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
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