[1166] Bye The Numbers

When I was a kid, my mom was shopping around for a church. For a few weeks, we’d try different ones, some we literally couldn’t stop laughing and making fun of as we sat in the pews, one that felt like a YMCA with the different activity rooms and mega-church-wanna-be vibes. I wandered into what was a kids playroom and those vegetable cartoons were playing on the TV. “We are the pirates, that don’t do anything.” I’m 36 years old, and that line still bugs the fuck out of me. It feels like a summary of the several books I’d need to write explaining my problems with “religious” thinking.

Whatever one wants to accept in regarding the modern era as having a “meaning crisis,” I think words still mean things. I think pirate means something. A pirate was my school mascot. Pirates of the Caribbean is a franchise so popular it can be bled for attention and money indefinitely. You can get a grounded and historical view of pirates and how Thomas Jefferson handled them. What pirates aren’t, are shitty lyric-singing entities that “don’t do anything.”

Religion is a process that is designed to turn Truth, into truth. It gives you a personal truth. It let’s you invert words. It lets you empower your feelings and create substructures of reality that do the heavy lifting where you’re unwilling or unable to find the personal responsibility. A pirate is a rapist, murdering, thief who has no business in being associated with children. The caricature and theft of the word “pirate,” can go anywhere at any time for any reason, like becoming my school mascot.

Now, I’m someone who understands and does not have some kind of visceral emotive reaction every time a concept is seemingly misappropriated. I don’t care in some kind of aggrieved nerd way about protecting IP or cannon when it comes to cultural expression broadly. I care about the ability to recognize what’s happening when you do so as a matter of habit across different contexts. I care when you get stuck in a “religious mindset” about something, oh, I don’t know, like one that wants to obliterate the word “genocide.” Or one that habitually downplays the spirit and nature of fascism.

I’ve heard a lot recently, from debates between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson to discussions with Peter Boghossian and what sounded like a brilliant and articulate scholar and yet horrifying Christian apologist Wael Taji Miller. It’s the notion that we’re “all Christian,” in the broadest sense of Western values. You’ll get soundbites of someone like Dawkins “agreeing” even as he’s trying, hopelessly, to keep the conversation grounded in “yes” or “no” answers to things like “Was Jesus born of a virgin?” No one should have trouble answering that question, yet, in the obfuscating equating substructure of religious apologetics, “was” “Jesus” “born” “of” “a” and “virgin” all mean something so convoluted and contradictory to match the mores of his individual sense of self, Jordan has to pause, answer with a another question, belabor the mythology, etc.

This is something I think is most damaging and painful to think about when it’s literal scientists who practice the same behavior. You won’t find a better explainer for some highly complicated topic like gene expression or chemical bonds, and then they’ll wedge some sentiment about god in there for …antagonistic effect?

There’s a lot of problems when it comes to how you market and teach information. They don’t get easier when your motivating principle is the one like social media has adopted of “engagement.” How you engage, for how long, what content, what it’s doing to you, none of that matters. Religious thinking was our first attempt at creating a social media company. *Have you heard the good news? Now you can connect with anyone, anywhere, and be united forever if you just sign up and follow these rules that violate your autonomy, privacy, and capacity to think freely beyond emotional manipulation.

I think, literally, you can’t even recognize what I’m talking about unless you’re someone hyper-concerned about things like “rhetoric” and “apologetics. For your average person, I don’t think those are words they’ve ever used, let alone can define. Unless I’d fallen down the “new atheist” rabbit hole as a teenager, I doubt I’d have many occasions to use them in spite of my academically-inclined disposition. You don’t go to church to hear about the “reasoning” behind “love thy neighbor,” it’s just more or less demanded of you, in spite of your actual, practical, ability to do so.

And here’s the most confusing and insidious layer, because actual, practical, abilities of money, group-think, and cultural influence manifest explicitly for people. When “the church” helps you rebuilt after a fire, you give zero fucks how many little boys they want to rape when you’re back in your bed and so thankful. When “the church” runs the food bank, it may as well be Jesus personally stuffing the nearly-expired food down your family’s throats. The cultural zeitgeist and landscape, therefore, gets considered “Christian.” You’d think we were the only species to share food.

I think everything good and contributing to our survival is derived from evolutionary, reactive, processes, and as our intelligence grew to protect us from deadly consequences, we’ve let narrative arcs supplant harsher forms of natural selection. You want a girl basically pledged to you since birth? Stay in your religion. “Women’s rights” aren’t really a thing, because “rights” aren’t a thing, because “your right” is whatever “you are right about” within the confines of irrational-yet-(co-opted concept)rational religious behavior.

Religious thinking always wants it both ways. They want the excuse, but to claim the responsibility. They want the reason, but the infinite sea of irrationality that justifies. They want the power while claiming victimhood. They want to be of consequences at all costs while maintaining they’re just following the rules.

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg

The section below I wrote a week or so ago and never completed. It was what was bubbling for me to arrive at the above.

If there’s one thing I wish “we” as a “culture” would learn how to do, it’s quantify.

I think about how much gets lost in the weeds of rhetoric and emotional appeals. Why, ever, in a modern environment would we be so compelled by a “strong man” or any narrative that is explicitly disinterested in context? Personally, I’m so rarely moved by emotion just as a probably-autistic person that I’ve watched my entire life situations compound and explode utterly baffled by why no one was willing to even nod in the direction of the greater reality or circumstances.

I do think this is an outgrowth of the psychological apologetics we engage in to protect religious thinking. When your faith claims come in the form of “absolute truth” instead of “practical necessity,” to my mind, literally anything goes. Up means down, wrong means right, just like an animal reacting in any instinctive way to circumstances it doesn’t understand. I see nothing more reliably consistent than this across environments. “Smart” people do it. “Rich” people circle their wagons. Any time you get two people together who desire to feed off the other’s excuse-making energy, we default to our basest animal that justifies compounding deadly sin.

This is where things that aren’t complicated get to be played at indefinitely as though they are complicated.

I’m not a thought or word police person. I do think, fundamentally, comedians like Tony Hinchcliffe get to say bad jokes as often as their career can handle. I don’t think jokes, in and of themselves, and especially coming from professional comedians, are the thing that “pollutes” the public discourse or “harms” and “endangers” people. That’s not what a joke is nor the function of a comedian.

The massive, under-stated and under-appreciated problem, is when you adopt fascism. Fascism is religious fervor played out in more directly and practically implicated ways against a particular group. Fascism empowers an individual to double down on deadly sinful behavior. When you “just do you” next to or in service to fascism, you’re no longer what you were the moment before you made that choice. Every one of a fascist’s generals were otherwise “normal” people with held-harmless jobs and lives until they started playing into and normalizing the depravity. The ones that survived immediately tried to return to that normalcy, some being tried at The Hague decades after because…you don’t get to.

We entertain an endless stream of disingenuous and completely vacuous conversation around what is or isn’t “dangerous” and “harmful” that doesn’t count things. We even pretend to count! In forming a narrative around our particular oppression, when in context, tells the exactly opposite story. We just don’t count the money and what it does. We don’t count the people getting directly negatively affected by a policy. We don’t count the time it does or does not take to engage someone and persuade or inform them. We don’t break it down into a cold and useful calculation like an assembly line does for man-hours-to-parts anticipated.

I don’t think we even barely grasp the conditions from which we’re starting, and we have no idea where we want to go, so we don’t even entertain the idea there’s something to be counted or approached in a more deliberate and methodical way.

The broader view that can approximate how many people are dispositionally fascist is about as close as we can get. The one that shows us how often we’d rather disengage and isolate is on full display with the amount of people who don’t vote. The long-term impacts of legislation and cultural narratives get hijacked to every end and supplant the graphs that depict republicans bankrupting institutions and enriching friends in spite of children. Before we had any data, we had what used to be compelling stories about the nature of greed, gluttony, and pride.

In fact, we don’t need religious dogma to witness “sinful” behavior in nature, but you’d think it was all invented wholesale by religion. A series of chronic inescapable conditions for which we all must be constantly redeemed. That’s convenient.

[1117] Down!

I'm something of an angry person. That statement alone doesn't mean much, but it's the one to kick off with. I have a standing steady state of anger that's waiting to be provoked. I've learned where it comes from, so it's infinitely easier to name and manage as an adult, but it's no less there. I think it was a School of Life video that helped round out my perspective of the underlying "hope," so to speak, that lies underneath it as well.

I'm someone who is very quick, and keen, to see the potential in something. I can see the catastrophe just as quickly as the celebration and implications of doing something well. It's "obvious" to me like watching someone's muscles grow from consistently lifting heavier weights and maintaining a proper diet over time. There's also an intuition born from experience either physically attempting something, or in speaking with thousands of people. Over enough time, I consider myself to, literally, "never have a good excuse."

Yoda said, "Do or do not, there is no try."

I think of the many lessons we're abjectly failing at culturally, this is one of the biggest. I don't think we see our potential, good or bad. I don't think we're living for something. I think we're reactive, addicted, and compulsively doubling-down on inadequate responsibility-obscuring coping methods.

I don't care how old you are, "professional" or "educated" you consider yourself, accomplished, monied, or socially ingratiating you may be. I care about what you do and your ability and willingness to account for its consequences. You either lock the flood victims out of your church and unironically beat your Christian chest to hear a righteous tone, or you feed, clothe, and house people.

I'm not a "dreamer," per se. I draw a straight line from the available funds, opportunities, working backs and tools until I reach a place the resonates as "healthier" or "stable" or "feeding even more potential" into my life. I hesitated for a very long time to even use the word "hope" because I never felt that's what I was doing. I was working. I wasn't "trying to work," I was literally working. I was stating my goals, putting up the money, putting in the time, and piecing together each part of a greater whole.

You can do that every day as an individual. You can account for something. You can build on questions you ask yourself about your fears, anxieties, or behavior. You can act as though everything you do and say is "just," or you can recognize how you're not living up to your potential and act definitively to contradict.

Much of what used to drive me was pure spite. I, compulsively, needed to refute your opinion of me. At least half of the drive to get good at my guitar was an off-handed comment from an acquaintance in high school that I'd never be as good as him. Teenage me can be forgiven for not recognizing his myriad drivers of behavior. Adult me would have a serious problem if I had to "one-up" everyone who lazily threw a faux challenge or comment my direction.

When I evaluate spite deliberately for its potential, it eventually runs dry. If I give myself permission to ignore people, particularly unreasonable and immature ones, it's silly to invite them into the disingenuous internal fight I'm looking to have to get something done. I must ask, can I feel good without riding this spite wave? That wasn't clear. Thankfully, the answer is yes, because I do in fact feel good doing a wide array of things.

What if you don't feel good? What if you're depressed? What if you're trapped and antagonized by an environment or family that undermines your capacity to pursue feeling better? What if that doesn't feel possible from the jump, let alone the wildest possibilities of it compounding? I think this is precisely where the majority of people find themselves, consciously or unconsciously. I think this is the entrance to an unhealthy spiral and compulsive reiteration of our exhaustion, confusion, or fear.

If you can tap into and anticipate a pattern, you can break it. That's the potential. You can tap into patterns through speaking about them, writing about them, reading about them, or literally just recording each instance you notice "the same thing" is happening. Every single feeling you have operates this way. There's an infinite list of occasions that might provoke the pattern, but at bottom, it is still a pattern. My anger pattern runs when my hope is betrayed. My anxiety pattern runs when I'm thinking about wasting time and money. I get sad the more I'm inclined to talk about the big bad abstract "world," and all its failings, instead of practicing asking myself what my responsibility to it might be that day. I practice contentment in watching shows, playing video games, playing music, and reading. I can get excited getting drunk and going to an energetic or funny show.

To the extent I feel any given thing is the interplay of my standing health, the environments I plug myself into, and the actions I take in any direction. I can't control whether I wake up with a headache, but I can stretch the muscle that likely antagonized it, take the Advil, and write about how the headache is making it hard to consider what I wished to obligate myself towards that day.

What I witness people do doesn't look or sound like that last paragraph. I witness people "blame God" for their headache. That is, it's often "just the way it is." Period. Or, it's so-and-so's fault because of what they said last night. Or, it's because of a dozen perfectly hallucinated reasons from the weather to 5G. "Why, me?" They ask. "How could my head deserve to suffer such a fate?" It is not that a headache is a human universal to be handled in stride. It is the latest thing to be used as a weapon, an excuse, to not handle it effectively.

We're dual creatures. We're infinitely mysterious, and nearly perfectly predictable. We're our best stories of care and accomplishment, and genocidal. If you choose to accept the project of piecing together your dual nature, you must be prepared to accept every level of superficial contradiction. It's superficial because if you actually contradicted, you couldn't exist. You're alive or dead, as far as we understand life and death. Your feelings and your words will be indefinite gross approximations of where you're "really coming from."

To act is something I consider sacred for this reason. Barring all else, you get a chance to leave an indelible mark on the world that others can utilize or be scarred by. You can't know for certain what your impact will be, but you can know as well as you know anything that planting an apple tree is going to be better than slipping razor blades into apples. If you don't know that, you're lying, and you're practicing a disingenuous self-serving game to stay smug and sarcastic in your complicit laziness. And you live in a time where you're one click away from a whole family of people who will make you feel good about that. Then you've an algorithm that recognizes what to feed you so you can seek that feeling unconsciously indefinitely.

As much as my betrayed hopes might piss me off, I act to contradict and defy the automatic places my feelings may land. If I catch myself saying "I'm too tired," I get up. If I know the process is going to be complicated and take "forever," I ask myself what I can do in the next 5 minutes. Sometimes that looks like doing an initial search or opening a spreadsheet. Sometimes it's 2 or 3 few-sentence emails. Sometimes it's digging one hole in the remaining daylight, staring down the barrel of 14 more and incoming inhospitable weather.

I'm not powerless. I, always, have a choice. Sometimes that choice feels as impossible as anything ever has. The next action resolves the contradictory feeling. That doesn't mean I feel "good" or "happy." It just means I set an example of my potential. If I was conscious and deliberate, the example speaks to my values and hopes more than my words ever could. The more I'm objective and articulate in those values, the more potential they have to survive in a world that is otherwise forgoing to express and defend what I think we need to survive and live well.

A real example that highlights this for me is around "pro-life" ideas. I don't hear pro-life arguments that concern themselves with what the science says about embryos. I don't hear pro-life arguments that care about DCS or adoption statistics. I've not heard about longitudinal studies pro-life people tout regarding care and consequences of unwanted pregnancies. Pro-life doesn't entertain your life as an individual woman once it believes you've loaded yourself up with their concept of a baby.

If I was "pro-life," here's all my choices. I choose to flatly ignore the science. I'm going to choose to call that ignoring "disagreeing." I'm going to choose to ignore statistics. I'm not going to adopt myself, but I'm going to choose to use someone's story of adoption in my argument. I'm going to choose to "blame god" for your whorish nature, but not for the neglect inflicted upon the child throughout its life. In fact, I'll choose to co-opt that suffering as even more evidence of God's plan. I'll choose to vote for politicians who bankrupt social services. I'll choose to decry the importance and sanctity of my deep and personal feelings about this issue, and treat you as though you don't have deep and personal feelings.

This is a caricature, as all mind-reading exercises are. But, I don't have to mind-read the actions these people take and consequences we're currently suffering. It's the exact same self-justifying process that empowers and emboldens them as disables you. It's riding the ambiguity of disquieting feelings into an abysmal abyss where anything can happen because we're all pretending choices aren't being made.

I promise you, in more ways than you are paying attention to, you're locking flood victims out of your church and calling yourself a Christian. You have a lot of complicated fancy ideas about your value and potential I challenge you to draw a straight line from your day-to-day actions to its realized manifestation. Closing your eyes, and crossing your fingers, and wishing real hard is getting us all killed. Whether you want to call someone like Putin pragmatic or psychopathic, anyone willing to exploit how we condition ourselves will, and literally is, killing everyone in their path.

People accusing Israel of "genocide" are decrying "That's God's baby!" like a pro-lifer about the jizz in your uterus. How do I know this? They aren't interested in the actual definition of genocide. They aren't interested in what Israel is or has been fighting against since its inception. They aren't going to let things be complicated and comprehensive enough to talk about religious extremism and psychological conditioning. They're at the mercy of their spite engines, compulsively reacting to a visceral sense of indefinite and inflammatorily defined injustice.

Big and small, hot or cold, an infinite list of issues can all be scrutinized similarly.

"What emotional pattern does touching on [this issue] kick off in me?"

If you don't understand or can't define that pattern, you're at the indecent mercy of propaganda and "arguments" that fuel your preferred emotion. If you don't care to understand that pattern, you'll compulsively double down on it until you're exhausted, interrupted, or forced to abstain. Broadly, we imprison indefinitely repeat offenders and punish harshly those without the means to control and account for their most violent potential, especially if you're poor. Shittily trained dogs bark at any and everything for no reason, except the barking feels like the right thing to do.

[1082] Dead Kids

We're post-Thanksgiving where many are reminded of the family members they wish had died in the womb or gotten mercifully aborted. If you haven't heard the "joke" about fighting with the "conservative uncle" 4 to 10 thousand times by now, you're probably lost in the woods and better off.

I was listening to a boring article on who artists thank in their Grammy acceptance speeches. At the end, the author links to a Nail Horan music video called "Heaven." It's a good song.

The first comment says, "my son passed away 2 weeks ago and we came out of the funeral home and heard it in the car. . . .I cried my eyes out and thought it was my son telling me hes in Heaven ."

Of course they did.

This isn't the first dead child scenario in the last couple weeks I've been a party to. In one of my latest facebook pissing matches, a guy referenced his daughter dying of cancer and him getting an "undeniable" sign that she had manifested for him shortly after. On my ride home from the movie theater, I was listening to "If Books Could Kill," which was excoriating Mark Manson for speaking to the personal responsibility for your feelings you might have to take in the face of, you guessed it, your child dying.

The hosts were clumsily trying to side-step hearing any explicit advice from Mark's (lazy) reiteration of different philosophical or religious schools of thought. To be sure, it's unclear if Manson even knows what schools he was pulling from, but that's not the point. They ridicule him for "relitigating a comment on his blog" and proceed to assert a definition for trauma. Then they claim they don't believe you can take your pain and segway it into something else or change what you're feeling. The other host chimes in, "It's actually much better advice to give yourself permission to feel the way you feel." This is a separate concurrent idea on how you heal and "move on," not a competing one.

I can forgive two sides completely un and ill-informed about trauma-informed care with competing agendas and audiences. I can't help but notice how stark of an example this feels. It's these misalignments that get baked into the air-headed zombie-jokes about holiday fights. It's the pithy attitude we adopt alongside catastrophized language. The real opportunity is lost. Namely, when you're discussing dead kids, the chance to access how much you don't really give a fuck about them.

The most harrowing example of the dead kid theme has been watching "20 Days in Mariupol." How do you get the haunting sound of parents grieving over their dead children out of your brain? How do you wash the images of the blood and missing body parts? Well, there's a few ways, and they start with the idea Manson spoke to and the podcast hosts belittled. You accept responsibility for your feelings on what you're hearing and seeing.

What does that look like? What is the practical first step you take? Here, I've stood in active fascination and wonder about every parent. When you have your children, are you, somehow, under the impression they can't die? I ask this question in all sincerity, because it's the most "boring" fact I can land on when discussing the reasons for having children. Depending on how or whether you bother to ask and accept the litany of questions regarding the morality, responsibility, or fallout of your children says considerably more about you than you may have intended.

Do you want to "accidentally" find yourself in league with the most ardently irrational and proud conservative Christians touting the sanctity of life as they let mothers die and children suffer neglected indefinitely? They aren't taking responsibility for the death and destruction they cause because they aren't owning how little they give a fuck about anyone besides themselves and their narrative.

We treat dead kids as political footballs. We're ambivalent to how many of them die for preventable reasons. We don't care how many are in foster care. We don't care, after we've assumed the worst about a given family, what we do to their bonds or how we approach "helping" them. I'm lucky enough to have seen this first hand at DCS and then get to compare it to our cultural narratives and responses from different media and entertainment outlets.

Why did The Sound of Freedom get so much press? Because it was true? Certainly wasn't lol. Because anyone knows the statistics or cares about abducted kids? Definitely not that. I had to literally do the math in one of my addiction groups to explain that if what the movie and media outlets were reporting was true, it would be like 1 in 4 kids that would be going missing every year. I then asked the group members if they knew even one person who had a missing kid or could recall the last story about one. Crickets.

I can watch the horrors of war and remain "unphased" because it's not lost on me how fucked everything is. It's not and never a surprise. I can kick around baby heads in my brain and recognize those as "just thoughts" I don't need the veneer of horror films or speculative nonsense "news" to depict for me. We exist on that line of remotely cordial progressive evidence-based inching into the future and utter annihilation every single moment. You have to take responsibility for how that plays out in your own mind, or not. You can suffer under the illusion your children can't die and let it turn you into someone who feels noble for attacking those who speak otherwise.

If you cared about dead kids, or suffering kids, or kids under greater threats than you've ever experienced you know what you do? You get honest about what they need, and then you pay for those needs. You track and report on progress, and you punish people who undermine your effort. You accept what role you may have played, even just in your ignorance, in why some of them died. Your household probably employed the "There's starving kids in Africa…" idea for generations having never donated as you practiced waste and gluttony.

These mythical narratives regarding our own nobility and perspective keep things the way they are. If you believe, at any level, a bird landing on your shoulder or Nail Horan's latest belief-adjacent track is evidence of the afterlife, you're just doing denial work. You're justifying how little of fucks you give verses accepting it. You're not actually comfortable with yourself and the choices you'd have to make to do better. You're an addict for the bullshit. You're running.

I want one dead relative to unambiguously write something that has nothing to do with nature, religious imagery, or a song to indicate they are "somewhere." Give me any piece of evidence I can't find in a cliche Hallmark movie. It's like everyone's "haunted house" stories where no ghost can be bothered to indicate how scary or unresolved they are except in ways that suspiciously sound like drafty basements, attics, and house's settling or breaking down.

You are a monster, and that's okay, because you have agency. If you deny your agency, we all suffer the monstrous consequences of your behavior. You don't care about damn near anything but yourself. You don't work on things you "intellectually" know you need to, but don't feel particularly inclined to even see, let alone act on. You could watch Donald Trump shoot a child in the face in the middle of the road, and your brain would scroll past that as quick as the next meme. We'd keep on scrolling and scrolling until we're into Putin levels of fascism and Hamas levels of pride and certitude.

[1044] Reason Seasoning

I haven't talked religion in a long time. I just watched this "Skinny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets" series though. My brain is kicking off down some heavily compacted trails, but I'd still like to see if there's anything new.

I'm very much in the "religion poison's everything" camp. Whatever you may wish to claim is right or wrong about human behavior, there's a familiar, comforting, and easily digested religious anecdote, adage, or idiom to summarize and excuse away any remote lesson or inclination towards accountability. At bottom, every book, every tradition, every gathering of thousands boils down to "Because God!" The unprovable, ineffable essence of what us boring nerdy types recognize as self-satisfied circular-reasoning and infinite regress. Every single religious tradition terminates the same way.

As such, you take whatever fiendish inclination between thought crime to child molesting to child torture then molesting then murdering, as long as you punctuate it with "God's will," or spin-doctor it into your next trial and lesson, it never actually has to get dealt with. And why should it? It's the same people perpetrating that get attention, power, money, and literally thousands of people crafting their day-to-day excuses to not think for themselves or find their agency. Arguably, beyond the wholesale corruption of critical thinking, the thing I hate most about religious types is the unearned pride and piety bestowed by thirsty empty sheep looking for a strong daddy.

This isn't shaping up to be a blog where I feel moved to qualify anything positive about religious experience, so don't expect this to look "balanced" or "fair" or giving much a shit about your personal story as it pertains to your Jesus. You've been warned.

Anyway, now that I deal with addiction, I get to see new, but precisely the old, patterns manifest in ways I haven't written about yet. It could be notions of "purity" and "submission" that plague the minds of those who literally can't see a paradigm that would allow them to be independent. You're at the mercy of the eldest man who I don't think it would be unfair to say you're addicted to. We're addictive creatures, trying to indulge the positive feelings at all costs. Literally, we will die to feel good, and I don't think this is framed as dangerous as it's registering to me in this moment.

I've heard a lot of, "I just don't want to deal..." from my friends as much as any client. No one wants to deal. They don't want the headache. They don't have the time. Whether they're addicted to their vape or to some desperate conception of their duty or destiny, they don't fundamentally feel situated to deal with the heart of whatever their own issues may be. It becomes very easy to get enmeshed in family issues, client issues, indulgences for their own sake, or a feverish "busy-ness" pointed in no real direction in particular. They want to feel good. Maybe not even "better" than "good" or "good enough."

That's part of the religious impulse, no? You want to feel better about the infinite. You want to matter. You want to think you've created a kind of noble and lasting example in your attempt to start a family or in how hard you've worked to get letters after your name and higher paychecks. You want to pay your respects and keep the traditions of your elders alive. You want to think someone's paying attention and keeping score. It doesn't matter if in your heart of hearts you "don't believe in anything," as one woefully incomplete phrasing tries to caricature it, it matters that it feels better to "believe in something" than your insignificance and lack of connection. Jesus is a thousand times easier to understand emotionally than "quantum" anything.

It just feels so fucking boring and disingenuous after, well I spent years reading/arguing this stuff, but with an adult brain and 15 minutes, some deeply consequential layers of this shit needs to crack. You can be a perfectly good person without anything religious making its way into the conversation or your identity. Your car takes gas, not God's will, and for whatever scientific description you want to use about the combustion engine, the same scientific principles and rules apply to what's going to make you "go" as a healthy connected individual verses an incidentally alive node in a narcissist's cult.

I genuinely wish for the shedding of religious indoctrination to happen as quick as possible. I wish the people who hold it harmless would spend more time in good faith analyzing what they think it's been teaching them. Every form of abuse is justified "because God." Every opportunity to hold someone to account is a move to kick the can all the way to Hell. You reduce yourself to the dog who got in the trash. It's never going to walk up to you, apologize, and begin picking up and putting it back in the can. It's going to live in fear, or oblivious pride, and wait for daddy to decide what comes next.

It's always and of course the religious household where you get the most abuse and allegations. If you build church bells to sound "duh" on the hour every hour, we would still carry ourselves as if noticing a cross on the wall is tantamount to a Safe Space sticker for runaway teens. Where else are you going to find the worst kind of predictable tragedies of human behavior than where there's billions of dollars and adherents fundamentally situated to pretending? They pretend they weren't abused. They pretend to know what it is to be accountable. They pretend to have an identity. They pretend with every single word meant to obscure. It's easier to say "sin" than, "He made an 8 year old suck his dick."

There's so many parallels in my thought right now, it's hard to put it together. People defend the wrong things in the exact same ways with the exact same language. Your abusive partner, Trump, religious pedophile, terrible drug use influence..."He didn't mean...." and you're off to the races of excuses and reinterpretation of words and actions that have about as definitive a meaning as you could ever ask for. Every second you experience a moment of hesitation or confusion about something you haven't studied or don't have the mental faculties to entertain..."It's part of a larger plan." Yes, someone's always Ocean's 11ing things in the background.

People will escape! Then they will still say, "You can still trust God!" As though I should be surprised that an entire lifetime spent being punished for having your own identity could lend itself to any other conclusion. No no, dear traveler, what all of these rich sex and violence addicts were doing with all of their influence and time, never being held to account, that's the "fake God" stuff. The "real God" stuff is do literally everything they've ever said and done that doesn't rise to the level of pedophilia or violence that leaves marks. Nailed it!

I get annoyed when Hussain will say something about sex or relationships that is as purely distilled "purity culture" cult shit as you could stomach. Even if none of his actions reflect that of a controlling husband/ownership dynamic, he can't shake that it just feels "right" that you have your one woman, and anything else is grounds for divorce or disassociating. This, with I guess his tongue sticking straight through his cheek, as he tells me the permissibility of having 4 wives in his culture. You see, you can't "cheat" or be "open," but you can corral four bagged women to be at your beck and call if the money's right. You don't get that stupid convoluted headspace without religion.

Let's get back to "deal with it" as a phrase. We just don't want to deal. We don't want to deal with climate change. We don't want to deal with the fallout of our toxic friends or habits. We don't want to deal with our oppressor be it at work or in abstract attacks from the government. Why deal? It doesn't feel good. No one in our various religious contexts is showing us what effectively dealing means. It's not even really an option because it can't be conceived of. What are you not "dealing with" in your "addiction?"  After a few weeks/months you can pretty much be physically fine if not in dire need to recalibrate your dopamine and serotonin over the next 2 years.

I'm interested in what moves us past this whole "religious debate" that doesn't get to the heart of making excuses and fantasy worlds verses working within our actual power. We talk about "raising consciousness" which I think looks a lot like people showing people things, but without an appreciation for how or why they learn so it doesn't really matter how often it comes up, it never sinks in. You could very easily discuss the assumptions and illusions we're situated in as conscious beings altogether to persistently derail what that next conversation space could look like. I don't need another cult-leader, rich god-guys-is-an-asshole story. Do you? Are you ripe and ready to fall for NXIVM or Scientology if your Jesus or Mohamed wears off?

These crazies, these cultists, these monetarily powerful playing on human weakness fucks think in generational terms. We can't be persuaded to get half a dozen people into an intentional community, but you have millions on the same smug team regularly donating, indoctrinating, infiltrating, and humbly requesting through speakers outside the baseball stadium that you meet them halfway in a discussion about who's more likely to burn for all eternity as though we're not literally on fire already. Blame Canada!

You don't want to deal? You don't want to accept? You don't want to try? You don't want to touch an ounce of the anger you hear from me when I type? You're the piddling middle-ground that doesn't protest when the Nazi sits at your table. You're the $10 donation affirming private air fare for your spew-daddy while your neighbor starves. You're the held-harmless "individual" "who's just trying..." every overtaxed phrase about caring for them and theirs or what it means to be "good." They're not trying. They're not just. "They" aren't real or a person. They're a water molecule without the language of "flood."

We're all part of more waves than we can conceive. You can disappear into it, or you can adopt the buoy's perspective. You can learn how to be weather and impact resistant, bob and weave, act as a warning and help others navigate. It's dangerous to give your checking capacity to anything else. You need to be able to recognize the impulse, what ignorance looks and sounds like, and feel, as deeply and radically as the ideologues do, a sense of purpose and direction. Religious thinking is arsenic sprinkled on food and you say, "Oh! Almonds! Want a bite?" It's where you go to feel good about not taking responsibility. It's where you go to celebrate addictive thinking patterns. It's how you get to Hell. "You," of course, not me, because I don't need your daddy. I don't need him molesting the kids I try to place. I don't need his money. I don't need his excuses or story for my behavior or sense of agency. 

Why the fuck do you?

[1043] One Step

The ten second version of my Saturday night/Sunday morning is that, on a trip back from Fort Wayne, I pissed off the kid, he pulled over and kicked me out of my friend's car while waving his airsoft gun around and ranting about how he does whatever he wants and what it is to be a man. The several pages that come next are going to build the months, if not almost two years-long context around that moment.

Most of you know my friend adopted a kid. It was a kid from his caseload when we were at DCS. He's known him since he was 7 or 8, and he's going to be 18 in July. He's, by the numbers, the highest you can score across categories recording trauma. He's had, or continues to have, every "behavior" dumbass eager Christian foster homes blithely discuss before they figure out they can't handle it. He's adopted the hood gangster affect, changes how he talks, walks, and is always, always, "on" in some form of aggressive tip, be it in name-calling or slamming cabinets in pouring himself milk. That is, to hear my friend tell it, if there's anyone else around and it's not just the two of them.

This is the same kid who found his dead brother, cousin, and cousin's fiancé after, in the months before the murder double homicide, my friend warned the kid if he kept antagonizing his brother, something like that tragedy would be the result. My friend had made a certain kind of pact with himself, that if he was ever going to foster or adopt, it would be this kid or this other little girl with her own sordid story of abuse and behaviors that he could navigate in a way others couldn't.

To my friend's credit, while it is an extremely weird habit and pattern, his "adoption" of disaffected white boys and seeing them all grow up, not precisely in the best place mental-health wise, but not having committed suicide, all with professional jobs, homes, or a connection that sees them reaching out for decompression or hang-out and come-to-Jesus sessions that don't spiral more than they need to. That this kid, with his extra-special aberrant status would kind of fall into his lap feels like so many mile markers on a highway we've been driving down for 20+ years.

The last few times I've written, I've wondered why so many "simple" things about what I desire are so hard or expensive to achieve. I've asked how much agency or control we really have under the spell of our pimps or cultural paradigms. Rarely anymore am I looking for the lesson, more than underlining or reiterating things it can be hard to build into new normative behaviors. Regardless of your trauma, level of emotionality, discomfort, or specific story of woe, you either discover and practice the littlest pieces of control and accountability, or you don't. It takes one moment to eschew your better demons and best ideas, and so practice, and honesty, and articulation deeply matter.

With all that in mind, if your goal in taking on a child is to merely "keep them alive," my friend is doing very well. If it's to expand their horizons and attempt to plug them into the larger world, no one is more keen to travel with the kid, take him to art galleries, buy him things related to cars and video games, and invite him along to the shows or activities he might otherwise be doing. Most parents, at least the ones concerned about how "the world" is going to perceive their children, know the task is much harder than keeping them fed and culturally enriched. And don't get me wrong, my friend knows this as well.

Here's the big "but."

This kid is mean. He's mean-spirited. He's volatile. He's aggressive. He's as unaccountable a person as I've ever encountered in life. I've worked for DCS. I've worked in prison. This kid is meaner and more disingenuous than people barely older than him serving years of their life for things he glorifies. Anyone who's been or has a teenager knows they're irrational and a certain kind of frustrating or "crazy." But you also probably have a strong instinct of when you're feeling particularly hormonal or out of control, and just being mean for mean's sake. It's unclear if the kid can differentiate, but again, to hear my friend tell it, when no one else is around, he's otherwise pretty decent and "normal." So?

We're beginning to shape the "have it both ways" portion of the narrative surrounding this kid. The fact that he can turn off and on whether he wants to be decent is not points in his favor. It shows that he's being as deliberately malicious as I accuse him of being. If I thought he was just "stuck" in some form of extreme PTSD or disassociative acting out, I'm backing off. I'm not writing this, forming some damming opinion, nor expecting him to behave in any other way than someone who functionally doesn't have their brain in their possession is going to behave.

My friend is extremely indulgent and entitled. I don't mind those character traits in and of themselves as, obviously, so am I. This influences his approach to creating a "stable" or "therapeutic" environment for what I call his "charges" more than "disaffected white boys." You're depressed? He'll take you to the woods and do some shamanic acid session. He'll get food with you and smoke you out. He'll let you rant about your blind spots and the consequences they've wrought indefinitely. It feels bad to be broke, abused, neglected, and lonely, like so many of us are, so if you get around him or he decides to care for you, let's flood your experience with the opposite of the pain.

The strategy has kept many a potential school shooter or suicide statistic alive. The strategy is incomplete and is being taken advantage of by the exact kind of mean-spirited violence engine that thrives on chaos. My friend drives a Camaro. That is, he did, before he functionally gave it to this kid who doesn't work, barely does chores, can't refrain from getting suspended or expelled every few weeks, and uses it to drive a series of high school girls back to their apartment to fuck and dismiss with some regularity. When my friend's cars are busted and the Camaro still works, he's coming to borrow my, also old and broken vehicles, because he doesn't want to leave the kid without a car.

The kid's "therapeutic environment" consists of constant access to vapes, I think Delta-8, weed, all of the accompanying parts that enable smoking from torches or pieces or batteries and surely a dozen other things I couldn't name. There's a tightrope you're walking at any given moment regarding his stability, and that's not to be disrupted. If he doesn't have a car, he doesn't get to go to his usual spot to get the "lesser" drug from the reliable spot and people they've coordinated to facilitate. Drug use is literally built into this kids DCS safety plan, because for years every other form of intervention has proven to cause more harm, stress, and drama than anyone involved, including the judge, cared to keep returning to.

It feels like now is the time to tell you, as I was being kicked out of the car, the kid referred to it as ,"my whip," which it absolutely is not, and he's had a melt down upon the realization of such in the past. Yelling at my friend, "That's not my car, that's your car. I don't have anything around here, none of this shit is mine for real," not an exact quote.

Anyway, some of the consistent interests the kid has shown are in guns, violent Youtube videos, Grand Theft Auto, and cars. He and my friend will talk cars indefinitely. The kid will bring out and clean his guns, airsoft or otherwise, like he's a war veteran trying to stay vigilant. They'll spend hours flipping through different skins and modifications to their in-game characters and cars. I can forgive a kid for being boring and single minded or having shitty taste in music. But he uses his interests to help bolster and glorify his thug-life narrative and demons.

On the way to Fort Wayne, there are decent stretches of straight highway. The kid, smiling, seatbelt-less, gestures with his head back to my friend, "You know, we have to come back out here and see what we can hit (speed wise.) We gotta make a pact though, that if one of us dies, it's not on the other one. You don't gotta feel bad or there's no heaviness or bad blood." Also not a direct quote. As far as I can tell, the kid has a familiar suicidal impulse that I want nothing to do with. I certainly don't want to be in the car with him as he's racing past 120 miles per hour weaving through traffic and riding asses from old people to bikers.

The kid does not seem to retain the capacity to genuinely appreciate the chance he's been given. He was literally on his way to a mental facility or prison before my friend stepped in. On his super speeding racing stints he'd say something like, "I got this bitch all the way to 125 even with your fat asses in the whip." I'm as much for jovial shit-talking as the next person, but that's all he's ever on, and he's proud of the danger and, at least while I'm around, almost never corrected or redirected. It's precisely here you start to flirt with terms like "codependent" and "enabling."

My buddy has his own list of stressors and drama related to his family and a bank fucking him financially. DCS has always played games. His jobs require a lot of time and driving. If the kid was a saint, his life would be particularly stressful the last couple years. With the kid as an ungrateful, hateful engine of chaos, we've seen even periods of remote stability get shaken by a stiff breeze. For every little seeming win, he's just as eagerly prepared to regress and destroy and throw what's been accomplished out the window. I don't care if for the first time in memory the kid is waking up and regularly taking out and cleaning up after the $800 dog he got last week if he's prepared to wave a gun at me when I yell at him to slow the fuck down and stop driving like he wants to kill us all.

We're at the point now where I want the game called. I want to press charges. I want consequences to send the kid where he belongs, which is not in a struggling household with a single foster parent who does not have the time, energy, or intention of the mental facility the child needs. Would they do right by him? Probably not. We live in Indiana and a country that doesn't train or care or invest in dealing with kids nowhere near his level. Is that his, or especially my, cross to bear? I don't think I've for a second supported him getting this kid well before I had any instantiated opinion on the kid for a dozen reasons related to getting our own shit together first. There's many reasons I don't have kids, even if I went to zero concerts the last two years and had thousands to spend on them.

The problem has reached the point where I'm feeling very "me or him." I want nothing to do with the kid. I'm watching my best friend functionally abandon me to the whims and chance of his kid's behavior, and I'm so devoid of how to conceptualize that, that it doesn't even make me feel angry or like I want to move into a space of judgment and resentment. I think my friend cares. I think he tried. I think it's an abject failure. I think I accepted the nature of our dynamic being that of, "You know, I'm not really trying to take the bullet for you," when we were having those discussions as teenagers. I'm not taking a bullet, or high-velocity air rifle rounds, from this little shit.

I handle crisis or crisis-adjacent situations all the time. To even talk about my "anger" related to the situation might give you the wrong impression that I didn't make a calm deliberate call to the police as I heard the tires screeching as the kid peeled away. My adrenaline wasn't pumping. I wasn't yelling. But, much as when I handed my ex the knife to shit or get off the pot with the threat of her slitting her wrists, I don't deal well with living under the sword of Damocles. This kid has been too hot and too unstable from the jump, and the gifts and rewards and placations have done nothing but provide an environment for him to feel emboldened to continue and draw pride from his self-destruction. My friend smokes a lot, speeds, and plays the same games. I don't see the capacity to lead by example along the metrics the kid needs to change. I see an uncle the kid might be allowed to visit in small doses after he's actually shown something worth rewarding.

One of the topics I've been talking about in Groups this last week is forgiveness/grace. How much room do you give? In my view, we never had to get to dropped on the side of the highway at 3 AM after gun waiving, but we did. I was certainly speaking to the issue well before it got that far. How much should we belabor the story of the kid's trauma? Certainly to a serious and far degree, but are we willing to also accept that you can be a fucking dickhead psychopath on top of that? Our job isn't to save anyone. It's to exercise your perspective and try. I tried right up until the point I couldn't stop repeating to myself, "I'm not dying for the fucking kid," and thinking about Ryan Dunn or all the shows unseen and projects not attempted.

I'm not forgiving the kid anymore than I'm forgiving my mom. Like her, he's not equipped to build on and exercise an accountable perspective. His upbringing or genetics broke his brain. The Hail Mary that is my friend attempting to contain this kid is causing me to contemplate in a measured way how I need to consciously uncouple from anything to do with either of them. This isn't a game, for all of my analogies suggesting otherwise. An excellent DMT trip might have released my buddy from a fear of death, but I'm not so ambivalent.

We can return to fundamentals. What can I control, what can't I? I can't make my friend adopt my perspective. I can never be in contact with the kid again. I can deny my truck to be loaned out and say, "You invited his impending meltdown into your home, not me." I can clear my booze and video games out of their house and go back to paying to do my laundry. I can press charges. I don't know if there's an underlying cry for help to release my friend from some sunk-cost fallacy that's rooted itself into this dynamic because I don't know what I can trust in the "I'm sorrys" that change nothing and persist in bad behavior, and tales of appeasement held up as growth. That's not good for my friend, for the kid, and certainly not for me.

[1016] After Ours

Don’t bother.

There’s the thought keeping me from writing. Don’t bother reiterating. Don’t bother wasting more hours of your life pretending you’ll arrive at some “conclusion.” It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth it. You don’t feel enough of anything to justify more empty words in service to your ingratitude and impatience. Fuck you, sit down, watch another one of your little TV shows. Clog your gut with more pink Starbursts.

I don’t want to be useless and mediocre. I think they go hand in hand. A thing that’s not useful for whatever it is you’re doing with it is, by definition “of only moderate quality; not very good.” “Moderate quality” seems like a contradiction. Are you having a quality time, or not? Or is “quality” one of those disguised useless terms that infuses the real description with nothing information? Is it a “quality” piece of clothing? Is it expensive? Is it keeping you warm, comfortable, or dry feel like the relevant pieces of information.

What is the “quality” of my experience? I just got home from a Straight No Chaser show. I’ve never been to an acapella show before. My first instinct on most acts I’ve seen online, confirmed ever more in person, is awkward Christian summer camp energy. Do you understand what I said? Did I have a “good’ time? Did I like the songs? I only knew a couple and I had no specific complaints. Would I see them again and again? Was it “worth the money?”

The whole of where my experience lies seems outside the realm of this line of questioning. I went for a small book’s worth of reasons, all of those and more will inform if and when I go again to them or any other band. I wanted to experience “something” remotely novel, affordable, and that would occupy my time I’m not otherwise in front of the TV, fast food window, or work environment.

Why am I parsing through an abstraction on awareness and time expenditure? I was asked by my boss if I’m “happy” working at Groups. This has caused me several days of ongoing mild panic. I genuinely want to “snap” at questions like that. I feel at once so many things. It’s, “Does baby have to boo boo?” from a doctor meant to be investigating a twisted bowel. It’s, “Live, Love, Laugh!” on the wall of the suicide hotline office. It’s limp. It’s pathetic. It’s shallow and shitty and fuck her for asking such a bold and fucking ridiculous question.

I got asked because I’ve been increasingly introduced into the drama between my office managers. I, again, drive an hour and a half at least once a week to sit in an office to do a remote job. I come face to face with overworked and underpaid secretaries who get regularly screamed at and threatened by our drug-addled population. As they get more burnt, it translates into how/whether they handle our people in professional ways. This spills over into whether anyone takes the program on the whole seriously, which they already have enough reason and ways to not do so anyway.

Am I happy about that? Do I like that my office managers’ leadership has deliberately and consistently removed herself from solving anything they’ve brought to her? Am I happy I waste gas and time driving to the office to plug into the failures and drama? Do I like working for a company paying me a fraction of what they’re billing my service for? Am I happy I have a schedule so scattered that I literally can’t be more efficient? Am I happy that I’m not challenged or driven to do anything but the bare minimum? I NEED MONEY! That is the only reason I have ever occupied any role ever. Money. Always. Whatever other perk or privilege is a thousand years removed from “money, please.” Happiness has NEVER factored into it. Am I stuck or placated? I’m probably still at the job. Am I out of debt? I find myself showing up, waking up, and shutting up. Fucking happy? You fucking cunt!

I’M NEVER FUCKING HAPPY. It’s probably a good summation as to why I don’t have friends. I’ll stick with the over-statement because it depicts a larger truth. I don’t want to be friends, colleagues, or concert-going with someone fucking miserable and oblivious enough to think any of this is about “happiness.”

I’m not happy bowling because I wish for more instruction and consistent practice. I’m not happy building on the land because I need more money, more time, and better weather. It’d be great if every time I took out the trailer a tire wasn’t flat. I’m not happy reading because I’m either learning more about what I can’t use or fix or feel like I’m mocking myself in trying to desperately “escape” whatever circumstance I’m in. I have so many books I’m genuinely interested in reading, and I can’t. They’re like my instruments. I don’t have the freedom. My mind is not available to “just play” or “just read.” I have to keep furiously scratching a compulsive itch to worry or reflect or mindlessly vibe through TV shows and Candy Crush levels.

I’m not happy and I’m not free. I’m play-acting all the fucking time. I pretend to be professional. I pretend to care. I pretend to be polite. I pretend I have anything figured out in terms of indulgence and ownership and the perks of being “hood rich.” When I do my budget I constantly, and I mean constantly, remind myself “only 5 paychecks and I’m even” or “Only until February…if I can just sit and do nothing.” Then you know what happens when you tell yourself that long enough? Insurance needs to be renewed. Property taxes are due. Contacts run out. My air conditioner will break. A tire needs replaced. My cats get fleas. I get sick. Someone needs a loan. I get bored and indulgent and spend too much on another ticket, drive, and pair of cocktails.

It’s stopped feeling like a climb or “requisite sacrifice” to get anywhere. It feels like a miserable slog through layers of shit, deliberately laid or otherwise. I was driven to create the coffee shop and throw the house parties. I was driven as a kid to do well in school. I was motivated to connect and share and try to build and celebrate. Now I just wait. I just wait and bitch and share pictures of musicians and comics living their dreams. I wait till you’re free or maybe return a text. I wait on insurance companies and for the next opportunity to piss away another 25 minutes inputting redundant information. I wait for the meeting to be over, the month to be over, and the payment to hit.

I don’t want to be present in most of my moments. I want to be with my TV shows. I struggle sometimes to watch them while I’m otherwise waiting, sitting at a bar until the show starts or at the restaurant eating alone. Until the comic is starting or the band starts playing, I’m just around disease vectors and people who seem mostly together because they match heights and looks. Do I want to feel my feet and back ache in the standing-room only venue? Do I want to huff your vape runoff or farts? Do I want to watch a band I enjoy through your hair? Does it make me happy to freeze outside for an hour or more in order to get an appreciable spot to witness what’s happening and costing too much due to monopolies and greed?

I fuck up and listen to smart plugged-in people talk about their accomplishments. I hear people talk like how my brain works about their areas of expertise. They get hyper-detailed. They know the subject has a dozen layers and it’s not going to make sense unless they find a way to speak to them all and tie them all together. “When I was writing my first book…,” “When I owned a pharmacy and was doing what Mark Cuban was doing 8 years before him…” So many bands remind us how grateful they are that they “get to do this for a living, and it’s because of you!” Whether they’re selling out the venue or not, there’s a culture, direction, and presumably sense of purpose that I lack. They don’t need 2000 words per song or joke. They don’t need $1400 every two weeks. They need to load up the van, move to the next gig, and play.

Why can’t I just play?

I don’t want to be useless and mediocre. When I think of playing, I think of children. If you drop obvious sentiments, they epitomize uselessness and mediocrity. I don’t really remember the last time I felt like a child. I have memories of going to the park and playing in playgrounds. Playing implies that you’ve nothing else to obligate yourself towards but that free self-expression. You have energy, so you run. There are other kids, so now it’s a chase or a thing to throw rocks at. I feel obligated. I feel responsible for living a certain kind of way that conforms with my best approximations or what might be derived from what I write.

I’m trying so fucking hard. I’m trying to be the constant cheerleader. I’m trying to understand the “reasons” verses miserable excuses I can or can’t move in some direction. I’m trying to derive layers of meaning from the shows I seek and artists I invest in. I’m trying to not lose sight of the veritable miracles I’ve been able to pull off so far. But there’s a healthy dose of suffering in each moment. The stakes and pressure are real. I’m running contingency plans. I’m mourning previous conceptions of dreams and myself. I’m tired and anxious not because I don’t have energy or anything to worry about, but because the fight feels less and less worth fighting and I’m exactly the kind of person who can carry out dramatic reflexive course shifts in spite of the consequences. I’m daring “the universe,” embodied by my supervisor, to keep asking me if I’m “happy.”

I’m embarrassed, ashamed, annoyed and restless. I’m fucking angry as fuck that I’m so angry it’s the same deadness-as-self-preservation I felt growing up. I’m lost. I’m first-world-poor. I’m distracted. I’m alone. I’m bored. I’m unfulfilled and meandering and eating like shit and spending money on so many wet bandages ill-suited for open wounds. I’m as full of hate and despair as I can imagine anyone with less impulse control and perspective can be before they hurt themselves or others. I don’t want another superficial interaction. I don’t want to dance around. (But fuck do I miss dancing!)

I need to disappear into a hole. I have from the 22^nd until the new year off. I dream of either reading a dozen books, or getting a lot of yard work done. If it rains, I need to stop myself from just wasting away, waiting around my dad’s house until dinner or thinking to myself I can get through several layers of each channel’s first episodes! Did you catch that perk? I get all that time to contemplate how much my job cares about me and makes me comfortable. That’s so nice of them. Way better than more money, a stake, vote, or sense of ownership and belonging to a mutually instantiated and protected culture of health care and accountability. Aren’t I “happy” to have the time off? Don’t you wish you had that time off?

I feel like I’m somehow lost or the only one acknowledging the broader context. Byron has increasingly said “Black people are the canary in the coal mine,” with regard to the slow-moving coup and creeping fascism. It’s beyond fucked Hershel Walker even came close. If that’s not scaring you to death in an ongoing way, you seem absolutely insane to me. If you can’t imagine striking, unionizing, or ever remotely speaking to your “authority” or “representative” about the detailed shit of your circumstances, we’re not on the same planet. What do you think is in store for your kids? What do you presume insulates this ignorant country from collapsing like any other? Are you “happy” to just not think about such depressing things? Are you all just making wildly more money, enjoying your time, and figuring out this life thing better than me?

[1003] Last Drop

I don’t know what I feel. I thought about saying, “I feel weak,” but that doesn’t seem true enough. I feel bored. I feel sad. I feel like I’m sick of fucking trying, and then that feels like the price of admission to ever, proverbially or otherwise, transcend my current condition. You know, I got someone to send me their license number. You know, they don’t have an NPI number, and that can take weeks to get assigned. You know, this delay was partly because the agency I contacted sent me the wrong checklist about what we’d need to get the impaneling process going.

When I first started with Groups, my boss was very gung-ho about “meeting people where they are” and defending not discharging people for simply missing too many days, generating threatening chaos, or other acts of noncompliance. You see, she had a story of “some” or “any help” that transcended the practical reality of what might be a dozen people’s experience of a member who isn’t suited for this level of harm-reduction care.

Groups is exploding. More and more money and greedy futures are on the line. In 4 months, it’s gone from practically never-discharge-anyone to, “Are these discharges done yet?” She might not be making any more money, but she’s not bound to anything higher than her master’s narrative. When the overall ethos shifted from whatever the analogous, “Don’t be evil” motto any brand that wants to believe the best of itself adopts, you step in line. She was formerly DCS for 12 years. She can swallow a lot of bullshit in the name of The Man or order or keeping her bills paid and kids fed.

Today, the last few hours felt like way more of a struggle than they should have. Again, I have the easiest job one can imagine. I talk about familiar obvious things I’ve said or done a million times, and turn what people share into encouraging sentiments about how much good they’re doing for themselves and the people around them. Any moment in my 4-day week that I choose to focus for even an hour puts me ahead of any outreach effort I may need to make or prep work for the rest of the week. I feel like I’ve been stockpiling reflections for the last few days, and I happened to put extra-curricular personal work things on my plate.

I’ve been working the job long enough now to track trends in certain members. I have about 120 clients. You’re certainly not going to please everyone, or to put it lightly, have a “style” they will all enjoy. A problem that kicks off my existential angst muscle is when I am invited to search for how and what I’m attempting to translate or share is divorced from…meaningful survival and bothering to exist at all.

I attempt to hold people accountable. But more than that, I attempt to teach them how to hold themselves accountable. This is anathema to the automatic fluid adherence to cultural norms or compulsive self-soothing addictive behaviors. It’s also the only “cure” to being a violent wanton ape flinging shit and crashing into every layer of life you never manage to understand. It’s not something you can “disagree” with anymore than I utilize my strong opinion to never drink water and maintain a concurrent desire to live at all.

But we find ourselves, culturally, writ large, acting as though we don’t believe we need to be accountable. Then, like insane narcissists, we double down on the belief, eschew the irony, and seek accountability, told in so many ways but Lord of the Flies will do, from those who don’t deserve it. We’ll take our hatred and resentment out on the innocent, the other, and those who remind us how truly weak and pathetic we are. We absolve ourselves of any individual obligation to our shitty feelings, powerlessness, and hopeless sense that we don’t matter, the people we’re close to don’t love us, and the things we care about are inane and unfulfilling.

So let’s disappear into the woods and grab a gun. Let’s adopt fiery conspiracies. Let’s get evangelical and dominate the conversation so our self-delusion can be shrouded in group protection; psychological, physical, legal, sexual and all the way down to verbal. This is why I consider a liar the most dangerous thing. All animals are honestly animaling. A human is the only one who can weaponize that honest nature into something that kills literally everything.

There’s a level in which I’m forced to “make peace” with the idea that people who run from my groups are not in a place for accountability. Except, that feels like an impossible concession. I don’t excuse you. I decided consciously to stop laying myself over the sword of decisions you were more or less capable of making than me, but still capable nonetheless. I push myself and ask for more. I look defeat and delay and head and heart-wrenching problems in their face. I reflect and look for what I can control. I investigate how complicated and messy and incomplete the story is in every seemingly hopeless moment. I show up on time, practically every day. I do the work in spite of the worst examples I may set.

You just…you have to. I’m not suicidal, but I don’t know how I wouldn’t have killed myself if I left who I was going to be up to whims of my circumstances or opinions of others. I don’t know how I would break depressive cycles, because no one was going to help me or listen long enough to work me out of it. I don’t know how I would have developed an approach to anxiety. I don’t know why I would bother to take risks in business and moving to this fucking field and building a fort. I don’t fucking know anything without practicing accountability. When I get too in my own head, I can count how many books I haven’t read to send me in another direction. When I want to pretend like I live anything less than a privileged regal existence, I can count the cashflow and number of people still dreaming of clean water and mosquito nets.

You don’t get to tell me any story that absolves you or who you’re tasked with working with of who they are and what they did or did not do when presented with the same fucking choice we’re given in every moment of every day. You pay attention and make a decision, or else. You pay attention to self-servicing and self-destructive things and you’ll make decisions to keep that going. You don’t pay attention at all, you’re at the mercy of how everyone else wishes to self-destruct, or you ride the security of those who don’t know any better as to why they should let you die off.

I ask people to pay attention to things they tell me they wish to improve on. I don’t say, “Here’s your assignment,” I say, “What do you notice about yourself you wish you did better?” Do you know what they tell me? They want to be more patient. They want to be less angry. They want to be talking less shit in their heads about the people around them. They want to be able to say “no” and set boundaries. They want to recognize when they’re taking their frustrations out on their children. They want to stop spiraling in negative and depressive thoughts. And you know what? When they pay attention, record what they’re noticing, and redirect themselves THEY FEEL FUCKING BETTER! They come to group excited to share. They attend to what others are saying. They begin to meet a reasonable expectation to just start attending to what’s going on in their own heads. They treat themselves and others better. They believe because they can “see the point” of what’s been recorded at the end of their pencil.

What’s the alternative? That’s a dead serious question. What other option do you have? Especially when you’re an addict, and by not paying attention, you almost immediately find yourself in some form of life-destroying space. Do you think you’re any less addicted to your narrative? Do you have any idea how much I wish I could ride the high of the ideas I had about where I’d be in life by now? My pride comes from the ongoing effort. I’m writing this after work, after a fun, if flirting-with-disaster weekend, and after taking another step in service to getting my business running. What is my alternative? Stop spending, sit isolated for months playing my piano, reading, watching TV, and writing what would almost-certainly get described as a “screed” excoriating society for all I’ve deliberately and delinquently checked-out of?

They say actors wish they were musicians, and incidentally, so many musicians end up acting. Whether it’s a perceived nobility or respect or simple grass-is-greener thinking, those who reach heights that give them the freedom to flow into new creative outlets seem to do so almost habitually. Whether or not what they create is “good” or culturally relevant is beyond the point. We access layers that we allow ourselves, and I think this works both directions. You ride fame and money into connections that get you on stages. You ride excuses and self-immolating narratives to the sublimation of everyone and everything. The creative energy will provide an infinitely irrational meta-narrative from which to proclaim your rule.

I saw Sam Jay at The Comedy Attic, and found she had a compelling point in her reiterating, “We’re all trash.” Her identity spans from junior man to woman to black to fat and all of which with their own groups she finds exasperating in their capacity to bitch and pretend like they aren’t shit. Sam’s takeaway is that she’s not going to focus on the big picture things and just keep trying to figure things out for herself. As long as what you’re doing isn’t trying to control or impose what you believe on someone else, fair game. Free and free alike. I think it’s an admirable position, and I don’t want to belittle Sam in conceiving of it as “merely naïve.” As I’ve thought about it the last few days, I can’t escape the impracticality and underestimating of what the religious or insecure or weak or invisible person’s compulsion is. Regaining a semblance of control at explicitly your expense is the name of the game.

When you don’t live for anything that you’ve learned or fought for, you live in contrast to your antagonist. When you’re not wise enough to forgive or incorporate your demons, you see them everywhere. When you’re not big or stable enough to tread into high waters, you’ll do anything to capture more air than you could breathe in a lifetime because you have no sense of proportion and an innate fear that any risk is the one that will end your ironically miserable one. Christians won’t leave you alone. Trump won’t stop. Haven’t you heard of the “gay agenda?” Don’t you know the only way to stop men from raping is to bag your women? There’s no such thing as a held-harmless free to do as you please idea. It’s going to infringe, impose, or desire more than you’re willing to pay.

That returns to my broad and often-argued point. You’re always paying something. You’re always fighting. You’re always building something up that is bound for eventual destruction. Whether it’s consistently mowing your lawn, keeping your self-esteem so you can show up and smile, or building the next argument for comprehensively dealing with the absurdity of existing at all, it’s all the same game, same obligation, same demonstration of your awareness, and in service to the same end. You get to have, hopefully, more moments than not that persuade you it’s worth staying alive at all. Does the nice lawn feel good? Do you enjoy the company of people who’ve tended to find themselves and don’t wish to give you shit and judge you? Don’t you love feeling “normal” or “responsible” in your title or ability to maintain your family and obligations? Why would you let someone deceive themselves that they’re worth the same as you who’s willing to do the work? Why would you give your life, as though you’re play acting some Jesus-caricature, for those who literally can’t be bothered to recognize what it is to live as you do? You raise kids to a point where you fucking must expect them to be an adult.

There’s no god raising us. There’s no authority, older than sin or otherwise, that is going to bestow upon you the infinite wisdom in a holy book, system of laws, or anarchistic decree. You wise the fuck up, hold other people accountable, or we all die. We die in big and small ways ANYWAY, and yet you’d have us do it faster and in more painful ways than we can conceive until it manifests as different crises of addiction, war, personality cults, and “post-truth” analyses.

We can’t all just get along. I can’t take you seriously when you don’t. I don’t respect myself when I sit and spin and get super smug about what I’m capable of or who I think I am. I respect when I’ve spoken to how I’ve managed to break the narrative spell again. I respect when I can patiently engage the next step through the desert that provides me just a drop at a time’s worth of water in service to the next tortured step. If we are so collectively not in a place to even acknowledge fascism, the severity of our mental health problems, the depravity of how we conceive of our neighbors, or the inevitable death of not experiencing some form of collective wake-up call about what it takes to survive and sustain, now the inherent wisdom of Sam Jay’s point becomes king. Find a way for you and yours to survive until it all burns down. Even if they’re coming for you, practice your ducking and weaving.

I’m not there yet, but I don’t think she’s wrong, and I don’t have money to seriously entertain a kind of “escape” like that too seriously without it manifesting as another one of tomorrow’s antagonisms.

I’ve tried, passively and with force, to make sure what I was thinking or where I wished to go wasn’t just in my head. You could read on your own time, or not. You can watch what I literally build to test and manifest. I, still, get drunk and text heartfelt “wish you were here!” things to people who won’t own how little they actually want to do with me. I take what I can control, the impressions you’ve given me, and respond as I want my best self to respond. Open, forgiving, trying, and not allowing “hope” to look like some platitude I’m unwilling to speak and work for. I don’t hope you’ll hang out; I invite you. You show up or don’t. I don’t hope you’ll read; I write. I don’t hope we’ll get back together or live like the old days; I pay the price of honest vulnerable expression and the many ways it manifests. I don’t do it perfectly or never delete, but I do it so often I’ve become all-but intolerant of those acting incapable of the same while professing to desire what I do.

I want as many words as it takes to feel better. I want as many opportunities as I can recognize. I want as many friends who will actually respond and encourage and grow and change with me. I want to damn that which belongs in hell and defend whatever’s left of why I bother to stay alive. I’m not imposing and justifying, just looking to acknowledge and celebrate. My expectations are about preserving me, not controlling you. I think when I “force” people to think of their lives the same way, they realize how little of themselves actually exists or there’s nothing they can recognize as worth preserving. All the more my fault and burden, I guess.

[981] French's Delight

Holy fuck did this article piss me off.

This is not how I thought I’d be spending my morning. I happened to listen to Sam Harris’s podcast where he and conservative David French have a compelling discussion about American division. I began to look up more information on French, and read and article called “Roe Is Reversed, and the Right Isn’t Ready.” Tagline: A movement animated by rage and fear isn’t ready to embrace life and love. In it, French describes his history as a pro-life advocate; the groups he started, the people he has defended, and the ethos of protecting the unborn.

French is a type of intellectual I recognize for the perniciousness of the knot at the heart of “otherwise good people.” He’s incredibly articulate. He’s done more laudable and walks-the-talk things as far as indicating the kind of person he is and what he believes in, than most public intellectuals who crack codes of influence circuits and publications. You don’t represent pro-life groups for 30 years, put your life on the line in ill-conceived war, nor raise tens of millions of dollars for things you don’t “believe” in.

At the top of the article, this is precisely the word French speaks with when relaying the advice he receives from two colleagues. They counseled, it’s French’s job to “write what I believe to be true.”

This, that it sits atop the following article which proceeds to discuss French’s conflicting feelings about a movement that seems driven by more malignant forces than innocent “pro-life” sentiments I think speaks louder than French intended. This taken-for-granted myopic presumption that “What I believe to be true” is the “most-valuable” or “most-useful” thing permeates corrupted conservative thought at a fundamental level.

I don’t claim that what I write is what I “believe.” It’s how I process. It’s the series of ideas, rationalizations, or facts-to-the-degree-we-can-discern-them-as-facts that I offer. That’s literally why we have the nit-picking and minutia of law. A murder isn’t a second-degree murder isn’t a manslaughter. In the same opening sentiment, French recalls his advisors saying his job was, “not to please a crowd or build a coalition.” You might miss it if you don’t know to look for it, but the next paragraph starts, “Their advice was good and true…”

Did you catch it? It’s a circle.

They told French to write what he believes is true. He, incidentally, writes his friend’ advice is both good and true. What he writes, is good and true, in a hidden circle not-quite-sinisterly snuck underneath him saying, “it’s not to please a crowd or build a coalition." It’s just how we think. I don’t blame French for doing this. I probably have done it a thousand times in everything I’ve written. We bleed our sentimentality onto things so we don’t have to cut the base from which we house our idea-making.

French continues, after Roe being repealed, “I described my attitude as joy in my heart tempered by disquiet in my spirit.” Flowery, but descriptive of something very human. Can’t we all empathize with the idea of your “spirit” perhaps opening like a pit in your stomach after you think you’ve won or got something you were after? Maybe at the highest it’s an Olympian getting their last gold medal, or you land a “perfect” someone that you won’t entertain criticism about.

After French describes his bona-fides, he discusses the shaky legal ground Roe rested upon, recalling Ginsburg’s criticisms of how it was decided. He describes the Civil Amendments as an attempt to correct for the in-built disenfranchisement of minority and historically oppressed communities. Oh, wait, no he didn’t. He phrased it as “deep flaws in the original Constitution that permitted states to systematically deprive individuals of their most basic human rights.” Wide birth, no? You can fit a lot of what the Constitution is “supposed” to do when you shy away from delineating what those “basic human rights” are, and who was being deprived and why.

In this loose language, French drops the hammer on the nail of his contention. The courts, now emboldened to, “begin the process of extending the blessings of liberty to every American” could do so, “Well, to everyone but the unborn.”

I find this a staggering sentiment offered by any Republican of any era or claimed “moderation.” This is the launching point of self-satisfied indignation that every, “I’m right, this is true, my friends think I’m right and true” ideologue thus steps into pretending there’s anything more “intellectual” about their position. Now it’s a faith claim. An “unborn” person, at whatever undefined stage fits their position, is, in fact-they-refuse-to-discern-to-any-shared-degree, a person. Proceed with bigger circling of reason that more resembles defense wagons.

Consider French’s own statement just 2 sentences later. “The ruling wasn’t just constitutionally unsound it was morally perverse.” Exactly. You have a “moral” issue, not an intellectual one. The problem, to any appreciable liberal observation, is that your “camp” has a tenuous grasp of “moral” considerations as it pertains to how we conduct and respect each other’s lives. Your camp “believe” they are writing and thinking and practicing true and correct things because their friends think they’re true and correct or their ideologues present true and correct enabling and validating feelings.

I’m considering the “camp” in this scenario, literally anyone who practices a propensity to write, read back what they write, and stubbornly and not-coincidentally continue to find themselves saying, “You know, this is true and correct” and despite their growing following and positive feelings generated from the association and spread of their ideas, will politely remind you, so humbly, their job isn’t to “please a crowd or build a coalition.”

Save it.

French claims to recognize the “animating moral essence” of the 14th Amendment. Well, now we can get into, you know, facts like the 14th Amendment existing to establish citizenship rights and equal protection to former slaves. For French’s position to hold true, you need to conceive of a fetus, in any stage of development, tantamount to a slave. Now, the extended “sympathy” you may hold to the “out of their control” nature of the vastly different scenarios starts to come into focus. Is a 12-week fetus a slave? Its circumstance the operant and mitigating condition? Do you really care to split-hairs regarding a zygote, embryo, and fetus when all you need is a vague slave-baby concept to feel ignited and righteous?

French continues to wonder what the “two-sides” will say to each other now that Roe is dead. He says, as all apologists tend to do, what their side “should” do, by committing to life, thus love, “to care for the most vulnerable members of society, both mother and child.”

Excuse me? WHEN, THE FUCK, HAS THAT EVER BEEN WHAT THE “RIGHT” HAS DONE!?

This is the ongoing fascination I have with “conservative” thought broadly. Whatever credible dissatisfaction and criticism you can offer of the Left or an extremist wing of any party, I can’t readily conceive of a more discernable difference in the tenor and type of differentiation between the animating vitriol of those who wish to control and suppress, codified in religious laws and folklore, and those driven by desperate naivety to lash out and exert control in-turn because they’re the target of the vastly outsized and controlling religious structure!

A ”radical leftist” is the target of religious legislation and “think tanks” and crimes and disproportionate attacks and statistics. This doesn’t excuse their lapses in reasoning, but it does account for it more than the honor-bound deliberate ignorance and laziness of the entitled powers that be.

French continues to say, “In deep-red America, a wave of performative and punitive legislation is seeping the land.” He discusses the bounty-laws, lawsuit incentives, and attacks on women. He shies away from denoting the sheer ambivalence to women dying as a result of failed pregnancies by calling those birthing circumstances “physically perilous,” while describing the “abolitionist” wing that would criminalize saving your own life.

In what strikes me as perilously and painfully unconstructive, French notes, “The culture of political engagement centers around animosity.” No, religious fascists drive their animosity through even a semblance of reason and civility. They have for as long as the country has existed. The “cultural” conditions have been in motion and were instantiated well-before you narrow your scope to exclude the dramatic and damning impact of the underlying norm your camp championed and iterated on to absurdist degrees.

French states, “The Dobbs ruling has landed in the midst of a sick culture, and the pro-life right is helping make it sick.” Just the “pro-life” right, huh?

Remember, we’re deep into the broader circle of reasoning, but in case you think I’m lying, French returns to form with more specifics. He states, “At this point I want to add a huge caveat. At the center of the grassroots pro-life movement are some of the finest people I’ve ever met in my life. Crisis pregnancy centers, for example, are staffed by people who have hearts full of love, and when the radical left firebombs those clinics, they’re firebombing the buildings and institutions that are giving an immense amount of hope to young women in distress.”

Holy shit.

Let’s leave aside that his point is predicated on anecdotal impressions of so many indiscriminate actors. “Finest people he’s ever met” suffices to him because, his friends are right and true. Again, he gets the opportunity to be right and true about writing the rightness and trueness of his friends. How many women negatively affected by crisis pregnancy centers do you think French is interested in speaking with? How detailed do you think he understands the nature of their shame imposition and psychological manipulation? He spends most of this article articulating his own lack of awareness to how he employs it, why would you expect him to recognize or consider how they use it?

It's when French manages to say the following, you wonder what precludes otherwise “intellectual” and decent people from using their capacity the whole way through:

“In the meantime, the Republican branch of the American church is adopting the political culture of the secular right. With a few notable exceptions, it not only didn’t resist the hatred and fury of the MAGA movement, it was the MAGA movement. And this is the culture that’s going to lead the effort to heal our nation, love the marginalized, and ask young women to face an uncertain future and endure a physical ordeal for the sake of sacrificial love?”

In moments like this I feel compelled to almost cry out, “You can see it too!?” What “moderate” republican or conservative position isn’t maga-adjacent or defaulting in its disregard and ambivalence for how things actually operate or how they play out in the lives of the actually oppressed? They, unironically, are so situated that way they deny the nature of their own oppression! You’re poor? VOTE FOR THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS! You’re dumb? CELEBRATE AND ENABLE CONTINUED IGNORANCE! Your camp is filled with actual pedophiles? INVENT THE CONSPIRACY THAT CALLS LIBERALS PEDOPHILES! A priest's first instinct is to shuffle the pedophile around the world, not acknowledge their complicated sexuality. So it goes for all oppression-oriented types.

It has always been about “the other” or “you” making the sacrifice in order for the dominant tribe to succeed and survive. French, again in staggering irony and confusion to me, pulls out a chart denoting the ignorance and literal death that befell those defiant of the science on covid. Yes, finally, once on the cosmic scorecard, the backwards and indignant got to viscerally experience what they’ve tacitly and explicitly built into their behavior regarding others since the dawn of time. Doesn’t French know his crowd isn’t interested in charts and numbers, though? Ah ha! He doesn’t have a crowd. He’s the maverick “pro-life intellectual” who doesn’t need a crowd or to build a coalition. Check out his “Good Faith” and “Advisory Opinions” podcasts though.

We’re getting close to the end, where the instinct to two-sides or falsely equivocate and “reconcile” takes hold. French states, “To criticize the anti-vaxx movement isn’t to hate or look down on its members any more than criticizing the pro-choice movement means hating or looking down on its members. Strong disagreement isn’t hatred, even when you believe the contrary position contains grave moral flaws.” Don’t you see? We’re all just subject to this hazy moral gray, and we can liken the nature of our disagreements to the in-built circumstances of this crazy and confusing life…right? Isn’t that great? We can get along now! We’re all making the same error, I just happen to have the moral high-ground.

French claims to not be able to get the “staggering death toll” out of his head. As though the history of ideological possession and the death it brings is foreign. As though you need look any further than any group of people captured by a vague set of ideals and dissatisfaction who move to content themselves with increasingly justified violence and intellectual isolation.

French: “In the face of that wave of death, a wave of death created by a staggering amount of Christian fear, disinformation, and defiance—millions of the same people who created that culture now loudly demand that other people sacrifice for life.”

Yeah, Jesus.

And as the comforting psychological underpinning of that lie unfolds with modernity, so it goes they look for the new sacrifice to get that visceral satisfaction from denying their own death and complicity in the death of others.

But, you know, as French drifts into more equivocation space, “There is a cost to this combat, and that cost is born in our ability to reach out to people outside our tribe and to have people believe us when we say that we care for them, that we want to see them flourish, and that we love their families—both red and blue.”

Remind me, which side “cares” by denying you bodily autonomy, the right to vote, the money for your time and labor, the chance to adopt, the right to marry, or pick-your-ongoing-sin now most-characterized by conspiracy and outright platformed election denial?