[974] Bloody Needs

I may have lingered a little too long to capture what’s been on my mind, but here we’ll attempt to piece together what’s still floating.

I’ve found myself more capable of “disengaging.” I used to be pretty plugged into the active gobbling up of information. I was ready with details, history, citations, and rehearsed arguments for why “things” “should” look, sound, or operate one way over another. My first bite of it was arguing about the nature of healthy relationships, then I had mounds of religion versus science exchanges. The primary reason I know anything about any philosopher was a manic search for knock-out insights or phrasing for how to conduct life. I didn’t have a specific or parsed understanding of what my problem was. I just knew I needed “more.”

Conversational patterns seem to be the ones I’m most attuned to. I take in so much from TV, books, or news that I can readily recognize when you’re being a parrot verses thinking through something for yourself. A unique, albeit common, perspective literally doesn’t sound like anyone else in an important way. It has a kind of novelty that keeps you hooked when your perspective has that same “more” hunger, and someone is speaking to what’s on your mind in a more individuated and personal way.

A FOX viewer isn’t only “dumb” or “misinformed,” they’re inarticulate about the mess of angry and afraid feelings, so they seek out the confirming narrative to do the work for them. I was drawn to Jordan Peterson not because he was telling me anything necessarily “new,” but he was articulating it in a personal way, imbuing the story with his experience as a clinician and personal struggle trying to understand human depravity. Elon Musk struck me in how he approached acquiring knowledge and the emotional pain of being misunderstood at a fundamental level.

This is why I find criticism akin to, “We’ve heard this all before,” so severely lacking in honesty or depth. If you can so quickly write-off a show because it’s a “cop drama” or a person because they’re “famous for nothing,” you’re making a similar error. This doesn’t mean you have to respect or enjoy those things, but it does mean you’ve handicapped your capacity to understand what draws in other people. Provided you’re still a person, you’re missing a way to tune into yourself.

I think a lot about when I first learned why toddlers watch the same things over and over. Surely the propensity of algorithmic media engagement preys upon that. A movie has demonstrative and predictable patterns, and even still, you can find different emotions or things you missed with each rewatch. This is training. Just like when you remember something, even if .0001% of the memory or retelling changes, it’s not the same each time. Each stroke of a FOX-induced hate-boner is fractionally different and reinforcing. Each chant of a radical mantra or prayer recitation the same thing.

The fact that we have so much to consume information-wise suggests that, whether it be biological or some perfectly obscured mythically epistemological concept, “more” is universal to the human experience. Whether you want more love, sex, or food, it seems extremely rare, if truly in existence at all, that one is just “okay” in or “at peace” in whatever manner they are. I read old blogs and think about how desperately I felt the desire to get power, clean water, air conditioning, a way to communicate from the middle of nowhere, my tools, time to get things done, and the various piles of things I’ve acquired in service to future builds. I couldn’t shut off my “more” valve if I wanted to.

What more do you want when you’re parroting someone else’s script? What if it’s something you can’t get or can’t conceive of how to get? Maybe it’s self-esteem and brainpower. You’re only born with so much brainpower, and maybe you’re surrounded by people who give zero shits how they make you feel. Maybe you can’t begin to understand how to carry a positive conception of yourself independent of their imposing views.

What if you can’t even recognize that you’re running on someone else’s script? This feels like a lot of the tension in generational differences or the thirsty ideologues clinging to post-modern obscurity. A right-wing Christian conservative antagonist should not be able to get so many doctors tripping over their tongue about the question, “What is a woman?” One of the quickest ways you know someone isn’t thinking rationally is circular reasoning. “A woman is however she defines herself.” No. A woman isn’t that, any more than anything is anything because you add more words that still reduce to, “The thing is the thing because it’s the thing.”

An unwillingness to define a “thing,” is a pillar of not thinking. It’s why I hate talking in “ists” and “isms.” You need a PhD in “feminism” to figure out which sect and era’s position you might be speaking from. Do this messily, and you might not even understand if you’re being an advocate or in opposition. That fascist-speak can summarily dismiss “radical feminists” attests to this both, in their irrational fallacious claim, and the in-built weakness of conceiving of your position under the moniker. When you stick to asking questions like, “Do you believe in equal pay” or “Do you hate men?” you figure out the individuated position.

I don’t think a lot of us like to recognize how often we’re not thinking, or how often we notice it in the people we’re feigning closeness towards. I’ve experienced people driven together by mutually shared not-thinking narratives regularly. It’s a behavior that’s rewarded and reinforced unironically. The group can’t be a group if you’re popping your head up too often commenting on the unhealthy nature or inadequate capacity of the group.

I challenge you to count how often you say something like, “Because that’s how I feel.” You feel it “because,” or you feel because you feel. The insistence is to respect feelings that, by regular demonstration are not reflected upon, not given to understanding, and often have pretty dramatic and ongoing consequences. If my mom lost her temper, my shit’s getting broken, I’m getting beat, and we’re building in another layer of generational trauma to explore with indefinite therapy. But I need to respect how she felt? My experience is the same as someone in college challenged to think harder about what some “controversial” speaker is “violently” discussing at a podium or on the street?

The landscape feels locked in this word-obscurity and language of feelings. And the march from someone reasonable and healthy towards the high-stakes chaos of “cancellation” and “de-platforming” I think played out like an abusive relationship. If he only yelled at you in a scary way once in a year and a half, hit you just before year 3, and all-along had made seemingly reasonable arguments at the time to chip away at your autonomy, the drift was almost imperceptible.

If you tried to chronicle the shifts in our cultural dialogue as it pertained to individual well-being, happiness, indulgence, capitalizing, or decadent self-expression, and you’re 7-years old a few years after “greed is good” becomes subconsciously instantiated in the cultural milieu, you don’t have a prayer. “You need a college degree” or “middle-class house, wife, etc.” as laws changed to exploit and prey upon you didn’t get noticed. You’re always being supplied a narrative. You’re always being influenced by your biases and ingrained practices. It’s incredibly hard to dig “you” out of all that.

I tend to write people off who I can’t recognize as their own “You.” You have a problem you speak to time and again and refuse to change how you approach it, perhaps. You have a “strong opinion” about something you’re absolutely incapable of hearing conflicting or rounding evidence about. You engage in things like questioning the person you’re talking to’s motivation for bringing something up or asking at all. You find yourself incapable of drawing a conclusion that isn’t the most damning interpretation of what’s been said or flat out ignores or denies there’s anything else often literally in front of both parties.

It gets old. It doesn’t seem to get old for most people as fast as it should. Everyone seems to have some topic in which they’re as quick to circle up their reasoning as the “irrational” or “asshole” over there. All you have to do is poke something they’re insecure about. Getting old, fat, or ugly? Like a flash! Body-positivity narratives wash over conversations about health and beauty standards. Feeling oppressed? Here’s a hashtag drumbeat for shouting down critics. You can lament the number of “phobics.” You can start a campaign to overthrow the “violent” enemies who use their words in ways that did not respect your feelings.

Meanwhile, big portions of reality appear, to me anyways, like they’re trending towards some catastrophic reshuffling of who lives and dies and whether we really continue down a path that nets more freedom, safety, and self-determination. It’s hard to even recount the number of times I’ve been functionally shouted down or isolated for talking, and I’m just an individual example of what we’ve watched in the media on a global scale. I get incredibly frustrated when I watch otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people invite cunts like Kellyanne Conway to spin and spin and waste time like we don’t already know the fascist playbook. We don’t need to reimagine “doublespeak” and invent the straw-man.

As much as I want “more” money, time, or freedom to fuck off and do whatever strikes me in a given moment, I have a deep hunger for time around people who have found themselves, or are making a genuine concerted effort to figure out what parts are missing. I suspect I’ll be typing this same kind of story from an increasingly regal circumstance I occupy in the future. I don’t really believe that the culture I’m plugged into will provide me much beyond more stuff. I’m incredibly thankful I can eek out the friendly individual here and there, but I do, most often, feel the chill on connecting or speaking at all, let alone to what’s really on my mind. I don’t find it valuable or worthy to share with people who can only mindlessly consume and relish in the absurd antagonism of obscurity.

[889] Nothing More

I suspect a mess.

One of the things I struggle most with is giving people credit. That's not to say I can't see what they're worth. I simply see people as “only” worth a series of superficial things that pass for what a lot of modern day culture consists of. Maybe you're smart, so you stay in school and get advanced degrees. But you'll subject yourself to a kind of financial or emotional ruin because “smart” only got you so far. Maybe you're really good at showing up or encouraging others, but you let your fear or ambivalence keep you from reaching out when you need help or contributing in service to a deeper ideal. Maybe you forgive everyone besides yourself.

A frequent topic of conversation between Allie and me is about the environments we're cultivated in and cultivating. You can take something as simple as a grocery store to think about everything implicated and matter-of-fact that goes into it. You don't have to pick fruit, cut vegetables, come up with a way to keep things cold, build a cart, or expect a fight to break out about when you're next to check-out. Food costs money, right? It grows everywhere, but you don't go to the store without money or the intention to steal. Food you don't eat goes in the trash, right? There's a large amount of people who wouldn't dream of composting or thinking of things in a cyclical manner. You go to the store, you buy food, you throw away the waste.

Every area of our life has these in-built expectations or hesitations whether we are paying attention to them or not. What's an online conversation? Does it even exist? Not even among friends! It's a fight by default. You're hearing in your mind an unwanted challenge, you don't have the wherewithal to “debate,” and you are situated in a place that cannot understand. It's what's expected and beaten into you. You're fighting, you can't hear or see what's said, and no one is attempting to understand. This whole conversation happens with yourself before you ask, “Why bother?” before posting anyway. If it's not a meme, emoji, or pleasantry, it's an off-limits way to engage.

I have my fair share of pissing matches with people online. It doesn't matter if I'm slinging hateful words or asking sincere questions, across the board my act to respond to someone's voice is treated as hostile, not an invitation. I think this is partly a consequence of the internet algorithms who assure us the world can be cultivated for us to see only what we want. I think this is a display of humanity's basic insecurity of discovering just how fraught with problems and complications their thinking can be. God forbid they be shown to be wrong, and in front of so many people!

Then you devolve into the condescension, the dismissing the very notion of “debate,” inevitably someone's mistyped word or phrasing gets latched onto, and the fight over the last miserable word until the post gets deleted or locked ensues. It's familiar, it's ridiculous, and no one has seen fit to study the consequences of it or how to get out of it.

I still try. I look for the analogy. I've got print-outs on toddlers who destroy houses and act like they're the boss. What is a parent supposed to do? Reset to a baseline expectation. This is akin to me insisting you actually quote me before claiming to disagree with something I've said. I don't trust your contrarian impulse, it's the default one offered to us by our internet training. If someone wants to pull their cord and recite cliché after cliché, return them to the question they've ignored. Don't give them more words to destroy.

What's worse than arguing with idiots, if it isn't something of a not-so-scientific study and exercise for you, is when your “friends” don't give you credit. I think I go above and beyond to share the most clear, researched, or affecting things that I read. They're almost never shared. I can say either people aren't or don't care to read. I can say they just don't have time. I can say they don't think it's actually as good or informative as I do. I can say they don't believe their crowds care or deserve to see it. I can say anything, because I don't know anything. There's no real feedback besides the handful of people I know pretty regularly read. The most important voices, that aren't even mine lol, are not breaking through to networks I'm not a part of. Whether what I post even makes it in front of a plurality of my friends, I don't know. I do know, it remains something of a personal secret whether anything was read or enjoyed.

If good information is treated as arbitrarily as cat videos, this medium that connects us all makes us feel hopeless and attacked by default, and even with regard to the people we seem to get along with or enjoy in real life don't tempt us to share or celebrate how they're orienting themselves to their thoughts, by what mechanism are we ever really sharing anything? What's the genuine connection? Who am I really hanging out with or talking to? How much credit can I give you, when the means by which we relate to each other 99% of the time, you appear to give me practically none?

I want to stress how large and impersonal I think this problem is. I know I read a disproportionate amount regardless. I know no one subscribed or signed up to hear from me or what I have to say. I know we've all got reasons we're too busy to be bothered with each other. None of that helps us pay attention to why or how we engage online. We can see thousands of sentiments about reducing screen time, the dangers to our children, and the ripping at the fabric of society, but we won't ask ourselves if maybe we should think out loud, deliberately, slowly, and try to piece together a collective framework for better understanding the world that isn't so miserable?

I've said it a lot how much I wish I had a blog a week from each one of my friends to read. No one wants to share, but I don't advocate for writing just because I've done it a lot. I think it's vital. I think we need to fight back against the many default forces that suggest our spaces and resources can only be used in specific and harmful ways. You have options of how to relate to me, to each other, this medium, and the world at large. How many people could live in an abandoned Wal-Mart? How much dust could you blow in the face of your enemies after grinding down its concrete walls? Who would bother or think to ask such a weird thing? Someone choosing to be just a little more creative and motivated in service to what's possible.

For as meaningless as the word “balance” has seemed to become today, perhaps we can move on to “tempering.” You're perhaps in balance at all times, physics-wise. But is your environment tempered by better choices about where your energy is directed? Can you simply read and respond to something? Can you share because you need to even and especially when you don't want to? There's nothing more or less dramatic going on nor exercise in patience and humility to practice.

[xx-23] Who's Bad

I'm flabbergasted I feel provoked to write this, but here we are. I'm just going to post the whole conversation at the end as it highlights many things at once.

To be brief, if you know nothing about me you should know that “manipulation” is one of my most beaten-to-death topics, and I developed a whole mode of being to ensure I could create relationships that didn't only and always play to what I could get out of them. As a result, I read a ton, became hyper aware of how I constructed my social dynamics, and regularly hit the page to evaluate if I've somehow lost the thread.

What I find is a continued stream of people who not only allow themselves to be perpetually manipulated, but insist it is everywhere that it is not, most notably from me. I take umbridge to this, not least of which because of how often I would get warnings from different family members about how “manipulative” their child was. I could only stare and try not to look confused and condescending. You allow yourself to be manipulated. The second you claim someone is manipulating, you're explicitly denoting that you don't know what manipulation looks like, are powerless to stop it, and built yourself a typical defensive narrative saying the exact opposite of the truth of your situation.

I worried pretty consistently about my capacity and willingness to manipulate people. I'm cute. I'm smart. I know immediately what your soft spots are, how to steer conversations, and what I could do or say to give or drain your confidence. I know this because it's not hidden and we're all animals and our faces, tone, posture, and word choices say things about us. This isn't magic or a special skill. When you feel yourself at the mercy of someone “manipulating” you, you're doing a really bad job of translating what everything about yourself is saying to yourself.

The person below is insecure. They're extremely outgoing, personable, and do a good job at a stressful job. They have a rough Southern affect that toughens up when their feelings get pinched by trying to silence the conversation. The person below is very afraid, and presumably has been swamped by people who have taken advantage of their insecurities.

The conversation depicts a crossroads that I'll say emotionally mature and immature people come to. Difficult topics, like how much responsibility you should take or what if any actions might contribute to solving a big and scary problem, create a stress response. An emotionally mature person recognizes this and goes to work analyzing the feeling. An emotionally immature person attacks the thing that scared them.

For me, I don't need children as “friends” or acquaintances. In a racing heartbeat you become the boogeyman. I have a very large and complicated social, psychological, and emotional problem I would like to address. Wouldn't you know it, that's a perfect analogue for a lot of the families lives we get thrust into as caseworkers. Do you believe anyone is capable of doing a good job when they're teetering at the mercy of their own baggage? They can go through the motions. They can recite the catch-phrases. But they aren't helping. They don't have the tools to build the mechanism to grow into a better place.

I can handle emotional outbursts. I can handle shitty things said in a moment. I have exactly zero patience for taking zero responsibility. Holding no respect for what someone said is it's own hurdle, but as someone who fundamentally or professionally treats everything as maybe true enough kinda, I can at least understand that.

See if your thoughts match mine in the (parenthesis) analysis.

Scared Person: Dude I read your whole post, and I get it, but no way in hell am I gonna speak out against them like that. I can't afford to risk losing my job. (reasonable enough fear)

Me: You don't need to put your name on it (troubleshooting)

Scared Person: But you legit just made a post, calling us all out by name, asking us to do that.

Me: I forget you guys have like other people at work you're friends with

Scared Person: So no, I'm not gonna do that and risk being looked into and potentially losing my job because of it.

Me: see, this facebook stuff, big big reasons I don't add people lol

I deleted it

Scared Person: You should've sent it in a group message instead of posting it like that

Me: Absent mindedly made the post to function as a group chat

I fucking hate social media

Scared Person: Trust I get it! I really do!! But I literally cannot afford to lose my job. (3rd time's the charm)

I'm sorry I can't help.

Me: No one usually can, the families get to pay the price of things shuttered under the veil of fears

you can, like, lol I don't need to out you for your stories (troubleshooting more impatiently)

Scared Person: I just do the best that I can for my families. (Default to cliche)

I try my hardest to make a difference for them, but I can't save them all. (Default to cliche)

Me: The best thing that place needs is a flush on the clogged toilet of shitty leadership lol

Scared Person: You're not wrong. (Seemingly acknowledges the problem)

Me: I won't be able to help alone. (fact)

Me pissed off is just me looking like I can't let go of some petty grievance (no?)

but the things that are wrong are large and systemic (fact, digressing)

and that takes organized collective action and perspectives (fact)

Scared Person: I am sorry, but it's a risk that I can't take. I'm sorry for letting you down. (presumes my feelings)

Me: It's not about me dudette (fact. And extremely important detail)

Not gonna twist your arm lol (pulling back, cliché joke)

Scared Person: Nick, please stop trying to guilt trip me into risking my own wellbeing (What? Derailing happens now) 

I cannot afford to risk my job. (I meant 5th time's the charm.)

Me: Here's the thing, this is where it gets difficult. I know you can't. I'm not trying to guilt trip you. I'm saying pretty plainly that a story divorced from who tells it is still powerful and compelling. You disagree. That's cool. (My attempt to acknowledge, affirm, assess, condense, and accept.)

Scared Person: And you're not hearing me when I say that I'm not going to risk them looking into me for other shit. (Starts to spiral into other compounded fears. “Not listening” indicator that all trust has been lost.)

You don't think they would realize what case I was talking about if I said anything? (Condescending flail)

You don't think they would put two and two together and go through all of my work and try to rip me apart? (Condescending flail)

They wouldn't even have to fire me for giving you a story, I'm sure they would find some other reason to do it. (Denoting another layer of just how big the problem is)

Me: The fact that this job makes you this scared, practical concerns or otherwise, is pretty horrifying alone. Denoting their shit behavior is what I'm looking for. If you've got other skeletons that would get rattled, I def get it. (Acknowledging, clarifying with specific goal, cunty speculating knowing there's nothing to be gained)

Scared Person: I would be scared to lose any job. (I've lost count)

I'm not privileged enough to have anyone else supporting me and paying my bills for me if I'm out of work. (I still can't tell if this is insinuating I do)

I'm not scared to lose this job because of this job, I'd be scared to lose any job. (Same reassertion, extra salt)

Me: No one we know or work with is lol

Scared Person: You say you're not trying to twist my arm and that you're not trying to guilt trip me, but you absolutely are. You are absolutely trying to manipulate me right now and I don't appreciate it. (Now we get into the pound down onto the worn pillow of open wounds. Left is right. Up is down. Absolutism, fold arms, pretend the monster is vanquished.)

Me: I'll find another way to contend with the in-built fear associated. I trust you don't want to be a part of it. You have nothing to fear from me even if you found the ask annoying.

It's unfortunate you feel that way. It was not my intention (It doesn't matter what I say at this point)

Scared Person: You're twisting my words. I didn't say I found the ask annoying, what I find annoying is you trying to manipulate me. (If the irony here is lost on you, you may be suffering from the same issue. Nothing can supplement or replace their assertion of the truth. Even if I were to buy in, people often jump into further spurious details while doubting your sincerity.)

Me: I'm gonna peace out. (I didn't realize it would be a lie)

Scared Person: It may not have been your intention, but it's how I have perceived your behavior. (And Lord knows, when you're the one who's afraid, your perception trumps everything)

Scared Person: Again, this is unfortunate.

Scared Person: I do wish you luck with your efforts though.

Just please leave me out of it. (Adults understand they are in it, complicit, and the guilt is only resolved through taking more responsibility. Children want to be left alone to play in their own worlds)

Me: They always do

Fuck it, I gotta say it. I really really dislike being accused of trying to manipulate you. I think your fear response flipped its shit and took where I was coming from well beyond what was required. I feel uncomfortable pretending I'm cool with that, and if it's the kind of thing you believe about me so quickly, I don't know that I can jive with cats like that. It's unfair, emotionally immature, and does overtime in distracting from the proactive approach or topic of how to fix the problem I'm aiming at. I can accept you don't wish to be a part of it, I can't accept all that flood that came with it. My intentions matter and I'm not going to be told I doing something significantly shittier than I was which I pretty actively police because I know how to manipulate perfectly well, and the first rule is the other person doesn't feel manipulated.

It's really the only rule

Scared Person: If that's what you need to tell yourself to feel better about that. You act like I don't know when I'm being manipulated. I've been manipulated my whole life. I tried to ask nicely and you kept pushing it. You kept trying to guilt trip me and that's a form of manipulation. (If you can recognize the dialogue that's be prescribed for you, face the fear instilled in you, and respect the truth when it's presented to you, then you might hint at knowing when you're being manipulated. Demonstrating you haven't even shuffled the demons in your past and doubling down in your fear and insecurity betrays your indignation)

Manipulation 101 dude (From someone super in control)

Me: You experience elevated levels of guilt, presumably because you've been manipulated your whole life (If you look close, you'll see these are their words. Mirroring evokes the blame response.)

It's clearly a soft spot

Scared Person: Still trying to manipulate

Me: so everything looks like a tiger (Mixing metaphors, but you get it)

or explain (tit-for-tatting)

what would explanation of that behavior look like? (Questions will never be answered. They can only exist in an environment open for examination. This is not one of those.)

Or is always and only what you say?

Scared Person: Ok you're rambling at this point and making no sense. (Attack the person, avoid the question)

Me: I'm curious, what would explaining your behavior look like in a form you wouldn't consider manipulation?

Scared Person: No Nick. You're trying to turn it around on me and I'm not playing that game. (Read: Won't become the target of my own disingenuous and dishonest scrutiny)

I asked a question. How do I learn how you perceive things without doing so?

Simply telling you my view registers as manipulation.

Scared Person: What the hell are you even asking? (Several things at this point, but don't expect answers)

Me: Asking you does too

Scared Person: You're literally making no sense. (This is the same panic response when you confront an addict with the consequences of their behavior or abuser or overbearing mother. Nothing makes sense because they don't register the impact of their subverted personal agency.)

Me: What could I say about how you responded to me that wouldn't register to you as manipulation?

This conversation is over Nick. I'm done. Good night.

Me: Exactly

Literally nothing.

Scared Person: You could say ok I get it, have a good night, and leave it at that. Period. (I do get it, but to a degree they don't, and it's not left. It's going to get dragged into the rest of this person's decisions and interactions with families unto the ages of ages, amen.)

Good night.

Me: I think I've learned a great deal tonight. I'm gonna save you the frustration of dealing with me further. (I unfriended. My friends no better than to “let me manipulate them.” If they don't, we aren't friends, by definition. And I certainly can't trust them.)

[702] The Catch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[688] Part In Particle

What is it called when perhaps the worst things about you become what differentiates and makes you popular or successful? Because you remain steadfast in your beliefs you become a darling of some political or identity movement. Because you're fairly ruthless and dead inside you rise to the top of your company. Because you've no capacity for introspection you bring the same scorn and enthusiasm to your 365 hour length videos ready to tell us all how it really is.

I think about the characters in life that have stayed with me for how annoyed I've been with their being. Dinesh D'Souza kicked in off in offering the same tired, refuted and deliberately misunderstood and mischaracterized arguments against atheism. There's a ton of political talking heads from Ann Coulter to Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck. My own mother managed to increase her crazy as time went on if you'll recall her accusing me of studying witchcraft in college.

In their own ways, they thrive. They make money and publish books. They get protected bubbles that reinforce their ideas nonstop. I want to say that they inhabit an entire world that I'm not privy too. I don't get the privilege of that degree of self-delusion and self-confidence to put forth impossibly easy to dismiss ideas with such vigor that I make a million dollars or always find someone else to blame. They're always going to have a village, and even the one's who don't subscribe to their lines of bullshit will succumb in some form of self-sabotaging guilt that protects them from deeper consequences.

My hang up about this “bubble world” built on undue confidence stems from a pattern I see in conversations online. There's a million and a half reasons to never bother commenting on something you read, but if you're as dumb as me, you might notice that, without fail, there will be a move to put you in your own little bubble. If you open with a comment about how you think it's lazy and dishonest to write a character assassination piece instead of sticking to a deeper history and facts, particularly from a publication that seemed to pride itself on doing so, the people responding will move to speculate on your tone and disposition. They'll conjure the idea that your words are coming from your cult-like worship of the magazine's target. They'll tell you “DUH, it's a socialist publication!” But they won't agree or disagree with your words. They'll create a you in their image and then proceed to barrage it with decreasingly sophisticated obfuscations.

I worry about this. It happens often enough that it seems to suggest some pretty damming things. Either I'm perpetually that confusing, incoherent, “too angry,” or just beyond redemption when it comes to getting a point across, or, we're literally so blind and broken in our capacity as a society to talk about things that the idea and suggestion to focus and retain the point of what's been said is simply gone. You can have your trolls and your earnest stupid people. But what do you have when either “side” is trying to diagnose the other or armchair life coach on communication skills in between called names and condescension? It's every single thread. The smarter each person thinks they are, the dumber the conversation gets.

I retreat to the relationships and conversations I've been in where there's never been that degree of, “YOU'RE JUST A BULLSHITTING TIRADE OF INCOHERENCE!” levied at me. It's not all people all the time in my life, in fact, it's practically never in person or with some serious adult aimed at conveying something. There are no arbitrary interjections of demeaning and irrelevant pontifications. That doesn't mean conversations can't get a little random or work sideways, but it does mean there's a common thread. What that thread is supposed to look like or why it never seems to manifest online, I have no clue. I don't know if it's the lack of noise and facial signals. I don't know if it's that the internet is like a dog whistle of mere reactions competing for space. I don't know that there's a way to combat the problem short of significantly more people shutting up who are the most prone to talking.

As it pertains to me though, when I'm presented with the idea that my ideas are just too disjointed or arbitrary, I'm never asked a question about one of those confusing lines nor do people even pretend I had something to say at the onset from which further ideas came forth. They seem to be turning me into my own conservative talking head. I have this idea, according to the “win or lose” camps and barking dogs there's one way to explain myself and one way only, no one will tell me what it is, and unless I've gotten more likes than them on the comment train down, we'll all know who lost.

I still retain a fuck ton of doubt. I ask questions. I very much do lead with an explicit stating of what I see as a problem, or a fix, or my feelings in relation to something. Did I miss the year we decided that the words we use don't actually mean anything and it's up to us to figure out how to relate to an infinite number of interpretations all at once? If you call someone a moron, and they ask you what you mean by that...don't you have a responsibility to put that person out of their misery before you attempt to answer the question and thicken the conversational fog? I recently said that people become micro-Nazi's about all sorts of things. You lose the battle before you begin if you attempt to discuss something with ideological possession predicated on magical books or racial bigotry. If talking is fundamental to survival and human flourishing, and now you fail before you ever begin, doesn't that only leave us with war?

For my part, I'm running with my anti-matter theory with how to relate to the rest of the world. If you're regular matter and collide with me, we'll both annihilate. I've had this idea growing with me for maybe a year. I'm the person to blow things up. I'll immediately list the reasons it sucks, it will fail, and you're impossibly lost and stupid. We'll both glean everything we need to know about each other with what comes next. You can blow me off and earnestly attempt to pursue or defend yourself. You can hate the shit out of me and proclaim to all your friends you get why you were warned in advance about talking to me. You can consider what I said and incorporate what I've pointed out in an effort to improve your current model. What you will not do is affect me in any sort of manner that turns my anti-matter nature into matter.

I think this is a more forgiving and accurate representation of what people have deemed as “negative” about my personality. This negative guy is fat and happy well on his way towards a life with no bills and all the time in the world to create. Something about it is working, just not for you. I've said a number of times how much “communication” is a concern of mine. I've been thinking too small and linear. I can communicate a thousand things talking or otherwise. I'm fated to be misunderstood. The people who I admire the most for communicating the best get thrown under more buses than I've tempted to run me over, and what do they do? They keep talking anyway. They keep showing. They keep selling. They can blow up your mind and ignore or refute the endless stream of lazy stupid reactionary bullshit, and so can I.

I'm mostly looking forward to having a flash of an inspiring person hit me as I phrase something in an “angry” or “bizarre” way. I look forward to “trying” to explain myself or my position on something and it only amounting to me saying fuck too often and showing what my words look like as consequences in the real world. For someone who has to write, I really am sick of talking. The reasonable people already agree, the crazies will never get it, I'm not patient or forgiving enough to translate or dumb down, and frankly, I don't think we're going to make it, nor deserve to, anyway. And if I feel that as earnestly as I do and ever have, and still figure out some way to help people in the world who actually need and appreciate it, it'll be one more “fuck you” for every character assassination piece you write about me and my motives and my incoherent struggle to figure something out or propose a fix.

I choose to engage with myself in a way that makes sense to me and seems to suggest I've got more of life figured out with regard to my happiness and ability to contribute. You choose to resent that. I actually want to understand the Coulters, Becks, and even Arrow fans in the world, even if they make my skin crawl. You don't want to understand me, and I'm nowhere near the level of bullshit and abstraction that would start chucking aliens or conspiracies at you as an explanation behind my reasoning. But that's not where the vast majority of people are. They don't practice being open, pausing and asking, or having any doubt. Therefore, I hope every time we meet, things blow up.

[683] Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

I feel as though I've been corrupted. There's a file in my operating system that's degraded and broken into little pieces floating about the rest of my body causing problems. There's a statement I've made often enough that I truly believed. I write for me. At the same time, what started as a build up of feelings and confusion I had no grasp of was, from the beginning, an appeal to the outside world to help me better explain. As much as I needed to get it out, the sentiments often lived or died by whether or not they were challenged or reinforced. Talk about women in abusive relationships? Easy enough for people to get on board. Make sweeping generalizations about sex or the utility of school, people feel the need to chime in against.

That is, they did. There was a point in my life I could count on some measure of feedback whether it was a “I didn't understand this at all,” or “Hey, you know, you put that in an interesting way.” There were 3 and 4 conversations going on across each other back when you couldn't type as many words into comment boxes. People seemed to feel things with a measure of intensity. They seemed to care, at the very least, about putting their view out there even if in their response a qualifier like, “I know this will get jumped on, but” existed.

There's no denying the difficulties of having a conversation at any level. Text removes all the extras conveyed in person. Language is fairly ambiguous by default. Sensitive topics cause people to respond to their feelings instead of the point raised. People go into conversations with different agendas or may not see the purpose to engage at all beyond a kind of bored antagonism or devil's advocacy. I can't tell you the number of times I've been met with, “but the implication!” of something I've said that acts like a springboard into wild conjecture and anger. Considering how often I attempt to connect or make the appeal, you'd think I'm a glutton for repetition dying for a different outcome in service to insanity.

I thought I wanted to write last night, and then I second guessed myself and tried to sum it up in a status. I was annoyed about the different snippets into the past I had read. There were segments I barely knew what I was getting at. There were fights. There were all of the enthusiastic, “This is what I'm gonna do!” statements, and the day to day realities that cost obscene amounts of money and time. One thing I will give myself credit for, I do try to capture the moment, and I do feel the brunt of what I was getting at remained as true then as it does now.

The problem with not writing last night was a sort of anxiety I felt about saying too many of the same things at too close an interval. The idea that, “I write for me” would be worried about alienating a crowd that rarely if ever still reads, let alone responds, seems to betray the sentiment. I have more to say. I always have something to say. I should be able to write about it every day if I want and not think it's some undue burden for eyes I'm not forcing to be there.

There's layers to this picture though. At a ground floor layer, writing is like eating. I have to do it. I literally will start developing chronic headaches, will actively chase people away from me, and likely slip into what's perhaps been a persistent depressive state reminiscent of growing up. The next level up is my persistent appeal to try as often as it strikes me to get a conversation. It's not “only” attention seeking. It's not meant to be exhausting. It may function as both and it may never register as anything but in the minds of some, but honestly, I'd rather just be in an ongoing conversation. It's how I conceive of the best relationships. We can crack jokes and relate our troubles and give the benefit of the doubt that no line was meant to sound like screaming condescension, if we so choose. The final level is a kind of insidious, kind of experimental one. It's to track the changes in people I know have read me, but refuse to acknowledge they've done so besides indirectly. Even knowing this fact, you won't be able to help yourself.

I have what feels like a giant list of reasons that people wouldn't respond that range from innocent to a measure of what I'd deem, “life threatening.” Every time I think to type it out I wish to push for a greater point about the times and places we inhabit and why instead. I've said a number of times that I can put myself right back in the center of a past fight. I can catch a whiff of elation at the awesome party moments. I can inhabit the deadness of staring at all things as equal measures of pointless, guiding me nowhere, but existing nonetheless as a description. I suppose a positive view of aging is the idea that you can give this sensibility to people by default. I don't actually believe that, but I think it's a comforting cliché of de facto wisdom via time spent, and given the small amount of “rewards” we might achieve in life, everyone stands to feel gratified that they actually matter a little more, if only eventually.

What constitutes a relationship seems to be as much your own understanding of yourself and what you bring to the table, as what exists between you and another person. I've argued for both sides of how life plays out, calling it extremely personal, in that you always retreat back into your own head, and wildly impersonal, in that no one much gives a shit about you and you're at the mercy of incalculable forces. It's two sides of the same coin, but the only way it seems possible to tip the scale in life-affirming ways is to be paying attention. It's to bring your attention not to the circumstances you merely have to survive, but in your shared understanding of a raised problem.

There too, you have layered ways in which you need to speak about “problems.” I'm a fan of saying I don't have real problems. That's more true than not. It doesn't mean I won't call my car breaking down, dead end job, or unhealthy eating habits problems, but it does mean I'm not fleeing for my life, about to get deported, or were born into an era where I would have had to say goodbye to my uncle guaranteed to die from his recent cancer diagnosis now cured.

Keep the idea of describing problems in layers in mind and follow me down another idea. I went into “friendship” as fumbling and naively as I did “love.” I'm Mulder. I want to believe. I want to believe that anyone who meets me at an intellectual level will also meet me at honesty or morality or work ethic levels. I want to believe they know how to get their dispositions best oriented and their time best spent. I figured if we were all laughing at the same horrible jokes the same way, could rally around the same TV shows, could be pushed to do things like climb or hike (in my case) against any real desire to do so besides the company involved, that it signified a kind of “higher” form of being that spoke to kind of the point of existing at all.

So, then what should we ask of our “friends?” I thought, in sharing, in trying to talk, in rooming together, in planning a way to collaborate and save and create that I was doing something “good.” It didn't feel wrong to ask friends to help me throw the coffee kiosk together. I don't feel guilty calling someone to give me a ride when my car dies. I had an open-door policy at the party house and it felt weird if you knocked. Mind you, no one asked me to shed them of their obligation to knock. The first words out of a friend picking me up aren't usually, “Now, where's my gas money?”

Certain things don't really concern us at those levels unless someone's struggling pretty significantly financially or we try to be too familiar with an acquaintance who has a claim for knocking. What about bigger problems? Where does the friend cliff drop off? It's surely not the majority of your old party crowd that would feel obligated to drive you to and from chemo. Maybe you have a cause you support that they'll throw you $20 for, but they're not going to mail out a hundred invitations. We start venturing into how to describe the “problem,” and at what layer people feel comfortable or not contributing to alleviating it.

Say your problem is hard to nail down. Well, then absolutely everyone else is going to be as well. Say they have no regard for their own voice or opinion. Asking for it a thousand times isn't going to make them any more willing to potentially sound foolish. Say you've been painted into a corner of being “impossible” or “difficult.” It's as good a way to be losing before you begin as any.

My “problems” run the whole range of big to small. I have a problem of living in what feels like a dead-end environment. The marginal ways I think I wouldn't is to get into conversations predicated on the things I think about a few pages at a time. No one wants to chime in? Another problem. I have “big” problems in that I want to create a generally large enterprise that, either through conservation and saving, or cornering some market, nets large amounts of money. That begets small day to day problems detailed in past blogs to the problem of rediscovering the underlying truth of what motivates it all after things feel stagnant and oppressive. It all becomes great fun or a testament to human resolve, if you can mange to feel like any humans are involved.

The consequence of having “too much” to say is a level of depersonalization. I have very cold, “rational,” reasons I want the things I do, even if I can feel in real time the comfort that comes with having “enough” to ride it out to the end. Every new pain in a muscle or joint says lay down. Every broken “friendship” over something stupid suggests choosing malicious shortcuts. Every small attempt to assert the dignity of an evidently stark-raving truth of how to respect the individual and time met with censorship and excuses shovels more on the pile of hopelessness.

But if you have a friend. If you have something behind the reflex that likes likable things, then you have a reason. Then you have a plan with a better likelihood of success. Every blog is a reflection of me back to myself. There's only so much “new” I can put in from the media I take in or comments I catch from people I'd otherwise never speak to at length. That was why I started being more deliberate in picking you. That's why you have the chance, nay, the opportunity, to be at the ground floor of anything we may create together. And yet, so far, that seems to only speak to that measure of my initial naivety.

I think the story of why the conversation died is pretty straightforward and alluded to in a few of my recent blogs. “Kids,” with their protected environment and enthusiasm in college just became “adults.” They reverted to “people” who've been developing their capacity for excuses and throwaway placations for centuries. It hurts to dream. It hurts enough to live from paycheck to paycheck without thinking about all of the things you'd rather be spending your time or money doing. I'm struggling to cope with not having a bathroom yet! Well before we begin on my musical or entrepreneurial aspirations. But I think people have humbled themselves with regard to what life has provided. The growing list of their responsibilities hijacked them like it hijacked their parents, like society let itself be hijacked into the emotional out of control roller coaster that begets fascism.

Did that feel like a leap? It's layers though, right? For everything you're paying attention to, there's an infinite amount otherwise you're not. If you don't incorporate the “negative” aspects, the suffering, and the inevitable death of all things into that, it's easy to flow on that river out to sea, dead in ways you never saw coming, that left before you got the chance to fix them. That's why when I'm fed and comfortable watching my favorite show I get anxious. That's why when I can count on both hands almost 3 times! how old I am, I'm constantly reevaluating my time-schedule and peeking back into my old blogs about just why exactly it is I'm not a millionaire this moment. Even in documenting my capacity for change, there's plenty to miss.

The pragmatist knows that if I never get another comment, I can still probably mostly rely on a handful of people for larger order problems. I know that the conversation is always going on in my head if nowhere else. I know that no matter, if likely in spite and in fact because of how jaded I can be, it's still immediately easy for me to never play the game that uses words like you don't like. You remember, I always get invited back to the after party before I decide to start in on my target. I know that as long as my very being, the one who basically always has something to say and is stuck focusing on the things that don't make him nor anyone else happy, I'm not going to have very many “friends.” And given my enthusiasm to jump into things and live out the consequences one layer of skin at a time, the experiment has at least provided another thick callous.

I also know that I haven't lived up to that vitally important aspect that I've called out in the past. I haven't provided the environment to plug people into. I didn't get movie moments at parties or girls to think I was cool by doing anything less in the cultivation of my environment. With this in mind, I always find the accusation that I “think I can control things” odd. Of course I can. I controlled the environmental layer, so people got drunk and naked. I push away from people who hand their feelings over to me because I find it highly irresponsible and immoral to pretend it's your place to exercise that amount of control over people you profess to care about. I control my own proclivities to name call and insult when I see after 3 words you're not pleased I decided to chime in on something you shared. I control whether the conversation exists in the only way I can walk away describing it as “going well,” or one of a dozen ways it would register as fruitless despite my efforts. If nothing else, I retain control because I'm actually trying.

Here, I wonder what you're actually trying. It's not to respond to me. The only “kind of” goals I've seen documented are different trips to the tops of mountains and rocks. I'm sure you're plugging away at your jobs or something. But I don't really know anything about you. You know by the dollar amount and day of the week when I might have something less fatalistic and bitchy to say. Or, if you were wondering the information is at least readily available. Is it useful even in a small sense of solidarity? We all get fucked by surprise things. We're all kind of struggling at least a little, right? But I still like hearing when a friend is paying out the asshole for insurance to keep on her meds. Maybe there's more to be mined there about “our” societal next collective push on a referendum regarding healthcare. Maybe more personal testimonies will push over the edge what needs pushing.

Only once has someone told me how little they think the “average” person reading me is feeling regarding the circumstances of their life to change. They don't feel this moment is precisely the one to start an important conversation. They don't think the idea they had has any value. They don't think the problem they're currently trying to surmount may ever be overcome. Then again, I have to ask you, what are we doing being friends? What are you afraid to ask of me, at what layer, may I be able to contribute? Or, why don't you think it's important to describe why you think I have nothing to offer? I'm certainly trying with regard to you.

I'm a big believer that it's the small amount of radicals of any ilk that are tending to control things. And I think that's a problem. My voice, no matter how persistent, shouldn't be the be all end all, and I know this, and I ask for it not to be. Radical tea-bagger oligarchical ideologues steering an entire country into the ground are making sure things get pretty goddamn shitty before you pussy-hatted bitches decided to wake the fuck up and get into the streets. There are profiles of the actually psychopathically monied and motivated dismantling each piece of what's brought us to a relative stability and civility today. Shouldn't we be talking about those things every day? Shouldn't we be probing for creative solutions, even conversationally, in how we understand the perpetually shifting landscape?

Or, do we return to that being too high-level of problem to ask of your “friends?” It's too much to talk. It's too much to read. It's too much to care. It's too much to challenge. It's too much to think. Black out, live and let live, cross your fingers and pray all those someones out there have a healthier and proactive response that will save us all. If it hasn't been stated, we can make sure it is now, but if you don't have the words to describe how we relate to each other, I'll reduce it to something simpler, something “negotiated” and conditional. Every positive memory and emotion I've ever felt towards you can be corrupted. It's absolutely not the direction I want to go, but I'm compelled by my otherwise empty and selfish environment. I'm whispering to myself and a handful of chat boxes.

It's funny that after typing that I had an immense momentary calm. I always come back to that “cold” baseline. Once I get the excuse to go into robot mode, it gets easy. It doesn't hurt there, I'm not angry, I'm not empty, I'm not hopeful, I'm just “do.” I like to just do. There's a significant point and measure of irony in the description of being driven there by my environment and circumstances. I have to acknowledge the new conditions under which I'm to regard friends, but I didn't create them. To achieve the calm, my “choice” was to observe what I conceived as the best alternative. It's why I will always and forever be fascinated with what you're observing in your own lives. It's why I comfortably say I don't think you're thinking when you've nothing to say. It's why, as long as I try, as long as I see and introduce those sights, I'll retain a kind of control you've dispossessed yourself of.

It's how I can see any number of futures for myself, but a primarily shitty one “in general” as the consequences of impersonal forces describe what's happening to us across problem layers. At the level of the individual, what's that? Phone zombie? Polarized and distracted ignorant wage slave? The environment? Dying, flooded, getting literally exponentially worse in mass-casualty categories. The law? Still in “white-lash” mode, doubling down and dismantling what got us this far. Interpersonally? I find people arguing against their own interests and discover piecemeal my college cohort barely interact or regard each other as people; my ego thinking I was the only one :,-(. The stats on where wealth is going? Horrible. The future of the jobs that still exist? Nonexistent. The numbers to care for the sick and dying? Inadequate. The funds to at least attempt keeping things from falling apart? Drying up and stolen. Consequences for the worst actors? Not even the memory of what those look like. One metric after another begets more and more shit. It's not your job in this moment to provide reasons for optimism. It's your job to acknowledge and consider fixes at different layers. The work of your job should take place in the form of a polite discussion between you and your friends.

I suppose I take a fair amount of comfort in what I've heard described a few times recently as “having a chip on my shoulder.” There's people who never achieve enough, destroy enough, fuck enough, or whatever else. No amount of awards appease them. No praise will ever live up to the ideas they conjured about themselves. If there's a “different” qualifier about me, that's one I jive with. I shouldn't be guilt-tripping myself for having too much to say. I'm responding to the world that isn't saying enough of what I think needs to be said. I'm playing games people aren't. I've expectations that I've only scratched the surface of meeting. Consider, I actually did want to be “retired” by 30 when I was 15. I won't have a pension, but then I consider neither do the people who worked for 40 years and then got fucked by Wall Street and their “representatives.” If my car could stop breaking down, owning my own house to one day die in, and the land it sits on, at 29, are still feasible. It's leagues away from not knowing who my roommates will be every year, or living back with my parents, or renting from extortionists, or donning a 30-year obligation to show up to a job I hate for the mortgage.

If my shifting, invisible, fake as shit interpersonal layer is gone and my work setting is “independent” employment, I seek to fix the problem of my personal environment and set it up for the potential to grow or save my ass when things get pinched even harder. We're all “entrepreneurs” now. I like to believe my acceptance and understanding of the world at 15 speaks to my position and behavior now. And I think at 45, you know, after the consequences of the “tax reform” bill, partisan gerrymandering, or the 2 or 3 degrees rise in the planet's temperature, that my designs on off-grid sustainable living will prove to have been worthy of concern over the details today. I hope all of my worst predictions for how I've seen my “friends” respond to their lives, problems, and our conversations won't spill over. I really do hope that. Points for paying attention if you know what I think about “hope.”

I feel like I ask for so little. The catch is that I'm asking for attention. I'm asking for detail. I'm asking for something you have to work to even discover you have and is at the mercy of your disposition and various stresses in life. I worked 3 jobs and would come home in the 5 hours I could sleep between them to write about how more fucked than anyone cared to think working a job like Kroger really was. I'm writing this at midnight after I drove my car from the mechanic basically straight back to work until close. I'm not even reading nearly as much as I used to, but I snuck in several hours of lectures, interviews, and podcasts on my forced days off. I've habituated the burden of keeping up on things I profess to care about. Maybe you have too, I just never hear about it.

[682] Fill In The Blank

It's another late night and I've done another round of skimming and sorting of old blogs. Concurrently, I had a Jordan Peterson lecture on in the background. It's to the point where I've heard enough of his lectures I no longer have to zero in on each line that so initially captivated and motivated me. It's an apt analogy.

Writing is a reflection of “my burden.” Whether I describe that as an “obsessed” mind, “sociopathic,” an exercise of “honesty,” or you want to sum it all up as a string of incoherent “rants,” it arose because I didn't have the words for the pain in my head and heart. That there are so many religious traditions that try to capture the sort of “inevitable suffering” that's supposed to account for the essence of existence I find incredibly telling. My head has adopted different but familiar methods in trying to deal with it.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, people used to talk under my blogs. They talked a lot. Acquaintances talked. Friends answered questions. They wrote their own little blogs under mine and we discussed things over hours or days. People called me out. They questioned shitty analogies and words. They were comfortable saying, “I don't know” about things I wasn't sure of either, but there was a cooperation and show of solidarity in the mutual thoughtful effort. It eventually trickled out.

I can only speculate, but I think that happened for a number of reasons. Socially, the group dynamics shifted or degraded. In real time people were moving into more advanced classes and starting to contemplate “bigger” things than whatever the crazy guy at the end of the hall had to say. There might be a measure of boredom and feeling it's all been said before. I could have simply exhausted a finite well of goodwill that was willing to engage with my “combative” and “intimidating” positions. Tellingly, I was considerably more actually shitty with people back then, and they still stuck around to talk or fight back. For any whiner today who thinks anything I've written in the last several years is “too much,” let that discrepancy testify to a deadly weak defensive skin.

If I write something I'm working out, or think I've stumbled into some insight, it stands to reason I'd want to defend it. You watched the thought unfold. You might have ridden along the last few blogs that anticipated a new conclusion. Whomever decided that any back and forth or disagreement was automatically an untenable and impossible “fight,” I have no idea. I genuinely wonder if the silence and shoring up of “sides” of our political trends aligned with the precipitous fall of anymore feedback. What I can be sure of is that I'm not just confused or angry about nothing, and under what I'd today consider a “worse” capacity and willingness for civility prompted the kind of exchanges I couldn't beg you today to contribute towards.

I think that's scary. Something else brilliantly clear about those days is that there are always a gigantic amount of problems that not enough people are willing to talk about. Would you have guessed that I was worried about net neutrality in 2008? I didn't realize it either until I stumbled across that blog. Would a conversation that organized and accounted for my concerns have potentially steered us in a better direction today? Not that I'm a community organizer, or seem to exert much power over anything but the destruction of my social life and car, but the point is simple enough, right? It makes me think of how many friends said they wished they helped me create a Bitcoin mining machine when I offered the money and we both had the time.

Is there a ton of redundancy? Absolutely. Well before I had the patience to ignore, or even had the term “ideological possession,” I had all of the complaints and problems with “stupid” and “irrational” Christians and lamented ever having to experience the depravity of a Dinesh D'Souza dozens of times. But I have to think each time I was moved to say something, either a step was being taken, or a chip was breaking off. They remain invitations as well as doorways into the past. There are versions of yourself perhaps so compactly stuffed beneath what you're doing right now, behind the eyes that are reading this, maybe you've lost something important. Maybe it takes addressing, and then readdressing, and then doubling down on that thing, whatever it is, before you hit pay dirt.

I had one friend noting a trend of people becoming “increasingly fake.” You'd think that would be something I would say, but now I get a dimension to consider if that idea ever crosses my mind. I used to get a ton of encouragement with people calling me “deep,” or suggesting I compile and try to sell a book. I think about this in how quickly I was able to get 200+ followers on a new, now defunct, blogging site with old thoughts paired with a picture. I also bring it up to say none of that shit was what motivated me to write then, and reading it back now, I don't feel some positive feeling for being praised. I'll always want the work of your input over the blow job.

A section of the lecture in the background that did catch my ear was when Peterson started discussing playing different games at once. You have many iterations playing out over time, and you have to consider them all in trying to account for how to orient yourself in the world this moment. I think about this with regard to my level of “activism” or “morality” that I didn't engage in in the past and don't get up to today. I know it's the cliché, but I've never once considered volunteering my time to help the “less fortunate” in something like a soup kitchen or clothing drive. More than that, I'm often the first one to point out some paper or study that shits all over the efficacy of those individuated, what I called selfish, acts.

I don't know that I've ever tried to compile the amount of “most pressing” games I'm running in one place. I know that a huge motivation for pursuing things entrepreneurial was the abject boredom and hatred I had for school. I know that I want no scene even remotely adjacent to happen to my dad or stepmom as what happened with my grandma. I know that if I'm destined to have primarily superficial and harmful social relationships, I'd rather be home and drunk during them. I've adopted some concern for being familiar with our abundant media landscape. And while I'm reading and watching and arguing, I'd like to believe that the same tools I've exercised to gain what I have in life could be adopted across different problems in the world.

Less interesting to me are the vagaries of how that all fits together and the degrees they need to be altered or sacrificed in order to appease the present moment. More interesting is how many games are you running? Have you completed any? Have they changed over time? Have they been materially altered as you gained experiences or heard back from your social circles? Because this is something I think is vitally important to help explain some of my underbelly. I get precisely no feedback. It wasn't until I specifically tagged every girl remaining on my friends list who I'd ever had a remote sexual encounter with, and offered the concession that I was a sexual assailant, that garnered more than a “like,” let alone a conversation.

I have to wonder, did people stop thinking?

We can put up an endless list of other reasons they aren't responding, but I think they'll miss the point. Just to scratch the itch though, maybe facebook's algorithm makes sure only the same handful of people see when I post. Maybe I literally am just “hated” and “taken for granted” enough to be ignored. Maybe everyone is so busy and distracted they couldn't be bothered if they tried. Maybe every single thing I've said over the last several years has been so intuitively obvious people almost feel sorry for me that I bother to keep talking. Maybe “snowflake” isn't just an indication of someone's derivative condescending alt-right predilections, but a social condition that's infected and paralyzed. Maybe what got people talking initially had nothing to do with me and I wasn't aware enough to preserve whatever it was. Maybe we really are living in impossibly dangerous times where the devoid intellectual landscape has so altered us, we couldn't understand the origins and consequences of our silence until it killed us.

There's plenty of talk about the reasons we got Trump, and echoes of our misunderstood and ignored history that could lead us into actual nuclear war. There's talk with the buzzwords of the day regarding which direction we should heave the country after we wring it from the cold dead hands of our oppressors. There's funny signs at marches. There's tweet storms. And to be sure, there's a string of intellectuals and lecturers trying to put a box around what plagues us and provide hope and objective means for moving forward. But I can't get my “friends” to talk to me? What does any of that popularized polarizing mess at the top mean if I can't get intelligent conversation down here in the mud? What does it mean that as I've gotten more patient, more deliberate, and more respectful of my potential impact and responsibility, the conversational waters run dry? The problems got bigger, my views got more nuanced, now, nobody's interested. I must point out, this isn't entirely true. A roommate's girlfriend invited her brother over the other day. He's 20, low-status, and epitomized a white entitled mediocre opinion. He had “plenty” to tell me about how Japan's isolationism in the 1800s is a model for how the U.S. should conduct itself today. This is what you've left me with, people.

I want even the smallest grasp on the largest trends. The technologies that will materially alter your life started with that one article you caught 8 years ago. A bill or foreign policy decision will ripple throughout the rest of your life. How you talked about your feelings or plans for the people in your life have an immense deal to tell you about why your relationships look the way they do today. Literally, go to my blog and you can take my words that came true. If instead you adopt a complicit filter that decides all that's important are the inches in front of your nose, you're at the whims of it all. You'll sway the wrong direction and bring us all down. Don't talk back for my sake. Do it because it's literally the only way we can orient ourselves in the world that approaches a practical life-affirming sense. Do it because I'm telling you how cold and lonely I am, all the time, and if you have a drop of “friendship” left in you, you'd bother to understand what it means to do so.

Run the game where you challenge or argue with me on top of all your others. Hit the redundancy button until it breaks and the pieces need to be reassembled into something new. Help me remember that really cool thing you read about that it behooves us to check out more. Act like this magical means of connecting with any idea and any person can be used for more than positive feedback loops of arbitrary hatred and goofiness. Do it because you don't want to. Do it because it's hard. Do it because it takes time. Do it because you're afraid of what happens to a person like me if he loses too much of how to orient himself in the world. I don't actually care why you do it, but that you in fact do. I know nothing about you but my last fleeing memories of our time together and your cultivated online personas. I haven't known what I'm doing for so long because my context erased itself.

[680] Think Twice

I don't know the first time I used “sociopath” in a blog. I don't know when I discovered the word and felt it had anything to do with my personality, or, I guess, lack there of. Every time I use it, much to my own betrayal, I feel it is incomplete. Never have I been “unfeeling.” Never have I been unable to “understand where someone else is coming from.” Not once have my nicdecisions been blind to a kind of “inevitable fallout.”

Tonight, I did what I've done in the past. I chatted up some people, got myself invited back to their house, drank a little more, sang a few songs, and found myself one on one with the host after his friends left. Notably, one of his friends drunkenly expressed how she desired this man to be the one to hear her unload some troubles she was dealing with. She wanted him to point her in the right direction, be the one she could unburden herself with, and just fill that space that “the one who seems to understand something” should.”

I immediately did me. I asked what he thought of the power he had over his friend. He took immediate offense. He doesn't conceive of his place as a kind of power. He reflexively read all sorts of negative connotation and implications into my question. He was as quick as anyone to “rephrase” what I said into something more reflective of what he felt instead of what was actually said. Each attempt I made to ask him for a better way to phrase the question, a “better” line of questioning, or to switch roles and have him ask me questions that he considered “beyond the pale” went unanswered or argued with.

I honestly don't give myself enough credit for what I've learned. Nobody listens. People hear what they feel. This is not a fact that is lost on me, no matter how much you'd like to insist I don't get it. What you fail to understand is that I refuse to let my capacity for dialogue fall to that level. Yes, a number of times in our “conversation,” the word “condescending” was dropped. I will die “condescending” if the measure of that judgment is me asking you to be more specific. Literally, the point when I left the room was when I asked him to ask me a question. Instead of doing so, he started with some judgment, some unnecessary confusion and complication, as to the nature of the task.

If what I say is always and forever “wrong” and “condescending” and “inappropriate” and I say, “Hey, let's role reverse. Ask me anything, especially the questions you think aren't 'appropriate for someone else,” and your only response is to huff and puff and proclaim my inanity, I'm not the one who is wrong.

People think, I assume, I'm okay with losing “friends” because of some up-my-own-ass conception of intelligence or self-righteousness. At least, this is what is most often forwarded to me when I try to ask people sincere questions and am instead met with, “HOW DARE YOU!?” defensive and ridiculous behaviors. No. I'm okay with losing you because you aren't an individual. You're not thinking. You're not willing to do the work, so when I ask you something like, “What does it feel like to have measure of power over your friends?” You say I DONT' THINK LIKE THAT, FUCK YOU!” instead of something sane and thoughtful like, “I think it's a great responsibility, and I worry everyday I might say something that sends them on the wrong path.”

See, in my world, one of those answers shows an awareness and responsibility for the reality of your social dynamic. The other is vehemently afraid of dealing with the idea that we don't exist on equal playing fields. Just because you have the capacity to manipulate someone doesn't make it wrong by default. In hippie bullshit theory we all start with a full deck and trade accordingly. When you answer me with some version adjacent to that sentiment, I think you're a superficial piece of bullshit.

I've never felt bad about my awareness. What does that mean? I've never felt guilt, in and of itself, that I recognize what it takes to get to one end or another. I've noticed plenty of girls who've been attracted to me that I let be. I've seen how I could climb the ranks in job situations that I forwent for someone who was more suited. I've no guilt about the time I tried to share with my friends or the feelings I expressed in my relationship because when my sociopath devil on one shoulder said, “You know how to make her happy,” I simply replied, “I'm not going to manipulate the person I want to be with.”

It's a choice. It's always a choice. You can look, or you can lash out. You can deny, or you can acknowledge. I don't believe that gopher looking queen doesn't understand the pull he has over his friends. That he would be offended that I would even bring it up is not a measure of my “cold oblivious sociopathy.”

I really do struggle with people who think I just don't know or just don't “get it.” I get it too well. I still overwhelmingly feel. I make different choices instead. When I ask you to ask me a question that's “too much,” I already know what's going to happen. I'm already the comedian who says nothing is beyond joking about. There is no way to get the truth out of you without an attack. Every time I ask you the stupid question about how to phrase something better or what's the “right' kind of thing to talk about, I'm just fucking with you. You're not a comedian. You're not honest. So the answer is always some version of, “You're fucked up for even thinking that way!”

I'm not. You've no argument that's persuaded me that thinking is fucked up because it happens. I'm not immoral because I'm aware of something you choose not to be. I'm not “unfeeling” because I respond to adrenaline and pain and fear with words and questions instead of accusations. People never tire of being the cliché. Please, attack me for my polite question, it's almost like you're the first defensive empty asshole I've ever talked to.

I went out tonight almost by accident. I came home and had a beer, then a shot, then a mixed drink, decided “fuck it” and ventured out to my favorite bar. I ran into people I recognized, I chatted a bit about law, and then I closed out the night challenging the host on his awareness. I did it because I want nothing less. I'm not gay, so we weren't going to hook up despite the Disney and Phantom of the Opera songs we sang together. His fat girl friend and wildly insecure child friends figuring out how they were going to fuck later were the opposite of interesting. So I looked for what I do. I probed for an aware person. Not a “smart” person. Not a “sympathetic” person. Just someone honest and aware enough of their own mind and place in the world. And, per usual, I was denied.

If you ever act so idiotic as to start calling me “condescending” because I ask you a question, just get out of my life now. If you ever feel the urge to substitute words I never said for your “brilliant inference” about what I actually said, get fucked. If you fail to see the irony of trying to school me on how bad of a communicator I am while you do everything in your power to morph me into some easily trashed and shit on bastardization, consider ducking, as I'm considering starting swinging. Nothing is off limits. Your offense is YOURS. It's not right, it's not justified, and it's nothing to do with whatever I said to you. We're nothing and will never be anything if that isn't true. If you don't know that by now, there's no hope for you.