[855] The Game Loser

 I'm in a weird head space. It felt like weeks before I was able to write my last blog, and I used a cliché like starting a new job to find my mildly different words for the same sentiment. It didn't provide me with enough to look at and sort through. It wasn't really showing me anything.

Right now might be better able to grasp. I feel...loose. I don't mean the loose that suggests a freedom of movement or sense of comfort after drinking the edge off. I mean loose in a kind of defiant way. When I feel defiant, I often want to say something inflammatory or imagine a future in which I run into an enemy and deliver a crushing line. Or, I feel mildly panicked about some shit I'm about to pop off on. This feels smoother. This feels like an attitude adjustment. This feels like the resolve you gain from having encountered harsher circumstances a hundred times before, so why not exist psychologically at the end of round 101.

Let's try to ground it. I moved more bricks today. I moved more bricks from a site in which I believed I was done with the task. Of course I wasn't done with the task. There's always more bricks. The guy's son didn't like to drive on the rounded edge of those bricks. The opportunity for more bricks soon followed. There's always more work, never think you're done, when you persist through the task you get more out of it. Eventually, he'll run out of bricks for me to pick-up, so whether I was wise enough to recognize when I should stop amassing bricks or not, I've got 3 more trips to his house before there's physically nothing left.

What am I going to do with these bricks? Why did I decided 1400 red bricks and 200 field drainage bricks need to be stacked in my field? That's as long and complicated a story as you have the imagination for. Didn't you have LEGOs? Didn't you play with blocks? It upped my cardio game. It saved me hundreds, probably thousands, of dollars. I learned a little bit more about a pocket of my area and state. I have little else more meaningful to do with my time than drive back and forth, load and unload. It was a nice day. My arms are looking jacked.

The bricks were free, but the gas was not. Everything has a cost. I got fast food in between runs. The speaker blasting my music so I don't get too far in my head while I work wasn't free. My several pairs of hole-ridden gloves weren't either. The luck in finding a solid, slightly raised, and affordable enough truck was free, but if you're paying with your attention to things speaking to you in earnest, that costs something too.

You're paying at all times. The rich who hide trillions cause people to starve. They're starving for the right to exist at more than the mercy of expenses or as expendables. Major companies don't pay taxes, disguise profits, and roll their influence into policy that instantiates cultural norms where the belief is that one day you'll be rich or powerful enough to not have to pay. This too inverted to trash poor people as lazy or ungrateful for being on welfare or needing to pay the rent. We're paying with our lives as we disregard rules that don't need to debate the depravity of your opinion.

I haven't read the article yet, but I have “Who am I prepared to kill?” by William Davies in my open tabs. It's a question you're not allowed to ask yourself as a “polite” or “normal” person unless presented with harrowing self-defense narratives. Society seems perfectly willing to kill itself time and again. The idea of a “history lesson” presumes a great many things about our capacity to learn, self-actualize, and take responsibility. Indeed we're the consequences of constant examples of people going unpunished, if even recognized for the destruction they wrought. But, seriously, who are you willing to kill?

We're willing to let old and sick people die. Easy enough story to blame their health issues or advanced years on them. Don't wanna catch Covid? Don't go outside, granny! I don't care if you have no one else to pick up your medication. Don't wanna die you high-risk category 5 hurricane of fat and excuses? I don't care if you grew up in a food desert, worked your whole life at grueling jobs to provide, and I unknowingly liked a picture you drew online. You mean nothing to me.

I can't think of a louder and more frequent message I receive from people than that. Whether it is about me personally or not, that's about the king of all messages when distilled down. You don't matter, I don't care about you, you're too much for me, you do you just leave me out of it, subject yourself to my rules or be punished, where do you get off? You're poor? Oh well, I'm rich. You're sad? Take a pill, watch TV. You're too hot? Learn to enjoy swimming, idiot who should blame the sun. No one wants to give you anything but an opportunity to be used by them. I work in service to different megalomaniacal and financial interests, not for myself. I work so I can fight their tolls on top of an expensive life; what with the whole dodging fascist violence and car accidents.

We're not even playing the game. In college I was forced into “the game,” an awareness game where, once you think of it, you lose. That's it. Before I was made aware of the game, I wasn't playing. If someone said out of nowhere “you lose,” which traditionally you say “I lost” given it's you who remembered the game, I could stare blankly and walk away or ask them what I lost. My asking would invite my responsibility to play, even if I had no interest. It's a game you can't win unless you're not thinking about it, and, in theory, you're always thinking about it in some form or another, hence why you'll continue to randomly lose the rest of your life.

I'm fighting pretty viciously for my own kind of game. When I was first told about the game, it frustrated me these idiots were trying to include me. They just smirked. By now, if the analogy hasn't made itself known, you're a bad reader and thinker. I know I'm in the perpetually losing position. I know power, of any sort, does not like to be challenged. I know that I've given written tabloid material to last me the rest of my life for sourcing things to attempt to shame or embarrass me. I'd want to kill myself were I to respect, embody, or recognize that world, that game, as the one that matters.

I try to keep waking up as myself and to myself. I try to keep practicing the skills it takes to master that actual game, because it's something you can win. A game you can't win is any number of things, but they aren't games. It'd be torture. It'd be death. There's nothing to play with, so you become the object moved in arbitrary directions to no end. I can build the board. I can list the rules. I can coach the players. I can define rules and keep it fair. First, I had to recognize what I was or wasn't trying to play.

I know that I don't regularly translate to people. They just speak to me when they're at “low points.” They know, like we all do, all of the things I regularly complain about. They know, like we all do, how to make a list of things they might do or things they might sacrifice to reach a desired end. What I don't think they know is the nature of the game they're being subjected to. You don't grow up in a derelict house thinking about the lead or asbestos when the roof leaks in the rain. As such, I've tried considerably harder to manifest a home that people might see themselves in. I try to get more exacting with my words, so maybe on the tenth pass, it clicks. I try to not excuse away my thoughts that tell me I'm not done writing or working until I'm done, and it won't be as obvious as there being no more bricks left to move.

Everything you do is a brick. Everything you say is a brick. It's a brick you hurl through a window of unduly gilded power or it's a brick you drop on your foot. It's a brick you build a house with to protect you from all the run-off of inadequately managed games happening around you. It's a brick you build a fire pit with so you can bring people together, cook and energize, and stay warm and pliable for the work that lies ahead. We're at the end of hallways built to trap us, then we've retreated into even tighter dwellings built out of bricks of despair, excuses, and memes. We don't see our effort to build anything else rewarded. We don't believe the bricks can be used for anything more than layer after layer of psychological insulation or impossibly heavy mess not worth moving.

I'm about as angry as I've ever been when I think about the choice to remain living like that. There's no reason to believe that just because someone is rich or famous or nice or loved or funny or dark or brilliant that they're anymore aware of what boards or fields they're playing on either. Everyone has a master even if it's as diffuse as “the mob.” We're all lost, but by now, you should know and be working on the playable game. You'll just be tortured to death otherwise.