[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.