We're post-Thanksgiving where many are reminded of the family members they wish had died in the womb or gotten mercifully aborted. If you haven't heard the "joke" about fighting with the "conservative uncle" 4 to 10 thousand times by now, you're probably lost in the woods and better off.
I was listening to a boring article on who artists thank in their Grammy acceptance speeches. At the end, the author links to a Nail Horan music video called "Heaven." It's a good song.
The first comment says, "my son passed away 2 weeks ago and we came out of the funeral home and heard it in the car. . . .I cried my eyes out and thought it was my son telling me hes in Heaven ."
Of course they did.
This isn't the first dead child scenario in the last couple weeks I've been a party to. In one of my latest facebook pissing matches, a guy referenced his daughter dying of cancer and him getting an "undeniable" sign that she had manifested for him shortly after. On my ride home from the movie theater, I was listening to "If Books Could Kill," which was excoriating Mark Manson for speaking to the personal responsibility for your feelings you might have to take in the face of, you guessed it, your child dying.
The hosts were clumsily trying to side-step hearing any explicit advice from Mark's (lazy) reiteration of different philosophical or religious schools of thought. To be sure, it's unclear if Manson even knows what schools he was pulling from, but that's not the point. They ridicule him for "relitigating a comment on his blog" and proceed to assert a definition for trauma. Then they claim they don't believe you can take your pain and segway it into something else or change what you're feeling. The other host chimes in, "It's actually much better advice to give yourself permission to feel the way you feel." This is a separate concurrent idea on how you heal and "move on," not a competing one.
I can forgive two sides completely un and ill-informed about trauma-informed care with competing agendas and audiences. I can't help but notice how stark of an example this feels. It's these misalignments that get baked into the air-headed zombie-jokes about holiday fights. It's the pithy attitude we adopt alongside catastrophized language. The real opportunity is lost. Namely, when you're discussing dead kids, the chance to access how much you don't really give a fuck about them.
The most harrowing example of the dead kid theme has been watching "20 Days in Mariupol." How do you get the haunting sound of parents grieving over their dead children out of your brain? How do you wash the images of the blood and missing body parts? Well, there's a few ways, and they start with the idea Manson spoke to and the podcast hosts belittled. You accept responsibility for your feelings on what you're hearing and seeing.
What does that look like? What is the practical first step you take? Here, I've stood in active fascination and wonder about every parent. When you have your children, are you, somehow, under the impression they can't die? I ask this question in all sincerity, because it's the most "boring" fact I can land on when discussing the reasons for having children. Depending on how or whether you bother to ask and accept the litany of questions regarding the morality, responsibility, or fallout of your children says considerably more about you than you may have intended.
Do you want to "accidentally" find yourself in league with the most ardently irrational and proud conservative Christians touting the sanctity of life as they let mothers die and children suffer neglected indefinitely? They aren't taking responsibility for the death and destruction they cause because they aren't owning how little they give a fuck about anyone besides themselves and their narrative.
We treat dead kids as political footballs. We're ambivalent to how many of them die for preventable reasons. We don't care how many are in foster care. We don't care, after we've assumed the worst about a given family, what we do to their bonds or how we approach "helping" them. I'm lucky enough to have seen this first hand at DCS and then get to compare it to our cultural narratives and responses from different media and entertainment outlets.
Why did The Sound of Freedom get so much press? Because it was true? Certainly wasn't lol. Because anyone knows the statistics or cares about abducted kids? Definitely not that. I had to literally do the math in one of my addiction groups to explain that if what the movie and media outlets were reporting was true, it would be like 1 in 4 kids that would be going missing every year. I then asked the group members if they knew even one person who had a missing kid or could recall the last story about one. Crickets.
I can watch the horrors of war and remain "unphased" because it's not lost on me how fucked everything is. It's not and never a surprise. I can kick around baby heads in my brain and recognize those as "just thoughts" I don't need the veneer of horror films or speculative nonsense "news" to depict for me. We exist on that line of remotely cordial progressive evidence-based inching into the future and utter annihilation every single moment. You have to take responsibility for how that plays out in your own mind, or not. You can suffer under the illusion your children can't die and let it turn you into someone who feels noble for attacking those who speak otherwise.
If you cared about dead kids, or suffering kids, or kids under greater threats than you've ever experienced you know what you do? You get honest about what they need, and then you pay for those needs. You track and report on progress, and you punish people who undermine your effort. You accept what role you may have played, even just in your ignorance, in why some of them died. Your household probably employed the "There's starving kids in Africa…" idea for generations having never donated as you practiced waste and gluttony.
These mythical narratives regarding our own nobility and perspective keep things the way they are. If you believe, at any level, a bird landing on your shoulder or Nail Horan's latest belief-adjacent track is evidence of the afterlife, you're just doing denial work. You're justifying how little of fucks you give verses accepting it. You're not actually comfortable with yourself and the choices you'd have to make to do better. You're an addict for the bullshit. You're running.
I want one dead relative to unambiguously write something that has nothing to do with nature, religious imagery, or a song to indicate they are "somewhere." Give me any piece of evidence I can't find in a cliche Hallmark movie. It's like everyone's "haunted house" stories where no ghost can be bothered to indicate how scary or unresolved they are except in ways that suspiciously sound like drafty basements, attics, and house's settling or breaking down.
You are a monster, and that's okay, because you have agency. If you deny your agency, we all suffer the monstrous consequences of your behavior. You don't care about damn near anything but yourself. You don't work on things you "intellectually" know you need to, but don't feel particularly inclined to even see, let alone act on. You could watch Donald Trump shoot a child in the face in the middle of the road, and your brain would scroll past that as quick as the next meme. We'd keep on scrolling and scrolling until we're into Putin levels of fascism and Hamas levels of pride and certitude.
Friday, November 24, 2023
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
[1081] First, Fist Fuck
Sometimes I'm tempted to regard myself as just flagrantly "ungrateful." It's not the right word, but it starts with that idea. I'm going to avoid citing every horrible circumstance that is or has happened that isn't happening to me. I'm trying to hone in on a good way to describe this sense of myself.
I'm constantly thinking about, or bitching about, the discrepancy between our descriptions and actions as it pertains to "reality." That theme goes back to some of my first blogs ever. I wanted "on the level" people who could 2+2. As an adult, I get to see the ongoing consequences of that discrepancy, often what feels like outright betrayal, play out with sickening regularity. My go-to phrase bemoaning all that "doesn't make sense."
Take my foray into attempting to be a "content" creator. To me, it's a sad and pathetic desperate stab in lieu of just…you know…saving children, or being a counselor, or working on my sustainability and off-grid goals. Wouldn't it be grand if each day I woke up secure in both my finances, focus, and sense of what the future could hold? But, for nearly my entire existence, that's a considerable fairy-tale more than registering as "realistic."
My parents had debt. They had debt so long that it was taken out of what my dad was to inherit from I believe my grandpa dying. The only period I wasn't in debt was when I was doing drug studies, and the second I went to buy a thing to live in, that was gone. But, I was also renting and at the mercy of ever-shit roommates, so the debt was on it's way or slowly churning through my resources in one form or another. Mortgages have always sounded insane to me. Student loans. Car payments. I have a very unpretty car. I own that car.
Debt is reality. It's a chosen one through millions of betrayals each day. My "ingratitude" for whatever comforts or freedom I enjoy is born of having my face rubbed in that fact indefinitely. The fact that I can pit my remote sense of joy/engagement against whether or not I should maintain a certain debt ratio is insane. I haven't' gone to 135 shows every year of my life. I've been in debt the whole time well before I decided it should count towards invaluable memories and experiences.
In a world that made sense, I would just be able to do good. I would just use my skill as a talker, people would like me, I'd have earned respect, and I'd use my money to see shows, eat, and live a fairly straight-forward and peaceful enough life with my little dad-projects and hobbies and series of forays with divorcées until I died.
But no. I, with all my "potential," and in like some constant mockery or that ill-begotten spite of my work so far am left to contemplate if I'd rather Door Dash, gamble on a YouTube venture, or break myself over some new miserable nonsense job that wastes and exploits me in lieu of at least making it remote. And it's not so much that there's some expectation of "sympathy," as though I have zero awareness of how fucked everyone and everything is. It's that I feel like I'm the only one who wants more.
My mind thought of the union pushes. It's all good news. These pussies aren't fighting for enough. Our politics aren't demanding enough as we slowly warm up to the idea of not having crypt keepers continue to defy nature. I wonder if I'm not demanding enough of myself, but then just watched myself spend 30 hours aggressively digesting and working to try and escape my paradigm with something "new" or "different" or that challenged me, until I found it's failure point and contradictions and deceptions and source of its power….the same mythological, "This isn't so bad!" nonsense of seemingly every fucking thing else. Glossing over details. Excusing away the negligence. And pretending like you didn't just lie to my fucking face and charge me for the privilege of listening to you!
It's bad. It's real bad in a lot of real serious ways. I just finished Hyperbole and a Half (I know, many years after it was popular), but Allie Brosh ends her book by realizing she's as bad as she is in spite of her wishes and stories and confusions as to the consequences of being bad. It's hard for her to not be selfish or violent or judgmental. When she's practicing otherwise, it's hard. It's just a bad core that needs active attention and decision-making to rise to the level of author and accountable fleetingly-normal and respectable person.
It's bad when I can graduate, work the kind of jobs I do, work the kind of hobbies and life goals I do, work harder and longer on random shit over 2 days than most might on their primary occupation over weeks, and I'm feeling like a fucking chump. I'm sitting and spinning on the existential dick that claimed my asshole before I even knew it was there.
We all fucking deserve better, not just and especially me. What the fuck is there to lose by trying to do better? Is the fucking story of this shit heap played out enough? It's like "cancel culture." We all got scared there for a minute. Now Matt Rife is on the rise. The zeitgeist is over it. Let people say "retarded" and "fat shame" and just generally understand what a joke is before they fuck off back to their life, right? We figured that shit out, why not something more important?
I found myself envying Planet Earth documentarians and photographers. Do you have any idea how insane that is? Fuck the jungle. Fuck the mosquitos. Fuck the diseases in different countries. Why the fuck did I want to trade places with the asshole chasing the chimps? I mean, chimps are cool, but fuck chasing a goddamn chip around the jungle.
But their lives have snapped into focus. The mission is clear. He's doing "good" just by being there arguing with a primate and contemplating ways to get them to accept his presence in their tree. Should all of our missions be so clear? Should we so reliably be able to trust our task and the payout? Chimp guy is at the mercy of what the animals want to do that day. He's free. Me? You? We have to fist fuck ourselves with the most selfish and greedy cunts of our species, every day, in big ways and small, no matter how much we bleed.
Oh, wait, EXCEPT WE FUCKING DON'T, AND WE DO SO ANYWAY.
We take our very nasty and guilty feelings over what our gaping asshole looks like, and then proceed to fistfuck ourselves, the people we claim to care about, and keep fucking until we're positive the future gets as thoroughly fucked as we've been. We class it up and call it "generational trauma." We play act like anywhere is safe. You think it's a mental health crisis and opioid epidemic? HA! Our very concept of mental health is defined by its pathological norms. We don't even know what "better" is. It's not a real registering feeling for nearly everyone. There's no motivation, no direction, and in that forever irony, even those who profess to help you get there don't have a fucking clue.
Every single thing I own or do is in perpetual standing of some kind of defiance first. It's precariously placed, waiting to crash and break or get taken away. If I can't pay my bills, I get to imagine selling my cars. After 20 years and helping thousands or specializing in areas almost no one is equipped to deal with, I need to stay on my toes. I can't get lazy and think I've earned a sense of security or deserve a savings account and multiple streams of income.
It's a fucking joke. It's a fucking scam. It's all one giant diffuse lie that seeps into every. fucking. thing. It doesn't get better. We're not going to change. I'll never be able to "just play" my instruments and sing the song on my heart because I'll never get a chance to stop screaming.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, "reality" would still be fucked. I'd still be trying to work all these broken levers and I'd start to learn just how useless money truly is. The bills would be paid, sure. I'd have more "fun" useless shit and set goals like seeing 365 shows one year, but "it" would still be fundamentally broken. My "best friend" would still be a story of Shakespearean betrayal. My extended family would still be selfish cunts. My brother would still be whatever weird state he's in about me. I'd still be alone out here or wherever I chose to go. The things I wished to fight, like DCS, would be because they are still acting horribly.
I don't own my life. It's waiting for me at the company store. I check it in and out at the mercy of their needs or demands. My time is spent thinking about how they're gonna fuck me next. It's spent praying my car doesn't break down. It's spent dreading the next empty hopeless conversation I have about my next work environment. It's doing the math on the money I don't have to do the project I'm perfectly well capable of exercising my ability otherwise. I can sit here all day and bang the drums, or read my comics, or watch shitty Star Trek, and it's all just grains of sand ticking away until the inevitable newest actualization of the death I'm embedded in.
How can you be ungrateful for something that isn't yours? I don't rule out the role of chance or the infinite creativity you must explore with your agency. Those do very little to assuage choking on the thick atmospheric bullshit. The world is horrible. You're horrible. I'm horrible. It's just not in the way you've baked into your self-serving story. You have to figure this shit out and fight it. You fucking have to. We're going to be stuck here for eternity otherwise.
I'm constantly thinking about, or bitching about, the discrepancy between our descriptions and actions as it pertains to "reality." That theme goes back to some of my first blogs ever. I wanted "on the level" people who could 2+2. As an adult, I get to see the ongoing consequences of that discrepancy, often what feels like outright betrayal, play out with sickening regularity. My go-to phrase bemoaning all that "doesn't make sense."
Take my foray into attempting to be a "content" creator. To me, it's a sad and pathetic desperate stab in lieu of just…you know…saving children, or being a counselor, or working on my sustainability and off-grid goals. Wouldn't it be grand if each day I woke up secure in both my finances, focus, and sense of what the future could hold? But, for nearly my entire existence, that's a considerable fairy-tale more than registering as "realistic."
My parents had debt. They had debt so long that it was taken out of what my dad was to inherit from I believe my grandpa dying. The only period I wasn't in debt was when I was doing drug studies, and the second I went to buy a thing to live in, that was gone. But, I was also renting and at the mercy of ever-shit roommates, so the debt was on it's way or slowly churning through my resources in one form or another. Mortgages have always sounded insane to me. Student loans. Car payments. I have a very unpretty car. I own that car.
Debt is reality. It's a chosen one through millions of betrayals each day. My "ingratitude" for whatever comforts or freedom I enjoy is born of having my face rubbed in that fact indefinitely. The fact that I can pit my remote sense of joy/engagement against whether or not I should maintain a certain debt ratio is insane. I haven't' gone to 135 shows every year of my life. I've been in debt the whole time well before I decided it should count towards invaluable memories and experiences.
In a world that made sense, I would just be able to do good. I would just use my skill as a talker, people would like me, I'd have earned respect, and I'd use my money to see shows, eat, and live a fairly straight-forward and peaceful enough life with my little dad-projects and hobbies and series of forays with divorcées until I died.
But no. I, with all my "potential," and in like some constant mockery or that ill-begotten spite of my work so far am left to contemplate if I'd rather Door Dash, gamble on a YouTube venture, or break myself over some new miserable nonsense job that wastes and exploits me in lieu of at least making it remote. And it's not so much that there's some expectation of "sympathy," as though I have zero awareness of how fucked everyone and everything is. It's that I feel like I'm the only one who wants more.
My mind thought of the union pushes. It's all good news. These pussies aren't fighting for enough. Our politics aren't demanding enough as we slowly warm up to the idea of not having crypt keepers continue to defy nature. I wonder if I'm not demanding enough of myself, but then just watched myself spend 30 hours aggressively digesting and working to try and escape my paradigm with something "new" or "different" or that challenged me, until I found it's failure point and contradictions and deceptions and source of its power….the same mythological, "This isn't so bad!" nonsense of seemingly every fucking thing else. Glossing over details. Excusing away the negligence. And pretending like you didn't just lie to my fucking face and charge me for the privilege of listening to you!
It's bad. It's real bad in a lot of real serious ways. I just finished Hyperbole and a Half (I know, many years after it was popular), but Allie Brosh ends her book by realizing she's as bad as she is in spite of her wishes and stories and confusions as to the consequences of being bad. It's hard for her to not be selfish or violent or judgmental. When she's practicing otherwise, it's hard. It's just a bad core that needs active attention and decision-making to rise to the level of author and accountable fleetingly-normal and respectable person.
It's bad when I can graduate, work the kind of jobs I do, work the kind of hobbies and life goals I do, work harder and longer on random shit over 2 days than most might on their primary occupation over weeks, and I'm feeling like a fucking chump. I'm sitting and spinning on the existential dick that claimed my asshole before I even knew it was there.
We all fucking deserve better, not just and especially me. What the fuck is there to lose by trying to do better? Is the fucking story of this shit heap played out enough? It's like "cancel culture." We all got scared there for a minute. Now Matt Rife is on the rise. The zeitgeist is over it. Let people say "retarded" and "fat shame" and just generally understand what a joke is before they fuck off back to their life, right? We figured that shit out, why not something more important?
I found myself envying Planet Earth documentarians and photographers. Do you have any idea how insane that is? Fuck the jungle. Fuck the mosquitos. Fuck the diseases in different countries. Why the fuck did I want to trade places with the asshole chasing the chimps? I mean, chimps are cool, but fuck chasing a goddamn chip around the jungle.
But their lives have snapped into focus. The mission is clear. He's doing "good" just by being there arguing with a primate and contemplating ways to get them to accept his presence in their tree. Should all of our missions be so clear? Should we so reliably be able to trust our task and the payout? Chimp guy is at the mercy of what the animals want to do that day. He's free. Me? You? We have to fist fuck ourselves with the most selfish and greedy cunts of our species, every day, in big ways and small, no matter how much we bleed.
Oh, wait, EXCEPT WE FUCKING DON'T, AND WE DO SO ANYWAY.
We take our very nasty and guilty feelings over what our gaping asshole looks like, and then proceed to fistfuck ourselves, the people we claim to care about, and keep fucking until we're positive the future gets as thoroughly fucked as we've been. We class it up and call it "generational trauma." We play act like anywhere is safe. You think it's a mental health crisis and opioid epidemic? HA! Our very concept of mental health is defined by its pathological norms. We don't even know what "better" is. It's not a real registering feeling for nearly everyone. There's no motivation, no direction, and in that forever irony, even those who profess to help you get there don't have a fucking clue.
Every single thing I own or do is in perpetual standing of some kind of defiance first. It's precariously placed, waiting to crash and break or get taken away. If I can't pay my bills, I get to imagine selling my cars. After 20 years and helping thousands or specializing in areas almost no one is equipped to deal with, I need to stay on my toes. I can't get lazy and think I've earned a sense of security or deserve a savings account and multiple streams of income.
It's a fucking joke. It's a fucking scam. It's all one giant diffuse lie that seeps into every. fucking. thing. It doesn't get better. We're not going to change. I'll never be able to "just play" my instruments and sing the song on my heart because I'll never get a chance to stop screaming.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, "reality" would still be fucked. I'd still be trying to work all these broken levers and I'd start to learn just how useless money truly is. The bills would be paid, sure. I'd have more "fun" useless shit and set goals like seeing 365 shows one year, but "it" would still be fundamentally broken. My "best friend" would still be a story of Shakespearean betrayal. My extended family would still be selfish cunts. My brother would still be whatever weird state he's in about me. I'd still be alone out here or wherever I chose to go. The things I wished to fight, like DCS, would be because they are still acting horribly.
I don't own my life. It's waiting for me at the company store. I check it in and out at the mercy of their needs or demands. My time is spent thinking about how they're gonna fuck me next. It's spent praying my car doesn't break down. It's spent dreading the next empty hopeless conversation I have about my next work environment. It's doing the math on the money I don't have to do the project I'm perfectly well capable of exercising my ability otherwise. I can sit here all day and bang the drums, or read my comics, or watch shitty Star Trek, and it's all just grains of sand ticking away until the inevitable newest actualization of the death I'm embedded in.
How can you be ungrateful for something that isn't yours? I don't rule out the role of chance or the infinite creativity you must explore with your agency. Those do very little to assuage choking on the thick atmospheric bullshit. The world is horrible. You're horrible. I'm horrible. It's just not in the way you've baked into your self-serving story. You have to figure this shit out and fight it. You fucking have to. We're going to be stuck here for eternity otherwise.
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
[1080] Look At Me
Let me give you a snapshot of my last 2 days.
I'm feeling desperate. Whether I'm "actually" desperate or not, the feeling is growing. From a purely financial perspective, my comfort with levels of debt remains the same, but the practical animal in me wants pretty much anything to suggest that money can or is flowing the other direction. The grant process is still processing, including the credit card to keep the people working. I'm almost certainly going to be Door Dashing for a spell here in a week or two. My resume rewriting is just a headache I've already gotten partially refunded and will probably go for more.
I'm interested in many, many things at once. I don't talk about them all because it gets overwhelming. One area I've almost never mentioned is exploring content creation and ad monetization. I'm genuinely jealous and resent the dopey, wide-eyed, plastic copy-cats who make hundreds or thousands by creating "content." I know there are various ways to game the system. I know there are dozens of "niches" that make themselves known after a few questions. I know that I consider myself a very adept pattern learner.
So I bought a $1,066 course from one of the biggest content creators. I've spent 20 hours doing what, on his provided timeline, it's suggested should take 2 weeks. I'm compiling and sorting data. I'm taking key words and style tips. I'm writing down every remotely interesting thought or niche to explore when my initial efforts prove futile. I've already even gotten into an errant pissing match with another content creator on the private group who talked right past the concerns I raised and was looking for guidance on! I'm in the weeds, guys. I also have 60 days to get refunded.
I picked this guy because he gave me the exact opposite of the impression of all the genuine scams. The ones situated on infinite-scroll pages telling you vague nothingness and promising the world and then providing you a check-out page to buy 1/10th of their program. This isn't that. He has many, many hours of practical, actionable information that I'm seeing the future with fairly clearly. He's not always consistent and articulate as it may pertain to your specific niche, but the playing field is fair.
There is a genuine conflict between the idea of "quality" content, and content that gets views and clicks. One of the main reasons I drifted away from Youtube as a source of my entertainment was what felt like a massive waste of time. If I want to learn something, I don't need your diary for 2-7 minutes at the top of the video. I don't need hundreds of quick cuts and arm-chair philosophy. I don't need guitar Muzak and delightful fonts. What I don't need is precisely what Youtube desires and what keeps the consumer draining their life away on Youtube.
I've been at this less than a day and I can tell you the recipe for success is to mine those trending buzzwords, combine them with insights from your-niche tracking programs. Create a video with 5-10 tips or insights regarding "x," If you're a late 40s or remotely attractive upper-middle-class female, you can say just about anything. Use approximately the same gentle guitar music, reference books everyone has heard of, steal Alan Watts quotes, cut together whatever it is you may be doing or samples of things adjacent to your subject matter.
100s of thousands of views, with some luck, timing, and system-gaming will follow. Then you can get sponsored. Then Youtube will put ads on your video. Then you can become an affiliate hocking other crap. Whether any of this is "good" or "valuable" is not for yourself to judge, just to achieve.
Here we reach how you know I'm feeling desperate. I'm leaning into that cynicism. For as much as I've felt genuinely inspired to maybe make useful-to-me or practical compiled best practices and insights, that all has to come second. First, I need the eye-balls. First I need to be carbon-ish-copy. First I need to flood the already distracted, depressed, and confused landscape with bait before I can entertain the idea of creating a worthwhile brand or example. It's capitalism 101 with ambivalent systems dictating the attention rules.
I think this makes me a bad person. I think I'm a desperate person first, bad one second, but a bad one nonetheless. It makes me envious. I want everything these rich idiots have. I can't win for losing in trying to do "genuine good" in the world in my social work roles. I can't sustain my off-grid or sustainability goals for the land when I'm otherwise occupied, alone, or broke.
I'm going to be more or less locked into this project for the next 2 weeks. I had to stop because my procrastination was manifesting when I hit what appeared to be a contradictory roadblock regarding what the course was telling me and the feedback from the facebook group. I had a 20 hour flow before that hiccup. I didn't feel my muscles tighten. I wasn't sleepy. I kept getting flashes of inspiration on what to do next. It was a good time and quite the ride.
I have 17 more ideas I need to conjure based on these key words and recently trending videos. Once I do that, I'll write scripts, do voice-overs, schedule releases, and then hopefully collect and refine good data for what to zero in on. I might have to release as many as 100 videos in the niche before I find traction or useful patterns play out. I may have to switch and experiment with entirely new niches. Who knows. I just know I've given something to do with all of my angry waiting-around energy, and if it pans out I'm going to be about as angry as I've ever been for 1 extreme moment before I begin my redemption practice.
Every "motivational" or "this is the secret" kind of book, video, or lecture boils down to "do the thing." I'm doing it. I'm going to do it quicker and precisely as I'm told, and I'm going to use my instincts and pattern recognition to try and infiltrate where maybe it hasn't been yet. I'm just another idiot like all of these dumb hopeless cunts beautifully packaging and selling their cynical desires as "content." Surely those who might consume it are wholly indifferent to my opinion of myself in creating it.
I'm feeling desperate. Whether I'm "actually" desperate or not, the feeling is growing. From a purely financial perspective, my comfort with levels of debt remains the same, but the practical animal in me wants pretty much anything to suggest that money can or is flowing the other direction. The grant process is still processing, including the credit card to keep the people working. I'm almost certainly going to be Door Dashing for a spell here in a week or two. My resume rewriting is just a headache I've already gotten partially refunded and will probably go for more.
I'm interested in many, many things at once. I don't talk about them all because it gets overwhelming. One area I've almost never mentioned is exploring content creation and ad monetization. I'm genuinely jealous and resent the dopey, wide-eyed, plastic copy-cats who make hundreds or thousands by creating "content." I know there are various ways to game the system. I know there are dozens of "niches" that make themselves known after a few questions. I know that I consider myself a very adept pattern learner.
So I bought a $1,066 course from one of the biggest content creators. I've spent 20 hours doing what, on his provided timeline, it's suggested should take 2 weeks. I'm compiling and sorting data. I'm taking key words and style tips. I'm writing down every remotely interesting thought or niche to explore when my initial efforts prove futile. I've already even gotten into an errant pissing match with another content creator on the private group who talked right past the concerns I raised and was looking for guidance on! I'm in the weeds, guys. I also have 60 days to get refunded.
I picked this guy because he gave me the exact opposite of the impression of all the genuine scams. The ones situated on infinite-scroll pages telling you vague nothingness and promising the world and then providing you a check-out page to buy 1/10th of their program. This isn't that. He has many, many hours of practical, actionable information that I'm seeing the future with fairly clearly. He's not always consistent and articulate as it may pertain to your specific niche, but the playing field is fair.
There is a genuine conflict between the idea of "quality" content, and content that gets views and clicks. One of the main reasons I drifted away from Youtube as a source of my entertainment was what felt like a massive waste of time. If I want to learn something, I don't need your diary for 2-7 minutes at the top of the video. I don't need hundreds of quick cuts and arm-chair philosophy. I don't need guitar Muzak and delightful fonts. What I don't need is precisely what Youtube desires and what keeps the consumer draining their life away on Youtube.
I've been at this less than a day and I can tell you the recipe for success is to mine those trending buzzwords, combine them with insights from your-niche tracking programs. Create a video with 5-10 tips or insights regarding "x," If you're a late 40s or remotely attractive upper-middle-class female, you can say just about anything. Use approximately the same gentle guitar music, reference books everyone has heard of, steal Alan Watts quotes, cut together whatever it is you may be doing or samples of things adjacent to your subject matter.
100s of thousands of views, with some luck, timing, and system-gaming will follow. Then you can get sponsored. Then Youtube will put ads on your video. Then you can become an affiliate hocking other crap. Whether any of this is "good" or "valuable" is not for yourself to judge, just to achieve.
Here we reach how you know I'm feeling desperate. I'm leaning into that cynicism. For as much as I've felt genuinely inspired to maybe make useful-to-me or practical compiled best practices and insights, that all has to come second. First, I need the eye-balls. First I need to be carbon-ish-copy. First I need to flood the already distracted, depressed, and confused landscape with bait before I can entertain the idea of creating a worthwhile brand or example. It's capitalism 101 with ambivalent systems dictating the attention rules.
I think this makes me a bad person. I think I'm a desperate person first, bad one second, but a bad one nonetheless. It makes me envious. I want everything these rich idiots have. I can't win for losing in trying to do "genuine good" in the world in my social work roles. I can't sustain my off-grid or sustainability goals for the land when I'm otherwise occupied, alone, or broke.
I'm going to be more or less locked into this project for the next 2 weeks. I had to stop because my procrastination was manifesting when I hit what appeared to be a contradictory roadblock regarding what the course was telling me and the feedback from the facebook group. I had a 20 hour flow before that hiccup. I didn't feel my muscles tighten. I wasn't sleepy. I kept getting flashes of inspiration on what to do next. It was a good time and quite the ride.
I have 17 more ideas I need to conjure based on these key words and recently trending videos. Once I do that, I'll write scripts, do voice-overs, schedule releases, and then hopefully collect and refine good data for what to zero in on. I might have to release as many as 100 videos in the niche before I find traction or useful patterns play out. I may have to switch and experiment with entirely new niches. Who knows. I just know I've given something to do with all of my angry waiting-around energy, and if it pans out I'm going to be about as angry as I've ever been for 1 extreme moment before I begin my redemption practice.
Every "motivational" or "this is the secret" kind of book, video, or lecture boils down to "do the thing." I'm doing it. I'm going to do it quicker and precisely as I'm told, and I'm going to use my instincts and pattern recognition to try and infiltrate where maybe it hasn't been yet. I'm just another idiot like all of these dumb hopeless cunts beautifully packaging and selling their cynical desires as "content." Surely those who might consume it are wholly indifferent to my opinion of myself in creating it.
Friday, November 17, 2023
[1079] What A Day For A Day Dream
I feel like a whiner. I don't know if what I'm about to write will come across that way, but I want you to know what I already feel like. I'm going to try to explain by way of the exceptionally random examples that have been swimming around my head the last few days.
When I was working to start the coffee catering van, I recall doing some of the paperwork from the bank. One day, I was introduced to a new form. My really cool banker guy Adam handed it to me, wished me well, and went back to his office. I sat down, took approximately 5 minutes to fill out the form, walked back to his office, and him, genuinely surprised invited me back in and we completed that portion of what needed to be done.
Why does this story stick out? It highlights the contrast between me and how other people engage and experience the world. Adam had probably given that form to dozens of people, most of whom left the office, maybe got to it later that day and maybe when they found the time later that week turned it in. I recognized 3 to 5 minutes of my time I could move beyond now so I could focus on the next thing. That, alone, brought surprise and mild delight to my banker's face.
I've hired a few free lancers to research and apply to grants. One seemed more suited for a consultant role or more appropriate for after I became a non-profit. I asked her how much it would be to just hire her to do all of the "non-profit stuff." She needed to get back to me after consulting with her partner. She came back 3 days later with $3000. I did what half of it I could do while I wait on the IRS in 3 hours, told her my progress, and she responded, "That's amazing!"
It's not, but, to the normal regular world it may as well be a miracle. I did the bare qualifying minimum, read a couple government pages with step-by-step instructions, weeded out the bullshit, and plugged the things into a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet will one day save myself, or anyone else who wishes to incorporate in Indiana 3 hours of their life, and apparently $3000 if they want a high-end non-profit writer.
When I think about the shows I've been going to. I've been to 127 things. The only reasons I've been late to 2 are an incredibly blind-sided stupid parking surprise. (No, I'm not paying $40 to park at Rock the Ruins, an already shitty venue experience.) And my brother. I can not only attend that many things, but do so in a timely and safe manner. When I record the feedback from most people about even coming to 1 thing every 1 to 3 months it's. "I can't," "I don't have the money," "I don't know what I'm doing," "I'm tired," "I don't know the artist," "I can't get off work," "I would, but."
I'm not suggesting people don't have legitimate reasons to not come out. I'm suggesting that I occupy a universe that is steadfastly about the possible, the potential, and the opportunity, and others are stuck wherever they are.
I still hear people pipe-dream about their farming aspirations or green and isolated living fantasies. My neighbor, just because he wanted cows and still doesn't know what he wants to do with them, got 3. No one I know is getting cows or asking me for the room to start experiencing the practical realities of their desires.
I talk about clients in counseling a lot. Every single spot I left has resulted in 0 people continuing their counseling with me. This is in the face of, no exaggeration, dozens, often several per week, of professions about the "good" I'm doing and impact I've had. No more texts, no emails, no follow up from the ones who went out of their way to say, "No no, I'm serious, I'm definitely going to reach out." I don't think I'm being cynical when I tell you that I know they won't. Just like during group, the ones who "got the most out of it" could often not bring themselves to show up every week.
Meanwhile, when I discuss how earnestly I hope to provide affordable and flexible counseling, even when I get people who seem to be a good fit, they don't last more than a couple weeks. The accountability and structure isn't the priority. The obligation to answer for what they've said or thought is too much extra "with everything going on." I'm, still, offering to provide what I have been for $5 and would move most of my schedule anywhere it needed to go to ensure we could keep the conversation going. Nope.
I think a lot about the things I've tried to invest in. I think a lot about the times I've been burned. It's not in an obsessive way, but because I find them sources of perpetual confusion.
I would never just abandon you to a lease or to functional homelessness because I was unwilling or unable to discuss my living plans.
I would never pick a fight every single day.
I would never scrunch my nose and criticize you spending money on me.
I would never allow a novel's worth of gossip and bad blood prevent me from trying to have a conversation with you.
I would never expect you to drive an hour to my house almost every day for months and then leave you to work on my project only to turn around and stiff you.
I would never surprise you with some new judgmental and serious tone because I'm old and mature now and you've offended me, but I won't explain how.
I would never steal your inheritance.
I would never turn what's good about you into something bad.
That's the line. That's what I'm feeling. I feel like the things that are borderline spectacular about me register as bad things. I think I'm regarded as a bad friend. I think I conjure an incredible amount of negative feelings and thoughts about what I'm doing or trying to do. I think literally every single attempt I make to grow or celebrate or experiment or explain is met with whatever that wall is that normal people push and crush you under. The fake politeness. The empty words. The silence.
I find almost nothing about the world is straight-forward, yet with that perfect irony, it's as demonstrable and predictable as anything I could hopelessly continue to bare witness to.
I had a "friendly" conversation with some people in the bar line before Penn & Teller. One offered to buy my drinks, as the show was beginning and it was taking a while. Actually, what he wanted was to speed up the line, but after the girl in front of us got cross thinking we were attempting to cut the group smashed in next to her, we ended up waiting, and dude made sure to clarify that he was sorry he wasn't going to cover the drinks anymore as I ordered and motioned back for them to say theirs. We'd talked and joked for probably 15 to 20 minutes. He called me handsome. It was all fun and games, but it was fake. Illuminated by 3 whole extra minutes.
Meanwhile, on the off chance I go out or get to drinking, I can't tell you how many drinks I've reflexively bought for people I've just met, guy or girl or group, particularly on deal nights, or just because I'm in a good mood. I'll bring the booze for the whole party if you're feeling strapped.
I have that part of me because of my dad and grandma. There isn't a day in my life I've thought my dad was trying to take advantage of me. I learned to cover the drinks or lunch or ticket because he still does that for me. I never talked to my grandma and thought she was looking for an angle or keeping a secret in asking me about my day or interests.
Are people just the worst products of what they grew up missing? Because, while I feel like I'm about as giving and sacrificial a person as you can find without it getting pathological, I'm also the biggest potential asshole and enemy you've ever met. I learned that from my mom. I don't wish to be that person. I don't wish to occupy the space of prefacing and justifying everything I do or say via the intensity of my feelings. I don't demand respect and allegiance, I demonstrate what they mean to me. I pick up the phone. I answer the text or facebook message. I'm 99% of the time the first one to reach out. And, for some reason, I feel wrong or bad that that's who I am.
I drove 3 hours to Louisville yesterday (it's 5:13 AM and I've yet to go to bed). I waited in the line outside for 1.5 hours. I waited against the stage for 1 hour. I waited through the openers and the set up for Kingfish another hour. Between the openers and Kingfish, a lady stuck her beer-clad arm between me and another guy who had been waiting just as long as I had. She leaned on me. She tried to squirrel her way against the stage. I've been grumpy all day and weighed my options. I decided to just focus on watching Survivor on my phone and moving centimeter by centimeter to close the gap. I won the day.
I would never not put in the time or work, show up at the last minute, lean on you, and expect you to get the fuck out of my way to reap the best standing seat in the house.
These frustrations and sense of betrayal all contribute to my overall sense of hopelessness when it comes to starting a business or just doing anything remotely worthwhile in a "professional" capacity or that relies on the ambivalences and negligence of the way we do capitalism. I'm offering a service that people don't want, desperately need, and the only way I know this is because of how much I've personally witnessed over years combined with how they praise my effort or work done so far. That's a crazy-making sentence. And we have a system designed to prevent me from even making a realistic attempt. It's the $1500 for rent College Mall wanted for my coffee shop in the dead space that malls are after an attorney told me their contract was "standard."
So I spend a lot of time just thinking I'm ambiguously wrong. Wrong for trying. Wrong for speaking. Wrong for spending money, not spending money, seeking help, going it alone, or implicating anyone in my plans or ideas. I try to hire help, they somehow create more work and stress. I try to do myself, I find myself spiraling into ways I might escape the whole idea of working altogether. Maybe there's some "online niche" scam or way I sell my land to a shady entity that needs a place to dispose unmentionables.
I try to not get trapped by the words "could" and "should." In my head, we all should recognize the 5 minute form, do it, and move on to tackling the real or bigger issue. In my head, it should be easy to fill out your first and last name, phone number, address, name of your company, and sign at the bottom. It could take 3 minutes to say, "Hey, I'm planning to move next year, so take the next 3-6 months to search for a non-batshit roommate." It should be "obvious" if you're single and rich and you've got younger family members who are regularly demonstrating their worth and values, you'd try to enable them.
I'm trying not to resent the amount I've attempted to give in service to what I need for myself and what people have claimed to need from me. It's getting incredibly hard not to think about what I should take instead. Once you get past stealing office supplies, it escalates dramatically. I could have taken the girl's arm off at the concert, spilled her beer, turned around and left her feeling dead or afraid after some mean shit I might say. Because that's the worst thing I take from people. Their illusions.
Dave Chappelle's line/story about manifesting his dream and feeling humbled when he recognizes he's just a piece in someone else's has rubbed me the wrong way since I heard it. It got me thinking about "The Secret" and other bullshit that blissfully ignores statistical analysis and historical trends when discussing who tends to succeed and who doesn't. No, Dave, you didn't just will yourself to your levels of success, and it's not humility to notice there's another rich douchebag at the club you're in as you presume to know what his dreams are.
It seemingly impossible to not fall under an illusion when you get that famous. Who do you think is telling Dave "no?" Uhhh, are you sure you want to have a 4 hour show with 7 openers and a musical number afterwards? "I've transcended comedy and Method Man has transcended Wu Tang Clan, of course." Okay, Dave! Are you sure you're still mining the "funny" from trans related material? "No, actually I'm transitioning to yes." Hell yeah you are, dude! Hannibal rapping about his fake teeth? "Put. It. On. Stage." Of course, of course! We just have these lists and I wanted to cross all the boxes and check all the Ts! "Where's my cigarettes?"
The money is in keeping with the charade. Make them feel good. Tell them what they already know. Excite the feelings waiting for a license. There isn't a crowd in the world as loud as they can be on the first ask to make some noise. We want the usual and familiar so much we literally marry people about the same size and shape as us. Does it have anything really to do with them? Do you like Dave Chappelle's stand up anymore, or have you romanticized his TV show and yelling that you're Rick James?
In all sincerity, I wish I could find a way to be mostly left alone. That's hard to do when you're in debt, and will always be in debt. It's hard to do when the things you enjoy are in public. It's hard to do knowing you're carrying a loaded weapon of charisma and intelligence and cool hair and a big smile, and you feel it's wasted on people handicapped in what they can see of it.
Let's take it one step further and then try to bring it home. Privy to so many lives and how people talk about them, I know of an endless stream of terrible relationship patterns. I see people stay together for years with one bailing the other out of prison almost as a matter of routine. I know husband's who gaslight or straight lie to their entire families. I know wives who put up with years of verbal abuse. I know moms who shell out thousands to the most ungrateful or violent adult children or hapless "friends" the world has to offer. I know the amount of bosses strangling your, just like me, desire to "do good" or "cover" even as it exhausts you or takes you away from your family and sleep. I know the horrible, horrible things you've done in the darkest corners of your addictive behavior and can only speculate (hardly) what it says about the people who eventually take you back.
I can't imagine. In an effort to try to save money I got a ride from Hussain to the airport and back. I filled up his tank. It was about what it would have cost me to park the whole time I was gone. Would I expect gas money from someone I drove to the airport? No, but it'd be nice to see that they had the same awareness about it that I did. Expecting a friend, or partner, or spouse to not only put up with me abusing them, lying to them, getting in trouble and needing their money, and just carrying on each day like it's all normal and tomorrow will be more of the same? There's someone for everyone, they say.
What I need can't be bought. I'll never have enough money to survive in relative isolation. I suspect I could circle the globe and meet a small number of autistic-types that still just don't quite measure up. I don't need new friends. I needed the ones I thought I had to actually be friends. I need people who don't need me to explain to them how you treat people you care about. I need people who I don't have to second guess whether or not they care about me. The proverbial world certainly doesn't, but it also doesn't seem to care much for itself. Where do you suggest I go then?
When I was working to start the coffee catering van, I recall doing some of the paperwork from the bank. One day, I was introduced to a new form. My really cool banker guy Adam handed it to me, wished me well, and went back to his office. I sat down, took approximately 5 minutes to fill out the form, walked back to his office, and him, genuinely surprised invited me back in and we completed that portion of what needed to be done.
Why does this story stick out? It highlights the contrast between me and how other people engage and experience the world. Adam had probably given that form to dozens of people, most of whom left the office, maybe got to it later that day and maybe when they found the time later that week turned it in. I recognized 3 to 5 minutes of my time I could move beyond now so I could focus on the next thing. That, alone, brought surprise and mild delight to my banker's face.
I've hired a few free lancers to research and apply to grants. One seemed more suited for a consultant role or more appropriate for after I became a non-profit. I asked her how much it would be to just hire her to do all of the "non-profit stuff." She needed to get back to me after consulting with her partner. She came back 3 days later with $3000. I did what half of it I could do while I wait on the IRS in 3 hours, told her my progress, and she responded, "That's amazing!"
It's not, but, to the normal regular world it may as well be a miracle. I did the bare qualifying minimum, read a couple government pages with step-by-step instructions, weeded out the bullshit, and plugged the things into a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet will one day save myself, or anyone else who wishes to incorporate in Indiana 3 hours of their life, and apparently $3000 if they want a high-end non-profit writer.
When I think about the shows I've been going to. I've been to 127 things. The only reasons I've been late to 2 are an incredibly blind-sided stupid parking surprise. (No, I'm not paying $40 to park at Rock the Ruins, an already shitty venue experience.) And my brother. I can not only attend that many things, but do so in a timely and safe manner. When I record the feedback from most people about even coming to 1 thing every 1 to 3 months it's. "I can't," "I don't have the money," "I don't know what I'm doing," "I'm tired," "I don't know the artist," "I can't get off work," "I would, but."
I'm not suggesting people don't have legitimate reasons to not come out. I'm suggesting that I occupy a universe that is steadfastly about the possible, the potential, and the opportunity, and others are stuck wherever they are.
I still hear people pipe-dream about their farming aspirations or green and isolated living fantasies. My neighbor, just because he wanted cows and still doesn't know what he wants to do with them, got 3. No one I know is getting cows or asking me for the room to start experiencing the practical realities of their desires.
I talk about clients in counseling a lot. Every single spot I left has resulted in 0 people continuing their counseling with me. This is in the face of, no exaggeration, dozens, often several per week, of professions about the "good" I'm doing and impact I've had. No more texts, no emails, no follow up from the ones who went out of their way to say, "No no, I'm serious, I'm definitely going to reach out." I don't think I'm being cynical when I tell you that I know they won't. Just like during group, the ones who "got the most out of it" could often not bring themselves to show up every week.
Meanwhile, when I discuss how earnestly I hope to provide affordable and flexible counseling, even when I get people who seem to be a good fit, they don't last more than a couple weeks. The accountability and structure isn't the priority. The obligation to answer for what they've said or thought is too much extra "with everything going on." I'm, still, offering to provide what I have been for $5 and would move most of my schedule anywhere it needed to go to ensure we could keep the conversation going. Nope.
I think a lot about the things I've tried to invest in. I think a lot about the times I've been burned. It's not in an obsessive way, but because I find them sources of perpetual confusion.
I would never just abandon you to a lease or to functional homelessness because I was unwilling or unable to discuss my living plans.
I would never pick a fight every single day.
I would never scrunch my nose and criticize you spending money on me.
I would never allow a novel's worth of gossip and bad blood prevent me from trying to have a conversation with you.
I would never expect you to drive an hour to my house almost every day for months and then leave you to work on my project only to turn around and stiff you.
I would never surprise you with some new judgmental and serious tone because I'm old and mature now and you've offended me, but I won't explain how.
I would never steal your inheritance.
I would never turn what's good about you into something bad.
That's the line. That's what I'm feeling. I feel like the things that are borderline spectacular about me register as bad things. I think I'm regarded as a bad friend. I think I conjure an incredible amount of negative feelings and thoughts about what I'm doing or trying to do. I think literally every single attempt I make to grow or celebrate or experiment or explain is met with whatever that wall is that normal people push and crush you under. The fake politeness. The empty words. The silence.
I find almost nothing about the world is straight-forward, yet with that perfect irony, it's as demonstrable and predictable as anything I could hopelessly continue to bare witness to.
I had a "friendly" conversation with some people in the bar line before Penn & Teller. One offered to buy my drinks, as the show was beginning and it was taking a while. Actually, what he wanted was to speed up the line, but after the girl in front of us got cross thinking we were attempting to cut the group smashed in next to her, we ended up waiting, and dude made sure to clarify that he was sorry he wasn't going to cover the drinks anymore as I ordered and motioned back for them to say theirs. We'd talked and joked for probably 15 to 20 minutes. He called me handsome. It was all fun and games, but it was fake. Illuminated by 3 whole extra minutes.
Meanwhile, on the off chance I go out or get to drinking, I can't tell you how many drinks I've reflexively bought for people I've just met, guy or girl or group, particularly on deal nights, or just because I'm in a good mood. I'll bring the booze for the whole party if you're feeling strapped.
I have that part of me because of my dad and grandma. There isn't a day in my life I've thought my dad was trying to take advantage of me. I learned to cover the drinks or lunch or ticket because he still does that for me. I never talked to my grandma and thought she was looking for an angle or keeping a secret in asking me about my day or interests.
Are people just the worst products of what they grew up missing? Because, while I feel like I'm about as giving and sacrificial a person as you can find without it getting pathological, I'm also the biggest potential asshole and enemy you've ever met. I learned that from my mom. I don't wish to be that person. I don't wish to occupy the space of prefacing and justifying everything I do or say via the intensity of my feelings. I don't demand respect and allegiance, I demonstrate what they mean to me. I pick up the phone. I answer the text or facebook message. I'm 99% of the time the first one to reach out. And, for some reason, I feel wrong or bad that that's who I am.
I drove 3 hours to Louisville yesterday (it's 5:13 AM and I've yet to go to bed). I waited in the line outside for 1.5 hours. I waited against the stage for 1 hour. I waited through the openers and the set up for Kingfish another hour. Between the openers and Kingfish, a lady stuck her beer-clad arm between me and another guy who had been waiting just as long as I had. She leaned on me. She tried to squirrel her way against the stage. I've been grumpy all day and weighed my options. I decided to just focus on watching Survivor on my phone and moving centimeter by centimeter to close the gap. I won the day.
I would never not put in the time or work, show up at the last minute, lean on you, and expect you to get the fuck out of my way to reap the best standing seat in the house.
These frustrations and sense of betrayal all contribute to my overall sense of hopelessness when it comes to starting a business or just doing anything remotely worthwhile in a "professional" capacity or that relies on the ambivalences and negligence of the way we do capitalism. I'm offering a service that people don't want, desperately need, and the only way I know this is because of how much I've personally witnessed over years combined with how they praise my effort or work done so far. That's a crazy-making sentence. And we have a system designed to prevent me from even making a realistic attempt. It's the $1500 for rent College Mall wanted for my coffee shop in the dead space that malls are after an attorney told me their contract was "standard."
So I spend a lot of time just thinking I'm ambiguously wrong. Wrong for trying. Wrong for speaking. Wrong for spending money, not spending money, seeking help, going it alone, or implicating anyone in my plans or ideas. I try to hire help, they somehow create more work and stress. I try to do myself, I find myself spiraling into ways I might escape the whole idea of working altogether. Maybe there's some "online niche" scam or way I sell my land to a shady entity that needs a place to dispose unmentionables.
I try to not get trapped by the words "could" and "should." In my head, we all should recognize the 5 minute form, do it, and move on to tackling the real or bigger issue. In my head, it should be easy to fill out your first and last name, phone number, address, name of your company, and sign at the bottom. It could take 3 minutes to say, "Hey, I'm planning to move next year, so take the next 3-6 months to search for a non-batshit roommate." It should be "obvious" if you're single and rich and you've got younger family members who are regularly demonstrating their worth and values, you'd try to enable them.
I'm trying not to resent the amount I've attempted to give in service to what I need for myself and what people have claimed to need from me. It's getting incredibly hard not to think about what I should take instead. Once you get past stealing office supplies, it escalates dramatically. I could have taken the girl's arm off at the concert, spilled her beer, turned around and left her feeling dead or afraid after some mean shit I might say. Because that's the worst thing I take from people. Their illusions.
Dave Chappelle's line/story about manifesting his dream and feeling humbled when he recognizes he's just a piece in someone else's has rubbed me the wrong way since I heard it. It got me thinking about "The Secret" and other bullshit that blissfully ignores statistical analysis and historical trends when discussing who tends to succeed and who doesn't. No, Dave, you didn't just will yourself to your levels of success, and it's not humility to notice there's another rich douchebag at the club you're in as you presume to know what his dreams are.
It seemingly impossible to not fall under an illusion when you get that famous. Who do you think is telling Dave "no?" Uhhh, are you sure you want to have a 4 hour show with 7 openers and a musical number afterwards? "I've transcended comedy and Method Man has transcended Wu Tang Clan, of course." Okay, Dave! Are you sure you're still mining the "funny" from trans related material? "No, actually I'm transitioning to yes." Hell yeah you are, dude! Hannibal rapping about his fake teeth? "Put. It. On. Stage." Of course, of course! We just have these lists and I wanted to cross all the boxes and check all the Ts! "Where's my cigarettes?"
The money is in keeping with the charade. Make them feel good. Tell them what they already know. Excite the feelings waiting for a license. There isn't a crowd in the world as loud as they can be on the first ask to make some noise. We want the usual and familiar so much we literally marry people about the same size and shape as us. Does it have anything really to do with them? Do you like Dave Chappelle's stand up anymore, or have you romanticized his TV show and yelling that you're Rick James?
In all sincerity, I wish I could find a way to be mostly left alone. That's hard to do when you're in debt, and will always be in debt. It's hard to do when the things you enjoy are in public. It's hard to do knowing you're carrying a loaded weapon of charisma and intelligence and cool hair and a big smile, and you feel it's wasted on people handicapped in what they can see of it.
Let's take it one step further and then try to bring it home. Privy to so many lives and how people talk about them, I know of an endless stream of terrible relationship patterns. I see people stay together for years with one bailing the other out of prison almost as a matter of routine. I know husband's who gaslight or straight lie to their entire families. I know wives who put up with years of verbal abuse. I know moms who shell out thousands to the most ungrateful or violent adult children or hapless "friends" the world has to offer. I know the amount of bosses strangling your, just like me, desire to "do good" or "cover" even as it exhausts you or takes you away from your family and sleep. I know the horrible, horrible things you've done in the darkest corners of your addictive behavior and can only speculate (hardly) what it says about the people who eventually take you back.
I can't imagine. In an effort to try to save money I got a ride from Hussain to the airport and back. I filled up his tank. It was about what it would have cost me to park the whole time I was gone. Would I expect gas money from someone I drove to the airport? No, but it'd be nice to see that they had the same awareness about it that I did. Expecting a friend, or partner, or spouse to not only put up with me abusing them, lying to them, getting in trouble and needing their money, and just carrying on each day like it's all normal and tomorrow will be more of the same? There's someone for everyone, they say.
What I need can't be bought. I'll never have enough money to survive in relative isolation. I suspect I could circle the globe and meet a small number of autistic-types that still just don't quite measure up. I don't need new friends. I needed the ones I thought I had to actually be friends. I need people who don't need me to explain to them how you treat people you care about. I need people who I don't have to second guess whether or not they care about me. The proverbial world certainly doesn't, but it also doesn't seem to care much for itself. Where do you suggest I go then?
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
[1078] Almost, Not Quite
Whether I had a specific or genuine intention to be or not, I'm a critic. I critically compare or analyze the things I see and listen to. So rarely does anything make me "feel" that when I'm doing so it can register as if I'm being unfairly judgmental, jealous, or begrudging and negative for their own sake. I've spent a lot of time developing my tastes or competencies. I'm going to have an embodied and informed reaction, or lack thereof, to most things even just by virtue of continuing to stay alive and pay attention.
Why? Why criticize anything ever? Why not "let people create" or "live and let live?" It sounds so simple and easy, right? No one is obligating me to engage with what they're putting out. Tastes differ. What's the point of investing any energy whatsoever into an opinion, particularly one that's less than supportive?
That's the framing from the uncritical. To them, all information can be treated equally. They act as though any piece of music, any article, movie, or any interaction with another person just exists in this neutral space with more or less equitable consequences and presumed decent enough reasons for their existence. It's why you can have dipshit day-time talk shows that have been having the same conversation since their inception. There's a gigantic herd of people ready to be info-taimed via the perpetual novelty offered through their ignorance.
There's only so much time. There's only so many stages, radio stations, movie studios, or remotely informed opinions it's worth incorporating into yours. If your time isn't precious, say, because you think you're going to live for eternity after you die, whether you spent 5 minutes or 50 years trying to inform yourself on something, it doesn't matter. It's hard to believe you have a real concept of "trying to inform yourself." I'd argue you're mostly killing time.
It's scarcity that breeds critical opinions. If there's truly moving, energetic talent out there, they only have so much in the tank. You want to promote them. You want to enable them and connect them with people who share not just some naive sensibility that broadly "celebrates artists," but can say, "Oh fuck, this is different, special, or plugged into the zeitgeist right now." People who are paying attention want to hear from others who are actually saying something. Finding voices in an endless scroll of noise is hard enough without entertaining bad arguments for bad art.
I criticized Ayaan Hirsi Ali under her article describing converting to Christianity. It was really poorly written. It was wholly devoid of any discussion regarding secular and scientific value systems, which, she's perfectly aware exist and has written about in the past, and just kind of discarded. She straw-manned the word "atheist" as if it's a value or belief system. She spoke to her failing mental health and fear as the things making the argument for her. It was really bad, especially for someone who's a noted figure on religion.
What was the pushback? I should allow her to feel what she feels. You know, because I have the power to stop her? Every time I hear this one it confuses the fuck out of me. The usual attempts to read my mind and question my character came in. Laugh emojis, personal stories about dead daughters who came back as undeniable signs. Just a ton of nonsense. Per usual, no one quotes me. No one asked me any questions. I'm not even sure most even read the article, and they definitely didn't read Michael Shermer's response, which I also shared.
In the non-critical mind, any perceived affront to someone's profession of "truth" is worthy of vitriol. It doesn't have to make sense. In fact, that's precisely the point. The more and more sense you try to make, the more you fuel the fire they'll use to burn you. You're not occupying the same universe of values, words, attention, or evidence.
Artistic works of all kinds, good or bad, impress upon us regardless of whether we want them to or not. How many advertising signs can you recognize quicker than people you went to school with for 4 to 15 years? How many jingles come to mind at their mere mention? We, creepily, applaud rhetoric and obfuscation from propagandists. Hitler is literally Hitler, and it's rare you hear him mentioned without props to his performances. Because that's what they are, efforts to compel your attention.
I've written a few songs. I play a few instruments. I've made a little documentary about the Merrillville Marching Band. I've written jokes. I've written 1,100 blog posts. I have as much of the creative spark as anyone, and yet I choose to share it with almost no one. You have to come to me and seek it out. You have to cling to the rotting corpse of facebook or have bookmarked blogger.
I put out things that I actually wish to say or I think are worthy of sparking more conversation or reflection. I'm not keen to spam our shared space with "demo" level noodling and experimenting if I know that's what I'd be doing. Let me write and record a song I'm proud of, you'll hear it. If someone comes in to criticize it who listens to exactly one band over and over again, I'll take them as seriously as I do people arguing religion with bronze age insights. I say or share jokes I think are funny and at least make myself laugh first or while I'm thinking about them. I share poems that burst out of me. If I ever got an opportunity to publish things I wrote, 95% of it would be left on the floor.
The same criticism applies to myself and people who wish to create "great" things. They want the work to be recognized, not hop between a series of flukes and incidentals. How many artists get popular with songs they don't even really like or thought they wouldn't include on an album? It's a lot. Listen to interviews about song-writing processes or thoughts as stars are on the rise. The cultural forces that popularize dumb or annoying one-hit-wonders are riding that ambivalent arm-chair capacity for evaluation or cynical spam. Is that what you feel about what you might create? It's so much more noise to be tossed into the ether?
The tools you develop in being critical you can apply across domains. You can be tough but fair to yourself instead of anxiously and despotically tearing down every effort you might make. You can borrow and allude to elements from patterns you notice verses plagiarize. You can work a sensibility into your bones that translates through nuances and between other critical sensibilities. You see this in music constantly in trading off jazz legends and guitar heroes.
I find myself begging for criticism sometimes. I don't exchange a lot of information for all I share. I have like 2 people left in my life who I can talk in depth or at length about some things with. We don't have a competent and critical culture. We have fandoms and feelings. We have tribes. We have overwhelming amounts of debt, sadness, health issues, and we're staring down the literal potential fascist takeover. It feels silly, one might think, to be critical of art or music at times like these. Irony forever wins the day and you might start arguing chicken vs egg.
If you dismiss, or are too exhausted, or "just don't care," or rush to call everything "fair" and declare what everyone's "rights" are as though you're not shitting on expressing them when they arrive in reactionary turn, you lose the whole game. A willingness to offer and engage sincere feedback bred from an earned perspective feels like it's wholly evaporated.
I have incredibly strong instincts about people and relationships that get proven too right way too often. I feel like I'm cheating and clearly must be ignorantly doing what others are so keen to do to me, but unfortunately I just keep seeing the same patterns and people willing to mindlessly let them play out. I'm deeply informed by having worked with, partied with, or attempted to engage in things "differently" or "better" with thousands of people over two decades. I actively listen to hundreds of bands and watch hundreds of shows. I've earned the right to say at least a little something about how someone or something is operating. I'm not stomping my foot and screaming my right to, I'm citing and reflecting on my experience.
Only when you do that do you afford yourself the opportunity to see how many gaps it contains. I can be incredibly right about someone's shitty romantic dynamic. It has nothing to do with every beat of their history and day to day that I'm not privy to. I can summarily dismiss cliche, boring, derivative bands and watch them soar never even knowing I exist. I can reduce the years I've spent learning about religion or human psychology to facebook pissing matches. Whatever amazing person that cunty moron might be when they're not talking at me I'll never know.
Take what gets into your head seriously. Respect yourself enough to utilize the evidence and recognize the patterns. They are there. From the fascist pattern to the shitty country music pattern, you don't have to listen or pretend it's tantamount to Bach. You don't have to stay silent as though your polluted landscape isn't worth coughing out of our collective lungs. All it takes is sincerely qualifying what you don't know, asking questions, and actually sharing what you believe is worth people hearing. We don't really have a prayer as individuals or as a society otherwise.
Why? Why criticize anything ever? Why not "let people create" or "live and let live?" It sounds so simple and easy, right? No one is obligating me to engage with what they're putting out. Tastes differ. What's the point of investing any energy whatsoever into an opinion, particularly one that's less than supportive?
That's the framing from the uncritical. To them, all information can be treated equally. They act as though any piece of music, any article, movie, or any interaction with another person just exists in this neutral space with more or less equitable consequences and presumed decent enough reasons for their existence. It's why you can have dipshit day-time talk shows that have been having the same conversation since their inception. There's a gigantic herd of people ready to be info-taimed via the perpetual novelty offered through their ignorance.
There's only so much time. There's only so many stages, radio stations, movie studios, or remotely informed opinions it's worth incorporating into yours. If your time isn't precious, say, because you think you're going to live for eternity after you die, whether you spent 5 minutes or 50 years trying to inform yourself on something, it doesn't matter. It's hard to believe you have a real concept of "trying to inform yourself." I'd argue you're mostly killing time.
It's scarcity that breeds critical opinions. If there's truly moving, energetic talent out there, they only have so much in the tank. You want to promote them. You want to enable them and connect them with people who share not just some naive sensibility that broadly "celebrates artists," but can say, "Oh fuck, this is different, special, or plugged into the zeitgeist right now." People who are paying attention want to hear from others who are actually saying something. Finding voices in an endless scroll of noise is hard enough without entertaining bad arguments for bad art.
I criticized Ayaan Hirsi Ali under her article describing converting to Christianity. It was really poorly written. It was wholly devoid of any discussion regarding secular and scientific value systems, which, she's perfectly aware exist and has written about in the past, and just kind of discarded. She straw-manned the word "atheist" as if it's a value or belief system. She spoke to her failing mental health and fear as the things making the argument for her. It was really bad, especially for someone who's a noted figure on religion.
What was the pushback? I should allow her to feel what she feels. You know, because I have the power to stop her? Every time I hear this one it confuses the fuck out of me. The usual attempts to read my mind and question my character came in. Laugh emojis, personal stories about dead daughters who came back as undeniable signs. Just a ton of nonsense. Per usual, no one quotes me. No one asked me any questions. I'm not even sure most even read the article, and they definitely didn't read Michael Shermer's response, which I also shared.
In the non-critical mind, any perceived affront to someone's profession of "truth" is worthy of vitriol. It doesn't have to make sense. In fact, that's precisely the point. The more and more sense you try to make, the more you fuel the fire they'll use to burn you. You're not occupying the same universe of values, words, attention, or evidence.
Artistic works of all kinds, good or bad, impress upon us regardless of whether we want them to or not. How many advertising signs can you recognize quicker than people you went to school with for 4 to 15 years? How many jingles come to mind at their mere mention? We, creepily, applaud rhetoric and obfuscation from propagandists. Hitler is literally Hitler, and it's rare you hear him mentioned without props to his performances. Because that's what they are, efforts to compel your attention.
I've written a few songs. I play a few instruments. I've made a little documentary about the Merrillville Marching Band. I've written jokes. I've written 1,100 blog posts. I have as much of the creative spark as anyone, and yet I choose to share it with almost no one. You have to come to me and seek it out. You have to cling to the rotting corpse of facebook or have bookmarked blogger.
I put out things that I actually wish to say or I think are worthy of sparking more conversation or reflection. I'm not keen to spam our shared space with "demo" level noodling and experimenting if I know that's what I'd be doing. Let me write and record a song I'm proud of, you'll hear it. If someone comes in to criticize it who listens to exactly one band over and over again, I'll take them as seriously as I do people arguing religion with bronze age insights. I say or share jokes I think are funny and at least make myself laugh first or while I'm thinking about them. I share poems that burst out of me. If I ever got an opportunity to publish things I wrote, 95% of it would be left on the floor.
The same criticism applies to myself and people who wish to create "great" things. They want the work to be recognized, not hop between a series of flukes and incidentals. How many artists get popular with songs they don't even really like or thought they wouldn't include on an album? It's a lot. Listen to interviews about song-writing processes or thoughts as stars are on the rise. The cultural forces that popularize dumb or annoying one-hit-wonders are riding that ambivalent arm-chair capacity for evaluation or cynical spam. Is that what you feel about what you might create? It's so much more noise to be tossed into the ether?
The tools you develop in being critical you can apply across domains. You can be tough but fair to yourself instead of anxiously and despotically tearing down every effort you might make. You can borrow and allude to elements from patterns you notice verses plagiarize. You can work a sensibility into your bones that translates through nuances and between other critical sensibilities. You see this in music constantly in trading off jazz legends and guitar heroes.
I find myself begging for criticism sometimes. I don't exchange a lot of information for all I share. I have like 2 people left in my life who I can talk in depth or at length about some things with. We don't have a competent and critical culture. We have fandoms and feelings. We have tribes. We have overwhelming amounts of debt, sadness, health issues, and we're staring down the literal potential fascist takeover. It feels silly, one might think, to be critical of art or music at times like these. Irony forever wins the day and you might start arguing chicken vs egg.
If you dismiss, or are too exhausted, or "just don't care," or rush to call everything "fair" and declare what everyone's "rights" are as though you're not shitting on expressing them when they arrive in reactionary turn, you lose the whole game. A willingness to offer and engage sincere feedback bred from an earned perspective feels like it's wholly evaporated.
I have incredibly strong instincts about people and relationships that get proven too right way too often. I feel like I'm cheating and clearly must be ignorantly doing what others are so keen to do to me, but unfortunately I just keep seeing the same patterns and people willing to mindlessly let them play out. I'm deeply informed by having worked with, partied with, or attempted to engage in things "differently" or "better" with thousands of people over two decades. I actively listen to hundreds of bands and watch hundreds of shows. I've earned the right to say at least a little something about how someone or something is operating. I'm not stomping my foot and screaming my right to, I'm citing and reflecting on my experience.
Only when you do that do you afford yourself the opportunity to see how many gaps it contains. I can be incredibly right about someone's shitty romantic dynamic. It has nothing to do with every beat of their history and day to day that I'm not privy to. I can summarily dismiss cliche, boring, derivative bands and watch them soar never even knowing I exist. I can reduce the years I've spent learning about religion or human psychology to facebook pissing matches. Whatever amazing person that cunty moron might be when they're not talking at me I'll never know.
Take what gets into your head seriously. Respect yourself enough to utilize the evidence and recognize the patterns. They are there. From the fascist pattern to the shitty country music pattern, you don't have to listen or pretend it's tantamount to Bach. You don't have to stay silent as though your polluted landscape isn't worth coughing out of our collective lungs. All it takes is sincerely qualifying what you don't know, asking questions, and actually sharing what you believe is worth people hearing. We don't really have a prayer as individuals or as a society otherwise.
Monday, November 13, 2023
[1077] Fate Fell Short
Stuff's kicking around up there again.
There comes a point when the kisses aren't real. This, at least, is in my experience. At some point in a relationship or even in the middle of fooling around or flirting, the kiss is missing whatever drove the initial thrust of it. Things get familiar. Many new things take priority to focus on besides lingering an extra few seconds or taking in a breath. Maybe you get stuck, and the kisses become procedural, performative, or polite. You're no longer checking for evolutionary compatibility and firing up the procreation engine.
To find someone who even "tolerates" feels like a faraway dream to someone like me, let alone someone who genuinely likes who I am or what I'm about. I've been given considerable feedback over the years that "people" are "definitely not about" doing this lol. A friend of mine just sent me a picture calling a discarded baby doll leaning up against a fence "creepy." I said it'd be way creepier if she took it's head off and put it in its lap and drizzled jizz around the neck. That's what I'm about; saying shit like that at every conceivable moment is like a quarter of why I bother to stay alive at all.
I like to paint little professional connection maps in my head when I watch comedians and who shows up in their sketch shows or is in their credits. Michael Che is contributing to me reflecting on the "introspective" types of comedians like Sam Jay or Godfrey. Whether or not something is funny as you're introspecting is, oddly, almost secondary to the task of "saying something about it at all." I found myself chuckling at Che's sketch show. I appreciated the different way to go about it.
I've seen both Sam Jay and Godfrey live. Sam was funny. Godfrey was…angry? Insecure? Resentful? Sam was writing jokes and showing an appreciation for her circumstances and growth. Godfrey seemed to be high on his own conspiratorial supply. Both were approaching the artform with meditations on the state of the world and identity. One was more comedy about it, the other obnoxious tragedy.
I return to the idea a lot that I would entertain the idea of doing stand-up, but I hear my voice across so many already. It wouldn't be "my therapy." It doesn't call to me anymore than being a musician does. I think I can craft jokes, am confident enough that I've made people laugh throughout my life, and can avoid saying "ya know" and 'ummm" or "like" 36 times in between every joke. But I don't think it's where I necessarily belong or that it's going to give me what I need. It would be one more thing I've added to a list and checked off.
It's important to me to have some distinction between "comedian" or "stand-up" and "did some comedy." I want there to be a meaningful distinction between being a "writer" and "blogger" or "self-righteous piety" and "professional" or "journalism." Are you funny, or desperate, dedicated, and/or lucky? Are you being "productive" and "driving towards" something or bored and occupying your time with distractions and coping mechanisms?
The overlap regarding sincere kisses and thoughts on comedy runs through my head when I think about how immeasurably driven I was as a teenager. I didn't just have a crush, I was bold and confidentially asserting my "love" and feeling the rush and motivation to do and say ALL THE THINGS. This without the remote inclination that it would have been influenced by a degree of autism. I was running with ankle weights through theaters. I was convinced I would have some thriving business and be functionally retired by 30. The spirit of what drove me as a teenager ran through what became of the party house, the coffee shop, and in ever-humbled attempts to flourish out here on the land.
It's not irrationally driven anymore. I recall Byron remarking before I cut him off that he was, again, considering plans to maybe move out here. I had zero reaction and was pretty dismissive. I've heard that bullshit from everyone forever. It's my clients telling me they'll reach out after I switch roles. It's "I'd love to, but" when it comes to seeing a show. It's the basic human disconnect between a real kiss and what you're supposed to do or say as you feign enthusiasm for the task or situation presented.
Notably, nothing about life has become palpably "harder" than when I was desiring my high school crush, running the party house, starting the coffee shop, or from day 1 of trying to get my house in order verses today. It's been hard or shitty the whole time, but my disposition about it has gone through many shifts. My concepts of "romance" or "love" or "passion" or "drive" I liken to a 70 year old woman, still spry, 3-time divorced, dressed comfortably and confidently asserting her opinions. She's seen it all. She's not broken and despotic, but she's accepted and measured as to how much or whether she's going to invest in anything after herself first. You've met this woman. You want to be more like this woman.
She seems to have a certain lightness about her that I don't think I've achieved. I don't know if that's an innate disposition thing, guy vs girl thing, age thing, or something else entirely. I've certainly tried to be lighter regarding my approach to my professed goals. Some have sat semi-worked on for years. I stopped huffing about debt. I now take as many as 15 months to politely explain in different ways how my idiot-proof high-enough paying job is actually a Huxleyan trap gnawing at my soul and self-respect before I leave with a deep suspicion I shouldn't put them down as a reference.
I don't want the things that distinguish me to be merely about checking boxes. Yes, there's gratification in doing so and collecting and gaining whispers of a perspective on everything I can get my hands on. I'm not alive for the sake of a bucket list or the nicest version of the story I can tell you about the things I've spent money on. I've enjoyed nearly everything I've gone to this year. It's not going to stop me from telling you if I wasn't concurrently in it for the gains in perspective, seeing Godfrey would have been a waste of time and money. I want first hand experiences, and I want them to translate in my ability to communicate or connect.
Yet, I spend almost all of my time alone. I go to most shows alone. I live alone. I work on the land alone. The times I include people into the things I enjoy I often gather a measure of stress or their mind is elsewhere. No matter how much I do or learn about, that has nothing to do with what people care about, practice, or obligate themselves towards.
When I entertain the idea of joining whatever it is others are doing or say they care about, it sours almost immediately. I might want to keep playing the fun informal Ultimate games? Oh, well, now they want to turn more serious and conduct drills and travel around playing. Ok, how about softball? Everyone is smoking and drinking as they play because it's about the idea of athletics and health, not winning or improving. Let's join the town band! Oh, you don't want me to copy or practice the music, and when I try, an old guy will place his hand over my instrument. Let's join a maker's space! Oh, people abuse it and you'll easily spend a quarter of your time there picking up after them or disproportionately paying extra to have what you need. This also assumes the hours when these activities take places are conducive to whatever job I'm working at the time or the fees aren't needlessly exorbitant.
If you're "passionate," or just ambivalent, about the details for anything or anyone you might obligate yourself towards, you'll lump things into a "cost of doing business" idea that lets you choke down getting taken advantage of. That's what I saw in social work across the board where naive or broken do-gooders spend obscene amounts of their emotional capital, time, and money like so many teachers in a neglected school system. All abuse relationships follow approximately the same pattern, interpersonal or otherwise. There's a slow creep and endless ambiguous responsibility-deficient language. It's kisses at 90% for 3 months, 88% for 4 more, 75% the next 6, each period retraining your concept of "normal."
With so many "new rich" comedians or room in the modern era to attempt to capitalize on the endless connectivity or resources not available in the past, many discussions are about the ebbs and flows of professional careers. Fame happens differently for different people and depending on the mediums from which they rose. The landscape is in constant motion and whether it's podcasting or tik tocking, there's a way to put "whatever" you want to call your voice or brand in front of people. "Your audience" begets your status as an "entertainer" or "personality" or "influencer" and whether or not they can discern the value of what you're putting into the world, it's only ever been that you're watching in the first place.
I believe that speaks to why I intuitively keep my shit on facebook and blogger and don't sincerely attempt to court elevated levels of attention. Do I think I write "well" or that any of this is "good?" I have no fucking idea. My only metric for success is whether or not I can get rid of headaches or be persuaded to move on with my day that's otherwise hindered when my brain is clogged. Much as you hopefully are able to shit when you need to, if you took a picture of it each time and congratulated yourself or sought likes for its size and texture, we'd be right to be concerned. I'm a blogger who writes obnoxious shit, not a comedian or philosopher writing for the best-seller list or booking agents. When I got the 3rd most followers on that Sondry.com site, it was a clue that what I was writing vibed with people (213 followers!) but it's a niche group that joins a budding blogging platform that could go defunct, and did, at any time. Aren't I supposed to start a Patreon and ask for $5 a month as I release audio versions of each 1 or 2 times a week?
I don't trust anything that gets popular that is unconcerned about the means in which it becomes so. Money subsidizes abject corruption and laziness as a matter of routine. The "hype machine" ensures certain bands or TV shows get on all the right platforms. The consequences of endless spamming bullshit from right-ring batshit factories are ever dire. If one of my chief persistent complaints is feeling unrecognized, how perverse would I need to become to consciously decide to weaponize that resentment? How cynical must I become to "go through the motions" that translate to a particular brand of cunt who controls the purse strings or recognized roads of success?
I'm not even an anarchist or necessarily anti-establishment. I'm extremely anti-willful denial. That's it. If you can't honestly say you do a bad job and collect more money than you deserve (thinking specifically about my professional environments measured by the amount of people they keep afraid, dependent, and away from their stated goals,) I can't work with you. If you can't be bothered to even fight for the job you are doing, resentful that I would have any expectation that you defend yourself, go fuck yourselves. You reflexively occupy my posture when you dip into unfair judgments about how someone else conducts themselves. Whether it's the person who cut you off in traffic, or the one who spends their money in ways you would never. Intuitively, you demand an explanation or seek a means of swallowing your discomfort. When invited to the table to talk about your own bullshit though? Perish the thought. Where do I get off?
So much of me trying to start a business is just spending money and box checking. It's not fun. It's not gratifying in any way. It's me talking myself into levels of debt to try and play along just enough to capitalize while maintaining the vision and dignity to, maybe, one day, do the work in ways that register as genuinely and accountably better. I'm not giddy at the prospect of paying the bills for these free lancers. I have less than 0 interest in spending the next 2 days reading about and applying to become a non-profit. I'm trying not to hate myself at entertaining the very real practical concerns for having any source of money coming in from a new work environment bent on mangling me further. But that work, patience, will, and dream is how I hope to define myself.
I've been to 125 "fun" things this year, with 9 left on the calendar. I celebrate the working vehicles that got me safely to each one and back. I celebrate the good meals I got before or after them. I celebrate the clips I took and go back and watch after uploading to Youtube. I like that I can include my perspective on all of those things in anything I talk about going forward. I like knowing where to park, the good places to grab a drink, and where a seat in a certain spot is worth the money. I like learning that I'd rather go to a dozen $20 "small venue" shows and own too many t-shirts than over spend on "VIP" and try to drink to make up for it over a 4-day festival, excellent company notwithstanding. I like doing an insanely large amount of fun things and knowing what it costs so I can budget if I want to do it bigger another year. I like knowing I can experience that much in less than a year. It makes me feel like there's so much room in life.
You can't take my experiences from me or persuade me that the hell of your office life, small town, or shitty family is where the best perspective lies. 25% of my expenses have gone towards "entertainment" in the last 2 years. That's gas, parking, flights, AirBnbs, 2-item minimums, some tickets for friends or my dad, a couple ridiculous VIPs, and more clothing in the form of band t-shirts than I've bought for myself in life so far combined. 2 years. What can I do with a little more room, a little more time, or combined with someone who recognizes just what it is I'm trying to do and am, in fact, doing?
What are you working on? Is it nothing? Is it that you're not proud to share it to the last few people you know are really watching? Is it what keeps you from coming along to whatever I'm doing? Do you even still like whatever your lips are pressed to?
Thursday, November 9, 2023
[1076] Hum
I'm positive I'm going to lose all of the compelling thoughts I had before I left the house and while I was driving, but let's try anyway.
I like being voracious in my consumption of media. It allows me to see. I almost wanted to make that sentence longer, but it really starts there. You can't get a perspective on what you can't see. You can't be made aware of what you're unable to see unless you're open to new information. You may not even have a perspective on what it means to be "open" until you engage and are challenged by whatever the information may be.
That is, I've known plenty of people who confidently describe themselves in terms of their political affiliations or what they do or don't like, but it's unclear they've ever even attempted to really bring something new into their mind. Maybe I get a TV recommendation from someone who watches 3 whole shows a year. Ok, so what we're actually talking about is something that jives with, or joyously betrays, your disposition more than whatever might constitute the quality of the show.
All sitcoms on "safe" networks are kind of the same for that reason. It doesn't mean they can't be funny, speak to important representation and cultural growth in values, or evolve as the technology does, but having now watched thousands of episodes from hundreds of sitcoms, I have a pretty strong view that they're fundamentally the same. They run the same pattern. The style of jokes are the same. The personalities cultivated for each character may resonate bigger, but Urkel is a sitcom character first. He can't imagine telling Carl to go fuck himself.
We have a baseline humanity disposition. Things that violate or betray that disposition fall into categories we mostly act as though we can't see. At least, I call it out as an act. For many, maybe they literally can't. The tricky thing about that disposition is that it oscillates or is a coin flip between what we learn and what we're made of. We know that statistically. You're as much rabid beast as you are your culture's version of civilized. The choices that exist for you to behave as though you occupy either realm can feel more or less like they even exist at all.
Real, wanton, jihadist level violence is on display. Megalomaniacal totalitarian violence as well. The ones who, not too long ago, tried to transform the culture into believing dirty looks and words were violence look particularly foolish. Our animal side prevailed in demonstrating a reality that betrayed what they were trying to cultivate otherwise. At what appear to be "pivotal" moments like this is where I believe we have choices.
When you don't perceive a choice is when you double down. Say, when your emotions are hijacked and you see an injustice. Then, not only are words violence, but there's some that are "the worst kinds" and doing "the most harm." Literal violence won't compel you anymore than one faith group's adherence to their god cares what yours has to say. This is why so much is reduced to either/or, in-group/out-group false dichotomies. It gives you a great excuse to refuse the responsibility of learning or changing.
This is how I conceive of people as helpless. Pretty much uniformly when you push on something, someone will double down. They "can't believe" or "can't understand" how this new idea could possibly operate or be true. It's not part of their lived experience or language even if it's baked right into their daily reality. It's one fish asking another as they swim in the ocean, "Isn't it crazy the amount of water?" and the other confused, "Water? What the fuck is water?" They don't know the narratives they're swimming in. They don't recognize them as narratives. It's not particularly deep or complicated the idea that someone has a story to tell you. If you don't have or use the tools, or even care, the most compelling story wins. Not the truest or best or most convincing story, the one that compels. The one that results in action and consequences.
The overwhelming majority of your life is not a series of choices. Not choices like you have in picking each word after another. I'm making hundreds of choices in writing this, but I'm also bound by a linguistic culture and style I was taught. You can only hear me in English and it's the only language I profess to have enough of a grasp on to try and seek mutual understanding. That's an innocent, but extremely important detail as we scale up the structures we're plugged into that operate like our language.
Every culture has a model for how you should behave. Every religious framework tries to box in your potential to service its god. Your individual family, school, and friend group is reinforcing norms every second of every day. It is functionally impossible, both by design and just because you are incidentally a mammal that needs a pack, to astutely judge the health of your particular system. You have a dual problem of almost no data arising from your limited and perhaps handicapped perspective, as well as too much data coming in from how different corners of the entire world engage with your example. This means you're stuck comparing apples to oranges, say your positive subjective notions about your nation or faith, against the catastrophic harms you're eager to dismiss as bad apples more than layers you need to peel off your own orange soul.
I think I have a decent perspective. The only reason I think that is because I literally demonstrate the work I'm doing to keep it. I can deeply appreciate why, if you're not aware of how ideas work and where you fit in them, you might believe Israel killing civilians is the same thing as Hamas. You're wrong, but you're not really prepared to know why because, without irony, like "deeply held" religious beliefs, your version of events is foundational to your identity, your sense of decency and morality, and how you wish to be perceived in fitting in. Is your identity a good or healthy one? Probably according to your friends, family, and institutions. You want the world to bow at the feet of your good intentions as you dismiss the reality of other's perception of the goodness and righteousness of their own.
I think about this when I'm feeling "critical" of something or someone deigns to criticize me. Are they even remotely equipped to judge what I'm doing? Do they have the same amount of hours logged introspecting, if nothing else? Do most of us have even 10 genuine hours having studied any part of the world and the nature of its conflicts? Have we put any real effort into identifying our psychological and interpersonal pitfalls? Do we feel the challenge of ideas that undermine our assumptions, or do we profess to be "open-minded" by betraying the sentiment with every act that follows?
I went and saw my aunt recently. She'd fallen down and broke her hip. She's in her 80s I think, but still spry, better with technology than people I know in their 30s, and plugged in. We were talking about my recent foray into Vegas and time with my brother. She's been struggling a bit with the pain of rehab and getting recovered and had some thoughts regarding forgiving people that wrong us and making sure that we love ourselves. She recently converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, which for me registers as a distinction without a difference, but it's prompted her to reflect. She's a cool aunt and I've never had a problem with her.
She's got a pretty limited perspective boxed into kind of superficial and cliché sentiments you hear from a blog post on the top 5 things people who are dying say. She's not even "wrong" in what she said, but it's a truth wrung out of her encroaching wretched circumstances. Did she adopt the ideas into her bones after deep consideration and practice? Or did she "find god" on the way to the ground after jumping without a parachute?
What you don't want to look at is staring at you every moment of every day. Maybe it's your addiction. Maybe it's injustice. Maybe it's entitlement. Maybe it's guilt and curiosity. Maybe it's a smoothie of what feels like too many things to explicate, so the insistence that you get specific and analyze becomes the beast to shutter away. You don't get wise by default. You don't act accountably due to a divinely inspired nature. You can't trust dying words from someone who spends their whole life as though they'll live forever.
But that's what we do. If there's something about nature or matter that persists forever, we refuse the evidence and math that might describe it for our interpretation and thoroughly bred and beaten dead horse mythology. You set up fence posts around what you "believe" to be true and the fight ensues indefinitely. An entire world of beliefs create a knotted mess of "identity," and the example gets set about what you can or can't weaponize within that identity. Your "authority" (I mean, author is written right there in the word) follows as naturally as the air your breathe until it crashes against a more compelling author. That's why you live forever in religion when death comes knocking. That's why you eschew specificity and your actions, or lack thereof, can exist in perfect justified obscure excusability. That's where "he made me" and "following orders" or "I didn't know" overcome "I admit" or "I might be wrong" or "I don't know."
Note the meaningful distinction between "don't" and "didn't" when you're describing personal responsibility. One suggests you're aware your perspective is lacking and you're willing to own it. The other equivocates like "there's so much we can't know" or because you were never told therefore whatever you in fact did was okay.
I think more people than not don't seek any real power. I think they want to be accepted. I think they want to feel safe. I think they want their concept of power to remain a messy amalgam of people's opinions about them. It's an endless source of fuel towards whatever complex you wish to maintain about yourself. I think there are dozens of things you can do every day that "the world" can react poorly to and make you feel like you are wrong or don't belong. The incentive to sound like everyone else is as high stakes as it gets. The impetus to follow the rules speaks to deep evolutionary behavior. If you don't, you may be abandoned, and starve, and you certainly won't be fucking and passing on genes.
I have all this time to sit and think and practice and reflect while I'm not working. I'm still trying to build something that locks me into this place. I want my narrative to expand into more and more things I've seen or places I've been. I want to meet people not stuck on "Indiana." I want to cultivate environments that are hostile to complacency. I want to feel free to play my guitar, not guilty or distracted because I feel I'm not saying or doing "enough" to deserve and enjoy my little corner of the world.
I'm living the consequences of challenging prevailing narratives. Punks in the 80s were literally hungry for their ideals, getting beaten up, and mostly at war with the embittered narratives assuming things from the outside only watching the worst examples that confirmed what they already believed. I look around at all of my stuff and manifestation of my work and focus, and it suggests to me that even when they don't, things still are decently going my way.
Can I practice the appreciation for that in a way that keeps me evolving along my own selection pressure lines verses the ones I'm still embedded in? I know I need and want money, but I'm willing to tour in a van that needs repaired every day, get ripped off by venue owners, and humble myself in how I act resourceful. I need the energy and message from the music I'm playing more than your empty or hateful opinion about it.
If you really wanted to, you would. This is a sentiment I heard reiterated recently from /r/askwomenover30. It was speaking about partners who fail to communicate or answer texts. If they wanted to send you a lovey dovey text and try to make you feel good about yourself, they could. The fact that they're not tells you at least one thing about where their head isn't. I have a therapist that can't seem to be bothered, for a week, to change a fucking password or respond to a text. Her head's not in it, and hasn't been for a while. She won't share that with me, but I don't need to be a jealous girlfriend wondering all sorts of fantastic excuses. I can just see that I need her for something small, quick, and relatively painless, and she's not offering it.
If you really want to change something about your life, who you're interacting with and how, or you wish to take on the responsibility of trying new things or challenging an injustice, you do something about it. You do some version of sending the text. You quell the anxiety and fog of procrastination and you turn on and move in some direction. Like magic, instantly you start to feel like your words matter and your actions ripple through time. You can achieve the same awakening on psychedelics, but I tend to look for reminder mile markers at points of exhaustion.
I get sick of myself sitting around. I get sick of thinking like I'm saying the same shit in a thousand different ways with "nothing" to back it up. I can literally within the same ten minute period of that sick feeling spend the money to hire the help, work on one of the many things I'm perpetually working on, organize, clean, write, get ready to head to a show, and my irrational insecure circumstances will nag once again with the same tired expectation for "more." It's baked into my brain. Whether I raise 1 or 100 houses from a cornfield, work 1 or 100 crisis situations or environments, or write another 10,000 blogs trying to get a handle on it all, the feeling will persist. The wrong, ridiculous, painful feeling is not going away.
Everything I'm trying to do about that have the same things in common. They aren't looking away. They aren't denying. They aren't quiet. They aren't easy. They aren't dependent on the recognition from the blind. They aren't bred from religious conviction. I'm extremely persuadable, but I have to trust we're defining terms and identifying both the problems and the potential. I have to watch you practice what you preach like you can me. I have to hear you say back to me what you think I'm doing and believe you get it. Otherwise we're just fighting for a turn on the soapbox, or playing keep up with the Jones's, or making deafening "shush" sounds.
I like being voracious in my consumption of media. It allows me to see. I almost wanted to make that sentence longer, but it really starts there. You can't get a perspective on what you can't see. You can't be made aware of what you're unable to see unless you're open to new information. You may not even have a perspective on what it means to be "open" until you engage and are challenged by whatever the information may be.
That is, I've known plenty of people who confidently describe themselves in terms of their political affiliations or what they do or don't like, but it's unclear they've ever even attempted to really bring something new into their mind. Maybe I get a TV recommendation from someone who watches 3 whole shows a year. Ok, so what we're actually talking about is something that jives with, or joyously betrays, your disposition more than whatever might constitute the quality of the show.
All sitcoms on "safe" networks are kind of the same for that reason. It doesn't mean they can't be funny, speak to important representation and cultural growth in values, or evolve as the technology does, but having now watched thousands of episodes from hundreds of sitcoms, I have a pretty strong view that they're fundamentally the same. They run the same pattern. The style of jokes are the same. The personalities cultivated for each character may resonate bigger, but Urkel is a sitcom character first. He can't imagine telling Carl to go fuck himself.
We have a baseline humanity disposition. Things that violate or betray that disposition fall into categories we mostly act as though we can't see. At least, I call it out as an act. For many, maybe they literally can't. The tricky thing about that disposition is that it oscillates or is a coin flip between what we learn and what we're made of. We know that statistically. You're as much rabid beast as you are your culture's version of civilized. The choices that exist for you to behave as though you occupy either realm can feel more or less like they even exist at all.
Real, wanton, jihadist level violence is on display. Megalomaniacal totalitarian violence as well. The ones who, not too long ago, tried to transform the culture into believing dirty looks and words were violence look particularly foolish. Our animal side prevailed in demonstrating a reality that betrayed what they were trying to cultivate otherwise. At what appear to be "pivotal" moments like this is where I believe we have choices.
When you don't perceive a choice is when you double down. Say, when your emotions are hijacked and you see an injustice. Then, not only are words violence, but there's some that are "the worst kinds" and doing "the most harm." Literal violence won't compel you anymore than one faith group's adherence to their god cares what yours has to say. This is why so much is reduced to either/or, in-group/out-group false dichotomies. It gives you a great excuse to refuse the responsibility of learning or changing.
This is how I conceive of people as helpless. Pretty much uniformly when you push on something, someone will double down. They "can't believe" or "can't understand" how this new idea could possibly operate or be true. It's not part of their lived experience or language even if it's baked right into their daily reality. It's one fish asking another as they swim in the ocean, "Isn't it crazy the amount of water?" and the other confused, "Water? What the fuck is water?" They don't know the narratives they're swimming in. They don't recognize them as narratives. It's not particularly deep or complicated the idea that someone has a story to tell you. If you don't have or use the tools, or even care, the most compelling story wins. Not the truest or best or most convincing story, the one that compels. The one that results in action and consequences.
The overwhelming majority of your life is not a series of choices. Not choices like you have in picking each word after another. I'm making hundreds of choices in writing this, but I'm also bound by a linguistic culture and style I was taught. You can only hear me in English and it's the only language I profess to have enough of a grasp on to try and seek mutual understanding. That's an innocent, but extremely important detail as we scale up the structures we're plugged into that operate like our language.
Every culture has a model for how you should behave. Every religious framework tries to box in your potential to service its god. Your individual family, school, and friend group is reinforcing norms every second of every day. It is functionally impossible, both by design and just because you are incidentally a mammal that needs a pack, to astutely judge the health of your particular system. You have a dual problem of almost no data arising from your limited and perhaps handicapped perspective, as well as too much data coming in from how different corners of the entire world engage with your example. This means you're stuck comparing apples to oranges, say your positive subjective notions about your nation or faith, against the catastrophic harms you're eager to dismiss as bad apples more than layers you need to peel off your own orange soul.
I think I have a decent perspective. The only reason I think that is because I literally demonstrate the work I'm doing to keep it. I can deeply appreciate why, if you're not aware of how ideas work and where you fit in them, you might believe Israel killing civilians is the same thing as Hamas. You're wrong, but you're not really prepared to know why because, without irony, like "deeply held" religious beliefs, your version of events is foundational to your identity, your sense of decency and morality, and how you wish to be perceived in fitting in. Is your identity a good or healthy one? Probably according to your friends, family, and institutions. You want the world to bow at the feet of your good intentions as you dismiss the reality of other's perception of the goodness and righteousness of their own.
I think about this when I'm feeling "critical" of something or someone deigns to criticize me. Are they even remotely equipped to judge what I'm doing? Do they have the same amount of hours logged introspecting, if nothing else? Do most of us have even 10 genuine hours having studied any part of the world and the nature of its conflicts? Have we put any real effort into identifying our psychological and interpersonal pitfalls? Do we feel the challenge of ideas that undermine our assumptions, or do we profess to be "open-minded" by betraying the sentiment with every act that follows?
I went and saw my aunt recently. She'd fallen down and broke her hip. She's in her 80s I think, but still spry, better with technology than people I know in their 30s, and plugged in. We were talking about my recent foray into Vegas and time with my brother. She's been struggling a bit with the pain of rehab and getting recovered and had some thoughts regarding forgiving people that wrong us and making sure that we love ourselves. She recently converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, which for me registers as a distinction without a difference, but it's prompted her to reflect. She's a cool aunt and I've never had a problem with her.
She's got a pretty limited perspective boxed into kind of superficial and cliché sentiments you hear from a blog post on the top 5 things people who are dying say. She's not even "wrong" in what she said, but it's a truth wrung out of her encroaching wretched circumstances. Did she adopt the ideas into her bones after deep consideration and practice? Or did she "find god" on the way to the ground after jumping without a parachute?
What you don't want to look at is staring at you every moment of every day. Maybe it's your addiction. Maybe it's injustice. Maybe it's entitlement. Maybe it's guilt and curiosity. Maybe it's a smoothie of what feels like too many things to explicate, so the insistence that you get specific and analyze becomes the beast to shutter away. You don't get wise by default. You don't act accountably due to a divinely inspired nature. You can't trust dying words from someone who spends their whole life as though they'll live forever.
But that's what we do. If there's something about nature or matter that persists forever, we refuse the evidence and math that might describe it for our interpretation and thoroughly bred and beaten dead horse mythology. You set up fence posts around what you "believe" to be true and the fight ensues indefinitely. An entire world of beliefs create a knotted mess of "identity," and the example gets set about what you can or can't weaponize within that identity. Your "authority" (I mean, author is written right there in the word) follows as naturally as the air your breathe until it crashes against a more compelling author. That's why you live forever in religion when death comes knocking. That's why you eschew specificity and your actions, or lack thereof, can exist in perfect justified obscure excusability. That's where "he made me" and "following orders" or "I didn't know" overcome "I admit" or "I might be wrong" or "I don't know."
Note the meaningful distinction between "don't" and "didn't" when you're describing personal responsibility. One suggests you're aware your perspective is lacking and you're willing to own it. The other equivocates like "there's so much we can't know" or because you were never told therefore whatever you in fact did was okay.
I think more people than not don't seek any real power. I think they want to be accepted. I think they want to feel safe. I think they want their concept of power to remain a messy amalgam of people's opinions about them. It's an endless source of fuel towards whatever complex you wish to maintain about yourself. I think there are dozens of things you can do every day that "the world" can react poorly to and make you feel like you are wrong or don't belong. The incentive to sound like everyone else is as high stakes as it gets. The impetus to follow the rules speaks to deep evolutionary behavior. If you don't, you may be abandoned, and starve, and you certainly won't be fucking and passing on genes.
I have all this time to sit and think and practice and reflect while I'm not working. I'm still trying to build something that locks me into this place. I want my narrative to expand into more and more things I've seen or places I've been. I want to meet people not stuck on "Indiana." I want to cultivate environments that are hostile to complacency. I want to feel free to play my guitar, not guilty or distracted because I feel I'm not saying or doing "enough" to deserve and enjoy my little corner of the world.
I'm living the consequences of challenging prevailing narratives. Punks in the 80s were literally hungry for their ideals, getting beaten up, and mostly at war with the embittered narratives assuming things from the outside only watching the worst examples that confirmed what they already believed. I look around at all of my stuff and manifestation of my work and focus, and it suggests to me that even when they don't, things still are decently going my way.
Can I practice the appreciation for that in a way that keeps me evolving along my own selection pressure lines verses the ones I'm still embedded in? I know I need and want money, but I'm willing to tour in a van that needs repaired every day, get ripped off by venue owners, and humble myself in how I act resourceful. I need the energy and message from the music I'm playing more than your empty or hateful opinion about it.
If you really wanted to, you would. This is a sentiment I heard reiterated recently from /r/askwomenover30. It was speaking about partners who fail to communicate or answer texts. If they wanted to send you a lovey dovey text and try to make you feel good about yourself, they could. The fact that they're not tells you at least one thing about where their head isn't. I have a therapist that can't seem to be bothered, for a week, to change a fucking password or respond to a text. Her head's not in it, and hasn't been for a while. She won't share that with me, but I don't need to be a jealous girlfriend wondering all sorts of fantastic excuses. I can just see that I need her for something small, quick, and relatively painless, and she's not offering it.
If you really want to change something about your life, who you're interacting with and how, or you wish to take on the responsibility of trying new things or challenging an injustice, you do something about it. You do some version of sending the text. You quell the anxiety and fog of procrastination and you turn on and move in some direction. Like magic, instantly you start to feel like your words matter and your actions ripple through time. You can achieve the same awakening on psychedelics, but I tend to look for reminder mile markers at points of exhaustion.
I get sick of myself sitting around. I get sick of thinking like I'm saying the same shit in a thousand different ways with "nothing" to back it up. I can literally within the same ten minute period of that sick feeling spend the money to hire the help, work on one of the many things I'm perpetually working on, organize, clean, write, get ready to head to a show, and my irrational insecure circumstances will nag once again with the same tired expectation for "more." It's baked into my brain. Whether I raise 1 or 100 houses from a cornfield, work 1 or 100 crisis situations or environments, or write another 10,000 blogs trying to get a handle on it all, the feeling will persist. The wrong, ridiculous, painful feeling is not going away.
Everything I'm trying to do about that have the same things in common. They aren't looking away. They aren't denying. They aren't quiet. They aren't easy. They aren't dependent on the recognition from the blind. They aren't bred from religious conviction. I'm extremely persuadable, but I have to trust we're defining terms and identifying both the problems and the potential. I have to watch you practice what you preach like you can me. I have to hear you say back to me what you think I'm doing and believe you get it. Otherwise we're just fighting for a turn on the soapbox, or playing keep up with the Jones's, or making deafening "shush" sounds.
Saturday, November 4, 2023
[1075] Wrapped In Plastic
If I’m going to find a place of remote peace, I need to get a better definition of “the problem” and ways to go about “fixing” it.
Every day is a bombardment. The problem is as big as the fate of the country, surviving climate change, or the next pandemic. At every scale, there’s an opportunity to get sucked up into the exciting and thriving drama. I often speak of people as each unto their own black hole that is hungry and waiting to pull you down. The abstraction that is thought, made slightly less abstract through writing, is my ongoing exercise to look for something more tangible, with direction, or conceptualized in a way that it provokes action.
I’ve been done with my last job for 3 weeks, over a week of that time I was in Vegas, and 6 more days of that time I had a show to attend. Part of this last 3 weeks has felt like an eternity. Even after I learned how to sit and watch TV, there’s a large part of me that’s nagging me to “go.” I’ve very slightly boxed it in with a piddling expectation of myself to do at least 5 squats, read a chapter, read an article, and practice an instrument for 30 minutes each day. I’ve not managed to do that every day, slacking in the practice in particular.
I thought I’d have so much more to do. I even wrote about it while in Vegas because I was ready to get home and start. I don’t know if I hyped it up or expected people and time to start magically responding in quicker and more comprehensive ways than they ever have, but I found myself prioritizing my TV shows and doing little collecting/OCD-adjacent organizing of files. I sent a few emails, called a law firm, and then proceed to “chill” without feeling chill.
I also have tabs open with grants to explore. I’ve budgeted for creating a non-profit arm of the wanna-be counseling operation to perhaps help facilitate getting money. I’ve barely toyed with exploring how to modify the website, and the first place I asked pretty much confirmed I, of course and again, was looking to do something no one knows how or ever conceived of doing. Again I get, (and maybe it’s always just an ignorant feeling) stuck, and proceed down my moving pictures path.
I could also be looking more aggressively for a job. I’ve been reticent to begin. What’s the goal? I know what it isn’t. I don’t just want/need “more money.” I was making plenty of money at the last job and, somehow, I could only be persuaded to keep buying concert tickets. I certainly intend to slow down that habit, but the first 2 months of 2024 have about a show every week.
I kind of want to just fuck about. I don’t see, “realistically,” much of anything beyond pain, loneliness, or utter destruction on the horizon. Realistically is in quotes because I can’t see the future and know I’m but one incredibly small distorted window into the world. Very few are ever coming with me to a show. Even fewer are remotely interested in contributing towards anything I’d regard as a larger ambition with the land or in business. I’m not “doing it for the troops” or trying to “save the children.” I talk often enough about being an engine of spite, but even that is starting to sour.
In the most important sense, as I currently exist and carry on, I am alone.
Is that a problem? I’m certainly as capable of being by myself as I am running the party, so it’s a problem insofar as I still desire to joke and talk or be basically human towards anyone. In theory, I can always continue to invite people out even though they won’t come, or go extra hard in celebrating days like yesterday when I went out to eat, bowl, and then watched a movie with my friend. I don’t want to get weird though. I’d like to stay grounded and have a perspective about time spent with people. It’d be cool to consider myself worth hanging out with or as someone more people would seek out and utilize.
But that begs a different kind and set of questions. That phrasing made me think of being a counselor. Experience has taught me that, no, in fact, people do not seek out and utilize. Actually, they make an entire production out of pretending to do just that.
Perhaps it’s that I don’t really want much of anything anymore. Maybe I’ve been informed enough through experience, conversation, and attempts at doing things “better” or “differently” that something about my wants died. It’s entirely possible I’ve been in some kind of zombie state trudging forward with this semblance of ambition or greed that just betrays my day-to-day or sense of what’s actually possible anymore.
I don’t want to be a social worker, so why start a counseling business? It’s an opportunistic and kind of cynical attempt to cash grab. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if I’m actually good or not. My “oversight” doesn’t have the time or interest in reviewing my notes provided I’m not actively hurting someone or threatening her license. I have no one intelligent, accountable, or interested enough to require anything of me than to pass tests and pay fees. Just because I can structure an environment, ask probing questions, and be non-judgmental (read: not hateful and shaming) when I listen does not mean that anyone I’m speaking to is, at their core, interested in that project at all.
I’ve had well over 300 clients in the course of counseling. I’ve had dozens of those clients, and at least 2 or 3 every week, tell me how they wanted to keep in touch. Not a single one has scheduled an appointment 3 weeks later. Not a single one has texted regarding a base touch or to make a referral. Not a single one has asked if I’ve found a way to coordinate getting their Suboxone in conjunction with counseling. Why? Are they all liars? Well, yes. But also, no. They live in the normal world where words don’t really mean anything. For us autistic-types, you can choose to feel heartbreak, disoriented, or to boringly relay the predictable observable pattern and change your expectations or approach. Or, don’t, and disingenuously suffer as though you don’t know what’s going on.
If I frame my sense of “problem” in what might otherwise be reducible to “the human condition,” I will fail indefinitely. People being full of shit is not my problem. At the level of civilization, it may mean the end of us all, but locally, practically, I’m not cursing the heavens that people lie, don’t even know to what extent, and it means I have to temper and humble myself. I’m willing to attempt to capitalize on this propensity, and the seriousness with which I take my role is me combating my cynicism about just how far you can take it.
My problem is attempting to get back my time. I haven’t forgotten that. I want my time. Whether I’m seeing a comedian I’m mildly into, reading all day, or pretending I have a clue how to build something on the land, I want to feel the extent of the possible freedom to do so. In this moment, my computer is begging me to job search, read dozens of pages of grants, or click about government pages for more excuses to spend money for certifications and numbers.
My head isn’t in the game of seeing Ari Shaffir tomorrow. I’m not “excited” by the prospect of getting return calls or emails from those I’ve reached out to. I haven’t felt a genuine sense of growth or progress in almost…2 years? The things or people I’ve attempted to invest in have done nothing but punish me. The things I create register as decorative towels in the bathroom. Sure, it looks a little better, but what’s the real utility there? Is the light above the mirror sitting in a gaping hole? Is the black water flowing to an open pit? Are you sure you’re focused on the right part of this bathroom improvement? Or are you grasping at the only thing you feel you can really do, and now it registers as some kind of meaningful “fuck you” to your otherwise hopeless circumstances?
Given that I want my time, there is a certain comfort in sleeping all day, waking up whenever, staying up all night, reading through books that have otherwise been glaring at me for years, and continuing to marathon the never-ending list of shows. I think a lot about “retirement” when I’m organizing and making lists of TV. One I just combined a bunch of other lists into has 4,325 days worth on it. It includes things like old talk shows (1100 days are just 3 talk shows and 3 soap operas). At my 2x pace, for archaeological purposes of course, in my infirm years, I could be done with all that in about 6 years. 5 I bet if you cut out commercials and intros/credits.
I’ll probably have 5 years behind the wheel or on planes if I get my way. Isn’t it weird to think there’s a way to see every Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Days of our Lives etc. in your “spare” time? Even one of those shows laid on normal sensibilities feels impossible. What does that say about us? What does that say of our perception of what we’re worth if we’re unable to even conceive of ourselves properly within the time that exists?
All this talk of TV, but it’s helping me frame whether or not I have a problem. I, again theoretically, have a decent amount of time left to live. I don’t want to spend it in a rage at an abstract machine. I don’t want to spend it feeling beholden to forces that don’t recognize me or do anything for me. (I’m not making a Libertarian argument against taxes.) I don’t want to spend my time as a Cassandra imploring people to recognize we are, in fact, going to die, and the things we profess to care about need work in their creation, cultivation, and defense. I don’t want to spend my life pretending I have anything people need or find myself attempting to persuade them I’m worth anything.
Very, very rarely, someone genuinely listens to me or follows my advice. I’ve yet to get the feedback, “That was some fucked up shit you told me to do.” Hatsam listened and has turned into a more confident communicator and leader. There's my one client who was emboldened to self-taper after embodying my sincere praise for her demonstrable effort in service to being accountable. Clients who stopped killing themselves working to death I saw their faces loosen and language mellow. Clients who established even one boundary with their family or job reported nothing but smiles and a sense of liberation.
But they had to do the work. I’m just passing along my “common sense” and observation of reality. That is, you’re not listening to me when you’re taking my advice. You’re listening to the part of yourself that sounds like me. You’re finding a way to feel deeper about that blunt “do it” person you have in you that people like me feel plagued and stuck on. I still believe I can achieve anything I set my mind to. I just don’t know if I care to anymore. I don’t trust that I won’t go into darker places out of spite to get what I claim to desire.
Who would stop me? I had a whole blog on that notion not too long ago. Who would even recognize what I was doing? We live in a paradigm where naked criminal pride was not only elected president, but threatens to do so again, perhaps while in jail for unlocking the, in my view, plainly evil, inclinations in us all and celebrating them. We’re getting louder than any other noisy message that literally nothing matters but what you repeat to yourself and the world most often. Whether or not that’s “true” doesn’t even enter into the equation. The consequences and the power of doing so are felt at the cellular level. It’s religious fervor for a Cheeto messiah.
Is my problem that people are born sheep? Certainly not if they’re lining up to pay me, right? Certainly not if they could keep their sheep shit and sheep wool from wafting over into what I’m doing. But that’s the rub of living in a society. I’m never truly by myself or can be left alone. Someone is coming for me. Whether it’s the fallout of explicitly terrorizing forces or the consequences of paralysis and ignorance, the time I presume to have left is under immediate threat. I don’t need something abstract to scare me into a desire to amass wealth and explore options. I live in a society that got hateful and violent over masks and vaccines. The next bug I suspect will be more deadly and we’ll be even less equipped psychologically to deal with it.
I could choose, right now, to abandon larger entrepreneurial goals, Door-dash just enough to cover credit card payments, spend the vast majority of my time alone, eating hot dogs and ramen, and returning to a familiar place for decent chunks of my life. Recall, I spent most of my 20s functionally retired just sitting on drug study money. When my dad was hurt, it was movies, video games, and then more movies and video games for years. I deliberately tried to save money and conserve in college, not spending too much on food, splitting rent half a dozen ways. You think I was going to shows, buying game systems or tools, or investing in a truck and living space? I was practicing my guitar for 10 hours a day every day or going to the pool.
I’ve had many, many “peak leisure” points in my life as I dramatically swing from working myself to death to doing nothing and then back again. What if I just stopped doing that? What if I prioritized doing the minimally viable thing like a store trying to get a single cookie recipe perfect before they even whisper the word “milk.” “One demands milk!” You decry. But perhaps I’ve been fucking up the initial recipe for so long and hocking this mockery of a cookie, I’ve lost the thread as to why I got into cookie sales to begin with. Maybe I’ve wasted so much effort and money for a store, marketing, napkins, and a little bell on the door, but it’s never tasted right. Incidentally, the quality control team lost their ability to smell during covid and have been lying that it’s returned.
I don’t even know if I “need” to feel part of something bigger or more meaningful more than I “want” to. The spell of having a group of friends was incredibly powerful, naive as I was about what they were to constitute. Before I appreciated the extent of religious capture, I genuinely thought people were reasonable and persuadable. Before I literally worked for and as “The Man,” I thought they were filled with intelligent, intimidating adults who knew something “special” or “complicated” others didn’t. Not. Even. Fucking. Close. We’re all just idiots playing out emotional baggage in spiteful leveraged ways and pretending we feel, do, or care more about whatever-the-next-thing is than we do.
Some of us get scared and endlessly whine like Trump. Most of us reflexively find who to blame and go into lawyer mode for our own righteousness. Plenty play the narcissism of condescension and pageantry like my brother. It’s all a show. For who? For you. You’re front row center for every dismal thought, poorly set expectation, or failure of will. You’re here to distract, “entertain,” and pacify you. That’s how you clap for our troops (because they’re for US) while you let them suffer in the street. That’s how you tell me, straight faced, you care about children you target for unnecessary removal. That’s how you detach from any call to action as a summary and uniform dismissal of all things. It feels not only appropriate, but downright required.
I’ve never thought I could help or save anyone. I wasn’t saving children. I wasn't lapping up the praise from clients. I look at every compliment about my looks from the blind with the same elevated suspicion. My concern then becomes whether or not I can save myself. I’m not a “prepper” by disposition. The things I’d like to save myself from aren’t really things I personally struggle with. You know, you invite me to dinner, I’m there pretty much every time. You, always, too busy, broke, or not seeing my texts I’d love to never experience again lol, and it’s nothing I can fix that doesn’t beg for detachment.
Do I even want to share my experience? Writing is, and always has been, for me. I need to feel better, alone, forming a narrative that when I go back and read dozens of times, I better articulate what’s otherwise an agonizing and antagonizing fog of angst and consternation. You can “like” my posts. Do you share in what they say? If I explicitly ask someone to comment, just like a client in group, they’ll have loads to say. If I wait around looking for someone to speak or share something back, I’m as alone as I ever get. I don’t know if there’s two more contradictory words than “social media.”
We’re content hubs for consumption. I’m consuming shows. They’re not inspiring me to create or join their ranks.We consume our families, never giving them what they need, even if it’s just honesty, because it would impede our ability to feast on them in the future. It’s a feast to fuel the narrative of our relationship to them, their pathology we’re *immensely grateful* we don’t share, and the lesson we can all learn by caricaturing their example. We let our work consume us, because we don’t really want to be here. We don’t want to feel like *this is the choice I made? We don’t want to acknowledge how much we destroy in ourselves and others by being gluttons for punishment.
Slow. Be slow. Be simple. Flow. I have $2000 in cash, $11,000 in debt and minimum payments for bills and card payments reaching about $500 a month in total. I haven’t looked that deeply for any kind of job, let alone one that would pull in $500 a month. I don’t have to do much of anything. I’m not obligated to keep beating my head against the wall of (my most-forgiving framing) the human condition. I’m not necessary. I don’t matter. They can’t see me. Do whatever you want to do, even if it’s next to “nothing.” No one gives a fuck or is keeping score except you.
Every day is a bombardment. The problem is as big as the fate of the country, surviving climate change, or the next pandemic. At every scale, there’s an opportunity to get sucked up into the exciting and thriving drama. I often speak of people as each unto their own black hole that is hungry and waiting to pull you down. The abstraction that is thought, made slightly less abstract through writing, is my ongoing exercise to look for something more tangible, with direction, or conceptualized in a way that it provokes action.
I’ve been done with my last job for 3 weeks, over a week of that time I was in Vegas, and 6 more days of that time I had a show to attend. Part of this last 3 weeks has felt like an eternity. Even after I learned how to sit and watch TV, there’s a large part of me that’s nagging me to “go.” I’ve very slightly boxed it in with a piddling expectation of myself to do at least 5 squats, read a chapter, read an article, and practice an instrument for 30 minutes each day. I’ve not managed to do that every day, slacking in the practice in particular.
I thought I’d have so much more to do. I even wrote about it while in Vegas because I was ready to get home and start. I don’t know if I hyped it up or expected people and time to start magically responding in quicker and more comprehensive ways than they ever have, but I found myself prioritizing my TV shows and doing little collecting/OCD-adjacent organizing of files. I sent a few emails, called a law firm, and then proceed to “chill” without feeling chill.
I also have tabs open with grants to explore. I’ve budgeted for creating a non-profit arm of the wanna-be counseling operation to perhaps help facilitate getting money. I’ve barely toyed with exploring how to modify the website, and the first place I asked pretty much confirmed I, of course and again, was looking to do something no one knows how or ever conceived of doing. Again I get, (and maybe it’s always just an ignorant feeling) stuck, and proceed down my moving pictures path.
I could also be looking more aggressively for a job. I’ve been reticent to begin. What’s the goal? I know what it isn’t. I don’t just want/need “more money.” I was making plenty of money at the last job and, somehow, I could only be persuaded to keep buying concert tickets. I certainly intend to slow down that habit, but the first 2 months of 2024 have about a show every week.
I kind of want to just fuck about. I don’t see, “realistically,” much of anything beyond pain, loneliness, or utter destruction on the horizon. Realistically is in quotes because I can’t see the future and know I’m but one incredibly small distorted window into the world. Very few are ever coming with me to a show. Even fewer are remotely interested in contributing towards anything I’d regard as a larger ambition with the land or in business. I’m not “doing it for the troops” or trying to “save the children.” I talk often enough about being an engine of spite, but even that is starting to sour.
In the most important sense, as I currently exist and carry on, I am alone.
Is that a problem? I’m certainly as capable of being by myself as I am running the party, so it’s a problem insofar as I still desire to joke and talk or be basically human towards anyone. In theory, I can always continue to invite people out even though they won’t come, or go extra hard in celebrating days like yesterday when I went out to eat, bowl, and then watched a movie with my friend. I don’t want to get weird though. I’d like to stay grounded and have a perspective about time spent with people. It’d be cool to consider myself worth hanging out with or as someone more people would seek out and utilize.
But that begs a different kind and set of questions. That phrasing made me think of being a counselor. Experience has taught me that, no, in fact, people do not seek out and utilize. Actually, they make an entire production out of pretending to do just that.
Perhaps it’s that I don’t really want much of anything anymore. Maybe I’ve been informed enough through experience, conversation, and attempts at doing things “better” or “differently” that something about my wants died. It’s entirely possible I’ve been in some kind of zombie state trudging forward with this semblance of ambition or greed that just betrays my day-to-day or sense of what’s actually possible anymore.
I don’t want to be a social worker, so why start a counseling business? It’s an opportunistic and kind of cynical attempt to cash grab. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if I’m actually good or not. My “oversight” doesn’t have the time or interest in reviewing my notes provided I’m not actively hurting someone or threatening her license. I have no one intelligent, accountable, or interested enough to require anything of me than to pass tests and pay fees. Just because I can structure an environment, ask probing questions, and be non-judgmental (read: not hateful and shaming) when I listen does not mean that anyone I’m speaking to is, at their core, interested in that project at all.
I’ve had well over 300 clients in the course of counseling. I’ve had dozens of those clients, and at least 2 or 3 every week, tell me how they wanted to keep in touch. Not a single one has scheduled an appointment 3 weeks later. Not a single one has texted regarding a base touch or to make a referral. Not a single one has asked if I’ve found a way to coordinate getting their Suboxone in conjunction with counseling. Why? Are they all liars? Well, yes. But also, no. They live in the normal world where words don’t really mean anything. For us autistic-types, you can choose to feel heartbreak, disoriented, or to boringly relay the predictable observable pattern and change your expectations or approach. Or, don’t, and disingenuously suffer as though you don’t know what’s going on.
If I frame my sense of “problem” in what might otherwise be reducible to “the human condition,” I will fail indefinitely. People being full of shit is not my problem. At the level of civilization, it may mean the end of us all, but locally, practically, I’m not cursing the heavens that people lie, don’t even know to what extent, and it means I have to temper and humble myself. I’m willing to attempt to capitalize on this propensity, and the seriousness with which I take my role is me combating my cynicism about just how far you can take it.
My problem is attempting to get back my time. I haven’t forgotten that. I want my time. Whether I’m seeing a comedian I’m mildly into, reading all day, or pretending I have a clue how to build something on the land, I want to feel the extent of the possible freedom to do so. In this moment, my computer is begging me to job search, read dozens of pages of grants, or click about government pages for more excuses to spend money for certifications and numbers.
My head isn’t in the game of seeing Ari Shaffir tomorrow. I’m not “excited” by the prospect of getting return calls or emails from those I’ve reached out to. I haven’t felt a genuine sense of growth or progress in almost…2 years? The things or people I’ve attempted to invest in have done nothing but punish me. The things I create register as decorative towels in the bathroom. Sure, it looks a little better, but what’s the real utility there? Is the light above the mirror sitting in a gaping hole? Is the black water flowing to an open pit? Are you sure you’re focused on the right part of this bathroom improvement? Or are you grasping at the only thing you feel you can really do, and now it registers as some kind of meaningful “fuck you” to your otherwise hopeless circumstances?
Given that I want my time, there is a certain comfort in sleeping all day, waking up whenever, staying up all night, reading through books that have otherwise been glaring at me for years, and continuing to marathon the never-ending list of shows. I think a lot about “retirement” when I’m organizing and making lists of TV. One I just combined a bunch of other lists into has 4,325 days worth on it. It includes things like old talk shows (1100 days are just 3 talk shows and 3 soap operas). At my 2x pace, for archaeological purposes of course, in my infirm years, I could be done with all that in about 6 years. 5 I bet if you cut out commercials and intros/credits.
I’ll probably have 5 years behind the wheel or on planes if I get my way. Isn’t it weird to think there’s a way to see every Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Days of our Lives etc. in your “spare” time? Even one of those shows laid on normal sensibilities feels impossible. What does that say about us? What does that say of our perception of what we’re worth if we’re unable to even conceive of ourselves properly within the time that exists?
All this talk of TV, but it’s helping me frame whether or not I have a problem. I, again theoretically, have a decent amount of time left to live. I don’t want to spend it in a rage at an abstract machine. I don’t want to spend it feeling beholden to forces that don’t recognize me or do anything for me. (I’m not making a Libertarian argument against taxes.) I don’t want to spend my time as a Cassandra imploring people to recognize we are, in fact, going to die, and the things we profess to care about need work in their creation, cultivation, and defense. I don’t want to spend my life pretending I have anything people need or find myself attempting to persuade them I’m worth anything.
Very, very rarely, someone genuinely listens to me or follows my advice. I’ve yet to get the feedback, “That was some fucked up shit you told me to do.” Hatsam listened and has turned into a more confident communicator and leader. There's my one client who was emboldened to self-taper after embodying my sincere praise for her demonstrable effort in service to being accountable. Clients who stopped killing themselves working to death I saw their faces loosen and language mellow. Clients who established even one boundary with their family or job reported nothing but smiles and a sense of liberation.
But they had to do the work. I’m just passing along my “common sense” and observation of reality. That is, you’re not listening to me when you’re taking my advice. You’re listening to the part of yourself that sounds like me. You’re finding a way to feel deeper about that blunt “do it” person you have in you that people like me feel plagued and stuck on. I still believe I can achieve anything I set my mind to. I just don’t know if I care to anymore. I don’t trust that I won’t go into darker places out of spite to get what I claim to desire.
Who would stop me? I had a whole blog on that notion not too long ago. Who would even recognize what I was doing? We live in a paradigm where naked criminal pride was not only elected president, but threatens to do so again, perhaps while in jail for unlocking the, in my view, plainly evil, inclinations in us all and celebrating them. We’re getting louder than any other noisy message that literally nothing matters but what you repeat to yourself and the world most often. Whether or not that’s “true” doesn’t even enter into the equation. The consequences and the power of doing so are felt at the cellular level. It’s religious fervor for a Cheeto messiah.
Is my problem that people are born sheep? Certainly not if they’re lining up to pay me, right? Certainly not if they could keep their sheep shit and sheep wool from wafting over into what I’m doing. But that’s the rub of living in a society. I’m never truly by myself or can be left alone. Someone is coming for me. Whether it’s the fallout of explicitly terrorizing forces or the consequences of paralysis and ignorance, the time I presume to have left is under immediate threat. I don’t need something abstract to scare me into a desire to amass wealth and explore options. I live in a society that got hateful and violent over masks and vaccines. The next bug I suspect will be more deadly and we’ll be even less equipped psychologically to deal with it.
I could choose, right now, to abandon larger entrepreneurial goals, Door-dash just enough to cover credit card payments, spend the vast majority of my time alone, eating hot dogs and ramen, and returning to a familiar place for decent chunks of my life. Recall, I spent most of my 20s functionally retired just sitting on drug study money. When my dad was hurt, it was movies, video games, and then more movies and video games for years. I deliberately tried to save money and conserve in college, not spending too much on food, splitting rent half a dozen ways. You think I was going to shows, buying game systems or tools, or investing in a truck and living space? I was practicing my guitar for 10 hours a day every day or going to the pool.
I’ve had many, many “peak leisure” points in my life as I dramatically swing from working myself to death to doing nothing and then back again. What if I just stopped doing that? What if I prioritized doing the minimally viable thing like a store trying to get a single cookie recipe perfect before they even whisper the word “milk.” “One demands milk!” You decry. But perhaps I’ve been fucking up the initial recipe for so long and hocking this mockery of a cookie, I’ve lost the thread as to why I got into cookie sales to begin with. Maybe I’ve wasted so much effort and money for a store, marketing, napkins, and a little bell on the door, but it’s never tasted right. Incidentally, the quality control team lost their ability to smell during covid and have been lying that it’s returned.
I don’t even know if I “need” to feel part of something bigger or more meaningful more than I “want” to. The spell of having a group of friends was incredibly powerful, naive as I was about what they were to constitute. Before I appreciated the extent of religious capture, I genuinely thought people were reasonable and persuadable. Before I literally worked for and as “The Man,” I thought they were filled with intelligent, intimidating adults who knew something “special” or “complicated” others didn’t. Not. Even. Fucking. Close. We’re all just idiots playing out emotional baggage in spiteful leveraged ways and pretending we feel, do, or care more about whatever-the-next-thing is than we do.
Some of us get scared and endlessly whine like Trump. Most of us reflexively find who to blame and go into lawyer mode for our own righteousness. Plenty play the narcissism of condescension and pageantry like my brother. It’s all a show. For who? For you. You’re front row center for every dismal thought, poorly set expectation, or failure of will. You’re here to distract, “entertain,” and pacify you. That’s how you clap for our troops (because they’re for US) while you let them suffer in the street. That’s how you tell me, straight faced, you care about children you target for unnecessary removal. That’s how you detach from any call to action as a summary and uniform dismissal of all things. It feels not only appropriate, but downright required.
I’ve never thought I could help or save anyone. I wasn’t saving children. I wasn't lapping up the praise from clients. I look at every compliment about my looks from the blind with the same elevated suspicion. My concern then becomes whether or not I can save myself. I’m not a “prepper” by disposition. The things I’d like to save myself from aren’t really things I personally struggle with. You know, you invite me to dinner, I’m there pretty much every time. You, always, too busy, broke, or not seeing my texts I’d love to never experience again lol, and it’s nothing I can fix that doesn’t beg for detachment.
Do I even want to share my experience? Writing is, and always has been, for me. I need to feel better, alone, forming a narrative that when I go back and read dozens of times, I better articulate what’s otherwise an agonizing and antagonizing fog of angst and consternation. You can “like” my posts. Do you share in what they say? If I explicitly ask someone to comment, just like a client in group, they’ll have loads to say. If I wait around looking for someone to speak or share something back, I’m as alone as I ever get. I don’t know if there’s two more contradictory words than “social media.”
We’re content hubs for consumption. I’m consuming shows. They’re not inspiring me to create or join their ranks.We consume our families, never giving them what they need, even if it’s just honesty, because it would impede our ability to feast on them in the future. It’s a feast to fuel the narrative of our relationship to them, their pathology we’re *immensely grateful* we don’t share, and the lesson we can all learn by caricaturing their example. We let our work consume us, because we don’t really want to be here. We don’t want to feel like *this is the choice I made? We don’t want to acknowledge how much we destroy in ourselves and others by being gluttons for punishment.
Slow. Be slow. Be simple. Flow. I have $2000 in cash, $11,000 in debt and minimum payments for bills and card payments reaching about $500 a month in total. I haven’t looked that deeply for any kind of job, let alone one that would pull in $500 a month. I don’t have to do much of anything. I’m not obligated to keep beating my head against the wall of (my most-forgiving framing) the human condition. I’m not necessary. I don’t matter. They can’t see me. Do whatever you want to do, even if it’s next to “nothing.” No one gives a fuck or is keeping score except you.
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