I've been waiting weeks to try and write this blog. I've finally come across the inspiration to start.
The theme is about being “infinitely indirect.” After watching Dave Chappelle talk about who he watched to try and be like during his Mark Twain prize acceptance speech it hit me. Even my heroes.
We start and continue to exist explicitly indirectly. The vast majority of what constitutes the universe isn't any one individual. You had no say in the circumstances of your parents meeting. You didn't pick your genes. You didn't choose your adverse or love-infused experiences. You're bombarded with forces we're only beginning to barely understand, and you produce feelings and words you think you have some control over, for reasons you can't quite explain, but the second you contemplate too deeply the abstractness of it all, you might plummet to fatalistic or nihilistic depths.
But we have these instincts. We see people we want to be more like. Whether it's how they look or how they sound. We know when we're pulled towards someone or something. One of the reasons I offer as to why I don't earnestly pursue stand-up is that I'm not convinced I have anything to say that's any funnier or any better than the people I idolize already, Chappelle among them. I want to be like Chappelle in other realms. I want the authentic power of my words to be felt. I want to make my friends laugh. I want the people around me to know it was them who shaped what I can or can't become as much as it is my dogged effort in perpetual spite of the world.
If you accept the indirectness of life, you can behave more confidently in ways that perhaps create the environments that can indirectly lend themselves to more of what you'd like to see. I have a very deliberate manner. It has lent itself to certain kinds of drama and conversation that people don't even try with me. This is the kind of world I want to see. I genuinely believe people want a kind of freedom of play and expression and risk taking that modern existence provides zero room for. Occupying a rent-free space where you can create per your capacity to budget has significantly more potential to spin-off into worlds of like-minded individuals and their ideas than squirreling away in my modest rental, albeit for all of the convenient perks.
Parents I think understand this implicitly when they watch their kids grow up. I can't tell you how often I step into a household where they've got extended social networks, a nice place, maybe an independent business and some money, and one of the kids is seemingly born ratchet. Or maybe they were adopted and their genes didn't get the “it's okay not to get pregnant early and do meth” message. You can choose to introduce the chaotic indirect forces of someone else into your life, but you can't erase them. You'll contend with every second you negotiate reality away from the direction you're earnestly pulled. You'll wear it on your face and posture. You'll see it in the hapless faces that surround you. You'll feel the weight of the bleak settings under which you've trapped yourself.
The directness comes from that conversation and understanding of yourself. You have to get your voice and influence under control. You have to pick the goal, not have it prescribed. You have to establish that you have a voice at all, then decide it's worth expressing, then fight for it with every ounce of care or bother you can discover. I think I can never improve the world more than to be me all over the place. Maybe I tone things up or down depending on the audience, but it still has to be me. Maybe it comes out violent and harsh on first or twelve passes, but it came out.
I think the indirect destruction of ourselves plays out with things like fascism. We play with the obnoxious absurdity at our peril. The vast majority doesn't want what's happening in politics and around the world environmentally. Except, indirectly, it's the only story we've celebrated. Limitless growth, greed, and indulgence. It's one thing to read in the newspaper the virtue of a particular industry or to hear on the news the various touted “values.” It's entirely another to embody it yourself. There have always been canaries and hippies in some form or another. I can swallow the buzzwords and image-insecurity of my State job, or I can push, every day, when they pretend “child safety” is synonymous with meandering meetings, arbitrary power pinches, burned out employees, and badgering people not in a place to recognize or change.
I write blogs attempting to directly dictate the endless mess of words and impressions and seeming coincidences that make the stars align. I also know just enough that I'll never know the real impact they have. It still brings me joy to recall the drunk friends who said they read me, but will never say anything in the comments. It confirms there's indirect air swirling. It means my voice was worth tuning into in spite of so much else to pay attention to. When I let these go into the wild, like a child, they may end up dead in a drunk car crash, or they may provide the same kind of launch point that the people I admire inspire in me. But no matter what, it's okay, as long as it's exactly as I say it to the degree I attempt to understand it. I'm listening for the next line like I find my best joke material in the moment.
It's incredible to think that the whole world passes through you. Part of my undying confidence is a deep appreciation for that which I consider as fact. That we've conjured the internet is our best stab at appreciating the extent of the phenomenon. No matter who you are or what you're doing, you can instantly be an interpreted version of that for the entire world. How vital does it become to do as best you can? How important is mere honesty then? We look for heroes and representations because our best impulses have to be dug out and fought for. The general human disposition tilted towards remembering pain and experiencing suffering hardest is still at play. You can be someone's hero and fight. Everything literally dies without the fight.
I think we get deceived by the idea that things have to be “perfect” or unimpeachably moral. That's not honest. Even and especially your gods don't operate under that projection. The virtue signaling exhausts me. The cancel culture got very sick very quick. They started going after jokers and the story tellers and things snapped back hard, neatly glossing over any honest reflection on the impact or motivation of the aggrieved or targeted. I think we got incredibly lost in the search for an honest voice and representation, so we gave ourselves a stark-raving lunatic to beat us over the head until the fear of death pushed things into alignment. I think the people who defend the wildly irresponsible means we landed on for psychological course correction are those perpetually unable to find that voice and personal responsibility. Maybe they're broken and traumatized. Maybe they're just cunts.
The self-destructive impulse is alive and well in drinking and smoking. It's self-deprecation and overbearing power trips. It's the low hum of anxiety no matter how far you move in the direction you're being pulled. This is why we can't have nice things! You need some of that to dream bigger and push yourself, but anymore if you're not constantly distracted or flooding the mental memesphere, I don't think you know what's sitting there if all else was left alone. I don't think the power is appreciated. I don't think the capacity for change feels like it can voice the nature of its choices to hopefully create a world for the people who will never meet them but for what they left behind that should be worth finding. I don't know who built the roads or any of the technology I'm using to “be me” for the whole world. I do know I want to ensure whoever else might exist gets the same chance as I did. When did we lose that impulse? Who believes we should bear children into incoherent fear and death? We torture children like so many tortured children.
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