[895] Sharp Dressed Man

Perhaps it's because lately I've been inundated with more religious-themed books and media, or perhaps I just can't sleep because my dinner was 7000 calories of delicious carbs, but here we are.

I consider myself a reasonable person. Why? I remain aware of how limited reason can be. I don't “believe” I'm a reasonable person. I think I'm a reasonable person. For me, there's a huge gap between thinking and believing. I struggle to conceive of things I believe in. I have an endless array of ideas which I either can or can't reason my way towards some kind of relative conclusion.

When I'm angry, down, or incredibly confused, I turn to reason. I don't pray the pain away. I don't deny what I feel or the words I wish to use to express it. I don't try to act like things are okay. I don't lust for someone to make excuses for me nor whisper in my ear that everything will be okay. Reason, for me, is nothing if not a tool first. I find meaning in attempting to be reasonable as I allow my thoughts to act through my fingers in searching for what I have to say.

I understand why people don't want to be reasonable. Reason is, at least theoretically, dispassionate. A story told boringly or series of facts aligned don't necessitate your opinion. A reason might be cold, flat, and weighing you down, while an excuse comes out hot and ready to protect you or float into as many ears as will take it. Reason gives us a path to often just as cold and heavy conclusions as the facts required to get us there.

I watched a short documentary from Braver Angels using marriage counseling sessions between democrats and republicans. I listened to Chris Hedges' book American Fascists. I watched What's the Matter with Kansas? In some ways, I don't know how to refrain from rehashing what I feel exists in one tenth of my writing about religious thinking, conservatives, or the inevitable consequences of forgoing your agency in service to things with less evidence than farts in the wind. There's still something I'm missing.

I think I understand religious belief. I think I understand it as a series of forces, not some ardently defined moment or act of “belief.” I see it as a kind of parallel mind where the only thing that matters is remaining alive as a character in some kind of story. I take it for granted that people are incredibly psychologically fragile. The fine line of remote sanity, in sheer practical terms, bolstered by religious myth or interpersonal cult feels almost reflexively mandatory. I think people who bemoan the amount of alleged believers often ignore the series of myths you're required to adopt even as an otherwise “reasonable person” just to function.

As such, I've come to understand the strategy of poking fun, getting angry, or otherwise attempting to belittle someone's faith as futile. It doesn't mean it can't be fun or justified, but it does mean if I'm to maintain that I want to change culture, my pitch is going to have to be more comprehensive. I'm positive I've stated this years ago, and it's manifested as a generalized disinterest in engaging with anyone remotely religious about anything religious more than any kind of advocacy specifically.

What's important to understand about my change in position is that it didn't come from anymore respect for religion or any one religious person. In fact, I still hate staunch ideologues and think religion is the best tool they use to destroy most of what I care about, including the practice and teaching of reason. Reason allowed me to take in more information and adopt a broader view. I could further contextualize not just my antagonizers, but myself and how I feel about them. No religious person was persuasive. No religious argument just shook my feeble atheistic mind. I just kept working to understand the problem broader.

A lot of my anger for religious people is for a perceived intellectual laziness and dishonesty. Fear I can at least basically respect insofar as it's a complicated emotion at the basest level of our brain, and when you're afraid, you're bound to be unreasonable. Once you've removed the fear, or poor excuses to pretend you're afraid, I think it's a direct flight to dishonesty and laziness. Flying right over facts, questions, “I don't know,” or any one of a thousand things that might chip away at the catch-all answers of “faith.”

Religion is often referred to as something very personal. Whether or not you even want to use the word religion, people flock to “spiritual” or some such “mystical” realm of communing with forces “beyond” or “greater.” I've done drugs that made me feel that way. They did not result in religious conversion. Before I did those drugs, I did a lot of reading about the ways people achieve those states and what happens in our brains when they're going on. I sucked the magic out. I didn't let the question linger like no answer could possibly exist and moved on with my life.

We act like there's any real separation of church and state. This intimate, deeply personal, often rallying cry to go out and convert others, global phenomenon about how to characterize your place and organize the world is treated as though it's an incidental afterthought when you go to the ballot box. A lazy economist might say you've got “perfect information” from which to decide who's going to represent your best interests and disregard your “personal values.”

The challenge, and I think so few people understand or agree with this, is to understand how totalizing and threatening it is to have a perspective subsumed by a religious mindset. Maybe Jesus isn't your brand, but something in how we respond to story-telling and club-affiliation is speaking to you. It's no better to be emotionally hijacked by a political party than it is a sky daddy.

We know as well much about how and why people pick these fascist feelings and tendencies over reason. They're desperate. They're alone. They're exhausted and ashamed. They're angry, perhaps even as angry as me, and they don't know what to do about it besides burn things down. Could you have asked for a more lame coup? It played out like a bad TV episode of a TNT show. Faith without acts is dead? The hollowness of faith is clearly alive and well.

I think I semi-consciously decided that the psychosis was too large and the numbers too few to really combat it. I started praising the idea of so much to eat and watch as forms of a stop-gap to any kind of genuine movement towards destruction. There' no more fat, hopeless, and addicted than the ones who vote in service to their fascist values. Fight the next Civil War from the top of any flight of steps and you'll be done by the afternoon.

The word “reason,” like all words in double-speak land, gets tossed around to mean its opposite. “The reason I vote is to save the unborn!” Of course, you don't need a concept of “save” “the unborn” or “reason” to form those words into a sentence. You don't need science. You don't need statistics or analogies implicating your god in significantly more natural abortions than are ever sought medically. A reasonable person knows you're tribal. Your morals are shaped by a story, not morality. Your feelings dictate instead of inform. You feel the story in a way that facts don't concern themselves with.

Reason, devoid of context, gets you into as much or more trouble than being merely faithful. Now, you've functionally broken all the rules. Nothing weaves your thoughts into a context. Psychotic breaks put this on display. Even when you're perhaps technically saying a series of true things, they're anchored to nothing, and you, not anchored, can't tell. Our fundamental need for a story now becomes the game of people marketing their “family atmosphere” at a slave-labor job. It's a story of manifesting destiny and entitlements. It's class warfare. It's righteous slaughter of the threat just over the hill or those guilty of thought-crime in not believing your origin or orientation story.

Where does the individual, or just the capacity to reason, go? If we must have a story, and I think we must, which one do we choose? Here, the apologists for various faiths point to the generally large number of people not blowing themselves up or stoning gay people and consider that reason enough to pat themselves on the back for their club membership. I reject this, and say you should be choosing your story.

Your story is anchored by choice. Refined choices are dictated the larger you make your perspective. If you're a child and you choose milk and cereal for breakfast, because that's all you've ever had or known, or perhaps all your parents could afford, you have little choice. Your story is small, predictable, and speaking to a universal story perhaps about poverty or simplicity. Now you're grown. You can eat literally anything, food or otherwise, and you pick a piece of fruit for books and books of reasons that still may tell a story about poverty or simplicity, but now with your agency and intention. You can recognize your choice now in the broader context. You can reflect on your “choice” as a child as primarily a series of circumstances and ignorance.

It appears many people struggle with this kind of exercise, not because it's hard, but because it begs a lot of questions they start afraid, and then end lazy and dishonest, about answering. How much of your day are you really choosing? Are you still practically a child? What horrible terrible things are you choosing? What might've happened to you as a child that you have no choice but to relive the terror of each time you think of it? What if the people you care most about in the world were actually choosing to do things that would hurt or kill you and the people or things you care about? What if you don't know or aren't confident you can, in fact, ever choose to do anything about anything? (Just double-dog dare these people to lick a toilet seat and then ask them how helpless they feel because they know the rules.)

Much more polite, simple, and “safe” to step right over all that and, god forbid, anyone remark how banal some Jewish snobs regard evil or remark on how it triumphs.

This is what will kill us, in my estimation. It won't be bloody Trump nuts hanging like balls from a neutered nation. It won't be nuclear war or mishap. I don't even think it will be climate change. It will just be the silence of business as usual. It'll be on the wind between the pages of a trillion memes. It will come like a virus. It will come straight-up, nicely dressed, and telling you, exceptionally reasonably, what it's doing and intends to do to you in the future, and you'll usher it inside, introduce it to your kids, and pray it's only joking.

[894] Tell Me Why

What if I can't be fixed? What if there's never a stabilizing point where it all just clicks? What happens when I can't find my stride, I'm stuck rehashing old rhetoric and beating a dream of a kind of existence to death as my hairline recedes, my joints ache, and I struggle to hear what's been said across the room? What if I'm destined for a generalized forlorn blog or biting indictment of politics every week, and every sincere exploration of my being or state of mind is reduced to a randomized index number of a whole-internet archive and never to be seen again? What if I'm not even granted the irony of dying from a car crash while I'm tweeting about how likely it seems I might be about to die in a car crash?

I was riffing on “hate” yesterday on the drive home. I'm reminded often how much of my behavior is driven by hate. I don't “accept” things. I'm not particularly stoic or disengaged. I'm not boundlessly joyful at the sheer absurdity no matter how many jokes I can come up with. Hate is first and foremost on my mind and only after I engage the hate does room for other modes of being come through. I have to talk about how much I hate my job before I pick up the phone and schedule the next appointment. I have to bitch about the weather before I pack on layers and attempt some outdoor task. I have to belabor the shittiness of any given situation before the joke comes or the move to account for what may, innocently-enough, contribute to the shittiness.

It's a hatred that keeps me clenched, tight, and taking Advil like candy. It's a hate the cups the anxiety in the pit of my stomach. It's a hate that has me rehearsing conversations with people or interviewers when I actually have power or the ability to be of the kind of grand consequence I'm under the impression will pacify the hate. Mostly I think it will do so because when I get to “do more,” whether it's the opportunity to demonstrate my competence for things I don't even care to do, or stay busy enough to justify my time and energy, I do feel better, if brief enough to know it's not a long term fix or really the kind of example I'm attempting to set.

I remember not feeling necessarily “good” when all I had to do each day was read or do drug studies, but I don't recall seething with hatred nor regularly clenching my jaw and needing to constantly massage my shoulders. There's a different kind of pain when you put your body, not just your mind, into some kind of contradiction. Thinking convoluted, contradictory, or conflicting things comes with the territory of having a mind. Working and watching yourself betray what your muscles or attention might otherwise be focused on is another level. I don't just think it's silly or inefficient the way the organizations I've saddled myself to run, I'm the engine that doesn't get the oil to function right. And if they give me drops of oil, it's on the condition I ignore the grinding brakes.

Social workers broadly seem to epitomize that “make the best of it” mindset I think has choked the country as a whole. Whether you were driven to the job because they're always hiring, or you actually have some genuine regard for the work, the default presumption, whether voiced explicitly or not, is that people are pretty terrible, and it's up to us with our models, good will, and belief in our better natures to show them the door and hold their hand through the chaos. That chaos can sometimes just be meeting attendance and paperwork, or the ongoing drama of a mental health struggle and addiction.

At bottom though, we are all operating under the basic premise that people suck. It comes out as “it's a hard job” or “I could never do that.” Every study on stress has DCS or social workers as its focus. It's our cultural narrative. People suck so much, they don't deserve to get paid, get healthcare, have access to time off, or even live if you prefer to call them “illegal” or “antifa” in a deliberate dance around the human and ideas they represent. We take these suckers and we get them addicted, hold the pharmaceutical companies harmless, and then we take their children in a process to be overseen by an office with a 50/50 chance you'll get an insecure power monger with their own incredibly sucky behavior dictating how it proceeds.

We send inexperienced or exhausted people out to “advocate” that you don't suck that bad and just need someone in your corner, when the country, county, town, and any remote authority in your life has failed you, considers you a criminal, and were they to not actually consider you a giant ball of irredeemable suck, couldn't help you in a meaningful and comprehensive way if they tried. They are forced to draw inspiration and meaning like a parent cheering way too hard at a soccer game, thinking the deeper they feel and the wider they prostrate, the more of helpful consequence they'll be.

And you're supposed to carry on like this, every day, your whole life, swapping in one job for another, one excuse or company policy disavowing the language needed to liberate. You're supposed to maintain professionalism and maturity as you watch yourself prematurely age or resent every minute you're finally “alone” to think about how deeply you're haunted by the next obligation. And they're obligations because they lend themselves to guilt. You, somehow, still know what you're worth and what you could be doing. You know that the “little bit of good,” be it colloquially or practically is seemingly all you ever get, and being a tired or depressed stick in the mud contributes only one more to the instances in which you weren't able to justify your existence.

How liberating, some people tell me, to be less attached, not full of feeling dramatically one way or another as though the hatred isn't squeezing and visceral. Why don't I go back to school? Why don't I apply to be a...? Why don't I try to pursue? There is no goal if you're not enjoying the ride. The processes that are difficult are supposed to be in service to something, not a self-inflicted painful reminder of something severely lacking for which no one seems bothered to account for. I can't enjoy the movie while the theater is on fire.

We don't have the time to process how big of a fuck up it is that we're at once manifesting and suffering in a loop. And we're told by those who would never doubt their own sincerity or utility of their being that maybe we're just having a bad day or haven't come to appreciate enough about our circumstances. When your hair falls out during chemo, there are so many fabulous wigs, after all, and they just so happen to be in sales.

I want it all to come to a grinding halt. I don't just want “stimulus” money, I want stimulus time. I want to pause functionally begging for the right to exist, be pretty much left alone, and I'll throw you some cash to let me go to the doctor, eat, and keep watching TV. This shit shouldn't be so hard. It shouldn't rise to the level of existential crisis every single fucking day when the car blows a tire or your billable hours maliciously coordinate to cancel on you the same week. My body shouldn't hint to me that maybe an occasion deserves a tear when I'm shown a moment of compassion, understanding, or opportunity because it knows how short we are on supplies.

I'm so incredibly tired of feeling like I have some disorder, deficiency, defect, or determined role like I'm over here wisely choosing each day to play the, “What can I swallow?” game. I'm tired of singing the same song. I'm tired of seeing shit like a Bernie fucking meme go more viral than every fucking thing that man has stood for his entire life. I'm tired of looking for the excuse to tap out gracefully as though the mental and emotional worlds we're occupying can even grasp the concept of grace beyond its weaponized god-ridden invocations.

There are battles worth fighting. There are reasons to live and worse struggles to endure for the kind of rewards required to thrive over being afraid and exhausted. Why does no one believe that?

[893] Tool Boxer

I anticipate a bit of a scatter-brained amount to talk about, but I need to focus so I can turn my day into something remotely productive.

I have something of a list of “philosophical cliches” that I take for granted when I talk, but that I also apply to my life broadly. It's things like assuming an “ambivalent universe” beyond naive ideas about good and evil. It's that time is an illusion. It's that all conversations are happening at once and about everything at all times.

To someone not familiar with me or my, probably-poor understanding of physics or quantum mechanics, and how it's married to hopefully-not-Chopra-esc ideas about how to conduct myself, the purpose or utility of how I talk about things or why I engage in one thing over another are going to “seem” very hard to understand.

I liken it to the cultural understandings of narratives, and meta-narratives. You might have a narrative about “minimum wage” that says definitively there's a standard or floor that we're all going to agree or adhere to. The meta-narrative is the assumptions built-in about the kind of work that pays minimum wage or the type of people who would “choose” to engage in it. We would certainly get a lot more done and agree much quicker if we just did the math on what it costs to live with the necessities, but someone's always going to start a selfish fight about what's really necessary.

To the best of my ability, I try to refrain from meta-narratives. I ask questions for answers, not because I've built in the question an implication I think you should follow. If you use damning and oppressive language or words in how you orient yourself in the world, I'm perfectly okay with that, if you are also able to maintain a sense of the ongoing forever-narrative that's curious and open to change in service to the facts. For as often as I've been begrudged my “negativity” or negative language, rarely if ever can the person doing so concede that, one step beyond the level of their emotion, is the mere fact that needs to be contended with on its own terms.

My buddy's mom died the other day. It was relatively sudden, and she was only 62. Aggressive cancer infected her entire body, and a 4 day hospital stay ended with her dying. All things about that scene remain true at all times. We could develop the same cancer. The depth of his love and care for her is as true as the depth of my ambivalence and cheering for the death of my own mother. How you're spending each day and whether or not it's with the idea of when, not if, the cancer analogue gets you is an important thing to remain vigilant and contemplative about.

Can you remain contemplative? Are you responsible enough to maintain the level of thought and concern for your place relative to everyone else?

I stay angry. I'm relatively domineering and unsympathetic. Some of that's built in, some of that took work. I'm angry because I'm not represented in the “democratic” country I live in. I'm angry that I'm subjected to the task of money-making in a rigged and violently idiotic game. The anger focuses my resolve to be singularly focused on how to create the conditions that make it so I'm not so angry. I frame that story in terms of “me,” but I intimately understand myself as an amalgamation, a limited window, and an expression of “everything at all times.”

This is why advocacy and a voice is important. One angry person, perhaps disproportionately so, tells us nothing. I could have a broken brain or many bad ideas. I respect shows of solidarity in marches and protest. The problem is forgoing an individual responsibility and sense of agency or accountability in pawning off to those willing to do or be.

If “most” people are ambivalent, and the rest left to “progress” by “the narrowest of margins” as every media outlet likes to refer to the democratic majority, I don't believe we'll make it. We have to be clear and determined in what's right. We have to be defending every day the right to not be subjected to the power-mongering fear-based narcissism of fascism. We have to normalize and cope with our inherent Nazi-impulses and decide, consciously, actively, to reduce them to the numbers, the contemplation, and the work. It's a work that does not reduce us to our story of victimization. It's a work that requires sacrifice.

I think there will be a temptation to read things I write and react as though it's somehow abstract. I live in a country that is over-extended. I drastically reduced my bills, sacrificing presumptions of convenience and comfort. I made dozens of unhelpful, impractical, and mentally exhausting attempts to connect and be friends with people I thought could “do better.” I stopped romanticizing, sacrificing an unproductive and ignorant assumption about the power and utility of mere feeling. I've taken ideas I had about ownership or money and distilled them down into a process of how they do or don't balance with my internal sense of happiness or well-being. I sacrificed the narrative of “me alone” and look instead for how I can build my understanding of circumstance into a more robust and honest picture of the whole. Everyone should have their own sense about what they need to be doing or working in service to. It's an individual exaltation or failure, every day, every moment.

You can recognize that you are the cancer. You are a cascade of multiplying ambivalent forces eating up the resources, time or material, looking for as many host cells as possible. That's every one of your bad ideas. That's every moment of impatience and imprecise “fight” or conversation. That's each moment of ingratitude and presumption. The cancer's going to win, but ours is a story of what we were doing each day to understand it and mitigate it. This isn't something to “debate” with “another side.” This isn't something that can leave you feeling like you've won or spared feelings. This is whether or not you can acknowledge the boring deadly fact and divorce it from the meta-narrative that implicates your prejudices and pithy feelings.

By the numbers, I need more money to do what I want and support my household than what I will make scrapping or side-hustling. I, pretty much hate, my job, but I've aggressively approached it with radical honesty about its relative utility against how I might otherwise be spending my time. For now, cold hard cash speaks louder than old water heaters. I hate that. I hate it so much I've written a blog over the course of an hour to aid in pushing back me starting to work in service to that job again...on my day off, because I hate that fact at least as much as I hate the detailed day-to-day. And now you know. And I'm coping in my way with my words, and whether I stay on for another 2 weeks or 12 months, it's something I'm actively navigating, not resolved to, not heedlessly suffering, and not sacrificing my understanding of what informs that hate to paint a rosier picture than is due.

Do not let yourself be deceived. Do not follow the herd. Do not pretend like dispassionate analysis is the antithesis to really engaging in life and discovering what your place in it might be. You will not be erased by rendering things down into their component parts, you will be a pointed tool for building something only you are capable of. Use it.

[892] Death Cult For Cooties

I'm annoyed. I'm watching “The Vow,” where Scientology-lite ex NXIVM members functionally recreate Leah Remini's series with, somehow, even more exposition. I don't know if I even really appreciate the amount of catch-all nonsense cliches people employ to describe their time under the influence, but I know I'm losing my patience for this narrative that seems fit to start and end at, but how could I know!? This could happen to anyone!

The cult leader started as a multi-level marketing scammer in the 80s. If that's not enough to sound the alarm, say, because back then the nature of those organizations was less understood or you were young enough for him to consider you a target, there's more to explore. Hell, I've fallen under the allure of an MLM. I was 16, made one pathetic attempt at sending my dad to work with an energy drink catalog, cost myself like $20, and thus ended my career in “being my own boss.” I've also fallen for an Ebay scam, and believed I had a shot at girls I absolutely had no shot with. I characterize a good portion of my 16-25 year old self as something of a wide-eyed idealist verses deliberately naive.

As such, along those lines, I can empathize with these people. They had their own social and emotional issues. They were “looking for something,” and a nice-enough crowd with a persuasive personality coaxed them along. I think as someone who recognized his own capacity for manipulation and concern for the potential consequences, here's where I dramatically diverge. I start writing. The narrative used to justify the different environments that were making me miserable needed to be explored, not justified.

Part of the reason I didn't and still don't feel naive about the parts of my life that haven't gone as planned or didn't feel like they “should” was because I was actively examining them and making decisions in spite. You hear the same thing from the cult members though. They don't consider getting branded a bad thing. They don't think the bad press is anything but nay-sayers and people threatened by their growth and influence. What makes my conception of examining my life better than theirs? It seems too easy to point to the things any one member might have been convicted of, right? We were definitely drinking heavily, drugs were all around, and clearly not everyone experiences the party or sexual energy the same way.

I don't know that there's an “objective” analysis here. I think one of the reasons I insist on constantly writing, sharing, and exploring, is because with the ounce of sympathy or empathy I might have for any one member, I can't shake this sense that there's something dirty not being addressed. I can't believe they wouldn't be having the same kind of conversations I was, internal or otherwise. I can't stomach the amount of silence and circles one would need to let “everyone I know is starving themselves and exhausted” go unexamined.

Easy enough to think of the cult of Nazi Trump supporters, no? How many interviews have you watched of them just sounding dumb. And it's a deliberate dumb. It's a proud dumb. It's the kind of dumb that is servicing a disregarded maliciousness. That maliciousness is ravenous to see how much it can get away with or devour. That's what I feared about my awareness of my capacity to manipulate. Even before I had any real sense that I could go about it deliberately, I knew simple things like, smiling a certain way defused or disarmed people. Humor works pretty much always. To what end?

Maybe if most of your days are doing workshops and yoga classes, it's a little easier to be dragged along in a more-or-less agreeable way. What's the fat, drunk, gun-toting basement dwelling retard's excuse? Do you think he subjectively views his life as one worth living? Do you think there are a few, pretty easy, hard truths to wrestle with before you find yourself face-painted and shitting in the halls of Congress? There's a scene in The Vow were an old actress says her mom is second cousins with Prince Charles and he needs to do her a favor to get the Dalai Lama on the phone. Cletus T. Dickhead would certainly spell it llama and accuse him of being a pedophile. These are superficially entirely different worlds.

What unites the two is ritual lies. Shitty families operate this way too. They lie about the impact they have on each other. They lie about what holds them together as though blood is sacred enough to divine kings and soak up the mess of incest and emotional abuse. We're all shaped and shape culture, as much as we wish to deny the latter. “Generational abuse” exists as a term because we've come to understand that trauma travels over time. To the extent you are made aware of this and then proceed to ignore the obligation to examine how it's almost certainly playing out in your life, any asshole who gives you enough reason to distract from that line of inquiry is going to become compelling.

This is a big reason why I don't hero worship. I have people who I tend to admire, briefly, and then I start to let what's human about them creep in. Jordan Peterson is an easy target. I've gorged myself on the podcast 5-4 the last few days. If you ever make the mistake of letting your favorite band's members speak, you're in for a ride. Every thing and every one can be credibly criticized. They can be subsumed in your subjective estimation or they can be incorporated into our collective objective measuring. Nothing about what we should seek to understand in our enjoyment or promotion of something needs to rest in an angry or defensive space. It's disingenuous cowardice or intellectual narcissism otherwise.

Accountability is something that's just not here anymore. I think accountability is often thought of as “someone” “out there” who needs to “do something.” Like there's indeed something to be done, a hero is on the way, and whatever our obligation, it's to squawk like the morality is in sounding the bells everyone else has already been ringing. This is why your silence is terrifying to me. This is why when in the days after the literal attempt to overthrow the government, dumb as it was, gave license for these fucks to escalate further, why am I not seeing every single one of you demanding the assholes be arrested?

I can speculate that you don't hold yourselves accountable, not really, to anything of consequence or sacrifice, so it feels really hard and like some undue burden to add what you might only perceive as noise. Okay, and what else does your cult leader tell you you're not allowed to say? How many millions of psychological cults have you joined that have so many of the features of the Nazis? Dressing up fear and shame as pride? Seems likely. Wishing for death? Pretty much my constant thesis for the last few years. Deliberately isolating yourself in a deadly comfort zone from any further obligation to the world around you? Please, stop me if this shit all feels made up and reaching.

[891] Salty

“Can I come out now?”

I want this to be very broad. As something of a fundamentalist when it comes to the method of discerning and repeating factual information, there's a sense that literally anything, big and small, is playing some version of the same song. I think there are functionally foundational methods to not just orienting yourself in a conversation about the natural world, but about what it means to be human. I think a lot of those fundamentals have been dressed up and confused in the manner in which they've been shared in school or between cultures. The truth of them, and the consequences of playing in concert or discord, play out predictably.

To be a little thirsty is familiar.

Everything, everywhere, needs to replenish itself in order to survive or perpetuate. You don't get life on Earth without a closed energy system constantly raining down from the sun. The light doesn't know nor care if it's illuminating a book or a torch. Heart disease is the biggest killer in the world. You clog the rejuvenating system, it prematurely ends. Your body is a closed system that can only work with what's been put into it. So far, we haven't learned how to scrub our veins and arteries so we don't feel burdened by the effort or expense it would take to eat healthier. We prefer instead to adapt by adopting a “you only live once” mindset that makes poor attempts to cope with death in every onerous bite.

In one of the last episodes of Vikings, a group is lost at sea. Slowly, they begin to die, and one boy hastens his death by drinking the salt water. Hopefully, if you're reading this, you've never been someone so thirsty you would deeply empathize with his plight. For all of the things these adventurers were excited and motivated to discover about the world, they already figured out it's foolish and deadly to drink from the sea. What goes through a person's head, so desperate, so deluded and bereaved, to do it anyway?

Our biological systems are a wealth of knowledge. Before we began the conspiracy to persuade ourselves we were ever “safe,” we built a complex series of understandings that tracks straight from our genes to our hero stories. That understanding was meant to provoke us to react to danger, real or imagined. It said we can take a thousand cuts to our skin in service to protecting what lies deeper. Practically overnight, those systems were subjected to modern environments they weren't designed for. When the physical plain or jungle disappeared, a new stomping ground was created in the mind. Now, convoluted philosophy or religious ideas shape and bind. Needs multiply in keeping with ever-iterating abstractions, to be saved, to follow rules, tithe, consume, or otherwise obligate yourself to your neighbor.

I think at every single moment, since the beginning of time, and at least since the beginning of consciousness, it's the same tools, same game, and same decision as to whether or not to drink the sea water. As deadly as it may be, a little won't kill you. This provided you drink 2.8 units of fresh water for every 1 unit of sea water. It will never be “safe” anymore than drunk driving, but each time you make it home without killing yourself, someone else, or ending up in prison, you have a visceral reminder of what *seems* to work. That fresh water is coming is taken for granted. Unrealized consequences, in fact, aren't consequences.

Water, at least, you can tell whether or not it's salty. Whether that's enough to deter any one person is its own question. What to do about murky ideas? What to do about abstract or deliberately convoluted ideas taking years to impact? You just got away with drunk driving yesterday, sipped a little sea water to celebrate, and now you're being told to ponder what happens to children you don't have 10 years from now when billionaires get tax breaks? Meanwhile, it's completely lost on you that the reason you were out drinking is because you feel generally miserable from your low wages now impacted from what was done to you maybe 40 years ago! How can you be expected to wrap your head around this game or these timelines? Especially because you've been told never to trust who's told you about them.

The more you own your complicity, the easier it is to understand. That is, say you've been given an opportunity to join something, say something, or build something, and you don't. First, and this is the insidious yet most meaningful detail, you have to recognize you had the choice to join, say, or build in the first place. Much of the modern discourse seems wholly engulfed by the idea that we're all just along for the ride. (Choo choo Trump train!) It's not me, it's my boss. It's not me, The State is all-consuming. It's not me, the rules are *clearly* written down. We're afraid to get called out or be held accountable. We're, pathetically, afraid of disassociating with the worst perpetrators. We don't want the burden that comes with holding and fighting for what it means to choose to be a rational and responsible actor in the world.

A little, dumb, coup attempt took place not 2 days ago, and there was an infinite saltwater sea of moments between certifying the election and going home to “debate” whether or not a president inciting insurrection should be removed. His vice president isn't on board with the idea, and the cowards and opportunists he hired resigned before even chancing getting asked the question. These aren't people. These aren't leaders. These are the result of previously unrealized consequences filling a power vacuum when you don't join, speak, and build.

So much of the narrative over the last 5 to 10 years has been about “canceling” or extirpating “problematic” ideas from our thoughts. We learned the dangers of social media, and continued to sip at regular intervals. We learned that absurd math of “trickle down” and devoted cherished Disney classics to the folly of greed and pride, sip sip sip. Mollify the angry Whites, don't condemn. Beat the Blacks for daring to claim their lives matter. Fake news and foreign interference. Nary a nod to the misdeeds in our own backyards when it comes to spying, environmental destruction, war mongering, or entertaining a unique racist brand. It's as simple as representation! Don't you know words like “qualified” are toxic and maybe violent and sexist?

By default, we are wrong, and nothing about how we engage with the world tries to reckon with that save scrupulous scientific pursuits. By default, we are thirsty, and we can be persuaded to drink sea water. We can squeeze it drop by drop, or gulp by the handful. I see people who swim or surf that perhaps accidentally drink it. I know some people make a game or guilty pleasure out of downing a cup here or there before racing to the water fountain. They go on to pretend like it didn't happen. Then, they pretend they can't see dehydrated people on the verge of death gleeful and delirious as they reach once more over the side of the boat.

The Nazis become the Germans we know them as today because we gave them a plan, dignified work, and an opportunity to buy-in to this increasingly precarious global experiment to prevent the extinction of humanity. (Or at least to get them all shopping.) They were very thirsty, and those as equally informed by history and human psychology as anyone else of their day opened fire hoses of sea water. These same monstrous fools are in every third house in your neighborhood. They're still thirsty, and no one is turning on the water. They don't know of any good wells. And whatever you're drinking has made you quiet, afraid, and unironically entitled. Onto the infinite negative feedback cycle you go, justifying your ongoing posture as the threat escalates sip by sip.

[890] Lesser Gods

I've been trying to write a certain kind of blog for at least two weeks. Maybe after watching “I Am Greta,” I'll be able to find it.

There are problems big and small. We address them, or don't, in the same fashion. We regard them as big, and respond inadequately. We regard them as small, and perhaps ignore them. Rarely, perhaps in war or specific disease eradication, can I recall gigantic problems being addressed in gigantic ways. In fact, when you look into the details, it's a dogged and select few who get about the organizing and persuading to make the rest work.

There's an idea that you don't want a king who wants to be king. It should be a begrudging obligation and responsibility. It should come with the “divinity” bestowed upon revelous privilege. For so long we've only known the power of kings as something to abuse. We're kings of our own story, insofar as we ignore our neighbor and history. We tax the planet insatiably. We use the language of war until the words indefinitely obscure the violence they retain. We look for heroes and scapegoats.

I identified a lot with Greta. She speaks, the world imitates. She learns, the world hurls opinionated condescension. She doesn't want to be a person who says one thing and does another. She's an extremely begrudging leader. She responds reflexively, “No, we're here together.” when praised for coming to give a speech. She knows that for every increasingly angry or emotional talk she might give, it's going to take us all. She does not falter on this point.

As I've gotten older, I've had to reevaluate what it means for me to be a leader. I have a lot of not-exactly-empty words about being a loud, combative, and obnoxious voice, if nothing else. I dream of driving around with a mega-phone and fact pamphlets. I rehearse what I might say on stage in a talk or to reporters. The things that I've learned about my capacity to cause a fuss and draw attention are ripe to be exploited by the media noise machine. I could see myself dance and smile and laugh about whatever bumbling following or accolades I might receive. I'd then sit back and watch Trump get elected again or some other oligarchy-based right-wing tragedy unfold every day.

My understanding of myself, power, and my relationship to it has changed. I don't think attention means anything in and of itself. Attention is cheap. Commitment, focus, dedication, and truthfully serving an ideal? That changes the world. It changes it in dramatically terrible ways, and makes incredible saves here and there.

I think it's easy to confuse my conception of truth. Truth is ambivalent. The power of it indifferent. I don't try to speak the truth to obtain some kind of badge or out of a sense lording pride. I try because I decided I wanted to make my individual impact on the world in spite of how impossible and shit I think most things are. It sucks to feel abandoned and naive. It sucks to be poor and always in struggling to catch-up. It sucks when your water smells like sulfur and when everything you own seems to break at the same time. It sucks talking about it for as bad as it sucks, and hearing silence suspiciously disguised as tinnitus.

If I were ever in a leadership position of my design, it would be to first lead with the ideals and practice of what I believe in. That's writing and the land. That's my budget being hyper focused on paying off debts or bills and investing in tools. I'd want to be in a world, small as five acres, of people leading themselves through the ideals and work they stand for. If and when it draws attention, I don't want it to be for its novelty. I want it to be as a provocation. I want what I build to make you feel like shit and then immediately feel like you need to create something like it in your world.

Greta is finding out the hard way, just like I had to, how much of it is talk and pageantry. They'll cheer you on. They'll fixate on your image or at least their caricature of it. They won't, you know, do anything after the splendid walk through the city streets. 10 or 20 will try. 1 or 2 will succeed, kinda, before being wrapped up in the greater artifice as they learn the language of “compromise” and “maturity.” What are you supposed to do then besides carve out your little space that you hope fills with water and one day becomes a river?

I like to think I'm ready for it. I think I can handle the bad reviews, the thousands of opinions, bot, troll, or otherwise, about how I sound, something I've said or done in the past, or just how incomplete and wrong-headed I am in being soooo whatever the adjective. At the same time, I want none of it. I want to be smarter than to get sucked up in that kind of attention hole. I want to overwhelm with my force, not get battered around by rage and hype machines. I want the example I set to be as strong as I genuinely feel about what I'm trying to accomplish in the world and who I believe needs to be standing next to me.

The “argument” for driving on the correct side of the road makes itself. I want to be understood at that deep psychological and normative level. I want to infiltrate and divert power across so many mediums, I hear my talking points on your lips and in your headlines. I want to blithely wave my hand at what I'm doing when asked for a comment. I want to turn privileged and poorly dressed information into instantly accessible resources like a tool you might see on Star Trek. They don't have time to argue with user-incompetent software!

I think this takes the kind of “reflective grind” I've been in what feels like indefinitely. I lost the zealotry to sacrifice everything in service to my most compelling ideas. I don't have the energy to fight every battle. I have what I intend and believe, and as many alters as I can erect in service. There are so many churches, humble and ornate. If nothing else got built, people ensured a church did. I'd prefer a star ship, but the same underlying mechanism is what's at play. What do you believe in?

I have brief moments in my day where I can sometimes see the information I've given someone has actually helped them. They had no plan, I told them what to do. They had no understanding, I spelled it out until they almost get as bored with the details as I am. I believe what I'm doing is a good thing. I think people need organized, practical information that will help them gain control of their lives. I think that while I'm supposed to be dealing with a “difficult” population, I just see people as ridiculous or boring as anyone I've ever met with a little less money, tact, or luck. I use this understanding to knock everyone down several pegs.

I'm never tempted to exploit these people. I want to shit on the leadership of places I work. I want to get angry at coworkers who put in less than an appreciable amount of effort or respect for themselves and the nature of the task. My world gets better when people are accounting for each other, and when I see myself actually helping. It's brief, and why I'm not suited for ongoing empathy-based work, but it's there. I'm not willing to act that by virtue of my title or experience, I'm anything more or less, in a fundamental way, than anyone around me. As such, the artificial and empty words used to justify how the world looks stick out as the disproportionate source for the generalized misery that burns people out and makes the future look bleak.

I think people deserve to lead their lives. I don't think this comes without a consideration for the world they inhabit. Never in the history of our species have we been so unequal, faced challenges so large, and faced the kind of catastrophic consequences of inaction, denial, and mindless fighting over what side of the road we're driving. I think you are obligated to lead. I think you need to take bigger steps in service to your voice and perspective, and I think you need to defend it when no one's around to hear or support you. I think more people need to hear what's wrong, the truth about how wrong it is, and what's going to happen if it doesn't get fixed.

It's not Greta's job to save us. I've already pulled out of the “argument.” We continually serve our heroes up to be devoured by the attention-machines; “follow me!” What's your daily devotional after you concede God's not there? What's your understanding of “the problem?” I need to see it. You need to see it. We are built around saying one thing and doing another, while the arbitrary swings of power maybe, kinda, work here or there. Where are we going to get the appreciation for the divinity in the work that needs to be done without talking about it, deliberately, with a plan, and a sense of responsibility to get it done? Is it space we're going to continue to cede to the most delinquently faithful and ideologically possessed?

I go back to “work” tomorrow. I did “better” in staying on top of my notes and mileage this week, but it's still not complete. I get to scramble for a few last-minute hours in service to my wage-slavery. I get to carry on like the sliver of “help” I provide, be it in visitation or information, is supposed to sustain me until I find myself with enough paychecks saved to call it quits. I find the world outside of genuine effort and creation absolutely miserable. I hate myself slogging through it. I hate every time I'm compelled to use the word “practical” in service to it. I hate every wasted minute and repeated thought about abuses of power, money, and someone's otherwise good nature and skill. It's going to take considerably more than my voice or effort to change that. I won't pretend I believe help is coming.