[981] French's Delight

Holy fuck did this article piss me off.

This is not how I thought I’d be spending my morning. I happened to listen to Sam Harris’s podcast where he and conservative David French have a compelling discussion about American division. I began to look up more information on French, and read and article called “Roe Is Reversed, and the Right Isn’t Ready.” Tagline: A movement animated by rage and fear isn’t ready to embrace life and love. In it, French describes his history as a pro-life advocate; the groups he started, the people he has defended, and the ethos of protecting the unborn.

French is a type of intellectual I recognize for the perniciousness of the knot at the heart of “otherwise good people.” He’s incredibly articulate. He’s done more laudable and walks-the-talk things as far as indicating the kind of person he is and what he believes in, than most public intellectuals who crack codes of influence circuits and publications. You don’t represent pro-life groups for 30 years, put your life on the line in ill-conceived war, nor raise tens of millions of dollars for things you don’t “believe” in.

At the top of the article, this is precisely the word French speaks with when relaying the advice he receives from two colleagues. They counseled, it’s French’s job to “write what I believe to be true.”

This, that it sits atop the following article which proceeds to discuss French’s conflicting feelings about a movement that seems driven by more malignant forces than innocent “pro-life” sentiments I think speaks louder than French intended. This taken-for-granted myopic presumption that “What I believe to be true” is the “most-valuable” or “most-useful” thing permeates corrupted conservative thought at a fundamental level.

I don’t claim that what I write is what I “believe.” It’s how I process. It’s the series of ideas, rationalizations, or facts-to-the-degree-we-can-discern-them-as-facts that I offer. That’s literally why we have the nit-picking and minutia of law. A murder isn’t a second-degree murder isn’t a manslaughter. In the same opening sentiment, French recalls his advisors saying his job was, “not to please a crowd or build a coalition.” You might miss it if you don’t know to look for it, but the next paragraph starts, “Their advice was good and true…”

Did you catch it? It’s a circle.

They told French to write what he believes is true. He, incidentally, writes his friend’ advice is both good and true. What he writes, is good and true, in a hidden circle not-quite-sinisterly snuck underneath him saying, “it’s not to please a crowd or build a coalition." It’s just how we think. I don’t blame French for doing this. I probably have done it a thousand times in everything I’ve written. We bleed our sentimentality onto things so we don’t have to cut the base from which we house our idea-making.

French continues, after Roe being repealed, “I described my attitude as joy in my heart tempered by disquiet in my spirit.” Flowery, but descriptive of something very human. Can’t we all empathize with the idea of your “spirit” perhaps opening like a pit in your stomach after you think you’ve won or got something you were after? Maybe at the highest it’s an Olympian getting their last gold medal, or you land a “perfect” someone that you won’t entertain criticism about.

After French describes his bona-fides, he discusses the shaky legal ground Roe rested upon, recalling Ginsburg’s criticisms of how it was decided. He describes the Civil Amendments as an attempt to correct for the in-built disenfranchisement of minority and historically oppressed communities. Oh, wait, no he didn’t. He phrased it as “deep flaws in the original Constitution that permitted states to systematically deprive individuals of their most basic human rights.” Wide birth, no? You can fit a lot of what the Constitution is “supposed” to do when you shy away from delineating what those “basic human rights” are, and who was being deprived and why.

In this loose language, French drops the hammer on the nail of his contention. The courts, now emboldened to, “begin the process of extending the blessings of liberty to every American” could do so, “Well, to everyone but the unborn.”

I find this a staggering sentiment offered by any Republican of any era or claimed “moderation.” This is the launching point of self-satisfied indignation that every, “I’m right, this is true, my friends think I’m right and true” ideologue thus steps into pretending there’s anything more “intellectual” about their position. Now it’s a faith claim. An “unborn” person, at whatever undefined stage fits their position, is, in fact-they-refuse-to-discern-to-any-shared-degree, a person. Proceed with bigger circling of reason that more resembles defense wagons.

Consider French’s own statement just 2 sentences later. “The ruling wasn’t just constitutionally unsound it was morally perverse.” Exactly. You have a “moral” issue, not an intellectual one. The problem, to any appreciable liberal observation, is that your “camp” has a tenuous grasp of “moral” considerations as it pertains to how we conduct and respect each other’s lives. Your camp “believe” they are writing and thinking and practicing true and correct things because their friends think they’re true and correct or their ideologues present true and correct enabling and validating feelings.

I’m considering the “camp” in this scenario, literally anyone who practices a propensity to write, read back what they write, and stubbornly and not-coincidentally continue to find themselves saying, “You know, this is true and correct” and despite their growing following and positive feelings generated from the association and spread of their ideas, will politely remind you, so humbly, their job isn’t to “please a crowd or build a coalition.”

Save it.

French claims to recognize the “animating moral essence” of the 14th Amendment. Well, now we can get into, you know, facts like the 14th Amendment existing to establish citizenship rights and equal protection to former slaves. For French’s position to hold true, you need to conceive of a fetus, in any stage of development, tantamount to a slave. Now, the extended “sympathy” you may hold to the “out of their control” nature of the vastly different scenarios starts to come into focus. Is a 12-week fetus a slave? Its circumstance the operant and mitigating condition? Do you really care to split-hairs regarding a zygote, embryo, and fetus when all you need is a vague slave-baby concept to feel ignited and righteous?

French continues to wonder what the “two-sides” will say to each other now that Roe is dead. He says, as all apologists tend to do, what their side “should” do, by committing to life, thus love, “to care for the most vulnerable members of society, both mother and child.”

Excuse me? WHEN, THE FUCK, HAS THAT EVER BEEN WHAT THE “RIGHT” HAS DONE!?

This is the ongoing fascination I have with “conservative” thought broadly. Whatever credible dissatisfaction and criticism you can offer of the Left or an extremist wing of any party, I can’t readily conceive of a more discernable difference in the tenor and type of differentiation between the animating vitriol of those who wish to control and suppress, codified in religious laws and folklore, and those driven by desperate naivety to lash out and exert control in-turn because they’re the target of the vastly outsized and controlling religious structure!

A ”radical leftist” is the target of religious legislation and “think tanks” and crimes and disproportionate attacks and statistics. This doesn’t excuse their lapses in reasoning, but it does account for it more than the honor-bound deliberate ignorance and laziness of the entitled powers that be.

French continues to say, “In deep-red America, a wave of performative and punitive legislation is seeping the land.” He discusses the bounty-laws, lawsuit incentives, and attacks on women. He shies away from denoting the sheer ambivalence to women dying as a result of failed pregnancies by calling those birthing circumstances “physically perilous,” while describing the “abolitionist” wing that would criminalize saving your own life.

In what strikes me as perilously and painfully unconstructive, French notes, “The culture of political engagement centers around animosity.” No, religious fascists drive their animosity through even a semblance of reason and civility. They have for as long as the country has existed. The “cultural” conditions have been in motion and were instantiated well-before you narrow your scope to exclude the dramatic and damning impact of the underlying norm your camp championed and iterated on to absurdist degrees.

French states, “The Dobbs ruling has landed in the midst of a sick culture, and the pro-life right is helping make it sick.” Just the “pro-life” right, huh?

Remember, we’re deep into the broader circle of reasoning, but in case you think I’m lying, French returns to form with more specifics. He states, “At this point I want to add a huge caveat. At the center of the grassroots pro-life movement are some of the finest people I’ve ever met in my life. Crisis pregnancy centers, for example, are staffed by people who have hearts full of love, and when the radical left firebombs those clinics, they’re firebombing the buildings and institutions that are giving an immense amount of hope to young women in distress.”

Holy shit.

Let’s leave aside that his point is predicated on anecdotal impressions of so many indiscriminate actors. “Finest people he’s ever met” suffices to him because, his friends are right and true. Again, he gets the opportunity to be right and true about writing the rightness and trueness of his friends. How many women negatively affected by crisis pregnancy centers do you think French is interested in speaking with? How detailed do you think he understands the nature of their shame imposition and psychological manipulation? He spends most of this article articulating his own lack of awareness to how he employs it, why would you expect him to recognize or consider how they use it?

It's when French manages to say the following, you wonder what precludes otherwise “intellectual” and decent people from using their capacity the whole way through:

“In the meantime, the Republican branch of the American church is adopting the political culture of the secular right. With a few notable exceptions, it not only didn’t resist the hatred and fury of the MAGA movement, it was the MAGA movement. And this is the culture that’s going to lead the effort to heal our nation, love the marginalized, and ask young women to face an uncertain future and endure a physical ordeal for the sake of sacrificial love?”

In moments like this I feel compelled to almost cry out, “You can see it too!?” What “moderate” republican or conservative position isn’t maga-adjacent or defaulting in its disregard and ambivalence for how things actually operate or how they play out in the lives of the actually oppressed? They, unironically, are so situated that way they deny the nature of their own oppression! You’re poor? VOTE FOR THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS! You’re dumb? CELEBRATE AND ENABLE CONTINUED IGNORANCE! Your camp is filled with actual pedophiles? INVENT THE CONSPIRACY THAT CALLS LIBERALS PEDOPHILES! A priest's first instinct is to shuffle the pedophile around the world, not acknowledge their complicated sexuality. So it goes for all oppression-oriented types.

It has always been about “the other” or “you” making the sacrifice in order for the dominant tribe to succeed and survive. French, again in staggering irony and confusion to me, pulls out a chart denoting the ignorance and literal death that befell those defiant of the science on covid. Yes, finally, once on the cosmic scorecard, the backwards and indignant got to viscerally experience what they’ve tacitly and explicitly built into their behavior regarding others since the dawn of time. Doesn’t French know his crowd isn’t interested in charts and numbers, though? Ah ha! He doesn’t have a crowd. He’s the maverick “pro-life intellectual” who doesn’t need a crowd or to build a coalition. Check out his “Good Faith” and “Advisory Opinions” podcasts though.

We’re getting close to the end, where the instinct to two-sides or falsely equivocate and “reconcile” takes hold. French states, “To criticize the anti-vaxx movement isn’t to hate or look down on its members any more than criticizing the pro-choice movement means hating or looking down on its members. Strong disagreement isn’t hatred, even when you believe the contrary position contains grave moral flaws.” Don’t you see? We’re all just subject to this hazy moral gray, and we can liken the nature of our disagreements to the in-built circumstances of this crazy and confusing life…right? Isn’t that great? We can get along now! We’re all making the same error, I just happen to have the moral high-ground.

French claims to not be able to get the “staggering death toll” out of his head. As though the history of ideological possession and the death it brings is foreign. As though you need look any further than any group of people captured by a vague set of ideals and dissatisfaction who move to content themselves with increasingly justified violence and intellectual isolation.

French: “In the face of that wave of death, a wave of death created by a staggering amount of Christian fear, disinformation, and defiance—millions of the same people who created that culture now loudly demand that other people sacrifice for life.”

Yeah, Jesus.

And as the comforting psychological underpinning of that lie unfolds with modernity, so it goes they look for the new sacrifice to get that visceral satisfaction from denying their own death and complicity in the death of others.

But, you know, as French drifts into more equivocation space, “There is a cost to this combat, and that cost is born in our ability to reach out to people outside our tribe and to have people believe us when we say that we care for them, that we want to see them flourish, and that we love their families—both red and blue.”

Remind me, which side “cares” by denying you bodily autonomy, the right to vote, the money for your time and labor, the chance to adopt, the right to marry, or pick-your-ongoing-sin now most-characterized by conspiracy and outright platformed election denial?

[980] This Too Shall Pass

 It’s hard to say if a lot has been on my mind, or if I’ve just had too much time to myself, but here we are again. The last thing I wrote was my 1000^th post to blogger. Every time I hit a “milestone” like that, I look for some kind of “extraness” in the air. I also beat my 8000^th level of Candy Crush today. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they both feel the same “meh.”

I think I just want to drill old themes. I’m feeling self-satisfied, or like I earned a kind of pretension about “things” or “the state of the world.” Does anyone remember when the “new atheists” first hit the scene? The God Delusion was all the rage and there were a series of debates and documentaries over the next few years that I couldn’t get enough of. At the heart of the fervor was a question on the method and discernability of truth. Do you adopt faith, or reason?

In the giant pile of books I read during that period, The Portable Atheist I remember leaving an impression because it provided historical accounts. The same fights I had been having online were recorded in ancient times. Word for word arguments and reasoning. It signaled the beginning of the end of my infatuation with the subject matter. The past reached out and told me, explicitly, I was never going to “win” the “argument.” In fact, it never was, nor ever will be, about an argument or “different views.” Something deeper, simpler, or just else was going on.

That we live in a world with seemingly unfettered access to all information, and yet are still compelled by fascism, propaganda, and try desperately to justify moves that control speech I think underscores the insight from above. “Everything” exists, or has existed, forever, and your agency, or lack thereof, is resulting in competing environments. You might think of those who say democracy has to be continually fought for. You might study various revolutions and discover they all rhyme. Your better angel is nestled inextricably against every evil thing you’re capable of. To the extent you deny or shy away from considering that idea, you rob yourself of your agency, and those with the most intention lead you around by the nose.

I think this is how I get the great distinction as the one to blame. I think a lot about the incidents I believe have lent themselves to the “ghosting” by my former college group. “We” didn’t party together. “I” threw the party, created an atmosphere where people just happened to find themselves hooking up and doing drugs. Something bad happens at the party? There’s a clear ringleader. No one else could have stepped in, banded together, or used their voice because, well, I was just so compelling, overwhelming, and every other slew of judgments volleyed over the years. So, of course if someone alleges rape, I probably did it. Of course, I knew that providing access to acid would result in a shitty afternoon for anyone who had to engage with Dave. A man can choose to go to war, but he can’t choose me shoving drugs down his throat.

To be sure, I’m not denying my capacity of my own agency. That’s, incidentally, the precise thing people utilize. I know how people tick. I own my power. Naturally, that’s not to be trusted, because when you’re surrounded by people who don’t recognize their agency, there’s literally nothing and no one else to blame if you won’t just pawn things off to your god. This works insidiously in the other direction when you consider “strong men” like Trump. Malignant narcissism is a manipulating force. You’re not going to describe yourself as victimized by the fascist. You’re going to revel in the symbolic embodiment of all it claims to be!

We do this, in our respective camps, until we die or the cows come home. We have little snippets of art or religious lore to suggest to us how to behave better, but they fall prey to that deeper, simpler, other thing. We don’t really know a great many things, in fact, an infinite number of things. Whatever can be said of our consciousness, it was much simpler in baser-animal form for most of conscious existence. All we had were “beliefs.” My cat “believes” it’s going to starve if I don’t feed it when it’s hungry. My cat “believes” it “deserves” to eat from the trash, sleep on me, bug me for affection, or to play with things that are not toys.

I think the internet allowed us to accelerate the march to the cliché of, “You believe what you believe, I’ll believe what I believe.” When the god verses science talk was kicking off, I didn’t just get to “debate” with other interested intellectuals who had studied the same material, it was a free-for-all of every opinion and potentially patently crazy view vying to snuff out facts and figures. You can’t tolerate the intolerable. It didn’t occur to me that those people weren’t after the same thing and weren’t governed by the same rules. After all, to them, it looks and feels like they’re doing “god’s work” and are the correct and righteous camp. Even those not on their side adopt that rationale to “respect other’s beliefs” routinely.

For what might be innocently lazy reasons, this all feels acceptable until you’re at the end of the judgement stick. All of a sudden, you and your reasons wish to be understood. You’re magically cured of the de facto group reasoning, and it becomes important both you and them agree on why you shouldn’t be burned at the stake. If you’ve spent all your time thus far swimming in familiar pools and schools, you probably don’t realize in the same way there is no argument, you can’t win, and fire awaits provided you keep making appeals to the crucifiers.

What do you do? Do I obsess every day that I’ve been accused of rape? No, but I evaluate drunken circumstances and the hook-up culture I helped cultivate and don’t try to recreate the circumstances. Has my behavior been questionable? Absolutely. Have I ever forced someone to fuck? Fuck no. I’m not scared to talk about it or say it either lol. It’s not controversial to me to not rape someone and then talk about how you didn’t do so even if you can empathize with drunk regret. I don’t need to attack someone’s feelings or credibility to understand the perspective that localizes me as the one responsible. Could I have guessed Dave’s time on acid wasn’t going to go great? It was better than even odds. You know what neither I, nor any of his “friends” did, tell him not to. He was adamant he was going to do more. Personally, I kind of prefer that he at least did it around people and not by himself given the state of his mental health at the time.

The begrudging truth, independent of our subjective opinions, is we cultivate the landscape together, or it cultivates us. We take responsibility for choices we acknowledge and we can examine the routes we took to get there. Is it littered with finger-pointing? It’s why I’ve trained myself to blame “you,” the voiceless, formless, ironic void that I speak into when I find the urge to reiterate the infinite moment we’re either suffering or utilizing.

How do you arrive at truth? Is it even possible? This is the garbage being used politically to obfuscate important lines in how we identify ourselves. Those fed up with the game follow the leader to whatever claims they make. Those maybe angry enough at the deterioration get loud and occupy space. Those with the resources, perspective, or otherwise manifest as personally gratifying consequences and efforts to preserve environments, mental and physical, that instantiate their power. The fundamental irony being that we can’t really know our power, because we don’t know the contributions and deficits offered in every moment of our attempted exercise of it. Moreover, we don’t want to know. It would interrupt our personal narrative. It would make us feel insignificant and uncomfortable. It might disrupt our ideas of who and what we’re responsible to.

Personally, I feel on the border of “too powerful.” I say this only because of my attitude to that $42 bottle of wine, if you’ve been paying attention to me. I do slip, in that, I’m human, and forgo the amount of agency or power I might otherwise exert. I can’t control my heart rate and blood pressure.  I can’t reflexively think “positive” or “forgiving” thoughts when people do things I feel license to get pissed off about. I feel like the world is closing in on me. The more I pay attention to those incidents, the less I feel I know what my responses are supposed to represent if they’re merely reactive. I stop existing in those moments.

To that end, to the extent I want to just “feel good” in my loathing or sense of injustice, I can adopt a reactionary and judgmental posture that refuses to engage with the infinite question and situation at hand. I can judge myself as lazy or unworthy of the brain and body I’ve been given. I can call my exercise of time “wasteful.”  I can set psychological barriers to my enjoyment or prejudge the consequences of my actions as though I don’t have meaningful reasons for why I do anything.

I don’t want people needlessly harmed by who I am or how I behave. I won’t deny seeing how their behavior doesn’t return the favor. Whether it’s the “harm” of being a dumb loud cunt in an environment where you should be quieter, or the physical and psychological harm of playing with human vulnerability. I’ve generally chosen the pursuit of incorporating the negative feedback, exploring where it came from, and identifying the circumstances under which I might act or believe the same. It’s been a lot of work. It’s been over 1000 dives into how I’m using my words and orienting myself, and I’m still working stories from college, if not my childhood, into the dough.

What are you doing? I’m kidding lol. I know you’re not gonna tell me. You won’t even tell yourself.

[979] So There

The last couple days have driven a point about my nature and how I’ve evolved. One of the more depressing and low periods of my life was when I spent the better portion of every day reading. I learned so much about the state of the world, history, philosophy, and cutting-edge science. I knew, down to the technical compounds and structures why solar panels were going to be worth the investment. You could name a country at random, and I probably had 2 or 3 facts about it. I remember being tested on that by Hatsam at Kilroy’s once. Man, was I knowledgeable, and very lonely and sad.

You see, in spite of my $10,000 or more in the bank, relative health, relationship, or concept of the associations I kept, the world was trending in the wrong direction. I felt a kind of duty to pay attention. My blogs are like a time-capsule sometimes depending on what I reference that’s been in the news. The Tea Party and Sarah Palin were big bold letters on the wall for me, and come to think of it, that was even pre time spent way too involved reading.

Often, I’m just tracking negligence. More than there are just so many “bad guys” out there, I recognized pretty quickly that the whole “evil prevails when good does nothing” was an understatement. Somewhere along the way, our concept of good and evil broke. I blame the internet, but I also blame silence. I see more sin in silence than anything. You stay silent long enough and forget that you have an obligation and duty to speak. You practice fear, and you let the definition of things like “evil” or “good” devolve into semantic pissing matches or absurd feeling analysis.

How does this speak to how I’ve evolved? Well, I’ve been spending. I’ve been “buying experiences” as those wise in the ways of the world profess. I’ve been to a concert or comedy show almost every weekend for several months, and have them scheduled through September. Even if I capitalized on a deal and got a lot of them for $25 apiece, they’re all an hour away. Gas ain’t cheap. The comedy shows are a two-item minimum. I’m usually in the city early and grabbing dinner or drinks. And a good portion of the shows were not $25.

One of the last concerts I went to, I mistakenly ordered a bottle of wine I thought was coming as a glass. It was $42. The bar tender, after I spoke to my error, was willing and making moves to sell me the glass. I thanked her and said something like, “I get paid tomorrow, whatever just give me the bottle. I have nothing else to pay for but increasing levels of indulgence. No kids. It’s not going to charity. I just bought some shit on Amazon. If not this, what do I think that money is going to turn into?” I have a fair number of conversations and commentaries around people that go on too long.

I expressed a fairly dismal and fatalistic point. Buying $42 bottles of wine, that I didn’t even want, not really, is the kind of personal faux pas or failure serving as the analogy for displeasure I have with “things” or “life” or my old “friends” at large. When I was working 3 jobs and staying up 20 hours a day, $42 represented maybe a week’s worth of cheap fast food to keep me barely alive enough to keep working. I wasn’t cooking in my “free” time. $42 is less than half a tank of gas in my truck. $42 is somehow way too much, yet incredibly little when your environment is ever-cultivated by a set of indulgences or “refined” and “earned” tastes and privileges.

$42 is not buying me healthcare. It’s not changing the minds of my politicians, local or otherwise. It’s not being spent to treat a friend to dinner. I’m not overindulging my cats who play with Starburst wrappers as enthusiastically as they do bread ties. It’s not building a school in an impoverished area. It’s not being invested in the future of the planet. It’s just there. It’s just mine to “do with as I please” because I’ve ascended to another peak. I can spend a couple thousand, build half a workspace, chill for a while, make the money back, or spend more because I can’t plan to save my life, and the only thing changing is the number and nature of options I give myself for staying entertained or chasing the idea that I’ve learned or achieved something.

I want to believe that $42 is earmarked for something “important” like a vital tool or part of the lessons on some music app I download. I want to think some negative emotion I might conjure about the $42 represents my respect for my past and the work and struggle it has been to achieve this level of stability. $42, in actual time spent and effort, at least this last two weeks, is less than 2 hours I was probably asleep because I’m on salary and have had almost nothing to do. I said in a blog recently I’m not a millionaire feeding $100 bills into a machine. I fed $42 into a wine machine with a guaranteed prize I didn’t want.

The U.S. has been on salary for way too long. My middle-to-upper-middle class friends/associations have been blowing their awareness, obligations, and capacity for real work in $42 increments for…at least since I’ve been writing about and imploring people to speak back or help out. You stay silent with something to say? $42 pissed away. You self-censor and play nice with genuinely oppressive danger and death? 42 regretful dollars not going into something, anything, but this empty pit where some inaccessible and increasingly hard to remember feeling should be.

I’ve worried for a while what might happen to me if I get too comfortable. I’ve had “too much,” yet hopelessly never enough, money for a good portion of my adult life. I’ve only made investments that have enabled that propensity to stretch even further. If I save for a few months and get another $10,000 or $15,000 in the bank, you know what I don’t have to do? Buy land, my shed, my tools, my truck or any of the other pieces and labor it has taken to get me typing from my home verses a couch or rental property. I paid attention to, and believed, the threat of what I was watching back then. I’m not anymore hopeful or with any less examples of how we need to operate and speak now.

Election denial is the standard of conversation. Roe v Wade just got overturned like we’re actually in a dystopian movie. Mind you, it’s just the latest in all of the rights and laws that have been getting attacked for many years, and for those paying attention, like so many Cassandras they go. We haven’t been getting more environmentally friendly, or has the weather felt “normal” to you? Housing and homeless crises are ballooning, you know, a problem that was fixed in the 70s for, I guess about, 30 seconds. You getting paid enough? You think about the next routine errand you’ll be on before staring down an assault weapon?

I’ve been the person habitually last to leave. I would play a videogame with a failing strategy, moving piece by piece until I could crack what I was getting wrong or until I became too physically exhausted to continue. Or, once until my RA came out to make fun of me. I wanted to party until the bar closed. I wanted to have hang-out breakfast sessions the morning after a party. I’ve historically won Risk or poker when everyone else got bored. I stick with bad television series because I started them, and if I know nothing else about it, I can say I saw it and completed it.

My hyper-angsty vigilance occupied that space. I feel like I’ve been trying to talk myself out of it for many years. So what if I knew things about many countries? No one’s talking to me about them. So what if I raise the alarm and hold up and celebrate those who are doing the work and paying attention? No one’s reading or sharing the articles to their circles. So what if I write? I garner likes here and there, but I swing pretty wildly. From barely-coherent entangling of disparate ideas and provocative disquieting sentiments to occasional earnest insight, I’m a mixed bag. No one’s asking me to unpack the unpacking or challenging my analogies or introducing the manner in which I engage with the world to their friends.

I spent $28 on sea food, then $5 on fancy chocolate, before a hilarious show by Stephen Lynch tonight. I spent $12.50 more on McDonald’s on the drive home. The show, in again peak irony, had me sitting next to a drunk, fat (her word, not mine), and screaming often and loudly enough woman that Stephen literally said, “Shhh, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I can’t even hear myself.” When she first sat down, she extended her hand and introduced herself and her friends. She said her husband was just deployed for a year and she was happy to be out. She asked me what my favorite song was and if I was a fan.  She told me she was going to make me her friend even though she’d been annoying me. At that point, I felt compelled to correct her that she hadn’t been annoying me. The silent part was “yet.”

Heedless in indulgence, tactless, classless, but sincerely hurting and very clearly low in self-esteem reaching out to shake my disinterested hand in some mockery of connection. It was a small-enough crowd in an intimate enough venue, and Lynch was so funny, that I ruled out just moving seats further away. It’s unbecoming to pity people, but I feel my embarrassment on her behalf was similar to her friend’s girlfriend also sitting at the table and having none of it.

I almost engaged in a goal-reiteration exercise instead of writing. It’s so fundamental to mental health and behavior-change. But for someone like me, it’s like doing jaw exercises. I’m talking enough, my shit is strong. I know my goals, I pursue my goals, and I put their achievement on display pretty regularly. When I claim to be disoriented, at least along what I want and work on, disorientation is not the word. The only thing I can’t get to align is a preponderance of people working with me on the same things. Be it indulgences, their purported goals, and certainly nothing we’ve conceived together. We can all change our profile pictures to The Handmaid’s Tale, but you’re not going to start listening to the podcasts and reading the books that are telling you of the next Roe v Wade catastrophes now. You didn’t care then, you don’t now, and the handful of naïve and incensed “youth” will get 10% back of what’s been taken away over the last 50 years in 30 years.

I’ve known more than intuitively for several years that I need to escape. We’re not getting better. We’re not “woke” to genuine injustice. We don’t “work” as much as exhaust ourselves in self-pity and ignoble sacrifices. We obscure and blame and wag our fingers and drink gallons of expensive whining. Why didn’t I want to get drunk? There was nothing to celebrate and no one to share it with. I’m extremely thankful for the friends and my dad who’ve shown up and come bowling or to shows. I might have a mini heart-attack the day some insanely informed and coherent article I share gets shared. Maybe when I have the money to pay people to work like I want them to I’ll create a powerful enough engine to turn things in as comprehensive a manner as I need them too. Maybe I just need to run to a part of the world not designed to thrive on greed and zealotry.

I’m only mildly concerned there’s more $42 bottles of wine on my horizon. I don’t want to be attached to the drama of it all anymore. I don’t want self-imposed guilt at carving out what I’ve previously described as excessively selfish spaces for me and mine while things around me burn. I’ve said many times I’m not a martyr, and that includes for any ideas that no longer serve me or prove to result in very little, if any, value. Staying informed and earnestly advocating wins no one. Providing space and leaning hard for time spent watching, laughing, or rocking out garners a touch of connection. When I finally cross over into making absurdist caricatures and ironic virtue-signaling with a hot dance and backing track TikTok videos, I’ll have legions.

If historically we’ve only just now flirted with the idea of liberal democracy, breaking the chains of gilded rulers, and the long arc of history is a myth, and the peasants ruminate in their misery because, to them, it’s psychologically satiating to consider the meat of the rich “unsavory,” what side of the gated-community would you want to be on? I don’t think God’s going to reward me for going down swinging in advocacy, social work, or sense of common decency in spite of the license our cultural ambivalence may grant me. I don’t see statistics suggesting we’re getting better, even with Pinker screaming global trends while ignoring asteroids. I don’t sense that anyone has time, attention, or enthusiasm. I know busy, quiet, psychologically isolated and insecure people, watching, just not too closely.

I posted an article recently talking about quantum mechanical experiments confirming the overlapping “everything is possible” or “simultaneous potential” status of existence until there’s something about consciousness to snap it into focus. The future where I type something other than this sentence literally doesn’t exist until I observe the matter in the computer, my fingers, and my brain arranged that way. It’s not that it can’t exist nor that it’s inevitable that it will or won’t. It’s that I consciously arrange the words, move my fingers, and collapse an infinite series of wave functions into “my” perspective and these words, noises, or connections, instead of every other “thing” they might be. I’ve consistently felt the “mechanistic” arguments and “simple cause and effect” positions lacking, and the science keeps moving in my direction.

Practically. I don’t see what I think needs to exist. I don’t see you collapsing your potential into the tools we need, the words we need, the awareness, investment, risk, and fight. I don’t see the resistance, the rally, nor hear the battle cries. I occasionally see waves of pictures, hashtags, and every few years or so someone will write something from their own perspective, and then immediately apologize for the “rant.” Because who wants to listen to them, right? Not anyone that matters. Not anyone who wants to simply follow their cultivated brand. Not me who’s imploring people weekly for 16 years to say more and try new ways to revolve. Why should they be an authority or have any esteem and pride in what they said?

You’re a bunch of fucking pussies, Americans. You’ve been courting death for so many years you don’t have a memory of the values the country was founded upon. You instinctively respond to challenges with avoidance and denial. You prefer addiction. You prefer to suffer because it’s all you’ve ever known. The punctuated incidences of happiness feel like shame and worthy of suspicion, so you insist on destroying the means by which it might happen again. You “believe what you believe,” and “won’t judge” in an effort to deny being stuck in the most damming and deadly judgment indefinitely. “It” won’t get better because you aren’t.

[978] You Pull Me Down

I went to another concert today. In my totally absent-minded approach that’s increasingly taking over my life, I didn’t even register where its actual location was until I was sitting in a restaurant 40 minutes away. It probably could have been held where I thought it was going to be, Mr. Josh Groban didn’t draw that large of a crowd for a Thursday, but that’s not important. The sequence of events in my body and mind during it was, at least briefly. Bitches be talking.

You might know, I’ve complained about how we seemed to have collectively forgotten that you need to shut the fuck up in a movie theater. I lamented that I could readily predict one in three movies I was going to have to “shush,” say, “Shut the fuck up,” or otherwise adjust my posture relative to some dumb cunt sitting near me. Well, this last time, as two whispery, coughy, and ever-undulating obese people carried on as they found the last Jurassic Park movie more and more boring, I just moved to the other side of the theater.

At the concert, at all concerts, I wear earplugs. If I didn’t, I’d probably lose my hearing within the course of a year. If I can hear you talking, laughing, or otherwise being an oblivious and entitled cunt, on top of the music no less, you’re being too loud. If you’re that way for song after song, and I’m growing more and more agitated, that I managed to respond to it in the way that I did I’m rather impressed with. My adrenaline shot through the roof as I stared them down, which, of course, they didn’t notice. I literally turned around and just watched them for 3 minutes.

Let’s set the scene. They’re about 7 seats away and 2 rows back. 3 middle-aged women, and one who brought her daughter. I could sum it up with, “It’s Karens, you know the type,” we are in Noblesville, after all, but that feels cheap if still correct. I’m getting jittery. I’ve accidentally purchased an entire bottle of wine for $42 which I had zero desire to finish. I’ve also just eaten the world’s soupiest snow-cone.

I got to thinking. I didn’t want to make them about me. I, pretty habitually, can turn things about me well without my desire or intention. I rehearse the lines I might say. “Hey! Shut the fuck up!” Classic. Do I look like a dweeb around all of these ageless greys and just make an exasperated shush and add my finger to my lips to really sell it? I shouldn’t have to be thinking about any of this shit! I’m not even some major fanboy of Josh Groban, but fucking gas is expansive, and I live an hour and a half away, and I’m pissing away even more money on wine and sugar, and I just want to sit here in the moment with a good singer without constantly jerking my head over my shoulder to investigate your dumb fucking ass.

Finally, I snap. I jerk around and yell out, “Hey, are you enjoying the concert!? It’s good right!? You enjoying yourself? Can you hear it okay!?” They get Karen-face and one attempts to turn it into a conversation about how they’ve been talking the entire time…I turn around and reinsert my earplug. They talk even louder for the back half of the song. They don’t speak for the next. They continue, ever-slightly muted for the rest of the concert afterward. I still want to fucking stab the one in particular.

It’s not that “all people” are a certain way. It’s that today, the worst of what it means to be a person has been given such license that we all carry on like that bitch isn’t in the wrong. And not just in the wrong, but wrong in a deep and profound way. She came to a concert to disrespect the artist, the people around her, and when confronted, doubled the fuck down. Can I think of a more on-the-nose analogue to this Faustian nightmare that is Trumpism? My blood pressure is skyrocketing trying not to be the sore thumb about the raging bloody cunts bleeding into our collective experience. I remain extremely confident that no one else is going to say anything, and if they feel the same pulse and stress that I did, they won’t handle it in as contemplative or a proactive way.

I’m very disoriented. It confuses me when I reach out to 3 to 5 people, and get no response all day, particularly if I know their phone behavior. I’ve had next to nothing to do in this “training” period, so I’ve had a lot of idle time at home, cleaning and rearranging things, and ordering more not-precisely crap from Amazon. I spent, and this must be a form of self-deceptive theater, YEARS avoiding reading this manga I find very interesting, and with the books in front of me, I’m dragging it out. The goal isn’t to get it done, like so many bad TV shows. I enjoy it. It’s intriguing where so little else is. I want to sit with it and think about it and escape into its lurid landscape.

But, that’s what I want out of my life. I want books to be a playground, not an alternate reality I’m desperate for. I want to live in a world where people shut the fuck up and respect each other, and none of us need finishing school to figure that shit out. I want to live in a world where the minority zealots don’t capture the majority psychologically. But I don’t. I live in a quiet place, by myself, in a tick-ridden field and occasionally pop my head out at the prospect of capitalizing on the misery or distracting myself with a shiny new stage performance. And they’re coming for that too, like they’re coming for libraries, and fucking water!

When is it over? When will the deluge of opinions about how to conduct life coalesce into either enough death that whomever is left over can try something new, or we just stop letting the mouthy cunts dictate the noise? There’s a goddamn performance and work on display every day that we just cede or ignore. Like so many texts and so many blogs with so many words that speak to who?