[866] Bits

 

There's been a lot on my mind the last couple weeks. I almost thought I could write every day for the last one. I figure I'll try to capture the snippets and maybe be done thinking for a while.

My aunt, who the last time I talked to I asked to borrow money so I could handle some coffee shop closure related issues, asked my dad for my information in order to update her will. She decided to do so after my dad told her I'd be taking care of the family gravestones after my dad, who currently does so, dies. My aunt has had 3 husbands, all wealthy, 2 died leaving her everything, and has lived magnitudes of extravagance I could only imagine. She didn't give me the loan, but the idea that I might make her look good in death will get her pocket book to crack. I assume it will be just enough to buy flowers and maybe a solid lunch.

My family, on paper, had an extreme amount going for it. Three men that were my dad and uncles and one aunt born to two steel-working immigrants. All the building I'm doing out here, you'd think we might come together and knock some impressive shit out. All went to school and consistently worked. My grandparents set them, and intended to set their grandchildren up, for comfortable and cared for lives. The richest people in my family are millionaires. The poorest live in a stolen paid-off house, hoard, and refuse to even call repair people to fix things around that house. They stole money that was supposed to come to me. They exist in service to movies and their pet dog.

I couldn't help myself from thinking about some payout when my aunt dies. I consider it a kind of temptation that, for the sake of irrepressible thoughts I'll indulge, but I have nothing invested in getting any luckier. Some key ingredient was missing from the makeup of my family. Whatever my grandparents did to keep things together, perhaps they never really did, completely died when they did. I pretend our annual Cubs game outing with one of my uncles makes up for how fucking shady he is.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm still trudging along in my quest to draw attention to DCS. I'm not getting the kind of feedback I think I'd appreciate. It's no matter, but I can't tell if I'm completely lost in the woods, or maybe new Facebook is taking away attention, or maybe people are exactly as they've always been, mute, with regard to anything that matters. My fliers are printed. I'll be going to The Hill maybe tomorrow or sometime over the weekend. I kinda like the idea of being a lone person standing in the silence. Dignifies it, kinda.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have a neighbor who epitomizes the difference between city-folk and country-folk. City-folk would be wholly unknowing that this man has, in his estimation, made hundreds of thousands of dollars across random ventures, but mostly trucking. He's spent all kinds of money on tools and equipment to turn his plot next to mine into a mess of vehicles, sheds-under-construction, and bought an excavator/loader “I really can't afford” but for the thousands he routinely seems to spend each day for projects maybe years away. He's 55 going on death, 3 heart attacks and a host of other health issues. He's rough, grungy, and sincere in his particular track of how he wishes to behave towards people. He keeps regular hired help who he refers to as “Retard Ricky.” It's unclear if Ricky appreciates this moniker.

I'm wary of my neighbor. My gut tells me that if things every go wrong, he's not going to be insanely keen to talking things out without some form of overt contrition. He's let us use his big equipment, and is routinely trying to give us things he doesn't think he'll have a use for. I don't want it to go bad, but these are the kind of entanglements I moved far away to avoid.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was thinking about how lucky I am to have been born during the transition from offline to online. My earliest habits aren't shaped by instant gratification and convenience. I appreciate having a working memory. I have the visceral experience of watching “the conversation” get stultified and “woke” as no one had received direction, no one was interested in giving it, save ideologues, and now we have overflowing buckets of anxious and depressed nihilists speaking to each other in memes. To be sure, the generations that failed them are adopting the same habits because they in no way know how to cope with the severity of the irony.

In my brief 32 years, I get to keep watching the same lessons play out as if it's impossible to learn. I wondered whether or not it was really possible to learn a lesson. To some degree, every single human interaction is different, and general rules of thumb might prove catastrophic throwing everything you know into question. I think of James Baldwin asking, “How much time do you want for your “progress?” When are you going to be comfortable enough with yourself and your responsibility to even speak? This is why I choose to have an ongoing “hate-hate” relationship with most people. It's always a constant dance around doing what you should, saying what needs to be said, or representing on behalf of the positive and vital forces that constitute why any of us are here.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Every day I get a little more done on the land, I swell with pride. I point to my effort in service to my idea and ideals, not mock and cope with endless layers of otherwise oppressive forces. The key is to figure out how you're going to channel all of your obsessive and doubtful energy. I have debts too. Debts that feel less bad than the stress of working at DCS. I have pains and open-ended pursuits that may lead to good things, or may devolve into petty fights. They started in earnest. They started under a philosophy of exploration and options.

My girl has expressed concern that were her mother ever to come out here, she'd turn up her nose at the amount of “negotiations” we have to live like we do. While I know I live like a king, you may find yourself hopelessly lost in a hole of judgment at exposed drywall or extension cords in the rafters. To each there own. I'm fully, warm, and parlaying the expensive aesthetics into more living space, gardening tools, and business speculation.

More to the point, my capacity to recognize my king-like status is informed by the current status of the vast majority of how people live on the planet, knowledge of history, and honest evaluation of what it is I actually need to feel good about how I'm oriented and positioned in the world. I've always hated apartments. I don't want a mortgage.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I say pretty often that I don't get how people can live “backwards.” I don't understand the appeal of being someone like Trump. I don't get being a sycophant aiding and abetting. I don't get how you think it's “just business” or like some iron law that you can hoard money, steal, and people suffer for no other reason than you're empty power games. When your concept of power is about how much destruction you can cause or attention you can bring to yourself.

I remember being an attention seeking kid. I'm still a fan of attention, but I want it to be for the right reasons. At least, each time I flirt with being the kind of person who could behave differently, it tends to lose its appeal. What's the wiring? Why do I remind myself that I need to build in struggle, I need to remain humbled by how things perpetually go wrong, and I need to cherish each moment, dinner, or laugh because life is short, while others can just take and break and scream, and seemingly live forever in our collective nightmares? Why do I think you have to start with a deep appreciation for how bad you actually are before you can ever approach being appreciably good?

There's no worse thought I have than in believing these people are choosing to behave this way. I didn't see bullies growing up as kids in traumatic households. I didn't see ego for how fragile it was. It wasn't until I started writing did I really grant myself the agency of my decision making and the ongoing consequences. I stopped taking it for granted that just because you reach a certain age important perspectives and valuable modes of being should have soaked into your bones. It seems people get to carry on as louder and louder indictments of their otherwise potentially better selves until they die and bequeath their license to the next one.

[865] Checks And More Checks

 

The goal of writing this is to, upon completion, go outside and get as much of the room extension built as possible. A big impediment to me ever getting things done is when my mind is occupied with the trivialities of interpersonal conflict. My labor squabble has a new battery in the mail, but the principles that were ruffled are still at play. My understanding of the situation can be parsed into further detail.

It's safe to say that everyone has insecurities. I prefer with regard to myself a language of “unsecurities” more than insecurities given the connotation. I'll walk naked down the street, inject myself into any conversation, and defend what I've created or learned without hesitation. My access to affordable healthcare is an unsecured variable undermining my otherwise secure conception of myself in the world. The same goes for other kinds of insurance, number of connections leading to work, or sense of competencies to routinely achieve things like building a room addition. I'm confident I can always build and explore more. I'm secure in the knowledge that rarely am I unable verses unwilling or uninterested, if only for the present moment.

Insofar as we respect the things about each other that we would like to improve upon, and name or discuss when we get it wrong, I'm as cool as can be to interact with. My proclivity to fight, while tempered and wrought with more considerations than were I properly alone or simply naive, is an unsecured variable. I'm significantly happier than the average person to cut ties, look for something else, or struggle through working within my confines than seek to borrow something or assistance. Very rarely is anyone freely offering. Very rarely will those instances not be used to emotionally leverage or justify shitty behavior. My dad coming down to help me install drywall is not going to result in him texting me two days later to clean his garage or I'm not invited to dinner.

My willingness to allow for “slippage” in respect or common courtesy is not a willingness to justify or coddle it. I know I'm not perfect in this regard, and don't expect you to be either. I do expect that you retain the ability to recognize what you fucked up. I do expect you to take responsibility for the severity of your incivility, just like I mentally walk myself through lock-up when I feel like I might beat the shit out of you.

There are solid arguments for remaining accommodating and forgiving. I certainly do not think every disagreement rises to the level of existential crisis for the soul of the concepts of "accountability" or "respect." I do think that I've the lived experience of behaving in accommodating ways, and watching the eventual and inevitable consequences be of much greater significance than whatever initially ruffled feathers. How many hundreds or thousands of little negotiations at DCS were made before I was at the end of a targeted attack? How many people are sacrificed at the alter of “petty” grievances because the principle underneath wasn't advocated and fought for?

The only way to have the kinds of discussions that lead to mutually sharing responsibility or respect are to allow for as many relevant facts into the discussion as possible. Your side can certainly feel passionately, but what did you actually say with regard to the issue? What's true independent of your racing heart? Superficially, we all pretty much agree on a long list of modes of “best” ways to behave and terms for engagement. The details matter.

Is it fair to say that I have a “problem with authority” or lack the requisite respect to carry on in the world? That's certainly not my choice phrasing, but it's an easy enough one for me to conjure in my speculation in how I'm perceived. To what degree is this a problem? I think you have to look at the goal. The broader your goal or the narrowness of your expectation is going to determine the answer. Do you “just want a paycheck?” Do you expect no one to improve or account for their behavior ever? Well, then you're a complete fool for not habitually capitulating to anyone's demands for your deference or conciliation. Keep your suspicions of power or authority to yourself. Don't wax poetic about the example you think you're setting.

What if you believe, as I do, as a foundational stone in your being, that there are not enough examples of pointing to the naked emperor as naked, and the responsibility to yourself and world is to check lazy and emotionally manipulative behavior? Well, now you can either do the work of recording and parsing conversations (like I do), or you can feel at the end of everyone's manipulative and lazy behavior and cry your victimization at every opportunity. What prompts me to build checks on, as I've stated, my foundation? Where do I find balance when my heart races and a new affront has been made to not just my being, but how we're all supposed to live with each other!?

This is where I look to my small, and begrudgingly if only occasionally responsible for me, crowd. This was a big reason I started writing. If one day the people I respect took what I was saying and were like, “What the ever loving fuck dude, you're slipping,” okay. I tell people frequently to “train me.” If you have a certain friend you know I'm going to “be all Nick P.” about, say so, I'll refrain or stop. My life is not a series of looking for fights or destroying opportunities. It's me highlighting pivotal disagreements or disconcerting scenarios after a lengthy period of trying things your way. My willingness to fight and name and double down on exacting a narrative is not a hunger for it. I wish shit was simple. I wish we were both fighting back our willingness to give room, give pause, or give reasons. I wish we gave so much, that left unchecked, would be taken advantage of. I wish the impulse was, culturally, to take on more, not assign blame, be condescending, or retreat to a place where you hold yourself hostage to prevent solving your own problem.

The guy I'm in a disagreement with signs my checks. When I told him to take the money for his battery out of it, he said no. To me, this is a great example of the kind of principle mind games people play when they're trying to fuck you in the ass. He wants me to bend over more than he wants a new battery. Would you be willing to bend? A “solution” to this problem arose after Allie and I discussed how uncomfortable she anticipates feeling being “in the middle” of us and after she raised the prospect of just buying the battery herself. Of course, that would be ridiculous and unfair and was regarded by me as a bad self-invitation to a problem that didn't really concern her. I explained that, in service to my care and concern for her, I would let a package arrive at her office with her name on it with the battery, and Venmo her the cash. Men, right?

He'll get his battery. He'll make whatever assumptions he wants about interjecting her in the middle of it. Neither he nor I will still feel good about the situation. He still wants me to bend over and won't admit it to himself. I'm still aggrieved that he made nothing of my good will, demonstrated effort, and willingness to make the situation better before he whipped his whole ass out to kiss in claiming to try and mentor me or pretend I claimed to be a victim. I suspect he'll raise concerns that it's not “new” enough for him because it came from the “used” button on Amazon with “Brand new” in the description save the original packaging. If and when he raises that concern he'll prove ever-more his insincere and disingenuous perspective. I've maliciously offered the opportunity for him to keep pedantically spiraling.

I'm increasingly trying to exercise the idea of the much larger world of options. But he's got a network! Yes, so do other smelly hippies in other towns. But what if word gets around? If grown men want to quibble about lost batteries, I struggle to think their larger enterprises are something I want to be too deeply involved with. I genuinely am thankful it only cost me $38 to learn what a fine psychological line of civility and coherence he walks. I've casually excused or glossed over the several unclear and constantly changing directives with regard to the project I was hired on for in that accommodating and remaining pliable spirit. I have to continue to believe it is possible to not operate like the people who send me to the page.

While he and I's text battle was going on, I was offered a phone number to my neighbor's friend who needs tree work done. This morning Allie and I discussed fixing up and cultivating 11 acres of a friend of hers in Kentucky. I remembered that I used to pay my rent and beer money with plasma donation. I've listed exactly “0” things for sale, nor even thrown together a basic bitch website. There are always a thousand things to do otherwise. There are always options and configurations to explore. You don't even have to spend time re-framing your shitty circumstances as something better than they are. Fuck him just like fuck everyone else who behaves like him, I'll figure out something different. I've made peace with how little I care about that kind of burned bridge. I want to burn as many bridges made of naive hopes and twigs as possible.

My confidence in a “curt” or “terse” sense of being paired with cracks in my walls holding back on more exploitative tendencies likely won't get out of hand. It will make me look significantly meaner and uncaring than I think I already project. The last few weeks has been about making peace with that as well. I didn't move to a tick-ridden field in the middle of Trump country with a lifetime's worth of TV, reading material, and yard work because I had a fairly robust sense of trust or working relationships with the people and environments I've otherwise spent the rest of my life in. I'm not going to let the same negotiations to survive under those conditions pollute the new one I'm looking to create if I don't have to.

I don't remember it exactly, but there's a story of two generals who were constantly at war. Eventually, a peace treaty was orchestrated and both came to the table unwilling to budge on their respective conditions. Their wise mediator framed the conditions in terms where neither general had to feel like they were backing down and could return to their people with something to celebrate that they won. There's a story of Steve Jobs raking a contractor over the coals to make a contract look like he had gained more or paid less than they were charging, berating her until she returned with the exact same information arranged as more palatable.

I don't want to be a foolish general defending some cheap sense of honor for my position in constant and desperate need for a mediator or for whom to pawn off my responsibility. I think stories like that illustrate a pragmatism, desperately needed, for situations with seemingly considerably higher stakes. I'm not responsible for people's lives in a war scenario, and Jobs's ego and shit behavior was the stuff of legend. The amount of people directly impacted by not capitulating in those instances would render some personal sense of indignity mute. Do I have some secret army I'm commanding? Do you regularly voice your support for my disposition and behavior to lean one way or another? As far as I can tell, I'm just another spectacle.

Mitigating agents are important. Respect for the stressors and responsibilities of the parties involved is too. I want to believe that I'd be a general who proactively created agreements that could give a little more than they take and result in peace. That's what I did in offering to buy my own equipment, reimburse a tool I thought I lost and later found, and in offering my battery to replace one I don't believe I'm responsible for losing. That's clearly not full-proof either though. You can't buy or perform  good will nor prostrate yourself enough to not look like a threat. Alone, you survive by staying in their good grace, removing yourself from the hostility, or becoming the bigger threat. That is an emotionally exploitative and exhausting job all by itself, and at inflation-adjusted minimum wage, I was only willing to do for families in need and not the pathetic people who pretended to manage them. No one's come close to paying me enough to condone or cheer them on while they fuck me.

[864] Excuse Me

Anymore, I think power is only something that is abused.

I'm involved in a small labor dispute. A battery was lost. I do not believe I was the one who lost it, but offered to replace it with one of mine. This offer was thrown in my face, a new one was practically demanded, and sprinkled on top were very weird lines telling me I was not a victim and that I could learn something from this person who considers themselves a “mentor.” I offered to buy a new one which provoked a tit-for-tat struggle for the “last word.” I said for him to take it out of the money he owes me, which he refused to do, calling it “unethical” to replace something through the fund that's paying me. He did as they all do, wished me luck, and said it was a shame a professional relationship would be sullied over $50. I said I consider it a gift it only cost me $50 to learn so much about his character.

There's an idea I've thought more about as I entertain the thought of a civil war. The irony of the term “civil war” notwithstanding, “live by the sword, die by the sword” is broader in scope than it would seem at first glance. Your sword can be fashioned into anything: your pride, your insecurity, or any degree of power you choose to exert. Pride coming before the fall is wrapped up in this sentiment. People finding partners to reenact trauma is as well. It's a place of perpetually slipping into the realm where all the words you're using to accuse or lecture someone else should be tattooed on your forehead.

I'm often looked at with this kind of forlorn pursed lip slow head shake with how I engage with people. They, always, well before they even know for sure, but assume I “know better.” I still think about being blamed for giving Dave the acid. Dave went to war. Dave got messed up in war. As a society we're comfortable sending Dave to war, giving him less than adequate mental health care, and then blaming me when I don't hold the line for how much we're all supposed to respect or enable each other. No, I probably shouldn't have given him the acid. Yes, you all could have spoken up a little sooner about what we could have done to contribute to him getting help, or was that my job alone too?

This “negotiated middle” of how much we're supposed to play along with each other in order to get along broadly is rarely discussed. I think in “letting go” of the “little” things like someone's insecure abuse of power trained us perfectly for adopting the narrative and excuses to usher in fascism. I really do think it is that serious. I think you let things go to the extent you want to be subjected to them later. You let problems in yourself get ignored so they can show up as heart and head issues when you're old. I think you excuse your friends to the degree you wish to have shitty friends and be one in turn. I think you appease your boss to the degree you undermine the kind of boss you can be.

I suffer my idealism 100%. I want people to share responsibility, not reflexively blame when things go wrong. I want people to take a beat to respect what you've brought to the table or the conversation while it's happening. I don't want an “ongoing relationship” with someone who's looking for an excuse to use me as their punching bag when they're stressed out. I don't want to give another person an opportunity to flex their really shittily trained muscles on my mind and being.

I bend the knee constantly. I worked for the fucking State for 2 years. I got the degree. I suffered the consequences of being under-resourced in how to negotiate a better contract for my business. I hold my tongue when my neighbors pull out dowsing rods in an attempt to find water. There are infinite opportunities to play along and contribute to the normal drum beat of how to engage in civilized society. You're not just allowed to, but obligated, in biting back when your hard-earned perspective sees someone fucking up in an important way.

Often, the money is less important to me than the principle. (Cue that exasperated head shake.) I've seen people pursue money, power, or influence in the ways prescribed, and I've watched them get about as “nowhere” as me. I've watched them continue to struggle with some other unresolved issue after landing the “perfect” job. I've watched their relationships deteriorate after they thought the dream was complete upon making it to another state. I've watched people squander things they can't recognize as precious because they never found the time to bother with standing up and naming something fucked up when called to do so.

It really sucks to think of people as things you can use to whatever degree before you have to cut ties and move on. Well, it only sucks if you want to be responsible and demonstrate developing something real. Otherwise, the world is large enough that we can just pass over and through one another indefinitely having never learned anything. We can never be held to account. We can never recognize the irony. I write because I never want to sound like the people that send me to writing. I like emails and texts so when we review the history of who said what, I can prove my instinct was to take responsibility, not blame and whine like a bitch while calling you a blamy whiny bitch.

 

But that's how I'm oriented anymore. I have a neighbor who's been offering us things since he first got out here. Me and Allie were both skeptical of taking anything. People are always trying to leverage goodwill and use it to encroach for bigger and bigger asks. We've been given keys to his excavator and used tools that have sped up some of the things we're working on. I'm just waiting for something to go dramatically wrong. I'm waiting for the arm to break on the big machine I'm too poor to fix (I've told him this explicitly.) I'm waiting for the music to be too loud or too often. I'm waiting for politics to enter the conversation after I've had one too many beers.

Some take away the message that there's never a reason to explain or engage with someone who's functionally behaving in psychologically fascist ways. I do it because I don't want to be defeated. I troll Trump supporters sometimes. When it feels less fun and more like I'm hurting myself by slipping into a desire to “persuade” verses mock, I stop. You need to be as steadfast in your psychological lines and perspective. You need to know that the reason you do or don't do something transcends you. You need to advocate for forms of being that may be foreign or difficult, but objectively better and worthy of sacrificing for. I call Nazis Nazis because that needs to happen. It's better than them thinking they're merely “supportive of America's 'greatness.'”

I don't want all of my relationships to devolve into the inevitable fight where they lay their insecurities at my feet, but that's what I'm going to continue to find. Meanwhile, I'm going to continue to create with the people who aren't playing that game. I'm going to keep trying to stake a different standard in this red desert. I'm going to continue to expect you to engage me at this parsed and polite level. You're very rarely paying me enough to perpetually coddle your feelings and follow Rule #1 of The 48 Laws of Power to never outshine the master.

 

You're not my master, and never will be.

“"If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them—just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you accept."

[863] Resistance Is

 I feel I'm in a weird “in-between” place, and I want it to transition. I'm wondering if anything “externally” I do matters. I'm hungry. I had a whole plan for the day that got subsumed by my almost arbitrary desire to fuck with video editing software and post uploads related to DCS.

I hate apathy. I don't hate it on its own terms. There are plenty of things I don't give a shit about. I hate it when it's hidden behind affirmation. I hate it when it's disguised as exhaustion. I hate it when it accounts for such a small hurdle to be pushed over with a little effort, but ends up impeding life-saving equipment when you've let your legs give out.

In an effort to not succumb to apathy, I'm still meagerly trying to draw attention to the failings of leadership and lack of accountability. I want the information to stand on its own merits. I don't want to have to create “fun” videos with screen wipes and catchy music. I'm not confident we're conditioned to hear anything less than that level of production value. I'm not confident the world is psychologically oriented to feign outrage or a desire to engage in another fire.

So, as always, it has to resolve to me. I have to do it to say that I did. I have to be able to look back at my history and mental state and say confidently I moved in service to actually addressing the problem by the only means I knew how. I need that example to exist more than I need DCS to get fixed. I can act, I can't force anyone else to. I can speak to my motivations, I can't remain ever-refuting your concept of “care.” I can sleep knowing I'll have a video or blog or flier testifying to my ability to recognize, name, and attempt to fix.

I don't see a lot of that in my life. There's a night and day difference to proactive engagement and “getting by.” I've known an overwhelming amount of people capable of paying the bills. Is that respectable enough? “Enough” being the key word. Anymore, I can't seem to persuade myself so. It's not enough for me. When I feel stuck like that, I leave the job, experiment, and search for a means of organizing my time differently. I'm not as afraid, complacent, or ambivalent as the next person.

When I say I want things to make sense, I mean with regard to myself. “The world” may operate around a certain set of parameters, but I don't always have to. I can be the one and only who does what you think is futile. I can handle the pitying eyes and forlorn sentiments. I can snap back or warmly engage whatever brand of doubter. I want the situation with DCS to be an example for how to engage with the world and families, but I don't think I have the power to be the engine it needs. I can voice the concern in an ongoing way as it strikes me. I can flier. I can passive-aggressively shame the people who talk all the same talk and know they're full of shit in accounting for it better.

It's cool if it's futile. Everything is. When I get done failing to draw attention, I'll struggle to straighten wood and tear-down a refrigerator. It doesn't matter, it just feels like it does to me.

[862] Stick Figures

 It appears as though I’m trapped in a thought vortex concerning my potential for devolving morality as I grow increasingly personally satisfied. Let’s lay out the initial conditions of how I try to normally operate.

I consider the world fucked, people hopeless, and want so little to do with how “normal” things operate, I moved to a tick-ridden field in a cousin-fuck state and routinely discuss to what degree I may be a psychopath. I seek to ameliorate my perpetual practical despotism by creating a large enough institution or series of powerful infectious entities to instantiate the behaviors I’ve described as “saving” me from my worst inclinations. There is no guarantee I’ll be able to create such a thing, and I’ve more or less retained the belief that I would given my experience of getting basically everything I’ve ever truly wanted or worked for.

I consider myself a pretty simple animal. To make me “happy” or generally satisfied, put me in front of the TV, feed me, let me sleep in, or let’s fuck around. I can always find a distraction or something to obsess over. This is easy, consistent, and little to do with what I believe to be the larger important realm of your morality or what you do in service to it with your time.

I reach critical mass with how I choose to behave. You might think of it like spending your early 20s willing to apologize for your spouse’s shitty behavior, your mid 20s giving the older, refined gentleman a shot, and your 30s realizing you’re asexual and really wishing to be alone. I think it’s important to try on different skins and attempt to live through the consequences. I think you can have all of the wise words and personal testimony of those who came before, but often experience is key.

At the same time, experience, when repeated often enough, can start to overtly compel you towards one course of action, for better or worse. Abused women continue to find abusers. People reenact their disappointments and trauma in endlessly creative and destructive ways.

There’s a thread in my life that could have just as easily persuaded me to continually, shamelessly, and aggressively take advantage of people. I get hints of this lesson nearly every day. People share their weaknesses like they might fries. They tell you exactly what they want or desperately need whether you asked for it or not. The irony for me is how often I tell you exactly what I want or need and how often I’m characterized as being too convoluted or confusing until you get to see how things evolve when the obvious shape fits the obvious hole.

I think this “threat” to be a certain kind of person is one that people don’t take seriously about me. I think they believe that, in spite of everything I attempt to demonstrate, and likely an equal amount of words speaking to the worries I have regarding my worst nature, it’s more a kind of fluff or posturing given my overall pretension or how much I talk about being smarter or better than “ all that.” No, I’m not likely to do TV-show escapades and end up on the news. Consider, neither cancer nor AIDS drop an ax through your skull.

I think it’s worth describing how I could act or what I believe I could extract in short order from a concerted effort. I think if you’re made to feel uncomfortable by my mere description of what could be, perhaps it’ll give you an insight into the ongoing battle in my head about why I’m not.

Starting simple, there are any number of people I could exploit on the back of my work ethic. I do a job, word of mouth gets me another one. They have a Trump flag. The job would take 5 hours, I confidently assert 10 after ascertaining they really want someone to talk to or something to fuss over to feel alive, and talk sweetly until I walk away with 20 hours worth. You may think this is actually not that bad, fuck Trump and his enablers, and this presumably old or lonely person is walking away like someone was there who listened and they got some solid work out of it. You may currently occupy a more comfortable level of shit behavior than me.

But let’s take it a step further and consider the average desperate headcase on a place like OKCupid. I’m not into fat. I don’t think body positivity is honestly motivated. I can see the space between your eyes, the insults you haven’t coped with, or the severe personality flaw you put in overtime to gloss over. Poof! My preferences can be made to disappear. Maybe I make you fall in love by timing little gifts, calendar plotting times to interject my memory of something you relayed you held dear, and literally borrowing from cliche playbooks lines that make you question, but not too much, so that I can legitimize your doubts on my schedule. Maybe I do it just to prove that I can have unsatisfying manipulative sex any time I want. Maybe I do it to rehearse for when I need to do the same thing with someone who has a little more money or access to something else I want.

Keep in mind, the underlying “ethic” of all of this is that people beg for it and get what they deserve. I learned things the hard way, why shouldn’t they? Who’s so dumb not to remain cynical and guarded enough to protect themselves from me? This is all “because I can” more than for any remotely respectable reason.

What’s it to plunge a little deeper? Well, you’ve got friends and family and things you care about. Why don’t I infect them? Maybe I subvert something about them that is meaningful to you. There’s always something you feel guilty about, no? Why do I seem so good at fulfilling that role? Maybe I use information about them, or you, against you. Maybe I leverage your emotion or need I’m fulfilling towards making you feel smaller and smaller. Maybe I make you denigrate yourself, but in such small increments, you feel like it’s the natural consequence of a series of bad decisions perfectly aligned with the kind of bad decisions you always say you’re making.

Have we even scratched the surface yet? So far, we’re talking about targeting “weak” and vulnerable people. We haven’t even gotten into specific set-ups and false realities. What if you really like me. No, like really really like me, and I’m some pseudo-alter boy in your religious fantasy. What could I get you to sign over? How much access could I get to your life? What if I did it in a way that you never even found out and then passed me off to someone else you love or trust?

I’m getting kind of bored. These are often the laziest character dynamics in cheap soap operas, but they’re genuinely terrible modes of behavior people engage in routinely like it’s just to be accepted from such lowly creatures. It’s a thing where “everybody knows” the same things and aren’t motivated to say much or do anything when it happens. The problem being, what everyone knows is related to the kind of basic bitch behavior of idiots intuiting ways of taking advantage of each other. They aren’t making a profession or game out of it. They aren’t making a point. They’re “surviving” like the flailing morons they are.

I wouldn’t get that excuse. I’d have to deal with knowing I was deciding every moment to tilt you one way or another. I’d have to redraw the line in the sand about just how malicious I was going to be. Scam a Trump supporter out of a few extra hundred? Psh, who cares? She wants me to work on her car and I “innocently” cut something I don’t readily understand after noticing she lives atop a hill off a busy intersection? Whoa there buddy! Except, it’s not that clear to me that the mechanism for making either decision is all that different. It’s the impulse to justify. It’s the brush you use to paint how you see the world and other people in it.

I regularly want to hurt people. When I spit on a Trump flag waving truck, somewhere in me I know I could be provoking a physical altercation. I’m met with the ass-backward assessments of my character and intent almost daily. I feel like I live in opposite-land as just a general state of being. I do exceptionally well, I’m regarded as shit. I learn or grow or do, it’s like they bussed in the haters and nay-sayers. I find a cause, you assure me there was never a reason to bother. Even at my happiest or most content, there is something wrong. I can’t swallow the idea of a red lamp being regarded as blue by the overwhelming majority of people (even if in private they’re perfectly willing to say it’s red in service to shitting on the 20% of people who are genuinely deluded enough to see blue.)

I still return wallets to the mask-less scraggly hillbilly fuckwits who drop theirs at the gas station who didn’t notice. I offered every service, communicated honestly, and never made a single threat or attempt to intimidate in the course of my DCS work. I don’t over bill when I’m feeling lazy and walking a little too slow for my liking as I’m in a semi-open-ended timeslot to get work done. I don’t disingenuously eschew being polite in a self-righteous crusade to feel better or smarter than those around me. I’m just prepared to be a bad person. For one reason or another, I’m looking for the excuse, the license, to serve up what’s being begged for.

I don’t particularly feel good about the idea of getting away with some level of depravity. It makes me feel dumb or like I’ve abandoned the idea that I’m not just better because I say so, but because I work to be so. It makes me think I’m creating a problem that’s going to reverberate and fuck me later. This, again, something I have no evidence for, but it’s like an instinct I’m not even sure I should trust. I see myself suffering the consequences of everyone else’s shit all the time. How am I to believe that if I get things increasingly together, they’re not just going to reap some disproportionate reward? When do they bite the bullet of their fascism verses into fresh local produce we’re interested in selling to any political stripe?

The overwhelming majority of my relationships have taught me to be excruciatingly selfish. They teach me to fuck you over on rent or move out responsibilities. They tell me my time is much too important to be bothered with what you’re doing. They tell me “busy” and “tired” should be certified sol for their ability to blind us to what moral obligation looks like. My relationships tell me I’ll find 1 in several thousand ever even basically willing to entertain a real conversation let alone work in service to it. My relationships suggest I should stop suffering at the sacrificial helm steering my demons towards other preoccupations with the wind blowing so ceaselessly the other direction. People who give appear to be taken wholly for granted. People who create are “criticized” by those unable to form their own thoughts. People who do will never do it fast or well enough to appease fucko-John who’s been given the keys or the money.

Do I actually want the responsibility of doing better, or has my spite engine been hijacked? Have I been infected by the idea that I can churn out examples combating a timeless and gigantic social or philosophical problem, when really I just hate you? People get away with considering themselves God’s instrument, right? Maybe I’m built to be “negative,” destroy, and target you, and I’ve been tricked into adopting some complicated paradigm of arbitrary universal morality. Maybe there’s nothing to be, no progress to be made, and it’s just my job to be Yang to whatever end presents itself, and Yin in accepting whatever justifies it.

I don’t know that I’ll figure this out. I don’t want it left to chance. I want to feel responsible either way and for you to know that I had a reason beyond befuddled disillusion in my efforts to victimize. I’ve said before that some of my behavior is mitigated by my crowd and the people I work with or talk to. What should we make of that if the surrounding gross milieu is creeping in a bid to sponsor a disposition and decision-making shift?

[861] Grass Is Greener

 I’m just kinda surging on some kind of goofy and motivated energy tonight. Today’s been a solid day. I got more work done on my job site, salvaged some bricks and roofing tiles. I ate a delicious meal I didn’t have to cook. I watched dope shows, and have been brought to tears laughing a few times watching some things online and in recalling instances from my day that struck me. Like, all days should have many of the elements of today. It’s spurred on by an incredibly mild tipsiness from 2 beers for which I’ve already come down and taken my preemptive pills to not wake up miserable.

I got to thinking. I still have to get my fliers out speaking to the shitty behavior of DCS. At the same time, I’ve reached out to a few people about sharing horror stories. Not one has emailed me yet, in spite of voiced enthusiasm. I know, I know, busy lives and not their fight and the world is ending in several concurrent ways. But in a very real light, no one really gives a shit. Whether the office was run in pristine fashion, or just acceptable enough to pass for human, the fact that it takes the disproportionately-likely-to-do-anything type of person to try and address it any kind of way is indicative of the larger cultural disposition.

Is that okay? I think “age and experience” are overburdened in persuading you that it is. I don’t want to move mountains. I want checks on power. I want accountability. You’re on board until you realized it would require you to write a page or two? Until the life you have outside of dealing with the exact same problems you voice independent of me looks like it’s more fun or easier to engage with? Even if I’ve grown to accept the kind of pace of “adults” and the “regular” world, I still cry foul. I’m, again, even willing to do all the work!

I think it takes a severe lack of appreciation for your agency and culpability before you start thinking about what the neighbor has. Just to blow a hole in the idiom, I don’t even like or want grass.You think the new job, new girlfriend, or new toy absolves you of the guilt or worry wrapped up in whatever’s on your mind. When confronted with an opportunity to address it proactively, you can do only two things. Nothing, or the work to process. Sometimes, I suspect for most actually, even just talking honestly about whatever that “thing” is for you is the processing. It’s no secret I can never get people to freely offer their words or thoughts. (Gotta flash the old smile and offer a shot.)

I try to run thought experiments. I try to put myself in others’ shoes and wonder what it would be like to fly a Trump flag. I wonder what I would have to have been through or not been born with to deeply appreciate my fast food job. I wonder how I would stay in certain kinds of relationships or allow for certain kinds of people to pollute my airspace. Every time, I remember I’m an aberration. I’m too critical. I write things like this parsing out details. Were I born in Nazi Germany or cousin-fuck Indiana, “me” would breakthrough as this process of not trying to be the dumb fucks around me. I don’t have that kind of empathy and understanding because I’ve never had it.

This causes me to remain fascinated by your experience. You have an infinite amount of information I can never access nor maybe even really understand. I can only hold up my disproportionate slant-rhyme kind of existence. Why yes! I can explain, I have been deeply in love! As you skim my blogs from high school you wonder what the fuck I could possibly mean. Oh I know what you mean! As we’re waxing about the importance of family and immutable bonds before you learn the calculus behind picking those worthy and capable over something like blood or the divinely designated.

I’m never going to get your experience though, am I? That’s what entertainers are for. To package the real experience into something with layers to unpack on television and fan forums or with a special license in comedy specials. People don’t talk or share what isn’t cultivated or safe. The memes are ready-made. The sentiment baked into their “engaging” platforms.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Aesop fable The Ant and The Grasshopper. Moreso, I’ve been thinking about the quality of “timelessness.” What can we expect to be true, like math, indefinitely? What moral truths or sets of behaviors? What expectations can you set and know beyond a shadow of a doubt, the “best” outcome probably doesn’t need to be in quotes despite whatever baggage may accompany it? If you’re unfamiliar, the ant spends the summer collecting food for the winter which he denies to the grasshopper who’s starving when winter comes after dancing all summer.

I feel I’m more ant than grasshopper. I feel the more my disposition flirts with being comfortable and smug as the world around me burns, I get the temptation to throw someone’s courted death in their face. Isn’t it all so obvious? Don’t you know what happens when you don’t face the reality of all you’ll need to eat to stay alive? Of course, I’m thinking of more than just food. You need good information to work with. You need standards to return to under duress. You need examples to act as guideposts to future explorers and moralizers.

The idea of nothing being a secret I find compelling. The only mysteries I really find entertaining are the yet-revealed plot points in a TV show or video game. I know there are things about the universe to discover and things we’ll probably never know. But, like, people? What we “should” be doing? The “secret” to happiness? The source of every miserable thought or wish I’ve had in life can be traced back to the same points. Dishonesty and isolation. When I refused to see my shared humanity, I refused to accept my shared responsibility. I, alone, could sit and spin on an endless array of dicks to fuck myself with.

We remain so convinced though. So close to the election, Trump flags are out in force. No one can tell us anything. Hell, even lived experience can’t crack a shell hardened by your own pretense! “That never happened to me!” That’s what makes me want to be incredibly selfish. Nothing I could say or do. Nothing I could offer. No dollar amount. No opportunity. No softening the edge of what cut me. No debate. No fancy package would make you open what was in front of you. Is it a binary situation though? That no one seems to answer when you knock, does that mean you’re no longer obligated to?

This is probably my central struggle. While I’m inclined to think you always and forever have to keep knocking, I don’t completely know why I’m inclined that way. I can habitually cite the good examples set by my dad and grandmother as having “saved” me the all-encompassing trauma of living with my mom, but that’s incomplete. I want to reap the rewards of my knowledge on how to take advantage of people, right? I want to trick you out of your resources. I want to intimidate you. I want to put out gag-worthy videos on social media and conjure my own kind of cult-like followers like Trump. It works, doesn’t it? What about our current level of existence doesn’t seem to suggest to you that it works? Do you just hope and pray Trump is as miserable as you imagine you’d be? Do you think every dollar paid to an “influencer” is like a little dagger in their back? Do you think any aging oil executive looks back at his life as a series of regrets?

Again I return to, I literally can’t imagine. I have no idea. If I were afforded the same opportunities, I’d come to the page, pick apart what the appeal of being Trump-like was, and find a timeless truth I’d have to choose to ignore. I like being a dick with the work ethic and evidence to back it up. I think a righteous bitch-slap is stronger than an insecure or angry one. If nothing else, I want to be a spiteful indignant cunt who shows you that well in spite of how absolutely horribly I’d love to treat you until the day I died, I managed to keep my shit together and create something that transcends. It isn’t about me. It’s about this sense in me that more people need to have. It’s about this habit of organization and accountability that lends itself to days where you can laugh, work, and drink, and expect to have more in service to the celebration instead of the escape.

Meanwhile, nobody gives a fuck, so I remain obligated to. I have to say I did what I could because fuck you. Fuck you in the way that’s fuck me if I behaved like you. Didn’t this start sounding kinda light and fun? lol

[860] Built To Last

I woke up today with a lot of energy. For the last week (indeed about the last 3 months) I've been physically active in the form of an array of “dirty jobs.” I've deconstructed sheds, moved bricks, and cleaned up an array of gross and heavy things from weed-laden and not-the-best-smelling areas. I've turned “rather Black” as an associate put it from my time in the sun. My cardio has improved. My arms are bigger. My pants are slipping. I'm getting marks and callouses less as a result of my picking, and more from scrapes from brush, wood, or bugs.

I've never been a morning person. I'm groggy, stiff, often rushing to piece together the clothes or food I didn't set up the night before. I remember running for the bus as a child after waking up late and then feeling like I needed to puke (indeed doing so a few times) my morning coffee or Pop Tart. I still don't consider myself a morning person, but in having things I look forward to or that require a certain kind of energy, I regularly wake up by 8am or earlier, not dragging myself out of bed, but ready to go. I fall asleep shortly after I go to bed without feeling like I'm “missing something” that should keep me awake.

I used to be annoyed by this. While it may be new that I have a meaningful amount of labor that might be expected of me each day, the energetic feeling from exercising is not. I've had bouts of hitting the gym, feeling good, and then been left with nowhere to put the energy. I'd get amped-up to come home, find no one available or willing to hang out. They didn't want to work out with me. They weren't interested in helping me experiment or play with whatever was going on at the time. I was perhaps too broke or uninterested in stepping up creative ways to exploit the energy. So I'd read and destroy my mood, or settle back into TV or noodling on an instrument.

“Holistic” has become one of my favorite words. To have a deep appreciation for a broad picture is often an exercise in futility or irony. We celebrate when someone can achieve higher levels of specificity in their education or craftsmanship. To be an “everythingist” is to look kind of foolish or like a lack of focus and direction. In spite of this, a holistic impression of your place in life is vitally important. You are you in every moment, at work, in your community, and in history. There's as much of a “work/life balance” as there is a “personal/interpersonal” one or “money/happiness” one. As my balance seems to come into focus, I think it's worth describing how and why it feels that way.

In this moment, I have a job that keeps me physically active. It's with an organization that is concerned about conservation, health, and revitalizing a small-town that is rife with all of the problems you'd associate with a bygone era of middle-class exceptionalism. I'm getting paid $30 an hour as an independent contractor. I'm willing and able to remain within their budget as this job hopefully bolsters my available tools and clout for the ongoing needs that will be associated with developing this trail. I can work when I want, and I want to work “now,” like I usually do, and the contacts I make could influence my access to heavy machinery and decades of knowledge related to farming that can translate to the land.

It's still rough work, and I'd prefer help or to be delegating more than navigating wasps and sweating. But it feels like a genuine investment and opportunity. It's a short-term gig with hopefully long-term relationships. That's what work should be. There should be manageable bits where each available skill can contribute to an overall goal that benefits all parties. You should be enabled proportionately to what you're bringing to the table, but if that's an imperfect calculation, the effect and respect you have on or for each other should remain stable. In an ideal situation, that happens with open communication, honest exchanges, and achievable measurable benchmarks.

In less ideal circumstances, you need to claw these standards out of the block of whatever has been put in front of you. Practically, you're doing this regardless of your best will, intention, or beliefs in the parties involved. Create the contract. Insist on reiterating your standards. Continue to demonstrate what you're about and how you work so it isn't lost in the fray of disappointments, miscommunications, or outright lies and exploitation.

I see something of an endless parallel. Whether you're in child welfare, or tearing down a shed, you can do it right, or you can waste a lot of effort pretending otherwise. Whether you're conducting your life along a set of prescribed beliefs, or finding a hodgepodge of examples to serve conflicting selfish narratives, the task is the same. Are you asking if you're able to make an honest evaluation of your circumstances? Are you able to contribute meaningfully? Have you worked out definitions for success? Do you even feel good?

The more I experience my life as a fluid transition between things that meaningfully contribute to the different areas I'm aware of, the more fulfilling and worth it it seems to be awake and aware. The probabilistic chain of life events takes on a significance that is no longer theoretical guesswork or series of “hopes.” I don't get the job without the girlfriend who also doesn't get her job without an earnest opportunity and pursuit of her areas of expertise and interest. We don't have plans for a garden without the land, that didn't come without the savings, which didn't start without the ethic of ownership and cost reduction. I don't advocate for my hourly rate without eschewing culturally-imposed guilt and a deep desire for the ongoing narrative verses opportunistic cash-grab.

I wasn't compelled to think in those terms without a persistent reckoning with how miserable the “regular” expectations at work or school sat with me, and how dishonest people seemed to be in relaying their satisfaction of their own life. You have to be the progenitor of every important detail missing from the pictures you pose for. I currently need to see someone putting fliers out to a community I feel is underserved, someone sweaty and sneezing as he tears down derelict structures, and someone sitting pretty in and on what he owns and the ongoing work it will take to develop.

I'm still an asshole. I still have every worst thought and written sentiment. I'm still prone to levels of antagonism, defiance, or obscenity that seem to make me very small and petty. But I'm willing to cede to the conditions that make those behaviors harder to allow for. I feel less motivated to make “fun” of easy targets. I find it possible to distinguish when a personal grievance might interfere with my ability to advocate from a broader lens. I can take my time, not because there aren't a dozen things to do or that urgency isn't important, but because I can actually probe for and demonstrate what's needed in the moment to ensure one thing is done correctly in service to everything.

What that one thing is is different for everybody. It can't exist without the capacity for honest evaluation, and honest evaluation is severely hindered by the environments you are plugged into. It's hard to see what you can't speak truthfully about, and it's impossible to see what you refuse to imagine. I genuinely hope you are using your place in life to turn you out into the ongoing work that coincides with your best self. I don't really hope things, but the world will be better if the processes that have worked through me happen to you too. I don't “just feel better” about my life, I can demonstrate how the ongoing acts speak to the robustness of the system across layers.

[859] It's Christmas Eve

If there's nothing else you take away from this, just know how incredibly bored I am.

I was recently re-reading a blog entitled Character Assassination. In it, I used a fresh example of the things very often levied against me when it comes to discussing difficult topics. For a number of reasons, I'm often at the end of someone's very earnest, exasperated, and insistent feelings with regard to how I argue something, discuss my place in life, or how I flick my hair or something.

I give no fucks. This is the dumb teenage way of saying, “I'm not concerned with a vast array of things regarding your disposition, opinion, or actions in the world, most specifically as they pertain to me.” My respect is for people who earn it. My good will is for people who grant it in return. Do I want to impress with the things I do or create? Sure. You'd be unconscionably foolish to believe I did it for you before me.

What seems to be lost on people is this is an expression of empathy. I literally imagine myself in your shoes engaging in something I'm asking of you. If you come to my house and your first instinct is to criticize (and not in that fun shit-talking way) all of the things I've yet to do to make this place emblematic of my larger ideals, you're a cunt. You're a cunt just like I'd be a cunt. You don't deserve the invite. You don't deserve my good will, my beer, my fire, my anything. That's easy, right? I walked into absolute shit holes as an assessor. Did I carry on like they were shit holes if they didn't endanger the child? Absolutely not. I didn't even have to use my imagination as to why their standard of living was what I came upon. (I hear it too.)

I talk an insane amount of game. Do you think I've done much beyond hint as to what the world looks like that I actually want? Is it because I'm disingenuous I haven't continued to exhaust myself every day in service? Is it that I'm just kinda dumb or lazier than I let on? What if, and this is a huge what if, I learned through hard way after hard way that there's an excruciatingly small amount of luck, good will, respect, circumstances, and money to practically do anything in life, and thus became reoriented? What if you're shit, I'm shit, we're both busy, and we've allowed any number of old cliches to bolster how we protect ourselves from engaging with the world in a more dramatic and real way?

Here's the rub. In my experience, I overwhelmingly watch as people devolve into insecure husks of themselves looking for the smallest of things to celebrate in a perspective that is otherwise degrading. I mean their perspective degrades their bodies, their minds, their relationships, their expectations, their belief in reality itself and what's possible. Do I need to remind you people that Trump is president? I'm not like alone on this uppity opinion about the shit bowl I'm swimming in.

As such, I'm extremely, probably as much as one can allow without turning it into a pathology, confident in the good things I do, and why I do them. I've done the work. I watch the examples I set and their consequences every single day. I watch my disposition to see if I'm on the border of breaking down into tears when I'm challenged (I'm not). I watch to see if the bills are continuing to get paid, and my work matches my predictions (they are and do). I ask, constantly, for reasons I should somehow think less of myself or prospects or people I'd prefer in my life, and the crickets are happy to chime a symphony.

I think insecurity is a self-indulgent luxury. How are you more feeble than a hapless animal spinning into oblivion, endlessly ignorant, and reasonably afraid of everything that could kill you instantly? Oh, you're fat too? Oh, you're scared “they” are gonna look down on you? Oh, you're petty expectations, so proud and defined, aren't going to be met? Boo, fucking, hoo. I respect that no one really gives a shit about me, that's my whole disposition. I get, intimately, that you are up your own ass too. Therefore, I only entertain the judgments you make from up there with so much salt. You're not even reading this blog! Lol, I have 5 people maybe that still catch these, and I'm pushing 900 that I've been writing for 16 years.

Be humble, insofar as you understand that it's your burden to keep demonstrating and reporting as honestly on your inner world as you possibly can. I'm 32. You don't get to just cry and breakdown when the topic is sensitive anymore. I'm not saying you can't or you won't or that I understand you trauma as you do. I'm saying you don't get to say with a straight face that it's supposed to be the reigning arbiter of your decision making or place in the world. You don't get to keep blaming me for being bored with it. You don't get to judge my confidence or otherwise as condescension and disrespect because you won't own how much you wished you felt better but are rarely willing to do the work to get better.

I fuck with people that get better and want more for themselves. I fuck with people who aren't dramatically changing how they dance around my endless slurry of pithy opinions or psychopathic blunt takes. Do I need to be more sensitive to people's feelings? This has been a central question since...about my whole life that I pretty consistently come down on the side of “why?” What is it serving, really? I'm giving you a helping hand in justifying what I think we should all consider pretty shitty behavior. I use feelings as something to acknowledge and inform, not an excuse. Be the example you want to see in the world?

One huge sign there's an incredible amount of unfair selfishness going on in your judgment is when you reach for the tit-for-tat and either/or mechanisms. When someone isn't deeply understood for the severity of their feelings, it condemns you as precisely the opposite of the kind of person who is capable or willing to bother in the first place! And wouldn't you know it, here's other aspects of your character to bolster the point. Relevant? Silly, now's not the time for questions.

You don't make me angry, I let my desire to be pissed off raise my voice and look for hurtful things to say. You don't make me sad, I allow the demonstrably sad shit going on at any one moment to steer how I'm going to write or indulge in the feeling. You don't make me happy, I've worked on how to contextualize and appreciate things for how they lie and then bolster myself at the prospect of how to make them grow or be organized in a higher order (or make them “better”). I want to remain responsible for how I engage in the world, so I try, aggressively, to contain the otherwise raging animal that wants to react react react and justify because of how icky you and your cruel world were behaving towards me.

Whether you want to believe it or not, you have precisely as much agency as I do. You often have significantly larger obligations and responsibilities than I do. Whatever superimposed games you've adopted on top of what I consider to be a basic ethic of respecting where and how you are oriented in the world, I'll never know. What I can tell you is how I'm going to react when all of the feelings you've tied into those games come into contact with me. No, I don't care what other people think. I respect that what they think has consequences, and play my cards accordingly, but the thought alone is not my concern if it doesn't impede how I'm trying to live. No, I'm not going to respond to tears. I don't want you to feel bad, and I know my advice to “don't,” doesn't work, but crying doesn't indicate that someone hurt you (even if they did), just that you feel like crying. You have to answer for why.

And just to end on a humanizing note, I've cried when I had no control. I've cried when I felt powerless. I've cried when I didn't get my way. I've cried when I didn't know what else to do. I've cried, barely, when I was drunk enough to get the directions wrong in attempting to walk 2 blocks. Does this make me “hard” or “cold?” No, its just taught me that crying can have a lot of really bad excuses, true enough, but that I've learned to take responsibility in service to, not break down over. I don't care how emotional you are, I care how you respond to it. If your first instinct is to blame me, or blame at all, pardon my red card for a foul on the play.