[1157] Open For Business

 I kinda wanna birds-eye my spot in life as I get ready to head to my 85th concert, Mother Mother, of the year. Earlier in the day, I did some back-of-a-napkin math on the amount I’ve traveled for shows or entertainment over the last 3 years. It was approximately 62,000 miles for 312 events, including flights to Phoenix, Seattle, Daytona, Las Vegas, and a drive to Niagara and Toronto. I have 18 shows set for the rest of the year, and if I get a job, it’s likely that will jump a little more.

The last 3 years have been a kind of testimony to one of my ideals. I felt like I was falling behind. I had a plan that I would “get rich,” so to speak, and spend most of my life doing exactly this, but from a more care-free place. There’s a world in which I went to dramatically less shows and have a marginally higher amount in the bank (read: am a little less in debt), but I wouldn’t resonate the same. I like the memories and ability to opine from first-hand experience. I like getting up and around the world.

Just being an American from a more or less middle class place, I know how much has been afforded to me. I know that I’ve practiced learning how to better appreciate my circumstances and options as I’ve gotten older. I know the work it takes to maintain perspective so that you’re not at the mercy of your feelings or compulsive insecurities.

Why bother saying that? What’s bringing up this, maybe true, maybe not, sentiment have to do with seeing shows?

I’ve spent the last few hours listening to some usual suspects from the “public intellectual” space. These people make careers and brands out of sometimes talking in circles, but appearing on each others’ podcasts and talking at length about topics most people don’t have the attention or interest in understanding any deeper than the intellectual who might begin talking outside of their lane. One person remarked that the whole exercise is “fun,” debating the theory of mind, for example. I agree.

I think it’s fun to stay curious and talk about things that often feel out of reach. I think it’s fun to try and resolve ideas that might be very sticky in inconvenient ways. I want a certain level of dissonance and to see how it maps to my behavior and words.

Sometimes I introduce dissonance in a way that feels less than helpful. It’s mostly inaccurate to call the feelings I have today as “panic” or even “anxiety,” necessarily. They’re just the closest or what I started out as before I learned to write. I have this desire to stay in this moment. Most of the time, right now, in spite of the little things wrong with me from a tight muscle or itchy face, is where I want to be. I’m either full or on my way to satiating my hunger fairly easily. I have the whole of the world’s information and entertainment a click away. I have air conditioning.

The dissonance, or drama, or angst, or “problems” that I introduce into my life are meant to shake things up. I worry about “comfort” as an ideal. It’s never been one I’ve adopted deliberately, but you’re probably a lot more comfortable than you’ll ever let on, and if you don’t look at how that influences you, then your perception of how to fix something or shake something up is going to be off.

I’m staring down the prospect of returning to a kind of job I won’t enjoy. Not because of the work itself, but because the types of people and types of companies that get involved with the work are fundamentally betraying the alleged purpose of their existence. You can argue “innocently,” to the extent we all feel stuck or forced to play capitalist games and logic, but it’s no less psychologically troubling for someone like me.

I know I’m as full of contradictions as anyone. I know how to describe when I “betray” my “best self” in any given moment. I also know when I’m not trying to, but am otherwise feeling unable to stop. That’s what working in shitty environments provokes. When I adopt writing to keep myself sane, and then work in an environment that won’t expect the same kind of behavior from its people, what am I doing? Shrugging my shoulders indefinitely and collecting a paycheck by doing the bare minimum and ignoring conflicts?

I can put a single goal like “get out of debt” at the top of my list and automatically filter those kinds of conflicts out. I’ve watched myself cut through mountains of cacophonous noise when I know what it is I want. Pain, sleep, opinions, money, the weather…I can best them all.

The problem is maybe being made a little clearer as I type this. I’m kinda over this “hero story?” Like, I want to vibe. I want to continue mostly on the road of what I’m doing, but have enough reasonable challenges lined up that I don’t feel I need to antagonize myself in some showy or dramatic way.

This last round had me applying to every kind of random job. The moment they call? The reality sinks in. Get your CDL and just drive around from time to time for cash? Pony up $5,000. Go back to school and get your Master’s? Northwestern is happy to have you for $135,000. Wanna “simply” do some manual labor? They’ll have you driving your truck farther than you were errantly driving to remote work as a counselor, and pay you less! Woo! The place I will probably land will be the 4th job I’ve followed a friend to or vice versa, run as precisely miserably as the places we’ve left.

I want to be “more okay” about that. It’s a bad situation fundamentally, but it would pay and pay consistently. That’s the “practical” “mature” way to “eat shit.” It’s not enough of a reason by itself. A big portion of the picture for why I come back around to joining those environments is what I’m doing otherwise. You can watch too much TV. You can spend too much time on your hobbies. I love having my own place and space, and getting out into the world and like, you know, interacting with people and feeling alive.

I don’t necessarily want an “easy” life, but I want it to feel real and possible to both handle practical adult business, and live as though I’m not an ignorant constantly justifying slave to my circumstances. I’ve tried the affirmative “live in service to my values” thing in one form or another, but if people around you don’t share your values, or can only do so in “accessible” doses, you don’t necessarily get as far as you’d like or need.

There’s a framing of my circumstances that lets me feel like I “finally reached a point” and found some relative peace with the idea of repeating a bad pattern. But it’s the same story of victim of circumstances. I capitalize on my free time, for sure. I don’t find a place that’s as elevated and motivated to achieve as consistently. I need structure. I need income and future planning. I’ve only recently trained my brain to believe I won’t be “somehow occupied” months in the future in order to go to all of these shows. I literally couldn’t imagine buying a ticket a year in advance, my underlying unstable psychology couldn’t pretend to guess who or what I’d be that far away.

Well, now I kinda know. Barring a certain tragedy or improbable unknown unknowns, I’ll be more or less about the same income or debt. I suspect my friends will be about as available as they’ve been. I may be a little more developed in my songwriting or woodworking. But much as it’s been for the last 7 or so years, I’ll probably be right here, writing something about how basically good I have it.

I think in the past, I was mostly on that tip and taking for granted I could incorporate the people in my life into the grander plans and schemes. I didn’t think it would take “bravery” or a particular tolerance for risk. I thought we all kind of knew that we had it pretty good and it was more just a series of conversations and pooling of resources that would allow that story to compound. Instead, everyone splits up, stops answering texts, and gets incredibly busy with whatever they’re doing.

One of the themes on today’s lectures was talking about the denial of death. How so much has been invented and exhaustively professed today as old-world concepts of religion have died and new ones rush in. People need that cause to believe in that transcends them. They have to have a story about their place in the world that outlives the heat death of the universe. I’ve never had a gun to my head, exactly, but death has always felt close. Part of my fuel to do what I do is the very real exercise of wrestling with what happens when the semi doesn’t notice me or I cross the wrong crazy person. There’s literally no reason “life,” in its ambivalent abstraction couldn’t take what’s left of mine.

That informs how and why I speak at all. That informs the guilty conscience of complicity. That informs the sense of urgency and hope and math behind why I think I can or can’t do something. I’m healthy. I’m fed. I’m on my way to my church of music and artistic expression. I’m spending time with friends and family tomorrow, and not in a way that’s like tongue-in-cheek or because I “have to.” I dress like I listen to the bands on my chest and play the instruments they play. I’ve never thought “tomorrow” about anything I’ve genuinely wanted, for everything that might get ignored or procrastinated otherwise.

I want peace of mind. I want to know that if I go down swinging, it’s because I wanted to swing and not because I was flailing in desperation. I want the vaguest approximation of a consistent paycheck that’s actually consistent, but doesn’t require me functionally donating my life in service to it. 9-5, 40 hours a week, not including a commute, and time spent thinking about it does not comport. Odd job door-to-door “What’s this guy doing here?” doesn’t either. Constantly gambling or going extra broke trying gate-kept or monopolized sources of income proved infeasible as well.

Like the last job, I’m only going to work it until I can’t anymore. I’m going to document everything, get it in writing, and patiently watch how things burn. I’ve ran this play dozens of times. I’ve lived this pattern for 20 years.

There’s things I dream about that I don’t think I have the will and attention to do. I’m probably not going to be a touring musician. I doubt I become a “master” wood-worker. I don’t know how I would ever afford my license, let alone actually run my own company, particularly with what I’ve learned about who gets the money and why. I think it’s fairly unlikely I find a particularly robust social network where we all just continue to enable our higher and higher goals each year. I doubt I go viral or build a culty brand around my personality.

All I really want is to keep going to shows, maybe with better seats. I want to go, on a whim, to some restaurant I see on a cooking show. I want to feel the inspiration I had last night composing and mixing a song, and know I have the time and freedom to stay up all night watching tutorials and cursing those same tutorials. By the numbers, it’s not an incredibly expensive or unreasonable series of goals. It’s aspiring to “more” that has cost me money. It’s been trusting the wrong people that has help keep me secured in debt. It’s been perhaps not owning how much I need to modify my previously idyllic concept of “owning my own business” or something in that vein.

Is it impossible to find peace of mind in these social work jobs? No. I worked for 2 years at DCS and quit over the dumb cunts in “leadership.” The work is never the problem. The clients don’t keep me up at night. It’s when I try to more sync up the higher-order values with my day to day that I get into psychological trouble. Does that make them less worthy of attention? Should I be resolved to a kind of middle? I’m struggling to feel a full-throated “NO!” Do I want “followers?” Is anyone appreciating the example I’m setting? Again, I spend 95% of my life out to sea and alone.

Certain stints of positive feedback aside and pretending it’s not been empty or superficial, the examples I try to set often seem to mean something mostly just to me. I know that story isn’t complete and I do trust some people some of the time, but if I don’t know where I’m trying to go, why, or what doing one thing or another does to/for me? It’s game over. It has to be for me. I have to make sense for myself first. On the whole, people are silent and afraid and waiting to get drunk before they tell me they read or like something I said. I feel like I’ve drowned myself in those kinds of people, and thus am shopping around the narrative for the proper cloth under which to be water-boarded.

There’s still a lot of life left. There’s still hours in this day. There will be thousands of decisions I make over the next few months figuring out how to either cope or accept. I want the right kind of challenge. I want the option to sleep and wake when I please, even if it’s approximately at the same times. I want to enjoy the craft beer and burger wherever I smell it coming. I don’t want to continue pitting my practical needs against some story of indulgence or privilege. We’re all privileged, and have been. It doesn’t mean hate or punish yourself in stupid ways. It doesn’t mean swallow shit indefinitely and pretend it isn’t shit.

[1156] Tragic Quip

It might just be a quirk about me, but I find it almost impressive how terrible people are at arguing for something.

I can be just as quick to “clap back” at someone’s comment or shitty opinion of me. That’s not “arguing.” I would call that more “shit talking.” Because of the internet, we’ve created this kind of hybrid shit-talking attempt at argumentation that is like the beating heart of most interactions online.

For as much as I distaste emojis, I think they got so popular because we instinctively knew our conversations were devoid of important context our faces, tone, and even ability to look basically coherent betrayed by spelling errors, otherwise provided.

Enough, too much, I get into some kind of back-and-forth with someone who I perceive to be oozing a substance described as “middling.” A reddit moderator. An HR person or supervisor. A first-order call-in representative. The kind of person who occupies exactly one area in life in which they have any remote authority or power, and if it’s under the threat of your observations or inconvenient perspective, they feel it’s time to sit you down and tell it like it is.

I post these digressions on reddit. Sometimes, my word choices trigger the automatic moderators. I message the mods asking for reviews. Almost always they get posted without issue a day or so later, and/or I have to go in and put [reddit trigger word] in place of a political figure name or you know how people will say “unalive themselves” in Youtube videos? Goofy shit like that because every day has to mock the reality of life in some way or we don’t get our ice cream.

Who decides they want to moderate a subreddit, let alone a popular one, I have no idea. That’s a very different person from me. One of the ones I caught recently complained that my posts are too long, they aren’t paid, and (after 4 emails) eventually quoted where I used the reddit trigger word, dismissed the context of it, and then went on to say my posts are inappropriate for a sub called “/r/self.” I’ve made about 100 so far over the years, but today, they’re inappropriate. The moderator also cited my “low engagement,” as though were I to garner enough internet points, I could spend them somewhere, or your average engagement on reddit is anything but obscene and hateful.

/r/self is a place where people mostly just go to ask teenager-level questions, quip about awkward situations, and stress over relationship issues. You know, my posts really spoil the pot of, “when ur naked in bed then he starts ranting & u find out he’s racist” and, “Is it weird for my younger brother (16) to stay in my room for a weekend?”

You would be making a strong and compelling argument for me to not use reddit (or even much of the internet) at all, let alone for the amount of time I do. I wouldn’t even feel compelled to argue back. I would describe my context of being mostly alone and functionally fishing in the ocean for the oft positive comment or interaction and person who feels like they found something useful in what I said. I have garnered 130-something followers on a blogging site before, have just a handful on reddit, and had people leave encouraging comments or send DMs. It also doesn’t really cost me anything to post depending on how you quantify dignity and time otherwise clicking between webpages.

Many people have described the kind of wimpy tyranny of these kinds of interactions. I liken it to the day that I was working at the liquor store, and a clearly decently drunk older lady came in. I could have denied her immediately. Instead, she came up to pay, was missing a penny, and I gave an extremely poor and unreasonable excuse that she needed to go back to her car and get me that missing penny. She gambled, showed up with a level of disingenuous entitlement and made a “Are you serious?” comment, that I would have said, “Of course not,” to anyone who didn’t put me in that position. She ambled out, back in, and got her booze. I can’t stop you from destroying yourself, but I have a say in how we interact together.

We have to interact with the systems on offer if we’re to maintain a certain level of awareness and superficial connection. You can spend hours finding alternatives to the giants of the internet, but it’s the same logic behind why people subscribe to major TV and music providers instead of torrent. You can make a wholly disingenuous argument about “theft” or find it too confusing, but ultimately it’s familiar, readily available, you’re bad with money anyway, and you already know “your show” is “right there.”

A handful of not the worst people on the planet are here. Sometimes we interact and it’s smile-worthy. They’re not going to flock to the alternatives with me. I’ve spent 20 years not-learning Linux.

I think we should all be mindful of that, “Now now, child” syndrome when it comes to discussing our issues with what someone has said or done online. You’re, almost certainly not, an authority. Even if you were, you probably unconsciously relay your perspective in a manner that isn’t just uncompelling, but antagonistic, condescending, and self-refuting. I know this because I write a lot and feel all of those things in my argument to the avatar of this collective voice. But, I can also feel the argument against things I’m saying in real time. It leads to qualifying, googling whether I’ve chosen the right word, struggling to analogize my instincts to real-world examples, or describe explicit easy-to-understand patterns.

My power isn’t in keeping the nonsense fight alive indefinitely. It’s incorporating it into how I engage going forward, or comfortably putting it aside in the future. For every 1 time I might write a digression about a particularly jarring or indicative-of-something-worthwhile interaction, I move on from 100. That wasn’t the case when I first started online, nor how I carried myself in life.

I don’t force you to read anything I ever post. You do sign up to have it pass by your eyes if we’re connected on these mediums. It’s worth figuring out why it bugs you so much.

[1155] Ring

If you believe you are a someone who “overthinks,” maybe you’ll find some solidarity with this digression.

If you dig through my writing history, several times I’ve described being, always, “on.” I don’t really understand the concept of “checking out” or “daydreaming,” per say. I can get distracted. I can get decently immersed in a movie or TV show. But there’s always a “hum.” Almost like a tinnitus of the mind. There’s an extremely vague, yet palpably felt and unyielding persistent “thing” I “could” or “should” be doing.

I understand that today as, more or less, an “irrational thought.” That is, against my will or intention, I’m getting bugged or poked by the mere existence of my sensory inputs and torrential storm of errant thoughts. Yes, it is true, I can do an exhaustively large list of things in any given moment. I am feeling the air, taste in my mouth, itch, or inclination to pee. I have considered the future of the day from what I might do outside all the way through to the decision to start and continue writing. If I had a vote, or the capacity and consequential decision, I’d shut off the automatic nature of existing altogether. I don’t want to itch, or be cold, or think I’m a stupid piece of shit because of a hasty or naive set of decisions.

While I can’t control any of that, I can scratch. I can write. I can put on music. I can frame the entirety of that nagging constant series of impossible to ignore or shut off things into my own set of words and responses. This is the burden of bothering to exist altogether. It’s trying to make sense out of the fundamentally arbitrary and irrational. This is why “god” is both the answer, and not an answer at all. It might be the language you adopt, but it’s also the irrational condition we’re all suffering at the mercy of regardless of our opinions.

If you use “god” as a banal linguistic place-filler for the unknown and mysterious, you’re not the problem. If you use “god” as a weapon, which can also be read as an “excuse,” you are explicitly the problem.

As far as we know, we may never have a satisfying and comprehensive understanding or scientific account for consciousness and existing altogether. This, to me, makes it all the more imperative to make explicit our burdens and responsibilities. Provided we actually care about being alive and living one way over another. I don’t want to be surrounded by people who can’t be bothered to take whatever level of responsibility they can. There’s extremes, always. But that’s part of the responsibility to discuss when you’ve gone too far.

There is infinite work. I return to this idea often. I met dozens of people through counseling who suffered from the idea that they, pretty much, always need to be working. Maybe it’s multiple jobs. Maybe it’s job, then kids, then spouse, then parents, then friends, then, maybe but probably not, they’ll get 5 minutes to themselves. It’s no wonder they then end up in a chronically antagonistic place where addiction can flourish.

When you arrest or donate your sense of self and agency to a pathological framework, the path out literally does not manifest in your awareness.

As a kid, I didn’t know what it meant to respond to my mom’s violence with a calm tone and specific word choices. They aren’t highly intellectual or difficult concepts, they simply didn’t exist for me. Until the day that I could physically restrain her, it didn’t even occur to me I had options until the precise moment I’m holding her wrist.

In moments like those, and this is coming from the social worker perspective, you most often see the corrupting nature of your realized power. It’s domestic violence. It’s the tense and threatening interactions with the accountability systems. It’s an invigorating sense of license to double-down. Just as soon as we get a little jolt or pride in exercising our new power, we crash. Why? Power, in and of itself, is ambivalent. The electricity that Zeus strikes you down with didn’t give him the idea to do so.

Very quickly we get confused and defensive. The nagging from our existential demons gets colored by arbitrary consequences and uses of power. We reflexively seek “why,” because it’s psychologically untenable or impossible to digest the level of absurdity. There is no why until you invent one.

No one likes to believe that in order to “stay sane” or “take responsibility” or “beat addiction,” you’re literally working. How often you work, or how that work takes shape, is both to be determined, and made obscure by everyone’s version of the work they’re professing, but often pretending, to be doing.

Whatever you might say about me, for example, you cannot deny me the 1,155 times, at least, I’ve worked to better understand, or failing that, stabilize “enough” my mind through writing. I’m building a verbal context, history, and example to help prove to me that my perception is a decent amount of the things I’m claiming about it. I release that perception into the wild to be scrutinized and judged. If I can’t notice a contradiction or unhelpful vagary, I invite feedback deliberately, because it’s coming regardless. Maybe I can filter it through more helpful or reliable means.

That’s, hopefully, what you’re after too. I hope you want to better frame yourself. I hope you want to feel empowered to take on more responsibility and problems others struggle with. I hope you wish to be a more open and honest person. I hope you’re willing to take the time to explain what’s worth your time, sacrifice, or attention. You may not and you may never, but that’s the hope considerably more than the expectation.

I might expect it from you if you come to me for counseling. If you came because a gun was to your head, probably not. If you came because everywhere else you tried wasn’t working, I’m listening, because I’m acknowledging the desire to try is there. I can see and understand that the “thing” missing is a lot like mine, and everyone else’s, when the frame is wobbly or corrupted. Instinctively, or as a result of your “I can stop you from hitting me” moment, you know there’s “more” or something “better” available, but might not realize what to practice in order to get there.

One of those things is “radical acceptance.” I don’t like the idea that it’s “radical” to accept the facts of your experience, but that’s what we have, and have to do. The “facts” don’t need to be intellectual or convoluted either. I can accept that most damming description of my life and existence possible; that I’m nothing, don’t matter, etc. I can accept that if only because it’s only as true as what I must unironically deny in…you know, continuing to exist. I may not know what that “something” is, but if I feel like nothing or that I don’t matter, I might as well kill myself. Simply refraining from killing myself means I know, at least, I “matter.”

Have you made it to his paragraph alive? That’s it, we have a floor. You may not have or agree with any of the language that describes that floor, but you’re standing on it with me nonetheless.

I’m a big believer in balance too. I think for as easy as it is to intuit or react with a negative valence to something, it simultaneously begs the question of the positive. This is why I will never mind “bad” or “inappropriate” or “too soon” jokes. They are the best evidence that life is both at once, not one way over the other. They are evidence of the inherent choice that feels impossible, but isn’t. You can spiral out of control in every moment available to you. You can also make a fart joke. Just because we don’t understand our power, doesn’t mean it isn’t there, or that we don’t have a responsibility to and for it.

I’ve resisted my power, and still do. I don’t trust myself not to “get high” on it. I “panicked” pretty hard just yesterday, and it took me less than a day to build the kind of foundation that made the panic feel “stupid” and “misplaced.” It’s one of my patterns. I think, irrationally, that I need to be “backed into a corner” in order to find the “motivation” or “reason” to “behave exhaustively” until a need is met. Then, I get to look at my creation, take undue and sick pride in my capacity, and ride that until I burn out.

Here’s the thing, though. I panicked as someone who has written 1,155 times about the nature of his thoughts and perception of the world. That’s why it resulted in a blog, a few phone calls, and a handful of practical steps in service to quelling an otherwise inevitable spiral out of control. I’m still thinking about every obligation I need to meet, but my heart isn’t racing, my stomach isn’t sinking, my jaw isn’t clenched, and my head isn’t pounding. I’m no less bombarded by my catastrophic thoughts about how I got here, how long or hard it will take to “fix,” or what it still says about me in my less than ideal responses. But this is as good as it gets.

I can accept that too.

I don’t need nor like to compare myself to others in the story of why or whether I can swallow something about life. It certainly helps to know there are an insane number of people suffering from the same issues, but whether or not I realize that in a personal way and build into my bone structure my own path through the condition is always up to me. It’s not enough to “simply know” you’re a cliche. You have to feel it. You have to develop your practice for incorporating and redirecting the consequences.

This is why I get fundamentally and instantly exhausted by people who don’t care to act. You can’t change if you won’t move or try or manifest something. Talking only gets you so far, maybe only to the point of describing an approximate door you can one day walk through. When you sound like a commercial, bad TV show, or series of colloquial truisms, I don’t trust you exist in the way you need to. I accept that you’re here, and good or bad for things, and might entirely reject my presumption that you “need” anything altogether. All that means for me is that we’re probably not going to be friends lol. I might also have to refrain from damaging my character by being condescending or manipulative.

I write this much so I can move in the world. I’m not “persuading” myself, nor you, of anything. I’m not “arguing” for my point of view, I’m spewing it. I’m articulating approximate doors for myself so I can feel as though I’m walking in a direction instead of falling into holes that open up forever beyond my choices. I don’t even have to have a coherent idea of what a “choice” even is to recognize this is one, and so is this, and so was the decision to put every weird word that popped into my head on “paper” instead of back up my ass and empowered to swirl around my concepts of “panic” or “anxiety.”

I get somewhere “stable” and “better” and “consistent’ and ”hopeful“ and turn the infinite intangible mess of existing and itching into the power of mercy for myself. You poor, lowly, suffering idiot thrust into this world through no fault of your own, here’s the ability to collapse the noise and the mess into a few pages. Here’s the cues to breathe, and stretch, and call, and eat. Here’s an invitation to the joke as your heart is being run through. Are you scared, or excited, or both and a dozen things more about what happens next?

[1154] Scream Queen

My disposition is shifting into a familiar gear.

For as much as I espouse the value and virtue of having the freedom with my time to do with as I please, it comes with caveats. First, I don’t know anyone with time like I do, so I’m almost always alone. When I have time, it doesn’t mean I have money, or the required tools, or skills, or focus, or motivation, or weather to do the things I otherwise like to do with said time. Most of my hobbies are not ends unto themselves. I’ll fiddle about on one of the instruments, but I have to be in some pretty low places to find the focus to actually write a song and fight with DAWs I don’t understand.

I get dozens of ADHD targeted ads trying to…apologize? for what maliciously might be described as “laziness” or “wasted potential.” You see, I’m actually just without enough structure. I’ve navigated the structures of school and 15 different work environments. I’ve never had issues showing up, doing what was asked, and moving on. Whether I was working 20 hours a day like when I started my coffee shop, or just needing to meet my 1 client for an hour once a week, if the structure is there, I stick to it.

Well, I’ve had no, or not-enough structure for too long, and it’s throwing me into, not precisely a panic, but it’s raising a lot of alarms. I’ve complained about debt for years now, and until the last few months, I’d never paid a dime of interest. Interest is now 9.7% of the money I have spent all year. I cannot psychologically stomach this. As a result, this morning I debt consolidated. How much debt am I in? Right about equal to the amount of money I would have gotten had my uncles not stolen money from me when my grandma died. I’m twice the amount I was expected to make (when it was half as much) from selling a house I spent 10 months renovating. I’m about as much as I would have hoped to make from any sane and reasonable grant for offering counseling and casework services at 20% of what the State overpays shitty monopolies.

Most people are familiar with the horrible, horrible process of applying to jobs in the modern world. You think you’re done just because you have your resume uploaded to half a dozen “the jobs are here!” websites? HA! Spend literally hours on the worst designed systems known to man filling out the same information on buggy spamming websites for prestigious roles like bagging groceries or delivery driving. You know, jobs that absolutely need 7 pages of redundant information.

I’ve gotten really lucky in my life so far. I was able to do drug studies for a couple years and amass enough money to buy my land. As I was trying to transition out here in a smart or patient way, I got fucked. The consequences of that fucking are still playing out. But, what it’s meant in general is that I have not had to spend the vast majority of my adult life swallowing loads of complacent shit about how I’m infinitely bound to whatever my shitty job might have been at the time. $5,000 a year pays my property taxes, electricity, and internet.

When I work shitty jobs, I do the math. It usually costs me somewhere between 25% and 33% of my take-home pay just to drive to the mother fuckers. So, even when I’m technically making enough to cover “basics” (if you’re raised poor enough and know insurance isn’t always part of that equation) I’m still often losing money just because cars break down, gas fluctuates, and the handful of times I’ve tried to meal prep I ended up throwing out half the food I got sick of

I’ve spent my adult life, save the last 3 years, pretty much living as though “fun” isn’t a thing. I’ve gone in debt to get my house in order. I’ve bought “toys” like a new computer because I absolutely needed it for my job and hadn’t upgraded for 15 years. I drive cars that have been crashed into or guzzle damn near as much oil as they do gas. Half my clothing is free giveaways from places like bars or clothes that have somehow maintained some kind of shape since high school. I know how to apply and get SNAP. I know how to cope with being functionally indoors or at home for weeks and months at a time.

I’m the kind of person who should NEVER be in any kind of debt, difficult situation, or piddling “I’ll take any job!” kind of place. I have my degree. I have special skills when it comes to interpersonal professional engagement. I have a supervisory level addiction counseling credential. In the past, I’ve gotten my real estate broker’s license. I’ve engaged hundreds of people at a time at varying levels of ongoing crisis. I’ve learned how to do fun things like woodwork in my free time. I’m a doer. I create. I struggle with every second in which I can describe myself as a “lazy piece of shit” because I didn’t occupy it with something to stimulate my brain or demonstrate my worth. It truly is a pathological base disposition to belabor my strengths as I lament excruciating details impeding my small conceptions of progress.

The self-hatred spilleth over. Now, I want every shitty job. I want to exhaust myself until I’ve paid off the money. I want to ignore my hobbies, TV, or the idea that I deserve a single second of my time doing something like this, instead of moving some box from one side of the room to the other in a warehouse or bagging your groceries at the white trash Dollar Store up the road.

If I could have “simply” maintained an uncritical and complacent disposition, I could have just kept my job enabling addicts to not really improve. What’s wrong with me? I pretty much had my remote position, wasted gas to the office 2 days a week 1.5 hours away aside. This is the critical piece of what is wrong with me. I fucking believe in myself! I try, desperately, to practice the behaviors and beliefs I arrive at after writing. If I think I’m being an exploited and exploitative cunt who is contributing to the veneer of insincere “help” that plagues disingenuous social work, THAT ACTUALLY BUGS THE FUCK OUT OF ME! I can’t ignore the ick. I can’t play along and adopt the catch-phrases.

I have left so many otherwise straight-forward or “comfortable” positions for this reason. Until recently, I haven’t had a job, paying next to nothing or otherwise, that couldn’t pay off my debt in 3 to 6 months. Why wasn’t the debt paid? I needed to go to extreme levels of distraction and coping because I was spending 12 to 15 hours a day poorly playing along. If I couldn’t pack the handful of hours or weekends with other shit to do and think about? I might lose my shit around clients. My mouth will get me fired and more alienated than it already does.

The wild swings between doing “nothing” with all of my free time, to this craving to occupy every second with something on the clock making me any kind of money I know is wrong or inappropriate. But also, I need to hype myself up. I need to get comfortable with the deadening that happens. I need to mourn the loss of the things I’d rather be doing while I’m standing for 8 to 12 hours a day or being directed by someone who gives me immediate pause and cause for concern.

I can’t ever seem to find some happy middle ground with my collection of skills and experience. It’s either 40+ hours a week, in office or equivalent, taking home 70% of my pay and eating 70% of my day, or it’s peanuts in the form of plasma donation and odd-jobs offered to me out of pity, no less appreciated and very needed, from friends and family. Part-time? No no, that’s a trick to get you in the door so they can impose mandatory overtime. Well, that’s the case no matter what role you get.

I also can’t seem to stomach the idea of constantly starting from the bottom. Every field has its “pre-license or certification” “x-hours you need to blah” “a year from now you might be qualified to tie my shoes!” kind of stupid fucking process. It’s fees. It’s tests. It’s arbitrary because the role they hired you for actually needs something they’re gonna take 9 months to even hint at bothering to show you how to do.

I should deliberately avoid trauma-dumping my experience across roles right now.

I had to back myself into a corner that raised my internal threat level. Included in my debt consolidation plan, I’m also thinking about returning to school for my Master’s in counseling. Why? Because I don’t want to pay some greedy asshole for the privilege of using their license number to run my nonprofit. I don’t want to have to keep reminding the people fawning over how I do counseling that I’m not licensed, technically, just “credentialed” and trusted to conduct crisis intervention. It’s about the money and plausible deniability for liability if someone loses their shit, not that any of the companies I worked for genuinely give a fuck. I’m extremely timely and organized with my paperwork, they like that.

I’ve worked 4 jobs at once before. I very nearly passed out, but I did it. I was also 24 and not 36. I also know that when an idea gets stuck like “I’m fucking sick of this, fix it,” I won’t be able to let it go. Before I started writing this, I applied to 15 more jobs, all over the map, but applied nonetheless. I’m getting up at 8, it’s 2:15 right now, no matter how late I stay up, to hit the job placement spot in town. I’m reaching out to people who might let me host a fundraising event for free in their spot. I’ve got the list of things sitting around my house and property that can make their way to facebook marketplace. I can start breaking down the large pile of scrap I collected over years because I thought that’d be a good and consistent form of money-making for too long.

There’s a world where I go into something of a fugue state and fix my problem in a few weeks or couple months, but I genuinely shudder and worry about what the true cost of that would be.

I want balance. I really do. I want a healthy medium between how much TV I can watch, or the 20 years of video games I need to catch up on, or the 80 hours of music production tutorials I need to filter through, or the dozens of pieces of wood I’ll fuck up and my otherwise capacity to deftly psychoanalyze, encourage, and model behavior. I wouldn’t advocate anyone do what I’m gearing up to do. But, more to the point, I’m not at the mercy of the compulsion to try, I just deeply appreciate the utility and my capacity.

The goal is clear, get out of debt. My arms and legs work. I can operate for months on 4 hours of sleep. No one is going to “save me” from myself like when I reached out to my “friend” that helped drive me to this fucked place altogether. I was thinking so naively that it’s worth turning every stone once a certain psychological threshold has been breached. I gathered his distance-putting pretense and superficiality immediately. You know what happened when I called another friend later that day? He sent $200 in anticipation of a work I’m going to do to install workbenches around his garage. He sent it after I told him 8 times not to. My former friend? He doesn’t even think he’s done anything wrong. This isn’t the mind-reading I caution clients against, this is me reading tone and his phrasing, “I can see why you would have that position.” Yeah, I bet.

This is the most chaos-like I’ve written in a long time. I’ve got like 4 separate things I could bitch indefinitely about. I’m fishing for a sustainable approach to what’s a flatly irresponsible and unrelenting place I’m inviting into my behavior. I’m so beyond whatever levels of anger or frustration I’ve bled onto pages in the past. Or maybe the numbing is doing its job. Or maybe, and this is a symptom of this state of mind, the fact that I’ve eaten 3 pieces of toast and some Cheez-its all day is maybe starting to sink in.

If I get 1 or 3 jobs in the next couple days and my new budgeting spreadsheet put together, it’s entirely possible I’ll write a 3 paragraph matter-of-fact digression about how I’ve solved my problem, and in 3 to 6 months at yada yada pace (with no overtime or a return to dreaded meal prep) this will all register like some frenetic fever dream accident blog reflective of a bygone era. Do I dare hope?

[1153] Mean

I’ve written maybe 7 pages over the last week of noise. I’m not in a wholly chaotic and ambivalent place, but zeroing in on something specific to explore has been elusive. Maybe this will get me there.

A few weeks ago, I came across an explanation for why so much abhorrent behavior is tolerated in different work environments. There are things I, and people in my circles, find it “incomprehensible” to do, and a common refrain I hear is some complaint about why a colleague gets paid more, isn’t fired, or is otherwise ignored when they do something that, my friend or higher-achieving person, would never.

The explanation was that we’re more a collection of average-to-shit than not. When you have someone who can legitimately do something better than you, you’re a threat. Almost always you’re going to have a boss that is exceptionally average, typically lazy, and aspiring to the middle of the road maintain basic survival space. This was true when I worked at a movie theater all the way up to the literal head of the Indiana Department of Child Services.

“Average” is the key word. Most of us, probably too often, can speak to areas in which we excel. We ruminate particularly deeply on our strengths or past achievements when we want to fuel a narrative of what we’re entitled to or our worth. As a society, I would put money on the idea that almost all of us have said something to the effect of, “I hate people.” Whether that’s true or just true-enough, it’s a gut-level reaction to our approximate engagement with “your average person.”

I try to depersonalize how I understand the average person. Every baby that’s born functionally resets the species. Whatever genetic information that carries through, it’s only informed in a passively selected way. All of the religious baggage you might wish to stain that baby’s brain with, all of the “cultural norms,” or pathological circularly reasoned spaces need practice. The infinite sea of things that baby will stay ignorant about as it grows up will be as diverse as any individual, but no less infinite.

What happens if you are “generally” an improvement on what’s average? Say you’re pretty. Say you’re smart. Say you’re exceptionally agreeable. You don’t have to be above average to recognize the potential desirability and exploitability of people like that. You can simply want to jerk off to a pretty face, pawn off the responsibility for cleaning the oceans, and abuse the persistently self-immolating patience of your exhausted-mommy-esc spouse.

When one of those people gains the confidence or self-awareness, now you’re in trouble. The smart person might dictate, in excruciating detail, how you aren’t living up to your responsibilities. The pretty person recognizes the control they have over your emotional well-being which might translate into a certain control over your finances. The agreeable one plots underneath the outward displays of social chaos as no one suspects they have an agenda beyond affirming yours.

When you’re average, you’re safe. You don’t become a target. You aren’t immediately resented. People aren’t deeply suspicious that you’ll just “do anything you please.” I think back to the party house. I engineered the conditions, but at a certain point, I became like this evil mastermind presumed to be…I guess…pulling the strings of hundreds of people coming over almost every weekend? People were practically sling-shooting their sense of agency and self-control at me if anything remotely went wrong towards the end of the party years. “We” were no longer partying together, I fucked up for organizing it in the first place altogether. You certainly can’t be blamed for moving into what I pitched, explicitly, as a party house, right?

As average habits go, finding someone to blame is as biblically cliche as it gets. Even when we may be more accurate than not in assigning the blame, we’re still exercising the wrong muscles. I’m a big Bernie Sanders fan. I think millionaires and billionaires are “victims” of our disingenuous systems. Why? By the numbers, you can call someone rich. By their psychology, or history, or wisdom, or rules we incentivize them to play by though? I blame the species-level messaging. We’re still scapegoating our own poor understanding of macro-economic systems. We’re still refusing to lead with a collective ethic versus entrench behind our narrative presumptions.

That is, if we don’t generally, on average, believe and behave as if power and money are corrupting forces, in our heart of hearts, we’re not going to do the practical work to claw back the money it takes for all of us to live better. It’s analogous to addiction. We’re absolutely sold and stuck on agency-crippling notions. We refuse or are never invited to do the work of explicitly stating those notions. So, in the abstract, in the grey, we flail. Without a goal, we default to the norms. We succumb to induced states of propaganda and irrelevance.

I think average is unduly and overwhelmingly deadly. Average is the output of unsympathetic, unconscious, and ambivalent natural selection. What’s “natural” is going to be insufficient if there’s any real “we” in this collective exercise to survive beyond this given moment. We need to define and enable other areas of exceptional human behavior and achievement. We need to do it in the same way we do with Hollywood. I want the Brad Pitt’s of social work to be making 6 figures, not their greedy share-holding bosses or subsidized firm bilking the government. The money is, and has always been, there. The values aren’t.

I genuinely struggle with the idea of wanting to “excel.” I want to be, not just better than average, but exceptionally good at things I do. It’s a borderline pathological disposition that’s taken me many years to find a remotely mellow way to relate to it. I’m literally thankful for getting older and having some energy zapped and thus forced to slow and calm down if I didn’t want to hurt myself. My experience of life has often left me dumbfounded in how people respond to the desire to live and act in service to “more than average.”

It’s worse than that though, because I’m still scarred by the responses I’ve gotten from people for being basically human or competent too. When I called the police to wellness check a friend who vague-booked a suicidal-sounding message, the look on like 7 people’s faces around me was like, “Why bother?” I still can’t fucking figure that one out and you’d think I wouldn’t need a larger display for why I shouldn’t have continued being friends with them. Each client at DCS I informed of their rights or treated with respect and not as though I was a wanna-be cop who needed to threaten them, more than half of the leadership maintained the not-so-quiet condescending and flabbergasted posture because, in their minds, you get better outcomes when people are scared, angry, and lied to?

Round we circle to looking like a threat. When you hold an above-average decency and engagement standard, the insecure cunts who’ve bullied their way to positions of power or influence know that, were you ever in direct competition to something, people are going to prefer you. People are going to be looking for the solutions-focused patient leader more than the threatening asshole. (Innate fascist tendencies and patterns aside. Or, once they subside.)

If I’m not doing something that I create, or where I can be more or less left alone, or where I can do a dozen other things that serve as coping, I’m stuck in an impossible situation. I can’t help but notice when you’re being inefficient. I can’t help but notice when you’re getting in your own, or especially my, way. I can’t help when people like me more than you. I can’t help that I’ve developed in a way that does not allow me to accept “average” where better can be achieved, often with less effort, once we’ve made a detailed account of the nature of the process or problem.

I’m not on auto-pilot. I’m not using every opportunity to speak with someone to unload prepared remarks or cliches. It is what it is? It’s also not what it’s fucking not. And it’s also not making much fucking sense, stressing everyone out, and does not have to be this way. We need to recognize we’re in a constant, moment to moment battle, for control. Control of what? Hopefully, with any sense, how we define and practice our values. How we dignify our work and time. How we celebrate and long for each day instead of justify and excuse all that we haven’t lived up to.

[1152] And The Horse You Rode In On

 Here’s the thing, because for the first time since Trump ever entered the political area, I’ve professed to facebook that I would literally buy guns and kill Nazis - that explicitly.

Life is not actually a game. I’ve said it is as an analogy plenty of times, but it’s life and death at all times. Whether you get stopped by  your ailing heart or a car coming the wrong direction, you need to be paying attention to the right shit and proactive to survive in any manner beyond “animalistic.”

You are a fucking animal first. That this is so willfully denied is how we will all end up dead by our own hands. Animals are fucking dumb. Animals are fucking violent. Animals are reactive, arbitrarily horny, and at the literal mercy of circumstance. THIS IS YOU. YOU ARE FUCKING DUMB. YOU ARE FUCKING VIOLENT. YOU ARE REACTIVE, ARBITRARILY HORNY, AND AT THE LITERAL MERCY OF CIRCUMSTANCE.

Whether you deny this about yourself or about the “other side” you’re pretending to engage with, this is the operative fucking narrative and detail that will adjudicate existing altogether. Neither of us needs to maintain an “opinion” on that shit. Neither of us needs to fight over “just how much” we’re plagued by these conditions. You are a wretched, scared, naked animal, first.

Whatever incredibly fair and mean-spirited things you can say about the democrats, they are entirely different categories of awful when you play with fascism. This shouldn't be hard to understand, and it’s not, when you stop acting like a dumb fucking monkey. You don’t get The United States of America when you cede to fascist thinking. It literally no longer exists. When you double down on being fucking stupid and PROUD of your stupidity, everything fucking burns. And you know this, and your evil stupid animal self will do it anyway.

It can get worse. You might literally see the world where you have to kill in order to survive. WHY THE EVER LOVING FUCK WOULD YOU PLAY WITH THAT?!  Why would you apologize for it? Why would you downplay? Why would you hold your tongue against your cliche “right-wing uncle?” Our literal capacity for a remotely coherently modern and stable existence is at stake, and has been, since we started ushering in this fatalistic avatar and hyperbolic bullshit back with Reagan and Thatcher.

It’s a single fucking thread through history. Learn from this shit. Today. I’m not excited about the prospect of some morbid culling of the dumb, lazy, and proud.

[1151] Friendly Refiner

 A good portion of how I understand the world is extracted from conversations and observations on relationships. I’m a pretty big believer that you can get to know a ton about yourself through introspection, but it’s still less than half of the necessary information if you don’t invoke who is, has, or you’d like to be shaping you.

For many years, before I ever knew what it actually symbolized or its history, I wore a yin yang necklace. I was literally drawn to it, noticing it dangling from a display at the Lake County Fair when I was in middle school. To this day, 25-ish years later, I’ve never read that deeply into Chinese philosophy, because the interconnected and counterbalanced symbol itself pretty much matched my intuition. It helped to have a kind of reminder imprint.

Balance is a much different place from dependence. “Codependency” is when there’s an excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner, and the other enables. These are not distinct and discreet measurements when you’re attempting to assess “excessive,” and as a matter of basic existence, one might argue we psychologically rely on our loved ones, networks, or imbued sense of self bred from our culture.

One of the things I’ve had to practically discuss and work out is how to balance healthy doses of traumatizing and often nakedly destructive forces against the appropriate level of State intervention, or against an individual’s sense of self and safety and security. At DCS, with a policy for children to remain with family if at all possible, that’s remaining with a sometimes wild cast of characters. In addiction counseling, you get clients describing physically and emotionally abusive partner dynamics all the time, and yet, they’re so otherwise unstable, that the abuse becomes “less bad” than being alone.

I think this is a really hard thing to understand for most people. One reason, life might not be as bad as it definitely is if you’ve occupied a certain level of wealth for a certain level of time. The exact same kinds of drama and mental health issues do not play out the same between the people attending their remote counseling session from the bench they slept on, and the people who can go to adult summer camp indefinitely. If you tell a story of someone’s impoverished circumstances to a “regular” middle-class person, they’ll tell you and them exactly what to do based on their sense of horror about it all.

Thankfully, I’ve had limited exposure in my personal life with cop-show plot levels of relationship dynamics. It’s not zero, but it’s never been remotely close to chronic. This means when I’m reflecting on what I think a “healthy” relationship is, I have the prolonged explanations and explorations of dramatic incidents from my life. I also have the dynamics, few and far between, that have sustained my more positive and prescriptive behavior.

One of the places I’ve landed is the question, “Do they even treat you like a friend?” I’ve struggled with the word “friend” for a long time, but even my proved-to-be-superficial relationships were friendly in a way that I often see missing in people’s dynamics. It’s like a movie trope to see two outwardly hateful people speak terribly to one another or occupy their own physical space, and then something weird happens that sheds a light on their deep and abiding love for one another. I think that’s a horrible and entirely misleading picture.

You can’t really see how someone is being a friend if you don’t know what constitutes you being one. I have a knack for being everyone’s “not-therapist.” Being up my own ass, reading all the things I do, and desperately trying to cling to my life values each day has lent itself to an awareness and perspective that I’ve received a waterfall of feedback suggesting it’s helpful. Getting certified as an addiction counselor was a pretty natural extension of my practice already, and if I had the money I’d become a therapist just because.

I’m also “too giving.” I want to be wanted. So when you need something from me, I’m extremely likely to go out of my way or do anything I can to help. I’m so like this, that I can recall the handful of times I’ve ever told someone no when their issues had reached a point that I would no longer be able to balance.

These two pieces alone give me enough of the half of a relationship puzzle to inform whether or not I think you’re being friendly in return. I don’t think you need to be a not-therapist to me nor be willing to give me any and everything at the drop of a hat. I do think you need to respect and recognize those things about me, and not take advantage of them. What would taking advantage look like? Attempting to use me to justify, instead of explore and fix, the things on your mind. Attempting to squeeze my effort and goodwill until I’m threatened financially or my life ends up in danger.

The third thing about me is that I’ve developed a really good ability to read and connect with people. That’s a deadly tool in the hands of someone who isn’t concerned with being transparent, friendly, or balanced. It follows then that I’m my best version of being a friend when I listen, give as much as I can, and refrain from unduly utilizing what I know about how you operate.

We make this very complicated for ourselves. An example that stuck out for me once was a speaker talking about how if our pet got sick and we picked up a prescription, we’d make sure it got the whole thing at the same time every day with the right food and cuddles until it was better. We won’t take our own prescriptions, if even go to the doctor. Now, this example is royally fucked by the practical issues of the American healthcare system, but the sentiment rang true at the conceptional level and in my experience working with people.

I know people who will work two jobs, take care of kids, put up with endless bullshit from their emotionally unwell parents or siblings, get demeaned by a boss, deal with health issues, and the impending psychological terror of whatever anniversary that’s coming up that they’ve never coped with. They’ll simultaneously struggle to take even 30 minutes for themselves a day to breathe, relax, or watch their favorite show. It’s a package of guilt, chronic stress, and “survivor mode.” They forget how to be friendly to themselves.

One of the things that confused and bugged me for a very long time was how to wrap my head around my friendships petering out. Beyond the ones that just went silent, there’s the ones that went out with someone lobbing some observation or judgment about who I was or what I was thinking, as if they ever really cared to know in the first place. I wasn’t giving myself credit for both the kind of friend I was trying to be, nor recognizing that simply existing around each other or being polite is not the same thing as establishing a friendship.

I discovered “normal” people were mostly in the pageantry and pretend game. They need you to perform and defer your actual sense of self and agency to their insecurities. I’m the type of person where literally anyone I might recognize or have enjoyed their company for an hour, I would invite “back in” in a heartbeat. I’ve been pretty confident in myself and who I am for a good portion of my young-adult to adult life. My perception of your, at the time, positive energy or influence is the thing I’d seek more of. I’d know it’s there. You can’t deny it, even if you’ve drifted into normal life morass as we’ve gotten older.

Maybe a way to illustrate this is to think about Christmas cards. If you or your family sent those out, how many people made the list that you might never talk to for years? It’s like your friend’s list on facebook. There’s like 10 people that sign on anymore, and if you’re lucky, 1% of them will notice when it’s your birthday. That kind of superficial engagement passes for normal “friendship.” It always felt fake and like a waste to me, and even when I tried to spice it up with personalized and creative messages on birthdays, they seemed to fall flat or get ignored over time.

I’ve got a lot of practical behaviors that inform my sense of friendly behavior. I’m not trying to yell. I don’t expect you to do anything for me that I’m unprepared to do for myself. I’m not lying to you about what I feel or don’t. If and when I have the money, I’m excited by the prospect of buying your ticket, meal, the gas etc. I’m one of those people who is physically unable to stop himself from voicing what he thinks is fucked up, and if that’s something about you or how we’re relating, I’ll do so out of respect and hope it can be fixed, and in a respectful way. I’m not going to ghost you after years nor stay vague and passive aggressive about the road forward. If only! I was treated the same way.

I believe it’s important to living well that you find your center independent of anyone else. The moment I return to the kind of teenager I was ensconced in limerence, be it with a person or too-compelling idea, I’ve hit a codependent state and am looking for ways to enable it. The adult version is to belabor the story of how many years you’ve been with someone, or employ a cliche about not knowing who you’d be without them, or reflexively listing all of the services they provide you that justifies whatever you need them to.

I do not think you can truly be of service to other people if you’re unable or unwilling to figure your own shit out. What happens when someone you care about dies? They’re going to. Sooner than you think. Mostly sooner than you think because you never think about it. What happens if you get critically injured? I think about this one all the time. If I lose a hand, I’m thinking about how to get a chip that let’s me write with brain waves or a robot one that types faster than I ever could. The point is about looking forward and rooting in the idea that life, my life, is worth it for it’s own sake, despite what may happen or my inability to square my ideas with my actions in any given moment.

I think we collectively reel at the idea of abusing animals. We’re animals. We’re our own kind of confused, dumb, and helpless. Give yourself pets and treats. Find habits and ideas you can cuddle up next to. Ask yourself what the people who treat you best would do, and then if you’re doing the same for yourself. If not, that should give you pause. If you don’t have people treating you that well, that should inform some larger shifts in your behavior or priorities. They will become you way more than you’ll become them, because they don’t have a real and friendly relationship with themselves, so neither will you.

[1150] Seething Is Believing

I want to talk about lying.

A couple days ago, I somewhat accidentally brain-dumped on one of my friends. I was reflecting on my efforts over the last few years, and the conclusion I came to was that I was first and foremost severely affected by lies.

If you’re a long-time listener first-time caller, you’ll know that lying was a particular pain point for my mother. She would flip the fuck out and engage in the most dramatic displays of violence or breaking my shit if she felt she was being lied to. As an adult, I can figure out that she was very poorly coping with how often she probably felt betrayed in life, but it no less left an imprint on me.

But I’m not here to talk about the past. I want to provide a framework for understanding lies. I think between lies and the truth, it’s much easier to discern lies. Often, they’re as simple as the exact opposite of whatever it is someone is telling you. Most insidiously, they’re something we “deeply believe” is the truth, only betrayed by a faint whisper that, for me, manifests in my gut.

Let’s begin.

We’re familiar with the idea of “white lies.” These are presumed moral behaviors to save someone unnecessary pain. When I was deep in my god vs. science debating, inevitably you’d get challenged on whether or not you’d lie to your dying grandmother if she professed that she would see you in heaven. Are you, atheist cunt, so devout in your lack of belief you’d stamp on your grandmother’s sentiment? It’s an absurd scenario that most remotely human people would navigate without issue, white-lying because not believing in something doesn’t give you license to be a dick.

We have what I call “political lies.” These are the kinds of lies you literally have to tell to occupy certain positions of leadership, or any time you’re speaking to more than 1 person. It’s a fool’s errand to blame a politician for “tacking to the middle” for this reason. It’s in the job description to compromise. It’s the nature of democracy and new information. You’re going to be lying, but it’s not even your fault more than it’s the nature of the incredibly complex arena we’ve constructed to mitigate our differences.

Modernity has hopefully shed some light on the distinction between these kinds of lies and the next batch, “operative lies.” These are lies that work. Work for what? Work for you. They can be about anything, for anything, as long as you feel they are keeping you safe. That’s their primary function, to keep you locked in mentally to “wherever you are” that you deem is where you need to be. Any arena can be abused for your purpose, be it national politics, your family, your job, or your artfully cultivated circle that might even only contain you and your pets.

Operative lies are the important ones to parse further. An operative lie becomes pathological when most outside observers would judge you to be self-destructing along normative metrics. This is where addiction falls. The sense of “this is where I’m safe” bar gets set too low, so all of the operative lies you employ end up servicing destruction to your relationships, finances, and health. This is part of the reason I am professionally suspicious of literally anything my clients tell me. Addiction shuffles your whole self-concept and what constitutes lying.

Here’s where it gets even trickier and scarier. Operative lies are how we house a collective and cooperative society. It’s not just out of the mouths of our campaigners and would-be leaders. We’re each baked into “normative lies” that operate to keep things copacetic.

This feels almost “too obvious” to speak to, except we confuse how to relate to these different levels of lying all the time. I can also personally attest to how often I’m punished for violations of these normative lies, and it’s no small part of why I’m choosing to explore now.

One of the biggest normative lies I’ve been at the mercy of was an implicit understanding after explicit commentary about the inevitability of my successful future. It’s the “go to college, get a good job, you’ll be set” lie. It wasn’t said maliciously. They weren’t saying it to a kid who was flunking school or unmotivated. But it was a normal expectation bred from incomplete information. I’m certainly one of millions who’ve been through that rough awakening.

For my generation, it seemed to be the start of a major transition away from functional operative lying guiding fair-enough norms of society, into the chaos of pathological lies that only serviced the operations of those with power. The bar got set too low. We collectively began shifting our language around self-destructive new norms to operate at this unsustainable level.

In this new jungle of habitual pathological lying, every playbook for success has a sort of standing refutation built into the brain of everyone you might engage. And they don’t even realize it! Because the self-destruction doesn’t look like an overdose. It doesn’t look like self-harm that needs hospitalization.

What does it look like?

It looks like my time at DCS, where a catch-phrase like, “I care about the children” placates over aggressive, illegal, and policy-violating behavior, while the state massively under-pays and under-trains those tasked with keeping them safe. People who do care and behave as they should get punished and chased away. The underlying shameful cheeky sick satisfaction of those who embody Mean Girl bullshit are ultimately steering the ship.

It looks like the dozens of people who advertise themselves as having the specific set of skills you’re looking for, and 2 of them proving capable of doing what they advertise. Yet, they get paid, get reviews, and leave you feeling incredibly confused by how they command such a high hourly rate to not help you accomplish what they said they could.

It looks like friends who devolve into acquaintances and then into memories. There used to be a village. There used to be friends you held on to your whole life. The bar for engaging or working together got set somewhere in the story of the sanctity of your individual dreams and capacity, and we’ve slowly eroded the meaning of belonging to anything bigger than ourselves. We don’t think we exist past whatever is in our head, and don’t bother being shaped by influences vastly different, but vital to illuminating our depths.

It looks like the thousand and one “I’ve got a secret!” Instagram ads about making money, reaching the “next level” of whatever your hobby, and any commercial that’s telling how you must spend more money and acquire more things.

The thing I believe cuts through all the noise is inside us all.

Maybe you think my broader and somewhat hastily conceived categories are confusing and woefully incomplete. That’s fine, I literally just made them up based on my operating instincts. What I do in response to each of the categories is what makes them easier to understand. I listen to my body in how it feels to try and believe in one of the lies at each level.

Let’s go back to dying grandma. “I believe you’ll disappear into nothing and there is no god, let alone heaven!” If you can say that, full-throated, and not recoil, okay, you, psychopath, there is no deeper truth for you than seeking the consequences of that behavior in that moment. A normal person is going to feel like they’re lying. They’ll pull back. They’ll feel “off.” The truth is illuminated, how much they care about grandma, in shutting up and playing along.

Take an extra moment and think about the truth being illuminated from the lie. How you manifest your care for grandma is through silence or nodding along.

Let’s look at political lies. “I’m anti-fracking!” There’s too many competing and convoluted truths to be revealed. Is it true you care about the environment then? Is it true you’re concerned about corrupt corporate capture of energy? Is it true you need to align your views with the party? Is it true based on information today, or information that might be changing faster than we can process? The only truth that can be reliably revealed is that the person saying it thinks it helps more than hurts their chance to get elected.

How about these personally operative lies? What do you need to tell yourself to get by every day? Some of my classics are about being smart and still decent-looking. I point to the stuff I own, interests, work I do around the house or stuff I make. I talk about the struggle to create and stay cheerleading for unknown possible positive outcomes. These things aren’t lies, but taken as a whole, can give me pause and a reason to reflect on if that day, in that moment, I’m living up to the story or including enough humbling detail. I know when I don’t feel like a champ, king, or boss no matter how well I eat that day, how many shows I’m headed to that week, or storied my accomplishments on an instrument or weed whacker.

That said, whatever my personal failings to find focus, motivation, or the ability to account for a consequential detail, I’m not less embedded in a deeply sick and delusionally lying era. At this rate, I’m probably not going to be much richer than I am now, but you’ll hear routinely how “the average American” still suffers from the complex of being a “temporarily embarrassed millionaire.” We’re still teetering on full-blown, albeit incredibly stupid, fascism. We’re praying for a long and jovial ride on renewed “hope,” as a nice substitute for investment, sacrifice, and accountability.

To me, we’re still stuck at the misplaced bar. We’re still addicted. We’re operating under lies that tear us apart, little by little, and then all at once, as they infect each new thing we care about or took for granted. And it feels impossible to combat because we don’t even listen to ourselves. We’re getting super-charged algorithmic ways to play someone else’s game and learn someone else’s language. It’s self-reinforcing through the lies underneath pretension, gate-keeping, language-policing, and every instance of cliche insecure lashing out.

The truth of my circumstances has come out through my genuine adoption and beliefs in the lies. I keep learning the hard way. I keep putting my time, my money (credit card debt), my energy, and my future in the hands of people and systems who can’t understand how to hear the truth of themselves, let alone me.

I’m constantly looking for a way to establish a true and persistent “floor.” A place I can work from and believe in that isn’t riddled with the kinds of lies that tear down what they profess to build. I’m leaning deliberately towards my friends and family that haven’t played on what I got conditioned to feel was normal. I’m every ounce of every hopeful, forward-thinking, genuinely believing in himself asshole who has appeared on 1,150 blogs over 21 years. I won’t let myself forget how to recognize a lie.

I swear, on everything, I’m trying. Nothing about me recoils over that.