[998] Deep See Diver

What if I was able to persuade myself into what I’ll call a “fundamental wait?”

I’m impatient. As far as I understand myself, I’ve always been that way. I had to get my school work done NOW. I had to master some aspect of a videogame well past the point of frustration or needing to sleep. If the world is ending, I walk along a path where so much of the ground beneath me is cracked and fallen away. I’m, by disposition, situated to want “the next thing” while I’m literally in the midst of having gotten the series of things I’ve wanted before.

I either don’t describe myself as getting some “fundamental” thing, or I’ve just given up on expecting more from the nature of what happens when you want something. There aren’t so many moments I truly wish to sit in, quasi-enjoyable or otherwise. If I was learning a new song or technique, that harkens back to the obsessive place of playing videogames. If I’m enjoying a show, I’m often pulling away from any particularly “deep” investment in the writers or networks doing good by it the whole time. The “want” in watching so much television is to fuel the engine of seeking ever-more in a way that was more sustainable.

I feel like in thinking so often about death, it allowed me to transform impatience into an appreciation for what was in front of me more than I was able to find “patience.” I’m still incredibly impatient. It rears its ugly head the moment I put something meaningful to me in the hands of anyone else. I can’t (shouldn’t) necessarily rely on anyone to work as quick or potentially pathologically as me, nor are they going to have the same internal sense about the order of operations in prioritizing what gets attended to.

 I don’t really know what “patience” looks like. It takes the same form as “forgiveness” to me. Both feel like derivatives of “understanding.” I don’t forgive my mom, but I understand her in the context of millions of broken people with brains running aberrant patterns. I’m not patient with difficult people or scenarios, I just understand that it’s not my fight, it’s not personal, and I’m comfortable being honest with myself about how, fundamentally, I just really don’t care. After I understand all of that about them and myself I begin to move into “actual choice” space to engage the spite engine and carry on “moral” or “human” enough to not feel at the whims and mercy of the ambivalent chaos of culture.

I embody what it feels to not care, and it clues me in to how little I’m cared for. There are good and bad reasons that so many of us may recognize and feel the same. You can “wait it out” the lack of care of an “institution” that lumbers along and is so deliberately obscure. You can feel and react to the person behind the desk who talks to you like trash. When you can’t find or define the person, and lack sufficient insight about yourself, you land in a place of thought-policing and calls to destroy abstract feeling-provoking conversations or disagreeable governing practices.

I try to not throw the baby out with the bath water. I can identify the things about me, the institutions I join, and the ideas I haven’t made more explicit, and how they are at war to dictate how I move in the world. I don’t, most of the time, blow up on the person behind the desk. I probably don’t conceive of them as an individual person to begin with. I understand being constrained by institutional forces. I know the vast majority of time I ever wish to blow up is informed by a dozen things inconveniently adding up before a fateful encounter.

But, I don’t have a fundamental ability nor argument for not, at some point, “blowing shit up.” The universe doesn’t stop entire galaxies from colliding, why should I concern myself with the fallout of battling semantics or designating and removing a cancer working upon the cultural zeitgeist? This feels like a fancy way of justifying solipsism that most people just call “fuck you.” My agency, revolt, or desire to effect change does not cede to how much I understand. This is why it’s impossible to “talk yourself into” something that doesn’t feel right. The logic is sound, but the experience bellows. All the details of the larger context and perpetual theoretical actions are there, but fuck me if I’m not amped, panicking, or blacking out with rage. I, also, and vitally important, don’t want to change, thus, presumably, making it that much harder to discover, let alone entertain, what the “patient” or “fundamental wait” state would even look like.

I challenge people to discuss what they want. Uncontrollably, they find themselves talking about what they aren’t, what they don’t like, or insisting they don’t know the answers to questions they’ve just explicitly answered. The logic is there, but they don’t feel confident in their ideas and capacity. They don’t trust themselves to remain committed and honest to the fallout of doing “more” or standing up and alone for their individual perspective. And why should they? Most ideas, most of the time, are incredibly stupid, wrong, and working to actively harm our ability to continue existing at all.

I practice the opposite. I assert, often, what I want, why I want it, and how I think it will evolve or contradict things I’ve wanted in the past. Do I want a long-term committed relationship, or to be a whore? Yes. Do I want more money than I know what to do with, or find solace in my fort with music, shows, and projects now capable of being paid for in a month’s-worth of effort? Yes. Do I want to “help” people and continue to staunchly argue that I can’t, in reality, help them when they can’t help themselves, so I’ll take a proto-fascist position on how to distribute power or what can be left up to a vote, and be heavily persuaded Nazis need to be punched, shot, or otherwise disempowered? Dump it all in.

I want to be left alone, and called to engage in random things at random times. I want to sit here all day and watch TV, and get outside and work on the land. I want to eat unhealthy food, and desire a convenient affordable way to get all of the best food in me as much or more often without having to spend, really any time, learning more about cooking or investing in future dirty dishes. The seeming contradictions are a result of a lack of clarity. When you chase an unclear feeling with direct questions and can honestly speak to the answer, for you if no one else, you can feel the nature and power of what it means to make a choice. That’s how I learned to watch TV instead of continue to try and work 3 jobs.

The story of my current moment is that I want to pay down debt. Deeper, I want to own the things I own. I want to quit my job. Deeper, I want to find a way to actively cope with one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had because it doesn’t feel bad to have “extra” money. Deeper, I’m worried I’m stuck in this “lack of appreciation” space for my circumstances because my day-to-day experience is most often felt as either a run-from or begrudgingly-engage-in thoughts about the company I work for or the nature of what I’m involved in. Deeper, the failures and conversations I have with myself about the job or how I feel conjure all of the larger despair around not being able to run my own business, not be in a new house I’m remodeling, or not be working on something on the land or on an instrument without so many other obligations on my mind.

Instead of doing my notes last night, I built a very odd stand so I could rearrange my computer monitors along with the furniture and my instruments. I was tired at midnight and stayed up until 2:30 or 3, “just because” I was seeking that weak sense of “control” or “autonomy” of a child defying a parent’s proclamation of bedtime. I do versions of this a lot, laying on the ground at work while the insistence to input notes whispers overhead. It’s not what I want to practice. It’s not who I am. It’s a middle finger to the idea that I have anything meaningful and worthwhile to do worthy of being impatient about not engaging in. To me, the country is still on fire. I still want to genuinely improve on my hobbies. It would be magic to be able to go back to sleeping for as long as I wanted, when I wanted.

I seek an ongoing transcendence. I don’t think you get to embody that without being impatient, at least it doesn’t feel that way. I wish to get past the conversations about how, whether, and why 2+2=4 with people who can’t recognize the utility and universality of math. The “human math” for those that would argue it’s a bad analogy is precisely this. Complicated, seemingly contradictory feelings + attention and time honestly exploring them = process for engaging the world and yourself made of more choices than incidental circumstances.

This is the only way I can continue to “do my job,” today, tomorrow, or in any moment when the whole of my being is crying out to blow shit up and go back to sleep. I feel the power of my ability to do that. I respect that I actually will. I better have at least as many reasons and plans around doing so as have informed my reasons not to.

[997] Tag - You're It

I don’t feel well. Today (I’m lumping in all of Tuesday until now at 6:20 AM on Wednesday) has been a struggle. I didn’t see it coming. I’m ridiculously tired and have a needlessly convoluted day ahead. It seems a lot is happening at once I haven’t been able to pay close enough attention to.

Last night, around 8 PM, I get an email from my ex. It’s a comprehensive yet concise summary of her perspective related to issues she experienced while she was here, what she’s discovered about herself, and the better and more stable situation she has managed to work out for herself. My initial inclination, not seeing the email until 10 PM, was to write very briefly that I’m glad she’s in a better place and that I’m around if she needs help. There’s a decent chance this exchange set the groundwork for my difficulties the rest of the day.

For long periods of time, I’m professionally open, empathetic, patient, and using my brain to try and wedge bits of helpful information. I’m often trying to do this for people who are hell bent on not learning, changing, or even speaking honestly about how little they care to learn or change. While I don’t have the propensity anymore to have wild mood swings or extreme elevations of sadness or anger, it does not mean the tools I use to stay that way can’t break or get exhausted.

My ex is emotionally exhausting. Watching myself work in contrast to my better self is emotionally exhausting. Hearing crickets and feeling stagnant when I earnestly try to improve my circumstances or proactively do something better is emotionally exhausting. All of these happening at once mean I’m waking up at 4AM to get my notes in just before the 48-hour deadline because I can’t find myself in the wasted hours at my meaningless job.

I’ve made the group discussion topic this week about bragging on yourself and discussing the things you like about your personality. There’s a slew of people who all consider themselves “hard-workers.” There’s many who think they’re “loyal.” A lot of proud parents (except for that year or 3 when they weren’t able) or grandparents (“to make up for how I wasn’t with my kids.”) So many consider themselves helpful and willing to give of themselves in much greater proportion than they get back. Many enough struggle to say 2 positive things about themselves back-to-back, and even if they manage to, each answer is glued to reiterations of, “I don’t know.”

I could draw any number of damming conclusions from my series of informal take-aways from people’s aggregate answers. It’s “obvious” to me that whether you’re describing things you like or hate about yourself, you’re probably doing it in a very fuzzy way. You don’t realize, not really, the impact of doing so and how it feeds your inability to remain emotionally stable or evolve your relationship to yourself. Are you a hard-worker, or obsessive compulsive? Could you tell the difference? Are you even interested in learning how? Each question probes different and nuanced layers that the vast majority appear either uninterested in or incapable of accessing.

That means, as a society, you create pill-mills with passable optics and hostages-named-counselors who need to pay back their sign-on “bonuses” if their conscience catches up to them. That means a lot of fancy words about “care-coordination” and “golden threads” tracking progress. That means entertaining a difference between “maintenance” and “stabilizing” per hazy diagnostic criterion, but hardly practically employed or useful for more than passing an audit. That means overlooking the demonstrable harm of employing people wholly incapable of remaining consistent and professional, and prioritizing their ability to parrot company lines over look too closely at their tangible impact and conduct.

What I want must be the hardest thing in the world to achieve. Maybe I’m making a huge thinking error in regarding it as “easy” because of the isolated examples I can set for myself. I have this analogy in my head about real accountability or moral behavior, responsible exercises of power, methodical and deliberate practice, and recognition and reciprocity that feel practically fucking mythical in this moment.

When I want to learn a song, if nothing else, I get in the habit of sitting down at the piano, picking up the guitar, or leaving my alto sax case open and assembled so I can catch and flow with the moment. I’ve watched myself learn a new song on the piano over the last few weeks. I’ve felt myself die and recede with regard to my “professional” development. I’ve felt myself punished for the goodwill and effort I’ve put forth. In echoing my ex’s language, after failing to establish and protect my boundaries, I’ve allowed myself to get disrespected over and over again. But I don’t know what else to do, and help is not forthcoming.

Do you think I should reach out to my past exes and tell them how much more mature or accountable I’ve become? Do you think any of my past “friends” care to hear how I’ve incorporated their perspectives or concerns for my “negativity” or the parties or the pain I’ve resonated as for them? None of them give a fuck lol. They aren’t reaching out to me anymore than I am to them. I bet if they were in my groups, they’d talk about how hard-working, loyal, open and honest, and effusively giving they were in spite of how much they might get back. And then it’d be my job to encourage that self-talk to “break a negative thought pattern” so they can “improve” or incorporate a “coping” mechanism to deal with “cravings” to act like disingenuous or malicious cunts.

Meanwhile, I wait around for the next obligation to listen indefinitely, encourage, translate, entertain, or otherwise try to account for any reason you can’t be bothered to join me, answer me, or even feign solidarity. Does it cost too much? I’ll pay for it. Still, no? Must be me. Did I not give you enough time? Here’s weeks, no, a year, no wait several years. Can’t be bothered? Must be me. Didn’t resonate with this one’s tone? Here’s a thousand more. Crickets? I’m batting a fucking thousand over here.

It doesn’t matter how much I work or share. It doesn’t matter how often I try to focus on the good things about you, myself, or my circumstances. It doesn’t matter all the little psychological games I play to distract me or box in my capacity for self-destruction. It just matters that in the most fundamental way I remember I’m alone. Occasionally our industrious or indulgent pathologies will line up, and we’ll call it a team and ferret away our profits. But the heart of the perpetual betrayal will manifest eventually. It’s nothing personal. It’s no one’s responsibility. Not that they could tell one way or another.

[996] Just Annoyed

Another day, another series of moments filled with indignation for my working circumstances. I certainly try to pretty-it-up about the amount of time I feel is wasted and how terribly I think about my waste-of-money drives and hours spent meandering about the office until I can discover the path to inputting notes. It’s annoying because it’s not even a hard problem. I’m not indecisive. I’m not confused. I know I deeply hate not getting paid what I’m worth. I know “worth” is a wholly subjective and relative concept that, in our sick capitalist society, says what I’m doing is worth significantly more than I’m making for considerably less time. It’s the glaring open wound at the heart of my experience.

If I had a “real choice,” I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be employed. In an effort to not get on a personal hamster wheel of repeating the obvious to nowhere game, I walked over to the independent counseling business located next door. No one was there. I went back a bit later, still no one was there. An analogy presents itself. Do you keep trying, forever, until you can squeak out a sense of “positive” direction and - very maybe - get another question answered? Or do you listen to what “the universe” is telling you about your effort, and forge a different path? The latter sounds absurd on its face. The former a kind of self-immolation. Say you freeze instead of fight to the death or flee. What’s that manner of frozen contentment with so many gaping wounds?

Reconceptualize the wounds! Examine them so closely they lose all coherent meaning! Find the eternal thread that ties your perception of them to unrealistic and haughty expectations, cut it, and walk about life so present and free and connected! Monk that shit up, baby!

My ex emailed me last night explaining she’s been told she has Borderline Personality Disorder. She attached a video of Jordan Peterson giving a concise explanation that matched my experience of her precisely. She’s apparently doing considerably better, thriving in her land-management and cash flow, and vows to not treat people like she treated me going forward. Great. She gets her breakdown, time to process, growth, and me still in her corner, not precisely any more or less jaded about the prospect of connecting with people and how, but certainly not convinced I have much a capacity to attract anyone without varying degrees of severe personality or emotional troubles that don’t pair well with, you know, me getting to grow and thrive or rely on anyone to the degree they have on me.

Does that sound selfish? Or just how I process and engage in a constructive conversation regarding my “self-care?” Shouldn’t I be concerned with my seemingly inescapable patterns and the walls I’m against that inspire movement in different directions?

What if I acknowledge this moment and acted as I saw “morally” fit? Let a micro-breakdown, shirking of responsibility, and lapse in judgment/awareness dictate the rest of my day? What if I just left? I make it potentially harder to get hired somewhere else. I’m still in debt. I wouldn’t “fix” anything beyond enabling my sense of “freedom,” naively held, in the moment. I’m stuck. I could almost-certainly find another job, but I’d be like a client of mine who quit in a huff because she couldn’t get her emotions under control. Am I like my clients? Well, yes, that’s why I know how not to behave like them. But I can’t “think” my way out of how I feel. I have to construct the road to the continued self-punishment for not seeing another way on how to conduct myself.

Arguably one of the shittiest realizations I ever came to was the idea that I ever need help. People aren’t that helpful. They aren’t consistent. They aren’t particularly ethical or aware of their own damage that informs how or why they fuck with you. To need help is a precarious place on many more levels than whatever the issue at hand may be. And as I discover more things I don’t know or ways in which I’d like to explore, I find more that I need help with. The nature of my problems externally far outweighs my experience of myself internally. In a sense, it’d be nice if I “only” had to figure out I had a personality disorder.

Again, I feel like that makes me sound unduly cunty. The mistakes I make with regard to my experience of the world aren’t so fundamental. I’ve long passed the discussion of my relative psychopathy and incorporated it. I’ve talked my “depression” or “anxiety” to death or a level of ambivalent mockery, they barely register as anything but head nods to the laziness of language. I don’t struggle to employ boundaries. My “judgements” are fruitful for jokes, but not what I’m betting money on, until, you know, I get a girlfriend or find someone as equally pathological in their drive to work as I’ve been.

In this precise moment, I can’t even persuade myself that my notes will get input in the next 3 hours. It’s 4 hours until my next group. The notes will take, maybe 35 minutes. I could have done them yesterday. I have until 11 AM, technically, tomorrow to get them done. But every miserable step in service to my “responsibility” to this job is dragging the knife over another skin cell. It takes that long to kill you, cell by cell, until you die of “old age.” And I don’t know what else I’d be doing. Wouldn’t it be great if the ex who just reached out to me had a project she needed me for and connected me with that helped build the land-management business? What if I invited her out there to live her dream and all I asked was to split the utilities? Wait, I tried that? We only recently discovered the creature comforts of more sunlight, long showers, and a nutritious diet were integral to her mental health, so we were doomed from the start!? Shucks.

I experience this persistent sick feeling. It’s anticipatory. It’s a dare. It’s frustration. It’s anger. It’s dread. It's me looking at myself like I’m the stupidest person in the world for not doing “whatever” it is I “should” be doing next, I’m just typing and waiting and trying to stomach the heave of the ocean of bullshit. Am I “free enough” or not? Do I have agency, or not? Am I “creative” in how I address my issues? Am I smart enough? Am I wise enough? Am I willing and able to suffer as many people as it takes to eke out morsels of helpful information or meaningful steps?

All I can be for certain is that I’m not demonstrating whatever I may conceive of any of those questions when I’m here. When I’m in a building, for no reason, presented with a task that means nothing to me but the access to money, already spent, at a more consistent interval than I’ve discovered since washing-out of doing drug studies.

Fuck me am I feeling miserable right now. I fucking suck, this fucking sucks. I just want to be done playing the stupid fucking games.

[995] Check Yourself Wreck Yourself

When you’re practicing a piece of music, you’re rehearsing a behavioral language. Whether you get to a place where the song sits somewhere besides the notes on the page comes after the work of making it into a song in the first place. You have to go slow. You have to be deliberate. You have to be persistent. You have to look for resources when you get stuck. You have to open and re-open the notes so they can be built into your instincts and recognition patterns. Only then do you manage some “mastery” or get the license to “cover” and remix it. Any art form requires the same general approach. The abstract artists can probably draw anything less abstract considerably better than the “modern artist” who throws paint at the wall. The novelist has ten times as many ideas that made their way to the trash or were borrowed from than books published.

I finished watching The Hand of God just before watching The Worst Person in the World. They are both the “slice of life” kind of film, following a person at a transitional stage of life and the often awkward or shallow observational place they occupy as they try to “figure things out.” Both movies, highly-rated, are surely indicative of a familiar fledgling sensibility that’s enshrouded the last several generations. They’re a point of view privileged to discuss a struggle from a taken-for-granted perch of wealth and options.

I don’t discuss privilege in the way I feel most people do. I don’t view it as this kind of scar you acknowledge to write-off whoever’s view or work you’re discussing. It’s merely a point of view and a head nod that it exists with it’s own influences and pitfalls for how you may think. I identify more with those of a certain access and wealth than those in genuine poverty. That’s okay. If I can’t identify that, I don’t have a prayer of translating how I behave or how I think across that experience barrier.

I look for words that do what I can’t. I can’t make you understand me. I can’t make you feel like me. I can’t give you confidence. I can’t increase your IQ. I can’t make the artists and philosophers who mean the most to me into something digestible and an earnest reflection of their “independent” value. This is where I start in every interaction I have, be it with media, myself, or you. I identify what I can or can’t control. It’s not always conscious, but it has been a deliberate practice for so long, that I just hit the “D” key on the piano of, “That’s not my problem” or, “I’m not capable of that.” I don’t scan, count back, or hesitate until I start writing. I feel that after you talk to thousands of people over many years, particularly about their problems or various crises, you get that deep appreciation and earned short-cut to certain “best” answers or practices.

It’s not privileged information, per se, to learn how to play an instrument or read music. It’s there, freely available, in many forms, and you can go slow, build your instincts, and get pretty far. James Taylor can’t read music, and you don’t have to assume he’s learned how to speak and translate the language. He’s put in the time and practiced “something,” that many of us aren’t in service to our respective arts or desires.

I get frustrated with how long things take. I don’t want to drive a second longer than I have to. I watch most things sped up. I see myself flub a note on a new song I’m trying to learn, and I instinctively get shitty with myself that I can’t make my fingers respond in exactly that way that would suggest I’ve mastered what I’m trying to do immediately. I know my brain doesn’t work like that. I know I have to take the time to make the pattern. I know I can and will eventually, but I still manage to “hate the journey,” when, in the moment, it’s exactly showing me what I don’t want, even while simultaneously existing as exactly what I need. You learn from mistakes. You learn from brushing against boundaries. You learn when you practice “openness” for all that can spill in while you’re working.

I think sometimes this frustration for the time obligation gets confused as a lack of empathy for how long it takes others to learn something. I don’t ask myself very often, “Compared to what?” What does it mean to “feel” like I’m “not learning fast enough?” It might be understood as lying to myself. If I’m trying to speed through a passage I haven’t etched into my instinct, I’m practicing a lie. I’m getting in my own way. If I profess to want to play this song, and play it well, why am I rehearsing a barrier? Why am I letting myself take even longer to get it learned and shown-off in public? It begs deeper and more explicit questions.

Do I want to learn the song? Yes. Do I want to learn it “quickly?” Well, maybe not. I’m someone who struggles to be moved by much. If I’m practicing something new, that was kind of the point already, just to have something new. Once I learn it, I fall into a familiar problem. I’m no longer practicing a new song; I’m hunting for a song that makes me want to practice. Isn’t that a lot to ask of a song? Why is the song motivating me in a way I can’t on my own? We can chalk that up to the miracle and intangibility of any given song and how you relate to it, or you can write dozens of blogs explaining how your “normal” life and obligations obscure and interrupt the time it takes to intimately relate to music.

Music kids are weird. Whether they come from a household where their parents pathologized music and forced their kid to practice, or they just found themselves utilizing the necessary practice as a way to work compulsive or obsessive tendencies, if you’re able to do impressive things on an instrument, there’s a decent chance it’s acted as a stand-in for lesser-understood things you might otherwise be obliged to practice. It’s a bedrock cliché the slew of famous musicians with drug problems, abusive relationships, or mental health struggles that are endlessly mined for deep catalogues and hits. Can you turn your bad break-up into three #1 albums? Can you make others’ hearts race like the cocaine made yours?

What is the nature of the necessary and obligatory work? It’s a foundational question. Are you on a hero’s quest, or a balancing task? Do you need to wake up, or allow yourself to sleep? Can you acknowledge when you’re, maybe not out of questions, but certainly arriving at the ones that consistently ask you why you haven’t fucking done something by now? There is no “fix” save the eternal obligation to slowly practice in the directions you think you want to go. Keep asking yourself if you even recognize where you are. Reckon with the nature and layers of your hidden dishonesty. It’s a dishonesty realized in as many ways as you’re willing to look. Maybe your stomach drops, jaw clenches, or you race to complete something you know explicitly you haven’t practiced as you should.

I’ve learned how to better appreciate “the journey” more than the destination. That’s taken practice. It’s why I enjoy practicing new songs at all or learning new facts or watching new movies. I’m not one to watch a series I like over and over or fall asleep with the same movie every night. I want to keep evolving and seeing how robust and familiar my concept of an identity or foundation might exist in other things or people. The heartbreaking part is two-fold, both in rarely ever being recognized, and struggling to see or hear how anyone else is trying to be. At least the movies, songs, and books exist. I could criticize David Lynch and find his process and message indiscernible, but dude is doing something, and with help I can discover it’s not just him going insane.

If I’ve discovered any remote wisdom in life, it’s that you have to do. So I do. I write. I work things, well in spite of my worst or best ideas about myself or how I’m spending my time. I have monuments of my acts and effort literally surrounding me. “…faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.” I don’t have or need faith. I need work. I need meaningful work that I can attend to and that I can utilize to celebrate my instincts when I might not be finding the patience to put them on display through a mastered song. I don’t need to hear how poorly you understand your circumstances, I need to hear what you’re working on. Your “political opinion” is mute when you vote for fascism. Your high-minded ideals regarding “violence” bleed to death at the end of a weapon. Your fierce proclamations of “freedom” are consumed by the infinite icy void or virulent fire, whichever catches first.

I know what your problem is, every time. You pretend. You pretend to know more than you do, then you double down and pretend that you aren’t playing the “I know more than I do” game. You don’t humble yourself in your ignorance. You don’t allow yourself to slow down where the work of humbling yourself can begin to take place. So you run away, into walls, into people who will give you new language for constructing complex excuses, and as far away from “another obligation” as though you’ve accepted the first and only one that matters to make the rest make any sense.

When I’m not learning the song “fast enough,” I’m pretending it’s a worthwhile goal to “learn fast,” that I’ve ever bothered to define “enough,”  that real learning can take place like that altogether, and that I don’t have a small death I’m not exactly crazy about on the horizon once it’s learned. I also pause movies I’m enjoying 5 or 10 minutes before the end. I collect books I’m enjoying and refrain from completing them until…I can make peace with the idea they’ll be done.

 I’m not trying to sabotage myself, but if I refrain from ever looking at the nature of how I’m working or what I’m working on, I’ll never admit, discover, complete, or change. Thus, when you refuse to work, and profess to be “trying,” I know, immediately, the nature of the lies that lend themselves to your own self-sabotage. You over-burden a story about “what you think” that has very little analogous representation in the world. It’s a story formed by machinery you’ve not trained slowly, deliberately, to give you a decent representation of what you’ve been observing or working on in the first place!

Therefore the struggle, the familiar - universal flail - depicted across mediums and critically acclaimed sensibility gets to sub in for the work you’re not doing. Watch the masterpiece over and over like a child building into its foundational sense that good will triumph over evil or the square piece goes in the square hole. The happy ending is inevitable when you’re not looking for a sequel about the days and years after.

I want to learn the song, and hundreds more. I want to learn them even if I never get around to. I demonstrate that I want to learn them by practicing, and spending money on the tools to learn them “correctly,” like on weighted keys that build the muscles in my wrists, and software that facilitates time in front of notation. How do you know I want to learn the song? You see me post videos of me practicing and getting it approximately right or not-quite up to speed yet. How do I know I want to learn the song? I turn the nature of my work into a story about how it reflects across the levels of things that are more meaningful than whatever might be making me money. Can I hate my job, and see how the money for the tools can be a more emotionally compelling story than a spiral of stress, dread, and waste? It’s a simpler question when you can ask how the song or garage or business endeavor is coming along. When you can either point to your work, or commit yourself to co-opting someone else’s, what more is there to say?

[994] Speak To What You Spoke

Let’s do some synthesizing.

I went to a Jack White concert. He had a DJ playing 80s and 90s hits before the opener and between sets. He has everyone seal their phone in these magnetically locked bags. It was refreshing to feel like I was at a concert from yesteryear, but I noticed that people didn’t necessarily pay more attention than they would have otherwise, they just talked louder. There was, interesting to me, a significantly larger proportion of single men in attendance. I don’t know what that means, it just contrasts with what I’ve noticed everywhere else. I brought a book.

The book was called The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch. It’s one of the few books I decided to order after John Vervaeke’s fawning over it during his Awakening From the Meaning Crisis lectures. He recommends half a dozen books in each of his 52 lectures, and how he talked about this one stood out. Like many philosophical works, it’s dense, references a lot of literature and arguments from its time, and I got about 25 pages in before my focus decided it couldn’t try to digest more quasi abstractions on “of” “goings on” or “happening.”

What the book did seem to indicate for me what that Murdoch is a reasonable person who sees how we are not apart from the world. Whatever we are to make of our thoughts, the nature of decision-making or a “conscious decision” not to do something is a certain kind of happening in the world with world-stuff. While our concepts can’t really manifest, and therefore exist, without something external to reference, that we’re able to name and share a reference point does not dictate whether or how that internal world might exist. We all stop at red lights. How you experience red maybe doesn’t matter, but that we all have a means of generating, sharing, and acting upon the experience does. I pray no real philosopher ever gets ahold of how I interpret the few pages of one essay of dense reading I semi-focused on.

My takeaway was the importance of movement and action in the world. The infinite abstract of potential and opaque interpretation of what’s-a-washing in your brain are of little to no use to us mere mortals struggling to understand your version of red. It also felt like the perfect argument for never trusting the simple and probably incorrect words you or anyone else comes up with to describe where you’re coming from or what you should “believe” about yourself. Liberating indeed.

You don’t have to know what I believe or think about you, despite my readiness to share it. You can look at my setup. You can point to my roles. You can see what I’ve moved in service to against what I haven’t. What I may “believe” in any given moment is an infinite sea of words and blogs briefly captured in each syllable. You may or may not hear what’s enunciated. I may or may not have a clue the implications of the song I’m singing. At the end of the day, where are you, where am I, what have we done about it?

This guy tapped my shoulder and asked if his, maybe special needs, nephew could stand in front of me as he was 16 and it was his first concert. I stepped aside. The guy thanked me, too much. Before the kid occupied that space, for only 2 songs before returning, it was a woman with I assumed her grandchild. She spent 4 songs looking back over the crowd trying to get the attention of someone in her party. That was considerably more annoying and distracting than the kid enthusiastically cheering and, you know, doing the concert-thing at a concert.

I believe you should more-or-less go to a concert to listen to the concert. Even when you’re managing to take away from my attention, it’s going to take the loud, drunk, 9-deep social club forming around my precious rock to make me tell you to get away from me. I have to hear you from 3 rows away for multiple songs before I turn around and inquire about what a good fucking time you’re having. My internal world is constantly asking whether to say something, what to do next, looking, planning, and debating. I know how important to me it is my actions mostly speak to what I might otherwise say or write. I can be the meanest person you’ve ever met; I don’t behave that way until you beg for it. It may look like I should be contented and appreciative of whatever comfy work situation or cashflow, but my actions form this giant mockery and betrayal of what I could otherwise be putting effort towards.

[993] You Might Miss

This is gonna be one of those struggle-bus ones to figure out if there’s really anything to say in a nominally more coherent or comprehensive way. I know you skip ‘em all anyway, but this one you can scroll past extra fast.

I have a recurring nightmare. That’s a way to immediately overstate something. Every week, I’m going to be asked (told), in a formal and professional way, that I need to meet an obligation that I have, not just a zero, but a negative inclination to do. It’s not hard. I want to revolt. I want to destroy. I want to mock and question. It doesn’t take very long. I don’t have to sweat, lift, or try to do anything but retain respect for myself and how I’m exercising my time. Maybe it’s sit through my boss reiterating idiot-proof information in 6 different ways for 30 minutes when it could have taken 30 seconds. Maybe it’s emailing a probation officer information that’s, for some reason, 7 clicks deep on software that takes juuuuust a scream-worthy nanosecond too long to load. Maybe it’s input 95% copied information as I wonder how we get to 97% to save me those last few sweet keystrokes and toggles between spreadsheets.

I have a hard time robbing other people of their choices. I’ll try to explain more. I think I have a decent understanding of when I feel as though I’m making a choice, verses playing a part. Every professional role has been a part. Every rent payment has been a part. Most tanks of gas, a part. The “entertaining” place-filler before you move on to your “real” friend or love interest is a part all the way. I’m assigned an array of roles via the expectations, wise and unwise, of the people and systems around me. I’m an instantiated daisy-chain of ever-evolving and undulating consequences. I “bare” and “cope” and “roll” with that existential sea.

While all that’s happening, somehow, miraculously, I do this. I choose to look at it, name it, organize it, and set it all in neat little rows of digital contraction. I choose this sentence, then these words, and to delete the ones that came before. While I automatically breathe, I deliberately type. I follow the “feeling” into a place that’s “better” or “contentment-seeking” or “flow-y” so when I go back and read this, it can carry me into, hopefully, a place where the nature and power of my capacity for choice-making can flourish. I can bring it out into the larger rippling sea of consequences, and watch my choices manifest after harnessing or navigating all that I can’t control.

I have two cats. One arrived one day, the other I chose to buy. I play a game with them and myself where I pretend they have more autonomy than they do. I leave the trash can open and act like my cat won’t get into it. I’ve had to reorganize my home several times to allow for the routes they wish to jump and climb to not interfere with my sleep or things I don’t want jumped on. I’ve been forcing them to cuddle and eat snacks right up against each other. I don’t forget they’re cats. They remind me with each blocking of my screen, insistence on my attention, and fresh shit improperly covered. We are remarkably different in our awareness and capacity, but technically both conscious entities. They don’t know how I’ve conditioned them.

I know how the world wishes to condition me. That is, in any given interpersonal scenario or environment, I know the rules, the expectations, and how to get to nearly any end I desire. I used to think this made me a psychopath. There was never any “fun” or “novelty” or “reason” to play along too strictly. I can’t help but to be stuck on “why?”. Worse than an inability to stop asking, I choose to explore what the answers might be. Why get married and have kids? Why live in a “normal” house? Why get a degree? Why respond to anything, let alone nearly everything in practice, with anything less than the truth of what you think or feel? What’s there to be afraid of? Why respect the backlash, or imbue the silence and resentment with some special dignity or consequence?

In doing so, I leave myself with almost no capacity to “believe” anything. I’m not convinced there’s anything I could say, write, or do that I could consider “complete” or “the absolute truth.” I know there’s unknown unknown variables. I know I don’t have perfect access to every flare up in my mind. I know that there’s never a reason to be too self-righteous, confident, or unable to change your position if new information comes in that’s compelling, coherent, and reliable in a way that you aren’t.

I’m pretty reliable. I rarely, if ever, miss work. I respond to phone calls almost immediately provided my phone hasn’t enabled “do not disturb” without my knowledge prompting my best friend to think I might be dead because, what else makes sense for someone who has never not responded within 8 hours in 18 years? If I control the pieces for any given plan, I start it, carry it out, and more or less accomplish the mission every time. The out-of-control sea insists on offering weather snafus and muscle aches or threats to the budget, but the littlest opportunities and efforts made on those efficient days speak to my ongoing experience for years at a time.

I’m sensitive to the effect of working in a holistically appreciable way in service to goals that achieve numerous ends simultaneously. I understand the conditioning patterns well enough to know how I wish to break them or how to redirect them. But, I do not know how to create enough consistent hyper-efficient days. Moreover, I’m struggling to believe I have the capacity to do so in my current state and environments. What does that do to a person who can’t “believe” in anything that deeply to begin with?

It leaves me procrastinating on meaningless tasks. It leaves me spending money so I can impose a series of competing narratives on top of the, more depressing more suffocating, prevailing one. It leaves me looking for solidarity in the parts of myself that would “love” to “hope” at 99% for “anything” but the current stasis, but are buried under so much hijacked and abused attention. I can’t patiently explore music or literature when I’m so busy-worked by the oblivious. I can choose to “sneak in” little nuggets of knowledge, barely retained or worth their salt as a party trick as my mind is otherwise captured by my “professional adult” obligations.

I just feel lost. Like I was set adrift into a world I was told so many times made a certain kind of sense, and with each blink, I stomach a new betrayal. The “sense,” so hyped, so insisted upon, is just a series of familiar narratives meant to placate or hide. You hide who you are behind the words, the clothes, the money, and as technology blossoms, the shares, likes, and followers. Once that really sinks in, who’s going to choose the path of the madman that searches for the focus and time for the “most noble” of pursuits? Why is the song I might sing in isolation more valuable than a top ten hit? One is by you, for you. The other was carried by an ambivalent, distracted, and uncontrollable sea with perhaps as boring and predictable a grasp on the hit-making pattern as I have on the “people” one.

I tell people you can’t break patterns you can’t recognize. And even once you recognize them, you may not have a genuine desire to do so. You may have no awareness about how little you wish to change because it’s buried under so many words that aren’t really yours. It’s masked by habits manifesting in differently-addictive ways. We need some degree of predictability. We need to rely on our good instincts or that we’ll be paid on time. But I wonder how many layers get packed in every taken-for-granted sentiment and familiar setting. I wonder what I’m missing about the patterns I’m stuck in, and the ones I rely on to keep pumping out a continued choice to invest time and attention towards things that betray how and where I find myself. Both my cats are sitting in front of me just licking, and licking, and licking. There is nothing they would rather be doing.

[992] FFS

I need to attend to my bubbling experience. It happened during a video call with my supervisor. We were discussing some process on engaging members and getting forms signed. It was innocuous, boring, and I’m not on any lists or generally doing anything wrong. I’m not feeling particularly unwell or dealing with concurrent issues. In fact, I just came off a very successful and fun weekend. But, something hit. Something snapped, and I just wanted to scream.

My phone’s been acting up and my alarms didn’t go off this morning. I told my supervisor as much and offered that I’d come in Thursday instead. She said that would be fine, and that was it. The absurdity is that there isn’t, nor has been, any reason for me to be in that office since I began. It’s the “littlest” thing that speaks volumes about my big picture circumstances.

You might get the impression that I struggle living with “corruption” or “tyranny” or “immoral” or “incoherent” things. I’ve certainly the intellectual posture that sympathizes with environmentalists and vegans and people who want peace or to invest in vastly different things than where money goes. The amount of contradictions and often frankly horrible things one must swallow to be part of the general population is pretty long. I still eat a fuck ton of meat. I’d rather pay more to keep my air conditioning on indefinitely. I’m constantly in a morally gray negotiation with regard to just how hard I’m willing to burden myself with your bullshit as a client.

What nags me is not that “things are fucked” on some broad inescapable way. It’s that I have a perfect escape for perfectly good reasons, that a plurality of people can see and understand, and I could do it “now,” and I can’t. I’m being mocked. I’m being attacked. It’s a threat to my sense of common fucking sense and well-being to know that I can do the job I’m doing, remotely, as well as if not better than going into the office, but I need to “make up for” not being there, FOR NO FUCKING REASON, because that’s the unreasonable expectation I signed up for, under duress.

You never get done solving problems. I listened to an interesting talk discussing smart vs chance vs stupid. You’re smart if you can systematically apply a set of behaviors that improves your ability to accomplish things across domains. You work on reasoning skills, you can apply them to the logistics of moving boxes around a room or yourself through the world, or how you organize teams around people’s strengths. Through chance, you can shuffle and reshuffle variables, and half the time you’ll get something passable, half the time you’ll fail, but the direction is dictated by the physics more than the intention. Stupid, you can destroy and impede indefinitely the ability to get anywhere. Stupid works against itself, and the death of worthwhile possibility reigns. If I have a prayer of tackling bigger problems, I need the stupid parts of my life to be incidental or non-existent, not something I’m compelled to practice regularly.

I feel fucking stupid, and I’m not fucking stupid. I use the stupid feeling to feel helpless because when I speak, I get the answers that acknowledge the reasons to behave differently. I don’t get the argument that is filled with a lot of “maybes” or “when we get back to…” not the “when you’re there you’ll accomplish (x).” So what do you do when you’re stupid and helpless in screaming contradiction to your sense of being and agency?

I don’t know. I write, which usually gets me through the next few hours, but I don’t feel any better. The area of concern is not going to get fixed. And whether or not I can actually fix it or not, I feel like I can, and believing otherwise starts to influence me in other negative ways. I have a dozen little things around the house that feel handicapped too. Moreover, I get to compare what I’m not doing about my surmountable problems with the ones I’m constantly hearing from my 120 clients or friends with significantly more on their plates than me.

In the middle of the last paragraph I had a group. The provider said something like “we train people how they can treat us” in chiming in about how one member’s child abuses her for money and tears up her apartment if he doesn’t get what he wants. People treat us how they treat themselves. If we could properly “train” each other, we wouldn’t have to have institutional pressures forcing us to whip ourselves like they’re dying to when we get out of hand.

This would normally be the end of my day. I’ve gotten functionally backed into a corner to “cover” what they never built the infrastructure to handle correctly in the first place. My head started hurting at the beginning of the last group. Whether I want to or not, I’m processing all the crap people tell me. I’m thinking. I’m working and searching for solutions and practices and phrasing they’ll understand. Anyone in “service” knows the feeling. I’m tired of serving. Where’s the job where I just fill in numbers on a spreadsheet? Where’s the research position? It’s entirely possible I’ve got such a low opinion of jobs because I’ve always had to have too much time in front of people.