something I wrote in a blog, sometimes very much later than when I said it. It's the kind of fanboy nerd shit I'd do to a writer hero of mine.

I said not too long ago that I miss believing in things. I'm pretty sure I was acutely drunk. The more I think on it, I didn't stop believing, I just stopped thinking anyone around me did. I bought the land. I keep reading everything. I support causes I see every endgame for because the people I believe in chose whatever that thing is. I'm the one about to die here pushing 30. Most of the people I know I'm at least 2 or 3 years older than. What do you believe in? What's a giant intriguing question you're working towards answering? You could all obviously get fucked and married and keep your shit together enough for a job. But are you really that fucking boring? Are you willing to forgo the hard part of standing out like I once saw you capable of? I already know the standing answer, but you could surprise me.

[726] Ok, Stupid

I turned my OKCupid profile into a long “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” bad sorta-poem. I want it preserved cus it was fun.

What I'm doing with my 

I want a girl who loves having her boobs played with.

I want a girl to prove it's possible to get bored with them. 

I want a girl who reminds me of my exes. 

I want a girl who likes I've more good memories than bad. 

I want a girl who's kind of a whore. 

I want a girl who doesn't glorify sex. 

I want a girl who uses big words. 

I want a girl who doesn't think they're that big. 

I want a girl with kind of a weird laugh. 

I want a girl who can be alone. 

I want a girl who isn't resolved to her fate. 

I want a girl who'll call me out on my weight. 

I want a girl in a sun dress in June. 

I want a girl not afraid to sing along. 

I want a girl who's wise and polite. 

I want a girl who can put up a fight.

My worst quality 

I want a girl who can see through what I say. 

I want a girl who's got so many questions. 

I want a girl with the things that she likes. 

I want a girl that can be left or right. 

I want a girl who acts like herself 

Not "like a girl" or "like a boy" just with something to say. 

I want a girl who appreciates bad writing. 

I want a girl who knows tomorrow's another day. 

I want a girl who's ready to delete her profile. 

I want a girl who's bored and stays anyway. 

I want a girl who will dance in the street. 

I want a girl who's okay with going grey.

The first thing people notice about me 

I want a girl with creative energy. 

I want a girl who can start without me. 

I want a girl who's first to the table. 

I want a girl who winks at me while you pray. 

I want a girl with her nerd and TV shirts. 

I want a girl who's hair will flow all day. 

I want a girl who will crack the joke. 

I want a girl who can say anything. 

I want a girl who cares my arm is asleep. 

I want a girl who knows that I don't care. 

I want a girl that I can see myself in. 

I want a girl who thought of sex just then. 

I want a girl who's available and wicked 

I want a girl to take to see the show. 

I want a girl who hates her job 

But in the off hours finds the point of it all. 

I want a girl who knows who to blame. 

I want a girl with incidental fame.

Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food

I want a girl who's seen it all. 

I want a girl who can never get enough. 

I want a girl with a taste for finer things. 

I want a girl who can eat on the run. 

I want a girl who's never thought she fit. 

I want a girl who's one in a million fans. 

I want a girl who's down for the late show. 

I want a girl on which tomorrow depends. 

I want a girl who's been a proper book worm. 

I want a girl with her own sacred space. 

I want a girl who believes in something. 

I want a girl who can save my place.

I want a girl who's spent a little too much. 

I want a girl who knows it was worth it. 

I want a girl who creates her own luck. 

I want a girl with the power to change. 

I want a girl who takes it all in stride. 

I want a girl who thinks it's not that strange.

My partner should be

I want a girl who should be what suits her. 

I want a girl who's hung on for this long. 

I want a girl who wants to know what's next. 

Thong thong, thong thong thong thong. 

I want a girl in the spirit of truth. 

I want a girl who will take her time. 

I want a girl who will shoot the tequila 

I want a girl who prefers it with lime. 

I want a girl who's not so scarred and afraid 

Who turns her pain into power and charges ahead 

I want a girl who's happy to cook. 

I want a girl who knows it's my turn. 

I want a girl who doesn't need to perform. 

I want a girl who knows the stage his hers. 

I want a girl with a plan of attack 

I want a girl who can play it by ear 

I want a girl with her tongue down my throat 

I want a girl who can kiss so sincere. 

I want a girl who says of course it is her day
 her week, her month, and even her year.

I spend a lot of time thinking about 

I want a girl who knows what feels right. 

I want a girl who can think it through. 

I want a girl who can tolerate risk. 

I want a girl who thinks so too. 

I want a girl who will scratch my back. 

I want a girl who'll be my emergency contact. 

I want a girl I could stare at all day. 

I want a girl who won't look away. 

I want a girl who's as busy as a bee. 

I want a girl who wants to start a colony.

When I die, I will

I want a girl who knows the end is nigh. 

I want a girl on a responsible high. 

I want a girl who's post STD. 

I want a girl who can go viral and live. 

I want a girl with her own vehicle. 

I want a girl who goes where she pleases. 

I want a girl who gets noticed and praised. 

I want a girl who can mutually raise. 

I want a girl who will do the work. 

I want a girl who's too old for this shit. 

I want a girl who will stay the execution. 

I want a girl who is fire and lit.

My biggest regret 

I want a girl who appreciates "hey." 

I want a girl who's already impressed. 

I want a girl who borrows without stealing. 

I want a girl who knows how to invest. 

I want a girl who will try random things. 

I want a girl who comes in under budget. 

I want a girl who can drop the ball 

And then shoot it, or kick it, against the wall 

I want a girl who is mildly obsessive 

I want a girl who can pull away. 

I want a girl with too many sleepless nights 

I want a girl who knows it'll be okay.

You should message me if 

I want a girl who can roll with the worst. 

I want a girl who wants to hear it straight.  

I want a girl who's playlist has this song. 

I want a girl who doesn't really date. 

I want a girl who can be a good friend. 

I want a girl who bothers to check in. 

I want a girl who can grow on me. 

I want a girl who I can defend. 

I want a girl who would call me right now. 

I want a girl who's stuck in the moment. 

I want a girl who takes care of herself 

But knows it's pretty cool when someone is there. 

I want a girl who says time is an illusion. 

I want a girl who says she's still a kid. 

I want a girl who can doubt her best. 

I want a girl who I want to be like. 

I want a girl who knows that I like me. 

I want a girl, not "the" or a "dream."

[725] Trip

I don't like helping people.

I wasn't sure how to start, but this thought crossed my head, so wah-lah. Today I was dropped off as a neighbor who recently had surgery on her arm was leaving her apartment. She, half jokingly, asked if either me or Byron wanted to go get drugs with her. She's been on some pretty high dose pain medications, and it's unclear that they had worn off enough for her to drive safely. I, as a not psychopath, offered to driver her to the CVS.

What I take to be a result of a mild trip the day before was a sense of...nothing. It wasn't a “I don't care” kind of nothing. It wasn't a “nothing matters” kind of nothing. I wasn't hollowed out or secretly and desperately wishing my better angel didn't get the best of me. I just drove her and we talked about coffee. We discussed the looming crisis of many more older people like her in bad situations which make getting taken care of difficult.

I do like the idea that people can get the help they need. I like the idea that I might be able to contribute to that effort. I like to think there's something in place that will support me when I need it. I, and the rest of western civilization save my country's insanity, think get it in the same way. I don't want people like me desperate for a job to be in social work or home health care. I don't want to watch people struggle with what any of us would reflexively do for each other, but for the cultural fog or monetary incentives.

To be able to say something easy like the last paragraph, I had to start with something, presumably, difficult. I don't mean I felt a particular way about saying I don't' like helping people. I mean I don't know why that felt like the provocative thought. I don't know what I mean by it. I like knowing I don't have some kind of irresponsible and irrepressible malicious intent that prevents me from functioning in the world. I like helping those who've I've personally discerned reasons for justifying my help. But who am I? Why should it matter what my fickle and small ego has to say about what constitutes help and who deserves it?

If nothing else, I'm a person who's readily admitting that he doesn't like to help, even while he is, even while he's prepared to do so again. My contentious and contradictory spirit is a process. It's the work of figuring out “if there's a there there” when I think or say something difficult.

I just got done watching a debate on the value of “political correctness.” The loudest message I took away was about how oppressed the people who were defending political correctness felt. Their takeaway message was to plead with you to feel as desperate as them. Their method of discourse was to avoid definition, project language and insecurities, and to play victim. I don't want to help people who conduct themselves like that.

It seems to me that if you're going to help yourself to a stage and decide your words need to resonate to thousands or millions, they almost shouldn't be your words. That is to say, what do you know? A few emotionally compelling anecdotes almost certainly bias you to some form of rhetorical style or emotionally shielded posture. What does your message look like when it's not about you probing for laughs or unfairly misrepresenting your opponent?

Can you walk away from this blog with folded arms comfortably proclaiming to the world I don't like helping people? And indeed, why not take the natural step forward and say this dislike is such that I may actually be endangering them by being trusted with their information and lives! As far as “the world” is concerned, I'm a “random dude” with a week of “training” who a bunch of people I'd spent less than 2 hours total in person with said, “Alright! Shuffle other people's children around the state and invite yourself into their homes as you probe the depths of their minds with our handy questionnaire.” I'm not a therapist. My only license is one to drive a car.

But this system “works” for lack of a better description. Even with your own struggles and prejudices and concerns about your demons, with a basically competent and basically moral random asshole, we've concocted a process that gets to speak to the reunification of families and other improvements in their lives. Do I suspect that's what happens most of the time or that we're even doing it particularly well? Absolutely not. But the relatively nascent stage at which humanity is in regarding human well-being, I'm loathe to criticize it too harshly.

To take my work example and try to tie it to how I opened this, is that barring any particular atrocity, from the daily lives of those my company serves, or grand societal destruction, if there wasn't something there about humanity in spite of whatever ridiculous words and egos want to say about it, we wouldn't even have the opportunity to be doing as good a bad job as we're doing right now. That is, when you're attempting to describe the landscape that we're operating in, if you're “politically correct” about the desperate and indifferent and wanton opinions that have churned us out to this point, you start to think they're not there, and as John Mulaney said, no one can figure out how or why a horse is rampaging in the hospital.

People need to feel offended. They need to feel oppressed. They need to feel like there is no hope, and then they need to see themselves figuring out how to live anyway. That's what we're made of. Whether they'll need to feel it indefinitely into the future, I don't know. But I don't feel driven to change anything when I'm tripping through a comfortable and “matter-of-fact” atmosphere about my place and the means to navigate it. I “desperately” want to die on as many machines and drugs as it takes without thinking about it bankrupting me. I've been “oppressed” by greed and institutional powers relentlessly. A simple victimhood feeling is not predicated on a group identity claim. Even countless incidences that seem to betray that group identity don't speak to the point.

The point is that it's about you. You have to swallow your guilt or your pride. You have to disavow the shame insisted upon you. You have to tap into a meaning-driven flow or fluid structure that speaks for what you'll never be able to. I could write a blog a day decrying the insanity of things I encounter. None of it will ever speak to why I'm not doing 90 down the highway with a kid in the car. Here we must leave aside the perpetual danger we put everyone in with our various other driving distractions, but the point remains the same. You are all, not either/or. You can be black, and only black man on the stage invited to speak over the next 2 hours. You don't look like a victim, even if you are.

You hear often enough in places that claim to believe and care that you don't know someone else's story. They say don't judge. They say keep an even disposition when you're walking into someone's broken house or they're talking to you through broken teeth. What most would describe as victims after a paragraph of what they or their kids have been put through does not mean they carry the same kind of complex you'll insist upon them. Even and especially when they are actually victims.

Equally broke, equally addicted, equally geographically located, equally in a State database and labeled and sorted, the only people who return to normal are the ones who take command of themselves. They show up to the imposed meetings. They fill out the paperwork. They bring the food, even shitty sugar bullshit, but food enough, to their interactions. They ask questions about how to do better. They're scared and confused and frustrated, and what no one has the indecency to say is that they can only “help” so much. We don't grow as a business when we help people. We grow by plausibly deniable billing practices and rushed certifications that allow for the acceptance of more referrals. Do some social workers somewhere some of the time help people? Sure. Is the fix to poverty and addiction bilking the state? Obviously not.

I pick writing this back up after I catch a line from Jordan Peterson saying that first you have to admit something before you open the door for it to potentially being fixed. I think that's the purpose of the ongoing and open discourse. That's the purpose of analyzing and never shutting up. Keep admitting. Keep accepting. Keep throwing in your own face all the reasons it might be you instead of the world. When it is the world, there's still more room to admit what else you might be doing in harm or service. The discourse needs the information from the collective differences, as difficult and misaligned as they're forever perfectly situated. To admit there's a fix, and moreover you could be a part of it, is an optimistic view rarely denoted as such.

One convoluted way or another, in spite of whatever might be wrong with my head, no matter the amount of money I've been fucked over for, the constant hurdle of dying and superficial friends, and wasted effort being incidentally “helpful” doing jobs I hate, I still try to set a kind of basic example. I still write. I still do the job, better than I even care to, or respond to frustrations with more, what feels like excessively hopeless effort, until I burn out. Should my goal to never be a person who burns out? Or is there only a certain span of time I can be what I want to be that the world is going to snuff out too soon regardless? That depends on how much of my experience I want to blame on my birth year or whiteness. That depends on if I'm a victim of circumstance, or an excuse-ridden empathy frother. I'm both. I'm fucked, and trapped, and feel hopeless and alone, and I have everything I do and enjoy daily too. Why can't we be both?

I think once you ask that you're forced to contend with how much of your decision making is just that, your decision. I choose my small daily reality's conception of pragmatism to keep the money coming in too, but I'd stop in a heartbeat if I saw a way forward that worked things like I know they need to work. Would you? No. You choose “this.” You choose silence. I don't know how to fix that. I don't know how to make more offers to those I wish to connect and build with. The chasm between me and finding friends to create something sustainable or affordable or healthy feels like the divide between extremist political groups save for the fact I actually want to connect. I actually want to learn from and share. I don't want to be on some side of a self-righteous dividing line. But here I sit.

Then I'm moved to say you don't want the responsibility. You don't want the burden and risks associated. You don't want something “better” in so many ways abstracted or not. You don't want me. You don't want to try. You don't want to catch one blog over another complaining I'm not moving fast enough. You don't want that anymore than I want to read dozens of proclamations that I'm to blame for the way I look, or to hear an educated black man with millions of views frame his victimhood as a measure of my incapacitated empathy. He's not my victim anymore than you are. 

We all have the darkness and coldness of the opening line. Ignore it at your peril. Deny yourself the work of figuring out the “but.” Pretend there's nothing to be done, and I'll go about my business writing to no one in particular.

[724] Dent

Midway through a “Vice News Tonight” episode talking about kids born with deficiencies due to Zika, I had a thought. Well, there were several.

Initially, I thought about winning the genetic lottery. I've alluded to my general good health, size, looks, brain etc. that I enjoy or have used well-enough in life. I don't really struggle to learn or remember things, at least when I care about them. I don't have some deformity to hide or that I'm particularly insecure about. I'm not bleeding money on hospital bills. And despite my capacity to describe an ongoing crisis that is the set of my various neuroses, there's hardly a day I'm not laughing, lounging, or otherwise throwing things into my life that I enjoy.

The point is that I have it good. I have it really good. I suspect many people don't believe they have it as good as I do. And I think this lack of belief in themselves is why I find myself relatively alone in what I choose to worry about or try to fix. If you're not “the problem,” something external needs to be. That isn't to say you aren't a problem or won't become one, but it does mean your perspective on how those problems are nested and where your attention can go are different.

I don't need to be entertained, for example. I'm not craving vacation or my next day off. As I've gotten to know more “regular” people, each moment off seems like a craving and clawing. They're consumed by what they think they should be worried about, and then nothing else gets in. By the time there's room to look up or breath, they're literally desperate for air. If all of your brainpower is spent fretting over shitty software, corruption in the system, and the inescapable hole modernity has born you into, every new issue makes the flashing lights and noises all the more chaotic.

That's how you get selfish. Each escape has to trump the last period of desperation. Say you're worried about being single or dying alone. Say you hold that worry for years. Then here comes a chance to get married! Is marriage right for you? Who cares! Fantasy time. Well-wishing and professional pictures abound. The driver of your decision can get ignored, or worse, celebrated as of course I was afraid, but no more! That is to say, were you healthy, good looking, and smart before you got married? Your mind can zero in on some glaring presumed hole and block out what else you've been doing or what you might instead.

I see many different futures for myself. I believe they're as attainable as anything because I've done the math or prepared the floor to allow me to fuck up in forward motion as often as it will take. But that's sort of like my dream wedding. I read stories of Elon Musk sleeping on the shop floor and get jealous. He gets to work himself to death on something important and what's genuinely the best there is to offer. I want that. If I didn't, I never would have ran up and down theater aisles like cleaning up popcorn was the most important thing in the world. I wouldn't be able to have zero guilt about starting the coffee shop because every second of it was exactly me and what I wanted to do. I keep tasting appetizers of my ideal meal.

The problem I have is being unable to know what to do with myself with all this “belief.” Maybe it's like being an earnest disciple on a planet where everyone's already been converted, just not to believe in what you do. One of the things I think made me so angry about my friend group in college was that we all seemed to have the same “problem.” All were as smart or smarter. All looked good. All could figure out one thing or another to keep floating on by or achieve some goal. So I didn't understand why that goal wouldn't be the world. 

I don't know why I'm not comfortable living out of a van traveling between national parks. I don't know why it seemed the exact opposite thing to do to lean into ideas of monogamous relationships and middle-class comforts. I don't know why I couldn't maintain the idea of a “real job” after getting an advanced degree and paying back debts for years. I don't know why it always feels like there's more to sacrifice, and it's worthwhile to do so, in order to achieve otherwise dreamlike ends. I can watch so many lives running in parallel that feel familiar or safe. How could a set of my equals not feel like it's all a little too easy? Where's the guilt?

With my non-physically-presenting brain conditions, I do my exhaustive pursuing of things, adopt “your” shitty real-world jobs, fight for every inch of progress on some big dream, write, watch, read, and think incredibly hard about working out regularly. I've got a month and a half to blame youthful indiscretions on my 20's. I don't have a lot of money, but I also never planned to have a lot of money, because nothing I ever read suggested I should expect to find said money. And I still feel there's so much to do moving forward. I still think tomorrow could be the day some friend of a friend here's about me or some random Craigslist person turns out not to be shit and we work together to build something real.

That's a word that gets shot to hell when you're in the fog of day to day existence. Real? Well, I'm here, aren't I? I showed up. I answered your email. I feel the weight of busywork and the humidity. But what about the dark matter? What about the indefinite future your particles could arrive in, or indeed are already inhabiting, just less and less so with each new concession? Real means something. Like we all do when we break statistics and trends and create the conditions to capitalize on luck. We don't live in an environment where we can take anything for granted. But every day, all I see is people who do. Plans and meetings months in advance. Dream partners one day or exes coming back. The party neatly scheduled between 8:30pm and 11:00pm, because you don't want to get home too late before work the next morning.

I haven't felt real in a very long time. I'm not excited to meet each day. I don't know quite if I'll be able to persuade myself against doing something stupid “because” and “why not.” I don't have much focus beyond the haze of failed attempts to get things done I've trained myself to never expect will happen anymore. They won't without a hundred more phone calls, dozens of online posts, hundreds or thousands of wasted dollars, and a hundred more blogs decrying the same problem in slightly different ways. No one wants to help. No one believes. They're comfortable doing whatever it is they do. They don't even want to TALK about it because, well, you'll rub off on them in guilt-inducing and embarrassing ways, and haven't you made enough people resent you already?

It's still right now is the point. You're still young enough. You've got time to fail. You've got as many hats to wear as you can reach for. I may have squandered my shot at ever getting a six pack before I turned 30, but you don't have to say you were too afraid or lazy to indulge your idealism. You don't have a brain deficiency. You're not hungry. You've got more money than you'd like to admit, and you might not appreciate the nature of the sacrifices you'd have to make. But there's worse things. You could be old and have the same problems. You could die an old cliché. You could be hungry and alone or have your own sick kid. Think those will feel like the times to do something more or different?

[723] Tag Out

Okay, before I bother to go back and proofread or decipher whatever I wrote last night, let's try to capture this bizarre morning after that followed the bizarre night.

It's not like anything particularly weird is happening. Same goes for last night. I didn't get wildly drunk. I didn't have a dozen conversations I can't remember. I didn't get surprise angry, or sad, or racist at the end of the night. But I did spend $24 Ubering to and from the bars after already getting home around 12:30. I did drink beer I didn't have a taste for. I danced to music I wasn't really feeling. The conversations I got into didn't suck and the people lent themselves to offering interesting opinions and forthrightness. The bizarre part is following that arbitrary line that seems to be gaining thread as it constitutes my life.

Maybe I can put it like this. I'm envying the dog. There's no guilt or pride when he goes to take a shit. When he slips on the floor or traps himself between a shoe rack and the wall, he's not glowing with embarrassment. The dog has one speed. “Whatever's in front of me, this is what I'm doing.” We of course shouldn't aspire to be dogs, but the perfectly arbitrary space we inhabit where no one bats an eye while they watch us take a shit seems like an important truth at the base of our soul. You don't care about my headache, or money spent, or even that I felt shitty and tired enough to not make it up to a lunch for my friend's sister's graduation. I knew it was coming. I was planning on going. I said, “Meh, I'll work it out” and then proceeded not to.

It's like part of me is trying to “take back” the irresponsibility and arbitrariness. All week is dictated by stupid drives and stupid people persistently fucking with me? Well guess what weekend! Not that either things leave me fulfilled or I can justify what I'm doing. It's like my compass is showing cracks. I'm construing a way to make it look like “fate,” whatever happens to me and my pipe dreams. But I'm also losing more and more of my capacity to care. That sense of urgency and shame are hollowed out. Let me take a shit on the dance floor. The next time I'll be out, half those people will have moved away.

Why not text an ex a question you've apparently asked in the past? Why not try to enjoy sitting around alone all day? Why not take all the requisite pills and syrups to suppress your inflamed brain that much quicker? Why not write more words than you'll ever care to read back, eeking out each line to end as pointlessly as you started? I don't care. What's my ask? To share publicly for a semblance of accountability? HA! I'm alone, and tired, and arbitrary. My thoughts are leading me nowhere, and I'm going to try and go back to sleep.

[722] Every Morning Halo

So the reason this is gonna be a killer blog is because not only did I write a status saying so, but because I've been contemplating how to open it for the last 2 hours, and you're getting the hottest off-the-presses words of what's happening in my head. Neat, right? If the roller coaster of emotion hasn't been puke inducing enough, imagine where the rest of the night is going to take us.

Let's plug what I've said before, which is always very important, and can never be said enough. One of my favorite things about me is that it's real. Right now. I'm typing exactly what I'm thinking, mildly drunk, and the things I recall aren't dressed up and filtered through a matrix of “civility.” I want to get whiny about my ex? Boom, shit hits the page. I want to repeat myself 7 times on a point simply understood that wasn't that strong in the first place? Best keep pressing on cus I gotta upchuck like the hiccups until they're done.

Tonight was a bit of a weird night. It was an “in between” kind of realm. I didn't get wasted. I didn't stay sober. I walked half the way home before capitulating to Uber. I talked to some people, but it didn't carry with it the “energetic agenda” I usually need. I think that's because I mostly talked to older (50+) people. I find them reliable. No matter what level I engage them on, they are actually there. It's not drawing back to see what “this fuck is doing here.” They ask questions. They contribute. They have real opinions on how they operate in the world. I'm never guessing on how to “crack” them.

I regard older people like this with a certain special respect. They're at the bar. They don't feel old. They're living the future I anticipate for myself. I've conceded I'm always and forever a child, and I wholly loved the time I spent in the party house. If I had a “mature” version of that which fit between my day job or other responsibilities? I'd do that shit in a heartbeat. I know very mildly drunk me is the best version of me. Every day I'm not living up to that is a real and tragic shame.

I think the most important thing to say has to deal with how things don't change. You are you. I am me. I am whatever memory you have of me 8 years ago. I am right there with you in some stupid scenario living out some truth of that moment. I truly do not believe people get this. They have “the past” as this thing they levy untold baggage onto. I don't. As long as I have the feeling and memory, it's now. I'm 10, and 22, and 29, all at once. And guess what? The science of my individual particles agrees! 

I referenced Epicurus to a gentleman tonight. He knew who he was. He got it without explanation. I talked to 2 old dudes at the gay bar who were clearly intrigued by my explanation of how important one of their's study in math was, and how he should incorporate it into his writing about his life. I know, as fractional as my being is, there are those who've done it and are doing it, and it's my job to inflate. I still believe in things changing in an instant. Not when I'm “30 something,” and not when some tragedy has befallen us that the only desperate road forward is progress or death.

Given that I don't jive with the word “hope,” I'm absolutely too hopeful. I really fucked up. I really believed in you guys. I really thought we'd work on something, anything, that tried to do things differently. I thought you wouldn't get old. I thought you recognized that I'm that one in a million who actually does all that weird shit you only see in movies. I got that so unfucking believably wrong lol. I wish I could blame you more, but I can't. It's me. It's my responsibility to pull and plug you. I know that, but I don't respect it.

I'm 30 in about 2 months. Do you have any idea what a joke that sounds like to me? Because I'm 15. I'm a kid dicking around, being told what to do by forces I don't respect. I barely getting by, exhibiting the basest control over my emotions and reactions. I've watched nothing and everything change. I'm already dead. I'm a big dumb idiot who refuses to let go of the only idea that he knows which justifies his existence. A belief in something more. In something real. In the actual capacity stored in every moment to get precisely what it is you know you should. It's been at the tip of every sentence of every blog. It's here right now. It's laughing at me when I'm too drunk to use it. It's going to look down on me when I'm too old to see how to appreciate it. It has to absolutely hate me in my inability to send it in to overdrive for all of my blabber-mouthed professions of it's existence and utility. Double me, I'm 60. What the fuck was I doing the whole time?

What's becoming increasingly clear is how very tired I am. I retain all the enthusiasm in the world for doing new things and creating and fighting. I also just want to sleep. I want to stop caring. I want to be a Pew statistic that gives you a misleading view of my responsibility to the question asked. I want to forgo writing, of all things, to sit and roast in the circumstances of my incidental job. I want to be normal, in spite of my quippy texts and affectations. I feel the compulsion to be a “mere reactionary.” Let me take a news story on it's face. Who says I need to read every article written by the “reporter” and cross reference a Harvard review?

I'm bending. I'm bending and I don't hate it as much as I feel it warrants hating. I'll piggy-back Byron's' political bullshit. I'll navigate stupid emails and meetings for more of a paycheck than a Foxconn worker will see in 10 years. I'll eat my slightly poisoned unethical food bite by bite. I don't want to be the old raving lunatic who never “got it” to die quietly inside and out like the rest of us. I say that in this moment as a capitulation to what I perceive about the rest of the world, but I'm sure I'll rebel is some dumb-ass way. But the cloud will remain. I'll be the wrong kind of different. I'll be the easily dismissed.

Do I care? There's like 5 or so people I even remotely care of losing the respect of, and I'm not sure I would. The point is bigger and remains the same. How do I be me, at all ages, at all times, with every real feeling, and still “progress” along this line of “maturity” so described? I'm just not. I know the science on how the brain develops and attitudes over time. This is it. I'm not calling myself a teenager by accident. 10 more years slugging it out at pointless jobs and ups and downs of love and loss aren't going to move that needle that much. Maybe I'm unfairly prepared to lose everything. Does my logic extend to a kind of social apocalypse? Is everything you were good for, or will ever be, just mine to perceive right now, and when you decide I'm too sexually assaulty or immature or presumptuous and naive, I'll scrape together what I can get and boldly proclaim it was only on it's way after all? Sound the trumpets, I guess.

It's still true. That's the line that keeps coming back to me. It's still true. A blog wrote years ago. A feeling I have towards someone I haven't talked to in months or years. A desire to create a space that brings out that I was doing at parties. An appetite to pick things apart until they're smallest details become boring. An unquenchable thirst to fuck over everything I actually feel and think with words to give everyone bothering to read an excuse to fuck off and feel good that at last someone's saying it.

You know, I'm stuck now. Now is me crying as I watched stuffed animals get gutted. Now is every best night I've ever spent cuddled up against someone I care about. Now is every ridiculous thing I've done on a whim out of boredom. Now is the fear and the anger and the excitement and the hope or the drunk and the confusion and the bleh. I have it all, right now, all the time. It swirls and informs and tortures. I have it all, but I still want it all. I want more of it all. I want to get lost in it all. I'm just a mouthpiece in service to the music of the time. I've got no one to play with.

[721] May Meander

This may meander more than usual.

 

Every day I hear a story of someone with a life circumstance I do not want. Teachers striking testifying to working 4 jobs (while I wither at a mere 3! occasionally), a minority group preaching to the real world damage from ignorant comments from celebrities, or just the general muck that surrounds the president. If I had 1/10th of the degrees of bullshit I read about, well, that's the thing, it's easy to say I don't want that, but then, adversity breeds creativity. People willing to work that hard for something they believe in have a more powerful motor than I'm operating with. And call it every ounce of bleeding ignorance it is, the idiots surrounding the white house are of immense consequence we might only ever accidentally find ourselves being.

 

There's this huge unease when I have too much time to sit and think. It's never about whether a task or job is particularly hard. It's the attitudes surrounding it. It's the suppression of what could make it better. It's watching people be rewarded by those who know better (do they?), and waking up to eat your bran. At least you're fed, right? At least you'll keep regular. I don't think it's wrong to want to change or improve your circumstances no matter how good you have it. I just don't know how to describe the story of “my good” that isn't more parts shitty backdrop than it is my prevailing opinion or capacity of my will.

 

It may just be a consequence of my basic lack of belief in most things creeping too far. I don't just not believe, I know I'm actively wasting, with a purpose, for a check, my time with the vast majority of the things related to my new job. I had the epiphany before I ever entertained the idea of a “real job,” I don't need 30 years in an office and a mid-life crisis. No amount of teary-eyed mothers and fathers who stick to the program are going to fill my heart with a sense of drive and purpose. I'm just not wired that way. Or, the path to accessing that wiring involves the stripping of every superficiality.

 

Last night a kind of wake up call was vollied back and forth between me and Byron. It's not that our jobs are ever that hard. It's that they occupy so much space in your mind that if anything outside is going wrong, it feels exponentially worse. Is it a “problem” the software this company uses takes 10 seconds to load between every click? Well, yes, but it's not the problem of traversing a desert looking for a better life. The problem is in the response of your colleagues who've no time or energy to speak to how to improve it, and your supervisor is going to, in the politest email terms, suggest you're an idiot, and when you get home the dishes will be dirty and another roommate decides it's time for a concert at 9:30pm. I don't want to talk at length about shitty software, piano playing roommates, or dishes. But where is my mind?

 

If I ever manage to have a proper breakdown, I want people who were looking for “signs” it was coming to take note. There is no “thing” or “moment.” It's a lack of sensible structure and meaning that slowly rips apart the excuse to keep it together. “Going through the motions” is indifferent as to whether it's carving out a canyon in your conception of yourself or washing and re-washing your brain with the normative zeitgeist. The “stress” comes from your unconscious mind that knows better. It knows it doesn't have to be like this. It knows you'll hear thousands of the wrong story before a tenth of a percent of what is needed breaks through and slowly disappears. Or worse, you adopt a “faith” that it will work its way into the fabric and do precisely what it needs to do. A good or important idea mimicking raising a child perhaps.

 

I'm losing the desire to ever invite people to things. Ego wants to believe it's me they don't like. Despotic understanding of how life doesn't have to work but does knows they don't even think to bother thinking of me. Then you start to wonder what's been in it for you in thinking about them? But then, hoping to avoid the irony, you're not. You're thinking about yourself and how you're reacting to their absence. Looks like the blame is yours all over again. Idiot.

 

And what would you do if they were around? Make too many references to “the good old times?” Force a level of politeness you absolutely haven't matured into? Constantly be checking your watch for the next appointment one of you has to get to? Spending more money than you “selfishly” want to insulate yourself with because food or toys always feel more deserved and meaningful than the Instagram picture testifying to your time together? Look how quickly and magnificently I can despotically paint an interaction before it ever begins! What purpose does this serve? Is it “reality?” Is it akin to a “suggested donation?” Probably just some lame cry for help, so then what else is new?

 

I keep returning to the idea of how much I miss believing. “In a few short months I'll be able to...!” “You love me! You really love me!” “If I follow these rules, master this art, good things will follow.” “If people could just be shown or given the tools, things will change.” “If I provide the kind of access or dedication I wish someone had offered me, like minds will find each other and we'll take off.” Small and fragile dominate my mental landscape. The last threads of trust and reliability slowly ripping away from the past. And me, still but one ridiculous voice in a handful of heads “sharing my pain” and “sounding crazy” and “wasting his time bitching” and “making quotes as if someone has actually said these things to him out loud.” I wish.

[720] Something For Nothing

The kickoff phrase this afternoon will be “something for nothing.” It seems an adequate way for me to describe how “my culture” behaves while they ignore that it is in fact what's happening and there are major consequences.

One thing I think separates a lot of genuine and real pursuits is the difference between the people who gain attention verses the ones who seek it. You can do either for good or bad reasons to be sure, but in gaining attention instead of seeking it, I think you're able to speak about “the world” responding to you more than a hundred speculations might speak to your motivations in pursuing attention. I think we try to hide the idea that we want attention. “Nobody likes a show-off,” they say. There's always a bigger fish, someone more talented, or reason your idea will fail.

I think it's an irrational fear that keeps us from acknowledging and accepting those limitations in our reach and perspective. We want the praise, the positive press, and the tortured well-wishing and ass-kissing speech denoting our competence and accomplishments. With enough of that, we start to delve into ideas of what we “deserve.” An entirely new mythology surrounds our impact and nature of our alleged positive consequence on the world. Maybe you were “discovered” for something you could do or studied, but now you're ushered into a position to promote and advocate, and it's unclear precisely how much you're translating.

It's fame culture in general. It's every criticism of becoming a “YouTube celebrity.” It trickles down into the all-star at the office or the high-school championship you're still talking about 40 years later. There's no denying people have different degrees of competence that can set them apart within or between realms. There's every effort to deny that “they” aren't the smallest sliver of “us.”

That is, psychologically, we accept the joy they bring us. We accept their effort in lieu of our own. Yes, score more touchdowns for “our” team! Yes, “humanity” sure is brilliant with that new cancer cure! Let's upvote 20 thousand times someone pursuing a recipe for a gourmet Kit-Kat over 5 days. We collectively positively regard indulging in the arts and honing a skill at the highest levels, right? That kind of stuff works for dozens of psychological booster shots every day.

What matters more seems to be everything that surrounds every pursuit. Why does that person get to spend 5 days dicking around in a kitchen to get, “Hmm, that's pretty good” from her fellow cooks, and significantly more don't? Why do we supplement indulgence and distraction before education? Cooking is a skill, and a potentially expensive one to develop at that. I don't begrudge people their hobbies or indulgences as a matter of habit or resentment. But I have to think “we” needs to look for and respect the things about us that don't feel good to a much greater degree than every indulgent and mildly smug video lets us off the hook for.

It's easy to tell the story of “your life” as a series of accomplishments that you think speaks to you. It's significantly harder to hold in your mind contexts that inform your approach to every moment let alone every day or month or individual task you seek out. I got really good at guitar at one point in my life. I posted exactly 0 videos showing you that my hands could work as fast as thousands of other people you can find online. It was an individual, selfish point to prove to myself. I didn't have anything real to say through the music I was playing but, “I can do this.” So, “showing off” felt stupid. Okay, so maybe the person who lists the 90 steps over 5 days to get Kit-Kats really had something to say. Go on, what was it?

For me to even flirt with the idea that something is “mine,” and not some emergent phenomenon dictated by every impartial circumstance, I had to fight for a voice and grow comfortable with that “being on” feeling I've described before. The first time you see me post a cooking or guitar or gardening video, the pride I take in what I'm doing will be real and the example I hope to set will try and speak to my values or hard-fought voice. Cooking can be your thing, that's great, but anyone who's spent an inordinate amount of time pursuing something obsessively has 90 or 900 steps it took to get there. I don't like hearing the smirk as you read off the list of what yours were for your thing.

I feel like this is a weird thing to be put off by. I feel it pretty hard to explain. But I feel it nonetheless. I don't want to give people chances to piggy-back my effort or consider themselves “supportive” of what I know full-well to be pure self-indulgence. I want more of a collective rationale and identity. I don't want to sublimate the individual, but we live in incredibly selfish and resentful times. I don't need gourmet Kit-Kats. Literally nobody does. We need them even less, somehow, with the planet on fire. No, it's not either/or, but it kind of is. You maintain focus on things that make you feel good, or on things that will ensure more people can feel good over longer periods of time. You're allowed to indulge, but right now, I just don't feel you're allowed to celebrate indulgence in the ways we do, lazily or otherwise.

My “leadership” in my job want to get into Heaven. They want to do so through State funding and prayer meetings and willful blindness to the practical impact on the ground to their employees. Is there a more indulgent an idea than eternal grace and peace? I don't think so. Do I suspect these people also believe they deserve to get there, despite every faux-humble sentiment deferring their brilliance and stewardship? Absolutely. But they're not giving anything. They aren't providers. They're playing along. They're reciting the cultural normative terminology. They're gleaning undue praise and positivity from the isolated incidents of individuals who decided to do something better for themselves. And the more nothing they raise up and spin, the more somethings they'll get in the form of cash, attention, or praise.

The world feeds on that nothingness. They say nature abhors a vacuum. The less you are you, the more praise you have for others who seem to be doing indulgence right. The less you feel you're helping, the more help you're going to see in your flailing actions in response to a world you don't understand, shockingly often, deliberately. No one wants to believe they're infinitely small and violent and messy and wasteful and confused. In fact, they can't believe it, because when they do, they get depressed and suicidal or addicted. Which, I suppose a better phrasing would be, that they can't accept it for what it is or is making them feel, so the indescribable hole is filled other ways.

I think subconsciously or not, we pursue things in ways that let us trade excuses. Instead of acknowledgment, and struggle, and honesty, and accountability, it's desperately dig up a hold-harmless position and defer to an impartial machine or uncaring world or dignified victimhood. We don't see the God in one another, we envy each other's desperate gambler. “You picked food!? I wish I could care so much about Kit-Kats!” I don't envy the chef, or the kid making a million dollars playing video games, or anyone who draws true joy and connection from whatever their artistic pursuit. I envy the person able to succeed with equal parts due for them as an individual and all that went right or wrong to see themselves where they sit. Would a recipe video get so highly upvoted with a 2 minute thank you to where the money came from and a reminder that when she's not cooking she's out protesting for women's rights? Or what if it ended with the admission this was a complicated new way to advertise Kit-Kats?

I don't buy the “separate realms” kind of posture about how to conceive of life or your place in it either. You're not “just” a “professional” or a “drunk” or a “chef” or whatever else. You're a part of and accountable to the whole, even if that whole never bothers to figure that out. Isn't that how we got Trump? We pretended we weren't a gigantic mess of ignorance and disregard as we pulled back our hammers ready to break the glass ceiling? Isn't it easier to imagine the rest of the world, and general world history, doesn't exist in our story of the glass ceiling? But the selfishness is an obsession. I certainly can't escape my mind, and writing is the only way I know how to hold myself accountable. No one else bothers to step in, and I'm certainly not offering many things to “like” and “upvote.”

That's because I want a real something. When I write, it can be self-indulgently ridiculous or convoluted, but it's not nothing. It's not an empty and easy thing to dig out the abstracted pit in an anxious chest. It's not easy to dictate every aching moment of your life that doesn't look like how you've anticipated or worked towards. “My” story is each try in spite of my feelings. It's the redirecting of my speech to speak to my values or what I've learned. It's the collective pile of shit of drunk-spouted obscenity and every borrowed line from sources of inspiration. I don't want the 5 minute YouTube version of that, even if it would sell. I don't want thousands of empty-headed followers. I don't want to be dishonorably “reviewed” and retweeted by those who've stopped trying, and I don't want to be celebrated for things I overwhelmingly had nothing to do with but be born into a luckier circumstance.

You're going to know all the hell and bullshit and waste that goes into what I create. I want to be a stark example of the whole of human existence that we take for granted every day. I want deference paid to every unremarked labor that gave us a sense of stability. I want it to be true that my perspective can actually help in a meaningful and efficient way, but we've chosen differently for considerably worse reasons than we'll admit. I want lines to get stuck in your head for years like the ones that have stuck in mine. An intangible abstracted concept like the nothingness of my words speaking to what more than just feels right is the only something that keeps me going. So naturally, I don't think I look like much to the rest of the world.

[719] Sleep Tight

I think I just need a mild digression, as what seemed like a perfectly average day appears to be ending on a weird and impending doom kind of note.

 

I find myself not feeling “smart” anymore. I'm almost totally at the whims of circumstance. Consider how “dramatic” the shift in my life from “mere delivery boy” to “responsible adult” took place. Wasn't the smart thing to never have to do this? To never have to temper emails, ask stupid questions of even stupider processes, and play along? Yet here I am, trying to piece together the broken lives of broken individuals who find immediate reasons to hate me for even trying. And I don't even care about them.

 

I drove around a fair portion of the state today. One of my side-gigs, because you can never just do one thing and get paid a respectable wage, is tending to sanitizer stations and replacing ads. Everywhere I stopped, it was like a meager skin you apply to a basic character in a videogame. Was I just in Avon, or Noblesville? Well, Avon, the roads were paved and everyone was rich and old, so perhaps that's a bad example. The point of talking about driving, is that, again, I am traffic. On my way to spend my time doing nothing that important for nowhere near the amount of money necessary that has half a dozen ways of being done way more efficiently.

 

But this is what is asked of me. Every moment of every day it's the same. Just be normal. Just do the task. It doesn't matter what you think about it. It doesn't matter how it can be changed or fixed. It doesn't matter that your brain could be used for something more fun and engaging. You don't matter. You're a particle in the sea.

 

I don't know what to do. That's what bugs me the most. I'm alive when I'm engaged. I worked myself to death, several times, and I barely scraped by. I adopted the “real world” job, and it's everything and less than I could have ever dreamed. I keep my indulgences to a minimum. I make every call to every person anyone ever suggests or I can discover after weeks of hounding people, sometimes literally at random. I make appeals to the darkness of Craigslist. I put the smallest amount of trust in people to follow through to have it routinely go bad. I humble myself with all forms of work or now civic engagement. I put up with childlike dispositions and refrain from emotionally investing in the part of me that could burn so much down in an instant. I don't know what to do.

 

I don't want to reside here. I can't build my house faster, or make people get back to me, even while they're insisting they'll do so. I can't get paid any faster or keep students in town to order more throughout the summer. I can't run my car into the ground without coaxing some new long-term shitty consequences. I can't even guarantee I won't be back to sleeping in my fucking car in 2 months without taking a huge chunk of my cash and devoting it to some ridiculous living situation with random people perhaps. What am supposed to be looking forward to besides the prospect of losing money I barely, and still don't even, have? At what point do I just sell everything I have and join some commune that trades in berries while my money builds interest for retirement?

 

I'm getting as sloppy as the world around me. I'm adopting the last-minute scramble of idiots who can't plan or listen and letting it bleed into an image of myself I can feel I'm losing any remote control of. One of my feet has stepped a bit too deep into chaos. I still don't know what to do. Keep arguing with addicted negligent idiots? Keep showing up to video-chat meetings pretending an hour of my life is worth listening to a discussion of paperwork THAT DOESN'T EVEN CONCERN ME for 45 minutes? I'm actively pissing my life away while I operate under the glaring contradiction that I'm the “adult” who's “responsible” for being anything but a glorified taxi driver, secretary, and delivery boy all rolled into one, for a company that doesn't respect my values, literally cuts pay before I even begin, and is filled with boundless pride in their faithless mission.

 

What bugs me most is that I don't think there will be like a “snap,” so to speak. I think it'll be more like slowly laying into the accelerator from falling asleep at the wheel.