[1239] Take Me Out

I’m going to keep writing until I dig out the heart of what’s lodged in me.

I just got back inside after engaging in a kind of ritual. I have a dozen things related to the development, organizing, and cleaning up of my land at any given time. I have a block of well over a hundred tires. I have overgrown weeds and prickly bushes weaving their way through a scrap pile. I have hundreds of pallets, bricks, and panels. I have windows and old mowers. It truly is a snapshot into the white-trash half of my blood that I guess felt neglected growing up.

Today was cutting through a lot of the brush and beginning to load up my truck with steel for the scrap yard. I’m trying to not get short changed, so it’s spending time applying a magnet and cutting away plastic or aluminum from different pieces. It’s kinda dirty, occasionally painful, and something you have to go about in a very specific way or you’ll get nothing done. It’s snipping bit by bit the thorny vines. It’s noticing how pieces attach to each other and having the right tool available. It’s trekking back and forth from the truck to the pile and taking solace in the little bits of order you’ve wrangled from the chaos.

At some level, it’s simply preoccupying my brain which is otherwise plagued by enough thoughts to start me on my third digression in 3 days. At another, it’s cleaning up and accounting for one more piece of my pie-in-the-sky vision of how I was going to operate from my sustainable land in the middle of nowhere. Isn’t it romantic to think you can get by patiently breaking down and recycling what you’ve collected over months or years, and have it pay? That pile of tires I’m working into a, functionally, art project, that will also serve as a privacy fence.

There’s a few problems with the dream, not least of which that it’s winter in Indiana. Yes, you get these odd days where it’s like a cold spring, but it could snowstorm in the next 15 minutes, and then rain for 3 months, and now all my plans on what to do next for the pile become moot. Also, scrapping doesn’t pay much. The most I ever got was in dropping off a load of cast iron radiators, which lowered my raised truck bed almost to the ground, and got me a little over $100. It also takes a lot of time to disassemble little rubber bits from complicated metal pieces. The tools it takes to do the job need replacement pieces that break or get lost.

More to the point, a dream turns into a chore, and barely one that feels tolerable the more you get into the, often actual, weeds. The effort doesn’t feel precisely “wasted,” but you’re forced into a tempered place.

“Tempered” is different from “defeated.” I worry that over the last few weeks, and last several days in particular, I’ve been defeating myself. I find it hard to operate from an endlessly motivated and optimistic place when I’m staring down what feels like a miserable series of obligating tasks. That’s humbling, or humiliating, work tasks. That’s legitimately needing to borrow money. That’s the tortured negotiation as to whether I “deserve” or “can afford” to get fast food, and what that says about my “respect” for the hole it feels I’m in.

I’m the kind of person who has spent years of his life proud to exist on ramen noodles, hotdogs, the dollar menu, bologna, and $1 or less frozen dinners. Back when it meant I was doing right and saving. Was I raised on super-sized double quarter pounders? Yes. Will a double cheeseburger suffice? Absolutely. When you’re stressing over every dollar, the difference between a $4.28 meal and a $10 one can’t be ignored.

What for? I keep returning to this question with regard to my behavior. Why do I want to get out of debt, even if it meant owing friends or chopping up my land? I feel good about the idea of working for friends. I don’t feel good working for anyone else. Why was I trying to save money in the past? I was saving for what I needed to build my house, and start my businesses, and invest in “the dream.” I wasn’t depriving myself of the burger I’d prefer; I was advocating for the future. There was no conflict until the future never seemed to arrive.

I think developing a TV watching habit, and then investing in going to shows both grew out of a desire to live more in the present. At least make peace with the present. If “right now” I have things to look forward to, to plan around, to budget for, then no matter what else is bugging me or is failing to arrive, the show is probably still going to go on. There are systems with more money and competence than I can plug into that keep the monkeys dancing and singing on stage, so why not join them as often as I can? Why not do what feels like stealing memories from a world trying to dysregulate or kill me?

This has all been a diatribe at the individual level. I can’t wait to have AI analyze the piece and tell me how the introduction of “fascism” or broad political issue is where I might lose “the reader.” If you’re even barely online you’re catching a headline of the not-slow-enough descent into abject chaos and violence. Resist the temptation to mock yourself for your paltry individual concerns when you’ve a president routinely picking at the fabric of the world order. I don’t trust even my closest friends to be a meaningful bulwark against what I believe has a legitimate chance to get us all killed. “Conflicted” doesn’t begin to cover it.

If I get everything I want personally tomorrow, my environment is still on fire. My future isn’t up to me. Every meal feels spiritually like the last one. Every show a selfishly defiant protest begging-to-be-violated by the armed religious fanatics next door. Hunker down and wait it out? Use my voice? Join the latest protest and feign the emotional outrage I’m supposed to sustain for the raped children, then the murdered children, then the exploited workers, then the beleaguered minority, then the feckless complicit politicians, on and on as I get bombarded with hot takes from people I would otherwise respect until they tell me Erika Kirk was gracious in her forgiveness. Bitch is a lying reality-show bot parlaying the attention economy to capitalize on her propaganda partner-in-shill’s death. Obviously. Do I want attention-whore shills saying nice things? I'd prefer people who actually practiced them, and the work getting the credit, not the words mindlessly parroted as though they represent genuinely shared decency. You don't marry someone like Charlie Kirk because either of you are good people. 

You say otherwise because you don’t consciously believe in anything. You’re as arbitrary as I feel, but it’s dressed up in modern garb. You’re not suffering your loneliness, ego, and megalomania, you’re a reality TV star! You’re not a greedy liar stealing from the poor, you’re a tech genius capitalist! You’re not stupid, you just have valid different opinions. Round and round we circle the drain, pretending “meaning” even means anything anymore. What you are is preoccupied, overwhelmed, dead inside, nihilistic, solipsistic, cynical, lazy, judgmental, confused, hateful, smug, lonely, hypocritical, scared, and foundationally unapologetic about how many things you’ll help kill before you catch yourself admitting to any of it.

So I should work for a company that can determine how desperate I am to take $3 food orders 30 minutes across town and adjust how much it pays me in real time? I should pay back Chase who will get bailed out for gambling with other people’s money? I should stop eating what I want or going to shows because I don’t deserve a sustainable “right now” series of thoughts, I should always be at the mercy of what it would take to “fix” the next problem I didn’t create. I should spend almost all of my ever-fleeting time at the mercy and directives of the equally lost, but certainly quicker to adopt their helplessness than me?

When I feel stuck, I explore different frames. The problem is that every frame is begging the same kind of question and delivering the same kind of answer. I’m one fucking person. I don’t believe any singular story I can tell about myself. Of the last 3 things I’ve written which one is “most true?” It’s absurd. It’s all at once, today, ten years from now, and it echoes the same shit I’ve been writing about for 20 years. Where the fuck am I, or it, supposed to go?

[1219] Too Sweet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1217] Ding Dongs

It’s hard to overstate what writing can do to help you think clearer. As I reflect on what I perceive to be a series of muddied and disingenuous responses to Charlie Kirk’s death, I’m noticing patterns that hark back to the era of The New Atheists. The “nature of debate” is on full display, and routinely, no one defining terms nor willing to be nailed to the cross of their alleged convictions.

If you want to be “reasonable,” you can start by trying to say one truthful thing after another. You don’t have to know anything else about where you’re coming from. You can start with what’s most obviously true, for you, or of your perception. For me, it’s something easy like, “I don’t give a fuck about Charlie Kirk.” That, by itself, is very true. A reactionary response is going to invoke his children, far-flung theories of political violence, and almost certainly personal attacks questioning my right to say what I say or feel what I feel.

But I don’t give you the rest of the rope to hang myself, you invent it. I care, generally, that we have an environment where people aren’t dying for speaking. Speaking, in and of itself, is no reason to kill someone. It’s not hard to understand that “speaking” and “invoking violence” or “apologetics” are different things. When you meet someone who treats those distinctions as illegitimate or confusing, if you’re me, you dismiss them out of hand. You’re not prepared to have an adult conversation and I’m not interested in engaging with your feelings.

The most compelling thing I hear is about how the fascists will use death as a pretext to escalate. I know things can always get worse, but I don’t see how we’re not already living in the midst of their endless lies and pretexts to continue trying to control and kill. It’s like I’m hearing we shouldn’t attack the Nazis who’ve taken a small town because they’ll just ramp up their efforts on a different front. Bro, we’re already at war.

In taking things line by line, I can clock “elevated rhetoric,” because no, we’re not literally at war. Nor do I wring my hands hoping we devolve into some kind of civil one. At the same time, literally, the people in power are sending National Guard troops to cities and rounding people up, deporting them without trial, and claiming national emergencies. The “highest court” in the land cosigns and invents whole-cloth justifications to destroy the entire system of accountability. An entire party spends more time defending rich pedophiles than writing policy that remotely represents their constituents. They didn’t need Charlie Kirk to die to get there.

What are you supposed to make of your individual response or responsibility to the state of affairs? I work directly, every day, with the population who is going to lose their health insurance and SNAP. You think it’s my job to preach civility when I’m trying to get people to believe in their fundamental worth and humanity while they’re under attack?

People are getting fired for posting quotes from Charlie. His words are supposed to be at once banal and about “freedom” of expression, but when you use them, you need to be punished? This transcends gaslighting. When his killer was discovered to be the whitest of the whites — gun-toting, perpetually online, with Republican parents and Mormon upbringing, who went on Charlie’s show to decry the violence of "the left" -- the vice-president. Why am I supposed to be afraid of what they’ll do “if?” They’ve been doing it in big and small ways for decades.

I also can’t help but think that we’re falling into the trap of putting things off on “leaders.” If 10 more people are killed on either side, does that mean I don’t have to think critically anymore? Does that mean I shouldn’t vote in an informed way? Does that mean I’m just at the mercy of the notion that “violence begets violence.” Does it? Does it not sometimes cause the aggressor to stop long enough that we get a chance to live peacefully again? Dozens of clichés and statements that are ringing as increasingly hollow sentiments are offered as it clicks how terrible people are at denoting the real enemy and nature of the problem.

Somewhere along the line of “social media” or “public discourse” we dropped the expectation that things needed to have evidence, make sense, or be an extension of reason and shared reality. All that began to matter was the performance. That’s leftist land acknowledgments just as much as it is fascist professions of faith. What you actually care about is how you feel and look to the tribe. It’s a tired observation, but it continues to manifest in ways that aren’t being articulated. It feels like we’re trying to address it by continuing to point at it, ridicule it, or reduce the discourse to both-sides gibberish.

How can you be more accountable? You can accept that people lie. You can accept that you are human, and you lie. You might even be lying when you don’t “feel” like you are. The lie is that you’re informed enough. The lie is that your confidence is real. The lie is that your tribe will protect you or that you belong to one above your class. The lie is that you’ve put in the work to think more deliberately and reasonably about ever-evolving topics and your place in the world. You’re stuck reacting. You’re stuck regurgitating language you have no emotional connection to nor could ever arrive at on your own.

My hatred for people like Charlie Kirk is mine. I know the kind of stain and impact they have like everyone they’ve targeted does. I don’t need to cross my fingers and trust that the fascists will do one of a hundred things I really care about. I know what a fascist is, how they operate, and what they will destroy in service to their ends. If you were honest, and not lazy, and practiced in your accountability, you would too. You wouldn’t waste your time “debating” someone’s dog-whistles and not-so-tacit endorsement of wanton death.

The unreasonable people will spend your whole life never figuring it out. Why continue sacrificing for them? Is that why you wake up every day? To be told who your god is, what to think, and what your life is worth? Your brain can’t distinguish for itself what you never create or protect it from.