[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.