[821] Orgasm Addict

I just want to write a bad blog because my head wants to hurt. I've been recording and organizing the books I got for free. The journey we've been on together has amounted to a fair amount of effort for so far indiscernible gain. I can't help but to view it as a larger persistent analogy.

I'm all about the probabilistic thinking. I very much doubt anyone's particular “brilliance” or special effort. I believe there's more luck involved even before I pick up a book making a case for just how much. As such, whatever the cost of these books in labor or space, the ideas they give me remain invaluable. I want to hold them hostage as a sales tactic. I want to create ways of quickly organizing and displaying them. I want to try to read some of them.

If life is a similar series of a kind of randomness, I want to set myself up for as many “what to do with all these books?” kind of scenarios. Ideally, the books are supposed to be a series of individuals with a capacity for honesty and introspection you don't otherwise find in a “normal” distribution of people. It's as much the experimentation in business running or marketing as it is toying with websites and general attention seeking. I think the secret to my success will be tying everything I do to everything else. You came because you read a crazy flier. You stayed, or you bought something, because I made it part of my world, and you wanted to be associated.

I think a lot about an infinite sea of associations. Whether I remember the character names or not, I'm associated with thousands of stories. I have a familiarity, or parity of experience. I think a lot about the confused, almost angry look I got from an acquaintance when I said I watch some shows sped up. She didn't understand opening as many small doors of connection as possible. I take it she's getting all she needs from her life.

I think about comedians who say they sounded like their favorites when they first started out. Who do you sound like if you don't put in the time and effort to differentiate? What happens when you no longer borrow from enough sources to push the needle on the topics of importance and interest? This is the concern I have for myself right now. I have a thousand worlds staring at me from the corner. I have books on construction. I have Oprah's book club stamps across covers. I have as many windows for new insight as I do in looking for lines that stick in my thousand TV shows. And they're heavy. Any they fall over when you stack them too high. And they're covered in dust and make me sneeze, and are in “good” to “acceptable” condition, waiting to waste their life on someone else's shelf who can shell out the four dollars.

I think about helping yourself before you can help others. For how many years have I tried to differentiate between the “right and wrong kind of selfish?” My thoughts came from what seemed like nakedly self-destructive acts meant to put distance and shame in the space where a conversation and personal responsibility needed to take place. As I get older, I feel I need to be more conservative with myself. It's harder to juggle things that aren't arranged in a way that makes things simpler. It's harder to have the patience for really bad words and wasted time where an adult or consequences are necessary. It's hard to watch yourself act in a way that seems to betray where your mind was most at ease. Does it have to get hard before it's easy? Or are we just trying too hard to run too many poorly conceived ideas at once?

Whether or not I get my bills paid in advance, the way my life is organized, I'll still need ten thousand dollars a year. Cars need registered and property taxes are a thing. I'm tied to the grid and can't share my piddling thoughts without the interwebs. I'm freer, but I'm not free. I've got people in mind I'd like to spend that extra time with. I've got less than the naive hope it would take to think it's going to amount to more than a weekend or so year without some perfectly random intrusions of money or impropriety.

So I think about the slog. I think about the little pieces I put in place for the families I interact with every day. I think about picking up the pieces and giving the direction they can't seem to find for themselves, and I think about having someone to do that for me. I think about how that plays into me not going to the gym unless it's with someone. I was recently invited to run, something I wouldn't have done on my own, so I ran. I think about wishing I had someone to call me a fat cunt every day, daring me to eat better, so I could have that push-back and accountability. Discovering or respecting that someone has intention or credible expectations of you is something I can get behind and find motivating.

Here I want to break off a bit and explore intention verses attention.

I like attention. I don't want it for its own sake, but I'm always seeking the laugh or the admiration and respect for when I do something better or different. I truly felt at home when I was on stage at Warped. I walk into rooms and theaters, and envision myself giving speeches. I rehearse what I'll say on Colbert. I know, just by virtue of my personality, I'm a literal aberration from the norm in ways that will garner attention. I speak different. I respect my feelings less. I approach problems from an assumed inevitable creative way it can be fixed or reduced. I always want to bite. Containing or organizing that is the task of life. Making it something worth courting those who would find their own intentions with it is the work worth doing.

When I intend to do something, the rest fades. The drive doesn't feel so long. The show isn't a painful marathon of intermittent focus. The day at work isn't the thing otherwise impeding my only route to happiness. It takes the smallest goal to get there. It's why I love food. Whatever else in your day, you get to have a goal with a high probability of a great pay-off and feeling. I don't know who's going to choose to yell at me instead of engage when I call people, but I do know how the burger is going to taste. I can prove the value of my intention.

The larger task? Can you pretend to know the influence of an intentioned life? Can you regard the consequences as “good” on faith? If it doesn't fill you up like a good meal, can the value be measured in other ways? I certainly find myself able to invest more of my time and effort into others' lives when I feel like I'm getting things done and organized in my own life. I remember just the act of doing my laundry made me feel considerably better about typing up the notes on a few cases a few weeks ago. So what's going to last longer than a meal or spin-cycle? With any luck, and some work, your relationships. Your investment and intention for other people.

I suspect this is why people express what having kids has meant to them. I suspect this is why so many kids are living out the consequences of neglect and people grow to resent each other. If you genuinely care, all of the adages about helping other people being the highest calling or way to draw the most from your lived experience may prove to be true. If you hate yourself and/or the space you occupy in the world, it's going to be someone else's problem, one way or another. This is the baggage I attempt to keep from dumping on people. I share what I hate or think you're doing wrong. Rarely are you in a place to engage or cope with that. I don't always react to being triggered in ways I respect either.

Existing in the space as someone else's problem is familiar to me. I've often felt like something to be dealt with or compromised around. If the mean wasn't paired with the funny, I'd be that much lonelier. If I wasn't smart enough to talk my way out of something ridiculous, how much more trouble would I find? If I wasn't large and angry enough to silence, at least to my ear, a degree of immature emotional dissent, how many ways would I find myself petty and distracted by fake villains or tyrannical justice? It's my intention to not be at the mercy of the world that gives me my value. I'll take the judgment as the worst if, by the numbers, I can prove to be better or the best. I'm certain I'll identify a stream of quantifiable problems related to you and your environment while you over-burden the value of your gut reactions or prescribed morality with regard to me. I can maintain my standard for friendships and allow myself the view from the eyes of the people who dare to say they love me (which I still discourage, though less emphatically than I used to) or make them think.

Perpetual good is the smallest shift when it's at the hand of the collective in the right direction. I alone might need ten thousand dollars a year in order to live minimally first-world. That's 5 months of my current time-stupid job. Together with your resources? I don't want to say I'll never know, but the divorces and mid-life crises definitely haven't kicked in yet. I also won't give you the credit to think you've got more you'd like to do than get by the way you are. I'll never be able to tell whether that's bad or good beyond the amount I'm able to lodge my way into your head as the problems I have with things wedge their way into mine.

[702] The Catch

I am a creature who has been molded. I think this is such an amazingly important insight and admission that we collectively forgo in our understanding of the world and ourselves. “You” hardly exist. You can throw together all of the physical ingredients you want. You can appeal to metaphysical nonsense to describe your spirit. You can point to the story of your individual past that you believe looks nothing like anyone else's. And yet you are still controlled and described by things so beyond your control and outside your awareness, it makes me wonder how an “ego” ever managed to evolve in the first place.

As a molded creature, it gives you varying degrees of leeway in taking responsibility for your actions. I think it's significantly easier to be an adolescent or just transitioning into an “adult” for you to recall moment after moment where you didn't feel you had control. Parents or school dictated something. Your hormones drove you crazy. It was your first experience with an illicit substance or you'd never seen enough of some show or interpersonal scenario to be bored to tears. While no one wants to admit it, if you took a functioning alcoholic who knows how to drive home drunk everyday, and hasn't been in an accident for 15 years, he's arguably more responsible than the teenagers who might try to do the same.

What makes that above example difficult is what I refer to as an “either/or fundamentalism” that haunts all discourse and infects those who don't critically think or comprehend slivers of important differences. An either/or fundamentalist, never simply says, but screams, “Drinking and driving is bad! It will get you killed! It's irresponsible!” They're born into a time where .08 is the rule, and never knew any different. They got the school PSA and targeted commercials. They might have a deeply touching tale of how alcohol affected their life personally or in their family. And ultimately they'll be making a conservative appeal to the cultural lawful norm.

The person who watched their uncle not only climb the ranks at work, but manage to have a loving family, and never get a ticket, let alone in an accident, is going to know that there's at least one person who can do this whole drunk driving and life thing better than the average duck. I'm not saying we should create rules in service to the one person who can do it differently, or better. I'm saying every attempt to codify life and delineate acceptable modes of behaviors has lines and exceptions. We routinely pretend they don't, but nature is probabilistic, not fatalistic.

The way to describe this is to just call it, “the catch.” Gun violence is hot right now, kids marching in the streets, change coming around the bend. The catch to rah rah motivated ignorance on the reading of the 2nd amendment? Dead kids and extremely weak and hateful professions from rich white pundits. I'm proud of these kids, and I hope they get what everyone wants. Will it come with a catch? Of course. They're getting attacked personally. They're kids, so if you listen to the wrong ones speak for too long they start to sound like dumb kids. This isn't something I'd belabor them for because everything said on FOX is worse than the C and D-est of students might blurt out. But having a voice, creating a change, and taking responsibility at any level always has loose threads that will catch.

Age has forced me to confront the catches that came with my idealism. The world, for most people, seems to “get by.” People are engaged in what they don't understand, for indeterminate amounts of time, around people they generally dislike, and occasionally drinking or a safe space is created for them to pretend to work through the cramps of their existences and neuroses. In general though? They're meeting “professional” and “polite” versions of what I like to say out loud. They're bumping between self-involved and precariously placed balls of fear and insecurity who've hollowed out a place within to keep bothering at all.

These husks. These nodes. These “masses,” were conditioned. Someone took their imagination and future in defunding their school. Someone polluted the air so they'd get sick and sad. Someone voted against measures to take care of them, and give them options, and ensure the future of the species was in the right hands. Their parents might've mistreated them. Their brain might genuinely have something wrong with it that ensures they'll never breach a level of understanding or reach a “baseline” example humanity might consider healthy. From the socks they wear, to the songs on repeat in their head, more went into crafting them than a million allegedly intentional decisions over years is going to erase.

I say all of this as someone who tries to be intentional. I try to account for and describe the background that is so consistently, so reliably so despotic and angry to how I've been molded to respond to the world. This whole exercise, the vast majority of people HATE it. They hate the idea that you might speak at length. They hate that you might believe or arrive at something through the annoying process of sitting down to think it through. They hate that you have more reasons and evidence and direction, and they hate you even more when they can't see it or understand it. They hate your tone, your examples, your metaphors, and your word choice. They hate that you tried. They hate that they think they've thought all this before! And where do you get off telling them anything, asshole? And they don't accept that their hatred is as conditioned as much or moreso than the environment they'd maybe like to escape where they didn't need to hate so much or so often.

I'm a deliberately challenging person. I know the language of politics and body language. I know how to look and sound the part. I know how to point my language to mirror what I think is your intelligence or interest. I know, to the letter, to the word, the difference between “rambling” and “ranting” and a diligent exploration of an incomplete or ongoing idea. I've written research papers, and while extremely drunk. I've endeared myself to hundreds, and provoked “get help you idiot” in a thousand different ways. The point being, in our interaction, I've already taken responsibility for what I said or how I said it. Why do I know how you're going to respond? I don't know you personally, I just know there isn't someone there. I know the environment you're responding to, because I've been incredibly molded too.

The catch of being deliberate is that nobody can tell. People use the exact same words in the exact same scenarios, irrationally, in a panic, when they're projecting, when they're feeling insecure, and when they're lazy as are afforded to you. And just because you're trying to be deliberate, it doesn't mean you can always stay that way all of the time. You'll get tired. You'll slip up. You'll fuck something up in a magnificent way that calls upon the God of Comeuppance to embolden the smirks of your critics. Think you're smart? There's a list of every stupid thing you've ever said or done in someone's back pocket. Think you've figured something out? Who better to come into your life than the guy who always knows just enough more than you to try and make you feel bad about it.

We have a “competitive” capitalistic culture. The roots of our competition are literally inherited tools to mete out life and death in a violent and confusing environment. In a blink of an eye we're expected to get educated, keep up with the world of creative endeavors, and emotionally regulate? The comment sections online didn't happen in a vacuum, because the people writing them didn't develop under anything less than masked violence and death of one measure or another. Death of their ideals. Death of the concept of a healthy family or dreams. Death of an ability to appreciate their own place in the world or ability to be of any consequence in it. They don't believe the negative consequences anymore than the prospect of positive ones. They don't see a catch, because they don't know they're the living embodiment of one.

So what do you do with the catch? Do you want to turn to a self-help book that lectures you on “grit?” Do you want to give up and rot in your meaningless existence as you fire up the video games again? Do you want to rest on your laurels, also conditioned, for enough kids to die or disaster to strike before someone gives you an excuse to make a sign? It's not clear what any one person will do in response to the inevitable catch.

I build it into my personality. I can play politician, but I'm not one. I can speak what you consider to be wildly inappropriately, but it's serving my purposes. I can let anyone willing to honestly inquire or share in my motivations. In these times, to individuate, is to breath. It's to pause and listen and ask questions because you're recognizing that the neurons aren't firing and connecting like you might really want them to. It's to swallow the hard truths of what our environment is doing to us, and, if forever modestly and practically hopelessly, try to do better. When the “haters” and “crazies” talk ad nauseum, or even take over your government, you step back. The fix isn't to be like them with an illiberal drumbeat of incoherence. It's to understand and modulate them. It's to take control of your base tribalism and instincts, and move the ball around the field before you take a shot on goal.

I'm literally trying to develop different fields. There's a field to build and play with things on. There's a field of people I'd like to be able to talk to and rely on. There's fields of interest where I want to be in the loop. There's a mental field I want to romp about that allows me to persist in my goals and interests without too much fuss and distraction. The unifying point and understanding that belays them all is that it's deliberate. I talked it out. I wrote about it. I ran experiments trying to do it differently. I continue to question the degree in which I should engage at all or in one area over another. It's work. It's time. It's necessary, and it's worth it.

Ru Paul recently on The Daily Show said he realized a long time ago he couldn't change nobody's mind and if he gave a shit what people thought about over all these years, he wouldn't be sitting there right now. His sentiment is one I've struggled with for a while, because I conflated it with what I considered the “bad” kind of selfish. I think humanity has big looming threats that need more attention paid to them that we'd rather offer to a TV show about cross-dressing. Can you revel in the light of your “best self” that cares to indulge like that, watching or participating, while the ice melts or insane people hint at nuclear war? I have a hard time not adopting my piece of the collective stress we should have about that. We should be able to do both, not give a fuck about “haters” and advocate from our platforms or indulgences on how to do it better, but that's not really what I see.

I see people in their “attitude realms.” Once you're the “other” or “wrong” or “stupid” there is no redemption. Catch the wrong first comment on a reddit post? Here's a hundred upvotes to their damming sentiment about you. Provoke someone's resentment over your subject matter or tone? A self-righteous environment who didn't come here to be challenged or read revolts. Forums are this visible micro-chasm of the sea of influence we operate offline, and you can watch it play out in real time, and you can still not be persuaded that your mood and attention are hardly ever your own.

You should just know that you're never woke. You're never right. You should never be comfortable. You haven't figured anything out. You can't fix things. And when you try, you're automatically fucking something else up, even when you aren't aware of it. You can be like me, and be bored with the response you decided to actually read from the world, or you can react. You can be “surprised” shit begets shit, or you can build the shit into your disposition and prospects. Feel all day. Feel and react and be a normal human, but don't think anyone has a clue to how you respond to yourself besides you. Don't let yourself off the hook if you absolutely know you've no right to indignant condescension by starting the “conversation” with “fuck you, idiot.” Maybe you meant it. Maybe you're just at another peak of the endless hateful wave from your survival system being co-opted by forces we don't much understand.

I may not care what people think, but I care why they think it. Empty insecurity won't persuade me to change my approach. I can distinguish between projection and valid criticism. I have the patience to dissect line by line or word by word if the truth springs forth from the bottom. “People” or “the masses” or you when you're too tired or lazy or hungry or hurt, do not retain that capacity. So try silence. Try again later. Try to figure out the catch before you hand yourself over as the catch to someone who's bothering to try harder than you. You're not going to, because that's the catch of advocacy, to betray your naivete and provoke the opposite response, but you can't rob me of my deliberate understanding and decision to appeal to those better than you. And in never allowing yourself to acknowledge why there are those better than you, you'll ensure the environment that molds us all is mostly dictated by the mediocre sea.

My voice and accomplishments are destined to fail, but at least they'll be mine as far as I was willing to look for them. Catch.

[566] Human Faces

I try to look deep. That is, I try to pick up on things beyond what they initially show or say. I look how your face and body move as you're telling a story. I notice little changes in the tone of your voice and come up with reasons you might be getting angrier or happier. I watch your posture or mood shift over time and infer things about your relationship or job. I try to classify the stories you're willing to tell or what people are willing and quick to say about you. If I ever get a writing sample, then it's like part of you has been put under excessive flood lighting. I can literally watch where your reasoning starts and stops and pick out your particular word choices I might have skipped over in a cordial conversation.

We're born, to some extent, to be able to do this naturally. Just as most people can see, taste, and smell. You can get a job tasting, smelling, or spotting forgeries because the very senses you take for granted have more layers than you might discover on your own. You can then take it a step further. The reason there are FBI profilers and body language “experts” (as that field I hesitate to say has the required scientific uniformity of reliable replication) is because with enough practice you can start to see trends, pick apart particulars, and often see reliable-enough information into the future about who a person is, is becoming, or is trying to be. Absolutely it's not perfect and people can opt to be perfectly random or be thrown off course by unforeseeable circumstances, but the point is less to argue for the strict scientific basis of my claim, and more to talk about the practice.

Band taught me that “practice makes permanent.” If you hold yourself to bad standards and ingrain bad practicing habits you'll subconsciously move into those spaces you've carved and synapses you've strengthened. The malleability of the brain is such that you can reinforce or degrade these proclivities, but the earlier you start and learn something and the more you replicate it, that's often what will stick. This is the heart of learned prejudices and poor stress or conflict resolution strategies. This is irrational fears and insecurities that play out as the most confident and intense people you'll ever meet. This is why when conversations all degrade the same way I'm not surprised, because through our families, cordiality, and the media, we've all been trained to deal with information we don't like or understand the exact same ways.

Now I'm caught running with the thesis that we're a society of extremely bad social habits. I can repeat that to myself as many times as it takes to become convinced. I can make it harder for myself to see the arguments in favor of the social games we play and how they beget more cohesion or happiness. Every single supposition I take, by virtue of “it came to mind,” I can argue in the light of criticism, damnation, or depression. Precisely at this point is where we can either do and say what I just did or carry on like we're perfectly unable to recognize our ideas and what they may be translating. When I write, I don't particularly feel unduly or unfairly critical, like I'm damning the world to hell, or that what I say should make you particularly sad, but how often do my words get the kind of reaction that would suggest I'm doing anything less?

My habit is to dig. Digging has its problems. When I dig into people, they stop looking like people. They look like forces. They look like habits. They look like parts of every poorly done psychological test on biases and highlighted parts of the brain from an FMRI. Anymore, I apply the dig to the “bulk” of news articles and look for trends or styles in the information. Is there a general voice of bloggers and newscasters beyond, “Oh fucking shit?” Can you put your finger on what the public is digesting and sharing and wishing when the well of commentary is the actual place you should look if you want to see unfair criticism, depressing sentiments, and general damnation? Is there more to Hitler 2's cabinet picks than the simple observation that opposite day will be in effect indefinitely?

I got the jolt to write this because of an article that pointed out one of Hitler 2's picks plagiarized their PH.D. Can it be anymore on the nose? Someone who's gotten to such an academic level that they're even writing a PH.D suggests a whole world unto itself. Then you go and corrupt, or celebrate depending on your view, the notion of advanced and specific education by cutting corners at the top. You want the letters, not to be what they're supposed to represent. You want the authority without the work. You want the respect that you've never had for yourself and you want the empty fame, or infamy, to keep you hidden in plain sight. You'll take your fake credentials and no-comments to the highest places of authority and accountability in the land, and you'll get in anyway. You, and hundreds of your closest inadequate, lazy, and dangerous friends.

I'm forced to look at the deeper picture. I'm forced to comment on “people” when that many terrible ones are glamorized as worthwhile and capable of being leaders. It matters as long as I don't choose to commit suicide. In precisely this moment you have to understand that when your larger picture is as corruptible and fickle as the human animal, it is not rational or helpful to rely endlessly and needlessly on the artifice of this faux leadership. It isn't hard or unexpected to practice bad habits until they feel normal. It speaks to why I have to constantly write and pick apart what I'm doing in life. How much of me feels so normal that's actually beyond destructive to those around me and my long-term feasibility as a human? If you're willing to look, your mind can be a picture of emaciated squalor that nobody had the perspective or bravery to inform you about.

The work of paying attention is hard. I rail against cliches because they skip over the work of identifying why they're true. To be in the moment can be to suffer, and suffer a lot. It can be anxiety and depression. It can be always throwing down a wall of judgment and doubt between you and the people you meet. And it's why you have to habitualize recognizing how you're practicing doing so. Am I writing to beat myself up, give myself excuses, or try too terribly hard to convince myself of something stupid I refuse to find better words for? Am I repeating myself for effect and stress or because that's all I have to say? Am I truly frustrated at “the world” and what it's constantly doing to me, or that after another groggy night of television and big dreaming, I'm still freezing in basketball shorts writing this, instead of seeing what I want to come true beyond my living room? It's not always clear.

Something I do notice too often is how the words never match up with the actions. That's how I get to employ the word “superficial” more than any one word should ever be employed. That's how I get to bitch about all the “friends” I never see or talk to who are perfectly happy to agree with you about your ideas or plans, and would love to see something like that, but are actually more happy in their game servers or work station or classroom. That's how you see all the “informed” and insistent commentary that tells you what's wrong with the country lamenting how far we've fallen, but if I tell them, “Live free, right here, just put me on the phone with someone with the resources to get us started” nothing still happens. The deeper truth, the fundamental things about us are what is shining through, not that I believe you believe anything about what you're saying.

I like to think my world reflects to it's best ability what I actually think and feel. I believe I can run a general food or service establishment as good as anyone, so I tried. I believe my future is perilously threatened if I don't learn more about being self-sustainable and connect in a more informed and democratic way on a smaller scale, so I bought land. I think the overwhelming amount of conversations I get into and criticism I get is so beyond the pale unfair as to border on abuse, so I ask you to explain yourself, get genuinely angry when you don't, and am more sad than I'll never get credit for in knowing when and why we can't be friends anymore. It wasn't because I blog. It's not that I'm too confusing. It's that you're not willing to admit...anything, ever.

Our daily practices aren't about who we want to be. We're practicing who we are. When we're “innocently lying” about our circumstances, that should bug and scare you. When we're able to overlook and downplay ethics, literally just general ethics, you need to bring that reality to the center of your being and figure out what it's done to pollute how you operate in the world. If you're not sounding as “crazy” as me, why? If you're not worried about the day your town becomes Flint or New Orleans or someone wants to privatize and bankrupt or kick out your neighbors, it's not that I sound too critical, you're a lying person who's dead inside. It feels so normal.

The keys to respecting our station and relationships to each other aren't just dangling in front of us, they're perpetually thrown right between our eyes. In order to not make yourself crazy with the joke and stress of just existing at all, you have to do the work and be honest. If you can't account for your outside life in honest terms, I can only suffer in thinking about what's going on internally. Here, another brilliant opportunity. Do you believe I'm suffering? If not, you're broken, because you can't even recognize what it's doing to you. You're not looking as deeply at your face as I am. Are you unwilling or unable? Are you going to say out loud how much you don't care what I think or if I die? If not, I'm only going to keep doing what I do and tell you what you're actually saying. I'm going to work around it or throw it back in your face. I'm gonna keep suffering your face trying to look and talk like something deserving while you plagiarize and kill even the memory of what the real work looks like.