[781] He Is Dangerous

I have the “interesting” conundrum of wanting to do “social” things, but having no real desire to connect with any of the people involved. I've said about a million times I don't care for small talk, even if I'm well aware that it's the safest and most polite way to feel people out before you get to anything interesting. I'm not terribly interested in the details of my own background, what I do, where I'm from, and knowing you're from Pittsburgh when I won't remember your name until maybe month 3 or 4 I'm sure just dislodges something else I'd rather remember. It's not like something insidious where I dislike the people either. I'm just not interested in them.

Now, I know why this happens. I'm always in observation mode. When I'm “getting along,” without pathologizing it, I'm always in some kind of “manipulation.” For the sake of civility or getting you to move on to someone more interested, of course I remain polite. But, for me, there is no “test.” I'm not trying to find out if you're normal. I want to know immediately why you're weird. I want to know how you don't fit. I want you to be kind of off-putting and aware of it.

I think about this when I meet new “nice” people. The dedicated nerd, perhaps. They have a proper thing to study, and they're proud of their geeky hobbies. The several I have in mind are from my town's community band. They'll bond over fun facts about town or that function they played in together. I barely get, “Hello, nice to meet you” right. I kind of pause and smile and wait until they retreat when they realize I've no follow-up questions for them and didn't really want to answer whatever it is they asked.

I want to be in some kind of band though. I don't want to lose my chops forever. I want to see myself improve on counting or sight-reading. I don't need a 20 minute snack break, and I don't want to buy anyone else snacks. Of course, my only option is to roll with what's available, or pretend I could start my own thing. Just like I want to be “green” and learn all kinds of garden stuff, but damned if the hippies aren't a group of bizarre and high-strung disorganized ickiness.

It's always important to remember, it's not like I don't try! I don't judge. I don't make comments. I don't pick at or make jokes. I play along. I help out with whatever tasks I'm assigned. I play the...2^nd...part. My day job is to bullshit people into compliance. I can offer a stupid factoid about myself here and there. I can look you in the eye and smile as you tell me how long it took you to get back into playing music. But, as with most things, I'm there for incredibly selfish reasons, not so much to make friends. Any association that somehow bubbles to the top alongside my reasons for being there has to be an accident and afterthought.

I thought this would be a nice lead in to another thought I've been kicking around lately. I think I'm deathly afraid of “success.” There's 2 kinds of success. There's winning other people's games, and winning your own. I think a huge component to why I'm no longer in drug studies is that I was panicking about beating my own game. I genuinely felt that I was going to just start making money, doing my thing, and there was nothing else but to finally feel good about it. Psychologically conditioned me who always has to find something to push against couldn't handle that. Options? Real freedom? Bad tasting smug status updates? That shit is overwhelming in its very conception.

I don't know if I'll ever feel like I deserve to not be panicking. It's not that I have an ever-growing list of demands and “things” that will keep me thirsty. I just know when certain bricks are in place, I'm going to walk like my shoes aren't covered in mud. “Panic” doesn't describe the thought of becoming friends with someone new, as that's an old and boring pattern. But I do freak out that I could have something I'm so earnestly proud of I can't help but pour that enthusiasm onto anyone dumb enough to ask.

If I do make the “nice” people think I'm nice too, I do get a little...bendy. What could I make them do? What could I ask them for? I've played years-long games with people convincing them I'm one way over another. Not even insidiously, but omission is omission. That's who I am. I either need to be unable to mold you, or to stay away from you. When you tell me, with every micro movement of your face and body, that you're looking for me to signal in the ways “normal” signals, I've not only lost the respect for you that would keep me from trying to play with you, but I'm tempted to see how easy that shell is to crack. You know what kind of story people love? The redemption of yourself from their first impression. You know, I was just shy, or something.

I'd love to see what my face does throughout the day when I'm talking to people. I've been told enough times that I wear every thing I'm thinking on it immediately. I want to know if people are responding to an innate boredom face or measure of contempt that I've been cornered or made to play off a bad joke. I wonder if they feel bad by how I look at them because they can see how little they're registering in my eyes. Part of me would consider this unfortunate, another part says it's just a consequence of my built-in filter which I cherish.

The problem is that I don't meet people like me to tell me about me. I wow drunk kids at the bar occasionally by picking them and their friends apart based on the looks on their faces or how they talk. I never get the same courtesy. Or, I get the two-by-four to the face “style” that says something like, “YOU LIKE TO ARGUE!” Well, no, but I gather you've recognized I'm quick to the contrary or offer another explanation. Often, it's something akin to, “YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN EVERYONE.” To which the only response is, “Of course, because I'm honest about how much I actually hate myself.” So much so, that the hate dissipates and I actually don't, and that ironic conflicting confidence is hard to grapple with. It's a story told in my smirk, shifty eyes, and other ticks. Your move, Ekman.

There's some important things to be said about this condition. One, I don't think it's a bad thing. I don't, nor have ever wanted to be, friends with everyone. Two, as with most things I'm forever in my head about, as long as I don't actively try to hurt someone with my perspective and despite my temptations, I think it's perfectly acceptable to let people just deal with their internal conflicts, or disregarding, of your presence. It's not so simple as to say “I don't want to fit in.” It's that I've never fit in, no matter how good I am at playing along when I have to. The only other person properly off in their own world during our 20 minute interlude was the autistic kid staring at something on the bookshelf from the floor. Game recognize game.

I'm five questions away from turning someone around on me any moment. “How long have you been with the band? I envy how you seem to get those solos down so quick, what's your secret? I've got like 7 other instruments I'd like to learn back home, do you play anything else? If I made copies, would you want some? Tell me literally the 20 minute version of anything I could possibly ask you about because you're 50+ and are default interesting enough with a wealth of life experience.”

I've heard the phrase a lot lately, “peel back the onion.” That's more my kind of long con. I pock the conversation with certain identifiers in the jokes I make. I see who laughs the loudest. They start approaching me to be their buddy. I find out their kind of insecurity. If I wanted to take a social angle, I'd meet them out for too many drinks, and goad a kind of boldness about an incorrigible position or aid in breaking down some barrier. To stave off the resentment you put in distance as their sober and hungover heart reflects on what I MADE them do or say. So you ingratiate yourself towards the people they admire or get along with, and they begrudgingly accept that they'll have to play along because the evidence of your treachery took so long and made them feel so bad, it's easier to forget, and they'd never find the words to explain it if they tried to press the issue. It'll be enough to ride a rumor or nitpick the signifiers of the kind of person I am I was throwing out from the beginning that you no longer laugh so hard at.

All the while I won't know if I'm having fun, feeling nothing, or supposed to be playing this role as nothing else seems more proper or worthwhile. The world is run by people like me with higher-order delusions about their command of their perspective. That is, they command an audience, as do I, but I wish everyone to be in on the joke. I know what patterns I can repeat or how to break down different types after my cold read. To the degree I use their unwillingness to recognize and rebuke against them is something of a measure of my morality. That I'm so blatant a force for amoral destruction coming strains my sympathy.

Maybe I'm just scared of returning to the past. Making it fluid again. Convincing myself the “best” version of me is to not think so much and just pursue as earnestly as I did to whatever ends I demanded. Saying it out loud makes me certain that's probably wrong to do, but then, I've been stranded in the deep end alone for a while and don't know how much longer I'll keep kicking. At least you'll have all the facts if you bear witness to my trial.

[780] Daily Doze

It's killing me to hear all of the talking points and initiatives coming from the different TV spots new presidential contenders try to snag as they dance around.

What made me stop watching The Daily Show, sped up to twice the speed, with Kamala Harris as the guest, was a kind of “nexus feeling” regarding how slow it seems for even remotely reasonable things to ever boil up into the “modern consciousness.” Part of me feels like I've been hearing some version of the things these people have been saying since I was still in college. In 10 years, I'm watching basically the same interview, the same lack of added insight or capabilities, and the same smile and handshake and everyone self-congratulates that they finally decided to get “woke” after screaming and spitting fascism dared to tear it all down from the inside.

I was 16 days too late in sharing my “unpopular opinion” on reddit that Trevor Noah wasn't funny. It was massively upvoted. He's something of a poster child for new wokeness and representation. Of course, I'm in no way against people representing. The media landscape is incredibly varied and shifting. There's always something else I can watch if I'm unable to tuck my memories of Jon Stewart away, or even long for the kind of field pieces and wit that made me enjoy every correspondent in a way I'm unable to with the current lot. The point has so little to do with my estimation of “funniness” though.

“Woke” is not a perspective. Woke is a catch-phrase and reaction. Woke is a brand. Woke is having the script and imposed expectation that flies in the face of pre-perceived prejudice and of all reason or counter-argument. Therefore, as “noble” as you may think you're behaving, appointing someone to a position they can't fill because they're “different,” is not only it's own kind of disingenuous racism, but an abdication of responsibility and truth. Would Jordan Klepper have done it better? Are “these times” bothering to ask that question at all?

I'm tired in a new way. I'm tired of “advocacy” without evidence. It's so easy to talk. If I'm proof of anything, it's that I can endlessly talk, and for any one or two lines that may stick, the rest is the noisy fluff or incoherent and poorly phrased babble that arbitrarily decided to settle on something that makes sense occasionally. It's why I always return to what I've done or accomplished “lately.” Did I put my money where my mouth was? Are my itches left unscratched staring down my looming nails?

And in that regard, I understand pocking the cultural landscape with more and more representations. I understand trying to “normalize,” that which is more inclusive, understanding, and speaking towards long-term health and growth. To that end, one “failed” show by my limited opinion at least isn't causing undue harm. I can't help but to imagine the underlying mechanism keeping it in motion. What's the psychological underpinning making certain artists popular or shows start to trend?

Ridiculous and amateur as it is, in the pursuit of trying to keep a finger on a presumed pulse, I have no opinion on what college kids are doing or saying until that, also sped up, episode of “grown-ish” tells me “I even sank to facebook...” Facebook is where I go to get likes from the last 5 people who will bother to talk to me! But the monolith entity poisoning our news landscape and playground for “Russian trolls,” is the oft-discussed bane of existing coherently. The kids aren't having it, but enough moms, dads, and grandparents are.

There's surely always been a divide in the ideals of different eras, and now it's just all on display. It's hard to imagine being indoctrinated by FOX, but that shit is happening in a big way. It's hard to think that most of your life might be communicated through pictures and emojis, but apparently that's a bus that's forever left my station. I do feel like something of a “lost generation” type in that, I'm nowhere near social media ignorant, but I'm old enough to not give a shit and feel it lacking.

I once complained in a blog about not finding something “authentic” in the world of insta-fame and endless options. I hope to address that in what I can cultivate on the land. Grassroots and DIY can start anywhere, and there is no sense in romanticizing the past. I'm probably just overloaded with media in general. It's the largest portion of my world. I get the occasional time spent with a friend I haven't seen in a while. I sometimes have more than a 2 minute conversation with someone at work. I get the dressed-up lies and pleasantries from clients. The phony “we're winning, we're talking about the important things in a real way!” TV shtick is feeling all the more grating.

I barely see things I want to be a part of. Dance class is helping me get more flexible. The community band is way more about inclusiveness than growth and high expectations. The Green New Deal is wonderful in conception and spirit conjuring, though I struggle to think we're competent enough to do what needs to be done. What else is new there, but show, don't tell. I don't want to play basketball with co-workers. I don't want to pretend to workout at lunch with co-workers. I don't want to hit on lonely co-workers. I don't want to be out partying with college kids. I don't want to help the fruit-loopy hippies in their garden. I don't want to volunteer. I barely want to even go outside and see bands or performers I admire because I bet the money spent would feel considerably better if it went to building my garage or driveway than the memory of having someone I'm familiar with exist in my presence for an hour or two. It's not like I'll be going to the show with anyone. It's not like shared memories for the sake of them are really my game anymore.

I was contacted at 11:00pm on Thursday by a rich out-of-state, maybe country, student acquaintance asking me if I wanted to hang out that night or the day after. I said Friday would be best. I texted him after work if he still wanted to roll to let me know. He said he'd get back to me. He didn't. I was a brain-fart call in a likely-drunken stupor in the mind of a nice-enough guy I've drank with a few times. That's as on the nose as I could possibly describe where I likely exist in the minds of most people. I'm telling you, after the divorces, disconcerting weight gain, or survived terrible medical condition, I'm going to spring forth in the minds of the people from my past. I don't know what triggered my young acquaintance, but I bet a mild disillusionment washed over him in something they said. Or maybe I just wish that's the case so I can be right about the hole I occupy when the facade breaks down. We've all got to fit in somewhere.

[779] Talk Like An Angel

I keep repeating a line in my head. “It's evolutionarily adaptive to have an immense irrational confidence in everything you do.” I didn't hear it anywhere, but it's the thought I had about myself with regard to the different things I want to create. I started to think about religious people. The infinitely forgiving and uplifting spirit to justify or excuse away all hardship. Why is belief in something “higher” ubiquitous? It's the most likely scenario where you'll push through or reproduce in spite of literally all reason not to.

Attempting to discern the line between overbearing or undue confidence, and the only game reproduction cares about, is explicitly messy. How much is maligned “ego,” and how much is “perfectly fit” for passing on genes? Either makes more or less sense depending on what context you choose to adopt. A strict “naturalist,” who pretends to want to live by the rules of the jungles and plains will see the brash or boast as indicative of health and competence. A feel-good inclusive appeaser will consider the same person downright inhumane.

I find myself in this vein of thought when I think about what it might take for me to embody many of the people I interview. What would it take for me to just abandon all sense of responsibility? Where would I be when all I can do is point fingers? If I wanted to spur of the moment burn down my future job prospects for ever working with The State again, or erase any goodwill that might act as a reference, what would that place look like? Why don't I let my mechanism for despair and complaining win, finding every possible place to inhabit that makes it about something external instead of internal?

I make the shift into talking about my talents, ideals, or history. I also attempted, for relative to most things, a brief period of couching that mechanism in my associations and friendships. I thought about trying to physically sound out the words I hear that make me reflexively gag or angry. Then it occurred to me, I don't have to imagine these things. I already attempt to occupy that lowest of the low place psychologically. I've already sounded like these people during points of my life I don't revisit for fun. The next step, or slog, or stumble, are always me after I've spoken as if I've just been set on fire, or remember what it feels like when I was.

It might be another psychological protection feature, but I forget I exist “at bottom.” I'm always where I am after I've roasted in what I consider abject failure or someone else's hell. The series of failures are what each aspect of my current reality is speaking towards alleviating. The conservative living arrangement. The capitulation in my dress and manner to fit into the “real world.” The disposition that certainly doesn't remove the swear words, but greatly reduces them when I interact with other people who certainly aren't experiencing their highest highs (ha!) when I arrive.

I'm an extremely curious person by nature. Anyone who's watched what can happen to an animal who espouses curiosity for its own sake knows it doesn't always consider the consequences. Already knowing them doesn't stop the temptation from existing, anymore than trying to eat better means cookies won't call to you. This curiosity combined with a kind of resting anxiety and guilt; a guilt I'm ever-more convinced was beat/bred into me by my unhealthy and desperate society, means that things can go excessively well for me on paper, and I still want “more” or to “change” in some radical way.

I was told a lot growing up that “he's not stimulated enough.” I'd get bored and disrupt class. A combination of immaturity and genuinely needing a bigger challenge is arguably the same problem I have today. I'm a 30-year-old child for sure. I'm impatient and petulant and presumptive. I need the kind of challenges that allow me to get overwhelmed and tired verses frustrated. Frustrated is when you're given inadequate tools to fix something. Tired is when you're working through as many options as you can conceive or learn about.

At my current job, there's plenty of tools always changing and to be made aware of. But, and I predicted this, I'm normalizing it. I have a pattern. I'm repeating the party lines. Sooner or later, everyone's “big, dramatic problem” is a speak and spell combination of the “service” we should provide them, or the extra form or two I'll need to get signed in order to close and leave. I was already adept at jumping into people's lives and conversations before it was my occupation, so there's a diminishing thrill at seeing what new drama I'll be plopped into. I'm no longer curious as to the staying power of the scent from your cat's litter box.

My thing is to not go so far as to completely self-sabotage, but to start letting things fall through the cracks in order to build up a kind of “more complex” scenario I need to navigate. Maybe I'm a touch less on top of trying to hunt somebody down or record something. Maybe I take a little longer to get a report written than it should have taken. Maybe I talk myself out of the simple hour or so of overtime that would put me in a comfortable spot. It's a horrible strategy, but it speaks to an immediate need. It may analogize to people who become emotionally withholding in order to gain attention. “Notice me! So fuck this thing right here that doesn't need to be fucked with!”

The right layer of complexity is a deeper ambiguity combined with the option to do things the “wrong” way. There's relatively clear and consistent expectations for what it means to “ensure child safety,” and none of them involve playing it fast and loose with a disrespectful teenager as you alienate the soft-spoken appeasing women in the room, as I flirted with the other day. When someone needs a kick in the ass, I want to be able to provide it. When a situation involves years of perspective and subtlety or tact, I want that built into my organization, not paid lip service to in marketing meet and greets.

Another fairly consistent thing I hear is people appreciating my “focus” or “clarity.” I get immediately confused. If I ever felt like I had those things, certainly I wouldn't write so much. Then, as a natural consequence of spewing, the things that remain look like focus and clarity. After I explore that which I no longer have to imagine, it's not a real question my reasons or motivation. After I try to attack what I'm thinking or pick apart my behavior, the confidence to continue on as one thing or another is reinforced. The degree of my belief in anything I say or do is simply at the end of things I've yet to show how they fail.

When I reflect on having my own, humble, first approximation of a rent-free home base, every single time I talk about it, I can't make myself feel bad about a 45 minute drive. I'll just be watching TV or listening to an audiobook I would be wanting to listen to anyway. There are specifics to be navigated no matter where you live, and my unfamiliarity with country living is not tantamount to them being “worse” than what I've experienced in town with shitty roommates. Rock dust on my car, the children of the corn, and even some imagined hillbilly confrontation where I answer the door with a weapon all pale in comparison to the stress of “keep paying or be evicted,” or “can you please turn down the TV.”

When I discuss my disposition, I'm not just shitty for shitty's sake. You have to trigger pretty specific “I'm a shithead” indicators before I drop the veil. Did you know that you can exhaust your boss, sincerely, and without being unreasonable, when their instantiated pettiness or pedantry rears its ugly head? I can be more meticulous than The State and not break a sweat. That doesn't mean it's the kind of pissing match I want to be in, but it's nice to know it about myself and hold in mind when I'm trying to explain to an indignant addict that the “choice” is theirs in how we're going to proceed. My frustration is theirs, but they're imagining a fight can win, while I've realized and conceded the loss.

“Fail forward” is the kind of catch phrase for eventually getting to a place that people seem to envy you for. The most successful people always have the longest stories about all the shit that went wrong. In keeping with the intertwined chaos/order and probability understandings of life, I think it's something of a hard and fast rule. The genes that survive an infinite sea of failure were in keeping with the environments on offer. Our environment is a huge soup of people who will never figure it out without being compelled, for better or worse. “Society” is built on the exploitation and subjugation of many millions of intertwined things that are practically impossible to understand, and as such, provoke an extremely personal narrative about “individual liberty” or “sovereign rights” or “divine souls,” or maybe just the particular title, pride, and dignity you take from your job or familial responsibilities. This also speaks to the danger of adopting victim narratives, but that's a whole several blog discussions unto themselves.

I think this is why I don't begrudge people the things they suck at or whatever flaws they may identify in their character, and just hate the living fuck out of dishonesty. You're not the only one failing, infinitely, trying to figure out how to walk the edge, but you can be the only one describing the nature of your journey in wholly unhelpful and dishonest ways. This fucks up the larger empathetic grand narrative for the rest of us. This is why, try as I might, I never want to be on the receiving end of my own bullshit, so I try not to get lost or persuaded there's anything to be gained in doing less than relating my experiences as honestly as I can. Everything has the capacity to send you down the wrong path, especially if the person trying to sell you on it knew it was bullshit from the onset.

You can always come to ground. When I panic, I'll get to panic with a paid-off house. When I'm disillusioned, in theory, I'll only have to navigate it or explore options over the course of a month or so, without having to make too many last minute dramatic decisions to try and fix something. Importantly, with each new hole plugged over something to worry about, a new leak springs forth somewhere else. Thus, the goal has to be about how you orient your process, not merely that you've prepared a landing pad. Why are my finances always “even?” I want my money to be working for me, or go into building something, or speak to the enjoyment of good food or entertainment. My process is capable of sitting on reserves, but it'd rather be processing. The future I've built in my head costs more than I'm making now, and I simply haven't irrationally believed hard enough through all of the coming failure in order to achieve it.

As such, it's important not to tie your character to any one spot you may choose to acknowledge you're inhabiting. You're many places and can choose many more. You're also completely ignorant of the paths trending around you that you'll have to ride in spite of yourself. Don't let that be the fodder for losing the narrative of who you want to be. To want to be isn't irrational. Finding a consistent method for sustaining that want, spitting in the face of the irrationality, suffering, and randomness, is an impossibly difficult task without accepting the nature of things into your process. Maybe that speaks to the capacity for forgiveness. Maybe that's what they meant when they said, “Work sets you free.”

[778] Signal and Flow

Standard disclaimer for ones I think will be mostly random and an odd attempt to tie very disparate things together.

Shared depravity. While I don't recall phrasing it that way, that's often where my deepest connection with people lies. Jimmy and Gretchen in You're the Worst portray it well. There's a constant sort of joke made out of just how horrible you are on the inside, and the ways you can't seem to expel it from how you conduct your life. You think by making the conscious choice to open up or attempt to connect and build something “normal” or “mature” will win, but at some point, inevitably, you find yourself getting your dick sucked in the bathroom after goading yourself into proving a point about your fundamental absurdity.

There's both a wise and desperate point to be made here. The wisdom is that the absurdity is actually there and is as real and consequential as you on your best behavior. The desperation comes from feeling like a slave to it or being unable to account for the fallout when it comes out to play.

The most obvious example to me seems to be in looking at open relationships. I think it's dumb to think you don't want to fuck other people, even if it's rare, and just as dumb to think one person could possibly be all things to you at all times. You acknowledge your limitations and can potentially work out a system specific to your relationship needs and goals. When you're desperate to ensure a perfect happy picture or story related to your relationship is what's on offer, the enslavement by your other proclivities increases.

One place that I look for new ways to think about things is in science shows or documentaries. Some theoretical physicist has a way of understanding the world I'm never going to hear in my day to day. I heard the line, “Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.” In Quark Science, Kip Thorne explains that somehow the difference in how time flows is 1 second in 100 years between the surface and high altitudes, but that such a small difference is enough to account for massive differences in how we experience acceleration and gravitational pull. If you don't know what to make of that sentence, trust it took me several replays of the clip and attempts to word it to make it that far.

I take a much simpler point from it. Enough small over time means big. Evolution speaks to it. The reason things fall apart or get more complex are a build up, not generally a single dramatic event. Notably, because things are probabilistic and not easily predicted, you can't know what the complex iteration is going to look like, but you can make it trend a certain direction.

So take the kind of person you are. Is it one who avoids things? That can build on itself. Are you someone who white lies all the time? They're probably grayer than you think. I'm slowly eating my way into a heart condition I'm sure. The messy pieces of the life I'd like to be living are still scattered about my floor and yard and moving truck. You can't reverse the flow that's carrying you to more probable places in life that you had no vote on, but you can stake the ground at places that flow is going to have to bump into and work around.

This is why I look for voices and individuals. This is why I'm an active participant in trying to protect or dig up what my actual voice is in the sea of memes and complacency. This is why I'm happy to be “alone” and state frequently, “I have no friends” or am found to be annoyingly consistent in the things you consider wrong or right about me. Blogs are stakes. Relationships are stakes. The unshakable anxiety or condition your brain has been molded into is a stake, and it needs to be accounted for in the little ways it helps or hinders you every day.

It's only just so lamentable that I consider myself something of a chaotic and annihilating force. I'm not a slave to it, but I can feel its pull. I always recognize the boundary I'm always tempted to push. If I didn't introduce measures of chaos into my life, it would manifest in spite of me. Last minute steal finding a couple hundred pound engine hoist that needs to be transported in a wholly inappropriate vehicle for the task? Sign me up. Job that introduces me into stranger's homes routinely as we discuss whether or not their children require a different kind of oversight? A snore compared to the stress relayed by those frequently in and out of the field. An unjust ticket? I'm just emboldened enough to face my accusers, cops or otherwise, in court.

I believe it's from the kind of controlled chaos that our best versions spring forth. A certain degree of conservative regimentation is required to exist, but to flourish and commune, you need to find yourself on slippery boundaries. This is how lessons get instilled verses lectured and ignored. This is the field of insight that can find peace or motivation. This is where you can come to accept things “as they are” and decide what about the flow you can use, and what needs to be staked.

Chaos is by definition a threat to an ordered and understood way of doing something. It feels dangerous no matter how objectively real and in-built to the structure of everything it is. Therefore, it's avoided and denied. Act chaotically, you're wrong or bad. Introduce something new, and be prepared for retaliation. Look as though you can't garner the support or likes, and be presumed guilty, maybe they're not even sure of what, but damned if you're not guilty of it.

Consider the chaos of feelings that lurched for the “strong man,” if nothing else a stable archetype and cliché. Or how about the identity politics and “social justice” that wants to damn perfectly innocent descriptions of how you look, and paint them as an ordered list of blanket privileges and historical atrocities. One wonders if racism and its consequences were invented in The U.S. a few hundred years ago. How about the chaotic “media,” now a hodgepodge of voices spanning whatever you're looking at on your phone at any given moment, causing a retreat into safely held familiar beliefs or fueling biases via sympathetic baiting for your attention. Where should you plant your stake?

I think people simply refuse the obligation. I think a bashful dismissal of the charge to participate in a loud way against “small” points of corruption or failure are the reasons the world looks the way it does. Wars don't start overnight. Fascism doesn't foment in a vacuum. Inoperable cancer starts with a few cells. I'm 30 years old. I'm “old” in every conception I had of “old” people when I was kid. Already. It's happening, and has been doing so for 7 months! Things look as good or as bad as they do for every reason I chose to do or not do something in the days leading up to this moment. It only feels bleedingly obvious until you consider the amount of times you didn't plunge into the chaos to try and shape the world to look a little more like you'd prefer. Think of the chances you still have that you've already forsook.

I think to bond over mutual depravity is a kind of foolish game you play when you haven't really figured things out and you're under the illusion that you're responsible for writing someone else's story. When I simply count, the amount of my “friends” who were/are seriously depressed, lazy, self-involved, or persistent liars gets up there. This isn't to absolve myself of my depravity, but it does mean I didn't “surround myself with motivation and accountability” as the popular catchphrase suggests is a key to transforming your circumstances. I'm literally playing the same game I've accused everyone else of for years in peacocking empathy and “shouldering the burden” of ensuring those less well-off than myself are fleetingly safe and accounted for, and I still know, if not even louder, that it's not enough to sustain what I really am alone.

If everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, for me, that's dancing along an edge with injections of randomness and obscenity. Time has flown and been an utter dragging suffocation simultaneously, and the more I lose myself in the tasks rooted to “practically” make “enough” money, the more I feel things have slipped past me. It's the most kind of horrifying to think I could lose myself to the background noise.

[777] Full, Mental

It's not like I have to write every time I feel a little panicky, but when it seems to be coupled with a few other persistent thoughts and themes, might as well explore, right?

I keep thinking about what it means to “take something for granted.” The innocent understanding of it is just about not thinking about something. There's only so many things you can hold in your mind at once, so as long as your heart keeps beating and your feet keep moving, maybe your morning walk can just be about getting in the steps, and not an occasion to freak out about who's going to jump out of the bushes. Colloquially, it's the rendering of something or someone important to the functioning of your life as smaller or less than they're worth. It's someone feeling maliciously forgotten. It's someone abusing their position or resources.

As with most kinds of inescapable problems, I try to build it into my general behavioral framework. I don't know when you think I've taken you for granted, but I will know if I did or didn't pay you for your time or effort. I will know if I asked for a birthday gift, and had no intention of buying you one. To me, you can skip right over the grey of who you're hurting or who might hurt you by just being consistent and deliberate in whether or how you go about asking something from someone. You'll always need to, no matter how delusional any individual is about their personal sovereignty, and it can either be an honest exchange or gamble.

I'm hoping to exercise less and less the need to ask in the first place. It's a backwards thing to do for a co-mingled and aggregating species member. At the same time, the implicit survival lessons that got us to this point can no longer be taken for granted. It opens your mind, forces your mind, to consider things that you would otherwise never see coming. What happens if there's a flood and I can't escape the country for a week? What happens if the unknown unknown creeps in and threatens the presumed future? Whether you're at the day to day slog of the practical, or knee deep in your dream, there's always something coming.

I'm going to be relatively distracted and rehashing the arguments I plan to make when I contest my ticket from the other day. It was an unknown unknown. I didn't expect to get a ticket. I didn't forget there are cops or that you're supposed to stop for buses. My morning simply shifted a little, I left a little later, the traffic was a little heavier, and a variable I haven't been primed to think about in months if not years occupied fatal seconds. Grungy, dusty, beater-car me never got ticketed. Dressed down, new red with tinted windows and pea coat was matter-of-factly handed a ticket. Do we take for granted the sharp-dressed man sees the best side of everything?

I think a great source of panic comes from never forgetting that there's always those fateful seconds where things can go horribly wrong or amazingly right. People are starting to get their tax refunds. I always thought those were something of a myth, and now I might be able to actually be “evenly poor” like I had planned to be last week. That thought alone had me feeling generally mild-mannered and liberated earlier today. Then I started doing the math. I subtracted the credit card, the ticket if and when I lose contesting it, the pending labor that will almost certainly be 5 instead of 4 days, and the food I've yet to buy or things like floss and toothpaste I'm running out of. I started to theorize a little bit about which of the dozen projects I could put a little money towards, or maybe just go buy a few more pairs of work pants.

The poor person in me knows the money is being targeted. If it doesn't go to something that makes some kind of sense, I'll get pulled over again tomorrow and be out that much more. If I try to sit on it, I'll get a knock on the door from an uncover debt collector a dentist from 4 years ago decided to settle old scores with. Some new tax or problem or supplies will be absolutely required, and I better get used to the taste of recently thawed and dry chicken. The money is always leaving, as a poor person. The concept of “investing” is a nonstarter. The idea of “passive” income and ever having remotely enough time or the resources to create something new or build up enough credibility and skill to make bank off your brain will never happen.

This is the point I never want lost. I'm still fighting to be able to fall asleep and wake up when I want. The freedom to be noisy and decorate or build as I please are one thing, but being able to do them at all hours of the day and night are another. The “real” dream is still a ways away. I think that's a large component to the panic. When does it get better? Will it even? Will I get to be a silly little pipe-dreamer rambling on to the youth about how crazy it is out there, and to think twice about flying too high? The routine is how you eat up your time too. I have court dates weeks from now. I have 45 days to submit each individual report. I have a concert I'm headed to in a few months which I'm already at, because I know what my days basically look like, and I know I don't exactly want to be that present in every moment of them. I can know intellectually it's all a game, but what's at stake doesn't feel that way.

In some ways, I feel my time would be easier if I was actually kinda lost. If I “just wanted to explore” career options or, “gain experience” for the life I planned to live when I was 35, it wouldn't feel desperate and imperative things happen “now.” The “problem” is that I know what I want. I know what I want to see. I know what the environments I put together can breed. I know the dollar amounts required and time investment. I'm intimately familiar with what my mind and body is and isn't doing during times things are going wrong or right. The law of diminishing returns is playing a big role in the amount of words or information I could keep bringing to my circumstances. I need the next steps.

One thing that's certainly getting old is the bizarre nonsense realms my head wants to go when I've exhausted all material logic as to why things look the way they do. Questions like, “How shitty was I in a past life?” or, “Would a charity donation kick off a butterfly effect to help me next week?” If you ever want to plug the hole that would make you desperate and reactively empathetic, just consider the impact and lifestyle of psychopathic greed has allowed dozens of individuals to revel in spite of hundreds of millions. There is no cosmic justice as far as I can tell, as no even quasi-functioning rich person could amass the number of mental, physical, or social problems as what routinely plague the poor.

I can't lose sight of that “freedom” though. I promise, I'd rather be “bored” and reading or playing alone than feel chained to my job. If I didn't have a fair degree of leeway to pick my own adventure each day, I'd never last. And I'm only going to allow myself so much guilt in not completing all of the books and articles I want to before I just say fuck it and lock myself in some form of library for a month. I don't think I've had two years pass by both slower or faster than these last two, and neither of those options feels good when I consider why. Constant work, constant delays, constant dancing on the fence of meaningful consequences as I tumble between negotiated practical concerns. That may be what life is, but that's not what I'm going to allow mine to be for very long. I suppose it's reasonable to panic over whether or not I even have a choice.

[776] Boo Hoo Bitching

Some days, I wish I wasn't so hollow that I could remember how to cry. That takes a dangerous amount of alcohol, but while I sit here and wallow, I feel like if I could just be a sniveling irrational idiot, maybe it would scratch the right kind of itch.

 

It just never seems to get better. I do not get lasting highs. I do not find “comfort.” I don't get lucky on things that aren't what I was born to take for granted. I don't feel stable. That's a board in the kind of floor I can't build. I don't feel stable for shit. The second I do? Here's a charge. Here's an obligation. Here's a particularly ridiculous case. Here's a frozen Hell storm.

 

I find it insane how much I've been willing to sacrifice, and I still can't seem to figure “it” out. I'm not a good friend or good with people? One field please. I want to create and build to my heart's creative delight? Okay, let me choke down your “real world” and budget in a way that might suggest a prayer. Think you're doing something right? Oh, hey there, did I mention one thing or another that makes sure you're glued to your helpless and flailing existence?

 

I hear so much bullshit every day. So many people lying, not about dumb big and thoughtful things like I must be registering as doing, but about dumb shit. “Well, I didn't actually see him doing coke, but I know for sure he used to, so it must be around the kids.” “I don't have a drug problem, no I won't screen.” “I don't have to punish my kids, they're so well behaved.” “I heard you guys love taking kids away.” “It's HER fault, not MINE!”

 

No responsibility, not a care in the world as they sleep until 2 in the afternoon in their disheveled house. No thought to the wasted time and energy using their spitefulness to weaponize us into nonsense interviews and questionable scenarios. Smoking themselves to death, drinking in “secret,” being poor enough that it probably qualifies as neglect, but not in an illegal way, I go from one house to the next hearing excuse after excuse. And remember, all of these people are the ones with kids. I at least suffer my treachery alone.

 

Is now the time to back track and kiss ass about institutional barriers and sympathy for poverty? I'm not feeling that. Because my point isn't about all the things that fuck you up. My point is about how you respond to them. Where's my caseworker? Who gets to pick up the slack for everyone I wish to blame for why I can't get where I need to be? How do I find ways to internalize blame for things like the weather? I mean, I know how that happens, but who can I commiserate with when I have the unshakable habit of often getting blamed for merely existing in whatever space I'm in?

 

I have you, words in front of me to reflect on indefinitely. You started soaking up tears well in advance of today. You get to carry the weight of flogged and tarred expectations. You get to whine and whine and whine and never make a sound. You get to be that guilty pleasure for the quiet friend now stalker who waits to see if I'll ever get around to doing or saying something properly crazy. Where would I be without you, oh words?

 

I just want to be alone. I want to be alone and do whatever. I want to go back to sleeping until noon with thousands in the bank I don't need. I want to feel normal in my way. It's not normal to watch as much TV as I do. It's not normal to have literally no emotional attachment to a single person or child I encounter throughout my day. It's not normal to keep pretending like every day spent making money for its own sake, or to pay off ridiculous tickets, or to bleed into an endless-array of Hill House never-done renovations, or like I should want to give a fuck about not being the guy who's trying to get himself invited to lunch.

 

I don't belong here. The world has a fair amount of decent-enough people who are trying in spite of themselves. Everyone's got bills and I'm not the first person to get pulled over for something stupid. If I were fat, or ugly, or dumb, or more in tune with a higher degree of childhood trauma working its magic to rob me of any form of productive adult life, I'd probably have a lot more friends. If I were able to drink religious Kool-Aid, I could get the Superman statue at work for my overtly pleasant persona and do finger-guns as I tell people how much I like them.

 

I'm just not. I'm not a nice person. I'm not a good person. I have an incredibly well-crafted mellow shell and “nice smile,” as one dodgy grandma put it, that lets me get my job done and whisper to anxious people like Cesar Milan. I don't want them groveling, pathetic, and deferential because they're terrified of my job title. I don't get off waiving “In the name of child safety!” as I tramp through your house or think it's an everyday thing to have someone take a picture of your refrigerator.

 

Why am I carrying on so much about my job? Is it “burning me out?” If only. I'm burnt out. I'm burnt out on expectations. I'm burnt out again, viciously, stupidly, believing something could go “right” for more than a few moments at a time. In this moment, I feel like I'm always going to be broke. I'm never going to pay things down. I could switch to eating bagged vegetables and Ramen noodles for 3 months, and I'll find myself with $500 cash and a litany of surprises, and not even the marginal joy of good meals to carry me through the pointless days. How depraved to bemoan being fed, no?

 

And no one's coming, no one's calling, no one cares. I could die in this chair tonight, some secret pinched artery that only happens after the exact amount of days I've managed to sleep incorrectly in a chair. I'd be lucky to be pilloried postmortem. I need to sleep. I need to sleep, but I'm afraid it's going to start feeling too good and I'm just not going to get up for an indeterminate amount of time. I'll just sleep through work and use my few sick days. I'll sleep through phone calls that only tell me not enough has been done. I'll sleep through a few hapless “friends” reaching out after they think some line has been crossed. If I have to wait, and wait, and wait, and doubt, and isolate, and conserve, and watch or read and pretend, I'd rather just sleep. God forbid things actually start to work. You think I'm insufferable now...

[775] Super Bull

I'm amused and don't know that I'll be able to articulate this in any way that will capture it all, but here's a shot.

I was asked, “Don't you think it's weird that you have a plan that involves self-banishment?”

I said, “No, my life's been trending that way for years. I want to create and pretend to help things in my own way bred from deep resentment and distrust for how life seems to operate in general. You can't behave that way and think you're going to get along particularly well with a social species in the regular framework.”

Sooner or later, they all leave. This has been as loud a trope you could paint my life with as anything else. The torrent of cliches fill in the gap. “We grew apart,” “I've changed for the better,” “That's the old me,” “I deserve better,” on and on until you've knitted yourself the coziest coat of excuses and self-affirmations imaginable. It is the night and day, black and white, yes or no in whether or not you're willing to take responsibility for your feelings or blame them on someone else.

As such, when my relationships “break,” there's consistent themes. They want me to be something I'm not. I offer to be more like that thing. They resent the offer. They'll ask me what their plan going forward should be with regard to what to do with me. I refuse to play along or be condescended to.

I cannot fix you. I can barely keep me on a consistent page with hundreds of anchors in writing. I suppose it's the degree of compounding hatred that's hard to conceive of when the first block starts to slip. Say you marry someone and it makes sense because of the math. You've got the years on the table, the romantic memories of your dating, they check boxes related to your family or looks. So you lock it in. Someone shifts. That's the nature of things. You get to a point where you start asking yourself, “What was I thinking?” The dates are less magic. The conversations less exciting. Their behavior, be it from their own stress or self-involvement, suggests to you the situation has dramatically changed.

That's when the dragging up of things from the past comes in. That's when the, “Well I certainly don't feel like I'm to blame for that” statements get traded. “I never meant,” “I don't think you're appreciating,” “I've got my own problems,” Where were you when?” until you've produced the finest self-sabotaging silk slip-over to help keep your racing heart contained in your chest.

I'm told I'm consistent. If nothing else, I'm still me, infinitely annoyingly so, while everyone else is getting “mature” and old and “more reasonable.” More power to them. If I wanted anything to do with that, I'd pick that. If I thought they could contribute in more than errant dollar amounts or occasional laughs at the party, I'd make bigger asks and offers. None of those things are true though. People are right where they are. I, and those who show up from time to time, are the reason I get anywhere I actually want to in life. I will be that person in a field. I will be that person with $1000 or $100,000 in the bank.

Others? I don't know who they'll be without the dollar designation. I don't know who they'll be without “the love of their life.” I don't know what their interests will be if their job doesn't pan out or they get sick or they get disillusioned. I don't know anything about anyone else except that when I draw the remotest satisfaction or presume to have a plan or understanding, that's what they're willing to latch onto and turn into a problem for them. Cool. I'll force myself out. Fine. I'll take responsibility for the shitty place I go to when I reflect on that behavior, and turn it into play and opportunity I'll be under no obligation to share.

We're all treacherous spirits. That I wear mine on my sleeve doesn't make me wrong, doesn't mean I've lost my utility, and you'd think would suggest I'm capable and willing to be a vengeful God. We're all doing the math regarding the relationships in our lives and we're all trying to map the future with the most perks. Well, sort of. Most are doing it by playing the horse race of individuals in their lives that suggest a certain amount of money or looks they can play off of. I'm basing it on the amount of opportunities I can give myself to fail or profit through my individual effort. If I ask you to do something for me, I offer to compensate it. I don't rely on the “unspoken bond” with anyone beyond my dad, which harks to my posture regarding what it means to be a parent and why I'm not one.

In any event, I cannot put voice to the joy of the idea of having and owning my own thing. It's not something “pure” of any negotiated reality nor exists somehow independent of our collective world, but the nature of the chains becomes more manageable. The problems I want to have need to be further down than “I gotta pay the bills!” I won't get into disputes regarding “partners.” I won't ask anything of you that isn't what I've put in. All of the mess and assumptions and resentment (that's really playing the key word role for this round) go right out my window. You know how I act like I don't really need you? I can't wait to hear how you feel when I start showing it in even bigger ways. Of course, I do need you. I need holes dug and walls built and gaps in my knowledge filled all the time. I just need those considerably more than the damage you bring with you to everything else I wish to be or create.

That's not a mean sentiment either. It's the truth as far as my experience. The people that help me, do so because they want to, or they get some kind of gratification in turn upon seeing mine. Others, pretend they're not making a transaction, and get confused and angry when they run out of money or the high doesn't last as long as it used to. My contingency plans assume, they don't hope. They assume you're going to pull out of my life. They assume you're going to throw my habits and preferences into my face. They assume everything is going to burn down and I will be left with no one. In 30 years, the best examples I have to suggest the world doesn't operate like that aren't even remotely enough to suggest behaving differently.

[774] Paper Moons

I feel like I should be smoking a cigarette in slightly slow motion as a camera pans across me at an over-sized desk with my needlessly expensive pens and novelties laying disheveled amidst disorganized papers and a short glass of whiskey. I don't even really like whiskey, but I'd be drinking it to mimic every depiction from 1920s dick to modern titan of industry that's washed my brain with regard to what the sleek and disturbed, yet powerful, men get up to as they contemplate their lives. I'd start out speaking in a voice much lower than my actual tone about the many lives I've lead and the countless souls I've no doubt crushed in an over-indulgent and prideful bout of slick self-delusion. There would be a poignant stench and crust as my sentiments creep over the edge of the desk and sink into the floor that's been slowly opening up and swallowing me for more years than I could remember.

Big changes are coming. If I only look at the kind of things I'm finding new interest in as an indication, it might resonate as merely capitalistic boredom. How dare I investigate an array of fancy and “individualistic” pens? What a privileged joke. What a laugh to look into “box of the month” subscriptions, as though a random array of cost-effective junk shipped to me is going to take up more space in my mind than my tables and trash. The harder truth is still mostly unspoken. The tide and power are shifting, and the people at the front line are doing all they can to keep it off their tongues and out of sight.

I'm excited and willing to keep speaking in the abstract because I like the tension. I like the idea that it's finally not me who's got to suffer every waking moment of anxiety and questions about what's going to happen next. I like being able to treat people like they’re the kid who never knows when the punishment is going to take place, because why pretend I'm somehow above my influences and past or care to not perpetuate a force that played such a powerful role in shaping so much of what I enjoy about me?

“I wanna be the minority. I don't need your authority.”

I was thinking today of writing my mother a letter attempting to explain how my perception of her has shifted over the years. They say you get older and start to realize that your parents are just people too. We know I've read enough psychology or social science to pawn off significant amounts of responsibility on the forces we're born into. My job conjures up a kind of hopeless sympathy for the people you know are going to be...about where they are...their entire lives. So, surely, a deliberately crafted piece of prose about my empty sympathies and mild-appreciation for the times that weren't terrible could act as a nice capstone before a new resolution to never speak to her again. It's poetically retarded.

One of the things that makes me afraid is my capacity for conscious and deliberate evil. It's a place you go to when you're craving a kind of evening of the scales or lash out to “take back” a kind of individual sovereignty your environment or social scene appears to be robbing you of. “Oh yeah? Well wait till I get control.” The cold irrational morality of the “hate your manhood, hate your race, hate your power” community draws from the well in perfect irony. It's only in granting myself the realization of that capacity that I allow myself to grant you equally depraved agency. It's why my heart infinitely breaks when you're all talk and get unduly old. It's why I allowed myself to be deceived in what I thought we could mean to each other.

That capacity is a drug. It's the drug I think Byron took in his politicking. I think the people running around and making their introductions and asking to sit on boards becomes immensely gratifying. I think any criticism of the process, or the reasons he lost, provoked some of his darkest impulses. I think he forgot, or disregarded, that a revolt of 1 amongst equals is a losing strategy when both are excited to annihilate.

What that annihilation looks like is anyone's guess. For me, it's the continuation of what my not-so-subconscious has been telling me for an exceedingly long time. I need my own space, alone, away from everyone, where I can do things independently of the trappings of modernity. Debt from a car payment literally becomes an existential threat when you've been doing it like me for as long as I have. How can you not remember I was willing to get my spine tapped to not fit in? It's not hanging from hooks and face tattoos, but the severity of pain and degree of panic I will never forget.

I draw power from what I do with my own space. When I'm not thinking about anything else but how to flow from one thing unto the next. It's occurring to me that with this job, and the nature of it being that there's just enough to do each day, just enough manageable variety, just enough thinking on the fly to navigate different personalities or juggle the 5 things that fall into your lap at 4:15 on Friday, it lessens the “dragging” nature of me not getting what I want. When I have to figure out how to build, mend, and brew in the off-hours combined with the occupied-enough of my day to day, I'll be right back here at 32 in a too-comfortable position with a radically transformed circumstance. I'll have nowhere else to go, because I'll have cultivated the environment that forces a collapsed set of more likely outcomes.

And then what? It's a story cliché that before you get everything you ever wanted, you have to shed everything that came before. Think Thanos killing Gamora. My theory for why this happens is that you become something so entirely removed from all of the forces that pushed you there, it's basically a mathematical imperative. It's over-filling a cup with water. Yes, technically there's still a cup, and it is indeed filled with water, but each particle was replaced until it was in some exotic or indefinable way different, and the people who used to drink it now prefer pop.

I like the idea of a kind of cold denial and rebuke. Let me get that access or the perks. Let me start living the example people imitate, but never quite feel in their soul. Then let me deny them the invitation. Let me shed the last shells of facebook impersonalities and picture posturing. It'll taste sweeter than that wildly over-priced chocolate I considered ordering the other day.

I'm still persuaded that the more you allow death into your narrative, the more grounded and aware and honest you can be about your place relative to other things. I think the world looks the way it does in a large proportion to what people have or haven't dealt with in regard to their death. What's your “best” if it mirrors the behaviors you've learned about your worst? What's your motivation that pulls you out of bed independent of every obsessive rage-inducing thought or sweet suggestion of seductive suicide? What's the place you occupy when the shelves for your experiences of “love” or “trust” are so cluttered with a dusty and broken mess, yet so devoid of the objects that would encapsulate what they mean to you?

I welcome death, so I don't bemoan watching your suicide. I memorialize the broken relationships. I sing a sad song for the pages left unturned. But I always awaken right back at the end of another step in the direction I want to go. I always manage to find someone, just as erratic or judgmental or contradictory and ridiculous as you, to take your place and ride along until it's their turn to breakdown. It's a crass motivational poster to regard everyone who's ever hurt your feelings as a novel bump or stepping stone and learning experience. The trembling resolve of stolen wisdom in lieu of embodied practice.

I've never wanted to be liked by anyone I didn't like for one reason or another a little more than me. My dad and grandma showed the kind of committed family resolve I thought was paramount until that family decides it wants to eat you from the inside out. I want to laugh and joke, or let you play with my hair, if I know first and foremost there's as much of your individual shining through as the space we're occupying can accommodate. I treat naive-lamb people not maliciously, but like children who need to be listened to and indulged just enough while you account for the things they're over-looking. I don't need the approval of the monied because they're rich. I don't need the fervent insistence that I should be “normal” in social obligations and go through the comfortable routine. I don't need the flip and condescension when I discuss my potential to change the world or my interest in exploring things well-beyond my current level of know-how. I only want those speaking my language, who show up, and who recognize they're either all or nothing.

I have the sneaking suspicion that when the generalized yet modest marginal debt captain of my plane says it's time to walk about the cabin, most of you are going to go down and resent that I offered a parachute. I'm the pilot. The safe and predictable or practical place you occupy all the way down will feel perfectly righteous and reasonable. The power and perks of your path will surely match or exceed whatever it is I'm rambling about that day. And we'll all get exactly to the end of our negotiations as livened or wise as we'll ever be. Let the shedding begin.