[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?