[1253] Howl At My Ass

I don’t think I trust democracy. Take a really deep breath, because I can already feel your assumptions overwhelming the many different points I’ll be attempting to make that usually aren’t heard anyway. I certainly don’t trust any authoritarian. What both have in common is my distrust of people.

I don’t meet many people. I, generally, spend my time navigating reactive animals. I don’t meet many individuals. I don’t hear many novel insights. I’m mostly stuck, awake, trying to “survive” the circumstances launched my direction while trying to stay in touch with my own sense of being, values, motivation, and perspective.

That’s a lot packed into 2 little paragraphs already. My first line was shared by the founders of The U.S. A constitutional republic is not democracy. We gloss over this colloquially. Our historical, baseline disposition, is one that was shaped by the horrors of our behavior towards one another. We have good reasons and instincts to hate our neighbors, fear invaders, and protect whatever we’ve established as an adaptation that got us this far.

Widen your lens a bit and think about where trust actually lies. I, more or less, trust processes. I don’t “believe” in them, I get to regularly account for their consequences and add up stats. The process of evolution by natural selection trumps your opinion of what looks or feels best-suited. Scientific processes of concurrent independent verification and falsification are more trust-worthy than vibes. I trust people’s timeless inclinations to be greedy and selfish, so the consequences of capitalist expansion and exploitation are predictable.

I think people understand intuitively they need structure, tyrannical or otherwise. A cell needs a boundary to exist. You’re made of atoms. Your energy is itching to “die” and diffuse everywhere.

Is it unwise to seek a resolution to that tension? When you’re “exhausted” or “overwhelmed” by “politics,” are you just adopting a cliche and fundamentally empty sentiment about the nature of being altogether? What could you trust when you’re fated, in a sense, to be stuck with a fundamentally unreliable, inconsistent, and often extremely dangerous “choice” of who to surrender a meaningful amount of power over your life to?

You need a process. You need a regular exertion of your energy that reconstitutes a reliable enough structure to keep surviving, and hopefully not just so. Part of my process is writing. Another part is creatively expressing through wood work and music. I try to structure my life so it is fundamentally “open” to new experiences and allows me to speak truthfully and consistently to the powers I’m often at the mercy of. 

Have I “failed” in having 20-something odd-jobs over 22 years, working often less than a year at each or not working for months or years at a time between them? The alternative is eating away at what I think it is to be human. I could make excuses. I’m better than “good” at any job I take. I could cash the checks, keep quiet, play along, and then in no uncertain terms I might snap and actually kill myself when I can no longer even see where I exist.

The stakes are pretty high for me. It’s real life. I can come up with all the fun analogies and “game” language about what things are like, but at the end of the day, I respect and fear my power to destroy as much or moreso than I do to build or protect. I’m fundamentally tense and angry. I’m fundamentally exhausted and overwhelmed by all the stupid. I’m fundamentally and desperately overflowing with hatred for what I know intellectually is akin to millions of dogs barking, but as an individual, refuse to believe they don’t have a choice.

It’s a tyrannical idea that lingers over everything I do or say. I make choices. If I’m going to claim that, I don’t have a choice in whether I believe you have that same capacity. I don’t get a choice if you don’t. I don’t get to dignify and explain my conscious experience if you’re an NPC. The weight is nearly unbearable.

Why? Well, I want to live. I want to live well. I want to live abundantly. I want to create and express and speak the truth. I’m choosing those. When you’re not, I’m literally under attack. I’m drafted into a war I did not choose. I can’t just live like I want. I have to carry the weight and implication of your lies, your policy, your grift, and your mythological story of your power and importance over me and to my life. I have to suffer you whether I want to or not.

I grew up in an abusive household. My mom was the tyrant. Her irrational emotionality ensured I lived in constantly aware fear every single moment. I developed months-long headaches. I spent years in anhedonia. I became an avatar and extension of her cruelty. I wasn’t making choices, I was embodying reactive subjugation. I was at the mercy of forces that are incapable of mercy. I was dressing it up as pride. I was a bully. I was ambivalent to how you felt because I could no longer feel.

I’m still a product of that. I’ve, technically, spent more time under that spell than I’ve been an actual adult. I still don’t feel much beyond visceral anger, occasional happiness or joy, or kinda nothing. It’s easier to feel with a few drinks or under a hallucinogen, but whether I’m actually autistic or broken, I’m absolutely something different than a “normal” person. I have distance and dialogue that either interrupts my reactivity or accompanies it in real time. I’m watching. I’m recording. I’m checking. That I’m narrating my experience at all is “weird.” Animals don’t do that.

I trust that if I maintain my sense of truth or honesty and demonstrate it like this, I will have something reliable I can return to when I’m lost. If I wasn’t doing that, this wouldn’t help. If I can’t see the flow and path of where my thoughts are taking me, then I’ll arrive at consequences I probably don’t want and remain confused and upset about what’s happening to me. It’s work. It’s work every day to pay attention and try to dig out a real and persistent answer to “why.” And now you’re bombarded with algorithm assumptions and answers to keep you “engaged” and infinitely disconnected.

My sense of well-being, rightly or wrongly, is often tied to my sense of financial security. Even if people never care to nor develop the capacity to really see or understand me, money talks. Money buys their reliable complicity, silence, or movement in my preferred direction. Any rich person can functionally treat your will like an Uber. That’s why they focus on paying off and forcing NDAs on your “representatives.” You, little one, can kick and scream all you want, but your predictable helpless reactivity is already built into the equation.

This is the threat of violent revolutionary moments. It’s not what anyone prefers, but when all outlets for the expression of power or grievance get blocked, the most truthful underlying process makes itself known. One, or both of us, will die. If you’re chronically under an abusive dynamic, that doesn’t really matter to you. You don’t really care if you live or die because you don’t have the capacity to care anymore. It’s not that you can’t do the math or see the future, it’s that there’s no emotional resonance for either better or worse.

I think culturally we’re in the same space I was growing up. How you felt didn’t matter. What you want was decided upon in an arbitrary or predatory way. Your closest allies or theoretically most trusted friends and family are weaponized against you. Your logic rebuked. Your honesty, or, especially as a child, your inability to regulate criminalized and you’re basically told you deserve to be tortured and every level of suffering that comes with the reactions to your behavior you’ve earned. I think we’re in psychological hell. I think it manifests physically and socially. I think that because I can reliably predict the reactive dismissive nature of basically every online interaction or forgone conclusion sentiment from nearly everyone I ever meet testifies to the extent of the damage thousands of times a day just in my own life.

Maybe I’m lucky that the pain of trying to be human is less than the pain of playing along. My anger at myself and the confusion about how I should best conduct my day pales in comparison to the “I’m going to get arrested” energy I have in response to the absurdity, complacency, and excuses of people I’d otherwise wish to get along with, if only practically. I’m not a forgone conclusion. That’s an important space for me to protect. There’s a real chance I burn down and contradict the things I profess are the most important to me in maintaining my identity as an individual human. I can’t claim to be making choices if that isn’t true.

You, though? Do you feel that in any sense whatsoever? You fit, right? You belong. You know how the bills are getting paid. You know what power you do or don’t have. You know how accessible the irony and detachment can be deployed. What are you if not judge, jury, and executioner? Do you feel attacked by my abstract invoking of “you?” Who do you think I’m talking to?

I don’t think “it” or “things” will “get better.” I don’t know that they’ve been as good as they are often described. I think, objectively, we’ve coasted on the backs of a relative handful of technological breakthroughs and incredible insights of individual thinkers, researchers, or conquerors. I think we live in a kind of runoff space. It think we’re the residue of efforts “we” will never constitute of our own volition. A small sliver might create something that reconstitutes what it takes to survive for the briefest moment, and “the masses” will do as they do.

What’s my individual responsibility to that thought and how it makes me feel? Ride it in a self-justified way until I die? Weaponize it and excuse my capacity to exploit how I know it makes you vulnerable? Sit alone and pretty in my space doing whatever it is I do? All I can do, all I should do, is trust the process. Keep watching myself and seeing if that thought or feeling changes as I inhabit new environments. Keep looking for the words I didn't know I was going to type until I typed them. Keep expressing what anchors to me independent of me feeling like I had any choice in the matter, and then choose to reconstitute my brain matter.

But, my god, there’s just so much fucking barking.

[1252] Won On One

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to “feel” like my life makes considerably more sense within an “artist” frame. Whenever I caught the movie about the group that made their secret mall apartment, it kicked on a light that I’ve been unable to dim. I listen to Joel Madden discuss the work and mastering artistry with other creative people. His insights track with my experience and desires for how I conduct my life. I get hung up on what I might be a “master” of, or what I’m attempting.

I can say with confidence I was a master at the religion vs science space for a couple years. That was a very tangible, count the number of books read, citations I could put behind anything I wrote or argued, bring up questions in class that stumped the T.A. level of “mastery.” I’ve mastered individual video games. I’m extremely adept at persuading cats to like me, but we all know they can never be mastered. After 2 years I think I had finally just started to be considered masterful as a DCS assessor.

I’ve always been a smart kid, though. The kind of smart that knows how much you don’t know regardless of how much you may have learned. In a deep way, I don’t know that it’s possible to “master” something in the colloquial sense. I think you can practice. I think that’s why they call it practicing medicine and martial arts.

So much of my focus I think appears superficially on myself. I’m not that complicated though. I’ve had to navigate as many ridiculous, arbitrary, and confusing things from ignorant places as much as anyone. I write because “things,” rarely, “make sense” to me. In order for something to make sense I think you have to care. I think you have to feel consequences. I think you have to really want something.

I care about my experience of my life. When my brain is flooded with stupid shit, fascist posturing, or edicts and power attempting to put me in my place, I revolt. It’s very straightforward. It sounds a lot like, “Fuck you.” I care about having to experience the consequences of people’s stupid behavior. When they wield power irresponsibly or from an entitled place, people die. When they project their religious mythology onto reality, they don’t just die, but those who killed them feel deeply that they deserved it.

The things I think I’m good at both took practice and also took nothing at all besides a decision. I learned how to be more patient, even if my insatiable instinct for “now” is as volatile as it’s ever been. I choose to tell the truth. That can be the truth of my feelings, confusion, hatred, or ambivalence. I can feel when there’s a shivering child tempted to lie, and choose differently. I’m serving myself, not a catastrophic vision and set of assumptions about what that truth will negatively impact.

I don’t fit in. I don’t think I look very “adult.” I don’t pass in the minds of most people I meet as the kind of thing that will just let them carry on in whatever manner they are. It doesn’t mean I don’t accept them or that my head is flooded with negative judgments. It does mean I will almost immediately catch the point in which you’re hanging your self-conception on excuses. I will, begrudgingly, accurately, see where you start and stop, and you’ll know that I know.

I’m a fan of saying a reason is something that brings you closer to the story of your responsibility for something. An excuse is something that puts distance between you and the thing. They function very differently. I like to claim a lot of reasons for my behavior, whether it’s to leave jobs, “friendships,” spend money I don’t really have, or pick some number of months to engage in what seems like “random” projects or tasks. Again, I think it looks indulgent. I think it looks immature. I think it looks like I just can’t be bothered to find someone to settle down with and a job to keep me “secure” or “humble.”

I’ve been chasing the life I want to lead my entire adult life. Lead being the operative word. I’m often given the responsibility, but only a few times have I been able to play lead. The house parties, the coffee shop, and what I still hope to accomplish on the land. Ok, sure, I was the head of “The Gs,” our little lost boy troop of friends in elementary and middle school, but that hardly counts.

What does it mean to lead in today's world where corruption wins? Where racism reigns supreme? Where complacency and complicity are as thick as the air the EPA is probably no longer allowed to scan for pollutants? For me, it’s looked like a ton of interpersonal sacrifice. I leave jobs that pretend to be concerned with the well-being of their clients. I stop talking to people who talk so much in service to one conclusion, “It is what it is.” I take chances with people my gut tells me are “doomed to fail,” and then time proves it.

And then I return here. I examine. I look for things I might have done differently. I see if the pattern has repeated. I arrive at the same conclusions, now with new flourishes and details. If I don’t own it or it’s not really mine, it’s not safe. If I can’t enforce the discipline or rules I’ve set for myself, they don’t exist. If I’m spending the majority of my time emotionally wrought about any individual, the past, or some personal failure, I’m taking too long to learn what it is I needed from that situation and probably need to shut the fuck up and get back to work, or eat something.

It’s been a struggle to write recently. I’ve had nothing to write about. “The world,” is still trending towards fire. I’m still first-world broke. I’ve found vibe-coding, and despite my lack of knowledge, money, and the competition for my time, I’m on a new track of meeting people and exploring the potential of having given my life over to “what could be.” I’ve worked incredibly hard to get my website to where it is and see where I wish to push it. I didn’t let my criticism and cynicism of AI prevent me from noticing and running with the opportunity it seems to be providing. It’s important to me to be that pliable and capable.

What is that? I think about it like the fluidity with which comedians shit on each other. The hate isn’t hate. When I’m picking something apart or poking holes in an official story, it’s an exercise in curiosity. I want to know how we get to a place of shared reality. That’s where the real work, potential, and magic happens. I can’t just believe you like you believe you. I don’t just believe myself. I see what it would take. I speak as though I’m trying to get what I wish to happen. I don’t know that many people who operate that way.

I think that’s part of why it’s been hard to write. If I’m disoriented, who’s orienting me? If I’m perfectly oriented, who’s validating it? I’m not looking to be reassured or celebrated for their own sake. I want you to actually like the things I’m trying to build, find utility in them. I want you to actually feel the sense of ownership or relief and possibility that I do when I talk about the land or how we might work together. There’s a reality I’m experiencing that I don’t register from almost anyone.

That is, I feel their obligations. I feel their responsibilities. I feel their “adulting.” I feel the infuriating intransigence of their memes and vague-booking. I feel everything that they claim they can’t do, don’t know, or won’t try. I feel how impossible it is to do everything I both want to do, or demonstrate in perpetual spite, practically every day. I just took a temp job where I likely pissed off 15 people who wanted the task of applying stickers to calendar misprints to last another 4 hours. I wanted to be home, and I work quickly. We got done at 11 instead of 3:30. To me, a fool thinks we got paid less, because I got my time back. Time I’m not watching obnoxious lower-class people “joke” about how slow we should go.

The reality is that we live in a stupid culture if we’re concerned about paying 15 people over the course of several days to waste time and resources covering “Decmember” on a wall calendar. You have the money for that task, Staples, but not to pay your employees a living wage? You, poor person gig-worker, think the solution to your problems is an incidental squeezing of their stupidity for an extra $100? I don’t have the kind of brain that can “check out.” If I’m not working as well and as fast as I can, I’m in pain. I’m angry. Not just at my circumstances, but at you in your childish blindness, and ever-abstractions of systems I’m ill-equipped to alter while being consumed by them.

On some level, it absolutely sucks to know what you’re capable of. That memory persists. Whether or not it’s going to antagonize or reassure is news to me each day. There’s a story I could tell of my grit and genius that’s managed to figure out things in weeks most couldn’t in years. There’s a story of my entitled indulgent desire to be entertained and own “pointless” things like black T-shirts while I go bankrupt and build half-assed fences. What makes either true? I know neither, by themselves, is true enough. I’m not one framing of my behavior. I don’t “feel” either is true. I can see the arguments for the extremes and every step between. I want to protect that. I’m not indecisive nor a devil’s advocate. I just understand how the spell of a story works.

I can see the story because I’m writing it. I can feel what feels like mine versus what’s been imposed. What feels like it desperately wants me to believe or go along or ignore the implications. Your stories are inconsistent, at best. Lies, often. Unflattering, unhelpful, and deeply uniformed. I want to be nothing like that I hear and navigate. I want the deeply personal evidence on display truth. This, again, whether an “artist” framing feels helpful. Biggest band in the world, or “merely” paying the bills, you’re either singing your songs or you’re not. I don’t sound like you, and I never want to start.