[764] Placeholders

When I'm working this hard to avoid writing, I guess I have to start. I think I kind of want to talk stupid. I also think I want to make that stupid talk analogize to movies and songs. (Neither of which I ended up doing?...)

I've been thinking a lot about relationships. I glance at my blogger page and see the tag “relationships” is 8^th from the top of 427 tags I managed to pull out as mild coherence reference points in my usual blog soup. They mean a lot to me, but apparently not as much as Jordan Peterson, though they're tied with Obama.

For the longest time, every single conception I had of a relationship was about what I could get out of it. Maybe I wanted to be friends with dickhead kids because I wanted their power. I could play the ethical know-it-all in school because of the attention and accolades. I would garner a certain type of crowd to create a certain kind of fun or that could be controlled in specific ways. Basically, I didn't simply “not understand” relationships, I didn't have any.

That isn't to say people didn't try to relate to me. My general nonplussed demeanor or mild excitement at mostly-playful delinquency many depressed and “finding themselves” people are consistently drawn to. It's easy not to judge someone you're not invested in. And people, whether they're comfortable admitting it or not, like when the confident person filled with praises and gifts for them shits on everyone besides them.

That was a big part of my dialogue in my romance language regarding friends. They were “different” because of some ill-defined disposition that could tolerate me for longer periods than most. To be sure, I still think this speaks volumes, but I think I was willing to give out too much credit, and I was doing it at an unfair expense to my own self-conception. I wanted actual relationships. As such, I allowed other people's stuff into and onto mine.

Other people, for as much as I don't generally like them, can be something of a huge motivation. There's people who self-sacrifice in extremely unhealthy ways, and people who do for others out of loads of guilt or fear of themselves. I genuinely want to reward people I consider persistently better than me in some aspect of their life I'm not doing terribly well at improving. Perhaps even better said, there are people with qualities I find as equally valid and important as and I hold, but I want nothing to do with behaving like them. Arguably, given how actively I've sought to cultivate my crowds, words, and direction in life, that's basically everyone.

Here is where I think the word “unconditional” comes up. This is around the space people start to throw out the stupid love word. Unconditional, of course, doesn't really mean unconditional as much as it signifies a kind of persistence and determination through what are hopefully healthy and manageable levels of shit. It's the divine standard by which to set your own inadequacy watch. It's the kind of irrational place a parent may occupy in service to their serial murderer son or wife's devotion thrice beaten a day year after year.

That kind of place seems to pair well with irrational pride. The more you are unduly boastful about something you don't understand or don't deserve, the likelier it seems you'll go down with it. To simply call it “ignorant” betrays the very real motivated energy it conjures in you. The “deeply personal” feeling is everyone's scream for things to matter in a way that transcends the ups and downs of their emotions or tumultuous lives.

In that sense, it's not “irrational” for your stomach to drop when you look at a picture of someone you care about who's gone. They were more real to you than you have the words for. Their impact could have made you feel in ways you'll never experience on your own. Sure, those feelings are playing on survival instincts and deep-rooted fears about the tribe abandoning you, but we're also intelligent enough to extract a greater ethos and example who's death we're allowed to mourn as well.

That's the “heartbreak.” It's not any one person and what you did or didn't say or the details of some regrettable fight. It's the timeless example you thought meant something “special” proving otherwise. Or the proud presumption you have the capacity and wisdom to know what example that relationship was really setting. Or the selfish resentment you have for the work it takes to remain vulnerable and honest. Or the pain of knowing you were working hard, unsure of towards what, to death, conscripted into a cultural fairy-tale.

I miss my relationships that went bad to the extent I allow myself to forget what got them started to begin with. I long for days of old when I pretend I made the mistake of pulling a trigger I never intended. Relationships need people willing to discuss and respect each others' decisions. This is as true between you and every insane-but-savable Trump voter as it is you and those difficult friendships or relationships that blew up for, probably, wholly ridiculous and nonsensical reasons. Check the record, I've never said, “I'm done talking about this.”

My best relationships aren't just time spent, but people who seem to respect that the time we have is limited, and the person in front of you is all you're going to get of them. My deepest sense of connection is when I allow that sentiment to embed itself into my moment. When people talk about things like “no expectations,” the wrong and lazy way to understand that is as the shirking of responsibility. No expectations needs to be making a plan, while knowing you can't control the weather. It needs to be something akin to that AA mantra about having the wisdom to tell the difference between things you can and cannot change, and then drilling down on how or if you really want to. It's me knowing I could blow thousands of dollars getting nowhere trying to create and be independently wealthy, and can only expect from myself to act as well as I can to the extent of my knowledge and ability.

That's the kind of leeway it gets easier to grant when you're older. I'm still a top-notch shit-talker, but if my first impulse was to roast everyone at the office, dear god. As life has felt both more and less in my control, I'm not so quick to throw people's baggage into their face. I still think I prefer to relate in that kind of “mean because I like you” space, but I understand I live in the wrong place for too much of that. I want room to “fail as a person” as much as anyone else. I'm significantly less apologetic or insecure than what's normal, statistically, but I don't want to believe in lost causes, thinking we'll cobble together some misshapen gluey Popsicle stick existence together.

I'm not sad people who want to leave, leave. My first drunk instinct isn't to blow up ex's phones. I don't think I'll create the same (it'll only get better) magic of parties. It bugs me to think that I didn't matter to them as much as they did to me. That my kind of “fucked up” is “too,” but what I accepted as them presumably only someone better than me could really understand or they could bother with in perpetuity. The things I like about them seem to lose out to the things I hate. It's parts of them I think they hate as well, but only they're allowed to suffer them on their own. Their depression wins. Their insecurity reigns. Their conspiratorial gossipy child runs amok. I don't end friendships in screaming and pissing matches inventing a dozen explicitly untrue things to say about you before never talking again.

The things people use to lament me are the things I take pride in. I like having worked for my views and methodical needling down on things. I like being sexual and fighting jealous impulses. I like cussing, and being blunt, and “rough” messy friendships where everything is at once a crisis and immediate celebration that it will all still be over soon enough, so relax. I like knowing what part of the imperfect whole I'm getting more comfortable accepting, and discussing what needs to change. There's a gigantic hole at the center of how we conceive of each other as “right” or “the one” or “best.” This isn't to dismiss people who's styles and experiences mesh more than others, but it's to allude to a lost spirit of entanglement. The kind that happens when “what if you can't get divorced” or “this child is yours forever” enters the picture.

I'm still celebrating. Every forgotten name from my parties frequently lives on in the spirit they conjured in me. Every lost friend or girlfriend occupies at least words on the page, even if the swirl of their influence will never fit neatly into a waffle cone. And I'm still working to create even better and refined circumstances to build the fleetingly small amount of relationships with impacts worth considering and preserving indefinitely. That's the kind of friend I want to be, and misfired regrets over people less willing than me serve no one and never recognized me to begin with. And I'm just the smallest part of everything else we're missing.

[763] Unwritten Rest

One of my favorite free things to do is play with my Personal Capital finance management page. When I think I've spent some exorbitant amount on something I shouldn't have, I expand the dates and track the context. That expensive meal? About $5 a day on average. Wasting money on a gym membership I rarely go to? Less than .05% of all my expenses over the last 2 years. $23,000 towards rent and the big catch-all label “home maintenance” over the same period? Money I'll never have to spend again once I'm done.

 

I like to remind myself as often as I can how luxurious a life I lead no matter how hard I've worked or what I aspire to in the future. I didn't work myself to death in my 20s, and I think it speaks to why I had someone recently guess I could be 24 after I shaved. But now my thoughts are shifting into the kind of mind space I might be able to inhabit. I've craved that kind of security to “not have to think” about things. I wanna know if everything burns down, I've got insurance. I want to know that “retirement” will be a kind of choice and not desperate negotiation. I want to be the friend or family member who has that “secret” ability to swoop in and remind everyone that we have it better than the majority of the planet.

 

More than any degree of further personal gratification though, I want to go back to world building. I want to be able to have the freedom I had in college to cultivate environments and projects that I can plug people into. I want to compel by my increased access and expression verses being a desperate pitch-man walking a delicate tightrope about implausible futures. I want the freedom to fail, and I've materially already paid for that freedom at this point. That means, a driveway will be needed, but it's not a requirement to survive. I can paint and beautify my house, but it's not like I envision judgmental house guests particularly soon.

 

I talk pretty flippantly about how “long” it took to get to this point. I act like I didn't get an enormous amount of free time and experiences with things in the intervening years. For better or worse, I still enjoy knowing a little bit about everything. That's a luxury and hobby I've been able to engage in basically nonstop. I've more playthings and distractions than most would ever engage with in life, let alone by the time they were 30. I feel I've got a hard-enough fought middle ground environment that lets me appreciate what I have while not being naive about the power and difference money makes to your disposition and prospects.

 

This is a thing that irks me about watching YouTube videos trying to compare and contrast opinions on haves verses have-nots. The poor person inevitably takes solace in some personal characteristic of theirs or sense of family that “would never change” no matter the amount of money they had. The rich person makes some wholly unaware comment about how frugal they are in not buying something like a drink after arriving at Chipotle in their $100K car. I see a sense of denial and ignorance in both mindsets that I hope to avoid as I start to express myself differently as a result of my hopeful freedom.

 

They say money exacerbates you. I feel in recent years I've been brought to a relative heel, but I could see me slipping into some form of arbitrary nouveau hood-riche dilettante. I have something of a humanitarian-esc spirit and would find it great to create something that was sustainable and genuinely helped “things” and “people,” but on the same token, I've become several degrees more removed from my feelings of believing in what I can change, how, and the indefinable impact any one person's perception of it may be. One can remain skeptical if this is my attempt to run away from what will arguably be my increased responsibility to “the bigger things,” or if I actually feel that way and won't give a damn after I get mine and my circle is taken care of.

 

That was a big motivator in thinking there was any intention to reach beyond. “My circle.” Who's in that? Me and Byron routinely joke about how we can't seem to work together on a shared goal and mostly glean tag-along benefits from our individuated lives. My dad's in my circle. I stopped being so gushing in my “all of my facebook friends are the REAL MVPs” nonsense. How much do I want to contribute freely towards instead of seek to employ or exploit? My sense is it's a fairly smaller ring than the past. Keep the supply of goodwill low to increase the demand, like any emotionally manipulative parent. Because isn't that my angle? I've had enough middle-aged women inquire about my prospects for having children, implying my fatherly quality I assume. Will my fatalism regarding relationships usher me into the kind of surrogacy Byron maintains over his charges?

 

The fact that this specific change has happened so “slow” is not a testament that everything needs to be that way. That's the thread I'd hate to lose which I consider an important part of my personality. I still want things fast and to happen over-night, no matter how physically trained I've had to condition my body to not meltdown over them not doing so. I want the “empire” tomorrow, even if it takes next year. I want my experimental businesses to be branches off of every paycheck that would have otherwise went towards rent or car maintenance. I want to hang out tomorrow, not in six months after my floor is insulated and I can flush my toilet. The walls continue to come down. The “excuses” for as valuable and reasonable as they are, will be gone. And once every one of mine are missing, I'll be coming after yours.

[762] Fisti(n)cuffs

I'm about a half hour away from the end of BlackkKlansman, and want to take a moment.

I occupy a weird space. To be sure, unless the person my mother told me she cheated with was mixed or black, and I'm not actually my father's, I'm not actually black. A large proportion of black people in my life have said things like, “You're darker than my dad,” or, “Nah, you ain't white,” or “I'm so confused by your skin,” or “You know you my nigga” alluding to a kind of empathy with “the struggle.” As such, I've always felt a kind of solidarity and awareness that I've certainly occasioned to ignorantly betray. No less, when I go to the symphony, giant white crowds of very comfortable rich people make me uncomfortable in a way “being the only white guy” at a black friend's Thanksgiving does not.

That baseline reality that seems to permeate black culture is precisely what I gravitate towards in storied depictions of that struggle. There's something deeper about the language, the danger, and nature of the consequences in this movie, just like there's brilliant dialogue and entire worlds to chew on in a show like Dear White People. You can't shy away from things and exist as a “real” black person in this country. People are out to kill you for dumb-ass reasons and you are disproportionately affected by racist policies and a history where you're considered inhuman.

It's that deep hatred that can't be escaped. It's the pride and perpetual insistence of a damning and degrading narrative. As a purely intellectual question, I'm baffled at how anyone could be so sure and so loud about anything, let alone that degree of hatred of someone because of the color of their skin or how they dressed or talked. As a person who's been at the receiving end of someone's sheer irrational hatred and ignorant pride, perhaps that's the kind of desperate and low place real people connect with across differences.

I understand hate. I understand how much work it takes to fuel flames for people or a world that disappoints you at every turn. I understand the stress and headaches. I understand that there will never be enough words or screaming matches to account for how full a heaving chest feels when you want to obliterate the oppressive force, and yet that force never leaves. I've said I've wanted to kill things or certain people. I felt relieved the day Scalia died, naively enough. There is an immense waterfall of hatred spewing from as many corners as you choose to look.

Here's an example. I recently picked up a washer/dryer combo from Coatsville, IN. The guy was nice, a kind of outdoors man's man. We shoved that thing on the hood of my car, I went to pull out the steal of $100 to give to him. He hands $40 back and says he's a Christian, he's just happy to see it gone, and that “I don't mean to sound faggy, but do you mind letting me know you got back home safe?”

What do you call that? Complicated, to say the least. Is this the kind of Bill Maher “house nigga” comment, but for gays? Do I think this guy's disposition would have changed wildly if I got out of my car with a lisp and said I worked in something he considered perverse as opposed to child welfare? He literally gave me a discount on what was already a steal. He put out to a stranger that he cared that I got back safe. Do we call it a deep abiding hatred for gays, or a confused cultural aversion to something he doesn't understand? Do we react by ridiculing and sanctioning?

I understand hate, but I've never been proud of when it hits. I don't brag about the relationships in my life that have managed to end terribly. I don't routinely work in to conversation how insane my mom is, how shitty the conversations with ex-friends have went, or persistently espouse some level of violence towards all of the people in power I legitimately think are trying to kill me each day. For me, these are incidental feelings of being mashed up with people we barely ever understand or are given an opportunity to work productively with. But then it seems it's one thing to understand your own capacity for hatred, and another entirely to forgive it. And god forbid you practice apologetics.

One thing I persistently worry about is that “impulsive” decision to break something that feels fragile. I want to get it over with. I hate the anticipation of betrayal. I hate the idea of putting yourself out there and believing in something while someone else was just waiting for their opportunity to flip. Hatred pragmatically addresses that too. It preemptively blames people before they get the chance. You get to emote all over the place and proudly profess cathartic rage for all the “others” and “idiots.” This is about as close as I can figure in describing the thinnest of lines between hate and fear.

Fortunately enough, I've spent enough time writing that I don't walk around like a ball of rage anymore. I still pretty fluidly claim to hate things, but not in an obsessive and deeply painful way. All the tragedies of conversation I've neatly packed into blogs or examples. All the dreams stalled or things stolen occupy intricate webs of justification and pithy perspective. My fragile sentimentality is reserved for brief lucidity during infrequent intoxication.

How do you contend with hate? Is it embodied in the all-encompassing abstractions of identity politics and storied victim-histories? Is it individual instances of poor judgment more or less spurned on by a deep abiding racial or sexual hatred? Is it the general lashing against all that makes you afraid and that's hard to understand? A call for peaceful protest or truth and reconciliation isn't to deny these forces or their consequences. Asking for the conversation and the acknowledgment of pain is not an encroachment on freedom or rights. The effort in life should be towards mellowing of that hate impulse. The dialogue should be calling it out for what it is. And people who are actually filled with hate need to be reminded as often as they can that that's what they're full of. That's the face of their “Christian love” or “purity of intention.”

Stay cool, my brothas. We're already dead. Some of us just know that a little more than others. And everybody's terrified.

[761] No Problemo

I'm looking for a problem.

Usually when I start writing, there's something pressing. My head is posing a problem. The mash-up hasn't turned into a brilliant display of abstract art only I can decode. Increasingly, I'm finding it hard to figure out what's on my mind. I'm no doubt still thinking. I'm still pressed to do certain things or maintain my principle framing of issues. But, it's changing.

My singular focus for the last 2 or 3 years has been to “settle” my land. I'm literally a few hundred dollars away, and for all intents and purposes my mind considers it done. What's my biggest indication? I've went and seen 2 concerts, went out with friends 2 weekends in a row, and didn't think twice about fixing my car at the same time I bought the supplies to finish up the bones of the house and labor. I eat out nearly every day. I'm buying things like belts without metal so they'll stop fucking with me at the detector when I go into court. I'm deferring funds to preference and prevention.

The nature of my overarching problem isn't to establish an inexpensive place to live from which to spring forth all of my creative endeavors anymore. Now I get to pick and hopefully balance. Now I get to wait for sickness or an accident to bleed me dry, except, if I can stave it off long enough, I'll also have insurance. I'm eking over the edge of “hood rich” status, after what feels like a lifetime of making the joke, and I'm looking off into the abyss.

I could try and make a problem out of my past. No old person finds you interesting when you do that, and no young person is smart enough to grasp why their current behavior will make them feel like you soon enough. I could complain about the price of equipment or paint as I refine the grounds and move from “survivable” to “humble abode.” I'm already starting to micromanage some of my social behavior. I'm realizing that 25-30 “this is my life in the service industry” crowd are very different from “I got too tired working myself to death and being pretentious so I got a 'real job'” as I've described myself. I don't actually want to smoke or snort myself to an early death or get into a slew of self-destructive flings with line cooks.

I also don't want something necessarily approaching “normal.” I'm not comfortable making the statement, “If I don't have kids by 35, I'm going to (x)” as I overheard in the office about hitting the sperm bank if not knocked up by 30. I'm not above the practical considerations with body clocks nor do I root against single moms, but the idea that a kid is simply part of the calculus instead of the ethos or opportunity kind of creeps me out. I want my house to grow to fit exactly what I'm asking of it. If that includes castle towers and a room akin to a ball pit, but with pillows, so be it. If I end up raising some exotic animal who nobody realized were doper than cats and most dog breeds combined, I'm open to the possibility. But I promise I'll be okay if I don't have a lemur at 32.

I want to believe I've sort of “wised up” in taking the Jordan Peterson advice about having something stable before you try to be all creative. I've pretty much always known I'm not the starving artist type, either because I enjoy showering or am not that creative. The idea of living in a band van for months, or with 20 hippies in shared space we shouldn't enter while Venus is at 22 degrees has never rang as particularly appealing. I've always known I could “play-along” with the “adults” and do precisely what I'm doing now. I took it for granted the people I used to cavort with knew as much about themselves as well, and didn't think basement dwelling was the long-term vision.

I think perhaps my new overarching goal is to find where things meet. First, and I hate this, it would speak to the irony wearing a yin-yang for most of your life and never finding that balanced place. You know, the eternal underlying drum beat of existence kind of irony. Second, it's something that I think manifests from throwing yourself into competing forces. What's the middle ground, in these divided times, between my liberal hippie idealism, and my deliberate move away from an ignorant caricature of my neighbors just now? Surely something to discover.

But even more than that. I liken the kind of problem I'm looking for is the one rich people have to deal with. Athletes that grew up poor are often kind of dumb, but they know they want to “give back,” but their contributions, if not personally gratifying, do little to nothing to stem the tide of systemic problems. So what's their responsibility when they can no longer play or aren't getting as much coming in as they may feel needs to go out? Using your voice and platform remain important, but practically, how do we get rid of rich people guilt? When can we agree they deserve to keep it all?

It's not precisely in money, but this is the question I ask of myself when it comes to how I feel. When do I actually feel like I deserve happiness? I mean the kind of happiness that isn't derived from me making fun of something or having a wildly good time punishing idiots. When do I just get to believe in the relationships I've made or the friendships I want to preserve without the guilt that I'm going to say or do something to fuck them up? Does it ever reach some kind of “unconditional” stage? Is it a worthwhile or tangible problem to try and adopt to tackle? Is it something I can even address individually, or as my increasingly suspicion, through some roundabout reshaping of how I conceive of myself?

Back to rich people; they get addicted and abused. They're born unhealthy and with bad philosophies. They're people, exacerbated by their wealth. The point where that wealth meets survivable existence seems to be nearly out of reach. Do we selfishly hoard what we have and try to wait out disaster? Like any group or class of people, they seems to swim together in their own fog of similar pathology. The servers all drink together after work because they're all sore and angry and been through every kitchen in town and hooked up with every waitress that would have them. The rich all drink together because nobody understands them, the degrees of their brilliance or depravity, and after all, life is short, so enjoy it.

What do I aspire to be in acting or accessing like the rich via the methods of the poor? I envy the third-world areas who are getting to build their houses out of plastic blocks made by this Spanish-speaking company that has zero interest in internationally shipping me said blocks. Talk about a freaking cost and effort saver. Would choking down the aesthetics and emulating “moderate,” by global standards, entitle me to something else? Or is that just a stupid word altogether and we're literally, at all times, deciding what our balance is? I found the company, did the work, reached out, got the land, and every other piece that would go into getting my own Lego house, what else should I expect?

That whole mechanism has been fucked with, though. I'm not talking about my new starter-house on a little acreage at 22 with my college-educated job where I made $55,000 starting out. We've instilled a “poor dad” mindset in people. Live day by day. Buy things verses invest. Don't expect your skills or interests matter for shit because you're fundamentally taken advantage of. I've clawed my way back into asserting those interests in fact do matter. I don't want to be afraid of financial ruin and be subconsciously dictated to seek out as much as I can get before it all gets swept away. I want the kind of stability that comes with building the disaster into my life. I want to be able to roll in and out of anywhere.

The problem will be keeping it together after a series of too many wins. I'm going to fall under the same delusion that genuinely thought everyone was having as much fun as me at my parties. All the while I'm working out what to do next or who to include will engender resentment and insecurity. All the potential and excitement I'll have to be the sole cheerleader for and bearer of the majority of the work and direction. I'll say a million and one times what I advocate for and who I like and what we can achieve, and I'll watch as a shadow and insular mockery subverts my best intentions. And then I'll return to the same question, is what's been created worth what's being destroyed? Does this lie at the nexus of worthwhile pursuits and insights in spite of it all?

I mean, I'd throw the parties again.

[760] Half Breed

I really wasn't expecting to start writing right now, but I came upon a thought and can't let it go.

 

If I think I can, I want to.

 

I “struggle,” I guess, with why, despite everything I know full well I could or should do, and completely believe in my capacity to do so, I still kinda want things to burn. The feeling, in and of itself, doesn't feel like a “moral” proposition or question. I'm reminded of someone once saying you shouldn't be afraid of heights unless you want to jump. I'm not afraid of heights, per say, but there's a genuine intrigue I have about falling, or jumping.

 

I think about this with regard to the kind of company I sought to keep. Inevitably, if you aren't a certain kind of person, we clash. If I think I can clash with you, I want to. Whether we've been friends ten minutes or ten years, I'm rarely if ever wrong with my instinct that dictates to me how I could snuff out whatever it is we have pretty quickly. But it gets a little more complicated. I, obviously, don't just go hunting down the right moment or forcing the “inevitable,” right? Just like I don't routinely jump from buildings.

 

A simple answer is to do with self-preservation. You don't burn down your tribe. The more complicated answer has to do with what I recognize in you that I respect. Are you going to lose your shit in your ardent insistence that you have to misunderstand something I say? Are you going to shift gears after too much “wokeness” training and start pretending I'm just ignorant and hate-filled by telling the wrong joke? Are you going to allow some insecurity and years-long resentment build up into another fateful social media fight that leaves us never talking again? My general bet for those I allow on this page is, “no.” I like people who I can't provoke to the same degree I don't think you'll provoke me. I will die never seriously using the words “that comment went too far.”

 

To the degree I wish to understand or engage with you is closely tied to whether or not I want to fuck with you. I find it flattering if you think I'm interesting or funny, but my egomania already accounts for those things. The more “you” you actually are, the less I feel I need to do things to pull you out. Why do I want to pull you out? Why don't I just trust that whatever's being presented is to be respected? I suppose I dehumanize you as I believe you've dehumanized yourself, so I don't feel particularly guilty. I can respect a real person's boundaries.

 

People think it's like a self-defense or belligerent pride thing, but it's pretty much horrible to be right about people. I want them to be dynamic and shifting in loud, hopefully positive, ways. I don't even know why I want this, but I do. Presumably, we could use more “quiet and humble born and raised here with my normal job and wife I'd never cheat on” kind of stories, given the current landscape. But I distrust those depictions are terribly honest to begin with, and that reality by default is a wonky interesting series of things out of left field we try to ignore or downplay. I just saw Michael Buble and James Corden choke up and dance around discussing the cancer Buble's kid didn't die from. I take it the myriad ways kids can die, and the eventual death of their being regardless, wasn't considered before bringing them here?

 

And think about how many people would be enraged and “triggered” by that last line. Am I being “deliberately provocative?” Or do I think it serves no purpose to pretend we don't know what we're doing in introducing children to the world? The blind selfishness and fear is how you corrupt their little souls before they even begin as they adopt the same habits and fears that stir the shit as they get older.

 

I recognize every single day as a chance to swallow a little more reality and a chance to regurgitate it as something we can better contend with. We need to violently shake from our heads the idea that the mere mention or acknowledgment of a force in the world we find displeasurable means there's something wrong or immoral about us. Just like I can talk openly about my potential for destruction and recognition of your “triggers” and not make a game out of pulling them. Or, at the very least, invite you into the kind of game where you don't allow yourself to be subjected to them.

 

If you rehearse your imagination, you can play out all of the terrible scenarios in advance. An instinct for provocation can be trained into the same kind of boringness as approximating cliché personalities. It itself becomes one. Then you can choose to take the greater responsibility for the attempted anchoring of your disposition as it looks to map the world around it. Ride the waves of your influences verses splash in people's faces. This started on something of a tepid premise and “ah ha!” thought, and I picked it up a few days later about 3 paragraphs ago, so these are the kinds of whimsical places we get to go when I want this blog to feel done, but done not unlike a half shit.

[759] Snap

I'm writing because I don't want to. Specifically, I'm writing because I don't want to write about Trump. But it's worse than that. I don't want to write about Trump, but I don't want to write even more about a sense of conviction I've been experiencing. I don't want my Trumpian conviction of my perspective to win the reigns of how I steer my life. I don't want the totalitarian sublimation of my experience to occur.

 

I feel like I'm being hammered. Just yesterday I was the one actively seeking out every possible news article on every possible thing with their despotic and terrifying prospects for our future. The intellectuals I respect or who've had track records of getting things correct were all singing similar tunes. Mind you, they still are, but I was getting the brunt of the 20 page in depth interviews and hundreds of hours of their speeches. Even if you're just grazing the news landscape, you're probably familiar with the percentage of animals we've managed to make extinct, domestic terror is at an all time high, and in practically every “advanced democracy” some form of right wing nationalism or extremist position is setting the pace and agenda.

 

At work, I get to hear example after example of ingrained and proud ignorance do everything in its power to tear down the systems in place trying to help as well as their own stability. Little helpless kids I interview eventually lead to their parents which now get to act as visceral reminders that someone I've encountered or thought positively about is getting routinely abused or indoctrinated, and the best I'll have for most is a superficial plan that acts as a kind of prayer to incriminate deeper if they again fall into our net.

 

The all-encompassing nature of work is another kind of pound. Mind you, I don't describe the things I do above because I'm a “normal” person who's looking for an excuse to breakdown or loses any sleep. I can spend 7.5 hours a day, exceedingly easily, interviewing kids, talking to idiots, or bouncing between a courtroom and places to go to lunch. That's the point. I have my “distraction.” I have my “obligation.” I don't need to pay excruciatingly close attention to my teetering society because I'm going to be slowly breaking down an idiot's intransigence over the next few months who's doing everything in their power to lose their child.

 

How often can you really sit and think on what it means that this touted symbol of “freedom” and “Western Civilization” is being steer-headed by 25% of radical fascists doing irreparable harm? That the whole of the human experiment is threatened by those who, routinely, celebrate the chance to kill each other en masse or applaud those who are in fact killing each other already? We're under the spell of those so possessed of their...I struggle to even call them “ideas” as I think those reside in people with the capacity to think independently and recognize objective evidence. We're watching, not just the failed-to-learn lessons of history, but the active dismemberment of even the capacity of how to learn and protect or cherish to begin with.

 

I really, truly, believe that. I don't think this is an “election” issue. I think it's a group psychological one. I think it's a biological one. I think we've so massively outpaced our ability to cope and rationalize, that the deathly serious and violent irrational forces that killed or else are behind all of the proud ignorance. It's with that same blindness we charged into the battles that our ancestors came out on top of. We're not contending with “nationalism,” we're provoking survival instincts that are fully capable of destroying everything in their path. They're dying to prove it.

 

I find myself too actively cheering for “collapse.” I want ignorance to suffer, but my same exhausted sentiment is going to speak to that much more undue suffering for “the rest” who won't deserve it then anymore than they do now. Maybe we all don't deserve extinction, but the idea that we wouldn't vote, or pay attention, or stay awake at the wheel will not go ignored. Jordan Peterson phrased it brilliantly in another interview of his I watched recently. Reality has a way of snapping back when you try to bend and distort it.

 

Reality, so named, remains the word at the center of all of my interests. It's what I always hope to discover in writing. I was right, for example, that I didn't want to talk about Trump. I had to. His insane reality has beaten on my door from the moment I shut off whatever I was watching 2 seconds after the Mexican crime and rapists comments. The insanity of humanity I had a front seat for when I “debated” religious fundamentalists. I didn't need to take that class again. I also didn't feel particularly ignorant of what's physically happening in the brains of the “conservative” and the ideologue. It's a large pile of individually easy to understand forces.

 

What's the reality underneath? To me, it's the antagonistic force. The blunt force trauma of proud ignorance doesn't provoke me anymore. The idea that not only might I never be able to overcome it, but that it's going to obliterate everything I care about, that provokes me. When I have a fantasy land of little elves running around my chest working hard to dig deeper and deeper for a cavern suitable enough for my sunken heart, there's a problem. What's the larger pattern? If I hear the same idiot “reasoning” from the same “youth” just in a different language and a different country, what's my take away? When I see the same story reported about war-ravaged Africa or the Middle East, what didn't my parents get from the message when they were 30 that I'm supposed to in order to keep the flag of progress waving and flame of hope lit? What does it say about your prospect of “hope” when you find yourself empathizing with the feeble, yet communal, delusion of the faithful?

 

Faith is one of those words I've heavily lambasted. I define it as belief without evidence. The ability to trust in, not something simply “unseen” or “unproven,” but often demonstrably false. Faith is the “bless your heart” polite “fuck you” to life's otherwise terrorizing circumstances. Jordan Peterson has a different definition. He says that faith is believing in the “best possible outcome” from telling the truth. It's the conviction that no matter the consequences, you won't get a better one by delaying or distorting the circumstances. It's another of his ideas that's stuck with me for quite some time, because I think it's also something I deeply believe.

 

“My” truth lies in my ability to use as many words as it takes to talk around a sense. I'm made of the same incredibly dangerous and full of potential forces as every balls-out ignorant person I meet in life and on screen. I imagine myself in different hats attempting to mold myself to whatever crazy forces might show up at my door. I try to plan for navigating a whole host of futures I would consider less than ideal to downright terrible. I try not to let how I actually behave in the world manifest as an expression of my baseline hopelessness. It's true I will act in spite of it. It's true that I think the worst is yet to come.

 

I just don't know what more to do with it. That seems like the kind of epitaph on my living grave. “I don't know what else to do, so come what may.” I feel I'm sort of defaulted to a form of detached Buddhism or something; I'm “enlightened” by the prospect that my eventual death will lead to a cosmic balance to all of life's indignities. I'm at once entirely responsible for the world, and utterly detached from it. I'm a conduit for waves I can barely perceive but for their dramatic retellings in the labored voices of those drowning in them.

 

I have this problem when I'm bowling. You think this won't transition well, but hang on. When I'm “feeling it,” I keep my eyes focused on the part of the lane that nets me the most strikes. I have a little routine where I sit in the pocket and don't think about tripping over my toes or cranking my wrist incorrectly. Unfortunately, in some weird kind of way, in order for me to continue doing well, it almost has to feel like an accident or that I'm watching myself. I have to be deeply enmeshed in the song I'm listening to or conversation I'm having, and the strikes have to be an afterthought. My natural quasi-panic likely-disorder will kick in almost on cue the moment I start to care or “truly focus.” Perhaps you might call it amateur choking. Even when I think I know where to look, how to hold the ball, slide my leg, and prevent my wrist breaking, I don't seem to know what to do, and the “solution” resides in occupying my attention with “surrounding stuff.” The strike happens in the moment the ball leaves my hand. To take my mind off everything but that moment seems to be the relevant exercise in improving my score.

 

How might this scale? Is the fate of democracy won or lost at the moment you vote? Or, are there a million and a half other things that can be occupying your mind which ensure your vote means what it's supposed to? My disposition isn't mostly dictated by the insane and ignorant so much as it is the moment I choose to respond to them in the best way I know how after I've explored all the noise they seem to be creating around me. I don't need ideas I don't have to work for. I can't settle for “People are basically good” or “You have to believe” or “Just save one person!” It's always complicated. It's significantly more complicated than bowling a strike or keeping your eyes on the same arrow for each throw, right?

 

Again my mind is repeating the “underlying needs” line from my recent job training. Why are we at your door? Anyone can call in a report, but what's going on that you're not proud of talking about? Who might we refer you to so that we never have to come again? I have an underlying need. I need there to be meaning behind the things I do. I need you to recognize I showed up at your door, not the agency I work for. Better stated, I need to walk away with a perspective that transcends “It's just policy!” I need to know that your ridiculousness deserves what it's asking from me. I want to take away new windows into exploring the totalizing influence of proud indignant ignorance and how to engage with it a million different ways before the moment I have to open my mouth.

 

If I could fix it with a snap, it'd have to trigger something in me, not make them disappear. But like I said, I don't really know what else I should be doing.