[1219] Too Sweet

I feel stuck in a lane where I have to say several pages of boring, redundant, and too-obvious things in order to unlock what’s bubbling deeper.

I don’t understand the people who pretend like life isn’t horrible. Every moment that you’re alive and not actively suffering something is a miracle. The amount of ways in which you can die “normally” don’t make the television show 1000 Ways to Die. You’re incidentally complicit from everything to ongoing war crimes to environmental destruction. You tacitly accept the death and destruction of nearly everything that doesn’t touch you, without irony, every day. It makes the whole farce around Charlie Kirk all the more confusing and cringe.

I’ve now had the experience where someone told me they literally didn’t know who he was as they went in to defend him. The fascists and apologists think if they start sentiments with, “He was a father,” or, “Nobody should be killed for their opinion,” that it has anything to do with what’s at issue. No reasonable person thinks you should be killed for your opinion. You’re trying to shift the point, and not in a smart or honest way.

More importantly, our inability to accept how honestly weird it is that the dumbest of the dumb and the smartest of the smart commit the same error with such fluidity you’d think critical thinking makes you ill. He wasn’t “debating.” He wasn’t “honest.” He wasn’t harmless, even if his words weren’t literal violence. That goes doubly for his backers.

I don’t understand why people don’t grasp that most of the world, most of the time, but especially the rich who get that way by extracting and exploiting, don’t care about you. The religious who hide their power and money-hungry agenda behind rhetoric instead of practicing anything Jesus actually said don’t care about you. Your employer doesn’t care about you. Your reddit mods don’t care about you. They care about themselves. They care about how they look. They care about exercising superficial power and how it makes them feel.

So do all idiots, ideologues, demagogues, charlatans, cheats, liars, insecure cunts, incels, proud spiteful entitled children, Karens, pretentious music nerds, homoerotic dress-up-and-play-with-guns club members, or any average person who, on a given day, is struck by how confusing, absurd, arbitrary, and pointless their life is. Because they struggle to accept this, they turn their sights on you. Naturally, if you’re the problem, they can never be.

I know why I’m a problem. In my heart of hearts, I’m hateful and violent. I’m a literal counselor and professional de-escalator and feelings examiner. I can snap quick. I’m indulgent and wasteful. I do feel a certain pride in my accomplishments and stature, earned and unearned. I know how to work people and navigate the consequences of what my mother used to refer to as, “that mouth.” I know when I’m jumping to judgmental conclusions and not thinking deep or long enough about something. I know when I’m going to come off as inflammatory or cold. I know what I’d be tempted to do with the wrong kind of power in the right kind of circumstances.

It isn’t hard for me to say any of that, because I make choices. I can be many things at once and pick who I want to be. I can take responsibility, through regular practice of working to be more like one part and less like another. Meanwhile, it can still all be true. I used to think this made me a psychopath. I now think it says something unquantifiably damning about the nature of the culture in which I was raised that I couldn’t arrive at calling it “adult” for so long.

I don’t meet a lot of adults. I meet a lot of people at the mercy of their worst instincts. They use vague approximations of how they “feel” a word is supposed to operate. They use vague phrases to avoid accountable behavior. That’s the human animal first. The adult moral individual goes, “Oh, fuck, that’s a bad thing about me, let me try this. Also, let me try this long enough for it to have an effect and materially change my mental and physical circumstances.”

I meet people who check boxes. They rage at what they’re told to rage at. They vote like the only way to learn something is through word of mouth from your mouthiest friend. They do, barely, what a job kind-of asks of them. They lead with empty descriptors of “who they are” a thousand times before they’ll tell you anything they’re proud of doing or of what they’ve done. They’ll have kids and pretend they want to keep them. They’ll get educated and pretend they’re “passionate” about the field. They’ll get tired and busy prepping for who they swear they’ll be eventually.

When you actually care about something, you learn about it. You invest in it. You sacrifice the impulse to get lost in superficial feelings that are begging you to give up caring. This applies to yourself as much as anything else. No one, not a single solitary person who has performed their grief gives a shit about Charlie Kirk. They want to be absolved for their abhorrent beliefs, laziness, and terrible word choices as confidently and assuredly as he proselytized.

What “father” makes excuses and does apologetics for the guns and the “rights” after a school shooting? One who thinks he’s a god who felt license to flood the world. One whose sinful pride and greed would ride the adoration of being inflammatory. When you’re nothing but an attention mouthpiece, you can adopt whatever posture you need to keep the clicks and eyeballs coming. You don’t “believe” in anything besides yourself and how you feel in any given moment. A civil society hopes and prays you’ll feel bad enough through enough “debate.” But they don't understand that you’ve chosen to never feel bad again already.

You can’t recognize how egregiously and obviously people are lying to you when you don’t understand the nature of the lies you tell yourself. My sense that I’m going to “live forever” is as alive and well as my sense that I’m about to die at any moment. Whatever that means in biochemical or psychologically balanced terms, I have no idea. But I know for sure one is a lie no matter what you tell me about your heaven. I can differentiate what I wish to be true, versus what I encounter every day. I can pause before I speak, clarify, and own when I get something wrong. I choose to articulate how the lies manifest so I can practice working them out of my behavior. I don’t use what I know about lying and how rich it could make me to confuse you further about what constitutes an honest opinion or innocent exchange.

If I did, I’d be a cunt. If you spent years of your life explaining what I was doing as something noble and righteous, you’d be a dumb cunt. You’d be catastrophically wrong. You’d be contributing to the impulse that kills us all and rides the nihilism I chose for you to suckle on. Are there “true believers” out there? Sure, probably. Are any of them slapping their faces on T-shirts, creating clickbait, or occupying bizarre spaces that smell overwhelmingly like racist and sexist tropes conveniently contradicted occasionally? I have sincere doubts. The faithful don’t sell you things. The faithful don’t sell you. The faithful don’t sell. You don’t have to give yourself over to their games unless it’s secretly your game too.