[752] Sophist Space

I don't now if I should be more or less concerned about not feeling the compulsion to write recently. It could be a signifier of several different and competing things, which means I'm sure it's all of them at once, and I haven't decided which one I'll let win the narrative.

First, I could just be feeling “generally better.” While training is bullshit wherever you go, I haven't spent a single day at work yet where I wasn't laughing my ass off, figuring out a complex social problem, learning about something nuanced and complicated, or having a fair and nice chat with someone who immediately knows the nature and tone of what it takes to do a job like this. These are all reassuring things. People are dynamic, so when you're dealing with them, it's theoretically going to be hard to be “bored” in the sense that a job like delivering or stacking or generally laborious tasks might beget.

Second, it could mean I'm getting “comfortable.” I've talked about my increased spending habits for things like smoothies or frappes. I've dipped into that Amazon wishlist several more times this month for things like nicer clothes, basically for work, and a hodgepodge of items that have been staring at me for a while. What's 15% of your budget if it's things that you'll wear for the next several years? Particularly when most of your clothing is faded, misshapen, and occasionally an item you got for Christmas when you were 12 years old. I be looking fly, don't think twice about eating out, and besides general labor, there's no looming huge expense around the corner barring injury or disaster. I've even gone in for things like life and health insurance.

Third, it could mean I'm losing the capacity or will to be paying attention to “the world at large.” It's hard to be that scared of Trumpian fiery maelstroms when you're debating the whereabouts and hunting down white trash pieces of shit for several hours a day or giggling at a hilarious judge in court for several hours. I still scroll through. I still catch articles here and there. The focus? That has to keep me continually waking up in the mornings and maintaining polite-enough comments and the demeanor for a professional environment. We're at the front lines of the people's lives who are actually, sometimes literally, on fire.

Fourth, I might be losing a measure of respect for what it is I have to say when I'm realigning my place of knowledge towards a job or routine. I can't opine that intelligently and can mostly just skirt remembered statistics from headlines. I can give “general counsel” about the wisdom of not falling prey to fear-based decision making. I can say you should make time to practice all of the little things that are important to you. I can resolve myself to wildly practical and old sentiments and sentimentality because that's the kind of shielded environment I've adopted.

In reflecting on the environment, thoughts regarding “class warfare” or “protected status” came to mind. Mind you, this was while I was sitting in a court room. Here, in this little room, you have “judge” and “lawyers” and “FCM” and “CASA” and a bailiff and perpetrators and trainees and court reporters. All have their roles. All are invested in, at the very least, the pageantry and dignity of it all, and one wants to believe they have noble spirits who espouse the moral courage and commitment to the protection of rights. But, if you pay not that close attention, they're all still human. The judge can crack jokes. The attorney can look disorganized. The FCM can have his ears gauged. The whole of the endeavor is what's protected and what people will always rediscover no matter how crazy shit gets. It's safe. It has rules. It's a necessary bargain and conformity so you don't end up on the other side of the aisle crying and making excuses for your actions.

I've never been the disingenuous anarchist type. My “withdrawal” from society involves consuming as much information about it as my brain and body can handle. I slide pretty seamlessly between worlds whether or not there's an accompanying panic attack about the “radical shift” in my perspective. I think I'm hoping to discover a way to fit a multi-variant long-term position into my head without corrupting the spirit it takes to create in spite of norms. The big government machine is precisely that. Norms, procedures, pleasantries, and posture in service to maintaining certainly values which are meaningful and worth it. It's not that malicious or complicated, at least where I work, and for better or worse, if you bond with it too closely, you're not going to see the reasons and ways in which it needs to change.

I know that with my brain, no matter how seemingly comfortable or good I get with things, I'll get bored. I'll get restless. I'll start finding little things to pick at even while I wholly appreciate what makes things awesome. I stayed at a pretty terrible low-paying job precisely because every day I felt like I was working with friends who hung out after and developed flows and habits to compliment each other. I got to take this job with not only my best friend already laying out cheat codes and clout, but 2 other people I knew or worked with in the past. My biggest gripe is waking up earlier than I care to, and even that will be a fading issue after I get out of training. Turns out, I love cubicles. Movies have corrupted my mind about the utility of walls for organizing things. Grey walls don't look any bleaker to me than mountains look glorious, and I stare at white walls and a computer 60% of my time in general.

I've become ever-more painfully aware of my lack of “abstract” thinking. I can hold a small number of things in my mind at once and try to work with them. This is why I can “forget” I got my degree and am exceedingly competent and think the world is crashing when I lose a shitty delivery job after having never even applied to one that required my “adult” skills in the intervening 8 years. The cubicle bias is one example. My approach to playing and learning new music feels very static and repetitive. I need to think to myself, “I should beat the whole game” as I linger around firing up a system with one I bought months ago. I'm bad at doing things in small growing parts, I suppose besides from writing, as I feel I get lost or lose things in the transition. It feels like shuffling through the first minute of every song in a playlist. I can get the gist, but am I really appreciating what I'm listing to? Even my “bad” or “boring” shows I watch sped up, I try to, more or less, at least be focusing on it instead of reducing it to pure background noise.

Consider, I was watching shows, couldn't bring myself to continue, started playing the guitar, figured out I'd memorized well-enough a section of “Do You Want To Build A Snowman” and then remembered I hadn't written in a while and cut myself off before locking in the last 2 bars. I also have a habit of pausing a show with a minute or so left and getting up to cook or take out the garbage. I speculate I'm subconsciously trying to prevent something from ending or the feeling of “end” and the obligation to figure out something new. As long as the show is paused, or there's hundreds of them and movies in the queue, there's always something easy enough to occupy your time and mind with, right? Once the big projects on the land are done, then what? Back to eating more? Back to putting myself against invisible walls about the kind of creative and entrepreneurial example I need to be hell bent on setting? Because, I'm telling you, I fit extremely well into this well-dressed competent man world with just enough chub to make the lonely thick single ladies consider me approachable. My 2 kids and 2 car garage are about 15 flirtations and half a dozen “this is it!” cuddle moments at quasi-romantic locations.

Here I beckon my inherent obnoxiousness. The same antagonist you find insufferable ushers me along when none of you care to chime in or help. You think my polite deconstructions of our conversations were ruff? I could turn myself racist and ageist and ableist and express every ism to myself at the speed of thought if I felt myself slipping too far. Light the fires of fear and anger and get this train moving, as it were. Use the tightness in my right hand and crankiness of my knee to insist all the more urgently the need for decisive and consequential action! I'm gonna live forever, don't you know, just keep watching.

[751] Singin' In The Rain

I think I need to take a moment, after I've scribbled down an arbitrary list of notes about things I want to do or eventually buy, before I start my next random foreign film that Trakt tells me is part of some popular list, and as I stave off a weird sickness in my stomach, as well as thoughts of the work I'm blowing off because I can't be bothered. It wasn't now, but earlier today, it struck me. I really do want, more than anything, to be doing “nothing” with my time.

When I put down the presumed dollar amounts of the things I want to accomplish, on the high end I got around 8 months of “regular” work with fairly strict budgeting. This includes everything from fixing the moving van to spending way too much to play with 3D-printing materials. If I scale things back to just getting my “basic bitch” living situation figured out, shortly after I'm done with training, I should be in a pretty good spot. As I list one thing after another that I need to learn or budget for, as the mess of “random” things compiles in crooked lists on ill-suited paper, it's having the time to get lost in all of that which I cherish.

I've only been able to do so lately because I'm leaving my job and people have been canceling on me like crazy. This morning I went and mowed and weed whacked my lawn. I got home and bought a crock pot and went out to eat. I've sat and finished my shows. I've gotten lost in the dream of things to come and played again into the kind of arbitrary nature of what my general day was before I went corporate. To be sure, either extreme is bad. I recognized my need for structure in attempting #yearofeveryday. I recognize the danger of the narrative about being a lost overgrown man-child and have something of a reputation to uphold. But at bottom, I like having all the time in the world to do whatever the hell that I want with it first.

I don't regret watching movies and shows. I don't regret the books I read. I don't have lingering pains and sorrows from digesting the endless stream of depressing news. That's where I find direction. That's where I find voices to emulate. That's where I find the kind of stimulation and motivation to try my own shittier version of things. My mind has let go of the death grip “work responsibilities” has on me, and I felt a little at home. I returned to the organized chaos from which I always want to burst forth.

Basically, I know what I need to return to. I know I can't get too comfortable. I know there are definite perks to “just” doing your job and paying the bills and settling in, but that's not who I am, and I'm going to keep fighting its comforts. I'm going to keep bitching where bitching is due. I'm going to find ways to exhaust myself doing what it is I actually want to be doing. I know you've fallen asleep on me, but I won't.

[750] Work In Progress

I think I need to write this to figure out if I have any reason left to be considered interesting. The thing is, I've gone and spent about 5 months of my life doing a basic-bitch job, made as much or more money than I've managed to over-indulgently need to live on since...well, ever, and have the prospect of a new job and more money coming in looming. I've bought more McDonald's frappuccinos, shakes, and smoothies in the last month than I have in the last 5 years. I've ordered some of the more “expensive” (~$150) toys from Amazon that have sat on my wishlist for years, and I'm sitting here eyeballing $1000+ purchases for shits and giggles because I still don't have a realistic grasp on whether or not I'll have the people in place, or learn the skills necessary, to get my power and bathroom completed, let alone figuring out air conditioning with mine getting stolen.

I feel very “normal plus.” My money isn't immediately eaten up by kids or loans, so I'm more like the middle-class of old. I have a little extra cash, but not enough to be flaunting. Soon, I'll have a bit more time to do things like adult sports leagues or hitting the gym and bowling in the afternoons. I never think about simply filling up my gas tank or ordering from more than a dollar menu. If the state of Illinois wants to grab $400 in back taxes, or my registration fees come out of nowhere, or my VPN and Planet Fitness deduct fees I wasn't anticipating, I don't really bat an eye. I went to the movie theater and didn't lie about being a student.

I'm interested to see what happens when I have that consistent routine. When I know, for sure, I’ll have 5 or so hours at the end of each day and weekends to focus on something. Right now, I'm in the weird in-between realm where my schedule has freed up some with dumping and passing clients, but a surprise 7 hours of freedom isn't mentally preparing properly to do anything with it. I just feel tired that my quasi-routine has been interrupted allowing me to sleep in or stay up. I certainly see utility in routines, and my body reeling at the prospect of food or sugar after 7 certainly wants to compel me, but I still think they're fundamentally not really me.

I don't know what my first move is going to be. I wish I could “just” get the fundamental work done to live on the land. I don't even need a driveway yet. I could struggle-bus without air conditioning for a spell if I had cold water. I want to be able to sit down and power through a dozen building videos, step outside and try, and then be able to come in and shower off the ticks. I could find the rhythm to add a new room to my house every 2 weeks, presumably faster with better planning and skill acquisition. I know the costs for less-than-pretty but totally functional living. I'll save aesthetically impressing when I have money to blow that reflects my underlying pretensions. In the meantime, none of you are trying to visit.

I was eating today and started reflecting on my map again. I thought about it in a way that gave me the chills. I still maintain full faith that if I collect the information I want and organize it how it looks in my head, I'd have a proper “revolutionary” metric for approaching problem solving and idea transmission. The irony, of course, is when I get the money to commission 50 more hours on it, I wouldn't have the time budgeted to keep it under meticulous oversight. That's a great way to lose money. As well, it's supposed to be human-led individual data we're attempting to correlate and compile. I need the kind of security bills paid well in advance can only bring to fall down that rabbit hole again.

The question of whether or not I consider myself interesting, or whether I should even care about such a thing, seems to speak to the idea I'm trapped in about all experiences being one. I can't shake the idea that every possible thing is, in one manner of phrasing, the same thing. I know I have a poor and mis-remembered conception of different eastern mythologies or modes of thought that speak to this, but it's feeling more matter-of-factually compelling the less I conceive of myself as any potentially worthwhile discreet entity. That is to say, we're all made of the same stuff. Consciousness being “emergent” would suggest that the “subjective” experience of self is merely a word. Say “I'm me!” all you want, there's no rule against it. But no, you're “us” and “all.” As such, maxims like treating others the way you wish to be treated or an “eye for an eye” become more than throwaway “obvious” wisdom, but imminently consciousness preserving proofs.

I treat people like I want to be treated. I want to be presented with the opportunity to discuss my grievances until we've figured out places we can't budge. I want to be approached as if I'm potentially full of the most interesting and consequential ideas. I want to hear the “worst” jokes. I want to treat sex as flippantly as a borderline chronic masterbator might consider their dick. I want to be provoked and given the opportunity to not do just what it is you think I'm gonna do. If you can truly dish out the degree of shit that I'm accused of serving and turn me all inside out, you better. “My” experience was only made as good as I currently conceive of it by putting myself through naivety pains and hopeful pains and darkness and death and sadness and on and on until the part of me able to care that much died. I want that for everyone. It hasn't hampered my ability to have fun or appreciate things or treat people fairly. It just makes the conditions under which I'm going to do those things exacting. It isn't arbitrary when I like something, it's genuinely novel or moves me. I think you are unable to do this when you exercise the “like” button for every goddamn picture ever shared by your friends in the fucking forest.

There's a burden with depersonalization. You have to grow accepting of the crazy shit. You have to think of yourself as “justly” serving out the sentence of the reportedly innocent on the other end of a bomb or outbreak. What if “I” was a Syrian refugee? What about my experience might I want to hone for the sake of everything? A measure of resilience or hope? But, darker, who's to say any expression of consciousness is particularly worth preserving and respecting? We find it in us to kill, arbitrarily, those who violate the general pursuit of life narrowly defined. Wouldn't the death of a handful of greedy oligarchs maybe open the doors for better general welfare? Here I guess I'm trying to do a kind of moral calculus. Surely, an absurd exercise. And what fool would give the keys to the driver who can barely consider the significance of his own life save his passengers?

Here I think about the idea of “evolution” meaning “change.” I'm a fan of the saying, “the only truth is change.” At the same time, stumbling upon “consciousness” as evolution apparently suggests, the nature of the universe can change so radically as to perhaps instantiate a perpetual conscious awareness of a fraction of the expanding parts. I don't need to be “[redacted]” to create the math equation of experiences, genetics, and TV references that would constitute me in my absence. Well, I do, because we don't have the technology to perfectly map brains, but presumably something akin to the advanced Turing test-passer isn't that far off. But think about that. Everything about your being, at its best and most functioning, an engine for change. You change your and a partner's genes into another generator for change. You build institutions of thought into bedrocks to be picked at and stacked upon. The essence of the universe, is change.

Is that intimidating or sad? “You” can't even be you, by definition. You're a process. You're a probabilistic set of experiences. Here I'm thinking Dr. Manhattan, that for all of the particles and potentials, you popped out. You can write about it! I still consider that a miracle. I still think that there's a huge amount of shit we can't or can never know that makes the pursuit of lasting worthwhile institutions and behaviors worth creating and passing on. I'm literally a testament to what doesn't change in the face of the “only truth,” and that seems like a giant hint as far as dictating your behavior and adopting intentionality. I wake up every day with the same things that give me chills to think about. I dream the same dreams. I beat my empathetic head against the wall while proclaiming a fair pragmatic degree of sociopathy that always keeps the jokes coming.

I'm still going to get everything I want. That seems why I don't know if I'm still interesting. It would have been interesting to find a worthwhile person off Craigslist who let me accelerate the process. It would have been interesting to have seen my map come to life and have its implications carry me across sectors and appearances. It would be interesting even to hit the lottery as cheap as that may sound. Fuck, it’d be interesting if YOU bothered to help lol. For the life of me, going to work, being “basically responsible,” working “my” normal of never taking vacation, or sick days, or personal days, endlessly, for years, accumulating money, restricting my diet or indulgent habits, buying the shit I need, just learning “the thing,” and chugging along has got to be the dullest possible way I could consider getting what I want. I genuinely hate being so good at it I can't even consider it a problem beyond philosophically. Any idiot can pay the bills, and I want to be any idiot? No.

Maybe that's my balance sheet though. Maybe I need to generate the karma of uniting meth-mom and child consistently before the universe gives a shit about me staying up all night dicking around in a garage or hyper-reading about some new topic. Maybe I need to introduce myself to the me in other people so the rest of our experience can get a better bite out of what it is I'm actually trying to do. Maybe I fell prey to that insatiable ego metric that's glorified some level of improprietous indulgence I've dressed up. Who's to say? All I know is I have money again, don't feel like I've missed out on anything but sleep I don't require, and every inch I perceive for inserting my brand of engagement with the world, I take. I take it honestly and viciously, for better or worse, because I believe it's the best thing I can do for myself, and, if I'm right about consciousness, the best I could do for you.

It isn't based on some high-minded or convoluted religious principal either. It's just a series of questions. “Do I like me? Do I see a way through? Can I calculate the result? Is the alternative worse? Do my predictions come true? Am I open to feedback and contradiction? If I died today, would my project stand on it's own?” Overwhelmingly, I like my answers to these questions, and essentially never is someone willing to contend with the work it took to get those relative answers. Jordan Peterson has a consistent line about not saying things that make you weak, and when challenged about why he fears weakness, he explains that it corrupts you and turns you into something shit. I remember what it felt like to feel weak. On my worst, horribly phrased or deliberately indignantly picked word-choice day, don't feel weak. Any weakness in my writing is for its incompleteness, not disingenuous deception.

I think I'm gonna sit. I'm not gonna buy more stupid toys. I'm not gonna go out of my way to eat out more than I regularly do. I'll hit that overtime as it seems appropriate, but, I'm not kidding, the psychological shift of constantly calling yourself old really makes you reconsider exhausting yourself in service to “stupid shit” for more money than you can responsibly allocate in limited windows of free time. The “pretend it's not 50 steps” next step is make the house livable. I'm still of the mind that if it cost me everything but the gas money to get me to and from my next task, I'd pay it tomorrow if it'd be done tomorrow. It'd be the first attempt at calling something “home” since the ease with which I could fall asleep at my grandmother's house. Then seems the time to contemplate if I want another room, or deck, or to install a pool, or shed etc. Will you all promise to like and share my Insta pics as I refine and define my space? For the sake of us all, that is.

[749] Unjust Hearing

This is just going to be one of those nit-picking blogs about what I consider lazy word choice. A response to one of my statuses from a new acquaintance has stuck with me, and I want to stop thinking about it. You should be bored already, this is one of those “extra for me” kind of digressions.

Certain phrases come up that seem to immediately betray what's been said. In this instance, it's the tag “just saying.” It usually comes after someone thinks they've made a kind of colloquial truth point or mom-esc “told ya so” notion. It's really a very weird thing to employ because it seems to try and do so much contradictory work at once.

Consider, aren't we all, always, just saying? I'm just writing. But, of course I'm not. I'm scratching an obsessive compulsive mind's itch. I'm disagreeing. I'm “arguing” and picking apart. I'm reflecting. I'm hoping to convey a message that I'll understand now and into the future, and hey, maybe someone will gain an ounce of utility from. “Just saying” seems to desire to be let off the hook for all of that.

Surely one should respect what they say, no? Often there's an intention? I'm not saying the average cliché adopter and pleasant appeaser are mindless without their throwaway safe sentiments, but would they deny they had a goal in mind when they employed them? “Oh, you know, life's not fair!” Depending on the tone either trying to make light and or silence someone from carrying on. “Can't we all just get along?” Everyone's smart enough to know the question wasn't really asked, but the desire for a quelling of hostilities is there. How dumb would it sound to put “just saying” after something like a common cliché or aphorism? “You can't judge a book by its cover, just saying.” “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, just saying.”

Just saying is meant to downplay. It's kind of attempting to avoid a perhaps biting tone you actually feel. Just saying protects you from your angrier-than-you'd-let-on self. You've no need to skirt past something in the examples above, they exist to do a certain amount of work for you already. “Just saying” becomes misplaced and inane redundancy.

Yet, I think it goes deeper.

If you take a particularly “deep” or philosophical approach to the nature and power of words, you get an added layer of drama. You said something! That's something of a miracle. You put your voice into the mix and tried to build something or tear down something else. You entered the war of words and ideas. Was what you said “just?” The very nature of speech at this level is divine, so what's left to be said about it is whether it was divine fuckery or divinity worthy of worship and emulation. Of course, not a single person in a regular reasonable discourse is engaging this way, but again, this is for me.

My answer is almost always and certainly “no.” When you use “just saying,” I think you betray yourself. I think what you wanted to say, and what came out, don't match, so you don't give the person you were “just saying” to the respect to “just hear” what it is you actually wanted to say. In the example that was used towards me, I immediately thought of a dozen ways to “fight” the particular point raised that was just being said, but the human in me wisely figured out it wasn't worth it, and lazy or ill-conceived retorts can be dealt with, well, later (now) without necessarily implicating or breeding bad blood. (He said pretending no one's ever told him “NO ONE WANTS TO BE A BLOG!”)

It occurred to me that I have practiced, so hard, being sensitive to words and ideas coming from me that are ridiculously suspect and bullshit, that my normalized radar is set to reflexively and viciously attack any degree of bullshit I catch a whiff of. I write things as a series of individual sentences I could more or less defend, maybe not so much drunk, but way more often than not. I speak from that quasi-indignant gutterally honest place, particularly when I'm not primed to be pseudo-professional about something. As a result, insincerity, lazy catch-alls or throwaways, or general placations of a moment I've no real patience for. If you disagree with me, strongly disagree with me, and then be willing to get lost in the woods. If you don't, which usually it's a measure of either not really disagreeing and speaking too quickly, or it's not really caring and pretending you did, then I look significantly less like a pedantic dick, and more like someone who has a problem in which you've contended with his method of best coping.

But, after all, I'm only just saying these things. Who's to say if I believe them, or if they reflect a degree of emotion or lack thereof. Why did I bother? My mind was just saying some formulation of these words to me endlessly for the last day or two. Can't we just dismiss this all since it was just said and had no other impact or reason to respect there was a mind suggesting intentionality? We can all offer one or dozen things we may or may not believe in and walk away nonchalantly because where does it all go anyway and words are just weird.

Really, I'm just saying.