[1246] Bear Minimum

I don’t even want to proofread this. That should tell you whether you should bother with this one. No, I didn't mean "bare."

Everything I’m going to attempt to talk about is complicated by the cold and snow. I need discipline. I can feel too many things competing for my attention. It’s been preventing me from finding the peace I can usually get a sip of from writing. I think I’m going to avoid spending any time contextualizing something for “the random reader.”

I find myself returning to an idea that anymore, I want the bare minimum. My life has swung back and forth between austerity and indulgence. One was a project in service to a sense of long-term stability or growth. The other a reaction to the creeping understanding that I no longer believed I was going to achieve either.

I owe money. Not really, but according to criminal institutions, thieving family and friends, and the capricious greed of former employers and my state. The processes afforded to me in order to discharge debts have lied, wasted time, and are now salivating to squeeze me for every single penny I already don’t have.

You can only exempt $450 in Indiana of money in your bank account. Doesn’t matter if you have a $316 electric bill, $520 due to a credit card, $1800 in legal fees you borrowed, and $650 more you needed thinking you’d get your water running. if your account says more than $450, “It’s complicated,” according to my lawyer as to why actually filing still hasn’t taken place. Gotta make sure those transactions aren’t pending if you’ve moved to pay the bills too. Kentucky? You can have $8,000 in cash. But, I live in Indiana, one of the shittiest states in the country.

But it gets dumber. I’ve been telling my lawyer for weeks how much my “business” is worth. You know, the LLC with no assets that’s renting a house on the back of good graces from one of its partners. Super stable. My 25% stake gets me, anymore, a couple hundred bucks a month, maybe. Less now with a couple relapses and disappearances. This, another hiccup for the attorneys who can’t seem to understand I’m not trying to hide from them a house my business does not own, I certainly don’t own, and I can’t even expect a consistent meaningful profit from.

What are the fixes? Sell things? Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Also, the whole country is aggressively bleeding people dry, so it’s not like there’s too many itchy buyers for your old broken vehicles. I’m trying to get into a drug study. I’m poised to check in Monday. There’s a chance I flame out because my anxiety gets the best of me and my heart rate is too high during the final screen. That’s why I stopped doing studies for 10 years the last time. All I need to do is get to Cincinnati, not be one of the unlucky who isn’t chosen to dose, and then there’s a consistent income for 6 months with each trip back.

I haven’t been able to leave my house for 5 days. My car can’t get out of my driveway. My truck, with its precarious battery, was dead. Why haven’t I fixed the battery by now? It’s one of 20 things I could spend money on that need fixed, and until I absolutely needed to drive the truck, why spend it back then? Did we get more snow in 2 days than has snowed in 8 years? Oops. Now I’m underprepared, again.

The truck is currently, hopefully, being charged, and will retain that charge long enough to drive into town and get a battery that will eat up approximately 25% of my current capital. Then I’ll get some food; sandwich stuff, potatoes, and sausage are the usuasl. This is provided I can navigate the tundra road that is my rural neighborhood. I’ll try not to think about how my truck costs 3 times what it does to drive my car. I’ll almost certainly have to drive the truck to both Chicago and Cincinnati.

My best case scenario is that I’m filed this week, granted access to the study next week, taken to be as poor as I am by the treasurer's office, and in 3 months I’ve paid back my dad, fixed my water, and caught up on other bills related to my credentialing, insurance, and remaining credit card.

In the story my life seems hellbent on trapping me within, I continue to get “Weeeelll, we were talking” hiccups to getting my paperwork filed. I psych myself out of the study, or am not picked at all, making a mockery at that point of whatever I managed to do to reign in my anxiety and heart rate. I’m unable to get my car out for weeks leaving me to be potentially door dashing in a truck. When it’s time for the hearing, I get picked apart or delayed because they want to exercise every "fuck you" move they can. In the meantime I’m trying not to make “too much” money that makes them more powerful. I’m arguing with myself if I can or should try to go to the next show. And that plays out for months until I’m forced into Chapter 13.

I have to refrain from sliding out on what I’m hearing is large amounts of black ice and overturned semis, from what I’ve experienced, as generally negligent road clearing efforts. I have to spend most of my time in between the drives and decision-making from on high in my very cold poorly insulated home that hasn’t had running water for over a month. I get to smell bad for longer because I was showering at Planet Fitness before dashing. Those are 45 minutes away not in snow and ice, mind you.

Moving out here altogether used to be my bare minimum. I’ve been able to go to shows because “the basics” were well enough in place. Now? It feels like my home is not living up to what I need. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older and less resilient. I don’t know if I’m just opening up to more liabilities as I struggle to keep things maintained when they all want to break at once. I don’t know if I’m just tired of fighting the backdrop of constant attack. I can’t get left alone. I’m never “good enough” to just ride my little corner of the world.

I want the decisions already. I want to know what it is I have to navigate. I work quickly because I hate ambiguity for its own sake. I hate feeling dependent on forces and people I can’t respect nor would ever carry myself like.

It’s hard to play your instruments when you can’t feel your fingers. It’s hard to wood work when you’re hotboxing dust. It’s hard to yoga, or sew, or whore bathe. So I sit, write, make tiktoks now, and wait until I get little bursts to get up and pee, eat, or fuck with the 10-steps between me and starting the real also-complicated, also-annoying process. I still have to go check on the battery. What happens if I can’t get it to start? Which of my neighbors do you think wants to cart my stank ass into town? My friend that lives in town is in Florida for 3 months dealing with problems that make mine laughable. My next closest friend lives an hour away.

Can the cats go, perhaps a whole week, unattended? I think the most I’ve done is 5 days. If the power goes out and their water freezes? I can’t even sit here and think about what to say next without my foot freezing over. The cold shows me how poor my circulation is and what areas of my body are poised for arthritis like my dad and grandpa.

What do I even want to do? Nothing. The bare minimum. I want to feel, again, like there is absolutely nowhere I have to be, no one knocking, no disaster needing cleaned up, no hand reaching its way into my pocket. I want to do that for so long that the next thing I do after that registers as the best thing I’ve ever done.

But I need to get back to being broke. I need to get the bills paid a year or two in advance. I need to be the friend who’s able to buy the tickets, dinner, drinks, parking, and tickets to the next thing between sets or intermission without blinking. I need to be able to decide I have the energy to do a little bit with a hole and concrete, so let’s capitalize on the moment and not weigh the $40 in materials against the gas prices. My life needs to more consistently feel as good as it actually is. I can’t feel better or good until I’m meaningfully distanced from all of the forces I clock as wanting me under heal or dead.

I’ll then scroll through reddit and read stories, maybe true, of people pissing away, winning, or making more money in an hour than I’ve ever been in debt, ever made a year, or would even be worth if I sold everything I owned. I’ll compare my laments to the people with health struggles, ICE’s fascism, considerably more invested-in and more respectable roles and lives than I’ve managed and I’ll self-impose a “go fuck yourself” sensibility. I’ll type in circles. I’ll go back to TV. I’ll click between windows. I think it’s about time to get disappointed by the battery again.

[1243] Trust And Reconciliation

I don't think this is going to help. I think I've done about as good as I can do to mitigate my problem. I would love to not stay stuck in an anxiety spiral for the next several weeks. The immediacy of my feelings part of me is already bored and annoyed-enough with them, but I can't seem to dismiss them entirely. This still feels like the ambiguous beginning of what might be the meaningful steps that get me out of debt.

I hate debt. I hate it so much. Out of extreme luck I never had to take on school debt, and that's if you don't ask my dad who almost died and had to fight for years to get the settlement money that paid for college. My former best friend and I calculated to the penny what either of us owed in fast food buys. I didn't apply for a credit card until my 30s. The first time I borrowed around $2,000 to pay off my shed-now-house, I worked 18-20 hour days delivering food, donated plasma, and ate the cheapest ways I could to pay it back in 3 weeks.

I've only gone into debt because I've believed in myself, the people around me, and what I could accomplish. I've anchored to the fact that I've never gone in debt an amount higher than what's been stolen from me. Both my uncles, and my former friend, account for that. I've hired people who have stolen from me. Others who have, functionally, stolen from me in their unreliability and perhaps outright lies about what they could accomplish in grant-writing and fundraising. At a certain point while working two jobs, both stole wages from me.

This is the context. I didn't get myself in trouble because I don't know math or refuse to keep a budget. I love excel sheets and formulas showing me what is or isn't reasonable with theoretical conditions. I didn't blow money on hookers and cocaine. I don't owe for gambling. I don't drive a car I can't afford nor live in a house with obscene rent or mortgage payments that no psychology major delivery boy should ever expect to afford. I'm not behind or avoiding paying for children I don't have, or a divorce. I'm just an average poor-enough person who's managed to sneak in a few nice things over the years.

I'm up against, what I'm told, is a county trustee who likes to go out of her way to make Chapter 7 filings contentious. In a worst case scenario, I'm backed into a corner of filing Chapter 13 instead, which fundamentally protects my shit, but drags out the payment process over 3 to 5 years. I already thought I had a solid consistent payment with a debt consolidation company, and that proved to be untrue. It's why I'm in this bankruptcy exploration altogether. It's a doable, manageable, failsafe and fallback position. But it doesn't correct for the fundamental antagonizing psychological condition.

I deeply resent that I owe anyone for anything. I don't live in a catastrophically exuberant and excessive way. I've never tried to delude myself about what I can or can't afford. This isn't chickens coming home to roost. This isn't karmic justice for some Ponzi scheme. This is the latest step in a series of humiliating conversations I've had to engage in with the people closest to me that have supported me financially over the years. I have irons in the fire for paying them back, and in relatively short order, but I maintain that neither them, nor I, should have ever been put in this position in the first place.

And that indignity is at the core of what nags me even if I get a "solution" through the longer-form bankruptcy. I won't be "free" to "just be broke" and go back to navigating my few hundred to a thousand dollars a month at a time. I'll be on the hook every month for the next 3 to 5 years, and punished if I try to pay it sooner. I'll be at the mercy of the legacy of betrayal. I'll be there until I can find a soothing enough coping story about why it's small potatoes in the face of the world otherwise burning down or atrocity next door. I'll be there because a small-town trustee gets her rocks off adding insult to injury like so many that have been emboldened in our fascist era. It feels like I'm begging the universe to just let me get back to zero.

In a best case scenario, all of the information I've dug up for the filing, and the evaluation I got from a realtor, will just allow things to proceed without a fight or delay, and in 3 months, I'm still broke, but free. There's a small chance I don't psych myself out and get screened away from a drug study that's supposed to start the first week of February. In a magic land of hope and possibility, I get a clean filing, admitted to the study, and every couple weeks I'm getting $1,000 for each outpatient visit which I can use to pay back my dad and past investments from friends, as well as get back ahead on normal house bills. I might even get my water running again.

Then, months from now, I get to read this blog as just another piece of spot-panic that would have benefited immensely from hindsight it's impossible to manifest any sooner. Then, this is one more gripe in the infinite series of injustices I no-less navigate one way or another regardless of the anticipated pain or suffering. I want to be the kind of person that already knows this. I want to be at peace now, not when the questions get answered. The fundamental question remains. Why can't I just be cool, now? I already know everything. Didn't you see me type it all up without notes or study? Can't you pick a crisis from my previous 1,242 entries I survived or forgot about? Fucking learn your lesson already you neurotic dick head. You don't have real problems, and no one fucking cares. You don't have to either.

[1091] To Infinity And Beyond

I don't know if my head is feeling particularly random or if I've just got too much time on my hands again.

I watch so much TV. I get my stats sent to me at the end of the year through Trakt. They look more insane given most of it is sped up, but even if they weren't, I can easily sit with it on for hours. 6.7 hours a day on average, according to Trakt, so 3.35. It feels like considerably more than that, but what does that mean? I spend huge portions of time in metaphoric realities.

My brain doesn't care. It needs stimulation. I can only play an instrument for so long before my hand cramps. I can only "grind" in a videogame for so long before all of the years that built up behind me quitting playing for over a decade start to bubble. I don't have the social group that's doing something every day or calling regularly. I'm not obligating my time towards family. It's cold and I'm not inclined to work outdoors in it.

I have no more practiced a habit than sitting around. Of course I'm fidgeting and ADHD-ing, and rearranging furniture or books. But I'm an isolated, sedentary indulger more than anything. The TV show is paused while I write this, but whether it starts up immediately after, or while I'm driving, or while I'm waiting around before a concert or comedy show, something is on.

I almost use it to mark time. I've always been suspicious that we've got an incredible amount of time, and yet most of us will claim how much of it is lost, never to be found. I feel in some ways I've practiced slowing down so much, that it makes sense to not only watch things sped up, but fit as much as I can into all of this space that's in the here and now. It makes me happy to think if it takes you a month to watch a season, I can get it done in a few hours.

I've always been that way though. I was perfectly comfortable cheating on old video games if it would help me get to the end. I took pride in speed reading. I would get my homework done as quickly as you told me what was required for that day, then become a pain in the ass the rest of the day with nothing to do. If it's a physical task, like moving hundreds of bricks or pallets, I'm going until I start shutting down and hurting myself because I can't focus anymore. I used to speed constantly. Even if it doesn't sound particularly musical or show up in any song you care about, I like seeing and hearing speed picking and El Estepario tapping drum sticks like hummingbird flaps.

Almost married to this preference and propensity is a desire to be "comprehensive." To this day, I feel a sense of injustice, I even think I've written about this before, on a 3rd grade report I was assigned to write about a U.S. State. I was told, explicitly, not to provide every town and city. That just didn't make sense or sit right with me, so I printed one anyway for the state of Texas. I had all the other stuff she asked for too, but you and I both know you're not reporting on a state if you don't even know what towns and cities are in it. Duh. I got a C, and note in red that said "I told you not to give me a list of cities."

I watched a video recently explaining the difference in the sizes of infinities. Not all are equal or "as infinite" as the next. I don't know what sense can be made of the sentiment, but I feel like I hop between different infinities. It can simply be a matter of descriptive word choice categorizing what I'm engaging. The broadest concept might be "media." If I can watch or listen to it, I could plug in to that infinity and keep a rather opaque resolution on what all that noise is doing for me. Distill it down into movies, shows, books, podcasts, news, music, lessons, lectures, clips. Break all of those into genres. Each one provides a lifetime. An infinite sea from which to draw inspiration or distraction.

I think I seek both simultaneously. I notice the duality across a lot of these infinite spaces. I'm both full, comfortable, safe, and warm, yet my muscles are tight; my head and eyes are begging to start hurting. I'm full of salt, fat, the wrong carbs, and I'm protected only to the extent of my proximity to dangers I can't see coming. I'm mostly warm provided a given part of my body is against a heated blanket. No one state is in the extreme, and no one shift to a little bit more or less in either direction suggests something "meaningfully better."

That is, I'm "comfortable enough" to continue to sit here and type. I'm lucid enough. I'm TV-satiated enough to keep it paused. I'm satisfied enough with my body to not think more closely about what I'm feeding it. I've got enough of an ambivalence towards my debt to work just enough to keep its minimums paid on time. In turn, that's enough for the credit card companies and capitalist machines that want nothing less than me to never feel satisfied enough with the amount of things I own.

I think we employ the language of "enough" miserably. "Why can't I be enough!" we might scream at our romantically idealized notion of the person we claim to love. They cheat. They grow distant. Instinctively you might feel like it's about you and everything missing. It seems like it's only when we've had enough misery, and not just enough misery, but enough misery with the right prerequisites and under specific conditions, that we move to change something. Could we change sooner? It's a question of what resolution your infinity is dialed into. If you're a big corporate monstrosity who deals in "data" or "information," which can be indefinitely mined, tweaked, and reinterpreted, it doesn't interest you to curb greenhouse emissions until a more specific descriptive number threshold from outside your preferred genre makes a compelling impact.

The presence of so many infinities suggests to me that they are the rule and so by definition, nothing, ever, will be "classically" enough. Enough doesn't exist that way. All the self-esteem genres telling you you're beautiful enough or smart enough or worthy of love just as you are are lies. Not malicious lies, mind you, just lies that don't understand the nature of the game we're stuck playing. No one idea is meant to account for the whole of anything. Innocently, you might just consider it a mathematical impossibility that you'll ever be complete. You will instead be enough to suffice across a different set of infinite domains.

You might be fuckable to a lot of people, including your designated "soulmate." You might find yourself entertained by Star Wars AND Star Trek, or all of science fiction AND sports, or find the requisite levels of continued enjoyment in studying quantum mechanics and vibing with Bluey. It's never either/or. There's not conflict or contradiction. There's different levels of your experience you can access an infinite amount of ways.

From the outside, you can't necessarily tell if anyone is actually doing that or just adopting the infinite linguistic disguises that claim to. We peacock values we don't know how to practice. We're a beleaguered and confused "middle" who lazily votes for fascism, or downplays how fascism happens, because we literally don't know any better. We can't see our infinite capacity for destruction anymore than we regularly entertain ideas of our infinite potential.

As I was cleaning up old emails I came across old fights. There's math breakdowns I've sent former supervisors of how much money and time I'm wasting working for them. There's back and forths with me and one of my exes. There's exchanges I've had in pissing-match format with people online. I save this stuff for the same reason I keep almost all of my writing from back when I started at 15. I have new eyes at 35. Infinite gaps in my perspective are sometimes traversed by a more infinite truth. Was I arguing like an entitled immature cunt? Or had I figured something out, and now it was time to die nobly on the hills of my choosing instead of at the mercy of my combatant? As time goes on, I'm thankful to discover far more of the latter.

I think there's something of an inevitability towards people seeking "spiritual" or "religious" scape-goatery with its embodied allegory for the infinite. This especially so when paired with the sense of never feeling like you're enough. Fancy that, here's a thing that calls it "sin," and conveniently lasts forever to match the infinite sea of whatever you need it to in any given moment. Infinitely insecure? No worries, these paring rituals are blessed and divine. Infinitely attracted to children? Check out these power dynamics and forgiveness concepts. Righteously indignant and protective of your ignorance? Brother, we'll point you in the direction of where to blow yourself up straight into the arms of the infinite reward that matches your commitment.

My only excuse, at least when I've slowed down, written, picked a direction, and decided something is worth fighting and biting about, is an ongoing infinite conversation that ends the moment the decision is made, and starts up again the moment the decision is being evaluated for change. I don't get to pawn my failings off on Jesus and claim forgiveness. I have to weigh the evidence. I have to describe what I can make of the context. I can count the amount of people who seemingly never want to talk to me again or the extreme limits of my network. I have to see who keeps coming back and wrestle with why. I have to make sure it's not because I'm taking advantage of their infinite capacity to feed something I might disingenuously or greedily eat indefinitely.

There's peace in attending to this duality. But the peace doesn't feel like anything more than potential. I don't feel "good" or "bad." It's still hard to use the word "hope" without sarcasm dripping off my tongue. If I "hate" something, it's really just the same thing over and over, the seeming lack of sense, awareness, or accountability, playing out across genres of situations. Will I be "happy" if every one of my dreams comes true? Hundreds of my dreams have come true, and continue to remain true every day. I would not describe myself as "happy" lol.

I'm happy when I can share something. I'm happy when I feel like there's a real connected intention brought to the same space. That's why I don't get along with people who are "just doing their job" in realms like counseling or DCS that require far more personal responsibility and integrity for them to meaningfully represent their impact. It doesn't mean they'll be conducted that way, but it does mean when you fuck about, we all get to experience the infinite cascade of finding out. That's how a 5-10% minority eats 80% of the time and space we pretend can't exist in service to anything else.

We can ground that specifically. It's every abusive family member one of my clients "can't help" but wrap themselves around. That's the frequent flyers of our prison and healthcare systems. It's any monopoly of power and wealth. It's the job, family, or hobby you know someone is abusing to eschew a conversation about balance or the real extent of their responsibilities. It's the jaded cynicism of pundits and influential personalities beating fear and hate drums. It's virtue-signaling language you try to stuff every conceivable, especially its opposite, idea into. You know, because pumping gas can be "green" too and words are "violence."

Whatever scale or frame we choose to adopt has to start with the acknowledgement, acceptance, and voluntarily adopted responsibility for the choice altogether. You choose to respect and weigh evidence, or you bolster the strength of errant faith claims. You choose to "stare into the void" or touch the infinite capacity of your potential, and you can allow yourself to feel diminished and helpless, or emboldened to carry on more deliberately in a manner you can increasingly see fits. Fits what? Fits your given moment. If you see the same things I do, maybe we start manifesting things we both wish to see verses a random array of noise we struggle to cope with.

I care very little, if at all, about what I'm watching if I have someone to watch it with. We can share in how bad it was or jokes we make about it or references years later. The parties I threw weren't about collecting hangovers. The business I want to run isn't about being catastrophically rich or irrational defiance to conformity and oversight. The access to the freedom and headspace to enjoy my time isn't so I am always available to tend to another cat. Insofar as the vast majority of the people I'm connected to aren't coming or inviting or speaking at all, it's easy to believe you're meaningfully different, and maybe not in ways you really want to be.

But I write. I search. I try. I work. I invest. I continue to acknowledge the infinite ways I can describe my experience until I find a frame that allows me to choose, and feel like it was a real choice, a step in a direction I want instead of a direction I "have to." If that practically translates into all I can really do is keep picking my words and hills to die on, that's what I'll do. If I must be in debt, I want to know it services experiences and things I can hide from repo men or the consequences of bankruptcy. If my writing has no capacity to "wake up" others in the way different authors have helped me to, I can trust it will at least continue to help me to when I've drifted too far into the wrong infinity.

[1081] First, Fist Fuck

Sometimes I'm tempted to regard myself as just flagrantly "ungrateful." It's not the right word, but it starts with that idea. I'm going to avoid citing every horrible circumstance that is or has happened that isn't happening to me. I'm trying to hone in on a good way to describe this sense of myself.

I'm constantly thinking about, or bitching about, the discrepancy between our descriptions and actions as it pertains to "reality." That theme goes back to some of my first blogs ever. I wanted "on the level" people who could 2+2. As an adult, I get to see the ongoing consequences of that discrepancy, often what feels like outright betrayal, play out with sickening regularity. My go-to phrase bemoaning all that "doesn't make sense."

Take my foray into attempting to be a "content" creator. To me, it's a sad and pathetic desperate stab in lieu of just…you know…saving children, or being a counselor, or working on my sustainability and off-grid goals. Wouldn't it be grand if each day I woke up secure in both my finances, focus, and sense of what the future could hold? But, for nearly my entire existence, that's a considerable fairy-tale more than registering as "realistic."

My parents had debt. They had debt so long that it was taken out of what my dad was to inherit from I believe my grandpa dying. The only period I wasn't in debt was when I was doing drug studies, and the second I went to buy a thing to live in, that was gone. But, I was also renting and at the mercy of ever-shit roommates, so the debt was on it's way or slowly churning through my resources in one form or another. Mortgages have always sounded insane to me. Student loans. Car payments. I have a very unpretty car. I own that car.

Debt is reality. It's a chosen one through millions of betrayals each day. My "ingratitude" for whatever comforts or freedom I enjoy is born of having my face rubbed in that fact indefinitely. The fact that I can pit my remote sense of joy/engagement against whether or not I should maintain a certain debt ratio is insane. I haven't' gone to 135 shows every year of my life. I've been in debt the whole time well before I decided it should count towards invaluable memories and experiences.

In a world that made sense, I would just be able to do good. I would just use my skill as a talker, people would like me, I'd have earned respect, and I'd use my money to see shows, eat, and live a fairly straight-forward and peaceful enough life with my little dad-projects and hobbies and series of forays with divorcées until I died.

But no. I, with all my "potential," and in like some constant mockery or that ill-begotten spite of my work so far am left to contemplate if I'd rather Door Dash, gamble on a YouTube venture, or break myself over some new miserable nonsense job that wastes and exploits me in lieu of at least making it remote. And it's not so much that there's some expectation of "sympathy," as though I have zero awareness of how fucked everyone and everything is. It's that I feel like I'm the only one who wants more.

My mind thought of the union pushes. It's all good news. These pussies aren't fighting for enough. Our politics aren't demanding enough as we slowly warm up to the idea of not having crypt keepers continue to defy nature. I wonder if I'm not demanding enough of myself, but then just watched myself spend 30 hours aggressively digesting and working to try and escape my paradigm with something "new" or "different" or that challenged me, until I found it's failure point and contradictions and deceptions and source of its power….the same mythological, "This isn't so bad!" nonsense of seemingly every fucking thing else. Glossing over details. Excusing away the negligence. And pretending like you didn't just lie to my fucking face and charge me for the privilege of listening to you!

It's bad. It's real bad in a lot of real serious ways. I just finished Hyperbole and a Half (I know, many years after it was popular), but Allie Brosh ends her book by realizing she's as bad as she is in spite of her wishes and stories and confusions as to the consequences of being bad. It's hard for her to not be selfish or violent or judgmental. When she's practicing otherwise, it's hard. It's just a bad core that needs active attention and decision-making to rise to the level of author and accountable fleetingly-normal and respectable person.

It's bad when I can graduate, work the kind of jobs I do, work the kind of hobbies and life goals I do, work harder and longer on random shit over 2 days than most might on their primary occupation over weeks, and I'm feeling like a fucking chump. I'm sitting and spinning on the existential dick that claimed my asshole before I even knew it was there.

We all fucking deserve better, not just and especially me. What the fuck is there to lose by trying to do better? Is the fucking story of this shit heap played out enough? It's like "cancel culture." We all got scared there for a minute. Now Matt Rife is on the rise. The zeitgeist is over it. Let people say "retarded" and "fat shame" and just generally understand what a joke is before they fuck off back to their life, right? We figured that shit out, why not something more important?

I found myself envying Planet Earth documentarians and photographers. Do you have any idea how insane that is? Fuck the jungle. Fuck the mosquitos. Fuck the diseases in different countries. Why the fuck did I want to trade places with the asshole chasing the chimps? I mean, chimps are cool, but fuck chasing a goddamn chip around the jungle.

But their lives have snapped into focus. The mission is clear. He's doing "good" just by being there arguing with a primate and contemplating ways to get them to accept his presence in their tree. Should all of our missions be so clear? Should we so reliably be able to trust our task and the payout? Chimp guy is at the mercy of what the animals want to do that day. He's free. Me? You? We have to fist fuck ourselves with the most selfish and greedy cunts of our species, every day, in big ways and small, no matter how much we bleed.

Oh, wait, EXCEPT WE FUCKING DON'T, AND WE DO SO ANYWAY.

We take our very nasty and guilty feelings over what our gaping asshole looks like, and then proceed to fistfuck ourselves, the people we claim to care about, and keep fucking until we're positive the future gets as thoroughly fucked as we've been. We class it up and call it "generational trauma." We play act like anywhere is safe. You think it's a mental health crisis and opioid epidemic? HA! Our very concept of mental health is defined by its pathological norms. We don't even know what "better" is. It's not a real registering feeling for nearly everyone. There's no motivation, no direction, and in that forever irony, even those who profess to help you get there don't have a fucking clue.

Every single thing I own or do is in perpetual standing of some kind of defiance first. It's precariously placed, waiting to crash and break or get taken away. If I can't pay my bills, I get to imagine selling my cars. After 20 years and helping thousands or specializing in areas almost no one is equipped to deal with, I need to stay on my toes. I can't get lazy and think I've earned a sense of security or deserve a savings account and multiple streams of income.

It's a fucking joke. It's a fucking scam. It's all one giant diffuse lie that seeps into every. fucking. thing. It doesn't get better. We're not going to change. I'll never be able to "just play" my instruments and sing the song on my heart because I'll never get a chance to stop screaming.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, "reality" would still be fucked. I'd still be trying to work all these broken levers and I'd start to learn just how useless money truly is. The bills would be paid, sure. I'd have more "fun" useless shit and set goals like seeing 365 shows one year, but "it" would still be fundamentally broken. My "best friend" would still be a story of Shakespearean betrayal. My extended family would still be selfish cunts. My brother would still be whatever weird state he's in about me. I'd still be alone out here or wherever I chose to go. The things I wished to fight, like DCS, would be because they are still acting horribly.

I don't own my life. It's waiting for me at the company store. I check it in and out at the mercy of their needs or demands. My time is spent thinking about how they're gonna fuck me next. It's spent praying my car doesn't break down. It's spent dreading the next empty hopeless conversation I have about my next work environment. It's doing the math on the money I don't have to do the project I'm perfectly well capable of exercising my ability otherwise. I can sit here all day and bang the drums, or read my comics, or watch shitty Star Trek, and it's all just grains of sand ticking away until the inevitable newest actualization of the death I'm embedded in.

How can you be ungrateful for something that isn't yours? I don't rule out the role of chance or the infinite creativity you must explore with your agency. Those do very little to assuage choking on the thick atmospheric bullshit. The world is horrible. You're horrible. I'm horrible. It's just not in the way you've baked into your self-serving story. You have to figure this shit out and fight it. You fucking have to. We're going to be stuck here for eternity otherwise.

[1059] Incomplete Data

Something I like considerably more than any one "thing" is the realized expression of getting into whatever it is I wish to do in any given moment. It's exceedingly rare any one show is going to connect with me in some deep or individualized way, but I like knowing that if one is going to, all I have to do is click and it starts up. I only seem to find the intention to practice an instrument in starts and spurts, but when I do, it's on a high-end machine training my fingers the right way. I've got a t-shirt maker, sticker maker, sewing machine, and some wood working tools I've barely if ever touched. But the day I feel I have the time and focus to learn and set them up will make up for any thoughts of their "wasted" potential in the meantime.

I'm not a "passion" person. I have a severe distaste for the word. I can't say that when I was irrationally driven to be some concept of "best" that I was doing myself any favors. Now, in contrast, I have my attempts to be balanced and deliberate or day-to-day in how I conceive of myself. If I dropped everything to drill down on some instrument for the next 6 months, I'd get really good, or return to some mastery I had with my guitar, and then what? I cross my fingers I maintain the humility of elite players who are always looking to the people they stole from or they think do it better? I audition for a band? I produce my own stuff and claim a vaunted identity as an artist?

I don't want to be an artist, I am one. I don't want to be a big business guy, I am one. I don't want to be a country-folk coming up with redneck fixes to things, I am one. All that I may wish to occupy in the future, I currently am, just at varying degrees of resolution. What dials in any layer is both time invested, but catching when the thoughts swirl around what I believe are impediments. If I don't have the tools ready, I can't work on whatever feels like the most pressing thing to work on. There's a series of inspirations flowing through, and I want them captured on the right instruments.

It doesn't give me an irrational compulsive rush to spend money. I've been thinking about this when I spend months agonizing over whether or not to click to confirm an order. Am I just feeling listless and trying to fill the hole with junk? I'm still missing components of my otherwise "perfectly fulfilling" or "best flowing" kind of days. When I buy things, it's not that I don't want them or I don't enjoy using them, it's that I'm trying to talk myself out of having what I think, in a world that made sense, I'd already have without this lower-income negotiation.

I also, and this has been the prevailing energy for quite some time, just don't give a fuck about much higher degrees of debt than I ever thought I'd get comfortable with. I'm considerably more concerned about my day-to-day experience of life more than I am the infinite series of atrocities on their way that will be "impossible" to "pay back" as though I really owe anyone anything. I don't honestly believe I'm trying to justify being irresponsible. It's not without many calculations and spreadsheets and months of "Do I really need…?" No. I don't "need" anything past whatever keeps the poorest of the poor alive. Do I want? Yes. Is it speaking to something more intangible, yet necessary? Yes.

 
For most of the people in my life I'm either an ornament, novelty, or antagonist. The time in between is filled with me and my stuff and how I can justify each moment or activity. Any given hobby or skill can be parlayed into connecting with a broader ecosystem of people, but I'm not people. So I need stuff to connect with more stuff and parts of myself I'm not going to see reflected back or ever acknowledged by people. That's okay, it's just a bit expensive.

Anyway, I'm thinking of ordering/building the stuff it would take to get all my outside projects engaged. That and some missing electronics and instruments and lessons would put me at about $15,000 in debt. I'm still pulling about $2,000 a paycheck for the next couple months. I'm going to focus a bit more on meal prepping and still wouldn't hate to find something part-time on Fridays and weekend mornings. The last 4 times I've been told something would fit that have just disappeared into the ether.

I'm not tired, not looking forward to work tomorrow, and it's probably going to feel like a busier day. I just started the last season of Star Trek TNG. I have no events until Bastille and Duran Duran in Chicago Friday, Disturbed in Noblesville the day after, and Wargasm in Indy Sunday. Monday is a holiday. I think I'm occupying a similar disheartening space after hanging out that happens after working out. You get a taste of how it "should" or could feel all the time, but it's the exception. The energy or enthusiasm can't sustain and iterate, it just kind of sits there and nags you until it dissipates. All the more prescient one must be in capturing what manages to manifest I suppose.

[1033] Stormtroopers

Today reached a stressful point. It did so because I didn't see it coming. I couldn't see it coming. There was no "one thing" that was definitely more annoying or catastrophic than normally happens each day. I even went above and beyond what I normally do on Thursdays and ate food between my block of groups that often leave me tense if not with a headache every week. But, it just didn't stop. I couldn't run my decompression pattern. I couldn't find a fucking moment to breathe. I find it incredible and fascinating that so much happens "all at once" like this to...test me? It's bizarre and too coincidental.

My baseline nature to want to attend to things or apply "fixes" was pushed too hard. Idiots at work who refuse to take responsibility for their shitty attendance and communication wait until precisely the moment I close out my last note to open a can of worms we'd been dancing around to get done for two weeks. My friend's car breaks down, can he take my recently gotten home truck again? My favorite tool which I immediately put to good use and started making plans for utilizing for other things as well? The one with 220,000 miles on it and just cost $1500 and 2 months to fix? Can he also get $50 because drug dealers don't take credit cards?

I've got childishly entitled clients on the brink of emotional collapse raring to lose it any given week. Nice enough people, decently hard-working people, selfish, normal childish and entitled people who will come to me about "my dose" as though it's my job to just continuously answer their every panicked thought at any hour of the day. I ignore most of that, to be sure, but it's another phone ring. It's a call for my attention. It's a passive aggressive comment locked and loaded for next week about what it is we aren't doing to help.

I've been told about 9 times over 3 weeks that a "had no reason to believe she was that chaotic" client was going to get signed up. She apparently wasn't receiving texts and emails, has the money and then doesn't, wants individual counseling, but then maybe for her kid who has massively improved from his traumatizing situation, but actually hasn't at all. At the end of the day I get to spend several hours at the least convenient time troubleshooting, quasi-counseling, caseworking, and I've not been paid. Then, I get to dodge panic attack paragraph texts as though I'm an emotional support animal on retainer.

Did you hear? I'm not just in debt, but courting more of it because I just don't care anymore. I want stuff. I want to go to shows. I want to build more on the land. I just don't care. I'm not likely to get fired, getting directly paid through my business, and haven't scratched the surface of where referrals can be generated from. I'm, inch by inch, day by day, on the verge of fundamentally shifting the priorities and nature of my problems in life. But, it's not here, and I'm still debt-ridden first-world poor, and the things I have walk an incredibly precarious line of functional instead of financial burden. What if I then played the imagination game?

You think my truck is insured for another driver? You think I trust my friend's parents to help him replace it because, you know, could he? The parents who fucked me on the house? What happens when the wobbly car-jerking issue with the Scion finds me in a wreck. It's begging for it. If 2 is 1 and 1 is none, I might have a solid half with my 3. I have a coffee van that doesn't reverse, a truck who picks a new thing to break every couple months, and a Scion with an as yet undiagnosed issue I'm genuinely gambling won't go catastrophically wrong on my frequent hours-long trips.

I didn't exactly forget that life is always coming with the next thing to charge you, but I felt it in a deeper way recently. I got home insurance, of course catastrophically expensive because my home isn't "normal" and abnormality, regardless of the actual value, risk, or practicality, means you get fucked for the invitation to play the insurance game. Add the utility bills, interest charge (you know because you got fucked on how much it cost to get your water back because the only person you know who can do it can't fucking figure out how to bill, record, or communicate to save his goddamn life). You don't pay down as large as you planned. You don't pay off like you planned. You can't take enough long showers to feel like they make up for yet another negative spiraling trend built into your financial picture.

Let's not forget though, I don't really care. Most people my age carried tens of thousands in debt, which they paid towards for years, mostly in interest, never paid it off or barely have paid it off, and they have mortgages, car payments, a few have kids, health issues, etc. I might spend $15K on 100 shows, yearly bills, a new computer, guitar, rolfing, building supplies and car repairs? Every 2 weeks I can pay off 10%. If I can get 10 more clients, 20%. I'm certainly impatient, but it's not an irrational perception of that impatience driving my decision making. I'm almost 35. I live in a fort in cousin-fuck Indiana. I live in a proto-fascist country. It's kinda time to live it up, especially if we're the new tornado-alley. (Oh man, that would have been such a cunty thing to nickname my ex when we were fighting.)

My licensed therapist is in some, probably emotionally abusive and awkward power dynamic with her husband, so when I need her to fix something related to login information or to help our insurance wranglers proceed down the lie of the "80-100" day process of getting empanelled, she just won't respond to me. She'll call Hussain and get panicky and ask him all sorts of shit he can't answer, won't even respond to a text of mine. Won't send me a picture and bio to advertise on the site. Talks about spending money she claims to not have to rent a building in town to hold sessions individually, but also confidently asserts how perfectly unable she is to handle the business end of things. I have back ups, but it's all so needlessly convoluted and always in the background nagging.

I want to be reliable. I want to "help" and "fix." I feel like I'm constantly trying to do my best and do more while the people around me are getting by. They're along for my ride. I created and threw the parties, they were happy to drink and fuck and puke on things and carry on right into the resentment for inviting them and locking them inside. I provide the platform, pay for the infrastructure, maintain the fighting and cheerleading spirit. You think anyone ever calls me with news about who they contacted or who might help in getting more referrals? Hussain, to be sure, but that's why he's the business partner. Have any resulted in us getting paid though? Well...

It doesn't matter how much I do, create, risk, build, or invite to join. It will never be enough. It will never be persuasive or indicate that it's worth a kind of investment and sacrifice that I've made so many fucking times for so much shit that hasn't panned out. LIke, I fucking own land that I've offered for people to live on for free lol. I'm fucking ridiculous. I've paid thousands to live on a fucking couch after getting fucked out of my affordable apartment! How am I not the most entitled and shitty fucking cunt on the planet? I never get help moving. I've spent most of my life begging for an extra hand or the recognition that I would put up with emotional abuse for the better part of a year after finding someone who actually cared to work alongside me.

There's a decent chance if I ever get particularly successful I just disappear. I'm sick of talking to your memes. I'm sick of "normal" conversation about the infinite list of things holding us back. I'm sick of politely engaging every iteration of sit-and-spin you can bring to your imagination. I know I'm fucking sick of it because I'm this fucking frustrated in spite of literally every week if not often each work day, someone tells me how much they appreciate what I do for them. The words feel empty. I gave such rousing encouragement to one of my people who I was so proud of, she nearly broke into tears. Professional courtesy, of course, dictates that we're not friends, and neither she nor I should exist in a mutually supportive context where we're getting the help or money we need to feel secure and grow versus being reduced to the cursed encouraging words.

I've been buying expensive black band T-shirts too. I don't want your branded bullshit from the jobs I work. I don't want to be buttoned up. The whole of my feelings in blogs are summarized by the collective works of the artists I enjoy and the creative energy they inspire. Maybe in 30 years they'll get special vintage status and I'll get to be even cooler than I already am, also for no one to care or notice lol. I have so much shit filled with so much potential fun and worthwhile consequences, but it only feels like it when I can cast a convoluted verbal spell that lays out the embedded vitriol and sabotaging forces. I have no reason beyond chaotic chance to believe I won't continue to get everything I want, provided I can keep it specific to things and experiences that merely cost money.

Do I want you to share my spirit? Do I want you to find the energy and the way forward no matter what? Do I want absolutely anything from you, and each time I allow myself to accidentally set some subconscious expectation delight in the inevitable let down?

I will always be fascinated by how many people wish to dress up as stormtroopers. I will always be baffled by how many wish to be a mere crew member on the starship Enterprise. People delight in the uniforms, soldier status, mythological families, and piety. I have always, always, looked at the hero as the thing to emulate. What is the main character doing, and why? Who supports them, and why? What is their obligation? What transcends their flaws? Who are people but nameless trudgers along micro-fascist environments. They're capitulators, persuadable, and predictable. They're not trying to be heroes, they're imbibing the reassuring feeling that someone or something will save them no matter what.

You fucking idiots. No, they won't.

[983] Good Debt

I’m mildly annoyed and been mildly anxious all fucking day and I want to know why.

Fucking Scampi’s on an adventure, so, like any caregiver to something alive I get to imagine he’s dead until he’s home again. Icing. (He arrives the moment I get done writing.)

I ordered a ton of stuff again. I kept doing the math and thinking to myself “Why not now?” So much of my hang-ups towards progress or enjoyment are about, “I don’t need that” or, “Not yet.” You know before I ordered any sizeable or useful amount from Amazon, I had things sitting in my cart for 5 years? There is absolutely no good reason I can’t keep a job that requires less time than I spend doing literally anything else for 6 months. Especially if during that 6 months, I’ve run out of shit to buy, occupy my time with, or use as an excuse to not inch forward on a project. Also, if the house sells as it’s planned to, my cut makes me even again.

I’m annoyed that I want to keep enjoying and building my home, but I don’t think I can stay in the country. I’m annoyed that I still don’t believe a plurality of people will do anything to make “things” better. I’m annoyed that I’ve reached a certain “fat and happy” status, and all I am is still filled with rage that I can’t seem to enjoy it like I’d like because…you know, fucking fascism and impossible heat and dumb lonely drunk ugly people who want to fucking talk to me at concerts like I fucking came there to see them.

I’m fucking annoyed because today I watched an entire season of The Last Kingdom while sitting in an office, an hour and a half and $50 away, I had absolutely no reason to be in. I then capitalized on a crazy pizza deal and stuffed my fat fucking face with slice after slice trying to quell the emptiness and shake up my day of surfing the internet in work-computer-appropriate ways and getting pulled out of the moment when a battle-hardened Dane says “humping” instead of “fucking.”

I’ve been polishing up the land. The weed-whacking brought some psychological satisfaction. The overgrowth is intense, but a commercial weed-whacker reminds you it’s just some bitch ass grass and shit. I’m going to go around and collect all the random wood and get it stacked up and around the bricks tomorrow. I have one group at 11:00. One. Then supervision at 2:30. I’ll have to see if I can play a game of “look busy and answer emails” while sweating to death and organizing, cleaning up just enough for when I need to be on camera.

Barring disaster, by the end of the year, it dawned on me that I’ll have seen over 90% of my favorite bands live, and some more than once. What does that mean? The same will be said for comedians. Will our respective aura-exchanges speak to my karmic  destiny? Until this year, endlessly indulging in shows and splurging on the means of building and creating shit were all abstract concepts pertaining to my idealized self. Now, my idealized self wants reliable health care, a fucking planet that won’t chase me to Mars, and people to have ongoing active fights alongside with towards the achievement of meaningful ends.

I don’t play the lottery because I think I’ve already won it. If I had a large sum of money dropped in my lap, I’m immediately setting up places to live in the most stable countries. Then I’m forming my influence network towards achieving political ends and diversifying power. All the while continuing to go to shows in more exotic locales and from fancier booths, but with pit access. And I’m definitely getting a fancier pool and bowling lane.

I’m annoyed because I’ve watched people live with 5-10 times more debt than me, and get to just about now start their adult lives with new kids and stable housing. Do they still have student loans? I don’t know, but most people I’ve met have pretty well resolved themselves to never paying them back. It wasn’t “good debt.” It was a debt predicated on a naivety at best and lie at worst. I don’t feel my financial debt in the same way I feel like the pain of what my country was supposed to have promised me. I at least get something, as soon as Amazon drops it off, for the money I spend. I at least get to see myself move around my space and see it grow. It’s like cigarettes. Sure, I need health/car insurance, but what are they really getting me If I haven’t crashed or don’t feel sick? Not a fucking nicotine rush of a pool, I can tell you that much.

The next thing I genuinely have to look forward to is any time spent with “you.” I pretty much know how the concerts are gonna go. My favorite comedians I suspect aren’t going to struggle the nights I see them. I’m going to struggle through the salt in my eyes as I keep erecting walls and rooves in my little corner of the world. But, what are we gonna talk about? Who knows!? Me and Hussain debated faith and god by accident for 2 hours last night. Didn’t see that shit coming, and am still definitely over sky daddy talk, lol even if it’s nice to talk to someone who doesn’t actually act like a malignant religious person, and can hear, “You put your bitches in black sacks,” half a dozen times without getting angry.

Anyway, I’m less annoyed and anxious now. I might be able to finish Tiger & Bunny and get to sleep before 2.

[373] Middle Ground Zero

I want to talk about the idea of “the middle way.” I also want to criticize ideas and statements that masquerade as the reasonable adult way of understanding the world.

Initially, I think about the ideal political situation. The idea of negotiating a center that keeps extreme positions at either end, and the reasonable people basically being able to agree on a common premise. In a democracy, it's theorized that rational actors with the perfect information would make decisions in service to their best interests. Clearly, that works every time. I think there are places, like our political realm, where that idea, that there is indeed a middle ground, does a lot of work in misleading our cultural conversation.

Another easy one is health. Would you rather be healthy or have cancer? Why not shoot for the middle ground and we just give you diabetes and a broken leg. It's manageable and not immediately life threatening, right? But no, you'll insist that you want to be healthy. Most sane people would because when it comes to the stark reality of “I feel like shit” it's so very clear what an ideal situation would look like.

I was reading over a reddit thread, specifically this one “hate the liberals” guy's comments to people expressing frustration over Obama's new bill to lower student debt interest rates. Examples of his comments amount to “you were an adult, you shouldn't have signed the loan,” “You're a fucking retard thinking the government owes you anything,” “Education is not free (n)or a right,” “I made better decisions than you, studied something better than you, I don't want to pay for you,” and “you entitled parasites don't seem to understand life isn't fair and that not everyone succeeds.” There are severely worse comments, but this will do for now.

Let's respond line by line. This idea that “you were an adult” seems to say that “now that you're a reasonable and wise individual with no unfair barriers and perfect information, you picked the objectively worst thing to do to yourself in this situation.” I, at least, had about as much choice to go to college as I have to currently work at McDonalds. It's amazing how many parents bought the idea that college meant job and opportunities well before their kids did. It amazes me to think that we'd admonish someone for, what's been touted as the “adult” thing to do, go to college, for incurring the costs that became normalized at all levels of society, in order to do so.

It's not being “reasonable” to lean on the idea that “well, people are adults!” Adults in a context. Or children who are as old as adults who've never been taught or engaged with by a reasonably better interpretation of the word “adult.”

The idea that the government doesn't owe you anything is particularly interesting. In a representative democracy, the government owes you everything. The government owes you its very jobs. If the majority of people with unreasonable crippling debt call on the government to do something about it, the government should respond. This accounting and thought experiment has been done hundreds of times. Things like relocating agribusiness and oil subsidies. Why begrudge the guy who tried to get educated and be responsible instead of writing angry letters to the banks? What did the government owe them? Whatever it was, it's still being paid.

Education not being free nor a right is a statement of fact. But, more to the point, nothing is a right besides the right to die. And then, only if you don't drag that phrasing into the political arena! Rights are bread from understanding and struggle. When you have access, ability, and intention, a “right” starts to manifest in louder and louder fashion. How many blacks and women have been explained to them the rights they don't have in our democracies over the years?

There are things you state because they are true. There are things you state, while incidentally true, only serve to promote the status quo or deliberately ignore other avenues. To say something like “don't touch that pot, it's hot” is not the same kind of factual claim as “don't complain because the government doesn't owe you anything.” The second statement is the kind of folded argument “logic” you get from religious types. “Well, you can't prove there's not a god!” Okay...true, but that usually has absolutely nothing to do with why you think that god doesn't want me to have an abortion. If you don't want to get burned, you don't touch the pot. If you want a different financial obligation, allegedly you appeal to your representatives.

The next lines are about personal responsibility. I don't know how you can talk of responsibility without speaking to what society considers responsible. It goes back to simply going to college in the first place. That's what higher paying jobs expect. That's what they did, that's their standard, and for a great many things, college isn't simply a giant waste of money. But, not only are kids in schools screwed going in, but when they're out, a lot of the jobs they were shooting for, say in medicine, are proving less than useful in paying back their loans anymore than the art student can. There's an underlying societal/governmental problem that makes a truly “responsible” decision, at best difficult, and at worst practically arbitrary.

Finally, the idea that not everyone succeeds and that life isn't fair. Maybe you come across someone who's been in a serious car accident. Do you pull up next to them and yell “life's not fair fucko!” and speed off in celebration of your ability to better avoid being in accidents? Probably not. It's a statement of “fact” that doesn't really speak to whether or not the accident happened on a bridge that wasn't reinforced or a road that wasn't properly paved. It ignores the poor car quality standards that could have reduced it to a fender bender instead of someone bleeding out on the pavement.

There are levels of responsibility and “fair” that we install. Also, we install them for reasons. If you want to speed, you don't argue with the cop that it's not fair he pulled you over. Why make the care able to go so fast if I can't use it! It's fair to assume that most people most of the time should try to drive in ways that don't make it more likely for you to die arbitrarily. We'll leave aside Montana's odd speed experiment, imposing speed limits and seeing an increase in death, with that analogy.

There is a, I don't know what else to call it but “religious zealotry” that people, at some level or another subscribe to that they coat in unhelpful and unnecessary “facts” to try and sound reasonable or advocating for “something in the middle.” These are idealists not because they understand what's actually ideal, but because they are allowed to create and defend to the death what they personally define as ideal. They subscribe to axioms about age or habits of “good leaders” instead of describing the context under which different ideas are formed. They appeal to reputation and common ethics above cause and effect evidence.

These are the people who say one of the dumbest and most popular statements right now, “there are some scientists that don't believe in global warming.” If you watch the episode of “Years of Living Dangerously,” try not to throw something through your TV when the pastor of one of the country's biggest churches argues that “because you haven't addressed my points!” He's neither convinced nor impressed. It's a guy you can't persuade ice melts, but you'll try, until you don't know whether you hate him or yourself more.

The “middle way,” to me, is not making these empty aphorisms about “life” or “how it works.” Nor is it taking a bath in shit, then in honey, and showing off how beautiful you look and awesome you smell. Put the shit in the garden and the honey on the toast. Understand that every time you say “Democrats suck” you're not really saying anything. The middle is about perspective, not leveraging bad or empty ideas against each other. It means you can advocate for equal opportunity without bankrupting potentially vital pieces of infrastructure. It means you're influenced by history and examples that aren't feeling laden anecdotes. It means you can respect when the responsibility is truly yours, you know, like for going to school, and when you should expect the burden for certain things, like how it's paid for, to be on everyone. Every old person on Medicaid who complains about entitled millennials should unironically drop dead on the spot.

“Objective” is not a negotiation. You don't want just a little bit of cancer. In the same way you don't track increasing tuition for 30 years, for no other reasons beyond corruption, and blame kids for “being adults who made the poor decision to pay for an education.”

[353] Not An Optimist

What's your impression of our [US] country? I ask in earnest because I'm about to offer mine. This will be heavily characterized by my thoughts after watching “Inequality For All” by Robert Reich.

If you want a history lesson of inequality, this is a movie for you. You will learn how and when wages stagnate. You will see parallels from the 1930s to what's happening now. You will get every number your heart could ever want regarding GDP or value. What you won't get is really anything to do about it. This is unfortunate because Reich knows his shit, is data backed, but most importantly, he's in the minority of anyone who seems capable of fixing things.

This doesn't mean he doesn't know how. Many people know how and I'd argue that he's one of them. But his method isn't rooted in what appears to be the actual state. His version for fixing things is to rise up and realize that we make the laws. We create the government that structures how free enterprise works. If we would only take it upon ourselves and remain optimistic, because history is on our side, things will eventually play out for the better.

For my part, I'm in no way an optimist. I don't acknowledge that we have a real government. I don't know how you can have a Supreme Court with justices that rub elbows with the Koch brothers. I don't know how money or corporations are people or can speak. Gerrymandering exists. Lobbying exists to the tune of investing 150 million to make 1.2 trillion the next year. We can't change the laws because we literally don't have people who speak for us. The best we are is an angry mob in the streets.

I really want to drive home how unhappy I am that the “optimist” attitude seemed to be a selling point from the film. Reich travels the country listening to peoples' stories of hardship. Working 2 and 3 jobs to pay the rent and barely feed the kids. People shacking up with friends or back home. He knows that technology and cheap labor over seas means that there is no new jobs just waiting over the horizon. These people have ideas about starting families or one day finding a better job to maybe afford a house or better car. These people should be rioting in the streets. Optimism in this context only serves to slow things down.

India and China are emerging markets. Both have a massive amount of people that want the same crap Americans want. Do you think companies care about getting you a job so you can afford their crap when several billion people are hitting the scene becoming engineers and doctors so they can live up to the example we set? Things will not get better here. Legislation is dead because it's bought and paid for. Unless you find a way to subvert the current paradigm, you're absolutely stuck suffering it.

His point about history being on our side strikes another kind of chord. My perspective of history shows that there's very human things that go wrong at any time well before we decide to be responsible about the free market. Not to mention, in a global economy, we're still contending and negotiating with plenty of areas of the world who don't think as “progressively” as we pretend we do. If anything, history is teaching us that no matter how angry a group of people gets and does something to reform, with enough time, money, and influence, the rich will get their way eventually anyway, as if they weren't all along.

To me, we ignore an overall philosophy. We don't appreciate that greed, is in fact, bad. People are fundamentally selfish. Even if it's private and they don't try to justify it with bastardized interpretations of social Darwinism and Ayn Rand. When you stop talking about human capital and consider yourself to be wealthy because of your manipulation of law and percentages of pensions, things go to shit. I don't know why we pretend that this is not what's happening. I don't know how people forgot to be human. I know the internet is distracting and poverty in this country looks different than in others. But why did we volunteer to be so stupid about it?

Reich's movie isn't going to do anything more or less than a Michael Moore one. A few people will learn a little more about how we're getting royally fucked, but it's not prescriptive. It doesn't identify bad guys because it doesn't believe there really are any. It's just “capitalism's” fault. It's our fault because we haven't crafted the correct amount of laws. We're talking about the Secretary of Labor under Clinton with all his information and influence and practically zero ability after 30 years of the same mantra able to shift the underlying tide. So what, we put one person like him in Congress and cross our fingers?

I look at all of my broke friends and their debt. I look at the ones who even with jobs are making what a teenager at a shit job would make even if they got “specialized” training. How many of you are just around the corner from a white picket fence and a kid? I look at the laws that have track records of keeping the country perpetually screwed over many years. I look at the smart people who aren't doing it any better than the next smart person.

This is why I think we're fucked. Just because your county or town does something a little different or manages to find a small piece of pie does not mean anything about the overall system. It doesn't mean people are smart enough nor inclined to figure out how to call out the real people making real decisions that take real food out of their mouths and really cause a lot of harm.

I live in the now generation. I don't even want to talk about things like gay rights or abortion because it's tantamount to discussing the merits of slavery. We shouldn't have let them go. I don't need pundits telling me tired, broke, and word for word arguments from 30 years ago that don't work. I think fuck them, stop giving them a voice, fix it and move on. Just “be happy” and wait for history to take over doesn't work for me.

And fuck pretending that everyone's an innocent bystander. You can listen to Jaime Diamond explain that Wall Street is STILL doing the same things that crashed the economy in 2008 today, in front of Congress, and nothing gets done. He gets to stay rich and his bank lives and we'll be the ones living the consequences of it for, if we're lucky, just under the majority of our lives.

Finally, economists have this habit of talking about growth. We need growth. We need people to buy buy buy. If we don't the economy slows down, people don't buy, we don't have taxes, we don't invest in infrastructure, everything starts to go to shit because it's broken and people are dumber. Granted, this is how it's worked since the 70s, but I think it's because people haven't figured out how to subvert power. When I hear growth, I hear pollution. When I hear buy, I think back to when I learned that the idea of an identity being wrapped up in what you buy being crafted by companies back in the 50s. I think of mental health and priorities when you attempt to “Americanize” billions of new people to repeat the process.

Maybe we look at what it could be like if we pulled out. Maybe we create things independent of shitty decision making from rich assholes who deny you the right to be educated, healthy, or even basically functioning. They only win that game if you allow yourself to play it.

I'm not happy nor optimistic because I don't know anyone who really experiences what we have in this country who is. Maybe I should just get more rich friends?