[1191] One More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1190] Begging For It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it’s time for pizza and laundry.

[1189] Just Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1188] Self On A Shelf

Self On A Shelf

2/10/2025

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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