[1215] Awesome God

I tend to watch movies on Sundays. I don’t know if that’s by accident, or because as a child we used to go over to my grandparents for lunch/dinner on Sundays and watch a movie afterwards. I’ve been more or less baked into my home for the last 4 days, leaving last night under the impression I was to spend time with a friend I haven’t seen in a while. Instead, I did some grocery shopping and returned to my nest.

I’ve been anchoring to an idea lately. I watched a random short or TikTok where a man described how much conservatives care about your life and body. They care who you marry. They care who you fuck. They care where your immortal soul is going and how to get it there. If you just want to be left alone, you can’t do so in a world where a conservative will make it their mission to introduce you to Jesus or otherwise condemn you to their hell.

I listen to pushing 100 podcasts. The Pod Save America guys dutifully list the atrocious consequences of the continued spiral into the fascist abyss. Why are we cancelling research to save kids with brain cancer? Because. Because, fuck you, that’s why. Because it doesn’t serve the financial interest of those in power, and because hundreds of millions of people can’t be bothered to register their neglectful impact on others.

I’m tempted to say I’m like the man in the TikTok video. I don’t care about what you do “personally.” I don’t think it takes a high I.Q. to understand that if you walk around as a disease vector, that can affect me. If you’re keen to kill people I’m not sure are the enemy, that will blow back on me too. If you’re incapable of defining and carrying out laws and justice, I can’t expect to maintain a certain coherence to my own thoughts, household, and family. You’re not leaving me alone in the same way I’d grant to you.

I asked in my IOP group the other day what made people so confident in their judgment. No surprise, no one had a good answer, but they wield it reflexively all day. They don’t want to be judged by the worst things they’ve done as addicts, but give them a second of unstructured/unfocused time and most sentences start with something like, “That motherfucker,” or “He knows what he did,” or “I’m just being real.” We’ll label, other, mind-read, and circularly “logic” ourselves into compulsive coping cycles.

The religious person is analogous to an addict. All answers resolve to an infinite unearned confidence in how you compulsively cope with the world. What makes it an addiction is your proclivity to do it in spite of the self-destruction. When your god sees fit to burn the latest witch, your hair also being on fire is a feature, not a bug. It’s just god’s warmth lighting your way.

We talk about “extremes” on the Right and Left and how they end up mirroring each other. Despite a whole period of The New Atheists, I don’t think culturally we walked away with a deep enough understanding of ideological capture. I listened to Dan Carlin and Sam Harris talk about how ruminating on modern times and the absolute craziness people are willing to go along with makes the past easier to understand. That we’ve supercharged it with technology is all the more confounding. “We” are captured. I don’t feel like “we,” because I still use my voice, and look for every opportunity to fight the march over the cliff.

I don’t think people wrestle with how much they do, in fact, want to die. They grow up in ridiculously ignorant and abusive households. They consume media that makes it nearly impossible to think clearly or coherently. They’re fat. They’re weird looking. The nice things they try to do for themselves, say a concert, come with huge price tags, people masturbating in the crowd, and some asshole with a sign blocking your view. Paid $20 for popcorn lately, or a single shot?

It’s not like they’re born wanting to die. It’s that they get messages fed to them their entire life that dying’s where it’s at. You’ll get to Heaven. You’ll get to enjoy your enemies in Hell. All that you can’t understand or cope with will be revealed and made perfect. It’s a linguistic drug you feed yourself in every moment you stare a little too long over the cliff’s edge, too curious.

Doubling-down is the name of the game most people are playing. Whatever they say, say it again. So often the words contain less useful information than a baby crying or bird cawing. Never stop. If you stop, you’ll interrupt the road to the true goal of dying. If you stop, you’d have to start working to account for your infinite ignorance. Why do that when you can celebrate and be empowered by it with your claim to your god and its powers? Why can’t you just be left alone to condemn and destroy as you see fit?

Addicts share an immaturity and entitlement. Their development has often been arrested. Who are you, counselor, to tell me anything about how to live my life if you haven’t walked in my shoes? Unless you’ve walked the fine line between “normal” and “meth-induced psychosis,” you certainly can’t be trusted. It’s not their fault, necessarily, but you have to approach subjects as though you’re talking to a child. We pretend like we’re not all fundamentally children in the same way. In addiction, it’s just exacerbated. Why would a third to half of the population in any given moment or era want a “strong man” or “angry daddy?”

I think about this any time someone “intellectual” claims to be a specific religion or believe in a god. I think it’s why we’re doomed regardless. The exercise of self-justification, the double-down, can be dressed up in thousand dollar words, books, and surgically precise sutures to moral postures. The concepts of “good” or “fair” or “justice” or “individuality” or “rights” or anything we’ve trudged up from The Enlightenment will never feel as salient as “my god.” We can’t share in my god. You have to navigate my god. My god is awesome. My god fills in the gaps. My god is all-powerful. My god can do literally anything ever I need him to, except give me genuine peace about how you are living your life.

This is the utility, the joy, the comfort, in self-destruction. Every piece of me that dies is one less I need to suffer. If I break my brain, I can’t think about how you make me feel. If I break my legs, I can’t be expected to stand on my ability to argue. If I break my back, it won’t be expected to be in the fields. If I break my tongue then it’s your fault! for not recognizing the drooling ramblings of the confused and infirm. If I break my eyes and ears I’ll never know how many die, needlessly. If I break my heart, I won’t feel how violently I’m beating my chest.

[573] Sweatpants

My prevailing thought for the last week or so has been that I’m too tired to write. Having picked up a few jobs and managing to schedule them stupidly, I haven’t been sleeping well and find myself with enough back and foot pain to throb for hours. Only part of it is the physical exhaustion though, as the tasks I’m engaging in for money are such old news and so familiar that I was bored with them 10 or 12 years ago let alone after my reintroduction now. It takes no extra undue besmirching of general labor to hate the culture, the people, the dialogues, or the vapid power games exerted on you through spite and insecurity.

I’ve always thought I could make more sense of it. I’ve always thought that while I may be consigned into slavery-adjacent tasks, that was never who I was. I’m choosing routes that I can option into other things. I’m choosing settings where the expectations are low, ignorant, and petty. I don’t enjoy these things or refuse to expect more out of myself. When asked, “Having fun yet?” I don’t even give you the courtesy of sarcasm. Fuck no I’m not having fun and you’re stupid for asking. “What do you think of the job?” It’s a job you fat propagandist.

What’s persistently scared me about humanity is that we don’t want to get better. Hundreds of thousands of television shows and millions of books or short stories highlight individual characters with their roles to play, but no matter how many people ever manage to be born, there will only be a relative handful whose stories will truly stick out to me. That doesn’t mean it’s defaulted to the rich or famous. It’s those with an awareness that they’re in the story in the first place and are doing everything they know how to make it theirs.

Because what do you hear in the normal world? “Yeah, I told them about it, but it’s been broken for years.” “You know, daddy didn’t raise no fool, I’m just doing this job here because it keeps me off the streets.” “Me and my husband have worked for this company for 17 years, and while they don’t have a spouse-covering health care plan, it’s a wonderful and caring place that truly wants you to love working here!” “Hey, at least I got to live my dream for a few years before I ended up here!”

It’s the most evil and ridiculous person, according to the rules, who would point out that excuses and ignorance are deadly and vicious and they’re not going to play along. I don’t even know what to call the face of the person who can’t handle or hear the truth. Indignant comes to mind. They’re taken aback. Under it all is fear though. You went right for the words they can’t deal with and now they’re afraid of you and prepared to lash out. What did I do to deserve my lot? I tried to account for it accurately. In hoping to hold myself more accountable than you, I ride the rocky waves of your emotional oceans. I’m crippled by your fears because your fears dominate the landscape.

That it’s not even hyperbole is what literally kills me. I say, “Teach me this thing you’re into Friday, I’d like to try and expand it.” Your response, “It’s just a hobby. Yeah it’s fun. I’ve been so busy lately. I don’t know that much about it.” I say, “Oh, you have this particular skill? What’s stopping you from surmounting your circumstances and doubling down?” Your response, “I know a lot of people in that world. I was real good at what I did. I don’t actually have a car right now. I’ve put my time in already.” I was making solid enough cash with drug studies and bitch more in ten minutes about the regular working world than I hear out of you in years, and it took me all of 2 weeks to adopt 3 jobs in service to my goals. I. FUCKING. HATE. EXCUSES. The only real business I’m in is to rip yours from your cold stupid hands.

Do you hear me praising my “work ethic?” Fuck no! I’m being exploited, like you’re being exploited. I’d be wildly wasting my time if I wasn’t using it to synonymously listen to Radiolab, Dan Carlin, and books on tape. I’ll set up my tablet to keep watching my shows while I deliver food. I won’t let myself be consumed by my added obligations. As I’ve stated before, I’m going to take what you do or what you expect or claim and make it mine. Jobs aren’t yours to give me, they’re mine to create or take. Money isn’t my god to be worshiped at the expense of my body or self-respect. It’s the thing I’m incidentally accruing while I watch TV or learn more about the world.

I have a friend who said it brought him so much joy to see me in uniform slumming it restocking shelves. This friend who I’m working to save up the money to build him a place to stay that he can live in for free. This friend who I want to build a garage as well so he can independently have a place to exercise his skills fixing cars. It brought him joy to see me as a peasant. This is sad. This is damaged. Just because you’re doing it too or understand the pain and frustration doesn’t mean you should opt to revel in an odd selfish solidarity. It would mean something to me if it pissed you off that it caught back up to me. It would mean something if you saw me and were emboldened to more actively pursue your goals. Don’t fucking tell me it brings you joy to watch me kill myself.

I may be tired, and angry, and full of demeaning and depressing quips, but I’m not dead. Having to walk among them and fend off bites is just the added bonus of inserting myself into the drudgery. Right now absolutely sucks. Right now feels like condemnation and waste. Right now is a struggle to barely exist tagging between worlds that have swallowed everyone around me. Right now I’m practically nothing. When I get through, not years from now, then you’ll hear about whether I’m having fun. You’ll hear how my approach to your struggle will have nothing to do with enjoying it. No matter how long I have to live in this world, your complicit psychosis won’t become mine.

[436] Beacon of Dope

Take an immediately hyperbolic sentiment like, “I don’t believe in free speech.”

I’ve been feeling my gut want to flirt with expressing and justifying this sentiment for the past couple days. I’m provoked by statements that I think I can show to be threatening, deadly. I have a waning conception of “freedom.” I’m so steeped in how “I” can “break down” or “justify” what the statement means to me. I feel a crippling sense of irony seeping into every new line.

Again, I’m falling over the edge of thoughts provoked by the world of music. Watching the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony specifically. Whether the artist being celebrated is alive or dead, it feels like a eulogy to me. Nothing is genuinely bad at ceremonies like that. The tears are real. They flow from the kind of emotion that springs from a place so much bigger than you or your song. Somehow you and everyone you’ve touched are sharing the same moment.

And that’s the dreamy way to state it. Is it somehow more or less real than other things I could say? Timeless classics I’ve never heard of don’t bring me to tears. I can understand the marketing behind including artists that span generations and styles. I’ve looked up the biggest names and attempted to listen deeply and hop into the boat of emotionality and passion that you can feel from each person expressing themselves about their respective hero. I’m, often, just not that into them.

There’s so much to be said about the personal nature of experience. To my mind, it’s the difference between creating for personal reasons and the infinitely different ways your creation can be experienced. I think you approach a danger zone that pits “popularity” against “truth” and can only mangle what either could mean.

There can be no doubt as to your reaction. You felt the tears fall, the chills on the back of your neck, the unstoppable butterflies and urge to dance. In the moment, it doesn’t have to mean anything “more.” I imagine it’s the same sort of rush from winning a championship or nailing a job interview. You don’t want to hear about the handicaps working against the other team or that the person they were really after couldn’t make it. Aspects that are just as true, just as immediate and relevant independent of your awareness of them.

I think this is why you can experience, though I haven’t lately, people who are scarily passionate about a band. It doesn’t matter to them how many came before, nothing has moved them “like this” before or since. How could you not understand!? Then be prepared to tread lightly in how you talk about their gem. Objectivity needs to be left outside. Just feel it. But I also think this is the difference between the litany of videos of crying little girls at a Taylor Swift concert compared to the zero crying older women videos after seeing Paul McCartney for the 40th time.

Here I begin again thinking about “truth.” Perhaps that woman was a shrieking crying girl back in The Beatles’ heyday. Perhaps the power of their music then is felt just as deeply as it is today, but her sway and lighter mean as much or more than the tears back then. Perhaps there’s an extremely detailed handbook for making superstars willing to put in the time with a dedicated industry geared towards hijacking the naive, fallible, and inattentive brain. Perhaps that doesn’t matter.

For all my “cynicism,” a word I still use under protest, I’m no less compelled by musical heroes. That is, I can listen to Ringo Starr sing in an annoying “old guy voice” wrapping up the celebration of Rock and Roll’s latest wave of paid respects and think “eh I’m really not into this performance or song...holy shit is it cool to see THE BEATLES and GREEN DAY playing together!” Look at all those legends trading solos and singing about how they get by with a little help from their friends too!

I want to maybe shift down a gear and hit a new tone. I’ve been thinking a lot about the last book I read on empathy. At the same time I’ve been listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and Common Sense podcasts. At the heart of the messages I’ve received is to work harder on putting yourself into the other person’s shoes. Before you bang the drum of patriotism or rush to signify someone as “evil,” genuinely ask yourself how you’d behave, what you’re government would do, and what’s really at stake.

Here I see the power of music. It’s an open invitation to jump into someone else’s world, cynically contrived or not. Empathy splashed around to be basked in at your leisure or desperation. Justification rendered impotent and insulting. You could no more question divine love for orphans when you absolutely should.

I think transformative artists and compelling work needs to be respected, protected, and inducted. I like feeling a fire or comfort from the right song at the right time. I remain “stuck” more concerned with the truth about Imagine not dictating our foreign policy. I get by knowing most of my friends are stressed, broke, and more lonely than they’d let on. I can actually play American Idiot, and no matter how angrily I sing or loud I crank the amp, we’re still pretty fucking idiotic.

I come back to my truth. I don’t seek to disrespect or degrade the work that has moved me too. It’s just work in a very specific self-indulgent direction. Self-indulgent doesn’t have to mean “bad” or “selfish.” It just needs a more dramatic fissure than a liberal artist getting pissed off at a crazy person co-opting their message and sound.

I pick up on habits of self-justification. How you feel being all that matters. The difference between how an artist speaks to you about war and your appreciation for the reasons we engage in and perpetuate wars cannot be understated. It’s bathing in a pool of empathic feelings not tied to the deeper reality, deeper consequence. I can’t call you “wrong” about what U2 means to you, but I can know how fucked Live Aid left Africa. No one was really trying to walk around in Africa’s shoes, even if they really felt like they were doing something good.

There’s a kind of happiness and motivation that is unmatched when you’re working in service to the bigger picture. I hit large periods of not playing music because I feel too dishonest. I’m not expressing as much as copying or drilling. I’m not telling a story as much as I’m trying to distract myself. I don’t want to see an old nuclear silo, poorly maintained and understaffed in nowhere Ohio, “accidentally” turn the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame into a wasteland. The situation not made better by my favorite bands in hazmat suits standing atop the rubble vigorously belting out a protest song.

The equivocation remains at the level of feeling and awareness. I’m not telling bands to fix war. I’m telling you to not allow yourself the feeling that they might. Your brain doesn’t split hairs about what you feel or can be made to believe. Certain truths need a louder volume. They need to beat harder than your heart and your fist. They need to ring with the many voices of adopted and respected realities you’re not habituated in seeking or figuring out. We sing alone and will die together.