[1131] Don't Care Where I'm Going

I'd like to shake off this grumpiness I went to bed with and appears to be carrying on into waking up today.

Yesterday had an overall really good flow. I was in good conversations, got to see and chill with a friend at a concert, and even made myself a big breakfast. There was a small storm delay for the show, but nothing too bad. What sparked a sense of aggravation when it came time to leave were the bands' dopey and awkward thanks, political, and "artsy" commentary.

I'm not a "shut up and play" type. I've seen some hilarious bands, have appreciated well-thought out and worded sentiments from artists who actually read or listen to genuine experts. I can't say that about Hozier or his opener Allison Russell. If you want to see how quickly an overt political band can die, see Anti-Flag.

Both Hozier and Allison spoke to Gaza. They didn't simply say they cared for the women and children. They called it genocide. They paired sentiments about everyone being connected and valuing each other for who they are. Hozier brought out a modified pride/trans flag. None of them care for a second that there likely aren't even dozens of the general population of Gaza who wouldn't actively or passively throw a gay person off a roof and stone them to death.

Hozier rambled, for an uncomfortable amount of time, about civil rights and America's impact in the 50s on Northern Ireland. He literally went through and thanked almost 50 people involved with the production of his show. He introduced each of his individual band members, 8 or 9 of them, twice. With the rain delay, the show was already running late, but now having these drawn out wholly unnecessary and blissfully heartfelt ignorant digressions between the last 2 songs, it's 11 PM and change before you start the zombie walk back to the parking lot. I fucked up and didn't cut out a little early to avoid congestion, and spent an hour huffing fumes.

A particularly discourteous vehicle in that parking lot triggered the extra aggravation. We could zipper, but no, you're gonna block, and then sit blocking for an hour, just because. Cool, fuck you. Then it's the 1.5 hour drive home, now 12:15 hitting actual streets. I had that big breakfast, but didn't eat the rest of the day. I find an exit with what look like open fast food spots. McDonald's? Giant line of cars not moving. Leave and drive to Steak N' Shake? Always appearing open, never going back to 24 hours. Back to McDonald's? The lines have moved, but I'm there 2 minutes after they close, and get sandwiched between vehicles. The vehicles take 8 minutes before they move enough for me to get the fuck out. I load up on junk from a nearby gas station and make it the rest of the way home.

I've been waking up tired for the last couple weeks. I'm sleeping and waking up without an alarm, but for whatever reason the energy levels and focus aren't there. I put on an English documentary about The U.S. during the pandemic. Stories of people losing jobs, getting evicted, and selling what little they have to feed debtors and landlords. These juxtaposed with oil tycoons and bigger business owners talking about how Trump will save the country as they show off their luxury cars. The old white landlords with guns on their hip and expensive purses offer ignorantly pithy statements about needing their money.

Invariably, there's charity programs and food banks that barely alleviate the burdens, for a month or so, maybe, of less than half of any amount of people who attempt to utilize them. I then catch a news demonstration asking people to distribute pie to plates indicating income classes. Everyone gets it miserably wrong, somehow.

I'm also on probably hour 50 of watching Peter Boghossian interviews with often conservative or right-leaning people. His less radicalized guests often speak to observing people on the Left as believing they are acting genuinely compassionately when they advocate for inclusion, diversity, equity, "innocent civilians," etc. They shut down debate, wish to control and compel speech, form cancelling lynch mobs, and care absolutely nothing about data, history, or what it takes to form and defend a rational idea…but their heart is in the right place, history is on their side, and anyone who doesn't conform is invariably evidence of the abusive and unfair expression of corrupt institutional power.

Themes keep emerging. I can't understand why enough people can't recognize the themes and decide to change how they behave in any way.

I do think people's goodwill and compassion or empathy systems get hijacked. You shouldn't be donating bandaids to the cancer that is your economic incentive system. Your desire to "help" is pathetically useless in the face of greed.

Housing prices only go up and up. Rent is astronomical. You'll spend more than 50% of your income just keeping a roof over your head before pretending you can afford health insurance or healthy food. The documentary had people making $100,000 a year lose their job and be on the verge of collapse overnight.

You have so much energy to repeat things you've been told and platform the ideas you think are best, but absolutely none for ensuring they are correct and robust and meaningfully consequential over time. Waving a fucking pride flag at a concert saves no one, and then in your next breath telling your crowd that Palestinian civilians are just like them does active harm.

It is insane to me how much of life has turned into a survival game. Deliberately first, and then our psychological and social systems said, "Are we being hijacked? Cool! Let's continue to operate exactly as we do with demonstrably worse information!"

I had someone reach out to me about renting-to-own part of the land. Is there a part of me that would just love to collect rent indefinitely? Yes, but not from someone who also needs to live in a shed in cousin-fuck Indiana. Do I want to give up any amount of an asset I've fought tooth and nail to acquire? Not even a little. In some of our conversation, I'm learning she has no idea what it would take to get properly set up. It's certainly not anymore of an idea than I had, so almost immediately I'm talking too much and asking questions she can't answer.

We have millions like her who need to or should have made a shift like I did. They don't know anything. They don't have the time or inclination to learn. They cross their fingers and throw themselves into a different story about what they think their life could be. Other poor-enough people, like me, then feel obligated to fill in gaps as though their own lives aren't constituted of considerably more sand than bedrock. We stopped the whole world for a year and couldn't find the time or inclination to sort out our core issues.

All of this mess and depravity speaks to why I try to operate the way I do. I want to be as close as I can to my cats. Fed every day, have a place to shit, have my human equivalent of getting scratches, and mostly otherwise asleep. Let me see how long I can work for functionally "free." Let me flow with the day and maybe I'll stumble upon a garbage bag feast or kill a lesser mammal for gluttonous fun.

I'm "eager" to see "every" show because I have zero confidence I can keep this up for any longer than I manage to. We're at 2.5 years of spending less than I've spent to keep vehicles running against 20 years of working 25 different terribly-paying jobs, paying rent, or pissing away money on a useless degree, "coverages" that cover nothing, or service fees and emergencies. All of the baggage and habits and excuses I've made to "function" in those systems are still screaming at me every day. I think we're wholly deaf as a society.

I still don't see it getting better. I see people getting more pinched, more exhausted, more "too busy" to learn or do anything besides claw out a desperate vacation here and there or engage in overly-sentimentalizing the drama within their families. We may be barreling right back into the wanna-be fascism of another Trump absurdity extravaganza. We talk ourselves in circles and out of the real accountability and work. From my view, what's the fucking point of fighting for, advocating, and trying to do anything that doesn't tear at the fabric of that miserable self-stalling yet perpetuating reality?

[1130] Open Wide

I've spoken to it before, but one of the phrases I hate the most is, "It is what it is." It gained special hate status when I was working in the prison, as it was the go-to phrase of two of the longest employed women in our roles as addiction counselors. People tasked with helping others figure out their triggers, patterns, and sources of pain that are coped with unhealthily fluidly and consistently threw up their arms and said, "It is what it is" regarding every nagging absurdity associated with the job.

Students of logic immediately recognize the circularity of the statement. It's been argued to me, and I don't think effectively, that it's a phrase about acceptance. I flatly disagree. It's complacency disguised as wisdom. It's laziness and fear punched up to sound like some reasonable explanation about all for which you can't control. It's a smuggling phrase, like so many, meant to silence and move things along or provoke a communal head nod and shoulder shrug. It's pathetic, annoying, and extremely distasteful in its hubris.

We don't know what "it" is. We can't be bothered to ask. We don't imagine counterfactuals or challenges that would better define what it is we're trying to talk about. I've been griping across 3 blogs now about that being the sick broken nature of existence, to play along and dismiss that which doesn't conform or make you feel comfortable. "It" is a rotten core of bad habits, prejudices, oversights, and forms of denial. "It" shifts across whomever it is put in front of. "It" is infinite apologetics. "It" is submission.

And that's what I really want to talk about. When and why do you submit?

When you're sparring, you tap out when you might otherwise have a bone broken or are no longer able to breathe. The mutual respect and trust with your sparring partner ensures you're both able to practice and experience the reality of the martial art you're training. Submitting is an exchange of a shared understanding and sense of value for the partnership.

I think of war, where you might retreat, but never really submit. You might end up in a camp and bide your time indefinitely. The latest character I watched never submit was Furiosa from Mad Max. At the no-mercy of circumstance, you either maintain a fire in your eye and unyielding sense of direction, or not.

"Happy wife, happy life!" Submit your base and immature manly desires. Submit to a board for evaluation and oversight. Submit to the demands of the police. Submit to the dictates of what your culture finds acceptable in ways of speaking. Submit to your god, and every contradictory whim that suits your needed justification.

I like to believe I submit once I develop a reasonable answer to "why." Just because you tell me to do something, or say it's normal, or say it's good for me, or say everyone else is doing it means absolutely nothing to me. I submit to avoid retribution. I submit to acquire capital. It's honestly even hard to call it "submitting" more than "subverting." I undermine the fire out of my practical sensibilities. I haven't given up fighting nor am any less likely to bite if you leave your neck open.

I think it's about as negligent and dangerous as you get to not bother trying to understand what you're submitting to. By default, it's going to be someone or something that does not give a fuck about you. It's something that will probably kill you. It's something that, were your nose pressed right up against it, you'd pull away and explain how gross and uncomfortable it was trying to deal with it on your face. If you imagine the thing being pressed up on your face as a mole you were born with, okay, "it is what it is." If you imagine it's a giant bag of shit you've been pretending not to shit in for years, no, it's actually a bag of shit, and it smells, and we need to do something about it if we don't want to eventually be buried under so much of it we forget what it's like to live otherwise.

We've submitted to our algorithms. We've submitted to the the myopic nihilism of fascism. We've submitted to empty and ironic professions of values. We submit to narratives about power and how it works a thousand times before we even pretend to retain any agency or control when we're thrust out of the abstraction and performance. I see people submit their identities to their job, their sports team, their busy-ness, and their diagnoses. I'm regularly told, from client to colleague to friend, about how much we can't do. 

I'm wired different. Even if I don't know exactly how "it" can be done, I have an imagination for it. So much of my experience is starting from a place of "how" or "what first" that I'm constantly having to maintain a level of awareness and enthusiasm for what feels like a perpetual solo vision. The more I offer concrete steps, the quicker I watch people pull away. I've felt compelled to tone down my goals and expectations, but at the same time, that proved to be an irrational "fix" to a problem I could only pretend to have control over. Parsing how to achieve versions of those goals or pieces of them that doesn't resonate antagonistically is an ongoing process. 

This, by the way, is a good chunk of the meat about what's so tragic in me and Byron falling out. Two people moving forward in spite of whatever the messy details is a proper force to be reckoned with. I signed up for everything he was doing based on 20 years of being on the same page. That thread got lost or supplanted by what I would otherwise describe as "ho-hum it-is-what-it-is" until any real potential and sustained rational beliefs were snuffed out. "Life" is either a game of your choosing, or a meta-narrative undermining the silly dance and words you're using to pretend you have a grasp on it. 

This is why you always return to the fundamentals. Who are you alone? What happens if everything you rely on dies or lies or just gets so lost it can either haunt you or show you something important? I entertain thoughts on loss constantly because it's a submission you can see coming and a reasonable thing to build into your framework for dealing with the world. I'm not served by pretending either of us can't die tomorrow. I'm not served indefinitely mourning a derailed train. There's so many ways in which your well can be poisoned. It's your choice to swallow.

[1129] E.G.O.A.T.

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[1128] Save A Lot

I'm extremely tired. There might be a palpable level of incoherence.

Why should the truth matter?

I've written, no doubt, tens of thousands of words defending what I don't observe to be a prima facie obvious answer. The cultural instinct is to challenge the word "obvious," and immediately seek to make the discussion abstract or obscure. It doesn't matter how many practically applicable circumstances we ground the discussion in, the drive is to fundamentally suppress the truth.

Quick examples. The whole of law requires you to swear to tell the truth upon penalties of perjury. Journalists and whistleblowers are routinely killed for revealing often "boring" or "matter-of-fact" information about the corrupt systems within which they reside. There's no more familiar and tolerated root-for-the-victim scenario than when someone cheats in their relationship; entire networks have been built on the back of watching people weaponize and dance upon hearing the test results. The consequences of not having money for a necessities are immediately felt.

If you can say nothing else about the truth, it's that in its immediate expression, we believe it's going to be painful. Therefore, it has to be buttressed against something in order to maintain or measure our confidence that it exists altogether.

Are you willing to go to jail or be fined for, importantly, getting caught lying? For many people, yes, so good luck keeping that as your sole metric or practice for eliciting the desired truth. Are you willing to die to expose the nature of your government or corporation? For most people? Fuck no, and the ones that do often see their effort paid lip service to with no consequences. I can tell you as a literal counselor that functionally nobody is seriously examining the nature of their romantic attachments, as the second they do it's akin to inviting Jerry Springer into their living room.

These examples, more specifically in their celebrated failings, are what we train our expectations on. The truth comes with externally imposed punishment, is ignored, or is exploited. Where does the truth exist, if it does so at all in these scenarios? Or stated another way, what can be said that's most true, or least wrong, about them? Here we beg the contribution of emotions. Here we're introduced to the concept of "emotional truths" that are used explicitly to justify, obscure, denounce, or exploit the truth.

The truth, without quotes, includes and incorporates the feedback and consequences of emotions, without supercharging them. You can understand intuitively why someone would lie on a witness stand, cover up the money or weapons they steal, and pretend you are or aren't the father. You can matter-of-factly state that for any given conscious individual from now unto the rest of existence, those behaviors are immoral, unjust, and reliant upon dodging the many damning truths associated with that behavior. You can easily understand the benefits; monetarily, socially, and psychologically of suppressing the world that otherwise deliberately attempts to account for the consequences.

But we're only at the first level of abstraction. These are the most obvious and easy to understand scenarios. One might even try to argue for forgiveness and leniency for dipping into unhealthy behavioral places when it comes to matters needing court intervention or implicating the most powerful and resource-ridden people on the planet. It gets more subtle and dramatically worse.

We formalize and institutionalize lying. We build it into our concepts of connection, health, doing business, getting educated, and being entertained. We bake so many lies into the patterns our brains adopt, it is all-but literally impossible to maintain an eye or ear for what's actually true. If you're not formally instructed in logic or scientifically rigorous or habitually breaking apart your language and behavior and attempting to reassemble them in service to reliably repeatable pieces, you're at sea. You are at the mercy of the waves, weather, and floating device you may or may not conceive of as a seaworthy vessel.

Of course, here "emotional truth," with ingrained fluidity, does the heavy lifting to sweep in and deny the desperate truth of your circumstances. You don't feel adrift. In fact, you have an amazing story of not just the family you have, money you've made, planned vacation, hobbies and friends, but you're also deeply passionate and informed about the things someone of your cast and capacity should be.

Be on the lookout, because that's the pattern. Invariably, my clients lead with the, "It's embarrassing and confusing why I'm even here" story. They tell me all the good things they have going for them. They land on repeated choice cliches they've adopted, unconsciously, as justifying tools that obstruct the ability to fully account and otherwise infinitely impede the capacity to change.

Your feelings are the foundational lie. You don't allow yourself to accept them, and the truth of how powerfully they influence your thoughts and behavior. As a result, you build mega-structures of insecure pride.

I get exhausted by religious apologists for this reason. A 60 Minutes interviewer ass-kissing the Pope really honed in the feeling recently. It's emotionally gratifying for your modern cosplaying Catholic to celebrate the extremely moderate dance he's engaged with regard to homosexuality and bare-minimum response to fucking children.

I recognize when I'm tempted to make similar moves in my own life. The lazier I feel, I try to remind myself of how much I've accomplished and how I'm living within many of the desired goals and parameters I set out to achieve. The truth is that no matter what I accomplish, the second I dismiss or downplay my need to develop larger and even-more needing of accounting goals, I'm suffering sea sickness. If I lose sight of how much I'm explicitly not trying to be "happy" or "comfortable," I'm not "Nick P." anymore. I'm an antagonist. I'm an experimenter. I'm a creative. I'm explicitly and habitually attempting to consciously repudiate that which I find is fucking with me.

The truth hurts because it has to. You can't maintain healthy muscles if you're unwilling to feel them sore. You can't train your ability to register and respond to emotions if you don't entertain how they induce your crazy-making instincts. At bottom, you are no better than a wild animal that lashes out in predictably wild ways. We smugly joke about lion's eating faces while dismissing the smell of constantly shitting on our own rugs. It's all reliably animal all the way down.

I consider myself a considerably better-than-average truth teller solely because I do this. I look for understanding and to organize something I only had a tired and discombobulated notion of. I emotionally detach and release myself from the obligation to protect myself from any emotional response the exploration brings up. I can speak in a measured way about ongoing sources of misery, loci of failure, and dare myself to respond proactively to an otherwise endless bemoaning of circumstances. I'm both willing and excited to discuss and describe every single facet of my relationships and behavior in the most damning and forgiving terms.

The truth is the fluid complicated mix of both stories. Incorporating and resolving the learned behavior to emotionally placate instead of doing the work to form accountable narratives is the best place any one of us can arrive. Perfect is off the table. "Your truth" and "my truth" get ridiculed as the unearned faith-claims they are. The real nature of the pain and harm of floating along on a precariously placed raft of presumptions becomes strikingly clear. It will hit you as violently as the cuffs around your wrist, the pregnancy test results, or the fist of your "true love" who may control whether you live or die.

And what is touted as the most noble thing any one of us could do but to die for what we believe in? We pretend a mother fucker that comes back to life is a proper sacrifice! We pretend suicide bombers and your average everyday ideologue doesn't believe what they ritualize and chant! Sometimes I think we apologize for the faithful because we're jealous we can't be so irrationally convicted. You feel obligated to justify, infinitely, everything we kill within ourselves to protect the loudest and comfortably familiar lies.

If you don't, do you still have friends and family? Are the bills getting paid? Are you staying alive to any degree someone would desire to be so?

You are obligated, every minute of every day, to lie. To practice the party lines and be practical. To protect the familiar and those vulnerable to the dangerous and nasty suggestions from people like me to pull back and watch closer, or pull out altogether. You can't leave an environment you can't conceptualize. You can't consciously and deliberately change circumstances you don't recognize as both fluidly probabilistic and perfectly predictable. Until you do, your words and actions aren't really yours. Your feelings won't properly match what you're talking about or professing to create or strive for.

That is, it's not a mystery or secret to me why the story you tell yourself about who you are, what you have, or what you care about leaves you feeling empty, exhausted, or filled with dread. I know you're lying. I know how you're lying. I can take every single word or sentence you've used incorrectly and describe how it's actually the opposite in how it manifests. Do you feel your "emotional truth" bristling to sweep in again? Aren't you eager, so eager, right now to deny my faux super power? That's the real nature of your god, to protect you from what isn't actually even an attack. It just feels like it.

[1127] Moving Right Along

I felt myself getting a little heated in today's CASA group discussions about "trauma." For every 10 times you'll hear that word, "resilience" will come up maybe once. I think most of us are aware of how arm-chairy and buzzworthy trauma and therapy have become. It's one of the latest cultural trends that facilitate a fluidity to presumed-more-informed conversation, without the practice of developing finer lines of understanding and distinction.

On the basis of your invocation of "trauma" you can rush to provide "help" and "services" and begin blaming an incredible amount of "mental health issues" or "unresolved childhoods." It's literally the cliche of a freshman's behavior after enrolling in their first college psychology course on blast. They've already invoked unsubstantiated pseudo-science and pop-culture explicitly not psychology as tools to provide frameworks for understanding your families. When someone infers substance abuse from a story just because the accusation was levied or any kind of drug was referenced at any level, their conclusions or assumptions go unchecked. It's predictably baking a recipe for an unnecessary mess on top of whatever the family is going through.

You can feel the tension every time you speak in "checking" ways. This happens to me routinely. One of the presenters spoke to the biased and incomplete ways that foster parents or aggravated family members might speak to the nature of the case or anyone's character. I pointed out that case managers can leave out details and massage stories to fit their ends as well. That got ignored and we moved right along. It's a real concern, and you need to know how to protect your relationship with someone who might be specifically directed to undermine your effort to advocate with the evidence.

But it doesn't feel "pleasant" or "decent" when you "want to believe the best" about your colleagues. Is it less true? Absolutely not. I was literally forced into that position from predatory supervisors and watched dipshit coworkers skip along those disingenuous lines without hesitation. Anecdotes fawning over better-inclined and capable FCMs do nothing to erase that.

So I started thinking about "discomfort" broadly. Another concept that's been wholesale abused. We needed to be way too on guard for what or whether we said might be a "micro aggression" or would cause someone to feel "unsafe" or "uncomfortable." Again, our pop psychology and propensity to overstate the noisiest out-ragers, made it so critical thinking and doubt became sinful in and of themselves. Facts don't matter in that space. "Being heard" is afforded only if you're claiming victimhood, but then, only victimhood of a certain type. The own-goal that is reactionary politics when you forgo any genuine attempt at taking someone's, almost certainly mostly irrational but nonetheless real, concern seriously is the ongoing consequence we get to suffer.

I think the more you practice observing conversational patterns, word choices, and trends, you can start to see previously "abstract" things considerably more acutely. One thing I notice is a propensity for "moving right along." I don't care what the topic is, there's a "normal" pace and pater that is preferred. Violate that, and it's time to move on. Point out the failings of the people you're supposed to trust most or even ingratiate yourself to? Let's move right along into the next module, as we all know there's nothing much more to say about that.

Another pattern I notice is the "taken aback pause." It's not precisely a reaction to being "offended," but it's a stark enough detail or way of relaying information that who you're speaking with was not prepared to engage that intensely. If they're quick, it'll be a brink-of-condescending acknowledgement before moving-right-along, or if they're not quick, it'll be a placating obfuscating of what you said to "even things out."Again, these are imprecise norms of conversational behavior around the particulars of one culture at one point in time, but they're real and of consequence whether or not you can see them.

When we use the word "bias," we let ourselves off the hook on the myriad ways it manifests. We let "bias" obscure in the opposite way that we let "trauma" obscure. Trauma is abused to over-explain what should be considered a necessary series of responses or consequences. Bias is abused to overlook how deeply it colors your propensity to engage that over-explaining behavior. You are biased, first and foremost, to your subjective experience of reality. In my experience, almost no one is that clued into their own flow of experience. Even the ones that are, or are showing the most growth and evidence, struggle, and will struggle indefinitely. This includes myself.

That's the point, though. You need the struggle to keep your wits about you. You need appropriate stressors against the things that will help you grow and incorporate. By definition, norms put that insistence to the side so we can all find a baseline mutual understanding to move right along down. The more cliched you sound, if you don't have a reflex to pause and pull back, the more you're training yourself to believe and act on "just whatever it is you say." You're a circular and totalitarian monster by default.

Add to that, you may not have any real ability or willingness to recognize how many cliches you truly are under the spell of. This is what the unironic attempts around discussions of "privilege" do a generally miserable job of explaining. We all have privileges up and down hierarchies and competencies and dozens of other metrics we fluidly transition through all day. None are necessarily going to jar you awake or indicate there's anything worth examining on their own. Your cohort speaks your language. Your education taught you the "right" things. Your hobbies and interests conform to a person of your state and stature. "It's just how things are done."

This provokes people's insecurity as a standing state of a lack of readiness. When you poke people, you'll find they don't have "real" reasons for their behavior, beliefs, or words. It's all been handed to them. They're a series of unconscious forces they're more or less molding to because that's how our brains work. Your brain doesn't care what it forms a pattern around, just that it can do so. There's survival reasons for this, as well as a story of basic capacities to function regardless of the nature of the environment that's all-but certain to otherwise kill you if you can't figure it out.

I, routinely, provoke that insecurity. I've learned to show considerably less ambivalence about the person after they've been provoked, but it happens just as an ongoing and predictable course of my practice. This is my practice. I analyze. I pull back. I try to identify and speak to patterns, even if they're abstract, but certainly concrete enough for me to anticipate them and work with or around them. I know what kind of response I need built into what I can reliably anticipate is going to be yours. I know how to piss off and get ignored by "the internet," and I know how to illicit a thousand likes. What's important to me is that I'm speaking as closely to my real perspective or agenda as possible, and not being driven by an elusive brain chemical game subject to the mercy of algorithms or inarticulate desires to unhealthily fit in.

I want to fit in, but with an ever-winnowing type of person. I want to be less-wrong in the information I share, but not at the expense of someone's capacity to hear it or learn from it if I can't be bothered to temper how I say it. I want to grow in my capacity to accept people, but not at the expense of their obligation to better account for and relay their own experience. I've been told my whole life that I'm not allowed to expect the same things from other people as I might of myself. I think this is fundamentally wrong and condescending. I think I should maintain the expectation while doing everything in my power to reduce the barriers to any one person getting to whatever heights you think I've managed or been born with.

Here again, we stay lost. How do you remove barriers you can't see or might even be dispositionally against even acknowledging can exist altogether? How many "boot straps" types can even be bothered to acknowledge the impact of the villages they're living in? How many "deeply empathic" people would entertain pairing their sensibilities to the word "toxic" under any circumstance? It's pretty easy, now, for me to see when my forthright manner acts as too blunt an instrument. Can you see where your baseline disposition and sympathies cloud your judgment and capacity to act more accountably?

I feel like "accountable" itself is poorly understood. Just count! Count the disquieting contradictory thought. Count the intensity, frequency, and severity of the feelings. Count the attempts to mitigate or times you recognized forgoing to do so. Accountability doesn't mean wildly wielding an axe to bring down dramatic consequences upon everything and everyone that wasn't noticed until now. It's just asking yourself, over and over again, what can I control about this situation? What can I act on that speaks to my values and perception?

Let's take the real world example of me and Byron. I can't control his perception of what he thought he was doing in service to the kid. I can't control his awareness of any creeping mental health issues that might have arisen. I can't control whether or not he responds affirmatively to my new boundaries. I could control telling him what those boundaries were altogether, so I did. I can affirm that I'm only going to communicate along the lines that hopefully help the boundary conditions get met before I'm willing to get more colloquial or back to friendly. I can respect that he told me our friendship is "invaluable." I can't truthfully say I think we'd be using that word in a mutually understood way until I see practical, tangible effects upon my life that counteract where I feel I am as a direct result of my expression of friendship getting grossly taken advantage of.

Until then, I'll treat him like I would any client. Show me. I'll patiently-enough nod along, provide whatever perspective or reframe that I can, and remain open to demonstrated behavior changes. I don't have to throw myself back into his fire. If I'm going to claim a desire to protect and maintain genuine friendships or care for those in my life, I'm not going to treat myself with the ambivalence I see others suffer from themselves every day.

I choose that level of discomfort. I only mildly complain today, as it's gotten dramatically better, about doing things alone and never having anyone to hang out with. Byron was my go-to spot for killing time or hanging out. Not once in my free time have I said, "You know, fuck my boundary, let's hang out there!" How could I look myself in the mirror? How could I advocate for you establishing better boundaries with people in your life? How could I ignore what I would characterize as gleeful and willful defiance of doing "better" than playing out battered-wife excuse making? I will not play-act friendship with someone who can't be bothered to work as hard on themselves or in service to me as I've been for them. That's not the kind of friend I am, so it's not the one I'll let back in lightly.

What's normal, though? No matter how bad someone fucks you, forgive and pretend to forget, right? They're "family." Life's too short. It is what it is. They didn't mean to or weren't aware. That's not who they were in the past. Holding grudges is unhealthy. Your insecurities around being isolated or alone betray you. Your obligation to play along and appease your mutual network takes over. Whether any real healing or mutual understanding comes into the equation is perfectly mute because we need to just move right along and "love each other."

I watch that dance justify literally every conceivable level of atrocity. It is the exact same self-servicing motivatedly ignorant pattern. From your god's behavior right on down through your secret satisfaction and smirk at punishing your pet a little too aggressively just that one time. What you don't account for counts on you to carry out its consequences. And you are, every day, in big and small ways, and it's predictable and fixable, but only with stuff like this. You have to own it. You have to "yes, and" like it's an improv class. You have to perpetually entertain the thought that you are a misguided monster, but that fact doesn't have to dictate your behavior going forward nor need to illicit some special amount of stress or talking in circles.

Then you might have a prayer of genuinely helping anything, because you see how you're otherwise fucking it up within yourself. You can resist the insistence to move past meaningful details. You can point to specific repeatable demonstrations of your values. You can see other people responding to your confidence of relatable recognizable capacity, and not the shadow game of peacocking virtue signaling and mantra echoing.

I will spend thousands of dollars, use all my tools, and spend every waking hour I have trying to help. I think most people I've met would say the same thing. Who is actually doing so? And in service to whom? Do you trust what drives them? Do you see equitable put in get out dynamics? Or is it codepedence? Or insecurity? Or some noble story of infinite sacrifice and unconditional love?

I'm willing to set the conditions because I expect better than what's normal of and for myself. Were circumstances reversed, I wouldn't treat you as I've been treated, and most importantly, have the demonstrated behavior from myself to trust. I've spent the time and money. I've opened the conversations. I've challenged the mismanaged powers and privileges. I've risen to the challenge of creating circumstances that inch me closer to what I actually want or think is better versus what's expected of me. It never ends. Every second you pretend otherwise, you disappear, and I have to fit your abstract abdication into my specific constructs.

[1126] System Processing

This may be more outlining different things in little blurbs to talk about later.

I think about what would happen if Biden lost on the basis of Israel/Hamas. Typing that sentence alone will get this post banned from /r/self on reddit. You know, the self page where you can only reflect on approved topics if they don't get too "political." Trump, who enabled Israel in dramatic and unprecedented ways, who also happens to be trying to overthrow democracy, is your alternative? And alternative, not to what is actually happening or a deep understanding of the nature of the conflict, but alternative to your new religious fervor in service to your miserable concept of what a victim is. It's almost too dumb for words, but then, so is all religion.

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I got some stuff done today. Not a ton of stuff, but some gross stuff, some stuff that won't properly complete until probably around midnight tonight, and some stuff that's been flirting with paralyzing me in an ADHD stupor. I'm happy about it. This is the 2nd weekend this year I don't have a pre-scheduled show to head to. I noticed the surge of energy I had upon waking up almost immediately dissipated after I ate. Usually I forget to eat before I get in the middle of some yard work or project, so I deliberately tried to fuel up, and it worked against me.

I'm almost through the 4th episode of 601 shows, or that's the closest approximation, with some much further along, and some I just added to my list. I went from feeling stuck and overwhelmed at the prospect of watching the shows I had backlogged to feeling energized to add more and more now that I'm approaching them like TV of old times. There's 20 of those 601 I've put on their own playlist to watch sooner. There's 60 that are currently airing that I'm staying on top of. I've used ChatGPT and Advanced Renamer to give me code to make the titles easier to sort, name, and pull from shortcuts. I've been recording clips that either make me laugh, I think I can send as inside jokes, or I imagine I might use if I had a commentary/clip channel. I also signed back up for Drumeo for a 2nd time due to El Estepario. I should spend a lot of time practicing tonight and recording lessons so I don't have to keep paying.

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I'm deep enough into the woods of CASA to start having stronger opinions. It's filled with Lisa Simpsons. If you're curious why volunteer organizations that require high-level organization and competence can work, it's because the already overworked, brilliant, but deeply insecure people who run 1,000 miles a minute to avoid working at their core issues self-select. I say this having been born and bred in that same vein. The problem, and I can't really overstate this, my job is literally, one-for-one, what an assessor and permanency worker, if they were competent, paid enough, and properly supported, would do.

I'm not learning anything new. I'm not getting any special powers. In fact, I'm learning just how over-burdened your average DCS worker is from a new angle. This program takes what I'm finding to be an unbearable (not really) amount of time to over-explain what your life should look like with one case. One singular family. In a month of one day, three hour, online learning courses together, some modules to barely fill out, and a couple in-person base touches, and you get sworn in to "advocate for the child."

They go head over heels to pretend your job isn't actually to be an assessor or permanency worker. But you are doing literally the exact same things I was doing, just for free, and for one family instead of 12-15 at once every week, or maybe 20-30 on your permanency caseload. There's 725 kids who don't have CASA representatives. The existence of CASA altogether is a judge's response to inadequacies he saw in the system back in the 70s. I advocated for children's best interest my entire career. That apparently comes so not-naturally to so many people that no one is willing to hire and pay anyone enough to do so in a sustainable way, and the only way we can even pick at the correct solution is wait for the MCATS-taking, master's graduates with 3 jobs, and wildly successful retirees to step up.

I think I can do more of my inside stuff now and fire back up the squawk box.

[1125] 10 Paces

What's the argument you wish to have?

I find myself exasperated. Incidentally, it's not regarding any one thing or because I've come off some nonsense exchange online. I'll start just discussing the variables feeding my thoughtful moment.

I watched a documentary called "Uncharitable" about the hole nonprofit organizations got dug into after bad reporting and mischaracterizations about how funds are used. Macklemore released a song about the Israel/Palestine conflict. I had a session with a client yesterday in which she reported being more or less cured of the reason she was referred to me. I've been helping a friend navigate how and what to communicate with herself and her partner. I've began the CASA training and am about a month away from maybe starting groups funded through the health department.

It's a series of seemingly disparate sources of influence that at least provoked the opening line wondering what the argument you wish to be having really is.

I find a sickening reassurance when someone with maybe an advanced medical degree says something I do, or have said, in one of my analytically complaining blogs. For all of their brains, time invested, and connections or resources I haven't discovered, they're fucked by the exact same forces, at a larger scale, and are as flabbergasted as I am that this is how it works. Their funding runs out. They're criticized for budgets no one is interested in genuinely scrutinizing until years later. Bureaucratic or capitalistic entities with even minor stakes in your given mission find ways to obstruct.

What's been clear for decades is that we have the technology. We have the money. We have the manpower. We look at the totalitarian things China can accomplish in a decade as an antagonistic ongoing proof if we could only be persuaded to forgo a chunk of our individualistic pathology to manifest destiny.

The nonprofit person is arguing for something broadly conceived of as "obviously good." It's self-evident when you watch a child drink literally shitty water, if you can install a well for less than your coffee budget that month, everyone could have fresh water. It's not a thought experiment, for your average genuine do-gooder or resident of The West, whether or not veterans should have health care. Most people grasp immediately the consequences of pollution, threats to food supplies, and mass migration when you draw the seemingly stupid-proof arrows of what's been happening as a result of climate change.

The kind of person described above lives in an entirely different universe from the naked "capitalist." It's several worlds away from the malicious psychopaths and narcissists we know tend to rise to power across influential realms. They don't know, until it smacks them soundly, the nature of "the problem" that interrupts their ability to do obviously good things. Until relatively recent history, most might be forgiven for this as levers of government have previously demonstrated a capacity to actually demonstrate the will of the demos, if only briefly.

When you give a TED talk, what's your goal? If you think it's to "convince" the random asshole like me who's going to watch 200 TV episodes for every TED talk, you're probably at a TEDx event and don't understand the assignment. You're there to talk to all of the richest and most influential people in the room. You want them to engage in trickle-down propaganda. You want to ignite an evangelical belief system around your cause and perspective. You're a culture warrior, and you fight with words and compelling mildly enlightening and chuckle-inducing stats and facts served as sermons.

I get "comfortable" the more I contemplate my "real enemies." I have an almost-zero desire to argue with anyone regarding Israel/Hamas. Why? Don't I have the will, brain power, or basic human empathy to listen to their "points?" No. They don't have points, and it's not an exercise for your brain.

The mismatch begs to run again. There's people who wish to genuinely fix things against people who've never figured out how to fix things. People who fix things are hungry to learn, grow, and change. People who never figure our how to fix things scream, chant, and share empty anecdotes. You can't pretend to have a reasonable perspective on something you're unwilling to break open and contextualize. You can't claim to concern yourself about "human rights" when you pick the popular thing that flares up every few years, but have no regard or concern for the ongoing atrocities anywhere else.

It's co-opting and peacocking versus doing the work. You could be getting aggressively aggrieved by the actual forces that perpetuate the kind of violence you pretend to be incensed by. You know what fuels violence? Magic sky-daddy beliefs. You know what fuels violence? Cultures that bag their women. Your language, in the right setting, causes things to escalate. Your resistance to other forms of power causes friction. You, using your energy to fight and argue with the wrong things makes the entire exercise a parody and performance. It fuels the worst habits of attention-seeking media, and your ego, and the hopelessness that ushers in fascist "fixes."

My enemy is the willfully indignant, impatient, irrational, and imprecise. It's not been my worst bosses in ambivalent or capitalistic machines. It's not the power any one police force exerts sometimes disingenuously or disproportionally. The idiots chanting Jew-hating mantras aren't my enemy, necessarily, nor are the most liberal women and children positioned as bullet barriers Gaza has to offer.

When the in-crowd chanter attacks me for telling them where the saying came from, now they're the enemy. Now, the argument shifts from direct confrontation to an internal one about whether or what's worth it in service to the asymmetric influence on culture. I'll keep writing, sure. It doesn't cost anything but time well spent and it makes me feel better. When a religious fanatic (who certainly doesn't feel fanatical) asserts "There is no debate!" Hello, new enemy, who's actually just a weak approximation of the behaviors I wish to holistically influence through other practices than continuing to talk past or inflame further.

Gang violence gets better when you get kids enrolled in after school programs and provide support to their parents at home. Illiberal children screaming about issues they don't understand need to be surrounded by educated, patient, and persistent people. Institutions used to stand for something they no longer seem to. Debate and conversation are literally the only option if you care about the inevitable violence that will follow otherwise.

My enemies are timeless. The sin-system bores them out fairly well. I don't want my misdirected pride going viral. I don't want to be high on my own supply of mod-approved opinions. I can't figure out how explicitly not conservative I am, and yet, it's the crazy anger-inducing people "on the other side" that are bothering to entertain new information. They proceed to shit all over it in the forms of Kellyanne Conways, Ben Shapiros, and Candice Owens', but the remotely reasonable thing will slip out of their mouth that were you more patient with those types than me, might genuinely help you construct your argument or behavior. I wish I lived in a world where those idiots could speak and I trusted 95% of all who heard them would know explicitly how batshit they were. My argument includes striving for that kind of world.

You're under a spell. You have to be to function. It's not necessarily a malicious spell. I still think very highly of myself no matter how many days I spend mostly watching TV. I'm not installing the next shit-free well somewhere in the world. I'm not flooded with needy families I'm doling out sagely advice to. I'm not doing something akin to "training in the off season" so that when I get lucky "one day" i'll neatly fit into the mold of some dreamlike opportunity I always believed was coming if Just…prayed? enough. That's not the kind of spell I'm under anymore. I can fix very little, ever, especially if it's beyond my current level of awareness or concern. I can scratch the itch on my arm. I can talk to a friend in need. I can budget, if never really afford, potential steps for a later date. I can enjoy the last of my port wine.

What is my argument? Every day you're alive is a gift. Of all the things available calling for your attention, are you aware of what you're using for inspiration and why? I think you should figure out what you actually want to fight and why. I think we're all cliches who rhyme with patterns that either build or destroy. You can build your self conception and capacity to meaningfully speak or work across topics. You can crash like a drunken elephant into town after town you barely registered where even there and certainly didn't care who they consisted of. My enemy is "religious fervor" and "deeply held personal beliefs" that make it impossible, at specific points of contention when you try, to fix anything.

A volunteer is getting paid. Maybe they only know how to spend the currency, but it's not because they're especially moral or better or less blind to their motivations. Maybe it feels good. Maybe it looks good. Maybe it gives you a chance to formulate your asymmetric attack on a problem you couldn't begin to fix other ways. You're volunteering yourself to all sorts of shit at all times. In my experience, it's in service to getting taken advantage of. It's in service to someone else's pathological allegiance to their insecurity and immaturity. It's to the "hive mind" of the attention for its own sake and internet clout. The ones who can use that energy and misdirection will keep you spinning forever.

[1124] Anomaly

I'm "weird." I know I'm weird. It's been apparent my entire life. I do and say the things you won't. The fact that I'm writing is weird. The fact that I've been writing for nearly 20 years is weird. I live in a weird house. I approach normal things like TV in a weird way. I'm in a weird field and trying weird ways to attempt to do business. There's something(s) about what I was born with that differentiate me. It's more than something like brown eyes or curly hair, but it's also no more than "boring" attributes like that put to work over time.

I'm still in the woods of Peter Boghossian and his interviews with people who have been bitten by reactionary forces. He can get exhausting in how much he lets on, but I think his core perspective and points are sound. He wants evidence and reason. He wants conversation. He wants to figure out how we protect institutions from the human propensity to devolve into tribal incoherence. He's weird.

I'm increasingly aware of how weird it is to want to "do better." A growth, evidence, and accountable mindset are the exception, not the rule. I happened to have watched the first episode of The Imagineering Story. Walt Disney was a weird generator from which the whole of what we know as amusement parks has followed. It took dozens of imagineers and thousands of people to put it all together, but he pushed everyone over the cliffs. It makes me think about the first time I heard that it's something like 5% of overly-motivated and radicalized revolutionaries that overthrow something or kick off new eras. The vast majority of the population is living in the wake of a relatively small handful.

To be sure, I have serious doubts about the "great man of history" narratives. I do not think they take away from my own sense of weirdness nor the impact of small deliberate pushes where something hasn't been pushed before. I don't think the future is inevitable, and the choices and focus some maintain in their realms have an enormous spill-over effect. We see this in medicine, the leadership of certain countries and companies, and in the wake of the death of the stabilizing force in our own families.

What constitutes the difference? Why am I weird? Why, and this is from Boghossian, do pretty much all people fall for the latest trends, political waves, language hijacking, and others just seem constantly skeptical and impervious? Why am I willing to see the reason in J.K. Rowling, yet the people who know her will spend years voicing pain and concern? Why do I care about gun violence statistics, but most will belabor the worst anecdotes devoid of 95% of the context? Why can I understand why Kyle Rittenhouse was deemed not guilty, even if I think he has the most cunty punchable Ben Shapiro-esc face that I've seen in a while, and question the motives of anyone carrying around guns?

I want, genuinely, to not believe incorrect or dumb things. That's the weird difference. I want that more than fitting in. We're a tribal species who does not inherently see the dangers of the tribal wisdom that maintains a certain internal coherence. Whether or not that internal coherence comports with reality, evidence, or consistent accountability does not even enter the conversation sometimes until it's litigated or there's concentrated sustained outrage.

For the longest time, I did not understand why trans issues were even part of the political conversation. As I've listened to more and more of these interviews, it's becoming clearer the lanes of disingenuous outrage and language being used to hijack our understanding. I was perfectly unaware of how deep the corruption went or how it manifested. As a liberal, leftist, generally "live and let live" person who vehemently hates religion, barely tolerates guns, and wishes we had drive-through abortions, I'm going to instinctively say "Yeah, trans, whatever, let them do what they want."

Oops. Except, the science wasn't there. The journals purporting to have the science were publishing literal garbage invented by Boghossian himself to prove a point. The "it's not dangerous to block puberty" and "children know what they are" narratives are just lies. The stats on people who de-transition, who turn out just to be gay or have autism, or who have some often well-documented mental health struggles overwhelm the actual data and story of what it means to be pursuing "trans rights."

You say something like that, you get labeled. Not by the data or the scientists or the people with direct experience who might testify. You're a "terf" or "transphobe" or "hateful" or whatever damming epithet is trending that month. You're silenced, and depending on what place you occupy in society, punished. We've been doing this dance long enough that those punishments are getting reversed after lawsuits, and the adults in the room have woken up to the liability of riding trends instead of science.

The battle wasn't about whether or not we should accept trans people. The battle is about language and facts of biology. I don't think anyone sincerely gives a shit how you wish to dress, modify your body, or present in the world. I think everyone who is reasonable cares about male bodies beating the fuck out of a woman's in a physical competition. I think we need to protect the facts of sexual dimorphism, know the numbers behind exceptionally rare intersex conditions and what that constitutes, and be of the general constitution of taking claims seriously, investigating them with evidence, and opening debate in service to policy.

Is it actually a good thing to build into a curriculum for kindergarteners to entertain the idea that they're trans? It seems not. It doesn't "feel" wrong or right to me, the evidence suggests children are dumb and confused. That's what it is to be a child before we even introduce longitudinal studies, which exist, and we could talk about, if we actually gave a fuck about raising healthy children. Is it actually a good thing to erase the differences between the sexes? The evidence suggests there's a catastrophic impact socially, psychologically, and disproportionately bad compared to any given individual who wishes to insist they are different than how they were born.

Doubt shouldn't be a death sentence. Questions are not harm. Doubt and questions are not hatred, erasure, denial, or evidence of some immutable destructive power complex.

I was absolutely fascinated the day I got railroaded by 15 people on facebook under a former friend's post. She talked about binding her chest and I think was entertaining non-binary? I was already sympathetic and on the crowd's side, but all that was on offer was incoherent hatred. The attempt at a conversation wasn't about her as it was some spin-off related to hormone blockers or something. I was a transphobe, ignorant, impatient, unwilling; anything but a sentiment that was trying, engaging, or sharing the evidence of what was forming my view. I literally hooked up with the friend in question, but somehow I'm "afraid," but my dick wasn't? I "hate" her for being uncomfortable with her femininity or sexuality? I'm antagonistic or evil by referring to her as "her" when I have no clue what she may or may not wish to be called today having not interacted for pushing a decade?

I fought pretty much everyone I could find about religion versus science for 4 years of my life. I read every book. I watched hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of debates, lectures, and panels. I was as detailed and evidence-based as you could get about the 30-odd things tangential to "the debate" the New Atheists kicked off. That shit was my world. I persuaded no one. Evidence mattered to me, not to the faithful. "Evidence" was merely a fungible concept to them, not the preponderance of probable reality. They were not foundationally situated to hear me, nor was I aware of the nature of the game I was really trying to play.

The same rules apply in counseling. I persuade no one. I'm speaking a different language. I'm trying to get them to turn the insights of evidence into their own working practice. You don't know the same things I do because you're not practicing the same things I am. I say sometimes there's a difference between knowing something "intellectually" and knowing it "in your bones." It's the difference between physically working to create something, and telling yourself "Oh yeah, I could do that." You almost certainly can't, not as you are now, but the hours, weeks, or years it takes to get there, what you could do starts to manifest in reality. What "I can really play" manifests frustratingly as a direct proportion to how often I'm practicing my guitar.

You can get to a place where you're not as emotionally reactive and self-justifying. You can read that and profess to be a certain way, but I guarantee there's a large majority of people who read the names Kyle Rittenhouse or J.K. Rowling and have been running their prepared-for-them speech the entire time they've not-read everything else here. The reaction is dictating, not reason, not curiosity. You know how I know? Because I still feel a certain kind of way talking about Rittenhouse. I've never held animosity towards Rowling, as I found it self-evident that women need their own space free from dicks.

I've got some broad rules. The name-callers are wrong. I say this as an incredibly inventive shit-talker. If your "side" is stuck on labeling someone, and cannot be moved to offer data, reason, patience, or listen to a divergent point of view, you're just wrong. I'm someone who calls his state senator a Nazi every few days. My state senator wrote a letter saying he wouldn't certify the election. If tomorrow he sponsors a bill that raises the minimum wage to $30 an hour, I'll tell you my nazi senator has a great grasp of faux predatory inflation and the needs of his broke-ass constituents. I'd call him a Nazi to his face, and give him credit where it's due.

The silencers are wrong. There is no "platform." You have a voice. "Crazy" people have a voice. You're crazy about something. If you're uninterested in learning how to identify and incorporate what makes you or them crazy, you're wrong. If you can't talk and articulate, or more likely just refuse to be bothered, you are wrong. You hurt the project of long-term societal sustainability and undermine whatever underlying liberal ideals that keep you comfortable.

Boghossian does a series where he breaks down NPR segments. It's been widely acclaimed by people, also weird, but like me, who genuinely want to learn and do better. If you don't have it in you to be perpetually swayed by what's popular or normal, when you hear endless reams of propaganda or unscientific superficial takes, it frustrates and bores you. I think we're so unsophisticated and dishonest, we think the Candace Owens' and Ann Coulters' of the world are fundamentally different in their instantiated absurd propensities to dodge and obscure a subject while professing their independent or critical thinking capacity. Crazy fucks make shit up and don't hear words for what they actually mean. Why would you ever want to emulate them?

Your god forbid you ever read a blog of mine echoing fear for fear's sake. Pretending there aren't people doing the work compiling the data on whatever the subject might be. I entertain the idea indefinitely that I'm wrong. I want to be less wrong. Why don't you? I want to be articulate. I want to have a real shot at accomplishing the things I profess to care about. I want us all to feel more understood, capable, and alive in what connects us. That cannot happen if you "disagree with biology" or "those aren't MY numbers," or you "don't feel that comports with your experience." Ok. Well. Your experience, like my experience, is infinitely small, corrupt, and comprised of seemingly contradictory forces. I'm willing to ask if my feelings make sense. Why aren't you?

I used to believe in the Southern Poverty Law Center statistics. I would previously have said of course you can trust The American Academy of Pediatrics. I would say listen to NPR or VICE. It's not "merely inconvenient" about who does crimes, in what neighborhoods, and why people die. You're allowed to worry about wildly divergent cultures poorly integrating into yours. You're allowed to believe you're the superhero of your own life with your weapons and grudge against authority and state influence. You're obligated to suspend every reactionary posture in service to another question. You're obligated to maintain a certain level of integrity in the face of any claim. Go on, simply disagree with that and scream at me. Let's keep getting exactly what we deserve.