[1149] Everything's My Fault

I want to linger on a few cultural buzzwords and see if I can dig out a more coherent relationship to them.

The first one is “identity.”

It seems to me that major shifts in culture swirled around this word. More specifically, the more you could parse your identity into different categories of race, sex, or trauma, you gained a certain license. You could not only empower and weaponize your identity, but denigrate others without really looking like you were doing so in a superficial and prejudiced way. I genuinely think a large portion of the rise of fascism was in direct proportion to the idea of “straight white male” becoming a caricature divorced from a discussion about class struggle.

When I think about my identity, it’s this constantly undulating blob of influences. To lean into any one aspect is often to betray what’s now the majority of my otherwise being. The most pain and stress I’ve dealt with is when someone utilizes a bad thing about me, or even a good thing reimagined in a bad way, to pigeon-hole my entire being and draw ridiculous conclusions. Indeed, the worst I can make myself feel is when I belabor a mistake or act as though my first and worst impulse maps onto some larger story of fate or karmic justice.

“Identity” is the first word to explore because I’m watching “The Dark Side of Comedy,” and the idea that so many “troubled” comedians struggled to “live their truth” is echoed constantly. Often as a result of “trauma,” they would abuse substances, disappear into characters, withdraw and self-destruct, or otherwise suffer their insecurities no matter their level of success. These problems often exacerbated by our culture’s ignorance or ambivalence at the time.

This brings us to the word “trauma.” You’ll still read or hear about trauma dozens of times before you are invited to recall “resilience” is also a word. Trauma became the seed from which an identity could grow. “As a such and such…” and the explicitly poor relationship to the systems and powers that be, listen to me become an authority overnight. In the spirit of being “modern” and “progressive” the ground was ceded to what was presumed to be “evolved” and “woke” ideas before woke became a caricature.

When your identity gets rooted in trauma, it begs a question of how far you’re going to dig for the roots that inform your description of that trauma. Are you just at the mercy of terrible systems today? Or are you historically oppressed? Are you sure it’s just racism or is your oppressor also sexist, ableist, and any amount of “ists” and “isms” you can sneak in to really sell it? Almost by definition, trauma suggests victimization, regardless of the 2-second-later thought experiments where you could tally an infinite list of things that may destabilize you that are perfectly impersonal.

I think it’s easy to get lost. That’s the first thing. It’s easy to lose track of anything. We have, and this was true even before the internet, a nonstop vying for our attention. We have overgrown children in our families who never figured out how to get their needs met. We have all the obligations that come with owning stuff or wishing to be a part of things larger than ourselves. We have the diffuse ever-confusing personal quirks that are hard or impossible to articulate nagging on even our best days. And all we can do about it, most often, is ride it out.

Here we arrive at the last word to linger on, “agency.” Agency carries with it the implication of responsibility. If you exert agency, you made a choice, you’re more culpable, and the story can be better understood about the consequences. Kill someone while you’re texting and driving? Negligent manslaughter. Create a serial-killer-esc map with yarn and cash-bought supplies over months? Murderous psychopath who gets documentaries and series investigating your “reasons.”

Slowly I think we’re coming about and realizing again as a culture that we’re all suffering. It’s built into our religious doctrines, but modernity offers a major disconnect. It doesn’t really look or feel like the suffering of the past for most people. We’ve had quick and dirty fixes provided by technology that have worn down our humbling influences from disease, hunger, or the weather.

You have to go out of your way in the vast majority of spaces to not hit “basic survival” levels, pervasive injustices around inequality and greed aside. I say this as someone who routinely threw out hundreds of pounds of unwanted or unneeded food at a food pantry every week. We have enough houses for everyone, but people who own them, regulate the economies around them, or mythologize and pathologize the stories of those who need them ensure they stay empty.

There’s a major disconnect in what we conceive of as “basic survival” though. Just like our identities, our truest, basest selves, they’re amorphous undulating blobs under the influence of too much to process. Maybe you’re uniquely suited to thrive in a Naked and Afraid scenario. Most people today would reflexively talk about the modern amenities like phones, cars, and healthcare as “basic.” You can’t get a job, drive to said job, or get your often-needed medication, so obviously those things are foundational, right? It’s not complicated.

How do we get our needs met? We belabor the story of our traumatized, victimized, impossible-to-exert agency. And because that story is constantly shifting, muddy, or plausible from an infinite sea of gray areas, it lingers in our cultural conscious more that we’re mostly stuck on this ride, and the most we can do is lash out, self-destruct, or look for simple catastrophic narratives and fixes.

Much is made of “the addiction crisis.” Being a social worker from DCS to addiction counseling for hundreds of people, I’m of the opinion that there’s so much spillover of our current cultural victimization narrative, it’s highlighting very normal and human tendencies to adopt those methodologies for meeting meaning-sized and agency-implicating needs. If you’re a little less mentally quick, a little extra broke, a little more surrounded by emotionally abusive or exploitative people, your normalized suffered environment makes the concept of exerting any control that much harder if near impossible.

That is, we need to feel like we’re in charge. We need to believe we have control. No one is typing these words for me, and if I’m born with the “problem” of a contemplative brain that won’t shut off as it nags me about every wasted moment or mistake of my life, I can choose to organize it like this and feel better. Feel “good?” Feel my “best?” Absolutely not, but I can orient myself away from the compounding consequences of thinking I’m stuck and at the mercy of unforgiving and uncontrollable forces indefinitely.

[1148] Bad Kitty

I feel like a fool. I crashed my car into my dad’s car as I was following him to go bowling. There’s enough context for it to be swirling around my head in need of a digression, because I’m finding myself stuck ruminating.

First, the day before, I mentioned to a friend that I’ve only hit 2 things in 20 years that were ruled my fault, and they were barely fender-benders in stop-and-go traffic. I’ve hit deer a few times, but that’s sometimes impossible to avoid. When I was 15 I fell asleep driving and swerved into the median on the highway, lucky to wake up/get woken up quick enough to brake without incident. I got into an accident in the country on a curve where it was a touch rainy and people tend to drive down the middle of the road. It’s not a perfect driving record, but I feel typical or passable for 20 years.

I mentioned this to her because we had encountered 5 different questionable issues within a few minutes in trying to escape a cramped parking spot, alley, and eventually make our way onto the highway in Chicago. Something was in the air, people were driving poorly on top of it, but we made it back without issue. 

I had also been talking about how much I appreciated my car. It’s been fuel efficient. It’s gotten me to almost 300 locations all over the midwest safely in the last 3 years. It’s uncomfortable and guzzles oil, but it’s worked, was $1,000, and did what I needed it to do. I knocked on floor trim, again, the day before, that nothing would happen to my car in spite of some disparaging remarks I made about being ill-fitting as a 6’2“ person in its roof-grazing cabin.

Fuck me, right?

It doesn’t present in an ”obvious“ way, but there are days where enough shifts happen in my expectations that I exist in a form of disorientation. My plan for today was to do concrete work. I woke up getting into the mindset of dealing with the heat, wrapping up with enough time to get food, go bowl, and then get back home. As I set off to do that, it gets cancelled, we decided to jump straight into food, beers, and bowling. 2 beers, not 3 or 20, not without food, and not without being 225 pounds.

The spot my dad and I ate was in the same parking lot of a new bowling alley he wished to check out. One so hoity-toity, they think reasonable people pay $50 an hour for a lane to bowl. I literally said, ”Fuck that,“ and we walked back to our cars, the plan for me to follow my dad to a familiar alley 15 minutes away. Another, small, but large enough factor that contributes to my sense of being disoriented, is switching from the kind of driving I do around where I live in the country, and on highways, to the stop-and-go (my old nemesis) of lights and neighborhoods and suburbia. It’s what I trained on, zooming around in my Mini Cooper as a teenager, but I pretty rarely come back to the area, where my fairly loose but still country-functional breaks, don’t register so blatantly insufficient.

Ok, I’m not working today. We’re loosey-goosey, on our way to bowl, full, edge-removed, and the future is bright. What’s that? A home being rennovated? I should turn my full attention to that and linger staring at the scaffolding setup while I belt out Senses Fail. Genius. I turn back, slam my inadequate breaks, and hit my dad’s car. He lightly bumps the car ahead of him who is happy to leave us after ensuring we’re okay upon getting pulled over. Thankfully, I didn’t fuck up his car, and my dad is chill, so there wasn’t some extra international incident on top of things. In spite of what looks like a large crunch, shattered light, and all of the anti-freeze gone, we hobble the thing back to my dad’s house after a few over-heated pass-out stops along the way.

The even broader context is that I feel like I’ve been particularly lost and flailing for direction or purpose for the last several months. I’m only up here to do more indulgent concert-going and organizing how I might put myself in work service to my friend and family. I’m in the wake of job prospects that fell through for ranging from laughable to straight insulting reasons. I’m the closest I’ve ever come to not being able to comfortably pay a credit card bill on time. I’m over-thinking every nice gesture sent my way because I don’t want to smell of desperate leech or entitled cunt piggy-backing off of people who are more responsible or put together than I can seem to figure out.

This feeling came to a head as we were being driven to the Incubus concert and I learned of a service where you can become a pet-sitter/home watcher. My friend chimed in that it could be a way I meet my baseline financial goals with the added bonus of getting to play with pets. My heart kind of sank. She was absolutely correct and meant nothing by what she said. It would be a cool little gig and I do love animals. Also, I’m a college graduate with years of experience across high-stress and emotionally sensitive disciplines. I’ve physically built parts of my own house. I’ve spent months or years learning every intimate detail of topics that I’ve found interesting, and I’ve invested thousands to try to take my demonstrated capacity to sustainable ownership and growing levels. Jay-Z doesn’t care about where you’ve been, only where you’re going.

It would be incorrect and imprecise to say that I’ve lost ”confidence“ in myself. I am still perfectly capable of doing and exercising the things I’m good at in a moment’s notice, and work to show that with each chance. My incredibly helpful and sympathetic friend was like, ”Hey, build me a shoe rack!“ Could she buy a shoe rack? Absolutely. And that’s just one of the projects and ways in which she’s been tears-inducingly helping me not feel like a hopeless alien. My dad, ever the mench, buys the meals and games when we hang and uses every waking hour to demonstrate his service to his family and obligations.

Statistically, we’re crashing cars in big and small ways all the time. It’s a thing you’re extremely likely to do at least a handful of times throughout your entire life. I have clients who have expasperatingly explained the 7 to 12 cars they’ve totaled during the heights of their years using drugs. After heart disease and strokes, driving is one of the deadliest things we do, and most are just happy no one was hurt, and there’s still room on the credit card.

But here I linger. I’m not on some wild coaster of emotion. I’m not ironically trying to kick myself when I’m down. I’m not without a plan or resources. But it feels like one of those times where ”the universe“ has sent a particularly jarring metaphor for my overall sense of being in the world. My other friend has done dozens of hours of free mechanical work on the car for the last few years after I bought it off him. And here I go and run it into my dad? Is that who am I right now? Is that indicative of what I’m ”really“ doing with my life?

As soon as I signed into Instagram, a Definitely Maybe song they’ve been pushing a lot over the last few months starts playing. ”I crashed my car this morning….“ Cool. I continue to scroll and Scott Galloway starts up, ”It’s not about life happening to you, it’s how you respond to it.“ Here here, Scott! And the story I’ve been telling myself over the last 3 years is that, if I can’t seem to establish this ”floor“ of stable income that doesn’t require my entire life of time, I’m going to at least pack into it as much indulgence and culture as I can barely afford, and trade fast-food meals for bags of concrete and wood to slowly build out more on my land.

That’s all well and good! Nearly everyone tells me. They’re envious! Whether they’re choosing to ignore and refusing to like anything I share regarding my endeavors. Again, I’m met with the prospect of what I’m being told, verses how it manifests, or doesn’t, in practical terms. I don’t think the grass is greener at a 9-to-5, or at sub $20 an hour, or in any environment that requires the kinds of sacrifices that strip you of your humanity. I hear it from the horses’ mouthes, across industries, constantly, and haven’t forgotten my time across…20? different jobs since the age of 15.

Well, then I fuck up and engage with personalities or read about someone doing something approximating my interests. So just do that! Make investigative journalism videos like Johnny Harris! Or, why don’t you put together tutorials cutting out all of the ”Heeeey guys“ and annoying backstory from the DIY videos you’ve been watching to do more handyman stuff? I know! Everyone can get sponsored by Better Help eventually! I mock myself, envying exceptions to rules and knowing I don’t have the attention span or interest to emulate, or I would have already.

I understand when my clients want to punish themselves. I’ve been talking about how I’m of two minds. I’m perfectly capable of choosing to be like a cat who just fell off something or spazzed-out and then 2 seconds later carries on like nothing happened. I’m not replaying the crash in my head thinking I’m going to turn back time. I don’t claim there’s some absent-of-my-insisting deeper meaning to extract as through your god again picked the worst way to relate to me. I’m just someone who doesn’t ”let things go,“ and don’t even really know what that means. I have to incorporate, not pretend to forget, or downplay, or ignore. My cats, all cats, are stupid cats.

Anyway, tomorrow, since I’m marooned anyway, I’m going to work on a concrete project for my dad. I’m going to look for a new old car. I’m going to try incredibly hard not to cuss and panic about how and when I might have to drive my truck an hour or 6. I’m going to wait out feeling gun-shy and yips that come along with thinking I’m just going to hit something again, because, of course I will.* And I’ve got to mourn this car that has been such a wonderful and persistent answer to so many problems that come with owning cars, which I fucking broke.

Oh, one more piece of conversational context. My friend and I were talking about how bizarre and unhinged members of her family have become around the subject of death. A grief counselor once explained that it’s normal to pretty aggressively grieve for a month after someone dies, but any further and they probably need therapy for deeper issues. I said that the denial of death is one of the biggest weird psychological holes that American’s can’t seem to get a handle on. We’re incredibly fragile and all suffering the precariousness of life. You either figure that shit out, or you make your insecurity and resentment towards the facts everyone else’s problem. Obviously, I was just really trying to sell my point by crashing, writing, and moving on. You get it.

[1147] Class Hole

Apparently, I’m stuck in a considerably more thoughtful place than I had planned for the day, so let’s digress.

I want to talk about class and character.

I tried to go to a comedy show in Chicago on Saturday. I had to drive my F-150 4 hours there. Parking was $16. I got there hours early because I’d never been to the venue and wanted to scout the area and know where I was going. I find out when I arrive that the show had been cancelled. No notice came out on social media. No email blast was made.

I reached out to the artist, who somewhat surprisingly, responded and said it was the other guy who he was performing with that was supposed to put out the cancellation. He offered to refund the money and apologized. He showed an understanding and courtesy that I feel has become something of a coin-flip in general. It speaks to a class of character.

He’s not responsible for parking in Chicago, and I think it would be very not-classy to bundle that cost into a request about what I’d get back for the ticket. So I reach out to SpotHero. Turns out, by virtue of my spending habits and use of their app, they’re happy to credit my account! They must insist that this is normally outside of their policies, but, me being me, they’ve got me covered.

Can you spot the difference in each piece of how that scenario was addressed?

There’s a version of that story where I’m simply shit out of luck. The “non-refundable ticket” is sunk. The parking I needed for 30 minutes but paid 9 hours for is gone. The gas, old truck wear-and-tear, and time and effort just part of an unfortunate scenario that most adults are going to understand, but also encourage you to move on from pretty quickly. Especially in the era of discussions on “privilege,” I’ll be invited to appreciate more that I even own a vehicle, could afford the ticket, or have any number of qualities that do a terrible of job of acknowledging and entertaining the actual discussion I’m hoping to have.

I belong to a certain class. It’s not rich, but it is first-world and informed by some upper-asshole sensibilities. I have rich family members (who, to be sure, want nothing to do with me). I’ve dated girls with even richer family members. I own stuff, including land. I’ve got a college degree. I have hobbies that involve big-word books and expensive tools or instruments. Most of my “problems” fall between a set of safety barriers that would have to work pretty hard to approach something resembling real poverty or struggle.

If I weren’t regularly spending the money, how classy would SpotHero be? How supportive of my character would they be inclined to build in to their business model? Is the money I spend and frequency with which I use the app a good or the best measure of said character?

By our capitalist logic, yes it is. I clearly do something worthwhile that affords me either the cash or credit to play along the lines I do. And, to be sure, I do and have worked to make money, subjected myself to many forms of job types and punishments, and actively campaign to maintain every inch of gained privileges or access I achieve. Is it “fair” more than “fair enough?” No. It’s just fair enough for a practical means of approaching an otherwise impersonal mode of operating.

It gets sticky and complicated, particularly with modern also-narratives about who is suffering from what and why. It’s gotten so dramatic that, without irony, people were trying to cancel the police and downplay getting car jacked and mugged from positions of leadership in major cities. Rich or poor, when you steal someone’s shit, it’s not classy and demonstrates poor character. Yet, we’ve seemingly allowed rich people to steal with impunity for generations. Our instinctive moral compass that would snap into action within a tribe gets twisted and broken when abstracted across a nation.

What you’re left with is resentment for those who can get away with it, and yet a perverse desire to be more like them. Don’t you want to be rich enough to get away with murder? Millions and millions of people vote for Trump on precisely that desire. They’re the “privileged poor” who have to deal with customer-service headaches, prices they can’t control, health care they can’t afford, hard to afford and maintain vehicles that technically work but are ill-suited, and every nagging detail that contrasts poorly against your imagination born from an episode of The Wonder Years.

There isn’t a lot of room to be “classy.” We’re in a fundamental death match of an eroded social contract, so it remains, tragically, something of a surprise when someone does the right thing. It reminds me of The Walking Dead, in that you never know what you’re going to get with the next stranger you come across. Even if you wish to claim the ones who almost immediately try to steal or kill your favorite main character are doing it wrong, you still begrudgingly understand where they’re coming from.

We can contrast my experience of getting a refund for this show with getting refunds from Ticketmaster. I shouldn’t have to climb the chain, implore the minimum-wager to not get unnecessarily verbally berated, or write heartfelt letters of my circumstances in order to get money back for a rained-out event. If I paid exorbitantly to see 4 bands, and half of them aren’t going on, and I’ve driven 2 hours and stood in line for 2 more, just give me the money back when I never enter the venue and the circumstances have materially changed beyond my control. It shouldn’t be a fight, but it always is. When you monopolize a space, you’re seemingly less-inclined to find civility or class.

Of the many shows I’ve gone to over the last 3 years, I’ve created giant playlists of clips I’ve taken from most of the shows. I haven’t had a single issue doing so, uploading to YouTube, and just playing them when I clean or sharing with friends and family. Yesterday, I get 2 copyright strikes from George Gargan and his Damnably label for Otoboke Beaver videos I took when the opened for the Chili Peppers in Noblseville. YouTube has a pre-scan thing that tells you if your video is copywritten. It says, “Copyright-protected content found. The owner allows the content to be used on YouTube.” It said that for the Otoboke Beaver videos, or I never would have posted them.

YouTube tells you to either reach out to the person who filed the strike, and ask them to withdraw it, or you can do some kind of legal retaliatory option. I did both. The email exchange was devoid of class. Whether it was George himself or a representative using his Hotmail, all I got was a series of bizarre condescending hoity-toity moral posturing and nonsense trying to justify filing the strike. It didn’t matter that I told him I’m perfectly happy to just take down the videos. It didn’t matter that I explained how I found the band, why I appreciate them, the merch I bought, or that they’re celebrated along with hundreds of others I’ve encountered no issues with for 3 years. Nope, he’s going to fold his arms and use vague truisms about what he thinks all bands in general believe about why he’s justified.

Naturally, I’m going to hold that grudge and avoid supporting his label going forward and cross my fingers the one band I care about on it drop him.

This intersects with notions about the appropriateness of recording anything from a show at all, what rights artists do or don’t have with regard to their work, and the monopolized means we’re offered by which to experience it…but I’m not getting into all of that.

The point is, I think a person who appreciates music and artists like I do to such a degree he’s spent thousands in support of them over the last few years, shares moments from one of their performances, and isn’t in any way making money from or misrepresenting them is the opposite of the one you try to moralize and punish for…trusting YouTube’s pre-check? It’s not classy and shows me your character is misaligned and petty.

I think one of our largest moral failings today is regarding each other as simply one of a pack of dogs wreaking havoc across our otherwise pristine and perfect palaces of leisure and indulgence. Are there healthy doses of entitled disingenuous and immature assholes pissing in the overall soup we’re trying to enjoy? Absolutely. Does that give you license to treat everyone like they’re coming for your last meal and head during the apocalypse? Not even a little.

You’re not classy or have a good character just because you have money, the keys, or the presumed duty to carry out some unjust and ill-conceived rule for its own sake. If you remain persistently unable to think critically, give the benefit of the doubt, or see and listen to circumstances that, often enough, don’t require a dozen tit-for-tat emails or tired digressions about “policy” where common sense would do, you damn us all.

I have 25 more shows on the horizon. I can create another channel. I’m healthy, fed, and technically not in debt, but definitely in debt with several means of alleviating it. I just saw Green Day at Wrigley Field. I’m not looking for sympathy. I do think one of their lyrics should rattle around more heads of those who try to shuffle the wrong targets back to their place.

“Do you know your enemy?

[1146] Check Please

I’m mostly sick of writing about accountability. It feels like the thing that just bubbles up incessantly. Whether I’m listening to stories from people I know, a podcast, or just carrying on through a normal day, the consequences of whether or not the practice of accountability takes place play out.

There’s many ways to get accountability wrong indefinitely. I think it’s easiest to see in relationships.

When you’re unduly possessive or controlling, you’re not being accountable to your insecurity. When you’re trying to spend or lie your way out of your bad behavior, again, clear as they can get indications that you are in the wrong. Overt praise and what’s colloquially been hijacked as “love bombing” is a good way to obscure the landscape of your broken mind by what’s flatly emotional manipulation of your target.

You can also get your sense of accountability wrong by adopting a hero story. That is, you can pretend your entire life that you’re waging some kind of personal war against unjust forces in a way that only you can understand. It requires no sacrifice, no team, and no paper trail. It’s the story you tell yourself to quell any rebellious feelings towards your boss and unjust work environment. The kids and the mortgage, after all.

You get accountability wrong with apathy. You’re just not going to play? That’s an unhealthy reframe that pretends you don’t have a choice. You’re just gonna live as though you have a personal island, and use your ability to talk about “reality” to acknowledge and designate all that you observe to be fucked up, but it’s not about you in any meaningful way. The unironic amount of attention paid as you pretend to lounge or hunker down I guess we can just ignore.

There’s a component to accountability that requires a scientific ethic or sensibility. If all we needed to do was amass information by literally counting everything or making infinite lists of facts and their counters, we could exist in an arbitrarily held-harmless space, just awash and overwhelmed by too much to operate with. In science, the more you’re demonstrably wrong, the better your chances for arriving at better truths. The more you can describe how you might be catastrophically wrong, the better your chances of shifting a paradigm of assumptions and actions entirely.

This is illustrated just in how we’ve come to understand toxic chemicals in what we’ve built things with. This is constantly shaping our understanding of what constitutes “healthy.” This is under-girding panic about screens and hours faux-socializing. This speaks to the power behind a metaphysical belief system where all roads can terminate at “divine judgement” regardless of how suspiciously it aligns with any given era or adherent’s opinion already.

But, it’s also not a mystery to us or anyone watching when something meaningful isn’t being accounted for. You live in a formerly safe place where the police are getting hamstrung by a new philosophy about crime? Shit snaps into focus. You used to eat every day and a new Republican bill takes food out of your mouth because you’re a poor kid who doesn’t deserve it? You don’t have to understand convoluted debased moralizing like you will hunger. I think when it comes to a “passable” sense of a life worth living, what needs to be accounted for is built in and built in deep.

It gets more complicated when you dive in to social circles, preferences, monetary policy, or navigating an endless series of dangers. Should the rich entitled 60-something woman I was chatting with yesterday learn to actively listen and refrain from being condescending towards her older husband? I think so, but that’s with a snapshot of their dynamic and a whole personally opinionated framework of observed and engaged conversational dynamics. Can it account for theirs in particular? Or, can it account enough*?

Right at this point, we need to look at motivations and goals. I don’t need her to change anything about her dynamic with him. We paid to use their garage and he likes to supply cheap beer and chat on the porch. If the second we leave they go inside and he beats her with his cane, still, does not change a thing about what we needed and used them for.

But what if my goal is to get a handle on a “healthy” or “healthi-er” relationship dynamic than the one I’m in or about one I hope to get in the future? Well, now my concern about her rudeness informs how I interrogate my preferences or approach if I encounter the same thing. Certainly, people love and care for partners, parents, kids, family and friends who are incredibly rude to them constantly. The accountability is still personal though. I can’t account for their dynamic, just how it makes me think and feel about mine.

So, it’s “enough” to get me thinking. Whether or not I suppress those thoughts, write about those thoughts, or make excuses for those thoughts is the work.

If you don’t know how or what to be accountable to, panic sets in. Luckily, the logic of capitalism, norms or radicals, and conservative practice immediately step in to tell you what you need. You need to free Palestine! You need to find Jesus! You need 2.5 kids and a nice car! You need to work 3 jobs and grind and hustle! You need increasingly specific degrees and specializations and to reinvent yourself every couple years to keep up! You need to be in debt, but told through a story of pretty pictures and memes!

If you return to the question of your goal and examination of what everything on offer makes you think, you can cut through.

For me, my goal is to feel free enough to do what I want, when I want. Kids don’t comport with that. Jesus certainly doesn’t. Debt has a way of making options feel exceedingly restricted and clouding even thoughts about what feels possible. My goal could, and has, led to some choice paralysis and obscene amount of time spent alone, but I’m not confused about why it’s my goal or why it needs to be foundational in pursuing or building towards other goals. I also don’t want unreasonable hard to articulate or impossible to achieve things.

In order for me to be “free enough,” I need a basically functioning country. I need principles that aren’t being whispered into the ears of eager and motivated ideologues mostly steering the ship. I need to encounter people who feel like they have some purchase on their domains and lives. I need to exchange and relate in ways that can inform and empower either side. Where, how, and when I can be more accountable comes into greater focus. Aspirations begin to look like daily achievable activities on the way to getting somewhere meaningful purposefully.

I think it’s normal to have your sense of accountability to be “implicit.” It’s whatever “feels right.” It’s what was handed down or dictated. It’s part hero story, part excuse-ridden child, and part exhausted checked-out ironic solopsist.

It’s a wonder how often we feel lost without intuiting that we never understood or articulated the goal in the first place.

What kind of friend or family member do you wish to be? What kind of citizen? How would you need to act in order to develop a sense of what to reasonably expect in return? What would you need to learn or lean into to fix what you already describe as wrong? Where can you place your discomfort or confusion so that it serves more than suffers?

[1145] Try Hard

I feel “teetery.”

I’ve been approaching a “mild panic” about my financial situation lately. Are there a dozen ways to contextualize it to not sound so bad? Sure. But that’s not the point. The point is about the amorphous blobs of thoughts and contexts that allow for my present moment altogether. The point is a moving target of when and whether the world in which we’re situated “makes sense” is “fair” or whether there are creative ways to exercise “privilege” to “make things better.”

That’s a lot of air quotes, no?

I can’t easily summarize the impact the dialogue around me growing up had on my attitude, goals, and general orientation. It was palpably felt. When you’re a “smart kid,” when “you should be a lawyer” because of your smart-ass mouth, when you get complimented and granted access or privileges, the shit adds up into a complex. You believe, deservedly or otherwise, that you’re destined for a certain kind of life and/or “greatness.” In a school or home environment, that shit can compound in extremely misleading ways.

So you get older, and hopefully go through a series of humbling and sobering experiences. At the same time, if you’re me, you still seem to rise to positions of leadership or greater responsibility or demonstrated capacity even in the contexts that truly give no fucks about you beyond what can be mercilessly squeezed out. Ok, undue or overt praise aside, you’re still able to demonstrate value and illicit positive feedback in many contexts over many years, but it’s not translating into enough money or enough free time to justify what you’re putting in.

A “wrinkle” in your experience is that you tend to be “all or nothing.” If you’re gonna work a “normal job,” you work the fuck out of it, and aren’t thinking too hard about vacations, extra indulgences beyond maybe eating out or home maintenance, and you ride that for as long as your sense of agency, efficiency, and moral compass can stand the abuse.

For the better part of the last year, it’s been back to the kind of life you had in your 20s. You’ve got “too much” free time, very few people, if anyone, to spend it with, and maybe, but mostly not, the resources to capitalize on the time as you watch TV, maybe pull off a woodworking or yard project. I don’t know at what point it started to feel right to talk in an impersonal or birds-eye way, but here we are.

Whatever you want to say about how I budget, there was a genuine plan in place to have been already making a sustainable amount of money with a position offered to me months ago that, today, fell through until “maybe next year.” This compounds my sense of being fucked and harks to my overall disposition that feels generally hopeless and distrusting of the broader environment. In focusing my attention towards the, exactly 2, people in my life who have been explicitly supportive, there’s some hope of putting together some longer-term sustainable and foundational pieces, but I do not wish to become some kind of unruly dependent.

So often the “answer” to my sense of foreboding, danger, or “problem” is “wait.” I hate that, because I don’t know if it’s correct. I just know that moving, or moving disingenuously costs money, credibility, and time that might be vitally needed to sure up bases and potential in areas I care more about.

I’m healthy. I have tools. I have vehicles. My brain still works. I’m closer to 40 than 30, but in a modern world, isn’t that practically like saying I’m a baby? There’s always someone older and condescending, right? What you wouldn’t give to be 40-something again and here I’m whining?

When I consciously decided to center time as the thing I was most concerned with having, it made the choice of whether or not to find a 9-5 thing become a considerably higher opportunity cost proposition. I’d rather be free and “doing nothing” than driving to work, sitting around and waiting at work, in a pointless meeting, or actively causing harm playing by normative rules that actually don’t serve who I’m working with. “Counseling” that teaches you complacency and infinite insurance billing isn’t helping.

I don’t want to feel myself making the calculation of “just how much am I willing to go into debt?” It occurred to me that I’ve been in debt for approximately 8 years, but it’s always felt manageable even as my priorities have shifted. I was willing to be in debt to have my initial shed. Then to make all the fixes and livability investments, then to build the tool base for more work. Then to invest in Allie. Then to invest in Byron. Then to just go to every show. Then to invest in grant-writers and business promotion.

My debt spending isn’t precisely frivolous, and, to this day, I’m not even half as in debt as the amount I was supposed to make had I not been fucked, stolen from, or otherwise had my time wasted. I find that more than a little curious and perhaps the anchor to my sense of injustice. If the people who maliciously and deliberately simply got me what I was owed, I’d be 10K in the black. Provided I outlast them, I’ll be lucky to get what they owe when they die.

The broadest point is that, for someone “like me,” it’s ridiculous that I should ever be in any amount of debt for any reason. I’ve not pissed away funds on addiction, ineptitude, or things like you hear people spending or losing money on and you go “Really, motherfucker?” I live in a shed. I don’t have dependents. I don’t have giant medical bills nor school debt. My story is as much an indication of the generally shit jobs and pay and prospects as it is about any series of things you may want to highlight about my choices.

That is, I could absolutely just sit around and do nothing, see no shows, eat no food that isn’t from a food bank or with a SNAP card. I could play video games, watch shows, play instruments, indefinitely, for free, for as long as my body and mind let me. I could play around with the hundreds of wood pallets on all of the tools. That sounds, comfortable, right? Comfort-ish? Privileged? But is it “meaningful?” Is it the right thing to do? Whatever you want to make of existence, it’s calling to me to set a certain kind of example. It’s telling me to be in the world. It’s shown me dozens of areas where me fucking around in my field would suggest a level of selfish indulgence that just does not register as the correct thing to do.

So where the fuck do I belong? Soon, it’ll be helping my dad with a couple grave-maintenance tasks and my friend with getting her new house in order. I have a client at 6. My cats need me to go buy more food. I’m severely under-utilized.

I’m the kind of person where no matter what I do I will feel like there is “more.” That’s a disposition thing regardless. I can build a shoe rack that gets compliments and took me weeks of learning things and overcoming frustrations, and the first thing I said at the fist compliment was, “You have no idea how many things I fucked up trying to make that.” I did the same thing when my dad told me he liked a little song I put together in playing with and learning some recording software. I didn’t say thanks, I called it dog shit, and I guess by extension my dad’s taste? We like the same music though…and there are definitely moments and vibes from the song I enjoy as well.

TV? I can’t watch the 600 shows I already have, I need to find a new list and at the 28 “missing.” Music? Maybe you have 1 or 2 songs I heard I liked, so let’s get that discography on a playlist. Get good at one instrument? Why not buy 7 and kinda suck at them all. I have 50 video games I’ve never even popped into a system, and 13 systems, 2 of which I play extremely occasionally. Why even mention this stuff? It’s all symptomatic. I have “the world” at my fingertips across time-spending options, but their testimony only goes so far. Do you know anyone who doesn’t work on tour or live above a venue who has averaged seeing 100 live shows each year for the past 3?

I fucking wrote like 10 more paragraphs after this that got deleted. Mother fucker.

At the end of the day, I want to fit somewhere. I don’t want to be desperately searching for ways to look presentable and adult. I don’t want to subject myself to the bureaucratic games and self-immolation to appear normal. If I’m one to hyper-focus and creatively iterate to match my values, I still want that housed in something coherent and consistent. I don’t know what that looks like, but I think I’m obligated to think about and try to create it every day.

[1144] Bad Bad Bad Bad Boy

I want to talk about acting in “bad faith.” I almost didn’t, but then I caught a headline about private equity firms buying up vet offices to drive up prices and make you choose between your pet’s life and otherwise financial situation.

I reduce most things down to the “individual” fundamentally. That doesn’t mean any given person actually chooses to own their behavior or place in the world, but it does mean that I believe in any given moment a choice exists, wrought and complicated as it may be. I think we collectively pay lip service to this idea, but don’t “truly feel it.” That is, we are always, and I mean always looking for some excuse to prompt or justify our behavior.

Impersonally, I suspect this is just a consequence of evolutionary wiring. If the only “goal” is to reproduce and you’re being crafted by natural selection, it’s a dependent state by default. You’re waiting for the queues from the environment to trigger your behavior. You jump at the scary thing, adopt a certain affect to secure a mate, or discover a well of energy to construct or protect a sense of sacred feeling towards something.

We stumble when we talk past the actualized consequences of our behavior. If you are, somehow, convinced you are innocent or are only ever coming from a “good place,” you remain perfectly blind or in denial about the harm you’re otherwise causing. I think this is true down to the most banal of situations. You go out of your way to be a caregiver whose insecure imposition alienates and undermines, all the meals you cook and loads of laundry are a litany of divots on the fields of your relationships.

Whatever the context, as an individual or part of a broader group, we start with the justification. “As a capitalist…” or, “It’s because I care for the children…” or especially, “As a Christian.” The “logic” of whatever more formalized system you wish to adopt exists for the necessary conclusion of how it’s going to exploit or hurt something. Indeed, I don’t think the systems or even formation of those kinds of sentences would exist were it not for the deeply ingrained at-the-mercy-of-circumstance conditioning we’ve been naturally selected for.

I think it’s wise to start from a mindset of “I’m probably hurting something” first. It doesn’t mean you’re dispositionally malicious, it just means you’re ignorant. We’re all, fundamentally, extremely ignorant about almost everything. We hurt things because we don’t know. We hurt ourselves because we can’t unpack how we operate. We hurt the things we care about most because we find it extremely hard to conceive that we could actually be as ignorant or devoid of the necessary tools and perspective as we really are.

How do we get a better handle on our own potential for depravity? You might not think ignorance and depravity need to exist as words so close to each other, but practically speaking, it’s often a series of depraved consequences and compounded decisions that play out. You’re anti-abortion and unconcerned about what happens to kids born into our current system? You’re “staunchly capitalist” in a way that chokes on the word “regulation.” You’re “pro human rights” in a way that has you unironically cheering for Hamas?

Let’s take a simple example of someone who recently reached out to me on OKCupid. The ignorant, malicious, and depraved voice in me was there the entire time. Why? Whether you want to call it immaturity or a simple consequences of how I was raised, I have a voice that’s just mean and cold and at least a little bit tempting to distance me from interacting with someone I’m not attracted to or otherwise might conceive of as “lesser.” This person talked about being raised sheltered, being in bad and abusive relationships, having a child, and sent a picture of herself that made me think of my mom. We’re in very different places.

Here’s the thing, I carried on in polite conversation. I’m perfectly aware that I was tempted to say something like, “You know, I’m just not attracted to you, so let’s end this before I’m accused of leading you on.” It’d be unnecessarily brutish if not true-enough. At the same time, I’ve grown increasingly sensitive to the idea of what you put out into the world and hope to get back. I don’t actually believe in karma, but I do believe we’re all connected. I don’t actually consider that a “belief” system, just a fact of physics and atoms. As such, I know when I act cold or in a depraved manner, I’m functionally peeing in the pool of our collective awareness.

I’m not less capable of being an asshole, nor is the voice inside any less loud. I don’t have to deny my ignorant potential to practice or advocate for my better self.

I think this is why we’re constantly swinging between “reactionary politics.” Anyone who too-deeply adopts a “side” is unwilling, foundationally, to understand what makes them fickle, weak, and wrong. It has nothing to do with what the “other side” is even advocating. It has everything to do with how you’re choosing to navigate your antagonized feelings. Or, as I understand people, how you’re explicitly carrying on as if you have no choice and you’d be justified in lashing out further if it was suggested to you that you did.

If you can’t qualify your own being, you don’t have a prayer of understanding or believing someone else’s. That’s the existential danger I think we’re doing a poor job of navigating. That’s the pivot to endless memes and irony in lieu of using your own words or developing your own concept of how you navigate the world. You’re otherwise skirting by with passive aggressive knowing winks that don’t actually know shit and can’t be bothered to try.

Think of all the things you get away with by adopting an excuse-ridden pretext. When you’re always too busy, you don’t have to maintain any real obligations to friends or family. When you’re job is too demanding, let the responsibilities around the house or to your partner fall to the wayside. When you’re too “anxious,” “depressed,” or “stressed,” why go out and look for fun or believe you can make a friend with a stranger?

I argue the excuses come from both a cynical and lazy place. I have friends who ritually abuse the stress and job obligations they’re under to not even answer texts. I have friends who downplay the traumatizing relationships with family so as to arrest their own obligations or desires to develop healthier relationships outside of their familiar bubbles. I have clients, especially, who will write me a book of excuses to justify physical abuse, property destruction, child endangerment, and chronic fear of what’s going to pop-off sometime in the future after months of, hopefully not just parroting, expressing or demonstrating genuine growth and change behavior and language. You can cripple yourself in a couple weeks if you stop practicing.

You’re a bad actor, and that’s okay. It just needs to be accounted for and  worked against. I have someone who has still functionally stolen $500 from me. She’s stopped responding to me asking for updates or when a next repayment will be made. I guarantee you she’s in some kind of paralyzed guilt spiral who doesn’t want to entertain the true nature of the consequences of her lies and theft. How can someone who works for nonprofits and overcome addiction and who cares about and raises her children be bad? I know how. I need her to know how for me to stop flirting with getting increasingly impatient and antagonizing as it’s been 6 months of getting taken advantage of. I believe she’s as bad as the consequences I’m facing as a result of her behavior. She doesn’t.

It’s not theoretical to me how much pain I can cause. It’s not a secret or source of shame. Independent of the consequence of our negligent ignorance, there are people just as perfectly aware as I am of their malicious intent, and they weaponize their resentments, intelligence, greed, or sad-sack story to exploit. They’re doing so high on their own supply of self-righteous justification, just like you, but to greater financial or power consolidating effect. I’m not asking you to believe that. I’m asking you to look inside at what you get away with when you ignore the part of you that wants to do bad.

If you imagine that at scale, much of the world makes considerably more sense. How to approach or talk about it can start to take focus. The practice of accountable behavior and sense of deep appreciation for when things go well can take root. It won’t happen if you don’t understand that you’re a dumb cunt with terrible ideas and a woefully incomplete picture first, and what we’ve barely managed to figure out needs practice and protecting.