[1096] Your Turn

Whether I wanted to or not, the moment calls for writing. My friend and business partner’s wife was in a bad car accident. As of this writing, whether or not she is alive is uncertain. When these kinds of tragedies hit, for me, certain things snap into focus. Major questions about our working assumptions rise straight to the top.

It’s freezing. Whatever else I may discover to say while writing this, most of the country is cold as fuck and I’ve been particularly so with my poorly insulated fort house. The roads aren’t great, and I’ve had just enough slippage while driving my country roads to remind me of the standing precarity of winter. I’ve slowed down to let several, bolder idiots, pass me, invariably in Jeeps, “4-wheel drives,” or SUVs. I’ve had enough scares and slides off the road to build the extra 20 minutes into my patience.

Many people drive as though black ice, hills, or other drivers aren’t a thing. I’ve dipped my toes into a few days of Door Dashing, and I swear the general behavior of cars on the road is hard to believe. I’ve been a delivery boy in the past. I’ve driven a cab. I’ve driven all over the state of Indiana in service to visit supervision and my DCS responsibilities. I’ve spent an obscene amount of time behind the wheel, and I’ve never felt more under threat than I do today. I also watched a documentary recently that seemed to back up my instinct showing an increase in accidents and death due, in part, to disingenuous oversized car designs.

We all, myself included, treat driving as “just another thing.” We’re in the U.S. You have to drive everywhere for anything. For all the people who instinctively say “Well you’re so far away from everything!” about my living conditions have never timed themselves in traffic heading to the mall or work that’s “just up the road.” It’s the kind of thing you build instincts about that you don’t even realize unless someone points them out to you. It’ll speak to your budget, how much time you think you do or don’t have, jobs you can take, or if you have a truck, things like moving tasks and preparing for winter by weighing down the bed.

It would take a major catastrophe or revolution to get you to think differently about your life in a way that genuinely considered not having a car. You’d have to be plugged into a system with robust, safe, and clean transportation or where most of your needs were within walking distance. If you hit a high financial status you could ensure someone was transporting you or transporting things to you. The benefits and pitfalls of car ownership are a quasi-universal accepted norm. We accept the pollution, how many people die, the unfair and unreasonable costs of insurance, and the insane price tags for the concurrent status and head turns.

We don’t imagine every time we hop in our car that it might be for the last time. It might even be considered a kind of pathological thought pattern to concern ourselves with that thought too deeply or too often. A tire popping at the exact wrong time or a swerving truck or drunk speed runner might be modern analogies for the dangerous animal lurking in the bushes waiting to pounce and eat us. If you’ve watched any nature documentary, the second the prey escapes, it’s back to life as usual. We might have considerably better odds of surviving our encounters, but we falter through the same slack in our awareness, bad lack, or along lines of thinking that take a world of things for granted.

In and of itself, to take something for granted is simply how we operate. Your brain makes shortcuts to condense and map the world. If you haven’t died in a car accident for 35 years, you’ve got tens of thousands of times and hours suggesting today won’t be the day. It doesn’t mean you forgo your seatbelt, or that you make it a point to venture out in the shittiest of shit weather, but it does mean that you may have drifted into a space that doesn't keep your guard up. Combine this baseline disposition with any other thing that’s going on that day like stressors, a phone call, bad weather, you’re tired, the kids screaming in the back, etc. and it's a wonder we’re not crashing more often than we already do.

How do we treat the crash when it occurs? It’s almost a statistical inevitability, at least as much as heart disease or cancer. Are we left in shock? Did we believe it was a real possibility all along, or are we paradoxically now demanded to wrestle with a previously inconceivable reality? In fact, there are decades of industry and oversight designed to make thinking about such a reality increasingly hard to do. What did we think about our car, or loved ones in it, before the crash? Here is where my sensibility of the world comes to a head.

I think about death constantly. I don’t do 90% of the things I do unless I’m asking myself what example I’d wish to set if I died tomorrow. I’m asking myself if I’ll give a shit about a decision 60 years from now presuming I’ll make it to 100. I’m entertaining contingency plans for when the ideas or people I attempt to invest in inevitably flake and metaphorically die. I think about why you do or don’t choose to be bold and direct and honest as though you have forever to find a space that you can share and celebrate or draw strength from. When I think about my friend’s wife potentially dying, I’m worried for him, because I think he’s afflicted with the same assumptions almost everyone carries - that we’ll live forever.

I can’t help but to speak to reason ten million I hate religion. It’s an emotionally salient training mechanism to pretend that right now doesn’t matter. And every time it betrays you or its adherents betray when they allegedly believe, like magic, it turns into an excuse to double down and profess that much harder. I can’t look away from the hundreds of believers I’ve witnessed losing someone who just don’t seem convinced they’re gonna see that loved one again one day. It’s not in their face and eyes. It’s as if every wasted opportunity while they were alive becomes a basin of infinite guilt. Should you not rejoice knowing they made it “home” before you? Aren’t you relieved that cosmic/karmic justice came for your bubble? Of course you aren’t.

We want it both ways. We want to feel good when our support systems support us and we want to feel good about taking for granted and taking advantage of those systems. We want the comfort of our good nature and good deeds to overrule the alligator capitalizing on our innocent drink. We act as though the ambivalence of nature or existence isn’t the thing to contend with. We act like we’re not in a constant state of flux, neither good nor bad, and none of us gets out alive.

My friend is as hard-working and self-sacrificing of a person as I’ve ever met. As if anyone “deserves” tragedy, he’s not the one you’d wish it on. He’s still under a spell of bad assumptions. It manifests as stress his doctor has warned him about. It manifests as a kind of trolley losing more and more control as it barrels down the rails. It’s still on the rails, but no one on board believes they're going to survive the dramatic stop. I worry that whether or not she survives, he isn’t in the place to take the example as a cue to slow down and smell the roses. How can you? How can you think that in the wake of tragedy, or losing the love of your life, that it’s the time to root through reasons to keep going? There’s “romantic” schools of thought that would powerfully assert he should follow her.

One of the themes of many of my clients who struggle with addiction was an inability to effectively grieve. People they lost years ago might as well have been yesterday. Every year around the time the person died was difficult for the months leading up to it and for weeks or months after. They were essentially stuck in the pain and confusion of what that person represented for them. It’s easy to get stuck in those places when you’re lost in the story of your relationships versus the practice and exercise of them. How do you resolve something that, maybe in a deeply important way, doesn’t actually exist save the story you’re telling about it? What if you don’t even realize that until the story is ripped away from you?

[1071] You're Gonna Die, Gonna Die, Gonna Die

Oh dear.

It's not that I can't handle silence. It's not that I'm afraid of what's in my head. It's not feeling overwhelmed by loneliness. It's not anxiety for what's to come.

It's dread. It's a hopeless void that somehow infinitely recurs. It's hearing and seeing all the same things under the sun, and facing the impossibility of escape.

There's an unbridgeable void between the world of logic and the world of what we feel. When I say unbridgeable, I mean that any time one is built, it collapses moments after. You can read every contrary book, live well into your elderly years, and listen to thousands of embattled pleas to be understood, and you will die smiling and assured in your personal truth.

I got 14 minutes into this mini news documentary on Indiana passing a near-total abortion ban. I watched an old white dumb cunt representative skip on by a question about the benefits there are for the 10-year old girl who was raped. I can't help but think of the potential for escalation with regard to this country's fascism almost every day, what the ongoing wars will bring, or what ecological or economical cliff the "elite" will have us barrel towards next.

We want to die.

I don't know how to arrive at any clearer a sentiment. Of all the patterns I profess to notice, this one just keeps popping up in new and tired forms. We simply want to die.

We want to die through our work. We will do so functionally 24 hours a day. We build our entire lives around the dictates of work. We've, barely, scraped back almost laughable dignities when compared to others or our ideals. We think about work when we're not working. We anticipate the work we must do when we get off work. We dream about new and marginally better, if not at least different, work when we're not at it. We don't wish to exist. We wish to work so long and hard that we cease to exist.

We want to die through our entertainment. We want to die so bad, we don't even recognize it as entertainment. We're squawking through the whole performance. We don't see the stories they are telling because we aren't heroes or even background characters. We're watchers. It's meant to be on, streaming, endlessly, racking up views and playing ads. You're not supposed to take up your own sword like some hero of your own existence. You're not supposed to see yourself as the funny one, poised for a romantic tryst, or scheming to enact your hidden agenda. You're a 1 or a 0, selecting from interchangeable squares calculating in real time which ones to show you next.

We want to die through our politics. This almost doesn't feel worth elaborating. The cultural psychosis that is Trump worship is tantamount to a religious inquisition. We celebrate, not just ignorance, but determined and proud denial of facts, science, or the language and possibility of a shared existence. Conviction and repetition sweep us under like an ocean current. I predict hundreds of thousands will die before you get half a generation attempting to undue the damage of the last 50 years.

We want to die through our relationships. We let our abusive and dismissive family members tear through our self-conception. We let our partners control us. We let our kids run amok. We let our relatives take advantage and get demanding and we pray away the self-respect and responsibility it would take to cut them off or tell them the truth. We enable self-pitying and compulsive excuses to stay lazy, silent, and distant. We seek people who "compliment" our pathological self-destructive narratives and coddle our unhealthy coping mechanisms.

We want to die through our memes. Who needs an "original" thought? Why sit with yourself long enough to conceive of a means of describing your life or circumstances after asking and wrestling with questions that arose in you? Do questions even arise in you? The answers are in limitless supply, so why question? Some errant "thought leader" said it first, and certainly meant it exactly as you feel they must have. Just as well. Who has the time to write, or read, or embody a series of difficult contradictions when the right voices, color patterns, and approved activities can be added to the conveyor for all to notice and not be threatened by?

We want to die through our language. It's just empty. It means nothing. It's the fakest most painful series of interactions I have every day. So much nothing, about nothing, for no one. You wanna hang out sometime? Maybe if I hound you for a month. You're upset about the state of the world? Bet we didn't read the same series of articles. You wish "things" were "different" or "better" than you have now? Whether you practice the naked ironic inability to appreciate all you currently have, or you dutifully abstain from pushing yourself to budget and coalition build, every path leads to pre-verbal sensations of cyclical inured guilt.

We want to die in our celebrations. Halloween is so many people's favorite holiday, right before they slump into a 3-5 month depression remembering everyone who isn't coming to Thanksgiving or how many Christmases have been nothing but stress. We carry dreadful narratives about what one must do with and for "family" no matter the cost. We pretend not to resent all the effort we might put into the facade, and the obliviousness and disregard from the other players leaves us not quite unaware of how suicides tick up this time of year.

We want to die in our addictions. It's not so straight-forward as to suggest we wish to go down in some hazy bliss of an overdose or poisoning. We want to die by being beholden to our comfort, our pattern, our overseer. Be it a persistent avoidance of the feelings and traumas and ignorance of how we're wired, or kneeling in prayer for getting "stable" on a "harm-reduction" medication, we wish to be absolved of ourselves through the rituals and the rulers. "As long as I have my x, I'll be okay." As long as I never determine what it means to be "I," any x'll do in making and following a rule.

We want to die as watchers. The more we watch how others are or aren't, we can implicitly compare and reassure ourselves that, wherever we are, at least we're not over there. When you watch, you get to trick yourself into thinking you only exist right behind your eyes. You're not your body, your words, your works, nor anything more abstract like your potential, your intention, or your awareness. Ephemeral bursts of agency or desperate claps-back serve to embarrass and train to self-correct. Don't change, fix, or challenge. Watch the story unfold, hit your mark, and play along.

We want to die as consumers. We'll bleed the planet dry for doodads. We'll burn ourselves alive to keep things "convenient" and "cheap." We'll bemoan soaring coasts and defer to inflation before we face our own greed that would obligate us to hold others to account for theirs. There will never be enough to buy, therefore never enough produced or commodified. When the robots learn how to do it for everything physical, you'll find even more ways to divide up and price out your soul.

We'd rather die than forgive. We'd rather die than admit. We'd rather die than acknowledge words like "humility" and "wisdom" even exist. We scream and cry when concerted efforts are successful in their explicitly stated aim to kill us, and we don't try to defend ourselves let alone kill back. We die in our silence and complicity and late-to-the-party complaints as though we weren't happy to celebrate our deaths as long as they were politely dressed and laughably convoluted and incoherent. They would never! Say the incredulous bloviators. Yet, they always do.

Unfortunately for you, you're not dead yet. Your merely meager and often feeble existence is still killing us all considerably more than it's keeping us alive. You know how I know? You're silent. You're alone. You're depressed. You're anxious. You're confused. You're exhausted. You're poor, but not poor poor. You're stuck. You're afraid. You're working incredibly hard to not feel how deeply all of these things you are, and you're scared of touching how close you exist to death, and how often you seek it.

Or, maybe, you occupy an entirely different world than I do. Maybe you're in some pocket of middle-class bliss and reverie that one such as me has never known. Maybe Jesus is keeping you so safe and snug that you can't wait to ride the next catastrophe into His Light. Maybe everyone else's mythical beings you don't believe in are really the ones looking out for you, but they aren't taking it personally. You're already in the club, right? Just gotta dance, drink, and hit on people. It's simple. Just gotta believe. Gotta have faith. There's always hope to be had in something.

Death will be a gift, but only if you've figured out how to live before it gets you. All this practicing and dress rehearsal is a mockery. Wake up. You're asleep. You are drifting between narratives that have nothing to do with you or what you need. Your voice works. Your work matters. You need to find the things to fight and push through instead of treading water. There is no prize at the end. All you have is right now.

[975] Mo Mo Mo

I need to spend some time thinking about my motivation. In no way will I be able to synthesize the thoughts before now because I’ve passed up at least 3 times I probably should have started writing.

I do things, often enough, after being backed into a corner. I create debt for myself so I can get a “real job” and provide the justification to submit myself to the pain that entails. I might physically exhaust myself on some task so I can shake off the “I’m not doing enough” feeling. I create these kind of high-stakes social dynamics that pit your sense of cordial duty against my righteous indignation, so by the time we’ve disassociated, I don’t have to pretend there’s a bridge worth repairing.

I had a lot of energy when I was in high school, college, and right after college, to push an incredibly strong notion of “excelling.” It could be attached to anything. I could take pride in the sheer amount of TV I was able to watch, or the efficiency with which I made money doing drug studies. Academically, the designation of “A” had lost its muster, so I tested how A/B-ish I could be with the least amount of effort possible, and I decided to get really good at partying. I was pumping a certain kind of psychologically gratifying, albeit arbitrary, stats. Who cares if I can go from zero to coffee shop in 4 months? Just me.

I seem to do things in a disproportionate way, just not precisely the things I’d really rather be doing. When I get the chance to do what I’d rather be doing, the rules of life are still at play. This speaks to an underlying motivation at play at all times. I want to exist in a way that renders those life circumstances mute. I want to always have the money, the time, or the help. I can’t change the weather, but I can build a considerable amount indoors. If there’s a rule that would stop me, I want to have the means to undermine or circumvent it. This could also be a complicated way of describing the drive towards creative self-expression.

The desire to accomplish “small” things plays by more viscerally practical rules. I almost never leave trash laying around. Shit’s in the way. I don’t have a lot of space, and I don’t want shit in the way. I may dawdle on doing dishes because until they’re in the way of me eating or making food, they’re where dirty dishes belong. When you own a house, something’s always broken or missing, but it gets ridiculous to think that you’ll account for it all in every moment you notice that the milk is low or bugs’ nest isn’t easily accessible. There’s less “do it now” with those things, and they get grouped for weekends or those days where you’re just really into getting things done.

I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast, and he brought up how we’re always looking for the next thing, living in this illusion that obtaining it will make us happy. I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary as a compulsive millionaire gambler blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a few days. I’ve noticed the eyes of the bewitched with their hollow desperate and craving emptiness for recognition of their suffering when their persona wears thin. I suppose I’m lucky to have maintained a kind of motivation to not end up perpetually in that state.

I don’t like to feel bad. This may seem like a weird thing to have to state so plainly. I think it’s important to do so though. It’s more than obvious. I don’t like to feel bad so much, that I will write for years until I feel a little bit better. I don’t like to feel bad to such a degree, that I will work myself to death to ensure the thoughts in my head align with a decent-to-exceptional conception of myself. I might habitually bite off more than I can chew, but I took the bite, and I’m still chewing. The moment I felt what rolfing could do for my physical well-being, that money was gone. My food budget is so high because the shittiest I tend to feel is when I haven’t eaten enough. Again, we could describe this as being up against a kind of pain-threshold wall.

When I think about how we evolve, it’s selection pressure. What is the environment selecting for? What genes are being activated under the current constraints? If we talk about different “classes” and the cultures they entail, is it down to the biology that iterating obnoxious selfishness plays out in superficially different ways? You can complain about black-on-black violence as a loud example, but how many people suffer and die as a result of greed? Why is greed good in rich culture? The environment dictates the conditions for remaining in said environment. You might not consider yourself rich, certainly not Bezos-rich, so the nature of your greed, familiar, common, is hardly noticed. You’ve got an HOA to answer to, and you earned your privacy fence.

I’ve removed a lot of the walls in my journey through this shed-life thing. It’s sweltering outside, and cool in here. I’m still inconvenienced in my bathroom and kitchen setups, but I’m not flinging shit out the window nor going hungry. All of my effort to build more is in service to creating new corners to get backed into. I have the tools, now they need a home. If they’re not running, why did I buy the tools? Indefinite hobby and selective guilt await. If I think someone is special or unique, well, surely, they deserve my effort to create something cool! I get to take it a step further. If I don’t dictate, complicate, or imbue my work into a larger context, I just sit and wait for things to happen. I refresh facebook and reddit. I marathon TV and don’t think too hard about the gross juxtaposition of “marathon” and “TV.”

It’s been insufferably hot lately. You think I’m building my workshop in that? I already barely drink enough water or eat right, let alone wear sunscreen or generally go about things that would suggest to you I don’t like to feel bad. If I feel faint upon opening the door, game over for that idea. Are there things that need to be done indoors? Kinda, but no, not really. If I choose to rearrange the furniture again, it’s hard to say what’s been accomplished beyond it feeling good to pretend exercise and experience the different room flow.

This is a restatement that the vast majority of my “problems” are, not. I’m not a jaded and broken millionaire feeding machines hundred-dollar bills, but I’m also not a millionaire. I’m not cripplingly sick or in mental turmoil, but I don’t have health insurance. I know how to swim, I’m not drowning, but the only race I’m in is against death, which serious as it might sound, I can’t win.

I really do feel like I have made a concerted effort over time to be okay with whatever “this” moment is. I affirm my health, wealth, comfort, kitties, conveniences, computers, and capacity for compartmentalizing my competing conceptions. It doesn’t take away from my desire to proverbially “take over the world,” but it does mean I don’t suffer the anxiousness or depressive guilt by not “excelling” via being busy or “above” in my concerns for how I’m spending my time. If I had millions of dollars right now, you know what I’d probably still be? Alone. It might be with someone(s) happy to spend my money with me in the next room of fancier architecture in a distant locale, but people I consign to my larger goals would be just that, paid for.

Part of me feels like that’s an incredibly real scenario because of how hard it’s been to get people to join, with weeks or months-notice or otherwise, what I’ve been up to. I do have friends and my dad who are down, it’s not a desert in spite of what the weather suggests. But I’ve had people kind of flirt with the idea of spending time together or doing stuff. I’m not their priority, which is perfectly fine, it just naturally translates that will continue to hold whether I’m inviting you to Fiji or a comedy show. You’ll have a life and obligations that I’m supposed to what? Pay you to put aside like any good capitalist?

It feels like I’m talking about that sneaking suspicion we all might have that there really is no “our” page, goal, or reality. That doesn’t mean reality won’t kill us all the same or that we don’t rhyme, but it does heartily explain the appeal of religion. You don’t want to go through a series of thoughtful, accountable, and painful evolutions in thought or behavior? Check out this brand-new forgiveness for sale! Just give it up to God! You can be as free as Sam Harris in his disposing of free will! Good is good, evil is evil, and we’re all just along for the circularly-reasoned ride! Yee-haw! I still believe “consciousness” is the “what” that makes the indeterminate determinate, so I struggle, or futilely refuse, to be a happy cog. I didn’t will myself into existence, but if I maintain my faculties and shoot myself in the head anyway, you’re gonna get an attestation of the nature of my will, messily depicted and ironically incomplete in its finality.

The last time I used “motivation” in the title of a blog was in January 2013. A few lines from that blog stick out to me, but as I started to mine them, it seems inadequate to the task. You should read it after this one. What’s clear, is that at least 9 years ago, I still hated the idea of getting a normal job, knew no one would respect me or my time like I might, and I acknowledge the conditional nature of my being. I was aware of the clarity that having a goal provides. I was suspicious of the form my potential impact on the world could take. I lamented people who couldn’t pair their best ideas with any practical actions.

Do I even remember what I was doing in 2013? 2 years after college I was probably failing at the mobile coffee van and circling the pillow of the loner-in-the-basement status I was about to adopt. A month later I was speaking to the comfort I felt thinking Kristen and I were in the same kind of relationship and I was understood lol. Maybe we were at that point, who knows, I only have one-sided small and garbled snapshots.

It’s easy to get lost. I repeat myself a lot. In going through and scanning some old blogs I’ve like reignited the memory of the “stuck” and anxious place that I fairly-well grounded into the center of my being. 9 years ago? I was in a long-term relationship. I was just starting to do drug studies. I had a lot of ideas and energy to put behind my informal “retire by 30” plan. Was my motivation fundamentally different than it is today? In the greatest sense, no. I still want the same non-physical things. I don’t feel like I have any less “energy” than I did then, it’s just not sporadically involving itself with more than I can reasonably address in any given moment.

I think I feared that if I calmed down, I would start to “settle” and look and sound like all of the people I grew a severe distaste for. The ones who have every excuse not to move to the middle of nowhere and try to get out ahead of our modern fall of civilization. The ones who blow superficial smoke up every ass of interaction because that’s what polite society expects. The ones who just stay silent and suffer indefinitely and live vicariously through comedian commentary or the pleasant pictures whirring by. It was harder to recognize or accept my “alone” status because I was with someone. I wasn’t so far removed from college and there was still a fair amount of people left to drift away. My environment dictated, for as much as I was talking about it.

That I’m where I am in life now, I think speaks to how much I’ve maintained a sense of self and orientation in spite. My capacity, happiness, or direction isn’t fundamentally dictated nor rooted in “you.” I choose friends. I chose to suffer the discrepancies and loss. All these new babies hitting the scene are going to die. You knew that when you got into baby-making mode. They may even die before you, and isn’t that colloquially understood as the worst kind of tragedy? Surely it wasn’t thoughts like those that fed your motivation to have a child. I thought, probably incorrectly, that I envied people who found their deepest sense of purpose and drive to ensure their children grew up and passed those genes on. What a burden to carry if you don’t know why you’re doing it.

You can linguistically reduce all efforts to procreate or proliferate literature to the same nihilistic absurdity. You can ignore that it might just feel good. It doesn’t have to be deep. You may just exist to be personally gratified, at least the conscious part of you, for as long as you can. A kid gets wrapped up in that? All the more collateral damage. I mean, child brides are still a thing, and I don’t know if you know how many kids are molested growing up, but you’re not gonna find a statistic that won’t remind you how woefully under-reported the 25-30% of the known cases are speaking to.

Have you noticed the drift in this blog? How did I get to child molesting? Isn’t this about motivation? As I continue to describe my spite engine as moving me right along, it’s no wonder the sheer amount of atrocity that’s pressed right up against how I conceive of my effort and best conception of the world. To talk of “my motivation” or “spite engine” is just a personal understanding of the marriage and dance at the conflicted ever-changing heart of existence. I think about death constantly, and it makes me want to live a certain way. I still don’t know that the reasoning I apply for my own existence I would use in service to a new child, but I also don’t think early-abortion cells, or any persons, are going to an afterlife.

Motivation feels like a calculation. I want many things at once. I want them in perpetuity. I’ve both experienced intellectually and emotionally the reality and diminishing returns of the mere acquisition. You can’t just make a friend. You have to celebrate, and work with, and evolve together. You can’t just buy things or amass wealth; you have to put them to work. Things like Amazon and SpaceX are incidental giants who need to create giant corners to get backed into like I need to pile up a few dishes and turn 2x4s into adult building blocks.

We’re shaped by these unconscious desires to belong to something “more” and beyond ourselves. The endless irony being, we perpetuate circumstances that keep us isolated, angry, and feeling almost perfectly misunderstood. We keep up the façade that we can’t learn or connect, share in our goals and motivation, by staying silent unless it’s to say something disparaging or superficial. My motivation is inextricably tied to my awareness and the demonstration and repeatability of that awareness. I know I’m going to die not feeling really any more or less happy than I have for the last 9 if not 18 years since I started writing.

I don’t make it a secret that I want you to speak, or that I’m going to. I won’t be surprised if things turn out as bad as those who’ve been paying attention say they will. I won’t lose my motivation to fight or create or move the hell out of the way. There is no illusion about life I need to paint over how I actually feel and think, even if I didn’t “will” every impression I could extract. I will the words. I will the movement. I’m not at the mercy of my chaotic and contradictory heart. I dance with the chaos, and in so doing, create an order that suggests balanced direction. Who could get tired doing that?

[908] Mirror Mirror

 “Right, but which truth are you going with?”

I feel like it's been a while since I've written. I'll lump this in with my blog from yesterday. At once, I've thought I've had so little to say and it wouldn't be worth it, and yet my entire world is still happening, still chugging in some kind of direction. Things still annoy me, and there is always some level of existential crisis to constantly unpack.

You never are really allowed to stop talking. That is, it's always very noisy. There's TV, news media, YouTube personalities, best-selling authors, and that nagging so-and-so in your life. Your kids never shut up. Your brain, plagued by anxiety or otherwise, reminding you or hinting at all of the things you're not giving the requisite attention to. It's an unconscious conversation with yourself at all times, manifesting as distracted or hurried moves in the world meant to assert or pacify.

Adam Curtis's latest documentary “Can't Get You Out Of My Head” just taught me Valium was trying to quell the emptiness in 1971. The Sackler's then kept on sacking. Today, I have endless discussions to nowhere with people addicted to opiates, trying to reorient their behavior into something “healthy” or “productive,” or in their words, “normal.” Curtis's documentaries are a meditation on the infinite amount of forces and ideologies permeating every thought we have. Coincidentally, I just saw the movie “The Sound of Metal” that ends on a scene where the main character shuts off his cochlear implants to finally take in a moment of stillness.

It bears remembering at all times that you will die. I think when death is fresh in your mind, you get more deliberate, more patient, and find more meaning. Your example is one you choose to set more than the one you are incidentally setting through circumstance. When you can own your death you can begin a life project you feel motivated to be responsible for. Death is hardly something people take a significant amount of time trying to define. Death is the thing to be protected from, reacted to. It's not something to bear proudly or exalted by anyone but mythological heroes who, in one form or another, get put right back through the human anxiety machine and are reborn or otherwise immortalized.

I think I understand power as a complex way of denying death. Whether you rise through the ranks of a particular organization or terrorize your household, you haven't sorted through your powerlessness in the face of death. You'll never terrorize to the degree you feel terrorized. You'll never control more than the law of entropy. You can lead the dance of your conversation and observation about death or things breaking apart, but you're going to trip. I think as with most ironically held desires, you get power when you don't want it or pursue paradoxical ends given the contexts in which it is sought. Who is more powerful, the dictator, or revolutionary? To me, both are undermined by the power of ideology, thus I feel the most powerful in my understanding of the broader context or nature of the human mind. It's on me to not let that become its own pathological ideology.

Thus a habit of persistent scrutiny and healthy doubt must be employed. An active discussion about balancing forces must take place. Without them, we become defaulted to the sea of indifferent and incidental forces of infinitely fluctuating power. If you believe nothing else about your place in existence, it's that you have the ability to speak to, examine, and shift what you think and feel. Perhaps you do it for the sake of the shifting. Perhaps you have grand designs to help others shift in different or easier ways than the current culture paradigms allow for. Regardless of your aim, it behooves you to understand the nature of the game and forces you are up against. Ignoring them is how the disillusioned fringe become the next tyrants.

So much of my effort is in pursuit of the privilege to be left alone. I don't want to fight. I don't want to have my brain hijacked by the chaos of people unable or unwilling to sip let alone gulp responsibility for how their miserable consciousness is manifesting in the world. I comfortably eschew your decision-making whilst still respect how little I believe there's much of a “you” there deciding to do anything. I tie that struggle to the practical options I wish to give myself in the world I'm bound to. Oh, you want fascism? I can probably buy my way out of its worst consequences. You're just super stoked to keep denying history and racism? Bet I don't use my future wealth to back minority-owned businesses or support immigration causes.

I think of my obligation to the world or myself as a form of asymmetrical warfare. I'm not gonna storm the capital like an insurrectionist dipshit. I want to create diffuse loci of power. I want to be off-grid. I want to be multi-lingual and counter-cultural in a perpetually subversive manner. I want to take the diffuse and abstract and meet it with an intentional greater abstraction driven by a tempered wisdom and playfulness about what it is I'm really after or how it might get there. I know I can't “control” in the colloquial sense. But I can acknowledge my identity, my mark, and witness my environment get shaped around my ideals. That's as close to peace as I'm going to find. That's how I get to die in my world on my terms.

My clients tell me often how their drug use did not make anything better. “It masked or numbed what I was feeling, but...” Same story every single time. Same truism, cliché, almost rehearsed lines. The response? Do the drug again. The mind's agency has been subverted. The compulsion capitulated to. The forces their brains formed around win again and again. They'll say, “Well everyone's addicted to something.” I can agree, but arguably in a deeper way than they're even speaking to, as they're employing the saying from an excuse-ridden place. It's dismissing their agency and responsibility verses acknowledging how someone else's addiction might mirror our own and then asking ourselves what to do about it.

I discover my responsibility every time I ask the question. It's no small feat to take it upon yourself to ask the question. It's any wonder how you build the resilience to keep asking every day or every moment. It's terrifying work on its face. It's the killing of ceaseless presumptions and pretensions that would otherwise occupy the space for the question. It's a space people are happy to fill in for you when you're not paying attention.

At some point, I think it was in early high school, it sunk in that my eyes were permanently nailed open. Whether I understood what I was watching or not, I had to keep looking and feeling and coping with it. I had to make peace or I would drive myself insane. I had to write. I had to read and question. I had to argue. I had to stand for the slivers of hope and peace I could cut out of otherwise ceaseless angst and pain. So I started writing. I started anchoring my experience in a sea of words that more often seem to make considerably more sense to me than anyone else. I observe myself trying and organizing and turning consciousness into a reflection. It makes me feel better and like I can begin moving again in the world; like I have a stake and ability to change and grow with as opposed to suffer from. It wasn't magic. I didn't start believing in mythical beings who granted me special privileges. I just paid more attention. In doing so, it becomes pretty fucking clear what other people are ignoring, and what, if anything, I can responsibly do about it.

[748] Weeds

I must be weird.

In an interview to work for The Department of Child Services, the interviewer relayed to me a quote from a long-time judge. “A cop can be on the job for 31 years and then retire, and they'll see less trauma than your office will in 6 months.” I didn't blink.

Death, trauma, evil, pain, exploitation, lies, and otherwise wanton destruction or violence make sense to me. I thought I was mis-remembering a video I saw once of Mexican drug cartel members getting beheaded with a chainsaw, looked it up, and forgot it was only one who got the chainsaw, the other a knife. I couldn't recall if the chainsaw grazed the 2^nd guy's arm, but I thought it did, and I didn't see him flinch. Odd as it may sound, I think those, former, Mexican gangsters and I had something in common. They'd clearly accepted something about their circumstances. While I'm still flinching in the face of chainsaws, so have I.

What's striking to me about this disposition is how often and vehemently it's labeled or discussed as “negative” or “nihilistic” or “dark” or “pessimistic” or “inappropriate” or whatever analogue that is the opposite of life, joy, or the pursuit of something affirmative and lasting. And for the thousandth time I've referenced the irony at the base of everything, I think we're striking a bedrock psychological example. Some might find it as easy as asking yourself, how better to stay alive than understand as many ways in which you could die?

There's dying in the fun ways, like as many times as it takes to watch your favorite violent movie. We reenact famous plays where the characters die for love or power. We play fight and die as children. We employ a vague notion of death at a level of embarrassment or shock and intrigue. We make a game out of killing bacteria or shedding old skin in personal hygiene. Video and carnival games pick off people and ducks. Death is playful, when we want it to be.

There's ideological death. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” In the face of technological and social upheaval, many a foundation are shaken. Who you were as a believer can be as dramatic a personality shift as the alcoholic turned stone sober from “giving it all up to God.” A part of you that was protecting something died, or a part of you that was never quenched decided to kill. Maybe you were viciously hurt in love and now live in the wake of the sewage of your emotions. Maybe you were neglected and couldn't spell the word “family” or “mom” if your life depended on it. Maybe you're just realizing that no matter what you do, you'll never be the child you remember, and it's time to sober up to the “real world.”

But here again, I think I must be weird. All of that seems very familiar. I didn't really have to explain how we play with death or understand the consequences of polluting someone's mind with abuse or their naive notions of love. I mean, we literally call them “plays.”

What kills me is how (successfully?) we're pretending we're not hyper-obsessed with death. Isn't all of existence speaking to it? Isn't it the root of self-sabotage? Isn't it our addictions? Isn't it our complacency? Isn't it our entertainment, or undue celebration for personal victories, and betraying our pithy grudges? Aren't we alive as a result of all the other things we're willing to kill around us? Personal preferences held up as badges of honor. Friendships unburdened by truth or struggle. Vicious internet opinions, like so many assholes, meant to defend and defame, who? For what? In the first calculations, save the final, where does it all go? It's what we feed off of. It's nourishment.

I think this speaks to the romance narrative of death. Something has to die so others can live. We need to be proper Donner party members. I feel I watch this play out everywhere, all the time. School ate us alive. The mall ate my coffee shop. My aunts and uncles ate my grandparents, dad, and stepmom. My brother wishes he could eat me. Our country was eaten by the rich and vitriolically opportunistic. And we cheered them on because we saw so much of ourselves in them. A concert of Little Deaths, in an endless blinding sequence of pleasure.

Think how closely this mirrors and pollutes the idea of sacrifice. The death of a sacrifice isn't superficial. It's payment. It's respect. All you have to do in order to hijack it is claim you've put up whatever your particular god thinks is due, and bask in the glory. “I worked for everything I have! Fuck the moochers!” You killed your time, after all, in presumably much harsher circumstances and with greater loss than those struggling to get by now. The truth of who you've eaten be damned.

How do we “get better?” Think about it. How will the economy improve? Once we get people to eat more! Eat more Iphones, cars, and prepared meals. Eat your heart out at a generic “job.” How do we fix loneliness and boredom? Eat more Netflix and video games! Eat this new hobby and finely tuned pill. How do we celebrate in spite of every-day personal folly and failure? Eat this World Series win! Eat this master of his craft! Eat this pre-approved algorithm of characters in this most popular genre! As long as something is lined up to fill our bellies, we presume “everything” should otherwise fall in to place.

I'm in a struggle for my life right now. That's what this blog is. I'm 6 months into the throes of “comfort” of a regular paycheck, menial task, and handful of things I'd like to get done each weekend or after work. I've been describing myself as Hank Hill. I've been saying, “We can spring for the extra to get that VIP, we're old!” Am I a function of my age? I have severe doubts about the nature of time for sure, and I suppose in small ways my body feels older, but I'd argue I'm significantly more all of the mess that spews out of me in disorganized angst-ridden energy. So how does that guy put on business clothes and sit in a cubicle? I suppose I'm starting with acknowledging all the different kinds of death, and seeing if I'm buying into them.

I can 8-4 it and still build. I can sit in a cubicle and call it analogous to the living room or basement I'd otherwise be sitting in. I gave myself all the free time in the world, no one wanted to play with me, I already know without a certain amount of money or vastly different group of friends, there's nothing outside and no greener grass. There's ideological death if I've ever seen it.

I've also been working on the narrative that might make me finally bored of TV. I'd like a proper “obsession” to be sure, but any type of work and otherwise worthwhile task makes something as stupid as finishing Arrow out of spite feel more than pointless. I probably still would anyway, as I feel my TV habit has morphed into a bigger point about how many hours are really in a day, but a budding desire for a dispositional death is still there. I don't really get lost in TV or movies like I used to, but then again, that's not really why I'm watching anymore.

I don't know where to introduce it, so it's now. All the death-talk and everything that comes with it being easy makes the appeal of what seems to be so hard inevitably compelling.

How often do you find the people going out of their way to bring about goodness? This is a question that's going to need a few different phrasings. Who goes out of their way to help people succeed? Who sacrifices themselves, in a healthy way, for the benefit of others? Who gets immense joy and pride out of helping? I mean actually helping, not lip service and “good intentions,” like picking the biggest and hardest things they think they can fix, and diving in? Would you even feel comfortable saying something like that about yourself? Or would it be in the form of something personal, like child-rearing? Perfectly noble to want to rear a healthy and happy kid in spite of the broken home they were born into.

“Nice” is something of an all-consuming novelty to me. I let my ideas of nice bite me with regard to friendship. We let it perpetuate myths of people like Mother Teresa or in Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Nice is there for the exploitation. At least, that's my instinct that I'm trying to correct. I have and have had actually nice, sacrificial, genuinely good and helpful examples in my life. I've been “saved,” not by God, but by my grandma and my dad. I know there are at least 2 people in life who never have and never will try to fuck me over with their “niceness.” That's fucking important.

The flip side of that is that for every dad I have and dead grandma I have memories of, I have half a dozen other family members not like that at all and significantly more acquaintances and former “friends” who are nothing like that. This is the battle. This is the burden of the genuinely good. The person who lives and creates life because of the celebration of what it can be, not for the exploitation of what it can give them. If anyone less “blunt” or “jaded” or “cold” or “intellectual” or “funny” or “persistently indignant in his railroading and intransigence” is dealing with the same numbers of shit verses nice as I am? Get right out of town. I don't employ my “I don't have hope” mantra on a whim.

Now, for the friends reading this who've bailed me out of something or stood by through a measure of bullshit, chillax, you're deeply rooted in my mind, you just weren't first. And the larger point remains, for every one of you, there's a dozen who've shit the bed in important and consequential ways.

I want to be the genuine article of things that surprise the every-loving fuck out of me if I ever see them in other people. That's in jokes. That's in endless exploration and nit-picking until something is understood and internalized. That's in 7 months of 13 hour days to get off and load up your ill-equipped car with wood to drag out to your pitch black field in the middle of the cold night so you can inch along progress on the thing you actually care about. That's letting go without forgetting. That's recognizing and holding your precious sacrifice out in front of you before you kill it, instead of taking for granted your mere discomfort is enough to supplement the dirty work you've yet to do.

That's where we're at right now culturally. “I'm uncomfortable.” The room gasps and those weak of stomach and will run for the doors. Someone is out to eat us. Batten down the hatches and prepare to be bombarded with waves of insincere pomp and incredulity. Birds chirp, “butwhatabout butwhatabout.” Prepare a victim, anyone, and feast on what falls out. Definitions are for the power mongers! We're hungry, dammit, and if I can't get that house, or car, or job, or the girl, or the right pills, or even just my way, then I'll take every ounce of you.

What's hard to cope with is the idea of being an NPC or non-playable character. In a virtual environment, you sort of reflexively believe they don't hurt anything, even if that's absolutely not the truth. They perpetuate the story. They steal your dragon egg. They present challenges and side-quests. You're the passive agent at the will of what these pre-programmed problems drop in your lap. You're of every consequence. You're not the hero. The hero is the myth. The hero is one who has to literally die and be reborn, which, I'll remind you, isn't fucking possible. You need missions that otherwise random idiots would be wandering around in the dark killing things if they weren't a part of. When you figure out what it is you can provide, you'll stop endlessly feeding.

This is at the heart of what I don't like about “normal” jobs. I don't want to feed off the teat of established norms. I don't provide “easy.” There are millions of people paycheck to paycheck with familiar narratives about what their responsibilities are and how to “fix” or meet them. I have work-arounds. There are endless creative paths to addressing problems across societal and psychological layers. I can do none of them in the environment presently offered. I find people who like to feed off of my honesty or “taboo,” because to embody where it comes from takes work they're not interested in. I give thousands of miles for every inch I try to take back. I'm on a mission to not lose myself across the many worlds I may inhabit. But I'm not in a video game, and I doubt someone's going to walk up to me to try and join my quest.

“A working-class hero is something to be.”

I look for the people who challenge me. I look for the orators I want to be like. I look for the papers I dream of writing and shows I wish I developed. I look for lines in songs that come up time and again. I force myself to think through the words that aren't there yet, and beyond the feelings that make me want to feast on everyone around me. I pursue what I actually picture in my mind's eye. If you're anything less, then you're less. I won't let you eat me.

[736] Not Worth It

I was robbed. More specifically, my stuff was broken into. Turns out, there is not such a thing as “the middle of nowhere.” It's very much more that “nowhere is safe.”

Let's start with context. This is stuff I've left alone in my field for over a year. This is stuff I've not used for even longer. This is some stuff I've gotten for free. This is stuff that, as I was driving up to check on it, I imagined was burned to the ground before I arrived.

All the same...today I was asked, “You never have problems, do ya?” by a grandma whose house one of my clients holds her visits. This grandma offers me drinks I can't take. She asks about turning on lights I'm not concerned with. She's quick to want to move the clothes out of my way when I'm sitting on the porch keeping an eye on the kids for the report. For everything she's asked me or offered to do, I've responded with some version of, “It's not a problem.” I explained, in my job, you're always reminded “relative to what?” My problems are abstracted out or can be explained away indefinitely.

So what do I call getting broken into? What do I describe of my land, with its overgrown brush spurred on by incessant rain, and littered with ticks? How do I regard walking up to a scene of mostly destruction as boxes were torn through and the things I've accumulated were strewn about the property? Is this not a great and opportune problem if there ever was one? Doesn't it suggest a whole host of problems that had to accumulate resulting in the scene before me?

It's important to note, I have too many competing feelings to let any one win. There's relief. Relief that I've so prioritized the things I own that anything really worth stealing is in a closet here at the apartment. There's pride that I packed that truck so tight that it was difficult for them to even be disappointed. There's fear. Fear that, get this, I'm convinced that were I there, and had taken the advice of my neighbor to own a gun, there would be at least one dead person on my land. But if an emotion might win, I'd want it to be sadness.

Let's do my crime scene show play by play. I walk up and see a gas can next to my van. The cap is missing. It looks as though someone has tried to siphon its gas. I get around the back of the van, the door is left open on the moving truck. 2 bikes are laying down with vines growing over them. It's happened maybe a week ago. A bin and sink are laying there. Pieces of my drum set are sitting next to the front door. My dresser, sitting on my bar, is tipped over, the bar top removed, all crashed into the shit stored in the middle of the moving truck. I look into my coffee van, it's a mess, the only things obviously missing are the Wal-Mart pseudo college dorm shelf bins that housed my cups.

My heart drops further. I try to door to the shed/house. It's still locked. I look around the property for anything else obviously missing, thinking of my ladder. It's still up against the house where I left it. I step into the truck. You can see where they climbed on top of the stuff to rip apart boxes and toss the load of free books I collected. They may have made off with my register, which was empty. It seems they got maybe an old game system and box with assorted dvds or a few games. Whatever else, I didn't stick around to assess any further.

Why does sadness, why should sadness, win? It's one thing to steal something. You can tell their first thought was to break into the truck and drive away with everything in it. Discovering it's a broken piece of shit, they proceeded to trash everything. They threw the books. They left the coffee cups and filters to rot in the grass and rain. My drums are warped. The sink I hunted down so I could afford and meet code had filled with dirty water. Everything about me. Everything about my effort and intention and will just shit on. I don't believe they needed money. I don't believe it was mere mischief. Abject absence of any conception of humanity trash-panda-d my life.

I don't want these kind of reminders about how I think. I would bet that you can read one or a dozen blogs and think it's mostly blowing off steam or some measure of incoherent heartache. No. It's a reminder that I actually am the way I am. I actually think the things I say over and over again. I actually have a solid conception of “not having any problems” and I am prepared to lose things. I'm waiting to die, every moment. What's disheveled storage container pipe dreams in the face of that?

What a situation like this really attacks though is more fundamental and more dangerous. What's it going to take? That is, I've tapped my spine, spent years saving, living frugally, alienating and isolating, reading and writing, planning and budgeting, got a small piece of land, put my shit out there. AND I COULDN'T EVEN GET THAT FUCKING RIGHT! What the fuck does it take to even be left alone POOR, SO FUCKING POOR POOR IDIOTIC FUCKS DON'T EVEN STEAL THE RIGHT SHIT! What THE FUCK am I doing so wrong, or so right, that I CAN'T JUST BE LEFT A FUCKING ALONE TO EVEN FUCKING TRY, IN THE MIDDLE OF FUCKING NOWHERE, WITH MY SHIT THAT ISN'T EVEN FUCKING VALUABLE BUT FOR WHAT I WENT THROUGH TO GET IT!?

How much lower does the universe need my opinion of people? Don't I shuffle broken and ridiculous children to their broken ridiculous parents for a living? HOW THE FUCK AM I THE GUY WHO NEEDS A VISCERAL REMINDER THAT IT'S ALL FUCKING POINTLESS AND NOTHING MATTERS!? NO ONE GIVES A FUCK. THERE IS NO FORGIVENESS OR PERSPECTIVE THAT MATTERS. I've gone several years without killing anything with my car. I've killed a rabbit and skunk in the last 2 days. Not intentionally, but bringing them up feels fitting.

I witnessed a version of my funeral. When I'm dead and gone, that's what my shit will look like after the animals in the field go through it. How am I not already dead?

[692] Shout, Shout

What if I don't actually know my own voice?

Consider, what's the first thing people do when they hear themselves recorded for the first time? It's often a cringe or insistence it be shut off or even that it isn't them. How many “humble devil's advocates” are nothing but the asshole at the office? How many failed “trying to be funny” types have cast themselves into a pit of aspersions they'll never climb out of? How many pathological professions of love so routinely reduce the feeling to pain and combat? If you never know you're screaming, your answer to why people are crying and running in pain will always be incomplete.

There's a number of lines clashing at once that made me raise the initial question. Kevin Smith just said at the end of the episode of Comic Book Men that it's always fun watching movies, but way more so to be making them. Recently as well, I read an explanation for why The Walking Dead decided to kill Carl. And I've been thinking considerably about the message I profess on my road to self-sufficiency and the excuses I've offered as to why I don't engage in something like stand-up, movie making, or really anything I don't particularly care to suck at.

Maybe first we should talk about the consequences of not knowing your voice. It speaks to many of my old themes. You're a parrot for the times. You're forgoing the requisite thought to take control of your identity. Your ideas become open for manipulation and exploitation in ways that had you a consistent and deliberate message would make such things considerably harder. We take the concept, the individual nature of our own voice as for granted as any other part of our body, despite it surely being of greater implication than your tongue in its physicality.

When it comes to any kind of artistic expression, I hate it when it's done for its own sake. I'm with the pretentious art critic who doesn't really believe AI algorithms making pictures is the same thing as a person putting in the work. I like the genuinely depressive and desperate comedian who's been in pointless feuds and is in recovery considerably more than the 19 year old who can match the pace and set-ups. I'll give them credit if they're funny, sure, but “they” aren't going to stick with me like the comedians and stories of my favorites have.

Writing is really the only example I have of something creative that I do on any sort of regular basis that I bother with people seeing. First, a few pages that I may come to regret are a considerably easier time, money, and effort investment than what it would take to drag people to an open mic or pull together the resources for a film. Second, I tend to only write when I really want to explore something or think I have something to say. If I don't want to write every day, I don't. If what I'm saying I think is more important than how sad it might make you feel or how far you may question what's left of our relationship, I'm putting me before you and telling you to take responsibility for how you perceive me.

That's basically the thing I wonder about everyone who puts together a movie or thinks the world needs to experience their art. Are they doing it for the right reasons? Is it truly the group of friends writing and shooting Clerks who's voice is so powerful a group of Irish guys want to make a movie about that friendship? Seems a huge sign that Kevin Smith is embedded in the right world for the right reasons. Why do certain directors make hit after hit after hit, and they all register as some degree of timeless or quality, and others are Michael Bay?

In the episode of The Walking Dead, the creators explained that they needed a reason for a transformation in Rick. Rick's “voice” as dogged leader who survives and keeps people together tragedy after tragedy, now pushed to the edge of all-out-war having blood feud has been a long and complicated one. What would prevent Rick from killing Negan? “His” voice would have to shine through as his love and commitment to his son. The spirit of what kept the group together is what's needed to keep even the concept of humanity alive in the storm of constant raining shit. At which point does Rick know what he's supposed to do? Is it the thick of it all as the guns are blaring, or in the memory that flashes before his eyes as he refrains from doing something that would betray it all?

People are loathe to defend the show anymore, and I think it's because of the same “I don't want to persistently think and evolve” mindset that plagues the modern era in general. A show comes out and excites you about the prospect of death, the lingering wish at the back of every fat desperate “millennial” mind and child not knowing if they're making it home from school. Now the show wants to speak of humanity and redemption as we're entertaining the idea of arming teachers and hearing that God wants the EPA destroyed? The Walking Dead is going where people might one day be again, but it's certainly no longer where they are.

I woke up to see the first article on my phone telling me that Kevin Smith had a massive heart attack. I read about how after facing his biggest fear, he realized that he had a good run and found himself oddly at peace if this was really it. He had his friends who he's still creating with. He created a family he's crazy about. He's used his underlying love or all he gets involved with to propel him across platforms and into so many worlds. I don't think that happens merely “because he made a movie.” I think it's because he made his movie. And if you never remember a line from it, you'll remember how it made you feel like he feels about his life and friends.

I think that's what I tried in the party house. I think that's why I'm willing to sever ties when the conversation has died and “life” has substituted for your life. It's why I bother to make appeals at all in writing. I feel confident enough that my voice is all of the blogs. If I adapt them into something else, then at least it came from a place I thought only I could speak to in my way. You don't need to hear my record, you don't need to see my routine, you know my motivation. I want to report on what I don't see enough of or where I see weird things connect. I want to create because I have to, not because I can. I want to know that if I get my heart attack well before I or anyone thinks it's due, I can have that same feeling that I did what I could as I thought I should, and how it looks right now is okay.

Maybe I don't want the “workaholic” narration to be so loud. Maybe I don't need to denigrate exploring what other people have created, even if that only involves a screen. Maybe my voice is better for all the people that no longer need to flavor it. The ideas wouldn't bring me a tinge of happiness if they were out and out wrong, right? I wouldn't bother to write if I didn't think my voice existed in the first place. But I'll never know the totality of what I'm saying. I'll only be able to look for how to respect why I said it. That's the voice I hope is in every blog and touches anything else I might think to create in the future. That's what needs to live so that I can die happy.