[1227] Catch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1226] Good Go Bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1225] Sober Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1224] It Takes A Village

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1223] Master Debaters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This tension between focus and abstract is key.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1222] Yuck It Up

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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