[855] The Game Loser

 I'm in a weird head space. It felt like weeks before I was able to write my last blog, and I used a cliché like starting a new job to find my mildly different words for the same sentiment. It didn't provide me with enough to look at and sort through. It wasn't really showing me anything.

Right now might be better able to grasp. I feel...loose. I don't mean the loose that suggests a freedom of movement or sense of comfort after drinking the edge off. I mean loose in a kind of defiant way. When I feel defiant, I often want to say something inflammatory or imagine a future in which I run into an enemy and deliver a crushing line. Or, I feel mildly panicked about some shit I'm about to pop off on. This feels smoother. This feels like an attitude adjustment. This feels like the resolve you gain from having encountered harsher circumstances a hundred times before, so why not exist psychologically at the end of round 101.

Let's try to ground it. I moved more bricks today. I moved more bricks from a site in which I believed I was done with the task. Of course I wasn't done with the task. There's always more bricks. The guy's son didn't like to drive on the rounded edge of those bricks. The opportunity for more bricks soon followed. There's always more work, never think you're done, when you persist through the task you get more out of it. Eventually, he'll run out of bricks for me to pick-up, so whether I was wise enough to recognize when I should stop amassing bricks or not, I've got 3 more trips to his house before there's physically nothing left.

What am I going to do with these bricks? Why did I decided 1400 red bricks and 200 field drainage bricks need to be stacked in my field? That's as long and complicated a story as you have the imagination for. Didn't you have LEGOs? Didn't you play with blocks? It upped my cardio game. It saved me hundreds, probably thousands, of dollars. I learned a little bit more about a pocket of my area and state. I have little else more meaningful to do with my time than drive back and forth, load and unload. It was a nice day. My arms are looking jacked.

The bricks were free, but the gas was not. Everything has a cost. I got fast food in between runs. The speaker blasting my music so I don't get too far in my head while I work wasn't free. My several pairs of hole-ridden gloves weren't either. The luck in finding a solid, slightly raised, and affordable enough truck was free, but if you're paying with your attention to things speaking to you in earnest, that costs something too.

You're paying at all times. The rich who hide trillions cause people to starve. They're starving for the right to exist at more than the mercy of expenses or as expendables. Major companies don't pay taxes, disguise profits, and roll their influence into policy that instantiates cultural norms where the belief is that one day you'll be rich or powerful enough to not have to pay. This too inverted to trash poor people as lazy or ungrateful for being on welfare or needing to pay the rent. We're paying with our lives as we disregard rules that don't need to debate the depravity of your opinion.

I haven't read the article yet, but I have “Who am I prepared to kill?” by William Davies in my open tabs. It's a question you're not allowed to ask yourself as a “polite” or “normal” person unless presented with harrowing self-defense narratives. Society seems perfectly willing to kill itself time and again. The idea of a “history lesson” presumes a great many things about our capacity to learn, self-actualize, and take responsibility. Indeed we're the consequences of constant examples of people going unpunished, if even recognized for the destruction they wrought. But, seriously, who are you willing to kill?

We're willing to let old and sick people die. Easy enough story to blame their health issues or advanced years on them. Don't wanna catch Covid? Don't go outside, granny! I don't care if you have no one else to pick up your medication. Don't wanna die you high-risk category 5 hurricane of fat and excuses? I don't care if you grew up in a food desert, worked your whole life at grueling jobs to provide, and I unknowingly liked a picture you drew online. You mean nothing to me.

I can't think of a louder and more frequent message I receive from people than that. Whether it is about me personally or not, that's about the king of all messages when distilled down. You don't matter, I don't care about you, you're too much for me, you do you just leave me out of it, subject yourself to my rules or be punished, where do you get off? You're poor? Oh well, I'm rich. You're sad? Take a pill, watch TV. You're too hot? Learn to enjoy swimming, idiot who should blame the sun. No one wants to give you anything but an opportunity to be used by them. I work in service to different megalomaniacal and financial interests, not for myself. I work so I can fight their tolls on top of an expensive life; what with the whole dodging fascist violence and car accidents.

We're not even playing the game. In college I was forced into “the game,” an awareness game where, once you think of it, you lose. That's it. Before I was made aware of the game, I wasn't playing. If someone said out of nowhere “you lose,” which traditionally you say “I lost” given it's you who remembered the game, I could stare blankly and walk away or ask them what I lost. My asking would invite my responsibility to play, even if I had no interest. It's a game you can't win unless you're not thinking about it, and, in theory, you're always thinking about it in some form or another, hence why you'll continue to randomly lose the rest of your life.

I'm fighting pretty viciously for my own kind of game. When I was first told about the game, it frustrated me these idiots were trying to include me. They just smirked. By now, if the analogy hasn't made itself known, you're a bad reader and thinker. I know I'm in the perpetually losing position. I know power, of any sort, does not like to be challenged. I know that I've given written tabloid material to last me the rest of my life for sourcing things to attempt to shame or embarrass me. I'd want to kill myself were I to respect, embody, or recognize that world, that game, as the one that matters.

I try to keep waking up as myself and to myself. I try to keep practicing the skills it takes to master that actual game, because it's something you can win. A game you can't win is any number of things, but they aren't games. It'd be torture. It'd be death. There's nothing to play with, so you become the object moved in arbitrary directions to no end. I can build the board. I can list the rules. I can coach the players. I can define rules and keep it fair. First, I had to recognize what I was or wasn't trying to play.

I know that I don't regularly translate to people. They just speak to me when they're at “low points.” They know, like we all do, all of the things I regularly complain about. They know, like we all do, how to make a list of things they might do or things they might sacrifice to reach a desired end. What I don't think they know is the nature of the game they're being subjected to. You don't grow up in a derelict house thinking about the lead or asbestos when the roof leaks in the rain. As such, I've tried considerably harder to manifest a home that people might see themselves in. I try to get more exacting with my words, so maybe on the tenth pass, it clicks. I try to not excuse away my thoughts that tell me I'm not done writing or working until I'm done, and it won't be as obvious as there being no more bricks left to move.

Everything you do is a brick. Everything you say is a brick. It's a brick you hurl through a window of unduly gilded power or it's a brick you drop on your foot. It's a brick you build a house with to protect you from all the run-off of inadequately managed games happening around you. It's a brick you build a fire pit with so you can bring people together, cook and energize, and stay warm and pliable for the work that lies ahead. We're at the end of hallways built to trap us, then we've retreated into even tighter dwellings built out of bricks of despair, excuses, and memes. We don't see our effort to build anything else rewarded. We don't believe the bricks can be used for anything more than layer after layer of psychological insulation or impossibly heavy mess not worth moving.

I'm about as angry as I've ever been when I think about the choice to remain living like that. There's no reason to believe that just because someone is rich or famous or nice or loved or funny or dark or brilliant that they're anymore aware of what boards or fields they're playing on either. Everyone has a master even if it's as diffuse as “the mob.” We're all lost, but by now, you should know and be working on the playable game. You'll just be tortured to death otherwise.

[854] In The Beginning

 Let's try to get oriented.

That was my day so far after all, to be oriented. I took a “gig” at Boston Scientific assembling medical devices. It was pitched as 3 12 hour shifts, overtime if desired, and with many ways in which you can learn more and climb the ranks. About two hours into orientation, it was clear they are massively understaffed, still bitter about a billion dollar fine from 2006 (as though they don't have the money), and overtime will probably be more mandatory than “convenient extra money.”

Their orientation was similar to the pageantry of the “training” at DCS and Lifeline. Everyone pretend to read 15 pages of excessively detailed descriptions of what bins to throw things in and who to call if you happen upon a hazardous waste spill. Confirm you've read the updated policy! There will be a quiz! ::chuckle chuckle::. If you're big enough, it behooves you to have as much written down to avoid lawsuits and prove to the people giving you money and licenses that you're paying attention. Before I started regularly engaging with this working world, I didn't realize how all-encompassing the grand joke really was.

I'm reassured that there are collections of basically together people willing and capable of consistently following safe practices that allow for the tools that are going to crawl through my body and break-up plaque. Just like I was assured when I met a fairly robust group of people I would trust to oversee the process by which you do or do not lose your parental rights. At the same time, cracks show pretty quickly, and we can mark this as my first radar pings that I'm going to have to construct a context and narrative that keeps me idling at Boston in the same way I have for every job I've had previously.

While that nothing-burger is cooking, the land and our lives are moving at a better pace. We've cleared ¼ acre where 9 different gardening experiments can take place at once. Allie is testing and sampling the soil so we can experiment with brick building and deciding what to plant. I've got the bones of the new shed laid out and rearing to be set and attached. I've got plans for a fire pit installation that will not only serve as a giant display piece, but hopefully pool heater and oven. It will probably be a month or so, but I intend to get a home extension completed by the end of the year. Allie got an incredible job with the opportunity to transform Spencer and parlay or her contacts into things we can develop. We've got plans for years.

The contrast between my experience and what I gather from others' I can rarely find the words for. I reiterate my pace, my values, and my practice, and when enabled, I watch them manifest in a great relationship, the transformation of my environment, and the efficient consumption of my earnestly enjoyed indulgences. I see the “business world” versions of trying to get everyone on the same page of how to “best practice” and ensure the profits continue to roll in. Every single environment has that set of values, delineated in a thousand pages of policy, or signaled in the behavior of the “leadership” and their adherents.

This is when I start to consider how often I hear about Trump being the symptom and not the cause. This is why when I really let myself believe and let it sink in how depraved we must be on the whole, I can access the darkest thoughts about the impending doom or violence. Your values can be what you fight for, or they can be what you cobble together as leftovers from your ideals. They can be the doublespeak that gets you to kill yourself while claiming you've never felt so alive. They can be the simple lockstep to what you've never known otherwise. It's excessively easy to be bad or break things, and it gets exponentially worse when you can't acknowledge that you've been working in a bad or broken system from the start. Cue the racists perpetually curious for what all the fuss is about, or DCS panicked pull-cord dummy phrases about protecting children.

We're barely evolved to cope with our own lives, let alone the needs of billions and infinite permutations of advanced economies and culture clashes. Our heroes are often the most exploitative or poorly understood for their capriciousness and history. The justifying mechanism we use to keep us trapped in a parallel reality that maintains our mood or stress levels is the exact tool stuck crooked and forward creating a spiral begging to crash in service to our hypocrisy. He can't be serious! They surely well know otherwise. It won't get me! As they struggle to breath or hide their zombie bite. Things could always be worse. While they've never known what it is to feel better.

I think the kind of sacrifices I've made in the relationships I used to have are the exact kind people should be making in their own lives. I think you need to cut off and shit on your fascist or emotionally abusive family members. I think you need to compromise creature comforts and collaborate in circles that have better ideals and practical goals which can pragmatically affect or subvert the broken systems. I think when you find a pocket of sanity, you don't get to forget that, if you had to cut it from the cold dead hands of the world around you, the world around you is cold and dead and you have a lot of work so that it doesn't remain that way. I think you need to get into fights and feel your chest swell with the unknown and that it needs to scare you less than what you know already.

We've gotten off so easy being able to pawn our responsibility onto internet versions of words and action. We're still practically begging minority groups to get a touch more violent and organized so we don't otherwise have to dip our feet into generalized horror. It's a shared horror to be sure, but those forced to engage with it have a perspective we can't tolerate. Or, we pretend we can't tolerate it because pick-your-favorite throwaway sentiment about our own mental insufficiency and life stress. I caught a Jordan Peterson quote about there always being a price to pay for anything you do. You can either introduce the cost into your being and build something within you and the world that remains vigilant and prepared, or you'll break under the weight of what went ignored.

Less abstractly, I can draw a direct line from the things I sacrificed to live on this land, and the benefits I've been seeking. I still can't take 20 minute hot showers with water that doesn't often smell like sulfur. But, I don't have a water bill, which adds up, especially if you want to water ¼ acre. I can also transport fresher water or build a filter or conceive of a half dozen other ways to fix the problem that will not only keep me pliable and creative, but better informed. There's bugs and Trump flags and I have to drive 20-45 minutes to remote civilization, but I don't have a homeowners association. I just dug a hole I'm working on how to swim in, satisfying a dream to have a pool since my mom filled ours in. My conversations are now about how to turn-out and take back the country. My property value has doubled since I've been here.

We can all get by. Probably, you'll always have some way to pay the rent or soft enough crash if you're in my socioeconomic circle. We're exactly the ones who need to be making bigger pushes and bigger sacrifices now. What didn't our parents do? I know for most of us it wasn't stay together, find themselves able to comfortably afford our schooling, and they weren't listening to the science. Aren't we playing the same games? I'm 4 years older than my dad when he had me, and I haven't had a single job longer than 2 ½ years. My generation is the one nut-kicked repeatedly with economic crises, pills galore, and debt exhaustion. Why aren't we all in little Hobbit huts around the land, saving, creating, and practicing the life our children will need to normalize in order to survive?

It's not getting better folks. It's getting so bad we're literally begging for The United States to adopt a dictatorship. Parallels to WWII and Rome are all over the place. We're dying, a lot, of preventable things, not just Covid-19, but of being fat and sad and sick as fuck. You don't have a retirement fund, and in the blink of an eye, you can't tell if this is written by philosophizing angst-ridden 16-year-old Nick P. or the “mature and methodical” yet still pretty hard to understand 32-year-old one, Steven Pinker be damned. What's it gonna take? Or are you already dead?

I know that we're always going to need more help, escape plans, and deliberately creative fixes to the problems happening now and how much worse they will manifest in the future. Ask yourself what you have that's going to outlast you. Tell me, at this pace, in this shit storm, are we going to limp each agonizing step until we consider it merciful to drop dead, or are we going to “radically” respond to the forecast and build the requisite shelter? Are we going to approach the world and each other with the spirit of shared sacrifice and long-term goals? Are we going to allow ourselves to believe we don't have to keep playing things by ear because we're demanding things to believe in and trust?

I suspect no. I can't and won't save you anymore than the people's behavior I'm responding to suggests anyone's going to save me. It's got to be a joint effort. It's gonna be more work than you're used to; it was certainly more than I anticipated to even flirt with having a floor. Write about the alternatives. Plot your future. Ask if it's enough, if the excuses are strong enough, if you'll feel “fixed” or confident, or if you'll just be getting by. Then ask what could be if we combined forces. Ask yourself if Nick P. who's meticulously bitched and complained and screamed and fought and engendered all the personal and professional baggage can see the light ahead, in spite of unremitting chaos, why can't I? I found help. We continue to do the actual work to render the chaos mute or manageable in how we organize. I can't do it alone and neither can you.

[843] The Only Way

The broad theme of this is communication. I'm going to try to not shoot too high in how I connect the scattered lines I'm hung up on. The major question is whether or not there is a right way to do something.

We make the argument, often enough, that there is only one way. Implicitly for most things, but explicitly when the danger is more immediate. You are silent in a theater. There's a correct and incorrect side of the road. Jesus.

The deliberateness or explicitness of the task is a dependent variable. It depends on the abstract frame you use to decode the world. If you have nowhere to be except to “transport” yourself, you may walk, ride a bike, be carried, send yourself through the mail, or take mushrooms, and the goal - transportation - is achieved.

This very blog has the goal of quieting my mind as its largest abstract framework. I define what “quiet mind” is. The next layer down is the careful word choices that hopefully you can digest. Together we might frame and conclude if anything has been translated. I hope you can identify your frames and see how they bump into others. I hope to provide resolution to how you and I orient ourselves and decide on goals.

I want “security.” A knee-jerk fear-based response might mean buying a weapon. This boxes “security” into the two hero-story scenarios everyone defaults to when they pretend they are a “good guy with a gun.” A model U.N. participant might regard stabilizing an entire region of the planet as the just and proper means of attaining “security.”

We know the ambiguity in communication so well that we tend to disregard the perpetual pain and consequences of misaligned meaning as “normal.” We settle for “different ways to skin a cat” sentiments instead of digging. We beg to be understood for what was “plainly said” with “common sense” and plead with people to tell us “what you really mean!”

I find business books constantly alluding to psychological studies on why your pitch or good idea doesn't resonate with a big boss's lizard brain. Relationship and self-help books prompt you to define your personality and style to categorize and depersonalize what your frustrated partner might have regarded for years as, “That's just Bill!”

Politically we bicker beyond the point of feeling sick about the ways to “defend the country,” and very often decide there are “sides” that cannot be resolved, somehow both perfectly reasonable, moral, and with their own kind of “rationality.” The consequences, often excessively felt by those hardly represented, serve less to teach something we later correct for than to punish those we disingenuously regard as “merely disagree with.”

As with most positions I try to take, the idea is not to bemoan the very circumstances of life to make some fatalistic throwaway comment. Yes, you can be right and wrong across many dimensions or layers of focus. Yes, we're always seemingly in some form of contradictory position. No less, I think there is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things, at the most abstract levels I can imagine. Specific is easy. Right side of the road, or crash. Eat, or starve.

Abstract is whether you should drive at all. This is a broad historical story predicated on the ethics, ignorance, and selection pressures at the start of the combustion engine era. There were angry environmentalists in those days, but it could be easy enough argued that the prosperity from working in a car manufacturing factory at that time, contributing to the boom and technological development of vehicles, and being an earnest part of modern society outweighed the impact of the pollution.

Can you be right about this issue? Immediately, the impulse is to cite individual justifications and get defensive. “How else can I get grandma to the hospital!?” The effort to lose the point makes itself known. I ask myself, if I were offered another means, a sustainable and reliable means to stop driving grandma to the hospital, would I take it? Yes, that's the right way.

This is a huge hurdle. The way we do things, talk about things, and orient ourselves in the world is our entire world. It works, for better or worse, in “maintaining life” as miserably as we conceive of it in any moment. What are you introducing that's more reliable than my car? What problems does it bring? Where's your proof it works as well? While we lose ourselves to the details and fight, poor grandma is left with all the time she has left to contemplate if, in the abstract, she was really the kind of person who should have had children.

Individually, we don't spend a lot of time attempting to frame things for other people unless maybe we're a parent or supervisor (and even then who knows). The trend of recent human history is to cultivate individual frames and feedback loops. Without ever thinking about the consequences of doing so, we start to regard this as the correct mode of interacting and obtaining information. After all, “information obtainment” and or “being entertained” are ends unto themselves, right? What's being communicated doesn't matter as much as that it exists at all. Thus, naturally, it follows we should compete as entertainment or for other resources.

I think this is a wrong way to be human.

Humans are conscious. Consciousness is awareness. “Awareness” is abstract. How to be “abstractly aware” the “right” way? This is the junction where people default to prescribed religious doctrines or a hodgepodge of mangled philosophy with “ist” and “ism” monikers doing the work of lived experience.

Claims of awareness abound. Pastors are aware of what God said to them. Environmentalists are aware of the impact of fossil fuels. Situational awareness is bestowed to the most paranoid or trained. Reliably though, we find ourselves only just-so aware and often tricked by those who understand the underlying forces at play. We'll be able to fool people with the monkey dancing between people passing a basketball video indefinitely.

It already feels impossible to be aware correctly, no? Even the phrasing feels weird.

This is where the humanity comes in. You qualify with acts. Immediately, your awareness coalesces around specific acts. You can arrest other's attention. If and when you become aware of something, you can choose to act in service to your understanding, or lack thereof.

We're about to get in trouble. What do you know? What kind of understanding doesn't beget a feedback loop of isolated self-satisfaction and justification? For before you can get to whether or not you are behaving in the “right” way, you have to find the impulse for truth and honesty.

Uh oh, I did it again, didn't I? I offered two exceptionally boundless words that we routinely treat with every possible interpretation as bedrocks. I didn't put them in quotes, though. I think they exist as far as you can throw them, sure, in varying degrees of focus and relevance, but also as an indomitable consistent base in each of our hearts. Absolutely none of my indignant posture towards other people makes sense without this broad abstract assumption I lay across everyone.

The thing is, I don't know what it is to be human if I ignore that impulse in myself. When I lie, it's disorienting. It's in service to something impersonal, primal, and probably reactively and unduly destructive. If I approach all of our interactions like you're perfectly understood and honestly relaying your experience, I betray the lies in you that I recognize in myself.

Practically, this means I occupy two very different conversational, social, and emotional worlds, and from the outside, they're impossible to differentiate.

You don't have to believe when I write that I'm being as honest as I can muster. If a part of you knows that I am, and you refuse to believe that, we're occupying different plains and I find it impossible to conceive of you as “doing human right.” This is not the same thing as struggling to contend with conflicting information or holding two competing ideas in your head at once. This is about whether or not I have the capacity to speak to, and you have the capacity to hear and recognize, whatever it is at bottom that connects us. I'd like to call it a science without cheapening science.

So you make the decision to be honest and tell the truth. First, impossible, hurdle and footing is done.
Next, you start denoting what you're aware of and stating where you exist relative to it.
Last, you act to change your relative place or in service to consequences the study or science of your experience can reliably predict.

This is doing human correctly and being aware in the right way.

When you hear an “intellectual” tout a series of catch-alls and vagaries that tangibly and reliably beget death and destruction, don’t get lost in their weeds, as they deliberately lead with lies. They pick untruths. You have to believe this about people, just like you can believe it about yourself when presented with the magnitude of your mistakes all at once.

People will deliberately choose death before they will choose honesty. They will do this because a life suffering the consequences of the reality of their decisions would be worse than death. Ironically, they only know this because their bottom-line communication science that understands blogs like this tells them so.

The problem, as our coronavirus times can no doubt attest, is that their choice to die in service to their demons, when scaled up, kills us all.

Thus, you need to return to the exercise. Is it honestly hard to believe people are willing to die and kill those around them, so recklessly, as you consider our violent past or watch them do so every day? Are you allowing yourself to be corrupted, in so many ways, by sympathies and physical or emotional burdens that have entangled themselves to those who are going to get you killed? Can you move in a way that maximizes your chance to survive?

Only once you frame the game and its different layers can you play it. If you're unwilling to do so, it's hard to consider you human. If you're unable to do so, you're likely the kind of person that needs protecting. If you're unable to find protection, you'll be the first to die. Maybe you don't care about who dies, but then again, I reflexively call you inhuman and a liar.

[840] Corona Made Me Do It

I don't know what to say.

How long have we lived in the 24-hour “news” cycle with everything “the war on” and “breaking” from Justin Bieber entering the country to how so-and-so “slammed” and “eviscerated” so-and-so with their legendary commentary?

How long have we had to study the various eras in how civilizations thrived or fell?

How long have we known that we've lived beyond our means, in selfish isolation, screaming “fuck the world” with all of the jaded wisdom of every teenager?

How tired have we been? How fat have we gotten? How many “School of Life” videos and existential memes have been shared?

How many times has “Get out the vote!” been parroted? How many silent wishes for death upon generations of those not as “with it?”

First, I was indifferent to the coronavirus. Then, I went to Wal-Mart and felt the low key panic of people's shifty eyes and odd choices on what to stock up on. I'm not panic buying, but I wanted to make it a couple weeks for if and when the shit really starts hitting the fan.

Next, I'm a touch curious about 1 out of every 50 articles that pop up about it. The prevailing theme is that we're, obviously, unprepared, defiant, and going to make things incredibly worse before they get better.

Then, I want to exploit the crisis. I email my investment guy. I tell every single person I can find in the office, now is the time to lobby for work-from-home and more money. I'm energized to do a little more land walking and mapping, because space away might cost a premium.

Now, I'm “generally angry,” that for all of the hullabaloo, for all of the cries about how things should go or the ways people are “stepping up” in a crisis, it all feels like bullshit. I subscribed to some “we'll get through this!” groups for central Indiana where pleas to find ways to get food, rent, or even cars towed stream in.

FUCK. ALL. OF. YOU.

As we speak, the neoliberal mess of Joe Biden wins Florida by a landslide. The narrative on Trump's response is morphing from his general perpetual lies to the handful of reactive and scared shitless plays he's making to appease anyone and anything that resemble “the market” or “his base.” The edifice, even while crumbling, is dedicated to the shine. The mouth pieces stoke the fear. The half-truth minute by minute scare pieces flood in. Catch-phrases repeated, finger waving the moral turpitude, and self-promotion acts of solidarity abound.

We've lost even the capacity to recognize it as an act. We used to have location-based relationships, or short and incidental ones. We might've built “professional” verses “personal.” A “brand” was something independent of the things you did in service to making it profitable. Now it's just this all the time everywhere. Wait until you hear someone a little quicker on the take say it or do it first, shop it around. Don't create or plan in service to the genuine betterment of something, “make a statement” and tell people to follow a dead link and flooded, incorrect, phone number.

This is how it ends. Probably not with coronavirus, but with this sheer inability to ever recognize the real again, even as death stares you in the face. Trump is death, and we voted for him. So was Sarah Palin. So were the celebrities and lobbyist narratives and daily capitulations we made in service to keeping our own heads above the shallow waters we were still allowed to swim in.

What kills me, what floors me to no end, is that for all of my constant and perpetual bitching, I've struggled so fucking hard, not to piece together a house or cope with one meaningless waste of my time after another in trying to get a little more of my indulgent American dream. No, I've fought and fought and fought to speak as though there is something better to be doing, and you, me, us were not doing it, and even during a fucking crisis, I can't get the conversation, the plan, or the disposition that can treat this shit LIKE WE ALL KNEW IT WAS FUCKING COMING.

I don't feel like I exaggerate when I claim people long for death. I don't think that the emotional burden of the silence is overstated. I don't think the ho-hum, literal fucking shoulder shrug I got today, is less deadly than the deadliest virus. Our minds are poisoned. Our spirits don't bite. When the panic truly sets in, there won't be enough news outlets to cover it. When the ship really starts taking on water, you're gonna feel hungry, starved, from all the bullshit we've been feeding on. There won't be land to swim to as we cramp up and drown.

When we come out the other side with 2 whole extra days of half-paid sick leave, that's when you kill yourself. Don't do it as you lose your job, run out of Hotpockets, or think too hard about how sick your grandma got after you came back from spring break. Do it when you realize it's never getting better, and you don't even know how it could. Do it because you're already dead, and there's nowhere left to go. The virus seems like it's trying to force the issue, but at least it wants to live.