[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.