[920] Pitter-Pattern

The ability to recognize patterns may arguably be the best explanation of “consciousness” we have. Without a pattern, there's chaos. Whether we can mathematically account for that pattern, or superimpose the very idea of “pattern” onto the chaos, is what's at the edge of scientific investigation. We know the very act of observing photons denotes a pattern that otherwise looks like a probability wave. We have ancient philosophers developing the language of how to describe the “form” or what's “analogous” in our experience. It's such a fundamental feeling and discussion that we have lost, at least colloquially, the history of our species exploring the patterns that seem to run through, if not control, our lives. We have myths we're still flocking to movie theaters to watch on repeat, but how many liken their motivations or actions in the world to that of The Avengers?

A lot of my confidence is derived from speaking to patterns. When my world gets too small, I look for historical trends. When my effort feels lacking, I describe my story over months or years. I can see trends in my behavior that have little to do with many of my individual days. I hunt for free items on facebook. I retrieve free items, maybe, once or twice a month on average, which means I own dozens of free things. It's a good habit, or type of pattern to have, when you're trying to save money, believe in conservation, and wish to keep practicing the search for opportunities. It's a pattern that, unmitigated, can lead to hoarding, anxiety about “missing out,” and compulsive scrolling.

The patterns that manifest for all to see, one imagines, are the easiest to recognize. We know people who are reliably grumpy or dopey or even oddly satisfied. Your continued deference to capitalism creates a pattern around “worker” or “responsibility.” It's “obvious” the patterns you need to fall into in order to account for your “needs.” You may fall into relationship patterns that are informed by what you witnessed between your parents or what was imprinted on you from romantic stories. You eat certain things consistently, greet people with familiar phrases, seek enjoyment or distraction from a handful of activities. You jostle the fairly rigid patterns of your life to keep things mildly interesting, and you can follow them until the day you die.

For as many patterns as we may follow, it's psychologically antagonizing to know we're still at the mercy of chaos. A car can crash into you. A looming disease is working its way to a dreaded doctor's visit. Natural disasters take advantage of our collective indifference and inability to be accountable. Our underlying psychology sucker punches our hopes and dreams. What a cruel twist of fate that you might do something to elevate the experience of millions, but you'll attune to the anonymous negative commentary. You're practically required to ignore 99.9% of existence outside of your particular brain and its pattern-seeking behavior to even function, however haphazardly. You're literally ignoring the things your brain is doing to keep you alive in order to live! Fun!

My understanding of patterns is how I tend to escape “guilt.” I look at whether things I do constitute a consistent shit thing about me, or an incidental example drawn out from a series of other patterns. Deliberately moving away from a semantics discussion regarding guilt or shame, I'm more interested in what it takes to recognize patterns of negative emotion and how that underpins our behavior. For me, that recognition is built from writing. I don't just happen upon epiphany after epiphany and change accordingly. I need to find words. I need to take root. I need to explore the infinite probabilities and slowly coalesce. I need to find the ironic indirect direction that doesn't fill me with woe and unsavory contradictions.

As such, it's often non-verbal. I write so I don't have to clench or hate or interrupt my flow. I'm writing now because I woke up with an agenda. I want to carry on with that agenda without getting distracted more than I have to. I've decided today is going to be a “productive” day, and that means from errands to business organization, I need the kind of focus that only happens when I'm done brain-speaking. I've watched my insane amount of TV. I've made my lists. I'll get to places while they are open. I've decided the coffee shop I'm going to sit in and focus. I know I'll use the library as a back-up when the coffee shop no longer feels tenable.

Compelling reading, right? But I have to do it. I have to say it, now. I have to make it real in a parallel way. I have to speak to the effort that's going to make it so I can succeed across the different dimensions of my being. I have to make whatever conscious agent that sees me also tend to think of me in the terms I'm trying to lay out. The hypnosis of totalitarians isn't unfamiliar or hard to understand. Having a “totalizing” experience is a default state either deliberately attended to or ever-hijacked. You have to keep bringing yourself back to what you want and letting your auto-ignore work for instead of against you.

I learned how to let my patterns want things in ways that were better for me. I stopped pairing my sense of overwhelmed exhaustion to a signal that I was “good” or “better.” Plenty of people are killing themselves for nothing more than misguided ego or misunderstood notions of “help.” I want my contributions to be timeless. I want to tap into patterns at the deepest level of reality. I want what I mean about that sentiment to be felt in a way that no language could undermine the work it does consciously or unconsciously. That means “being” a certain kind of person, now, and listening to myself about the next move that will speak to those deepest desires.

Goals are no small endeavor. Creating one, however small, is an act of “God.” It's a conscious rearranging of the infinite sea of “potential.” Does the goal push your behavior to change? Does the goal enable goals that take even more organization and attention? Does the goal liberate you from the draw of everything poised to pull you away from its pursuit? Is the goal explicit enough to move your fingers yet fluid enough to account for the many small acts that can service it?

I'm so distractable. That is, my attention isn't mine until it is. I'm getting pulled constantly. We try to diagnose this and medicate it. We build media that caricatures the consequences of having no direction or grasp. I'm building a relationship to how my attention moves. I'm trying to not fight it. I'm trying to accept what's at the edge of my jaw being clenched or not. I know that next level I wish to be on that is not ambivalent about where I go or how I manifest. I want all of the forces otherwise to flow through too. I want the shroom trip without the shrooms. I want it because it's not enough to intellectually speak to all of the relative conclusions. I want it because nothing speaks like a feeling, and I can see how what I make people feel manifests in the world. It manifests in a way that nothing I ever speak to does.

So, if the words themselves are less than how I say them, I say them “like me.” My style is “relaxed,” and I refrain from biting back until you've damn near chewed through my arm. I write, and reread, and piece together how I think I want to work and what I think is fair much slower. It's not because I'm not anxious or not able or unwilling to “do more.” It's because it has to feel right now and forever. If I build all of the baggage of my heightened states into what I do, it'll come back around. If I can't make peace with everything I won't accomplish, with everything that needs to be ignored even after it's been brought to my attention, I'll keep missing everything I have that's worth just as much as everything I want or could create. I'm just setting an example more than bearing an unrealistic burden to an ever-obscure standard. Truly, what do I really recognize when I call Nietzsche “a real mother fucker?”

If you have a notion that your being is weighed on some cosmic scale of justice or righteousness, I assure you, you're the only one who can determine that such a scale should exist at all, let alone which way it leans. The questions at the heart of your being, your motivations, your movement, will always be obscure, but to be obscure is vastly different from being a liar. To “practically capitulate” or sublimate your being to the conditions as best you understand them is to occupy an entirely different world from the one where you're striving to live in service to what transcends your limitations. Keep fighting, or flowing, or whatever you need to do to keep you oriented towards whatever sense and order you can recognize. Here's to recognizing your example.

[919] Slap

Many of us are taught “the basics” when it comes to engaging each other. Say “please” and “thank you.” Shake hands. Say you're sorry. Where and why these ideas came into being each have their own history and confluence of forces that pushed the behavior into our consciousness. You may have heard that shaking hands was a way to demonstrate you were unarmed or that it gives either person the ability to gauge nervousness. You might have had it beaten into you that apologizing is required if you're going to reside in a peaceful household.

When you're a kid, at least when I was a kid, none of the “normal” or “basic” things people did made much sense to me. When I was told to apologize, I wasn't sorry. When I said “thank you,” I arguably felt entitled or that it was “obvious” that my caregiver would feed me or buy me something on Christmas. My family meets and kisses on the cheek. It's a habit I never picked up. We know now a lot of the things we've built into how to interact are carried over from poor understandings of trauma as much or more from tradition.

By adulthood, I want to believe you develop an appreciation for why you do or say the things you do. I want to hear “thank you,” and I offer what I appreciate about people or situations regularly. The world feels bleak, and to know you were even acknowledged becomes a little lifeline. I figured out how to relate to being “sorry” and under what circumstances I actually was. Being a going-through-the-motions liar has never sat well with me. I know how to shake your hand, but I prefer flashing a peace sign, and I'll tip my hat to the pandemic for helping normalize that.

I'm watching this series discussing the “meaning crisis.” A neuroscientist and teacher of enlightenment practices explains why there's this drive to be “mindful,” and dozens of pop-psychological misunderstandings about how to attain enlightenment. He covers a wide breath of history and literature. Sometimes he's more intelligible than others. At bottom, he cracks open just how many “basic” ideas and definitions we had to come to before our language continued to evolve and confuse or distract us today.

You can listen to a dozen teachers tell the allegory of the cave. None of it will compare to being the person trying to tell the other fools what the shadows on the wall really are. How many doctors and nurses were prepared for this level of vaccine “skepticism?” How many scientists need to cry foul before something more intentional throws its body on the gears of mindless mass consumption? We're children without the basics. We have timeless myths that we don't feel for ourselves and don't weave into our lived experience. We take so much for granted. We leave ourselves one option, to be “shocked” by preventable tragedy after preventable tragedy.

I think about the ideas of mine I considered basic or foundational and why or if they have changed. I've never been particularly “passive” or “non-violent,” but it's never been persuasive to me to fight or beat up women. Do I know there are crazy bitches out there? Sure. Are there large and trained ones who I wouldn't have a prayer in a fight with? Absolutely. Even at the height of the violence perpetrated on me from my mom, if I wanted to hit back, it would have been more to get the point across than the first of a series of blows until she was dead. We probably lucked out that I only had to catch her arm one day to send the message.

I never believed I'd encounter a circumstance that would have me act violently towards a girl, let alone a girlfriend. I never had the language of a “spectrum” of behaviors or the idea that corrosive emotional slights and outrage build over time. I took it for granted that I'd heard, felt, or seen it all before, and that certain things were simply off the table for me. It was a dangerous and incorrect position to hold.

Much is to be made of “harm” today and who is causing it. I had to get exacting about the conditions under which I could and could not take responsibility for what feel most often like presumptive claims to my willingness or capacity. Were the series of reasons that led to me slapping a previous ex hidden from me? Being drunk didn't help. Do I remember what I was thinking? I was shocked and panicked. Did I do anything to escalate the situation? Well, I functionally dared her, handed her the razor, and watched her drag it 6 inches down her wrist. Different than being a little man who gets off on beating women? Sure. Considerably worse than that in other ways? I lean towards words like “absurd” given the cartoonishly inappropriate “solution” I landed on for “she's out of her mind and needs to be slapped back into reality,” like in the flash of TV and movie scenes that scrolled through my head. It wasn't going to work without the actual “pop” noise, and I miffed it landing the tips of my fingers, so tried from the other direction with my left hand with more, but still inadequate results.

There's a very neat and forgone conclusion you can tie that situation up with. Drunk boyfriend hits girlfriend, bad, fuck that guy, we always knew what he was capable of... It doesn't ask where either of us was coming from. It doesn't account for the months, if not years at that point, of being emotionally invested in attempting ways to bring peace to her mind. A mind that was entertaining suicide seriously enough to describe to me how she'd go about it in detail. The moment doesn't speak to the amount of times you ask the person you care about to seek help, try different pills, take time off, or take your money when they cite concerns for the cost. If I told you I was crying, wrapped her wrist up in my red blanket (you know, because red) and immediately called the police, that would be me trying to garner sympathy and downplay my otherwise violent soul, right? A few days later I offered to let her stab me, only half-jokingly, because...eye for an eye? I had no tools and no ideas for what, if anything, makes that situation “better.”

It's been like ten years from that night and I still ask myself questions. Was I angry at her? No, I was terrified. Could I have done anything better? Not been drunk, not handed her the razor, not let myself be consumed by the hopes and dreams I had for our relationship that had been cracked and peeling for quite some time. I don't deny my actions nor expect anyone close with her to associate with me or really bother to understand how or why things played out. I've never been anymore or less tempted to fight or hit anyone, let alone girls, before or since. I just have a new outlier data point I use to contextualize when and whether outbursts of emotion seem more likely. If I'm angry enough to hit anything, there's likely a pretty serious underlying problem that's not being attended to. The irony then hits that even if you can identify, for over a year, the habits of an unhealthy dynamic, it doesn't mean you're going to immediately sever the tie and not find yourself punching a wall or throwing recycling bins.

What is a “basic” notion of “love” or “civility” that isn't understood, isn't embodied, and functionally doesn't mean anything? Why do we have “harm-reduction models” of “care?” Don't people who care try to “fix” problems, not drag scarred skin over slightly less jagged rocks indefinitely? I still don't see myself punching a girl in the face for any reason but self-defense. I don't think it's very “loving” or “civil” to try and partner up altogether if we're going to remain perfectly ambivalent to how our behavior plays out on the brains of our partners. We might not always know how things will play out, but also, as we find the language and identify the feelings before we just react, we need to acknowledge whether or not we're deliberately working to share an effort, or merely resentful our minds aren't being read.

That's how I differentiate my behavior and sense of responsibility, at least. I don't hate you for not being like me. I don't get angry that your interests or perspective is different than mine. I get angry when you tell me where I'm coming from before you show any interest in reading a blog or dozen. I get angry when nothing I say or do can return to my ears as an accurate account after passing through your lips. I know I can practice, through this, examining how to find one more day, if not hour, of patience or decision to make more in advance of things getting escalated in a less controlled way. I didn't drag out the drama of my last relationship, but I also didn't insist 3 to 6 months in that she stay primarily in her trailer. I didn't refrain from buying more expensive pieces in service to her garden I knew she couldn't appreciate.

I think sometimes people wish they could “take it back.” I wouldn't forgo my perspective for anything. There's plenty of people living in pain and daily screaming or violent situations that haven't learned what I have. I'm not better or worse then them but for my willingness to keep talking and trying to measure what and whether there's something better. I don't hate myself. I don't even necessarily blame people as consciously responsible for the conditions under which things deteriorated. When the flames die down is where I look for blame. Are you willing to own it? Can you keep exploring? Has it changed your behavior in a way anyone but you can recognize?

It's incredibly hard to balance your own confused, contradictory, internal state and dialogue well before you try to introduce someone else's. Complicate things with your culture's norms. Become extra-informed about all of the words you've been using incorrectly your entire life. Try to see the contextual forest for the tree of any aberrant display. It might not be gratifying to think of yourself as weak and conflicted, but those feelings can lend themselves to openness and humility. They can feed your propensity to take responsibility and power an otherwise dead or excuse-ridden tongue. It's how you build a “basic” engine for turning the things that happen to you into the things you can actually do. I can't take it back, and neither can you, and I'm not asking anyone to save me. Not even Jesus.

So where does that leave us? I'll be here, in my writing, in my field, trying to keep speaking and working towards what I wish to embody. It's not someone unsympathetic to how you feel, but you'd be a pretty fucked up person if you flatly accepted my behavior just because I told you, “I felt like it.” We have the same impulse and ability to check our behavior, even if we only want to trust it when it's employed against someone else. And at your core, only you're going to know if you're lying. That is, if you've managed to figure out how to speak to and own yourself at all.

[918] Act The Part

I've tried to write about embittering things over the last few days. I thought, hungover, mildly reeling from an answered drunk text regarding harm I've caused a different ex-girlfriend coinciding with the new ex showing up to pick up her cat for the last time, I was going to proceed down some sorrowful road of regrets and woe. Then a curious thing happened. My first swigs of Dayquil start kicking in. I lose the ability to keep typing after six or seven sentences, and something clicks.

I'm not sorry.

I'm not full of woe I don't have people in my life to any greater or smaller extent than I do now. I know where I was coming from in my shitty or otherwise behavior, own it, trust it, and can describe in detail the generally aberrant or absurd circumstances under which I break down. I don't take some special pride in anything I haven't worked for, which has not been someone trying to cause harm, but either can't help himself or finds people on their own little paths of self-destruction and is unwittingly enlisted.

I don't feel bad about reaching out to old acquaintances drunkenly expressing what I wish I could have done better. I think it's kind of funny and me, feebly crying out for help and connection in the face of my clearly lacking capacity to do so. I'm not scared of the consequences for doing so. I'm not one who bends to notions of “awkward.” I think I texted like 20 different people last night, and on the whole have like 3 dinner/lunch/beer plans. It's not that serious whether or not you're deeply up the ass of the people you claim to be close to. When I get to be more human, drinking, and I'm not calculating the gas and time and weighing them against my budget or daily obligations, I'll reach out, and we'll either eat or won't.

That's the kind of friend I am. It's maybe the only kind I'm good at being. I'm your fading memory of my obnoxiousness who drunkenly texts you every few years when he's feeling lonely and questioning every interaction he's ever had with an ex-girlfriend.

That's not quite right though either, is it? I'm not really questioning my interactions. If anything, I've gotten dramatically more patient, deliberate, and forgiving in my posture towards people. I'm relieved I get to come home and not be obligated to a fight. I'm thankful I've been on top of the math and reasons I came out here so that my whole life wouldn't blow up when the “inevitable” blow up happened. This was literally my plan all along. Offer, trust nothing until it happens, make peace with manageable losses in advance.

What I take to be a weird and broken part of me like yearns to be more sorry or sad than I am. It's another reason to drink when you can like trigger emotions that I've functionally talked my way out of fluidly experiencing. I can't get over the irony though, of how people approach their emotions, particularly with regard to me. I'm, oddly, often, accused of being manipulative for doing just this. I'm implored to consider the depth and consequences of how people feel.

Meanwhile, I lend myself to being emotionally leveraged perpetually, and if or when I express mine, it's time to beat irony to death again. People won't talk to me again, ever lol. I'll give them room for dozens of angry emotional outbursts, laundry lists of judgments about me, gossip trials, distance, resources, but one thing must remain absolutely true at bottom. I'm the enemy beyond redemption. My perspective is just this mess of garbled words and excuses in the face of your true and noble feelings. It's not all people or all of my friends who do this, but when I think about it, an incredibly large amount relative to how many I had, I've subjected myself to.

So maybe I should cut that out. Maybe that's the nature of this calm I'm tending to find on hangover days where there used to be panic about what I said or to whom. Wake up, Nick. You moved to the middle of the middle of nowhere, on purpose, and spent many hours and dollars trying to get away from the impact those kind of relationships have had on you. You know you're a dick with a heart of gold and black soul. Stop pretending you're suited for some familiar or common idea of togetherness or a relationship. If people want to be emotionally manipulated, just do them the courtesy, and stop this game of seeing who can balance on this conceptual “level” you have about who's a “real” person.

[917] Succor Punch

 

Considerably more needs to be said on this notion of “helping.” I felt it when I ended my last blog, but I knew the phrasing was incomplete. I've criticized vague notions of “help” in the past when I watched Kristen in particular seem to come home, daily, exhausted and suffering her shitty work conditions at Centerstone. I think it's one of the fiercest drives of evolution and most exploited if not misunderstood as well.

What does helping mean to me? Help is differentiating between what I think I want and need from what someone else may tell me. Help is working in service to proven modes of being that exist above or beyond current turmoil. Help is attempting to be prepared for things we will all inevitably need help with. Help means to not cripple myself with bad ideas or behavior before I even begin. I can't help if there is no coherent notion of what “I” am bringing to the table. I can't help if I couldn't pretty quickly come up with a comprehensive account of how help manifests. I can't help if I can't recognize or acknowledge when something isn't helping.

I think it's really easy to see when you look at social work contexts. The difference between a seasoned, hopefully not jaded, case worker and someone just out of college is their notions of what can and can't help. Sending service providers to the door isn't a quick fix. Berating or chastising someone in crisis is a chosen punitive naivety too many feel unpersuaded to stop. What helps? Your word choices, body language, and ability to recognize who or what you are actually speaking to opens the door to helping. Your ability to remain healthily skeptical verses insecurely judgmental keeps you on a helpful path. Can you hear a genuine cry for help or specific need without imposing one you think you're most situated to employ?

I've been tasked with “helping” at a couple food pantries. Food pantries exist because of presumptions about food insecurity, guilt over lazy mishandling of waste, and no doubt the people volunteering feel some kind of way regarding the help they are providing. The vast majority of the food gets thrown away. The waste, potential compost, might go into raised garden beds installed around the properties from which a handful of people nibble. Is it broadly a “helpful” thing to do? Is it helping the “right” people in the right way? When the pantry has an overwhelming amount of fruits and vegetables, no one's eating them.

A thinking person might get the idea to hold food preparation classes on how to make fruits and vegetables into something palatable to the American diet. Maybe the compost fuels flowers or native species conservation efforts. Maybe less ambitious, there's a tweak that ensures the disabled aren't forced to inch back to their homes in the rain, spilling their food in the yard and struggling to pick it up. You could go your whole life given narratives around what people need and hearing of the organizations tasked with helping those in need, and miss the underlying issue completely. It's only recently dawning on us the extent to which income inequality has ruined basically everything. While a system overhaul appears needed to help that, how can you localize your effort to remain helpful up and down the layers of your potential influence? I think a lot of basic income experiments are currently speaking to this awareness best.

Help comes not just “in” defining a problem, but how you do so. For the longest time, I conceived of my problem as a lack of money. While, factually, I don't have the money to snap my wildest dreams into existence, I feel I've grown up and can better define or drop altogether my notions of the “real problems.” Am I dreading the ever-crushing fascism? Sure. Does it have anything to do with the extremely dirty house I helped clean or disabled gentleman I helped carry his shit for in the rain? In probably the most abstract way possible if you don't have a solid conception of “us” and how we treat each other. I'm currently providing counseling to anti-vaxers. I've fought persistently to prevent or close DCS cases for Trump supporters.

I don't think the problem of persistent existential crises are solved begrudging any one ignorant individual. I think you have to identify the drivers, both internally and externally, that instantiate the behavior. I think Bezos knows considerably more about what drives our suicidal gilded consumption than the poor person who “prefers” instant macaroni to cucumbers. I think the hard task is sussing out for ourselves new notions of help before we lose ourselves in “passion” projects “assisting the needy” through countless hours of bureaucracy or power mongering.

For most of my life, I've had very little idea of what I might actually to do help myself, let alone anyone else. I get criticized for my advocacy of writing and touting its cascading benefits. “I don't like to write!” “It doesn't work for everyone!” “No one wants to become a blog!” I think these ideas are quick to miss the point. It's not the writing in-and-of itself that's useful. It's that I go into it looking for what to do. Bezos doesn't just organize a factory a certain way, he's looking to become efficient in his exploitation and process. He's trained our “now” impulse to track with buying shit, so “help” looks like the myriad layers that go into facilitating that. I've certainly thought that in order to feel better I just needed to buy that next thing.

If you look at my actual spending though, I've done a lot of work to dial back action in service to that impulse considerably. “Toys” and “Entertainment” have accounted for around 6% of my budget combined over the last 5 years. My understanding of my biggest problem was not having a long-term affordable means of stabilizing my entrepreneurial impulses, so, functionally all of my money has gone to “Home Maintenance/Utilities,” “Automotive/Gas,” and “Restaurants” in the same period. If you're lost in conceiving of your own problems, look at what you're spending.

I've tried to turn my life into a question of efficiency and what it might speak to. I wanted to “hurry up to slow down.” I was constantly, feverishly, trying to “work” or “help myself” with things like the coffee shop. I wasn't making nearly enough money. I wasn't giving myself any time to enjoy anything. I was becoming hyper-aware that energy is not an inexhaustible well from which a body that's not sleeping or eating right can draw from. I had to train myself not to feel guilty about being stuck in “on” position, whether it's my brain nagging or just being up and out in the world doing something.

Learning how to engage or cope with “now” is the infinite task. I'm all of me that ever was or could be in this moment. It's changing. It's overwhelming. It needs to be attended to actively, patiently, and with the grace and civility I would grant a child learning something new.

I haven't quite felt right all day. I'm in a role as “assistant” to the resident coordinator for the housing authority. As far as I can tell, it's my job to babysit a printer, and help unload a pallet for a shanty food pantry. It's 12 hours a week at $12 an hour. The idea was to use the role to be on the front line of public housing's transition to not-so-public housing. I would be an on-site service provider, either doing case work in helping people get signed up for things, counseling, or more intensive engagement like DCS prevention. When half a dozen people want to skip right over the dirty home, if I can wrap it into something that Medicaid would pay for, I can comfortably and confidently just get to work before the problem gets bigger or your children are removed.

It's been about 3 weeks of...office. I sit around. I've had 5 or more discussions about my calendar. It took 2 weeks just to get into my email, where no relevant information resides, besides questions about my wackadoodle schedule. I'm told they have a general purpose or mission to get all of these metrics recorded about the neighborhood and records put in about what we helped them print. They have on-site volunteers who regularly do the pantry. I'm supposed to be moral support? We throw out several hundred pounds of food at the end of each pantry. People aren't hungry here.

In any event, I'm struggling to keep myself oriented on all of the little things I could be doing in service to the actual small service provider business we started. You know what's hard to do when the schizophrenic non-resident shows up to speak to herself in front of the computer for hours at a time? Parse through Medicaid policy. There are people who need transportation. There are people who need signed up for disability and SNAP. There are people who threaten their ability to stay in their home because they associate with violent offenders who have been banned from the property. There are people on the verge of getting kicked out for cleanliness. Why am I babysitting the sign-up sheet and peaches?

I'm also in the middle of watching this lecture series on the “meaning crisis.” John Vervaeke explains the history of how we came to all of these notions about ourselves and how or where we fit into existence. He discusses the ways in which we can bullshit ourselves around compelling sophist rhetoric and remain unable to map our thinking and behavior onto the actual world. In practical terms, it's my struggle with constantly having to navigate and play to people's feelings verses speaking to and working with people on the “real” page able to articulate and move towards a shared goal.

You see a dirty home as “administrator” and file a report, send out an inspector, leave a threatening letter, and wait. I see a dirty home and say, “We should clean the home and learn why it got that bad.” I can hear all of the trauma-thoughts and rationalizations from the home owner, and remain non-judgmental nor paralyzed as I see how it fits into greater and more comprehensive contexts. You can arrest your action because of limited license you think your role boxes you into. I'm a person who takes as many things as he can, and works them into higher-order working models of how I think you should be.

That is, when I actually can. Right now, I can blow $15 going to town, hit plasma donation in a mild-panic for the time constraints on my lunch break, then sit and sweat on the patio as people saunter in dismayed there's only fruits and vegetables and high-end organic milk or cheese they'd never touch. I come home, and I'm alone. The call of “chill” or sleep is increasingly loud. I'm trying to take back my space for all of the tension and fervent energy I was constantly trying to turn away from resentment. I'm unhappy at how relieved I'm able to immediately feel that I'm not coming home to a fight. Being alone isn't great, but it's better than fighting.

My head hurts. I've got little energy. All of the little projects or house chore I might do aren't disordered enough for me to feel bothered nor of any immediate impact once they're done. I don't have the brain space for more lectures as all of the new terms I'm hearing aren't settling in nicely. I barely want to watch TV. I'm worried that were I to try a video game, I'd find a way to piss away the next three days straight. Did I mention my head hurts?

I'm working with this family that has seemingly done everything in their power over the last two years to enable the worst behavior of their 18 year old. He was a month away from graduating from the army. He doesn't have his license. He's got his own shitty background with a negligent mother, but today, he weaponizes his personality and his parents' weakness to be generally shitty and entitled and emotionally destructive. I'm there to be the “bad” guy who gives them license to take away his video games and get him working, get his permit started, and have him eventually out of the home. I don't know that I trust the parents to actually holding the line and sending him to the homeless shelter if and when he does not meet his obligations.

This family has a dying mentally handicapped daughter they have to center their world around her care. The daughter has breathing issues. They aren't vaccinated and “have their reasons.” The absurdity really knows no bounds. I feel considerably less guilty at whatever rate we may be able to bill their Medicaid.

[916] Are You Ready

I've had a lot on my mind lately. This provoked in no small part from recently splitting with my girl. I had several long and reflective emails, a blog with scaled back viewer access, and now this. I keep noticing little lines calling out. Let's see where they go.

I think it's incredibly short-sided to lose track of your environment. As much as any individual wants to believe they are doing their best to live their values, you can be corrupted and subverted. I read an article from a woman who was trapped in the Chinese prison camps for Uyghurs for 2 years. She said she finally knew what it meant to be “brain-washed.” Her individuality was broken down. Her punishments were arbitrary. Her imposed silence all-consuming. In a radically oppressive environment, the consequences are swift, visible, and for the rest of your life built into whatever manages to come out of the other end.

It's easy to lose track of the idea that the story from above is the modern-era. In one form or another, we have an environment with totalitarian governments that kidnap and imprison people. They do it from a set of cultural values derived from their experiences and narratives carried out over generations. The world, left to its own devices, is kill or be killed. Whether one can psychologically get the notion of existing in an otherwise “polite society” to comport with the extent their ideas are deadly, is a world deconstructing then rebuilding task few are prone to do.

A few more refrains from modernity are about representation, who has the power, and instantiated repressive and traumatizing systems. White people, men in particular, are told to maybe shut up, contemplate their complicity, and realize the broader nature of their tastes, humor, or privileges. Whether and how any of them do so is measured by anyone's guess, but participating in show-trials or guilt-signaling language appears to quell Twitter somewhat. I think for all of my privileges, earned and unearned, I'm still first-world poor, have a credible fear of getting sick, and have felt “oppressed” by the normative language, willful blindness, and expectations laid out for me. My experience, not-black, not-woman, not-Uyghur, should be a cry for a gospel of unity sung by Sly and the Family Stone, not a game of oppression bingo.

I think it's the habit of most, if not all, culturally momentous movements to get co-opted by a subset of particularly privileged or radicalized adherents. You got the money or smooth tongue? I bet you find your way to the head of something that forgets who's still on the ground. You willing to be violent? I bet you swallow the news coverage. We don't ask ourselves what makes us like our oppressors. We don't contemplate the environment as a subset of larger environments all with their own dominating forces or tendencies. We don't account for the parts of our nature that ravenously subvert and consume.

It's exhausting. It's hard enough to deal with a bad day, break-up, or the in-your-face fascist symbolism daring you to put up too much of a fight. What if you're sick? What of your unrealized or recognized trauma? How do you work in service to some “largest context ideal” at all? Doesn't it require a kind of privilege or extreme naivety to begin with? Even if you try given the resources at hand, your larger contexts are creeping in. The series of things that would make you fail get added to the “let's not discuss that” list. The denial, resentment, or catastrophic oversight will make themselves known, and then familiar narratives about the inevitability of failure or corruption go to work.

The fact that I can watch or read about any era of history and see direct parallels today suggests to me the “themes” of history or humanity are eternal, and the work always the same. “Waking up,” or acknowledging and building as much of the context into something salient and not-arbitrarily or incidentally powerful seems to be the task. What's that mean in English? You have to know and accept that you are good and bad. You have to know that you are perfectly arbitrary and perfectly exist with as much agency as you can claw from that existence. You are oppressor and oppressed. You have to start seeking failures you intend to learn from. You know the wisdom and purpose of being truthful in spite of your fears. No one is keeping score, not even you, in this game, and the temptation to “give it up God” is no excuse or path for taking as much responsibility of the largest projects.

What I'm trying to do with the land, or at least through my work and speech about it, is provide evidence that the environment can change. The environment can suggest to you 30 projects that embody ideals in service to the largest projects. The environment has visceral and pragmatic asks that remain infinitely obscured by modernity and hashtag-activism. My environment, in spite of recent trauma, is still my land. It's still with a budding counseling business. It's still surrounded by my words attempting to process, not merely cope, with its changes. It's a privilege I've worked for and never been tempted to apologize about.

Last week, I sat with a client who has no-less than a dozen severely traumatizing incidents from her life that have wholly subsumed her present. I spent two-hours with her scrubbing dog and cat shit off the floor of just one room of her house. Hers wasn't the worst house I've seen nor cleaned. Before I got there, half a dozen people, including the building inspector and a social service agency worker, were witness to the crisis. None of them got the inclination to start helping clean.

It's not any more or less complicated than that. Do you try to clean, or not? Do you recognize as much as you can about that environment? Can you recognize her trauma? Can you feel yourself reeling at the prospect of the work that clearly needs to be done, and then do it anyway? Can you remain encouraging, pro-active, and realistic about the consequences? Can you enlist or create the kind of help that's screaming to exist?

So far, my environments suggest, “no.” Unless I do it, it doesn't get done. My help most often resents me. My consequences remain contained to my budget or back. I keep trying to create and demonstrate otherwise. It's not “noble” or “nice” or “moral” or bending an historical arc. It's trying to count. It's trying to feel myself for all of the different contexts I inhabit. How often I talk about wishing to be left alone. How thankless and low-paying if not negative-paying it is to try. The worst narratives and inclinations don't have to win or dominate. They don't. You can work differently. You can try what you don't recognize anywhere else. You can acknowledge where your project fails or was blind, and then persist. You have to keep tapping into what's already there, celebrate it, and keep the invitation open.

What I can't decide is whether or not it happens “alone.” We all seem perfectly willing to lend ourselves to the oppressive environment. I've worked myself to proverbial death both for myself and for organizations happy to exploit me. You're taking risks and making sacrifices in everything you do. Are they ones you choose or ones you're forced to swallow? Are you patient and methodical enough to do the math behind the “revolution?” Are you humbled by the nature of your task and service you provide?

Persistently, I see an unhealthy ego. It's not an ego grounded in doubt that keeps you open and exploratory. It's an insular protection mechanism. It's a selfish, defensive, and insecure pride for the ignorance of your larger environments and how they're shaping you. The Chinese know you can literally beat that ego to death. Why leave it up to them? Why leave it up to Trump to play with? Why let it arrest your attention with memes and “news?” Maybe the infinite task and nature of all work is to be able to fluidly change to meet the needs of any given moment and sublimate the ego in service to the task. Maybe what we need altogether is poorly understood and rarely appreciated. For my part, I “just” want to help and be helpful.

[915] Eyes On The Prize

This is as about as low as I ever manage to feel. It's the final scene of the movie of my relationships. It's part of a cycle. It's painful and traumatizing each time.

I struggle with “niceness” or “help.” I'm eager to please and get taken advantage of. I see someone help or feel the impact of their help, I never want to consider us square until their wildest dreams are being attended to. Allie helped me at an extremely stressful point in my life. I was making appeals to smug and rich relatives. I was sleeping in my car. She loaned me $2000 to pay off my house. I drove straight to her when she confirmed it was a real offer.

I thought we had the right amount of different but similar characteristics. She played with fire, I play with fire. She is thoughtfully critical of the world around her, I say “fuck that thing” about a lot of things. When she gets an opportunity to work at something she cares about, she does it.

We moved in kind of accidentally, which is a repeated pattern from Kristen who specifically denoted moving in as a poor choice for her back in the day. When me and Allie did it, the pandemic was locking everything down, and we were both under the impression she was going to be living out of her trailer. Well, we ended up functionally on top of each other in the shed.

Country life, let alone bachelor-shed-life comes with a host of negotiations in order to stretch those pithy paychecks. I go into “attempt to attend to needs” mode. I buy an expensive tiller. I look to explore ways to cultivate the space so she feels like she's not completely alienated.

I have no less than 30 projects I'm considering doing at any one time. There's 30 on the board right now. There were at least 30 on the board back then. They all took time, money, overcoming the learning curve, and often some shared concept of what either of us where going to contribute. We eventually decide to pick our particular projects and generally go about them alone.

We never really got to communicating well. Before there were any work tasks or dreams together, it was just going to classical concerts, dinner, and sex. It was the getting-to-know each other dragged out over the distance to Kentucky. We had a really fun time at her cousin's wedding, which shortly after is when I asked if she'd be my girlfriend instead of my “Kentucky girl,” as though I had girls all up and down the Midwest.

Eventually, every few days, then every two weeks or so we'd have some version of the same argument. We tried writing out discrepancies on the white board. She was not a fan of that method. I eventually demanded we parse through things and email each other, as recording our fights and maintaining civility were not seemingly possible. We cut each other off. We reacted and doubted verses listened and questioned. The emails didn't seem to resonate with her either.

The fights? The classics, “I want you to hang out with me!” “I do want to hang out with you.” “If you wanted to you would X, Y, or Z!.”

“I do more chores than you!” “I'm not sure that's true, let's count them and redistribute them.” “You never just believe me and support what I feel!.”

She zeroed in on aspects of my personality that she does not like or thinks I have little reason to express, like arrogance. She spoke to the relatively big game I've talked and compared it to the amount of TV she's witness to.

For my part, after many months of feeling hopeless, I started losing my patience. I punched a hole in my white board and have punched my door. Today I threw the full-enough recycling bins, certainly not attempting to hit her, but definitely close enough for it to not be worth splitting hairs. I emotionally leveraged and antagonized her until she ripped off a piece of the small porch pillar and busted through my front door demanding her cat, then grabbing the piece of broken wood as though prepared to stab me. When I asked her about this, she said I made her afraid, and it was self-defense.

Situations like these are why I have so little faith in myself, intentions, or long-term “fixes” to anything. We'd been talking across purposes for so long, I consciously decided to turn on what I understand about emotional leverage. I was desperate for an honest exchange, risking everything for it. I've felt ignored, caricatured, taken advantage of. I felt like I've spent hundreds of hours and thousands of words attempting to grasp where she was coming from. Only after I induce her to rage-quit my door frame does she capitulate and start speaking honestly?

For greater context, for reasons unbeknownst to me, we'd frequently be in some disagreement right before work, where there's no hope to take the time to try and find a resolution and it can devolve over text on the drive in. Or it would happen while I'm in the middle of talking to people about how there is hope for some resolution if they stick to the plan and remain responsibly accountable to what we've all agreed upon. I talk about irony so often it's lost all meaning.

I know I'm not normal or an okay person. I know whatever aptitude I have for approaching people to bring them ease or hash out their issues is because I'm so deeply enmeshed in my own. I will never be able to outrun, or out think, my feelings, or the cycles they provoke in me. There's something deeply life-affirming and meaningful when you are connected to people and able to invest in them or see them grow. I don't have any guilt or shame for that desire, but I really want to live in a certain kind of fantasy too.

I want to believe people with shared goals, personalities, or the general inclination to get along and work together can do so somewhat “easily.” I want to believe things can be talked out. My experience is shaped by dozens of “friends” I'm no longer connected to in any real way, having a psychopath best friend who's statistically more disagreeable than me, and now three relationships that have ended all with similar narratives about how I'm just not quite capable or willing or worth engaging in all this blogging nonsense that has apparently made me so set in my ways I'm just unable to “people.”

The worst thing about me is when I get the desire to burn something down. It speaks to my sensitivity to condescension. I hated nothing more than feeling erased and ignored. The story of my life was so often dictated to me in spite of all reason or contradicting information. I could move seamlessly between daily tension and drama into chill and video games and food in different divorced parent environments. I know which I preferred, and today I know my brain formed patterns around both environments independent of my preferences. I've seen enough instances of going crazy for “no” reason. I am someone who can do the same.

At the peak of the emotionality, and the wave of whatever washes over you as you're coming down, I felt I was finally able to have an honest exchange with her. I asked questions, she answered them, and not with another question or statement about me. In my writing, I've recognized that when I'm at my peak of some emotion, and in the feverish exploration, I find the most flow, insight, and useful actionable material. Today she told me, if I really knew her, I'd know she was “weak.” She understands weakness as not being able to trust.

Functionally, we have a recipe where anything I say, by default, isn't trusted. I'm feeling constantly on the defensive trying to unpack statements like “don't tell yourself you're doing me any favors” or “you only consider this one thing.” I use the word “dishonest” a lot when it comes to trying to understand where people are coming from. If they can't articulate it, which is often perfectly reasonable or understandable why they wouldn't be able to, then I ask to formulate something that can be observed by both parties. You think you do more chores? Let's define chores, count them, and explore. If you refuse to do that, confidence in my charge of dishonesty grows. You're either lying that it's about chores, afraid to be caught learning you don't do more, or unconsciously or otherwise presenting the situation because you already know how I'm going to respond, and are betting on me to fail you.

It's not about the chores, and basically never is. It's about whether or not you're going to change the subroutine that responds to their perspective. It reminds me of when I was supposed to just skip along with being accused of rape. Like, no, I have many questions, and while I'm perfectly willing to entertain or accept the depth of your feeling, we're gonna need to sit down and explore. I'm a “take accusations seriously” significantly more than “believe all women” type, and think we should all carry ourselves the same way.

I like the idea of being helpful and meaningfully contributing. I like the idea of questioning and searching until you break through into new behaviors or insights. I like the myth that I have an infinite amount of time and patience, at any point in the day, to parse through something after it feels like bad faith, distracted character jabs or lazy assumptions. I want you to bite the bullet and tell me you don't like me, don't trust me, and think you fucked up trying to do big things with me.

If you ever, for a second, delude yourself into thinking I'm a “good” person or think particularly highly of myself, you're not paying attention. I'm good at this. I can talk to myself in a way that quells the faint desire to just sleep and not come back. I can simultaneously crack the joke, and cry somewhere deep in my chest as I've practically forgotten how to sustain any real tears. I'm violent. I'm angry. And in one of the hardest ways to cope with, alone. I don't handle what feels like preventable disappointments and disagreements well. I don't like going into relationships waiting for them to fail in spite of everything I do or say. Or is it because of those things?

This is the only way I know how to approach what I consider “responsibility” and “owning my feelings.” I felt and carried out the worst of me today. I demonstrated, sober, in the pure light of day, why I insist on this forum, honest answers, and an inquisitive posture before the moves to mind-read, caricature, or demean. You think you can talk shit? You think you can scream? You think you're annoyed or afraid or alone or full of conflicting and complicated feelings no one understands? Watch this.

[914] Teat Fed

I'm entitled. Hey! Stop. I can hear the collective yawn and not-so-under-your-breath "duhs."

The Google definition of "entitled" is "believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.

Some of you may recall that my mother used to like to refer to my brother and I as "Serbian princes." My old-world Eastern European relatives were always cooking for us, offering compliments, and just generally being fawning old people. My mom, who was routinely ridiculed for her body (I saw a picture of her skinny as shit once) and mentally abused as a child, did not do a solid job with her resentment for that.

I should get it out of the way to say that I agree. I do feel entitled to some things. I feel entitled to things I consider "basics" like food, life, and respect. One can get lost in the weeds of what really constitutes any of those things, or "enough" of those things, but most people I think would fall within a reasonable mean provided they were from the same culture and class.

My favorite kind of entitlement is what I call "pretty girl complexes." All women certainly suffer from what might be understood as a "barrage of dicks," at all times, but pretty girls could build a calendar out months with, perhaps even otherwise committed guys who they also found attractive. That lends itself to a kind of confidence and attitude I haven't found a comparison to. Even the prettiest guys can't necessarily get the prettiest girls.

I think I'm entitled to the access and use of my "stuff." My things represent countless hours spent otherwise wage-slaving at unfulfilling and often demeaning tasks. I think I've worked for everything I have and am thus entitled to as far as I can stretch those things. There is a parallel universe where I am entitled to months of sitting on my ass reading, playing video games, watching TV, and playing my guitar. Just by the math, no extra ideas about the objective/subjective value of doing so.

If we return to the definition offered by Google, I'm perplexed by the word "special" treatment. Pretty girls might flirt with a cop or whip a titty out to get out of a ticket. The presumed idea being that they are worth more in entertainment or looks than the rule of law. I wonder as well, special with regard to what? I don't apply to jobs like "Apple CEO" or "machinist 1st class" even if they pay what I think I'm entitled to as wages that might keep with inflation and productivity. I've never demanded more time to finish a test. I don't kick doors in when I'm told the restaurant is closed.

I also think it's healthy to inherently think you deserve privileges, at least the exercise of them, if they've been earned. I might be misunderstanding how it's speaking to privileges in the definition, but I think everyone should presume an inherent deserving of *something* related to the universal nature of experience and connectivity. Certainly legally you have entitlements bestowed upon you.

More abstractly, I feel entitled to a certain kind of attention or recognition. I work. You work. We all work. Some of us work because we have to, hate it, and the idea of not working suggests many significantly worse layers of hell to fall into. Some of us work on things we like in really hardcore ways that may sometimes detract from what we like about it. Some of us work with the idea of what more work there is to be done and others with the idea that they never want to work some kind of way again. Surely we've lost or so degraded our sense of what's worthy of attention that it's all but obliterated our ability to act upon the necessary entitlement to basically survive. Anti-maskers should be literally bitch-slapped.

I think whether or not I get the attention or recognition for what I do, I'm pretty aware of my motivations and strategies I adopt. I know that I go about life in a way that often rubs certain kinds of people the wrong way. Namely, the ones who either think they do anything less or anything more than I do. I choose a degree of aggression, zest, and antagonism, and find myself fairly well moving the needle. They, perhaps patient, polite, and tight-lipped, are wondering just where the hell I get off. But, I can only speculate so much. I make a habit of leaning into the things I enjoy, as I'm perfectly aware of the otherwise "even" deadness space I've existed in for long periods of time.

Entitlement, like all mere adjectives or judgements, isn't inherently bad or good. It's whether you're aware of how it manifests, whether it can be tempered, weaponized, or tucked between things. For me, I tuck it between the amount of work I do and the spirit of openness with which I explore ways and whether I may choose to change how I go about expressing myself. I believe you if you levy the charge. I'm then entitled to as many questions as I see fit in examining how you came to it. And I never disagree with how you feel about it.

I hope your sense of entitlement makes you fight viciously for what you've earned. I hope you have a sense of it at all. I hope if you're watching mine manifest in ways that don't jive or you see to be a problem, you're willing to spend as much time owning what you have to say about it as I am.

[913] Pot Committed

What are you committed to?

It's a question that can diverge dramatically. You can be committed to a psychiatric hospital. You can signal your commitment through marriage. The two first google definitions state: 1. the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc. and 2. an engagement or obligation that restricts freedom of action. These sound like definitions that beg infinitely large questions about “freedom” and the nature of your “cause” or “etc.”

For me, you could say I'm committed to spite. There are few things that will motivate me, make my brain race to the series of deliberate and methodical actions I need to take, or clear anxious fog than spite. If I did not know that about myself, and then went on to do something significant or showy, I might be deluded into thinking “I” measured up to the grandiosity or was responsible for the show. No, it was the spite. Without the spite, nothing gets off the ground. If you want to examine the spite you might find certain insights about how it operates or different ways to describe it that you find more palatable, but if you pretend it's not spite, you don't have a prayer of understanding me or whatever I've created that might be regarded as significant.

Never will a single word nor overly simplified sentiment encapsulate what's really going on though. Spite won't suffice in place of all the words it's taken to process or experiences which lend themselves to rounding out a perspective. Spite might keep the flame alive, but a controlled burn is certainly preferable and required if you wish to keep something worth sustaining. So, we return to the question, imagining a commitment like a sustained and tempered burn.

Large institutions and interpersonal relationships can inform how you understand longevity. Maybe everyone in your circles is selfish and chaotic, so you internalize that no one is stable and never worth the attachment. Ironically, you can develop the exact opposite sense for the same reason, relying on the stability and attachment of and for yourself in spite of the chaos around you. You know you exist, you're still here after all, but stable and attached can only be trusted or wielded as you see fit, never extended towards things fated to abuse.

You could blithely remark, and you hear it often, that you're committed to yourself. You don't trust anyone. You hate to ask for help or favors. The running narrative is almost perfectly devoid of the different contexts you exist in or memory of things that compelled your decision-making in the past. This is an exceptionally lonely and often disingenuous place to exist for very long. It's akin to the baseline animal drudging though their instinctive behavior I watch from my nature shows. There's no plan, intercepting of foreseeable patterns, nor idea that there's anything to be done but suffer or greedily indulge in whatever the present moment is offering.

Nothing you commit to will last. Even if you're opting to take the wild animal route, the suffering will either end in death, the march to the next watering hole, or the chance abundant meal and time to play. You can get stuck in thinking you've derived some kind of wisdom in throwing yourself at the fates and arresting your agency as life carries on ambivalently doing the work for you. Rest easy, you're gonna die anyway. No surprise, this idea does not seem to provide people any ease or capacity to rest.

Again, what keeps the fire burning? What are you holding a candle for? What Olympic tradition is worthy of being passed on? Why?

I think of the sunk-cost fallacy. Committed for the sake of it and because you've already spent so much time or money. You could find the easy answer if you can overcome the guilt for your folly or undermined wishes. This is why people in professions of presumed high-value, money or otherwise, kill themselves. They've literally couched their identity, very existence, in nominally communal or colloquial notions of what those jobs and titles are supposed to mean, not necessarily what those jobs mean to them as an individual. Nearly all soldiers come back with PTSD, regardless of their role, some dramatically more shocked, SHOCKED, by all of the death.

Most often, we seem to be committed to things that were insisted upon us. I tried to drop out of college. College was a joke. Whatever you may glean from modernity bemoaning safe spaces, the lack of critical thought, and general exploitation offered by the post-modern indifference to defining and fighting for life-sustaining values, it was a problem at least 15 years ago, and I've recently learned the first gripes were codified by conservative thinkers in the late 80s. Ew. We've also got arranged marriages, notions of “elite” preschools, and the catastrophic fascist destruction from those with an infinite appetite for obstruction, dishonesty, and suicide. The mental asylum zeitgeist rages on.

In some ways, once you acknowledge that depth of the depravity and chaos, it makes what you may choose to commit to easier. Well, I can't fix all that, so let me focus on my kids! Or crafts! Or volunteer hours! Here, a most pernicious pitfall must be attended to, and it's why people self-sabotage and surprise themselves with buried resentments. Are you committed to those things, or are you committed to the shame and guilt towards the chaos? Shame and guilt are shades of spite. They're dependent, a response or initial coping mechanism. People are quick to deny they are feeling guilty or ashamed of something as it might undermine their ability to keep working in service to their kids, crafts, or whatever else. You birthed kids who are often disappointing and who are definitely going to die one day. What the fuck are you supposed to do with those feelings? ::Religion rings its hands.::

Come on, what are you committed to? Denying the depth of your lonely feelings, regrets, and aimless stabs at marginal fulfillment? Are you a task-master who makes lists and crosses them off because you have to? Are you a cheerleader because you believe in the team, or because your tight outfit attracts useful distracting attention and the noise keeps you from thinking too hard?

If your ideas are, none, or handed to you, or incomplete, it's impossible to commit. No definition will announce itself. No meaning will spontaneously manifest. No work has been done to get oriented, let alone embodied, across the worlds you inhabit. You don't know who you are, or at least, feel remotely comfortable with the seemingly contradictory abstraction that you are, so you're paralyzed, or resentful, or ashamed, and written off by a world as ambivalent to you as you are to it.

I'm committed to this. I'm committed to working though my ideas and the attempt to pay attention to how the things I experience synthesize into things I do or do not wish to be a part of my and our world. I don't treat people nicely because I give a fuck about people. I do it because the ambivalent math says the more people who's problems I can generally alleviate, the less problems I'm going to have to deal with. At the very least, the nature of those problems will be considerably harder to generate guilty or shameful feelings about. I can cross my fingers people will “get it” and not behave like I don't want them to behave, but I'm not naive, and I'm confident in my spite. I attend to my experience that is significantly bolstered when I behave one way and painfully hindered when I succumb to many others. I know how to tie the abstract nature of those sentiments into sweat and patience and words that almost force themselves out of me.

Are you trapped, or committed? Are you the cause, or distracted by errant et cetera?