[982] That Was Easy

Something’s missing.

This is probably one of the most consistent thoughts I have even if it never sounds so precise. I’ll eat something, but it won’t quite hit the spot. I’ll discover a new and useful tool, but it just doesn’t meet what I’d ideally like it to do. An endless blur of TV drones on with dialogue that doesn’t get there and plot points playing out an existential crisis one cliché and predictable episode at a time. I write, and am lucky to find maybe half of what I wished to say because I’m trying to capture what’s missing; the empty or wanting feeling more often persists than gets alleviated.

I’ve named consistently what’s been missing from my experience. From getting into this habit, I’ve been able to zero in more on both the nature of my desires, and what does or does not change upon acquiring them. I know how to match my words to the process of altering my feelings. It never has been, nor will ever be, that I “just don’t feel” or “don’t care.” I’m doing work. I recognize the language, tone, body language, and series of spontaneous utterances that tell me when you’re doing the work too.

What is “the work?”

I’ve spoken about “the machine” I put together that tried to colloquially break down for my clients at the methadone clinic a means for processing their thoughts and actions. I took from what helped or inspired me, and walked people through headings that started with “responsibility.” For as increasingly controversial and perhaps pettiness and anger that I have begun to observe from Jordan Peterson, I think he was spot on when he stressed personal responsibility.

I think many get confused when you talk about personal responsibility. They believe they’re supposed to “feel” some kind of way about “everything.” It comes across like an obligation, most often unwanted, and unfair. It is all of those things. Literally no one chooses to exist. By default, you aren’t asked to cope with what you look like, sound like, how much brain power you don’t have, or the series of horrendous circumstances you might find yourself in. To even suggest you have a responsibility is the most unfair thing possible. You caused none of it, and now you have to clean up? Now you have to fight? Now you have to sacrifice and risk whatever otherwise happiness or stability you’ve achieved? Who in their right fucking mind would bother?

So let’s be the rational actor, disappearing into their little world. They work hard, they send their kids to school, they recycle, and hell, they even donate to charity and vote. This plays out with regularity, tinged with righteous indignation, most often unvoiced, for those who can’t be bothered to leave you alone to “do you.” You’ll just move to a “blue state” or you’ll hole up with a gun cache and wait for the threat or until the leadership unleashes you. It’s pretty much chaos at all times, as far as you can tell from the headlines…just keep swimming.

I’ve felt like I’m surrounded by fish with so many missing memories. Whether it was about things we were supposed to have meant to each other, or the reasons we drunkenly blathered for why we were going to create something. When I talk about the superficial nature of my relationships, it has a lot to do with shaking off the responsibility to understand or engage. I know it’s often dangerous and disingenuous to take your personal experience and try to map things writ large, but I’ve been deeply examining the minutia of my experience for so long, I’m hardly, if ever, surprised or confused by “everything” being shit or things breaking down.

I’m not so naïve as to think it’s just not “my friends” who don’t wish to have an ongoing dialogue that tackles difficult subjects. That’s people. I’m fascinated with Sam Jay who seems to have built a brand around having dialogues. Will “the culture” be better for it? Or is it treated like a niche window into how a handful of people discuss their lives in something of a Taxi Cab Confessions manner with a comedic twist?

I don’t know that we’re built for “democracy.” I don’t think people are really thinking. I think they follow scripts, occasionally they get backed into corners or alter their mind chemically, and then what might be considered an actual thought or several start to come out. Because our brains are always doing “something,” we conceive of this as “thinking.” You think you thought about what you wanted to eat. You think you have an opinion on an inflammatory headline. You think you don’t like how something feels, so it’s bad, should be cancelled, or isn’t worth your time and attention.

I don’t respect liars. Part of my ongoing disconnect with people is their willingness to lie. It’s almost always lies of omission, but those omissions add up to a lot of work not being done. It’s lies dictated by fear for real repercussions that preclude even entertaining ways of changing or fixing something.

You know who doesn’t lie like that? Crazy people. They lie loud and proud and with their entire being. They lie for generations and build it into institutions. They lie through things literally understood throughout time as “deadly sins” and are proud, greedy, and grow fat off your silence, fear, or indifference. You know why history is wrought with war and martyrs? It’s not that ancient civilizations didn’t have rational people. They weren’t full of those incapable of empathically understanding their neighbor. The crazy, ever waiting, got louder and louder until they ate themselves alive. We’re just playing out our modern version of the script.

I’ve definitely chilled in my enthusiasm for people the more I…tried. The more I worked. The more I invited. The more I carried the enthusiasm. The more I rooted for and believed in. The more I sacrificed, the less pull people had on me. I’m dispositionally pretty distant, but also, when I tried not to be, I tried not to be like how I do things. I went all-in. I’m not going to truly challenge my worst ideas about who and how to manipulate unless I give myself over to the idea that there are people it’s worth it not to behave like that towards. Did I pick the wrong batch of people? Almost certainly, but I can’t deny what it taught me.

Today we have “ghosting,” because so many of our bonds are so fragile and arbitrary. My “style” or manner of communication set myself up to be “ghosted” by dozens of people in short succession. Whether it be gossipy rumor mills or the facebook chat that doesn’t get responded to for months, the message is clear. I don’t matter, at least to them. How much suffering might it cause a person who locates their “missing” piece in the interactions with people who want nothing to do with them? I wouldn’t wish that on most. At least with someone like me, it’s not a secret that I didn’t generally make you “feel good” nor do any better of a job of that today than I did then.

I’m always struck by the contrast in assessments of my behavior, words, or choice interactions with what I consider actually bad if not considerably worse things. I don’t mean to suggest that because big bad things happen in the world that you should ignore critical feedback or not take responsibility for your actions, but I’ve never found people more thoughtful, more vocal, or more willing to share than when they were angry with me. Not the world, not themselves, but what’s fucked up about me was ever so clear and particularly worth singular condemnation. It’s a point of ongoing fascination, not because I’m regularly eliciting negative feedback, but because the reasons why I see infused all over.

I say the quiet part out loud. I say anything at all, but I most often choose to say the prickly things. Moreover, I disagree the prickly things can be dealt with when we carry ourselves like so many balloons. You can’t “cancel” fascism. You can’t “persuade” me that fat is beautiful, on myself or otherwise. When conservatives bemoan a “woke agenda,” it’s scenes in Star Trek that go on way too long with the awkward non-binary kid staring at her(oops) gay dad in all of his glorious understanding. And I don’t even mean to suggest that these are particularly relevant or strong points and topics to get all fussy about. It’s just what’s on offer today. The march - the practical, detailed, and deliberate crazy is working to erode rights because it’s working. It’s working on the means by which things exist or don’t.

The crazy march voices its lies. It’s proud in its opposition. It’s not been a secret that Roe v Wade was a target. It’s not been a secret the billions of opinions offered as to what Jesus meant. It’s not a secret that the country is failing. It’s not a secret that homemade signs and megaphones mean precisely dick to those with money, influence, and organized decades-long systems for instantiating power.

What’s the work? Did I ever get around to answering the question? First, acknowledge how complicated “everything” is. You don’t get to silence people; I don’t care how hot your topic is or righteous your cause. You don’t have to invite David Duke to speak at your graduation ceremony or entertain him on your platform, but he gets to speak. But that’s easy to understand if you’re remotely thoughtful. Really, what is the work?

You have to stop lying. You have to speak up, but you have to do so in a way that isn’t furious concurrence with the status quo of your social circle. You have to own that the moment you choose to take anything from the shelf of life, you have to follow or establish the rules of the store. Right now we’re letting the crazy lock us inside and poison the food because they “believe” a whole series of incoherent self-gratifying catch-phrases. Like that bitch in “The Mist,” they need to be shot in the head, and preferably before they literally need to be shot in the head.

What is the work? You have to keep asking. The work is to build bravery, coalitions, and organize around deep understandings of the history and context in which decisions get made and power flows. I don’t have half a dozen friends who’ve been on this journey since college on this land with a series of practical responses to the things we worried and complained about graduating high school the year before the financial crash. We heard about climate change back then. We saw Sarah Palin. We fucked off, moved to different corners, got all in our feelings and suffered in adult silence in our jobs and relative first-world poverty. Brilliant set of go-getters we were.

All of this rests on what you think your responsibility is though. Is it to yourself? Certainly, in some important sense. You have to be in a good spot if you want to help others. Is it to “the world?” Now you’re just kind of being naively vague. You certainly don’t feel like you have a responsibility to talk to me lol. We get older and decide it’s just about our sliver of the world. We forget, very actively, that there is no “personal” world. Just the one we’re all plugged into for better or mostly worse. When “our” world is characterized by silence, and pithy rallies in lieu of seized power, “my” sliver gets sharper, cutting away at my dreamiest conception of where I am financially, psychologically, or socially.

I try to conduct myself in a manner I think serves “the” world, subjectively processed, but not persuaded by. I’m comfortable asserting how much I don’t know. I’m able to label when and why and how I have patience to entertain difficult subjects or judgments. I try incredibly hard to give as honest an appraisal as I can of what I see, hear, and experience in those pre-verbal parts of my brain that tell me time and again how much I’m missing. The thing about what’s missing is that it’s not just lost to time or impossible to find. It’s just what people refuse to do until they’re forced. Be honest. Fight. Talk about what “no one” wants to talk about.

I’m weirdly ambivalent about Roe getting overturned. I wish I could believe that maybe we’ll get some real anger this time. But what has history taught me? Do Black lives still matter? I could have swore with George Floyd’s blessing we’d be seeing some real change in society this time. Can you remember the last person to get #metoo-ed? Weren’t there so many feelings and testimonies and major revelations associated? Like the Panama Papers or those Occupy Wall Street guys! It’s almost like there’s this pattern of “outrage” that begets increasingly horrible circumstances as all of the ignorantly incensed retreat after failing to identify and address which mechanisms and holders of power don’t give a fuck about them.

It's going to be really hard to abandon the land. I’ve put in a lot of work. It’s a huge indication of what I “believe” in. It testifies to what I think the proper response to the chaos around us is. Salvage, conserve, diversify, learn new shit, give yourself more time, money, and space to create, reconceive of your space and how it can be used, and build into your bones how long it takes to achieve something meaningful. I’d bet $1000 that the videogame junkies are still videogaming and the middle-management jobs are just barely paying the bills, and the reality of so many lives hastily pursued in service of placating “discomfort” is crystalizing in joints, arteries, and daily happy-pills. But what do I know? No one’s going to talk about that unless it’s on-brand or a trending meme or can be summarized by a change in profile picture.

If I wanted to pretend I wasn’t living in a fascist country, I could continue to laud my efforts and chop, grind, and stack away without a care in the world. If I wanted to pretend like I didn’t expect myself to have a “house house” and a considerably higher bank account by 34, I could ride this train into oblivion. My country failed me. My peers failed themselves. I won’t let myself get sucked into my own narrative. I will keep talking about what’s missing. I will continue to feel bad because I allow myself the obligation and dignity of a responsibility to change my circumstances. I can plan and invest and demonstrate that I believe in more than either my most fanciful or damming conceptions.

It's always going to suck. I’m always going to feel alone. And I get to die either way, I’m just trying to avoid it happening via stray bullet or my neighbor making me a bogey-man. It’d be illegal to abort me at least.

I’m missing my match. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of educated people saying considerably more articulate and cited versions of my sentiments. It’s not that I don’t have people in my life who work as hard as I do, especially when it’s work none of us care to be doing for the money offered. It’s certainly not that there aren’t people who are angry and exhausted and trying in some manner or another. But if I met me? If I had another person who could do what I do like I do it, be loud about it, encourage and be open to exploring and trying and investing. Who did things “now” because time is precious, showed up because to be invited is an honor, and could pair incisive yet hilarious observation with the spirit of inherent knowledge that there’s a way through provided we do the work ourselves? Jesus wouldn’t have a prayer. I’ve been lucky enough to have 4 people who flicker on and off in riding with me at that level. But I’m a junkie. I want it all the time. And if we weren’t running out of time when I started, we sure as fuck don’t have any now.

I just have my back, the integrity of my tools, the patience extended for jobs and tasks that don’t recognize me, my debt, and my will or motivation to turn any nice day into something “more productive” than my mere enjoyment of it. That humbles you and chills you out. I learned how to watch “all TV,” and how to allow myself to read nonfiction, or enjoy a beer or hobby. I can do all that alone or surrounded by people. I can speak to when I’m not feeling like I’m fighting the good fight as well as I’d like. I may only be able to take so much responsibility for the mismatch between what I feel is my responsibility and how I’m able to respond to it, but at least I fucking claim the responsibility, talk about its nature, and try to own what is or isn’t working. Here’s another 4 and a half pages none of us have the time or energy for sorting out. I’ll be sure to reread it several times so I can still allow myself to sleep.