[1180] 404

After the last thing I wrote, I found myself stuck, repeating to myself the idea of just how often I needed to remind myself of the same ideas. Each moment is an invitation to rebuke perhaps a standing solution to your problems. That is, you might already be doing everything you have to do, but because a certain outcome isn’t arriving, you think it’s time to burn things down. I’m not really at the burn things down stage, but I do feel like the toddler who is watching the same movie over and over trying to build a reliable anticipatory framework for something I can’t yet realize.

If I were judging my life from the outside, I could understand someone thinking that I’m increasingly lazy, particularly disingenuous, and almost thrive on circularly talking about or writing about subjects they’re bored of, or never found interesting in the first place. Oh? You have another issue with a lazy empty-speaking coworker or disorganized boss? Really? Tell us all, we’re dying to know. Oh? You’re lonely, taking a stab at one of your hobbies, seeing a show, or are remarking on some line from an obscure podcast or article I don’t care about? Let’s see if you once again land in a place where you’re pretty much already correct in what you’ve been doing.

When I watch classical guitarists in particular, there’s still a pretty major disconnect for me in what precisely they need to practice to sound like they do. I’ve learned a few bits of a few classical pieces, so I have cracked open the door, but there’s still major chunks of the techniques and baby steps that I’ve never really tried to incorporate into my playing. I know what the process looks like for speed-pickers and scale warriors, and I know when I was able to play like them I put in 10-12 hours a day for weeks at a time. No one sees that 10-12 hours of analogous effort or experimentation in service to anything else you do, they just might hear and bother to remark on when you flub or pinch a note.

I do things like make a lot of calls and send a lot of emails trying to find people who can help me do things. I almost never get return calls or emails. I’ve probably sent out questions and info to or called hundreds of people in trying to develop my land in any remote way. I’ve looked through thousands of job postings trying to find one even close to allowing me the leeway I’ve been seeking with my time or savings of my resources. I’ve usually asked for or spoken to some issue, be it at work, or in my life, easily dozens to hundreds of times before I find the resolve to do something like actually spend the money in service to something fun, or shift my attention entirely.

I’ve been online for 3 hours this morning, trying to find, let alone apply, for real remote jobs. I’m open to nearly anything I’m even fleetingly qualified for. I have the time, equipment, background, and capacity. The infrastructure to find and apply? Absolute garbage. So I can spend 3 hours, maybe, applying to 2 or 3 actual jobs? And those will be so far removed from what was advertised when I clicked, it’s a wonder why I’m bothering to apply to those at all. Take that 3 hours and map it across dozens of days, month after month, and then you’ll have a robust understanding of why I would take almost anything willing to pay, like I did with the YMCA.

It’s stuck with me the notion that videogames have come to play an increasingly important role in people’s lives because it’s supplementing for what doesn’t exist in professional development. You can’t reliably find a job that will pay you enough to bother keeping, develop in that job, reliably get promoted or pay increases, and build your skill into your actively working identity. I know, sooner or later, I’m going to get my base to level 30 in Last War in a way I’ve never trusted I’ll be able to achieve things in work environments. There’s no mentors. There’s no leaders. There’s no one with a vision and agenda but to keep whatever ship is floating basically afloat while they extract as much money and time from people as possible. We aren’t artisans and craftsmen anymore.

If I build a decent shoe-rack, there’s not a dozen more in line daring me to refine my skill. If I nail a difficult sweep-picking solo, it’s not going into a performance, recording, or lesson plan. If I put together a comprehensive and deeply immersive plan at my job, if it was recognized for what it was at all, it’s not going to mean more money, responsibility, or power. I’ll get a shout-out email and an invitation to the next he-said/she-said. My early life in school really set this expectation that if you do well, you’ll be rewarded or those around you will recognize that you’re getting something you deserve. Maybe post-internet, that’s not even close to true.

I still can’t shake the disquieting notions about “how things work” though. I’m explicitly not surprised we have creeping stupid fascism because of this instinct that feels the vast majority of the routes to take in life are almost wholly corrupt. Merit feels like it’s not a thing unless you’re in some uber-brainiac niche medical or computer circles. There’s no will to fight for anything you might claim to want or need. Just because I’m not as burn-everything curious as my countrymen who elect sexually abusive fascists doesn’t mean I can’t taste it in the air.

I think it’s a mistake to think if you disappear into a selfish hobby “things” will feel, let alone actually become, better. I’ve been to over 300 comedy or music shows in the last 3 years. Most were a good to great time. I’m still right back here, bemoaning the heart of my cultural sickness as I tire of running up the tab and pretending music will save me. I’m experiencing the visceral contrast to being back in the area where I grew up for the holidays, hitting the bowling alley with my dad and concerts with my friend, and now back home, alone, with the cats and my stressed-out, too-busy, otherwise-always-disinterested or distracted crowd that I’ll be lucky to bowl or grab a drink with once every few months.

Join a club? Practice or meet-ups conflict with work or are populated with people who make you feel worse than being alone. I don’t think that one gets talked about enough. I’m not introverted. I’m not tactless. But I am in need of particular types of people who have an endless reservoir for talking about anything, joking about anything, and a foundational interest in explicating their unique experience of the world. Too many conversations about the weather between frames will see me dropping the bowling ball on my head to escape.

I don’t want to become the lonely opinionated guy in front of the too expensive camera for what he’s doing, trying to build a “brand” by being obnoxious or inflammatory about pop culture. I don’t want to perpetuate faux civility and regard for people who have no interest in working, let alone hard, or honesty or in service to something we could both find meaningful and fulfilling. I don’t want to spend all day on hobbies until I become as intimately familiar with details as I was when I was sucked up into the “new atheist” world. That is, I don’t need more personal gratification. I need evidence each day that there’s something to believe in that isn’t magic, nor squeezing the life out of something approximating stoicism.

[1179] Problematic

I think one of the bigger, presumptive, places that I’m more readily moving away from is the idea that, nearly anyone, is genuinely interested in “solving a problem.”

This isn’t meant to sound like some kind of abstract fatalism. I think my appreciation for what constitutes “problems,” people’s perception of them, and the utility they serve has been a major blindspot and underappreciated. That is, a “problem” to you is explicitly someone else’s “solution” devoid of a shared context. This can be anything from a political football topic like abortion to substance abuse to every layer of self-deception both necessary or insisted upon to ride the story of your life.

I try to be careful in my formulation and definition of “problem.” I find myself, particularly after I developed a habit of writing, qualifying my problems with things like, “first world,” and “I’m healthy, fed, have supports, stuff, etc.” My problems, by and large, are qualitative, selfish, and an extension of what I choose to indulge. That can certainly get fuzzy depending on what lens through which you wish to analyze and scale, but I’m not yet in genuine fear I’m merely at the mercy of the worst consequences of stupid-fascism, or hunger, or that sickness has to offer….yet.

The two areas of life where I dare invoke “problem” most often are with work and interpersonally. with work, I’m often trying to align the stated work goals or obligations with my personal values, competencies, or monetary goals. Interpersonally, I’m navigating people’s interpretations of how I speak to and attempt to achieve my goals. This is a consistent and ongoing series of conversations, roadblocks, and experiments.

Every year, I try to “give myself more room” to “engage problems” in a comprehensive way, and also via social experimenting. It’s not some kind of technical and scientifically robust experiment, and no matter how broad or encompassing I’d like to believe about my efforts, I’m always missing most of the story or necessary components. Nonetheless, this is how I tend to approach my “existential problem” of undiagnosed-ADHD or “multi-potentiate” or “busy-brained” or “woefully-under-achieving-high-achiever” kind of existence.

Practically, this looks like being childless and having my shed-house in the middle of nowhere so I can free up funds. This looks like the cars I drive that cost less than the tires I need to replace on them. This looks like my ability and willingness to both take and quit jobs that it’s unclear if they’ll serve my broader ideals and lifestyle. It’s the tone in my emails when I’m met with professional irrationality. It informs the standards for my friendships and concept of family. It helps me put my Amazon wishlist in order, because some toys expand how you might work or create, and some are just nice to have.

A lazier and imprecise me might say I have a problem at work with someone who recently emailed my boss an outright lie. It’s a simple lie from a simple person about where I spent my time during a holiday party. It’s an invitation from that person, and my boss, to get into a he-sad/she-said infinite digression that foments resentment, stress, and inefficiency. Thankfully, I’m not that lazy and imprecise. I knew, before I ever took the job, the kind of people I’d be working with, the blindspots and vulnerability of my boss, and most importantly, my broader series of goals.

If, stupidly, my goal was to persuade that staff member to tell the truth, I’d be stuck in a hell of my own making. If my goal was to make my boss better at discerning who to trust, or better at holding people accountable, or better at organizing her own responsibilities it’s the same deal. I don’t couch my goals in my ability to necessarily transform how people behave. This is a subtle, but important distinction from “holding someone accountable.” I can’t change you. I can change the environment from which we operate. If the environment lacks someone willing to speak clearly and honestly and able to account, I can choose to be that person.

In my experience, this has been both my personally mental-health saving series of choices, and professional ass-saving one as well. I’m not the kind of person who fucks around at work and makes it easy or obvious that I should be fired, written-up, or otherwise condescended to about how I’m approaching a role. I get the privilege of that confidence because I accept and recognize how I feel good and thrive when I choose to operate that way versus any other. Be it at the grill at Steak-N-Shake or at the table of other “directors,” I’ve met an endless array of people who complain. They have no desire to organize, fix, unite, or even speak to those above them. Worse than all that, they refuse what power they have to operate as good as they can in their own realm.

I find this propensity everywhere. It’s the first-line call center representative who knows your problem can be fixed with a click or a pass to the supervisor, but pretends for 20 minutes otherwise until you get angry. It’s my addiction counseling clients who, intellectually, have every answer to every problem, but can’t be persuaded there’s anything to tangibly practice or is worth experiencing discomfort during as they learn. It’s family who make (or have stolen) hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars who only tell stories of what they can’t afford. It’s apologetics of every flavor. It’s infinitely tailored to your industry, hobbies, and psychology.

I’m not under the illusion that I’m perfectly helpless and at the mercy of history. I’m deeply baked into how fucked “everything” is and how amazing everything is relative to something else all the time. I’m an “all things being true” kind of person who then asks the question of what my next move could or should be. Almost always, the answer starts with something like this. I take the endless flow of competing and messy ideas, write them down, read/listen to them, and keep asking where “I” exist, my agency and choice, to engage parts, all, or none of it.

I don’t consider it a “belief” system that we’re all united by something shared, coherent, or “greater” and “more powerful” than ourselves. This is the language we have, not the words I’m married to. I talk about how you don’t need complicated math or philosophy to pull your hand out of a fire. Barring a unique medical condition, that shit will hurt, kill you, or otherwise make it untenable to be conscious, so if you’re choosing to stay alive, you stay the fuck out of the fire. We get to decide how to frame our imprecise concepts as “more fiery” or not.

A good portion of my life has been in a state of confusion about what constitutes fire. That’s because I was basing it on the people around me. When my aunt was getting routinely physically abused by my uncle, it never made sense to me why all of these large men on my mom’s side of the family, one of them being an army sergeant, didn’t beat the fuck out of her husband and tell him to stop. And my dad’s side, I never understood why my uncle was able to get away with talking to my grandmother like she was trash. My grandmother whom he lived with his entire adult life, cooked for him, cleaned, and was just a beacon of love and care for her family.

As an adult, I can understand how notions of “family,” or “love,” or histories between people can complicate whether or not, on balance, for any individual, a little physical or verbal abuse is the bargain solution for a sense that it’d be hotter, for all involved, otherwise.

Most people most of the time aren’t going to write out pages of context and situate their series of choices as things to own and embody. Most people are going to reflexively react and justify, like a child who says, “Yes, I hit him, BUT.” Most people don’t grow out of that, they just turn it into something superficially more complicated.

In the spirit of that superficiality, a lot of choices look downright bizarre devoid of that shared context and sense of reality. Why take jobs you don’t like? Anyone with a remote sense of responsibility might angrily answer that question. Why spend your money on (x)? If you have an acute sense of time and how quickly it’s running out, things snap into focus. Or, if you adopt a fairly ambivalent or nihilistic sensibility, you’ll puff, pop, and glug away until your successful acceleration of your time to go. How invigorating and engaging can we make isms/ists, religiosity, gossip, reality TV, or consumerism when the alternative is to face and suffer the details that belie their appeal?

Who wishes to wake up everyday with a mantra akin to, “I’m an angry, afraid, irrational and infinitely ignorant great ape with bad habits, harmful biases, and a terrifying capacity to destroy, but there’s genuine hope and reason to believe things will be okay, and not because a strong-man or magic sky daddy told me so.”

Ultimately, my problems have nothing to do with you or your behavior. They have to do with my willingness to engage my perception in any given moment and perhaps reevaluate my goals or approach. Right now, I need to make just-enough money. I need to continue learning about my latest interests in music production, day-trading, and woodworking. I need to do some chores, finish some episodes, and maybe run a few errands. I need to stay on top of how much time I spend in service to an ideal versus rumination on when it’s been violated. I’m not here to argue a case more than live by an example. And, to be sure, it’s an example for me first, because I don’t believe a goddamn thing about what you say about the example I’m watching, recording, or navigating through what you set.

I think if you’re upset about pay, you organize and demand more. I think if you recognize and wish to fix the catastrophe of gossip, don’t pass it along. I think if you find yourself stuck in a chronically abusive dynamic, it’s a choice to define your situation as such, and detail your responsibility to it, all things being true about the tyranny of your oppressor. In this way, you don’t have to be naively optimistic, dispositionally blessed, or exceptionally lucky to enjoy most moments of most days. You’ll start to see the way out of suffering in small or selfish ways. That is, if you think it’s even a problem to do so, and want to fix it.

[1178] Talk At Me

We return to one of my favorite themes, communication.

I play the phone game Last War. Recently, one of our alliance members left, citing an unwillingness of the fellow members to garrison his base when his shield fell. “What’s the point of an alliance if we’re not going to protect each other?“ He bemoaned how often people say they have too many troops they need to burn. He complained that he’s been there from the beginning, and now the game is turning into Farmville light. He joined the proudly fascist UMG Trump group shortly after.

There’s half a dozen reasons you might not be shielded, from going out and seeking to engage your competition to being stuck on ”war fever“ which prevents you from enabling it. You might just not be paying attention on Thursday night when the new round begins and end up getting attacked, losing all your troops, and teleported somewhere randomly on the map. There is no mechanism for telling your alliance members your shield is down. There is no perfectly reliable explanation nor implicit obligation around shielding that everyone who plays the game knows is supposed to occur besides doing so if you’re not active and don’t wish to cost your alliance points. That was summarily ignored so this player could point the finger and leave.

I, being bored and feeling not-quite-trolly yet still unwise, messaged him and said I hope whatever else was wrong in his life gets resolved. Before he left, I made the feeble attempt to lay out those half-dozen reasons anyone at his base level would be perfectly familiar with. We’ve all spaced and not shielded when we were supposed to. We’ve all tried to garrison lost causes. I was met with, ”You don’t know me! You don’t get my point!“ and ”You smug assumption-making yada yada!“ (not direct quotes) As if you need to know a person’s intimate inner life to know when they blame others and pretend not to understand you, it’s a sign they’re thinking clearly and doing well.

This, petty, interaction occurred on the heels of communication breakdowns at work. I’m about a month in. I’ve spent the vast majority of my time assessing. I want to see what works and doesn’t. I want to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the people on the ground. I want to see, just like when I worked for the State, if the narrative in any way matches the evidence. Let’s lay some groundwork first.

On Wednesday, during a time when I was attempting to quiet our kids, apparently something I said got interpreted as, ”You don’t have to listen to the other adults here, I’m the one in charge.“ This sent one of my staff into a panic/rage in which she didn’t show up to work the next day, called several people associated with the company to decompress, and eventually send another staff member over to me to relay her frustration and interpretation.

When I asked what it was they thought I said? No one really knows, all they know is how they felt.

Further context, I’ve created an Excel sheet with messages about my leading philosophy. I’ve said, in writing, I will support them in any punishments they deem necessary. I’ve said, to both my boss, my bosses boss, and every single person at my site, that I’m not even trying to keep the role I currently have. I’m looking to demonstrate I can bring order to chaos and would prefer a more administrative and logistical role that engages the adults more than the kids. Nothing about every word I’ve offered previously, in writing or otherwise to anyone that would listen, would make the idea of ”Hey kids, fuck all these other adults, I’m the boss!“ make any sense whatsoever.

I can cop to being inarticulate. I write for a reason. When I get worked up, like I was Wednesday after a truly annoying and problematic individual aggressively chose condescension within 5 minutes of meeting each other, I can feel myself talking too fast and stumbling over the rush of words fighting to come out first. I can believe full well that whatever I said, it didn’t come out as I wanted or meant. That said, this is where adults and people interested in being fair and patient might go, ”Huh, that was weird, is that what you meant?“ And allow the awkward or weird moment to be checked, addressed, and moved on from in that moment. Instead, it became a Chinese telephone game of gossip and drama predicated on perfectly misinterpreted nothingness.

It gets a layer deeper in goofiness. I said for the last few weeks I’ve been mostly observing how my aftercare program does or doesn’t work. What I have done is introduce 1 thing, a small story/chat, before our snack time, to try and settle the energy. I observed this from another school and site director who is lauded for her program and who I’ve connected with and had prolonged discussions with each morning at my site. I’ve not told a single person how to discipline. I’ve not told a single person they can’t implement something they’re currently doing for ”parties“ and to raise funds. I’ve just tried to assess both the staffs’ and kids’ response to a 15-minute change. The only staff member to engage the change actively loved it and saw the utility immediately, telling me plainly, and we discussed how to evolve it further by getting the older kids involved and in how we select what to read or talk about.

Recall, the staff member that got most incensed by my inarticulate phrasing sent over our ”blunt“ staff member to relay her concerns 2 days later. In the course of laying out the case, several other grievances came tumbling out. In particular, the phrase, ”Kids need structure! I’ve never seen it more chaotic!“ This staff member didn’t agree with delaying the snack because thee kindergartners haven’t eaten since 10:30 AM (we eat snack around 3:30 PM) and her grandson, who is in the program, eats a lot when he gets home so she knows they must all be functionally starving by the end of the school day, or something.

Let’s take a moment and compile a few more of the grievances relayed to me haphazardly, if at all, over the course of my time there. I’ll provide the context for each one. Remember, I’ve been doing this job 4 weeks, the first 2 working only 2 or 3 days a week.

1. I thought you were anti-paperwork!

 We have kids who are probably not appropriate for our program. Some of them have behavior plans we’re expected to follow. Literally no staff member was following any directives or guidance from those plans. This means if we’re trying to make the case that a kid isn’t appropriate, and we’re not even following our own rules, we’re going to stay stuck with a disruptive child when we go to the parents and try to describe the efforts we’ve made to accommodate. My desire was to not look like we’re prejudiced and targeting kids with higher needs, so I was looking for guidance both from my boss and existing site practice as to what circumstances they actually chose write-ups. I was also in ongoing discussions with the star site director, who almost never employs write-ups, because after all, we’re talking about children who do children things. I, also, literally created a form to better track and account for the behaviors and my staff’s responses to those problem children.

All of this was interpreted as though I have no desire to punish, do paperwork, or appropriately respond to kids who I believed would “just figure it out.” That’s an actual quote from someone about what they thought I thought.

2. The kids need structure!

 I’ve asked, both in print and in person, for my staff to start discussing and picking topics they’d like to employ as part of our programming. Exactly 1 has responded to that request. We got our story time and chat because of her effort and response. I created a list of a year’s worth of programs that might inspire their choices. They’ve either refused to read it, or are continuing to pretend they don’t understand the expectation. They’ve been perfectly unable to structure the children's day on their own, and then want to come to be exasperated about how much the kids need it. One example, letting their popcorn and hot chocolate days extend snack time indefinitely until you’ve got messy tables and kids pulling out things from their backpacks because no one has told them it’s time to clean up or engaged them with the agenda for that day.

3. I’ve been walking on eggshells not knowing how to punish.

 I’ve explained in writing that I am not a yeller. I come from an abusive upbringing, and know the difference my crazy trauma-passing-on mom had on me versus my understanding and patient dad. I try to model this. I’ve never told a single staff member not to yell. I’ve never talked to them after the school day and said, “That was wrong.” I’ve never not supported them after they yell and the kids get quiet. I’ve said, “That’s not my style.” If you believe that’s the most effective way of correcting for a child’s behavior or wish to have a program that signals that’s the nature of your control, more power to you. Except, I believe my model and observed compliance from the children, makes you feel insecure and unsure about yours. That wasn’t something you were able or willing to discuss, so it became an indictment as to my level of permissiveness for chaos.

I’ve heard from a dozen people at all levels of my organization about the “problem child” nature of my site. Everyone has something gossipy and negative to say. At the same time, the people on site are getting reassured that what they’re doing is great or okay. You know, because you hire someone to direct something that already runs perfectly. Me, a professional skeptic, takes it all in and attempts to include people in the dialogue and decision-making about how we’re going to fit a more specific time-frame and nature of engagement. We’re not a daycare center, but my staff have been operating as a quasi one for years and don’t like the idea that they’ll be expected to do more than hang out and get paid.

There’s been little to no time to get everyone together to try and get on the same page. Watching children means I’ve had one uninterrupted conversation lasting 7 minutes in 4 weeks. When I called a meeting, of the 6 people hired to handle the afternoon care, 3 showed up. This is a staff that has also been not showing up on their scheduled shifts, not showing up on time, not staying their full shift, and not communicating with me when they will or won’t be there. 1 of the 3 at the meeting refused to even look at me as I described a plan for scheduling the 3 hours we have to engage the kids each day. I began proposing ways to continue to offer their hot chocolate and popcorn concurrent to snack time. She looked straight ahead, mouth agape, shrugged and under-her-breath said, “Sure, I guess” to things like, “Would it help to heat up the water earlier and collect their money before they enter the cafeteria so we can move things along?“ Her mother, the blunt one, who asked her the questions, was dutifully taking notes and copying the schedule I wrote down.

Like all jobs, this one doesn’t pay enough, has too many layers of middle-people who don’t do much beyond send too many emails and offer too many opinions, and regularly talks out of both sides of it’s mouth about its values and means of achieving its goals. They’re too broke, but are a globally recognized non-profit with giant state-of-the-art buildings in the heart of the city. They’re about honesty, respect, caring, and responsibility, just not if it means carrying out the necessary consequences and incentives. Also, the nature of the work isn’t back-breaking, complicated, nor one most people would feel comfortable asking inflation and productivity adjusted minimum-wage for.

For me, very much more important than all of that, as with most social-worky jobs, you have a deeper obligation to yourself and humanity. We’re talking about child-development. We should be broadly enthused by the prospect that we could inform and infuse their lives with something that might stick. When I ask you to pick programs you’d like to teach to them, some of you as literal teachers on my staff, should be excited and engaged, no? Instead, because I’m asking for more than the bear minimum of showing up and keeping everyone alive, I, and every previous director, is the enemy on their way to being foiled by gossip and lazy intransigence.

Eventually, my most-incensed staff member and I had a 45 minute conversation, before the official meeting, and worked out that it was a wholly insane misunderstanding and have been, and would continue to be, on the same page as every conversation we’ve had before that day. I literally told her week 2 that I would love to just put her in charge and disappear towards a role more suited to my skills and interests. We ended in chuckling and on high-fives.

The success or failure of my effort will not entirely be predicated on my ability to dictate a 3-hour schedule. I’ll need staff buy-in. I’ll need to be able to follow-through with consequences approved by my and her boss. I’ll need the space and time to tweak things as we observe whether or not the times I’ve approximated work for time for going to the bathroom or on whatever the program will be for that day. I’ll need to see how we navigate audibles when a room isn’t available or when a staff member in charge of a certain thing isn’t there that day. But, ultimately, this is the smallest of potatoes that is simultaneously people-at-this-level’s entire world that I need to tweak and align.

Exactly here we open up the conversation on what will probably be the next blog. The myopic places we come from that inform how or whether we engage a problem or conceptualize a goal inform this playing field as much or more than any individual’s disposition. My responsibility is to never personalize it. I’m not haunted by the scared and angry rants I got from parents at DCS. I know, viscerally, intimately, what it’s like to live as a source of perpetual misunderstanding. I’m still not going to yell, even if that’s what you continue to prefer. I’m going to invite you to conversation, even if you stare the other direction with your mouth open but silent. I’m going to box my goals into something I can measure, and base my assessment of their success or failure on whether or not you’re even doing the first things required first, if at all.

“I’ve never seen so much chaos!” Consider, you’ve never had someone consistent and present enough to hold the mirror long enough up to the nature of yours.

[1177] Fingerguns

To be sure, "emotionally," I'm not really feeling anything, but a road rage incident I was just involved in is clearly occupying my thoughts.

I'm in Indianapolis, notable for its statistically aberrantly high amount of road rage shootings both lately and over the last few years. I was coming off 465 headed to my newly taken up spot for killing time while school is in session. I had the light, but noticed a white Chevrolet truck speeding through, running a red light. The driver already had his middle finger up before crossing the intersection, positioned for me to see it as he goes by. I honk.

He drives a bit further up the road, stops in the middle and waits for me to catch up. I drive past, but towards a line of cars stacked enough that he can pull up next to me. Skinny white trash mouthing, "I'll fucking kill you, say anything, I'll fucking pop you, I fucking dare you." He points at me with his fingers mimicking a gun. The light turns green, I wait a moment to see if he will start driving. He sits there and I begin to move. He starts driving, continuing to keep pace and mouthing and motioning gun-finger threats. He pulls behind me and proceeds to follow. He does so long enough that I have time to call the police, describe the vehicle and point out several streets we're passing over. I see him continuing to mouth and threaten in my rear view before he cuts over 3 lanes, U-turns, and begins going the other direction.  

This morning, I was playing basketball with kids. I'm planning a drive home to spend time with my dad and friend and see another concert. Were I a different or less-aware person in how to de-escalate or prepare for evasive maneuvers, or he read something I mouthed extra-aggressively, or he was just unduly moved by the tone of my car horn, I might be shot at or dead.

It's hard not to think the general incivility and insanity of "the world" isn't encapsulated in moments like these. Earlier, I'm listening to podcasts where rich people are justifying their support of Trump. I'm scrolling and seeing my state senator praising the explicitly fascist governor-elect. Indiana has relaxed its gun laws. I've spent the last several weeks navigating and looking for places to spend time in the greater Indianapolis area, more than once, I've entered a place and been spoken to in Spanish. I'm not anti-immigrant and pass for half a dozen different races, but if I were poor white trash, I could see the path to anti-immigrant sentiments. Our healthcare is the bare minimum, exploitative, and diminishing. Our pay is in the dirt. Our education is embarrassing. Gun-finger guy is the model citizen of a society designed like this one.

I don't know what it says about me that, once I turned back around and noticed several white trucks that might have been his in some of the parking lots, I made a detour and cruised by. I had no intention of stopping or escalating, but it would have been pretty sweet to get a license plate and call the police back. None of the trucks were his. I also reject the insane and perpetual psychosis of this cultural moment that's supposed to wilt and silently suffer the brazen and irresponsible threats and violence of those too weak and stupid to own their baggage.

I don't go out of my way to find or create drama, but I am a fundamentally angry and violent person. I fantasize, regularly, about being in a justifiable situation where I inflict pain or consequences. The fact that I work in an elementary school and can dream about encountering a gunman should make my point indefinitely about the degree of our sickness. The fact that this area is at a point where I could reference recent shootings in my active response to a potential one of my own should too.   

I don't consider myself the kind of person who needs humbling reminders of how fucked up things are. When they occur, I start to intellectualize my potential response and ask questions like whether or not I should own a gun. I don't want a gun for a dozen reasons. I also don't want to live in a world where you're gambling with your life because too many people are proud of how reckless and antagonistically violent they are, looking for justification in every moment. I think it makes sense to wonder if, given your environment, do you have a choice not to protect yourself?  

I have ideals, but I'm not keen to deny my reality. Reality comes crashing through the window like a deer on cocaine with untreated mental health concerns. People who behave like that guy, and the people who pretend like that guy's behavior is just a story of rightfully entitled rugged individualism, need our attention in a way I don't think society has the bandwidth or spiritual and intellectual depth to deal with. In a remotely sane place, I wouldn't be writing this right now, I'd be back to taking notes and looking towards the future of my day and weekend. I suspect there's something of a metaphorical white-trash gunman cussing at us and pointing their fingers at all of our heads.

I'm finding it increasingly impossible to ignore the temperature, score, and suggestion that no matter how prepared or zen I might choose to be while the fire rages, I could stand to incorporate more water.

[1176] Sure, Enough

How often do you feel like the student versus the teacher? For several days I've been trying to figure out a way to speak to a recurring scene. I don't know how much of it might be as an extension of my hobbies and interests. I don't know if it's a cultural thing. I do know there's an incredibly myopic and condescending meme about it that goes something like, "All of your negative experiences or negative people in your life are there to service your growth and wisdom." 

Whether I mean to or not, I find myself reflexively in a "solutions focused" mindset. Those familiar with counseling or psychology will recognize this as a therapeutic approach to intervening on a problem that, more than likely, won't take more than 10 sessions to fix. It's not what you try to apply to someone who is swimming in childhood trauma and can barely form the sentences of how they're experiencing pain. It's not carrying a presumption of ongoing maintenance, say, in recognizing that you can be 30 years into sobriety and still experience a trigger. It's an attempt to be practical, fairly quick, and more deliberately accountable to whatever the situation is. 

As a listener, people are frequently taking up the hint that they can get into the weeds of their various problems with me. I'll learn from new coworkers everything from the extent of their various health concerns, to psychological issues, to history of patterns that preclude their ability to do anything but whatever they currently are. Once you get someone talking, probably a little too fast, you'll hear them reflexively say things like, "I just can't" and "Yes, but..." as they explain why they haven't advanced along some metric like school or professionally. People, intimately and confidently, know why they can't do something.

So, I'm also finding myself responding to the immediate and obvious holes in what they're saying. This morning I was given a story about why a person was unable to complete college because of dropping a public speaking course. Within about 2 minutes I learned that it's not so much about public speaking, it's concerns with getting picked on as a child that tie to, reasonable, concerns over self-confidence. She's not too stupid or mentally broken. She's too afraid to tackle the degree of work it's going to take to look in the mirror and see the positive things and practice the little bits in a manner that trumps what's mostly superficially wrong with her. If you think you're a fat/ugly/misspeaking reject it's easy to make fun of, you don't see the value in rehearsing your speech assignment so you don't stutter because the embarrassment would just kill you. Of course, it won't, you just haven't wrestled with how much you kinda wanna kill yourself...and that should, reasonably, concern you, but also is as explicit an arrow as you're ever gonna get as to what you really need to work on. You have a shitty therapist if they just want to write you a script and see you next week and haven't told you that. 

Back to that meme. As the person dolling out the advice, but also showing up to actually organize or manage something that's been neglected, I'm almost never feeling like the student unless I'm, also leading, that charge to learn something new. I've been using my time between shifts to read and take notes on day-trading. I don't have a teacher. I'm almost certain I won't find anyone excited about the prospect of teaching me without a fee. So, even if I'll be infinitely ignorant of most things until the day I die, practically never is someone attempting to help or guide me with something save whatever you want to make of specifics related to a new work environment recently.

It doesn't follow that my nascent interest in day-trading means no one wants to teach me. I have many interests and am constantly listening or watching. TV? If I literally watch 625 shows, you're watching the 626th I haven't yet. Music? Sometimes can get a little back and forth, but ultimately even if we're close in genre preferences, if I read an article about the artist, it's a bridge too far in your level of interest. Work culture? If I frame potential and plans, you pat me on the back and stare into the distance because your experience was formed for gossip and kvetching. Podcasts? You're not very political or don't really care about history. You can't remember the last book you read that wasn't about vampires or magic. I don't know if we're just so consumption-based that no one feels like they have anything to say, or if there's genuinely no interest or capacity to have more than a superficial relationship to literally everything. 

In a solipsistic sense then, I feel like I'm frequently the center of the story. To be clear, I know this isn't remotely true, and it's a confluence sensibility that comes from humanity's otherwise proclivities to eschew responsibility and be lazy. Another way of saying this is that no one is showing up in my life and encouraging me to keep trying or doing my best. No one is angling to round out and inform my perspective. No one is taking and rearranging my words to show me how much I'm talking out of my ass. No one is, reasonably, patiently, and insistently, trying to keep me and what I do on a particular path that, from an outsider's perspective, would serve me better than the conversation I'm having instead. I don't feel particularly confident at that point, just deeply alone and suspicious.

My interactions are most often either with someone being silent or short because they're mostly checked-out by habit. Occasionally, I'll get a reactive response, yet almost never actually towards me as the gossip makes its way round. Other leader-esc or manager-adjacent types will offer a kind of nodding along pretend-agreement where, on some level I make a certain kind of sense, but the underlying belief from the other person isn't there, so I'm being more or less entertained but not taken seriously. This is where I garner condescending chains of, "Good luck!" because obviously I'm just a dreamer who doesn't think hard enough about the how and why or practical realities. 

We arrive back at why I remain solution-focused. I can't remember the last thing I've offered advice or a process to that was genuinely intractable. I'm not heedlessly proclaiming to "destroy capitalism" or broadly "fix people." I'm saying things like, "If the gym is closed, can we move the tables and allow them to run in the cafeteria?" I'm saying, "If we have too many people not uniformly carrying out this criteria, can we send them somewhere else?" Or maybe it's as crazy as, "Let's do the math and spend more money on this useful, consistent, and efficient thing instead of that." 

I know fuck-all about day trading. I'm far enough into this book that certain scenarios or sentences are of the kind that I could read it 10 times and have no idea what it's getting at. I start with, "What's that word mean?" Then I google it, and move on down the line until I can conceptualize the broader message. Then I write out the next question I have about who, where, or what seems relevant in assessing what I just learned about. There's funds I can play with that are literally practice and play money. There's funds that require less money and low fees so that even if I lost it all, I'd barely feel it. There's explicit things you can guard against that, because it's very human not to, get belabored. I've never been a gambler, so I don't by disposition and definition worry I'll magically start desiring financial ruin the more I begin to grasp. I already acknowledge, accept, and contain the nature of my greed. 

What I can't tell from the people eager to splay their stories to me is whether or not they're as interested in acknowledging, accepting, and containing the forces that present as though they are, at least crppling, or eating them alive. It also becomes so normal and matter-of-fact, like the compulsive-eating diabetic who plans to have their foot removed. It's not fate until you're comfortable and convinced it is. 

What's crazy to me as well is that I feel a certain craving for wisdom, insight, or novel ways to approach things. I'm constantly looking for the next actual secret that I haven't begun taking for granted as a learned habit. Whenever someone remarks how well I've stated something, I point to this. I've been thinking about it for days/weeks, wrote about it, re-read it, and by the time I go to say it, it comes out short-enough and digestible. I shop those little bites around my life and into different scenarios that would otherwise test my best conceptions of myself. I wouldn't have them had I not done all of this work before some shit hit a fan. 

I suppose I work to not get exhausted by how often I hear, "I can't." When you're primed to hear it, you notice it fucking constantly. I don't exist in many worlds where anything feels remotely possible. It does, of course, to me, because fuck you I do what I want kind of thing. I'm thankful I have Brandy who might feel "I can't" but shows up literally every time. I'm thankful Hussain is still able to demonstrate how much shit you can get done under impossibly fucked circumstances with his wife, work, and broader culture. My dad stays reassuring when I dip into that, "How fucking stupid am I?" space of car-crashing or debt. I try to constantly remind these people that that shit isn't normal, and the world fucking needs it. 

I see where it comes from in watching these kids now day in and out. The amount of, "I know! BUT!" and "Well SHE did..." after you ask them about what they did. The move to perform tears is another constant. I don't coddle, preferring to either ignore or investigate. Yesterday, I literally had a kid go, "You know, I'm not even hurt," and ran back to playground after I asked him, specifically, where on his head he got hit with a ball. After pointing to his eye, then chin, then forehead, he gave up, smiled, and ran away. We have parents that you can see in the minute between arrival and taking them away feed the worst impulses. Too many adults keep those habits, looking for the license to lie, perform, and blame when a second of personal honesty would get them back in the game. 

You're not the victim. You're not actually hurt. I'm not on my way to the poor house. My pink eye and cold were not killing me. I'm not getting paid enough, but I'm also getting paid to do, in my own words, almost nothing, and certainly nothing particularly hard. You certainly can, always, be doing "more" in service to whatever it is that just popped into your head. Do you actually give a fuck? Does it mean anything real to you? Are your reasons actually your reasons, or were they given to you, like lines to perform, so you can once again conform, excuse, and pretend? You're not even asking the questions, so of course everything feels impossible.

[1175] Boss Baby

Oh, shit! You ready? I haven’t written in almost 3 weeks. In that time I’ve started a new job, gotten sick, my car shit the bed, I experienced what felt like a Craigslist “missed connection” at a comedy show in Chicago (Phil Hanley late Saturday show if you’re reading this, Sam!), and have already begun plotting on how to morph my new job role into something that isn’t tantamount to babysitting+.

Let’s start local. I got pink eye. I don’t think I’ve had pink eye since I was 4 years old. I’m a site director now for the YMCA. I’m around, by definition dirty, kids and the things they touch for at least 5 1/2 hours a day. No matter how much wood I’ve knocked in recalling how infrequently I get sick, they got me. This happened at the tail end of getting over a mild cold that decided to get worse just as I thought I had efficiently beat it. I wear contacts and don’t have backup glasses. My eye’s aren’t terrible, but driving has been extra.*

While sick, I’m getting a handle on the true nature of my role and responsibilities. As with most organizations, they have a “mission” and “ethos” and “goals” which are on thousands of pages of wasted paper and policy, but no less inform how some of the most true-believers operate. I’m at a poorer school that no less has figured out how to raise enough funds to consistently engage its kids. I’ve found some people to click with, and found some people who it’s clearly not in their nature to click. Underneath that is the fundamental problem all companies seem to have with basic demonstrations of competence and communication.

I can’t pretend that my job is that complicated, especially given my experience just in my hobbies, let alone at DCS or in counseling. I try not to say it in a condescending way, but I have said it dozens of ways, that I’m a glorified babysitter. At least, that’s how the role was translating my first few days when it sunk in that the difference between a YMCA program and an actual daycare is, drum roll, the programming of activities. If you don’t have anyone concerned with implementing and consistently executing programs, you’re just babysitting. Hence, in spite of 9 people currently hired to oversee 30-ish kids at my site, they hired me to, you know, actually direct something.

At first, naive me was asking things like, “Why can’t the 9 adults do what I’m told needs to be done here?” Several more days of watching people respond to my questions with deer-in-the-headlights faces and pensive toe digs while trying to explain how they’re getting paid to essentially hang out, I got my answer. Also, everyone before me is to blame, as well as the broader chaos of the YMCA leadership.

I’ve done that thing where I have immediately found common ground with the most adult and introspective person and we’ve had quasi-therapy sessions in the mornings about how things are ran or what informs our perspectives. She will be vital in helping me get on committees and pushing reforms that hopefully flesh out that identity and values the YMCA professes. The takeaway is the same as elsewhere, you need to be the adult.

I’ve got some experience with children, but I’ve never been interested in raising them, am bored to tears after too much of doing whatever it is they want to do, and am generally ambivalent about people which informs how I engage with them professionally. A key thing about this is that I don’t seek to control or dominate. I don’t yell at kids. I don’t condescend. I, viscerally, remember what it was to be a child, and actively attempt to mitigate unconscious cultural norms that aren’t helpful in cultivating what you want.

Thus, I have to be the adult for both the kids and the adults I’m now responsible for directing who might feel licensed to get loud and lecture-y and disingenuous in their approach to a kindergartner. For me, who does not profess to be an expert in child-rearing, but who is informed by his experiences, developmental science, and in watching how others operate, I maintain a certain degree of confidence my kids will figure out how to operate along more structured and accountable lines. I’ll suggest something like, don’t reward and entertain the kid who is being performative in their crying. I’m pliable, but keep a decently strong opinion about the efficacy of certain types of intervention, for what age, and under what circumstances.

Some people deeply appreciate this approach, others get petty, aggrieved, and gossipy. You will, under every circumstances, become “the enemy” in one form or another by virtue of any whiff of change altogether, but more accountable change in particular. That’s baked into any leadership role. To me, this means even more not to try to be a dictator more than demonstrator. I speak to the kids like I want you to speak to them. I credit them when they do something right. I trade in time, so when they waste ours, they get theirs wasted while they’re itching for the gym or playground. It’s literally only been 3 days of mild implementation of “my” way, and I’m already seeing positive results.

It’s hard for me to not think about what my day-to-day looks like at scale. We’re now tasked with hoping and praying our way through the next Trump catastrophe, but that’s only to frame it as though we aren’t the fuck ups. That’s to again distance ourselves from our impact and ignorance and hate that dictates the ship. I’ve no less been listening to all my podcasts and reading about how people attempt to digest the zeitgeist. I can’t recommend enough listening to someone like Anthony Scaramucci and then the 5 vs 4 crowd back-t0-back. Or the guests of Michael Moynihan and Bari Weiss and then up-in-arms Leftist academics on Michael Shermer. The nature of wanting/needing a story to supplement or replace personal responsibility beams brightly.

I don’t think there’s a room with or interaction between any two people that exists where there isn’t both an obligation and potential. The obligation would be to something like an imagined universal human value. You treat people a certain way or expect something even as simple as holding the door open for all of space and time. The potential is for that interaction to be dictated or mitigated by personal folly and ambivalence. “It is what it is” as though you have no conscious choice. As though “reason” doesn’t exist or isn’t defined by how it’s executed in good or bad ways.

Monday this week, at 4:45 AM when I tried to leave for work, I discovered my tire was flat. I live in the countriest of country. It’s pitch black, freezing, and recall, my job isn’t that hard or needing of me to actually be there in order for the kids to be kept basically safe and supervised. It’s already extremely wasteful the hour drive I make there and back every day. I’ve been sick. I’ve got the excuse to stay home and sleep in playing out brilliantly. My truck is at my friend’s house. I’m not sure if the new-old car has the equipment to change the tire, further complicated by being on a gravel driveway. I could have left it at that.

I informed my boss of what happened. I sat briefly with my coffee, and proceeded to get to work navigating the problem. The tire wasn’t just flat, but the car I’m driving is very old and 2 windows are taped to try and hold them up. The tape failed, so the car froze on the inside too. Gotta get that fixed. After 3 hand-cranked failed attempts to get the jack to balance, I get the boot on. I drive straight to a tire shop up the road from my job. It takes hours, I overdraft my account paying more for needed tires than the car cost, and navigate from the lobby trying to get money from an account I almost never use, forgetting the pin. In the waiting hours, I cross the highway to mail a package, get food, and make some other errand calls. I was at work for the after school shift.

That night, a flash frozen rain descended upon the area. Parents were over an hour late to pick up kids. Wrecks blocked traffic. I’m perpetually tired the last 3 weeks adjusting to my schedule, sick, and am trying not to ruminate on the irony of being more in debt after getting a job and in needing to get there than by just being broke and at home. I’m staring down the hour and a half minimum drive. I, too, have to navigate remote country roads at 5 mph so I don’t end up like the SUV I stopped for just before I reached home. A “let’s drag this day out even more” cherry on top.

This is either a story of one massive bitch-fest meant to draw sympathy or a basic story of adult accountability employing the tools and skills of perspective and resilience to meet obligations. Some people will view it defensively and try to engage in a pissing match about who has it worse. Some will be ambivalent because...yeah it’s just life and we all get flat tires and deal with the cold. It’s vitally important to me that we all understand most the moments of inflection and choice. I could have sat out the entire day, blamed circumstances, and lied about my ability to address any part of it. I think that’s precisely what we’re doing at less viscerally obvious moments every single day.

You are accountable to you first or you cannot claim to be accountable for anyone else. I would not deserve a leadership position if I were the type of person to pretend I don’t know how to begrudgingly change a tire in the dark, freezing, and on my gravel driveway. I do, I did, and I’m sure I’ll have to do it again some day. I’m sick, so even if it’s more debt and I can’t “really” afford it, I have my medicated $150 eye drops and Urgent Care bill, and began reflexively disinfecting everything I touched at work. I need to continue to watch myself not being an excuse-ridden piece of shit in the world in spite of my very real, very reasonably felt grievances for things I suffer each day.

I unironically bring up unionizing in every job I take. I get zero enthusiasm, feedback, or curiosity about it. Everyone is keen to complain about the pay, disorganization, conflicting feedback, etc., no one, ever, will even entertain the conversation about how to do it better. They also know that, on balance, they’re probably getting away with a certain kind of murder in how they’re making their money or conducting their role. A union is an attempt at a more formal accountability. We, as a species, instinctively and reflexively do not want that.

Don’t be a screaming ape or in denial about your inner insecure kindergartner. We live and die by what we are bringing into or seek to take away from how we engage with one another. I want patience. I want beat by beat reasoned understanding and reflection. I want an earnest investment towards positive changes and values that aren’t empty abstracted truisms eking out of ambivalent cliches masquerading as adults and leaders. Getting by or through each day on some egocentric story of your rights, victimization, or entitlements is not the same thing as demonstrating your understanding and embodiment of your value system. You might profess to be the boss of your own life, but you should be acting as a avatar of what the best version of that life could look like.

[1174] Work Sucks, I Know

Before I let the day get away from me, I very much need to write.

For about a month, I’ve done a handful of gigs from Instawork. They’ve involved being “event staff” for Taylor Swift concerts and, last night, Bands of America, where I dutifully manned an escalator for 7 break-less hours.I also broke down and loaded equipment after an international food-cooking and awards event. The displayed hours you’re supposed to work haven’t matched up once. The job descriptions are woefully incomplete or misleading. The pay is never higher than $18/hr, but more likely $14-$16. I live at least an hour away from the companies utilizing the app.

At the event breakdown, we were initially tasked with wiping down greasy, milk-spoiled heater rack containers, outside in the cold, with a handful of rags and sanitary wipes, and no running water. So, those didn’t really get clean. We mostly moved things like tables, boxes, mats, banners and poles, and cheap furniture from one side of the convention space to the other. There’s no formal leadership structure, so an emotionally unwell obnoxious guy who can’t help but to drag from his cherry cigar every few minutes might be “in charge” because he’s familiar to the client.

Now, you can be on your feet the entire shift, 8-12 hours. You can have no idea when/if you’re getting a break or be on break longer if they can’t proceed with something, say, because the union members need to complete a task first. You might have 5 to 10 not-really bosses who will pop up and question what you’re doing in any moment, like I did when, “I can’t have you sitting here on your phone” guy clashed with the girl who literally told me 2 minutes ago to go on break 2 hours into my shift. They might ask for volunteers for a position and then find out, because of the population they’re employing, 2 got fired an hour in, 1 is too high to work, and a family emergency pulled a supervisor back home, so can you shift over to another thing instead? Thank you for your help. (As though you’re not getting paid.)

I don’t know how other people feel, but I feel like trash. I feel like the left-overs that a company is trying to collect off plates and call a meal. It’s an entitled class-based feeling. The things I observe in these environments are typical of low-income work. It’s a tense, brooding, barely-contained chaos at all times. The expectation is to repeat, “It is what it is” and, “I give it up to God” ten thousand times until your shift is over.

As I was putting down a set of tables, a shelf edge hit the bridge of my nose. As I was walking with a large box, I shin-kicked a big black electrical device. I mangled my shins on a few other things during the warehouse gig. I wore callouses into my pinky toes and had sore feet for days after walking around in my only black shoes well past their expiration. I had an old-man hunch reminiscent of my grandfather when he used to go on walks.

Part of what informs feeling like trash is the lack of communication or clear expectations. When I first arrived at the Taylor concerts, they had us standing around for up to an hour after when we were supposed to clock in. That means you show up early enough to park 15 minutes away, walk to get there early, wait around for an hour, and then think you’re not getting paid. Yesterday, the clock-in supervisor explained she clocks everyone in at the shift-start time regardless of when we actually get out and start working. The missing clarity on this foments frustrated comments from others waiting and contributes to the overall poor-person angst.

The next is the details like being given a jacket you're not convinced was washed after last shift. It's them providing a hole-in-the-wall “break room” that’s a pass-through storage and large-equipment moving space, which, last night was left open to the cold so band equipment could be moved through.There’s one elementary-school seating table, the ones with the 8 circle attached seats that fold and roll, and maybe 15 people will be on break, so you can sit on the concrete, stand more, or chance an electrical box is sturdy. It's finding your own jacket on the floor after your shift because you had to leave it on a rack of everyone else's who can't be bothered to care or pick it up when they knocked it off.

You can feel each supervisor’s general exhaustion. The largest one had a conversation with someone that went like this,

“Are you already checked in? Why do you have a uniform on if you’re not checked in?”

::mumbles, silence, blank stare::

”Were you here earlier? Did you take your uniform home?“

::Points in the distance, mumbles something about someone who checked him in::

”Okay, but how do you have a uniform?“ ”Are you from the first shift?“

::Mumbles::

”Were you working earlier today?“

”Yes.“

”Okay, we need to get you checked out, go down there and turn stuff in.“

It was longer than that and the questions were asked several more times.

Then, like far too many things in modern life, you’re constantly being rated. If you show up early, do everything asked of you, but slip in any way or just rub someone the wrong way, you might open your app after an exhausting shift to find out you got a ”1-star“ rating, mocking you in the face of your otherwise 5-stars. You don’t know who it came from, why, but it’s an invitation to micro-analyze your every interaction with coworker and supervisor alike. It’s also a not-so-subtle suggestion that your job is eat shit, like it, and ask for more, not have any reasonable human expression about the conditions or chaos. To what extent these ratings have any real impact on whether a shift is offered to you or an employer is willing to hire is unclear, but you have no reason to assume the best.

Gig work is akin to “scabbing” to me. Each shift you’re undermining how your culture might otherwise approach labor, time, or what to do if you break your nose or ankle working for someone. You’re essentially constantly begging for mercy. You hope the tipper is in a good mood. You hope the spot you’d otherwise stand in for 8 hours has a chair. You hope you don’t get too hurt or looked at like a “problem” who can’t hang and deal. You hope that ambiguous 1-star rating won’t haunt you indefinitely. As such, you look for little reprieves.

The first day of the cooking competitions and awards, they were still taping while we were tearing things down around them. You, broke, having driven an hour and 20 minutes for maybe* $120, get to scrub spoiled-milk smelling containers, then pass by the scent of the best-smelling food all day. On day two, when filming is done and the cooking competitors are wrapping up their make-shift kitchen areas, if one passes you a world-class brisket, you’re going to eat it, and in my view, deservedly so. Of course, you’re then going to illicit a shitty comment about the “time crunch” (mysteriously absent until now) we’re under, and, “You’ve already had breaks,” from the also-gigging guy pretending to be in charge. What would the under-class be without petty internal squabbles about who is or isn’t really working* as they resent that you took 2 minutes to enjoy the luck of your cold scraps?

Each shift, I find talkers. I generally get people talking, so I’m willing to believe it’s a me thing, but each person comes with a large backstory, opinions, and way in which it really sinks in why this is the kind of work they are doing. There’s sometimes a baseline class-indicated short temper and aggression. It’s stories told through crooked or moldy teeth and bad breath. It’s lengthy theories and explanations for “the system” which, you know they haven't spent any real time or effort building a case for, but is on the back of personal experience, rumors, and cultural truisms.

I’ve been told cancer isn’t a real thing, been schooled on vaccines by someone who was adamant about their capacity to google. I learned of a gentleman’s chronic strained testicle situation that the military offered to pay to fix, but he was wavering because of how much he enjoyed smoking weed. I think I got him to understand how scary and consequential chronic pain can be though, so he might actually choose wisely after our talk. I heard a story of someone raped, ignored, abused and labeled, and forced to engage with her attacker every day for years afterwards. She now plots revenge and finds the strength to barely keep it together. There’s the guy who was retired from administrative work who just likes interacting with people and doesn’t want to sit at home. There’s the guy with, allegedly, 20 properties across Indiana and Ohio, some worth more than homes in Carmel, but for reasons I can’t discern was stuck, just like me, waiting for the endlessly self-congratulatory Avon marching band to get the fuck off the field and go home.

The handful of women, in particular, who could see the less-than enthused look on my face as the night dragged on who said something like, “Thank you for being here! I know it’s a long night!” I think this is what pissed soldiers off who get “Thank you for your service” lol. If you cared, you’d be polite and leave. If “The system” cared, it’d have me off at the stated time. If “society” cared, I wouldn’t resent having my time bled because I’d be getting paid enough and live close enough to where I work that I wouldn’t be getting home at nearly 3 AM. I would have had a break and snack in a basically acceptable space and not been left adrift indefinitely on no information. If you’re the kind of person to thank the tired or grumpy gig-worker after you’ve overstayed your welcome, you’re rubbing salt in the wound.

I’ve referenced several people with what I would consider debilitating conditions, in one form or another, from which I don’t suffer. I’m not sick. I’m not proud of what I don’t know or understand. Teeth aren’t rotting out of my mouth. I haven’t been raped, labeled an addict, and treated with naivety or ambivalence for years as I beg for help while my abuser mocks me in real time. I’m not even, necessarily, married to the nature of a gig style or environment, as I start back in towards my white-collar 40-hour space early tomorrow.

My goal, is never, to merely complain or lose perspective. If sitting around and waiting or driving late as though I don’t prefer to stay up all night, is the worst thing that happens to me for $150, no one’s crying for me. Therefore, my goal is to hopefully paint a picture of the nature of our cultural narrative disparities. The people at the bottom of the income, neighborhood, options, or general capacity to be much beyond frustrated meat to be shuffled around occupy an entirely different universe of expectations, language, and ultimately values that guide their decision-making.

If you ever presume to be “well-meaning” or a “problem-solver” or from a place, like Avon, where your band has more spent on it in a week than the person who helped you to your seat will make in a year, where would we even begin to bridge that gap? You don’t “fight for $15,” you demand $30. When you’re auditing, well first you bother to audit, where tax dollars are going, you’re investing in schools and healthcare. When you’re organizing, you start local with simultaneous lines into a broader federal or cultural vision. Then, you stay on that message and effort for decades.

I’ve been offered a dozen opportunities to view myself through the lens of the culture which breeds gig work. I’d be reasonable in walking away with a conclusion that my time doesn’t matter. What I know or whether I’m competent at my role is secondary to occupying the space in service to a performative agenda. Regardless of who I’m working with or where they are coming from, I will need to accept their “rating” and live in fear of unfair scrutiny and punishment if I get out of line. And the way to cope? Chronically engage in it, like you’re addicted, until you normalize the self-abuse. Silence and shit-eating become wise moral virtues. Criticism, not genuine criticism of an operation or “the system,” but of yourself, your others in your small ilk, becomes the self-corrective.

It doesn’t take some mastermind evil cabal to orchestrate things this way. Attention is limited in every human brain. Rich people are doing rich-people shit, not slaving away over how to cut you 1,001 times when 2 or 3 normative language strokes or business practices will set you to task cutting yourself indefinitely. It’s the same reasons and forces that find normative balance which undermine my faith that people will change or fight or better account wholesale. Trump got elected. People want to blow shit up. But Trump isn’t going to blow up the systems that keep them oppressed, just more of the extremely fragile things that barely contribute to keeping them going. Fuck, maybe ironically this is what provokes a proper revolution? I doubt it, but one can dream.

[1173] Workin' On The Railroad

I think I recognize a point of major confusion when someone is attempting to explain the “reason” they did something. We tend to think that a choice is discreet, or that one thing naturally follows to another. I choose to hit the cue ball into the 8 ball. Incidentally, we have an idea of the physics that will cause the ball to fall into the pocket, but it’s not predetermined. There’s an underlying chaos and probability matrix seemingly calculating indefinitely in real time.

I read once that to accuse someone of being a hypocrite was one of the weakest forms of both criticism and argument. The reason being, no one ever, ever, feels like a hypocrite. The moment a personally gratifying or sense-making opportunity is presented, a deeply personal choice gets made and the seeming contradiction is resolved by the new embodied person. You can see this during interviews with killers, or Daily Show maga man-on-the-street interviews. This is what every “modern religious” person does. It’s how I can “resolve” being a hyper-focused go-go-go-type person who maintains the capacity to sit around all day watching TV. We’re complex things.

This, I suspect, is where the wisdom of “hate the sin, not the sinner” came from. When we choose to be, we can be as discerning as we wish in painting a picture of the many things that influence behavior. You can love people in your family, it’s said, while you hate everything they do during the heights of their addiction, perhaps. I’ll refrain from speculating and dismissing the messy or haphazard definitions of “love” one might adopt there, but the superficial contradiction and hypocrisy are no less highlighted.

We have evolutionary systems that, one way or another, need the world to “make sense.” That is, you would not be here if your nervous system confused the sensations of pain and bleeding out with the taste of honey. So much of your being is attempting to resolve that sensibility with the abstract nature of language and ever-confusing nature of your experience.

I think I got considerably better as a thinking individual when I adopted an “all at once” and “yes, and” mentality about my power, motivations, intentions, and potential. It started with learning how to shit talk. You can’t become a good shit talker if you’re not observing the things about you that you would use on someone else to cut them down. If I didn’t know I had a receding hairline, big ass, or serial-killer beard when I don’t shape things up, it’d be really hard for me to make fun of you if the second you responded with one of those things I broke down.

No one or ten things you can pick out about yourself or someone else’s looks make the whole person, and the seasoned genuinely comfortable shit-talker knows this. They know it’s attractive to be funny and laid back. They know it’s cool to project power and intelligence or wit. They know that any deficiency they may have will pale in comparison to how someone next to them feels about themselves and what’s wrong with them.

Comics understand that trading barbs is a show of love. In a different context, with someone who doesn’t understand the culture and language, you might make someone cry. To them, you’re being mean, even if in your world you’re not even in a mean ballpark and are genuinely trying to connect. If you try to defend yourself and say, “No no no, I like you, that’s why I said your tits were saggy so be careful they don't get caught in the door jam!” Who says that to someone they like? You’re going to look like a hypocrite who claims to like someone, but says mean things to them. It’s entirely a product of a superficial understanding of where either person is coming from.

To me this feels like an area that’s both extremely personally familiar, but one that many people still misunderstand with regularity. I think the problem has only compounded with characters like Trump in our minds.

The comic who makes fun of you isn’t lying about where they come from. Someone like Trump is lying about everything all the time until it’s a transaction that personally helps him. And then, he’s still lying about whatever feeling he may express about you. He’s not gratified to know you, he’s gratified he got something out of you.

But what’s a frequent defense you hear from Trump’s apologists? “He’s just joking.” You have someone like Jordan Peterson trying to liken him to actual comics and claim they’re making the same kind of jokes. Absolutely not. One class of people are making jokes, professionally. When they step off stage they are normal-enough people with standards of conduct and a shared reality. It’s part of what allows them to reach the heights they do. Bill Burr hasn’t cut down and destroyed everyone in the comedy world like Trump cuts down and destroys everyone who doesn’t service him.

When you don’t want to accept the basic reality, you shift the conversation. You let the words mean something else. You move the goal posts until new norms of behavior and connotative baggage can be shaken or adopted.

There’s several thousand posts trying to explain why Trump got elected. The ones I caught, none avoided the trap of equivocation and nice, neat, or indignant summaries of familiar talking points. One person, Tressie McMillan Cottom actually and accurately spoke to the feelings that drive people on The Daily Show. The equation looks something like this:

Clock vibes –> Create excuse –> Call it “reasons” –> Passionately double-down –> Clock self-fulfilled prophecy vibes –> continue cycle indefinitely.

You know why the whole country moved towards Trump? We’ve been gagging on those fumes for almost a decade. No kid who grows up under that is going to fear fascism. Fascism is the new norm. No media that never learned how to cover or convey information in the first place is going to be a protective 4th estate. Our “norms” have only recently evolved to try and get used to surviving past our 30s. We can devolve into a considerably more ambivalent and blood-thirsty version of ourselves almost over-night. That’s the vast majority of our internal infrastructure.

I don’t want to drift too abstractly. You can stop the cycle at any point by just adopting better questions. You have to ask them of yourself and whomever you’re desiring to connect with.

Do you feel some kind of way when you’re discussing whatever the topic is?
 If you can’t recognize or own the feeling, it’s saying everything for you.

Can you recognize and accept whatever the last point I made was?
 If you are unable or unwilling to quote someone and recite back what they  said, you’re not talking to each other. You’re not sharing language or some  version of reality.

I suggest ceasing any conversation that can’t establish these two conditions if you’re genuine goal is to get somewhere useful and actionable.

One of the digressions I read from someone trying to front that they’re a “reasonable” split-ticket person criticized the border bill because of one out-of-context line about how many people it would allow into the country a day. To this person’s mind, they’ve got a reasonable criticism and wouldn’t vote for a bill that has that in it. The huge but, all bills are going to have things in them that one side doesn’t like. The fact that one came together at all, and was ready to be passed, and was deliberately tanked by the person you voted for says an incredible amount about how “reason” fails.

For that criticism to make sense, I would need that person to answer yes or no to a series of questions about the nature of my reality and perception of what a monumental accomplishment the bill was altogether. I’d also want to know their awareness of the history and context of our immigration issues against what the rest of the world is experiencing. What I’d discover within 2 questions is that this person has no idea how immigration works, what details needed to be negotiated, what future bills others were aiming for once there was a floor, etc. I’d also discover that they were not interested in those details fundamentally, because they’re engaged in backwards apologetics trying to justify a bad decision, not look to build reasons into one they think is good.

This kind of “reasoning” and behavior is something you see in social work constantly. I remind my clients often that there’s a huge difference between living in fear and avoidance, and living in an affirmative and accountable way. When they tell me, “I just don’t ever want to think about using again!” I tell them that’s building failure into their expectations. They’re going to think about using again. They’re not, yet, necessarily going to grasp the nature of their power not to do so. They’re not going to have an understanding and awareness of how their environment and self-talk and daily practices inform or impede their ability to reach years-later goals.

So it goes with everything we do. We live in avoidance of the psychological pain of superficial contradictions and difficult conversations with the forces that, having become too abstracted, we don’t respect as killing us. Fentanyl will drop you dead the first time you get the wrong dose. Rage? You’re not even angry…you claim. Fear? You like scary movies! You assert while I’m trying to talk about the consequences of you escaping an abusive dynamic. Faith? With god, all things are possible. Conveniently, “all things” in my head are something positive and not a global flood.

I’ve thought about taking as many posts as I can and sorting them into the categories of excuses, linguistic gymnastic rhetorical bins, and fallacies. It’s what I used to do back when I was “debating” religious ideologues. It’s the exact same mechanisms regardless of the topic of conversation. That’s what kinda kills and yet excites me, because it feels understandable and teachable. Michael Shermer has his books, but I don’t see enough people wrestling with the conversations in real time. I don’t see us as competent to both recognize and know how to redirect or call out in a way that keeps an exchange on the rails. Like, we don’t have a concept of the rails broadly.

I think for my purposes I need to continue speaking mostly to myself and my fleetingly small audience of people who aren’t reduced to reactionary pedantry when they pretend to understand what I’m talking about. If I can refrain from unironically engaging in the errant pissing matches as I’m searching for a compelling way to convert errant pissing matches into something useful, that will serve me best. We need more people demonstrating the value of methodically and purposefully approaching conversations while maintaining expectations for the nature of the exchange. This is incredibly hard to do, not least because I’m unsure how even most of the smartest and well-intentioned have the ability to recognize the problem.

[1172] Ooo Ooo Child

There’s a strain of rationalization that’s coming from the most “polite” corners of the “What really happened!?” podcast universe, TV hosts, and pundits I think is worth highlighting. Not because it’s more or less correct than any of the dozens of reasons that are somewhat true. I think it’s worth highlighting because it shows how bad we are at talking broadly or framing things in terms of genuine personal accountability.

The shorthand versions will sounds something like, “People really do vote on the economy.” Or, “If you tell them a man can now compete in girl’s sports, that really puts the fear of god in them.”

There are “obvious” indicators of what pisses people off. It doesn’t take long for a normal average person to think they don’t want a trans woman competing against their daughter. That’s throwaway simple for anyone but the ones who were in power and with the microphone. But, the issue isn’t the “real” issue. The issue is we are really really dumb when it comes to discussing or understanding what the science, if it has anything to say, is at all.

This happened with covid. Instead of saying, “We’re constantly collecting more data and will update you on what to do next,” they came in and mandated things catch-all style and then downplayed the consequences of the downstream effects. The problem wasn’t our “covid response.” The problem was an unwillingness if not sheer inability to message honestly and effectively about how the scientific process works and the reasoning behind an informed decision.

You know the problem isn’t the problem when old talking points still make their way into the excuse grievance narrative. People were still complaining about gas prices, for example. It will never sink in that presidents have nothing to do with gas prices, but even when they’re low, “gas prices” turns into “eggs” or the infinitely broad “economy.” “Inflation” is invoked, as though it’s not a global phenomenon and self-confessed consequence of opportunistic greed.

If you want to lay claim to the fleetingly small “rational” part of the human animal, you can’t dismiss the linguistic context within which they are operating. People do not know how to articulate what they do or don’t feel, think, like, hate, etc. The smart people don’t, the dumb people don’t, it’s just not a thing we do well, at all. This is how children of immigrants will vote to have their family members deported. This is why poor people will vote to have their taxes increased. They “feel” desperate and angry and are genuinely victimized. They glom onto the avatars of that. That’s not “rational.”

People “really” only vote on their feelings and impressions. There’s roughly a dozen people who will methodically calculate the policies and implications. I’ve felt, my entire life, at the ass-end of shitty republican policy that makes it hard to get assistance when I’m super poor, fucks with how much I should be paid for my time, increases my taxes, destroys the ecosystem, and endangers the lives of my friends. I don’t “feel” that, that’s their stated mission and regularly acted upon agenda. My new governor of Indiana was as complicit in the insurrection as they come. The Christians, the fascists, the ideologues of every stripe want you under heal.

This includes the oft-caricatured “radical Leftist.” The infinite sea of irony is that “the media” or the “proud” ones on the Right who own and make a show of that shittiest of all behaviors get to be viewed as more “honest” and “telling it like it is.”

NONE OF THESE CUNTS ARE TELLING THE TRUTH.

Worse than that, when you hear someone in the media say that exact same sentiment, or you get it reflexively from the no-information non-voter, they won’t be using it like I am. They aren’t going to be implying that we’re all scientifically and historically illiterate. They aren’t going to have a list of psychology and rhetoric resources for you to start gaining insight on your behavior.

I think back to economics classes. They literally presume a “rational consumer” who is going to make decisions about what to buy based on simple and boring calculation. They have the balls to then develop a whole mythology around this that you can major in, and then they wonder why people on the outside don’t trust their “expert” analysis of why prices or goods look the way they do. The theory behind democracy and having an “informed populace” suffers the exact same issue. There’s not simply too much information, it’s that to be “informed” you need to be able to trust the information altogether, do so for long enough to see and carry the consequences over time, and have a basic respect and defense for discerning truth and evidence in the first place.

We don’t have that. “The media,” wants clicks, not genuine information connecting and motivating informed behavior. “Public intellectuals,” personalities, influencers, and moralizers want money, attention, and to feel as special as they’ve always knew they were with their big brains and big hearts and ability to heard sheeple. As individuals, we’re not expected to live up to any standard beyond the ho-hum stupid fascism of our friends and families. So, what on Earth would make you think there’s a desire to “preserve democracy?” You don’t put any of your ideas up to a scrutinized and informed vote, except maybe occasionally where to go to dinner.

I already can’t count the amount of empty generalized platitudes the “adults” are offering to the people who are scared, desperate, and confused. We’re more prepared this time? Cool. We know what to expect? Right. None of us can individually cure a cultural psychosis. We’re all drinking from the same stupid language Kool-Aid. Our visceral instinctive reaction to any truth about the actual work and the descriptions and directions of where we need to go garners a doubling-down attitude.

Hey man, if you wanna stop doing that drug, you need to surround yourself with people who have many sober years and mindsets.
   Okay, fuck you, I can do this alone.

Hey man, if you want to connect with “the other side,” you need to recognize that your bleeding heart vibes have not once been curious as to the detailed Israeli operations.
   Fuck you! Genocidal maniac!

Hey man, when you don’t understand the science of fetus vs zygote vs embryo…
   ALL UNBORN LIVES MATTER!

The onlookers and “reporters” and pundits will remark on this dynamic as “People are deeply divided and have personal views they vote on as their one issue.”

Except, they’re all united by how unwilling and unable they are to process and parse information. We’re all very, very dumb and using superimposed narrative impressions to do the actual work for us. The language of modernity is our Suboxone or methadone. That is what we get when we go to our feeds and favorite “news” outlets. We get the script to not do the work.

We get the excuses so we don’t have to believe that every word we use, every disposition we bring into a space, and every thing we share or choose to stay silent or opine on matters. We don’t want that responsibility. We haven’t been taught how to wield it responsibly if we did. We don’t have the patience. We don’t see the point. “We” aren’t “me,” so what do you know? In the immortal words of a Surrounded idiot Trump supporter challenging an equally unhelpful Destiny, “Were you there?” Somehow, your infinitely limited, incomplete, and incoherent experience alone trumps everything, forever.

[1171] Kill Your Pets

I don’t know if I’ve tried this approach. I get heated. Like, I get taken back to childhood levels of dramatic emotion and readiness to break shit when I’m watching something that’s inverting words. If you were to take a quote from MLK Jr. or Nelson Mandela and slap it on a Nazi poster to somehow suggest they were on Hitler’s side, it’s that level of absurdity that still manages to get my blood boiling.

Academically, we’d talk about exploring “rhetoric.” It doesn’t matter if the words are true, just that they’re persuasive.

One of the major motivators that got me started writing was waking up to the nature of manipulation. I was into a girl who was in a typical bad relationship with an insecure boy that did all of the insecure boy shit that imposes guilt, intimidation, and control. As well, I looked at myself, and the relative ease with which I was able to navigate the world through smiling, jokes, or being generally cute. I’m also dispositionally a leader. It’s something people pick up about me immediately and is why I’m constantly asked to teach others, take supervisory or managerial roles, or am capable of maintaining order in a group counseling session.

Another way of stating this, say, even if I was a terrible leader, is that people are eager to thrust the responsibility of things onto me. This can look like blame for the worst things that might happen in a party environment if it's "my" house with 5 roommates. It’s, I would estimate, 99% of the emotional reaction I might illicit from someone after I’ve explicitly stated my assessment of their being if it's less than flattering. I’ve been told, as early as I can remember, some version and at some level that it is always and forever “my fault." Your perception of me is my fault, and as many of them consequences as you need to feel correct.

Now, this is absurd. We’re all to blame all the time, but that’s a specifically incomplete and unhelpful framing meant to equivocate instead of investigate.

There’s a way in which I would be extremely to blame, though. Let’s play out the thought experiment.

I recognize vulnerability. I know how insecure people are. I know how lonely people are. I know they’re looking for excitement, direction, novelty, and acceptance. They think they’re “weird.” They think they’re the only one who is going through their personal story of hell. These are all things I know explicitly and have watched play out in thousands upon thousands of people in one form or another. I don’t care about your job, title, friends, upbringing, I will locate what breaks you almost immediately. It made me an incredible DCS assessor and also lends itself to counseling because I know where not to step too aggressively.

What might I want from someone? Money? Sex? A bubble that affirms everything I say or do? Does it even matter what I want? Is it not already enough to consider me a terrible, evil person by just clocking what I know and finding the comfort and license to let the cards lie as they may?

So you can look for the ones that kind of like you or are intrigued by you. I catch more looks from chubby middle-aged women than windows do from window-shoppers. I make more people chuckle with my turns of phrase and random commentary than I can count. Now, I have your attention. I could ask 1 or 10 questions about you, and elicit months of ways to build rapport. I could innocently start inserting myself into your life, doing favors, picking you up when, again, you’re facing a problem that you and only you have ever encountered ever. And you need me to validate.

We don’t need to really share or talk about our dynamic. It’s something special. It’s crazy how we even found each other, right? Who knew that someone could see right through to your soul and become such a huge part of the directions you can start to see yourself going.

This, mind you, is how I witness a large majority of people’s “loving relationships” playing out. If you look closely at the details or listen to your mouthiest friend, he’s an emotionally abusive child and you’re a codependent internally-ever-crying mess. But damn if you don’t look passable taking a picture at the top of a mountain! The bible of cliches that lend themselves to a “happy marriage” is stapled to your tongue.

Okay, weirdly, we’re still only at the first few stages of how depraved this gets. You don’t really have someone until they’re not just doing things for you, but subverting their entire self in service to anything they even think you might want. That’s proper mind control. Do you want to go to your 9-5 every day? Of course you do, you have to pay the bills, feed the kids, keep your health insurance. Wait, why can’t you get those things any other way? You’ve been bred to follow a certain set of rules and order, so before you’ll learn anything about taxes or blame a billionaire, you’ll get a second and third job.

it’s not large accomplishment to get someone emotionally invested in you. That’s why it’s so cheap and easy to pick out the ones, like a cult leader, who will fuck you first and groom your future child brides. We’ve never established what the goal of doing all of this is because that’s also what makes it so nefarious. The goal is self-gratification and “because I can.” People who do this like this just wish to embody the fact that they’ve done it.

If you own a pet, you can snap that pet’s neck right now. You’d also probably get away with it. Why would you do that? It’s evil, unnecessary, ridiculous, you love it yada yada. Well, you’ve never done it before, and maybe you’re at a point in life where everything feels ambiguous and arbitrary, so, snap? The world doesn’t end. You don’t have to tell anyone. Your other cat doesn’t even blink.

Now, what if you did it because I told you I don’t really like cats. It doesn’t even live with me and I never see it. You’re just so in love with me, so convinced by the narrative we’ve been sharing together, and the emotions are so true and compelling. Is it even really a cat? Does it matter? Is there even a remote chance that I might notice your clothes have less and less cat hair over time, and that might make me happy?

If this feels far-out and gross, as far as I can tell, this is a 1 to 1 correlation of what apologists and con-men and ideologues are doing with every breath.

Who is to blame in this scenario?

If we have healthy minds, we’d instead be asking, at what point can you claim responsibility. When is the above scenario my responsibility? Well, I wrote it. From the jump. If the next time you see me and I’m missing a cat under suspicious circumstances, I can’t blame Trump, or my god, or some level of depression and existential angst. I choose to keep the little fuckers alive, and recognize and respect my capacity otherwise. If I don’t have robust, reliable, good reasons for keeping them alive, I guess all you can do is pray for them?

We’re going to spend, at least, the next 2 years trying to find anyone but us as individuals to blame for what may be the stupidest fascist takeover in history. Who killed my cat!? We will scream at anyone willing to listen. You did, bitch. You looked it dead in the eye, noted how soft its fur was, and with the smallest twitch, cracked that little bone that separated you from the monsters.

Every intellectual who’s out there lending their same awareness that I have to make excuses and apologize for Trump is killing cats left and right.

They aren’t doing the work of killing them though, you are. You tear down our ability to be safe, coherent, accountable, and human. You adopt their hyperbole in tern, you dutiful fulfill  your roles, real and imagined, that you think will service the dear leader.

Guess what, at that point, my work is done. All I have to do now is see how long I can last until I eat myself alive or someone capable of bringing consequences shows up. But, I’ve already established that people are incredibly and endlessly eager to thrust responsibility onto me, didn’t I? No one’s coming. If I don’t stop, it doesn’t stop. And why would I stop?