[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.

[1187] All Too Human

It appears to me that there's not just a broad failure to define words and concepts, but distinguish "human" from "animal" in particular. I have a pretty strong opinion on how different these words are. I hear, often enough, attempts to rationalize behavior that turn them functionally synonymous. When something seems abjectly cruel or irrational, don't you know, it's just human nature.

I thoroughly disagree with this taken-for-granted space and colloquial sensibility. I think "human" has everything to do with conscious and deliberate behavior. Insofar as someone knows they are being cruel and are gleefully, maliciously intent on carrying that cruelty out, that's human. If something catastrophic and terrible plays out because someone is too stupid or afraid to know how to otherwise navigate, the animal shines.

If you are able to hold this distinction in your head, you can start to approach what it would take to hold something accountable. For the last couple of months, I've been in charge of overseeing children, new staff, and learning how those who have otherwise been in charge operate. Every level has a unique way in which you should try to problem-solve or describe how it manifests.

You don't blame children for being children, for example. They are considerably more animal than human. On their best day, they may be operating at 5% to 10% human, to the degree they more or less comply with the dictates of hopefully adult human structures and directives. They don't have the dexterity not to habitually spill things. They don't have the prefrontal cortex for significant impulse control. They don't have the perspective that might temper tears over otherwise innocuous situations.

At the staff level, you have what I often conceive of as overgrown children. They've been socialized to a degree that can reliably get you something "passable." Cs get degrees, and I don't believe society has the capacity to rise above a "C" level. It's more of a toss-up if you're going to get more human or more animal out of any individual on any given day. It's the space where you can contemplate "the masses." It's like K in *Men in Black*: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." They crave direction, someone to blame, and are wired to look for ways to take liberties.

A human is an avatar of every spectacular and atrocious thing we've ever done. It's employed as our King Excuse to eschew personal responsibility because "we" went to the moon and "we" learned how to cure disease. "We" also "other" people, repeat history, "don't care," and are forever capable but seemingly unwilling. "Oh, the humanity!" The iconic phrase inappropriately applied to all of the screams in horror and visceral reactions to man suffering a misfire of his technical prowess.

When adopted into a personally responsible and accountable self-conception, human is what separates you from your animal self. Humans are patient, kind, or forgiving for their own sake. They are optioned into as a continuous series of choices and rest within a perspective of consequences. It's not an accident, magic, nor matter-of-factly assumed you're going to be one way over another. You're steering a ball of potential, or you're not.

My cats aren't mean or nice. They're cats. They'll be sweet and cuddly until the precise moment they aren't. They don't have deeper nuances and motivations beyond how they happen to react in that moment. They suffer no anxiety or embarrassment for swatting at each other, scratching me, demanding food, or shitting where they aren't supposed to. They aren't "trying to destroy my couch" when they claw at it. They are a fairly mindless force I either navigate and shape or suffer.

In order to recognize the palpable difference, you have to engage in the work of accounting for your self-awareness. You have to dig up the nature of your motivations or depressors. You have to unpack scenes from your life and figure out whether it was mostly something you engaged in for your own fair-enough reasons or mostly something you suffered because it was all that was available. And then you have to keep doing that work the rest of your life as often as you can.

This is what used to distinguish real leaders. They actually, genuinely, actively did the kind of work that would give them the perspective to approach complex problems from a reasonable human place. You don't accomplish things worth keeping on "vibes." You think them through. You compartmentalize. No human, ever, has had anything less to deal with in their life than you or me, and then they went on to create whatever it is they did that made them known to us.

I use that thought to help temper my capacity to catastrophize. Even if someone, practically, occupies a position of power and influence, it doesn't mean they are necessarily a leader. They might be the consequence of the sea of C-students being of inevitable animalistic consequence. Will bad things happen and a lot of people die unnecessarily? Certainly. Is "the world" any more or less asking of you something different than it does every day in how to properly deal with it? We've gotten "here," however you wish to conceive of modernity, through fighting and reactivity to the places those in power are trying to drag us back to. I think history rhymes instead of repeats. We're probably going to react to totalitarian rule like most people most of the time throughout history, but this time with more guns, means of communication, and memes comparing Nazi salutes to other, obviously Nazi salutes.

"It can happen here." "It" is anything too-smart yet unwise animals are capable of. Of course it can. Animals don't surprise me anymore than kids do. I get surprised by individuals awakening to their own potential. I get surprised when someone goes above and beyond, out of character, for their class or otherwise box they tend to shuffle themselves in. I see people give up all the time. I see people stay silent. I see people shy away from even the most innocent and basic forms of organization, asking for help, or steps towards bringing a peaceful resolution to a problem. All of the best things can also happen here, or anywhere you practice what they cost.

I suffer the most when I overburden my sense of agency and control. Noam Chomsky talking about how most of your life you live in a totalitarian state has been resonating in my head for days. You can "choose" to work or starve. I tried, desperately, to create circumstances where I would allow myself more choices than not, and I still find myself slipping back onto totalitarian hamster wheels. I still have to ask myself if I'm reacting to my circumstances or celebrating my tastes and preferences when I pick a show to attend. I have to locate my personality and perspective within my work contexts to ensure I'm still kicking and screaming for more than what's on offer.

I've never found reality TV particularly compelling for this animal vs. human reasoning. Would you watch 30 minutes to an hour of dogs barking? Have you convinced yourself there's something interesting happening? Of course not. You're like my 10-year-old who vibes with fomenting drama and smirks when she's getting screamed at by another girl. Trump has the same shit-eating grin. So did my little brother growing up. When all you have is the reactive place of the rest of the animals to dictate for you any remote capacity you would otherwise have to a situation, you drift between gratifying emotional rushes for their own sake. They become the times, in and of themselves, that take over in lieu of exercised reason. They're apologized for, excused, celebrated, and ultimately righteously justified.

[1186] Look Here

I want to talk about attention. Some conversation about it is embedded in the zeitgeist as people try to cope with Trump slurry. It's weaponized by social media and courted from every corner by those with something to sell. It's at once something we're invited to try, desperately, to protect, but often find ourselves at the mercy of whatever ride it's on. That ride is increasingly dictated by A.I. and algorithms that understand human patterns of attention better than any human ever could. 

I just paused a song I was listening to because it was drawing too deeply from my attention. That I had an unconscious instinct to listen to music while I wrote in the first place is it's own thing to examine. Now paused, I'm hearing the noises around the library I'm attempting to write in. "My" attention is hardly my own, and even attempts to focus it or dial it in can do precisely the exact opposite. The Mormon "regulars" I see here as often as I come just walked in. Time to write about their baby faces and religion? No, of course not.

I've been dipping pretty heavily into my TV shows. It's when I reflect on them that I can better recognize patterns related to my attention. I like getting hit with absurd premises that contain mysteries that you'll find in certain kinds of anime like Assassination Classroom or No Game No Life. I really want to know how/if they're going to kill the teacher, and I was curious as fuck how they would win games. The solutions were creative and not things I could immediately access. At the same time, I could trust there was going to be a reasonable solution. My investment and expectation of that resolution wasn't going to be betrayed as something easy or arbitrary. 

This key observation alone is why most things aren't particularly compelling. The problem is simple, the solution is simple, and 99 out of 100 times, the story of why you are or aren't getting a desired result is some kind of negligence or arbitrariness. It undermines the inclination to desire anything from your interaction at all. Soap operas made a genre out of this sensibility. The ZoMg RaNdOm vein of cartoons did the same thing. Think GIR in Invader Zim. A child will laugh at peek-a-boo. An adult who does so at the functional equivalent of that game is, charitably, undercooked.

The game Last War takes a solid portion of my attention over the last few months. It's by design, needing to click dozens of different things in order to achieve the simplest ends. 90% of the time I spend tapping could be done with a single button or different design, but then I wouldn't be on the game for nearly as long. The longer I'm on, the more familiar it feels, the more I can find myself in little lottery-adjacent feelings of "winning" or "collecting." The more it can invite me to buy something, or join digs, or engage in the chat, the more "I" will begin to "identify" with the whatever I'm doing in the game as a natural extension of me and what I like to do.

Thankfully, I'm not an addictive type nor is it something I do instead of something more compelling. It's a shitting, TV-watching, or waiting-around kind of thing, and I happen to spend a lot of time doing just that. At the same time, a new question arises of why I have so much time on my hands. Why would, by malicious design, a phone game or bad TV show take up hours of every day? Like, isn't fascism ascendant? There's no real world problem and movement to be a part of? No door to rattle? No incredibly pressing concerns to organize around? Could I not be dumping my proverbial bucket of water on so many inviting fires?

We don't want to falsely equivocate or frame things in a way that are absurd and impossible. You could call any set of personal life responsibilities your set of fires to keep contained. You might also do a perfectly reasonable job of doing so your entire life. Until recently, your life wasn't just whatever was cultivated between you and the algorithm. It would follow more matter-of-factually what your responsibility to our shared reality was. Once we started leaning into the active fracturing and arresting of our attention, there was nothing left to share but vibes and feelings.

When it's not a TV show or a capitally malicious design of a video game, I have a certain amount of attention when I have an opportunity to teach. When I'm exercising my brain to adequately translate what I've learned, I'm not thinking about picking up my phone or how the world is burning. There's a lot of information that, at one point, was new to me, and helped me form a more coherent narrative around my experience and decision making. The chance to talk about those things reinvigorates. The opportunity to see someone's confidence grow because they took and ran with something you passed on can't be matched by doing anything less.

We carry on like we're not being taught every day. We're being taught that "the way" to one mind state, social status, or sense of achievement is through engagement with the systems on hand. How do you answer questions? Brand name. How do you find food? Brand name. How do you date? Brand name. You wouldn't know human society had a way of operating before apps. Wanna be happy? Apply the right filter. Want to achieve financial success? Pump and dump and create a brand once you've hawk tuah'd our imaginations.

There is no concept of long-term anything in the minds of regular folk. Invest? Invest what? The money you don't have? In the country doom-casted via breaking news every few moments? In the kids who can't read as they don't have real teachers nor anyone interested in paying or educating altogether? Invest in your career about to be overtaken by A.I.? Invest in your family sitting under the modern awakening as to what constitutes generational abuse and trauma? Truly, what's the point if it's not viral?

What goes viral? Sometimes it's absurd for the sake of absurd. Often it's "impassioned plea" or "indignant finger-wag." Anything that can confirm the ongoing fear and dread experienced by the third of the country/world with decently working brains. The truth of the feelings on full display. The exact opposite of focused attention, forever on offer, dopaminergic provocation. 

Well, I know this. You might profess to know it, but I have my suspicions. Time to turn off this blog and step back into the mess, no? Take no heed of the warnings offered by Sam Harris and his Waking Up...app.

I get attention to write because there's an ongoing mystery to being alive and how to resolve the slurry. At the end, I usually feel some form of resolution, even if it's never complete. I feel, deeply, all of my standing hatred for things, judgmental thoughts, itchiness, need to shit, fullness, neck pain, or exhaustion, and the infinite series of moments between me and one where I choose how to go about things.

It's easier to let things burn when you stay aware of and accountable to the things you're not allowing to go that way. My responsibility will always be to speak to them, even if I can't fix them. I can always strive to be honest to my experience, and how it gets away from me. I'm not at the mercy of the chaos though. That's something I don't think most people can assert for themselves most of the time. If more war breaks out, or roving bands of illegal militias start going door to door, I can make peace with getting the fuck out, or I can bemoan how the circumstances I took for granted have gone away. I can only do that if I attend to that potential reality, not proactively submit to its inevitability.

So it goes with so many preventable catastrophic scenarios. I think we lack imagination for how bad it's been, can get, and is likely to be if we keep allowing ourselves the excuses for not paying attention. It's one of the best concepts. Yes, you have to pay. It has to cost you something, and if you value that cost, you'll ensure you're filling your attention with things that help more than hurt. Like any addict, you'll need to accept the broad nature of how that hurt manifests first. You'll have to identify how it intersects with every area of your life. You'll need to establish boundaries and find the bravery and sense of ownership that let's you invite the consequences of holding them. So, you know, we're fucked lol.

[1185] Match Game

Standard disclaimer, I sense there will be acutely disparate threads I'm attempting to weave together.

LeVar Burton exercises a certain kind of wisdom I wish I saw more of. On some of his stories he will include in his preface that there's a content warning in the episode description, "If you're so inclined to read it." He's a sympathetic person who you gather gets a sense of what his characters have represented to people. Even if he's intimately familiar with the kind of life experiences that might harden his shell and deride the idea that we should be coddling each other, he's not dismissive of his potential emotional impact. He's not going to decry "trigger warning!" and virtue signal, he's allowing you to treat yourself as you wish to be treated. He invites you to use your own time to dig up and decide if a short story is going to overwhelm you. It's subtle and thoughtful without capitulating.

A lot of comedians have the same conversation about whether or not "woke" made it impossible to perform. The landscape is always evolving, yet somehow famous comedians stayed famous, employed, and navigated. Ones that might have had to be more subtle and thoughtful in their jokes adjusted and thrived. Those who wanted to beat lazy cliches into ignorant sounding bad jokes cried the loudest. That isn't to say audiences couldn't be blamed for drifting too far into "righteously offended" territory, but it did mean here was again an opportunity to have a nuanced conversation, and either/or drove a hyperbolic discussion into the ground. Somehow, the most "anti-woke" comedians became literal fascist apologists.

Now, we're seemingly culturally viscerally reacting to "DEI." As if, by themselves, the ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion are anathema to a thriving country. Why? Those who were championing the effort refused to be nuanced and wise. They refused the lessons of the giants whose shoulders they professed to stand upon. When you do that, you cede the ground to the crazies. You foment grievances that piddling-middle types sympathize with because there's an incredibly compelling grain of truth wedged directly in their eye. I want a diverse community. I don't want people to be given things they don't deserve or haven't worked for. These ideas aren't at odds with each other in most reasonable people's heads. Institutions have biases and some are particularly corrupt. Every system and institution are not the same. 

This morning I went to breakfast. I work in the Indianapolis area, and every time I go into Sunshine Breakfast, I'm greeted in Spanish. The first 2 times the waitresses gathered I don't speak Spanish (at least not conversationally) and I was able to order without issue. Today, my waitress didn't seem to understand nearly anything I said, and after several extra minutes and assistance from another one, I eventually got my order in and correctly delivered. My first thought was that were I to open a French restaurant in France is that I'd be sure to know the language well enough to take orders.

How do you read that story? As an opportunity to engage on some racist tirade? Are you immediately thinking all sorts of things about my "questionable" instincts? Is it merely confirmation of all the hateful things you'd lump together associated with Trump's rhetoric about immigration? Was it just a mild inconvenience you think I'm foolish for even bothering to bring up? There's a fog. I want it to be simple, but as I discovered, even something that was simple twice, and why I keep returning, wasn't so much the third time. 

You can't build "wisdom" around a floor that's always moving. You can't share values that increasingly only exist between you and whatever your phone is showing you. 

I think, for example, that if you're going to bother to build rules and policy, you should make a good faith effort to follow those rules and policies. We now live in a country where that whole concept is functionally mute. Violently attack police and attempt to overthrow the government? Only "partisans" would care to pursue you in their unfair judgment of your morals merely vying to stop the steal. These kinds of signals trickle down into how, or whether you can at all, set expectations everywhere else.

I'm an adult in the room in my oversight of children every day. Why should they listen to me? There's the classics of, "Because I said so," or "Because I'm the adult," which on their face, are mindless attestations of power. Those rely on both the child's ignorance and the implicit violence I could inflict to force the issue. As is the cultural moment's habit, let's say it's because I'm interested in keeping them "safe." Safe became the new metric for an ever-illusive means of controlling behavior and narratives. How often we belabored the "harm" one might experience innocently discovering LeVar is still reading, and being shocked by the themes or language. 

Why we used to listen to anyone was because it was, in fact, keeping us safe. We listened to the elders who survived the precarity of existence and learned a thing or two. We listened to the experts who figured out ways to capitalize and heal. We listened to the writers of myths and journeys with embedded values which tied directly into our ability to survive. Now? The information landscape is so fluid it's psychologically impossible to ground yourself without an innate intelligence, practice, conscious recognition of the ways it's moving through you. The way my mind works, I wouldn't have a prayer of maintaining my values or see ways through the weeds without writing. I go out of my way to stay awash in media, and the disorientation occurs regularly. 

One form this takes is in the whiplash from listening to something like Pod Save America, and then the next episode be Honestly with Bari Weiss. Both kind of annoy me, which helps me stay reflective and critical of what they're saying, and who they're choosing to talk about things with. I feel the Bari crowd simping for religion and MAGA and can feel the permanent smirk they have by successfully persuading at least a million subscribers that they're the new "middle." I feel adrift and nearly drowning listening to Pod Save America reiterate everything that hasn't worked and ruminate on how impossible it feels to coalition build, message, or find remote joy in so much ongoing destruction. 

If I were to just draw from memory what I agreed with from both podcasts, I don't think it would paint me as a radical. 

Democrats are hypocrites when it comes to "money in politics."
Democrats need to be messaging constantly across every medium that will have them, but also be able to credibly speak to the work they're actually doing for the working class.
The conversation around trans issues went off the rails before anyone actually studying things was consulted. It's both okay to acknowledge biology and sex differences and make room to help those with dysphoria or who choose to express their gender differently.
I want a country with strong borders that concerns itself with protecting western values.
I want the people working and living in the country to be able to get citizenship. I think so much of the discussion about the "rule of law" is garbage, pageantry, and disgraceful when you put a convicted felon rapist at the top of the pyramid.
I don't know if I've heard 2 honest conversations about the greed and monopolistic capture that informs prices.
Privacy is important.
Social media shouldn't be given endless power to do whatever they want with our data.
Hating each other isn't going to solve anything, but many people are openly espousing and washing the laundry of the most hateful ideas we've ever popularized.
Your average person isn't sophisticated, nuanced, or remotely interested in their well-being like a proverbial "informed citizen" of a democratic ideal. 

We're dumb animals first, and there's a reason the propaganda works. I've been looking for refuge in this idea for weeks. I keep reminding myself that, even this language right now, is lip gloss on a screaming ape species only not flinging its shit because it's eating to reload. 

While writing this, I got an email from my boss, somewhat retaliatory, somewhat signaling "concern," about my approach to a child that is not appropriate for our program. I say that given their written policy standards, not because I just don't like kids or this one in particular. I've bent over backwards for weeks attempting to not only assess his behavior, but the staff's responses, and the ability to follow a "behavior plan" that's allegedly supposed to mitigate his outbursts. 

No matter how many conversations and emails I've had with her, his parents, the principal, the other staff, and people acquainted with the situation, she still found the temerity to suggest it's something like me fumbling to intervene with this kid not according to his plan that resulted in his write-ups. I genuinely want to quit my job in this moment, because it feels like that kind of "perfectly impossible" scene where you've been contracted for a suicide mission. I'm not going to quit, at least not yet, but it's the kind of existentially hopeless place that's all-too familiar. The purported idealists don't wish to engage the hard reality. The one begging for reality to be taken seriously gets punished. Or, in Trumpian parlance, "I've been hearing things...." Oh, really? Cool, guess nothing matters and we'll just go with whatever you say or heard.

The crazier things feel, I look for definition. Writing is definition. You can "infer" whatever you want from what I say, but I can articulate the feeling, "I want to quit," allow the moments after to play out, and keep my job. I was hired to run a program. When I identify and define the things that were making it previously impossible to run, the next moment shouldn't be suspicion that I'm the problem. Especially not when the problem has been one for years. Now, if you're part of the problem, and my definitions are forcing you into new accountable territory, which you subsequently poorly react to, the fuck am I supposed to do with that? 

I'm not a "woo woo" person. I do think math says we're all connected, and things have felt elevated, especially the past few days. I've spent years finding a remote "chill" level to operate on in spite of it all, and lately that shit's proving ineffectual. I'm craving an ability or justification of simple and pure reactivity. It's the moment when an addict might relapse. It's when you've reached out to a few people to try and talk to, and they aren't there, and you're stuck, and enough time hasn't passed to make the worst option resonate as catastrophically as it will inevitably feel over time. When all the "little things" stack up back-to-back at otherwise shit times that compound. 

I'm exhausted. I'm going to go back to work, eat a lot of candy, complain about my stomach aching, and then go to a comedy show and drink tonight. The future is bleak.

[1184] Blank Check

After a round of podcasts yesterday, a bit of time wandering my nearest small town's YMCA, and returning to work today, it's time to synthesize. 

I've said it before, but a comedian recently reiterated, there's not a lot of good leaders. He was talking in the context of working on TV shows and with different directors. I talk about it in pretty much every work context. I remember a broad discussion on the concept of leadership with a friend back in high school. Him, religious, wanted to be a leader in his faith and in service to his church. I, briefly aspiring to "find God" back then, but still deeply skeptical, questioned the efficacy of pedophile leaders who can't be bothered to answer basic questions raised or reiterated by the "new atheists" at the time. 

I would take the idea of a lack of leadership further and say we're in crisis. In order to lead, you have to have a strong idea of where to go. In an oft alluded to "fractured" world, no one has any idea where they're going, why, or who would want them pointed in one direction over another. In the wake up re-edifying negligence, greed, rape, insurrection, and other darkest impulses of our nature, the disorientation can only compound when you're unable to take control of and lead the narrative of your individual existence in spite of it all. 

I still listen to my political podcasts all attempting to "reason" the loss, or win, depending on which side I'm listening to. I listen to my "above it all" intellectuals who discuss psychological forces, macro-economics, and pretend not to rehash competing cliches that manage to capture the attention cycle. If I hear "price of eggs" one more time... 

Me? I like to frame. I like to see how my world operates at the smallest and largest scales and track what appears true across them. If I'm struggling with a crisis of leadership from my government, am I acting locally and noticing the same pattern if I do what I'm otherwise not seeing? Pretty quickly, "the world" looks different. My ongoing chronicle of entering my latest work environment attests to it. My site struggled with a lack of leadership, accountability, planning, managing of emotions, failures of communication, and ultimately flat lies that tried to foment a vicious cycle. 

What did I do? I bought a wall calendar, asked Chatgpt to give me a year's worth of plans, set times for check-in, snack, story-time, the daily activity, and asked the school how quickly and on what days we could get into the gym. I started to write the kids up who were hitting, spitting, or breaking things. I communicated my plans, how to measure their success or failure, and my larger goals to my supervisor, my employees, and my school principal. I set an expectation for cleaning, respectful communication, and earning rewards. In short, I lead. 

I can't fix fascism. I can address the symptoms of fascist thinking and behavior. I can be accountable to my own hateful and spiteful thoughts and make choices to contribute what I can, where I can. I have a strong suspicion that the wholesale abandonment of that relatively straight-forward notion is why we got here. Taking the time to account for your corner of the world isn't preached, rewarded, or as gratifying as the dopamine chase of endless indulgence and distraction, or celebration of hate and depravity. 

I can talk about my work environments in the same kind of hyperbolic ways that we do our broader politics. How lazy and stupid do you have to be to not follow a schedule!? How much do you hate yourself or the kids you're professing to "help" or "teach" to not bother with a remote lesson plan? Who let's their personal life and insecurities lean so far into their professional life they're willing to spend more time gossiping than anything else? All these hateful, ugly, fat cunts and their toxicity is why the next generation is going to be full of barely functioning retards screaming "skibidy sigma!" and turning into cannon fodder in the water wars. Fair and helpful, right?

I've never considered myself particularly good at "forgiveness." I need to understand. I need to figure out the pattern. I don't feel compelled to let you off the hook, anymore than I wish to live my life through a series of excuses for all I couldn't do. I understand the desire to be lazy. I understand the reasonable, or otherwise, criticism about how much we're paid, the poor leadership or direction endemic to life, and literally every conceivable grievance you will find from here until we're dead. I am solidly in the camp that can bitch, do so indefinitely, and damn the whole endeavor to hell. 

I'm considerably more interested in, "Okay, now what?" All that being true, does that mean I roll up in a tearful ball and wait to die? Does that mean I'm any less obligated to do a job in a decent or accountable way? Does it mean to even try is futile, naive, or ridiculous? The alternative is on full display, compounding every day. If the world is missing leaders, are you one? What's stopping you from being one? I'm exceedingly confident I am one not because I merely assert it, but because I practice what it is to lead every day. 

The comedian spoke to that idea as well. I forget what actor told him to do something every day to remind him that he was, in fact, an actor. Send an email to a casting director. Read lines. Go to a class. There's a whole fuck ton of time in between sets, auditions, or whatever else you might be pursuing in entertainment. Those who "arrive" have been stepping into their roles and potential opportunities every single day. 

I try to lead the conversation and practice of accountability in writing. I never, not once, deny the amount of anger and hatred I feel. I want to burn everything down too. I'm even more likely to do it, just not in an insurrection-y way. I'm poised to pop the fuck off pretty much any moment of any day when I reflect on the fundamental absurdity and injustice, not even inflicted most-often or most harshly on me. I think about the latest woman to die unnecessarily because she couldn't get an abortion and the smug religious nut-jobs who would bankrupt social services and school lunches as they pretend to give a fuck about life. I think about the families about to be terrorized by xenophobic morons who pretend to engage topics as broad as "the economy" let alone crime statistics. I think about the greed and gluttony that have flooded our self-conceptions so deeply it's hard to even conceive of what made "sins" so bad in the first place. I think about how I'm going to have to write about it, stomach it, watch as those in power kill and burn the next things I care about, and figure out how or whether I'm going to respond to it at all. 

Worse than all that though, I'm going to feel alone, because conversations like this still exhaust people. The idea of genuinely accounting and organizing still feels beyond our reach. Actual reform and consequences might as well exist on Mars, as its champion sieg heils. I know that were I to leave my site tomorrow, it would devolve right back into the chaos I observed the first few weeks. If 1,200 people read this, I'll be lucky to get 1 upvote on Reddit, 2 likes on Facebook, and avoid a condescending and despondent comment. Even the idea of "be a leader" won't get the laziest possible support. 

It's not that simple, of course, but also, it's absolutely that simple. We're consumed by waterfalls of information and the democrats are, somewhat, realizing that you need to saturate the entire landscape with your various messages. Oh, but your message has to be marketed, catchy, entertaining, and viral well-independent of its truth. Fair enough, that's the landscape, but also, as a consumer of information, you can choose how and what you consume. You can reject considerably more than you adopt. If you drown in exceptionally biased media every waking minute, you can clock how that makes you feel or what it makes you unable to sound balanced about, or you can double down and unironically point the finger at all the double-downers. 

What's your issue? Gaza? How many still cling to the idea they are experts on the middle east, war, religious ideology, and geopolitics because they identify with victims? Trans? Guns? Oil? Crime? If any of those words alone didn't flood your head with numbers, you probably don't know what you're talking about. You don't want to lead a coherent discussion, so you're not going to find nor identify a leader of one. When you end up with a "leader" who does nothing but lie about any given topic, personally gratifying or enriching himself, you couldn't ask for a better representation and manifestation of your behavior. 

We'll just idle there until we all die. Or, all things being true about your terrible, hateful, spiteful little goblin life and disposition, what's next? What choice can be made once we're able to swallow that we've gotten precisely what we asked for? Gonna shit on this blog to make yourself feel better? Gonna find the next person or obscure idea to blame? I'm not asking you to get in some kind of absurdist guilt trap where you irrationally blame yourself for "everything." I'm saying I can reliably predict, and regularly observe, your average "normal" human reaction to self-reflection, personal responsibility, honest discussion, and the effort it takes to not wallow. 

You going to figure out what you're missing? Is it my fault for reminding you, forcing you to read and antagonizing your insecurities? You're actively participating in the chaos and destruction. You're of greater consequence than you care to acknowledge. You'll be the death of us all. You'll neglect to balance with every step into the abyss, and you'll be absolutely certain it's Trump's fault, or Biden's, or "the system," or anyone with a perceived power or privilege you don't have. 

I'm not going to offer the same condescending "good luck" I always get when I talk about my plans and tries. I'm going to continue to invite you into the conversation. I'm going to set reasonable measurable goals for how to deal with things I can deal with. What I can't, I denote as such, and make peace with. I know I'm still intimately connected to whatever that thing is, so no effort at any level is in vain. I think our egos confuse, in too often motivated and malicious ways, our perceptions and preferences with the truth. You're as a part of everything and full of potential as I am. Until you own that, it owns you.