[748] Weeds

I must be weird.

In an interview to work for The Department of Child Services, the interviewer relayed to me a quote from a long-time judge. “A cop can be on the job for 31 years and then retire, and they'll see less trauma than your office will in 6 months.” I didn't blink.

Death, trauma, evil, pain, exploitation, lies, and otherwise wanton destruction or violence make sense to me. I thought I was mis-remembering a video I saw once of Mexican drug cartel members getting beheaded with a chainsaw, looked it up, and forgot it was only one who got the chainsaw, the other a knife. I couldn't recall if the chainsaw grazed the 2^nd guy's arm, but I thought it did, and I didn't see him flinch. Odd as it may sound, I think those, former, Mexican gangsters and I had something in common. They'd clearly accepted something about their circumstances. While I'm still flinching in the face of chainsaws, so have I.

What's striking to me about this disposition is how often and vehemently it's labeled or discussed as “negative” or “nihilistic” or “dark” or “pessimistic” or “inappropriate” or whatever analogue that is the opposite of life, joy, or the pursuit of something affirmative and lasting. And for the thousandth time I've referenced the irony at the base of everything, I think we're striking a bedrock psychological example. Some might find it as easy as asking yourself, how better to stay alive than understand as many ways in which you could die?

There's dying in the fun ways, like as many times as it takes to watch your favorite violent movie. We reenact famous plays where the characters die for love or power. We play fight and die as children. We employ a vague notion of death at a level of embarrassment or shock and intrigue. We make a game out of killing bacteria or shedding old skin in personal hygiene. Video and carnival games pick off people and ducks. Death is playful, when we want it to be.

There's ideological death. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” In the face of technological and social upheaval, many a foundation are shaken. Who you were as a believer can be as dramatic a personality shift as the alcoholic turned stone sober from “giving it all up to God.” A part of you that was protecting something died, or a part of you that was never quenched decided to kill. Maybe you were viciously hurt in love and now live in the wake of the sewage of your emotions. Maybe you were neglected and couldn't spell the word “family” or “mom” if your life depended on it. Maybe you're just realizing that no matter what you do, you'll never be the child you remember, and it's time to sober up to the “real world.”

But here again, I think I must be weird. All of that seems very familiar. I didn't really have to explain how we play with death or understand the consequences of polluting someone's mind with abuse or their naive notions of love. I mean, we literally call them “plays.”

What kills me is how (successfully?) we're pretending we're not hyper-obsessed with death. Isn't all of existence speaking to it? Isn't it the root of self-sabotage? Isn't it our addictions? Isn't it our complacency? Isn't it our entertainment, or undue celebration for personal victories, and betraying our pithy grudges? Aren't we alive as a result of all the other things we're willing to kill around us? Personal preferences held up as badges of honor. Friendships unburdened by truth or struggle. Vicious internet opinions, like so many assholes, meant to defend and defame, who? For what? In the first calculations, save the final, where does it all go? It's what we feed off of. It's nourishment.

I think this speaks to the romance narrative of death. Something has to die so others can live. We need to be proper Donner party members. I feel I watch this play out everywhere, all the time. School ate us alive. The mall ate my coffee shop. My aunts and uncles ate my grandparents, dad, and stepmom. My brother wishes he could eat me. Our country was eaten by the rich and vitriolically opportunistic. And we cheered them on because we saw so much of ourselves in them. A concert of Little Deaths, in an endless blinding sequence of pleasure.

Think how closely this mirrors and pollutes the idea of sacrifice. The death of a sacrifice isn't superficial. It's payment. It's respect. All you have to do in order to hijack it is claim you've put up whatever your particular god thinks is due, and bask in the glory. “I worked for everything I have! Fuck the moochers!” You killed your time, after all, in presumably much harsher circumstances and with greater loss than those struggling to get by now. The truth of who you've eaten be damned.

How do we “get better?” Think about it. How will the economy improve? Once we get people to eat more! Eat more Iphones, cars, and prepared meals. Eat your heart out at a generic “job.” How do we fix loneliness and boredom? Eat more Netflix and video games! Eat this new hobby and finely tuned pill. How do we celebrate in spite of every-day personal folly and failure? Eat this World Series win! Eat this master of his craft! Eat this pre-approved algorithm of characters in this most popular genre! As long as something is lined up to fill our bellies, we presume “everything” should otherwise fall in to place.

I'm in a struggle for my life right now. That's what this blog is. I'm 6 months into the throes of “comfort” of a regular paycheck, menial task, and handful of things I'd like to get done each weekend or after work. I've been describing myself as Hank Hill. I've been saying, “We can spring for the extra to get that VIP, we're old!” Am I a function of my age? I have severe doubts about the nature of time for sure, and I suppose in small ways my body feels older, but I'd argue I'm significantly more all of the mess that spews out of me in disorganized angst-ridden energy. So how does that guy put on business clothes and sit in a cubicle? I suppose I'm starting with acknowledging all the different kinds of death, and seeing if I'm buying into them.

I can 8-4 it and still build. I can sit in a cubicle and call it analogous to the living room or basement I'd otherwise be sitting in. I gave myself all the free time in the world, no one wanted to play with me, I already know without a certain amount of money or vastly different group of friends, there's nothing outside and no greener grass. There's ideological death if I've ever seen it.

I've also been working on the narrative that might make me finally bored of TV. I'd like a proper “obsession” to be sure, but any type of work and otherwise worthwhile task makes something as stupid as finishing Arrow out of spite feel more than pointless. I probably still would anyway, as I feel my TV habit has morphed into a bigger point about how many hours are really in a day, but a budding desire for a dispositional death is still there. I don't really get lost in TV or movies like I used to, but then again, that's not really why I'm watching anymore.

I don't know where to introduce it, so it's now. All the death-talk and everything that comes with it being easy makes the appeal of what seems to be so hard inevitably compelling.

How often do you find the people going out of their way to bring about goodness? This is a question that's going to need a few different phrasings. Who goes out of their way to help people succeed? Who sacrifices themselves, in a healthy way, for the benefit of others? Who gets immense joy and pride out of helping? I mean actually helping, not lip service and “good intentions,” like picking the biggest and hardest things they think they can fix, and diving in? Would you even feel comfortable saying something like that about yourself? Or would it be in the form of something personal, like child-rearing? Perfectly noble to want to rear a healthy and happy kid in spite of the broken home they were born into.

“Nice” is something of an all-consuming novelty to me. I let my ideas of nice bite me with regard to friendship. We let it perpetuate myths of people like Mother Teresa or in Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Nice is there for the exploitation. At least, that's my instinct that I'm trying to correct. I have and have had actually nice, sacrificial, genuinely good and helpful examples in my life. I've been “saved,” not by God, but by my grandma and my dad. I know there are at least 2 people in life who never have and never will try to fuck me over with their “niceness.” That's fucking important.

The flip side of that is that for every dad I have and dead grandma I have memories of, I have half a dozen other family members not like that at all and significantly more acquaintances and former “friends” who are nothing like that. This is the battle. This is the burden of the genuinely good. The person who lives and creates life because of the celebration of what it can be, not for the exploitation of what it can give them. If anyone less “blunt” or “jaded” or “cold” or “intellectual” or “funny” or “persistently indignant in his railroading and intransigence” is dealing with the same numbers of shit verses nice as I am? Get right out of town. I don't employ my “I don't have hope” mantra on a whim.

Now, for the friends reading this who've bailed me out of something or stood by through a measure of bullshit, chillax, you're deeply rooted in my mind, you just weren't first. And the larger point remains, for every one of you, there's a dozen who've shit the bed in important and consequential ways.

I want to be the genuine article of things that surprise the every-loving fuck out of me if I ever see them in other people. That's in jokes. That's in endless exploration and nit-picking until something is understood and internalized. That's in 7 months of 13 hour days to get off and load up your ill-equipped car with wood to drag out to your pitch black field in the middle of the cold night so you can inch along progress on the thing you actually care about. That's letting go without forgetting. That's recognizing and holding your precious sacrifice out in front of you before you kill it, instead of taking for granted your mere discomfort is enough to supplement the dirty work you've yet to do.

That's where we're at right now culturally. “I'm uncomfortable.” The room gasps and those weak of stomach and will run for the doors. Someone is out to eat us. Batten down the hatches and prepare to be bombarded with waves of insincere pomp and incredulity. Birds chirp, “butwhatabout butwhatabout.” Prepare a victim, anyone, and feast on what falls out. Definitions are for the power mongers! We're hungry, dammit, and if I can't get that house, or car, or job, or the girl, or the right pills, or even just my way, then I'll take every ounce of you.

What's hard to cope with is the idea of being an NPC or non-playable character. In a virtual environment, you sort of reflexively believe they don't hurt anything, even if that's absolutely not the truth. They perpetuate the story. They steal your dragon egg. They present challenges and side-quests. You're the passive agent at the will of what these pre-programmed problems drop in your lap. You're of every consequence. You're not the hero. The hero is the myth. The hero is one who has to literally die and be reborn, which, I'll remind you, isn't fucking possible. You need missions that otherwise random idiots would be wandering around in the dark killing things if they weren't a part of. When you figure out what it is you can provide, you'll stop endlessly feeding.

This is at the heart of what I don't like about “normal” jobs. I don't want to feed off the teat of established norms. I don't provide “easy.” There are millions of people paycheck to paycheck with familiar narratives about what their responsibilities are and how to “fix” or meet them. I have work-arounds. There are endless creative paths to addressing problems across societal and psychological layers. I can do none of them in the environment presently offered. I find people who like to feed off of my honesty or “taboo,” because to embody where it comes from takes work they're not interested in. I give thousands of miles for every inch I try to take back. I'm on a mission to not lose myself across the many worlds I may inhabit. But I'm not in a video game, and I doubt someone's going to walk up to me to try and join my quest.

“A working-class hero is something to be.”

I look for the people who challenge me. I look for the orators I want to be like. I look for the papers I dream of writing and shows I wish I developed. I look for lines in songs that come up time and again. I force myself to think through the words that aren't there yet, and beyond the feelings that make me want to feast on everyone around me. I pursue what I actually picture in my mind's eye. If you're anything less, then you're less. I won't let you eat me.

[747] A Million And One Fucking Times

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck!

Thank God, I've started. I have a dozen ways to start this, that was it, I can move the fuck on.

Anyway, I'm 30. I've been thinking of writing a commemorative blog about that for some time, never knew what it may say, as if I ever do, but we can float around some themes and hopefully give me something to shit on when I'm 60.

I just. don't. care. You know the drunk “battles” you get into from someone who's been kissing your ass for a half hour and then flips on a dime? No more. They just don't matter. It's not something magic that happens when you're 30, but you see it as this blip in the ongoing endless stupid conversations you're going to have with everyone until you die. I get it, you don't understand your degree anymore than I did, bleeeeeeeeeh.

More important, let's talk about “real perspective.” I got this social work job. You know how many people have been worked over by their social circumstances? Everyone. So the girl surrounded by guys who's had a difficult upbringing is endlessly hugging and deferring to my experience in saying I do social work. Now, let's be not cynical and say I'm not viewing this as some sort of game or sexual angle. What I am doing is solidifying that my experience is fundamentally real and connect-worthy and a basis for the kind of empathy and connection that tag-alongs can never touch.

And even that doesn't feel like the point.

As I was walking back to the house, before I called the Uber, I was thinking I wanted this to be a massive cathartic blog. A place where, in anticipation of being famous one day, all of the worst shit I could ever think to come to light would be neatly packaged for people to read and judge.

I was thinking of doing so because I don't feel guilty about my life. That's been a persistent theme I've encountered a lot lately. The best life is the life you live knowing how and why you did something and being able to say you'd do it again . This is the theory I tend to agree with. I've never been a person of many, if any, regrets, and the idea of why I would figure my life in those terms is persistently intriguing.

If I had to say the “worst” shit I've ever done, what would it be? I slapped the shit out of my girlfriend. Fucked up, right? Why don't I feel regret? First, I wasn't angry at her. I was the guy who said at least a thousand times, “I would never hit a girl” before I was presented with a situation I never anticipated. What's my excuse? I was scared as shit. The person I cared most about dragged a razor down her arm, I wrapped that shit up in a blanket, scrolled through a thousand random assortment of images of how to deal with the situation, and tried to slap her back to sanity. My ridiculous, cartoonish, terrible response thought this is what happens when someone loses their mind and needs to come back.

Would I do it again? Have me care about you and drag a razor down your wrist in front of me and find out.

The title of this blog refers to what you would do. The title is about what you would do a million times if presented with the same situation. I honestly can't think of many situations in which I'd change what I did. It's not because I'm filled with hate. It's not because I even think it's “the best” way to go about things. I just try. I just believe. When I react without thinking, it catches me off guard. And when I think something is fucked up or some “secret” demon, I want more than anything to talk about it.

I'm 30, right? I legitimately had no imagination for myself past this. I was supposed to be quasi-rich and just “living it up” by now. I had gone to the top of some hierarchy, made money, did “whatever,” and now all the ill-conceived people of my dream would be there with me living it up. My ideas the moronic incomplete ridiculousness that anyone provoked in youth might ascribe to. If in 30 years I can't come to account for the things I've done, things I actually think, or place I want to be, well, I've already said the early 20-somethings were hopeless, but as long as I think I'm better than you, if you haven't heard it by now, I should never bother writing again.

Consider, I don't regret being a whore. I don't regret being put in a situation where people would accuse me of rape. Why? Am I so brazen and “alpha” that I just don't give a fuck? Am I so self-satisfied and deluded that I could never acknowledge the pain I caused? I guess that's going to depend on who you ask. As far as I’m concerned, I'm still not a predator. I hurt her. That shit was not my intention. That was not on my radar then, and I was too much drunk to be a judge of the okay-ness of the situation at the time. You either believe that or you don't, but I'd line up everyone I've ever fooled around with to testify to my behavior, shitty or otherwise, before I let you get away with some bullshit.

I make the comment often that I'm already dead. 30? That's foot more than in the grave, it's hand reaching up slowly sliding over the coffin lid. I don't say this shit by accident. I feel dead and dying, all the time. I feel the encroaching darkness as my muscles and joints fuck with me. I know that shade I catch from the kids at the bar is significantly more unbecoming than endearing. But you know? I've always had and always will have this. I can nail down the moment. I can over-share. I can scream every ounce of my perspective because, as long as I maintain intentionality, I win. You should consider that when you want to label atrocities of character. When are you going to employ your hurt or empathy circuits? When you are going to draw stark demarcations or play with the lines?

I have nothing left to give. I can just write. I can just report. I can just try to tell people with as much as everything as I could wish for them that they do indeed have “it” and I'm in awe we happened to be talking about it. I can only apologize when I feel sorrow. I can only share, apparently, when you're comfortable enough with me sharing, which, consider this the absolute rejection of your discomfort and censorship. If you're not too old at 30 to give a shit about people's childish feelings, when the fuck is it supposed to click? Reality is what you observe? Reality is what you make of it? You're responsible for your feelings and whether or not life looks “good” or “bad?” Well excuse me, I'm hardly in the business of endless justification for smiling about fucked up shit. Reality is what I talk about and share. Reality is what you're choosing the balls enough to discuss honestly. Reality will not be taken from me, I've spent 30 years barely scraping the surface to not be as shitty as the things I'd call fucking shitty!

I give a fuck. I give waaaaaay too many fucks. I give the awkward fuck. I give the self-obsessed OCD fuck. I give the fuck that's fucking typed every blog. I give the fuck that makes me text people I haven't talked to in years kind of fuck. I will DIE with the ignorant bullshit faggy hope that everyone I've ever pissed off will mellow the fuck out and we'll be chill again one day. That's me. That's never going away. All the pain I've caused or feel perfectly capable of causing more of was not, and is not, the goal. If I'm fated to pretend along with the general superficialities of life, at least one place won't play by those rules.

Okay, those James Gunning for me, what else is there? I've said “nigga” and “nigger” enough to claim a measure of racism. I'm a “woman-beater.” I'm a sexual deviant, in that, I don't care who or when or why you want to fuck. What other layer is there? How much more do I need to shed before I can carry on with the business of being me? Isn't this the kind of shit the Catholics get off on weekly?

I've grown resolute. I'm not convinced, but I am unashamed. I will do. I will say. I will create. I will try. I will question and challenge. I will fight. No one gives a fuck about me. That's the point. No one gives a fuck about what I write or how much. No one gives a fuck about how much I make or the random-ass connections I use of my mental associations to create something. People treat my “truths” as point-and-dismissed fodder. People watch the show that is “[redacted]” As long as I'm the protagonist of my story, trying to sleep at night, hoping to impact the frivolous world with an ounce of direction, I'm going to do me. And “me” will be lucky to find much beyond the handful of people who already care to hear about it. So be it. I'm already dead.

[746] Hit By Pitch

I hope I can make this quick.

 

Suicide is in the news again. Chester, Robin Williams documentary, and not-quite-the-same I just sat through a presentation talking about LGBTQ youth and their rates of suicide and particular problems related to inclusion. In the set of presentations they also included a story of a baby born with cancer who died a little over the age of 2, and a sentiment that “God puts people in our lives for a reason.” Also, wholly unrelated but for it happened to me in close proximity, I went out to see someone away, and they were less than excited at my presence.

 

How do we unpack this and mash it all up? Let's start with the idea that people are in your life for a reason, or you in theirs. The second half I can at least speculate some divine role I was “supposed” to play. I've talked about it before. Being something of a “destroyer” or “anti-particle.” Things collide with me and never seem to come out like they imagined on the other side. In a world of tight-lipped and tight-assed people, I would serve a palpable function. If you're squeezing on to your conception for dear life, I'm the devil. Isn’t it properly avoidant and convenient of God though? Without him, how could you humble yourself in the presence of your dead child? Good thing you’re so important for him to focus on you so specifically; just what you needed. 

 

In talking about the dead gay kids, the point was stressed that the difference between life and death can be a feeling of inclusion and support. It can be having just one person who accepts them for who they are. It can be opening their eyes to a timeline for if and whether they want to come out so that they're safe and supported. We're in southern Indiana after all, that point needed stressed. Included. Part of the greater pack in which you depend on for survival. No finer point could be put on it than a suicidal child whose identity is being denied.

 

To make that “unfair” and “terrible” and “what the fuck man?” analogy, every time you strip someone of their identity, you're playing the suicide game. I consider myself lucky to no longer be a child. I like that I don't lay my well-being on the hinges of how people decide to think of me or whether or not that want to engage or talk. One must wonder how many people are truly teetering on that ledge though when you consider the music of Linkin Park. “Somewhere I Belong” has been on repeat in my head for a few hours. I'm not the only big fan. I've never connected so strongly with millions and millions of people to still fall under the weight of my demons.

 

Is that a choice of mine? Am I just better at constructing a story that externalizes? I was thinking about my proposition to try and stay “generally happy” for a week. I mean, I'm pretending like me shitting on things doesn't make me happy. I don't hate my jokes. I don't pretend I'm at the mercy of my mistakes. I don't glom on to people but for the remnants of neural connections I can't untangle. Why is the darkness my playground when it's just the damning destroyer of worlds for everyone else?

 

I suppose I feel I'm ramping up a bit. I've beaten my head into submission, and now our awkward hug or song and dance about friendship leaves me as empty as I always wished as an anxious child. A memory hit me early of a time when my mom took us to The Taste of Chicago, I had no desire to go, she had complained of having little money earlier, and in my angry pouting she said, “Crucify me!” and I replied, “Gladly.” The look on her face left me as dead inside as I've ever felt. Not dead embarrassed or filled with regret. But in that moment, it clicked how useless and nothing you were going to mean to me as a person if my words were going to get you so crazily worked up or break your face to look like an African war mask. Bitch, you threw the pitch and are shocked by the home-run? You're playing my game.

 

I don't seek redemption or forgiveness. I'm proud that I've the constitution or manner that keeps focus. I drive all over this godforsaken state and see thousands of people just living their lives, voting for Trump, spending money they don't have, coming up with excuse after excuse for why their lives do or don't look the way they do. All of it boiling down to modes of being that have nothing to do with me. The only people who are my people do the shit I do. They risk. They're screaming the truth. They take the beatings for their behavior. And they know they are nothing without the ongoing conversation. Maybe if someone got to the work of telling these gay kids they will always and forever be the exception they'll swallow their fate and stop hurting themselves in service to shitty rules. Maybe if we stopped romanticizing and perpetrating depressing environments we'd get to listen to the ongoing creations from our artist heroes. Maybe it's my embrace of the darkness that makes me feel entitled to the world and my conception of myself well in spite of you.

 

Try not to die, I guess.

[745] The Distance

Today, I sat in my car, just a touch before “impatiently,” as a child cried in her mother's arms, her sisters gave her a hug, and as she stole away a few minutes to see young cousins of hers who she refers to as, “my babies.” Her sister walked with her arm in arm to the door of my car, and they reached out to clasp hands through the window telling one another they loved each other. The child cried out to her mother, “I love you mommy!” who looked at my car with tears in her eyes as she waved goodbye, telling her daughter that she loved her too. Every face was sad, and the weight of what this family was going through sat in the heaving chests of everyone there. Everyone, except me.

I don't need to make a point about how we tell stories or share perspectives to sound more or less dramatic. That's too easy and old news, especially from me. I don't need to ring the bell of my general lack of emotionality or indifference. I don't need to describe this family in all of my subjectively overly judgmental ways that would more than a little muck up the initial description of that scene above. And yes, I needed to lay out all the things I don't need to do, because my mind went to those places first in what I'm assuming was a shortcut as it's going to take some digging to figure out what I want to say.

Some more grounding, I watched a lecture on consciousness. In the presentation there were those fun visual and audio examples that show you how much of your experience is your brain's “best guess” as to what's going on. I immediately thought of writing. I thought of every indictment I get about some grand proclamation I've made no matter how much I insist I'm just poking around in the busy darkness. These words are my best approximation of a fleeting idea or feeling, always. They are “right” insofar as they provoke me to continue thinking. They are “wrong” as long as someone has something to contribute or contradict.

But let's focus on the brain guessing. You see more of what you've been primed to see. For people who think advertising doesn't work on them, they don't realize they don't have a choice. You've been seeing McDonald's commercials your entire life. Just like Coke or certain car brands. They have taken up residence in your head whether you like it or not. I think I pretty consistently ask people to examine the “spells” and other people's “hells” they've been primed and conditioned by. That might be an easier exercise by saying things like, “My brain guesses such and such is true after experiencing this think piece/podcast/opinion/etc.”

You can strip away the emotionality. I suppose you first have to desire to strip away the emotionality, but if you do, you gain access to what might be considered privileged knowledge by the rationally irrational or disingenuous. Let's ground that sentence. I've been listening to Mark Blyth. A political scientist, who as plainly as a political scientist can manage, lays out the assumptions and standards, or basically bullshit, our major institutions run on. He's not “above it all” in that he's got some secret knowledge. He's just blunt, and discusses as practically and mathematically as he can what happens when you have X and Y under Z conditions. He rids his discussion of “perfectly rational consumers” or worshiping at the foot of GDP.

Blyth discusses the plight of Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan, who persistently calls bullshit on how different institutions run, and was subsequently blackballed. It didn't matter if he was right. It didn't matter his expertise. He made enough people who make giant sums of money feel bad. Their perception, the businesses and schools they've been primed and conditioned by, were “more true” than what he had to say. A tale told a thousand times in my own life with considerably less damning conclusions or money at stake.

What I find compelling about people like Blyth, or Taleb, David Graeber, someone like James Baldwin, or the gangster turned reformer, or ideologue turned atheist is how in it they actually are. It's the people not criticizing from the outside, but who spent or continue to spend their lives immersed in learning about their particular worlds. They observe. They offer. They preach. And you can pick them out individually from a million different people because they've chosen a mode of being that tirelessly works to relate as much of the truth as they can see it.

I don't even think that impulse is “wanting to help” as much as it is being responsible enough to not play along with demonstrable harms. What frustrated “intellectual,” drinking or driving themselves mad, believes they help a good goddamn thing? No. They just read and write and conduct their affairs and for one reason or another, they're not arguing with it, they keep getting invited to talk. Jordan Peterson has made the point that he certainly has a number of topics he could talk about in a more coherent and informed way, but that list certainly isn't inexhaustible, and perhaps it's time to take a step back and learn more and formulate new lecture series. What a Chomsky thing for him to do.

Okay, so I've started this by describing a tearful goodbye, and we've gotten to the point of hand-jobbing my intellectual heroes. Is that where I wanted to go? I originally thought to title this blog The Distance, because it's always how I've felt in relation to things. Distant. Not “isolated” like the kid too scared to play the sport or show off his brains or ask out the girl. I'm not upvoting every suicidal /r/meirl or /r/2me4meirl post. I'm not walking away from my different conceptions of “friend” or “friend group” more scarred than informed. I don't begrudge people their happiness no matter how long I may testify to the underlying lie at the heart of “love.” I'm just removed from it. I play with it at my peril, not, as my friend was eager to point out, because I don't know what to do, but because I feel more responsible than to play along with what I can mostly describe as demonstrable harms.

We can take a less dramatic example than any individual family crying goodbye, or any one person's subjective experience of love, and just consider the nature of my job to begin with. I bought in, in some tired and pragmatic sense, to a fundamentally corrupt structure. Interject yourself into people's lives, at least for 22 hours a week, and pretend you've been given any direction or credential that can speak to their addictions, abuses, or otherwise neglect. Join up with the people saying, “We're helping!” in the face of everything they've never read about how our brains work, what environment these people are embedded in, or what's in store for them when we leave, or even as a country, as we ignore the roots of what contributes to their circumstances.

As a not idiot, I know I have to buy in somewhere. I know I'll die a measure of hypocrite. But I don't have to like it, and I don't have to call it anything but hypocritical, even and especially when I may be due less admonishment than I'd reflexively give. What people don't want to believe, and this is how they are “rationally irrational,” is that you can criticize and try to change your corrupt structure while you're working inside of it. That's the extra responsibility. That's the “fight” I get into in writing emails and letters detailing very fixable things that nobody gives a fuck about fixing. I do. You're going to know I do. You're going to know the reason I dislike or can no longer work with you before I go. That's important. It's not just bitching and complaining. It's opening a door towards something better, and inviting people in, or providing yourself with the exact proper reason to move on and try somewhere else.

And how often can you do that? You have to structure your life in a way that attempts to force through behavior in service to the most important things. For all of the pain that it's taken, when I have my land inching along, nothing else makes more sense in the world to me. Every last gripe I've ever had about the nature of the tasks I've been subjected to, the long-term consequences of ignoring the difficult truths, and the potential to cultivate a kind of creative and removed environment is embodied with every killed weed, new structure, or dug hole. The greatest good I could ever as an individual bring to the world will come out of the ongoing work I do to make that land into an analogue for my mind. When what I hope to shape people with, that I never might do with my words becomes manifest, now they can be as taken with it as I've been taken by my experiences.

I've been feeling it more recently. The “comfort.” I get paid regularly now. I've gotten over my indignant stance on “normal” jobs. Well, not really, but I've adopted the same attitude towards it that I did during school. I'm not an idiot, it's either this or poverty or I'm likely just going to be watching TV because I don't have the money or help to move like I want to. I've lived the infinite downtime study life, the work every day mania, and my “normal” has resolved to some measure of over-doing something somewhere no matter what, so I might as well play bureaucrat, right? At least I might get health coverage for a year or so.

But what I became more aware of was the dimmer on that desperate drive and belief that I could do anything at any time. I was just as earnestly going to start a moving business as anything else. I could get the truck fixed and engine paid for right now. I'm not running out to do so as I still need power, a bathroom, a driveway, and now a consistent time I could even bother to do anything but sneak in TV and times to shit. It's so, so quick and easy, to get comfortable. It's the underlying backbone of the perpetuation of our species. People don't think twice about having kids or what they are really doing to themselves or the world by engaging in their job verses “the work.” Because, you don't have to. I could keep a kid alive in better circumstances than the places I drive these people to. I would want considerably more for my children than them simply being alive. I'm not an animal.

I think this blog speaks to my “spirituality” for want of a better term. I believe in the transcendent. I think there are truths and uses of information that are timeless and important and worth pursuing. I think you can be persuaded to live against all objectively obvious reason to creep over the double yellow line or plunge right into the lake. And I think I find my “god” in the embodiment and manifestation of the story only I can tell, the environment I can create, and the relationships that very much need me there to taste like me. I want to be so immersed that while I'm flipping through people like reddit links, I'm more me than I could ever talk about, and more me to other people than some empty prostration or matter-of-fact description pretending to have a handle on it all. I don't want to be stuck in the past, I want to transform and evolve it. I don't want my head on a pike for all my sins without climbing up to redo the hair or gloss up the lips.

As the faithful signs read on my drive out to the land, “Jesus is coming, ready or not. Heaven is Real” Well, rationally irrational monkey man, so am I. And the world I create will certainly feel more real than Heaven ever has. Just ask the increasingly long line of people who just wish I'd shut the fuck up.

[744] A Little Unsteady

Most times, my world feels very small. In the stupid language of the liberal caricature, I've been “triggered” by an interview from Joe Rogan's podcast with Sebastian Junger. Junger describes how we evolved to have bands of 40 to 50 people. Everyone was responsible for food production and could more or less be described as needed by everyone else. I've heard this before. But perhaps it's ringing a little louder right now for a few reasons.

Every time someone in my “friend group” from college gets married or something, now in come the pictures and smiles and yada yada perfect facebook life stuff. Hardly the friend particularly good at keeping in touch, I don't long to be there or wish for some “secret” or “magic” thing to happen that would render life into episodic romanticized memories from the past into a 20-something sitcom. I'm not hurt or confused by not being invited. I feel like, well, I don't know. It's kind of a lot of things at once, and also nothing.

I remember being oblivious growing up. I know in many ways I'm still primarily “goofy” or “nerd-type” fundamentally, no matter how cool my hair looks. I remember looking at parties or friend groups and just being baffled. I didn't know what to say or wear. I didn't know why things were cool or how to get the cute girls. I didn't even know I was cute because my mom made such a show and game out of it growing up. That “on the outside” feeling that everyone feels and makes not-that-great series like Freaks and Geeks spew nostalgia jizz on everything is alive and well in me, even if I learned how to defeat it.

So there's that. I've been on the inside. Well, sorta. I was mostly along for a ride. I cut out a reputation as something something at the party. I managed to +1 myself into a few weddings. I carried on like me adjacent-enough to convince myself I fit. Put any amount of distance between the bonded myth, life plays out as it does.

The inside is where you go to either ignore or confirm the things you see in people. I picked ignore. I thought it was the friendly thing to do. My friends are different, I told myself. This is my tribe. But, I'm just one very dumb man. I can't compete with all the monkey feelings I find myself in constant competition with, at least and especially with myself, let alone theirs. I've no business trying to turn the tide on a gaslit culture spiraling out of control. I have to “believe” in “my people.” I have to reside under a fundamental faith claim. All of my years of bitching about faith forsaken for what!?

I've discussed before the idea of all moments being this moment. You're as much “living in the past” as you are actively cultivating the future. I think it's desperate and naive to pretend we're all not living in the past. Our brains and bodies are wired on past rules. I can subconsciously crave a friend group, as though my life depends on it, because according to my body, it does. I can be shackled with the emotional fallout of “love” as many times as it takes to procreate and finally find myself too exhausted to give a shit anymore.

I'm okay with living in the past if it's in protecting the memory and feeling of what went right and why. I want to build on that, not try to return people to some former glory or conception of each other that's not only no longer true, but was hardly well-conceived then. I'm okay with sending invites to the forgotten bonds years later for one or two more drunken professions of affection and respect. With any luck, I'll have cultivated a new tribe along the way and create even more connections between people.

That seems to be where I fit the most. Put everyone in the room, see what they do with each other. I'm really good at finding cool people to meet other cool people and then sort of half pushing myself, half exhausting the rest of the parties out of the picture. I think about the hook ups and relationships started at my parties, some that still last today or ended up with people getting married. I think about all the crazy shit I have to do in the background to start your movie. Or maybe it's my movie because I'm always the one watching. I set the conditions, I don't get to play along without enticing backlash.

Wasn't I talking about feelings or something? Are they so weak and fleeting I can't even capture this? I feel like I know too much. I see the group of people, and I know how they operate. I know how they think. I know why they've ended up in that picture that way. I kinda, kinda, wish I could just be happy for them. I wish I still believed. Or, I'm glad that belief isn't lending itself to a more faulty perception, but it did used to feel good.

That's been kind of a weird note I've picked up when I know I've come up in conversation. A “friend” will state, “I'm sure it must be hard for you to deal with being accused or losing friends or [wholly without irony] finally being made to reflect on your behavior.” It makes it easier to disassociate if you pretend to sympathize with the sad and bad actor licking his wounds. They don't want to believe that I never want people in my life who abandon ship over conversation. I don't want to believe in someone who only sees “my behavior” up unto the point that it made someone uncomfortable and chooses to remain blind to corrective measures and deaf to the questions on how to make it right. No, it doesn't hurt to lose people like that.

For whatever reason, people never seem to realize that I can recognize when there's been a shit-talking session...you literally all use the same words in your explanations to me. I don't mean similar ideas. I mean like someone phrased something in a way that got the group head nod and pause, and that was the shorthand sentiment meant to confront an assault of my mention. Someone's feelings are doing the work of thinking for you, and that's weak and dishonest. A token few are about “dominating a conversation” and the assumption I'm unwilling to listen. In the mind of the person unwilling or unable to talk, the only one bothering to do so must look properly dominant or intransigent indeed. Don't forget, I usually have to defend the idea I have feelings, or anything in life worth having a stake in at all, and am want to forgo believing in myself.

As well, like anyone properly convinced about you, it never does any good to point to your ongoing book of reflection and suggest maybe, just maybe, I have deeply considered a charge or two, and exhibit more-than-a-little-mild obsessive behavior in picking apart words like “negative” or “friend.” and how I relate.

Anyway, I think my instinctual disregard is a self-preservation mechanism learned in youth. I envy those Army brats who just get used to befriending and dumping people, add thousands to their pages, and pop in once a year, if that, and “had the most amazing time with their besties in such and such!” I get too in my own head about when I should be claiming such things. Either the alcohol has to bring on the feels, or I have to have a few months build up of skirting around texting or messaging someone so it can come from the drive of “I actually missed you” or “I have something real to ask you about.” I can buzz between a hundred people at a party or the bar, but if you do so without a plan to get home, or someone willing to help get you there, you're just really sad if you call those people friends.

I feel bad for the people who don't consider the “friend group” a friend group anymore. I'm sure buried in some blog is me expressing more than a few times how I'd like to see the explicit group of people on my friends list as the ones continuing onward and upward together. How can you claim they aren't a group and still feel comfortable going to one of their weddings? Obviously we're all big and important busy adults now so we can balk at the idea of those childish memories, right? Seems like an old cunty thing to do. Seems someone maybe never tapped into the spirit of the moment and was the real outsider all along.

The reason my hands and arms are stung, cut, and sore is because I miss the feeling like anyone could be my new best friend. I liked cultivating a crowd of more-or-less cool and acceptable people. I liked setting people up to push their boundaries or wrap them up in the spell of my enthusiasm and energy. The shit heads went home and talked shit, and the ones who stuck around really stuck around. The parties were for me, and them, and then some other people showed up I don't know they suck. Just like everything I wish to create or offer to people is for those who can appreciate where it's coming from or what it took to get. I do that for you in not holding grudges or trying to deny and betray what I feel for you. That doesn't mean I forget, I just prefer to remember what I like about you. If you had any sense, you'd do it back by working harder to think and talk.

Excuse me, I guess I just dominated this whole blog and left you no room. I exposed all of the intimate details of our conversations and now aren't you so embarrassed! Or, wait, that's right. You aren't here anymore to beat yourself up.

[743] Principled Act

I try to explain “calmly and logically” the many things that go right in my life constantly. Where this habit becomes insufficient is in actual moments of dread or despair. When you just recite the lines or go through the kind of “I need to get this out of the way so I can get to the bitching part” motions, you don't feel what you need in those shitty moments to bring you back to anything.

I tried to do a little more affirmation and testimony in my last blog. I had a series of “it's okay” sentiments about my behavior and feelings. Because while I tend to feel the responsibility for “everything,” rarely do I ever let the positivity take me over as much as the paralyzing terribleness. Like, I think it's okay to wish for things you don't think are going to happen. I think it's okay to feel bad when people you care or cared about no longer do for you. I think it's okay to remind yourself that when you've done things in earnest affection and effort, no matter how many people will throw that back in your face or find something to resent you over, the positivity came from you.

I forget that about myself. I'm the positive force. I do things. I create change, and conversation, and blogs. I learn and explore. I make jokes. I do the tasks I don't want to as extreme and earnestly as I do the tasks I do. I don't get off on hurting people. I don't have some secret demon lurking to be exposed about my being or thought process. I tell you where, when, and why. I'll apologize when I'm sorry, and I'll work as quickly as I can to attempt to make things right.

These aren't just good things about me, they are excessively good things. I cherish those things about myself because I meet damn near everyone who is nothing like that. What good does it do me to constantly references a “capacity” and “awareness” to do shitty things all the time when that's not who I am, it's just what I know? Those awarenesses push me further into wanting to transcend any and every excuse to ever be shitty. It's like yelling at someone once in years and beating them up about it after every disagreement for the next 20. One time, my grandma hit me. Not hard, and I was going out of my way to be a dick. What kind of psycho would I be to reference that instance as meaningful insight into who she was or how she treated us?

This is at the heart of the sickness in how we talk about each other, especially when distance has been put between us. A fuck up or behavior quirk no longer looks like one color on the whole group painting. It's this thing people have been dying to rant about for forever! But you can't know that about someone who's comfortable being dishonest with you. You get pivotal times in your relationship that really do expose true colors. My true colors, good and bad, are easily anticipated, and manifest in stupid things said or done while drinking. Prolonged intentional maliciousness? No. Incidental inappropriate misplaced and immature? Absolutely. I don't know what the number of those you get a year is, but under 5 seems a fair allotment I'd be willing to grant every individual.

My current goals are still to what? Create places for people to live free to cheap. Become self-sustainable. I dream about being able to swoop in and fix some problem because I've been able to generate more money than I could ever use. That's significantly more who I am than drunken overt or inappropriate flirt. If we went by the numbers, I'm mostly a composite of television shows and food. This is lost on me, and lost in our dramatic depictions of each other and what we project of our hopes and admonishments onto people.

When I think about what I miss about the past, be it in partying or relationships, it's the chance to let the not depressed and whining on the couch person win. It's the idea of having people to look out for and provide. I'm a total Italian grandma cliché.

It's hard to hold the idea that someone “was never much of an individual in the first place” in so many words, and then think your life would be so much better if they could just come to some realization about where you were coming from or what you meant to them. People need to feel things on their own, or as I'm growing more and more fond of saying, you don't exist. If they don't exist, you can't, by definition. If they're merely the collection of stress, judgments, and gossip, that's the filter all of your efforts and all of your words are reduced to. Think then, someone like me, who relishes the thought of holding your words up to the mirror and pointing out how they don't make sense, I'm an engine for literally making those who are unwilling to do the work of becoming coherent crazy.

You can't “love” someone if you can't figure your own shit out. That's an easy thing for this insecure and ridiculous world to try and exploit like ravenous vampires. Every layer of society is saturated with the mythology of love. Why? It feels like this unobtainable mode of being, literally inspired and embodied by ethereal sky daddies. And we pretend there's enough songs or relationships or random acts of kindness that are going to get us all there. No one wants to admit that, just like anything worth having, if you want to get to love, you have to do the work. You have to understand what's being communicated and how. You have to suffer through understanding way more than you bargained for, and you have to cope with holding more in you than you'll ever be able to see reciprocated.

I breathe a sigh of relief when I think about how I'm not angry at the people who are angry at me. I couldn't do it. I couldn't hate myself as much as I'm capable of, and then take on the work of pretending I can think that much of you personally. I can poke and joke at an avatar or memory of you, but your disregard of me is not me hoping it stays that way. I'm almost positive if I make too much money one day, I'll invite everyone who's never wanted anything to do with me to a party. Half because I miss them, half to rub it in their faces. And no, I don't think being petty is the same thing as being mean or getting off on hurting people.

I've never been a person that wants to run from the issue. I don't know how it hasn't dawned on the people who disassociate, but I'm arguably the biggest “feeler” there is. This is me coping. This is me training. This is me fighting my beating chest and dropping stomach. I had lovey dovey professions about a girl in high school, I got jealous when my friends started dating people even when we were never together but to hang and fool around. I think it's okay to not feel purely elated when you see a picture of someone you spent a huge portion of your life with and invested in emotionally on the arm of someone else. It's like what I've previously said of jealousy. You don't have to fly off the handle and turn crazy, it just means you give a damn. Your memories and feelings that have shaped and continue to shape you matter. It means I'm not an evil bastard who would sacrifice those I claim to care about to my selfish designs on their being. This seems like a wildly important thing to know about yourself.

So, “haters,” and “critics” and those who are primed and willing to think every worst thing about me from a line, or an opinion, or some deep-seeded place that's been waiting for an excuse, I don't hate you back. I've worked myself to a place that tries to be stronger than that. I'm still willing to talk. I'm still wiling to try and make it better. You're still invited to share in my excess. I take my pain and turn it into shit like this. I look for roads back to relative stability. It's never been easy, and it breaks my heart every time something I care about dies. But everything dies. I'm not living as a killer.

[742] Less Is Less

I kind of feel on fire tonight. Not a series of made basketball shots fire. More like a fire that each time you try to extinguish it, it jumps and cackles. It looks like a low hum and sends a new wave of heat through my body.

I exist. That feels like a weird thing to be compelled to say. But I do. I exist. The good and bad I cause exists. My opinion of either notwithstanding, it's there. It's a hopeless sentiment. It's a “love me, love me, I'm begging you please love me” kind of phrase. I spend so much time trapped in a moment, analyzing and over-analyzing, and reading and re-reading, chasing some kind of ground or contentment. I search and dig and tear things apart looking for the last morsel that may feed my starved soul. I romanticize and plead. I reminisce and pretend. I choke and mist. I poke for it like a curious child pokes a dead animal. Maybe, just maybe, it'll move.

I'm currently in the middle of uploading just a random slew of pictures I've taken over the years of all the people I've been shaped by or perhaps helped shape. People I've worked with, partied with, and vacationed with. People I've had long, deep, and drunk discussions. People I've looked out for or considered some measure of chosen family. People that shaped all of my ideas about the party environments or what kind of friend I thought I wanted to be. People who've kicked off my explorations into what love means. People I've known for 20 or 2 years.

And then I start to think about what kind of sin is at the heart of my being that makes them random collections of photographs instead of hundreds of people to maybe call or rely on. What rotten egg have I morphed into to collect this sea of forgotten names and otherwise would-be scrubbed from the record books kind of history?

I think it's one thing to hurt someone. People hurt each other all the time. People say the wrong, or deliberately mean thing. People fight over what makes them afraid or insecure. There's as much hurt available as there are words and the potential to fuck those words up. But what does it mean when people want to forget you altogether? What does it mean that you're so incredibly bad or painful to them that they'll delete your picture and pretend years of their life you were never a part of? I almost feel like I'm existentially protesting by uploading all of this. I was there. I said things. I mattered.

I do to other people what I do to myself. I hold my feet to the fire. This, of course, except when I didn't, and that didn't go well either. I have 742 blogs now. I'll be 30 in like 2 weeks. Even if I was an amazingly terrible person with lies and craziness surrounding me in a maelstrom of abject failure, how did I keep it up for so long? How has my disingenuous behavior carried me along slamming into wall after wall so hard it'd make Princess Diana jealous?

But I can't even carry that thought thread too far. You know who else is in those pictures? People who didn't leave. People who talk. People who created the moment too. I go back to a statement about dying with 5 solid friends many times. Some old guy somewhere saying if you manage to die with 5 people you can actually trust or rely on, you've got 4 more than most. The pain and emotion and investment is the perpetual dress rehearsal for the show that puts those 5 on display if you die first. It's okay to have been invested. It's okay to want a family and memories and to want to feel like you belong. It's okay to want to talk about when you've hurt someone and to wish to make it better. It's okay to miss it, even if you were the only one not in on the joke.

I think one of the hardest tasks I'll have to engage in as the years carry on is to keep the larger picture in mind. I'm allowed to own my genuine investment in friendship. I'm allowed to feel betrayed. I'm allowed to wish, not so secretly, that “everything” could “go back” to some kind of peace and normalcy. I can advocate for forgiveness. I can keep talking. I can leave my door open. I've already forgiven, even if it doesn't come with the same kind of trust or naive vigor from the past. It's okay for me to just want things to be better, and conversations to be honest, and to type till my heart's content. It's okay to give people as many excuses as I need to put their shitty and childish behavior somewhere it can be merely shitty and childish and not specifically to do with me. I need doses of delusion like an alcoholic drink sometimes.

I'm just not that mean. It doesn't feel that way, but me, making a statement about myself, am not doing or saying things just to be mean. I don't prey on people. I don't conceive of power as the extent to which I can make you do something. I'm not afraid of you. I'm not angry at you. I'm not even sure who the “you” is anymore that I'm trying to talk to. I'm just tired and dispirited. I'm just trying to take in the picture instead the blog, for once.

I exist. I came from where those pictures were taken. I told jokes with those people. I played next to them. I worked next to them. My ideas and hobbies and interests were directed by conversations and late nights with them. I fit somewhere. They laughed. I felt intermittently as good as I ever do. They helped me make myself believe in however many things about myself today. I can't go away. I won't. I was there, you were there. I won't erase you, because I won't erase me.

[741] The Devil His Due

The last few hours has been a discussion and reflection on the different degrees and general pathologies of humanity. It's been a comparison of the kind of lives we lead, hope to lead, and lifelong pitfalls of thought and behavior people fall into. It's been a conversation that causes me a headache, and then a half hour goes by, and I start to feel a sense of overwhelming calm for both having got it out, and realizing again, that for all of the pathology and pain, the vast majority of it isn't mine.

One question me and Byron both asked ourselves was, “How did I get here?” Why, as people who can openly discuss bending people and exercising power, why aren't we just the most ridiculous and malicious and selfish people on the planet? Why doesn't he just invent some story to take kids away from objectively terrible people who just quite don't meet the criterion the State needs? Why don't I pull every lever of retaliatory power to bend addicts over my knee and punish them for their bullshit?

Or what about other realms of our lives? Why would I retreat into a mode of passive actor with regard to seeking sexual activity or adopt the modes and means of acquiring money I persistently regard as morally corrupt and naive? Aren't I a loose cannon who's too blunt and judgmental? Why not put on a million faces, like the perfect politician, and weave my way between the cracks of what look like gaping wounds in different groups and people I meet? Why don't I take every opportunity to squeeze all that I can from anyone, all the time, because I can, or because I can presumably make anything justified or simply lie about it?

What's demonstrated in that last paragraph is a kind of “mission creep” in the mind of someone who holds no regard for who I am or how I got there. The person who sees you as capable of having no high ground, in fact, doesn't have their own. The person who fears your questions and responds to inquiry with resentment, cedes the capacity for truth, therefore you are untruthful. The person who adopts the vagaries and accusations of a moment, abandons long-term goals and the responsibility of daily devotion, therefore you are devoid of inherent sanctity and forever non-specific no matter your language. The person with the most feeling, and the testimony of the mob, renders you emotionless, or incorrectly and not allowed to express your emotions, and so very, very alone. This is the tried and true method at the base of every rationalization. I know you are, but what am I?

I titled this blog The Devil His Due, because I always feel like that devil on people's shoulders. I can bring up the topic, or make the joke, or provide a suggestion, and then that suggestion lingers. You then proceed to spend your entire life avoiding the question, pretending you didn't laugh at the joke, or hold no sympathy for the suggestion as you physically fight back the tendency to agree. You'll marvel at the capacity to get in your head and stay there, while forgoing the exact tool you're perfectly capable of employing to find yourself in equal parts my head as I am yours. You could just try thinking.

When you start thinking, that's when you discover where you are or where you're going. The reason writing is thinking, is because you can't get each word without going over it first. No sentence is determined until the end. No “justifying” sentiment comes without the lines before and after it and hopefully paragraphs after those. How broken do you have to be to think that, of all people, I'm a liar, in a forthright manner? I can lie. We all can. We all do. But what do you understand, can you understand, are you ever willing or able to understand, why I don't want or need to? Can you recognize the difference between when you're lying and not? Because, remember, when you can't, I'm therefore reduced to the one who not only must be lying, but is doing so deliberately and maliciously. Not like you, no no, so innocent and on accident, but forever armed with the truth regardless.

This is a timeless pattern. This is why I need to take my potential judgments of people and angry feelings and lay them out. Why? Because I'm not actually filled with hatred. I have a brain that can provoke headaches and reacts with a level of anxiety I don't particularly care for, but I also have the contrast of my whole adult life with what I grew up with. I used to have several month long headaches from living under the general unresolved questions and stress of my domineering household. It was day and night to my mental health to be able to have a space I didn't regard as hostile and didn't cause me physical pain once I was able to leave.

Here we get to that painful irony of my being, and being that hot little devil on your shoulder and in your ear. My words cause pain. The ones meant to be painful cause pain. The one's that aren't, cause pain. The ones I regard as the “truest” or the best approximation of my feelings, those hurt the most and for the longest. I arrive at words today that have in some way been forming my entire life. That's truths that suck ass. That's descriptions of behaviors I'm not insanely proud of. That's motivations and misunderstandings I've let carry me through an ongoing mesh of complicated relationships, risks, and decisions. The only thing that has a prayer of making sense of it all is my individual sense of responsibility. I can't rely on your endorsement alone. I can't believe your words, let alone mine, as the absolute best and most reliable for all things at all times. I'm required to practice and reinforce unremitting doubt.

Doubt is not denial. Doubt is painful. Doubt needs to be rooted in something or you disassociate from all reality. Doubt that gets out of hand literally makes you insane, as anyone sacrificed to acid might attest. But doubt is also an effort and choice and exercise. Incidental doubt is fear. Fear is not what you need to practice, doubt is. Decrying the earth is flat is fear that you really are stupid as fuck and have no grasp of reality. Doubting the earth is flat is presenting information that can actually contend with all of the evidence otherwise. Healthy doubt is knowing there is no remaining argument and conceding the Earth is round, and moving on to doubt the next thing. In order to respect the example, one must imagine a child who's only as good as the information it's been presented. One should probably regard most people as children first and in a similar manner.

But then you get old. You don't have an excuse, barring mental deficiency. You need to start believing things for good reasons. You need to carry yourself and your words as if they have an impact. You need to build relationships on those kind of foundations as if your life depends on it. Because it does. Modernity helps mask this because the intellectual work has been done for us. You were born into clean water, you don't have a visceral memory of someone dying by drinking the wrong kind. You were born into a world where there is an organization that responds to emergencies, you don't have to adopt a whole host of self-preservation techniques or die. The world becomes a loose-knit game of interpretation, because no one's making it the right kind of painful. It's a pain either imposed, or one you can adopt in manageable pieces.

Pain itself then becomes pathologized. Instead of something that can be incidentally used incorrectly, it's wrong by default. “He made me uncomfortable!” The rallying cry of #metoo. Maybe you didn't know? Guys are insecure idiots with no idea too. They're uncomfortable. No guy, never, is going to carry the kind of vitriol for his being that is currently insisted upon without you exacerbating the problem. Guys respond to challenges with another challenge, or a breakdown. Broken men do crazy shit. And a physical or psychological challenging pissing match is not the way to improve the relationship between men and women.

So let's say I'm the devil. Let's run with the thesis that I'm as bad as it gets, cast out of God's kingdom. Relishing the souls he sends me after I've plagued them with sin and tempted them to sign away, for eternity no less, any right to their being for some fleeting delight. Okay, I accept. But the difference between me and you who might make that proposition, is that I don't give you the rest of my being or story. The last 3 sentences I typed before this immediately showed how quickly metaphors breakdown when you attempt to rationalize mythical beasts, so you get this instead, and we'll move on.

People blame me for expecting them to converse. Think about that. They think it's a “problem” that I should expect you to be honest in spite of the pain or difficulty of a conversation. They'll tell me to censor myself in descriptions of things I apparently did to someone, and am both remorseful and confused by the dialogue that surrounds it. They'll tell me you seem and ask what are you trying to say? Trying? Clearly, I'm trying to say literally everything I am. In fact, I'm saying it! I didn't try to tell you that, I did. Why isn't that enough? Why don't you know how to say, instead of try to say? I don't understand the question and I don't see the reason. Well, there was no real question, and the reason has to do with feeling something negatively about the words, not taking them in and recognizing what they say or responding to them.

This is why science feels like a threat to the faithful. They don't get it, they just know it doesn't feel good to think they're monkeys. This is why you can tell me what kind of person I seem like, but would never in a million years consider quoting me with something I actively chose to say. This is why you can get away with asking me questions that deserve an immediate answer and “taking responsibility” posture, but mine can go ignored. This is why relationships breakdown, and stay broken, because “you've changed” could never be, “I was never willing to listen to nor accept who you are.” You can't recognize the difference between an excuse and explanation. You don't have a concept of honesty. You don't have reasons, nor practice, how to be healthily skeptical or honest in your own life, therefore, no one is or can be. You justify, so they're unjustified.

I don't do that. I report to you your own words. I ask questions when I'm confused. I hold up your literal contradictions in thought next to each other because you've habituated not seeing them. That's painful, and you didn't ask for it. You only ask for it alone, in secret. You don't want to have an open public discussion because you know, not even deep down, that you haven't thought about it like you should. And if you did, you'd have to give the devil his due. He worked for your soul. He didn't recognize it as individually sovereign and held in the first place. The only reason you signed it away was because he was right.

My tone is so damming because I don't want a headache every day for months. My questions arise from the process, not because I thought, “This is going to be the best thing to fuck up your day.” It's a question because I don't know the answer. It's a question because presumably you don't know either, but you're acting like you do. Unlike you, I don't know how to resolve questions that go ignored. I don't know how to function even remotely healthily or orient myself in the sea of douche-bags unless I figure out my voice and behavior that isn't under constant assault to be molded by every pathology. I want to say something like, “Of course I'm a murderer, and rapist, and thief, and have anger issues, and would lie to save my ass, and on and on and on,” because that's true independent of everything, of everyone, about everyone. The rule is fuck, have kids, and die. That rule doesn't care about laws, or civility, or “civilization,” or the dreamiest love story or the most hopeful statistic.

You know how many of my well-meaning “intelligent” friends with their wedding pictures and good enough jobs and goals have had kids? NONE. You know how many children exist between the families I supervise for their neglect and abuses daily? No less than 2 each. There is no case to be made that we are anything but the hastily and mindlessly collected sum of our more often than not fuck-ups and animal instincts held together by some ingenious mental fuckery and self-delusion that pragmatically functions as preservation. That doesn't mean it doesn't need to get vastly better. That doesn't mean bad behavior is justified, or even inevitable, but it does mean you have a LONG long way to go on the road to “better,” if you can't even have the conversation or recognize more than one feeling-laden reason behind how someone or something functions in the world.

If you don't seek the failure point, you are the failure point. That's the new means of evolution. Active adapting to the new information. I was a lovesick child in high school. I learned the biology behind it, and said “open-relationship.” I learned the logic and utility of “enforced monogamy” and found the room to cut out “general monogamy” or my feelings as they pertain to sex verses trusting someone with my thoughts and intentions. I disavow language without the underlying ethic and without dismissing the effect of “love.” I eschew marriage with the capacity to respect and feel good for people who find ways to make it work for them. I concede there are problems and gray areas related to boys and girls and how they fuck, especially drunk, without condemning men and masculinity, nor denying someone their perception or story of feeling unsafe or violated. I don't give a fuck about the outdoors and will still look at your pictures and climb the mountain with you. I can have a point of view; I can have a well-researched and extremely thoughtful and painful point of view, and I can still wish endlessly, until the day I die, that you will fight it and change it and give me better reasons than the ones I discover while writing.

But I do the work. I take the risk. I face my behavior. I want the feedback because I use it to change. You don't, so you don't provide feedback, face your behavior, take risks or work, therefore, that must not be what I'm doing or capable of. I don't feel I understand your behavior, I'm turning you into a blog so you can be dismissed. A blog isn't an honest exploration and coping mechanism, I justify justify justify and preach preach preach and never find a way not to be “negative.” You see, I didn't think these thoughts, or spend a few hours on persistently aggravating ideas, I'm attacking you. Because if you were to write about me, or the negative influences in your life, you'd be attacking, lashing, because you're on the defensive. No one taught you the difference between explore and defend, pick apart and attack, doubt and afraid, honest and “truly feeling,” so it all just feels like a whir of incoherent ranting.

News flash, it's because that's what you sound like. We all do, but some of us are actually trying not to. Some of us invite the devil in to talk, because he can't make us sign away our soul. I'll never feel bad when I'm telling you that's precisely what you're doing. I'll feel pity. I'll feel hopeless. But I'll feel those things for you, not about me. Isn't that what we should be doing with feelings? Feeling for people, not about them? Shouldn't we be conjuring, or de-escalating, what we should feel? Aren't feelings impressively wrong, most of the time, so they should be as deliberate as we can craft them? Shouldn't they inform instead of dictate? Are you only hearing this as me advocating for abolishing all feelings? Are you even willing or capable of conceiving of me as having feelings that are well-earned and combated with? You certainly don't act like it unless they can be reduced to a reason to fight. You certainly don't include them in your “good-natured” tear downs of my intentions or awareness.

Ultimately, I get to know and behave like I don't hate you, in spite of all the good reasons to do so, because I don't hate you. You're disappointing, daily. You're bigger and whiter shells than I'll ever be. You'll keep reminding me of people who live at the logical extremes of your behavior that I'm paid to exploit. And I'll keep writing, and trying, and inviting, and claiming not to be a proper martyr as I die a little each day inside in service to my “naive idealism” that merely keeps me oriented towards trying to do better, do more, and finish the work. It hurts less than looking for your soul.

[740] Comes Crashing Down

I kinda knew I wasn't done writing after my sense of malice took over. Let's see what else is in store.

One of the things that persistently happens to me when I'm reading about the habits or methods of some Great Man of history, is that I think to myself, “Yep.”

Somewhere, at some time, I've worked some idea or assumption or methodology into my being that mirrors a ton of people I admire, or at least remain intrigued about. This could be sheer probability and easily calculable personality metrics, it could be baseless ignorant ego and self deception (I doubt it), or it could be an inevitable confluence of like recognizing like. The point being, the people I admire have built into their being things I've worked to build into mine.

Take the land. This godforsaken empty ton of work shell. It's an expression of potential creative freedom, a metric by which Chomsky says the “truly educated” are about. I want to discover things, not be capable of an endless mindless list of factoids. I want to create things. I want to figure out who I am as I'm working on it. Do task, get paid, play by rules has nothing to do with me. I don't think it has much to do with any individual really.

OH! I remember a thing from the biology torrent of information that seemed to mirror how I behave. Tit-for-tat, then tit-for-tat with forgiveness. I wait to be provoked or have justification. The most efficient mathematical models for behavior are often how I go about treating people in my life. I also tend to lead with the least efficient “trust first” position from people who don't regard the game they're playing as selfish. Every little “IS IT JUST ME?” quandary boiling down yet again to an infinitely played game with predictable outcomes.

I'm right that I'll never get shit done without cooperation. I'm right that the families that stick together, propagate (eyes wearily his backstabbing ridiculous bunch squandering what they've been given family.) I'm right in finding titles and money in and of themselves meaningless. I'm right for treating all people as equals. I'm so right about so many things I look for opportunities to be bad so I can bother to claim to be human. I relish the idea of “free will” and the improbability of everything and “my” moment in time talking about it. I almost feel like I'm searching for a route to “justifiable insanity.” Maybe I'll unlock the secret sequence of words that will let me flip the fuck out. Maybe I'll never undermine my position after one sentence more.

Do I want to be right? Sometimes I like to think that I was a disembodied “soul” who was allowed to program this individual avatar. I would get to borrow from my past experiences and try to make increasingly wise decisions about what trade-offs I'd want or the kind of life I'd like to lead. Have I already been famous? Because the trappings and pathologies there don't appeal to me in the slightest. I admire Jordan Peterson who says persistently he's always thinking any minute it's all going to blow up in his face. I'm certainly an attention whore, and I'd sign a fuck ton of autographs, but it's almost too easy. I mean, even Paulie Shore is still getting by.

So have I been abjectly poor? I must have. I'm way too comfortable “settling in” to the current perpetually ridiculous and oppressive moment. It's easy when you have nothing. I have a brief yet persistent “relief” that whatever was stolen is at least that much less I'll have to account for in the future. The vast majority of my mind begging to escape or be engaged is satiated with a TV, tablet, and phone.

Have I been ugly? That's almost too easy. If I was ugly, I'd only have that much larger an excuse to nerd out on things I already nerd out on. It'd be something I'd never think about losing. I might actually remember a significantly larger portion of character names from favorite series than I do now.

What then, of all the permutations and options and stats I might build into my person. What the fuck would make me pick me? Why be born to my parents? Why have the friends I do? Why learn lessons, lessons I pretty much figured out before I forced myself through them again, the way I have? What weird ass roller coaster did I set myself up on to glean that extra few points to add to the stats of my next iteration?

I see the potential utility in any kind of social behavior. That's a measure of the “relative sociopathy.” I've seen through childish superficialities that prevent me from taking action or feeling confident in myself. I eschew lying but for insisted upon ends to “get by” in some kind of working world pragmatic matrix. I risk money and time and spirit in pursuing the ground floor of the things I actually believe in, and sacrifice every speck of potential self-respect as I shit on myself daily for not figuring out how to utilize them as I imagine. Is the lesson that I'm alone? Is the lesson really to find some kind of “eternal patience?” For all the lives I could have ever lived, and all the metrics I could have improved on, the one thing that still hasn't sunk in is that it happens in “universe” time and not “my” time?

I'm not a mystic hippie type though, so all of that bullshit I just typed isn't fundamentally persuasive even a little. It's my metaphysic escape trying to understand why people can't seem to cooperate or try together to achieve something better. I went and explored the disorganized insecure hippies with expert levels of passive aggressiveness. Their indignant attitude to modern medicine or pretending it takes 2 people to harvest 15 minutes worth of food isn't what I need. I've tried playing games with townies who start to take themselves too seriously when it clicks this is the only thing they'll ever do. I'm not a child wandering home too drunk every other weekend anymore if only because my body would crucify me.

The handful of people I admire are either genuinely nice, or intelligent and verbose. I don't think I'll ever be nice, and your god knows I can talk, but we're hard pressed on whether or not it's intelligent. I'd like to be nice, but I don't feel nice. I don't feel a large enough portion of the world wants to be nice or sees the utility in it any further than I do. Nice is the waiting room labeled “waiting for an excuse.” Nice is something people grow resentful of if they're not a grandchild being fawned over by a grandparent.”Nice” tricked me into thinking the “group identity” I rolled with in college was anywhere near it. I'm nice in what I refrain from doing or saying. I'm “nice” insofar as I know how immediately willing and ready I am before staying my hand. So I must not be nice.

Should I just go spend $1000 on a lawn mower tomorrow, $150 on a battery, $50 on gas and see if my neighbor and I can get power out to the land? Will some good old fashioned retail therapy and grass cutting set me straight? I'd be doing it in a car with breaks that sound like The Wall in Game of Thrones coming down. I'd be doing it not getting paid until Friday and no way to get said lawn mower somewhere some new thief wouldn't be able to drive it away or defile it. Tell me world, my corrupted heart only knows how to move with the intermittently dramatic. What's remotely sensible in a world you've forgone assuming makes a lick of it?

[739] Catastrophic & Immediate Failure

I am a shell of myself.

Of the myriad thoughts passing through my head on the drive back, this felt the right way to start. Shell? What shell? I'm still me, no? I eat the same, I get my work done. I get stress headaches and wear more than a little wanting clothing. Am I not still racked with...guilt? for all that needs to be done that I find myself incapable of bringing to fruition? Just how many things can remain the same or concurrently true while the shell keeps it all trapped?

Lately, I've been inundating myself with biology. I catch a random series of lectures Stanford put out. I watch a BBC documentary on whether or not science can make us “perfect.” I watched or read or did something else that I pointed out at the time which I can't remember now. This persistent narrative about the underlying “rationality” and “causality” and “molecular history” or “gene expression” at the root of it all. All the politicking, all the anger, all the health conditions, all the addictions and excuses and quirks a series of tried and true adaptations or mutations. As you may well know, I spent several years getting this message when I argued science vs religion. It is not new.

What I don't like is the depersonalizing effect it has on me when coupled with my self-effacing job. I can only say or do so much. There's a deliberate and cordial manner in email. I have to go into full sociopath, or politicking, mode to ensure I draw out certain truths or stave off the suspicions of entitled white trash.

But let's back up. Because along with the biology, I've been listening to the advice of and histories of Great Men throughout history. I caught a Thomas Jefferson biography. I'm in the middle of an exploration of Churchill and Roosevelt's relationship. I read a small article about what it means to be “truly educated” according to Chomsky. People, not without their flaws and prejudices, doing people things, but donning a kind of mantel on the consequence dial for the whole human endeavor. The more you learn about someone, the more accessible they feel. The more their decisions are cataloged and mythologies stoked, the more they can be both revered and forgotten as the legacy transcends even the idea of who they really were.

When you find yourself depersonalizing, it can go one of two ways. You can remove stress and anxiety as you generally go about the flow of life, perhaps consistently doing what's been asked of you or acting with a kind of sporadic selfish energy as you float from one experience to the next. The second path is finding yourself indifferent to what may be regarded as malicious behavior. Unfortunately, or not, I find myself vibing with the latter.

Let me put it to you like this. I do a lot of work “behind the scene” to organize 8 people's schedules into a weekly visit. Those 8 people have 8 or more homes where their, never less than 2, kids live. Somehow, I can squeeze them into a coherent-enough structure that gives me days off, exceeds hourly expectations, and merrily pretends the sacrifices (like quitting their jobs) people make are going to one day see them back with their kids like normal. Then, one of these “clients” will get indignant and suspicious. I control if they see their kids. I want to squeeze them to make my life easier. One client in particular sucks the life out of her children and everything these people talk about is prison, pregnancy, or a measure of delinquency related. She's under the delusion her kids are coming back in a month while she can't stop doing meth. Her “super helpful” sobriety program is getting in the way of me not having to come home at 10:30pm on Friday nights.

So what can I do? I can email her case manager and ask if there are analogous programs. This one isn't required, but was suggested by their case manager, and allegedly they are going to it. It apparently doesn't run any other day of the week besides the exact time I want their visit to go. Seems like a nice and understanding person would trust them to keep with their program, right? But you see, these people are lazy and entitled pieces of white trash shit. They were 2 days away from getting their kids back before doing meth again. Their dad refuses all services and it was explained to the mom she won't get the kids back, or will have to choose between them and their father in the home, if he doesn't complete programs. He smokes at visits, against our policy, and I could at any moment decide the environment isn't safe and cart them back home. And just as icing, the kids are rude.

I'm pushing a point where I have the caseload and wiggle room where I can just drop a “fuck it, we're done” bomb to compel behavior. And I want to considerably more than not. I want these people to bend to me, because I exercise so little power elsewhere, this little “win” would get me home, stress them out, and hopefully speed up the inevitable so I can move on to my next pieces of shit. I've done nothing but make every appointment, increase their visitation hours, and politely inform them of our roles and responsibilities, and they say not one “thank you” or are willing to work an inch while blowing up my phone with inane presumptive bullshit. I want to hurt them further than they can hurt themselves.

That's a shell person right there. Harm for harms sake. What did I need to get back home for tonight? A friend to blow me off and to start writing this. Super good reasons to strong arm white trash into extending your weekend hours.

An aside: If you want to put a baby to sleep, sing a lullaby. If you want to put a retarded white trash teenage girl to sleep, put on an audio-book about presidential history. There's a much longer joke and stand-up set in there, but that baseline needs to exist somewhere for posterity.

It still feels real, my potential, to do more than fuck with idiot poor people. But there is a measure of compelling darkness to my being that I've little recourse in letting out. And don't they deserve it? And if not them, who? Anyone? Ever? Or is it just my job to be the general human toilet for everyone's shitty emotions and feelings? I genuinely want an answer to that.

My shell self breaths before writing a feverishly defensive and threatening text. In about 30 seconds, I'm going to have the perfectly apolitical words that get you to say exactly what I need. Now I'm waiting 30 seconds, or a day, or not even bothering to get angry at all. Where have I gone? Who is this placating non-invasive everyman? Who's humbly hunched in his ill-fitting shirt over his computer pretending not to fantasize about choking everyone in front of him with the swing chains? Who's the mockery of an over-enthusiastic and energetic fool who doesn't feel defeated by the prospect of getting not only another gas can to fill up his van, a battery, and a lawn mower so that he might get power this very weekend! And instead worries he's just going to waste more money chasing another dead end right before his car shits the bed? Why am I sitting here half-expecting the rest of my shit to be stolen the next time I go out to the land, instead of fervently making my way to defend all of this invested being unto the death!?

I don't feel like anything anymore. I just am. I just can or can't. For every Great Man I read about, who's left some indelible mark on history, there's several years if not my entire lifetime between me and when they became of note. Well, they lived storied lives and traversed the ups and downs of being born white, rich, and in the West in eras of vastly smaller populations and every new accessible frontier.

So maybe it is my place to “elevate” my “mere wage slave” status and be a “rockstar” who employs incredibly shady tactics to make my schedule and abilities look as good as I know how to make them. Maybe I parlay the “wows” and “nobody's every done that's” into the kind of fortune that lets me run wild on the land. Maybe I've never known anything about how to get what I want, and after the final capitulation, just be the shell, the world will open up as I've always assumed it should or would eventually, but stubborn old-world ethic me needed to be broken like the wildest of horses. Maybe power is to be exercised where you have it, not when. Maybe the universe is punishing me for too much deference and humility and indifference masquerading as patience. Maybe I'm meant to teach the exact kind of lessons in pain that I know how to to the exact people I'm interacting with in any one moment.

I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's the kind of story I should be finding compelling about myself, and whether there's anything that should be done about it. But it is the story I'm telling myself. It feels like a window back to “me.”