[968] Glass Aye

 Awareness builds.

I was thinking again about Waking Life and the first time I saw it. I was struggling for a way to orient my perception. The movie clued me into something I couldn’t yet articulate. It was thoughtful, but with an ease. I knew it had hooked me and I knew I’d be watching it again and again like a toddler forming the anticipatory framework in rewatches of its favorite Disney movie. I still think about the movie fairly often. It’s why it’s my favorite movie. It lives in me. It helps transform who I am in an active way. It can be relied upon like a friend to offer the words in a way only they can.

I consider myself a function of the different things I’ve become aware of. When I was a mess of uncontrollable feelings, I learned how to describe those feelings in a manner that allowed for more control over time. The more I dictated, the more I could direct. When I felt at the mercy of butterflies and anxiety, I dug through history and philosophy and so depersonalized “my” problem that it transformed into a mere thing to be dealt with like any other. I discovered intentionality.

This is different from “choosing not to feel.” I felt. I felt deep, but I was able to identify the compelling feeling as a complex mix of bad and good. Bad, in that it was desperate, compulsive, and depressed. Good in that it seemed to motivate and invigorate in a manner I suspect is not unlike methamphetamine. I didn’t “get better” at my feelings until I acknowledged, until I learned, how to give them the credit for how complicated they were. I had to nod to the contradictions. I had to track what they were tangibly netting me.

People don’t do this. If they’re lucky, they get old enough to get too tired to fight against what might be their “hidden” inclinations otherwise. Liberated old ladies or people who’ve had serious health scares carry a similar air. It’s like the veil is lifted and it’s easier to prioritize and assert who they are and what they want. I think no matter who you are, it’s work. You don’t pursue healthier relationships, leave religion, or stand up to any prevailing opinion or crowd unless you’ve first decided there’s work worth doing. You only have so many mental and physical resources, and overwhelmingly people seem to decide it’s not worth spending them going against the tide.

Well, unfortunately, we’re modern. We have instant communication. We have individuated algorithm means by which to isolate and embolden opinions. We have the most significant gap in wealth distribution since there’s been people, and those in power do literally everything in their power to instantiate “business as usual.” Whether it’s actual business in keeping the cash flowing, or psychological conditioning in keeping you too busy, angry, or exhausted to volunteer for some of the most distasteful work there is.

Is that speculation? Am I being hyperbolic? I think I’m just aware of things like January 6th and Trump. I think I listen to the capitalistic reasoning for destroying the planet and endless greed in my Nazi Senators’ facebook posts. I think I watch the word-for-word thought soup and salad spew out of the entitled and incensed when presented with the opportunity to work against their indoctrination. We’re just running the same story with more dangerous weapons and catastrophic means of communication.

Most often, when someone is telling me a story, it’s a pretty dramatic one. They’re experiencing relationship drama, they’re sick, their job is every level of exploitative and doesn’t pay enough, or the most recent article they’ve read about gas or the environment or the economy portends imminent calamity. They’ll trot back to work, pop on Netflix, and plan their next vacation, but boy oh boy, don’t you know the end is nigh? Don’t you know that “life” is always happening and we’re helpless to do anything about it? We can’t even leave the house without encountering a sign that questions the merits of how we define gender! What is the world coming to? Has anyone ever been so harmed?

Ignorance destroys.

Ignorance, deliberate or otherwise, destroys life. You eat the poison mushroom and die. You burn the witch. You turn off that damn science program because The Big Bang is an atheist plot to send you to hell! Ignorance destroys relationships, the concept of a family, and any dreamy future envisioned by sci-fi. It’s not hard to spot. It reflexively shuts things down. It doesn’t push a conversation to a later day, it denies there’s anything to be acknowledged altogether. This is how people “snap” or sometimes emotionally breakdown into places from which they can’t recover.

Ignorance is so good at its job, it’s a law of physics. Entropy. You can justify being ignorant your whole life, and on balance, you’re nothing but a universal dictum and destiny for every one of our particles. Isn’t that neat? You can smear shit on the walls of Congress, shoot at Muslim boogeymen in the woods, and tell Jesus you really didn’t mean those thoughts you had about your teenage daughter’s friends, and it will all devolve into so much dust. In the meantime, you keep your community, your “strong opinions” and sense of self. Your brain, by itself, can’t tell the difference between the pageantry and the life. It’s just there to fuck bitches and form patterns, and it’s probably out of bitches.

What’s the value of being aware? You’ve climbed the mountain, you’re wise enough to know you know nothing. Okay. So now what? You’re still labeled by all of the in-groups and not allowed to enter. Your individuated dreams may not comport with your physical location opportunities. Hey, wait. I just equated becoming aware to becoming an individual. That’s probably not a correct thing to do. For surely, if you’re aware, you’re keen to observe the constitutive parts of your being. Aren’t I frequently attesting to merely passing along ideas of those much smarter than me? Aren’t “my” values ones demonstrated for me?

Let’s make it worse. Groups of ignorant fucks build all sorts of things. They make things to worship. They make laws. They make endless streams of propaganda. They make a fuck load of money. I’d argue this is the wrong layer of analysis to claim they’re building or making anything but the bed we all get to die in, but if you need fast and dirty practical analysis fodder, they’re offering it through a firehose.

Maybe your awareness allows you the ability to manipulate and navigate the muck above. Feels a little cheap and like a waste of your potential though. Gaining awareness bestows upon you potential. Why waste it on the mercy of the crazies? Why obtain potential at all? We can keep getting abstract, or we can pretend we’re embodied and have things or people in our lives that mean something to us. We don’t have to know why they mean anything; we just have to be aware that they do. It’s the only way things can make sense.

Do you want to destroy your family? Most people might reflexively reel at the question and say, “No!” A savvy pollster would recognize a few problems in the phrasing. A person perpetually open to analyzing word choices and underlying motivations or primed thinking can’t take the question or answer seriously on their face. Some people think their family will be destroyed, even go to hell, by accepting a gay family member. Some people think their family will be destroyed by a Russian bomb aimed at a hospital they’re hiding in.

I still don’t think I’ve answered the reason or value of awareness. At least for me, it plagues my thought. I’m always in a form of doubt. It’s like a low hum tummy tinnitus. “Hmmmmmm, maybe.” Maybe she “loves” me, maybe I’m “smart” enough to pull something off, maybe you appreciate I “give a shit” or am a “hard worker.” Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true? But my goddamn awareness and “individual” perception won’t let me take the win. I don’t believe anything; I’m constantly weighing everything.

But, that isn’t entirely true. Mostly because I don’t have a good concept of the word “belief.” I feel or see the consequences of what people do in my life. I don’t “believe” my dad loves me. I’ve watched him respond in supportive and caring ways to literally everything I’ve ever said or done in life. Belief doesn’t factor into it. Dude demonstrates and does the work as dad. Friends inconvenience and sacrifice for one another. Byron, Hussain, and Corbin have all lent me cars. I think people do what they believe or they don’t really believe it. I know I’d reflexively be keen to be, not-quote/unquoted, friends with people I haven’t talked to in years. I believe nothing that’s transpired conversationally rises to the level of disownment. I still think I’ll be relevant again one day when the kids are grown and the divorces kick off.

As such, I feel and see the things I work on and embody. I ride few highs like when I’m collecting bricks or pallets. I wanna learn how to make shitty wood look cool or become useful? I have it! I can go do that right the fuck now. I can make the things I’ve written or said out loud dozens of times real. I can manifest. I can celebrate that my muscles still work and that I’m young and healthy enough to take this impossible to understand existence and build something from it. More than “something,” but something meaningful. Something that stands as a demonstration of my values.

So much of that story is filled in before we ever get here. You need to love Jesus! You need to love your family! In spite of abuses and contradictions! It doesn’t matter how you actually feel, play the goddamn part! Get your education! Get a job! Vote Republican! Defend your nation! Buy fucking everything! Meet the standard that exists for reasons no one can remember, but we’ll be damned if your hair is long or you’re pierced and tattooed! Don’t fuck anything that isn’t your wife and she better be a girl!

And it’s not all bad, because you get fed, and you do learn things, and some of the values actually translate into healthy ways of living. You have a considerably small incentive to rock the boat, particularly if you’re not trained to look for what’s meaningful to you. Isn’t it obvious? Continuing to eat! Continuing to garner the love and connection from your peers and family. What the fuck kind of question is that to go looking for what’s meaningful? You’re just trying to antagonize and stir the pot!

What if your awareness builds to the point that you find it incredibly meaningful that as many of us survive and survive objectively well for as long as possible? Well, fuck. Now you have to find a way to incorporate the crazy. You have to work within the absurdist nightmare of the consequences of fundamentalism and pure deadly irrationality. Fun… You have to “fix your face” when you engage with harrowing abusive or neglectful tales that literally cannot be made up and you will never see dramatized on TV. You’ll have to take all of the tools you utilized to pull yourself just a hair over the fog and see if they can be configured in a way to appeal to a crowd viciously addicted to smoking.

And today, you have to do it in competition with literally anything that might go viral or a power broker who can silence you for any reason. You’re up against the evangelicals, monopolies, bored money, your own ignorance, instantiated power, and bad luck. Your awareness bringing you any peace in that moment? You feel like a super hero yet? It mostly feels like a torture and taunt. “Good luck, fuckboi!” Jaunty condescension wins the day and insecurities stay safely buried.

Still, something deep echoes. In my basest conception of myself, as one among and apart of all, I know I cause ripples. I know I want those ripples to come from coherent, rounded, invested and accountable thoughts. I haven’t yet found a word to replace “selfish” in how I think about this. I just say the good and bad kinds of selfish. I think I’m an incredibly good kind of selfish in attempting to genuinely help people with the tools I’ve used to help myself. Whether that’s a literal physical tool I can lend you, or my healthy productive body, or the words I’ve used to find peace for my gut and head.

I’m old enough to see how my ripples have played out, whether in shitty things like incensing the wrong cunts in power or in building new, less dramatized, friendships after gaining a broader awareness of what I got confused about previous ones. I retain every piece of the puzzle that got me so far completed. I be ratchet. I can be case manager. I can be sadist. I can be not-doctor indefinite open ear. I work to be in a mode of learning, trying, and experimenting. I practice honesty and writing. I show up and do many things I don’t want to do because I’m aware of how they speak to what’s actually meaningful.

How would you trust yourself to land on or stick with a “meaningful” thing? What if you thought your kids were gonna do it for you and they don’t? What if you’ve invested decades of your life with an ill-suited partner? What if you’re mentally or physically unable to pursue whatever it was anymore? What if it changes over time, as it almost inevitably will? Was the effort worth it? If I had to sell everything on the land, did I just waste my time if I have to “start over” somewhere else? You probably don’t know what’s meaningful if that’s your mindset. I wouldn’t trade the things I’ve learned and become as a result of moving out here for anything. I shaped my environment and it shapes me in return, if I let it.

I learn pretty regularly how unwilling people are to let me shape them lol. I’m just another person in their environment, after all. Not a particularly important one or with any special insight into their lives or thought processes. It’s not like I have a kitschy book or catchphrase bolstering my bid for your attention or vote. I’m no more aware of what you “really need” than you are. I only know what gets my blood pumping. I only know the infinite well of motivation or direction I draw from as I do the work to account for my experience. I only know the glory in reveling in the completion of labor for the highest ideals. Popsicles and ice cream tastes different after yard work and hauling things.

I may be stuck in the present, but I live in the future. I have dozens of woodworking projects in a truck parked on my land right now, and dozens more I’ll be retrieving tomorrow. I have tools and intention. I have working limbs and a healthy-enough brain. Before I had the pieces, I had the blogs telling you what I was after, and before those I had all of the other things I built or was trying to build. I want your individuated awareness because it is an infinite sea from which nothing I could predict or do can build. I can’t write the song on your heart. I can’t love the way you can. I can’t work out what you find meaningful. I can’t train your patience or bravery. I, good kind of selfishly, want everything you can be and for you to know how much power is really there. It’s more powerful than a god or shitty abusive family members. It’s considerably more powerful than your opinionated friends. But it’s a lot of work, perhaps an infinite amount, in order to inform the entropy how you’re going to breakdown.