[1014] Chop Chop

Let’s talk out dumb old stuff again to see if I can get it to break or advance. I’m thinking the next time I attempt to figure this out, I’m just going to take a ton of shrooms and look for an angle only a kaleidoscope brain could access.

Stupid, easy, pointless, work. It’s not provoking elevated levels of anxiety like when I first began, but I can’t quell the unease entirely. I spent several hours this morning slowly mind-creeping my way towards doing, always, 10-30 minutes of work depending on how well I can focus and not have to redo something. Later, I conducted my groups, and it’s almost 5 hours later, and I haven’t done the next 10 minutes of work, and I’m nowhere near doing the prep that would complete the vast majority of the time it takes me to do notes.

I can do the notes with a show or movie on, especially the prep stuff. I can do them weeks in advance and it might take me an hour or two if I dragged it out. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why I allow myself to think about the notes, write about the notes, anticipate and mildly-anxi-e-tize myself about the notes, instead of just picking a focus lane and knocking the notes out. I enjoy the feeling of opening up the prepped notes and speeding through pasting the individuated portions. I literally have nothing else I do in service to my job beyond sending a few texts and emails occasionally. There is a greater series of absurdities at play.

Today I also attempted to turn that note prep into something more efficient. Well, I asked about how I might be able to. We use templates that the company has populated, somewhat. If they populated them more, it would save me another 5 to 10 minutes per note. That’s 1 to 2 hours a week, over the 6 months I’ve been working there, for 24 to 48 hours of time I could be speeding through sitcoms or cartoons. The response I got, eventually, was that my ideas were great and they’d be discussed at the next software updates/overhaul. That is, after I got a weird amount of pushback and confusing responses that I would even bother to ask for a way to be more efficient.

I don’t own my time. It’s the wretched tickle in the back of my throat that never goes away. Every second I spend in an email debating whether someone who isn’t appropriate for this level of care actually is, is stolen. Every time I’m asked to “support” someone who I don’t have the tools, license, referrals, nor any business pretending I can help betrays being a part of the whole endeavor. That I would specifically set aside time to do the functional equivalent of shoveling shit never makes the shit smell good. I have a perfectly good shovel. The shit is dry and ready to fly. But it smells like shit, and I’m conscious of the mess it makes of my psyche and uncomfortable with how it pollutes my lungs.

I lose when I go into “efficient Nick P.” mode. I feel an extra layer of defeat. They tricked me! They got me to “work like I do” on another thing that is meaningless to me. They designed something that made my wall come down, and now I’m over here knocking out tasks and staying on top of my game…but it’s not my game. My game is figuring out the insurance companies I’m impaneling with and starting my own company. My game is getting back outside and tending to my fence and pallets. My game is the stacks of books around me that need to continue to look like opportunities and trips more than antagonistic escapes.

What if I quit? Then I’ve put this effort into prep that never comes to fruition. If I do the prep, it makes it harder to feel in my bones that the option to quit is as close as it needs to be. Buy-in is how you fall for your captors. If I let myself go, I might start wearing their clothes and thinking their cheap version of my coffee mug isn’t half bad. This is a company that is still holding me hostage for $2,000 if I leave sooner than a year. I will never not think that is bad and a severe form of exploitation.

I never experience a palpably poor consequence of “procrastinating.” It feels like the wrong word. According to Google, it means “delay or postpone action; put off doing something.” Except, I’m not putting off doing something, I’m deliberately and aggressively *not doing something* in standing by my aggrieved principles. I’m not just plagued by some vague notion of “work” or “obligation.” I’m actively engaging in protest that I should ever conceive of the task as the thing that should happen “now” or take top priority. I have until Thursday to put in 10 minutes of notes from today. I only have 2 groups tomorrow. It’s a totally open question if I’ll be inclined to knock them all out tomorrow morning, tonight, midday, 2 in the morning tomorrow or early as fuck Thursday. I wait for the mood to find me, I don’t betray what I’m capable of.

Yes yes, that’s all well and good for a lot of excuse-making and demonstrating you have no appreciation for your circumstances that let’s you get away with making money for doing so little. But how do you really feel?

I can’t lose. I can’t lose myself to the drudgery. No one can protect me from the chances to give up dozens of little ways to protest and feel like an agent of my own making but me. It’s superficially a persistently dumb and petty ask to be tasked with some redundant clicks and boxes to fill. It feels like an existential threat. They know, and I know, that it doesn’t have to be this way, but the time-honored bureaucracy means, maybe, next quarter, we’ll give you back a day or two for every 6 months you stay chained to us.

Will I make any more money if I save everyone else time with my ideas? No. Is it now more likely efficiency will mean they’ll pile on more people until they reach new fail points? It’s practically guaranteed. Our ends are not the same. I want time. They want money. I evaluate the relative effectiveness of the use of my time in my overall sense of being, recognition of opportunities, and reflections on how freely I move about the world. They evaluate the effectiveness of their organization through the recitation of “we’re helping” propaganda and balance sheets. If this job allows for me to watch cartoons and fuck around until the last minute, that makes me feel good, like I’m capitalizing on an opportunity, and when I skip going to the office, that’s freer than a desky 9-to-5.

In school, most classes I could approach the same way. Very rarely was I doing homework right when I got home. I almost never studied until hours before the test. People mistake this for a kind of arrogance or indication of how “smart” I think I am. The bar was just that low. It’s been that low for a very long time across many domains. It’s set just behind the middle of the bell curve. Any average asshole is going to register as acceptable to the broad psychological zeitgeist. It’s the space of the familiar and mundane. It's where you celebrate the ease with which you can do your job instead of let it terrify you. I don’t brag about getting As and Bs; to this day I still shit on IU for failing me, just like I shit on predatory DCS workers, and negligent caseworkers who won’t schedule you to see your children, or ambivalent “harm-reduction” pill-mills that downplay health risks.

I don’t want to feel myself getting enthusiastic about shoveling the shit. That’s what being proactive does to me. It drives me to want to do even more. If I get two weeks done in advance, why not 4? Why not reorganize my spreadsheet and dig up resources and design a whole 6-month plan so I can take the thinking out of what to discuss each week? I could invite myself into more client drama with useless outreach. I could double-down on trying to fit more insurance company puzzle games in between sessions. The anxiety and drive will push me to “capitalize” on the “momentum” until I finally get disgusted enough with myself to relearn how much I like a balanced, modest, and self-aware pace.

A rich man has money, a wealthy man has time.

I won’t allow myself to lose sight of how much I enjoy using my time for “whatever.” My limits brought on by capitalist conditions aren’t going to disappear, but if I must remain a slave, I want it to be a slave that has the time to contemplate and write about his servitude. I want to be the slave that can, somewhat, pick his moment to get back to work. It will always be there and always gets done. My persistent pithy rebellion hasn’t stopped the bills from getting paid nor provoked me to get too dramatic in how or whether I cut off the flow of money. I have no reason not to trust myself that I will do what needs to be done. It doesn’t feel good, but it doesn’t need a constant anxious refrain as though this week is different or there’s some prize for forcing my focus. I’ll get to it.

[1013] The Chase

I’m not in the mood to write, but there’s clearly too much on my mind.

I’m feeling emboldened. I want to make “big” or “dramatic” moves in a new direction with regard to how I conduct my life. I want to transform my experience. I’m aware that this can rhyme with my sentiments about feeling “stuck” and desperately looking for something novel or fulfilling.

Something more fundamental is shifting. I have a friend/associate that has done most of the handyman work around the house. He reached out a week or so ago about feeling overwhelmed and maybe getting counseling. We spoke for about 25 minutes and attempted to schedule another 3 or 4 times to complete the conversation. It’s now Sunday through the holiday 4-day break period, and I don’t know if or when we’ll actually complete the conversation.

It’s immediately reminiscent of the space I occupy with almost every one of my clients. They have a problem, and in response they do one of two things. They’ll tell you about it once, then disappear and suffer in silence until they relapse, end up in jail, or otherwise breakdown. Or they’ll persistently repeat their problem, sometimes with the exact same words, for weeks, as they proceed to do absolutely nothing you suggest nor offer any insight as to what might improve their circumstances.

You let them go, or you chase them.

But I’m always chasing. Not so much professionally anymore, but with regard to friendship or basic companionship. Try as I might, I’m a social creature. I can’t make jokes about people I’m not around. I can’t challenge or be challenged by conversations I’m not having. I can’t learn about new and interesting things or happenings around town just through Google and talk shows. As much as I don’t like people, I’m at least half a person, and the things about me that co-evolved with the rest of the tribe mean I need a holistic view on the nature of my problems and how to solve them.

I chase people to go out to dinner with. I chase people to come to shows with me. I chase a kind of peace and civility with neighbors. I chase new acquaintances. I chase responses and noise and solidarity or comradery. I can’t pay people enough to hang out. I can’t persuade anyone to take 15 minutes for themselves, let alone me or our time together. It didn’t matter how many events I threw after college. It doesn’t matter if I’m free all day every day or get penciled in months in advance, from my perspective, the entire concept of friendship, time together, or building anything worthwhile with people is absolutely broken.

I can blame any number of things. I could personalize it, blame exploitative capitalism, call out any given person and their inconsistencies or lies, or tell a detailed history of changes in society related to technology, isolation, the pandemic, and cultural stressors and trauma. It would all feel incomplete in the moment. The moment, like so many, after you’ve been denied or ignored for the 10^th week in a row. The moments you’re digesting the “I’m sorry, but…” text or reading about how someone’s abusive or alcoholic acquaintance takes priority over you. Or, don’t you know, things are just so busy and chaotic! You couldn’t possibly be bothered to keep a regular sleep schedule or make it to dinner because, by default, the frantic self-destructive dance needs protecting.

I just can’t anymore.

I also chase money. I think that I can work hard enough, identify niches, or consolidate on so many modern comforts, and with my time or extra cash will arrive at some genuine feeling of safety or security. But don’t you know? They’re not going to pay me. My friends aren’t going to pay me. Insurance isn’t going to pay me. The desperate and exhausted and hollow, who will pay for everything but themselves or what they need, aren’t going to pay me. My jobs are going to pay just up to the line that keeps you gaslighting yourself about how much you need their money and what it’s good for.

I used to be so anxious that I was wasting every minute when I wasn’t hyper-focused on some “big” world problem or taking a step in service to some larger goal. I would make myself sick, because I only had so much time to create what was driving me. That started to chip away. I can build a big house and fill it with anxious cats, because no one’s coming. I can try to build a business that no one’s hiring because monopolies and grudges dig graves for your walking dead ideas. I can try to build new friendships or relationships, but the texts aren’t going to get returned and the underlying anxious lie about what’s driving you together won’t get left alone.

I’m fine to be a place-filler though. I don’t expect to be seen, heard, or understood. That’s an incredibly high bar in the clusterfuck of modernity. I don’t need to share what I’ve read. I don’t need to offer any genuine opinions. We can fuck like real dolls. I can dress and slim down for some proper arm candy. I can cheer for the sports team and feign indefinite interest in what is almost certainly the dumbest TV show, hobby, or preoccupation of all time, but if it brings joy, oh boy! I don’t care anymore. I’m going to go seek out more of these impossibly unfulfilling and meaningless interactions so, if nothing else, I have more explicit things to talk about in blogs.

What do I even want? I want to work to stop believing “things” will get “better” than what I’m given, or not, every day, every weekend, and every moment your excuses, silence, or malicious interpretation finds its way into my brain. I don’t care what you think. I’ve been experiencing what you do for so many years. I’m watching myself get infected by you so that the things I enjoy I feel like I can’t, and I have no idea what the fuck that is about. That is, until I think about incorporating you. If there’s nowhere to go, I can sit peacefully and practice or read a book. If there’s no one to share a joke or picture with, I don’t have to consider taking and thinking in those terms. I need to deliberately step away. I need to full-stop obligating myself to whatever it is you might need of me.

That said, as I emotionally pine for money and keep the ongoing calculation rendered about when it would be “best” to leave my job, I’m more or less resolving myself over the next 2 or 3 months to hunkering down. I don’t need to be mean about it, of course, and I’m always going to need help with things, but I’m not going to be the force moving things around. It’s me, here, with whatever I can or can’t do by myself for the foreseeable future.

[1012] Swing Life Away

I’m so confused. The other day, I envisioned myself hanging from one of my ceiling 2x4s and writing a facebook status, “Bye, can someone please grab the cats?” I’m not suicidal, but I let my curiosity and taboo orientation ride the thought waves to see if I’ll be “moved” or “jarred” one way or another. The takeaway is that thinking about that made me feel nothing. It was just a thought. It didn’t instruct. It didn’t cause fear. I don’t feel guilty. There I am, just dangling, and then a smirk slowly starts to appear at the idea that, you know, this is really about the cats and making sure they’re okay.

I’m more confused by what, if anything, my “purpose” is. I know I have to make my own decisions and own each moment I’m alive. I know there’s a certain gratification and sense of being/belonging in helping others. I don’t mean to echo too loudly the sentiment of a forlorn teen. I just mean that I’m built a certain way. My truck hauls things a regular car can’t. It’s built to. I’m built in a way that can contemplate tragedy and crisis in detached and pragmatic ways. I’m built in a way that voraciously consumes and aggregates information. I’m quick. I’m well-rehearsed.

My grandparents, if nothing else, worked. They worked to survive. My aunts and uncles all had/have jobs, made it through school. If we reduce the concept of “work” to “made money,” you can better account for their pathological and selfish behavior. Money keeps the bills paid, work keeps the house clean, discipline keeps you in line with the disciplinarian right up until they die or their power is usurped. “Work” is the common refrain for dictating orientation and purpose. You work to provide for your family. You work to distinguish yourself…at work. You work because no one is going to work for you, particularly in your faux representative democracy.

I discuss work often in how I do counseling. You don’t just show up, take your medicine, and blithely check in each week. You have to practice learning how to identify your feelings. You have to practice patience. You have to train your sense of responsibility and ownership. This takes existential-level work that your clients aren’t just bad at, but have literally been using substances to a degree that it perhaps cripples their ability to ever discover how. What, then, are we to say about the nature, purpose, or impact of their work?

I’m 34. In that time, I’ve worked hard enough on at least one instrument to have proven myself capable of performing techniques at one point in my life I would have described as “godlike.” I’ve worked to learn about the world to the point where I was spending thousands of dollars trying to build a website to organize and sort it all to become something useful for connecting and finding patterns. I’ve worked 3 jobs at once and 20-hour days for several years. I’ve worked 4 times longer in a role that burns people out routinely and would have stayed were it not for shit management. I’ve scrubbed the fuck out of a bathroom caked in grime of a mentally unwell client. I’ve created and ran a coffee shop, party house, done well in school, and been a person who has averaged reading more than a book a day. I’ve transported thousands of bricks and built out my house. I’ve hauled scrap, tires, pallets and torn down barns. I’ve been management and general labor. I’ve remodeled a house. I’ve been a part of a winning sports team and a jazz band. I’m working in counseling while trying to get my own business running.

I’ve scratched the surface. In that time I’ve also watched thousands of TV episodes, hundreds of movies, and dicked around, literally, or in days spent in the fog of “I’m not doing enough” or “Where to now?” or “Wanna spend hours driving around until we land somewhere to eat?” I’ve had 3 serious-enough relationships, entire weeks spent by the pool, and thousands wasted or gambled on less than meaningful pursuits. I’ve been to well over 100 concerts, dozens of comedy shows and several theme parks. I’ve beaten as completely possible that it is to beat 50 or so video games and spent as many or more hours playing them socially.

Almost never does it feel like “enough.” There’s work, forever, on whatever you choose, but the times I felt like anything I was doing mattered, whether it was drinking to oblivion or doing something around the house, was when I thought it was shared.

I’m confused because I don’t know what’s been shared. I don’t appear in pictures with most of the people I knew in college, let alone high school outside of a yearbook. My relationships appear to have been overwhelmingly built on a combination of naivety and “romantic” notions of who I am or what it means to be together. No matter what I watch, read, or play I’m not in some active conversation or exploration of the topic. I’m still the kid at dinner trying to tell his exhausted and disinterested mom about his day and getting shut down. Were we sharing a meal back then, or was she obligated to feed us?

I’m thankful for Hussain in sharing the struggle of getting the business started. I’m thankful I get to add “home renovator” via Byron to my list of accomplishments for every infuriating and baffling piece of crazy that has fucked that project. I will always boast about my partnership with Hatsam and the support our parents gave us. Friends certainly contributed back then. What was it to? Whether it was the shop or the parties, who was really there?

I’ve all-but stopped writing goofy paragraphs on old friends timelines for their birthdays. We’re not going to call each other. It doesn’t mean anything more or less to them than the unwashed uncapitalized mass “happy birthday” messages from the other veritable strangers. Anymore there’s several I’m convinced would be confused and offended I even bothered. What do I make of the time together? What do I allow myself to be convinced of about the nature of the friendship or words exchanged? Is it a measure of “wisdom” to maintain a kind of military-detachment that expects you or them to ship out or die at any moment?

I don’t seem to understand what I’m built for. If I bring everyone together to party and celebrate, I’m actually the target for scorn and resentment. If I reach out first, second, or a seventh and fifteenth time, now I’m a borderline creep or disingenuous puppy who can’t register it’s been abandoned. If I focus on learning and nerd shit, who cares? I’m not figuring out a way to get paid for what I know and the slurry of Patreon professionals are barely skirting by producing content every day and appearing on TV. I can’t persuade myself to take music seriously enough to sacrifice anything in service to again reaching my heights. Even if I’ve created for myself an adult playground with tools and space, I come up against some hard limits in the weather, time, budget, and tolerance for risk and pain while occupying the middle of nowhere.

I’m told, pretty regularly, about my capacity for building rapport and trust. I’ve watched people light up that they get to keep me as a counselor when they change group times. I’ve been told I can be talked to and seem like I really care in a way others don’t. I’ve watched the disappointment and anger as I’ve switched roles or the fear that I’m more abandoning you than saving myself. I’m not high on my own supply of self-serving narrative bullshit. I have a particular, high-powered, and special or different use. I can only seem to find it working in service to things that take advantage of me or treat me like a threat to what’s understood as a “normal” or “decent” way of existing. I can be really good at building trust and being encouraging, and line the pockets of a company that won’t provide insurance that covers the contacts in both of my eyes. I can give away the space to pursue dreams and create and be yelled at and looked at with ongoing suspicion about what I really want.

Even if I figured out what I was built for, who am I working for? An abstract notion of “the youth” and “their future?” I’m well past the point of believing I can “help” any fucking moron who has made a career of avoiding responsibility or bothering to define words. I can’t “save” you from yourself nor single-handedly fix my environment or problems of communication any better than an entitled billionaire.

Is this what I’m here for? Am I to keep reporting on the relative futility of it all? Am I just meant to watch and record as I confirm under different conditions how useless my hands and brain really are upon subjection to the infinite spin of errant interpretation and superficial relationships? What am I fucking doing? My best guess is “trying to amass money.” After that? Eat. Travel around and look for a remote sense of security. Build something, maybe better, maybe just more headaches, and keep people from…hurting themselves? Feeling victimized once more? News flash, I could have the best business in the world and you know what it can’t do? Make people pick up the phone, show up, or recognize anything about what it took to create.

You can’t help others if you can’t help yourself. I have no idea how to “help myself” be less suspicious about how or whether I’m capable of finding and maintaining meaningful relationships. Useful ones, sure. If your investment in me is on your terms, it’s not an investment in me. It’s not a recognition of me. I don’t exist beyond a narrative fixture in a fantasy. I wasn’t looking for a “wife” or “girlfriend,” and still aren’t. I cared about the people and what they wanted to do. I wanted to help and give and invest, and I can’t really explain how persistently that was denied and thrown back in my face. At the moment I might start to suspect that I could be a positive or consistent good in someone’s life, they pull out, and I’m a laundry list of problems and gaps and not-enoughs.

The “healthiest” relationships I could point to do a fucking circus extravaganza of not seriously discussing or fixing areas of contention. The overall sense of companionship or stability trumps the work and devastating consequences of battling things out. That’s the rule. Keep the image alive. Don’t race to the bottom where neither of you will find peace or solidarity in sharing a truth more precious than the most accessible and translatable narrative. Keep the sunglasses on your black eye teeth beaming pictures. Stay busy and distracted so you can better forget there was ever a smell coming from the basement at all.

We build families of this stuff. We’ve built entire nations on empty notions codified in anecdotes and lore. What do you win for speaking to that? Exile from the nation. Even if you play along, you don’t feel safe. Your soul no longer belongs to them. Any tenuous truce between your perspective and their power over you can get shattered in an instant. My uncles stole my grandmother’s house when she died and cut me out of the will. Do I isolate from them, be rude at Thanksgiving, and watch the proceeds of its sale when they die get sent to the church? Do I hurt and disappoint my dad who loves his brothers and his sons and just wants peace and prosperity for us all? Do I mock and practice ingratitude for the intangible things my grandparents have given me, their examples still being talked about now?

So I can mediate a crisis between you and the State, or between you and a problem you don’t have the time or notion on how, but perhaps intention to figure out, or with myself when it comes to a physical activity, socializing foray, or hobby preoccupation, but not within my thieving or leaching family. Got it, universe. I can invite a conversation about any given line from a digression like this, and I’m only going to catch those perfectly unwilling to quote, focus, or bother to do really any work to understand what was actually said or grasp the sentiment offered more than incoherently shit their feelings and demand I see and trust they know more than me. I can spend hundreds of hours on a given preoccupation or thinker and in seconds they, and I, will be caricatured.

Is that friendly? Am I just being impatient and “too serious” in wanting to get as far away from that crazy-making behavior as possible? If I’m feeling isolated or antsy, and I join the sports team where everyone smokes, drinks, and is overweight, am I in the wrong for feeling like I still don’t fit in? If I discuss the lengths I go to approach the myriad problems I might identify, can you begin to understand how isolating it is when you’re met with that look like a dog who’s waiting for you to drop something for them to eat? Like you’re speaking Chinese or talking about moving grains of sand one at a time across a vast distance.

There I dangle. My environment kills me. It’s often by design, but mostly through negligence. It’s a silence that crushes my head and restricts my heart and punctures ears. It’s a look, so infused, by the layers of dream-work laid over the necessary shoveling I’m discussing. It’s the void behind your eyes betrayed by the fear, anger, and sadness. The people I “counsel” are overwhelmingly terrified of me. They shrink if we meet in person. They say “hey” and grab what they need and leave. It’s not “me,” of course, they’re reacting to. It’s how they feel. It’s why they became addicted. It’s why they’re tuning in, to the extent they are, to what I have to say and not the other way around. That’s the ongoing tragedy. I’ll be read as some smug or proud braggart by someone who feels just like them who’ll gleefully skip past the invitation to own and explore how they’ve weaponized their weakness and victimhood.

I’ve said too much. Who was this for? It’s 4:04 AM and I’ve got to get a nap in before gearing up to head north for Thanksgiving. I’m just kidding, I know who it’s for. All of the blogs, always, are for me. Because I’m the only one who can give me what I need. I have to find the words or reason to keep playing along while I otherwise swing in the breeze. I’m thankful I don’t want to die, but I’m still incredibly confused about what I’m supposed to live for when I feel like you’d prefer it if I were dead. Not everyone, just almost everyone who’s gotten to know me. I’m also thankful I thrive on spite.

[1011] Listen Jesus I Don't Like What I See

Wikipedia defines fascism as, “a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement. characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”

I want to ensure that I get the comprehensive definition somewhere in my writing situated closely to my next sentiment. I hate religion. I hate your god. I hate your faith. I hate the, extremely human, impulse to see mystery and wonder and giant open questions and slap a self-soothing excuse over any inclination to learn, doubt, work, or hold you and yours accountable.

It’s a persistent hate. It’s a sincere hate. What is more authoritarian than an all-powerful god? What is easier a set of rules to pretend to follow than dictatorial edicts? How “naturally” it follows that those in the majority, or of the same color, or who can sound off the same creeds stand above the “other.” How liberating is it to sublimate individual desire for the glory of the hoard and the eternal reward after death? What could possibly suffice as a big enough lie to get you through your entire miserable life, ensuring that “you” never actually live it, than layers of fascist ideological narrative structures to plug your enfeebled mind into?

If you watch closely, people can’t fundamentally let go of their inherent fascism. If they eschew a god, they’ll worship the state. The state disappoints? There’s any hodgepodge of “individual values” or hobbyist preoccupations that never quite fill the void, but allow for a release of passionate advocacy that looks a lot like political violence and bids to control. Yes, far-left sensitive types who think racist jokes are tantamount to violence literally want to prevent you from speaking in the exact manner that far-right insanity wishes to prevent you from ever remembering what America was supposed to stand for. It’s about control, anticipating the end, and couching your sense of identity and future orientation alongside a pre-approved in-group story.

Simply, there is little to no control. That’s increasingly hard to believe as technology advances and we pretend the algorithms aren’t practically dictating mental health. We pretend that “control” certain groups have is in the form of blunt instrument money waves that get a lot of things wet, but it’s unclear what that moisture does but keep everyone annoyed and catching cold.

It always returns to a lie. The pretend certainty you have about what happens after death gives you cart blanche to pretend about anything for any reason. The pretend fairy tales about souls and babies let’s you remain blissfully unbothered by the science around birth, abortion, or the logistics of handling the 407,000 children in foster care and otherwise abysmal social safety net. How many times do we need to interview someone who says, “This country was founded on God!” It categorically wasn’t, but those giving the liars the mic don’t reflexively stamp the fascist-level ignorance with the truth or implications.

Why not? They’re in authoritarian-adjacent capitalist systems. The flame-war keeps the money going. The fear keeps you watching. Even if a report is as “unbiased” as you can reasonably portray, the dictates of daddy dollar win the day. Every “ist” and “ism” is a shortcut window into someone’s, “Tell me what to do” and, “Use me” sensibility. If I’m racist enough, will you give me more money? If I’m sexist enough, will you excuse our collective mishandling or subjugation of the opposite sex? If I’m a proud capitalist can I bankrupt your town with humble impunity and pollute the world for my starving share-holders?

The truth is pain and sacrifice. The fascist animal is “me me me” and “right now.” It wants the power by taking your life, your control, your agency, and resents any demonstration of responsibility or accountability you might engage in. I brought up 407,000 children earlier. That’s, at best, a lazy taunt to the fascist who can write every atrocity off on “god’s plan.” Those kids are living wonderful fantasy lives, and if nothing else, will certainly be rewarded for their struggles in the afterlife.

This is as familiar and tired a pattern as anything that has ever existed. And It’s reflexive and it’s in every one of us, and depending on the nature of the topic, your fascism will get triggered and feel perfectly righteous. How, ever, do we entertain the Palins, Trumps, Walkers, Boeberts, Greenes? Literally, how can they be a persistent and genuine danger…ever? They’re the hydrogen in a water molecule. There’s 2 people who can be driven mad by any given topic for every 1 person who stays vigilant in checking their biases and messaging or in attempting to think things through. Those pre-water oxygen molecules occasionally persuade one of the two hydrogens to hang out and vote with them for a while instead of drowning us all like an angry ironic god. It’s not a great metaphor, but you get it, right?

This is what Star Trek-dreaming types and scared broken Gen Z people need to figure out. The crazy is within us all. The entitlement takes exactly one generation for you to forget where you came from and feel as though your given “ism” can suffice for the work of writing legislation, holding anyone accountable, or having the conversation about why any of us bother to continue living. “Socialism doesn’t work!” It’s as ignorantly fascist a statement as you can make. It’s not dismissing a definition of socialism; it’s denouncing that we’re social or responsible for each other *by existential definition.* It’s a meta-lie designed to undermine the very concept that we’re actually, fundamentally, connected.

The impulse to lump is a fascist one. There are good psychological reasons our brain condenses things and we create summaries. Then we shit the bed and infuse our lumps with assumptions. We prejudice ourselves against de-lumping. All Blacks this, all Jews that, all women must be controlled etc. We then try to disguise this prejudice under banners of our “values,” “morals,” or “traditions” which act as hate propaganda. “Heritage not hate!” “Blue lives matter!” Our Left fascist counterparts say we have to “defund the police” while deliberately ignoring statistics on actual police behavior. They use media-fueled animosity to make the disingenuous lie that guns, while certainly a problem, are killing significantly more than is actually the case. Sam Harris has a really good talk getting into the numbers on that one I might look up and link here.

It’s our fascist impulses that let power do batshit things like take the world’s foremost innovator and futurist get reduced to pathetic Twitter Nazi. He does not have the wisdom to stop pretending that he can or should attempt to control anything he desires. The “ists” that make him rich design elaborate financial narratives to justify erratic behavior. The “ism” that his family fortune was built on is a not-so-dirty little secret. And we want to marvel at the fallout. We want to be entertained. We want to sit from our authoritarian toilet thrones and levy judgement and situate him against every new name and situation waiting for our engagement.

And it was good.

God, so pleased with himself, so circular in his logic, said it was good - until his fascist tendencies jumped the oxygen atoms and drowned us all.

You’re not up against “conservatives” or “republicans” or sects of historically relevant “fascists,” “socialists,” or “communists.” You’re up against yourself. We live in what I still consider an extremely confusing and painful world where it’s practically a toss up whether a brain-dead lying violent sexually and emotionally abusive cunt will “win” to “lead” against even a basically nice and “normal” person. A person who uses his fascist religious instincts to at least tout the values someone like me wishes we could figure out without sky daddy dictates undermining a robust and mutually-agreed upon means of caring for each other into the future. Jesus doesn’t persuade me not to manipulate and control you, he’s just a persistent nag about your sheepish nature and smirks all the way to the bank at getting you to believe coming back to life constitutes a “sacrifice.” That’s why you have to forgo an individual identity and sacrifice the other. You don’t actually believe him, but you can’t let anyone know that, especially yourself.

I hate that you’re willing able and proud to play this game of self-delusion and self-denial that, not figuratively, gets me and what I care about killed. I’m not naïve about how much needs to die to appease the angry whiny bitch god you pretend to venerate. It’s everything. You literally can’t stop because a lie, a betrayal of that which exists, needs to keep betraying like an infinite Judas. You can’t repent, because there’s nothing to forgive you. And you don’t exist, so you can’t learn how to forgive yourself. So, who’s next to blame?

[1010] Caught In The Act

There are going to be a lot of disparate threads in this one, but what else is new?

Last night was unexpectedly eventful, and then 5 minutes ago even more happened. That’s the nature of things, if you genuinely don’t believe what might otherwise be “natural consequences” of the pieces involved.

I went out with a new person. We had a good conversation, she paid for dinner, we did a little parking lot smooching before saying goodbye. She’s a therapist to rich people, works part-time making full-time money, and is familiar in her “need to be doing something” energy that has her adopting endless hobbies and connecting with all sorts of people. It’s rare that I meet someone that makes me feel like I want to slow them down to breathe.

In the course of our conversation, she said, “You have an avoidant personality type.” She also insisted she was a really good therapist several times. Her thesis, no one is more compelling at convincing ourselves of whatever it is we want to hear than ourselves. If you’re not in therapy, which she is, you’re likely enmeshed in a series of self-delusional excuses keeping you from accessing hidden trauma or truths or otherwise. When I asked her what differentiated “excuse” from “reason,” to her, there is none. My first instinct regarding her posture and confidence is that she’s very comfortable expressing her newfound knowledge of herself and how to orient and turn it into a therapeutic practice, but she’s not crazy about being pressed or challenged on her core assumptions. If that’s true, she will remain an at-arm’s-length acquaintance.

I don’t know if I’d have to spend any real amount of energy convincing you, dear reader, of my confrontational and pro-active insistence that I resolve, complete, or obtain insight propensity, but nonetheless, given that I look for people to ever bother to analyze or say things about me, I have to take what I can get. I also get the impression that I was being tested, which I dislike. But, again, I’m willing to approach that feeling with a “if true” posture and sensibility. For as good as I may be at analyzing, manipulating, or otherwise nailing your deepest darkest fears and insecurities, I’m never providing the complete picture, nor willing to die on some ego hill.

While I was driving to this meet-up (which I refuse to call “date”), I got a call from my (fancies himself neighborhood watch and gossip) about, “These idiots shooting on your land.” The idiots in question where my best friend, his kid, and his kid’s friend. I have a giant dirt pile, wet, situated in the middle of my property sitting towards the end of a slight hill that climbs behind it. We’ve shot into it before without issue. I’ve gone shooting with my buddy and the kid in the past. According to my pissed off neighbor, there was apparently no accuracy and bullets were flying just over head of his dad, and if I remember correctly, in his version his dad’s house. Mind you, they would have had to be shooting at and through my house to be in the direction of his father’s, so I’m chalking that up to his hysterical moment.

Now, I’ve been shooting with my buddy and the kid before. I have watched the kid click the trigger as quick as possible unloading as many bullets as he can into the woods. I also have a pretty extreme prejudice against the kid who generally annoys the fuck out of me, tends to foil or complicate anything regarding me and my plans, and appears to remain wholly ungrateful and ambivalent about the amount of extreme privileges he’s allowed with regard to driving, drug use, and responsibility given the extent of his, still in the process of being diagnosed, issues. I could use all of that and easily determine I don’t want it out here potentially antagonizing the neighbors. I don’t trust the kid, his friend, and I’ve told my friend the extent to which I think the kid gets away with things in his care. I say, “I don’t care, come on out.” I don’t get 10 minutes up the road before the angry calls come in.

Here’s a deeper complication. It was the first day of hunting season, so the woods are filled with limp-dick cousin-fucks looking to bag them a deer. This is where my neighbor was, camped out on his land, way down the line of where a higher-shot bullet or 3 would almost certainly catch the tops of trees. To my neighbor, “They almost shot me!” To me, knowing this neighbor has enthusiastically rallied with the Nazi Trump train that rolled through town, thinks to himself, I kinda wish they had. My neighbor’s son apparently came onto my property with a gun and unable to calm down as he interrogated my friend and the kids. There’s a version of that story where my friend shoots that guy, “stood his ground” on property he was invited to, and now we’ve got a whole new level of chaos and bad blood.

In my text designed to wholly feed the ego of my panicked neighbor, I said things like, “Of course, I’m mad at those idiots, you’re so right, this is serious, I’ll never allow them to come here for that again!” I took it a step a further and said, “This is why I hate fucking guns. They aren’t toys. I don’t understand the “fun,” and now I look like an irresponsible cunt for allowing them to come out.” The text tone shifts. Triggered neighbor says guns aren’t the problem, idiots with them are, but he would just appreciate me not allowing idiots back to my land. I thought I moved to the middle of nowhere, but nope, idiots just the same, wandering the woods to feel manly and even as the bullets fly overhead, it’s not the gun or any of the stupid fuck culture and entertainment around them, it’s that that guy over there is the idiot.

I didn’t ask to engage with any of my neighbors. They came to talk to me, investigate me, debate whether I was a “nigger” behind my back, and otherwise entertain themselves with the human crap that plagues small-town ignorance and poverty. And now, here I get to sit surely to be indefinitely scrutinized for anything I attempt to do out here going forward. Why, precisely? Is there a “reason” I allowed my friend to come out, or am I just making excuses for not trusting my hyper vigilant and judgmental gut? Did I avoid sharing anything about my perspective save my ambivalence to the idea of a fascist getting shot?

20 minutes ago, my buddy calls me to say his father had a stroke. He’s in the hospital. There are half a dozen reasons to believe pretty much any day his father could have had a stroke in the last 10 years, but it happened today. He’s still alive and presumably stabilizing.

You want to play in the woods with your gun, shoot at dirt with your gun, drink and smoke, live the healthiest and insidiest life possible, you all still get to die. If there’s anything culturally, individually, or routinely avoided, it’s deeply engaging with the death we’re helping to facilitate or downplay. I caught myself looking for an excuse to be more incensed or worried about the fallout of the shooting and my pissy neighbors. Ultimately, I know that I’m colder and sicker than they can imagine, and if they come after me in passive aggressive or otherwise ways, I’ll handle it. I don’t like that I’ve been invited to entertain that thought via an extended kindness to my friend and shuttering of my distaste for his kid, but here we are.

If there’s anything I’d love to “avoid” though, it’d be these kinds of idiot interactions over things that, in a serious way, have nothing to do with me. I’m not eschewing the idea that we’re all connected or that I don’t believe in mutual exchange and sacrifice for friends, but I am not a gun enthusiast. I’m not a hunter. When I moved here, I couldn’t even see my neighbors, let alone have campers parked all around with kids running around and at least one dog who’s been willing to bite me. I didn’t adopt a fucking kid. I thought, after the better part of a year making appeals to my network to hang out more and do fun things or make money, that I was simply going to make a foray into expanding my social network. In doing so, I wouldn’t provide myself with any excuses or resentful narratives about the nature of what they’re otherwise obligating themselves to. And I did shoot my shot, and was polite and charming enough to garner light lip service after a few short hours.

My new therapist friend asserted the “objective” nature of a therapist who has nothing invested in the outcome of what they’re telling you. I challenged, one, the capacity for any human to be “objective,” per se, and two, given her own explanation of those hidden truths therapy is supposed to ferret out, why we should believe any therapist isn’t under the spell of theirs. I think, if you’re really about that “objective” truth game, you do it like me, and let every single person in your life that you’ve shared your truth with pigeon-hole, abandon, judge, silent-treatment, or take up the pontificating mantel that details for you how much you hurt people, are blind, or are just mean and not caring. I lose money and comfort and connections as a matter of routine in trying to find the “objective” or “better” means of existing. I don’t want to lie to you; you really really really want me to lie to you. I’m not particularly wise nor brave in acknowledging just how far I could weave tentacles in betting on the weakness, ignorance, and ego of useful targets.

I think I’ve done a pretty amazing job of not behaving like that. When you avoid responsibility, the little evil villain in you takes over. People need to be punished and retribution needs to be had. They aren’t old and infirm on the verge of a stroke, they’re maliciously interfering with your plans to make money and dominate! I didn’t suppress my angry and judgmental feelings nor keep them hidden, I chose to trust not only my friend and his supervision of the teens, but my neighbor to be remotely civil in how he engaged with what was, hopefully, more of an accident than one more instance of a shooting behavior I’ve been personally witness to.

Now, does this whole digression just suffice as a big avoidance mechanism? Should I keep the flame of the situation alive and make continued forays into ass-kissing and ingratiating? Do I have some hidden pattern of making excuses for my friends and how they conduct their lives that has just manifested again in something that needs downplaying? Do I have something unresolved regarding my indifference to the death of fascists or the depths I might sink if my neighbor’s get all Hatfield and McCoy on me? I struggle to believe that there’s someone willing to scrutinize or question to the extent I am. I have sincere doubts that anyone, an “objective therapist,” “best friend” or “loving family member” are going to spend the time, ask the questions, or arrive at the best course of action for me in a way I’m unwilling to discover or speak to. Nor do I think prioritizing courses of action or abstention is tantamount to excuse-making.

When my new acquaintance asked if I’d ever do therapy, I said sure, but I’d want a goal in mind. She said, “Most guys do.” You know how much I like being lumped as just a measure of “most guys,” right? She went to therapy and was asked what to work on and said, “I don’t know.” After a series of EMDR sessions and other interventions was able to unlock and process a whole host of trauma from her past for which she no longer carries an emotional response. Hey, good for her. If you’ve got the money and a therapist’s office is your playground for self-discovery, more power to you. I, as far as I’m aware, and very unlike “most guys,” don’t have anything on my soul or conscious that isn’t contained within over 1000 publicly available blogs. Is that what people who avoid…anything, do?

My ongoing conversation is frequently about my cynicism for engaging with people who prefer their anxious and insecure narratives to doing anything palpably real, hard, or accountable to their existence that isn’t prescribed, familiar, and socially accepted along vague expectations and traditions. I don’t care how smart or dumb you are, your brain needs a narrative. You need to fit. You have biases that keep you alive and away from malignant psychosis. I don’t know that I’ll ever fit outside of these pages. I’ll keep rolling the dice and testing the boundaries in areas of trust or putting myself out there to try and connect in spite of my extreme prejudice. Just like I’ll vote as the fascists march, and build targets for destruction and judgment, and sacrifice ease and familiar for personal meaning, power, and control.

[1009] Small But

I’ve been re-consumed by the idea of “all the little things adding up” when it comes to points of failure, corruption, and propaganda. Most pointedly, my thoughts are stoked by my job. I extremely hate being talked to like I’m “family” or getting “rewarded” for “all the hard work you do!” I hate stupid company-branded crap piling up around the office or handed to me with a disingenuous grin. I hate “incentives” that are less than you might make mowing a sizeable lawn offered in exchange for your time around the holidays. I’m absolutely disgusted by the ongoing pageantry around the word “help” and the incredible heights of self-delusion that fuels ruthless capitalism under the guise of help.

I’ve worked for Groups about one month longer than I worked at the prison. It is, by far, the cushiest job I’ve ever had, and that is by design. It is experiencing the “green wave” of discovering just how many people are really addicted in the areas they set up shop. They are desperate for counselors, supervision, and ways to appease their providers, while they rake up money, open new locations, and put out “fun” engagement and training videos to try and corral the workforce onto the same page.

In my time the company has gone from using the idea of “harm reduction” to engage in ongoing conversations to keep unfit members in the program to jettisoning those members after 35 days of no contact and courting as many new ultra-unsuitable people as they possibly can. They’ve relaxed any standard of attendance. They’ve increased the number of pills or films members can be prescribed at one time. They stretch the staff they have too thin, don’t follow-up when concerns are relayed, look the other way when a counselor, perhaps, facilitates a misuse of medication (aka a drug deal), and personally involves themselves in all manner of places they don’t belong [real, perpetual problem and example.]

My company enables addicts to find a new “normal” or “comfort” in skirting by and using their medication as a new dependent source of their emotional well-being. Do you have to be on time? Not really. Do you have to be there every week? Again, not really. Do you have to follow any rules? You barely have to refrain from cussing at and threatening the office managers, several times over months, before you even illicit a stern warning.

My company pays its counselors just enough to be first-world poor if you don’t have any real bills, and asks just little enough that you recognize you’re getting “survivable” for “bare minimum” effort. It’s a deal most people in my role, who’ve gone through huge workloads and endless asks are want to give up. I can’t say I’ve worked a single “hard” day beyond whatever frustration I stoked about some pithy details in the moment. I work 4 days a week, 2 in the office. I’m forced to waste gas going to the office for, theoretical not actual, in-person groups.

If I wanted absolutely nothing for my life but to swallow company lines and collect the world’s easiest paycheck, I’d never leave this job. They need me. I can meet the expectations in my sleep. If I spent less on shows or building out my house, I’d have a decent savings in a short amount of time.

But that’s the thing. I can’t stand the lies. I can’t stand being offered a Groups-branded gym bag or an opportunity for them to donate $50 to a charity of my choice. I can’t stand talking to someone clearly in perpetual crisis week in and week out as though they are hearing me when they require a deeper level of care and intervention. I can’t stand not being able to dictate my time in what I think are considerably more efficient and respectful ways. I can’t stand that I’m not making so much money that I could donate $500 or $5000 to any cause I deemed fit when I pleased. I hate being told how grateful and thankful you are and not having it backed up with me feeling anything but dread and resentment for the cog nature of my existence in your greedy and ambivalent machine masquerading as some noble savior and not a pill factory.

I hate it so much that I’m actively searching for the words of my resignation. I’m responding to emails from the CEO with, “Please remove me from messages like these as they cause a severe amount of stress.” I hate that they have a $2000 leash on me that I’d certainly try to fight having to pay back as a “sign-on bonus” if you don’t leave within a year of getting hired. Who the fuck does that? What ethical company needs to leverage your loyalty? It’s not a sign-on bonus. Where the fuck do you get off calling it one?

But you get comfortable doing so when you submit to the dictates of capital. When you want “bodies” and you call them “members” to better obscure what level of treatment patients and addicts need, you’re a fucking joke, a liar, and ashamed of yourself, but figure you don’t have to think about all that because so many people are employing your fake ass language to do the heavy lifting in avoiding accountability. I can’t carry that fucking water for you. I can’t allow myself to be compelled by the same bullshit.

A big ass, a little ass, they both shit. The shit smells. A small lie, a big lie, it leaves a smelly dirty trail through your mind, your words, your relationships, and your capacity to orient in the direction you want to go. I want to be able to confidently assert my behavior, the reasons I do things, and what I envision for the future. I don’t want to be constantly saying, “Yes, but!...” as to whether what I’m doing is moral, “helpful,” “truthful,” or anything else that would provoke a strong instinct in any given honest person when it appears to be going wrong. I’m not a black and white thinker and can weigh all sorts of uncomfortable variables and negotiated positions, but I can’t break my capacity for doing so by entertaining lies I know to be lies. Simple things like don’t invite the inebriated person into the sobriety group. Or, when someone threatens to kill your staff, they’re not still appropriate for this level of care.

I reassert, I’m not a martyr, I’m not a cheerleader for you by default, and I’m not a battered-wife. I’m not going to practice what it takes to embody any of those things no matter how many times I’m offered. I work for you, you are not me, I am not yours. I work for myself first, and as that sensibility feels more and more threatened, I will no longer work for you.

[1008] Big Gulp

I feel like a tea time chat. It happened again, as it often does. I’m “technically” on the clock and at work. I’ve had one group today, and my next is at 5. This “in between time,” is often an anxiety-inducing affair. What, exactly, am I doing? Today, as the first rumbles of stomach-dropping started, I had the thought that I was “experiencing the reality of my full potential.” It immediately calmed my gut. Wait, what? I felt all of my possible choices and like I could perfectly well engage in any of them. It was excitement at the prospect of experiencing the reality of any number of consequences, and knowing it wouldn’t matter.

Say, for example, I up and quit my job. I know exactly what I’d be doing with my time. I know how full I would feel diving into the layers of what it takes to get this counseling operation running. I can go eat, or watch TV, or pretend I have enough tasks to eat up my time with spreadsheets and outreach. All of it, ultimately, doesn’t matter, at least it won’t impede me moving forward in the ways I would argue I prefer. I can’t move any faster or slower than I’ve been. Each time I’ve been presented with an opportunity to make a meaningful step forward, I’ve taken it. I have no reason to worry outside of the general random tragedy of life and how it may impact me at all times.

I can’t get that insight or phrasing unless I experience the anxiety first. An incorrect goal would be to say something like “I never want to feel like this again.” I think we haphazardly set ourselves up for failure with ill-conceived sentiments like that. If only, it was imagined, I wasn’t depressed or anxious. If only all of these variables weren’t. When you do that, you can’t weaponize your feeling into a viscerally felt and actionable stability. My so-named “anxiety” is the consequence of my training myself not to just be excruciatingly angry all the time. That mild “tickle” about competing courses of action is power. I’m aware first, then it can be a blog or cold call, or follow-up.

I really do want to quit. It’s for all the reasons I state often. It’s not mine, it’s not on my timeline, it’s not the kind of challenge that will beget growth or a sense of pride and dignity. It doesn’t pay enough for my ambition. It’s building more immoral behavior into its base of operations regularly. If I quit today I’ll owe my hostage-taking company two grand. I haven’t actually received any money from submitted claims yet. The practical reality of a paycheck continues to overtake many disgruntled lists. But I could quit, and that power is anxiety-inducing. When I get moments where I entertain how to navigate the consequences of doing so, I’m anxious about the credible confidence I have in my capacity to pull it off.

I feel like that sentiment harks all the way back to when and why I first started writing. In turning over how people engaged in shitty relationships, I inevitably shined upon how I could manipulate and under what circumstances it would feel more or less appropriate to do so. My awareness and ability to do so lends itself to being aberrantly good at things like DCS assessment and counseling. I know what makes me tick, so I know what makes you tick, even if you never quite land on language you would espouse as confidently. I also continue to learn that the moment I lay too far off a manipulation, you tend to use that room to hang both myself and you.

We could look at my business partnership. I don’t have to talk Hussain into working himself to death. He had that complex before I ever met him. I do have to be a cheerleader. I have a certain confidence that in his world might feel more like a desperate need. No matter how good a job he does or how hard he works, he has a gaping hole that needs to be filled with his effort and definitely not his father’s money. I trust his capacity to work even harder than me. I have to persistently counsel that he take time for himself and feel good about each tangible step we move in the positive direction. He knows we’ll get there because he’ll cut it out of your chest if necessary (or, his own, he’s a nice guy.) I know we’ll get there because we both weaponize our different types of pathological working behavior into tangible results.

Is it malicious or bad to recognize how he works? No. Were I to task him with “doing everything” because I know he would drive himself insane in order to do so would be. Is it manipulative to lean into my strengths when it comes to logistics or paperwork or contract formation? The moment I use that power to cheat him out of money or engage in some kind of hostile takeover it would be. We have our lanes, and they are both necessary for a successful operation. It doesn’t help either of us for me to be naïve about what I am or am not good at, nor downplay what power I do or don’t have. That’s why the design and distribution of power needs to be an exchange, not a grab, or a lust, or a desperate stumbling into.

I have the power to keep the peace, redirect the conversation, and hijack your brain. It’s literally my job. I prove to myself how much I can throw you into a place of self-reflection regularly. I can walk you down the road of questions you haven’t asked yourself in a specific order to draw a specific conclusion. I’m asking myself the same things, and humanity has been asking them since the beginning of the capacity to do so. If and when you experience the same kind of anxiety, accurately described or not, what happens? You use? You deny? You cut? You get distracted? You otherwise engage in some automatic addictive behavior to suppress?

I remember some moments of my life for their outsized capacity to speak so loudly. I remember when I literally, bodily, couldn’t be persuaded to be as “down” or “depressed” as I had been in high school. In the middle of The Will to Power, I just stopped reading, like Forrest stopped running, and stopped conceiving of myself in the way that was driving my desire to wind up reading things like The Will to Power. I remember consciously deciding that problems did not need to include yelling. I remember when that started feeling like a choice. I remember when it stopped feeling like “someone” or “something” “out there” was going to “fix” literally anything and my trust eroded. A sense of agency and intention are trained skills, not divinely bestowed nor an entitlement of any vague semblance of consciousness.

Almost every day I hear a story from someone describing “what happened to them.” It’s incredibly rare that the story identifies more than one place where the person might have intervened beyond at the end, and rarer that the intervention is necessarily healthy. We’re always picking up the pieces. We’re describing after-the-fact our later impression of what happened, instead of waking up to the moment and choosing a path. “My mom yelled at me for an hour!” What? Why not in second 5 did you not say “I won’t be yelled at,” and leave? Why did you “fix” that situation by cutting yourself, inducing a calm, so you could sit back down to be yelled at for another hour? This, and more, are the literal realities people share about their experience of time and decision making. What’s your personal analogue?

I’m not blind to the fact that I don’t just “want” to find more people to hang out with, it’s a necessary mitigation of my awareness. I don’t want to be corrupted by my power or singular window. I see it happen in bits and spurts whether it’s in some indulgent spending or conversational liberties towards the pliable. I need exchange. I need shaping as much as I can shape. I know people “adjust” themselves around me, just like I tailor my engagement professionally. But that’s what I hoped to avoid in donning the “friend” moniker to people and letting them run wild. That’s my persistent appeals to hang out with my otherwise preoccupied crowd that doesn’t so much conduct themselves like the college people. That’s my striving to create big and powerful entities that can operate by principles that no individual can tend to be trusted with indefinitely.

It's voting season. I can’t trust everyone I know to do so. I can’t trust my neighbors, the people I counsel, or those currently at any level of power, to not be literal fascists. My “power” in the context of any given crazed and irrational individual is immediately humbled and reduced if not for a shared exchange of an awareness of the problem and institutionalized accountable ongoing mitigation of the consequences. Whether that “institution” is the company I try to create or the relationships we build, it’s not a mere discardable artifact of an otherwise meaningful and purpose-driven existence. It’s a necessary component that needs nourishment and defended. It’s an awareness of what matters and why so we’re not driven by marketing, trauma, and blind fearful ignorance.

Each stomach drop is conceiving of “the whole world,” mine, yours, and the one we can occupy tomorrow, depending on my next keystroke, phone call, or deliberate pause. It’s not a power you should ever get too comfortable using, and it’s not a power I want kept to myself. I also can’t pretend that everyone is entitled to it or can use it responsibly. Most lottery winners blow through the funds in a few years. We’ve hit the historical lottery, country of origin lottery, monetary lottery, and often genetic lottery, and we’re teetering on indefinite self-destruction. What’s missing from our awareness? What’s your move when you feel that anxiety-inducing sense of power and obligation?