I have a superpower. It's true. I have
something that sets me apart from the rest. Wanna know what it is?
You might already know. It has to do with mind control. I can't make
people dance like a puppet. I can't brighten their day with a subtle
linguistic or body maneuver. No, my superpower is more insidious.
You'd think it would be a consequence of “negativity” or me
touting my diligent pursuit of knowledge, but those are just habits.
My superpower is the ability to not just make people merely dislike
me or be annoyed. I provoke longstanding and downright hatred.
To ring in the new year, my general antagonism in the past played a nice reminder as to why I don't get along. I may have talked about him before, but a friend of a friend came out to visit maybe 2 years ago. We proceeded to get drunk on winery tours. This fellow had a story about his dad being unable to grow some plant, to which I responded, “Is he dumb?” The timing and tone was that of a joke, but, as a normal wretched person, instead of hearing it as a joke, he heard, “I think your dad is dumb.” These kind of distinctions are always of the sort that get us all in trouble, but me more frequently. To speak to the fickleness of his offense, 2 hours later sitting around a restaurant table, I switched gears and started asking in “earnest” about his time spent in Africa with bomb-sniffing rodents. The report from our mutual friend was that he had changed his opinion and decided I was actually great and maybe worthy of friendship.
This same person, through facebook algorithm-fuckery, had him and one of his acquaintances appear in my feed. I spoke against some downright illogical or destructive claim (think healing potions) to which he felt he needed to step up and defend his friend. He called me out for, in his words, “showering at the Y” and discussing my housing plight, both more and less severe, but still ongoing. I tagged our mutual friend in congratulations for finding a pet project with teeth, petty and disingenuous as he may be. That's the extent of our history. A day-drinking adventure where he got to highs and lows, and a facebook comment. Turn to last night, when I asked to tag along to his ex-girlfriend's house, I was denied. The reason being, he hated me, and had polluted the mind of his ex about the kind of person I am, and my friend didn't think it appropriate to test the polite face she might put on.
I'm consistently struck by how easy it is for me to find myself in this position. I don't have to steal, hit, or bring up a single thing about you personally, to be a kind of all-encompassing frustrating focus in the mind of someone. I've explored this enough to pretty comfortably say that it's never about a particularly off-kilter or dark joke or comment you made. I know in a very complex way most people's issues have as little to do with an “individuated me” as they do with insecurities and projections of their own generation. It's why I struggle to take it personally, no matter how demoralizing it is, when I can't play along in crowds deemed too sophisticated for my tenor.
I thought that I might be approaching these kind of scenarios in the wrong way. I must be hurting people. As such, don't I get to claim pain as well? Aren't I offended and scorned when I'm not invited? Aren't my feelings worth considering? Don't you just feel grossed out right now? Find better friends. Don't interject yourself into scenarios not meant for you. Enjoy your time alone. My current struggle is to literally embody moving away from “the masses.” This is such unbearably old news, the reasons I'm drawn back into it I can barely grasp.
When it's explained to me my impact on others, importantly, I'm never offered a way of contrition. I can never be forgiven. In order for something like that to take place, I'd essentially have to become a different person, presumably through traumatic brain injury or self-delusional spiritual revelation. My apologies wouldn't be believed, nay, haven't been. My asks for routes forward go ignored. My indifference to the bites and claps back are perhaps the cherry on the mountain of offense. How dare I not be phased! How dare I reconceptualize and breakdown my response, or lack thereof, into another whine session.
How does one get my superpower? I didn't come to it by way of nuclear accident. As far as I can tell, apart from being comfortable with a degree of obscenity I think most genuinely comedic spirits jive with, all I do differently is write. I take the time to actually observe the process of my being. I deconstruct and blurt out the pieces. This habit is universally hated save a few very specific domains. If you're going to be a psychopathic titan of your industry, parsing out precisely how you're going to do something lies at the foundation of your effort. Having an exacting sense of how and why is the heart of the most dominating structures society has to offer. I'm finding that in a social work job like mine, the dominating and explicit tone is a natural remedy for the abject chaos many I encounter embody. You don't get to be a crazy abusive meth-head in my presence, or else. You don't get to scream and railroad the conversation, or further interventions will take place.
I'm not getting to the meat of the hatred though. It's got too many layers. For some, they let things foment for years and pick some random instance to call crossing the line. That's the girls who fell for me that I didn't turn into husband material for. That's friends who, in lieu of a discussion about their relative debt and poverty and creative or collaborative ways to address it, savagely horsewhipped their hobbies and became overtly sensitive to a perceived critical tone where it didn't exist. Some it just takes seeing even the remotest confidence in yourself or how you go about the world to seethe at the idea that they'd be the one finding themselves while you presume to have figured it all out. It all speaks to that either/or ignorance where “realistic” is equated to “negative” and you're not allowed to voice (or even not voice!) something resembling the contrary. I've literally run this experiment in deliberately remaining silent or picking moments to interject explicitly affirming things, and a friend, unprompted, claimed “I bet he thinks such and such damning thing about what we're doing.” I fail before I begin!
There is of course something to be said about your reputation preceding you. There is considerably more to be said about a propensity to lock people into little boxes and treat them unfairly after you feel you've been burned. I feel wholly disrespected, judged, and explicitly hated by people who, when you break it down, I struggle to feel how they're justified even remotely for that level of response. It reminds me of when I had my Ipod taken in high school by an assistant principal whose car I subsequently planned to blow up. I still kind of want to, but are any of you going to get on board with that course of action? Does my lingering years-long irrationality deserve your respect and understanding? Don't you understand? He took it while I was doing homework in an empty hallway outside of my 2nd period class because I was so smart, I didn't have to go to school the whole day! The nerve of his targeting one of the best! Fuck his car!
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
People consider that line to be about kindness or charity. They don't follow it. Moreover, they don't take nearly as much shit as they give. You know what I would not hold against you? Everything you already do that I don't. AND YOU HATE THAT. That's the heart of it. I genuinely understand you as weak and fickle, and don't take too complex a route in explaining what that looks like. Then, I proceed to pursue my dreams, live like a king, and maintain the creative and demeaning edge that confounds and belittles. Even when I'm hurt or “offended,” I understand those as weak approximations of incorrect thinking. Even when you throw years of shared experiences under the bus, I detach and conceptualize, and pat your head and say it'll be over eventually. I own where I'm failing, or again, it's not that hard to understand what I can and can't control and you don't have any answers as to how to move faster or smarter. And arguably, you can't hate so dramatically that which you don't understand as something you're intimately familiar with. You know when you sound dumb. You know when you lied. You know what the apology should look like. But that would only strike another “win” in my column for the game I'm not even playing.
I make the same “bad” jokes about myself as I do you and talk about my own life in “harsh” terms. I take the literal most “private” and embarrassing things about myself and break them down. I can't stand when people invent things to hate me for, so I don't do that about you. I wish I was invited to as many things as I've put out invitations for. I wish people were offering me opportunities to save money and create and live sustainably. I wish I had a 3 page blog to read about every one of the people I wanted to keep in my circle (Bezos requires his top management to write essays). I don't want to be lied to, so I try not to look or sound like anything more or less than I am in the moment. When it's your turn, you ask me to be as facebook-promotional and Insta-famous and picture filtered and as “positive” as the donations I'm asking for instead of a birthday present. You want me to justify, not actually be justified. As long as the moral ambiguity of our actions can be maintained, we're all safe. Stop rocking the boat.
Fuck you. I tell myself “fuck you” when I feel I've sat and complained and not done enough for too long. I say “fuck you” to the idea that I can dwell on how hopeless it feels to be at the mercy of car debt, the weather, or a strained capacity to deal with the creeping rotten air between us. If I'm so bad and all I am is the rehashing word pile of things that either plainly exist and shouldn't be controversial, or sentiments that don't even register in the minds of the adults or Europeans in the room, maybe you're more dramatically fucked up than even I'll ever be able to speak to. You want me to kill you, because you're responsible for why everything's dying. The meth-head gets that, so please authority, sublimate me. You refuse to acknowledge the bullshit you're addicted to. You hide your shame like you're wise and capable enough to handle it alone.
There's never any one instance of “waking up.” “Being present” is standing to be counted for the eternal war over the forces that would tell your story for you. The fat people who wanted to lose weight started when they were genuinely inspired on a Wednesday in August; they aren't the ones rushing to the gym today. It pains me to think about what becomes of the person who never finds the reason to stop turning me into the enemy. It's pitiful to not understand hatred as a fear-ridden fluke from more evolutionarily dramatic times, and it's not a righteous platform for dictatorial policy. I'm not saying “it” or “you” can't get better, but you won't. And as long as you keep letting me retain the dialogue describing the ongoing consequences of that truth, you'll maintain it was my rules and my faults all along that destroyed everything. So be it.
To ring in the new year, my general antagonism in the past played a nice reminder as to why I don't get along. I may have talked about him before, but a friend of a friend came out to visit maybe 2 years ago. We proceeded to get drunk on winery tours. This fellow had a story about his dad being unable to grow some plant, to which I responded, “Is he dumb?” The timing and tone was that of a joke, but, as a normal wretched person, instead of hearing it as a joke, he heard, “I think your dad is dumb.” These kind of distinctions are always of the sort that get us all in trouble, but me more frequently. To speak to the fickleness of his offense, 2 hours later sitting around a restaurant table, I switched gears and started asking in “earnest” about his time spent in Africa with bomb-sniffing rodents. The report from our mutual friend was that he had changed his opinion and decided I was actually great and maybe worthy of friendship.
This same person, through facebook algorithm-fuckery, had him and one of his acquaintances appear in my feed. I spoke against some downright illogical or destructive claim (think healing potions) to which he felt he needed to step up and defend his friend. He called me out for, in his words, “showering at the Y” and discussing my housing plight, both more and less severe, but still ongoing. I tagged our mutual friend in congratulations for finding a pet project with teeth, petty and disingenuous as he may be. That's the extent of our history. A day-drinking adventure where he got to highs and lows, and a facebook comment. Turn to last night, when I asked to tag along to his ex-girlfriend's house, I was denied. The reason being, he hated me, and had polluted the mind of his ex about the kind of person I am, and my friend didn't think it appropriate to test the polite face she might put on.
I'm consistently struck by how easy it is for me to find myself in this position. I don't have to steal, hit, or bring up a single thing about you personally, to be a kind of all-encompassing frustrating focus in the mind of someone. I've explored this enough to pretty comfortably say that it's never about a particularly off-kilter or dark joke or comment you made. I know in a very complex way most people's issues have as little to do with an “individuated me” as they do with insecurities and projections of their own generation. It's why I struggle to take it personally, no matter how demoralizing it is, when I can't play along in crowds deemed too sophisticated for my tenor.
I thought that I might be approaching these kind of scenarios in the wrong way. I must be hurting people. As such, don't I get to claim pain as well? Aren't I offended and scorned when I'm not invited? Aren't my feelings worth considering? Don't you just feel grossed out right now? Find better friends. Don't interject yourself into scenarios not meant for you. Enjoy your time alone. My current struggle is to literally embody moving away from “the masses.” This is such unbearably old news, the reasons I'm drawn back into it I can barely grasp.
When it's explained to me my impact on others, importantly, I'm never offered a way of contrition. I can never be forgiven. In order for something like that to take place, I'd essentially have to become a different person, presumably through traumatic brain injury or self-delusional spiritual revelation. My apologies wouldn't be believed, nay, haven't been. My asks for routes forward go ignored. My indifference to the bites and claps back are perhaps the cherry on the mountain of offense. How dare I not be phased! How dare I reconceptualize and breakdown my response, or lack thereof, into another whine session.
How does one get my superpower? I didn't come to it by way of nuclear accident. As far as I can tell, apart from being comfortable with a degree of obscenity I think most genuinely comedic spirits jive with, all I do differently is write. I take the time to actually observe the process of my being. I deconstruct and blurt out the pieces. This habit is universally hated save a few very specific domains. If you're going to be a psychopathic titan of your industry, parsing out precisely how you're going to do something lies at the foundation of your effort. Having an exacting sense of how and why is the heart of the most dominating structures society has to offer. I'm finding that in a social work job like mine, the dominating and explicit tone is a natural remedy for the abject chaos many I encounter embody. You don't get to be a crazy abusive meth-head in my presence, or else. You don't get to scream and railroad the conversation, or further interventions will take place.
I'm not getting to the meat of the hatred though. It's got too many layers. For some, they let things foment for years and pick some random instance to call crossing the line. That's the girls who fell for me that I didn't turn into husband material for. That's friends who, in lieu of a discussion about their relative debt and poverty and creative or collaborative ways to address it, savagely horsewhipped their hobbies and became overtly sensitive to a perceived critical tone where it didn't exist. Some it just takes seeing even the remotest confidence in yourself or how you go about the world to seethe at the idea that they'd be the one finding themselves while you presume to have figured it all out. It all speaks to that either/or ignorance where “realistic” is equated to “negative” and you're not allowed to voice (or even not voice!) something resembling the contrary. I've literally run this experiment in deliberately remaining silent or picking moments to interject explicitly affirming things, and a friend, unprompted, claimed “I bet he thinks such and such damning thing about what we're doing.” I fail before I begin!
There is of course something to be said about your reputation preceding you. There is considerably more to be said about a propensity to lock people into little boxes and treat them unfairly after you feel you've been burned. I feel wholly disrespected, judged, and explicitly hated by people who, when you break it down, I struggle to feel how they're justified even remotely for that level of response. It reminds me of when I had my Ipod taken in high school by an assistant principal whose car I subsequently planned to blow up. I still kind of want to, but are any of you going to get on board with that course of action? Does my lingering years-long irrationality deserve your respect and understanding? Don't you understand? He took it while I was doing homework in an empty hallway outside of my 2nd period class because I was so smart, I didn't have to go to school the whole day! The nerve of his targeting one of the best! Fuck his car!
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
People consider that line to be about kindness or charity. They don't follow it. Moreover, they don't take nearly as much shit as they give. You know what I would not hold against you? Everything you already do that I don't. AND YOU HATE THAT. That's the heart of it. I genuinely understand you as weak and fickle, and don't take too complex a route in explaining what that looks like. Then, I proceed to pursue my dreams, live like a king, and maintain the creative and demeaning edge that confounds and belittles. Even when I'm hurt or “offended,” I understand those as weak approximations of incorrect thinking. Even when you throw years of shared experiences under the bus, I detach and conceptualize, and pat your head and say it'll be over eventually. I own where I'm failing, or again, it's not that hard to understand what I can and can't control and you don't have any answers as to how to move faster or smarter. And arguably, you can't hate so dramatically that which you don't understand as something you're intimately familiar with. You know when you sound dumb. You know when you lied. You know what the apology should look like. But that would only strike another “win” in my column for the game I'm not even playing.
I make the same “bad” jokes about myself as I do you and talk about my own life in “harsh” terms. I take the literal most “private” and embarrassing things about myself and break them down. I can't stand when people invent things to hate me for, so I don't do that about you. I wish I was invited to as many things as I've put out invitations for. I wish people were offering me opportunities to save money and create and live sustainably. I wish I had a 3 page blog to read about every one of the people I wanted to keep in my circle (Bezos requires his top management to write essays). I don't want to be lied to, so I try not to look or sound like anything more or less than I am in the moment. When it's your turn, you ask me to be as facebook-promotional and Insta-famous and picture filtered and as “positive” as the donations I'm asking for instead of a birthday present. You want me to justify, not actually be justified. As long as the moral ambiguity of our actions can be maintained, we're all safe. Stop rocking the boat.
Fuck you. I tell myself “fuck you” when I feel I've sat and complained and not done enough for too long. I say “fuck you” to the idea that I can dwell on how hopeless it feels to be at the mercy of car debt, the weather, or a strained capacity to deal with the creeping rotten air between us. If I'm so bad and all I am is the rehashing word pile of things that either plainly exist and shouldn't be controversial, or sentiments that don't even register in the minds of the adults or Europeans in the room, maybe you're more dramatically fucked up than even I'll ever be able to speak to. You want me to kill you, because you're responsible for why everything's dying. The meth-head gets that, so please authority, sublimate me. You refuse to acknowledge the bullshit you're addicted to. You hide your shame like you're wise and capable enough to handle it alone.
There's never any one instance of “waking up.” “Being present” is standing to be counted for the eternal war over the forces that would tell your story for you. The fat people who wanted to lose weight started when they were genuinely inspired on a Wednesday in August; they aren't the ones rushing to the gym today. It pains me to think about what becomes of the person who never finds the reason to stop turning me into the enemy. It's pitiful to not understand hatred as a fear-ridden fluke from more evolutionarily dramatic times, and it's not a righteous platform for dictatorial policy. I'm not saying “it” or “you” can't get better, but you won't. And as long as you keep letting me retain the dialogue describing the ongoing consequences of that truth, you'll maintain it was my rules and my faults all along that destroyed everything. So be it.
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