[927] Always Antagonize

 I'm at the start of repeating another pattern.

I find it amazing the amount that can be done in so short an amount of time. I've watched the campus I walked and downtown I've drunkenly partied in turn into building after building. I sift through old blogs and see how I made a miserable month feel like an eternity before I turned less-so miserable months into my sitting-pretty posture of basic needs being met today. Entire generations are separated by wholly unknown technology and hopes for doing things like scrubbing arteries or uploading consciousness. We are racing through time, breaking more than necks in our wake.

I used to run pretty exclusively on nervous and anxious energy. It pushed against all of the things I didn't understand or thought I wanted, and I didn't have a great means of releasing that energy in any other way. I “spun,” repeating certain lines I found salient or energizing in their reiteration. I ranted. I used it as an angry place to judge people independent of the otherwise harmless or considerably more shitty things I could have focused on and reoriented around. I was ravenously hungry, with no articulation as to what for or how to go about getting it.

I started writing. I think most of what I write is almost atrocious. It's the chaos provoked only by the line before it or pit in my stomach. It's the racing heart and aching brain trying to move my poorly circulating fingers fast enough to catch up to what I'm dying to say to you, to myself, and to the miserable universe always provoking me. There are things I was literally incapable of discovering until I started writing. There were lessons I would never have had without the ability to look back and ground the impulse into something I could watch unfold in a a manner that was consistent and deliberate in a way that my mind and behavior is not.

I started to work what I began to understand into my behavior. I actually try to work and demonstrate the things I believe in and trust more than the things I simply think. I try to not reduce myself to the worst things I've ever said or done. I try to build context. I try to find a piece of my infinite narrative you can share. I look for ways to convert endless hopeful, nervous, angry, confused, or fearful energy into the next conscious step into the abyss.

That's all.

When I write, fight, or ask a question, I'm trying to repeat that pattern until I observe in both myself and maybe you the things that indicate we are moving in the “right” direction. “Right” for me is “deliberate” or “specific” exercises of my time. Maybe that exercise is hanging out or watching TV. Maybe it's one of a dozen menial tasks in service to one or a dozen goals. Every single time, it is the same process. Define the goal. Define the reasons it is in fact the goal. Watch if the work and behavior is achieving the goal. If there's a break in that observation, you need to pause, reevaluate, and ask more or better questions to inform your work and words you're using to describe it.

Every time, every subject, until you're dead, you will succeed or fail by your willingness or capacity to engage in the above. The dipshit racist who assumes people “trespassing” aren't just “lost” finds the license to kill and witch-hunt because he won't do the above. The racist doesn't have a goal of “doubt” or “we're all in this together,” so you get the ongoing compounding consequences of racism. The project manager who wants to be everything to everyone will be committing the same sin. You need to define and refine the aim by bothering to ask questions in the first place, and dare to make them more and more specific until the answers begin to move you in the required direction. You can be deliberate about natural selection and improve what you are fitted for.

My learned habit...antagonizes. It's a threat to the status quo. It's designed to provoke and push and make you uncomfortable in a way that you can manage and direct. The alternative isn't peace and tranquility. The alternative is stagnant cornered angst and hostility that compounds disorganization and stress. You can drag a great many achievements along the way through that mess with your enthusiasm, money, or on the back of concurrent ignorance held by your players or of your playing field. That doesn't mean what you're doing is sustainable, healthy, or artfully negotiating trade-offs between efficiency and robustness. You don't want to be stuck nor be mainlining poisonous habits.

As is perpetually true, I'm currently being paid to be inefficient. There are discussions about how to hire more people into the inefficient system I'm plugged into. There are meetings that aren't held on time. There are softball questions the leadership finds it hard to define. There are realities of intention in no way matching what's appearing on my calendar nor manifesting from my lack of work or direction. I've created a series of questions I need answered. Many have not been, but a good faith effort has begun. I've reached out to who is supposed to be monitoring or working with me and told them the holes. I've offered myself to any and all tasks. I've spoken to my willingness and ability to even get paid LESS, only covering my utilities if necessary to assist another team member. It's pushing 1 o'clock, and I've watched TV, typed this, and been on an accidentally interrupted phone call.

I'm not trying to be unduly critical or shitty. I'm not entering these conversations nor questions with anything but the spirit to resolve and work and grow together. I know all about “start-up energy” and the endless negotiations you have to make in order to be creative, make enough money, and still flirt with living in service to the ideals that drive you to be a certain way altogether. I can't let you off the hook if you're not going to use the tools in front of you. I can't play pretend with you if I don't want to start pretending with myself and the goals I have independent of what we may be doing together.

I've been asked a few times what drives me or why I wish to be doing whatever it is I'm doing. This. This drives me. Articulating, with consistency. Defining ever-more deliberate goals. Recognizing the spirit of forward-looking honest feedback and maintaining a desire to contribute in any recognizable way. Knowing the nature of what I'm prepared to sacrifice and why or whether it would be worth it. Believing all of the players involved are smart, sincere, and hard-working as well and wishing to treat their time with the care and attention I try to provide my own.

We're all probably working too hard at something. Pause. Breathe. Ask the first worst questions. Start the pattern that takes control of the antagonism. Follow it until the world around you looks like your wildest dreams. I'm telling you to do this from my shed-home, that has air conditioning, water, power, 30 in-progress projects, and an exceptionally low monthly bill obligation it took me many years to achieve by repeating and working in service to the best patterns I know.

[926] Combinatorial Explosion

I try not to get lost in the weeds.

When it comes to things going wrong, or when I'm feeling a certain kind of anxious, one of the first things I do is try to “look” at the feeling. I haven't reached a place of zen or awareness that allows me better endurance or the ability to incorporate elevated levels of nausea or pain, but I try to pause and look inside. Often, I'm just hungry. More often, I have some contingent piece of a puzzle that I have no means of proactively addressing. Putting that piece in place seems easy. I can't. I don't have the tool or response I need. It's just sitting there, not being picked up and put in place to complete the picture. This underscores endless reams of anxiety.

Keep in mind, this is described in the vein of things going “wrong.” Some people get worked up in perpetuity for the slow-motion train wreck that is climate change or creeping fascism. The pieces to complete the puzzle are often abstract notions of how to combat power or whose speech to crack down on. Once you qualify the situation as “wrong,” you can reach out towards anything to conceivably become a fix. It's a recipe to protect and exacerbate the anxiety. It's to muddy the waters of how to conceive of your agency or what you can really be in control of.

On the other side, what do we make of anxiety about things going right? We know people recreate patterns related to their trauma, tearing down things that might otherwise make them feel safe or loved. We have many parables regarding power and the inevitable corruption once you obtain “too much” of it. I find myself getting increasingly worried about what happens when all of the “first-world poor” things are no longer my main preoccupation. I've spent my entire adult life orienting around how to dig myself to a level where I'm not habitually mitigated by a dollar amount.

I'm also not a person who's unaware of nor perfectly happy with the amount of power he has already. My first steps into writing had two overriding themes. My teenage limerence-ridden heart, and my capacity and awareness for manipulation. When I turn it on in a professional realm, I get untrusting, insecure, and generally befuddled poor people to like me and comply. When I refuse to employ it towards people I wish to be close to, I tend to be the most annoying or biggest asshole or series of other judgmental words you could ever hope for. I have, and have exercised, the power to let a litany of relationships dither or explode and let the pieces be allusions in forgotten blogs.

In many ways, I'm in precisely the same places I was 10 years ago as I am today. I'm starting another business. I'm advocating for the growth and iteration that encompasses different areas of interest, and hopefully speaks to many levels of the era's problems. I want exactly the same things from the people I'm working with. I'm still trying to speak as honestly as I feel about the hurdles and negotiations it takes to create.

Mentally, I've achieved a moderate peace with the pace it has taken to not be exhausted by being cranked up to 11 at all times. I recall how obsessed and dramatic it felt in trying to get the coffee shop going. In actual time, it took 3 months to go from idea to have a physical structure and contract with the mall. The counseling business is happening faster, but the same anticipatory anxiety is there. The same waiting game for a form to get back or call to be returned. I'm weathering it better, but I see as bright and big of a future from doing this as I did then.

So, what happens if things start going right? What happens when I'm working 20 hours and clearing a grand or more every week? What happens when I enlist enough people to grow and scale to other counties or throughout the state? What happens when I just call the people who do big professional work at big professional prices and can tell them to simply get to work? What happens when all of the things I believe about basic accountability and civility balloon and start attracting people who want interviews or consulting? If doing this cold-calling for my other new job has taught me anything, everyone is a freakin' consultant.

What happens when my vehicles just work for long periods of time or I have zero qualms taking them in, using a rental, and going about my day? What happens as I take more time for all of the hobbies or schedule the series of concerts I wish to see out for the year? Am I “happier” than I am now? Do I sleep any better? Does my enthusiasm become so large and so much that it practically overwhelms whatever next endeavor I set my sights on?

I've always taken for granted the success would come. I've never been under any illusions about how hard I've worked, am prepared to work, nor what the end-game results of my manipulation or awareness powers would be. There's certainly a sense of a “culmination” factor of my years at DCS and the other jobs at play here, but I don't know that I've fundamentally shifted into any higher a gear in some important ways since even high school. I've learned mere facts and am nominally more patient, but who's to say my new baseline isn't blinding me to the growth, I guess. Were I more creative, it feels dumb to think I couldn't have been living out of a shed at 23. I certainly could have bought one and told my roommates I wasn't going to pay the rest of the lease, you know, like the dumb cunts have done to me.

That's, perhaps, the most consistent thing about me. I genuinely do not, have not, nor will in the future, want to be the problem in that...immature? Selfish? Nakedly unapologetic held-harmless way like what I'm doing isn't designed to fuck things? I've been stiffed with home clean-ups, extra bills, the baggage of in-group out-group judgment and silent treatments. I'm never not trying to talk about things only to be met with sometimes screams and extra-read-into indictments of my character. It's like...really been a lot, and from so many people I had gone into our dynamic with a deliriously hopeful naivety about what we meant to each other. A hopefulness literally bred from a deliberate effort to not treat people like pawns.

So what if things go right? What if I no longer need to concern myself with anything but that superficial charm and management capacity? What if I don't need anything but a fleet of useful "friends" or mock-intimacy? Where do I go when my life is wall-to-wall appointments or series of projects seemingly started in service to my deepest ideals? Will it make mourning the dead any easier? I doubt it. Will I erase my sense of spite and resentment for not being offered the basic civility of a polite and curious conversation? Also seems unlikely. Do I just grow angrier and angrier that everything I could be, could have wanted or gotten, didn't happen 10 years earlier with people perfectly fucking capable of trying harder or doing better? Seems a great way to complicate things unnecessarily, but what are we to make of our inclinations?

I don't know if I'll manage to be less exacting or demanding as things go “right.” I've driven myself to precisely a position I've wanted to be in in order to say the things I have and weather the practical storms that come with creating things. I know it won't last forever or go perfectly, but god fucking dammit, I want it to shine. I want it to shame every piece of shit fuckhole cunt it comes across. How could I tolerate a dumb fuck looking at me baffled by the idea that were he to politely ask questions or not lie on his paperwork the world would start to make a little more sense and his job would get easier? I'm worried my darkest and meanest inclinations will come out.

I've literally just ran this experiment to predictable results. My home felt under threat, and I literally threw shit along with my ex-girlfriend out. I let it go for over a year and a half the things that, were I just trying to “manage” her verses share in collective prosperity, I could have acted on sooner. My experience has been a series of disappointments regarding people who don't “get it” or “care” about the feedback loops created from their behavior or lacking efforts. Maybe they have a brain issue. Maybe their unconscious darkness goes into overdrive when enabled. I'm liable to kill a motherfucker who threatens what we could be, especially as the consequences get demonstrated at higher and higher levels.

I don't want to be me on the day I threw my ex out. I don't want to have the clash of high-expectations cloud my ideas of “friendship” with “professional-relationship.” I'm already worried about how to incorporate the people I know into the fold. I want them to work as I've watched them work, but people change, and their output has formed, presumably, around the pathetic expectations of the world as it is, not what I wish to push it into. I'll need to pay really close attention to the “policy” I demonstrate and “training” of that which you might not really be able to train.

I know that it takes all types and that the burden is not mine to shoulder alone. I don't want to be in charge so much as I want to not be the fucking hopeless and ridiculous and embarrassingly shitty and fucky fuck fuck places I've worked for. My spite engine is still roaring. If the richest people on the planet are anything remotely like me, and they are, I can see how that drive unfiltered or unchecked could swallow a country or few.

That's why you've got to be implicated and responsible by default. That's why you have to be master of your domain. That's why you have to play the check and balance to propensities those around you may never admit nor recognize are at play in themselves. What if things go right? The worst parts about me become ravenous and there's even less in place to contain or check them? What if things go right? I isolate in ways I can't currently conceive? What if so much is going so well and being attended to in proactive accountable ways, I return right back to where I already am, left to perpetually re-frame or re-structure the very nature of what's to be considered a “problem” at all?

Since it arose in my awareness, I'm constantly struck by how obvious and loud it feels that I want to do things for people considerably more than for myself. I want plenty, but I want the story and example set from those wants. I've barely picked up a tool since we've broken up. So much of what I was doing was trying to help my ex or making it so she might enjoy the space more. I already like it here. I've consciously decided to enjoy the fruits of the labor, and prioritize the details as so much extra icing. The 30 projects on my white board? I could address every single one over the course of a month or two, to completion, with the money from working part-time from the counseling/casework alone. Why sweat it out now if no one's looking and it only serves to affirm precisely what everything else out here suffices for already?

Every single thing is every potential other thing. Every atom could exist in more ways and more spaces than there are atoms in every universe. Thus, the awareness, the celebration, the dictated and observed purpose of this moment embodies an infinite miracle cascade some of us can't be bothered to pause and accept a kiss within. Everything can be lost and found, indeed is in fact concurrently both, in every moment. The process of embodying that reality is one I'm still engaged in. I no longer need to see a yin-yang reflected in the mirror to do so, but I am by no means done balancing.

[925] Future Proofing

If I were to boil down my approach to life, it's to start with "I don't know."

If you recognize you don't know something, you can then empower yourself with a choice to try to.

If I don't know what I want, I can investigate what I have and feelings conjured about those things. Do I want this shit-on-the-floor, smack me in the face in my sleep, sneeze in my mouth, leaves disemboweled mice on the porch, counter-hopping, stomach worm courting cat? My stomach drops a little at the idea of disowning him.

If I don't know what to say, I can say whatever is in the moment and on my mind right now, and see where that takes me. Blogs aren't structured beyond mini-paragraphs prompted by perhaps the last line or word of the one before it. I don't know what's going on in my head, and I'll never account for everything.

Once I reevaluated a lot of the assumptions I made about what I wanted or who I wanted to be, I was able to approach them more deliberately and achieve goals, at least the sense that I'd achieved anything, when it might look otherwise. I used to think it a sign of success to have a big screen TV. It's not unimaginable that many of my ideas of my value or potential were formed around the same age that conjured big screen worship.

One of the biggest switches was in how I conceived of the most valuable thing. I thought it was money, or myself, or my intelligence. Then I got, what felt, like a really good group of friends. It became about time together. My impaired imagination filled with large spaces and cool things rarely included anyone else there. I didn't dream of being married or having kids. I just thought I'd conjure enough money to sort of fuck around or do whatever I wanted. I wholly anticipated being "retired" by 30.

I didn't know what anyone else wanted and assumed I could incorporate them. I'm not entirely sure most people most of the time are doing much of any work to really suss out what they want or how they feel. But, like all dreamers, I was willing to play pretend for a while, and I swing back and forth beyond how much responsibility any party should take for maybe decisions that were made. Not everything I do, perhaps not most things, is altogether conscious and deliberate, but there are key things in high and low stakes moments where I'm pretty confident there was a “me” in there doing something on purpose. Those matter a lot to me, just like writing, because an example gets set, meaning can be examined, and responsibility for choices can take the forefront.

I was recently on a phone call where the founder of the company I started working for was courting business. The gentleman he was talking to was 64 and discussing his coaching business. He described his clients as leaders of the largest, some billion-dollar, companies who are beginning to feel the shift culturally from thinking of their employees as “units of labor” and more as...you know, people. He charges $42,500 to meet with each of them once a month for a year. He is part of an association of hundreds of business leaders, has access to hundreds of acres for retreats, and wishes to build his program and business into something worthy of discussing with Oprah (leaving aside what you may think of what Oprah thinks is worthy.) He was humble, he was focused, and he complimented me on how I described my understanding of leadership, prompting him to then ask me about my background.

It was a moment that I'm still processing for the rest of the context it existed in. The company's founder is a highly-motivated thinker and creator. I signed on because I've watched him grow over many years and he's helped me in my projects in the past. For almost about an hour he discussed the dozens of potential directions to go, sounded thirsty for the client's professional associates, while also managing to remain affable and speaking to the services the client was requesting that he could provide. I'm worried. In the break down of the conversation afterward, a few things felt latched onto that would derail what feels like an extremely high-value professional relationship to have. The way to connect with this client is to reflect the genuine values he has and is building into his brand. I think the founder and company have those values, but I'm left thinking they weren't emphasized as a deliberate point of connection and demonstration that we were listening closely.

It also has me thinking that all of my self-reflection at the “top” of many aspects of life has much to say in service to disillusioned rich people who weren't raised to conceptualize people as individual worlds unto themselves. The dude charging them $42,500 deeply appreciates my insights on leadership and the meaningful feedback loops you should be seeking when you superficially “have it all” already.

I'm learning that while I might have “official” duties in calling people and drawing out information, I'm going to act as something of my “anxiety whisperer” role I cultivated working for DCS. You want the extreme motivation and drive to achieve big things. You can absolutely be overwhelmed with seemingly endless meetings and speculation and different future ideas that blow right on past the few things the client has deliberately asked for. My brain does this to chaos, and one way or another, a stabilizing system will be put in place. It's a company worth investing in and lending your skills to. It has the potential to be one of the most lucrative things I'll ever do and it shouldn't interfere with my ability to do anything else I'm working on at the same time.

[924] You're A Shining Star

 I think there's a lot left unsaid about what it means to all have cell phones. Or, the things said are of a constant refrain. Hearing Drew Barrymore and Stephen Colbert talk about the 90s as the last time it was great to be famous has stuck with me. How much are we prone to being anxious by default because, unconsciously, we functionally can't fuck up anymore? How many people really want to go viral for losing their shit? How long have we been under the veil of "cancellation?" I think it's psychologically important to be able to not just have the room to fuck up, but cope and grieve with it in a way that isn't being scrutinized at the same time. In writing, I've clearly taken the opposite approach, but I recognized my need for accountability and sense that I had any remote control over what I was feeling or how I moved in the world. Most people ain't trying to write.

Our entire set of cultural narratives regarding redemption, forgiveness, or growth are knee-capped from the beginning. You're pre-scared of any bad thing you could do or what bad things you've done will say about you decades later. People have generally treated me as a poster child for what's to be shamed and erased, at least those with whom I perhaps had a more superficial relationship than I felt. What if I never learned to adapt and move on or incorporate? What if this passionately anxious bubble is squeezing every interaction and it's altogether impossible to orient after the path towards meaningful relationships has been obliterated?

How have we adapted? We've turned the arrested perpetual shame into fascism. We've decided to double-down on the bad bits and try to force them into something to be proud of. We've tried to distance ourselves from personal identities or cultural norms in service to brands and algorithmic destinies. The only currency left is attention, whether it takes the form of shame, grievance, or entertainment doesn't really matter. The point is to let yourself be hijacked or create the next hijacking thing. Can you spin or market instead of embody? Can you read the pre-approved script and do your time in negative attention jail? Rest assured, we're all waiting on the story of your comeback well-independent of what or whether you've learned or changed anything along the way.

You're not allowed on the path to "responsibility" or "accountability," not just because it wouldn't be recognized were it to still exist, but also no one is interested. Here, a fun irony to what I've pursued in writing. Practically, we're generally first-world poor, stressed, forcefully humbled by the world we've inherited, streaming, and doggedly trying to bolster that brand narrative that makes it fun to dance on Tik-Tok and talk depression. This is not to belittle the means in which people are trying to cope and connect, but doesn't it just feel way sadder, desperate, and misplaced than we're acknowledging? I'm imagining a judge do a hand dance as he explains why he's decided to grant the removal of your children. Simply calling that a terrible and uncomfortable statement of their judgment wouldn't begin to cover how we arrived at that display.

For many years I've been playing a game of ongoing reorientation and reassessment. I've been trying to figure out if the pieces in front of me could lead to the kind of world I imagine. I've been “hopeful” and getting myself worked up as my head turns over all of the potential things I could be or who we could be to each other. I've tried incredibly hard to “accept people where they are” and gotten dramatically more polished in how I speak to people. I've looked for ways to approach the most difficult situations that, obviously doesn't exhaustively cover how they might be understood, but allows for healthy doubt and a sense of progress. By default, that project is a “forgiving” one.

Forgiveness is a concept that has definitely evolved for me. I read or heard something recently that “the kingdom of heaven” is to be recognized here on Earth and within yourself when you exercise your capacity for forgiveness. I find the notion insightful and a considerably easier sell than all the metaphysical bullshit. To forgive used to mean that I just understood something well enough that I didn't have to obsessively think about it anymore. That's what put a barrier between corrosive thoughts about my mom and my otherwise better mental health as I learned more about generational trauma. Do I forgive her as a person? Nah, she'd need to discover and define accountability and responsibility alongside what might be explained by her upbringing, just like I try to.

There's a similar line I take with the “friends” I romanticized. I don't hold petty resentments about how often or not we talk. I watched the series of decisions to talk or not in deliberately shitty ways. I've watched in-group out-group and fear takeover. I've been an array of caricatures. I feel the silence. In my heart of hearts, I know what I wish for in terms of things being “better” or how I wish I didn't reflexively hang my concept of what could be better on anything requiring their input. But isn't that the rub and contradiction again? We don't have a shared path. We don't have articulated if remotely salient goals, let alone ones we share. I can't be your friend without you. Why I want anything less of a friend than what I'm prepared to be is my baggage to unpack.

Our community, our friendship, or what draws our attention cannot continue to exist rooted in this diffuse shame and fear. You can't be primed to fight or flee without wholly degrading your faculties needed to assess and feel embedded in the world. I know I need other people. I know I can only get so far, if you can call it “far” at all, by myself. I know I desire the understanding of what's happening to me, why I take courses of action, or what I choose to pursue. I know I've managed to understand, forgive, and incorporate the worst parts of myself independent of outside judgments. Are we capable of doing that on the whole? Will privacy, ambiguity, or what it means to really struggle and prevail instantiate as mockery and romantic tropes?

The ease of access and interconnections is always haunting. Don't you want to be reminded of your difficult past and follow the people who've left? They're right there, a click away. Haven't thought about them in months or years? We can fix that. Thought you were over it and moved on? Even if you have, let's suggest just intermittently enough that you haven't. Let's re-fire that drama you've otherwise incorporated or hashed a dozen times. For a brain like mine, I'm in a kind of eyes-stapled-open hell if I can't spit out what's vying to stay stuck on repeat. I even know it's going to get stuck and how I need to respond, and it doesn't make it any easier to feel my brain baste in those juices.

I try to build the kind of environments and maintain the kind of relationships that will better serve that mental propensity. Wherever I'm looking or whatever I'm working on, I want it to be something that adds, helps, or is relevant to one or hundred goals I'm pursuing in any moment. When you do that enough, you significantly weaken that which is lesser or distracting in it's power to overtake your attention and ongoing cognition. You're not reduced to a cliché or a meme or mindlessly reenacting the trauma patterns your brain may have trained on. Whether you write or just have the best people to talk to, I think we all need to up our effort in recognizing what we're paying attention to and why. We have to rebuild the path and consider that we may have yet to even bothered with traversing it.

[923] No Fair Don't Care

 Let's talk about “fairness.”

Immediately, one might think, “life's not fair.” It's as cliché an aphorism as exists. I contend the person offering it is often clapping back in a defensive dismissive way towards someone who's put voice to a perceived injustice. A condescending parent might employ it to shut down their child. Notice, the truth of whether or not the situation is unjust doesn't factor in at this level. “Life's not fair” is something of knee-jerk reactionary “fuck you” to someone. I think it's a viscerally powerful and familiar reminder as well as short-hand for how we treat each other, and thus life broadly.

Why ever offer to say it? Simply, you feel life has been unfair to you. You feel like something isn't adding up or playing out like it should. You can consciously know that perhaps “existence” moreso than “life” isn't “fair.” It might be better to say existence is “ambivalent” more than “fair.” Who's trying to contend with existence in every response to yet another problem passing through their awareness? Hardly anyone, so here you go, life's not fair, existence doesn't care about you, and here I am to remind you while I practice reinforcing my insecure self on the back of your misery.

To talk about any coherent meaning in the word “fair,” you must have agency and accountability. It's anyone's guess where you'll get those, but they're prerequisites. If cookies are to be fairly distributed, you need to account for whom and how many, you need to decide on why, and upon review or reflection, the reasoning and actions should be a consistent and shared set of behaviors you can repeat in the future. If you have 3 kids, 3 cookies, all well-behaved and having eaten their dinner after which you promised they could have a cookie, you best get to passing them out. Both your and their sense of agency is mitigated by a deal and relationship with cookies at the nexus of your shared conception of the world. Thus, it's fair when you provide what's been accounted for.

You could state that another way. In a household where cookies are out of the question because of your views about sugar, the situation above is modified dramatically. Now, you don't get to talk about fairness without discussing a new deal. Do you have 3 cookies at all? Do you wish to reward finishing dinner? Superficially, watching from the outside, you may have an instinct about how or whether the parent should distribute the cookies. What kind of lunatic would make this more complicated than it needs to be? Surely, regardless of your ideas about sugar, one cookie isn't too much, right? Children have an uncomplicated relationship or feeling towards sweets, maybe you do too. Maybe the baggage of knowledge, access, and guilt of what sweets have done to you blurs what would be “fair” in this scenario considerably.

A more forgiving way of thinking about “life's not fair” would be to say there's an infinite amount of things you can't attend to, thus you can't make any real deal with anyone else about them. It's not up to you who gets the cookies or what the sugar content in them is. If you tried to play baseball without lines on the field, you couldn't blow up at the umpire for making his best guess about balls hit right down the line. That's the kind of game you're playing with life, yet I suspect you feel your capacity to call foul balls is on point. You think there are lines on the field, or at least those lines conveniently appear the moment you need them.

As someone who likes to claim his own agency, I'm constantly trying to suss out what I think is “fair.” It rarely coalesces until I'm able to either understand myself and what I wish to bring to the situation, or get a shared idea of what someone wants from me. If you don't want anything from me, I'm not gonna gripe about what is or isn't fair. If you want something abstract or communal or colloquially understood, I may reflexively clap back with one of my comments or jokes because it's unlikely I've made the same deal with that space as most others. Maybe I don't understand or respect your reasons you want me to behave or speak like other people. My agency feels under threat, and what I wish to bring is a provoking jab or invitation to communicate another way.

Think about asking someone at work, “How ya doing!?” “Okay, thanks!” There's an argument, a fair one to me, for those kind of interactions a dozen times a day for the sake of a manner of “professionalism.” I won't spin-off and reiterate all of my problems with the word “professional,” but you do want the business of the day to trump an impromptu therapy or bitching session. There's reason to play along if you've accepted the broader deal of that work environment, having subverted some agency by default.

But what happens if you don't have that agency, don't make any claims, deals, or hold any responsibility to share anything? What if you're blind to the asks you're making? What if you're allowing your agency to be as ambivalent as existence? Surely that's the default state. You aren't born “enlightened” or on your way to matter-of-factly accepting your death. There's no class you take parsing through the litany of formal and informal asks regarding the society or era of time you inhabit. You're conscripted into existence, whether or not you decide how to conceive of the war you're fighting, your role in it, or whether it's even a war, comes much later, if at all.

We ignore the many contextual layers we exist in at our peril. If you hear someone disagree with “systemic racism,” consider what context they're coming from. An immigrant fleeing Afghanistan might conceive of the oppression and force used to keep a minority in check vastly differently from a third generation minority student growing up in a white neighborhood. The nature of red-lining is different and not equal to the nature of slavery. That's not a controversial thing to say unless you have a kind of “one drop” psychology and language for how to talk about things. That is, while absolutely not enforced this way, one drop of Jewish blood could give the Nazis license to exterminate you. One act of oppression or contamination of the narrative becomes license to declare the most extreme aspects of the problem and prompt disproportionate action.

We have to return to the idea of what or whether you're going to bring anything to a situation. Most people stay silent about most things. Most people who speak up, tend to inflame the flame war. It's why there's an appeal for mediums in which time is taken to discuss things. Whatever you think of any given talk show or podcast, it's perhaps the only time in someone's day they aren't otherwise subjecting themselves to whatever the ambivalent forces of life are errantly dictating. I can attest to how impossible it is to focus on a good book or lecture when I'm occupied with work responsibilities. I know how the mood or feel has to be right in order for me to get engaged or think I'm capable of learning or remembering something.

What's fair in this new business I'm trying to start? The rate at which Medicaid pays? The things they are and aren't willing to cover? The time it takes them to review paperwork? That I cobbled together my circumstances, certifications, and relationships into something at all? Will it be fair to ask for 2% or 10% of the gross from anyone I invite to be a part of it? They are questions without enough context. They have no input from the person I'm asking to sign on. I have no access to the forces that turned our health care system into what it's become. I know what I want to bring to the table regardless. I know what I'd be able to accept were I to sign up with someone like me. I know that whether I'm getting paid $15 or $1500, my next steps are what's going to allow me into the room about what's “fair” given the constraints, intentions, and needs as far as we can discern them.

The task is to check your impulse for fatalistic “life's not fair” thinking, and continually ask yourself what it is you can bring, why you're doing so, and whether a deal can be worked out so that while you're subverting your agency for some rules, you haven't submitted altogether. This will ease the anxiety or inner-conflict about when to speak up at work or why. This will keep you from working yourself into a froth in comment threads. This will keep you from resenting your partner. Because it's so abstract and indirect, it's nearly impossible to convince someone that their intentions, as much as their actions, matter. It's even harder to get them to understand how much goes into informing an intention. “I didn't mean to hurt you!” You might insist. From experience, I can tell you, no one ever believes me when I say it. (see: discussing trans issues, religion, my sense of humor, lashing out, or basically anything I touch or speak to ever.)

Do I need you to believe me? Do I need you to treat me “fairly?” What's at stake? I know what kind of friend or thoughtful person I wish to be. Do you? I know what lane my style of boyfriend or business owner or antagonist sits in. I know when I want to set a bad example, reveling in my depraved feelings, exhausted in searching for a sense that I share anything with anyone or that I could ever be understood. I know the different mes, what provokes them, what inspires them, and how they help or hurt my ability to find my center. I have to work out what's fair for me and myself just as much as we have to figure out what will be fair between us.

That's why fascism, unfair. Occasional emotional outbursts, incorrect word choices, time to breathe, and as many mistakes as need be made in service to the shared direction and terms, can all be fair. That's why you stay in abusive relationships, constantly changing the deal in a one-sided way. Abuser and abusee can make the same error. Who's responsible for what remains infinitely obscure even before something definitive, perhaps violently, happens. We have laws and protective orders and normative notions that trick us into thinking it's easy to understand or how to respond when the worst of the drama unfolds. We have statistics on how often we return to the abuse. There's a reason I had to assess your situation and unpack your details and discuss with others before a decision was made to remove your children. When a person, let alone institution, engages in one-sided power mongering, disinterested in the discussion, or is instinctively reveling in flames of the drama stoking the coals of their pathological past...you can feel how far removed a discussion of what's “fair” is from that clusterfuck.

If I use my awareness of what's prompting me to speak and act, dictate a goal for doing so, and imagine that abstract roundabout way in which what I put out comes back, it tends to mitigate things. I maybe choose a less “harsh” word. I maybe find a little more patience to explain something. I maybe feel a little more at ease and like life isn't rushing away from me. It's a fun little game for me to pretend to be a newscaster under my Nazi senator's facebook page. When it's not a fun little game and I play it fast and loose with the rules, I start making comments that get me banned for 30 days. If I want to bemoan a loss of agency when they ban me while submitting to a totalitarian facebook system, without irony, I'm creating stress and a contradiction in my being.

So what are the rules of the different systems you're in? Is there a conscious agent on the other side reinforcing them? Does it matter if the rules are fair? Betraying your kids on a cookie deal seems like it could have drastic ongoing consequences from fomenting distrust to provoking disobedience or even threatening how the children conceive of themselves. How could a person who cares, who they rely on, do them so dirty?

I habitually flirt with the rules and lines. It's a flirtation, not a rejection. I may drive my trailer without extra brakes, lights, a license plate, or registration papers...a dozen times, but that is considerably more a testament to my relative poverty and priorities than it is a brazen disregard. In the larger contexts of my life, if I don't have health insurance, I'm sure as fuck not spending more at the BMV first. And until I get ticketed, this conditional “unfair” space I choose to operate in is just that, a choice to roll those dice given my anecdotal experience of Indiana's general ambivalence towards licensing trailers. I may not feel great about that ticket, if it comes, but I'd be foolish to rush home to bitch for 3 pages about how fucked up the cops are.

We need to share. We need to feel like we're choosing and making decisions, at some level, in whatever context we might exist. How does someone like me survive in a place like a State institution and endless contradictory rules and policy context? I choose to do the job, but I pimped out my desk area to facilitate my needs and efficiency. I don't have to add “fuck” to every sentence to speak to real people in real terms about what's going on. I advocated for myself to get the role of assessor verses permanency because I knew I'd kill something if I felt chained to the office environment. I wrote my emails arguing for what I thought was right or where people were fucking up, and I left when the context decided it was time to overwhelm the agency I was expressing, probably a little too late. The terms of the deal, if ever they were, changed, and I still live out the consequences of that betrayal.

If I have any say in how you conduct your life, don't be like the people that, I must assume unconsciously, drive me away from the good examples I'm setting. Don't let yourself feel threatened and insecure by not taking responsibility for the words you're choosing to keep yourself or others down. Do you say, “Life's not fair?” Do you reflexively go to, “It doesn't matter” or, “Who cares?” Can you tell the difference between the you who might try to be funny in the face of fascism and the you who is about to be banned? One is an ignorant, judgmental destroyer of worlds, and the other ruminates on what causing and observing the destruction is going to do to undermine their own being.

What kind of power do you have if superficially, if not often practically, it's none? You have the power to envision and work towards a broader grasp of what's “practical” or “professional.” You have the power to keep yourself aware of what it takes to even discuss “fair” in a way that makes sense. You have the power to learn about how best to describe yourself across domains and obligations and the power to define what needs to remain steady and protected within them. I don't lose my creativity or voice even working for the State. I don't lose the fight in me. I don't lose the ability to incorporate everything I learned and every relationship I made into the next thing. I'm not forgoing the opportunity to write about and explore my time there. Hopefully, in the most roundabout way, it contributes to a more deliberate, intentional, agency-driven environment broadly, and I don't have to reduce myself or what we're capable of to “hope.”

Fair enough?

[922] Night Terrors

Fucking cat woke me up and apparently whatever I was dreaming about is now keeping me up with my jaw clenched and mind racing.

While it's not to the degree when I was younger, I have obsessive and obtrusive thoughts. It's part of the reason my humor goes so immediately and persistently dark. Had I not learned a way to incorporate every ridiculous and hurtful thing that races through my head, to no end, I'd lose my mind. The fact that I'm writing now, at 2 in the morning, testifies to my inability to shut it off when it gets going without being more exhausting in writing until it reaches a dull rumble.

In these compulsive episodes, things I'd otherwise feel generally “resolved” about play on repeat. The fight or word choice around my recent break-up. Thoughts about what a pain in the fucking ass the cat is. The spending habits of my clearly traumatized aunt and uncles. The greed of my dead and dying other relatives. The pain of being taken for granted. The irony of my stated project and the pointless roadblocks along the way. My demonstrated effort and capacity constantly squandered and ignored.

 

Why now? Why all at once? Why is my most recently salient dream about being caught in a tunnel high above the ground with no retreat, no way across to the rest of it, and no way down?

I don't know how to make peace with the idea of fucking up the easy things. I just heard recently that my aunt has spent 60 to 70 thousand dollars to keep a functionally dead dog alive for many months past his due. This is an aunt who years ago withheld my grandma's piano intending to give it to step-kids who didn't want nor would appreciate it, who then rejected it, so it's spent years in her garage and her foyer until now she's ready for me to come take it off her hands. Not when I had the energy, space, and means of engaging with the piano, but now, when I've added a room addition, it's rotted in the garage, and I don't have the money or manpower to fuck with it. You think she'd drop the money to fix the thing and get it delivered? I bet the thought hasn't even crossed her mind.

We have an endless array of stories touting what it means to be virtuous or triumphant in the face of evil. I've watched 14 or so movies over the last few days. The hero kills the bad guys. The hero overcomes the miscommunication or grudge. The bad guys kill for fun. The bad guys are extremely greedy. The bad guys can even be good guys when faced with even badder guys! We're supposed to unite with or avenge our families and utilize our friends. We're supposed to connect with our true loves and fight for our passions. To the degree you can submit to the avaricious feelings, why, all the more compelling to watch and emulate.

So much of who I am is directed by how little I wish to be like other people. I don't want to be like most of my family. I don't want to be like the people I've worked with or companies I've worked for. I don't want to be like the “friends” I no longer talk to. I don't want to be “religious” or “spiritual.” I don't want to be rich just for the sake of it. I don't want to pretend I'm going to be all-consumed by "love" or a woman. My pet is not my child. The nature of my help for other people is the many hours I've spent working out what it means to be “the right kind of selfish,” not me being deluded about how much my heart bleeds or blind to what my responsibility can or should be in a given situation.

I need some new language or approach to what can be easy. “It” can. I'm certain it can, because the things that are easy for me, I keep letting be easy. I take my simple and small pleasures. I take my time. I hit the page when the things that can't be easy, like sleep, try to dictate the terms. It hasn't been easy for me to find an angle on how to deal with how other people prioritize things. I don't get why we don't throw ourselves on the gears and stop the stupid machine or focus on pain caused by the delusion that has made reckless indulgence a way of life.

Do you have any idea the amount of things I would do with $70,000 before torturing a functionally dead dog?

[921] Bad Philosophers

I have about a dozen disparate sources of thought I'm trying to synthesize, so don't think too hard and come along for the ride.

Some of the criticisms I've received from writing, if you can consider them as much beyond a personal attack, is that I maintain this posture as offering the capital T Truth of a situation, and that I'm something of a two-bit or wanna-be philosopher. I bring these up not because I find them compelling, but because they are persistent. I certainly don't believe the people keen and quick in offering these sentiments are concerned about the reasons I'd started writing or when I think it necessary to continue.

I don't claim to be a “philosopher” in some kind of formal way. Pythagoras came up with the word to mean a “lover of wisdom.” Anyone can be that, and my demonstration of that love is to search for and attempt to embody the wisdom in the many areas that keep me thinking. The charge about offering the Truth of any or all situations I find exceptionally pernicious and disingenuous. Informally, I've referred to it as “I know you are, but what am I” syndrome. I can say it every day, bookend it on every blog, I don't claim to have the Truth. I have my experience to the best of my ability to articulate and remember it. I'm engaging a process, not dictating a mythological ethos.

I'm watching Awakening from the Meaning Crisis with John Vervaeke. I'm about halfway through the 52 hour course. He provides a broad overview of many different philosophical ideas and religious traditions. He puts titanic figures in context and shows how their ideas responded or incorporated who came before. I've read a number of philosophical works, taken classes in college, and written papers or blogs in service to what I've read. You know what never stops? Your need and desire to think about and practice what other thoughtful people have brought to the conversation.

Whether or not you read a book or an argument doesn't mean you understand them, and certainly doesn't mean you've experienced anything like what they're getting at. I recall getting an A on a philosophy paper where I deliberately felt I'd “fuck around” with some modern philosopher's position. I was praised for not merely regurgitating what he was saying, which also would have gotten me an A in a “safe” way, and which the grad student grading the papers was sick of reading. I don't remember the philosopher, or the argument, or how I fucked with it. I just got a deep sense that so much of these “thought experiments” and “professionals” was considerably more loose or playful than you'd suspect at first pass.

Most often, as I'm in the middle of some lecture or hear some salient point made by some nerd on a podcast about climate change or the supreme court, I'm met with how dissatisfied I am with people broadly. I'm struck by how little they think. It's like the whole world opens up as this plaything because I can influence or direct my understanding of what's driving or sucking people up. Are they draped in the nihilism of endless consumption? Probably. Are they exhausted, angst-ridden, anxious, or otherwise adrift looking for a new religion or meaningful supplemental occupation? You tell me, how many people refer to or treat their pets like children? I don't just “dislike” things like Tik Tok or memes, I worry for our collective “soul” that so much has been articulated, but can't find its way into our practice or language. We're addicted to the shortcuts and dopamine flashes.

I've tried to make the deliberate and ongoing point that this process, this writing, whatever it amounts to, is necessary. It's useful. It's how I work to “embody” the things I say and empower the things I do in the world. I can look back through blogs and see what has stayed the same while I've been under constant bombardment from errant criticism, endless distractions, or misguided notions of who I am to people or what they are to me. There's no Dewey decimal system in my head where I can just bring up where and when my ideas of “love” have gone wrong or right. I can't begin to explain what “friendship” has meant or evolved into over time like turning to an illuminating chapter of your favorite book without it being written down.

You may be thinking I'm making some kind of pretentious and overstated claim about how little people are thinking. You, in fact, are very thoughtful, and you have a lot of strong opinions about not just the state of the world, but how I talk about it. For the longest time, I wanted to grant this special privilege to the people able or willing to read what I might discern from the cultural ether. I dropped that. It's not that I haven't experienced you as such or on an appreciable level of awareness or enlightenment, it's that I've watched it fall prey to things I can't reconcile with maintaining respect.

I don't respect silence, for example. I don't respect meme-speak. It's not to say I'm not silent on a great many things or have never shared a meme, but the days where my feed is ten pictures you found mildly amusing, maybe, I don't know where you exist. I feel like I bring this up a lot because it bugs me a lot and I think it's a massive cultural psychosis we've worked ourselves into in normalizing not-think. I want you to hesitate before sharing the picture, then I want you to turn a series of hesitations into a long enough pause to explore what's really going on with you in sharing.

I think about this with regard to my last relationship. In a real sense, this is one of the cleanest, at least emotionally, breaks I've ever had. I had expectations for our interactions that had absolutely nothing to do with some elevated level of “love” or historically romantic notions of our time together. I don't care who you are, if we're going to be “close” or “intimate” or “trust” each other, that's not going to happen if you can't be a friend. My friends aren't routinely yelling at me, giving me the silent treatment, or conjuring memories of growing up where I was hyper tense and aware of the mood-shift so as to avoid getting knocked around by my mother. My friends let me speak without interruption, and I grant them the same courtesy. My friends tell me they're going to do something, and then do it, and if they're going to use me or my things, they express appreciation or know they're on the hook for fucking something up.

I took my time getting into the relationship, and I suffered the things wrong with it until I broke. It's a break that I will learn from and do better next time by not allowing myself to ignore the escalation or mask it under the guise of “accepting someone where they are.” I understand people as having no clue where they are, and it's something I downplay or express some faux humility about at my peril. I understand people as having the kind of mindless irony of an arrested teenager struggling to cope with their incomplete brain and personal trauma. It's not a gratifying point that my home has returned to a place of peace and comfort after removing someone I care about. It's an existentially critical point about how we quell our sense of loneliness or emptiness despite superficially having everything we could ever want.

I'm extremely impressed with many of the book passages and sentiments from Daniel Sherrell who was featured on the Know Your Enemy podcast. He discussed the conditions under which you embody something verses just knowing intellectually. You have to let in the depths of the dread and despair and marry it to the action you take in your day-to-day or long-term, if not infinite, project. Dorothy Fortenberry, also featured in the episode, discussed having kids with no expectations of them ever thanking you or even smiling with regard to your efforts in service to them, and yet knowing you had them for reasons not to do with your own gratification.

What resonated so deeply was a sensibility that I've had to cultivate over time. It's a form of acceptance, not of fate, but of known and unknown conditions. Whatever hell you may be suffering, I can only choose to roll the dice with engaging or not. I can only open myself up, tolerate the vulnerability, and live the consequences of sharing my honest experience. I can't make you accept me, be patient, swallow any of my “reasons” you may regard as “excuses.” My harshest judgments of you either lend themselves to changes in my behavior or mood, or they get used to beat you to death. I can claim a certain awareness of when I'm choosing to beat you to death, like in blowing up at my ex, but it's a wasted awareness if I didn't want to do that and chose to anyway. There's areas in which I'm bound to the notion of getting “license” or “permission” to access parts of me predicated on granting you the agency and responsibility of inviting me in. If I'm bound to a blood-lust like a vampire, I'm forgoing my agency, and thus cannot grant you my honest impression of your agency. I'm then eschewing the responsibility for my actions.

I want responsibility, and begrudging the conditions under which I might yield it doesn't serve me. So that means I don't get “normal” relationships. That means I get to feel “alone,” and any orientation I maintain that baits people or tests people is about me, not them. I don't really know how to reconcile this with what it would take to create or empower a new culture or zeitgeist. I'm not actually a god nor claim some special enlightenment. At some level, it feels like I either maintain expectations I regard as self-preserving, reasonable, and practical, or I drop all expectations and just work people like I know how to work them. Think about it, how many people have you had thank you or shake your hand after you explained you took their children? How many strangers' homes have you been invited into? How many children have you been trusted to drive all over the state with? How many hundreds of people have you invited into your home? How many codes have you had to switch or topics have you had to incorporate to create things that represent your highest ideals?

If you believe, and I use that word liberally, anything less than me about yourself or what you're capable of, by my understanding and definition, you're at my mercy. I can provoke you. I can work you. I can convince you. If you don't know what you're capable of, whether or not you're doing anything for good or bad reasons, I do. I'm not under the illusion that everything I do is for a good or coherent reason. I couldn't take myself seriously if I regarded what you told me as some threatening Truth claim or if I reflexively felt ick and sought to write you off as some lazy airhead. All I can do is make peace with using you until you “wake up” and buy in.

That sounds so crass and cold and feels like the heart of a many years long project I've been trying to avoid. I dance around what I'm capable of precisely because I know what I'm capable of. A cultural project needs the people who are going to be a part of that culture. I didn't party alone, but I garnered all the resentment for the consequences of the party environment, earned and unearned. I can invite you to my land, but you can be stuck linguistically and psychologically reiterating to me it's my land, so nothing you do or invest in is going to matter or be safe from my arbitrary whims. That's fine, but you don't get to retain your skepticism for my aims or good will when I offer it freely or am willing to bind myself to a contract. I want checks on my power and reflection on my aims. You either don't give yourself the power, and thus don't claim the responsibility, or aim at dumb shit.

If what you're accepting about yourself leaves you complacent in what you're willing to discuss or examine, you haven't accepted anything. You've punted your obligation and likely adopted some posture about how busy you are. You've probably reflexively found a way to recognize the faults in others that you can't imagine manifest in you. It's precisely because I am an intractable cunt with an extremely, aberrant, loud mouth and fluidity to his inappropriateness that I've been driven to the desire for an exacting conversation about the forces at play and who is using them. I get snippets of resonant and compelling moments. I get glimpses into the people I wish you were and the person I want to be. But I didn't build my house, start my businesses, or take a chance in my relationships because I lacked a direction or ideal I wished to embody. I don't find patience, and healthy skepticism, or respectful deference from listening only to the feverishly antagonistic demons that foresee and enact every catastrophic end drawn from inferences of your every utterance.

I have everything. My brain works. I'm full. I laugh hard and make jokes. I study. I work on things that are easy for me and hard for others so that maybe they can be free to better handle hard things I can't help them with. I can't recognize the “love” you don't demonstrate. I can't respect negligently wasting power you wish you had, and do have, especially if I show you how it works or give you the opportunity to do the same kind of work I had to do in order to be the one presenting the opportunity. I don't resent people with something to teach me nor am I only willing to learn something on my own terms. I can only work with what's on offer.

I'm offering you 921 insights into my head, 5 acres, my tools, my back, my efficiency, my experience in high stress and high responsibility environments, and my spirit and style of engaging with the world. And who am I to pretend that you want or need any of that, right? Save the handful of my regularly cited exemplars, what is it you think you're offering me? A like? A follow? What are you offering “the world?” Do you want to be just something I keep feeling good or operating well-enough until you've exhausted your utility? Are you my afterthoughts and naive idealism codified by the silence, our histories incidental verses entwined?

I'll weather the scorn or isolation, to be sure. Every shit example I set or shit “friend” I've taken a chance on is quickly followed by the waterfall of prosperity and better examples set by others. I need to maintain the memory of the standards set by you, not me, in how I've been treated. I have friends who don't judge me. I have friends who laugh easy. I have friends who respect my time and effort. I have friends who show up in emergencies. I have friends I start businesses with. I have friends who demonstrate their grasp of their own wickedness or sense of responsibility and maturity without making it yours or my problem. The structure and system are there, because again, I have everything. You find a way to vibe with that or make peace with how you incorporate it, or not. If you're unworthy of what's on offer, well, you're my mom lol.