[1197] Let's Fly Away

This week at the Y, there’s been a spy theme for the kids’ activities. Today, they were expected to take all of their “skills” of different kiddie activities and discover who stole cookies. At the end of their process we went outside, and they sat down and waited to “graduate” and get root beer floats. While we idled as gloves were looked for, the kids asked dozens of times where the culprit went. These are kids, perhaps this is most/all kids, who never accept an answer, so many, also ignored, ones were offered. I threw out, “Mr. C was disappeared to Ecuador.”

My supervisor and camp director, 10 years my junior, was not impressed. Nevermind that these kids are certainly not reading the news. Let’s ignore it’s El Salvador. Who cares that it’s in keeping with the theme all week. I was asked/told we should keep “politics” out of camp activities, and she, I struggle to believe, “knows I have opinions.” Her concern was that the kids are paying attention, when I initially responded that of course they aren’t. She believes the parents will get wind of something their counselor said, and it will blow back. Of all the things I could see kids saying, both real and imagined, to their parents about camp, it’s not a dark high-brow joke about where their soccer coach went for taking fake cookies.

This interaction has highlighted a few things for me that essentially force me to write. You’re not going to have me arguing that there’s not a fluffy and ridiculous superficial nature of exchange you might adopt when you’re “professionally” attending to the needs of children. I get it, in the absolute broadest sense. I also don’t expect my supervisor or coworkers to take flack for things I might say. Where I get into real trouble is in expecting anything like tact or a wink and nob and solidarity from people who are fundamentally afraid and conservative.

The Y, if you didn’t know like I didn’t know, has “Christian” right in the name. The people attracted to that environment are “simple” folk, do-gooders with complexes they refuse to be called out on, and pedophiles. I’m there because the job I applied for in no way matches what I’ve learned to be the expectations, and that sweet sweet kid butt.

Now, it doesn’t take a genius to know that kind of comment and joke would be beyond the pale inappropriate. You’d think that’s the kind of thing I said with the posture these people adopt. It manifests as “polite” passive aggression though. If I offer to give a couple shifts to my coworker who wanted more hours next week, don’t you know, that just has to count against me as “call offs” because I didn’t give two weeks notice. Did I know my coworker wanted hours even 15 minutes ago? No. Will they be short-staffed or hurt in any way? No. But the letter of the extremely hole-riddled policy must be followed right now…because. When kids smear shit all over themselves, that’s when we can play it fast and loose.

This kind of person, these kinds of environments, and these alleged rules for respectful and professional engagement are part of the heart of what’s killing everything. It’s akin to the democrats responding to abject stupidity, corruption, and failure with, “But the policy!” My supervisor, I deeply suspect, does not go home and think, “Man, I wish I was cooler and could laugh things off. I’m prepared to defend my employees even when they make a joke I’m not crazy about, but can tell is part of their coping and fun-having.” I’m not coming home and thinking, “I should keep it squeaky and G, no matter what,” so I can’t blame them, even if I think at bottom the “harm” anyone might calculate from either perspective will be exponentially higher on their end.

I think it’s emotionally impossible to understand nor feel that when you think your veneer or presumptions of your reputation are the most important thing to protect. She, like most people, believe considerably deeper in a myth about themselves than in any critical thought beholden to evidence or cause and effect. I’ve thought through the consequences of a “disaster” scenario where a child relays my joke perfectly to the world’s most ridiculous parent. Worst case, a weird conversation, slap on the wrist, and you learn something important about who you’re willing to tolerate in your youth-development mining of funds.

Also, it’s not “politics” or an “opinion” to be concerned about extra-judicial disappearing of citizens. Why isn’t that the thing?

It will always be the one talking about it, acknowledging the depth of the problem, the broader context, that gets pilloried. Because I’m ambivalent enough about the contexts in which I’ll act like the court jester, there will always be a passable normative argument against anything I could say. Surely, someone, somewhere, will think of the children! As if our decades-long march away from standards, respect, and individuality are incidental and not concerted policy efforts. As if they aren’t a means to a financial and reputational end foundationally.

[1196] Baby, Thinking Of You Keeps Me Up All Night

I’ve been finding it incredibly hard to focus. I’ve had much on my mind. I’ve felt “inspired.” I’ve felt almost incapable of talking about it at length or capturing it. I’m feeling myself discover an instinct for “later” or that my time, remotely free in any way, is too precious to meander through. This is an auto-pilot place. This is a place I otherwise tend very hard try not to occupy.

I’m in this place because I don’t find much of anything remotely appealing about my job and the ways I’m spending most of my time. This week, for example, I’ve been babysitting Y kids for 8 hours a day at “camp,” or, a gym area their parents leave them in all day. I’m not a kid guy. I don’t have some visceral feeling about them one way or another, but the facts about kids just don’t appeal to me. They’re gross, often very very dumb, and I get a level of internally shutting down and disenfranchisement when I have to repeat myself indefinitely in service to something I don’t really care about in the first place.

I’m at this job, truly, because it pays, and for no other reason. It barely pays. It’s an hour away from home. I drive there in a truck. When I’m not stuck at camp, the hours are less miserable, but I’m still marooned an hour away if I don’t want to wear my car down and burn that much more gas trying to go home. I’m also at this job because nothing in life has made sense for my entire adult one. My degree and education haven’t meant shit. My pay has never matched what I’ve contributed. My life has been a series of tactical decisions to try and emulate “normal” for someone of a middle-class background and above-average drive or intelligence, but I look like an arbitrary disingenuous slug who “chooses” one ill-fitting role after another to suffer.

Meanwhile, I’m gorging on information about, essentially, not just the decline of my country, but overall fall of man who can’t be bothered to swallow facts about it anymore than they will any other piece of nonconforming information. If I spend an hour listening to Leonard Leo point fingers and claim his magic sky-daddy thoughts are an intrepid march through history fighting back the strangleholds of liberalism…I have a lot of thoughts, retorts, instincts…and they all have stay bottled up so I can go inside and tell a 6-year-old to stop picking his nose for the 27th time.

I’m still the kind of person that can’t shut it off. I have to keep listening, learning, trying to wrap my head around the broader contexts and weigh them against what I think I can or can’t do within my own. I’m increasingly fascinated with language and how it’s used to justify abject atrocity and immorality. We lob the accusation of employing propaganda, but I see a much more specific pattern play out routinely colloquially.

Here, we’ll get messy. I want to start parsing out some ideas about what I perceive as a generalized habit for word-salad. I also want to speak to and highlight that, in this very moment, competing with the ability of me to do so is an array of things wholly unrelated to the task.

You can probably skip this paragraph. I’m listening to a new Linkin Park song. I’ve got 2 episodes of things to complete. I had to stop and shit. I’ve had a large hard-drive fail and have been experimenting with ways to revive it and/or back it up over the course of at least a week now. Without fail, I get several questions and topics I’d like to explore with an AI chatbot on my drives home. I want to keep looking for remote jobs. I have muscle tension I spent a long time driving a backbuddy into yesterday, and want to keep the war going. I’m itchy. I’m dehydrated and have no substantive food at home. My cat just left after insisting on attention. My head hurts a little. I’ll have tasks in Last War to complete in a couple hours. I need to complete The Last of Us Part 2 before the show starts back up. I want to search for missing pieces of my drum set, buy a bass, and several woodworking machines. My roof is falling apart. The weather is suggesting I could start back up with outdoor projects like a catio and my wood-pallet fence. I want to shower. I have a handful of dishes. I want to do some rearranging of my space. I need to put away laundry. I want to look up things to do this weekend. I have a consolidated debt payment looming. My cat just came back.

Okay, now the messy “serious” project. I’m intrigued by how often, be it the rich person, or the “crazy” person, conceive of themselves as fundamentally correct. That seems to be the first unifying thing. They’re talking with a confidence that no conscious being should ever possess. It’s what immediately puts me on edge when I’m listening to someone’s “grand theory of everything,” because that’s the next step. If they get asked about one thing, it becomes an answer about “everything.” “Yes” and “no” become the hardest words to ever pronounce, because that would betray the project and purpose of speaking altogether. That purpose, the third thing, is to keep things abstract and obscure.

“Expert” bullshitters do this as fluently as breathing. All it takes to be an expert is a propensity to keep talking. There is no end but yours. If yours doesn’t “make sense,” well, keep talking until it does, or you’ve worn down your opponent, or claim within your context It’s the most sense anyone has ever made about anything.

My hackles raise when certain words with certain characteristics get employed that really highlight this. Leo, reflexively, likes to blame “liberals” or “the left.” Anyone discussing politics does this as a matter of routine and regular discourse, but sometimes it’s used so pointedly that you get the sense someone has some deep personal slight they suffer by invoking their vague approximation of an enemy. When discussing consequences of who holds power or when, almost never, and I mean nearly never, do people talk about the specific incidents they believe indicate the drama and destruction or folly they’re crusading against. If, somehow, an example is used, it’s hyperbolic, incidental, and likely adjacent to their, seeming, broader point, but probably incredibly fuzzy on important details.

I think about when the shoe is on my foot. If I want to argue about “conservative” policy, I point to dead wannabe moms. That’s a kind of horror I don’t feel needs to be massaged into something “persuadable.” If you can’t wrap your head around that stupid, preventable, tragedy, I don’t think you’re someone interested in human morality or real conversation. I’m not going to make a sign and decry hypocrisy. I want you to sit within the death you create by pretending your position is less batshit than it is.

I know your sky-daddy is fickle and based on your feelings, not some shared reality we’ll all get to access the harder you push your dogma.

This is something that annoys me about The Free Press and “good faith arguments” between ideologues. They’re both doing the same thing, talking past each other with the same rhetorical flourishes disguised as expertise or evidence. And we let it pass because we don’t recognize or know how it works or how to speak better. They’re talking like us! They’re only saying things we either vehemently believe or don’t already! Bari tells you, if this conversation made you think, infuriated you, etc., write us and subscribe! The bitch knows what she’s doing, keeping the flame war alive, peppering in a reasonable person or two, and polishing her, “No no, I’m the reasonable middle!” crown until it blinds.

Caricature is a key component. Any time someone bemoans the “radical” or the “ist” and “isms,” you might as well shut your brain off. Individual actions and culpability don’t exist. Direct cause and effect can’t even be inferred. All you get are “historically” or “things” that “trend” or major institutional bodies taking the flak for the individuals and lobbyists that populate them. It’s one of the reasons I’m so enthused by the Atl National Parks people publishing everyone’s names fucking things up with DOGE. “DOGE” is an idiotic idea abused by both right and left to pretend it’s carrying out a reasonable idea. It’s an abstraction that is both boogeyman and savior, thus, it’s incoherent to invoke it. Tell me who it just killed, disenfranchised, or starved. Tell me the specific programs that might have, in fact, been corrupt and wasteful. “DOGE” doesn’t mean anything but what you want it to when you wish to argue with someone unwilling to hear you in the first place.

Materially, in spite of the “first-world” version of it, my whole adult life has been treading water. I couldn’t do less for myself and still have “just enough” to, if I were a normal person, “hope” and “hang on” and “get by” until my years of angst and resentment tickle me into laughing way too hard and with a painful growl for fascism. My country is in severe decline. The voices tasked with describing the hows and why are woefully inadequate. Modernity in its messaging and technology compounds our problems with communication incalculably.

I can’t save, because my car will shit the bed, or pipes explode, or I’ll get sick, and that money will be gone instantly. In the meantime, I’ll develop whatever you wish to call the complex of spending too much time alone eating ramen noodles is. I’ve somewhat gone the other direction in trying to indulge while my time is short, and that’s proven useful for coping, but doesn’t alleviate the fundamental state of existence. I will never see enough concerts to feel good about not getting paid enough for my time, effort, and experience. I will never listen to an hour or two of someone playing apologetic games for their power, our self-destruction, and myopic disregard for shared reality.

I can’t build, often because I need to spend that vast majority of the time it would take to do so to make money. What I do build is rough because I don’t have conditions that would allow me to become a master. What I don’t want to do is develop a resentful complex about the things I build, because they are direct evidence of a capacity that is otherwise hidden or muted.

I can’t play, because I don’t feel the spirit of it. Sure, I’ll play a game with the kids or something. I don’t want to. I’m not having fun. They’re not doing it right or even trying. I’m not even really contributing because they’re kids, I can, and have, hurt them accidentally but turning it up to 3% of what I might with an adult. Or what about music? How many songs do you need to hear about being bored, tired, and uninspired? Wanna hear me almost nail riffs and just-not-quite produce the vocals correctly? I can add a $99 40−hour production course and $5,000 lessons with Gaga’s touring guitarist to the things I’ll never buy or have the time for.

I bought 4 more videogames a few weeks ago. It felt like an act of rebellion. I made some money, dammit! I can spend it! I can spend it on 4 games for 4 different systems, and yes, I own all these systems! How many cunts walk out of this Disc Replay with 4 different games from 4 different systems!? I’m a unique wasteful idiot!

My life gets reduced to little snapshot incidents like that, mostly around me spending too much for food. I’ll add up everyone that’s been lingering on Amazon and see if I could technically afford it. That’s partly what got me into debt trouble a couple years ago, but after getting to the edge of getting out, I doubled down and spent the debt-money trying to hire people for fundraising/grant writing, building my counseling website, and fees to stay registered and legit.

My along-for-the-ride activity is definitely TV, so now that I’m in the midst of this drive that’s crashed, a hundreds-of-dollars replacement is feeling both vital and necessary to maintaining one of the most reliable and persistent copes/hobbies I have. It would mean, like spending any amount of money always means, that I couldn’t buy anything but gas and food for 2 weeks again, but what else is new? Here, I begin to wonder how many new bank accounts I could open for the $100 to $300 they often offer after you get 2 direct deposits. Because this is how you think when you’re first-world-in-decline poor.

I don’t like that tomorrow is Friday, and every day I’ve worked, even as I’m cursing circumstance as I leave my car and walk to the door, each day has felt “easier.” It’s only because it became familiar. I know which kids are shittier than others. I know what is or isn’t expected of me each hour. I know, eventually, some small amount of money is coming, even if it’s already spent. I can’t get the time back, so there’s something in being able to mourn it that’s more reassuring than suffering its alleged potential.

[1195] Not Like Us

If I were to lay claim to a sort of “super power,” it would be in pattern recognition. Specifically, linguistic ones. I only do marginally better than average at “official” tests for that sort of thing that might get you into Mensa. I, without having to think particularly hard, can recognize how someone is using words. I can tell when they’re batshit. I can tell when they’re “too smart.” I can tell when they’re scared or insecure. I can tell when they’re lying, most especially when they would deny they are doing so. I know people patterns. I know word patterns. I know how they work together.

This is a pretty big, bold, and vague claim on its face. My grandma was 9 for 10 in guessing who was on the phone before picking up the call. It’s a little like if she were arguing the “intellectual” place where her intuition came from. Arguably, she was only getting called by the usual amount of people at their handful of times they might usually call. There was a pattern, but to anyone watching, it might look like a kind of voodoo. I think whatever pattern she was privy to is one we could all see, and any ones I claim to notice, you could too.

Smart people. Smart people are the worst. Smart people have a habit of thinking they are the only one who is smart. They use this instinct to think it grants them license to engage in any number of unwise behaviors. I have a kid in my YMCA program who scored off the charts on some IQ test. I clocked him early in him trying to respond to my new direction for the space in a proactive way. Ultimately, he’s still a child, so he’s also been the one to steal from another child and get caught, is bossy and mean to younger kids who might annoy him, and wholly embodies the word “cringe” when you consider a 5th or 6th grade boy in the abstract.

As a smart kid, he acts as highlighter for what I might observe in smart adults. Which smart adults am I taking in? It’s political podcasts. It’s debates. It’s intellectuals interviewing Ph.D.s from the bowels of academic departments. So many, so smart, particularly in their realms, and then they invariably step over the line to draw broader inferences. Often said, it’s a very specific tone of confidence, that always makes me go “eeeehhhhhh.”

When I listen to smart people, I look for “wise” qualifiers. There’s a class of by-the-numbers Youtube personalities that will give you incredible breakdowns of some social or political phenomenon. They read the bills, site their sources, and are as accurate or relevant as any “expert” you might conceive of in an old-world framework. I’ll think to follow them or subscribe when my instinct about what I hope they’ll say at some point shows up by surprise. One recently detailed Tesla’s magnificent fall and towards the end of the video, wisely, said, “Now now, you’re not the first one who thought it’s time to short the fuck out of Tesla stock, and it’d take one tweet to wipe out your investment.”

I appreciate when someone can fluidly and matter-of-factly arrive at appropriate levels of caution. He wasn’t trying to contribute to a frenzy, he was trying to inform.

Contrast someone like him with what I’ll call “convoluted” or “masquerading” people. These people, desperately, want to be smart. They might have an aggressive ADD or anxious condition. They might have too good of memories. Their brains work, too well, and they find ways to exercise them that have absolutely nothing to do with being smart or wise. This is the pundit or apologist. What they long for is to belong, so their capacity for “reason” is shaped by whatever tribe they most identify with at the time. A lot of incredibly weird people like your Stephen Millers or Ben Shapiros occupy this world. The popularity of levying “cuck” and “simp” are the ironic lashing out of their resented scarlet letters.

What I think is the most prominent pattern of both types above is the utter denial of and then reshapping of words. A smart person can get away with providing a nuanced, bullshit, way of describing their circumstances or responsibility to something. A convoluted person will employ 6 logical fallacies in 5 sentences alongside a complete dismissal of the concept of a shared definition or coherent through-line of causation.

It gets exhausting to listen to conversations that go something like this:

“There’s bloat in the federal government, and people are concerned about wasteful spending.”

“Which departments are wasting and on what? Which survey says how many people are concerned, and about what?

“Only an asshole like you would just disregard the waste and defend DEI while these grifters and entitled others destroy the fabric of our nation and routinely piss on our Judeo-Christian Values; I, for one, believe in freedom and lower costs and bringing back manufacturing, unlike the liberals with their open border policy and men competing in girls sports.”

A convoluted person is perfectly ambivalent about numbers. A smart person might weaponize them in a way that serves their interests. In either iteration, you’re getting someone concerned with themselves, their emotional satiation, more than any concern for reality or the truth. Further, convoluted and/or smart people will jump on their numbers or “arguments” to conclude that, no, *they are in fact speaking in good faith!* And there’s much to be learned in an “honest debate” with them. At which point I dutifully give up and write another blog.

I consider these patterns because I hear them on both right and left media. Bari Weiss is as circularly reasoned in abstract solidarity simping with Batya Ungar-Sargon as the Pod Save America guys are in their smug self-righteousness in brushing against anything Bill Maher says. I’ve listened to uber-nerds absolutely spiral when provoked by Michael Shermer or Coleman Hughes to expand beyond their expertise. Everyone mentioned routinely slips into “There there, I’m kind of above it all” pretentious space and utilize vague smart-sounding generalized sentiments to get away with pretending neutrality or that “we’re all friends here.”

What starts to become clear is that there are no shared “values” beyond the ones loosely associated with being “in the conversation” or popular enough to stay in the public eye. The people concerned with the actual truth of whatever the matter are out studying it, or organizing it, or living it - they’re not arguing it. A segment from Jon Stewart talking about being glib and ignorant about distinguishing that from what he does will always stick out to me. It dawned on him after fighting with 9/11 responders to get healthcare. That’s, primarily, why we’re suffering the fallout of people who truly do live within their horrible value systems and those opposed don’t understand the “resistance” doesn’t even value doing so.

Wrapping your head around smart and convoluted people patterns is one thing, but then you also just have people acting as animals do. Those are the kinds of patterns any social worker, counselor, or busy-body could tell you about. We have reliable statistics on how long it takes to get out of spousal abuse dynamics. We know the reported versus suspected rates of violence, sexual or otherwise. We watch the consequences of in-group/out-group thinking play out at every friendly competition.

Many get dismissive and condescending wishing to write this off as “dumb” people. It’s certainly not someone like them who would behave in such ghastly ways. What’s seemingly always missing from a discussion of class warfare or inequality is the genuine opinions anyone holds about the ones beneath them. Those opinions gets churned through the convoluted pundits and weaponized by the smart people because, wouldn’t you agree it’s their fault, they’re lazy, and they’re motivated to self-destruction? The smart thing to do is avoid the subject and not pretend you can help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.

Vibes. You want to feel smart. You want to feel like you belong. You want to convince yourself that you’re worthy, contributing, or otherwise inherently meaningful to whatever you’re involved in. Any and all means of finding and maintaining that vibe is the pattern you will succumb to. That might mean staying too cozy against a wholly catastrophic family or partner dynamic. That might mean swallow every spoonful of shit your job hands you. That might be engrossing yourself in some hobby or community at 6th-grade boy level of intensity indefinitely. I think it’s your tailored propaganda soup you become a glutton for. Bitch, don’t kill my vibe.

For the myriad patterns I claim to see, important ones in myself are in how I destroy or utilize them. I’m perfectly aware I have zero capacity to “convince” anyone of anything. Convoluteds are keen to hear “arguments” where none are being made, but I assure you, I’m attempting to articulate and explain for myself. It’s been, not precisely a preoccupation, but a soft goal of mine to figure out ways to ride a vibe without exploiting it. I feel my house parties did this. I feel creating the coffee shop did to. The freedom and comforts I pursue as a result of my living situation I’m trying to extend to my working one. I was looking forward to seeing where I could go with it at the Y before the power to do so quit.

I used to routinely kill vibes. I’d be “too smart” in a situation that needed no words. I’d argue like a pundit for something fundamentally abstract or less true than I insisted. I was masquerading as someone more concerned or knowledgeable than I was. That’s a hard thing to notice and break because it’s not insincere, it just doesn’t know how to be more honest. That’s perhaps the extent of the grace I might extend to the Batyas and Dinesh D’Souzas of the world. My Y kids have no idea what they’re saying or where it’s coming from, full stop. They just talk, too loud, or dance, or run, and play with the noises we call words. You can’t tell me merely surviving a few decades longer magically grants you the ability to escape their pattern and make any sense.

I mean, these writings kill the reddit vibe, indeed the very infinite-scroll nature of the internet and social media altogether. This isn’t a place to genuinely introspect or connect with other thoughtful people. It also can’t be, you’ll argue to, certainly not me, but no one in particular. And you’ll invite a pattern of inane internet banter and depending on my mood I will devolve along with you. But that’s only if you break the pattern of fundamental silence.

[1194] Who's The Boss

I think there’s an incredible amount talked about “post-truth” or “postmodern” or “information silos” or “reinforcing feedback loops” or some such sentiment that it’s, seemingly impossible, to get on the same page and society is tearing at the seams. From our phones to the internet in general, we can look at anxiety/depression levels to genocides and find a way to blame the avatar for “the other” and their personal universe that is wrought with so much corruption and contradiction.

Whether this framing is deliberate or instinctive, I find it fundamentally incorrect. I think we dress up our inherent corrupt and contradicting natures with ever-complex sounding jargon. There are several ways I’ve tried to articulate this, often involving traffic. Your car doesn’t run on milk. Most people most of the time are driving on the “correct” side of the road for their country. Those rules carry across state lines, through “red” and “blue” counties and across neighboring countries. All things being true about how concepts get construed, hundreds of millions of us at a time demonstrate an active shared understanding of something.

There's an uncomplicated incontrovertible nature of reality that sometimes sends its message via measles. Concurrent to the idea that we’re, somehow, “post” anything that can be universally grasped, there’s the idea that people vote against their interests and “don’t care” until something personally affects them. Again, consider the framing, only this time substitute a child in the example. I work with one special-needs child, in particular, who depending on the day, his medication, or his sleep, can go from “annoying but fairly manageable” to “credible danger,” be it in getting physical with staff, or in recently impulsively eloping after a privileged plaything that was taken away.

This child, too earnestly, wants “something” every day, be it glue he plays with to pick at instead of his skin, a specific toy, to remain inside, or his tablet. You’d be foolish and incoherent to say, even on the days when his behavior isn’t acute, that he’s “voting against” his access to those things in misbehaving. In fact, he barely knows his interests altogether, finding plenty to play with and engage when he’s begrudgingly shuffled outside. He plays with the toys provided in spite of demanding otherwise.

It’s feeding a compulsion to pick; emotional appeasement is what he wants, and is more often than not, a slave to. Neither him nor his amateur helpers really acknowledge or care about how they might contribute to his compulsive or self-destructive behavior because they’re slaves to their own. It’s a hurtful “awww” when they can’t capitulate like a doting mother. Why not? What’s the harm? You can’t expect people living at the (no) mercy of their own issues to articulate or recognize the impact they’re having on others.

In the middle of writing this, I got an email titled “professionalism conversation.” My boss wants to set up a meeting with her and at least one of her bosses to discuss me being CC’d on an email from our adjacent county about our organization’s problems with staffing and child safety. This is on the heals of one of their senior leadership quitting, my friend, who has been giving me the inside dirt on the nature of their laziness and negligence.

In theory, we (as in society) should all want the same thing, right? We want to get paid adequately. We want concerns taken seriously. We want standards and places we can invest in and grow with. I’m exhausted by the constant job shuffle, plugging and unplugging from environments that can get deeply personal pretty quickly, and restarting the task of building rapport or credibility like a military brat. That’s the superficial understanding of people’s professed logic devoid of the emotional undercurrent directing or inhibiting action.

My boss is, undoubtedly, trying to intimidate and following the directive of an insecure, lazy, and mean person at the top who has proven consistently undermining of what our organization can be. It’s “unprofessional” to talk with your coworkers about illegal and negligent moves the company has made. It’s “unprofessional” to have a critical thought about your leadership between your counterparts and share in solidarity with their struggles. Don’t you know? Professional people don’t complain, don’t care, and don’t tell. Keep it in the family.

I’m beyond exhausted with this pattern. I’ve seen it in literally every work environment. They hate when you care, try, fight, organize. We live in a state and country that is actively working to dismantle literally everything that might get you what you deserve for your work and time. It’s so baked into my expectations of work environments, I tell people all along how each part will play out and what will signify my increasingly quick exits. I never, and I mean never, need to dance with some dumbass child offering me condescension and excuses for why they can’t do common sense or give even half a fuck.

I’ve met so many cool coworkers though. I’ve managed to retain at least a handful on the uber-dead facebook. I like to believe there’s some possible reshuffling of circumstance where I’m working with them in different settingson things we can believe in more than tolerate or swallow out of despondent pragmatism.

I don’t think this is more complicated than that. It’s just rather unfortunate, always.

[1193] Housekeeping

Round and round we go.

The reason I take any job is because the alternative reaches an unsustainable turning point. Whether or not I can maintain the kind of fire that sustains entrepreneurial efforts, I still maintain a value for my time that keeps me investing and trying to protect it literally until the last moment where things break. I didn’t dream about being any one of the 20 or so roles I’ve occupied since I was 15. I’ve only modestly enjoyed the perks of privileges that come with each one, and certainly have dozens of pages detailing each nuanced way in which they’ve exhausted me.

It looks like I need to, again, leave a position. I’ve only been here since November, but the cracks showed themselves immediately, and the friend who got me in the door exposed them even deeper. With her now on the way out, the groundwork I was laying to try and turn the job into something I could invest in is functionally dead. What I’m struck by is her perspective, because it so closely mirrors my own across all of my work environments, but it seems to be like a shock or something new to her how she’s been treated and what she’s been met with from her colleagues’ dispositions.

I’ve grown to expect unyielding complacency, excuses, double-speak, placation, condescension, failing-up “leadership,” resentment, undermining, and given I work primarily in fields dominated by women, enough gossip for 100 terrible TV shows. My friend, apparently, has only worked in supportive environments who allowed her to use her brain and skills in ways that could meaningfully contribute to her former work environments. She’s got plenty of general life things on her plate that are well worth her attention that would make any amount of the bullshit she's received acutely painful, but it still feels like it’s even moreso, or like she’s been experiencing a depth of betrayal akin to what I had with college.

Because I took this job out of desperation, I’m not heartbroken about the prospect of leaving it, but it just reopens the wounds that had me desperately searching for any job to begin with. I felt a tingle of panic earlier today at the prospect of returning to the thousand-spam link job boards and wasting hours of my life applying to incorrectly-described jobs with ambivalent leadership and high turnover. This job I’ve described as a bait-n-switch, and my experience is shared by many who have occupied my role and others within the organization. I’m a babysitter, full-stop. And I’ve got people who make it their job to try and dress that up while punishing those who would call for maintaining a standard or growth mindset.

Is it “easy?” Everything is easy if you can shut off your brain and do the arbitrary self-inflicted wounding necessary to meet their demands. Is it “worth it?” I do prefer having an incredibly little amount of money versus zero money, but of course it’s not worth it. If I wasn’t born into this system, it’s not one I would have chosen for myself, and the sacrifices we culturally perpetuate as matter-of-fact I’ve rejected from the moment I could choose drug studies for cash and to live in a shed-house.

Each new work environment I occupy helps round out my perspective as to why “things” work or don’t. Most of the time, I have absolutely no one with any power or inclination to change anything to even discuss the prospect of doing so. I’m about the only person who can even pronounce the word “union,” let alone feel any type of way about what organizing would or could mean. If I do find someone approaching my headspace, they’ve often got their own emotional baggage or family obligations that preclude any appetite for risk or consequences. They’re smart, say, but that also makes them anxious and depressed. Invariably, they’re “normal” with normal expenses and obligations like affording the medicine that allows them the ability to keep walking their psychological razor’s edge.

Here, there was a chance. A slim one, but a chance nonetheless. It was predicated on using the full extent of our respective positions of power to begin saving money and making moves with the blunt instrument of numbers and story of consequences when you actually follow policy. The “stuck” corporate-speakers and dead-eyed overwhelmed or incompetent middle-managers who would disrupt it could have been over-ridden by my friend. Without her, I’m again a baby fish swimming in murderous shark waters of the stupid, unwilling, and afraid. I’ve laid a lot of groundwork with my people about how things could be, and demonstrated the effectiveness of my perspective at my individual site. It’s over-stating to say it might amount to “nothing” now, but it feels that way.

At scale, we’re also at this inflection point culturally. Are we going to stay and fight? Are we going to resign ourselves or the business-as-usual chaos of those incidentally in charge of the “most feelings” they’ve violently weaponized against all sense and order? It’s hard for me not to mourn any loss of potential where I’m a player in the game, but it takes on an extra brutality when I map it onto why “things” at the cultural level feel like they’re in perpetual failure. Again, my curiosity about my friend’s experience shows up. What has, so far, been so insulated from the decline? Or is it perhaps just easier to mask in different settings? Me doing “poor people” jobs meant I never got too much of the hoity-toity posture as part of the culture I was working within more than from its “leaders,” forever in quotes. The types that all read the same 4 most popular business books about how to be a Good Human Manager.

I ran from my computer today. I went and got food and parked in my work parking lot hours early to listen to podcasts and write this. I don’t want to feel marooned looking for work again. I don’t want to spend months endearing myself to a new crop of listless and dejected chit-chatters who have no fight or broader sense of responsibility to themselves or the world. I don't want to tuck another crop of names and faces into a, “I’m sorry I don’t remember you even though we saw each other every day for months” folder. Because at this point it’s hundreds of clients or co-workers who would never text me on a friendly level or to do anything like eat or bowl.

I'm destined to keep looking. I refuse to be the person waiting for someone like me to show up. Those "nice-enough" or "well-meaning" husks who would be just as content following the mind-control of a Tiktok algorithm as they would whatever you propose. There's a ton more to say and this has been incredibly rushed, but I need to go.

[1192] Babble Babble Bitch Bitch

I need to try to identify another pattern. A few days ago I felt I had good examples at different scales of what I was looking for. Of course, I got busy or distracted, and now I need to try and claw away what I thought I had from my latest mental fog.

I’m often curious about “transformation” or “evolution” in people. Elon Musk is someone I felt immediately drawn to when I first saw him on like 60 minutes back in college matter-of-factly talking about what society needed to do to not kill itself. As someone who considers himself an adept reader of people’s bullshit, I didn’t sense that he was coming from anywhere insincere, and at the time, the proof was what had so far been accomplished at his companies.

Jordan Peterson also occupied a prominent spot in me being interested in what he had to say or how he arrived there. There’s hundreds of hours of him not being a Christian or fascist apologist, notably, before his star began to rise out of control and the peaks of his illness were reached.

In my life, I reflect on what brought me together with girlfriends, my best friends, work cohorts, or what I thought constitutes my family.

We’ve gone through, at least a rhetorical revolution, as it pertains to the fluidity of identity, the loci of power, and the nature of harm or what will save us.

Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve, overwhelmingly so, pretty much staid the same. That isn’t to say I haven’t “matured” or “tempered” or found ways to better emotionally regulate. It doesn’t mean I’ve continued to fight as vociferously for causes or actions I was particularly naive about. It just means my broadest lens has focused around the same things in spite of my environment.

There’s something that feels stable in me that I don’t recognize in the same way from other people.

The thing I do recognize in others is what we’re witness to from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, or our exes, but specifically the ones that, on paper and emotionally, made the most sense. The nature of the transformation feels almost impossible to account for, and people seem to only try decades later or after all the major players have died.

The word that keeps creeping in is “honesty.” The nature of the change I believe has to do with how you understand that word. I think most people understand it as some extension of the phrase, “Your feelings are valid.” It’s a very complicated and disingenuous phrasing that hides its arbitrary redundancy. I would say instead, “You have feelings.” When I see people struggle with what to do with their feelings, it’s often they wish to automatically suppress and obscure them. Perhaps that first phrasing is trying to make a persuasive argument that ignites your capacity to feel them altogether. I don’t know that it’s working.

I honestly don’t believe Elon Or Jordan started evil. I think they believe they are “deathly” honest. I think I had the same complex when I was younger, thinking “harsh” or “real” expressions of my opinion were the same thing as being honest. I would apply one exacting mode of determining the “objective truth” of a situation, and let the consequences be what they may. I wasn’t feeling necessarily insecure or scared or much of anything at all. I just didn’t care, because I was “right.” I wasn't prepared to accept, let alone be interested in embodying, the depth of my existential ignorance.

I think each step on the path to evil is the avoidance or ignoring of your conscious. You avoid and ignore by leaning into emotional expressions that act as justification. Whether it’s John Oliver tearing up on air, Jordan Peterson’s snarl, or your car-ranting TikTok star wanna-be, it’s the same dance away from what a more honest and accountable expression would look like. I think Elon knows the math doesn’t add up in crippling federal institutions for anyone but himself. I think Jordan knows it’s an embarrassing fascist inversion of the X-Men to compare them to Trump acolytes. I think the daily devotional resigned sentiments offered to me about the nature of a work environment, the future, or our responsibility to fix or work differently are driven by the same mechanism.

I don’t get the impression people know what they can trust about themselves. Or, they only trust the worst things about themselves. Or, they only trust their woefully incomplete conception about how the worst things about them actually play out. They know their anxiety is going to win. They know if they try they’ll fail and it will all have been a waste. They know which thing after thing doesn’t matter. They know they’re going to get too tired, or distracted, or someone in their life is going to object and dissuade. I’ve had thousands of conversations about what isn’t possible or what someone isn’t really like or capable of for every one about limitless potential for anything besides chaos.

I feel they’re all fundamentally dishonest. I think we’ve achieved our current levels of decadence because critical masses of people dragged perhaps their own predilections to lie to themselves kicking and screaming into a future they otherwise believed could be worked and fought for. I don’t think that internal investigation or discussion even has to do with the future. I think it has to do with asking yourself, what else are you missing from “right now.” What isn’t making its way into your conversation that’s just as true as the details of your complacent or complicit rut?

I think for Elon there’s a discussion about compulsivity, the coldness autism can inspire, and the danger of ego. I think for Jordan it’s his desperate longing to fit into something greater than he’s achieved through being an intellectual or via accident in bonding with his wife as children. I think he knows his story isn’t remotely typical or realistic, but he sounds so sure of himself when he’s excoriating modern attitudes and practices, no? At home, it was fairly easy for me to see the differences in disposition and, let’s say moral core, as to why a relationship wasn’t going to work. With family, I can see the placating apologetics employed to keep the peace. The catch-phrases at DCS and now the YMCA are all to do with “care” and “safety” devoid of discussions about demonstrated betrayals.

Capital or attention-based “success” is a unique form of capture. We’ve never had the kind of chance to transcend the lanes we’re born into that we do today, and we’ve never been able to witness the transformation so closely. Mostly, we’ve just been captured by our family, region, or work culture. Now, with so many new avenues competing for our attention and our unwillingness or inability to articulate how they work, I think we default to angry ambivalent animalistic survival modes of expression. That’s “me and mine.” That’s apologetics for sin. That’s cliches and average days because nothing more could or should be expected.

You can go back to my first writing, deeply emotional and angst-ridden 15-year old me lusting and confused and still find the things about me I consider my stabilizing core. I tread in obscenity and trying to be light-hearted. The title is:

“If You’re A Girl You Better Fucking Read This”

I’m curious and constantly asking questions.

“Okay, so this is like a call-out for the inner workings of the womanly mind.”

I’m responding to what I see as a self-destructive pattern.

“Over and over, I talk to my friends who have been in relationships that do nothing but fuck them square in the ass, and despite my warnings and suggestions, they still fawn over the assholes that fucked them over.”

I’m offering concrete examples of the behavior I think is wrong.

“If your boyfriend makes you cry, orders you to do things, or makes your friends and family uncomfortable... leave his ass now. It's plain and simple.”

Today, I stop being so prescriptive, and have had hundreds more interactions with people about domestic violence or emotionally manipulative dynamics, but at bottom, it speaks to a core belief I don’t think is unreasonable. It’s not evidence of a healthy dynamic to me if that’s the nature of yours.

I continue to lay out my “answers” and “harsh truths” about 90% of guys being in it for the pussy, and attempting to anticipate the feedback that often comes in from questioning girls as to why they’re excusing something.

I didn’t know the word “limerence” back then. I wouldn’t have copped to the writing being a passive aggressive way to trigger some form of introspection in my targets or side-building as I looked for ways to air dirty laundry. I knew my feelings were intense, I didn’t know how to address them, and it was occupying my thoughts in an unsustainable and compulsive way. Something broke, so I started to search through writing. I didn’t find a way to talk her into dating me. I found the world of information that wasn’t yet informing how I could understand myself against or in service to that world.

The fervor and fascism of pop-cultists and apologists rides the kind of energy I was on at 15. It’s totalizing. It’s self-reinforcing. It’s an artificial motivation bred from untempered inarticulate ignorance. It’s probably where the wisdom of “hate the sin, not the sinner” comes from and why so many are compelled by the idea that they have to give up their pathological behavior to something external. What’s juicier than the idea that the absolutely necessary sacrifice to find salvation is His problem, not mine?

I had to give up being “convinced.” I had to stop pretending I knew the truth in any form that I wasn’t actively manifesting or participating in. As long as I work, then the “deepest” or “most practical” truth is that I will more likely get the consequences of that work. If I’m working on the wrong shit, I will compound my problems. If I “believe” that which I’m unwilling to fight for or achieve, I’m playing a rhetorical game with myself in order to avoid responsibility. If I’m unwilling to define the nature of that work, from writing, to advocating and speaking at all, then I’m at the mercy of the people or plans that can account for my chaotic drag on the future.

No one is coming to save you. I don’t think you could recognize who’s even trying. They also can’t hammer for you what you need nailed to a cross. It’s not immigrants or trans people. It’s not the concepts of diversity, equity, or inclusion. It’s whatever is keeping you from being consistently curious, concerned about those getting fucked with, or capable of building the case that doesn’t depend on how passionately you can scream or cry through it.

[1191] One More

There’s a part of attempting to accomplish something I don’t speak much about. It’s there before you start, while you’re doing it, and sometimes after you’re done. The language that arises is different at each stage, but it all centers around a fundamental question, “What’s the point?”

Figuring out “the point” is the work of tying your emotional reality to your actions. This is no small feat, particularly when so much of our modern existence is hijacked and smoothed over. In the past, if you didn’t immediately set to work, you’d starve, or freeze, or be eaten. Today? You can go months or years garbling your chemical systems about where to act as you slowly kill yourself moment to moment.

You can then try to supplement “the reasons” or the manner in which you get something done. This is the realm of apologetics. This is where you leverage language to justify. You “deserve” a lot in this space. It’s why you can spend a little extra on the indulgence, for the hundredth time, or forgo the difficult conversation that would cause you emotional distress. It’s where you try to ride reactionary momentum or a manic high. It’s the oddly comforting hug of a depressive episode.

I just got some clothes put away that have been sprawled out for weeks. I don’t usually have clothes sprawled out for weeks, and it was mildly emotionally taxing to navigate the chaos I was allowing. Until 20 minutes ago, the emotional weight of contemplating and engaging that task was trumped by an ambivalent attitude I was taking towards their impact. I was “too tired.” “It doesn’t matter.” “It’s not that serious.” “I’ll do it later.” All, just true enough to serve the purpose of delaying what I know would make me feel better.

I’m someone who likes to have something else going on while he’s engaged in mundane or time-consuming things. I want to drive with the podcast at 2x speed. I was hanging my band t-shirts while watching a Frontline episode about Tibet. I’m rarely watching TV without playing a phone game. I read “the classics” or about how to grow mushrooms while taking a shit. Time always feels like it’s running out, and the majority of what I wish I knew or experienced is something I wish I knew or experienced already. I’m, desperate, to “arrive.”

Intellectually, I know I never will. Emotionally, it happens with snapshot moments when I look at the area I just organized or thing I just built. It happens when I get my shows watched and sorted. It happens when I move one thing of a certain type to a place of other things like it. The “point” is the “act of organizing.” Will I ever rearrange my room in the perfect way? Of course not. Will I ever satiate my quest to watch “all” of television? Of course not. That I’m embedded into a medium and shuffling around its variables is the point.

“Shuffle” doesn’t mean something isn’t being or can’t be rendered destroyed. If I allow myself to get overtly wrapped into my TV shows, maybe that irreparably chips away at my desire and capacity to seek out other people. If I get consumed by an increasingly pathological desire to collect and sort, now the realm of “things” are telling the story of their power over me. What I’m invariably doing in my shuffle is trying to sort some confounding feeling that doesn’t allow me to sit pretty and get comfortable being “stagnant.”

I have evidence of my aberrant or “other” kind of nature literally surrounding me. I have home infrastructure I’ve built looking down. I have a dozen instruments inviting me to play. I have 9 screens each with their own ask for a certain kind of attention. I will, theoretically, never be able to “erase” the evidence of who I am or how I operate. That is, unless I stop. Unless I look around at what I have achieved and say, “Good enough.”

Now, for someone who feels stuck in amateur land making just enough out of the resources he allocates somewhat haphazardly, yeah, I have enough to “get by.” I can make shitty demos of music. I can put together decent wood work, especially if I bother to take my time. I can fluidly do a fair amount on my computer and in navigating software. I am perfectly capable of attempting to hunker down and save most of my money so I can see cheap shows occasionally, versus ones I’d kill for regularly.

It’s not real stability though. It’s not evidence of what I aspire to or would dream about. It’s treading water, getting lucky, and constantly crossing your fingers that it won’t go catastrophically wrong and erase everything. Real stability would be my job paying me at least twice as much as it does. It would be the barriers to running my non-profit being illegal to maintain by the monopolies that protect their access to your insurance and addictions. It would be a friend and family group not so selfish, exhausted, or exploited to engage in higher-order goals together. It would be a persistent practical goal that exists every day reasonably achieved through reasonably persistent effort.

Instead, we have, “Play the game this specific way indefinitely, or die.” You work, or you starve, or you become a leach in the minds of everyone wholly unsympathetic to your hunger. You accept what’s on offer because the punishment for defying and organizing you haven’t adequately prepared for. I’ve been hearing so much lately about how you “can’t give up in advance.”

What? That’s all I’ve watched people do my entire life. Give up to the complacent or complicit emotions. Give up to their gods. Give up to their bureaucratic overlords and technocratic oligarchs. Let’s occupy Wall Street, but not a goddamn history or finance book. Let’s scream that black lives matter, and give the keys to embezzlers. Let’s fight for $15 as though it wasn’t supposed to be $21 at the time, and even higher now.

I emotionally resist doing the “small” things in my life because I struggle to connect them to the bigger things. Before he went full fascist, I was compelled by the “clean your room” stuff of Jordan Peterson. It made sense to me to create a certain order in your own life before you presume to wish to tackle the larger mess. What are you supposed to make of that sentiment from someone who clearly hasn’t resolved their own abhorrent feelings with regard to power and control? Was that his desperate plea for a reality he doesn’t fundamentally believe in nor can ever realize?

My reframing involves elevating the “small” things into the big things. I’m not cleaning my room so I can, in fact, tackle the large things. I’m cleaning my room for it’s own sake. It makes me feel better. The better I feel, the less I feel tempted to apologize for fascist behavior. The less I want to lie. The less I want to escape and adopt a strident face as I decry my righteousness against your…whatever it is I pretend to know you’re doing. I want to organize my work because I want to enjoy more than resent how I spend my time each day, not because I want to eventually find myself in a zero sum epic battle with corporations where everyone on the planet gets unionized the day before I die.

There’s a vital distinction between “norms” and “policy.” When you make it normal to violate policy, you’ve broken a mechanism that might otherwise help to stabilize and hold accountable what you’re trying to organize. If you have a lot of high-minded ideas about your behavior, voting patterns, or hierarchy of concerns, but your norm is to eschew evidence or define honesty, nothing you say about how things are “supposed to” work makes sense. I think in order for me to remain basically coherent, I need digressions like this. I need to see my reasoning play out beat by beat. Am I making assumptions and judgments based on vibes to claim some broader factual truth? If so, hopefully incidentally and accidentally in a way that can be quoted and refuted.

I couldn’t even eat pizza and hang laundry until I wrote at least this much 5 hours ago. I’m back, not because I was empty or any less antagonized by thought slurry. I want to “get more done” with my day. I want to connect to it in a way that doesn’t have me reflexively resisting it, thinking it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t be able to find the meaning behind what I’m doing if I wasn’t willing to look.

[1190] Begging For It

It’s just before noon on Sunday. I don’t have anything particularly pressing to do. I learned yesterday a belt sander I ordered was “delivered” to a tree in the middle of my drug-addled neighbor’s yard, so naturally when I went to retrieve it, it was probably hours into its way to being pawned. A few minutes ago, I received a text asking if I wanted to work from 5:30-8:30 last minute. I don’t, but there’s a broader political game I’m playing at work that it might positively influence to do so.

I’ve had around 3 “acute” flare ups of stomach-dropping anxiety over the last few days, the most recent maybe 2 hours ago. I’m a person who, in some form or fashion, wants to feel like he’s being “productive.” Sometimes that looks like extra sleep. Most days it’s trying to wrap as many little errands into whatever else I’m doing. The more free I feel, it bleeds into exploring hobbies or ever-fledgling business ideas. The belt-sander was going to speak to one of those, but because I’m so rarely home anymore, what I hoped to start yesterday will no doubt be pushed another week away.

While I idle and contemplate, I scroll and copy text into Natural Reader from articles about the state of the country. I’ve got Severance paused 7 minutes from the end of the latest episode. I’ve got a text half-written to my handyman friend about getting my water fixed and turned back on. There’s nothing “calling to me” beyond an encroaching desire to shit, complicated by the fact that my water isn’t on, and composting isn’t my favorite way to spend time. I have leftover pizza I should eat before a headache sets in.

All of that feels like things to mention in order to “get them out of the way.”

I have one brain. Every impulse or occupation of that brain is on the same plain. I could reroute my day towards unanticipated work, or slide right back into my couch and fall asleep. I could bemoan the rise of fascism, or play my guitar. The inherent conflict in how or whether I express my values can reduce me to a paralyzed haze, or matter-of-factly give me a reasonable sounding road to trod along. I’m presented in every moment of every day with the opportunity to reflect my understanding of myself, my values, or what I think is the right thing to do right now.

When I don’t know, I write. There is no perfect logic that would justify keeping to myself and pretending my options are more limited than they are. I’m not suffering ambivalent feelings about how I might spend the rest of my day. I’m certainly not yet feeling “motivated.” There are little organizational things I could do around my house. I don’t anticipate anyone reaching out to me to do something fun. I suppose I’m feeling decently “selfish.”

I believe your job is one of those things that takes considerably more from you than it could ever give. You’re not just at work the hours you’re there. You have the commute. You have the stress you must decompress from within the amount of sick, personal, and vacation days they see fit. I’m talking about my job right now, and I genuinely hate that. I hate even more that it’s such an all-encompassing substitute for how I might otherwise meaningfully engage my time that there’s a temptation to go.

Thankfully, I was able to dig out the deeper feeling in typing that. I don’t want to go. It wasn’t clear to me whether I might or not until then. If I did go, it would be only after I found and allowed for how much I don’t want to. I don’t want to float through ambiguous space. I don’t need to go to continue my broader political aims. I don’t need to endear myself towards one of the people who will be there I’m looking to subvert. The money will not be worth it. It will mess up my sleep schedule. It will push my willingness and ability to get those little house things done that much further away.

As I look for what to say next, my eyes drift to harrowing news articles about the ongoing fascist chaos. I believe what happens at the macro level is an extension of what’s being experienced in the micro. It’s one of the reasons I belabor each beat of my thoughts and what’s vying for my attention. If I’m a confused chaos agent, things I care about in life will suffer the effects from my chaos. I think you get “strong men” totalitarian waves because you have huge swaths of the population who want a magic daddy to fix all their problems they’ll never bother to own or articulate.

My job, like so many, is poorly organized and run by people who demonstrate immaturity, ambivalence, and exhaustion regularly. You don’t have to do some deep dive into the pathological make-up of the players. It’s the same tendencies and excuses wherever you go. They need people tonight because they are fundamentally stocked with unreliable people. They hired those people with an attitude about hiring concerned only with spot-filling. You don’t need an advanced business degree to know what happens next.

So it goes for our broader social and political environments. We don’t get our thoughts coherently organized around what’s antagonizing us, motivating us, scaring us, or empowering us. We just lay out all the feels in memes, tiktok videos, and shutting off our brains entirely. Always, “the problem” doesn’t exist until we feel it. You love voting for fascism right up until he ends your job? Sweetheart, your job was to never be confused about the nature of fascism in the first place. It still is. You gonna use your extra time to wise up and do better? Or are you so far down the stupid and lazy rabbit hole you’d rather die than face the truth?

You’d think the pandemic would have taught us that with so many dying while so ardently denying the danger. You’d think the alleged science communicators and reporters would have worked that much harder to convey consistent and accurate information as it developed. Instead, we double-down until the handful of people responsible for keeping the train on the tracks get to use their space to exploit and control that much more.

I’m mostly fascinated how I’ve been able to just kind of watch the burn. I think The U.S. is all-but lost, but only because every day most individuals at every opportunity are doing what it takes to stay that way. Most aren’t at Bernie’s rallies. Most aren’t picking up the phone to call and complain. Most aren’t getting detailed and nuanced about how anything actually works. Most aren’t advocating for the dramatic overhauls it would take to rediscover accountability. It’s still buzzwords, clickbait, awkward “stop hitting yourself” responses from the “opposition.”

I might have a chance of being apart of something worthwhile at my job because I work on and account for it each day. What would my effort in service to my country look like otherwise? Pithy and passive facebook comments on my fascist governor’s page? Calls to a full voicemail box? Honking extra aggressively in solidarity with protestors as I drive by? Do I really believe that the local translates to the macro, or do I suffer an ongoing delusion about the butterfly-effect hopes I assume for my potential impact? I think, though, it’s not a “belief.”

I just watch the same patterns, I don’t dictate them. I see what happens when you lie, whether it’s “at the top” or interpersonally. I know how I feel when I’m invited to play along with that game. I know what happens when you offer an excuse versus take responsibility. I know what happens when you can’t be bothered to account for all of the things at play in your brain, so you default to cliches and denial. I know how it plays out practically to be too afraid to speak up, be it to your colleague, or to a corrupted locus of power that would prefer to operate within your ignorance and its ability to intimidate.

I will start “believing” that “we” have anything resembling the tangible and practical capacity to fix or save anything when my day-to-day is more honest and accountable than I’ve been witness to my entire adult life. What happens when I am able to write about all of the things I can reliably trust, that are speaking to my stability and growth, and my ability to invest and see come into fruition? I struggle to even imagine it anymore.

What I can trust is the nature of a handful of individuals in my life. Take notice of the deliberate phrasing in trusting their nature. I can trust that I will continue to take the time to parse out where the heart of my motivations lie. I see an incredible amount of danger and death coming. I don’t feel there’s going to be an adequate response or appropriate lessons learned. I don’t even know that I’ll be able to “escape” so much as attempt to “insulate” to the degree the next pandemic or brown-shirt hoards allow me to.

This is what you asked for in pretending you don’t speak the language of what it takes to survive, let alone live well. You don’t get to engage in apologetics for greed, rape, pride, Nazi salutes, religious zealotry, anti-science “choice,” and held-harmless detached observation and “just asking questions” without an equal and opposite reaction from a cold and ambivalent universe. I may not be able to control the automatic responses in me to the smell of that bullshit soup, but I don’t have to bow at the feet of who’s serving it.

I think it’s time for pizza and laundry.

[1189] Just Dance

 I don't know where I'm going, but I do know how to start.

I'm bad at pretending. That's not the best way to state my perspective on it, but it's the first true way to begin talking about it. I don't feel "good" or "right" when I have to perform contrary to what I think is a "better truth." Let's make this immediately practical so you'll understand.

I lied to one of my bosses today. I didn't want to. I felt morally obliged to. She's not my direct boss, nor do I work with her particularly often. She's one rung higher than me on a bureaucratic ladder of the YMCA. She's, technically, in charge of the "camp" program at one of the locations. I've heard from her boss that she's a perfectly nice person, but a terrible manager. I've experienced this first hand in her woefully inadequate response to children shitting themselves while I attended her site's camp days. Today, I was expected to be at her site, an hour and ten minutes away, for 7 children who had signed up for this day off from school. I was told at 7 PM Thursday that I would need to be there at 10 AM Monday.

Leaving aside that everyone else at my level was otherwise getting a 3-day weekend, the late notice in and of itself is unprofessional and indicative of their broader extreme struggles with communication. I didn't tell a single person about the 7PM email who didn't respond with some version of "Yeah, fuck that." Holding a "camp" for 7 kids is pointless. Telling me, arguably the farthest drive of anyone working for the organization in the entire city, to be the one to occupy a spot is something of an insult to injury. Mentioning that she would be on site for most of the day and spelling my name so catastrophically wrong while simultaneously tagging me with the correct spelling all the more so.

The truth of most organizations is there are terribly managed and arbitrary dictums to navigate all the time. Most people shouldn't lead or don't have what it takes to remain internally and externally coherent long enough to maintain a team that trusts them and vice versa. That's a higher order truth one has to individually navigate. There's a series of increasingly honest discussions you could have about her capacity and the organization's broader responsibility in order to find the coherence you'd hope leadership would espouse. Because you can never trust they will, you get invited to organize, protest, or quit when demands become too much.

I thought to start with the idea of being bad at pretending because it feels like the most persistent truth of my day to day experience. I have to pretend I want to keep "doing capitalism." I have to pretend I'm enjoying my time around the people I'm obligated to work with or for. I have to pretend like much calls to me from each day beyond the next TV show or hobby. My poor capacity to pretend has obligated me to finding ways of describing my life and taking actions that don't feel fake or performative. If I eschew most "normal" narratives about family, keeping up with the neighbors, school, politics, or anything in which you know every beat of the story until the anticipated end, I can carve out an individual perspective that allows me to approach those topics from a real and reasoned way.

My thieving family hasn't caught every hateful thing I might say to them because I've reasoned through the impact that would have on my dad. When I coped with the emotional let down and joke that was college, I turned it into one of the most fun periods of partying. When I thought a mortgage sounded like the craziest thing I'd ever heard, I set myself up to live in a shed. When I punctured the naive entitled sense of limerace or "love" of my youth, I figured out "open" just means to the prospect of more accountability and honesty, not being a selfish whore.

To exist as a society is the reasonable maintenance of pretending. No matter how emotional you may get, you want the basic civility that comes with conducting yourself in any context. That, in and of itself, doesn't feel like a lie or that hard to do. What I experience is the next step further from most people. They feel obligated to perform in service to other's unreasonable emotional demands. If it is presumed, for example, that telling my boss she has no business being the boss, and that might hurt her feelings, instead of having the conversation, reorganizing the leadership, and getting everyone on the same page, we'll all just gossip or shrug our shoulders thinking ourselves powerless.

But, this is just the first, pretend, linguistic layer in which we pretend. They don't actually care if it would hurt her feelings. That's an, for reasons I don't know, accepted excuse to not be "too harsh" in your assessment of someone's inadequacy. What happens when you engage in that conversation is the next begged question of who hired her, protects her, or apologizes indefinitely for her bad job. Very quickly, you begin implicating the structure writ-large. In doing so, you trigger a pivot back into the abstracted cliches about big organizations, bureaucracies, or human nature. Round and round you go until you burn out, get entitled and indignant, or resolve yourself to the hopeless and exhausting business as usual that, if nothing else, keeps your bills paid. I think most people with children exist in that space as a matter of basic practicality. You're not fighting the system or navigating nuances of human failure when you're just trying to keep them fed.

I consider myself bad at pretending because it makes me feel bad. It's, mostly, that simple. I know that with each lie, something in me is suffering, dying, or being altered in a way that I have to pay attention to. I decided to assert my individual power over my time today. I was completely unsympathetic to whatever story my boss offered as to the late notice, the running of a 7-kid camp in the first place, or the idea that everyone else gets a day off but me. I'm getting much needed car repairs done as I type this. I've spent most of the weekend organizing my house which I'm rarely in anymore, and catching up on sleep. It takes only a moment of leaning too far into my reasons to start believing myself fundamentally reasonable, and therfore justified in advance of the next lie.

I think we get catastrophic failures at scale because enough individuals allow themselves this space. They pretend they aren't allowing themselves this space until something breaks. They eventually become dependent on the lie in order to function, and the nature of their agency is wrapped up in continuously doing so.

This is where I have a hard time empathizing with most people. I try my best to be making choices in spite of how often it feels like I don't have one. When I need to make a particular example of my capacity, I don't then use it as license for more or to pretend like I want anything to operate this way. I wish I lived in a world where reasonable people were in charge, or barring that, offered reasons for their behavior your average person could get behind without reservation. Instead, each day we're offered to do whatever we must to navigate bull-in-a-china-shop ways people conduct themselves. We're encouraged to get along, swallow a lot of shit, and shut up, or we'll be the next thing they shatter.

One of the areas I find it impossible to pretend about is when I learn something new. I can't go back to not learning whatever the thing was. I can't unsee the straw-man argument. I can't jettison the nature of cognitive dissonance or load. I can't ignore Bell curves and statistics attempting to ground how many people are suffering or from what. No matter how many times someone makes a disingenuous qualifying statement about "government waste," I can't blissfully pretend that firing every federal worker would make even a dent in the ways and whys of our debt. At that precise moment, you're starting with a lie, conceding the game, and just along for whatever ride they wish to take you on. "Yes! Waste is bad!" As though that's, at all, what we're talking about or what they're doing.

So much of political talk radio is people comparing apples to oranges in this way. They take one disconcerting fact, or fact-ish, and pair it against whatever they need to justify their feeling. To me, it's not even a conversation at that point. I've heard recently Joe Biden is worse than Trump because of his failures at the border, and therefore it was intentional.  I've heard Trump isn't a fascist because of all the laws he hasn't, yet, ignored. I've heard democrat lies and complacency touted as worse or "the real" problem, as though Trump isn't lying with the fluidity of a fire hose.

I think we're fundamentally, willfully deliberately, ignorant of ourselves, so we can engage in these exchanges with free and clear consciences. We can't even entertain the idea that we're pretending anything at all. Performative outrage, is in fact, the new actual outrage. Performative "research" is blissfully devoid of the concept of "confirmation bias." As long as your friends and family don't harsh your vibe, they can maintain their title. As long as your kids are fed, "it is what it is," and you've never heard of a "union" nor is time remotely as valuable as the next dollar.

I think the worst ways the pretending manifests though are in "smart" religious types. It's peak pretend when you have to lure people in and play coy about how much you want them to start speaking your crazy. Jonathan Pageau was doing this during a discussion with Jordan Peterson towards the height of Jordan's suffering years ago. Ross Douthat just did it to the enthusiastically curious Plain English podcaster. Smart people pretend worst of all. They can't help but to articulate and cohere and try to strive to not be at the mercy of their brains. The exceptionally convoluted worlds they invent will never match the validation from people they consider at their level.

It's, almost by definition, extremely lonely to be too smart or too capable. You can't just take orders because you see how it can be done better. You can't reciprocate for the same reasons because yours aren't superficial nor can ignore the implications and consequences. And no one has sympathy, nor even recognizes the nature of your struggle. You learn early that attempting to explain yourself only gets punished. You either are lucky enough to be born with the disposition that doesn't really give a shit, if not even thrives on that, or you're normal, and desperately seek a form of apologetics in service to your place in the world.

Thus, the "human nature" picture gets articulated across book-length examples of foundational insecurity and nagging questions. Animals need to belong. Animals need to perform their basic daily functions without the nagging anxiety of their inevitable death and arbitrary nature of their actions. So? Look around. What's popular? What's "true enough?" What's a place you can plug into where most people, most of the time, are refusing to do any of the work that honestly holds themselves accountable? Insert your favorite religion. It's the details lost to the sea of adherents to its framing.

I cut through noise. I ask myself if I'm pretending. I'd have to pretend to believe in any version of god offered by the famous faiths. I'd have to pretend that I think it's wise and reasonable to pretend a story book is better and easier to justify or follow than what we've learned scientifically. I'd have to pretend like the routine atrocities played out in the name of hardly-disguised power are what I'd consider "holy." I'd have to pretend like I need something "other" or "outside" my experience of the world in order to explain why I do something good, bad, or seemingly contradictory or confusing.

I don't need to act like the math is complicated. I don't need to resign myself to a conversation that isn't fundamentally coherent. I don't need to act to any degree that doesn't let me basically get along with the society I'm born to. That does not seem to be the ethos or operating principles of most people most of the time.

I think some of my perspective takes practice, but I think it's foundationally about honesty. I don't think you have to be smart to be honest. I don't think you have to be wise to know when you're talking adjacent to the truth. I don't think you have to get an advanced degree to know when a detail or fact you're leaving out would undermine how urgently you're insisting someone accept and believe your feelings on the matter are so true, whatever you might say about it also becomes true. Here, again, you can differentiate for yourself if you bother to. I'm not writing this to persuade you of anything. I'm not writing this so I can feel better about lying. I'm writing this because I can't pretend that I don't have a running narrative at least this long about so many scenarios I'm invited to, that I didn't choose for myself, and what I do to navigate them. I want to know and trust my reasoning indefinitely.

[1188] Self On A Shelf

Self On A Shelf

2/10/2025

Yesterday, I was wandering around a re-sell store. I had time and nowhere to be. That recipe is often an invitation to waste money, experience foreboding dread, or stay in a paralytic ADHD haze as I think about who I'd like to be one day, if only.   

  

That day, I found myself wandering and waiting for something to call out to me. Surely, I thought, I'll find something I want in the midst of a selection of everything we've ever produced. I'm a man of many interests, goals, and talents, so it follows naturally that I should locate the next step on one of my many paths within so many invitations. What did I find? What called out? $1.25 air freshener, because I cleaned the cat box earlier and considered the dust. $1.25 Valentine's Day paper airplanes because it was cheap, it's close to Valentine's Day, and my Y kids make a lot of paper airplanes.  

  

30 minutes earlier, I had made a decent amount selling some Pokemon cards at a shop that shared the plaza. The money wasn't burning a hole in my pocket, and in many ways is already spent. When I was a kid, superficially, those cards were explicitly something I wanted. My dad told me a story of my grandpa throwing out my dad's beer can collection, thinking it trash. It would have been worth thousands. That was enough for child me to make Pokemon my collection investment. I've never played a single game with my cards, and they went immediately into cases. 25 years later, the amount of remarks the cards got for their condition is certainly a point of pride.  

  

Here, we can see how it gets easier to answer questions about just what it is I really want. I want to show that I understand the value of treating things nice and investing in their preservation. I want to reflect that I understood the lesson and lament of my dad. I want to hear from someone who also appreciates what it takes to search for, save, and protect things, praise my effort and intention. As I've gotten old enough to value experiences more than things, I'm thrilled about the prospect of the money I make selling the cards turning into pit tickets for my favorite bands and trips.  

  

I didn't want the "stuff" of the cards. I wanted the hunt, the solidarity, the pride, and the story of what cashing-in represented. All of that is decidedly missing from aimlessly meandering around a store with an endless array of odds and ends.  

  

I think a lot about what my environment invites me to do. Always, the answer is "buy." I've spent the better part of 2 months looking for spots around the greater Indianapolis area where it's okay to just sit and do something like this. I've found exactly one answer, the library, and the moment you feel tired you recognize how specifically useful and limited it really is. There aren't places to lounge, mingle, be informally taught or engaged in any way that don't, first, revolve around buying something.   

  

I don't know how often I ever truly wish to consume. I get hungry, but a meal or two a day and I'm otherwise then contented to stay occupied. Maybe that's occupied with TV shows and music. Maybe that's occupied with a phone video game. Nearly every job I've ever had is truly occupying time more than challenging or pushing me to learn anything beyond it's brand of hopeless intransigence. The battle then becomes looking for a way to avoid getting consumed by such an environment. Can I find the things about me that I want, can I recognize what's calling out to me, beneath the Pokemon card collecting?  

  

That not-so-hidden world of desires comes up a lot when I listen to comedians or band members talk about their careers. I get flashes of it when I see familiar names on early movie credits in the "thank you" section. What everyone had, gets, or presumably finds, when they become big enough to put their stamp on culture is a community of people aimed at the same thing. The, not Skrillex, lead singer of From First to Last talked about 7 people living in a 1 bedroom and 5 of them just sleeping on the floor. Regardless of what else was in their heads as they slept, they were dreaming together.  

  

I get the impression that everyone who has a healthy relationship to their career, success, or scene deeply appreciates that sensibility more than anything. They find people who help them translate their ideas. They find people who will sit in a room with them for months until something feels cool enough to share. They find all the reason they'll ever need in the pursuit and moments trying to create together.  

  

I think this sensibility goes deeper than merely designating someone as a "friend" or laying claim to them as "family." I think it's why so many of my own friends and family, practically, play out in unfulfilling and empty ways. What, besides ever-fleeting history, and maybe a facebook page, do we share? What are we working on together? What do we both care about enough to sacrifice money, comfort, or something "more practical" than whatever it is we're choosing to do together? I don't have 2 friends I can consistently get lunch with, and haven't for over a decade. How are these fuckers starting and keeping bands? It's a miracle if I've ever seen one.  

  

I suspect that before the internet, it was mostly taken-for-granted that you had people, consistently, meeting your interconnected needs in those unspoken existential ways. You were in clubs. You had to talk to everyone to get anything done, not disappear into your phone and hide from, I promise you, your lonely DoorDash guy. You had to call and pick up to get anything moving. You had to anticipate and invest emotional energy deliberately versus provoked via auto-scroll. I think people felt a certain reasonable license and wisdom to share and correct in ways that contributed to the betterment of the whole, because an isolated perspective would prove more immediately fatal.  

  

I still look for solidarity, in spite of there almost always being little on offer. Let me tell you how it tends to go, particularly in a work setting. Most of the people at rung 1 or 2 of "middle management" all complain about the same things. Maybe their boss agrees, but she's also suffering from the same fundamental problems of the organization writ large. That is, no one's getting paid, it's poorly organized, general laziness and ambivalence contribute to arbitrary and contradictory pieces flung out for the lessers to navigate, inevitably poorly, providing endless fodder for talking in circles to complacency.  

  

While this is going on, I'll find the one other, more insistent, person and they'll see that I'm stuck on seriously speaking to and tackling the problems. They'll feel tinges of emboldened hope here and there because I'll articulate something well or give specific examples of how and why something does or doesn't work. They'll chime in with their hopes. Then, an hour will go by, and it's, "Good luck with that." They want nothing to do with it. They immediately feel the weight of "the modern era" in which nothing is possible, everyone's complacent, and believing in things making sense or being fair will feel like torture.  

  

I don't want more interactions like that anymore than I want more Pokemon cards. I really don't want the underlying world that makes them the air I'm otherwise choking on, like a million opportunities to buy junk I don't want and certainly don't need. They want to be in a band, but practice their instrument? That's for *those types over there*. Surely, we can use a droning preset drum beat, and that's good enough.  

  

I sometimes wish I was more enamored or invested in the "stuff" of it all, because for as overwhelming and hollow as I might feel wandering around, it doesn't feel like an attack on being alive altogether. It doesn't feel like I'm attending a series of wakes mourning a new dead ideal or chance to act. One of the few times I see or hear myself anywhere in the world is from those within their current success. I shouldn't have to come across a particularly insightful, articulate, and famous enough emo singer to find remote solidarity.  

  

I have a friend driving 2 hours down today so we can go see Silverstein, incidentally the band with the singer leading the interviews of Lead Singer Syndrome from which I'm drawing some inspiration. Before she moved back to this godforsaken state, she lived in the Indiana of the South, Florida for a decade. We've spent more time together going to shows, eating, or marathoning movies than I have with dozens of "friends" who've lived an hour or less away from me since college. We don't need a bigger goal or agenda than the next show or meal, all of my screams for broader revolution aside.  

  

Am I not good enough for the rest of my friends? Good enough, for what? They were good enough for me when I needed to fill a house with cool people every weekend who could talk and joke about anything. Anyone who's even glanced at my writing in the intervening years knows I'm not the friend who gets "weird" and is so far removed from their memory he's practically unrecognizable. Think any one of them is going to catch this and call or message to meet over the weekend? Think they won't be weirded out if I take it up on myself to, once again, be the one to force it? Do you think Billie Joe Armstrong spends 10 minutes a day or hours a month smooth-talking and cajoling and bending over backwards to get Tre and Mike to play with him?  

  

My friends are smart kids too. I know that part of us getting together makes them feel bad because we inevitably talk about how fucked up things are. While I'm writing out the existential crisis every few days attempting to actively cope and navigate, they're normal. They're trying to disappear into their relationships, jobs, hobbies, families, or TV shows. I'm not a good friend for not talking about things, and we can't maintain this hopeless suffocating culture unless we're mature enough to shut up and bear it in faux isolation. I don't talk in memes, and yet memes is all I'll ever read from them.  

  

I'm extremely thankful that I get to viscerally suffer and celebrate simultaneously. It doesn't let me pretend like the world is infinitely bleak, but makes me feel incredibly justified in explicating the depths in which that bleakness I think is bound to kill us all. I think I'm like that re-sale shop. I'm a standing invitation that can quickly become overwhelming if you don't know what you're looking for. You can get buried under a pile of things desperate to be consumed. I sit here, like it all sits there, waiting to be picked up, the value inherent in perpetual limbo. Feels like a bizarre thing to suffer as though you can't get off the shelf.