[1197] Let's Fly Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1195] Not Like Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1194] Who's The Boss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1193] Housekeeping

Round and round we go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1192] Babble Babble Bitch Bitch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m curious and constantly asking questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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