[1007] The Long Com

I want to explore what I mean when I say I want to experience “everything” by way of popular culture, TV, or more. This isn’t true, obviously, on its face. There are plenty of popular things that I have no interest in, but happen to catch because, maybe the mood is right, or I’m otherwise not focused enough to care what’s whizzing past my eyes or in the background. Over the last 5 hours, I’ve caught myself “holing out,” where I find myself falling down an infinite series of thoughts regarding actions I can take in service to this little “project” I’ve been engaging in; I’m building TV channels.

It’s another “weird” and “particular” thing that I’m doing that I can’t really discuss or share with anyone else. The closest analogues are going to be whatever Netflix cultivates for you, or your particular set of subscriptions on YouTube. Everything I’m using for my “channels” has been downloaded, renamed, shuffled about my hard drives, and been a kind of time investment that courts a confused dog head tilt. The “purpose” also feels terribly obscure until I get this contented feeling as my vision comes to life. Were I a programmer, I could probably build something to do what I’m doing by hand in a manner of moments. I’ve tried to find and pay for someone to do what I want for these channels in the past.

I’m organizing and ordering my shows to play in order and by how I conceive of them per my interest and emotional salience. Given there’s an incredible amount of TV, most of it is only going to resonate at the level of it’s structure. When an individual show sticks out, I get an opportunity to reflect on why. I’m searching for thought-provoking surprises and insight into myself. I just watched the first episodes of about 30 different shows over the last few days from I Love Lucy to the modern One Day At A Time. I went on ahead to complete One Day At A Time, as well I noticed Malcolm in the Middle stuck out to me.

Something is invariably lost in watching an older-than-you show. You can’t experience what audiences at the time did when something was “revolutionary” for its era. What you can do is gain insight into how long certain themes have been on people’s minds, and see how far we have or haven’t come in dealing with those issues. I don’t underestimate the impact of TV on its ability to mold minds, particularly with the current circus and psychosis we’ve been going through with fascism flirtation lately. I’ve listened to a number of Trump biographers and historians who are convinced without his TV shows, he never would have been president.

What resonates with me about any particular show? Is it familiar? Is it personal? I vibe with Bernie Mac and Malcolm because it feels more “real” than most shows. Ms. Pat is a modern analogue. One Day At A Time and pretty much every Norman Lear show aimed to have real discussions where a lot of artifice and cheese would otherwise dominate. We all want to bask in the glory of some lie or another, even if it’s that our preferred TV show is more or less “real” than the drama we experience in actual life. You don’t really find a tension-ridden, yet still happy and respectful conversation with fascists, no matter what the last episode of One Day At A Time suggests. It, like all TV, leaves you with a dream. They suggest you can always fade to black with an open-ended imagination and “perfect family” in tact without feeling the consequences of things going wrong or staying neglected.

Perhaps that speaks to my interest in TV broadly. The more debased and simple our media, the more we can surmise that the population lusting for it is basic and simple-minded. I can’t really stomach most of reality TV, and haven’t been able to since I was a child. My mother was almost obsessed with Anna Nicole-Smith. She liked 90210. She’s an absolute lunatic pushing 60, and was emotionally immature and abusive to me growing up. Does “dumb” TV “cause” that? Of course not. Could I design a test with better-than-average predictive capacity that assessed your TV watching habits and the health of your relationships? That’s something much further down my rabbit hole, but it’s not hard for me to imagine.

For a good portion of my life, I thought I only watched “good” things. You know, the preferences of a young boy with goofy comedies and action movies with the biggest stars. Subtitles? Miss me with that. Slow, conversational, or romantic things? Boring. You get older, and you realize more and more not just the appeal, but what each “weird” or “different” or “bad” movie is attempting to speak to. You find yourself drawn to rom-coms? Maybe there’s an immense loneliness. Or maybe there’s an intense childhood naivety that’s positively inflamed with each stoked memory of the beautiful faces tacked to the first time you saw them. Was your first crush Anna Chlumsky from My Girl, or one of Kevin’s girlfriends from The Wonder Years, or Topanga? Or were you not a straight white guy like me? [2022 gotta qualify everything!]

Now, I watch TV from an analysis and almost researching place. If I have no interest in The Flash, or the vast majority of what DC has ever produced, I want to figure out the qualitative difference for me and the culture at large why I’ll put up with the weaknesses and cringe moments of Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. but struggle, if not almost get angry, at any isolated 10 seconds of an Arrow or CW show broadly. A line from Bill Maher recently was about not forgetting, “We’re entertainers, and what we create needs to be entertaining,” (not a direct quote.) Your brain has been worked on a great deal to be persuaded that a certain style, format, word choice, and subject matter is entertaining. One way you can observe that is by watching TV that all “fits” in its genre or style across time. The Black family, Latino family, Asian family, white families, rich people, poor people, working-class people, gays, country folk, city folk, and even dinosaurs and aliens all speak the same language!

You get a Larry Sanders who breaks the 4^th wall and then you get to ask if it’s a case study in subversion or a meta-subversion of the impetus to think for yourself and individuate once more. Is any real insight or success built from an individuated voice? Is it just the dawning of familiar clothes and walking down familiar streets reminding us all that we’ve been here before, will be here again, and don’t need to worry about ever moving or changing into something new or unfamiliar?

There are “individual” voices. People stick out from the baseline, and they get famous or infamous. I’m a fucking individual, whether I can chuckle at an array of sitcoms or not, and whether I occupy a dozen cliché boxes about men or otherwise. I think it’s often read into a certain kind of dignity and obligation when one invokes the “individual.” Individuals are supposed to be “aware” and “real” and it’s the individual who will recycle and sacrifice their comfort or benefits of joining the herd to stand for a beleaguered minority opinion. Being an individual has no inherent dignity in and of itself. See: Kanye West.

Marc Maron, Al Jackson, Bert Kreisher, Kyle Kinane, Jessica Kirson, and others are individuals who have provided me pain-inducing laughter. Are they not popular or good at what they do by tapping into universally-relatable themes? Are they not mining the stories from their lives and shaping them around comedic timing and language? I barely, if ever, remember what any given comedian was actually talking about, no matter how much they’ve made me laugh. I’m immersed in how they’re telling it. I notice the difference in how Bert Kreisher tells a story from the first time I heard it, to the 100^th time he has to perform it, and how it does or doesn’t make me feel each time I hear it.

We know internally that a certain pacing, structure, predictability, and familiarity sell. It’s why we buy tickets and subscribe. It’s why we find ourselves perpetually frustrated when “I thought!...” doesn’t match up with reality. Our thoughts are continually subverted by different narrative structures ever-aligned with what’s most entertaining. You get generational trauma from habituated denial and abuses going unaccounted for. You get generational stupidity from the habitual subversion of any accountable and meaningful engagement with the information patternizing your mind.

I’ve drifted a bit away from the exploration of the hole I find myself in. What does it serve me to develop a “deeper” and “more comprehensive” opinion of media across ages? Why occupy my “idle” time with The Golden Girls and not another phone call looking for a referral for my new business? It’s not an either/or and is a different class of ways to engage my time, but another way of phrasing it might be, aren’t there considerably more useful ways to exercise my time? Doesn’t my business mean more to me than seeing what generic caricatures are arguing about?

I’m someone who recognizes how little interest he has in TV the moment there’s anyone to do something actually real with. What I seem to discover over most minutes of most days is that those opportunities don’t exist that often for me. What’s “actually real” mean? Exchange with other conscious entities. Whether it’s conversation, dinner, traveling, or vibing to the same tunes. When you don’t have that, or you don’t recognize the quality of it, I think the TV characters take on a new perverse kind of meaning. They are where you find a happy home. They are where you find a reliable and consistent setting. They are where you find trust, growth, resolution, and predictability that is otherwise never on offer unless you’re courting familiar misery.

I don’t watch TV while you’re sitting next to me unless I’m trying to introduce you to something I find compelling; unless I’m trying to share something. Why I’m sharing it is most often to see if you’ll laugh too or have something interesting to say about how the drama is portrayed. My TV-watching habit may have started as an OCD accounting for things I enjoyed when I was younger or desire to claim more of that “everythingness” I’m after, but it’s turned into this preoccupation with trying to “connect” with people in the only way on offer. I can’t pretend to care about my regional sports team to the extent people do, but the disconnect and superficiality is deadened when it comes to shows we may have both seen. It was good, wasn’t it? Like that throw to 1^st base…or that comment from the new demagogue.

I think creators need to bear in mind the contexts on both sides of their own mind. “You,” eager to breakout and make a name for yourself, and “you” modeled around your heroes and cliches of your preferred mediums. What do “I” ever want to say? I’m mostly discovering that with each new thing I write, after whatever I’ve watched pushes me to do so. I have ever-vague, until the decision needs to be made, concepts of what I value and think I/we need to survive. So I watch TV indefinitely until you call me to do literally anything else. I know, through examining my own circumstances, that you aren’t feeling like you’re doing anything particularly more or less “meaningful” than me, or your version of watching TV, so you feel like there’s nothing to exchange. Like there’s nothing to protect or insulate from the influence of our different contexts. I think this is an ongoing torture and tragedy of what it means both to us as individuals and our potential relationship. Our obligation to use our voice is indefinitely sublimated.

In fact, this blog is what I want from all of my TV watching. I want to find what moves me out or away from the task of building a 150-show channel and spending money and time looking for programmers so I can keep a running dialogue of family-friendly and network-approved ways to not-discuss things in my head. Why do I need their jokes? I’m not hearing any of yours. Why do I need their drama? They engage and resolve it in a way you don’t and seemingly never will. Why do I need their structure? We’re not building anything together. Why do I need their family? You want nothing to do with me, as such. My character needs to fit into a narrative you can stomach and summarize. That I’m still being written, and doing the writing, doesn’t work because it naturally obligates you to do the same. You might whisper that obligation to yourself in private, and then proceed to never do so, so then it’s any wonder why I’m able to conjure so much resentment and silence.

A TV character is always going to have the right thing to say. Right for them. Right for the era. Right for the family dynamic. An arc begets an inevitable conclusion. We don’t engage the consequences of an abstract “perpetual conclusion” we’re living within. This moment is that conclusion where you take responsibility and obligate yourself to a purposeful engagement with the world, other conscious beings, or not. This moment you seek inspiration, or you don’t. This moment you’re living in service to your highest ideals, or you’re at the mercy of the neglected end of so many consequences. Evidence of your awareness of this moment is in the utilization of your speech. When you don’t speak at all, you conscript us to death. Perhaps the most sincere and impactful TV producers recognize their feeble attempts to communicate this in any other manner than the familiar formats so practicality requires acquiescence.

Perhaps, whether it’s the cheesiest TV show or the most convoluted yet on-point philosophical digression, the question of what drove it to exist and the impetus to understand it for how it impacts the culture or individual remains the same. I don’t think you can understand either unless you understand both. How does your individual move and orient in the world? What is that individual over there attempting to move you or orient you around instead? Are you or they malicious, ignorant, or both? Are you or they consistent, and in what? Will you allow a de facto ignorance to let you off the hook for taking more responsibility, using your voice, or seeing clearly the mess you’re making?

I’m not going to find “me” or “my personality” in a TV show. I’m not going to join the family. I’m not going to let myself off the hook of building what I know I need or speaking to what I think is missing. I need accountable individuals speaking to how they’ve brought themselves a little bit more stability, predictability, trust, and meaning into their day. Where do you think I’ll find that?

 

[1006] Line Dancer

Occasionally, I get these little glimpses into the future. They’re more like an embedded sensibility after my imagination has run an experiment thousands of times. I’ll try to describe it using my recent year of going to shows pretty much every weekend. It is reminiscent of some of the epiphanies or conclusions you might reach while tripping, something deeply resonates that this thing perhaps is and isn’t “the point” of what you’re looking for. I like shows and have seen some incredible performances, but I haven’t structured my life around going to them, writing about them, or reflecting on them independent of a larger context. I’m not looking for “perfect” performances or to transcend my circumstances each time I bob and sway to a beat. The artist isn’t my salvation, the lyrics nor joke the answers to my questions.

I talk a lot, at least to myself, about what my life looks like when I have a lot of money. The indulgences might exist in equal or greater measure, but the goal of the money is to create new, better, and different culture. I want to feel safe. I want to feel like the future is worth looking at. I want to feel. This, I think is what I have in common with people who are otherwise pathologically driven to satiate their feelings. We want the feeling to change or be different, but some of us find ourselves lacking the agency, patience, or honesty to approach what it would really take to get what we want. I’m so angry by default and reasonably suspicious that a country seemingly ambivalent about fascism is going to be where I wish to stake my future.

I’ve been to 51 shows this year, 9 of them with someone else, 5 my dad. I’m down to keep going to shows with my dad, of course, he’s a baller who will fuck you up at a punk rock show. But it also indicates I don’t have a peer group. I don’t have a social network of people who I regularly do anything with that isn’t in some professional vein. The people I’m closest to are often extremely occupied with their jobs or family, and truly no priority is made for regular engagement. It’s incidental and when things are convenient. This has been the story for as long as I can remember. I’m not crazy about that, but I’m also not really about laying that at the feet of those I claim to call friends.

In any event, all the more reason I look to change the broader culture. I want my people happy and free to associate. I’m also cognizant that this alone is not enough and has drummed up resentment in the past from those not keen to take responsibility for what they’ve been free to engage in. As such, it’s less about the freedom in and of itself, and more a discussion of the ever-balancing act. I don’t expect to be indulged every time I profess being bored or lonely. Nor do I expect a sympathetic ear if I stifle an inclination to join a club or meet new people. But, we’re all still plugged in to the larger alienating and exhausting context. I haven’t created an alternative yet. I gather it’s not your goal to try.

This writing partially exists because a client messaged me to show me a bald eagle he saw. He then asked me how far away I lived from a state park. When I didn’t respond, as it’s Saturday and I was sleeping in, and it’s not a crisis situation, he sent “Hello,” a few hours later, like I’m, in his mind, of course meant to respond as though we’re friends. We’re not, and he’s someone who has carried on for months about not getting out more and doing things to occupy himself who, instead of messaging another client or inviting a neighbor, tried to carry on informally with his counselor. I explained the boundary, which he called, “bullshit” and then said he “just wanted to meet and shake my hand.” Extra no. That this was your inclination and expectation is an improperly set boundary that needs attention.

Attending to our needs is not easy. You may not even know what you need. You know what you’re getting or what you’re familiar with. You know the immediate gratification or regrets of substance use or cycle of violence and abuse you might engage in with your partner or family. But what do you need? Even if it’s a friend, it’s not an enabling counselor who will blur the line of appropriate conduct so you can feel better about yourself that moment or day. I have other members send me their accomplishments, and I go “good job!” and the conversation ends there or I ask them to take the next step and let me know when they’ve done so. At bottom, they have to do the work on themselves and for themselves.

So if I want to change culture, it’s as much me keeping the necessary boundaries as it is providing an environment where you can build on your awareness and responsibility. It has to be a robust and consistent enough space to compete with every other culture you’re plugged into. And if you’re someone who habituates unconsciously drifting between what each of those cultures offers you, my lines and expectations are going to feel like a threat, insulting, or otherwise difficult and unreasonable. I’m okay with that, because I’m discussing them regularly, soliciting feedback, and pushing myself into unfamiliar and uncomfortable realms as often as I can. I’m just a guy. I can only do so much with my attention, time, and energy. Do you think I’m that unsure or unclear about how to direct it?

My concept of “the work” when it comes to how to address yourself, your culture, or your desires is not something I conceive of, anymore, in terms of “have to” as it pertains to my own feeling and sensibility. Intellectually, I can state you “have to” in order to not go extinct, but emotionally, I’m excited to. I want to. I crave doing things that are fun, hard, together, creative, or going to set an example worth setting. I want to move fast. I want to leave an impression. I want to be remembered as having used my perspective and spite in as laudable and profound a way as possible. That’s how I shake off your offense. That’s how I examine your accusations. That’s how I continue to explore and reiterate points I’m stuck on in different ways over years. In that sense, I’m thankful for the entitled clients, news on Nazis, national trends, and silence from friends. I get to explore just where the fuck I really am and if it’s worth continuing to spend time there.

For example, I’ve already said “no” with regard to any job that wasn’t my own years ago. I’ve shed my romanticism about the college group. I don’t struggle to maintain professional boundaries or a sense of what I am or am not prepared to be for a client or as an employee. I don’t need to keep up with the neighbors nor pretend your opinion trumps the numbers nor my agency. 4 sentences capture thousands of words and years of work.

I don’t want to keep going to shows alone, but I also don’t want to attend them with people who aren’t really at the show with me either. I recall the spell of thinking I had a great friend group, including way more under that umbrella than I should have, and basing it on nothing more than our time together independent of any given individual’s headspace or priority. I think this is why people like cults and religion so much. You all get to align on some basic tenants until feds start knocking, but it’s the story of what you agree upon, not that you actually agree. It’s a means of quelling uncomfortable feelings and empowering a kind of conceptual meta-agency that’s still on auto-pilot, and has lost any connection to someone who would point it out in a compelling way. Whether you’re using drugs, smearing shit on walls, sex trafficking, or whipping yourself, “you” aren’t really there. And that’s the point. I want to be here. I fucking hate that a lot of the time, but I do. I want to be at the show. I want to be in your presence. I want to be given fodder for making jokes or thinking about things. I want to be attacking the biggest problems from as many fronts as I can lay my eyes on like I’m back grinding Kessen II to unlock the secret hardest and hidden levels.

Where do you want to be? I want to be at the next show anywhere in the world whenever it takes place. I want to be, occasionally, on telehealth calls or in organizational meetings before being on my way to an expensive and delicious eatery. I want to be building an organization that can create my antagonist environments. I want to be in the presence of people using power in accountable and meaningful ways. I don’t want to scream into the abyss at ghosts of my past. I’m thankful a long time ago I established that I needed to keep writing for me. I’d choke on the self-indulgence as though I actually felt my happiness or well-being depended on your engagement like a thirsty tik-toker.

[1005] Hush Hush, Eye To Eye

I’ve just completed an old episode of Vice Investigates where the founder of #metoo says, “Once you shine a light on something, you can’t unsee it.”

I work as a counselor. I habitually prompt people to, in their own words, start explicating things in their lives that are routinely under-illuminated. We might talk about how you constantly interrupt your spouse. What, precisely, any given person “sees” during or after that discussion is seemingly a large contributor as to why they can or can’t be bothered to change their behavior.

The boring, yet universal and infinitely impactful, truth about whatever it is you think is in the spotlight is that it is incomplete and perhaps wholly unknowable in a manner that will be emotionally salient. One person interviewed about her…4 years of discomfort…working for a restaurant owner had her explicitly state that it was unfortunate that he just couldn’t disappear and there was nothing in her imagination that would speak to forgiveness. Do you think she really sees the locus of her discomfort if it’s localized so viscerally in him?

It’s human nature to turn whatever we shine a light on into a fairy tale that helps us sleep at night. It’s just as much in our nature to turn the story into a nightmare. I’ve tried to spend less time bemoaning my experiences, negative as they register and perpetually uncomfortable, as though they’re only and forever my most damning indictments of how ambivalent and fucked life is. I invite layers of discomfort into my experience, be it in people who are miserable communicators, activities with endless questions I never quite find great answers to, or jumps into roles and responsibilities that no one beyond my ambition is asking me to take - if you don’t count the imploring screams of negligence.

Part of me is incredibly angry at people who allow themselves to be victimized by themselves. I’m not criticizing mental health or where you might be on your journey through trauma. But I’m incredibly put-off and almost insulted on behalf of every…child whose died via something preventable? Victim of a genocide? Anyone who’s ceaselessly punished for their existence, yet manages to dictate for themselves why they stay alive? People experience all sorts of crazy traumatizing things, big and small, and with some regularity. Creepy managers or crude commentary are not the bar to hang yourself over. It feels gross, entitled, and pretentious.

I’m absolutely fascinated that it has seemed to take years for us to culturally digest the idea that masculinity is not “toxic” by default. We are still reckoning with “competitions” between some of the dumbest and craziest people on the planet getting the keys to power. And we haven’t quite connected just how aggressively we attacked the foundation of how humanity rose in evolution through it’s interplay and connected dynamic. We’ve threatened something wholly foundational so aggressively we’re literally willing to forgo all semblance of reason to destroy the prospect of solving problems in a democratic way.

It’s the attitude. It’s the lack of expectations or end game. It’s not the “best” or “smartest” people who beat the addiction to their own bullshit. It’s people who keep their light trained on the next logical step for them to improve how they feel. When you’re entitled to your feelings and aggressively asserting the impact of “harm,” there is no indication that you have anything to contribute or anything to change. You just chant until the trance takes hold and carries you past any checks or balances.

I suppose after enough attempts to succeed at difficult things, whilst simultaneously watching dozens of failures every week, I see two dramatically different habits and patterns that distinguish people. Do you know how many times I’ve been “too busy” to do anything I want? I haven’t been. It’s a shitty excuse. I read about people who are actually busy doing huge things who still cut out time for their mental health. You, resident of Bedford, have the time. Do you know who gets all caught up in their feelings to the point it threatens not only their life, but of the people they care most about? People who tell you, automatically, every time, “I’m fine.” They lie, often, always, until they die.

We should be asking ourselves how many lies does it take to create the story that allows me to live with myself? Do I have to say I’m prettier than I am? Do I have to say I love my family until I’m blue in the face? Do I have to overlook a list of red flags about my partner that’s longer than any I’ve written for groceries? Could I recognize how dumb I was even if I asked the question? Can I reckon with my lonliness? Are my daily affirmations not juicing me like they used to? Did I live up to even 2% of what I imagined for my future as I was growing up?

We are a violent, ignorant, incredibly lucky species, and we carry on as though we’re all just trading answer keys to different tests. We are all trash, sniffing farts, and looking for the next excuse to crack the facade, en masse, so we don’t have to personally feel responsible for our behavior. Is my culture sick? Who cares, it lets me get away with countless lies about the state of my country, town, or capacity to change anything. I don’t need to shine a light on the gratifying feeling, in fact, it makes me shine so bright, it’s curious how many people can’t seem to see me. Even as I smear shit on walls, attempt to instantiate fascism, or couch my existence in an endless stream of infotainment memes.

You know I want a lot of money so I can run, right? I want backup plans. I want secured locations. I want to make my feeble attempts to build a better culture from somewhere safe. I’m trying to pull out. I’m trying to manage. I don’t have a living memory of feeling like I’m surrounded by adults who are in charge. I was in 6th and 7th grade when Bush was elected and found myself utterly confused that such a fuckwit could be put in charge, then teabaggers and Sarah Palin happened and it’s felt like the proverbial death by a thousand cuts right up until today.

I’m a victim too. I can still access incredibly low and dark spaces when I reflect on the examples that were set, on me, as to how to deal with innocence, ignorance, and vulnerability. Except, every time I shine a light on what’s happened to me or remind myself what I’m capable of, I also acknowledge the choice. Do I repeat the story to myself and make the feelings get more intense? Do I find myself trying to justify a lack of remorse and moves to exploit? Do I choose what I feel to be the wrong thing because it will be briefly gratifying? That’s what happened during my blow-up fight with my ex. I chose to chuck garbage cans, and yell and scream, and fuck her up mentally because she did not expect me to throw her the fuck out, and I knew calling that bluff would hurt as bad or worse than she had been making me feel.

Should I stay smug and entitled to how I felt leading up to that? During? What if I noticed I started taking pride in it? I’d be fucking sick. I would need guidance. I would need someone to hold me accountable if I was unable to do so for myself. I don’t want my amplified feelings dictating the rules. I don’t want the story of our dynamic to be of the inoperable discomfort where I’d start wishing she disappeared and that I’d never bothered. But this is what we’re currently doing, like, wholly trying to burn everything down and pretend we don’t exist in a larger context with greater ideals or hopes and prospects to do better. We don’t expect anything, let alone something remotely positive, to come from the larger experiment. And the day-to-day civility feels fragile and insincere.

I get criticized routinely for what I would describe as having standards. I need you looking forward. I need you to recognize and state what you need and share it honestly. I need you to incorporate perspectives that don’t agree with yours. I need you paying attention and trying. I need these things selfishly. I need to exist around people who are demonstrating and practicing the things that I must in order to remain oriented and healthy. I can’t be engulfed in your universe if it swirls with shitty excuses and the infinite void is utilized to dodge ever landing on a planet worth terraforming. I need you to say, “Yes, that thing is bad, and here’s what I’m doing about it, or deliberately not doing what would make it worse.”

I have a lot of ideas on how to personally survive in my own little bubble or chosen trajectory. I don’t know what “we” have going for us as wholly dependent on each other as we are. I feel empty and angry when I think about relying on you to speak, vote, work, or do anything but abuse your substance of choice, the narrative that keeps you precisely where you are. I’m hostile to the idea of collaboration. The way the world has trended suggests in my bid for more control or influence, I will court a new disaster in nearly every mind I try to incorporate. The unyielding pulse of existence will press me to seek control over cultivation. Will I be smart enough to devise a way around this? Will I choose a dozen tiny points of corruption until the driving ethos and mission statement transcend mockery? Either way, I’m keeping the light on the choice. Where’s yours pointed?

[1004] Pending

This is just a weird space. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to start anything, but it goes a little like this. Quickly get the “easy” stuff done like some paperwork or buys. Use that momentum to begin calling people about what to do next. Find out you don’t know even more than you thought, they don’t know how to help you, and there’s a dozen interpersonal barriers and variables you couldn’t predict in your wildest dreams. Try to start many things, you’ll find yourself at different points of the endless unpacking of what you don’t know, and more and more people’s interpersonal details will seep their way into what you’re trying to accomplish.

For 1 year and 3 months, I’ve been attempting to run a counseling business. For about the same amount of time I’ve been trying to cash in on the house we’re meant to flip. Today, I took the day off after 2 weeks of coughing culminated in me puking when it became uncontrollable. I’m better, but it’s 2 AM, I still have one day left of “work,” you know, counseling, which I can’t just do for myself. The house isn’t sold. As I watch my shows and movies, I long for days when I was doing drug studies and had the vast majority of my time not answering to anyone.

Among the shows I’m watching are episodes of NOVA. Miracles, by any grounded definition, are reported on for the many years of effort and contributions from the smartest corners of the world. HIV vaccine? Humanity is almost there. Raise an entire city and engineer ways to keep it from flooding? Just bust out the old pen and paper and let’s get to calculating. The “thingy-ness” of existence undoubtedly has one-to-many minds cracking how that thing works or can work to keep us afloat. Of course, there’s a hidden monetary motivation that doesn’t creep into the celebratory narrative, but this is why we reflect on these stories, to remind ourselves and humble the adulation.

I know there are people who do almost nothing beyond attend meetings, click a few things on a screen, and put on charm offenses who make hundreds of thousands to millions. I continually reference the 3 to 4 months of paychecks were I to stop all unnecessary spending to get out of debt. How I conceive of my “freedom” or the “brink” and “verge” of regaining a measure of my time is an entirely different universe of conversation to the person I wish to be. I feel like I live a mock-version of that person in extravagantly spending on shows and toys I can, technically, afford, you know, if my grand designs and plans ever came to fruition in a manner that felt anything but prolonged and accidental.

In fact, no matter how many shows I go to, or toys I buy, my world still feels very small. My suspicion many years ago was that no matter how much money I may make, no one around me that I cared to indulge with at the time, was going to be free. In 52 or so shows and counting, I’ve brought my dad most often. That’s not a problem, but it is telling. No one, but my dad, is traveling to me and what I’m up to. No one’s inviting me, if they’re up to anything at all. So what if I had 100 things scheduled for next year? You any less busy? You gonna discover a deeper interest?

So I want money. I want obscene amounts of money because I want to do a lot of big things and I don’t believe people in this country know how to do anything if money doesn’t dictate it. They won’t make time for each other, unless, of course, spending that time entreats or paradoxically prevents a very complex emotional baggage narrative about how much they do or don’t “love” their family. They aren’t valued and getting paid enough to push whatever role they occupy towards something better or more comprehensive. They don’t recognize their thoughts have been reduced to memes.

There aren’t any political networks going door-to-door in my neighborhood. There are more people getting actively harmed by over-booked caseloads and zero accountability than anyone wishes to admit. All of our major looming issues regarding the environment and ignorant violence are always at play. How do you approach without obscene amounts of money? How do you get your minute and a half blurb on Big Think without the networking and marketing? How do I find a life that let’s me use winter as a verb?

You tap into the existing models of exploitation. Women get exploited? You become a pimp. Oligarchic medical establishment? Lick up the endless crumbs of the cookie they’re munching. I’m convinced there’s no particularly “ethical” way to make the money I wish to. It’s reorienting around a narrative of entitled taking. Why take it? Well, they give it to you. People give every inch of themselves to the powers that be, religions they pretend to adhere to, the prestige and honor of their title. You name it, someone’s trying to hack off a part of themselves to give to it. I saw it at the party house. People volunteered for what would be paying jobs at any proper club or music venue. More than building a company, I know I’m building a narrative.

This is what incenses me about so much of the bullshit of different company “values” and “mission statements.” You’re narrative doesn’t have to be a lie unless you want access to the money controlled by the largest liars. You just have to obscure some details and downplay your company’s dance moves to be pretty wildly successful without ever reaching “throwing themselves off the building” kind of press. Every time I drive past some big building with a name I’ve never heard of, I’m a little jealous of whatever series of half-truths and opportunities they were afforded to get that little piece of certainly-not profit-shared real estate.

I want to know if it’s genuinely harder to build big things with people who are more equal, or if this system is just so catastrophically oriented against it that you might as well quit. More people, as I’ve already alluded, bring in all their baggage and different alignments or often lack of goals beyond, well, making as much money as possible. They may or may not jive with decisions that require them to affix their tastes to a certain income bracket. Is that the kind of drama I want to deal with when I try to either sustain a happy place or grow over a longer period? No. Or, what if they don’t even recognize how little the money really means to them as much as the drama of it all? Make that fit, or cut it out?

But even this fight is only a fantasy. I can’t get login information correct. I can’t discover, currently, how to write the check for $1300 that says we’ll be impaneled with insurance companies and can start taking clients. I’ve got a licensed person asking me to include her phone number on my flier “so it looks more official” to her alleged DCS contact. And, honestly, I can’t tell you what I’m doing wrong without conceiving of it as “everything.” It’s all wrong, all the time, and you just hope the next wrong move maybe makes you feel good or makes a little money eventually.

I stopped having any genuine expectations. I don’t think this is a healthy kind of detachment. When I was first told the house wasn’t going to sell, I didn’t feel anything. Of course it wasn’t going to sell. Why would it? I only worked on it for months. It’s only been an extremely hot market. It’s only supposed to have been to a wealthy and powerful political connection. It’s only overcame weird internal drama that no one anticipated. Why would it sell now? So I can be out of debt and we can move on to the next one? Not a good enough reason. Why should I think this person we’re utilizing for their license will be any better or worse than someone who hasn’t had their jealous husband accuse Hussain with sleeping with her? There’s no rules, just chaos. I don’t know if I embrace it so much as I’m just dead to it. Maybe this is my peak, in my shed, with a good portion of my time, occasional company, with just enough money to pay for one-off doctor’s visits and meds, but not good health insurance.

Aunt Vi in Queen Sugar said sometimes you forget to just sit in it while you’re living the dream in reflecting on the success of her pie company. If I don’t have a family or career to get complacent in, maybe I just make it about my shows and music and indulgences. I saw of clip of Gary Vaynerchuk talking about a proverbial fanatic of a show, and how if they just quit whatever they were doing and started making content about that show and their fanaticism, in 2 years, they could be a version of him, living their best life like the 3-5 emails a day he gets from people claiming to have achieved that. This kind of rich-guy circle-jerking philosophy I got bored with a long time ago. Any given blog or podcast from these types is very buzzy and motivational and all predicated on nothing but humble-brags disguised as hard-fought wisdom. They take on a false-god sheen as their brand seeks to supplement the mutual feelings that something meaningful is missing.

I don’t trust anyone telling me how to succeed that doesn’t have stories like mine about the inconceivably petty and arbitrary stops. The hollowness and emptiness of watching all of your highest dreams linger at the end of a phone call that no one is answering. Just quit my job and blog about TV you say? What if instead I became “passionate” about sustainable accountable care for some portion of a population local to me? What if instead of touring the country espousing the “purpleness” of everything, I had a message that spoke to the individual in a way that would get them to vote in a way that didn’t court fascism?

I’ve watched every episode of 1,005 shows and 3,146 movies. I’m 34. In many ways, I’m still very anchored to who I conceived of myself as a teenager. I still want shit to make sense. I still want to think there are right and wrong ways to live independent of the individuated rabbit holes our myopic selfishness might like to jump in. I still think we need standards and accountability. I still find it incredibly hard to imagine the mental world that allows many people to carry themselves as they do. That is, unless I factor in the incredible amount of depravity it’s otherwise impolite to mention. We’re dumb, poor, fat, exhausted, “busy” with whipping ourselves to within inches of suicide outside the death by a thousand cuts. We’re liars. We’re proud of our lies and we’ll isolate ourselves to protect the lies at any cost. We provide healthcare! No, we bilk insurance companies. We care about children! No, we work our complexes and sense of powerlessness on those even more powerless than us.

I mostly want to see what happens if I can be rich and continue to antagonize the liars. I want to use my money to destroy the psychological artifice that keeps people trapped, and record the results of how desperately they return to the same self-destruction. When given the freedom, opportunity, and access, will people do the “right” things? No, I don’t think they will, but I don’t know for sure, and need to run the experiment. Am I doing the right things with my freedom, opportunities, and access? I’m trying, no? Do I even know what trying looks like anymore?

[1003] Last Drop

I don’t know what I feel. I thought about saying, “I feel weak,” but that doesn’t seem true enough. I feel bored. I feel sad. I feel like I’m sick of fucking trying, and then that feels like the price of admission to ever, proverbially or otherwise, transcend my current condition. You know, I got someone to send me their license number. You know, they don’t have an NPI number, and that can take weeks to get assigned. You know, this delay was partly because the agency I contacted sent me the wrong checklist about what we’d need to get the impaneling process going.

When I first started with Groups, my boss was very gung-ho about “meeting people where they are” and defending not discharging people for simply missing too many days, generating threatening chaos, or other acts of noncompliance. You see, she had a story of “some” or “any help” that transcended the practical reality of what might be a dozen people’s experience of a member who isn’t suited for this level of harm-reduction care.

Groups is exploding. More and more money and greedy futures are on the line. In 4 months, it’s gone from practically never-discharge-anyone to, “Are these discharges done yet?” She might not be making any more money, but she’s not bound to anything higher than her master’s narrative. When the overall ethos shifted from whatever the analogous, “Don’t be evil” motto any brand that wants to believe the best of itself adopts, you step in line. She was formerly DCS for 12 years. She can swallow a lot of bullshit in the name of The Man or order or keeping her bills paid and kids fed.

Today, the last few hours felt like way more of a struggle than they should have. Again, I have the easiest job one can imagine. I talk about familiar obvious things I’ve said or done a million times, and turn what people share into encouraging sentiments about how much good they’re doing for themselves and the people around them. Any moment in my 4-day week that I choose to focus for even an hour puts me ahead of any outreach effort I may need to make or prep work for the rest of the week. I feel like I’ve been stockpiling reflections for the last few days, and I happened to put extra-curricular personal work things on my plate.

I’ve been working the job long enough now to track trends in certain members. I have about 120 clients. You’re certainly not going to please everyone, or to put it lightly, have a “style” they will all enjoy. A problem that kicks off my existential angst muscle is when I am invited to search for how and what I’m attempting to translate or share is divorced from…meaningful survival and bothering to exist at all.

I attempt to hold people accountable. But more than that, I attempt to teach them how to hold themselves accountable. This is anathema to the automatic fluid adherence to cultural norms or compulsive self-soothing addictive behaviors. It’s also the only “cure” to being a violent wanton ape flinging shit and crashing into every layer of life you never manage to understand. It’s not something you can “disagree” with anymore than I utilize my strong opinion to never drink water and maintain a concurrent desire to live at all.

But we find ourselves, culturally, writ large, acting as though we don’t believe we need to be accountable. Then, like insane narcissists, we double down on the belief, eschew the irony, and seek accountability, told in so many ways but Lord of the Flies will do, from those who don’t deserve it. We’ll take our hatred and resentment out on the innocent, the other, and those who remind us how truly weak and pathetic we are. We absolve ourselves of any individual obligation to our shitty feelings, powerlessness, and hopeless sense that we don’t matter, the people we’re close to don’t love us, and the things we care about are inane and unfulfilling.

So let’s disappear into the woods and grab a gun. Let’s adopt fiery conspiracies. Let’s get evangelical and dominate the conversation so our self-delusion can be shrouded in group protection; psychological, physical, legal, sexual and all the way down to verbal. This is why I consider a liar the most dangerous thing. All animals are honestly animaling. A human is the only one who can weaponize that honest nature into something that kills literally everything.

There’s a level in which I’m forced to “make peace” with the idea that people who run from my groups are not in a place for accountability. Except, that feels like an impossible concession. I don’t excuse you. I decided consciously to stop laying myself over the sword of decisions you were more or less capable of making than me, but still capable nonetheless. I push myself and ask for more. I look defeat and delay and head and heart-wrenching problems in their face. I reflect and look for what I can control. I investigate how complicated and messy and incomplete the story is in every seemingly hopeless moment. I show up on time, practically every day. I do the work in spite of the worst examples I may set.

You just…you have to. I’m not suicidal, but I don’t know how I wouldn’t have killed myself if I left who I was going to be up to whims of my circumstances or opinions of others. I don’t know how I would break depressive cycles, because no one was going to help me or listen long enough to work me out of it. I don’t know how I would have developed an approach to anxiety. I don’t know why I would bother to take risks in business and moving to this fucking field and building a fort. I don’t fucking know anything without practicing accountability. When I get too in my own head, I can count how many books I haven’t read to send me in another direction. When I want to pretend like I live anything less than a privileged regal existence, I can count the cashflow and number of people still dreaming of clean water and mosquito nets.

You don’t get to tell me any story that absolves you or who you’re tasked with working with of who they are and what they did or did not do when presented with the same fucking choice we’re given in every moment of every day. You pay attention and make a decision, or else. You pay attention to self-servicing and self-destructive things and you’ll make decisions to keep that going. You don’t pay attention at all, you’re at the mercy of how everyone else wishes to self-destruct, or you ride the security of those who don’t know any better as to why they should let you die off.

I ask people to pay attention to things they tell me they wish to improve on. I don’t say, “Here’s your assignment,” I say, “What do you notice about yourself you wish you did better?” Do you know what they tell me? They want to be more patient. They want to be less angry. They want to be talking less shit in their heads about the people around them. They want to be able to say “no” and set boundaries. They want to recognize when they’re taking their frustrations out on their children. They want to stop spiraling in negative and depressive thoughts. And you know what? When they pay attention, record what they’re noticing, and redirect themselves THEY FEEL FUCKING BETTER! They come to group excited to share. They attend to what others are saying. They begin to meet a reasonable expectation to just start attending to what’s going on in their own heads. They treat themselves and others better. They believe because they can “see the point” of what’s been recorded at the end of their pencil.

What’s the alternative? That’s a dead serious question. What other option do you have? Especially when you’re an addict, and by not paying attention, you almost immediately find yourself in some form of life-destroying space. Do you think you’re any less addicted to your narrative? Do you have any idea how much I wish I could ride the high of the ideas I had about where I’d be in life by now? My pride comes from the ongoing effort. I’m writing this after work, after a fun, if flirting-with-disaster weekend, and after taking another step in service to getting my business running. What is my alternative? Stop spending, sit isolated for months playing my piano, reading, watching TV, and writing what would almost-certainly get described as a “screed” excoriating society for all I’ve deliberately and delinquently checked-out of?

They say actors wish they were musicians, and incidentally, so many musicians end up acting. Whether it’s a perceived nobility or respect or simple grass-is-greener thinking, those who reach heights that give them the freedom to flow into new creative outlets seem to do so almost habitually. Whether or not what they create is “good” or culturally relevant is beyond the point. We access layers that we allow ourselves, and I think this works both directions. You ride fame and money into connections that get you on stages. You ride excuses and self-immolating narratives to the sublimation of everyone and everything. The creative energy will provide an infinitely irrational meta-narrative from which to proclaim your rule.

I saw Sam Jay at The Comedy Attic, and found she had a compelling point in her reiterating, “We’re all trash.” Her identity spans from junior man to woman to black to fat and all of which with their own groups she finds exasperating in their capacity to bitch and pretend like they aren’t shit. Sam’s takeaway is that she’s not going to focus on the big picture things and just keep trying to figure things out for herself. As long as what you’re doing isn’t trying to control or impose what you believe on someone else, fair game. Free and free alike. I think it’s an admirable position, and I don’t want to belittle Sam in conceiving of it as “merely naïve.” As I’ve thought about it the last few days, I can’t escape the impracticality and underestimating of what the religious or insecure or weak or invisible person’s compulsion is. Regaining a semblance of control at explicitly your expense is the name of the game.

When you don’t live for anything that you’ve learned or fought for, you live in contrast to your antagonist. When you’re not wise enough to forgive or incorporate your demons, you see them everywhere. When you’re not big or stable enough to tread into high waters, you’ll do anything to capture more air than you could breathe in a lifetime because you have no sense of proportion and an innate fear that any risk is the one that will end your ironically miserable one. Christians won’t leave you alone. Trump won’t stop. Haven’t you heard of the “gay agenda?” Don’t you know the only way to stop men from raping is to bag your women? There’s no such thing as a held-harmless free to do as you please idea. It’s going to infringe, impose, or desire more than you’re willing to pay.

That returns to my broad and often-argued point. You’re always paying something. You’re always fighting. You’re always building something up that is bound for eventual destruction. Whether it’s consistently mowing your lawn, keeping your self-esteem so you can show up and smile, or building the next argument for comprehensively dealing with the absurdity of existing at all, it’s all the same game, same obligation, same demonstration of your awareness, and in service to the same end. You get to have, hopefully, more moments than not that persuade you it’s worth staying alive at all. Does the nice lawn feel good? Do you enjoy the company of people who’ve tended to find themselves and don’t wish to give you shit and judge you? Don’t you love feeling “normal” or “responsible” in your title or ability to maintain your family and obligations? Why would you let someone deceive themselves that they’re worth the same as you who’s willing to do the work? Why would you give your life, as though you’re play acting some Jesus-caricature, for those who literally can’t be bothered to recognize what it is to live as you do? You raise kids to a point where you fucking must expect them to be an adult.

There’s no god raising us. There’s no authority, older than sin or otherwise, that is going to bestow upon you the infinite wisdom in a holy book, system of laws, or anarchistic decree. You wise the fuck up, hold other people accountable, or we all die. We die in big and small ways ANYWAY, and yet you’d have us do it faster and in more painful ways than we can conceive until it manifests as different crises of addiction, war, personality cults, and “post-truth” analyses.

We can’t all just get along. I can’t take you seriously when you don’t. I don’t respect myself when I sit and spin and get super smug about what I’m capable of or who I think I am. I respect when I’ve spoken to how I’ve managed to break the narrative spell again. I respect when I can patiently engage the next step through the desert that provides me just a drop at a time’s worth of water in service to the next tortured step. If we are so collectively not in a place to even acknowledge fascism, the severity of our mental health problems, the depravity of how we conceive of our neighbors, or the inevitable death of not experiencing some form of collective wake-up call about what it takes to survive and sustain, now the inherent wisdom of Sam Jay’s point becomes king. Find a way for you and yours to survive until it all burns down. Even if they’re coming for you, practice your ducking and weaving.

I’m not there yet, but I don’t think she’s wrong, and I don’t have money to seriously entertain a kind of “escape” like that too seriously without it manifesting as another one of tomorrow’s antagonisms.

I’ve tried, passively and with force, to make sure what I was thinking or where I wished to go wasn’t just in my head. You could read on your own time, or not. You can watch what I literally build to test and manifest. I, still, get drunk and text heartfelt “wish you were here!” things to people who won’t own how little they actually want to do with me. I take what I can control, the impressions you’ve given me, and respond as I want my best self to respond. Open, forgiving, trying, and not allowing “hope” to look like some platitude I’m unwilling to speak and work for. I don’t hope you’ll hang out; I invite you. You show up or don’t. I don’t hope you’ll read; I write. I don’t hope we’ll get back together or live like the old days; I pay the price of honest vulnerable expression and the many ways it manifests. I don’t do it perfectly or never delete, but I do it so often I’ve become all-but intolerant of those acting incapable of the same while professing to desire what I do.

I want as many words as it takes to feel better. I want as many opportunities as I can recognize. I want as many friends who will actually respond and encourage and grow and change with me. I want to damn that which belongs in hell and defend whatever’s left of why I bother to stay alive. I’m not imposing and justifying, just looking to acknowledge and celebrate. My expectations are about preserving me, not controlling you. I think when I “force” people to think of their lives the same way, they realize how little of themselves actually exists or there’s nothing they can recognize as worth preserving. All the more my fault and burden, I guess.