[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.