[1192] Babble Babble Bitch Bitch

I need to try to identify another pattern. A few days ago I felt I had good examples at different scales of what I was looking for. Of course, I got busy or distracted, and now I need to try and claw away what I thought I had from my latest mental fog.

I’m often curious about “transformation” or “evolution” in people. Elon Musk is someone I felt immediately drawn to when I first saw him on like 60 minutes back in college matter-of-factly talking about what society needed to do to not kill itself. As someone who considers himself an adept reader of people’s bullshit, I didn’t sense that he was coming from anywhere insincere, and at the time, the proof was what had so far been accomplished at his companies.

Jordan Peterson also occupied a prominent spot in me being interested in what he had to say or how he arrived there. There’s hundreds of hours of him not being a Christian or fascist apologist, notably, before his star began to rise out of control and the peaks of his illness were reached.

In my life, I reflect on what brought me together with girlfriends, my best friends, work cohorts, or what I thought constitutes my family.

We’ve gone through, at least a rhetorical revolution, as it pertains to the fluidity of identity, the loci of power, and the nature of harm or what will save us.

Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve, overwhelmingly so, pretty much staid the same. That isn’t to say I haven’t “matured” or “tempered” or found ways to better emotionally regulate. It doesn’t mean I’ve continued to fight as vociferously for causes or actions I was particularly naive about. It just means my broadest lens has focused around the same things in spite of my environment.

There’s something that feels stable in me that I don’t recognize in the same way from other people.

The thing I do recognize in others is what we’re witness to from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, or our exes, but specifically the ones that, on paper and emotionally, made the most sense. The nature of the transformation feels almost impossible to account for, and people seem to only try decades later or after all the major players have died.

The word that keeps creeping in is “honesty.” The nature of the change I believe has to do with how you understand that word. I think most people understand it as some extension of the phrase, “Your feelings are valid.” It’s a very complicated and disingenuous phrasing that hides its arbitrary redundancy. I would say instead, “You have feelings.” When I see people struggle with what to do with their feelings, it’s often they wish to automatically suppress and obscure them. Perhaps that first phrasing is trying to make a persuasive argument that ignites your capacity to feel them altogether. I don’t know that it’s working.

I honestly don’t believe Elon Or Jordan started evil. I think they believe they are “deathly” honest. I think I had the same complex when I was younger, thinking “harsh” or “real” expressions of my opinion were the same thing as being honest. I would apply one exacting mode of determining the “objective truth” of a situation, and let the consequences be what they may. I wasn’t feeling necessarily insecure or scared or much of anything at all. I just didn’t care, because I was “right.” I wasn't prepared to accept, let alone be interested in embodying, the depth of my existential ignorance.

I think each step on the path to evil is the avoidance or ignoring of your conscious. You avoid and ignore by leaning into emotional expressions that act as justification. Whether it’s John Oliver tearing up on air, Jordan Peterson’s snarl, or your car-ranting TikTok star wanna-be, it’s the same dance away from what a more honest and accountable expression would look like. I think Elon knows the math doesn’t add up in crippling federal institutions for anyone but himself. I think Jordan knows it’s an embarrassing fascist inversion of the X-Men to compare them to Trump acolytes. I think the daily devotional resigned sentiments offered to me about the nature of a work environment, the future, or our responsibility to fix or work differently are driven by the same mechanism.

I don’t get the impression people know what they can trust about themselves. Or, they only trust the worst things about themselves. Or, they only trust their woefully incomplete conception about how the worst things about them actually play out. They know their anxiety is going to win. They know if they try they’ll fail and it will all have been a waste. They know which thing after thing doesn’t matter. They know they’re going to get too tired, or distracted, or someone in their life is going to object and dissuade. I’ve had thousands of conversations about what isn’t possible or what someone isn’t really like or capable of for every one about limitless potential for anything besides chaos.

I feel they’re all fundamentally dishonest. I think we’ve achieved our current levels of decadence because critical masses of people dragged perhaps their own predilections to lie to themselves kicking and screaming into a future they otherwise believed could be worked and fought for. I don’t think that internal investigation or discussion even has to do with the future. I think it has to do with asking yourself, what else are you missing from “right now.” What isn’t making its way into your conversation that’s just as true as the details of your complacent or complicit rut?

I think for Elon there’s a discussion about compulsivity, the coldness autism can inspire, and the danger of ego. I think for Jordan it’s his desperate longing to fit into something greater than he’s achieved through being an intellectual or via accident in bonding with his wife as children. I think he knows his story isn’t remotely typical or realistic, but he sounds so sure of himself when he’s excoriating modern attitudes and practices, no? At home, it was fairly easy for me to see the differences in disposition and, let’s say moral core, as to why a relationship wasn’t going to work. With family, I can see the placating apologetics employed to keep the peace. The catch-phrases at DCS and now the YMCA are all to do with “care” and “safety” devoid of discussions about demonstrated betrayals.

Capital or attention-based “success” is a unique form of capture. We’ve never had the kind of chance to transcend the lanes we’re born into that we do today, and we’ve never been able to witness the transformation so closely. Mostly, we’ve just been captured by our family, region, or work culture. Now, with so many new avenues competing for our attention and our unwillingness or inability to articulate how they work, I think we default to angry ambivalent animalistic survival modes of expression. That’s “me and mine.” That’s apologetics for sin. That’s cliches and average days because nothing more could or should be expected.

You can go back to my first writing, deeply emotional and angst-ridden 15-year old me lusting and confused and still find the things about me I consider my stabilizing core. I tread in obscenity and trying to be light-hearted. The title is:

“If You’re A Girl You Better Fucking Read This”

I’m curious and constantly asking questions.

“Okay, so this is like a call-out for the inner workings of the womanly mind.”

I’m responding to what I see as a self-destructive pattern.

“Over and over, I talk to my friends who have been in relationships that do nothing but fuck them square in the ass, and despite my warnings and suggestions, they still fawn over the assholes that fucked them over.”

I’m offering concrete examples of the behavior I think is wrong.

“If your boyfriend makes you cry, orders you to do things, or makes your friends and family uncomfortable... leave his ass now. It's plain and simple.”

Today, I stop being so prescriptive, and have had hundreds more interactions with people about domestic violence or emotionally manipulative dynamics, but at bottom, it speaks to a core belief I don’t think is unreasonable. It’s not evidence of a healthy dynamic to me if that’s the nature of yours.

I continue to lay out my “answers” and “harsh truths” about 90% of guys being in it for the pussy, and attempting to anticipate the feedback that often comes in from questioning girls as to why they’re excusing something.

I didn’t know the word “limerence” back then. I wouldn’t have copped to the writing being a passive aggressive way to trigger some form of introspection in my targets or side-building as I looked for ways to air dirty laundry. I knew my feelings were intense, I didn’t know how to address them, and it was occupying my thoughts in an unsustainable and compulsive way. Something broke, so I started to search through writing. I didn’t find a way to talk her into dating me. I found the world of information that wasn’t yet informing how I could understand myself against or in service to that world.

The fervor and fascism of pop-cultists and apologists rides the kind of energy I was on at 15. It’s totalizing. It’s self-reinforcing. It’s an artificial motivation bred from untempered inarticulate ignorance. It’s probably where the wisdom of “hate the sin, not the sinner” comes from and why so many are compelled by the idea that they have to give up their pathological behavior to something external. What’s juicier than the idea that the absolutely necessary sacrifice to find salvation is His problem, not mine?

I had to give up being “convinced.” I had to stop pretending I knew the truth in any form that I wasn’t actively manifesting or participating in. As long as I work, then the “deepest” or “most practical” truth is that I will more likely get the consequences of that work. If I’m working on the wrong shit, I will compound my problems. If I “believe” that which I’m unwilling to fight for or achieve, I’m playing a rhetorical game with myself in order to avoid responsibility. If I’m unwilling to define the nature of that work, from writing, to advocating and speaking at all, then I’m at the mercy of the people or plans that can account for my chaotic drag on the future.

No one is coming to save you. I don’t think you could recognize who’s even trying. They also can’t hammer for you what you need nailed to a cross. It’s not immigrants or trans people. It’s not the concepts of diversity, equity, or inclusion. It’s whatever is keeping you from being consistently curious, concerned about those getting fucked with, or capable of building the case that doesn’t depend on how passionately you can scream or cry through it.

[1185] Match Game

Standard disclaimer, I sense there will be acutely disparate threads I'm attempting to weave together.

LeVar Burton exercises a certain kind of wisdom I wish I saw more of. On some of his stories he will include in his preface that there's a content warning in the episode description, "If you're so inclined to read it." He's a sympathetic person who you gather gets a sense of what his characters have represented to people. Even if he's intimately familiar with the kind of life experiences that might harden his shell and deride the idea that we should be coddling each other, he's not dismissive of his potential emotional impact. He's not going to decry "trigger warning!" and virtue signal, he's allowing you to treat yourself as you wish to be treated. He invites you to use your own time to dig up and decide if a short story is going to overwhelm you. It's subtle and thoughtful without capitulating.

A lot of comedians have the same conversation about whether or not "woke" made it impossible to perform. The landscape is always evolving, yet somehow famous comedians stayed famous, employed, and navigated. Ones that might have had to be more subtle and thoughtful in their jokes adjusted and thrived. Those who wanted to beat lazy cliches into ignorant sounding bad jokes cried the loudest. That isn't to say audiences couldn't be blamed for drifting too far into "righteously offended" territory, but it did mean here was again an opportunity to have a nuanced conversation, and either/or drove a hyperbolic discussion into the ground. Somehow, the most "anti-woke" comedians became literal fascist apologists.

Now, we're seemingly culturally viscerally reacting to "DEI." As if, by themselves, the ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion are anathema to a thriving country. Why? Those who were championing the effort refused to be nuanced and wise. They refused the lessons of the giants whose shoulders they professed to stand upon. When you do that, you cede the ground to the crazies. You foment grievances that piddling-middle types sympathize with because there's an incredibly compelling grain of truth wedged directly in their eye. I want a diverse community. I don't want people to be given things they don't deserve or haven't worked for. These ideas aren't at odds with each other in most reasonable people's heads. Institutions have biases and some are particularly corrupt. Every system and institution are not the same. 

This morning I went to breakfast. I work in the Indianapolis area, and every time I go into Sunshine Breakfast, I'm greeted in Spanish. The first 2 times the waitresses gathered I don't speak Spanish (at least not conversationally) and I was able to order without issue. Today, my waitress didn't seem to understand nearly anything I said, and after several extra minutes and assistance from another one, I eventually got my order in and correctly delivered. My first thought was that were I to open a French restaurant in France is that I'd be sure to know the language well enough to take orders.

How do you read that story? As an opportunity to engage on some racist tirade? Are you immediately thinking all sorts of things about my "questionable" instincts? Is it merely confirmation of all the hateful things you'd lump together associated with Trump's rhetoric about immigration? Was it just a mild inconvenience you think I'm foolish for even bothering to bring up? There's a fog. I want it to be simple, but as I discovered, even something that was simple twice, and why I keep returning, wasn't so much the third time. 

You can't build "wisdom" around a floor that's always moving. You can't share values that increasingly only exist between you and whatever your phone is showing you. 

I think, for example, that if you're going to bother to build rules and policy, you should make a good faith effort to follow those rules and policies. We now live in a country where that whole concept is functionally mute. Violently attack police and attempt to overthrow the government? Only "partisans" would care to pursue you in their unfair judgment of your morals merely vying to stop the steal. These kinds of signals trickle down into how, or whether you can at all, set expectations everywhere else.

I'm an adult in the room in my oversight of children every day. Why should they listen to me? There's the classics of, "Because I said so," or "Because I'm the adult," which on their face, are mindless attestations of power. Those rely on both the child's ignorance and the implicit violence I could inflict to force the issue. As is the cultural moment's habit, let's say it's because I'm interested in keeping them "safe." Safe became the new metric for an ever-illusive means of controlling behavior and narratives. How often we belabored the "harm" one might experience innocently discovering LeVar is still reading, and being shocked by the themes or language. 

Why we used to listen to anyone was because it was, in fact, keeping us safe. We listened to the elders who survived the precarity of existence and learned a thing or two. We listened to the experts who figured out ways to capitalize and heal. We listened to the writers of myths and journeys with embedded values which tied directly into our ability to survive. Now? The information landscape is so fluid it's psychologically impossible to ground yourself without an innate intelligence, practice, conscious recognition of the ways it's moving through you. The way my mind works, I wouldn't have a prayer of maintaining my values or see ways through the weeds without writing. I go out of my way to stay awash in media, and the disorientation occurs regularly. 

One form this takes is in the whiplash from listening to something like Pod Save America, and then the next episode be Honestly with Bari Weiss. Both kind of annoy me, which helps me stay reflective and critical of what they're saying, and who they're choosing to talk about things with. I feel the Bari crowd simping for religion and MAGA and can feel the permanent smirk they have by successfully persuading at least a million subscribers that they're the new "middle." I feel adrift and nearly drowning listening to Pod Save America reiterate everything that hasn't worked and ruminate on how impossible it feels to coalition build, message, or find remote joy in so much ongoing destruction. 

If I were to just draw from memory what I agreed with from both podcasts, I don't think it would paint me as a radical. 

Democrats are hypocrites when it comes to "money in politics."
Democrats need to be messaging constantly across every medium that will have them, but also be able to credibly speak to the work they're actually doing for the working class.
The conversation around trans issues went off the rails before anyone actually studying things was consulted. It's both okay to acknowledge biology and sex differences and make room to help those with dysphoria or who choose to express their gender differently.
I want a country with strong borders that concerns itself with protecting western values.
I want the people working and living in the country to be able to get citizenship. I think so much of the discussion about the "rule of law" is garbage, pageantry, and disgraceful when you put a convicted felon rapist at the top of the pyramid.
I don't know if I've heard 2 honest conversations about the greed and monopolistic capture that informs prices.
Privacy is important.
Social media shouldn't be given endless power to do whatever they want with our data.
Hating each other isn't going to solve anything, but many people are openly espousing and washing the laundry of the most hateful ideas we've ever popularized.
Your average person isn't sophisticated, nuanced, or remotely interested in their well-being like a proverbial "informed citizen" of a democratic ideal. 

We're dumb animals first, and there's a reason the propaganda works. I've been looking for refuge in this idea for weeks. I keep reminding myself that, even this language right now, is lip gloss on a screaming ape species only not flinging its shit because it's eating to reload. 

While writing this, I got an email from my boss, somewhat retaliatory, somewhat signaling "concern," about my approach to a child that is not appropriate for our program. I say that given their written policy standards, not because I just don't like kids or this one in particular. I've bent over backwards for weeks attempting to not only assess his behavior, but the staff's responses, and the ability to follow a "behavior plan" that's allegedly supposed to mitigate his outbursts. 

No matter how many conversations and emails I've had with her, his parents, the principal, the other staff, and people acquainted with the situation, she still found the temerity to suggest it's something like me fumbling to intervene with this kid not according to his plan that resulted in his write-ups. I genuinely want to quit my job in this moment, because it feels like that kind of "perfectly impossible" scene where you've been contracted for a suicide mission. I'm not going to quit, at least not yet, but it's the kind of existentially hopeless place that's all-too familiar. The purported idealists don't wish to engage the hard reality. The one begging for reality to be taken seriously gets punished. Or, in Trumpian parlance, "I've been hearing things...." Oh, really? Cool, guess nothing matters and we'll just go with whatever you say or heard.

The crazier things feel, I look for definition. Writing is definition. You can "infer" whatever you want from what I say, but I can articulate the feeling, "I want to quit," allow the moments after to play out, and keep my job. I was hired to run a program. When I identify and define the things that were making it previously impossible to run, the next moment shouldn't be suspicion that I'm the problem. Especially not when the problem has been one for years. Now, if you're part of the problem, and my definitions are forcing you into new accountable territory, which you subsequently poorly react to, the fuck am I supposed to do with that? 

I'm not a "woo woo" person. I do think math says we're all connected, and things have felt elevated, especially the past few days. I've spent years finding a remote "chill" level to operate on in spite of it all, and lately that shit's proving ineffectual. I'm craving an ability or justification of simple and pure reactivity. It's the moment when an addict might relapse. It's when you've reached out to a few people to try and talk to, and they aren't there, and you're stuck, and enough time hasn't passed to make the worst option resonate as catastrophically as it will inevitably feel over time. When all the "little things" stack up back-to-back at otherwise shit times that compound. 

I'm exhausted. I'm going to go back to work, eat a lot of candy, complain about my stomach aching, and then go to a comedy show and drink tonight. The future is bleak.