[874] Mind's Eyesight

When I was kid, my dad told me about his beer can collection. When he went to college, my grandpa, while cleaning out the attic, found and threw the cans away. My dad said my grandpa thought it was trash, and didn't realize that classic or out-of-business brands of cans would be worth thousands. Even after attempting to tell my grandpa this, he didn't believe him or understand. He came from Yugoslavia and worked on a farm. Trash is trash. You work hard, you make enough to live.

I started collecting Pokemon cards with my dad's story constantly in my head as a kid. I double-cased them, arranged them in importance of perceived value. I didn't fall for the shady trader who ran the card store in town who offered to trade an array of cards for my holographic Blastoise; I had the price guide as well. I wanted to build my little investment just like my dad's beer cans. I got older and had the same impulse when the first run of Marvel Legends came out. I never opened the boxes. I bought entire sets when they were $20 a piece.

Both some of my cards (including a prized Charizard), and all of my Marvel figures have been stolen. My foresight disappeared in an instant to the hands of children who were invited to my dad's house while I was in college, and either meth heads or scammy builders when I was trying to get set up out here.

In my experience, to invest in yourself is a rare character trait. No doubt it's easy to understand how heart-breaking and precarious attempting to protect something like toys or cards for decades can be. There's also no guarantee that what you choose to invest in is going to become as popular as Marvel and Pokemon (though, even in 5th grade, I knew Pokemon was what to go with over Digimon).

When I was 16, I tried to start my own “business” with a friend who knew how to build computers. The idea was to drive to Tiger Direct, get parts really cheap, and sell gaming computers. The internet was less robust, so we found out the hard way that the inventory wasn't exactly lending itself to be worthy of the hour+ drive. The idea failed pretty quickly. I then proceeded to work 2 jobs, practically 3 with band, and continued to do well in school. I dreamed of college as the chance to take my, at the time, insatiable desire to read about religion and science, and let me turn it into something worthwhile. After being immediately humbled by my naivety about what college is, I turned to trying to profit from throwing parties you might see in the movies.

To invest in something is to have an eye on the future. It's the clearest indication that you're trying to control the future. I think it says considerably more about your present. I think it tells you about your genuine morals or values. If you are unable or unwilling to invest, it comes with a predictable set of ethics. You seek the shortcuts. You want the momentary wins and are subjected to the tumultuous whims of your feelings or latest influences. This is where the “conservative” impulse that strikes many people as they age kicks in. They can more easily see what has retained value and why in the midst of constant change or chaos.

I've asked, and continue to ask, people to invest in themselves and me. If you can't extract an extraordinary dollar amount, then I want you to feel the impact of the effort or knowledge. The knowledge that my start-up coffee shop could gross $2000-$3000 a month with all of the constraints and difficulties is extremely important to me. That there's an extra room I built attached to my house, for all of its negotiations, is the exact same kind of extremely important knowledge. When I think I'm too fat or lazy, I walk by a mountain of bricks or ¼ acre of tilled soil.

You can't see it at first, but it is impractical to live under the idea that you can always rely on the paycheck, the benevolence of the powers currently in charge, or what's most familiar. Modernity has done everything in its power to put us into little boxes of what to expect from ourselves. Advertising told us what the future would be. Consumer trends dictated your diet. You consider your relative worth in terms of '”minimum wage” and “benefits.” An endless cycle of call-and-response means you can only find protest and disobedience as the means of redressing grievance instead of infiltration, preservation, or iteration.

The people I hold in the highest regard are the ones who respond to the metaphorical theft of their plans for the future with the reiteration and celebration of the means in which they are going to pursue it anyway. This doesn't mean you have to be deliberately naive about the practical constraints. It doesn't mean you are more or less likely to get anything like what you were after. It simply indicates that your mind is oriented towards what is possible. You're not defeated by default.

When I write, my habit is to shit on people for not acknowledging how defeated they are. You'd be deliberately missing the point if you think I'm upset about not having enough money, not running my little empire, or not finding enough “on the level” people willing to indulge my every fantasy. I see the spark of the divine in so few people, I think it is a catastrophic moral and intellectual failure for those people not feel the guilt or shame that I might associate with the impulse to improve. We still can choose, every moment, to acknowledge all we've been given, either in material resources, or in each other, and explore what that can turn into. Or, we can stay lodged in our asses, hoping the waves of change leave us undisturbed at the bottom.

On my “day off,” I'm about to head on another scrap run. I cut my fingers deep while working on the room extension yesterday. I maintain my “practical” job that barely rewards my ability to play by rules and brings me zero mental peace, even if the value of it might be argued by a client or supervisor. I'd have to construe a very long karmic chain of quasi-bullshit to conjure how it speaks to improving me or my circumstances baring practical throwaway statements about money. I'm never “off,” and I work to keep myself reminded of that. I require a dozen occupations to thrive, leverage, and balance. You do too.

If I came across a post for extremely cheap living circumstances, and all that was being asked of me was to use your tools to tear apart washing machines and list them on Ebay, I'd be sure it was a scam. What the ever-loving fuck would that even mean? You don't want rent? You're not trying to fuck me? You don't want me to stay hush about your meth operation? People don't “get it,” because there's nothing to get. There's no subtext and no secret. It's just a deliberate and methodical practice in service to an ideal of future circumstances. It's physically and verbally practicing respect for that work. We've been given the world and feel miserable because we didn't have to work for it. We didn't have to see behind the scenes or feel the ache of every shovel full of dirt under the convenience store.

No one takes me up on it, besides a few friends and the support we've received from our respective parents because culturally we're defeated. We don't have the language, practice, or habits that lend themselves to actually believing in ourselves. We don't know how much we already have and how much we can do without. We don't have an eye on the future, because we abandoned the responsibility of what it takes to maintain the system. We chose, continue to choose, unsustainable ideas about what's convenient. We choose the “comfort” of what's familiar and “reliable.” We're not choosing to respect what we're made of. We're not choosing to challenge and work with the best parts of what we see in each other. We're left with constant last-minute and desperate attempts to patch holes in a submarine that's been shot through. We're literally contending with fascism.

I'm not saying you absolutely have to move out here, sacrifice your worldly possessions, secretly hate everything about your life and how it's oriented, or that I have the best or most thought out plan for engaging with it all. I am saying that I find it incredibly suspect that one could take from the constant cultural refrains and diagnose the problem as a measure of *too much* respect and understanding in the nature of our problems. I'm saying the hostility and resentment for my offer is a telling sickness. If you think you need to spend more, work more hours, fight the thoughts a post like this plants in your head, or hit a donate button, you're not doing the real work. You don't recognize, you don't respect, and you're giving the future away.

[873] Atomic Puzzle

Let’s see what’s going on up there.

I called dispatch on a truck that was driving wrong. He was idling next to another truck in the fast line for what felt like an incredibly long time. We passed emergency vehicles and other hazards on the road for which the truck next to him flipped on his turn signal in trying to get farther away from. He didn’t budge. I told dispatch he was swerving, maybe on his phone.

I open with this story because I feel it is indicative of many things about me. One, I’m prepared to be that kind of a dick pretty much at all times. Two, I can confidently say I don’t drive like that, and get the fuck over or let people over. Three, I’ve both let things like that go, and elevated significantly less egregious behavior in the past.

I’ve called the police on people weaving like assholes through traffic, people clearly drunk at the gas station, and people who’ve otherwise demonstrated what I considered to be an elevated level of unsafe and ridiculous driving. Have I driven while on my phone, eating dinner, or otherwise gotten a little more swerve-y than is appropriate? Of course.

What made this make me feel justified more than hypocritical? Why did I think an intervention was required? He sat in the lane long enough for me to not just notice his truck number but memorize it. There happened to be several things the truck next to him passed, and indicated he wanted to avoid better, that he should have been able to. I was on my way to a scrap run, and the drive was feeling longer than yesterday.

This got me thinking that in general, I’m not calling people out for things like this. If anything, I lend myself to setting uncontrollable fires to your disposition independent of if it then spirals into hell or helps you. I feel this lends itself to my having “low” standards for what it takes for me to consider you or your behavior acceptable. Saying it like that makes me think things are incredibly more complicated, but maybe we’ll get there. For now, I’m merely reminded that I wore a yin yang symbol at all times for many years because I deeply vibed with the image of balance. Over time I came to understand balance as individual to each person and an inevitable fate of every particle in the universe.

I got to thinking, every puzzle is as big and small as the number of pieces it is cut into. You’re as much entire chunks of your body parts and organs as you are atoms, bacteria, or hair and dandruff. On balance, you can get many conscious beings describing their state of affairs in as many or few words as they are lent or discover. The impartial universe says you are equal enough to a thing that can reproduce for its own sake.

As a state of being, balance is by definition without judgement. All things weigh the same, until they don’t, and you either discover what brings the balance back, or you don’t. “The universe” may not care if you’re feeling anxious or depressed, but your behavior can lend itself to bringing balance back or anchoring one side.

Balance is constantly negotiated. As such, it’s easy to take it for granted as an unnecessary or thankless chore instead of a responsibility. Once you set a course of action into motion, it keeps moving unless acted upon. You need money? Get a job! Over time you find yourself hating your job, yourself, and those around you. But don’t you need money? Don’t you want to eat? How much hate is equal to new job? How much does food weigh on what you’re willing to put up with?

I think this is part of my struggle to understand the misnamed “other side” when it comes to things like Trump and fascism. I know there’s a host of underlying psychological forces. I know you can’t expect a dog to do your math homework or someone from southern Indiana to do much beyond fuck their cousin. If this is a “balance” to anything, it has to be the indifference, laziness, and hubris of people when confronted with all of the ignorant destruction that ilk represents. The universe has a dirty naked ass, wipe it, or be consumed.

I still don’t see us wiping though. We’re throwing up old mop bucket Joe next to an overflow of shit and hoping beyond hope it’ll catch just enough to keep us from drowning. We’re already drowning. We’re drowning in fear, excuses, and memes. We’re drowning in service to self-immolating capitalistic ethics. We’re drowning in ideas of our own saintliness and direction. We pretended “progress” was inevitable and not the violent ripping and defending of a standard from the abyss.

I sincerely need to get better at making escape plans. We require a revolution at a level unseen in human history. We can melt the entire planet via climate change or nuclear weapons in an instant. We will never wise up to the impossibility of negotiating with ideological and pathological terrorism, spearheaded and endorsed by fluid capital forces. What do you do besides retreat below ground until the fog clears?

I assert often that “we” don’t learn. We go to school. We pick-up various job skills and can generally meet a range of rules of survival. On the whole, I do not think the lessons earned through generations of death find their way into our being in a way that provokes constant proactive action. My immigrant grandparents birthed three out of four children willing to steal their resources and disparage their legacy after their death. Their lessons either translated to my dad and down to my brother and I, or we narrowly escaped the worse impacts and behavior related to trauma?

I return to the idea that World War II wasn’t that long ago. The idea that we would already have millions of people echoing Nazi sentiments or be ambivalent at racist flags at their rallies means an array of systems and their lesson plans failed miserably. While children are not born “blank slates,” they are malleable. If modernity has taught us anything, it’s to treat that malleability as fragile, volatile, and in need of a long-term planning and accountability.

Sometimes a small injustice is small. Sometimes larger systems subject small injustices to undue punishment. As a product of groupthink, we use conversational and psychological shortcuts to kneecap topics or people and then many years later those topics or people might embark on their comeback tour. When you’re out of balance, every injustice feels like the worst one. Every demand unmet makes you think the system can’t be persuaded. Every comparison you make involves an automatic assumption of your lack of power and constructs a narrow path to walk the story of your circumstances.

If nothing else, you can begin to bring balance back by entertaining broader and conflicting stories. You can read that as being generally “skeptical.” You can balance pessimistic sentiments with optimistic actions. You can voice your displeasure with detailed analysis and historical context while refraining from boiling everything down to how depressed or anxious you are. You can introduce oppositional voices into your safe spaces and study how they communicate or why others find them so compelling.

Out of context? My mind just said, “Relapse is part of recovery.” It’s a cliché that happens to be true. How often and severely you’re relapsing is an amplified drama when you’re accounting for the impact on children. The story of addiction is as much your personal experience and exposure as it is nefarious profit motives and crisis exploitation. For me, it’s also on the very large list of things I’ve never felt remotely compelled by. I can’t imagine my life as a methamphetamine addict or drinking myself to death. I can’t even register being a consistent smoker. Those are weights that don’t even exist on my scale. I think people get addicted to bullshit as much as anything else.

Through writing, I’ve been able to construct weights. I know how compelling my “psychopathy” feels at times verses my otherwise general indifference. I try to pay attention to when things I’m reading start to railroad thoughts of my growth or escape from a present form of consternation. I don’t “believe” I’m a good or bad person without lending snapshots of my life to scrutiny and conversation. I don’t pretend to understand myself outside of a context. Sometimes, perhaps my jaw is clenched because I’m hungry, and not because I feel the world is crumbling down around me.

I actively contend with dread. I didn’t use my time “off” between DCS and my new job to sit and spin. I got up and hunted appliances. I started forming a website. I made at least one relationship that has netted enough cash to pay the monthly bills, if nothing else, barring indulgences like room building. I seek new experiences and connections reflexively. I hauled the bricks and tore down a barn. I look for the work-around or negotiated reality.

What’s key is to remain in “reality.” You can talk yourself around reality, away from it, or never begin dealing with it. That’s what I see. That’s what I see a culture arrested by. That’s what I need to escape and feel a constant source of dread regarding. “Getting by” and “making money,” regardless of social work’s connotation is not “helping.” I’m not “growing” unless I’m refining my ability to fake enthusiasm or civility. It can all still collapse in a bigger and more dramatic way if record unemployment, 225,000 dead, the word quaking after the next thing Trump deigns to destroy, and environmental catastrophe aren’t enough for you.

You don’t want to pull together and get a little better organized? You want to scream in the street instead of takeover the castle? You want to, after about 14 years, finally be proud and share your “I voted” sticker and think that’s enough?

[872] Opportunity Cost

I should sleep. I want to sleep. There’s apparently too much on my mind.

I went on a work ride-along this Monday. The girl I was with said she paid for college selling pirated TV shows and movies to the Christian college kids who weren’t allowed to indulge in modern media. Stories like this, beyond being hilarious, highlight this dirty little fact and “secret” to success. It’s almost an accident. Why couldn’t I make thousands of dollars selling pirated material? Lack of initiative? Lack of sheltered youths? Or is there something deeper going on?

She’s not in the pirated media business anymore, obviously. It was making her considerably more money than she is making now. I suspect many of us can think of one or two similar opportunities in our own lives to make more money. At what cost? She enjoys helping people in her social worker role. Granting kids access to media is not the same thing as helping someone navigate how to get food.

I’ve recently written a detailed description offering parts of my land up for rent. 14 people have saved the listing. It’s been shared 5 times. I need 1 person with a little money or know-how to get the often lauded, poorly understood, “passive income.” Intuitively, I think people know what I’m after more than the money. Spiritually, I think it’s all-but lost on our psyche and culture at large. Do I want rent? No, I want enough money to free up my mind to watch TV, read, and play music. I want to be free from the obligation to constantly be busy instead of exploratory. That’s easy to understand.

The cause and effect mechanisms for participating in society are broken. The only thing you can rely on is your screen. The words pop up as you wrote them. The show streams when you click. Your paycheck isn’t going to match your time and effort. Your friends aren’t going to fit the romance. Your hobbies have morphed into coping strategies because you can’t afford therapy or medicine. You also try not to think about how you wouldn’t need therapy or medicine were you plugged into something that more holistically accounted for you and what it meant to be alive.

I have a pretty consistent habit of saying how “beyond” or “absolutely” dejected or angry I might be at something, right before proceeding to do it. The displeasure has to be voiced. The option to deny any obligation has to be entertained, accepted, and realized as an absolutely free-to-make choice before I capitulate without clenching or headaches. My mind is constantly doing the math and weighing the psychological impact. Do I have an overwhelming desire to quit? No. I didn’t even at DCS, I had to to protect myself.

So goes it with the land. I’m not rushing headlong into completing the little projects because nothing is weighing on it. I’ve “won” those battles. What’s the next most important thing? I’ve given myself a small list of things to do in “retirement,” but for the time being, I need a consistent source of income that more than keeps my head above water. I need to be a wage-slave. I need to pretend, excuse me, “be professional,” as though how I’m going about my time is indicative of my best behavior or ideas.

That sucks, has always sucked, and will suck into the future. Meanwhile, I hear stories about making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from my neighbor who has been a trucker since he was 14. “I don’t know where it went, but I made it.” Money is ambivalent about whose possession it is in and whether it was spent on guns or food. Money as an extension of ambivalent power means you’re simply at the mercy of its influence. You’re not entitled to it. We use phrases like “earn” when it comes to money. We beg. We negotiate away our morals and sense of dignity.

I absolutely want to “level up,” and be the kind of old guy I heard bellowing for the desk attendant at the hotel today. I want to roll up in my expensive camper and truck, be decked out in rich old-guy pseudo camper gear, and make my voice known. It’s a cliche and entitled place, but I bet he also has really good healthcare.

Mostly, I don’t see enough of the spirit I’m after. Even the people I thought had it the most are kind of falling off my radar. I don’t wish to return to some “feeling like a kid again” with a fervor for doing in spite of the direction it’s taking. But I do want the memory that has pushed me this far to remain a hot one. It still matters. The problems are the same. The experiments are still interesting. The obligation is still there. No amount of money by itself is going to buy what your life means to you or the kind of relationships you wish to form.

One thing I absolutely have to stop doing is playing the debt game. I chose a living room over financial peace of mind. My credit for the first time ever said “excellent” having read that I paid the card off. It’s by no means insurmountable, even in the next month or two, but it’s debt. It’s letting the bad team in the game we’re at the mercy of take extra shots.

I don’t know what the mix of “all of my time in a job” plus “the benefits and freedom of hustling” looks like. I really want to know. I don’t want my days off to look like times to sleep and escape. I don’t want to think about how dark it is by the time I get home each night. Maybe in a couple months I’ll have renters, a massive series of paychecks from comfortably covering everyone’s missing hours, and this dopey boring sentiment that was preventing me from sleeping will be one of the most glossed-over entries when future archaeologists dig up my blog.

[871] Ring

I’m in facebook jail. It’s my fourth or fifth offense. I’ve deigned to call Nazi cunts what they are, been reported for bullying, and for 3 days I won’t be able to tell my 4 followers on facebook about it. As usual, I’m struck by the irony. A fascist parade made its way through my small town the other day. The cousin-fucks flooded their yards with camera phones, honked their horns, and no doubt billowed exhaust. Ravenous screaming for death and dictatorship, that’s free speech. Calling Nazi cunts, Nazi cunts, hey, behave yourself mister, or SILENCE!

It’s been several years in which I’ve felt as though I live in The Upside Down; well before Stranger Things was even a thing. Evidence is laughed off. Journalists only have opinions. Nobel institutions become breeding grounds of insecurity and mental purity. Children (our great hope!) are now in their 20s still unironically talking about “adulting” when they figure out who to call to fix their TV. You can chart the decline from nearly any point you choose in the latter half of the 20th century. 

We don’t learn anymore. We don’t dream. We can’t imagine things getting fixed, or balanced, so it all has to burn. Not just burn though, burn while we celebrate how wet the fire is. Burn because, “Fuck you! That’s why!” Burn because people, almost by design, have no capacity for taking responsibility for themselves, and the ones that do have no means of foisting greater responsibility on the rest of the masses.

I sat through another new job training today. I noticed that it was less excruciating from my first “regular job” training and will be a quarter of the time it took to get “trained” for DCS. I couldn’t tell if I’d just gotten used to the pace and dramatically lowered my expectations. I wasn’t sure if I had calloused, or died. I can notice pretty concretely when my hands have gotten used to the idea of moving bricks. I can’t tell what’s going on with my soul when I’m no longer on the verge of ripping my eyes out as I see the information on screen while simultaneously listening to someone sound out “w w w dot” for a wholly inadequate insurance company.

I need to develop a short-term psychological plan. I need to ask myself every morning, in earnest, “Can I do one more day of this?” If the answer is yes, I need to let whatever other thoughts about how else I should be spending my time go. If the answer is no, I need to put in my two weeks. I need to do this so I don’t get the mission creep of psychological abuse from allowing the nature of the job takeover. I need to do it because I like looking good from exercising each day, and getting busy, home late, and fat eating last-minute meals is going to compound negative emotions. I need to learn how to sit and save again for a big, perhaps life-altering buy so I can easily dismiss “affordable” toys and distractions.

I’m in a nicer hotel in a comfortable bed having just eaten half a specialty pizza I’m going to get $15 reimbursed for. I’ve got my good book to continue reading. I don’t have to be up until 9am.

It is rare you’ll take a single slice of my day or life that finds something genuinely horrifying or really that bad. I still can’t seem to sort myself out. I want to believe that I’m a popcorn bag who has only been in the microwave a few seconds. Is that naive? I want to continue trusting that things can happen in big amazing ways overnight when preparedness meets opportunity, and no matter what I believe, I could as easily die on the highway as strike metaphorical oil. And in casting out those lines, I find myself only growing more ambivalent about death.

I never felt, and still don’t, that what I believed about myself or what I could accomplish was in the realm of “wishful thinking” or a “dream.” To this day, I look to set the aberrant example. Why be the top food delivery guy if not for the mythology I attempt to embody? Why go down in so many righteous fights for “things” to “make sense” and be “easy” while I swim in waters of tears and shit? Why do I pretend like I can create something that accounts for the wholly destructive force of people proud to die and take you with them? Why do I think my “infecting” or “inflicting” modes of being are going to break through? I’m in social work. I see daily that you can’t help those unwilling to help themselves.

Maybe a good portion of my ideas need to die. Not even because they’re wrong, but because they’re only so informed. They’ve formulated under different constraints that don’t play out when met with hopeless generation after hopeless generation. They don’t work when your neighbor is gearing up for the call to march up your lawn and shoot you. They don’t work when you can never pursue health, by default, because your money and time are always spent in service to an onslaught of immediate threats. Maybe it’ll only be good for a little while longer for those with just enough money to pretend like their number won’t be called. It may be called last, but it’s getting called.

[870] Maybe Tomorow

What do I really want?

There are days in which I feel I want to do everything, be everything, and experiment. At the same time, there still remains a sense of longing for something else. At least, something is missing from whatever it is I'm engaging in.

What's missing?

It might be described as “flow.” It might be the quiet contentedness of stumbling into something where you can lose yourself. It might be finally believing that you see yourself on a trajectory, individuated to the point where your behavior isn't motivated by fashioning or protecting a “brand,” but can stand as vital to the whole on its own.

I talk a lot about things that I would like. I'd like more space. I'd like all the stuff on Amazon lists. I'd like to learn or read or play video games and not feel like my time is, by default, guiltily handicapped by something else. I've worked to free myself from “classic” obligations, but they still rhyme with the problems of the time. My debt is the kind people with student loans almost get angry at me for referencing. My house and person could stand to be insured. My interpersonal squabbles don't make or break me and escalate to the degree I can be persuaded to keep stoking feelings that struggle to remain compelling for long.

I suppose I want to be left alone. I remember playing a strategy game in college well into the night. I had to design a route for these invading bug creatures to get killed before getting to the other side. My RA came by, made a smart-ass comment about how my design didn't seem to be working, and then went to bed. This was a popular game at the time and there were several videos of the “right” design that would allow you to utilize the tools to kill the bugs and juggle them between two exits. I don't know if I would have discovered that method by myself. My RA's smart-ass comment all but assured I never would.

I take a certain amount of pride in being able to figure things out in a “creative” way. The ways I get to express that are limited. Recently, it has manifested in the different sized things I've been able to transport fairly safely with my truck. You won't find a Youtube video describing the hillbilly methods I've employed. I believe, in a foundational way, that there are many ways to explore something, create something, and “fix” things that are immediately handicapped when you assume the “right” way exists and there's nothing more to be done but follow the instructions.

There are certainly things where I don't want the wiggle room. I'm still reasonably scared of doing electrical work. Give me those instructions all day. When it comes to installing my roof on the little room addition I've been building, my neighbor who has been in roofing for 35 years shit all over everything I did. It was in service to him wishing to help me, but he's an old “deep south gentleman,” so in between the “fuck this” and “that shit ain't worth nuthin” he relayed information I had come across frequently online and in instruction manuals about the “right” way. I proceeded to hit the store, buy massively overpriced wood, and now, pretty annoyed, eye the wood on my security camera resentful of the obligation to unload it when I never even really wanted it.

My neighbor's best intentions for how much effort I might waste or how many headaches related to leaks I might face had zero to do with the process that was interested in exploring different ways to get what I wanted. I wanted to keep the whole ethic alive, not merely build a roof or room extension. I want to be in debt in service to that ethic, not the fact that I'm able to use my credit card.

I think people find this hard to understand. If I waited to have the money to do things “right,” I wouldn't have anything. My shed with its aesthetically abominable insulation would be marred by the insistence I make it prettier. I'd never get things remotely organized because the proper place hadn't been established. Why bother building a garden when the soil is only suited for a specific kind of tree or weed? Why pour a driveway that's just going to get eaten by constantly shifting soil? Why build a fire pit if you don't know exactly the dimensions and can ensure your most judgy friends will want to share a picture of it online?

I've gained considerably more “flow” to my life in working in service to that underlying ethic than I ever have doing things the “right” way. I still feel marginally traumatized by purchasing a car I didn't really want with debt I extra didn't want so I could “fit in” to the “professional” world like the rest of the “adults.” I'm almost certain it was less than an accident that I managed to total it. I barely blinked at the debt I bought my truck with, and the amount of utility I've gotten from it can hardly be described, gas or repairs be damned.

So maybe more than being left alone, I want to be free to explore. That involves having all of the basics taken care of. The parties in college happened because I didn't have to think about rent and never found school so difficult as to meaningfully distract from what I otherwise wished to be doing. Each gathering was an opportunity to refine the environment and explore where people were at. Today, I'm an arm's reach away from a year's worth of things to explore, but I don't feel free to. I don't know if that's even a fair position to hold, but it's what I feel. I'm probably not going to get done writing this and spend the next 8 hours playing one of the 20 PlayStation games I haven't even opened. I'm less than 2 hours from finishing Ishmael, and I suspect it'll be in 20 minute chunks at 2 in the morning that I get it done.

There are two statements:

“If it's worth doing, it's worth doing half-assed.”
“If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.”

The former I hadn't heard until recently. It was speaking about things like dishes or yard work. Wash 5, then see how big a problem the rest remain later. Mow the front yard, maybe the tomorrow the weather will lend itself to the back feeling easy.

The latter is one I've used to hamstring my efforts to do things bit by bit that I feel I would otherwise enjoy. I've talked about it with reference to music. I don't want to keep my fingers calloused on familiar chords when I was cleanly sweep-picking at 200+ BPM my sophomore year. I'm no longer exploring what I can do with a guitar, I'm antagonizing the memory and potential of my ability. I'm reading Jane Eyre when I shit, sometimes, but mostly playing Candy Crush. I tried to think about what distinguished the two. I'm not learning anything with Candy Crush and barely have to pay attention. I can do that for thousands of levels. Jane Eyre is like the world's longest vocabulary test, which thankfully I'm mostly familiar with, but nonetheless requires a level of attention I'm not always keen to give.

I have so much stuff. I feel like I acquired it like levels in Candy Crush. My life hasn't taken an ongoing earnest and focused effort to achieve. Biding my time, taking a shit, I acquire money which becomes stuff, which stares at me. It betrays any anxiety I might feel about debt. It affirms the short-term desire to alleviate feelings over the long-term holistic consequences. What if I had zero video games nor 35 unread books? Would I have an extra $500 or $1000 in my bank account right now? Unlikely.

I want to do meaningful things for people. I want to be provoked to act in a way that enables people to act better in service to themselves. I think people attempt to this in disingenuous ways every day. They'll blindly donate to something. They'll talk about how much they love their job. They'll reference their children. They talk endlessly about their noble dreams to live a certain kind of life if it weren't for this prickly thing called “life.”

But ensuring someone doesn't starve to death isn't quite the same as ensuring your child gets into the “right” school or pretending you're more than a middle-manager in a problematic work environment. Giving money to a research institute is different that subsidizing an in-name-only nonprofit or endowment. If and when your good intentions get hijacked by the wrong entities long enough, you get selfish and myopic. It becomes about the cigarette you need, and not the lung cancer you might get. It becomes about you and yours verses the rules that would govern a healthy human tribe.

We're taught to “capitalize.” If you have an edge, if you can make the money, if you can capture attention, if you can make it more efficient, do so, by default. Don't live in concert with your environment, own it. Don't learn to coexist, kill and shape so you can pretend that what was introduced to contend with wasn't worth fighting. I believe in both the negotiation and fight. I think the exercise of engaging in both is more important than a feeling of “conclusion” that you're no longer obligated to either.

At present, I have a great many things I want to discover about myself and what I'm capable of. I know there are people who will offer me a trailer to transport wood. Can my truck do it? It can, did, and now I have vital information the next time I don't have a trailer and a similar situation. I have saplings needing dug, a fire pit needing refined, a room needing a roof, a house needing tidied up, media to digest, and side-hustles to deconstruct. I can throw another $1000 on a credit card and sit in the middle of a home renovation project just long enough to not figure out what I need before I start my new job. That's not freedom.

At once, the world is superficially available to me, and yet it doesn't feel that way. Whether I zero in on my personal life or recall that my larger environment invites fascism, what I really want is to feel like I've escaped one set of burdens related to basic survival that conflict with another set of burdens to refine how I see, engage, or enable the rest of the world. I don't know how I move into the next or better space without being unapologetically selfish. Maybe it's a different word than “selfish” when you're trying to be something diametrically opposed to people who find themselves so broken as to be “undecided” or proud of Trump.

I'm gonna eat, clean, and unload the wood.

[869] I Walk The Line

 I have so much work to do, but the topic is hot and my mind is making so many parallels, I have to trap them.

As I get older, it's becoming clearer why chasms open up between people and we generally orient ourselves into quasi-isolated “safe” spaces. Right now, I'm in a conversation about J.K. Rowling and her alleged anti-trans position. I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation, but it having nothing to do with the subject matter.

I have a whole habit and strategy at this point that starts with asking people to quote. If you can't quote, I can't be sure you're reading instead of “motivated reading.” When a child is frustrated in doing their homework and claims it is too hard, you don't take them at their word, you tell them to sound out the word, break down the math, and train them to understand that process as the problems grow more complex.

When you're arguing with someone who is ideologically possessed, you can't take it for granted that they know 1+1=2 if they never learned math, are dyslexic (selectively or otherwise), or have some unrecognized or underlying ethic that finds the whole exercise of doing math as fruitless or “impossible with someone like you.”

Now, words aren't math. So you get essentially infinite leeway to interpret them to your heart's content. That's, to borrow a phrase, problematic.

I'll take a quote from the exchange between me and my friend,”just because someone can explain their thoughts doesnt [sic] mean they are in the right.”

This is a true statement. Unfortunately, it's being used to argue that J.K. Rowling said a list of things she did not in fact say. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time getting exacting in his language, I've been at the other end of someone who can see all of my words, but quote none of them, and finds an immense amount of satisfaction in judging me, arguing, or condemning, again, literally nothing I actually said or position I hold. I don't think that just because I write the blog I'm correct. I think I'm demonstrating something that lends itself to being more truthful and accurate, which is by definition a threat to whatever motivates the vitriol.

I used to take it personally. It would make me exceedingly angry and I'd be so confused why it was so hard to just read the words on the page, and start there. Something about J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter has made an important detail clear. I'm not trans, the person I'm talking to isn't either. The person who liked her comment isn't either. What's going on? J.K. Rowling represents significantly more than an opinion on trans issues.

My claim to argumentative fame is through religion. I knew details back and forth. I could go bible quote for bible quote. I knew the logical fallacies by their technical names. I knew significantly more science facts than were ever relevant to your “believer on the street” who would claim their faith or to know what they were talking about. I was talking to people who said they would kill their own child if God told them to. The depth of the “insanity” knew no end.

With Harry Potter, that's about as close to a modern burgeoning adult's religion as you're going to get lol. Their sense of wonder and being in the world is under threat. Of course it makes sense to not be willing to entertain subtlety. I read Harry Potter to my class in 5th grade, saw the movies, but was never gripped by it like the force that turned it into a theme park.

As such, I'm ambivalent, in a sense, to J.K. Rowling's opinions and art. I'm not anti-Harry or her, and if she tells me she's got a foundation to protect women and children threatened by misguided legislation that would obscure medical differences between the sexes, I don't find it hard to understand why she'd want a more exacting discussion. She cites people studying trans issues. She cites statistics. This is all we get, people. This is the best. If you're unwilling to engage with the numbers and experts, you have your opinion and the rope you can weave to hang yourself with it.

Especially as you get older and life feels more fragile, you want to protect how you've oriented yourself so far. I habitually seem to “attack.” I'm reflexively regarded as “negative.” Why? Well, I don't just have a habit, I make a practice of doing this. I sacrifice as many sacred cows as I can find. I turn my weapon on myself. I learned how to treat discomfort and open questions as opportunities for patient exploration, not a threat to where I sit or how I understand myself.

This, as I'm often reminded, isn't human. The sense of “professional detachment” I try to maintain by writing, is not an anchored side-taking. It won’t matter how much I say I'm only practicing this habit, I'll be understood as someone who's impossible to talk to, unable to be persuaded, blind to his own enjoyment in sniffing his own farts yada yada. I'll never be quoted, that's for sure.

The comparisons and contrasts are most striking to me when you consider fascism and Donald Trump. How many times can you hear from his camp that “he didn't really mean it?” Liberals believe the negative and crazy shit he says, fascists don't. Liberals don't believe the reasonable and parsed thoughts of someone who seems to have betrayed their idealism. What's the metric of discerning truth here but tribalism? What does 1+1=2 look like to these people but middle fingers combining forces to shout, “Fuck you!?”

It's a thought worthy of suicide to contemplate all of the things that render you as pointless, inconsequential, and utterly meaningless. This is relevant, because it means as self-conscious biological beings, we have good reason to avoid thought patterns that take us to that place. We need to propagate in spite of climate change. We need to get along with “manageable fascist behavior.” But I want to zero in on the word “meaning.” Yesterday, when I tried to drill down on what “meaning” meant to me, it was just whether or not something prompted me to act. Things certainly have an infinite array of meanings and interpretations, the vast majority of which do not register as something I need to act or speak in service to. This is a less damming way of saying, “I don't give a fuck.”

As such, I don't know J.K. Rowling, so by definition I don't find her opinion on a topic I know a small amount about meaningful. I don't see her attacking trans people. I don't see her coordinating with groups who deny the different experiences of trans activists. I don't see her using the term “TERF” to describe herself anymore than the people I routinely call Nazis call themselves Nazis.

Why do I insist on calling people Nazis? Isn't that a 1:1 analogy for people calling her a TERF? I look at the policy they support that functionally renders one race subject to the oppression of another. J.K. Rowling doesn't support anti-trans policy, to my knowledge, and when I ask for how I could be wrong, no one floods the comments with politicians she's buying to push legislation. I look at dog-whistle comments. J.K. Rowling is accused, in my exchange with this friend, of writing a “bingo-card” of transphobic terminology. What are those terms? This friend has yet to quote them. If they ring like, “Jews will not replace us” and “We're gonna keep the 'thugs' out of your neighborhood,” I'll submit she has a point. Nazis reject the ideas of equality, class conflict, and internationalism (i.e. they're taking our jobs! The rich deserve their wealth! Religious ideas different than mine equal suicide bombs!) J.K. Rowling isn't weighed down with the history of trade agreements, religious strife, or tenuous economic principles in advocating for a comprehensive look at mental health.

Ultimately, you don't matter, I don't matter, you can destroy all of your friendships over exceptionally petty things and die smug and self-satisfied that you had the last word, riddled with the disease carried in a cocktail of deadly sins. Proud you maintained your conception as a “defender” of something. Greedily holding back vulnerability. Quietly jealous someone seems more comfortable or pronounced than you. Lusting after a means to reassert yourself against an easier target. Gorging yourself on the drama of it all, and being so unbelievably lazy in not merely choosing to act a little bit better and see a little bit clearer by starting with the words on the page or the rules that govern the numbers. You start humbled and open, or you don't start at all.

This is that “accommodating” or “political” game people think I'm incapable of playing. They don't want to believe they'll be sacrificed when I don't capitulate to the nonsense. They don't think it matters to me to have real conversations with real people willing to share the same page, sometimes literally, before they bring the fire to burn everything down. If it's not human to quote each other, I'm still comfortable being a robot and think I want to be more than human in how I exercise my agency and reason. To succumb to the group-think is certainly “natural” and anticipated, but it doesn't make it worthy of respect. That is, I respect how it works and its consequences, but I see no personal “meaning” in it besides to pick it apart. I'm not going to bend to the implicit threat of disassociation when you exercise it.

I never really expect to be understood, so I remain anxious about the means I utilize to get what I want in the world. You'd think I'd have created a perfect rationality for using my awareness of these pits people trap themselves in to conjure endearing feelings, trick and undermine, or otherwise play with the rampant emotions of a shrieking ape just trying to get by. I don't take it personally until I choose to take a chance on you in regarding your agency and friendship. I pick people to fuck with because they exhibit the traits and habits I respect and need to thrive in my own life. I'm not nervously balancing emotional leverage in order to exact some plan I have for their resources, nor looking to protect myself from criticism in surrounding myself with sycophants. What are you doing?

[868] Hippocratic Oaf

The dictionary.com definition of a “hypocrite” is as follows:

1. a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.

2. a person who feigns some desirable or publicly approved attitude, especially one whose private life, opinions, or statements belie his or her public statements.

What strikes me about these are that the person has to be “pretending” to be desirable or have a belief.

Anymore, I don't know that hypocrisy really exists. There are literally tens of thousands of examples born from modern history of Republican talking points being refuted by Republican talking points, a Trump tweet for a Trump tweet, a story of some religious leader's sexual proclivities mocked against their railing against homosexuality or the sanctity of marriage.

People “feel” internally consistent and justified about literally everything. Internal conflict arises when some political hierarchy is disrupted or plan you've put in place can no longer be anticipated. It's not that your soul is wrenching to speak to a saintly conscience. People are convinced of their moral sanctity. People are giddily complicit in their rage and joy. For every ten things you could tell them they were a hypocrite about, they'll have a hundred that fit perfectly together. People treat their decision making like drawing different shapes. A circle doesn't make a hypocrite of a square and a big triangle doesn't contradict a small triangle.

“Hypocrite” feels like a word invented by an uppity liberal blind to their own fascist idealism or moral certitude. How dare you!? In going back on your word or in showing us your true self how can polite society, nay, the universe, suffer the indignity?

To exist is to be positioned at the center of infinite unknowable forces. When one of them acts on you, in spite or ambivalence of another, that's not hypocritical, it's the often unfavorable condition to being here at all. Your staunch environmentalist will often find themselves in a car. Those pleading with us to not render their relatives as lunatic Nazis know intimately the love they've expressed to or felt from those lunatic Nazis.

In order for me to entertain the idea of hypocrisy, I have to respect your agency. Before that, I have to respect my own. In my world, you're allowed to call out hypocrisy. I worry about being remotely internally consistent and the seemingly always-changing ways in which that might look. Do I make Capital T “Truth” statements it behooves me to behave in service to? Or do I have a thousand little t true-enoughs that help me cope with my rage and indifference? Is not every moment an opportunity to affirm or undermine yourself? Can you spend your whole life in service to something, recant with your last breath, and be remembered primarily as a hypocrite? Ask Ayn Rand, because god knows The Fountainhead was about social security checks.

I don't regard people as respecting their agency, so I do not retain the impulse to tout their hypocrisy. It's like thinking my dog likes her food and feeling aggrieved when she eats a piece of shit.

With my agency, I attempt to demonstrate. I look for words. I build. I make calculated risks. I lament the things I'm “putting up with” and when I feel “stuck” and celebrate the opportunity to be uneasy about looking for something new. It's not psychologically gratifying to keep yourself on your toes. It is not anyone's first instinct to look for feedback from the mob or to test their new idea or behavior in the wild. As such, if I had 950 blogs talking about shitty friendships I still maintained or the things I wanted to do and learn with none in progress, you could be confident I had zero capacity or authority to wax about hypocrisy.

I have an idea that I have good reason to respect every little battle in which I wish to hold the line on one or more ideals that have held me accountable to myself. I'm fighting. I'm working. I'm looking for a daily reminder of the type of person I am and still wish to be. I'm actually in here doing and saying things outside for you to use in deciding whether or not you're going to take the license and responsibility that comes with advanced language.

Yesterday, I had a brief high in reflecting on how much money I made scrapping. It felt possible to scrape by with this single venture if scaled up and organized. It felt like a solid-enough piece of the dozen little things I wish to make part of my entrepreneurial pool. Then I got gas. Then I got hungry. Then I got a little too annoyed about the rust on my torn gloves and dust in my truck. I, incorrectly, thought that had I just kissed enough ass or went with the negligent flow of something like my State job, I'd have so much more money and feel some kinda way.

Did I contradict myself? Was I a hypocrite? I was out there actively pursuing a tangible perspective in service to the complaints and fights I got into over DCS. It's all good and bad all of the time for differently weighted reasons. It's all right and wrong. How do your decisions make you lean? What's the example and standard you’re setting?

[867] Fill In The Blank

What would this look like if no one were going to read it?

This is the central question to most things I write. Do I “care” if you understand what I'm saying? That is a question that struggles to enter into it. What would it look like if I cared? Would my sentences be shorter? Would I deliberately avoid certain words? Would I create an outline and story that carried you step-by-step? I started writing because I was in pain and continue to write because at some level I always am. Do I know exactly how it works to make my head feel better? Do I know why my heart slows down? If I can't even grasp how this thing contributes to better understanding myself save those simple effects, what hope do I have that you're going to get anything out of it?

There's a trend in my writing. I get more “likes” when I can zero in on a disagreement, talk about something personal from childhood, or offer the rare blog that sounds hopeful. I write those blogs with the same seemingly inane fervor of everything else. I think it's nice when people like things I create, but were I in the business of courting likes, I'd be destitute. Sometimes my life experiences are so familiar and particular they make something easy to understand. I'm not always looking for something to complain about. I suspect many people relate to feelings that still echo from their own childhood.

I don’t seem to “learn” from my writing how to do it “better.” I always feel as “clear” as I can be in attempting to capture the moment as it feels. I snap back into old fights or feelings when I read blogs. I'm building narratives to anchor and process myself through. I'm hoping to find both internal and external analogies in how my body responds to things, and the feedback from the outside world when they encounter me. Should a label stick? Is stoicism preferred? Is “professional” professional? I have an endless list of open questions fighting for attention. I don't know why one topic bleeds into another. I don't know what my gut would say if it had its own mouth.

I can grant that I'm convoluted. I don't think this is anything special or different from what it means to be human. On top of that, it has been relayed to me that while I am clearly well-read or might attempt to process saying things in real time, my message, whatever it may be, rarely connects. On its face, this isn't something I'm usually concerned with. Were I a preschool teacher refusing to speak in children's terms, you'd be reasonably concerned with my capacity to do the job or even basic wisdom. When I'm “screaming into the void so I can live with myself,” it seems almost antagonistic to suggest I'm not connecting with as many people as I could.

That said, I don't believe I've ever had a good grasp of what people were looking for when I wrote something. I've written papers that got “As,” but not usually, and I don't know how or the differences between them. I distinctly remember in school that umbrella writing style, filling in the blanks, writing lines in service to each clause, and then getting a “B” with no fucking clue how I followed the rules and it didn't work. I know I got an A on one writing prompt in college because it pertained to the heart of my religion/science reading I'd done exhaustively over the last two years. I think the T.A. literally wrote “wow.”

Add to that, when I read, I find every style imaginable, and find myself generally able to take away what's being said. I might not have the sensory overload or romance swirling in me from minute descriptions of a Charlotte Bronte boarding school, but I can digest 15 “big words” almost forcefully packed together. I can know what's going on and still entertain embarrassed or frustrated solidarity when something befalls Jane. There are some other “classics” I can barely translate, but admittedly was reading because of their touted status, not because I was interested in being challenged or prepared to gorge on the depth of the lore.

I certainly understand the idea of “code switching” and “meeting people where they are” as well. I rarely spoke to the families you find in social work about anything but the straight-to-the-point practical things they could do. If I knew or had just read a ton about how to discipline a child, I could sum that up as, “We know by now that physical violence doesn't work” usually as a client opens up about its failure as a strategy in the past. The thing about writing blogs is that I'm meeting people I've often deliberately chosen to meet me where I'm at, on a platform where the expectation is to, at best, get a like.

I suspect I could go back and take everything I've ever written and break it down into small sentences. I think it is well within my awareness and capacity to take airy and obscure ideas, tag them to a cliché, and functionally cheapen the consternation or conflict of ideas that had me spit them out raw. Were I ever to try and get published or mass produce myself, I'd be “happy” to do so. For now? It's hard enough to write enough to actually start feeling better. I need you to be as responsible as me in taking something hard to understand as an opportunity to ask questions if you want to know more. My blogs aren't weekly newsletters. We're not in regular correspondence, so I feel a greater obligation to the conversations and conflicts in my own head, than how they manifest as connotative or political footballs.

The icing on the “I can't understand you” cake is that when I'm trying to be more deliberate, it gets regarded as the most confusing. The whole exercise takes on a new level of frustration and the wisdom of not giving a fuck in how you come across grips even harder. Two competing and confused forces are at play. The person who can't understand you doesn't know how to articulate it. In turn, you couldn't possibly grasp how to say things any clearer. If you have a better strategy or method for reaching people, please, feel free to ignore the comment box and shout it into the wind per standard procedure.

I get headaches. I throw myself into situations and attempt to monitor how they play out. Whether it's running last minute an hour away to pick up something for free, or attending a job interview for a position I hope to jive with in a way my experience suggests I never will, my blood pressure will spike, my head will hurt, or I'll just start feeling feint or achy. Am I dreading the job? Do I regret the gas spent to pick up a scrap washing machine? Did I just not eat enough? Did I catch Covid? Is some deep-seeded anxiety provoked and reminiscent of something I didn't want to fail at again? I don't know. Because I don't know, when I pour the soup with different food bits out of the mystery can, I have to pick through and identify what my brain has been eating.

I don't know if you're aware, but it's extremely easy for me to feel bad about something. I have this nasty habit of noticing, and I notice a lot of bad that the good does not outweigh. I want to say that again, the good in my life does not outweigh the prospect of fascism, destroying the planet, and then adding up all of the things on the way down to nickle-a-piece problems of interpersonal strife or paper cuts. I don't speak the way I do because I was shaped by anything less than an immense and overwhelming weight to behave in ways that feel suicidal. I didn't move to a rural location and sacrifice a series of comforts because my environments felt better than what I currently occupy. Perhaps when you can't understand me, you're so steeped in the language of death that my meager struggle to keep things in perspective and organize more robust language, it registers as abstract, or god forbid, modern art. Perhaps, like the last sentence, it's always on me to clean up and clarify. (And, still, if you don't find modern art as obtrusive and pointless as I do, the metaphor will still die.)

We're not just speaking with our words, of course. Just like you can know who is a creep in your gut, you can tend to sense if someone has their shit together, is comfortable with themselves, or can relate to the world by remaining open to learning or trying verses judging and shutting down. I write. It's a thing I physically do to try. It's reaching out whether I know who it's reaching towards or not. I build. I gamble that I'm going to be able to figure something out or find someone worthy of trying new or complicated things with. Comedians “get away” with saying the unsayable because we get to know their “brand” which transcends the taboos of “polite” (read: silent) society. When I say I need the checks on my words or behavior from my crowd, it's as much a practical reality as it is an earnest ideal that they feel worthy and capable of the task.

Maybe it's easier for you to “keep it together.” Maybe I occupy a rarefied space that feels very precarious, or at least, I'm able to talk about it like it's bound to collapse or explode any moment. When I hear stories of “perfectly normal” scenarios turning deadly or newsworthy, they're never a shock. I'm willing to believe “it” is always bubbling just beneath the surface. I see the bio-psycho-social math behind the number of stressors that end in inevitable tragedy. Almost never do I see people get ideas about how to be proactive and overwhelming to fight back. Up and down power structures I read “defeated” and “coping” and “reacting.” Democrats act like they know less about how to stop a Supreme Court hijacking than a Vice News reporter vocalizing the details on what to try. Billboards will go up patting Indiana on the back for how many kids get adopted with not a whisper regarding Eli Lilly's profit margin on methadone.

I feel surrounded by death, and it makes me eager to record how that death manifests in the mind of someone who doesn't understand why is has to be this way. I don't feel resigned to my fate, so I invite almost intolerable amounts of stress with regard to how or why I bother to say things, or who I'm willing to fight with. I want the exercise of my time to be a living will. I want you to see how ridiculous and contradictory and confusing it can be, and how you can still build and behave in spite of it. I want you to get the impression that the conversation is never over, and that's okay if you and your people can just practice in service to words worth preaching.

What if you're worse off than me? What if you have the problems with being a refugee? What if you're sick? What if writing does nothing for you, your friends are all meth addicts, and you'd break down in tears to only be haunted by the things I might bring up in a blog? What kind of environment is created then? What's your cue? How hopeless does it feel while you're still getting fed, drinking clean water, and able to click and scroll your life away?

If I'm hard to understand, it's because the entire other half of the conversation is missing.