[1204] Just Chillin

Getting back into my role as an addiction counselor and case manager has me thinking more frequently about the themes I belabor in class.

One of them is “work.” I firmly believe that if you don’t feel like you’re working, you’re probably not doing your recovery correctly. That doesn’t mean you need to be manically occupying every moment so you don’t give yourself a chance to feel. (be it a craving or simple pleasures). It does mean when we’re exploring new boundaries, who is or isn’t supportive and why, or what it feels like to practice something new be it writing, conscious breathing, or exercise, if it was “easy” and you’re “killing time” or professing a cliche like “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do,” you’re lying to yourself.

Trust me, this position is often considered contentious or unreasonable. Surely, all that needs to happen is you being physically present, mostly, within the constructs of a recovery environment and in the presence of counselors, therapists, and peer supports, and when enough time goes by, poof! sober. Sober in such a robust and persistent way it’ll grant a new license to be pretentious and judgmental about those who haven’t done it like you.

When I moved to cousin-fuckistan, I routinely underestimated the amount of work it would take to reach a minimum level of comfort. Some people like the outdoors and can handle all sorts of weather. I need that AC. When you go to build something, the right tool makes a world of difference. An extra hand makes several worlds of difference. It started to sink in the resolve, planning, money, time, and disposition I would need to have in order to get the next thing. I started eating before I started, packing water, bringing “extra” tools, listening to my body when I started to get tired so I didn’t crush or cut myself out of fatigue and frustration.

I think it was a lot easier for humanity to find solidarity around things when we were all forced to work to survive. The argument from a conservative is that the negative consequences of welfare trickle down into how we conceive of ourselves as responsible conscious agents. They’re not totally wrong. They severely underestimate the degree to which the game is rigged and exploitation reigns. The liberal argument also rings true to me. But I’ve been around for, let’s say 20 “adult” years, and I’ve found 5 or 6 people willing to bet and work in bids to transcend the game, and the vast majority accepting or more or less making peace with their level of first-world poverty. Financial, "spiritual," interpersonal poverty or otherwise.

We’re working, somewhat, in service to basics. It has us believing that the effort we’ve put in thus far should suffice to get what we deserve. It has us shifting our concept of what we deserve to precisely what we’re getting. Our adaptability is a double-edged and dangerous tool like that.

What kind of work would it take to get to some form of globalized consensus? I mean the kind of world that bakes into the cake of “global understanding” that there will always be a forever-percentage of the most trolly/insane/just-asking-questions types that we can remain persistently confident might never again seize power regardless of their “platform?” How uncomfortable would we have to get trying, trusting, and investing in ways of being? And is it even possible to be intentional about it? I’m not so sure.

When I think about my “politics,” it feels weird to characterize it as some kind of “independent” position. It’s almost never I explain myself to someone, nor listen to where they are coming from, and there isn’t some kind of objective story to be told. I don’t meet people intimately familiar nor interested in learning the stats and science behind abortion before they offer their “strong” opinion about the sanctity of human life. I don’t meet people particularly concerned with “logic” or “existential assumptions” as they tout the dictates of their sky daddies and mysticisms. I think you get to maintain a certain wonder and deference to the myriad means of describing “power” that shapes or controls you without taking the extra step over the cliff and drawing conclusions about fate, ironic metaphysical constructs, or context-independent morality.

I think, for example, if you’re a death cult like Hamas, I want an extremely strong border with you and want to do just about everything within my power to eradicate someone who is willing to carry out the violence insisted upon. That can mean bombs, indoctrination, or painfully slow attempts at integration with the Western world. It probably means all 3 and more. It feels objectively true that debating tactics and timelines all need to be predicated on a fairly straight-forward idea about groups who kill concert goers. You’re also allowed to mourn the innocent civilians they embed with and regularly brag about utilizing in their sympathy campaigns. You can also ask yourself if they’re shielding themselves with someone who’s “soft” sympathies with their position is what got them voted into power in the first place.

But that paragraph alone takes a level of responsibility it’s hard or impossible to do if your identity rests in not grappling with it. I suspect there’s such a stigma around addicts because they’re simply a visceral example of our own posture as it relates to token issues. Who isn’t extremely dogmatic and intractable about any number of unhealthy relationships? Bill Maher recently said we need to move the narrative about personal responsibility and continue to take allegations seriously and hold men accountable through the efforts of metoo, but the women need to leave. The women need to be expected to, in one of his examples, take their private jets back to their loving rich families and stop talking about how toxic Shia LeBeouf is like they’re chained to the radiator.

Whatever it is we think we’re getting from tying our hands to various narratives isn’t as true as we think it is. That’s the work of articulating and reiterating where the lines are, why they exist, and what deciding what hills are worth dying on. I’m as confident as one can be that the next thing I profess to want will take time, effort, doing it wrong a bunch, and meaningfully engaging with the reasons why. The self-righteous are never wrong. The convinced are never patient. The noble and proud warrior can’t pronounce humility. These are defensive positions created by an ego that doesn’t wish to be threatened. It’s saying something objectively concerning about you if you consider new or more information a threat or something to fear.

The human animal is none of the things I talk about. It’s not what our biggest dreamers, creatives, thought-leaders, or scientists discover. The human animal is just waiting for the context, the excuse, to react in familiar and gratifying ways. The human animal wants to fit never asking where. The human animal wants to wink and nudge its way through a seemingly endless game of exploitation and distraction. The human animal won’t do the work. So where does that leave the humans? To my mind, at the mercy of the savagery and inevitable death that drives unbound nature. The appeal of the familiar religious fantasies will clench and suffocate as they do. The sins will pile up, and we’ll call the next, boring, compelled reaction a “revolution” and continue to pretend we’re ever going to take the requisite responsibility.

A client of mine wrote down that she was feeling lost and hopeless. She then said something about her ex and his behavior and, “if it gets to the point…” I stopped her. What? If it gets to the point, what? You’ll then have your excuse? You’re already at the point where you’re feeling what you wrote. There is no “point.” We’ve had several conversations on the best way to address her concerns which she’s provided thanks and expressed relief for in the past. Her job is to ask what her responsibility is to the feelings right now. Not after she constructs a false if-then scenario about him. Her responsibility is to bring the broader context into the catastrophized thought. Her responsibility is to respond to the feeling with things she can do to incorporate it, and barring that, steer away from the worst consequences of it.

I have interactions like that a dozen times a day. Someone might talk brilliantly, intimately, of the right and intellectual way to go about something, but it’s rarely acted upon or not felt. It’s not felt in their bones. It doesn’t serve as a quiet confidence built on example after example. So often it’s the ones contributing the most who feel like they’re not saying anything or “it’s probably of topic” or “I’m talking too much” as though there’s some neat and perfect answer I’m fishing for regarding their feelings and sense of being in the world. I remind them, it’s not just “addicts” that struggle to articulate and own what we’re talking about. It’s everyone. It’s the animals we all are that we’re up against.

The values need practiced and defended at all times. It’s work. There is no amount of shit you will eat that will absolve you of the choice to do so nor transform the flavor.

[1195] Not Like Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1137] You Had It All

If you're seeing this, I didn't delete it after never finding the point or remote satisfaction.

The word "heuristics" is sticking in my head. If you're not a word nerd, you may not know it simply means the process or method that is "good enough" to be practical. It feels almost personal to someone like me. My living environment is mapped along a heuristic of "functional" as opposed to "aesthetic." If in doubt, I want it to work in service to one or more of my goals 100% more than I care if it looks good.

I apply heuristics when I think about conversing or arguing with people, as well as when I register that I'm being lied to. I can't meticulously go through every individual's thoughts and flag discreet lies. I can reliably gauge how or whether to approach my next question or piece of advice based on a dozen different things related to your word choice, body language, and tone. I've watched people turn extra self-conscious when I say the quiet part out loud in what I'm reading from them that informs what I'm going to say next.

I've been watching a few more interviews and drifting into "debates." Familiar themes about the pitfalls of tribal allegiances get referenced and so many times do the participants wax about "what people in such and such circles do" as opposed to just answering the fucking question presented. Even good faith discussions can't resist pedantic urges and infinite qualifiers when it's not clear if doing so even adds clarity as it contorts fluidity.

I'm skeptical of debate at a conceptual level. I think an array of ill-defined metrics need to be assumed and it's any wonder how one goes about evaluating the "benefits" or "achievements" afterwards. When you're done, does it lead to, say, enacting a new policy or provide instruction on how to change minds about a given subject? Are you sure each participant was qualified to talk on the, perhaps dozens, of subjects that might come up? Is anyone flagging logical inconsistencies and straw-men besides autistic onlookers wringing their hands and screaming at the screen?

I think you can engage in a self-evaluative dialectic exercise to something of a greater effect. Or I think you can engage in a therapeutic exercise with someone versed in helping you organize how to better argue with yourself. I can feel immediately when a question I pose to myself is going to produce, essentially nonsense, no matter how I answer. Whose "foreign policy" is better, Trump's or Biden's? It's an insane question. It skips even the idea of an accessible and generalized heuristic that you might adopt for any given country or because of specific reasons related to your country.

Maybe some years "police the world" makes a lot more sense than others. If you operate under the idea of "no war, ever," you might be perfectly comfortable abandoning Israel and letting Putin take Ukraine because "other people" or "Western values" or "irreconcilable strong-man" don't comport with your heuristic for understanding the world. Maybe you shortcut anyone from the middle east as "terrorist," so Muslim travel ban? Yes, please. Either way, it's your personal preferences, prejudices, and blind spots pretending to be evidence evaluators.

For the question to make any sense to me, I want to be presented with the list of policy decisions that were made, broken down by country, and contextualized with the reasoning or history. That's likely several books long and the reason we have career experts informing these decisions. It's also why I think it's performative and unhelpful to get two, perhaps technically versed individuals, by virtue of their popularity or propensity to talk fast, blazing on through the question in any given "debate." Do we try to "contain" Iran, or find any remote common cause with the Ayatollah? It's a better question than "Whose foreign policy…," but it still requires defining "contain," exploring how it is or is no longer working, and maintaining healthy doubt about his intentions.

I argue with myself all the time. There's a temptation to fall into a form of listless despair. I think a little too highly of myself and what I hope to achieve, so literally every moment in which I can't get a glimpse of how that person should operate, I tempt a certain kind of despotic fate. Writing about it is part of my heuristic. The dread never leaves, but it quiets and I can get back to doing one of the general somethings that keep me occupied or contented-enough. I'm always fighting with myself about what the next thing to do should be. Relax? Definitely when I'm lightheaded after working in the yard. Maybe a little when I go up north and hang out with my dad or with a friend. Almost never when I've sat for a touch too long and the white board with its lists is staring at me and my dozens of projects are screaming that I'll never be any younger and I'm not a professional "whatever" yet.

I'm under a delusion that because I've developed somewhat more consistent of principals and actions I take in service to them, and like, one day, "the world" will make sense and "get it" like I do. It's not a delusion I want or practice, it's seemingly built into my broader and base character. I look around at this space that I've had something to say about every inch of, and it continues to make the kind of sense it needs to for me and how I wish to use it. I rearrange and organize things CONSTANTLY. I try to build my space to flow with my intentionality that whips around with a disorienting viciousness. I don't think I start a single thing, ever, and just do that thing all the way through. Movies and shows? Paused and stopped, or done with Candy Crush or brushing my teeth. Weed whacking? Better stop real quick and pick up trash or fight with random thing that needs to be moved over there exactly now for some reason.

You can chalk this up to ADHD if you want, but I do have the capacity to focus, and focus extremely deeply, when I "truly give a shit." What do I give a shit about? That's anyone's guess. Sometimes it's a particular guest on a show like Real Time with Bill Maher. Sometimes it's me desperately trying to experiment with some disingenuous money-making scheme. Sometimes it's a particularly engaging discussion with someone on the brink of breaking through a particular point regarding a chronic condition. Sometimes I'm drunk and the band is playing the song I know all the words to. I hyper-focused on books I was reading as I was mining them for argumentative ammunition during the god v science years. I obsessively focused on the injustice of depraved "leadership" targeting families, and then me, at DCS.

There's a certain ironic freedom from your ego when you can make it about anything else. It's their fault. It's the messiness of "the world." It's the isms and ists. It's some born-with deficiency I insist you write off, but also never demand an apology for. I think I'm just tired of never feeling like "it's enough."

I'm staring down the barrel of another meaningless, low-paying, unstimulating, and time-wasting job. The thought alone would be suicide-inducing if I didn't have so much I enjoyed living for. Hello again irony. You can continue to live for the things you enjoy provided you sacrifice functionally all of your time in service to what slivers of it you can cut off. Give them your time, your mind, your luck, your chance encounters, and let them box in your dreams and expectations. If you let your head and heart get too big, you'll not only alienate your supports, but yourself.

I don't think I accept the implicit argument of modern life that we need something of a perpetual humbling and modesty regarding the amount of wealth floating around. I don't think we're made better when "the struggle" is over whether we can describe literally anything as "essential to human flourishing," let alone a decent basic healthy and hopeful life. We start at the question of, "Who do you want to be in debt to?" Your followers as you bank on captured attention? Your sponsors? Your overseer because your health insurance is on the line? Your hospital when you don't have said insurance? Your credit card? Predatory home lender? Info-tainment-bubble-makers?

I try not to see just an utterly foolish child when I write something like, "I'm trying to live my values." Any random reader is surely going to scoff and say, "Yeah, aren't we all, asshole?" My extreme doubt after thousands of conversations aside, we come full circle to whether or not the question posed makes any kind of internal sense as stated, and then whether it can be parsed and defined at book-length detail. What are my values? In what order? Do I value my free time more than my horrible mood and thought process when I feel trapped in a bad job? Every day? Every hour? I played my last job day by day and left consciously and deliberately when "it became too much." I'm confident I can do that again, it just feels so pointless.

I was in debt before I ever chose to get more. I'm operating under systematic heuristics that have captured our imaginations. If I do something, like live in a shed, or try to start my own business in direct competition and defiance, my projects are already under water; drowned out by the noise of opinions, egos, fears, judgments and condescending "good luck" sentiments. What I want to do is continue to access and celebrate a feeling that I don't often get from other people, and when I do, it's overwhelmingly betrayed. I keep the faith, do the work, iterate, and crave the next failure so I can learn. I get left to my own devices to do so.

But I've committed one of the biggest sins in the eyes of a system heuristic. I'm not a part of the group, the family, the fan club, or the company. My values don't map to colloquial conversation as I'm not trying to get along and fit in. In fact, I'm trying to destroy much of what you instinctively hold dear. I'm trying to live, and work, and create in such a loud way you find it fucking impossible to unhear or unread me. That's what different writers and thinkers have done for me over the years.

I can cope with failure. I can cope with chronic uncertainty. I can cope with the pain of learning curves and financial burdens. I can't cope with an insistence I performatively shit on my values. I don't care if it's in the form of polite passive aggression from someone disinclined to fight with me about it. I don't care if it's the company I work for trying to hijack my language to justify their negligence. I don't care if it's lazy policy prescriptions and laws designed to nudge you away from adopting agency or holding people accountable.

But I can only viscerally feel the hatred and remain sensitive to when I'm under attack because I want the truth to win. I want the priorities to make a certain kind of sense regardless of your born-to disposition. I want it to be easy to identify when someone is being a lying lazy piece of shit versus utterly hamstrung by a culture of myopic ho-hummers pointing fingers and neurotically rocking in anxious safe spaces. I want us all to have reliable heuristics for bloviating suicide-inducing posture that makes even entertaining the concept of fascism as a governing prospect too stupid and boring to even whisper to your best friend.

Most things don't, and shouldn't, require us to get into the weeds unless we've wholly forgone some shared notion of why we bother to stay alive. Is it to wake up every day eager to find the next person to get shitty with online? Is it to exhaust yourself with endless punditry about who's on the verge of destroying the world? Is it to work so much you tell everyone "I would, but" or you only find solidarity with a tribe you simultaneously can't escape?

I need to stay escaping. I need to feel the connection between my choices and my well-being. I will begrudge every system, of thought or otherwise, that continues to fuck me. I will also continue to strive for those feelings of possibility, stability, and sense that I can barely, if ever, find in my corner of the world.

[1074] None Of Your Business

For as much as I feel like I'm writing a lot lately, I'm still not hitting it.

Let me tell you about a weird feeling I get. I started using this app, Habits. It, very simply, let's you create a habit you wish to practice each day, record how or whether you did it, and that's it. I've set it up to track doing 5 squats, reading 1 chapter, 1 article, and practicing music for 30 minutes a day. I have not been able to pull off those 4 things each day. More to the point, I haven't because of this sinking panicking feeling that just hit me, and does at different points in the day when I'm asked by the app if I've done one of the things.

Why would I have a flash of panic? Why would my stomach drop at the prospect of building on and forming new or better habits? Why do I feel as though I've sacrificed a sense of autonomy or ownership by…capitulating…instead of feeling empowered and in control by working my professed goals? I think there's something at the root of all misery and hell in the world related to the answers to these questions.

I don't think, deep down, we want a choice. I think we're instinctually anti-choice beings. I think that's why we attribute a certain dignity to notions of "conservatism" that practically and persistently just destroy or seek to control in the face of someone else's freedom. I think religious myths are so powerful because you are, by default, at the mercy or lack thereof in a cosmic game. When you do wrong, seek forgiveness. After all, it's sin's fault, not yours.

Rich or poor, you can subscribe to an environmental and cultural narrative that absolves you. You're the victim or the oppressed, demonize the other, justify your course, full stop every day all day. There's no obligation to really feel whatever someone else might be going through. You're not expected to learn or cross pollinate with ideas that challenge you. Even the pseudo-fight for the cultural landscape serves the same purpose for dipshit kids who think dirty looks or naughty words are "violence." You don't have to use words right when you're following the script.

I listened, very painfully, to Bill Maher talk with Candace Owens. I hate her. She's as dumb as a Dinesh D'Souza, Ann Coulter (who Bill also likes), or pick your favorite shit-smearing moron in any realm that draws press, like our newest House speaker. He challenged her to say, quite simply, that the moon landing was real. After some back and forth and chiding and pish-poshing, at bottom she said, "That doesn't even interest me." She didn't say it was real. She said he was asking her about something she's not concerned with, so it's functionally unfair or just rude to ask her for a head nod to what one might consider old-world "common sense."

She's not real, and people like Bill aren't wise to how someone like a Candance Owens thrives and navigates the world. It's not through deep intellectual analysis and differing opinion. It's through cultivating complicated-sounding bubbles of self-serving ignorance. You dress it up by being polite to people who tolerate you and then if you carry on long enough you start to get a veneer of legitimacy. Put out 10,000 podcasts, it doesn't really matter what each one says. There's 10,000 of them, so that counts for something, right? There must be a deep point to a personal truth in there somewhere?

I don't just want to practice, or read, or do a paltry amount of exercise. I want to live as though I have a real sense of freedom to engage in fun activities not at the end of a desperation gun. I think about school. School was fucking annoying. There are a million fun things to learn and do in school that don't feel fun or like you're learning shit. Why? Your teenage brain doesn't turn on until noon. Your teacher is an asshole. You're surrounded by other idiot kids. It's presented at a pace and in a way that may or may not jive with how you best learn. The background condition is a set of societal expectations that have nothing to do with how fun or cool science might be, or useful math might be, or how you could have better gotten into a gym routine before your bloodwork read "pre-diabetes."

My mind shoots reflexively through all of this. I don't necessarily have particularly bad habits. I don't tend to make excuses verses push myself to do the harder things. But I feel desperate. I feel like I'm mocking myself and the life I'm desiring. It also feels like I'm ceding something regarding my autonomy. I really want to just sit here, watch my shows, and go to bed. I want it more, in this moment, than to practice rudiments on the drums or Sum 41 songs on my guitar. I want it more because of that hopelessness and exhaustion that kicks in, because the more I talk about it, the more I want to practice. The more I unpack the feeling, the real sense of identity, motivation, and satisfaction starts to creep in. There's no dread or hesitation, but I have to dig.

I can't help but to tie this to thinking about addiction. You're not addicted to the drug. You're just not. I know your body has sometimes life-threatening physical attachments to it, particularly with alcohol, but you, as a person, as an individual, have an instinctive conservative reflexive narrative that keeps you locked on what is familiar, comfortable, and naively self-affirming. It's only validating that single sliver of your desires or potential. The sliver that wants to maintain a sense of control. So you feel "no" regarding any change, not just the kind that might make you better or push you towards a professed desire.

I've been thinking a lot about how to approach the next few weeks. The shows are winding down. I don't have a job. I still need to make about $12K. I have business goals and expenses looming. The weather is probably going to get shittier. I can feel a certain kind of lifestyle speaking louder to me. It's working considerably less. It's working from different areas of the country or world. It's making something more akin to the bare minimum than it is stressing on how to maximize profit. In the rush of all I feel I need to do, I'm consciously trying to be slow and deliberate so I don't desperately say yes to any new obligation that seems like it will satiate the familiar momentary panic.

I need to get out of social work completely, I know this. I need to stop juggling hundreds of pieces of disparate drama and repeating myself with regard to better practices. It doesn't matter if I'm good at it. I, personally, have nothing to back up how good I am other than the "fluffy" comments I get from people. I have had ZERO come to me after groups beyond a couple texts that have not been followed up. I knew that would happen. People don't want to get "better," they just want to find a new "familiar" or sense of "safety" with whatever it is they're presented with. The Suboxone or the routine and dance of "harm-reduction" does the heavy lifting. I plugged into the Groups routine and toyed with people's levels of comfortable. They didn't plug into me seeking the discomfort of what it takes to change and own and account for the things I'm attempting to.

You hear people profess to "thrive in chaos." That's shorthand for, "I've figured out who and how to exploit in my circumstances to feel stable again." Someone, or several someones, perhaps needy co-dependents, "love" to "help" and account for your chaos. Mutually assured stagnation, self-justification, and personally riotous [hear: "righteous"] truth.

So often my thoughts turn towards how I'm getting fucked, or how something could be a little bit better, or what it would take to convince a "reasonable" person to shut the fuck up during a movie or concert. It's a trap. We're not on the same planet. We don't have the same words. My priorities or goals or questions or jokes do not make sense in the context of the vast majority of people's worlds. They have their personal newsfeed now. They have their information silo. They have the culture of whatever excruciatingly small pocket of their world to draw from. Superficially, you can entertain them or sell them things, but they aren't there. Whatever you're practicing or attempting to show off or relate to can't be done in return. It's just not there.

I think about how the dynamic between me and Byron broke down. I used to be able to rely on what he said. Then, he started drifting into how "normal" people talk. "Hey! I've got this opportunity!" In reality, he's got this liability he wishes to foist the responsibility of onto everyone but himself. He doesn't want to man the food kitchen? Hire Nick under the guise of creating an on-site services coordinator. "You're my best friend, I'm looking out for you." He adopted the language of "best friend" to obscure the series of selfish acts and slights. Every single thing or connection or chance for growth or betterment presented by Byron turned into something that cost me money, a lot of time, or energy spent spinning my wheels and planning or learning for nothing. I occupied this "chess piece" thing in his head that he could wind up and move around, but never be viewed as a king in his own right with his own board. So goes everyone that heedlessly takes advantage and makes excuses and loses sight.

Hussain bemoans all of the "promises" he gets when he applies for a job, and every single one falls through. His clients blow the same bullshit smoke up his ass that mine do, and when he goes to follow up, gets frustrated when they don't answer or follow through. It's the ubiquity of the human condition. I don't know what percentage of "things I say" you'd need to match to "things I do" for it to be at a level that feels individually responsible or trustworthy, but my gut tells me most people are at less than 10%. Why? There's no expectation to be consistent. Your job is a psychological place-filler for that much less personal responsibility. You just have to follow orders. Be they to pollute, take-advantage, lie, stay silent, or kill. You play a certain role in your family. You structured the expectations of yourself around various perceived authorities or professed wisdom.

What are you to do, as an individual with a claim of awareness or meager attempt at diagnosing layers of our innate condition and ongoing conditioning? What am I supposed to listen to when it's not your god, your thought leaders, your pop culture icons, your politicians, educators, or pretty much anyone in too much authority acting in their capacity as an expert at maintaining their power and their narrative relative to all others? I certainly can't always trust myself. Myself wants to panic-pause me away from drum practice.

I have to listen to the flourishes and fleeting moments where someone seems to sound like me and explore why. I have to listen to the violent grading of gears operating against each other when your actions betray your words as they pertain to our friendship, your perception of my work, or professions of our allegedly shared values. I have to listen to the random lines I might hear from a TV show, song, performer, or overheard-at-lunch that give me pause and make for some bizarre inspired connection or insight. If I can't get that to congeal into practicing the goddamn drums, reading the book, or making the next miserable phone call to find an angle on the business I want to start, you shouldn't trust me. You have to be able to recognize and find the willingness to do the same work, or you'll never see mine.

I'm skeptical without getting conspiratorial. I try to use reason without pretending it has every answer to every question. I prefer to say "I don't know" instead of fill in the blank with magic answers. I demonstrate respect, often, through silence. I'm direct, and rude if necessary. I'm willing to entertain counter-narratives to my worst ideas about you if we spend too much time together and you talk too much. I'm open to being wrong, but I don't meet people willing to speak the language of humility and doubt. They'll perform it, but they don't work and feel it. I'm not wrong because you say so, or feel so, or are "just not interested in that" like a Candice Owens struggling to acknowledge the moon landing. I'm wrong when you can state my position, develop your own, and contextualize us both.

If I'm tempted to make sweeping declarations about "culture" or "humanity" it's after taking in the examples people set under many different and seemingly disparate conditions. Every single job I've worked has betrayed it's "mission statement." Almost every single "friend" I've had has needed to be reduced to superficial acquaintance or straight hateful bad influence. I watch people constantly torture themselves with their "dream self" and no, literally none, means of achieving it. Whether they're comfortable with the familiarity of their misery or luxury, I think it's the same mechanism. The Offspring line, "That's okay because I like the abuse," just came to mind. That song goes on to celebrate eventually getting to take advantage of the girl who was doing it first. Low self-esteem serving it's function on both ends.

I have so little power and am constantly getting taken advantage of. I get fucked financially. I get fucked professionally. I feel like I've pissed off the exact wrong people in the past and that's found a way to follow me for years. I can step into environments or conversations perfectly neutral and in good spirits, and in 2 minutes find myself getting yelled at over someone's perspective of my behavior or commentary. It will absolutely never matter who or what is "right" in those scenarios, just that I triggered someone to emote and my unwillingness to reflexively capitulate and share their pain will register as me doubling-down. Again, I'm the other, the monster in their narrative, the thing they can be justified in feeling anything about.

Now say you're a normal person who hasn't articulated all this out so far. You have the same sense about you. "The world" is out to get you. You're incensed and averse to their "judging." How do you cope? You actually double-down. You actually get more selfish. You look to control and constrain your perspective in a desperate race to the bottom. I am and do get routinely taken advantage of, so do you. How bad do you need to make yourself feel about that to justify maybe controlling your partner or child or lashing out at your parent or friend? I've gotten accused of heinous shit and looked at like I'm masterminding manipulative games. How about you? What assumptions do people build into your character that fuels the ways you rebel or bite back? Literally every word, body movement, or detail of your misery-inducing environment becomes a piece of the personal apologetics handbook if you want it to.

I'm going to continue to fumble forward and fuck up every possible angle there is to fuck up. I'm going to look over the sea of cars and lights and millions of narratives I can imagine from my plane seat and try to continue to identify the ones that don't get us all killed or leading hateful and spiteful lives regardless of how "real" their capacity to stoke our sense of dignity or pride in their expression. There's literally an infinite amount of ways to organize these words, let alone the hundreds of thousands that have came before just from me. Are you reading and hearing what you already know? Is that why you skipped this one?

[1021] Tribe

I did absolutely nothing to prepare myself for getting back into “work mode” after my trip to Phoenix, so now I’m finding it a bit of a struggle to pull it together to knock out my handful of tasks. I had many times I wished to write in the last few days. The last several times I’ve written it registered as annoying and wasting time and effort repeating myself. A few major themes arose this time though I wish to explore. A general recounting of the trip I also want recorded.

Again, I found myself on a plane. It felt a little less “enlightening” or “liberating” and more “routine” than the one earlier. Flying is fascinating every time, but like all things, you can habituate and take for granted what’s happening. I needed to get to several somewheres for this trip, driving wasn’t going to cut it, so quick trip across the country, and now I’m back home.

“Tribes” came to mind. Bill Maher talks a lot about the tribal nature of the country and our politics, but I don’t know that I let it sink in as deeply as it felt on this trip. We want to belong so deeply. I was listening to some of the people’s conversations around me, and it’s always striking when they talk about the band members like they’re friends. They just use their first names like they’re talking about a brother. They talk about their lives as though they aren’t experiencing them through Instagram updates. There’s this deep connection, seemingly less about whatever band, than just the desire to feel like these people are representing something much more than themselves through their music.

When we talk about “politics” and whether or not our message is “inclusive” enough, I think we somehow completely miss the notion of the tribal identity. Who feels like they belong in the narrative around speech policing and identity games? It’s eggshells and resentment. You know what resonates with tribe members? I, me, mine. “Protecting” whatever abstract notion of things like “freedom” or “the unborn” that you can slap the designator on. Anger and hatred are felt across all tribe members no matter what their political compass might tilt towards. Who do you really feel is on your team? Who’s angry at the same things you are?

Do you know your enemy? When we’re trying to explore what or whether it’s worth getting angry about, things get complicated because we’re not taught to look for a soup of causation. There are many ingredients in the mix that speak to the overall taste and expression. If you want to be indefinitely incensed by abstract “isms” and “ists” you’ll never get to the heart of your issues. If you want to bemoan “poverty” or “injustice” or “inequality” you’re not giving people the specific tools to address how it’s manifesting, not just in their lives, but as a measure of their perception of their lives.

A poor person who grows up poor doesn’t think they’re poor. A rich person who grew up rich doesn’t think they’re selfish and entitled. Dumb people don’t think they’re dumb. Hippies don’t think they smell. It’s never enough to offer soap, “educate,” bemoan what’s “fair,” or talk in terms of a “minimum wage” when it’s all an infinitely abstract and individualized series of perceptional markers. “Hate?” “Hope?” Those win elections. You personally hate or hope for things. You get on the ground and validate, you win.

I don’t care how similar your experience sounds to someone else’s you experience it in the confines of your individual mind. You can get help in how to identify similar trail markers or environmental stimuli, but you have to recognize and choose to walk the path yourself. If you have a strong notion or set of experiences and evidence to suggest how people find that path, your wisdom and insight means nothing if you can’t recognize the nature of the road they’re currently on.

I saw Mest, Zebrahead, and Unwritten Law. The venue was excellent if only because the doors were opened between sets to cool down the room. The crowd was energetic and respectful. There were mosh pits, crowd surfing, free things thrown and collected. I had good tacos at the restaurant portion of the venue. I was first in line, front and center at the stage, and I got there, to the AirBnb, and the airport in timely and safe ways. I had breakfast at an award-winning nationally recognized spot. I got to familiarize myself with a bit of downtown Phoenix and Tempe. It’s about as good of a trip as you could ask for.

I then came up against the ambivalence and disregard of Frontier Airlines. I’m still embroiled in what will almost certainly be a civil suit for the return of $200 they’ve effectively stolen from me. I come off a great trip with a 10+ hour delay keeping me stuck in the Phoenix airport, overpaying to eat, and searching for a way to stay comfortable and plugged in until my flight that was supposed to arrive at 12:30 in the afternoon now ensures I’ll get home at 11:30 PM. I had a decent amount I planned to get done that day, all still pending and contributing to the mental backlog that is preventing me from moving on to my work obligations. The stress of the situation was 5% being made to wait, and 95% the attitude and posture of Frontier.

My tribal principals regarding what’s fair and who should be accountable have been violated. I’m not driven through a persistent uncontrollable rage to try and get my money back, and were I to “let it go,” when I don’t need or want to would functionally enable the continued taking advantage. I didn’t eat enough yesterday, given my wonky schedule and headspace, so combined with the stress of arguing with Frontier, I started getting light-headed and feeling generally “off.” I forgot my keyboard at work, and even drove to work in the first place intending to use the many hours before my first group to do everything I’m hoping to achieve when I get done writing today.

I have the practice and self-awareness to know when, and over what, it’s worth calling it quits. I sent $150 to a guy whose shitty car I was going to buy. He’s poor, excuse-making, and full of shit. I tried, nominally, for a month or so to politely explore how he might return the money for the car that was sent to the junk yard and never received. It’s extremely unlikely I’m getting that money back, and weeks ago I deleted the chat bubble on facebook that was our only means of communicating. That’s a different kind of stupid and impoverished situation. He doesn’t know how poor and dumb he is, nor how badly he smells. I knew I was gambling. I’ve heard the song he was singing from hundreds of similarly situated clients over the years.

The second we stopped bothering to police ourselves in service to the wrong kind of entitled and selfish claims or ownership and self-expression is when we forgot how to dutifully and justifiably punish the obviously objectionable. It’s most frequently a story of “they did” verses “I can.” It’s reflexive and fluid. “He manipulated me! They control the narrative! They’re the ones with the most power!” As though you don’t have a brain or agency. Well, you don’t. You’ve donated it to the dialogue that keeps you disenfranchised and at the lack of mercy from whatever’s not really thinking about you in the first place.

Wherever you go, you can overhear a conversation about a person’s sports team. Mest is from Chicago, and their lead singer spoke of the Bears’ first draft pick for doing so terribly. He’s as much in his punk-rock tribe as he is his sports team’s tribe. The bouncers were discussing the fate of, I forget what teams were competing in the playoffs, but I think they were close enough to Phoenix. The trivia nerds playing on the patio outside of the venue overwhelmingly answered that Larry Bird played for The Lakers. We’re constantly indicating what tribes we do and don’t belong to. Even when we’re wholly not part of it, we know which one is closest or what we’d default to if cornered. We’re disinclined to access that which unites independent of our familiarity or preferences.

I wish I had a bigger tribe. I wish I had more in common with people than where we were from or that we saw the same TV show. I wish I had people who I could dedicate my effort to enabling and they were inclined to reciprocate. Instead, we all generally get walled off into our own worlds. I’m not downplaying or denying the impact the friends and connections I have in my life, but I see it in our dynamics as well. I’m very lucky to ever get someone on board to come to a show. I’m almost never called to come join whatever someone else is doing. They’re either not doing anything, or we’re just not in that kind of tribe, if we’re really in one altogether. I’m not suggesting they aren’t “maintaining their family” or “defending their stability and status quo,” but I talk to enough people in a regular way who make literally no time for themselves to enjoy, indulge, decompress, or even acknowledge there’s a world beyond the bounds of their stress and obligations. I would literally invite everyone I remotely liked to everything I ever do, just as I did with the party house. I’d be right back here whining about how they’re all too tired, busy, poor, or more into “their tribe’s music” to enjoy anything about the show we might head to.

People in my tribe might be kind of bored if invited to a football game, but would recognize an opportunity to drink more or make funny comments, people watch, and spend time with their friend. People in my tribe are looking to build and experience. That’s the prevailing character trait of Hussain, Byron, and Hatsam. They’ve contributed to growth and building things up or creating something new. Where others talk, they do, or did. You make the best of the ongoing shit sandwich of life or your options. You acknowledge the absurdity, dig that much deeper, and come out mangled but self-assured about what you’re capable of. I can walk to the top of mountains. My former tribe apparently plagued by the idea of how I must not be enjoying myself.

What are you using your tribes for? To self-validate like a basic politician getting you to agree to what you already agree with and stay blind to the consequences of their votes? Does your desire to belong lead you down paths that I tripped all over in trying to befriend the wrong characters? Do you pretend your favorite team or band feels connected to you and your details like you might in hoarding and reciting information about them? You’re just a person first, and they’re just a player. Are you capable of recognizing what they’re playing? Are you willing to see what you’re playing at?

[825] Snow Dei

It's been interesting, at least to me, to watch myself over the last few...minutes? Years? So much a return to the contrived. I'm plugged in. I'm day-by-day with the same resolve that got through school, drives me on my commute, and does the math to put his aberrant behavior aside just long enough.

It's a wonder how I manage to account for that aberrant behavior, if I manage at all. I legitimately didn't believe in my ability to correct for my language before I started real-world jobs. I didn't have the impulse control to not suffer my idealism with perpetual headaches and impassioned pleas to be listened to for all of the easily-fixable problems I could identify. I think I just started to really feel how actually simple things were. Or, better stated, simple for those who've worked to pursue the embodiment of timeless ideals and cliches.

Take something like responsibility. What does it really mean? I think, on balance, the world is random. There's as strong a case to be made for never and nothing responsibility as there is for my posture about being “responsible for everything.” Is it either? Is it both? What manifests is your genuine belief in either. You find yourself at the whims of fate, or you start dictating how you're going to navigate what's happening around you. That's perhaps the wisdom or spell of consciousness and why I don't feel bad killing bugs. You can find yourself flying blindly into a light, but, honey, you're human. I expect you to do better.

I had some pretty dope lines about forgiveness I don't know that I'll be able to reproduce. Is forgiveness possible? I think the fact that we've pawned the responsibility for it onto magic sky daddies suggest “no.” Without them, that leaves it to us to forgive. That means we have to understand our darkness. That means we have to actually feel good about things we actually never believe we'll feel good about. Does that betray your consciousness? Is it a bitten thumb in the face of existence? What if I “got over” Trump or my ideas about fascism? Without condoning, what if I discovered them as a continuum of human experience? What if I considered them as a wave, just up or down, subject to the gravity in which I could exert upon them? More manageable? Accessible as a physics issue, not an infinitely unknowable series of probabilistic human machinations?

I don't know if I forgive myself more than I try to understand myself. I think when I talk about my “self-destructive impulse” I'm speaking to a kind of ignorance more than a perpetual desire to die or experience pain. Maybe I don't know how to cope. Maybe I never really want to give myself the kind of credit my experience suggests. I find myself in a kind of ever-spiraling humble-brag about what it is I think I can accomplish or have already. I'm proud of myself. I can't stand what I get by way of other peoples' opinions or lack-thereof contributions. That has an insane amount of power I always want checked. Who's going to do so?

I've gotten so insanely comfortable. I'm sitting here at 1am, finishing off my Blue Moons, maybe going to get 3 or so hours of sleep, before I limp my way back to my cushy job dancing around poor and desperate people. Why do I deserve that? Why am I so comfortable, that I can recognize the degree of my regal existence well-before I actually start getting to the financial or decision-making place that will start shifting the world? Did I do the work of humility? Did I eschew the kind of ignorant pride I see on the face of business-school kids? Have I somehow atoned for all of the horrible thoughts or actions I've engaged in with reckless abandon for how we're all connected and what it would mean for the world at large? Do I, in my bones, even believe that high-minded jibber jabber?

What I know is that I've watched most of the people I've been closest to get as far away as impracticality calls for. I know that my supports are good for a good deal, but their heart isn't in the same place. I know that I've been thinking for a while about a line from Bill Maher about, paraphrasing, “maybe some people in your life were just meant to be there for a moment, and you're not supposed to be attached forever.” I don't think I need to facebook stalk everyone I've ever known, but I have an incredibly hard time dismissing the influence I saw you bring to the culture. The “random” text or invitation you get months or years from now is going to have everything to do with that sentiment.

It's the moment I want to sit back and just enjoy, just revel, just laugh, or just stare at what I've done that I realize I'll always want more. I want the world. I want what's next. I want to perform. I want to exhibit. I want to feel my fingers freeze as I cope with my impulse to address some longstanding need that presented itself without warning, so now here we are in some random-ass place and have to deal. (Imagine, figuring a way to transport a large tool in an ill-equipped car – a frequent occurrence for me.) Every span of time I think is “forever” leaves me feeling about for the next lever to pull after the bill gets paid or the months instantaneously blink by. These words, like everything I've ever said, exist now, and forever, and pick to operate in that vein of existence about what's possible verses what's happening.

Like I've said, mildly drunk me is the best me. I draw a lot of inspiration from that guy, and all of my deeply buried lovey-dovey feelings I've learned to repress come out as a befuddling diatribe talking about how great it's all going to be. Get on my level.

[814] Sharp Objects

I think this'll be one of those blogs that I've tried to write for so long, and tested so many ways to start, it's going to feel several degrees of disjointed, but I'm tired of not writing and want to get the word vomit out.

I think the word “progressive” is presumptuous. Progress describes the pieces of a story or process that start and eventually end with something that's taken for granted as worthwhile. “Progressives” imagine a series of social policies that are meant to speak towards equal opportunity or the staying of disenfranchising history. Progress is thought simultaneously with “gain.” The people involved picked up perspectives or relationships. “The real treasure was what we learned along the way.” Progress, as conceived of as the “positive” or “affirmative” carries an undue nobility or incivility for things that don't feel as though they are aiding you on your quest. The realities of those things often get ignored instead of incorporated or wrestled and contained.

A few things have reminded me of how to continue thinking sideways instead of up. At work, positions open often enough for a mildly different job with about the same pay. The State doesn't cultivate and harvest leaders or visionaries. The State walks you right up the line you can tolerate, and then offers to walk you down it until the scenery of something new keeps you chugging along another 6 months or year. As you “progress” through your career, they tell you to be excited at the opportunity to learn different aspects and “take something away” from your time there. Is it a very personal lesson regarding your emotional turmoil or an indomitable will instead of enough money? Always.

I think about myself in charge of my modest, but successful, entrepreneurial entity. When I have my dozen employees and niche blogs want to “hear my story.” I did an AMA on reddit once while I was working the coffee shop. I spent several hours tearing through the idea that anyone can just do something like that without people giving them money and trusting and relying on them in spite of a system designed for you to fail. Whatever I create in the future, no manual for how you can do it too should include, “get lucky on Craigslist and find x, y, or z” or “sell your body, save, and get real lonely and tolerant of rural living surprises.” I think it was Robert Rodriquez who said on Bill Maher he did a drug study to fund his first movie, so the sentiment would always reduce to “be infinitely creative, and stay healthy.”

Would I have “progressed” in my, very lazily conceived, goal of “retiring by 30?” I didn't even imagine a life past the age of 30 because I was sure I would pretty much have gotten whatever I was aiming for. At 31, technically, it's taken me like 9 years to get the kind of smoke and rumbles of the ability to keep playing the experimental business game. I've had the land for almost 3, a livable house for less than 6 months, the shed 2 years ago, and I've already got the paycheck en route to confidently say I'm no more than a month and a half from getting out of debt that matters. You know, when I type what my life has looked like out like this, it's occurring to me the severity of my compulsion to get what I think I want. I've spent blips of time securing my future. There's a version of this paragraph where 34 or 37 step in for 31 and anyone who reads is going to find me an impossible cunt in my casual reference to what I have, as though what I have right now isn't appreciable enough.

I remember thinking as a kid that I would be “properly successful” when I could afford a big screen TV. I idolized TV, and it was the “cool parents” or rich person in movies who always had one. I obviously had no idea the degree in which TV technology would progress, and could have a dozen of those TVs for the price of what one 65” big black box would have cost back then. Once I got my first big TV, I felt great. I found it for free, and got it repaired for like $100 bucks. I still enjoy it, and my other one I got at Wal-Mart. I like all of my toys and electronics on down the line. The wants didn't stop. The desire multiplier is always in play.

Can you “progress” in such accumulation? Many books and philosophies on that have soundly landed on “no.” Owning isn't appreciating. One of my TVs is quite heavy. It feels like less of a gift when you can't get it moved in, or even across the room, by yourself. A giant organization or a ton of money in and of itself aren't going to do it for me. I have too much stuff already that I've found for free that waits to be put into circulation. I've had considerably more money and did precisely nothing with it until I found the land. I will always find it wildly instructive to consider what I did with my in-class Star-bucks, give them away, when I had accumulated too much and had nothing left to buy. It's not enough to have the money, you have to know how to use it. It's not enough to have the idea, you have to see evidence of you working it. It's the process, not progress. It's the journey, not the destination.

There's probably no greater testament to my underlying obsessive tendencies than when I play video games. A “challenge” section in Spider-Man I'll replay a hundred times for several hours trying to crack how to get ranked at the top. I have to come in first in racing games, marathon races with a slip-up at the end are no exception. There's a zone of “do it, do it, do it” that provokes severe headaches that get ignored, reactive explosions of swearing or hitting things, and just a general “nothing outside of this matters” feeling. It's possible. It's just a bunch of code that wants to be appeased, and there's only so many ways you can continue to fuck up or time you can inhabit the incorrect mental space before you get there.

A similar sensation, though more dreadful, takes place when it comes to doing other work I don't particularly enjoy. At least the video game, I picked it. Paperwork or asshole parent and perpetrator interviews? I have to get paid. A degree of civility and trampling over what my body conceives of as the best time to sleep? There’s a persistent force working against my intention and what I'd like to try and control for. I excel at getting things done or achieving not because I want to. I have to. The alternative is a black abyss of spiraling self-loathing and other not-so broad abstractions of accepted shit into your life.

I have a coworker who has anxiety attacks. She's traced it back to when she had to ensure her sick step-father got his medication several times a day. If he didn't take them at the right times, he could get much sicker or die. So the same sense of “I have to pay attention, I have to get this right” is embedded in her. It was traumatizing to be her age and thinking about being responsible for maybe getting someone killed by not doing what she needed to.

Her story got me thinking about my relationship to school and trying to get approval. My mom was less of a bitch when I got good grades or would read a book. It only occurred to me much later in life how many parents get off on the idea of their smart kids, especially if they don't have to spend countless hours going over the work with them or paying for extra help. Being exceptional at school or a kind of perfect working choir boy kept me safe. So much so, I remember a dinner once where I was trying to tell my mom about a book I read, and she was either tired or had a bad day at work, and was so dismissive of my story, I'm talking about it 20 years later. The only thing she seemed to consistently like about me, being smart and engaged, she dismissed.

Joss Whedon posted an article talking about 5 lies we tell ourselves about trauma. It's a pretty on-the-nose kind of thing about downplaying and making unfair comparisons. It's the fake aspiration that things will get better without change or acceptance. The line that I've thought most about is the idea of control. The people who wrote the article became unbearable in the amount of things they felt the need to control for. Control became “safety and security.” They were told by a therapist that in reality, they only control about 3% of their daily lives, midnight stomps through the house on patrol be damned.

3%? It's hard to say how the therapist arrived at this number, but I got to thinking. I don't control whether or not I get sick. I don't control the bugs that get into the house. I don't control the consistency of the water in my well or the size of the outside water bin I need trucked in. I don't control when the power goes out or whether a signal gets through to my phone. I definitely don't control any of the people I talk to or the various circumstances under which they are or aren't hurting their children. I don't control how much I get paid, and I even barely control what I eat given the practical reality of pain or exhaustion in not doing so, and being situated next to things that are convenient and taste good, which I also had no control over.

What do you control? How you talk about your circumstances. Sentences are control, even if I can't control if or how they'll hit. You can control how you'll react to your reaction, or if you're really good and paying attention, you'll have allowed yourself to not react until necessary. You control your orientation. You control how to understand your actions in a sea of lateral and superficially unequal circumstances. I can be down about not reaching my poorly understood goals, or I can feel a sense of awe that I find myself doing what I'd otherwise need and prefer to be doing, any time I'm doing it, and it's still happening in spite of the unending amount of words I routinely use to ridicule my experience of the world or air my frustrations. I control whether or not I restart the failed challenge in the video game.

I don't hear a lot about what people feel like they can do. I hear endlessly about “how things are” or how difficult or next to impossible they can be to achieve. I hear about “the pace of the State.” I hear about monsters on “the other side” that need to be de-platformed, vanquished, or otherwise shamed into obscurity. But I don't meet people who feel like they can do anything about it. I feel people who are given a set of instructions or directives and can read and follow, but it's not control. I think I understand religious people a little better now. Belief is control. God will sort it out. He wills, as theirs can't be found.

I can control scanning and sorting books. I can control the next sentence. I can control my legs to take me to my car to go get food. I can't ride a bike with no handlebars, but I can practice. I can make it about the process until it manifests as more resembling the skill I want to have or thing I want to see. I can understand my simplest forms of trauma for the power and resolve they lend themselves to, and I can continue to pick to keep my eye on the larger holistic goals that provoke anxiety and guessing and risk and hope-adjacent or the reason to bother getting up again.

[762] Fisti(n)cuffs

I'm about a half hour away from the end of BlackkKlansman, and want to take a moment.

I occupy a weird space. To be sure, unless the person my mother told me she cheated with was mixed or black, and I'm not actually my father's, I'm not actually black. A large proportion of black people in my life have said things like, “You're darker than my dad,” or, “Nah, you ain't white,” or “I'm so confused by your skin,” or “You know you my nigga” alluding to a kind of empathy with “the struggle.” As such, I've always felt a kind of solidarity and awareness that I've certainly occasioned to ignorantly betray. No less, when I go to the symphony, giant white crowds of very comfortable rich people make me uncomfortable in a way “being the only white guy” at a black friend's Thanksgiving does not.

That baseline reality that seems to permeate black culture is precisely what I gravitate towards in storied depictions of that struggle. There's something deeper about the language, the danger, and nature of the consequences in this movie, just like there's brilliant dialogue and entire worlds to chew on in a show like Dear White People. You can't shy away from things and exist as a “real” black person in this country. People are out to kill you for dumb-ass reasons and you are disproportionately affected by racist policies and a history where you're considered inhuman.

It's that deep hatred that can't be escaped. It's the pride and perpetual insistence of a damning and degrading narrative. As a purely intellectual question, I'm baffled at how anyone could be so sure and so loud about anything, let alone that degree of hatred of someone because of the color of their skin or how they dressed or talked. As a person who's been at the receiving end of someone's sheer irrational hatred and ignorant pride, perhaps that's the kind of desperate and low place real people connect with across differences.

I understand hate. I understand how much work it takes to fuel flames for people or a world that disappoints you at every turn. I understand the stress and headaches. I understand that there will never be enough words or screaming matches to account for how full a heaving chest feels when you want to obliterate the oppressive force, and yet that force never leaves. I've said I've wanted to kill things or certain people. I felt relieved the day Scalia died, naively enough. There is an immense waterfall of hatred spewing from as many corners as you choose to look.

Here's an example. I recently picked up a washer/dryer combo from Coatsville, IN. The guy was nice, a kind of outdoors man's man. We shoved that thing on the hood of my car, I went to pull out the steal of $100 to give to him. He hands $40 back and says he's a Christian, he's just happy to see it gone, and that “I don't mean to sound faggy, but do you mind letting me know you got back home safe?”

What do you call that? Complicated, to say the least. Is this the kind of Bill Maher “house nigga” comment, but for gays? Do I think this guy's disposition would have changed wildly if I got out of my car with a lisp and said I worked in something he considered perverse as opposed to child welfare? He literally gave me a discount on what was already a steal. He put out to a stranger that he cared that I got back safe. Do we call it a deep abiding hatred for gays, or a confused cultural aversion to something he doesn't understand? Do we react by ridiculing and sanctioning?

I understand hate, but I've never been proud of when it hits. I don't brag about the relationships in my life that have managed to end terribly. I don't routinely work in to conversation how insane my mom is, how shitty the conversations with ex-friends have went, or persistently espouse some level of violence towards all of the people in power I legitimately think are trying to kill me each day. For me, these are incidental feelings of being mashed up with people we barely ever understand or are given an opportunity to work productively with. But then it seems it's one thing to understand your own capacity for hatred, and another entirely to forgive it. And god forbid you practice apologetics.

One thing I persistently worry about is that “impulsive” decision to break something that feels fragile. I want to get it over with. I hate the anticipation of betrayal. I hate the idea of putting yourself out there and believing in something while someone else was just waiting for their opportunity to flip. Hatred pragmatically addresses that too. It preemptively blames people before they get the chance. You get to emote all over the place and proudly profess cathartic rage for all the “others” and “idiots.” This is about as close as I can figure in describing the thinnest of lines between hate and fear.

Fortunately enough, I've spent enough time writing that I don't walk around like a ball of rage anymore. I still pretty fluidly claim to hate things, but not in an obsessive and deeply painful way. All the tragedies of conversation I've neatly packed into blogs or examples. All the dreams stalled or things stolen occupy intricate webs of justification and pithy perspective. My fragile sentimentality is reserved for brief lucidity during infrequent intoxication.

How do you contend with hate? Is it embodied in the all-encompassing abstractions of identity politics and storied victim-histories? Is it individual instances of poor judgment more or less spurned on by a deep abiding racial or sexual hatred? Is it the general lashing against all that makes you afraid and that's hard to understand? A call for peaceful protest or truth and reconciliation isn't to deny these forces or their consequences. Asking for the conversation and the acknowledgment of pain is not an encroachment on freedom or rights. The effort in life should be towards mellowing of that hate impulse. The dialogue should be calling it out for what it is. And people who are actually filled with hate need to be reminded as often as they can that that's what they're full of. That's the face of their “Christian love” or “purity of intention.”

Stay cool, my brothas. We're already dead. Some of us just know that a little more than others. And everybody's terrified.

[717] Safety In Numbers

I have a sense. There have been different instances over the last few days that have reinforced it. It's as if a big puzzle were constantly shifting, and then here a piece, there a piece, and as they slide in, you get sudden “ah ha” moments. It's a mild reassurance. It's a degree of comfort. It feels like understanding, and whether it actually is or not doesn't seem to matter.

A consequence I blame on getting old is starting to see everyone as a child. “Big” and “important” and “dramatic” things lose their shine. The connotative value of the life or death scenario that's playing out at all times loses its ability to provoke a sense of urgency. When I talk about having a foot in the grave, whether I were 5 or 50, it's still true. It's not some screaming insecurity or genuine fear as one might experience as they're actually spiraling out of control on the highway. It serves as a kind of reminder that in order to maintain a kind of persistent motivation, it needs to be rooted in your ideas.

As far as reminders go, I'm now living the firsthand experience of the kind of “safety” the “normal” world craves. If I stay polite and fill out paperwork, I could do this job indefinitely. Every home broken or saved isn't really on me, no matter the “faithful” lip service. When people trust you an inch, they give away miles of their lives with information for you to work with. I can make their lives easier or harder, throw their mistakes in front of authority or bury them, or maintain a standard of care and authority, or bemoan getting home a little later than I'd prefer. It's the same kind of choice you make every moment of every day even alone watching TV and reading, but it's dressed up with “consideration” for people's petty egos.

I'm reminded that I'm good at it. As “friends” found their safe spaces and stopped flirting with the idea of drunken hook-ups with me before finding a spouse, they liked the guy who could talk about anything and not judge them. They liked when I had a plan to entertain them or went out with the agenda to help them get laid. The energy it takes to keep a party flowing is 10 times more than to encourage a person struggling with addiction for a few minutes every week. Writing blogs takes me longer than the paperwork for a dozen families might take to fill out. I could choose to complain in greater measure and slack off, or I can place this job and its relative impact into my giant bag of life experiences that engender that much more credibility when I bother to opine.

It's in watching people rationalize in real time their inadequacy that sense of reassuring calm comes over me. Oh, right, this is why when I first started writing I was obsessed with discussing non-maliciously manipulating people. They give themselves over, all the time, every day, with every chance you give them. I choose to take to the page and lay out every possible detail for you to twist or learn from me, they pack a handful of sentences with how they'd like to be treated and understood the rest of their lives. They tell you how they're going to fail or how they justify. They imply things they know you understand.

And in the world of “implied understanding,” I thrive. Big and tall well dressed and well spoken man? It's night and day going to the bars in that outfit verses my normal tattered shirt and cargoes. I feel like an infomercial; it's just that easy. It's why I got bored with it initially and stopped whoring around. It's why conversations of potential malicious toying with the dynamic can creep up too often if you're not paying attention or no one is around to hold you accountable. Lucky for me, I keep sharing my writing.

There's also the reason I'm persistently angry prevalent as well. Particularly of my smart friends who didn't become doctors. You know it's that easy too. You could budget better, or organize, or try and create something new. You have the time to speak to big whole-world issues. I'm “busy” too now, except, of course I'm not. Just like we found the time to party in spite of college and still graduate. The “real world” is the magnified insecurities and fears never dealt with, not this looming mediocre fate one needs to suffer in solidarity. Remember, my biggest complaint isn't “failing” at the things I try, it's having no one to try them with, and it's not for lack of asking.

Alas, in the parallel normal world, I'll find all sorts of people! Yes, I'm sure soon I'll have co-workers inviting me to lunch or after a flurry of a few busy weeks that bank account will have me nonchalantly talking about actually making good on a few cross-country visits. Is that what I want? Well, sure, I wanna go chill with Hatsam and Wendy, no doubt. Is it going to be what I need? Is it going to speak to what gnaws at me every day I don't see a road to achieving? Hardly.

I feel I've moved a little too far away from that sense though. The pieces falling into place have everything to do with having lived, to some degree, through a similar scenario before. I've been in many random places and homes before I started doing it for this job. I routinely gamble with how much I should or shouldn't say so negotiating the space between me and a “problem” client doesn't register as intimidating. My fundamentals and outlooks are clear, so the wordy details get a little less important. It's easy to see how “playing by the rules” makes you think of ways to support a family or plan for trips months in advance that come without notice and are over too quickly. There's an extremely powerful cultural flow that isn't all bad.

My concerns remain the same. It can arrest your perspective. You work yourself to death. You make excuses and apologies. You get too polite. I let my “jaded” sensibilities breathe in writing, and perhaps it's a testament to a measure of wisdom to rehearse and release here so blowing up in real life becomes less likely. There's still a fuck ton broken and that we're not paying attention to. You know how little I've thought about Trump? I'm just busy enough writing a report that he's the furthest thing from my mind. Not terribly long ago, I was railing about the creeping fascism arresting this country. That's still true. Bill Maher calls it a “slow moving coup.”

I think my anger towards “friends” and confusion about my relationship to them is in taking for granted they could transcend this flow to the same degree I try to. They could see past their paycheck and bills, I supposed. They wanted to take chances and live differently. NOPE lol. God, I'm a fucking moron. They're as happy to capitulate to normal feelings and obligations as the next guy. They didn't take my blogs as predictive prophecy, THE BASTARDS lol. My anger seems more a mourning in that light. It was the comfortable “school lie” like this comfortable “work lie” keeps paying as long as I keep singing their gospel. You play along long enough, you might get a shot at affecting some “real change” (you know, because they're the guardians of the “real world”) and your name will go up in lights...or a plaque or something.

I still want to be what's underneath. I'd rather never be known and watching my impact unfold than be handed some award and be expected to give a polite speech about how the system really isn't out to get us. I'm not full on conspiratorial wing-nut believing every junk piece of “alternative” media, nor am I a buttoned up rule bloviator, but it seems I've exercised a degree of competence across layers that no single one is ever going to speak to. You don't care if I'm a “good” social worker. You want to see me build secret rooms in my playhouse and whether or not I can “revolutionize” some industry or way of living. You know why you want to see that? Because I want to see it of myself. I speak to what I actually want, even when I'm exactly confused or wrong in knowing how to get there.

I just wonder if you've taken enough time to know what you're really built out of. I'm still fitting in pieces some 717 blogs in, but what's stuck has really stuck. I keep shifting into different versions of familiar, and fairly fucked up, worlds. Breaking out is extremely hard. Doing it alone, I suspect more and more, is impossible. How many times have I advocated for a “culture” level change? That means I see myself shaping more than our professional or interpersonal relationship. I want to shift the tides of life itself. That takes a level of creativity and people signing on that you're willing to concede to the Scientologists? Even Waco managed dozens of people. I can't get one or two?

I suppose it's that every playbook is already written. I'm nothing special, I'm just reading. I want my story to be interesting and encompassing. I want the people in my world to view themselves as equitable characters and not incidental pawns or tragic failures filled with hopes and dreams about what they'll get to read about me one day. I want the kind of help that's actually people helping themselves. Because they're not, and you, the majority of the time, aren't actually helping. I can't stop people from doing drugs, or beating their wife, or from sexualizing children. I can learn and approach the topics in ways that could improve the culture that essentially acts like profiteers on their behavior. Be it emotional profiteering in lazy ill-informed donations and inflated budgets or actual cash grabs in sneaking in as many “extra” 15 minutes as you can plausibly defend in billing.

Who's side are you on? Your own, and therefore mine, or the end of some passive agenda? You do remember you've got a foot in the grave too, right? You know there will be plenty of struggle left over for your kids, excuse me, puppies, because none of you want to admit the dire circumstances you're living under which are constantly at war with your biology. What's it gonna take? Because when you're not the one acting, shit's going to happen to you. You're gonna get sick and old. You gonna have enough money? You're gonna wish and pray and try to remember the good times. Is your small donation or encouraging facebook post gonna prop you up?

Do you want to be the bigger and better culture, or just ride the one you've been given? Doing so doesn't mean you're thinking or have figured something out. It means you're already dead. Don't fool yourself into thinking there's a dollar amount or number of friends that will ever count if that's your umbrella. And you certainly shouldn't think of me as anything but a faint eccentric memory of our youthful folly. My begrudging ignorant pragmatism isn't condoning the larger picture in hiding behind the perks or recognition. My obligation remains. My real anxiety isn't being tangibly spoken to. Are you better off than me?

[711] YITV

I was recently asked why I watch so much TV. I proceeded to give a 10+ minute answer as though I'd been rehearsing it for weeks. I've discussed it before, but maybe not in a comprehensive way. I'm also kind of bored of watching TV at the moment, see myself staying up much later than is necessary, and figure why not break into the night with something light.

Like any habit, it doesn't start in a vacuum. The road is paved with dozens of things I've attempted to do instead. I'm as easily pulled away from a show as there is a suggestion to do so. But when all else fails, one thing remains certain. There is always something to watch.

Before it was TV, it was reading. If you're not focused on fiction, that will bring you down in a hurry. During drug study life, I had all day every day to read about the world. I made sure to sleep through the day and start reading sometime in the afternoon, but the idea is the same. Now, your busy and adult friends who might share an article or two every couple of weeks are up against your 5 a day that you've distilled down from the 25 or 30 you read that day. This means you have nothing in common to talk about, and when you do opine, it's at a level of derision and detail that little miss “helpful sharer” didn't want to engage you at. Low mood and active alienation isn't sustainable.

Before reading, it was the clinging to the last strings of hope for “together” things like consistently dancing on Tuesdays or trying new things at cheap enough spots around town. I had weeks and weeks of events rollerskating, ice skating, water sliding, movie going and hosting, sports and lunches, which week after week were either ignored or started to look like some increasingly desperate move to cling to youth more than anyone's genuine engagement to spend time together. The burden of getting older and adopting new responsibilities I'll say killed that, but I think there was a considerable amount of no longer wanting to fake what I wasn't actually faking taking hold too.

Before that people were actually around to just hang about and do nothing or anything with. Before that was coffee shop and business fervor. Before that school. Then back to partying, before school again. Then work and school all the time. The point is, there's been stages and differing degrees of focus at each one. Would I rather everyday be able to build or create at my leisure? Duh. Would it be nice to engage with people who want more for themselves than what they can scrape together or lie about over drinks? I'd kill every former conversational partner for a shot at a single one.

But why has TV persisted? It's my personal Elizabeth Warren. What can you do at basically every level of mental involvement? Sit around, or walk the treadmill, or do some yoga, while the moving pictures talk at you. I'll of course focus in on something quality, but the rest is to help keep my mind from attacking me. I need to be engaged in something, might as well be a show.

You might be wondering, why do I have to be engaged? Why can't you sit back and relax or enjoy yourself? Mind you, this is usually where we spring into judgments on my character, but nonetheless, I wonder, what makes you think I could get more relaxed? I've been a “sit and stare” kind of person the majority of my life. I was glued to my video games as a kid; at least my memory of being so wants to leave me befuddled that I developed any athletic ability. I grew up poor enough where loading up on free library movies and binge watching TV were the thing to do well before the term “binge watch” came into the popular lexicon.

Admittedly, I also like TV worlds considerably more than the real one. It'd be dope as hell to have a huge extended Modern Family where our hijinks would never overtake how we care about each other and eventual resolution. The deep mystery and high stakes of The Americans is as close as I'll ever get to play spy. Violence and the wonders of mysticism in Vikings makes you want to believe in destiny. Stories, be they in TV, movie, or comic book form, are actually going somewhere. They're going to be there each week. They're going to end. You can rely on them in a way the regular world will never provide. The Challenge and Impractical Jokers are going to make me laugh, every single time. Brockmire was suggested to me out of the blue, and my gut hurt all day from laughing.

TV also functions as sort of my last remaining bridge into anyone bothering to connect with me. I post a poem about another lonely and sleepless night, easy to forget. I post that Legion is perfection, now we're cooking with gas. I had an old show FlashForward on while I was delivering food, and wouldn't you know it, the guy handing me the bags remembered that show and liked it back then! It's easy to debate the superiority of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D over anything DC. It's considerably harder to debate the intricacies of the Marvel Civil War and what lessons those characters might impart to how we conduct our lives.

Given that I watch so much of it across different times and genres, TV is still a huge source of inspiration. You know what I never found googling different “green” ways to live? A water system they set up in the ground of a desert home on Homestead Rescue, also suggested to me be someone else who opened up via commenting on what I was watching at the time. TV gives me lines to explore whether I can be a friend or family member like what's being depicted. It keeps me constantly turning over in my head what it means to be an actor and whether any pursuit of fame or being seen isn't fundamentally corrupt. I get to lose myself in a way that makes me think of both Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman who both have decried not wanting or not being good at being themselves.

As a window into the soul, if you're not out amongst the people, you can infer what they're like. Reality and soap opera TV overwhelming? I bet there's a mathematical formula that could consider the TV variables that would have spit out Trump as president. Does it get easier to see through people's motivations when the hype machine cup runs over and the praise outweighs what you can pick out on screen? Constantly. You don't need “The 25 Best Shows this March” to watch. That you can get that, and 25 more lists as long or longer seems to speak to not just me having an overwhelming amount of time to watch or desire to connect.

I've managed to find some truly break-out interesting things or worthwhile people as well. Sometimes the musical guest sends shivers. I can hear about everything, but seeing how someone talks about what they worked on can spark my interest to add it to the queue. It's a feedback loop. Is 90% of everything James Corden does or says on the show throwaway things to sleep to? Sure. He's also an incredibly charismatic geeky fanboy who's enthusiasm has bled onto me numerous times. I don't need to see the same jokes recycled across The Daily Show, Colbert, The Opposition, Real Time with Bill Maher, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Our Cartoon President, and The President Show. I like discovering lesser known but influential people Trevor Noah and Jordan Klepper interview who reside at the level of whose works I want to map. Colbert acts as a barometer of “Joe Everyman” morality and sentiment. Long-form discourse at every opportunity is invaluable. Samantha Bee reminds us of what The Daily Show isn't anymore and does a lot of actual fund raising and awareness causing real change. And watching others' catharsis is an invitation to keep tabs on how people are working through what I perceive as suicidal circumstances.

TV is a search for a voice when no one cares to read what you're actually saying. It's attempting to pick up the pulse of what “the world” seems to be craving, be it the apocalypse in so many versions, or redemption, or family, or cheese, or just to abuse the safe and familiar. What to make of people patting each other on the back for “discovering” that as long as it's the black people who are rich and there's a fight for the crown it can be called revolutionary! At some important level, what we're creating is a testament to what we genuinely feel and think right now. Is our media landscape a reflection of something that amounts to more than a cultural psychosis or blindness? How broad are we looking? How willing are we to explore not just “that” something got popular, but why? What am I saying in watching so much TV? Well, pick a blog. Or pick up the bones of what I used to say and work towards before I leaned on my supplement.

I used to love saving shows to watch with my ex. Such a stupidly simple and common thing that says, “I want to spent all of this time with you.” I found considerably more laughs watching Archer as a group when we visited Colorado than I tend to on my own. I've watched shows I can't stand, and in describing why, turned friends onto them who've said it's now one of their favorites. In broadening my horizon of what I was willing to watch, I got to understand why my dad advocated for Friday Night Lights and plan to check out Lillyhammer because he used the same tone. I've gotten songs stuck in my head and discovered casting and production trends that I consistently admire and never would have found otherwise. You drop the right show name anywhere on the TV web and you get likes and nods out of the woodwork. It's a huge connective tissue of influence and ideas we take as for granted as water.

There's also a healthy dose of my obsessive tendency to “watch everything” at play. I tried to quit watching Arrow and The Flash cold turkey, and succumbed to the sunk-cost fallacy. Why watch 6 seasons and 17 episodes of something if you're not just going to get to the end, especially if you've been speeding up the playback and barely paying attention already? If I'm going to lock in, or at least feel the pull to, the things I do, the visual media environment is where I've carved out a large enough chunk of meaning that I do not find in the rest of my life. And while I have to be dragged through a job, or the struggles of home building, or the failures of interpersonal interaction, I can hop on and ride as many fanciful, dramatic, or life-affirming tales as are running.

My “balance” isn't between “relaxing” doing something like mountain climbing or camping and the everyday stress of real life. I'm always flirting with sanity verses insanity. I'm strung out on meaning verses emptiness. I need engagement against rotting. I'm proof positive that there are way more hours in the day than you might be willing to bother with. When you're stuck in this moment, and you can't seem to pursue anything “more” meaningful, whether it's words coming out here, or words coming in from media, something needs to happen. I'm still not prepared to stare at the ocean or a stream unless I'm tripping acid, and mountains are still giant piles of dirt. I envy whatever you're getting from wandering around and looking at those things instead.