[889] Nothing More

I suspect a mess.

One of the things I struggle most with is giving people credit. That's not to say I can't see what they're worth. I simply see people as “only” worth a series of superficial things that pass for what a lot of modern day culture consists of. Maybe you're smart, so you stay in school and get advanced degrees. But you'll subject yourself to a kind of financial or emotional ruin because “smart” only got you so far. Maybe you're really good at showing up or encouraging others, but you let your fear or ambivalence keep you from reaching out when you need help or contributing in service to a deeper ideal. Maybe you forgive everyone besides yourself.

A frequent topic of conversation between Allie and me is about the environments we're cultivated in and cultivating. You can take something as simple as a grocery store to think about everything implicated and matter-of-fact that goes into it. You don't have to pick fruit, cut vegetables, come up with a way to keep things cold, build a cart, or expect a fight to break out about when you're next to check-out. Food costs money, right? It grows everywhere, but you don't go to the store without money or the intention to steal. Food you don't eat goes in the trash, right? There's a large amount of people who wouldn't dream of composting or thinking of things in a cyclical manner. You go to the store, you buy food, you throw away the waste.

Every area of our life has these in-built expectations or hesitations whether we are paying attention to them or not. What's an online conversation? Does it even exist? Not even among friends! It's a fight by default. You're hearing in your mind an unwanted challenge, you don't have the wherewithal to “debate,” and you are situated in a place that cannot understand. It's what's expected and beaten into you. You're fighting, you can't hear or see what's said, and no one is attempting to understand. This whole conversation happens with yourself before you ask, “Why bother?” before posting anyway. If it's not a meme, emoji, or pleasantry, it's an off-limits way to engage.

I have my fair share of pissing matches with people online. It doesn't matter if I'm slinging hateful words or asking sincere questions, across the board my act to respond to someone's voice is treated as hostile, not an invitation. I think this is partly a consequence of the internet algorithms who assure us the world can be cultivated for us to see only what we want. I think this is a display of humanity's basic insecurity of discovering just how fraught with problems and complications their thinking can be. God forbid they be shown to be wrong, and in front of so many people!

Then you devolve into the condescension, the dismissing the very notion of “debate,” inevitably someone's mistyped word or phrasing gets latched onto, and the fight over the last miserable word until the post gets deleted or locked ensues. It's familiar, it's ridiculous, and no one has seen fit to study the consequences of it or how to get out of it.

I still try. I look for the analogy. I've got print-outs on toddlers who destroy houses and act like they're the boss. What is a parent supposed to do? Reset to a baseline expectation. This is akin to me insisting you actually quote me before claiming to disagree with something I've said. I don't trust your contrarian impulse, it's the default one offered to us by our internet training. If someone wants to pull their cord and recite cliché after cliché, return them to the question they've ignored. Don't give them more words to destroy.

What's worse than arguing with idiots, if it isn't something of a not-so-scientific study and exercise for you, is when your “friends” don't give you credit. I think I go above and beyond to share the most clear, researched, or affecting things that I read. They're almost never shared. I can say either people aren't or don't care to read. I can say they just don't have time. I can say they don't think it's actually as good or informative as I do. I can say they don't believe their crowds care or deserve to see it. I can say anything, because I don't know anything. There's no real feedback besides the handful of people I know pretty regularly read. The most important voices, that aren't even mine lol, are not breaking through to networks I'm not a part of. Whether what I post even makes it in front of a plurality of my friends, I don't know. I do know, it remains something of a personal secret whether anything was read or enjoyed.

If good information is treated as arbitrarily as cat videos, this medium that connects us all makes us feel hopeless and attacked by default, and even with regard to the people we seem to get along with or enjoy in real life don't tempt us to share or celebrate how they're orienting themselves to their thoughts, by what mechanism are we ever really sharing anything? What's the genuine connection? Who am I really hanging out with or talking to? How much credit can I give you, when the means by which we relate to each other 99% of the time, you appear to give me practically none?

I want to stress how large and impersonal I think this problem is. I know I read a disproportionate amount regardless. I know no one subscribed or signed up to hear from me or what I have to say. I know we've all got reasons we're too busy to be bothered with each other. None of that helps us pay attention to why or how we engage online. We can see thousands of sentiments about reducing screen time, the dangers to our children, and the ripping at the fabric of society, but we won't ask ourselves if maybe we should think out loud, deliberately, slowly, and try to piece together a collective framework for better understanding the world that isn't so miserable?

I've said it a lot how much I wish I had a blog a week from each one of my friends to read. No one wants to share, but I don't advocate for writing just because I've done it a lot. I think it's vital. I think we need to fight back against the many default forces that suggest our spaces and resources can only be used in specific and harmful ways. You have options of how to relate to me, to each other, this medium, and the world at large. How many people could live in an abandoned Wal-Mart? How much dust could you blow in the face of your enemies after grinding down its concrete walls? Who would bother or think to ask such a weird thing? Someone choosing to be just a little more creative and motivated in service to what's possible.

For as meaningless as the word “balance” has seemed to become today, perhaps we can move on to “tempering.” You're perhaps in balance at all times, physics-wise. But is your environment tempered by better choices about where your energy is directed? Can you simply read and respond to something? Can you share because you need to even and especially when you don't want to? There's nothing more or less dramatic going on nor exercise in patience and humility to practice.

[888] Know Mother Best

 

Know Mother Best

12/22/2020

This is gonna get weird.

“Violence” has many seemingly at-odds with each other definitions. I have a problem with this.

The first definition from Merriam-Webster says: a. the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy b. an instance of violent treatment or procedure.

This one makes sense to me. This is how I generally understand when I'm feeling violent or when I describe the kind of violence perpetrated towards me.

If you skip to number 4 on Merriam-Webster, you get: undue alteration (as of wording or sense in editing a text.)

What? It's violent to misrepresent text? This feels like the familiar refrain of the modern “culture wars.” I know the last time I touched a “sensitive” topic like trans issues, I certainly felt like my words were being violently ignored, reconfigured, or used to express sentiments that were the exact opposite of my views.

The degree of violence perpetrated in “mislabeling” people or in not reading the sheer depth of in-built racism into every interaction is insisted upon a lot lately. Don't want to give up saying Ellen Page even about her earlier works? Violent. Don't want to too seriously entertain a body dysmorphic teenager's appeal to transition? Egregious violence. Think the Civil War had other factors in conjunction with slavery? You're working hard to start lynching again, aren't you!?

I was a psychology major. If there is ever a time to learn how “soft” the study of human behavior is, it's during a series of classes where it's considered a revelation that we're composed of our bio-psycho-social environments. I'm also a person who was unfairly beaten a fair amount as a child. While that sucked, what was considerably worse was the emotional violence of my mother who left me anxious, vicious, and sociopathically cold in my attempts to cope.

I respect both kinds of violence. I still have trouble controlling anxious impulses. I still dig at my skin. I don't flinch any time someone goes to brush their hair or adjust their glasses anymore, but that took a deliberate effort. The pain of not knowing how to figure out where I sat relative to my mom, myself, and the feedback I was getting from my environment is a huge contributor to my ongoing writing. Was I hurting myself? Was I responsible? Could anything he helped or fixed? I didn't know, so I tore myself apart.

To be sure, I think the vocal and angry wing of any activist trope works against themselves by not parsing how they're going to employ charges of “violence” and who the oppressors and oppressed really are. We're all someone's victim, and lashing out at anyone who can't pick apart the flavors of your recipe is no way to the top of the mountain.

My mom reached out to either my dad or brother or both. She's “curious” about what I've been up to the last 10 years I haven't spoken to her. Around this time back then, I went on a verbal texting tirade calling her different variations of “fat cunt” at random times throughout the day and night for several days. Our last phone conversation didn't go well, and the preceding 20 years weren't exactly great.

I shut that shit down.

I called my brother and asked him what precisely this inquiry was about. He had, at one point, also discontinued talking to her for a year or more. Back in the saddle, he's playing pleading middle-man to his hopes and dreams for some kind of resolution or forgiveness. I won't belabor my perception of his naivety, but picture nothing short of a waterfall of pitiful and empty sentiments. Takeaway comments from him include, “I don't believe we were abused,” and “I can say one thing, I know she loved us.” Those were, of course, sandwiched between in-depth relays of the *serious discussions* he's had with her about every single person in her life she's chased away and his agreement that she is a total “head-fuck.”

I don't place my hand on a stove, nor in a fire, nor let boiling water run over.

I don't negotiate with fire. I don't empathize with fire. I don't make excuses for fire. Fire is ambivalent in burning down my house or cooking my food. Fire doesn't love, and if you deliberately burn someone, you're abusing them. When I explained that I've literally removed children from homes for the kinds of things enacted on us, my brother didn't buy it. He recalled *knowing* he would not have responded to anything but spanking at certain points in his life.

There's little doubt in my mind that my mom is severely sick. Whatever confluence of forces molded her, she did not, cannot, control. She can mouth all of the words of “love” or “family” she wants, but they exist in her universe her way. This is the nature of severe mental illness. Sometimes it's banal and is just weird or annoying. Sometimes it's predatory.

I recognize the difference because I've taken the time to extrapolate the kind of person she has molded me into. Unrestrained and unrepentant, I'm a monster. We all would be. I struggle to believe as many people straddle that line as precariously as I do, but who knows.

But let's extrapolate further and pull back for a broader view. What is fascism?

MW: a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy...[].

Kids have a fascist reflex. It's mine! No! Their way or the highway. The more you give in, the more tyrannical and entitled they become. Adults? They get to play dress-up and regarded with due respects for their “republican values” or “free market ideals.” You see, it's merely “conservative” to endorse racism, xenophobia, and deny the implications of math and science. You're not an ignorant child, mentally unwell, or as dangerous and ambivalent to what you're burning down as fire.

If you're lucky enough to be someone who isn't walking around with a gaping wound, congratulations. Mine is my mother. I have a solid-enough situation, plans, generally good days, and increasing degrees of comfort if not license to start nipping at the larger battles I wish to fight. Bring her into the mix? I'm tempted to threaten all of that. It's not that I don't understand her, what I've become as a result, or how to take responsibility for who I am going forward. It's that I understand too much. I know just how bottomless the hole for destruction and consumption goes.

What do I want someone to take away from my experience? What's the wisdom here? The same shit I echo in nearly everything I write. Tell the truth, horrifying as it may be. React with actual violence if necessary when the lies used to build the environment we're raising ourselves in is suicidal and insatiable. Know the enemy. Is it my mom? Or is it the pathetic excuses and desperation offered by my brother? Is it the ignorant advocate for reconciling what never could or should be attempted?

It's theoretically easy enough for me to make an argument for self-preservation and hype up a kind of lie about how I just couldn't control myself nor ever concede I had a single good day while in her care. I could borrow from some “it's just about how you orient yourself!” self-help book and focus on the positives. I could use all of my training and perspective regarding trauma to put up the facade that we're actually all in this together, and things can be okay, and we're all “adults,” and I could stop typing with one hand as the other goes to ensure I really sell the gagging. I'm not going to dress up for my day at the gallows, especially when it will lend itself to you never facing nor dealing with how fucked and complex of a monster it is you have to navigate.

When my worst instincts start kicking in, I work to fit them in with the rest of me. When I'm my most violent or dejected or confused, I write. Maybe I screamed at an asshole on the highway before I got to writing, but they couldn't hear me. I choose to do better than the malignant programming. I choose to look closer, contextualize, and expound. I recognize the bold, ignorant, angry, and violent fascist in me. I work and advocate and create what I need to see to keep him at bay. If you're not doing the same with yourself, you're at the mercy of people like my mom. You're riding the whims of 74 million people willing to lick the naked ass of their demons and insist it tastes like candy.

At least, now, I can write a calm blog about it. I can conjure a few choice insults on my mind-wandering drives, but I'm not experiencing month-long headaches and misting over lost stuffed comrades. You shouldn't lazily throw around “violence” as a catch-all for your hurt feelings or society's annoyance or indifference. I know violence. I crave violence. I even think we desperately need a large dose of genuinely righteous violence against the forces in power. But we're still apologizing on the perpetrator's behalf. We're still shivering and afraid, too ideologically possessed by our victimhood to see ourselves in our punishers.

Maybe the worst of us aren't making the choice and can't control themselves. You shouldn't be saying the same thing about yourself. I certainly can't. How much power do you think that affords me? Should we test my capacity for violence? No, so don't play with fire, and don't talk to my mother.

[887] Spring Time

Spring Time 12/20/2020 I've always been a night owl. I can remember bringing a flashlight with me to bed, and staying up reading books under the covers, perfectly convinced my parents had no idea. I remember the old gray TV I was allowed to have in my room, scooting my bed next to it so I could reach the buttons, as I fell asleep to it playing inches from my face. I had to learn how to use the sleep timer because we didn't have our electric company confirming that a running TV results in a negligible impact on your overall bill. When I was in high school, I worked at a movie theater, regularly not getting off of work until 10 or 11 PM, then I would stay out with my friends, roaming parking lots and Steak N Shakes. I was always down for the after after party in college, and when I had nothing to do but drug studies and sleep, I preferred to sleep from 5 to 11 AM. 

 I read about different people's sleep cycles, and how “not being a morning person” is as biologically encoded as those who are bafflingly able to run a marathon from their first steps off the bed. I still feel it now. Some days I'll start a project when I get off work, find a groove, and I don't want to stop, getting more energy as the night carries on. Knowing that the world immediately around me is still grants me a license and intentionality I don't find that often during the day.

 I've spent a good portion of my life on the “normal” schedule, whether the habits were instilled by school or day jobs. I feel the difference palpably between going to sleep and waking up at regular times, and letting my in-built nature to stay up remain ambivalent of the time or consequences. It's a hard contrast which has provoked this blog. I'm tired, tight, and working back the dread of my day. Two days ago I stayed up in spite of myself and ate a bunch of sugar. I'm still “suffering” that series of decisions now, as well as the anxiety over paperwork I woke up at 2 AM to mostly complete. 

Despite the rhythm or ease with which I might be able to emulate the mold of a day-walker, it's not me. I can practice it every day, and one loose afternoon I can affirm what I'd rather, what I *need* in order to feel normal, consequences be dammed. I'm 32. I'm never going to be fundamentally someone who wakes up early, goes to bed early, and finds peace. 

What does this kind of understanding of myself afford me? I know what kind of jobs or management I'm going to be able to entertain or for about how long. I know when an ideal I migh've held can no longer conjure up the zeal or indignation required to push it over a cliff. I know how vitally important it is to pay attention when something doesn't fit and to record how often you seem to be experiencing the same problem. I still procrastinate on paperwork. I'm still not bought-in. I still find no sense of value or worth in focusing and drilling down to get it done. I may put off cleaning a cat box, but it doesn't fill me with hopelessness and shame when I finally get to it. 

I'm extremely thankful I've been able to pull off what I have in regard to my life thus far. My timelines are accelerating. My bills, even when they suggest a “major” expense, are embarrassingly indulgent. I get to have these daily crises of confidence and faith in how I make my money knowing that they are more and more a choice of luxury than at the behest of my overlord. To borrow an idea from a book on happiness I'm reading, I'm not “hungry” that any one thing I buy or business I create is going to enable more happiness, but I am hungry to stop feeling obligated to a certain kind of engagement and expense. I don't think my sense of what's practical has caused me more harm than good, but its limitations feel altogether strangling when your eyes are fixed on what's beyond the horizon.

[886] Crying Shame

I'm thinking about the change that happens when you finally become desperate or miserable enough and how that fits with the idea that I might be "negative" or someone generally worth silencing. Ultimately, you force open a door that has been rusted shut. That's what writing first was to me. I had immature and insecure ideas about writing a "diary." I was under an immense amount of stress and confusion which finally overrode my ignorant judgements and assumptions about what I needed to do.

I'm finding the simple nature of this idea incredible. So much so I feel it could be in a cheesy infomercial about how easy it is to use. It's a map or tool that might require practice in how to use it, but the fundamentals are accessible to nearly anyone.

We divorce our understanding of things the less we work to embody them. That's how easy things become hard. If I want to play an instrument like a "god" I need to get around to memorizing the fret board, a few more scales, and keep the metronome ticking in my ear. In a month the frustration I felt last night "sucking" will look like I've actually put in a few thousand hours over the years.

How we're told simple things matters. This was something I vehemently disagreed with for too long. I thought the "fact" of the matter was the only relevant thing. Whether I said it cussing or ambivalent to feelings, it was there, so deal with it. You couldn't, I wasn't really telling you anything you could understand, and I functionally made it harder to be understood by burying what I hoped to get across underneath my ego.

This is the intellectual and patient or conversational way that I believe the majority of people could relate to each other. I think the most dramatic discrepancies in views are as boring logistically and practically as anything else. Unfortunately, the "average" person doesn't have the patience to read a book, let alone write several unpacking their way of defining words and what motivates their feelings. And, who has the time? What then?

I think it's a game of containment at that point. Keep "the masses" at bay and busy. It's practical, but equally as cruel as me stomping through your belief system arguing science over religion.

I like that Jordan Peterson talks about how we're all tyrannical. I've described it as this unyielding deference to your feelings and insistence on the narrowest definitions of what's just or true. We're no more cruel a jailer than to ourselves. We'll let the knot in our shoulder grow. We'll believe the part of our conscience that's been drinking too much. We habituate and then treat the behavior as gospel.

I take for granted how I've managed to get to where I am in the world. It is described in no less than 900+ blogs. It's after self-imposed stressors both physically and mentally, although not nearly enough and not often of the right kind. In place of generalized doubt about the utility of something I might do, I start with acceptance of how impossible it is and how I'm going to do it anyway. It's a conviction born of practice and experience. I rely constantly on the living examples to testify for me when all my words are wrong.

It's an order of magnitude more terrifying to realize what you're capable of more than what you've done. What you've done is boxed in. What you're capable of is infinite. When you live that kind of experience or are able to show yourself why it is true, it feels fragile and volitle. It's a simple truth with humble ways to practice it, and it grants you the power to build or destroy the world.

How do you trust yourself? How do you manage *loving* as deeply as you could? What happens when you misplace infinite rage? How naive and lonely are you prepared to look and feel when it seems like you're the only one who still believes in something? The "choice" at some level is foisted upon you to live or die, and whatever else you obtain or observe once it's made is something to utilize or be plagued by in an ongoing way. Trauma begets trauma, or intentional practice conditions you to cope and work with anything.

We act like it is easier not to do things. It's the cultural norm. Don't expect the morally superior thing unless you're looking to get punished as a needy and greedy interloper. Don't account for things honestly because, cross your fingers, there's someone who is more equipped and more responsible than you who will take care of it.

I think we need a revolution that espouses radical responsibility. I think that revolution needs to come in easily accessible pre-packaged amounts of practice and pain. I just learned you can improve your health, demonstrably, with cold showers. I've previously discovered that the stress I've chosen has lead to me becoming a better example of the kind of person I want to be and others to imitate. A choice foisted upon you is not one whose lesson is easily discerned nor purpose dictated. We haven't shown people how to choose to get better. We don't speak their language. We don't speak our own well enough to believe that we have to.

[885] Stop The Tape

I get so worked up.

To be sure, this is not going to be walking back what I wrote earlier, but bringing a few more pieces to it.

There's an idea I entertain about all conversations being about the same thing. You may start out discussing your relationship with a friend, pivot to a restaurant you drive past together, and it reminds you of a memory growing up. Weren't you focused on the relationship conversation? Didn't it matter? What did that restaurant have to do with anything? Where did some distant memory figure it belonged?

Your brain is just processing, or not, the information. How it combines and condenses, or what's forgotten, is a product of too much to calculate. What can remain constant across ideas or memories is your awareness of your ideas and where they are moving. “You” can still observe that one provoked the other, or the infinite sea of a certain kind of emotion conjures seemingly otherwise disparate moments.

I'm aware that I can't be helped. That is, how my head works, how forcefully I speak, how angry I may seem, and all of the baggage that comes along with it is mine. You can't fix me. You can't make it better. If you have one idea, that you disagree, I'm left in the familiar realm of abyss screaming, life goes on, maybe I quit a job or crash a car. I suppose I can understand why it would feel unsatisfying to simply accept such dramatic or unconscionable outcomes so well in advance.

Part of the reason I can't be helped, especially in fervent blog form, I'm having a dozen conversations at once. I'm reminded of a series of injustices. I'm forming thoughts in real time that associate with a feeling. I'm searching for a word that triggers a mini diatribe as I recall for whom and what I generally save that word for. It's almost confusing intentionally. I don't have things figured out. Writing is me facing the severity of my feelings, so I can move on and eat dinner or laugh at the movie I put on.

I try to write one line at a time. I try to ensure that when you are predictably confused, exhausted, or bored with hearing me say the same things, maybe one line sticks. No matter how many books or articles I read, it's a few lines or paragraphs I ever repeat or consistently think of when I write. I know it won't be a line where I'm asking a question that can hardly be answered. I doubt it will be any calls to arms. I know you're the hero of your own story and modesty or privacy are fair enough reasons to never bother sharing, the problematic nature of social media aside.

I'm worried, but I'm selfishly worried too. I worry that I'm living in a failed state. As “big” or broad a topic as that may seem, it seems as real to me as turning a key and expecting my car to start. I struggle to know what the purpose and meaning of words or history are if I'm not supposed to be feeling credible ongoing fear about how to respond to that. I'm worried if you're not worried. I'm worried if you're more worried and feeling as helpless as I do. I'm worried if you're all of that and quiet, leaving me to carry on like a budding genuinely crazy person (ahem, person struggling with mental health).

I'm selfishly worried that for everything I've attempted to cut out of life, in spite, by investing, by sacrificing, by negotiating with my worst impressions and judgments of “the system,” I'm never going to really enjoy it. My mind is going to wonder about whether I should have been *more dramatic* or brave. I'm gong to miss people I've never met. I'm going to feel like I skirted by because of my convenient circumstances. I'm going to think about the walking dead waiting to invade. I don't want the stories that have been written by following rules or orders. I know death will take you whether you're full of pride or shit just as quickly.

I'm angry. I'm not the kind of angry that comes in the door, slams things down, and begs an aneurysm to pop. I'm the kind of angry that's been told to be a leader, with no one signing up for war. I'm the kind of angry who has watched systems he's been a part of degenerate one after another while he's tried to work incredibly hard mentally and physically to account. My mind races through the times I've offered to do more, organize better, save time, save money, or shuffled between “authority” who shit the bed so hard I can't find the words. I'm angry that I don't know what you believe in beyond the status quo.

Then I just feel dumb. Why get angry about what I don't know? Everyone's fighting their own battle, right? Why am I not comfortable it's a worthwhile and important one on their own terms? I'm not a man of faith, and if I were, I'd say faith is dead without acts. I think some people are doing their best, most aren't. Fair or not, that's my napkin calculation just based on the “professionals” I meet regarding the safeguarding of children AS A JOB. I don't need to inflate or become hyperbolic about what I've seen there. I don't struggle to praise and point out when it goes right either. Literally, by the numbers, we have reason to at least voice the worry.

So it goes with anything else you can count. What else don't I have to play make-believe about and get all worked up in my feelings over? 73 million. DCS going from 8-10 supervisors/managers to 3. Ireland having perpetually 7-10 families that aren't getting regular visits because the number of staff can't meet the demand. $50,000 contracts to keep families out of the system, but not enough money to pay case managers nor discussion about how poverty compounds their issues. 6 months the average tenure of someone at DCS or social work broadly (honestly, this could be an “all jobs” thing, but I haven't checked in a while). Pushing 300,000 dead. 0 states you can afford the average rent on minimum wage. What about compound interest on student loans and the number of years you've been enslaved for trying to learn?

How smug and self-satisfied should I feel about my next build on the land? Am I “fixing” anything but my gaze just past the dumpster fire? Should I continue to indulge my dreams or fantasies and write off everyone not choosing to be like me?...like so many entitled generations before me...like so many possessed by their first and last ideas?

It's big and small battles, all happening at once, all talked about in confusing or contradictory terms, and all particular to the humans, the individuals, involved. We can submit to our animal instincts or we can be human. We can't linger in-between as the forest burns.

I'm *trying* to say exactly what I've said in every line. I'm *trying* to say what I believe in by creating what I have on the land. I'm *trying* to say that I don't believe I know enough individuals fighting worthwhile battles. I know some, and I know what 73 million people would say or do to keep them in whatever polite, mature, safe conversational box they're in now. I'm saying that I am, in fact, *trying.* I'm failing, nauseatingly, unceasingly, to find things that align with my biggest and smallest conceptions of my being, but I'm also grinding my teeth and feeling sick to my stomach about what I feel all but forced to do for money, in service to people who think it's polite to offer me a chance to take off my mask.

[884] Stop The World

The temptation lately has been to list. I want to point to things that seem like they are part of a constant flow of “shit is fucked.” I want to denote them as such, and then point to how they could/should/might be provided a certain awareness or series of choices.

I'll once again qualify the “givens.” Things are cyclical, balanced, and ambivalent. Right and wrong exist when you get down to any level worth talking about. There are problems with every organization, structure, or manifestation of power, which does not make them evil, but their tyranny should not go ignored or denied. You choose to take responsibility, or you don't. We're not at the mercy of anything more than we are the story or spell we put ourselves under.

In what feels like record time, I've gotten a call from my regional manager about “something she's been made aware of.” I, unable to ignore my thoughts or sense of agency as I seemingly watch myself capitulate day in and out, sent an email explaining my perspective saying how I want the owners to pay everyone considerably more. There was more to it describing my perspective of work broadly and sense of history and numbers, but I stated plainly, as I do, a perceived injustice and why it lends itself to overwhelming hopelessness and futility.

Psychologically, I can't keep up the act. I've never been that good at it to begin with, but I'm not exaggerating when I say every single day I'm feeling pressured to speak out, rage, or just bring the fight for a conversation that doesn't center around deference or excuses. I feel like I see people in defeated states, often practically on the verge of tears, or indignantly lashing out over exceptionally petty things. That's it. I don't meet the ones who are angry. I don't meet that ones who have a plan for anything. I couldn't shake an opinion out of someone about their pay, nature of their work, or place in the world. Always, *always*, it's “moving right along.” It's a furled brow and needing to sit down for a talkin' to.

Don't I know the way things work?

THEY DON'T.

Not just yesterday, not ten years ago, today, we're dying in record numbers. We're 9-11ing every day. We're letting Kentucky get away with re-electing Mitch McConnell. We're, in no way, prepared to deal with the reality of 73 million Nazis stark raving mad about kids in cages, the tyranny of public health, and the right to be as racist and ignorant as their Dear Leader. WE ARE NOT HUMAN. We are a faceless mass of hysteria crashing into all levels of how society attempted to organize itself. We're exposing lie after lie, and it took how many YEARS before people were even willing to use the word “lie” with regard to Trump?

Truth matters. Right and wrong exist. It is not enough to get-by and exist as we are. If you can't wipe the fog from your eyes or clear your head on your own, the world is begging to kill you, today. I feel “radical” for wanting to make enough to live with a degree of comfort. It seems like a “dream” to not regret how I'm spending my time and in service to what. I feel obligated to “persuade” people they have an individual voice and responsibility to get angry, say something, and fucking DO. Join up and manifest. Do the math. Fight, bite, and scream!

If we're on the front line of this wave of fascism and stupidity, and we are, kill it! If we're trying to cling to some nominal sense of being and family we've clambered together in spite of the chaos, fucking defend it! If we shed a tear like some cliché commercial Native American over the environment dying and profit for profit's sake, throw yourself on the goddamn wheels and stop this fucking machine.

I'm violently indignant about your title, your presumption, or your placating held-harmless excuse engine. We're not all equal in blame. The people not paying you enough are. We're not all guilty. The people burning and cutting and polluting are. We're not all just at the mercy of greater forces, you, quiet co-conspirator are more guilty than me. You, person who feels the same anger and passion and swallows it need to stop listening at me and listen to your fucking self. You need to act!

I'm worried. I'm worried in the same way as when I crashed my car. I didn't consciously decide “I'm going to crash this bitch, I hate debt, it's not what I wanted, yada yada series of regrettable thoughts.” I drove it like it didn't matter, like I didn't matter, and like I wanted it gone. My deepest compulsions and beliefs manifest. If what's true of the world is the same that's true for me, nearly everything either wants me dead or is wholly ambivalent at the prospect. I need to find an outlet. I need to live in service to right and wrong, not self-righteous delusion, not accommodating coping, and not blind and deliberately ignorant posturing. I need an environment where right is right and wrong is wrong and if I work to be right I can expect to build and teach and create something worth protecting and fighting for.

I meant it when I said I needed to break things. Maybe it's “polite” society. Maybe it's my last barely clinging to the cliff idea about what's “pragmatic.” Maybe it's the “mature” governor that's toned down my behavior suspiciously at a time that coincides with what is an ongoing societal existential crisis. Like I'm running from the responsibility to be the Alex Jones-voiced character from Waking Life roaming the land with my megaphone. I live in a time that I can't invoke his crazy-ass horrible-person name without taking on his baggage before someone would bother to watch the fucking movie!

I think it's fitting that as I feel myself winding down on what else to say, Stop The World by Extreme is playing in my headphones.

If nothing else, I'm positive I will break a considerable amount before I get to me. Here's to hoping it's worth it and works out as well as my car crash did.

[883] Bubbling

I have had about a dozen titles for this float by over the last few days. I do not believe it would be overstating that I am coming from a place of calm, deliberateness, but still acutely aware “something” need be said. I'm “procrastinating,” which might be understood as me prioritizing writing this first. I'm actively mitigating my cold house, the heater out of commission, with a plug-in blanket. My coffee is delicious. A movie I've tried to watch 3 times is paused with pre-famous Bobby Cannavale explaining to Robin Williams why he needed a break from their relationship.

Again, I feel on the cusp of greatness. The last few days I've felt my initial enthusiasm for the Sirius XM Radio stations in my loaner car wane. At the same time, I got a loaner car when my truck shit the bed. I got it from someone I actively told was not my friend after we became desk mates at my last job. This friend is also repairing my truck while navigating too many clients and attempting to get through a doctoral program. He references his culture as the source of his impulse to help. My sense of greatness is bolstered by a relationship both shaped and unshaped.

I try to set conditions. The creation of my home is arguably the largest expression of that. Whatever winds may blow, they blow against my house, not my apartment complex. Whatever broad “business” idea I want to pursue, I won't pursue it with anyone less than an Allie or Hatsam.

I think you set up the conditions in your mind and behavior, and they manifest in incalculable ways. With my friend fixing the truck, I told him we wouldn't be friends unless he affected my bank account after he, incorrectly, thought he could get me a side job with the university. It was something of a running not-actually joke for a year and half until I called him about getting hired on where I work now. They paid me, so we're friends now, and then he went and did some shit like fix my truck, and I feel the kind of enthusiastic reciprocity burden to help him insulate and pour cement in his garage.

It has been my suspicion for quite some time that “sharing” or “reciprocity” have been beaten to death culturally. Things have reduced to “me and mine” at all times. Independent of that I can think of my best friend who, over the 20+ years we've known each other were anchored by exacting dollar amounts in where we sat with each other. It's very recent memories where the impulse to reference that $3 spent at McDonald's has come due isn't the first one. I don't know what else you might expect from a couple of psychopaths, but it was a system that worked.

The concepts of what bring us together don't become so opaque without the active assault and assertion for the current cultural narratives. You're not sharing with someone you need to “capitalize” on. You're not sharing your happy moments and achievements as much as marketing your brand or providing data points to get you photographing algorithm-predicted brands next time. Our “culture” is to reflexively submit to the mercy of the various powers that be. The impulse to criticize or push for another standard or definition is punished, or you're just too tired.

For me, I can feel lighter about my impulse to better define and call-out. Did you write a polite, but direct, letter to your upper management the other day telling them to pay everyone considerably more? Do you need to? Yes. Can you afford to? Probably not. I don't like my job, but I'm not clawing my eyes out like I normally would. I can deliberately and meticulously parse out what I like, what I don't, and where it sits with me in the many contexts I exist in at once. That's psychologically regal. That I got to sleep in to 9, get up and write this, look at my bank account and see about a month's worth of similar “effort” between me and getting “even” is physically regal. The things I need are no more or less than we all need, like health insurance, so I don't take it personally like some deficit in my decision making or “simple choice” to spend obscenely for not enough.

I'm full. I'll need to eat again, and I know shit is coming, but I'm full. I get offered more food while I'm full. Whether I'm full of ideas I think more people need to share, or physically stuffed with Thanksgiving leftovers, the implication is to really or genuinely share. We all are packed with as many or more ideas about our lives, the directions we'd like to go, the things we deserve, or the ways we can help. There is no road map. You have to figure out what you're full of, and decide how it needs to be shared. You need to reverse narratives about what you are constrained by and discover what enables you to create. I create blogs. I create “pay us more” emails. I create the half of a friendship or relationship that says, “you must be this good to illicit this much in return.”

It's cold. Most people don't have the priming to hear you. Most people don't have the time. Most people don't have the disposition or the definitions to even understand, nor parrot back, what you've said or what you're doing. That doesn't erase your obligation to try. That doesn't let you off the hook for recognizing things you can be more responsible for. That doesn't unburden you from sorting out your reasons to exist each day. You can choose to respond to how you feel with another brick in your wall or with a brick thrown at your head. You can appreciate the space-heaters and warm blankets, or tell everyone what a piece of junk your air conditioner is. You can always do both, but can you feel which one your behavior is dictated by?

You don't know which part of the water is going to send up a bubble first. You can be sure it's not going to boil if the heat isn't on.