[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.