[1233] Seek And

This might be messy, but it’s no less on my mind. There’s two incongruent ideas that have been echoing in my mind. One is the concept of being “terminally online.” The other is a sense of peace I feel watching interrogation and sentencing videos.

Do “influencers” really exist in the same way from when they were culturally born? I find myself watching videos from “anyone” that happen to have caught the eye of the algorithm, and when I go to see their follower count or amount of posted videos, it might be a few thousand, or over a million, but they’re often produced similarly. They have the same patter, cameras, lighting, intros, thumbnails, “Hey guys,” etc. Billy Strings and Jesse Welles already too mainstream for you? I got 6 downhome folksy types standing in a field waiting.

We all get to cultivate our “niche” pockets of interests or influence, which turn out to be a simple measure of how often or not we’re fed the ability to view someone. I watched an interesting “the hit this month” video for every month of the 1980s. Even if I rarely or never listen to the bands, I knew 98% of the songs. The industry used to be the algorithm, and whether that music or those songs were ever “good” or just “popular” is inextricably linked to how often they were injected.

I think we’re under an illusion or misconception about what it is AI is doing to our understanding of media and art. It’s only exposing. If great artists steal, mock-worthy embarrassing AI “artists” merely steal at inhuman speed. “AI slop” is the billions of child drawings unworthy of the fridge. Now they’re given the chance to be remixed and recapitulated, occupying your brainspace independent of your choices or desire to see them. If what you bear witness to most of the time is the soulless, lazy, arbitrary rehashing of someone else’s often incomplete idea, I think you become a particular kind of stuffed sausage.

People being interrogated don’t seem to understand that the pigs can smell the sausage. Even the “weird” ones find ways to betray themselves and the underlying truth starts to unravel. I think someone willing to do something horrible, and then lie about it, moreover try to pass that lie off to professional truth-seekers, is suffering the same kind of condition as someone you might describe as terminally online. There’s the self-affirming, dopamine tripping narrative. Then there’s reality. Then there’s a chance for consequences so severely imposed, you, as an individual, are never again given the opportunity to avoid accounting for your ideas.

I worry about how smooth lies are. How thin they can be like a film laid across our otherwise “innocent” interactions or intentions.

There’s something serious to be said about a lack of awareness and how that differs from lying. While I don’t think lying is solely defined by intent, I think the list of unknown unknowns is practically infinite. I think your feelings about people and life evolve, and it’s easy to get caught repeating something you were taught or earnestly believed in one setting or era that no longer applies. You’re almost never going to know how something has changed until it does, and sometimes slaps you in the face by how much.

I know it’s often a cliche of getting older, but slowing down, or perhaps better said, not being so “in a rush” became a sensibility that sunk in with me. If the internet, and death by it, is this constant flow of “the next thing” and the anticipatory anxiety that feeds the cycle, I’m thankful it seems to follow that the more you wish to slow down, the less appealing those environments register. The click-baiting redundancy is exhausting enough. The idea that I would train my attention to re-read 100 times the same ads and often rage-inducing articles, now with incomplete or incorrect information, yet still populating days later, feels absurd.

I also feel like my life currently operates as one of the loudest refutations as to what “the world” or “the internet” and it’s oligarchs are trying to make me. I do still make inflammatory comments that certainly contribute to eyeball capture. I’d make them in person, but I don’t have the kind of representatives that talk to their constituents outside of controlled settings. I also have the brand of genuine obnoxious anger and commentary that life, broadly, should only dose itself with in moderation.

I get out into the world as often as possible, working to create a real memory or lived relationship to the artists I enjoy. The Letter Kills front man put his arm around my neck and sweated on me as I pretended to know more words to the song we sang together than I do. I bought the T-shirt and taped their setlist to my fort's door wall. I enthusiastically told him about how the Boys Like Girls frontman gave their band and Vendetta Red a shout out on Shane Told of Silverstein’s podcast not too long ago - and how I felt an exacting sense of solidarity with his perspective about both bands - so it’s like magic that one is back up and in rotation - and he did not quite know how to respond to my flurry of enthusiasm.

Part of me feels like I’m on a mission to demonstrate, as often as I can, how much you can really get done if you’re paying attention. If I can make it to 65-142 performances a year, for the last 4 years (my goal is to average 100 a year), and work full-time, and watch the 7th episode of 700 shows (albeit sped-up), and complete however many videogames, and be a solid guitar player, build a few things, and still be bored or needing to spend more time bowling or cooking, why can’t “we” have nice things? Why can’t you find the time to hang out? Why are we stuck on repeat in the fight against fascism? There’s so many hours in the day. There’s so much money going to nothing worthwhile or indulgence. There’s so many ways our ignorance and ambivalence get exploited.

I can both engage in it and call it out and it’s never taken up as a proper rallying cry or point. My entire adult life has been talking past and echoing old wishes yelled into an infinitely deep well. I don’t know what to do about that. I think I’ve instinctively decided there isn’t anything that can be done. My creative ideas as to what might be done break against what I think they’d need in time and money I’m not prepared to spend yet.

This started as an attempt to synthesize my perspective regarding what it means for something to exist online and feelings while watching interrogations and sentencing. It provoked an explanation of what I crave and seek out in the real world. I’m left feeling as if much of the real world is so polluted by the internet that it’s hard to parse how much of it is left or how it manifests in spite of what we’re subjected to. I’m not, foundationally, plugged into systems and people I trust, and it’s a condition that seems to worsen with each headline. No amount of music, comedy, house projects, or scrolling has meaningfully accounted for what’s missing.

[1232] From The Other Side

Lately, I have been a lump. It’s been snowing. The main highway I would take to get anywhere close to civilization had the worst multi-car accident in its history. I’ve managed to get from my house to The Region and back with enough Thanksgiving leftovers that I’ve not had to leave again. This means it’s been a waterfall of TV. This means staying under a heated blanket in my poorly-insulated fort.

I feel like one of the last times I wrote I hit a certain turning point in my capacity to feel anxious about not doing “enough.” Most often, sitting around doing “nothing” but scrolling, phone-gaming, and TV watching would fill me with a sense of worry or dread that I wasn’t out making money or filling out a frustrating and absurd job application. I’ve really started to bodily lean into a place that’s unconvinced there’s a genuinely more “meaningful” or “productive” thing that’s going to land me a persistent sense of accomplishment or belonging.

My desire to accomplish is no less diminished. My plans for shows haven’t changed. I think I’ve just punctured the illusion about what exists on the other side of what I might do. The horrors and potential of the present are keeping me curious about what is or isn’t driving movement or thought patterns.

The image of a woman dying from an exploded ordinance sent by Russia is staying with me. I think it was an episode of either Frontline or 60 Minutes. A pianist, her clothes and hair flutter furiously before she takes a few steps, collapses backwards, and bleeds to death. Any musician will know the time, patience, and dedication it takes to be described by your instrument. A war criminal’s ambivalence and his country’s either ignorance or complicity will snuff it out, arbitrarily, in an instant.

Watching her die is sticking with me like when I watched beheading videos and these couple of alleged Mexican cartel members get chopped up by a chainsaw. If you’ve seen the extended video of the Ukrainian girl stabbed on the train, there’s a similar sense and tone. This moment of infinite, “This is it.” If you did the math on their lives, would you mourn correctly? It sounds like a weird or inappropriate question. But would tears flow for the loss of potential, or for the worlds of selfish negligence that sealed fate well in advance? The gangsters didn’t flinch or cry. No one rushed over to even check on, let alone try to help, the Ukrainian refugee.

“Yeah so I’m already dead, on the inside, but I can still pretend.”

The gangsters know the patterns of gang life. It’s not a surprise to them when it’s their time. One could speculate part of the reason they got involved in the life altogether was to speed things along. One doesn’t routinely risk their life when they consider it something vitally important to hold on to. Travis Pastrana dialed back is adventures dramatically once he started having kids. Do you practice your instrument so it’s singing the song you’d want played on the day you die? When you travel to dangerous parts of the world, is there an irrational thrill for every second you’re not next to be abducted or taken advantage of?

As a narrative-based creature, it’s seems, literally, the most important thing you need in order to survive is the genuine belief that life matters. Count this as another reason to be deeply suspicious, if not angry, about professed religious faith. You get to bypass perhaps the paramount obligation in service to the next life. Your animal instincts may auto-pilot you through a series of impulsive pregnancies and acts coded as survival, but you might not really believe, deep down, that you should be here. If enough people pass a certain threshold with that not-so-deep “secret,” I think you start to explain why so much of the world looks the way it does.

Specifically, when lying becomes the air you breathe, to the point where entire organizations rise up in service to propaganda. Why care about any given endangered species, habitat, or “forever chemicals?” Why define words like “rights” or “zygote” when you’re stuck violently campaigning for an insatiably ironic and impossible level of control over forces that have already sealed your fate? “Life” knows you don’t get to escape and you’re probably not getting a pearly gate. The bullshit artist that constitutes your sense of an individual self is chronically incapable of incorporating that fundamental truth.

If there was some kind of “divine goal” of consciousness, I think it would look something like eradicating the otherwise ambivalence that dominates the landscape. It’s not to pretend it isn’t there. It’s not to act like it can be actually erased. It would be a dance. It would be a celebration of the knowledge of consequences. It would be the building of a communal accountable ecosystem that correctly clocks who is out to kill us and stops them before we’re converted into units of their system.

[1231] Add It Up

I think a lot about when I might believe I’ve “made it.”

I read an interview with a musician who explained that for many bands who don’t define success, it can feel hopeless or antagonizing that they aren’t getting a certain level of attention, money, or opportunities. If and when they are comparing themselves to The Beatles no amount of what they put in or get out is going to feel like “enough”.  This insight, of course, applies to many domains in life outside of music, and I think one of the reasons that explanation has stuck with me is because I’ve tried to apply the lesson to my day-to-day experience.

Is today “enough” for me? I woke up whenever I woke up after going to bed whenever I fell asleep. I was watching what I wanted to watch. I was playing with AI, or stated differently, creatively engaging with a tool I’m interested in and learning about. I’m going to another comedy show tonight after attending one yesterday. I’m digesting an apple fritter I got as a gift yesterday. I’m wearing a new band T. I’m on the verge of again-maximizing my base level of Last War. Food is cooking. I have enough money in the bank for a few beers and my debt consolidation payment coming up.

So far, even with the first few snippets of what I might say about today, yes.

Most of the days of my life look something like this. Even when I have a job, my days circle around the story of my otherwise fair-to-well operating environment. This is in spite of the negligence and fascism of my state and country. Even if, in general, I have a fairly precarious relationship to long-term employment. Even when it starts raining, and you can tell a compelling story about the different insurances I can’t afford.

The concept of “making it” feels all the more on the nose. I have to make a story of my context. I’d go a step further and call it something of an obligation of consciousness. Because my experience exists within some deep and perhaps unanswerable questions about what is “mine” or it means to “experience,” the narrative mechanism of my brain literally needs something constructed to anchor to.

When you’re poor, or poor enough, that constructed story ties intimately with your need to survive. A proud declaration of your “work ethic” might hide that if you didn’t, you’d starve. The hundreds, if not thousands, of times I’ve heard, “It is what it is,” from people in bureaucracies and social work environments. When your nose is pressed right up against the ever-failing human condition, you “accept” all of a sudden deeply “wise” and “obvious” things about what is or isn’t possible.

It works the opposite direction with every rich megalomaniac. You breach the bounds of “average” human activity? Now, all of a sudden, literally anything is possible! Including you being the one to lead us into your imagined future. The same trick is being played on your psyche though.  Your brain is under the impression it’s about “you.”

Many people have intuited ways out of this trap by finding themselves working “in service” to others. The difference between actually doing so and paying lip service to it could not be more clear. At DCS, I saw the people who got off on the power of what they could do to your family. Same in the prison. You can tell the people who are being led by the insecurities or inadequacies and laziness, dragging that posture over the struggling people they purport to serve.  Add to that, and I consider it a plague upon the modern condition, where your otherwise good deeds or service can turn into viral capital.

They say most kids want to be “influencers.” They want the money, prestige, and attention, superficially, like any musician might imagine about the lives of the biggest stars. The story of the work to get there will remain just as obscure. How many hours a day do you want to practice your instrument? How many posts do you want to feel obligated to every day? I question the desire to influence if you can’t wrap your head around the nature of what’s influencing you.

One of the ways I think I’ve found a degree of stability and quelled anxiety was to tell the story of what happened at each moment I got “the thing.” Did my life fundamentally change? Did my energy levels and time get utilized exactly as I imagined they would? Literally, never. I moved to the middle of nowhere, and I do play around with random projects and blast my music in the middle of the night, but it’s not my main preoccupation of time. I bought all the fancy woodworking tools, and have made a handful of things, but I’m not churning out an Etsy store. My “friends” and my friends don’t have any more or less time to spend with me. I’m still lightly concerned about my next unfulfilling job and how much it’s not gonna pay me to keep my head just above water.

One of “the things” I got was the ability to start going to a large number of shows. I’ve clung to that as a thing I both wanted, still want, and sacrifice other things in service towards. It was in making graphs with my show attendance data that informed my feelings about “making it.” It was my hundredth “fun thing” event last night this year. It was 109 last year, 143 the year before that. I’ve been playing catch-up and taking an active role in shaping my story by the things that I enjoy, like music and comedy, and the rituals around getting to where they are on display. You can ask me where to eat, drink, navigate parking, or best place to stand at dozens of venues across the Midwest. I can say, “I saw them open for” dozens of bands who are getting big or who I’m betting will.

I’m working on “more.” Because I want to not just attend these shows, I want to attend them on any day, in any location, they might happen. I want to get to them in a car that’s even more reliable than the ones I’ve been driving. I want a T shirt for every band I’ve even wanted to support a little. Is it a selfish or greedy goal when there’s so much going on in the world? It could be.

I’ve learned that the nature of my wants isn’t about “instead of.” I want it all in concert. Derek Thompson of Plain English and the book about Abundance fame, talks about how he can’t stay locked into one domain of interest. His brain begs the question of the broader metrics and narratives that explain something. I resonated with that idea. I’m not a “woodworker” or “musician” or “political junkie.” I’m not a “counselor” or “landlord” or “fan.” I’m just generally interested in the interplay of things and how we manage to react or work with them. I don’t want anything beyond feeling meaningfully engaged in that interplay. Because I accept that meaning derives from the narrative, I’m interested in continuing to write said narrative.

For me, it’s important that narrative is true. I mean true. I don’t mean “my truth.” I don’t mean arguing the weeds of subjective experience. I mean, for any English speaker, you can read these words. That’s a true statement. I mean, I’m a dude. I mean, I just ate meat, and regardless of how much suffering or intelligence I can attribute to the pig, it was delicious. I feel “intellectually” bad about it, and would eat pig cells grown in a lab and seasoned the same way if it were an affordable and reasonable option. I don’t feel bad enough to stop eating meat today.  It’s not telling a simple story of my righteous vegan posture or ambivalent negligence towards other conscious beings. It’s a true sliver of “me” and what I think it would take to change my behavior.

My relationships to things are always in flux. That’s not about making room for moral relativism. That’s about the exercise of accountability. Those who are innocently confused and those who are motivated to bad-faith reasoning will operate functionally the same way in the face of this idea. I’d call it a simple and easy truth, but for whom there’s an eternal mystical reality, one imagines it’s too disorienting for them to grapple with.  God can be their Rock. I’ll take Chris.

It’s true I want to get lost for weeks arguing with AI until I find it more useful than for torrenting and efficiently organizing my media. It’s true I want to be involved politically creating grassroots infrastructure to combat the rot I perceive at the base of our ability to collectively survive. It’s true I want to watch nearly anything that’s been turned into a TV show that was actually trying to say something. It’s true I want to learn how to produce music, and create worthy-of-sale woodworking things, and have the kind of “fuck you” money that doesn’t blink about empowering my cartoon soldiers on a gambling-adjacent phone game.

There are, easily, a dozen things I could rifle off about genuine desires I have that exist in each moment. Sometimes my presumed ADHD gets a chance to demonstrate that when I’m juggling 6 at once. A couple days ago, I undressed, turned on the shower, noticed something about my bathroom mirrors, and proceeded down a rabbit hole, naked, which included, cooking, power tools, a shattered bowl cleanup, and grime cleaning, before I found my way into the actual shower. Did I want to shower? Or clean? Or cook? Or adjust the mirror? Or not cut myself? Or ensure my tools were organized so I could find one easier next time? Or get that spot addressed while I’m down here? Yes.

I don’t want it all. I don’t want it now. I want to feel like I can do any of it in the moment I really want to do it. I want to celebrate the freedom of ambiguity more than feel trapped by obligations. I want you to feel as freely chosen as I was to choose otherwise. I want the power of my awareness and capacity to build as much as destroy. I want the conversation to start from that mutually shared place and routinely surprise and delight with where it goes. Given that I don’t really know where to begin in that endeavor, I guess I’ll go back to dinner, my shows, and keep my ears open for what the next story is that hits me.

[1230] You Only Meant Well

I think there’s a moment to capture.

The last few days I’ve been feeling viscerally aware of how good I have it. To be sure, I practice active appreciation for my circumstances, but I think a lightly drunk conversation with my dad, when I haven’t drank that much recently, helped nail the point in deeper. We talk a lot of politics. I often return to the idea that no matter how crazy things have gotten in the budding-fascism landscape, we’re more Huxley than Orwell in why we might be slow to react or as forcefully as required. Do I really want to die for anything on any given day? Not as much as I want to be entertained, eat, or hang out.

I feel like the story for a long portion of my life is one that was tempted to complain. I could have a lot of amazing things happening to me, and I would default to what I could criticize, fear, or be angry at. I think this was an extension of how helpless I felt, in spite of any, and often, demonstrated capacity. It’s still there, both an incredible capacity to complain and do great things. The difference in my old-enough adult mind between how they operated in the past to now is how I feel about them. The feeling informs, it doesn’t steer.

I’m what I consider to be an extremely judgemental person. Exercising judgment is a different game than weaponizing it. When you’re not in control, it’s a defensive weapon by default. You’re trying to distance yourself from all of the things to be fearful and angry about. When you are in control, you can say something like, “I find this scary, but” or “I’m filled with rage, yet.” Sentences structured like that are often red flags for diminished accountability. “I love you, but” “I know I said that, except.” When you’re stuck in your feelings, you can’t hear the contradiction. You don’t understand the disconnect between your words and actions.

I’ve gone well over the cliff of trapping myself in an environment that tries to pair my words and actions. As a result, there are literally hundreds of things I’ve written about that I’ve claimed to want, fix, or work on that are a living record/dare to test me about what I “seem” like or “what I mean.” As often as I can squeeze, it’s precisely what I do. This is also a prerequisite for getting credit for what you don’t do. How else could you determine laziness and neglect from a real choice? How big is your basket of evidence that you mean what you say? What confidence can you have in yourself that something is reasonable or “realistic?”

My extreme judgment is always going to target myself first. It’s why patience and grace are also practices. I, mostly, know about me in any given moment. Can I dig up every hidden thought and instinct? I certainly try, but no. Do I know an exacting percentage of diseased or complicated cells itching to kill me? Of course not, but I don’t feel sick. We’re invited, in what feels I suspect to most people like an endless nag, to be constantly observing ourselves. Could you ask for a better environment for creating anxiety and depression if you didn’t grasp the nature of your control? Your feelings defensively picking you apart indefinitely?

I find myself returning to the idea of “I can’t.” It’s just this persistent echo. It’s a response to the idea of complaining about “my life.” I have it so fucking good. Poor, I’m good. just-enough money, I’m good. Practicing or building something everyday or sitting around watching TV, I’m good. I’ve never been genuinely hungry a day in my life. I’ve survived every brush with death so far. I have so much stuff, and stuff that reflects my values and privilege. I don’t feel arbitrary and predatory impulses that weaponize my judgment or intelligence. I know that I want my castle built on the same foundation from which I built my shed.

Do you feel it? Do you feel like you’re in a place of perpetual potential, or surrender? Are you waiting until you hit 40, or 50, for the license? How much more do you need? Who’s going to be your sugar daddy or are you already hysterical by what has been granted from  your Orange Alpha? So much of what I choose to spend my time on has been a direct repudiation of what I’m told I should feel or do, starting as reactionary spite, and then molded into deliberate practice. I had to learn what I actually preferred. I had to clock my actual energy and enthusiasm for what types of engagement and towards what things. A perspective wasn’t bestowed upon me, it had to be excavated and shaped.

And it’s ongoing work. I’m sensing an analogy when it comes to working with A.I. I’m building me-centric software to manipulate and organize media files numbering in the hundreds of thousands. I have to think methodically, notice when it’s drifting, and learn things about how I can accidentally break or undo what was working. It’s taken me 20 hours on a piece of vibes-coding software to get, maybe 20% of where I’d like to be in quickening what I’ve previously been doing manually for hours/days. It’s personally gratifying/exciting to see what I can create. When I describe my media habits to most people, you can tell I sound “weird” or “crazy” or “just why?”

I’m not otherwise distracted, so I get to drift and linger in spaces that aren’t about merely surviving into the next miserable day. I get to gamble in ways that aren’t frivolous. I get to form opinions of things I’m not immediately inclined to give a shit about. And I get to do that quasi-indefinitely, even in the midst of when practical things come calling. The way to tear my appreciation for all of that down is to think about what I don’t have, or designate an “ideal” that feels, currently, unreachable.

A couple days ago I thought about writing a “here’s everything that’s awesome about me” piece. As I thought about the awesome thing, I immediately wanted to counter it with all of the negative examples or incidents from my life. That I can or want to do either, but most importantly both at once I think is one of the most important things to protect about myself. I’m prepared to give credit where it’s due. I’m not dispositionally avoidant of what else a story or framing could mean. I’m not letting how I feel about any version of my life be the dominating factor in how I consider myself or what I choose to do next. I’m everything good, and everything bad, about me. I’m every word I’ve typed, and everything I’ve yet to access, or never will.

All things being true, at once, I chose these words. I’m choosing my coffee. I’m choosing to return to my A.I. software project soon, then it will probably be food and to play my media. I’m healthy. I’m close to the right temperature. I’m surrounded by what I’ve actualized and what remains as my potential. I’m actively contemplating and discussing other goals and collaborative projects. I’m in the recent memory wake of attending the movie theater yesterday, as well as a comedy show, and 14 concerts/performances across 3 cities over the last 3 weeks. I went to my favorite bars with my favorite people. I ate and drank heartily. I made $1,300 selling some of my Pokemon cards. I’ve cuddled with 5 cats.

I think it’s okay to want things and “more.” I don’t think you actually want those things or something more if you can’t feel as deeply the wild and improbable nature of what you’re already within. If you can’t access the creative/destructive power of literally any given moment, it’s unclear to me you can qualify as “conscious” or approach some idealized version of “human.” If that sounds judgmental, consider it’s not actually saying anything about you.

[1229] Hard Mode

This will be an exercise in perspective keeping related to a recent saga/drama involving the sober-living house I’m attempting to establish.

Let’s start with math. There are 8 beds we’re charging $150 a week for. There are 4 partners. If things go perfectly, I stand to make roughly $12,400 from this house a year. My yearly bills are sitting around $11,000 if I’m including things like home and car insurance (still not health insurance), have SNAP (ha!), and don’t drive much (basically impossible).

I start that way so you know whatever you hear about other ways I’m spending money, or problems I’m trying to solve, it’s not coming from an explicitly greedy, entitled, or that kind of privileged place. I’m not shuffling other people’s money around like a literal lord. I’m not so far removed from our program participants’ needs that I’m ambivalent about when things blow up or what it would take to have  a long-term stable and sober environment.

All 4 partners worked at an IOP program together. 3 are therapists, I’m a CADAC II, and have all my DCS/social work experience. We all have to agree on who is admitted. We talk at least every week and throughout the group chat about our clients and what to look out for. We had at least 4 months of regular interactions with the people we selected to move in at the start 2 months ago.

Our clients are still in “early recovery,” which means there are often a host of emotional, psychological, social, etc. problems that are still pretty hot. 3, 6, or 10 to 12 months of sobriety does not mean you’ve straightened out your core issues even if you’ve hit a personal best or it was a struggle the entire time. These issues can be compounded by negligent programs, but all on their own they often cause the lion’s share of any horror story you hear when things break down interpersonally.

Remember how much I said I’d make if things went perfectly? We’ve had 5 people move in. 3 of them have been, or will soon be, discharged. Off to a great start. Of those 5, 2 are looking like a relapse combined with fraternization. It’s a bad idea to get into any kind of romantic relationship in recovery for dozens of reasons that most should be able to intuit. How many sober relationships do you know are going that well?

Both of our recent discharge situations have involved me ending up at the house in the middle of the night. I’ve had to get packed up and moved out way too many things that shouldn’t have been allowed in the house in the first place. I’ll have to part ways with someone I was hoping to train in more of a leadership capacity. I’ll be saying goodbye to a client who was as good as you can ask for in IOP.  If you don’t keep sane and emotionally stable, it’s the endlessly gut-wrenching nature of this world where your literal hand-picked evidence-based examples of people who “should” be able to do better will surprise you. Your expertise and experience, combined, does not matter.

Or, that’s what it looks and feels like initially. What it means to be human is infinitely iterative in its ways to find methods for creative destruction or construction. There’s literally no way to predict what someone will do around any given individual or with the opportunities you try to create. You always have to return to the things you can control. I can provide a bed, a warm house, people with an observed, even limited, history of doing the work and dispositions that have coped well. I don’t know what tomorrow brings. I don’t know a micro shift might topple the psychological building.

As it stands, I have 2 people missing. One male, one female, and it appears the male is impersonating the female, perhaps stealing her phone days ago. She’s got an unexplained gash on her arm. I’ve heard a story where a stranger intervened when he was allegedly talking aggressively towards her, knocking him out. I’ve got reports from other housemates just as confused about the major atypical shifts in mood and word choices in brief interactions. Missing person’s reports are getting filed. Family states away are worried. 3 days ago, these were 2 of the highest performing and accountable people we’d invited to the house.

While writing the last paragraph one of my partners texted that she’s currently speaking with the female.

As things have played out, I got screenshots of conversations about their budding relationship, a relapse from him, and a “don’t tell!” message from her about what they’ve been doing for at least a week and a half.

For anyone not familiar with the world of addiction, there’s about 10 absolute “no” things that must be accounted for if you’re going to be successful in recovery or in your relationship to a client as a counselor or case manager. Lying? Hell no. Vague/cagey and cryptic texts? Nope. Relationship that’s even remotely flirty? No no no. A reluctance to relay problems like a missing phone, house disagreement, or needs? That’s a form of lying in concealing. Being unable/unwilling to screen? No one in your circle of contacts can get a hold of you? Finding time to be “bored” when you’re not working nor apparently job searching?

You will always always always think to yourself as a responsible and accountable person that “more” could or should be done. You are not ultimately responsible for anyone else’s actions.

As the hours have ticked by, and I’ve added more verbiage to our program contract, this increasingly looks like an isolated, mildly-elevated, wildly aberrant yet at once cliche story of the chaos and contradictions of addiction. It’s certainly not the first “crisis” I’ve navigated, and all of the tools I teach I also employed. I wrote as it happened. I patiently worked with relevant supports. I acted in the best way I could for any given moment. I’m not blaming myself for introducing the two individuals to each other anymore than I’m taking credit for the couples still together who met at my college parties.

I can rely on me to identify and execute a course of action. I can’t know what’s in anyone’s heart. I can’t predict the future. I can say, “It’s time to go” and look for the next person to make the offer to. If there’s anything truer than how quickly circumstances can change when you’re in any form of social work, I don’t know what it is. Lives come and go in many forms in an instant. Do you know where you exist in that infinite transition? I do.

[1228] If You're Listening

It's so familiar, yet remains a curiosity. It happens as a little flash, a mild stomach drop, and a little tightening of my chest. It's like my body "realizes something" and the "panic" or "fight or flight" carries out its marching orders. I'm just sitting drinking my coffee and watching the end of a movie. I've only been up and awake about 2 hours. I'm thinking about how I might occupy my day. But somewhere in that ambiguity resides a perpetual invitation to panic. It got me thinking about intentionality.

Last night I made a light trek out to the 24-hour grocery store for junk food. I spent almost the entire day watching movies and arguing with AI about scripts for fixing my show shortcut links and cleaning up my music tags. I'm a night person, so tired of idling inside, I set out. I watched a movie across the drive there and back. Every movie, bad or award-winning, employs mind-boggling amounts of intentionality. That fact alone originally cracked open my curiosity and willingness to be opinionated about all media.

At bottom, I feel like a person who is "trying to connect." I remember a friend in college who mentioned a pretty boring and basic anime, Scrapped Princess, she said she liked and the next day I binged it. The idea was that maybe I would discover what she liked about it and have something to talk about. We already hung out and talked about plenty, but she made a point about speaking to that anime in that way so it seemed like a different kind of opportunity or level. I didn't connect with it. She also mentioned once that she'd be down to film me and my ex having sex, which I suppose was it's own kind of missed opportunity to connect as well.

I find it hard to believe you can not only have an idea, formalize it with a script, share it with people, find money, hire people, buy equipment, travel to locations, navigate setbacks, promote, and ride the consequences of success or failure without the highest forms of intentional being that we have. What manifests from that is fundamentally magic regardless of how bizarre, boring, or distasteful you might find it. I think even that which is cynically syndicated has an interesting story as to why buried within.

Between this paragraph and the last one I had to get up and shit. I didn't intend on that. It was a call from nature independent of my intention to write a blog. Underneath that call, I intend to keep a clean ass and refraining from shitting myself. Surely you can discern the difference between an aspect of my nature and the product of my choices.

I also watched recently a Frontline episode tracking the lives of people who grew up poor. There's a scene where an already hungry and insecure in their living arrangements family are talking about a new baby on the way. The dad matter-of-factly said how he doesn't believe in abortion. The string of hammy excuses and negotiations they were going to have to make followed. It's in our nature to propogate our genes. I think it's also in our nature to downplay the suffering and consequences of doing so indiscriminately. If you didn't plan to have a baby, and do so anyway, what should we take away from that story were we to package it as a desperately low-budget movie?

When I'm intentional, the anxiety disappears almost instantly. That is, I have something to do. The "magic" happens without me noticing. I'm not sitting and ruminating about all I can't, and can never, know. The plan never has to be that precise or coherent, it just has to be a plan. Go to the store. Finish the movie. Write the blog. I'm debating currently how messy and tired I want to get assembling more of my fence. I need concrete with money I don't feel comfortable spending. My intentionality often aggressively bumps up against my practical reality.

Here I may have arrived at a new way of articulating where the anxiety comes from. I intend on so much. I intend to build many things. I intend to learn many more. I intend to travel and buy T-shirts and invest in equally frivolous if not status-indicating things. Often, that intention feels like mockery. It feels like a pipe-dream not situated in the reality of what it costs in both time and money. It feels dependent on too many variables, often derailed by the feelings, opinions, and negligence of the broader body politic. I remember getting routinely, violently, punished as a child for things I never meant to do.

I'm now thinking about religious types, in particular those who profess to care for the unborn like our impoverished Frontline father. Do you forgive him because "he didn't mean to?" In a deep sense, it's not his fault another nearly-starving, mentally challenged child is on the rolls. Or does it feel like you're supposed to levy blame? You don't blame a child who has been indoctrinated. You don't blame a child for being born, unless you're my mother. You do blame a cynic manipulator who recognizes the power of espousing an idea independent of its truth.

I can reasonably gather from your words and behavior how little you really intend. You don't mean to come across so superficial. You don't mean to sound helpless and ignorant. You don't mean to suggest there's only one or two ways in which the subject on hand can be understood. No less, a virulent defensiveness will arrive seemingly intent that I understand the depth of your feelings. When I can't, or do and dismiss them, there's no easier a way to become the enemy.

Do I mean to become the enemy? Almost never. But what I intend, a lesson learned every day, is rendered mute to anyone but me. If I didn't feel better understood, more motivated, and a sense of order and accomplishment from writing, I'd be at the mercy of the negative reviews. Those contain no mercy. Those are not concerned with the "why" or the "how" I arrive at my ideas. That's a realm of complicated reactionary feelings towards the obligation I'm imposing by trying to connect.

Right? You're forced to read, just like I'm forced to watch movies. You have to have the baby. We are at the mercy of our bodies crying out to shit and there's absolutely nothing we can do, no edits, no casting decisions, no budget allowances to make this story better.

I don't depend on the storyteller's capacity for me to develop a view. I can decide to look for the redeeming things about art that doesn't align with my current tastes. I can believe there's a deeper intention trying to escape the cold or rote and superficial. It's not only possible, but extremely likely I'm missing something, perhaps the heart, of what was driving the creation altogether. I don't have to speculate about a fundamental desire to connect. To me? To their "god?" To the zeitgeist? To the art that's inspired them first? At some level it's irrelevant. You need to connect with you before anything else can make its own kind of sense.

[1227] Catch

I gotta get little free-wheeling. The last 2 days my energy levels have been off or confusing, but now I’m on the brink of sliding back into a more productive and active place. This is causing some messy thoughts to coalesce marginally more coherently.

I was trying to land on a word to describe what I “fear.” Fear isn’t the right word though. It’s the vague approximate way to couch what I feel, but I’m not actually afraid. There’s a lot of words that fit under the vague fear umbrella that, when combined, would start to get at what I feel.

I’m “exhausted,” in a way that’s akin to the Nietzschean use of the term. I’m “confused,” less about the mechanics of why or how things play out, but that they should do so in a demanding and persistent way. I’m “curious” for an unknown-unknown black-swan kind of surprise or solution to what feel like intractable problems.

I wouldn’t have to search for a list of 100 things that are “wrong” or “unjust” or “unfair” or “ridiculous” or “backwards” or “horrifying” regarding our political environment, “leaders,” and the consequences of their behavior. It seems like every waking moment of my life is an invitation to suffer and react with as base a hatred and dread for what’s happening as exists. Every single moment of every single day I’m reminded of something that’s trying to kill me or something I care about. Every single day I’m clued into a threat to my future, what I care about, and the world I’d wish to leave.

What prevents real “fear” from kicking in is thinking at scale. I know we’re infinitely small. I know time rages on. I know, fundamentally, all feeling and indulgent selfish complaints are choices. I can make that same choice as any given fascist, or I can do this. I can continue to advocate for my values, patience, and imagined future no matter how hot the fire they’re burning me with gets. It’s taken years to recognize that in order for that to qualify as a decision, it can’t be made in spite. The fascists are spiteful. They are at the mercy of that spite.

I think in probabilities. My feelings tend to align with how more or less probable I think something is. I think we are a fantastic force for creative good. I think we’re considerably more likely to let the insatiable bad overwhelm until we hit a kind of default restart state. I think apocalyptic narratives are popular for this reason. We all kind of assume that we’ll get tribal. We all bet that the richest will continue to get rich and exploit and there will be a permanent underclass. The best we get to do is imagine ourselves in the boardroom or bunker contemplating what’s happening “out there.”

When I think about things long-term or at scale, it prompts me to consider myself in a hyper-local way. I’m not making the decisions to starve children across the globe or knee-cap mRNA vaccines. I’m not setting arbitrary tariffs or dumping forever chemicals into water supplies. I’m not trying to incorporate the evil, waste, and stupidity of anything I’m a part of to justify the consequences. I mean, sure, as a normal human I exist in a state that has to do that in an existentially default sort of way, but it’s not my compulsion. It’s not my cope. I make reference to what I build, and why I built it, regularly for this reason. I need a standing refutation to the arbitrary, greedy, vindictive death that surrounds me.

I do think those of us on more or less the same reasonable page do ourselves a huge disservice by the language we use. I’m angry when someone says “misinformation” instead of “lies.” People are just lying, and have been, for decades. It’s not abstract. It’s not polite. There will never be enough people who die in service to it to trigger some kind of moral awakening. You have to call it a lie and you have to speak the truth, every single time, every single day. If you can’t tell it’s a lie or if you can’t make yourself face and identify it, the game is over.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that it’s incredibly hard to articulate. This is the 1,227^th time I’ve tried to find the words for what I’m feeling. This is the forever-process I’ve identified that seeks to land on one most-true statement after the next, sentence by sentence, eagerly searching for the novelty or insight that makes the next moment go down smoother. I’m a solutions-oriented thinker. You want to vent? You better make that clear, or I’m going to reflexively start offering “fixes” like this.

In a hyper-local way, I can and do continue to build my own little environments. I get presented with the exact same kinds of choices as those shaking up the world, and I can choose to hold myself accountable to the standards they forgo. I can also see where the conflicts and contradictions can turn into excuses. I’m using recycled materials for a fence I’m building. I also burn trash. I’m concerned about the environment, but obviously more concerned about the cost and inconvenience of disposing of waste in other ways. I also don’t know that it’s not going to get burned anyway given what I’ve read about global waste systems. I’m likely just saving time.

If I felt guilt or less comprehensive in my reading and behavior, ignoring that guilt would be the dangerous sin and precarious place that allows for unending excuse-ridden catastrophe. If you can show me we have a real recycling process or show me we’re holding the corporations accountable for implementing production processes, I’ll go out of my way to ask for paper instead of plastic to bag my groceries. Most days, it’s one of a million things that’s going to give me a micro-dose of stress I can’t really do anything about.

I don’t think it’s hard to figure out what you can do locally. I think it’s hard to stay mindful about the nature of your locality. We’re, seemingly, infinitely distracted, not just by the horrors, but by the placations. We’ve got hundreds and thousands of hours invested in our entertainment. We’ve got incredibly stressful and often-meaningless jobs. We’ve got our health issues. We’ve got our kids and pets. We’ve got the dictums and pain points and policy of even the most well-meaning and fulfilling spaces we may have found. The accumulation of small pleasantries, acts of defiance, or utilitious indulgence can often feel futile or resonate as a form of mockery.

I arrange my space to be useful to me. I don’t have to knock down historic monuments in raging metaphorical ways in order to feel at home. I try to eat and drink that which fills me with joy or comfort. I try to allow myself outlets for when inspiration hits. I don’t use my tools and instruments every day. Every single moment I do speaks overwhelmingly to a need that can’t be met another way. I need to create. I need to build. I need to see manifest in the world what I’m feeling in a way the last thing I wrote doesn’t meet.

The things that have chronically plagued me become merely useful foundational information for the next choices I wish to make. My personality isn’t one for addiction, but I empathize with being chronically unable to resolve problems that feel infinite. I can’t “fix fascism,” right? I can’t convince the brain worms to protect our collective health. I can’t talk a billionaire off the anti-Christ cliffs. I can’t line up the pedophiles and let the victims take their revenge.

I can talk about them. I can tell the truth. I can go back outside and keep building my fence. I can ensure the 8 people living in my first sober-living house feel like their needs are being met in a timely way. I can enjoy my coffee. I’m going to keep going to my concerts, comedy shows, theater productions, beer fest, and honking enthusiastically at anyone on a corner holding a sign protesting the unnecessary death of us all.

I think the practical, tangible work of survival is a messy congregation of all the memes, protests, “EVISCERATION” moments in punditry and debate, but needs to be undergirded by the same kind of persistent survival network at exists in fascist forms. I’m encouraged by all of the extremely-local efforts to get school-board people elected. I’m encouraged by the run-for-something crowds building infrastructure in areas long abandoned. I like the hard numbers showing what you can do for 1 million dollars when we’re seeing how to routinely waste billions. Someday, in a bigger way than merely alluding to those efforts at the end of a personal coping strategy, I hope to be part of telling those stories and connecting as many people as possible to the large plurality that already *gets it.* I’ve heard the term “reality-based community” a few times recently, already poised to get pitted against The Truest Truth-Tellers or Perfect-Faithers, I’m sure.

I say often enough how easy things are to understand when you consider children. You don’t debate a child about how much sugar they get to eat, bed time, bathing, or school. You do if you’re a moron or liberal caricature, but not if you, even only intuitively, understand what a child is. Not if you grasp that the infinite ignorance and precarity of youth can get you killed instantly. Not if you feel curious and excited about what that child can be with the right kind of direction and vision. We are forever children. We betray that child by pretending we’re equally as helpless to fix or change something as they are. We’ve been riding excuses for decades. We’ve been pretending there aren’t concerted efforts designed to kill and control us by weaponizing and systematizing our vulnerabilities.

Choose, right now, and then 1000 more times today, to do even 1% better than what’s contributing to the chaos. Why die any sooner than you already have to?

[1226] Good Go Bad

I find it interesting how quickly a sense of “overwhelmed” or “too much” or “panic” can really arrive.

It’s 9:45 PM. I’ve had something of a lazy day after returning yesterday morning from a few days in Las Vegas for When We Were Young. The night before, I had to evict our first tenant for failing to pay for over 2 weeks. Getting home, many tasks called out to me, from tending to the cats to paying an expired license plate ticket. I’ve been waiting to hear back from a job with an incredible rate per hour and the worst communication. I just discovered my old desktop computer appears to be dead-dead, meaning I have a whole rearranging of my external hard drives and USB extension project staring me down if I’m going to keep collecting, organizing, and watching my media. The mild “shock” or “annoyance” or “wtf another thing” sensibility is why I stopped and started writing.

I have big white boards on my wall. My go-to strategy for overcoming a kind of A.D.D. paralysis is to write down everything that I could or should do that’s drawing my attention. Usually being able to cross off things like “coffee” “eat” “shower” get me up and moving through the majority of tasks and leaving the more ambitious things like “fence prep” or “weed whacker investigate” alone. Much of what I’ve needed to do over the last few weeks has been related to the sober-living home. I’m hitting something of a psychological barrier there too because I feel like at least one of my business partners is hung up on something about me she’s unwilling to share or talk about.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing work that gets taken advantage of, thrown in my face, or ignored and unappreciated. What I bring to a job or entrepreneurial thing is hard to question. I raise the concerns and questions, I manage the spreadsheets and budget. I transport the client to the shelter in the middle of the night when the 3 people who live in the same city, me an hour away, can’t or won’t. We’re splitting the program fees 4 ways. 2 of the partners I don’t think have even been to the house. Not that being there means anything necessarily, but it’s becoming like a symbol of the disparity in our effort/contributions.

What muddies things for me is that one of the partners I know is well connected. She’s the one that put me in contact with this new job with it’s crazy high hourly rate. I don’t lay their communication issues at her feet, and if/when I get embedded with them, it can only mean more for our overall potential and my individual paychecks. (I literally just got a text at 10:15 asking me to be at their farm at 11 AM tomorrow). Is that the cost for passive aggression? I don’t know what else she may be working on in the background or what another connection could do for the overall project, and so maybe that means I, and the actual house owner, are left to be the grunts and that’s just the nature of an imperfect and often unspoken agreement.

Because I’m an actual hard-worker and chance taker, my concern is never about me or even the nature of any given problem related to what I wish to accomplish. I don’t need “faith” or “hope” that I’ll do what’s necessary to advance my aims. What has undermined my ability to grow, amass, or evolve is other people. The lack of trust, consistency, and insisted upon resentment make even mundane things cumbersome to impossible. You’ll hear me on my deathbed praising Hatsam for being there for every beat of us starting the coffee shop together. I’ll feel l owe our parents and a handful of friends indefinitely who have materially contributed to efforts over the years.

I suppose I’m looking for a strategy for coping indefinitely with the attitude I know threatens the whole game. Either that, or I’m anxious and eager for a way to render it mute. I moved to my field in the middle of nowhere to render a lot of noise mute. As I cut out old nonsense, new things arrive, much like a day’s tasks independent of how many get accomplished. I know I’ve done a lot of work to return myself to the present and take things day by day, but at the same time, I think I resent how unreliable “people” or “things” are when I know how meaningful and important it is what it takes to continually rely on myself. It’s like, where do you get off expecting me to constantly put up with your bullshit? If I could shut off the part of my brain that’s intuitively responsive it’s unclear to me if that would cause more problems than fix.

The person I had to evict recently was just 1 of several thousand who was a mountain of excuses instead of solutions. Life is complicated and shit happens, but literally every moment you have a choice in how to respond. You can reach out for help and communicate what’s wrong now, not 2 weeks from now. You can tell the whole story, not the version that paints you as a victim. That’s what I try to do in writing. I want to find my agency. I want to find the words that brush against the irrational or too-hot feelings so I can function in a manner I’d prefer over what’s taking me away.

So much of when my stomach drops is in the anticipation of loss. I know, in a deeply traumatized way, that what I care the most about can be literally torn to pieces in front of me. I know in an embodied post-traumatic way how helpless and vulnerable I am as a stupid ape. It’s not “fair” or “right” that every whiff of threat antagonizes that stress system, but that’s what my body trained on. At some level, my built-in catastrophizing is what writing sprung forth to fix so I didn’t have to numb, punch, or clench my way through every tortured moment of “too much” thinking.

I also think I remain concerned about time. I’m not always capitalizing on every moment to be “productive.” I’m not spending every spare minute learning something new or novel. And I know some of my largest projects and dreams are operating on generational timescales. That stuff feels impossible and naive when the feelings of contending with people’s day-to-day pettiness and selfishness flood in. How are we supposed to fix fascism when you can’t get your head out of your ass long enough to even vocalize the nature of  your feelings or problem? How are we going to protect and sustain the well of creative and accountable fixes when all you can do is keep shitting in the water?

All  you can do, all I could do, is look for areas to isolate and keep betting on the next person. The process is often miserable, by default, and it’s why I’ve evolved to be the kind of person who buys band Ts that people regularly compliment and builds in shows to see every few days. I want each of my indulgences, but never as much as I want to genuinely believe in what’s compoundingly and fantastically possible. I don’t need any convincing it can all burn and explode in an unrelenting manner. I find it as hopeless and empty as I can ever feel in contemplating the disconnect between one’s ability to connect the dots of who they are and what they’re doing right now to the visceral consequences we’re all suffering. I suffer the more I give my power over to speculation. It’s not precisely making assumptions, but it is automatically responding as though I’m witnessing death, again, helpless to stop it.

[1225] Sober Up

I’m on the verge of an anxiety spiral, and I’d much rather be able to focus on the latest episode of Gen V. I’ve got this sense that I’m “on the outs.” It’s the early stages, but it’s a familiar feeling that has never once not gone confirmed. Let me walk you through how and why I think it happens.

Even though I’m on the back half of my 30s, I still catch a fair amount of looks. At work, I work. I do more than I should, well, and people notice. I, naturally, speak and carry myself in a way that translates my education, preferences, silliness, and politeness. My “story” is filled with unique or intriguing things that draws people in or keeps them curious. On paper, I’ve got a decent middle-class, professional, capable conclusion you can draw about what I might contribute to your life. I’ve broken enough hearts not mapping onto baby-daddy/husband in the imagination of exes and fuck-buddies.

You see that last line? That scathing presumptive yet cheeky kind of sentiment? That’s the first line I cross with most people. Eventually, the darkness in my soul manifest as bluntness or humor and sets the stage for the alienation. At least, it’s an easy thing to point to when the other resentments start to pile up. I’m not an edgelord saying ridiculous things for the sake of a reaction or because I know it’s taboo. I do find sincere and persistent joy in trying to make the most horrifying or sad things about life laughable. I’m, literally, the person who fits in best with the dead baby unit colleagues when I worked at DCS. There’s like 3 of us every 100 or so miles.

“Bad”or “awkward” or allegedly mean-spirited jokes are one thing. What really trips me up is when I’m trying to take something seriously that others don’t have the emotional or intellectual bandwidth for.

Right now, me and 3 colleagues at the last place I worked started a sober-living program in a house that one of them owns. 2 are “best friends.” The job I left is, and has, been doing a series of shady and dangerous things with their IOP program, which I reported. Well, my 3 partners still work there. The owner interrogated at least one of them. I informed them I was going to make the report. No one said not to. I, frequently missing the boat of what “normal” people do/mean when they say they’re going to make the same call, didn’t (implied: should have known) know they weren’t going to.

This is after one of them said to a receptionist that came in worried and venting about needing to report what they were doing, “Girl, I’ll call with you.” This is after that same one said, “I’m not giving them notice when I quit.” Her, and her best friend, also said, “I’ve already got a new job.” All of this, you know, is “just venting.” I can’t take it seriously.

We work with people’s lives. We should, by any appreciable measure, be better about meaning what we say and doing the right thing. I’ve tried to set up a regular weekly meeting. You can feel the inherent resistance, even for a quick Zoom. I come to the meeting prepared with topics and open questions. I get half answers. I get a silly hang-out session, which is fine and fun, but we need to know how to evict someone in a way that doesn’t hurt us or them. How thoroughly did that get discussed? How many questions in the group chat have gone unanswered?

This is a real opportunity to get the kind of wealth and income that I’ve been desperate my entire adult life to achieve. 2 people at a company an hour south of us opened 2 years ago and they now have 8 houses and nearly 100 beds. The drug problem isn’t going away in my lifetime, and people needing adults in the room for regular therapy, oversight, encouragement, and affordable ways of navigating our increasing dumpster fire of a country is going to be one of the hottest games in town. I want it done right. I want it sustainable. I want to prove that it’s not idealistic to both treat people right while making money.

But, I don’t feel like I’m going to be able to trust creating something that I don’t, in some manner, own. That means getting my own house as soon as possible. That means creating and training from within the people we invite into the space. Increasingly it’s feeling like dialing my personality to a zero and just being as professional and hard-working as I normally am and not trying to be particularly friendly or loose.

As we’ve worked together for the last few months, each person kind of takes up what they think they know or would be good at. We’ve all contributed a couple hundred bucks, either in cash or in things like a stove, to the space. I’m the only one who has moved furniture and driven over the hour away from where I live to move things along. The house’s owner has hired some repair people to get odds and end things done. My old supervisor was supposed to coordinate grant opportunities and draw up contracts. I ended drawing up the contracts when she didn’t follow the instructions I laid out about how to protect non-profit status. I don’t even know that 2 of the 4 partners have even been to the house.

I want to believe that their experience, network, perspectives, etc will contribute in a long-term way to our collective benefit. I can’t escape the feeling that, by virtue of who I am and my whole life, I’m going to find myself cut out of the group chat they start themselves. I’ve listened to them gripe and trash-talk the people at the office, you know, “just venting.” I’ve immediately felt the hurdles and resistance to formalizing our processes from meetings to move-in to budgeting. I’m not going to do anything on purpose that derails what this could become, but I worry I won’t have any control over what ends up having the biggest impact. I, genuinely, didn’t intend to quit my last job, and that day the forces conspired around me.

That sounds insane, right? Like I’m not trying to take responsibility for what I said or like I had some deeper agenda I’m downplaying. I had no idea I was quitting that day. I had no idea that my already more than halved paycheck was going to turn into $200 a week over the course of 3 hours. I had no idea I was going to be in a conversation with the receptionist about fraudulent behavior from the owners. I don’t want to lose my credentials anymore than they should be worried about their licenses.

In counseling, one of the ways people hurt themselves the most is in mind-reading. You have no idea what anyone is thinking about you. It takes a long time to recognize they aren’t. That’s precisely my concern. I know that people, extremely and reliably selfishly, will think about how they feel independent of anything else. That, burns me. That makes anything I’ve ever done, said, or contribute mute unless it’s relevant in the case against me. I’ve never been this close to a practical grasp of my entire adult life dreams, and it feels at the mercy of that same spiteful process.

And I don’t really know what to do. Writing will get me through the night, but I’m on my heels. I’m going to be looking for the opportunity to demonstrate my worth and “really prove” I’m more than the last worst joke or social faux pas. That’s pathetic and unsustainable. It’s also not fair, nor something I’m willing to bitch about how unfair it is indefinitely.

At the end of the day, I can control the exploration and leverage of the power I have. I have, messier, more expensive, but would be entirely mine alternatives or concurrent plans to explore. I don’t have to become best friends with anyone. I don’t have to conflate my familiar, probably accurate, sense about how things will play out with some notion that it’s inevitable or like I don’t have to take things day by day.

I feel an immediate sense of calm and order when I look so closely at what’s wrong it becomes impossible to carry either a hopeful or dreadful expectation. I think I can watch TV now.

[1224] It Takes A Village

I woke up this morning with the sentiment, “It takes a village” echoing in my head.

Yesterday, I arrived at a farm that belongs to my new employers. According to him, it’s only 2 years old. There’s all of the classic farm animals besides cows. When I got there, a 15-year-old was driving a tractor with a bush hog. This is another social work job, mentoring, tutoring, case-managing, but this one comes with the actual life-infrastructure and physical engagement that children need to properly learn things.

While me and one of the owner’s talked, I was left with the 10-year-old younger brother of the boy on the tractor. He’d only been at the farm for 2 days. He asked how I got so tall as he wants to be a center or power forward in the NBA. I told him it’s mostly genetics, but that he also needs to eat right and avoid sugar. He proceeded to list the heights of a dozen family members on either of his parents’ sides. When the owner got back, he set the boy to a task of breaking down a little pen that got twisted by a recent storm. He wasn’t great at it, and the “little” things that speak to success or failure really get highlighted.

This farm is located pretty close to the Indianapolis “normal neighborhood,” off a busy road, space. The kids that come here aren’t generally doing manual labor, and if they’re with a program like this have areas in which they or their family are struggling fairly significantly. The many things that you may take for granted in how to take down and move a small animal pen don’t exist in the mental framework of a child like this. He’s likely to pinch his fingers pushing in the little metal button that snaps into place. He’s not thinking about how to stack the polls in the cart so they don’t spill over the sides as he wheels it back to the barn.

I think most good parents are going to have thousands of examples like this in watching their kids grow up. It becomes too-obvious how much is missing and what else is needed in order for your child to thrive and survive. I don’t think it excuses, but I think it meaningfully accounts, for why so many immigrant families in particular put such an emphasis on working hard or getting extremely educated. Not that long ago, the alternative was pretty regular and visceral oppression and death. You need to be able to do things correctly. You need to be able to persist. A place like a farm will wise you up to that and humble your worst ideas very quickly.

Whatever you can say about the kids that find themselves under the care of a social worker, it’s ten-fold for their parents. The community is deficient. The family structure or set of assumptions is broken. There’s not just one messy or evil person going around sabotaging otherwise perfectly functioning spaces. As inclined as we are to bogey-man things, this framing always let’s us off the hook. This takes the direct impact of policy-makers and not-so-hidden agendas and keeps them abstract things to fight about.

There aren’t a lot of good-paying meaning-imbuing jobs that can account for the extent of needs. There aren’t enough institutions protecting and espousing a genuine education. There aren’t enough protections and long-term support systems that also don’t make people dependents. What we eat breaks our processing power and energy levels. What we watch reduces complexity into dopamine fixes. What we say keeps us trapped in circular self-sabotaging illogical blame games. We’re addicted, isolated, and constantly searching for heroes often ignoring the immediate fight we should be having every day.

Without a village, the loudest win. It’s a math equation at that point. The most violent, wins. The most diseased infects. The most money dictates. The village is the interplay and competition. If you refuse to play the game and stop competing, the worst wins. This is why we regulate markets. I think this is why we give mystical faithful beings codified evil to battle into infinity. We know we’re shaped by an immense amount of seemingly immeasurable forces, and individually it’s impossible to sort them out. In the interplay, we can mutually arrive at conclusions that enrich our knowledge and immune systems. It looks like teaching a kid how to stack things correctly. It looks like planting an idea seed that you shouldn’t eat too much sugar.

I’ve felt this problem for at least as long as my college cohort complained about how bleak the world looked at the time. There was a lot of discussion about what a little eco-village might look like. There was a lot of pain being felt about the lack of jobs. We stopped really hanging out, even before people flooded to Colorado and California. We neglected the best fix to the ever-atomized landscape provided by our phones, algorithms, and now A.I. We don’t challenge, learn, and meaningfully engage. We scroll through content. We default to irony. We allow ourselves to be crafted by forces that have nothing to do with why anyone would choose to stay alive.

Are you working because you love your job? Or are you paying the bills? Are you going to school and learning about how to craft and invest in the future? Or are you managing, poorly, debt and trying to look a certain way towards an employer who’s itching to outsource your job? Are you “dating,” or desperate to feel safe and find a narrative about being single, or childless, or “complicated” that doesn’t feel like a self-defeating parody? Would you drink the water in the nearest lake or river to you? Are you exhausted and checked-out trying to anticipate the fallout of “political” consequences?

Where’s your village? Who is in your tribe? Feckless democrats? A family more defined by the addictions and denial than anything passing for “love?” A friend group who sees each other once a year or less? A job that might cost you more in time, self-respect, and if you’re me, somehow MONEY, than you’re getting out of it? I’ve been in a dozen work environments where no one cared to unionize. I’ve watched friend groups deteriorate well after my exit. I’ve watched my family eat itself alive, next on the menu my alcoholic cousin gearing up to follow his older brother into death.

It’s our village’s complicity, a story told at every individual’s level, in how they respond, or don’t, to their suffering. Do they fight to protect the gifts and privileges and push what they’ve been given into even more, or wait for someone to “fix it?” No one is coming. No one was coming back in 2011 when all my friends pretended they were going to be a coherent accountable group. No is coming today or tomorrow. No one is going to teach you how to “adult” in a way that fights fascism one farm-lesson at a time.

For me, it’s always returning to what I have to do today, this hour, or when I write, this moment. I have to try to account, first. I have to try to articulate what I think is the problem altogether. I have to see my agency play out word by word. I have to control, at least one narrative, and look for evidence across time that I and what I’m responsible for exist independent of the amount of noise. It’s been work the whole time. It’s something that, were I not holding myself accountable to it, no one would do for me. I can take my existence on my land, my experiments entrepreneurally, and my patience and exploration for places to belong to for granted. I can also break them down and see them as a series of next-best-steps I could define about how to “deal with it all.”

When are we going to rebuild the village? When are we going to recognize the values haven’t changed? They’re no more complicated than the difference between specific practice and excuse-ridden theory. The excuses trap you in a job that doesn’t sustain you. They trap you in a family that exploits you. They trap you in a rental you’ll never own. They trap you under political leadership that sends you off cliffs financially, socially, and psychologically. What’s your, “This is how you stack the polls” thing you’re not doing for yourself right now? It has to be done thousands of times, together, right now, while the world continues to burn down around us. What’s the alternative?

[1223] Master Debaters

Part of me thinks each time I write I’m looking to round out a “grand theory of communication.” I don’t know what that means. I do know that I continue to notice patterns and experience frustrations in talking with people that steer me in a direction that there’s a better way to account for how we exchange information.

I have a really good friend who, I think it’s still “innocent,” will do this:

I’ll ask her, “If you had 10 people, 5 of them white, 5 of them black, would you be able to separate them into 2 groups based on color?”

Her, “I don’t know if they’re actually black or white! I would just feel so uncomfortable and wrong!”

Sure, but, that’s not really the point. It obscures the simple for the sake of the moral posturing. She knows, I know, we’re all mutts. She knows, I know, I’m not fishing for some racist conclusion. She knows, I know, colors are their own mystery and exist all along the color spectrum. She invites an infinite list of needless-to-qualify sentiments that obscures or obstructs what, at least everyone in our high school, could figure out in self-segregating at lunch. We also both know that she, and I, and nearly anyone on the planet, could do it easily.

This is also a friend who, at least initially struggles to notice characteristics that might be shared by different ethnic groups in general. This could be a form of prosopagnosia. I find I struggle to distinguish cars, maybe similarly defining mechanisms are implicated. Again, she knows, I know, nothing is perfect as there is no archetype “Greek” or “Italian” or “Somalian.” But it would be weird to pretend like traits aren’t shared and passed down, and that some people look like the groups they, in fact, belong to. When I go to Serbian fest, I see my uncles everywhere. When I go to Italian fest, I see my aunts and grandma everywhere.

I don’t know if there’s a discussion that even brushes against racial or ethnic differences that isn’t immediately derailed, so you can reasonably criticize me leading with these examples. They do give you a most visceral window into the nature of the immediacy of the general conversational derailment.

The classic space where this occurs is in religion “debates.” Legions line up to argue facts, science, history, genetics, evolution, psychology, chemistry, philosophy…and they don’t understand they’re up against “faith.” Hours of exchange improperly coded as “discussion” and “debate” and “reason.” No, you’ve been banging your head against their faith. Any topic for any reason can be subsumed by your faith in it.

I think we’re wired to protect “just whatever it is I believe right now.” I don’t recall what the more scientific or accurate way of saying this is. It’s not enough to call it “bias” of our own opinion. It’s deeper than that. There’s a survival mode invoked in the emotional experience of being challenged, contradicted, or “threatened.” We dress up that reactivity in myriad ways, but at bottom it’s a defensive reaction, not an owned and methodically accounted for and relayed relationship. We feel insecure, lash out or shut down.

I listened to comedian Dave Smith word-salad ramble against Coleman Hughes recently. The unironic “I know you are but what am I” sentiments flew out of Dave. The “whataboutisms” the “Sure, but” as though the point didn’t just land or wasn’t true enough to negate and move on from the lazy and incomplete thing Dave just said. It was a masterclass in showcasing how someone who is cursed with an impressive selective memory has no capacity to organize the soup in his brain.

But, there’s an extremely small group of people who are going to listen to the 3.5 hours of that exchange, recognize what’s happening, or translate what’s happening in a way that anyone else might understand it too. What purpose did it serve? Other “intellectuals” got to dip into the pool of “debate” and take their mind off whatever’s plaguing them that day. It’s not “helping” the “public conversation.” It’s another errant play by the attention economy to capture yours.

I do think there’s utility in serious thinkers and academics getting into these kinds of exchanges with idiots, frauds, comedians, propoghandists, and apologists. I don’t think there’s a broader theory of mind and strategy that most are following when they do. A Christopher Hitchens debated differently than a Sam Harris or a Coleman Hughes or a Professor Dave. Notably, most aren’t, even when I think they should, going to just call the dangerous frauds, “fucking dangerous fraud” as explicitly as they could.

Regardless of the topic or debaters, I apply my heuristics. Who’s getting defensive? Who’s asking explicit and should-be-easy to answer questions? Who’s name-calling, not because it’s correct and appropriate, but so they can jump away from what’s attempting to be focused?

This tension between focus and abstract is key.

This debate I just watched between Professor Dave, Dr. Dan Wilson vs Steve Kirsch and Pierre Kory echoed even more viscerally that foundational discrepancy between an errant exchange for attention and good faith discussion.

I think it will need to be part of our cultural immune system, word choice deliberate, to be able to recognize these kinds of tactics and exchanges quicker. We need to move past the idea that someone who is anti-vaxx is “merely skeptical.” We need to stop pretending that an ideologue, of any stripe, is doing “good faith” in their thought exercises. It’s a complete inversion of the words. It’s good for them. It’s self-reinforcing for their foundational faithful position. All you can accomplish is peeling layers of respectability and coherence off of your argument in the minds of onlookers by engaging naively with their position. You need to be able to disentangle, highlight, and embarrass what they’re doing while also educating on whatever the topic might be.

It’s a feat, to be sure. To look and sound reasonable under what is a literally insatiable desire and comfort for destruction, grift, and ego/brand protection is nearly impossible without training or incidental personality quirks that not many of us share. Even with those people in our lives that we’d wish the best for our capacity to disagree and misinterpret leads to catastrophic outcomes so regularly, many people just shut down and don’t make waves as an act of self-preservation. Who has the time, inclination, motivation, etc. to combat and deconstruct what might be understood as the death of coherent coexistence?

Yet, I think we all will need to find our own engine of “actual debater” in order to last long term. Right now, we’re letting people die of measles because we’re acting like segregating people by color is hard or unreasonable. That is, we’re letting our fears and unwillingness to designate information as more or less reliable based on evidence instead of assumptions kill our capacity to sustain ourselves, let alone get better. Yes, if you’re having a assumptive discussion about who gets to be a slave, somehow always leaving aside the era or country, you are correct. Horrors would then abound and you’d be right to be deeply incensed and suspicious of the person presenting the exercise.

The nature of lying is what’s being protected. The story of how a lie manifests and contorts stays hidden. The reasons you would resist getting past your own insistence to lie stays a secret. The nature of your always-right, always concerned with your feelings god gets to exercise its power indefinitely. You don’t change. You don’t learn. You don’t grow. You don’t genuinely see the evidence or define that which can cohere between us all. That sounds like the death of us all.

As a counselor, I watch my words get twisted instinctively all the time. I can say, “The door is brown,” and be interpreted as, “That door has never been brown, will never be brown, and if you try to paint it brown, you’re an asshole.” That’s what feelings do. That distortion doesn’t just ignore or destroy our ability to see a brown door, it can take something innocuous and convert it into a feeling of being personally attacked. It instantly builds entire worlds around the subject matter from which “natural conclusions” follow almost as quickly, about the person, the door, the color brown, or why we’d be so bold and disingenuous to invoke the door at all!

Return to your questions and make them excruciatingly specific. It’s excruciating for the person who doesn’t understand they’re lying. It’s important if you’re going to maintain respect and rapport for the people in your life who are otherwise inclined to behave like bad actors, but without the intentionality. Those who are in on the grift will get angry. Those who are genuinely trying to think things through will let your questions linger and hopefully discover how to speak to them either more removed from their initial feelings or after better incorporating what that feeling was attempting to tell them.

I get 2% heated when my friend does the conversation obscuring, abstracting out thing. I have feelings just like anyone else that want to catastrophize and race through my pages of thoughts and experiences of things it rhymes with. I know that’s a thing. I don’t make it personal. I don’t treat her differently. I move on from nights where it’s going to get intractable and needlessly frustrating. She returns to the subject matter later, more specific, sometimes with questions, or with a demonstrated ability to digest more than what was happening at the time. It’s something I’m incredibly thankful for as usually I just have to pretend there’s not some growing well of irreconcilable resentment that tends to erase me from people’s lives.

We’re now in the future where that erasure is rewarded from AI to the attention algorithms. Whether you’re calling out errors in my thinking or vice versa, that whole exercise is gone if you’re not seeking it out. I’m prescribing a debate and communication process 10-steps long after we bother to agree on the nature of the problem or purpose and utility of engaging said process altogether. That’s an accidentally convoluted way of saying I don’t think we’re gonna pull that off. I also don’t know what our institutions would have to look like to mitigate the fallout of it never getting better. As it stands, they’ve proven to be ineffective against popular gish gallop.

Individually, you can recognize in yourself what I’m talking about. I know when I’m getting “elevated.” I know when I’m feeling “defensive.” I know when I need to learn more about a topic to discuss or debate it more effectively. I know when I’m inclined to make a personal attack instead of contend with what’s being said. I know there are real and persistent patterns across subjects that speak to the reliability of the person relaying the information. If your narrative is unconcerned, or incapable of defining, evidence, you lose by default. If you’re unable to build on relevant details, you're trapped like a Sims character in a pool without a ladder. You have to figure out you’re playing the game and there’s only one way the part of you that’s struggling to find agency doesn’t drown.

[1222] Yuck It Up

I’m having so many thoughts on the Riyadh comedy festival it’s getting in the way of me moving on to other things. 

When I’m wavering between things, sometimes I use the percentages exercise. I’m like 90% in the camp of Zach Woods, Marc Maron, David Cross and the things they’ve discussed related to fascist regimes and state sponsored violence. I’m 10% with, not even the comedians or the patent justifications and excuses they’ve offered, but with the idealized version of reality where people are just people and we want commingling and seepage that doesn’t try to paint entire societies by the atrocities of their worst actors or leadership.

 

I don’t think falsely equivocating countries is a wise or honest way to say why you’ll participate. I don’t think downplaying attacks on freedom of speech, particularly now, particularly in a country that will kill you for what you say, as a comedian, is ever going to be something people should stop giving you shit about. To me, you’ve reduced yourself to “entertainer” or “podcaster” or “influencer” and rescind the title. You’ve lost the dignity that comes with wielding the weapon of your individual voice.

 

The 10% of me is trying to embody the idea that I’m offered a huge amount of money. What’s the first line of the first excuse I would offer? I don’t owe anybody anything. My career is my own. I do, genuinely, believe we are more alike than different, even if that’s incredibly hard to discern in someone raised in a theocracy or dictatorship. How fast can you expect “progress” to be? If I’m a Jewish lesbian like Jessica Kirson, who I love as a comedian, isn’t it a monumental moment to just be there and not immediately murdered at all? So they don’t want me to make fun of religion or the royal family? Do I make fun of my colleagues who are clean and don’t touch certain subjects?

 

It’s not abstract, though, that they kill people for what they say. It’s the greatest piece of evidence you have about how important your voice is and how useful of an idiot they believe they can make you. That’s what would stop me if I felt the devil calling. That’s what would make me look at $1,000,000 or more dollars and trigger an emptiness and a closing of creative and accountable possibility. Anyone who claims it’s just a payday who’s either already solidly rich or mingling and friends with those who give them rich access, is simply not seriously engaging with their moral center. A moral center that hopefully continues to nag them.

 

I do believe the comedians who went over are also captured and insulated. They’re all, mostly, each other’s friends and apologists already. Bill has turned Jessica into a name. All the podcast bros just are on rotation on each other’s shows, touring or otherwise. Some of the comedians are hardly “comedian” anymore than they are “global brand.” When you reach those levels of success, everything takes on a more abstracted character. It’s why I tend to find arena-level comedians and shows boring even if they were, technically, the same people who made me fall in love in the first place.

 

To me, it’s pretty much a bad taste at every level of context you could apply. As individuals, I’ve yet to hear a compelling reason-not-excuse to go that doesn’t pie-in-the-sky the conversation. As a comedian, I wouldn’t invite that much scrutiny from professional shit-talkers into my life if you paid me 1.6 million dollars. As an American who is on the verge, if not already lost, freedoms, and in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel, it just feels like stupidest kind of betrayal too-indicative of the times. Thankfully, I worship nobody, so while I can be disappointed and I’m going to be significantly less inclined to pay attention to or sing the praises of anyone on that list, it’s not like my identity has been shattered. You know how many comedians who’ve brought me to tears laughing who aren’t on that list?

 

I think, reasonably enough, comedy has achieved it’s modern pedestal because people are desperate for more “truth to power” spaces. Whether or not it’s the kind of exercise that nets anything but laughs, the laughs become sacred because it feels like all you can do. I think that’s why people would imprint on anyone with the ability to articulate how they feel. But it comes at the cost of agency. Your hero let you down? You make the next joke. You learn how to meaningfully impact the thing that’s keeping you down. Save your breath trying to indefinitely shame them as they spend their money and ask yourself why you’re so keen to make it about them instead of you. You also have a microphone.

[1221] Another Time

I was super tired earlier and felt like I had to write something about my recent experience, but I don’t know that I actually caught what I needed to say.

My mind keeps returning to the idea of how “unfortunate” things are when it comes to my experiences with different work environments. The idea of a career, years spent in service to something, is so foreign to me. The idea that reliable and demonstrable problems can get routinely ignored, lied about, or compounded is as confusing to me as any chronic human condition that doesn’t concern itself with getting better.

Sometimes it can be incredibly easy to criticize from the outside looking in. I’ve been an agent of the State. I know the incredibly biting judgments and assessments of DCS’s behavior and occasionally bizarre takes on our motivation or incentives. It wasn’t until I was working on the inside that I was both able to develop a nuanced appreciation for those who break themselves in service to helping others and maintaining any semblance of order. I could understand the details of what breaks down and why. It always comes back to individuals abusing or negligently exercising their power.

I didn’t have the power to structure the business I just quit. I didn’t have the power to redirect funds to ensure the air conditioning was fixed in the only van they used to transport dozens of people from the houses to their IOP groups. I could say, “Let’s invest in another van, and a second driver” to ensure the timely and safe transportation. I couldn’t designate training days for case managers and counselors to know how to approach their roles in ways that didn’t become overwhelming. I couldn’t set the expectation that sitting in silence and not on phones would be mandatory even if you didn’t care to do yoga.

I was able to identify and state what would feel like “obvious” fixes. This happens everywhere I work. At the YMCA you have elevated behaviors no one on staff is equipped to deal with? Write up and remove those kids. Don’t fire the person who says he’s uncomfortable at the invitation to physically intervene against the special needs kid who is swinging. You have staff targeting families for removal at DCS? Sit them down and call them out for being fucked up and not even trying to investigate and remain impartial. When the cab companies I worked for wanted the lion’s share of my money for each shift and provided zero access to the peak delivery times, I took my money and ran.

I find myself personally often trying to address a different kind of problem related to creating. I now have a step-down house that needs tenants. So, “obviously” I should reach out to other programs and let them know what we’re about. My problem is akin to the ones I had in trying to run a counseling nonprofit. Everyone’s got their own little bubble and method of doing things. Working you in or around it, seemingly by definition, threatens their fiefdom. Thus, the real problem is a schmoozing and politely engaging in a persistent enough way that someone bothers to work  you in.

My job is keeping my partners happy, my tenants happy, staying within my budget, and ensuring I get all of the paperwork correct. There’s a dozen things I’d like to do and ways I’d love to operate eventually, but in the here and now, I need a full house with a reliable enough stream of income that allows me to pay the bills and scale in a reliable way. I’m not rushing out to rent another house or three, like my former employer did, before I brought sense and stability to what’s on hand.

I have little reason to believe that if I can keep working with a reliable set of boundaries and reasonable expectations I won’t get what I want. It doesn’t matter how many times I encounter this breakdown in communication, common sense, or respect for what I bring to a space, at the end of the day it’s me and what I’m bringing. It’s what I’m taking and applying elsewhere. I don’t care if you look at a stupid video game or I again cite the very house I built, with the tools, time, and money, it will be mine. It takes incredibly longer than I ever think it should, but it gets there.

Tomorrow I’m going to research and make a ton of calls to sober living environments and start building a networking spreadsheet. I’m going to look up cameras to buy and install in the house. I’m going to get the contracts in order between the various LLCs and nonprofit. I’m probably going to all or most of this well before 3 PM, and then I’m going to sit around playing games, or music, or watching TV as I wait for the next job I’ve lined up to call me back. Or, I’ll get bored and go door dash somewhere. Or, I’ll sleep. No matter what, what it takes to succeed will remain with me and I have every intention of following the obvious choices to the places I wish to reside.

What kills me is how genuinely hard I tried to not leave in a messy way. I did not intend to quit. I did not intend to stir up drama on my exit. I didn’t intend to create bad blood or look like I was being deceptive and underhanded in how I was operating. But that’s the table I was invited to. That’s the nature of people who lead through means other than competence and accountability. It’s passive aggressive, an interrogation, demands of loyalty, and ambivalence towards you if you don’t just go along with whatever they throw at you. Once again, it’s not about me or us and what we could have created together, it’s about them. I’m forever obligated to account for myself and what I tried and failed to accomplish.

I’m still not back in Jordan Peterson’s corner, but his impact on me still resounds, and probably in ways he never intended. The depth of his exasperated sentiment that anything works or exists at all I felt in my core. His face and tone regularly cross my brain when I reflect on how my work environments operate. How there’s an invitation to be like them, which only looks appetizing on the surface. I don’t want to hide and play pretend. I don't want to censor myself and practice the exact opposite of my moral values. I don’t want to fit in. I don’t just want a paycheck.

If our culture is severely broken, and I believe it is, now is so obviously the time to manage your accidental martyrdom and continue to fight for and set the examples we need. That’s being honest. That’s being accountable. That’s accepting as quickly and as often as it takes how many are not with you nor seem to have a prayer of finding out how to be. It’s unfortunate, the continued choices people make to stay right where they are.