[737] That Was A Hoot

Think I need a hodgepodge one.

Let's start weird. Maybe I don't believe in communication. What does that mean? It's something akin to a post-modernist point about “infinite interpretations.” I know I've probably said everything under the sun about communication, and of course it will never be enough, and yet as despotic fate would have it, it'll never be heard or read the same two ways by any two readers.

And at the same time, of course, we have as “objective” a means of understanding the world as science provides, and common narrative structures or timeless morality tales that resonate indefinitely. Aren't we communicating? Is there a semantic game here where “transfer” might not quite me “communicate” or “understand?” Is there more impersonal “information processing” or “data manipulation” terms that your senses and synapses can be reduced to?

It gets all the more confusing and more complete when I look at my relationships where I feel I have and haven't been understood. Purely selfish people seem to understand each other. More-sociopath-than-not seem to as well. There's a bluntness in a lack of emotionality that quantifies the capacity to be understood as more of a hammer strike than musical note. And still, you'll find people who enjoy pain more than a song.

If we run with the premise that communication is impossible, but something is transferable, replicable, or reliable, how would we go about finding it or describing it? We can go mildly solipsistic and say “I exist.” I'm writing these words, mostly to myself, so I'm in communication with myself. I have an all-encompassing narrative that describes “me” and “my” in relation to everything else. It can go as far as the words I know, or how I can configure them. I can type them as many times as I need. I can read them back and look for them to resonate. I can reliably account for the different states and phases provided I seek to pin down that something as earnestly as each moment seems.

Because it all seems. It seems like a catastrophe should get that name. It seems like there's timeless morality tales that should allow religious traditions to hold sway. It seems that even at our worst we're believing in something and churning through until the next iteration. There seems a fundamental ineffable “faith” claim to being, be it the endless story of the struggle to survive or the accidentally inevitable sense of consciousness as an end unto itself and its indefinite preservation.

What I don't like is after-the-fact justification. “Oh, I spent years in hell for this precise moment of clarity!” That seems very lazy and cheap, if not dishonest. I don't believe I need to spend a year doing social work for some insight at 70 that's going to make it all feel worth it. I don't think I need my shit stolen to humble me. I don't think I need to pick up a disease or destroy a certain amount of relationships before some “perfect” person or example comes into my life where I can finally apply the lessons and complete the puzzle. I think, if I'm communicating, attempting to better understand, or processing the data, by the only means I know how, I need to find ways to relate to or work with that information, and it's a measure of pure luck or probability that makes it fare better or worse.

What do I control? This. And this. And the ability to say “seem” instead of “feel.” And I can choose to read this over and over again until I feel some sort of way about it or think I've exhausted where to go. I've been complaining for months about not being able to find an electrician. Part of me knew my neighbor installed his by himself. I talk with him, boom, he offers to help if I get rid of the weeds so he doesn't get mauled by ticks. “You just gotta do it,” he says. An ethos I wholly agree with whose thread seems to keep missing my needle.

What am I communicating to myself with that? Certainly a measure of hopelessness. I certainly feel defeated even while I'm dreaming of the hours I'll be out there weed-whacking. Part of me feels like when my mind finally accepted the idea that my stuff was going to sit out there “indefinitely” was precisely the moment the other half of the universe said, “Guess we'll get to work stealing it for you.” In some magic way my inability to keep myself aware and believing made it so one more hole opened up and swallowed part of me.

What are these fledgling addicts communicating? They care? Their brain is no longer in their control? What do you make of people who quit things cold turkey? What do you say of the “enlightened” person who kills or ignores cravings to the person who might as well be watching a monster inhabit their body from the top of a hill as they destroy themselves one sip, puff, and lie at a time? I still don't understand not having a choice. A choice to view people through as many lenses as are afforded to you. A choice to couch your decisions in a structure of your making that butts against literally everything that would otherwise kill you.

Parts of me certainly feel dead. I don't know that they are, but they aren't helping me “just do it” unless it's a measure of my stupid job. I don't take pride in doing my bottom floor. I don't want to breed comfort. I've talked about that before. I don't want to submit more of myself than I've already done with my 20's to the half-completed “dreams” of what I thought I'd be able to do each week or where I'd be able to go. I saw another statement from a guy who's part of some gaming company with a recognizable name talk about being disciplined. He eschewed the idea of “motivation” and said to just train yourself to do what you need to do each day. I think both his and my neighbor's sentiment are incomplete.

Again, you don't need to understand anything, communicate anything, or have the slightest desire besides a remote fear to just do anything. You don't have to know anything about the forces at work doing things for or against you. You don't have to pry into a measure of pathology or insecurity. You just have to run up against “nuh uh” and react. There doesn't need to be a plan, a direction, good or bad reason, nothing. Just a whisper. Getting in shape doesn't have to do with eating healthy or caring about looks. A commercial could have rubbed you the wrong way at 7, and no one would be the wiser. Pursuing an academic career could be obsessive compulsive disorder “properly” channeled. There's plenty of evidence that seeking “the highest highs” of success in any one field is a measure of pure narcissism.

All you can do is take it and translate. You can pick, “narcissistic asshole?” or “greatest inventor ever!” Rapist or innocently-enough drunk? Hard-worker or desperate pipe-dreaming slave? Addicted or excuse ridden? Caring or pretending? Mistakenly hurtful or abusive? Joking or offensive? Somewhat right, or every ounce of wrong? Or a dozen things and a dozen more all at once all the time.

That's the point. I find myself at a perpetual emotional impasse because I've become persuaded of too many things at once. I still know when you're lying to me, but I know even better than you why you don't believe you're lying. I know what you're communicating to yourself, because I know what I'd have to tell myself to behave like you. I know what I'm telling myself to in fact behave like you. The difference is that I'm vocal about why I don't like it. I try to levy the guilt on myself, or you, or anyone who will listen when things don't seem to be working for bad, and a dozen more bad reasons all at once. I get frustrated when you decide not to hear the 10 positive and affirming and responsibility taking sentiments that accompany further questions you also ignore.

Because when you do that, you're not having honest conversations with yourself, and therefore me. You can never believe you're as big a problem as you are. You can never hear the excuses for how hollow they sound. You can never acknowledge a real hope or light that isn't harking back to that “nuh uh” survival mechanism blindly flailing. You're not you. You don't have a choice. You become another impersonal piece of data to process and figure out if or why I shouldn't bother. You communicate nothing because you are nothing. At least, nothing to me.

But I'm always something, aren't I? I wouldn't always be niggling away at you if I wasn't. If I didn't have a point or a voice, you wouldn't sneak away to read me when you're feeling a certain way or shut up at the opportune moment where you're about to feel or look stupid. My off-the-cuff and quickly forgotten sentiment haunts you months and years later. You've testified as much. I speak to a level of pain or struggle that, as you perpetually refuse to articulate, turns me into all kind of things I never intended to translate. But I give you the excuse. I give you the rope you need to hang me, yourself, and the rest of the congregation. Somewhere, alongside that “nuh uh” you know that my voice isn't mine, and the pain I describe and desperation and hopelessness is everything I'm taking in and relating to on the other side of the screen.

And I'm forced to relate to “you.” The bullshit you tell me about your bullshit job. The bullshit you post to facebook that you distract yourself with. The bullshit ways you use your finances to “keep on keeping on” and pay the bills. The “you” I never wanted to become in taking a “normal” job and finding myself fielding the same stupid questions from the same stupid coworkers about nothing in particular going nowhere. I'm forced to relate to the silence both my knowledge or my obscenity attempt to court. That is, until someone takes it upon themselves on a kind of pilgrimage once a year or so to get the balls to describe why they can no longer talk to me. They never were, but the clouds cleared in the form of an accusation or point of exhaustion and it's become safe to boldly proclaim the insistence they face and engage is abusive and negligent of their god-forsaken feelings.

I think I've done something right in this blog. It hurt to think at sections. I feel a palpable sense of hopelessness and resentment for each day “I didn't just do it.” I deserve the rest of my shit stolen or to actually come upon a picture of embers. I've lost the thread and now my life looks like compulsory comeuppance and “service” for those who are the starkest mirror to the faint voice provoking me. I'm growing addicted to the modern notions of “comfort.” I could see myself eyeing the fluid lies that protect me just enough to surface from my little homestead long enough to keep the lights on. I could disappear as quickly as they make the choice to erase themselves, as people do from my life, as the conversation dies just as it's getting good. I'll always have my hero stories, and my complicated screen relationships, and my “passions” that drive me into increasingly specific and overtly compelling descriptions about the end of the world.

I believe this is all I have left. My words. My words in relation to me attempting to process way too much input from every worst source. I don't have what I can do, I need to romanticize the past. I don't have where I'm going because dreaming no longer makes me happy. I barely have “right now” as eye strain and the prospect of paperwork looms larger than my capacity to hold the moment on the goose egg at the center of my brain. I feel like “why?” I don't even know what it means, but it's my perpetual feeling. Why to everything. I wanted sad to win when my shit was stolen, but there's more whys than any ability to think it's not just more on the pile. The why pile. I'm the monk who just does his thing and always says, “Is that so?” Or, I envy that monk.

Like I normalized abuses from my mom, and normalized the bullshit that was school, and normalized a “domineering rapey alcoholic obscenity,” and we normalized Bush and now Trump, and the families I engage with have normalized a guy following them taking notes, that's all I see winning. It's all normal, it all “works,” it's all one direction of justification. It's never the other side of the coin. The other side isn't dressed up lies denying the reality of the situation, as people insist, it's figuring out how to take all the shit and render it useful or informative. And if you're not doing it for yourself, it's not getting done. There's another indicator I know you're not doing work. You never really acknowledge the bad, how it operates, how it feels, where it feels, what it sounds like, or who's using it when. So when it pops up? Meh, not so bad, just an opinion, “You know, I've felt like that too sometimes!” You turn into it instead of relate to it.

When do I ever hear people trying to take responsibility for their fuck ups? A tad at work? But even then, quick to shuffle the responsibility back on my plate. “Yes, we do need to do better...butyoushouldhavesuchandsuch.” Bad sign. Dishonest at its core. And what is “do better?” Better leave that question alone or this talkin' to isn't going to sink in.

In 4 days I'll have 3 grand, maybe $1000 worth of projects to get done, and a weekend. Think I'll follow through? Or will life catch up? Will some emergency kick in where I need to schedule a client on the weekend? Will my car explode? Will I go back to the land and find even more of my shit is gone? Will I get sick? Will I discover lying about depression really does give me a sense of belonging I've never known before? What do you think? Will I flip the switch and after I get something marginally done after 2 and a half months of this job I'll start to feel like it's all worth it, and this blog will disappear into the bin of my old angst, easily enough ignored if not digested? Maybe I'll just sit, and die a little more each day. Maybe I'll decide money in the bank and my “comfortable enough” existence sleeping on a too small couch and rocking chair will suffice for another year. Maybe I'll let some ridiculous hippie sentiment about “now is a time for transition” to blare over any insistence to get off my ass. Maybe I'm never communicating anything ever, even to myself, and I'm only watching things unfold in a way that at least keeps the gun away from my temple.

I don't know, feel free to keep telling me nothing.