[1187] All Too Human

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1186] Look Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1185] Match Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1184] Blank Check

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1183] Watered Down

I think I’m gonna write because I wish I had someone to talk to. It’s 7:30 PM. I left my house at 5 AM, which I do now 5 days a week to drive an hour to work in a truck that costs me 7% of my paycheck in gas every 2.5 days. It’s cold as fuck, so when I am home, I’m quick to put my clothes in the dryer and get under a heated blanket. I haven’t played my instruments in a while. I feel like I’m gambling with my indoor/outdoor cat’s life in how often/when I allow him outside.

My current job has me deeply embedded with people in a way that I haven’t been before. Every day I see about the same set of kids, their parents or other family members, staff, and elementary school milieu. There’s the usual pleasantries and predictable smiles or avoidant posture of different people in the halls. My job is to instantiate a proper after-school program for the YMCA. Before I arrived, from no less than a dozen sources, I was informed of the hostile and chaotic history of my site.

I’m a professional assessor, skeptic, and reporter of events. All things being true, there’s also hope and positives and different responses you can elicit from spaces described that way. The harder the gossipy world wants to judge and caricature my staff, for example, the more I look for opportunities to compliment the things they do well and invite them into my designs for the program. I was not always this way. This was something another site director and I were discussing this morning. I didn’t use to be able to see and accept the raging dumpster fire and the rainbow at the same time.

I can’t help myself but to dream big and maintain a default “too much” posture about whatever it is I’m doing. There is no, “just sit here, and do the job, and in 30 years you’ll retire.” I don’t want to “live within my means” employing a cover phrase for humbling my ideals. I don’t simply believe some despondent opinion about “how things are” or “they don’t care.” I know enough about people to accept their baseline “getting by” dispositions and the books of apologetics to justify it. I also know, precisely, how to cut through the noise and get the shit done that I wish to do.

And so now I’m at an ongoing transitional space. It took me my regularly predicted timeline to adopt a new job, find out the broken parts, advocate, pitch, and have now begun stepping in the directions I’ve both been demanding and people are recognizing I should have. I have coworkers happy for me to shoulder the brunt of articulating and pushing back on the dumbest of dumb shit. I’m leaving myself room to otherwise capitalize on my time and create more points of leverage. I’m certainly pretty broke, but I’m making sure to eat gratifying food along the way.

I feel like I’m no-less treading water. I was fairly desperate in my adoption of the job in the first place. I’m not dispositionally, age-wise, or even hobbies or interests remotely close to anyone I work with. So even when I’m surrounded by people, rooting for them, working earnestly to create a space they enjoy and can thrive in, I don’t feel like I belong there. We can chalk this up to my usual condition, but also….I don’t belong there.

The space needed, like all spaces need, accountability. They need to stick to the clock and a schedule. They need a little planning. They needed someone to remind them that it’s disrespectful to be screaming at each other or ignoring reasonable asks and direction. Any reasonable adult can or should occupy my position. 6 failed to do so until I arrived. So either I have no idea what people could or should be capable of, or I’m continually exercising this unique capacity for doing things I struggle to conceive of as more than “idiot proof.”

I can’t trick myself. I can’t make myself believe that even when I do a “good job” or people tell me, “I was going to quit before you got here,” that it means the same thing to me as it might to them. I feel I have to be careful that I don’t end up just doing the “indulging for me” thing channeled through the prism of my role. Taking compliments or encouragement too seriously would be sucking on a certain kind of distasteful teat. While I won’t deny accomplishing something or doing well, if I can’t get at that “deeper” thing that speaks to my actual, I don’t know, purpose? It’s just going to be 1 of the 20-something jobs I’ve had that inform my “can you believe this shit?” stories.

I model self-confidence. I model open, honest, continuous conversation. I model an invitation to the messy team trying to figure it out together in spite of ourselves. I haven’t missed a day, navigating car issues, the weather, and illness. I haven’t hesitated to ask for more and take on responsibilities even while feeling like I got bait-n-switched regarding the nature of my role. If I’m going to have a prayer (ha!) of finding what I want or need, professionally or in general, it’s at the end of this road where I’m laying down each cobblestone.

I can’t afford asphalt.

[1182] Slow Burn

It’s been a little bit since I’ve dipped back into my onechannel. It’s the playlist I’ve created with every TV show I’ve downloaded that I haven’t specifically sought out to complete watching. Currently, there are 647 shows on it. These are shows I don’t consider worth slowing down from 2x to watch, at least yet. It’s all genres, languages, and eras. It provokes a unique sense in me when I’m immersed in it for hours at a time.

I think to create anything there’s an innate difficulty. I was listening to Mike Birbiglia and Ron Livingston talk about criticizing other people’s scripts and then realizing, “Oh, fuck, it’s hard to ‘just fix this,” whatever you may reflexively think about a line or scene, and then even harder to generate your own thing that isn’t rife with the same problems. Watching so many different types of things has softened me in how I might criticize as more objectively bad or poorly executed shows. It also has me thinking about the “why” so many of these shows exist or how they manage to occupy certain places culturally.

I’m sensing a distinction in comedies, for example. There’s a difference between zOMG RaNdOm, gonzo, irony, camp, or silly. That can be hard to make distinct, particularly from a creator’s point of view who has probably laughed at all of the above, messy mashing of them or otherwise, and considers them all part of their humor. Setting and maintaining a tone across a perhaps indefinite amount of episodes is basically impossible. At an individual level let alone at a professionally creative one.

Imagine having to maintain your “personality” every day, in every setting, and have it collaborated on with different departments so that it “made sense” or “accurately translated” through given constraints. You have a joke that is dead-on your humor and style, but standards and practices has opinions. You have a setting that speaks louder than any character will ever manage, but you can’t afford it. You have an emotionally compelling and pivotal moment in a character’s development, but it happened on the last episode, and season 2 is cancelled.

I often think many creator’s aren’t genuinely deciding on what lens they’re trying to tell a story. They just go with “comedy” and see what happens. That’s why you can get so many shows that might have different skin, but all sound the same or the “vibe” rests in a sort of middling place where you always feel like there’s more of a joke that’s supposed to be coming , but never arrives.

A show I love is Shameless. Part of what made me love it was that I could say, “Yep, that was shameless,” in scene after scene about every character. It knew its identity immediately, shouted it proudly, and doubled down at every opportunity. It didn’t feel like it was filling time in between incidentally shame-ish spaces. It wasn’t trying to persuade you of what reality was like for its characters. It was training the camera on exactly what it wanted and needed to say. If harder-to-believe things grew out of that, they at least had a reliable basin that felt honest to the environment that might breed such outstanding circumstances.

I feel cartoons went the way of arbitrary randomness. I get this sense after I watch a dozen Looney Tunes and then a modern Adult Swim show pops up. You’re tempted to pay attention to every moment of a 7-minute Looney Tunes skit. You’re invited to barely make-out at all what Assy Mcgee is even saying. Looney Tunes has visual jokes every few seconds like 30 Rock has verbal ones in almost every line. A show like Fairfax or Agent Elvis will build a unique enough visual world, but populate it with a kind of detached observational and circumstantial absurdity. What’s the voice? That you, in fact, recognize what people are wearing or are “supposed” to sound like?

I was scrolling though Trakt’s “discover” page and felt hollow. Another cop/murder investigation, or 10. Another doctor show, or 10. Another reboot. Another spin-off. Another “documentary” taking 8 episodes to tell you a 30-minute story. For the years of “identity based” rhetoric and public discourse, no one seems to have one, even and especially if a new show is based on having all of the boxes checked.

I’ve been exceptionally open to new bands and comedians the last 3 years. I’ve added or followed more than I’ve counted, but at least 100. One comedian I followed is coming to my local comedy club. I didn’t recognize him, and was only reminded when I scrolled through my follows. He, at least once, made me laugh, probably on the toilet. I scrolled through his page and decided he had enough of a unique voice and perspective to be worth checking out. I have 10 or more free passes to the club; it’s a no-brainer. Well, I didn’t have plans the weekend he was gonna be there. Now, it would involve an extra hour drive there, plus an even-later night drive, 3 hours instead of 2, to get where I’m otherwise going. Is his voice worth the extra gas money, time, and energy?

It’s mostly the wrong question, at least for me, as I tend to play things by ear based on my energy levels in the moment. I’m more curious about whether he would say it’s worth it. I want to know if he thinks his perspective and goals are things worth shopping around the country looking for laughs more than the thing he finds himself doing because he can.

I don’t think enough people, let alone creators, are asking themselves this. What are you trying to say, why, and what is it going to contribute to our overall experience of life? I don’t mean to suggest that everyone needs to have some deep and coherent purpose to everything they make. (I mean, have you seen how I write?) If you’re going to get on a stage, create or be cast in a TV show, learn the mechanics for bringing your animation, music, or comedy to the masses…I think you should bother more with why “you.”

Bill Burr is a comedian “the culture” is trying to mythologize. Why Bill? For many, he’s not a typically aggrieved east coast guy. He’s a “legendary ranter.” He’s not merely a funny comedian and creative who has been doing it long enough to have developed adequately. He’s treated more like a scapegoat instead of a goal. He’s what you don’t think you can be, so the more praise and lore you build around him, the less you need to concern yourself with your own comedic voice. Dave Chappelle was that for people previously. Dave recognized when people shifted from even knowing what the joke was about to laughing at the wrong things.

One of the first things that struck me about older, say 50+ years ago TV shows was how bluntly they dealt with issues I think a lot of younger people pretend were invented yesterday. We have these siloed screaming matches about race or gender, and there’s entire series based on those things many have never heard of. The crime or court procedural was dealing with heinous murders and unimaginable violence in black and white. Anything related to sex or its taboos shows up everywhere. You’re never reinventing the wheel, but you should be striving to drive the story in a machine maybe only you can build.

I theorize that people aren’t having genuine engagement with the things life throws at them, so they can’t discover their individual voice forged from the fires or compressive stress. They aren’t literate, so they can’t recognize nor say, “That’s close to what I mean, but here’s my flourish.” They aren’t curious because they’re exhausted by “the grind.” They aren’t genuinely creative, but more performing the performance of creativity in their Tik-Tok clipping and endless stream of podcast conversations.

Network restraints or dead-horse beating that you might recognize on any show, I do think real voices still manage to stick out. I do think shows that tap into the hunger we will always have while we’re alive to meaningfully engage experience altogether will most often win the day. At the same time, the barrier to entry is so low, you might have to sift through 650 shows to find the 5 or 10 worth being slowed down.

I’m decently creative when the inspiration hits. I’m not making a career out of it. I’ve never strived to turn it into something of monetary gain. I crack jokes. I do wood projects. I’ve started writing and creating music. It’s made me all the more sensitive to what is, or isn’t, in someone else’s creation. I get to ask myself if I could say that line, alone, and keep a straight face or feel sincere. I get to embody what I’m feeling, or don’t, as I reflect on what’s on offer. I don’t have emotional reactions to most things through most days. I can bring myself to tears writing and creating music. I can laugh till I cry. Measuring the contrast between connecting to that emotional space and why helps inform whether I even basically believe what you’re trying to tell me through your creative work.

I think it’s important to take as much space and time as you need to eventually “get it right.” The logic and engine of endless content or capitalism suggests that you need to turn into a machine your followers can gorge on indefinitely. I think the spirit of meaningful creation and engagement means you should do what you’re meant to do. Do it when you can, for your own reasons, and if you can both discover and celebrate that place, you’ll connect to that universal that let’s anyone else doing the same thing for themselves recognize and find you.

You might get cancelled, fired, ignored, endlessly misinterpreted and reimagined, but you’ll probably have something we should all slow down and pay attention to.

[1181] Somewhere I Belong

I want to talk about belonging.

As I try to understand what that means, I had times in my life that stuck out. It’s only a handful of periods in which I genuinely felt like I belonged. I want to see if they have anything in common besides however many stories I’ve written about how they went wrong.

My grandma’s house was a spot I belonged. The whole family would meet at my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner and a movie. My grandma, in particular, would keep an endless supply of food coming, and was genuinely interested in spending time talking or playing cards. I remember once when I was maybe 13 or 14 I was having trouble sleeping, for months, at my house. I was sitting upright on the couch at my grandma’s, and remember nodding off, feeling, but not able to articulate then, an ease and sense of comfort that I was not finding in my chronically stressful and threatening home life.

I’ve felt like I belonged in two work environments, Showplace 12 as a teenager, and at DCS. At Showplace, I got to work early to hang out with friends, worked with friends, and then stayed out late after work with those friends. I knew and was good at my job. The management for most of the time felt like older siblings or surrogate parents who matched our maturity levels. I got looked out for when gossipy bitches tried to get me fired. The people who lasted could both do a good job and keep the fun and jokes alive all day.

At DCS any belonging stemming from knowing the intimate details of a very complicated job and getting a lot of positive feedback from professionals across realms. When the police defer to you, it’s hard not to think you’ve figured something out. When openly hostile school social workers eventually confide in you that they were thankful you were the one who got a particular child’s case, like, that’s your role, and you’re home. I got the chance to do a kind of ride-a-long with someone trying to understand an assessor’s day who I know they would have never gotten as much from anyone else. I got to train people who lit up after being mostly ignored or poorly informed by shittier coworkers for weeks. I could talk to judges at the “wrong” time and not get in trouble.

I also felt like I belonged with the college friend group and at the party house. There wasn’t knocking to enter each other’s houses. Mind you, that “group” is more of an imaginary distinction that spanned, to my mind, as many as 20 or more regulars, but nonetheless I felt the culture and vibe was something people were hungry for and hoped to belong to. I think a space of genuine connection and freedom was cultivated, in spite of how it was transformed and resented eventually.

Finally, I’ve felt at home, at least in humor and what I thought were shared expectations with my former best friend.

Throughout my life I’ve been a part of different sports teams and clubs. I’ve got a family. I’ve had longer-term girlfriends whose families I’ve met and spent time with. I’ve attempted to put together different hang-outs and make new friends. Always, I’m prepared for it to evaporate.

I’ve read a lot of books. I know there’s a cliche trauma-kid in there somewhere that can’t trust anything and had to grow up too fast. But I think the rift between me and other people goes deeper. Within the last couple years that might be described as still not diagnosed autism. Even still, I think, or at least I feel, like there’s an even bigger piece that’s still missing in this story.

Today, I have 3 main friends. 1 lives 3 hours away, who I’ve managed to spend more time with than the other 2 by miles. 1 lives 20 minutes away, is from Saudia Arabia, but has lived in the US for probably 20 years now. 1 lives 45 minutes away and I almost never see, but we text almost every day for brief spurts. All 3 of my friends appear to me to have something I don’t. They’re plugged into something “normal” or “familial” that I don’t feel.

That is to say, it’s the same kind of thing I witness in my ex-girlfriends and their relationships to their families. It’s the same thing I see come up from clients when they’re trying to articulate why they can’t adopt some behavioral change. It’s this kind of allegiance that people who all seem to suffer from something deep and peculiar all agree upon. And I have no fucking idea.

Let’s linger on the word “allegiance.” There’s this both from fairy tales and colloquial conversation that you pretty much ride-or-die with your lot. It doesn’t matter how bad they treat you, what they stand for, or what they’re likely going to do to you in the future that’s your family. If they’re the reason you need anti-depressants, are in debt, or routinely shuffle and disrupt your self-care, no matter. You’re so overtly obligated that literally every violation forever is reduced to a write-off.

That’s only one side of it though. They also seem to be getting something wholly immersive and worthwhile. I might liken it to some kind of religious conviction that gets invigorated by each lash. With each donated strip of skin and drop of blood you’re one step closer to salvation. “You couldn’t possibly understand because you weren’t born into it,“ a furrow-browed and disgusted-with-me explainer might remark. It’s not for me and therefore shouldn’t be commented on or bastardized by my looseness or inability.

Movies about elves and orcs or super powers don’t make more money than anything ever has because the world is full of ”cool“ people. I don’t want to lose what I’m trying to articulate in some lazy idea of categories like ”nerd“ or ”outsider“ that plays the broken record of modernity citing their social anxiety or ”quirky“ introversion.

There’s something deep that people have that I do not.

My Saudi friend will get together with his other Arab friends and they’ll pray on his porch. My recovering alcoholic friend will spend as much time as she can get around her deeply alcoholic mom and sister. My 3-hours away friend will describe needing to stay closeted yet mostly enjoying her time with family who espouse many a fascist opinion and nearly re-traumatized her when she had to briefly move back in with them.

I think about the things people have cut me off over. It’s incredibly hard to square whatever this substance is that binds people together that might be 100 parts ”toxic“ for every dose of love or care. I will have people never talk to me again over rumors. They’ll cut me off when I’m ”too honest.“ I will get dragged into screaming matches so someone can build an excuse to run away, even as I’m literally offering food, money, time, and a white board writing things out to try and stay peaceful and connected.

Remember, I also have listened to hundreds of people’s descriptions of their histories and family lives. I’ve heard stories of years of physical and mental abuse turned routine. I’ve heard of theft, confinement, and substance abuse never being enough to tear some bond apart. I’ve had people report to me week after week for months or years the horrible things they’ve been called or accused of. They’ll tell me how they sacrificed savings or goals to ”help“ someone they care about. They’ll get genuinely aggressive and annoyed with me if I can’t phrase precisely my question about whether it’s wise to do so.

I know most people have an infinite capacity for self-destruction, including myself. So, no, I don’t think that’s what’s missing between us.

It has to be somewhere in the realm of positive emotion and that sense of belonging, no? I just watched His Girl Friday recently, and the whole joke of the movie is that the girl, no matter what else has transpired or been said, is his. They’ve got the magical bond that transcends literally everything. It’d be convenient to just write this off as an invention and mythology of the movies, iterated and evolved a million times, were I not witness to it from fucking everyone except myself.

I return to the battered-wife caricature so often because that’s what it feels closest to. I’ve also listened to a few podcasts recently just enamored by Christianity and the hold it has managed to have on society. It was novel to elevate the slave and espouse the idea that everyone has value. There’s not a more powerful tool in the universe than an indignant victim seeking self-righteous retribution. Oh! To be morally unencumbered! Is there anything more natural than a naked and afraid beast reacting after being provoked?

Most people are like my brother, and even my dad to a certain extent, when it comes to my batshit mom. I cut the bitch off at the first opportunity and haven't spoken to her in maybe 15 years? My brother invites her to his wedding instead of me. But, here’s the thing, of course he did and should have. He knows, like I know, that I’m not stuck to him or her or ”family“ like a normal person. I don’t belong. Weddings aren’t for ”people“ like me.

My 3-hour away friend’s dad remarked to her recently about our dynamic, ”whatever that is…“ He’s a little autism-y too, but also has clearly done the family-man, normal job, suburb life thing. His comment I feel articulates what my exes have felt instinctively. What are they even doing? It’s extremely unlikely I’ll want to get married. My sense of being an adult in the world swings from doing drug studies, to food delivery, to ”real job“ with the State seemingly at random. I do this, and it’s been insisted, ”Nobody wants to be a blog,“ meaning the subject of mine. How did I trick them so thoroughly?

I’m like someone who has all of the pieces, but can’t make them fit. I’m not a weird-looking ”anxious“ I can’t, I can’t, I can’t type. I’m not unable or unwilling to modify my behavior to be ”more normal.“ Fuck, typing that line just made me feel a wave of incredible sadness lol. Especially as I’ve gotten older and heard so many people’s stories, I’m so much less inclined to hold any serious negative opinion or judgment towards someone. I’m a doubt and counter-factual machine at this point. Even my crazy cunt of a mother I can depersonalize and describe her objective tragic woes.

I feel like I’ve been longing for the sense of belonging that I had at my grandma’s. I feel like I know how I feel when I’m open and trying and enthusiastic about helping or sacrificing in service to someone I care about. I have been soundly rebuked by several exes for not only buying things spoken to as necessary to facilitate a goal but even just in offering money to help or fix something.

I feel like I’m literally trying and living the standard I wish for, but the options almost everyone chooses are some version of fatalistic calculation. I think most of my dad’s side of the family, for example, are jockeying for inheritance, my uncles already having stolen mine from my grandparent’s estate. Now them and my aunt want my great-aunt’s money. We play along at Thanksgiving or Christmas, but they don’t feel like family to me. Too much time in their presence, and I feel physically stressed. Do I want the money they stole? Sure, kinda, but not for what it’s probably gonna cost me.

”It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.“

It’s never been my belief, in and of itself, in those times of belonging that has hurt me. It’s not that important to me if they were ”real“ or not because they felt real, and they feel different then the rest of my life. Incidentally, I’m not only accused, but it happens to be true, of not feeling particularly much beyond anger or spurts of happiness in general. I’m also loathe to give too much deference to feelings as a generalized rule. Who cares what I feel? That’s easy, fucking no one. I think I just care more about how those feelings inform or dignify the values I wish to live by. I want them free of the sticky muck that seems to inherently undermine their manifestation in shared reality.

That is, you can call your black eyes ”love“ all you want, I’m gonna think there’s something wrong with you. I’ll then be ushered into my shame corner for stating things so bluntly and condescended to because fear is the heart of love, idiot. It’s familiar and traditional and therefore worthy of identifying with.

My ex best friend couldn’t fight the temptation to prey on my sense of longing and hope to belong to something meaningful and robust. He got a whole house flipped off the back of it, and me complicit in a threat to my life. I believed the best about our dynamic right up until the moment I couldn’t. I voiced my displeasure along the way. I provided opportunities to make things right. But I no longer existed. That appears to be the end goal for nearly everyone I encounter in life. To act like what I saw, said, or felt wasn’t real. Whatever needs to get said or done to make explicit my wrongness or otherness is fair game. I couldn’t possibly be just like everyone else and choosing to sound and act the way I do. Best to suffer my syndrome alone.