[1163] Boo Collar

It's official, I can say I've "worked in manufacturing," even if it's been barely. I found myself on a shop floor moving things from one bin to another and one said of the room to another, tailing an older gentleman who had been working there for 22 years. 90% of the job I learned in the first hour. I have a solid-enough instinct for staying out of the way from racing forklifts. I made 3 small errors that took less than a minute to rectify.

I was there because i've cornered myself into absolutely needing "a job." A temp agency placed me there. It's a touch more than half of what I'd make in my field. They've already made an issue out of "overtime," essentially keeping it secret what that would precisely entail until you're on the floor. The shift is, technically, 6:30 AM to 3 PM. You get a $2/hr "bonus" if you have "perfect attendance" which can be undermined by showing up 5 minutes late any day. With overtime, they expect you to stay until 5 PM. 

 What this means is essentially a 13 hour day, 5 days a week, at what is grinding, mind-numbing work. I have to try to force myself to sleep early, which never works, wake up at 5:30ish, get to work early enough to not threaten my "bonus," and then get home 6ish. Invariably thinking about how fucked my life has become. I know, even as my best self, I cannot sustain that. It's not labor intensive. It's not too quick paced. I'm not going to complain about my aching back and hands from walking around and pushing things on wheels. 

What struck me most was the people. You could see the deadened resolve of "these are my circumstances." No one was really talking to each other. Very few people even feigned smiling or head-nodding as you walked by. You are made into a machine, and you perform your function at or better than the pace indicated overhead. The gentleman I got temp-hired on with worked there previously for a couple years, then explained how bad it got and why he had to leave. He complained that similar jobs were on offer in or near his home up the road in Brazil for $18-$22 an hour, and he's just biding his time until one of them calls him back. 

 I'm desperate enough that I think I can shut my brain off for a couple weeks. I also immediately applied to every remotely open, regardless of how poorly rated, addiction counseling company, located anywhere, I could. Certain experiences have a way of clarifying why you’re no longer willing to be picky or high-minded about what impact you might have. Watching souls actively leaving dozens of bodies is one of those experiences.

It also got me thinking about the fervor and entitlement in the voice of the guy who hired on too. It brought me back to Steak N Shake, where the drug-addled children spoke so highly of themselves and how screwed the place would be if they quit. Everyone has this story about their place and vital position in these massive corporations who literally wouldn’t notice if you died 30 seconds after your shift and just outside the parking lot.

It’s with that blind and naive pride that you get people defending their low pay, exploitative overtime hours, and weird gamification for $1,000 drawings if you download the company app and spend too much at the company over-priced mini-mart. It’s one, insanely huge thing, to negotiate with yourself to handle financial business by entertaining a place like that just long enough. It’s entirely another to be born and bred from that culture, baked into it like it’s normal or human to be set on repeat, insofar as we are pattern-seeking animals, but goddamn.

It’s one more instance I get to bear witness to as far as “chronic conditioning” is concerned. You might be fooled into thinking it’s more a Tetris-like zen going through the set of motions related to your very specific lane. But it’s so much darker than that. And, to be sure, I begrudge no one who enjoys their work or provides for themselves or their family. I just find it excruciating to think about how the baseline conception of a conscious human is so far removed, it’s less hard to imagine why we’re always teetering on a meltdown.

[1162] Mad Man

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the idea of me being “angry all the time.” It’s one of the most true and consistent things about me. I’m ready, pretty much at any moment, to make something of a show out of how much pent-up feelings I have about something. I’m not precisely looking for an excuse to blow, but I am secretly daring the universe to test me. Based on my size and history, I have every reason to believe I could be some dramatic display of consequences that fly in the face of my otherwise training, practice, and outward display 99.9% of the time.

I forget where I read it, but this is apparently a well-documented and categorized personality already. That took some of the oomph out of my enthusiasm for my potential years ago. If you’re reading the right books, you’ll reduce yourself to someone’s particular field’s cliche with every chapter eventually. At the same time, being capable of an explosive episode is different from a standing anger.

The circumstances that provoke the anger are going to be often obscure or counter-intuitive. I don’t get intimidated or scared and adrenaline-rushed by other dudes macho-manning or doing the weird almost-kiss chest bump thing. I didn’t get angry when my SNAP card info was skimmed and food money was stolen. I don’t get angry at the weather, even though I deeply hate snow. I don’t get angry at animals for doing animal things until it’s a reflection of the ambivalence of their owners.

Here we start to breach into the base of the anger. I want to believe people have more control than they care to acknowledge. There are many standing mysteries regarding life, agency, “free will,” and spooky probabilistic means of describing existence. As a person, as a conscious agent, I think there is as clear and obvious difference between making a choice and doing something like this writing, and throwing my hands up to suffer and proclaim the inevitability of my victimhood.

There’s dozens of ways to describe this. When my cat jumps on the table and thinks he’s going to eat my food, I can bop him on the nose or ass. I can do it every single time until he arrives at the place he is today, looking onward from 3 to 5 feet away, not even trying. It might take months or years, but the reality for him has no less been molded by me and clearly set in for him. The less-conscious agent I’ve taken the responsibility over to both be kept alive and turned into less of an annoying cunt.

I don’t find this controversial, hard to understand, immoral, or anything less than necessary in order to function in my home where I would like to eat in peace. I’m not punching, bruising, or breaking the cat. I’m speaking a universal language that gets me where I want us to go. It’s right here I will say exactly one line about the fucking idiots who would never harm an animal as though we’re in Narnia and a deal could be cut with his instincts, or that it’s somehow noble to live at the mercy of the ambivalent destruction of nature.

I don’t blame the cat. I blame people who would construct a fantasy around what a cat is and let that pollute how you might better engage and orient one. It works the other way too. My, extremely shy and scared female cat? I’ve turned her into an annoying lap cat. I don’t yell at her for crawling into my lap. I’ve spent years constantly training her to normalize and not flinch at pets. Now, she doesn’t even move sometimes as I go to step over her. My will be done, sometimes overdone. I was lucky enough to grow up with collies and know very well how much you can get a dog to do if you care and try and mold.

I find myself most often in conversations that betray what I know to be true, not just about myself and the nature of control, but about pets, health, government, or really any single interpersonal interaction. This is probably the heart of my anger.

A few days ago, as it’s now time to vote in Indiana, as I sent out a couple texts encouraging people in my life to do so, I had a friend respond that she wasn’t going to. She offered the cliches; they’re all corrupt, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean anything to her, she’s not informed enough, yada yada. A day later, I sent her another text saying, “I’m not trying to persuade you, but I’m curious, what would it take you to vote?” She responded, “Money.” So I asked, “How much?”

This then kicked off an anger-inducing exchange where, all of a sudden, she’s behaving as though her vote matters to her, and when I earnestly say I would buy it from her, she’s got paragraphs of excuses and explanations I have less than 0 interest in fielding. I don’t need her to explain. I don’t need her to contextualize. I do not care if she doesn’t care, provided I can carry on with my agenda.

But, that’s exactly what she said. She’s talking out of both sides of her mouth. She’s carrying on as though her life as it’s currently being conducted is “just hers” bestowed upon her as an inevitable perfect manifestation that suits her preferences. The kicker? She’s an addiction counselor. It’s her job to help people wake up to their patterns that keep them under the threat of dying or destroying everything they care about.

I understand, at some level, the societal need for performance, ritual, polite pleasantries, and the facade of basic civility. There is something practically and inextricably “corrupt” about the ways in which we communicate and navigate shared spaces. I’ve already explained my latest understanding of lying, and I don’t think the majority of how we engage with each other in those veins are the dangerous corrosive kinds of lies.

Yet, there’s what appears to be a spillover effect where we treat ourselves as superficially, and that’s where the disingenuous danger appears.

Of course your decisions, awareness, and actions matter. That you have a choice to perform one thing over another matters. It’s, to me, literally the only thing that can truly matter if you’re going to distinguish yourself as a moral person and not some arbitrary collection of atoms. I feel like, to deny this, you’d have to be perfectly okay being force-fed any type of food, merely kept alive. Surely, you have food preferences, right? You'd like it to enter your body through your mouth and not a tube cut into your stomach?

When I think about a cultural narrative that either sees us colonizing space or ending up wiped out via nuclear holocaust, it’s the distance between responsible personal agency, and forlorn ambivalent conclusions.

At many levels, we are stuck. We don’t know what we don’t know. We can’t perfectly predict the weather, but we can evacuate. To deny yourself the use of your legs, vehicles, or eyes and ears taking in the news is inhuman. I don’t think you get fascism unless a major plurality of people are not just subverting and excusing and denying their humanity, but an even larger portion of people are letting them get away with it.

It’s an everyday kind of exercise. Every day you have to find your power, choices, and orient yourself against, or in concert, with the way the wind is blowing. It’s work. It’s hard. It’s most often unfair. It’s the operative difference between being human, or just an animal. Are you a perpetually justified at-the-mercy-of-instinct being? I’m not, and we’re made of the same stuff. It makes me incredibly angry when you sacrifice yourself, and in turn me, to your base animal. I actually want to live, and live in a particular kind of way. I can’t achieve my goals pretending, like you, that I don’t have them.

We normalize complacent, complicit, hopelessness constantly. “It is what it is.” That’s my go-to catch-all summary. You, in all your majesty and wisdom, know what it is more than anyone else, and you think it’s time to give up, ride it out, and die. Thanks, dick bag. “They’re all corrupt!” That’s not just simply not true, it’s not true-enough to matter for the issue at hand. Identify and vote for someone who is not corrupt, or barring that, less corrupt. Are you corrupt? If so, how much corruption are you willing to stand from your representative so you can keep functioning as you please?

I can kick the shit out of most people. I can snap into verbally and emotionally abusive language in a split-second. I’m the meanest person I know, and I go through zero emotional withdrawal when I shift into those demonstrations of my character. I’m as petty, small, volatile, ignorant, hateful, spiteful, judgemental, and ridiculous as anyone you’ve ever met. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a choice. That doesn’t mean I get to deny the compounding nature of my better habits. That doesn’t mean I get to let my vitriol excuse my responsibility to myself or others.

I don’t know how much of it is a consequence of the internet, or of the general wealth and decadence of modernity, or of the targeted plots of nefarious power-hungry actors, but we seem to have forgotten how to feel meaningful shame. We should be ashamed of our laziness and pride. We should be ashamed of empowering those who fuel our anger and resentments. We should be ashamed of emboldening our indignant self-righteous pretensions because we’re afraid of the patience and humility it takes to be a proper person.

Every single one of us contributes to this pot, and I feel like I’m never not floating in shit. We keep choosing to look away and lie. We keep choosing to lay down and give up. We keep reducing what would be a preferred direction or sense of stability into a tit-for-tat ironically hyperbolic performance. The only thing more powerful than my anger is the exhaustion.

[1161] Blind And Silence

This might be easier to read and follow than my instinct suggested as I began.

I've been thinking about "having my back against a wall" versus "having a goal."

As I've scrambled to take (nearly) any job that will higher quickly, I'm feeling the familiar waves of panic, motivation, relief, dread, and comfort - all tentative - and on rotation over the course of each day. It's not unfair to say that for most of my adult life, I've had something of a plan, contingencies, and emergency pull-switches for ensuring I could keep a certain standard and platform for my life. The plan is always lacking, but has been acutely felt recently.

Back when I had considerably less perspective, I took it for granted things would be about as easy for me in life , as it pertained to jobs or professional obligations, as it had been for me in school. I was lucky enough to be born with a big enough brain that allows a solid amount of what life asks of you to come pretty easy. It is exceptionally rare that I'm at a job for even 3 months before being ask-told to learn the next thing, take on more, or become a supervisor or manager. That is, provided I'm not trying to cross into an upper-class environment.

Here, thoughts about "showing versus telling" come up. I can get pretty dramatic in how I describe my feelings or what I think the "inevitable consequences" will be of a course of action. It's not that I don't feel intensely. It's not that I'm talking purely irrationally and just routinely predict incorrectly. It's that when I pull back and look at my behavior and pair it against my most ridiculous or hyperbolic writing, or most compelling and exhausting stomach-dropping, headaches, and jaw-clenching, I almost without-fail do the things necessary to appropriately and accountably respond to the moment.

The first of which is writing. I'm exceptionally rarely going to actually scream, hit something, or drive a little too fast a little too buzzed around a blind corner. I don't oblige people to "handle me at my worst," nor do I take some kind of secret undue pride in the amount of chaos I can embody. This is showing, to myself first, that I'm thinking more carefully, deliberately, and acknowledging each wave of feeling or choice word as it hits me. The words aren't hot, sharp, heavy, or dangerous. At bottom, they don't inherently mean anything, except to me, and except if they can be construed in a way that I calm down, pick a direction, or make a certain amount of peace with my antagonized moment.

I think it's important to point out that it's never "fixed" or "settled." I'm, forever, processing. I'm weighing the last thing I demonstrate against the next thing I feel, and am constantly balancing.

It's the first day of early voting in Indiana. My two closest friends in the area pay next to no attention, if not actively avoid politics. They aren't fascists, but they could easily "forget" to vote. I'm incredibly sympathetic to their feelings, and wholly angered by their ambivalence. I can't trust they would vote without my intervention. Whether or not they "believe" in the consequences of participating in the maintenance of the country, their actions, and the reason we're friends, suggest they don't want to sleepwalk into fascism. Materializing the consequences of ambivalence for someone is nearly impossible.

So it goes for all of us about the infinite list of things we aren't paying attention to. You don't pay that close attention to the words you choose or friends you keep? I've watched that turn into chronic addiction attempting to cope with instantiated abuses and excuses. You don't pay attention to how much time you spend at work? I've watched that balloon family and child problems because a narrative about "taking care of your family" doesn't include the time to foment emotional well-being after being reduced to a desperately-sought dollar amount. A dollar amount often explicitly not even budgeted for, so people will work over-time or several jobs and not register they are making sometimes less than if they worked less after gas, taxes, and other opportunity costs.

Here we can bring it back to an examination of class. Rich people, significantly more often than they'll ever admit, work less and earn more. There are plenty of hyper-focused talented and particularly-skilled people who deserve every penny of every minute they spend exercising there worth. For every one of those people, there are tens of thousands more who simply own everything. They indefinitely benefit from their family history, adjacency to privileged places, or other circumstances invariably downplayed in their autobiography/self-help book.

It would be foolish, for example, for me to pretend I'm not, as measured by many tests, "generally intelligent." It doesn't mean I'm wise. It doesn't mean I'm likeable. It doesn't mean I'm suitable for your team or can figure anything out I please. It just means I'll be able to describe and execute how to navigate all of those deficiencies in a way most won't. Whether I find the will, capitalize on an opportunity, or manifest the luck that sees my circumstances improved remain indefinitely open questions. General intelligence, in and of itself, doesn't mean shit if people don't like you, trust you, or recognize and respect what you're showing them.

I can show myself the work to remain "sane" or "stable," but that doesn't mean it translates. I can work myself to death accomplishing tasks at a job, but it doesn't mean I'm emanating pride in my work that anyone looking at won't simply resent or seek to undermine. I thought, incorrectly, if I showed you could move to cousin-fuck Indiana, build something from limited resources, and then carry on describing the math and timelines for more indulgences and opportunities, people would join or follow. I've described every beat of how I've gotten to now. It is perpetually unpersuasive and uncompelling.

What is it people want to see? Themselves? Maybe, sometimes. Maybe at an instinctual basic animal level. We do pack together. Girls with about the same levels of attractiveness or similar body types certainly do. Frat bros flock like migratory birds. I feel like I can smell most pictures from a gaming conference or Comic-Con. I'm suspicious people can see at all. I think in order to be able to see, you have to have an idea of what you're looking at. We spend most of our time having the idea of what we're looking at filled in by other people.

I didn't discover I was smart. I was told it, constantly, growing up. I didn't know I was cute. I certainly didn't feel I was cute, and therefore didn't carry myself with the confidence or attitude of someone "worthy" of engaging attraction games. I was told I was cute, didn't believe it. I cut off my hair. I dug at my skin. I bemoaned not having abs. I refused to smile in pictures. What was I looking at? The caricatured, resented, and made-fun-of target of my mother who turned her weight issues and low self-esteem into lessons on how to emotionally abuse. I was looking at the opposite of the kids wearing Abercrombie and playing sports. This, in perfectly unrealized contradictory irony, as I also played sports and wore a bit of Abercrombie.

I think it's easier to conceptualize "not having an identity" or "not knowing what you're looking at" in the context of kids or childhood. We start practically feral and are at the mercy of our circumstances, genes included. So many of my clients at the prison started using things like meth or heroin when they were in their teens after being introduced to drugs while being in the single digits. Many had no idea what it even meant to be an "adult man" because they severely got their brains fucked with before they ever had the chance to learn what that could mean.

The class you're born into comes with it a certain narrative. Maybe it jives with your sensibilities, maybe not. Maybe it compliments your inherent capacity, or maybe it stands as a constant source of antagonism. Maybe you don't have the industriousness and high-achieving capacity of your parent who immigrated. Maybe you don't have the emotional intelligence to surround yourself with people who compliment and redirect your negative self-regard. Maybe you don't have the capacity for ambivalence and pretext to play politics in elite circles. If you don't know you're born into a certain vein and are described by an existing, evolving and diffuse story, you can't figure out how, or why you'd even bother, to change it.

Neither of my parents are dumb. My mom is insane, my dad is Tim Walzian. It's a reactive distinction I've felt emotionally my whole life, and took years to understand intellectually. My dad has been an iron-worker almost my entire life. When his parents immigrated, you could raise four kids, put them all through college, and retire working at the steel mill. If, like so many families in our middle-class existence, you wanted to keep repeating the pattern of my grandparents, we've watched how the systems have declined and devolved into nascent fascism. We fundamentally can't conceive of the magnitude of what we're embedded in and looking at, so a reactionary posture foments.

Back we return to having your back against a wall versus having a goal. Here is the reason so much feels like life is binary instead of probabilistic. The binary exists, but it's at the level of choosing altogether. It's not "Trump vs. Harris." It's asking what probably happens when you enable and support one version of existence over another. Do you compound the pain and absurdity? Do you make it harder to see and believe in things getting better? We can equivocate literal dumb fascism with perhaps a valid laundry list of complaints and criticisms about any other form of democratic politicking. Why?

We don't know what we want. We don't know how to articulate it. We don't practice the patience to deeply appreciate when we've gotten it. We look at our work and feel exhausted because we've been exploited and punished for trying, trusting, and caring. Our backs are against the wall, so anything we do or say as the bullets barrel towards us is justified. We're linguistically and psychologically trapped. Our concept is so distorted that the work of how to make things better is unrecognizable and takes too long to be realized emotionally. Or, worse, we've crippled our capacity to train a positive feedback loop at all, introducing proverbial meth into the system too early to fully repair.

Your voice is the most powerful thing in finding a prayer for dealing with "everything." It's the first fucking amendment for a reason. Those who had something to say were violently and perpetually silenced. I believe you have something to say, and are violently and perpetually silenced. But your goal hasn't been articulated like theirs was. Their imprecise, imperfect, ever-evolving goal was written down and given a place to start informing whatever beautiful or damning thing you wish to say about our place and country today. You hear the goals of the craziest and most vitriolic people every day. The "corrupt" part of that system is you pretending not to hear them. It's you pretending not to have feelings about them. It's you pretending you're not baked into the cake with them.

My life doesn't get better the more I hate something. I might need to describe my ongoing hatred and accompanying feelings, but ultimately my behavior has to look like hope. It has to look like I'm reasonably trying to fix the big abstract bad feelings with day-to-day exercises patching all the holes life pokes through my sense of agency and well-being. I will never not be an angry ape, raging and afraid. That will never excuse my decisions to reward instead of correct for how that manifests. I can acknowledge the infinite list of things cornering me, trying to shut me up, or attempting to hijack my attention. The consequences aren't "more true" than what probably happens in how I do or don't respond.

[xx-27] Cope

 

Is it hope if you don't have a choice?

Hope or die

Hope or cry

Hope or tell another lie

What is hope if not a default setting?

Hope that "one day"

Hope that they'll forget

Hope that you'll manage

Hope is foolish, and we're born fools

To hope is to live within hope's betrayal

Hope, for what?

Hope's sake

I do not have hope, I have stuck

I have stuck myself in a bottomless well

Of nope, nonsense, and venal temptation

To ascribe hope where stuck reigns

I move in mockery of my motives

I dance like I don't hear the bangs

I sway with the wind working its damnedest

To blow me on the tracks.

Why cry when you can whistle?

Pick, dig, haul, slumber

Bite, clench, stare, wonder

Any minute now

[1160] Huff

I’m a level of “anxious” I haven’t been for quite some time. It’s partly because of coffee on a mostly empty stomach. Even acknowledging and writing that down tempered the feeling immediately, and is why I put the word anxious in quotes. I have a specific desire in writing this, to feel better, and I know how to get there, by being incredibly specific in my word choices.

I’m waiting to hear back about a job. (I learned approximately 30 minutes later I didn’t get it.) I’ve managed to back myself into another corner, and if I don’t get the job (for what would certainly be some left-field universe nut-kicking-me reason) I’m staring down the prospect of taking literally anything that hires immediately. I’ve done that and ran that experiment in the past, and I have little faith if I found myself on a production line that I would last any longer than the 2 and half days I did back then.

I had what felt like 2 good interviews. I’m not a pie-in-the-sky type who pretends things went better than they did, nor would I discount any particularly egregious missteps or misspeaking. I had a couple decent conversations with people of what appeared to be similar dispositions for roles I’m told they are fairly “desperate” to fill. I have the credentials and experience, a friend already works there, and I’ve patiently and professionally navigated an initial red flag where my second interviewer didn’t notice or show up for our first meeting.

The pause, doubt, and pain of the waiting game is tied directly to the amount of debt I’ve gotten into. It’s tied to my 2 or 3 failed attempts to get other roles or even volunteer in similar social work roles. One for certain fell apart for small-town political reasons, and I suspect another did as well. I’m one of those people who, on paper, should not have the kinds of “problems” or type of “financial insecurity” that I do.

It’s all self-imposed. I leave secure work environments when they start to degrade my sense of responsibility to values and standards. I’ve broken the dam of self-indulgence and being conservative in my spending. I’ve made bets on my ideals in starting the counseling nonprofit, LLC before that, and attempts to hire people to get them to a sustainable place. I sometimes talk about myself like, “If I could just shut up and deal, relearn how to eat time playing video games instead of leaving the house, go back to eating nothing but hotdogs and ramen for a year like in college, and just ‘be normal,’ I’d have my bills paid years in advance, all kinds of insurance, and the money to modestly explore my hobbies.”

What happens instead, is I experience too many of these heightened moments back-to-back. I find myself in a chronic state of stress as the boiling frog water inches towards cooked. I find it nearly impossible to justify any given moment of my day. I play in the dramatic and despotic dialogues of colleagues who all have their take on why they’re stuck dealing with the inadequate support, pay, or basic dignity.

I am properly exhausted by a “look on the bright side” or “of course they’ll hire you!” narratives. Anything that smells of hope is extremely off-putting. Anything that tries to matter-of-factly describe my potential or worth is off the table. Any remotely positive impression I get from someone I haven’t known for longer than an hour is beyond suspect. So much of my interactions contribute to this deep and gaping hole at the heart of my ability to trust things that “should” go a certain way, ever will.

I’m not the first person to complain about job hunting. I’m not on the verge of being homeless. I’m not interested in making a dozen qualifying statements about my privileges and options.

I want to fit. I just want to fit. I think it’s incredibly stupid to exist in this society that’s constantly swinging from crazy presumptive talking point to the next, bastardizing all language, and pulling up drawbridges after our luck nets the right status. I don’t want to sacrifice every waking minute of my life with thoughts consumed by work for the hour or 2 a month to myself or 2 weeks vacation. I don’t want to keep playing dress-up as though there aren’t sincere and capable ways we could be using resources and rewarding those with the capacity to efficiently execute the task.

I’m so fucking angry, all the time. It doesn’t matter how many fun things I go to. It doesn’t matter how creative I get with a woodworking project or song. It doesn’t matter how much I write. I’m so. fucking. angry.

I can learn how to incorporate abuses from the past. I can swallow all kind of logistic shit when it comes to trying something new or coordinating with someone. I can stomach the darkness and ambivalence of life broadly. I’ve never been able to drop my fundamental anger. I know that because when the “perfect storm” of circumstances highlight the details and history that inform the anger, it’s like I’m the helpless child getting wailed on growing up all over again.

And it’s fucking STUPID. Nothing should be this hard or complicated, and it’s not. If we actually gave a fuck, it would not be this hard and stupid. It doesn’t need to be some series of abstract parables passed down through time. It doesn’t need to be abstracted economic equations pretending at bottom there’s rational actors with perfect information. We don’t have to celebrate greed. We don’t have to cross our fingers fascism versus any alternative isn’t a “toss up.” We don’t have to do any of the shit that makes it so we all suffer the same shit, but a handful complain about it, and the rest try to get them to shut up and deal like they are.

The point is, you’re not dealing. You’re not dealing any better than I am. 48.5 million Americans battled a substance use disorder in the past year. That’s 16.7% of the population, or close to 1 in 5 if you consider how many people hide and pretend. That means whether it is you, or someone in your family, everyone is chronically coping in a series of unhealthy ways that permeate through families and work environments. What if a fifth of your body didn’t work? Or your brain? Or the words you use? Every fifth one just drops or confuses and steers the conversation awry. 41.9% of Americans are obese. Almost half are not the type to take the stairs, let alone entertain the vicissitudes of class struggle. “We” don’t have the inclination or headspace to even google “vicissitudes.”

I feel like a fucking joke and failure. Not because I actually am, but because I suffer my idealism and let that shit play out in dramatic ways when it comes to accounting for practical shit. I could’ve worked harder to find something remote and paying even peanuts. I could’ve looked harder for something part-time. I could’ve leaned into efforts advertising and side-hustling. These are the thoughts you can suffocate under as though you didn’t have reasons and feelings and obligations every moment you weren’t attending to fixing the latest issue.

I’m constantly trying to remind myself and others that it’s never “either/or.” No situation is all bad or good. No decisions come without strings. No moment can you confidently claim the sum total of knowledge and potential about it. Those are brute facts that should temper any enthusiasm for belaboring the worst version of the story you tell yourself. I still don’t know shit, and never will. I’ve made long-term friends from “bad” work environments. I’ve gained perspective and demonstrated persistent resilience. I’d rather have money and hopes not consistently betrayed.

[1159] About Ten

 I want to run a few thought experiments. The task is to say, “What if what was said is even 10% true?”

I’ve been going back and reading/listening to some of my old writing. Sometimes, I come across a blog that’s blisteringly drunk and “embarrassing” insofar as I might compare it to how I speak and write now. It doesn’t mean that version of me isn’t still there, but I can more easily identify the weaknesses in its voice and character. I care about voice and character because I want to make sense and discover operative ways of being. To recognize, starkly, how often I can get in my own way is instructive.

That doesn’t mean that what I was writing about wasn’t true. You can’t adopt or discover operating principles if you don’t first start with a foundational pursuit, respect, and recognition of the truth. I was, truly, coming from those places, even if today they’re less intense. I can’t treat the sentiments as a raging hot inferno of “things we all must realize” or “be all end all” fatalism of a One True Opinion, despite their phrasing. They are no less informative and emotionally resonant at some level. It’s at least 10%.

This got me thinking about answers that snap into focus if you frame them like this:

“If it was even 10% true that Palestine will not accept a 2-state solution and desires the expulsion and extermination of the Jews, what would you do?“

”If it’s even 10% true there’s genocidal things being carried out by Israel, what’s the next step?“

”If it was even 10% true that an extremely messy and disingenuous political prospect and his followers wanted to overthrow the government, what would you do?“

”If it was even 10% true your partner was verbally and emotionally abusive…?“

“If it’s even 10% true that you’re being lazier, angrier, deceptive, quieter, more obnoxious, defensive, etc. than you need to be, what does that mean for what to do next?”

I think when you do this, it gives you the opportunity to introduce critical thinking. You see responses to absolutist phrasing, and you see the back-and-forth leveraging of specific atrocities and hyperbolic language ad nauseam. “They’re killing babies!” If it’s even 10% true, then surely we can agree it’s atrocious, and then move the conversation into the realm of context and history. Israel didn’t raid Palestine and start killing its children. They’re playing 2 different games. Israel hasn’t mandated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It’s literally impossible to carry on a conversation with someone who can’t qualify even the possibility that “their truth” and “your truth” might exist at all, but maybe only 10%.

That leaves 90% of space for the “real work” of agreeing to context. The 10% is the good faith, but it’s hardly enough to find a negotiated middle or consensus. We complicate this further by misidentifying who or what constitutes an immovable ideologue. I think this is why it’s most important to apply this exercise individually and with regard to your subjective experience.

I’m persuadable. That’s only because I come up with the arguments that make sense to me. Screaming at me isn’t persuasive. Demonstrating you have a looser or incomplete grasp of the facts than I do turns me off. An unwillingness to consider or introduce relevant details does too. If you can’t take what I say and repeat it back to me in a way that demonstrates understanding, I don’t pretend we’re having a real conversation. In the abstract, words are ever imprecise, sure. There is a realm where you understand not to put your hand on a hot stove. Even and especially if you’re the type of cunt who promises you like that kind of pain, hate your hands, and would lay your forearm across the adjacent burner to really sell it.

Most of the time, you don’t need to entertain the “most damming” or “craziest sounding” or, in the language of recovery, “catastrophized” version of events. We feel at 100%. We react at 100%. That’s fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We’ve thrown this into overdrive with algorithms. We’ve let then 10% of propaganda and arbitrary associations dictate our operating systems. Even if the craziest and most shocking thing was 10% true, the next step isn’t to swing dramatically into the arms of whomever said it or decry the evil as though you’ve confirmed or worked to establish the 90% of the context.

“They’re eating dogs!”

Some cultures do eat dogs. Do I know enough about Haitians? No? Okay, are they one that eats dogs? No? Okay, 10% acknowledgment that dogs are meat to some people, Haitians aren’t one of them. Time to move on.

“Global warming will kill us all!”

If that’s even 10% true, give me the charts, like on the latest series attempting to rehab Bill Gates’ image, that show what’s contributing. Give me a budget. Show me the leaders and investments. Let me listen to the scientists describing the damage. I don’t need to cry and scream with you, nor am I the enemy for my desire to build the context.

Let’s do a personal one. “This job will kill my soul and make time feel insufferable.”

I’ve already adopted behaviors that mitigate this. I fill in dead air with podcasts, shows, and books. I build efficiency if I’m driving somewhere and have several things to get done throughout the week. I document, both work-related incidents and my experience when it reaches acute levels of dread. I’m already prepared to leave and continuously apply or search for the next thing. It’s not either I’m suffering at the ambivalence of my worst phrasing or I’m thriving. It’s all at once all the time provided I do the work of identifying the nature of the context and continue making decisions.

After a while, you might start to phrase it like, “That’s not true enough to matter.” You might start to feel that way so you can move on quicker until you run up against something that does. You don’t have to guiltily indict yourself by saying something like, “I don’t care about dead babies!” or “Fuck climate change!” or whatever the issue may be that day. You can begin to understand how genuinely removed and ignorant you are about most things in any given moment, and how the work to contextualize probably doesn’t interest you. You can put some distance between your feelings and the propensity to feed and justify them.

This absolutely does not happen incidentally or just because you get old. This takes work. You have to actually want to be accountable. It’s only if you want to recognize and entertain without being an embodied perpetual reactionary. This, I suspect, is less than 10% of any given population at any point in history. If that’s even 10% true, the burden to those of us trying to do better is the 90% of nonsense, instinct, patterns, norms, and undulating nature of consciousness as it bumps against technology.

What does that mean for how you should conduct yourself each day? What does that mean for the words you’ll choose? What does that say about the lines you’ll draw for acceptable exchange? What does it say about the work you have left to do in order to adequately shoulder that burden? There’s something to react to constantly. Are you sure you have the real desire and energy to even want to do better?

[1158] The Teensiest Bit

My head hurts. I have this string of muscles/nerves that run through the back of my head into the middle of my back. They’ve been aggravated for 4 days, swinging between decently severe nausea-inducing pain, and dull “You know, I haven’t gone away” antagonism that can’t be pilled away.

But I don’t want to talk about that.

For an ever-so-brief period in my life, I found a writing home at Sondry.com. It was the first place you could find both introspective writers and people who were seeking out that kind of writing. The site wasn’t particularly robust, but it eked out an identity and a fair amount of engagement. It took me back to the days when I first started writing on Myspace, and how those would get people commenting and engaging in a conversation. What started as me bursting forth with too much to say and barely intelligible ways of saying it, turned into an exchange, a flicker of what the internet was advertised it would be, as a place to connect.

I’m feeling murmurs of the cultural tide really starting to reckon with the disconnect. I think most people are over being constantly full of hatred and dread. I think a lot of the people mostly ill-equipped to understand internet tone/culture are dying off. I think the things we miss about our nature and history are taking shape again, and it’s not some kind of extra or noble thing to hold an event without phones or install something to shut down a screen. We’ll never go back in time, but I think getting jaded and less mystified about the pace or usefulness of technology is allowing more adult thoughts about regulating and control to take over.

Maybe that’s the theme in the air, “control.” It’s fundamentally always about control over “the narrative.” I can’t control the pain in my head, but I can control how much I talk about it. I can control, or pre-control, the conditions under which I’ll attempt to explain what’s on my mind. There’s something illuminated about the nature of control if you begin listing all of the things you don’t. It’s in that exercise. You don’t get lost in semantics about “free will.” You just uncover and embody “whatever it is” that colloquially registers as a control or a choice.

Recently, I was explaining how magic mushrooms can work to a friend who is often “blocked” or “primed.” While we’re spending most of our time basically locked into our bodies, mushrooms dissolve the barrier between intention and the ability to act on what we feel. The reason you can have a bad trip and spiral out of control is because you might not take up the task and responsibility to prepare or respond to the negativity. It flows just as easily as the positivity, and when you embody the dam between them or the bridge that connects them, it’s hard to unlearn or unfeel that true extent of your power.

There’s much you can’t control while on shrooms, or many hallucinogens, but what you can is the exact same thing you can control sober. This isn’t necessarily the case with other kinds of drugs. At the time we were discussing it, even the idea of experiencing that process overwhelmed my friend and we had to stop.

I picked up writing because I felt explicitly out of control. I couldn’t help myself, so I had to spew. I had to externalize. I had to give myself something to occupy my hands and mouth along to so I wouldn’t keep feeling sick and anxious and whiny. I’ve written more than I’ve posted, erasing or losing a decent amount. I’ve deleted so much that never felt like it was getting to where I needed. All of the time and effort could be conceived of as a giant ongoing summary of feelings and thoughts I can’t control, but for the words they manifest.

I consider it a certain kind of magic and mystery. I don’t know “exactly how” but I certainly “feel better.” I can define this as “order” of what’s otherwise standing “chaos.” Some days I rearrange furniture or meticulously clean something and achieve the same feeling. When I put together a stellar spreadsheet or check everything off on a list I can get it again. It’s not even palpably felt. If anything, it’s felt mostly as that contrast to chaos. Not “good” or “bad.” It’s “can” versus “can’t.” It’s “now” versus “one day.“

I had a job interview yesterday and was asked about my approach to counseling. I said I try to teach what I practice. I said I try to get people to define things in their own terms. We have everyone in every moment telling us something as though we share definitions. You’ll meet people in recovery, regularly, who’ve been in for decades, who deny they have ”triggers.“ Do they have a million things each day that signal to them a desire to use substances? Absolutely. They just don’t have ”triggers,“ or understand the response to a stimuli as one, or just maybe don’t care for the word.

I get intrusive thoughts. In a sense, all thoughts are intrusive, but I’ll have something dark or mean come to mind for shiggles (that’s shits and giggles for you high class folks) and then I am given the chance to wonder what, or if, that says something about me. I think it’s a knock-on effect of having a dark sense of humor. I don’t know where some of my best jokes come from beyond a contrarian dispositional habit and free-association. I do well on hallucinogens, so I don’t entertain those fucked up thoughts as anything more or less than a thought that I’ll eventually move on from. It doesn’t change my preestablished, pre-controlled desire or goal for myself or our interactions.

Making this distinction practically gave me license to mature. I’m an argumentative cunt, at heart. I will fight you, myself, and even people I don’t care for, over anything in which I can find an inconsistency. With no goal in mind, this means you often exhaust or alienate people and stockpile void-screaming time. If my headache was a result of being too full of errant thoughts, I’d know to stop when it subsided. The goal of talking at all would be tied directly towards my sense of my own health, thus I would find the reason and motivation to keep doing so when I experience the same kind of pain again.

Tying things together, though? That’s an individual art. Writing didn’t used to, or ”always“ ”fix me.“ In fact, it’s not the writing in and of itself that does so. It’s getting things ordered. It’s exercising a reflection. It’s allowing myself to occupy each feeling, or lack thereof, as it comes along, and translating it into English words. I feel like a perfect fool for not recognizing the analogy when it comes to writing or playing music. I’m not someone who can cry remotely easily. I’ve shocked myself in hitting chords that ”feel write“ and singing poetic phrasing that could induce tears. I can get a little misty over a line or two in the penultimate paragraph of 1 in 100 or so blogs? And probably only if I’m drunk.

We’re incredibly complex creatures just baked into an unceasingly mysterious and evolving story. To maintain some kind of entitled and insecure ego instead of adopt a curious and matter-of-fact posture about that is a tragedy. You’re allowed to not know something and fuck up as you keep figuring things out. You’re allowed to understand your worst enemy from as many viewpoints as you choose to introduce. You’re allowed to choose your sense and response. Start by listing everything not in your control, and then let yourself feel where the control comes in. It takes practice. And even if you find a way to do it for years, you might still only be telling the smallest part of where you’re coming from.