[1112] The River

There's a theme from Star Trek, Buffy, and Angel that is sticking out to me. The whole crew is under a spell, and maybe one character isn't affected or is the first to see that something is off. Because it's TV, that character devines a way to gain allies, break the spell, and explain the anomaly. No matter how many times it happens, whether the arc is resolved in a single episode or over several, no one ever seems to remember that this precise thing has happened before. They can't seem to build it into their wisdom banks and offer it as a first hypothesis about what's happening this time. They don't build systems or protocols that anticipate it happening again.

Exploring that narrative arc or the pitfalls in the people afterwards feels like it could be its own short-story. I think part of the reason it's sounding bells in my head is with each "random" or "lazy" response I get to my reflections about my nonprofit efforts. My blog auto-posts to reddit as I must be something of a curious and lightly masochistic beast. Invariably, there's someone who says one of the handful of same things over again. "You sound manic." (or other armchair diagnosis) "I didn't read all of that." "I don't know what to say, but here's a lot of words anyway."

It's instinctively dismissive, reductive, condescending - - the internet. But also, it's the same attitudes I encounter in social work. The people who beg for court intervention or involuntary confinement are the ones who adopt the same attitude about their perspective and behavior. They occupy a "safe" or familiar and protected universe where their actions and words make a certain kind of sense to them, and in fact their whole crew, and you're the only one who has a problem with them. The elixir, unfortunately, often came in a compellingly-worded appeal letter to the judge and sometimes years of involuntary therapy before we could put a child back in your custody. For some, the spell is absolute, and they fuck up large enough to stay incarcerated or lose their parental rights altogether.

As with everything, there's a spectrum. We're all under different spells and happy to reinforce them well past a healthy point. I've read the Vulture article on Joss Whedon which discusses the power of fandom. Joss is a person, complicated, "good" and "bad," and not everything he's done in 57 years is perfectly respectable, mature, or with a deep appreciation for his experiences that drive his behavior. If you're wearing a "Joss Whedon is my God" T-shirt, you're likely going to find every excuse one does for any god to dismiss or situate their divine behavior.

One thing that never works against the spell is to just call it out. That, by itself, doesn't understand the nature of spells. It's to create a wholly different world of meaning from whatever you might say about a truly universal or objective and "mathematical" conception of existence. If you talk normally, and the rest of the cast can only understand you through song, "You're all singing, and it's crazy," literally doesn't translate. It can't be interpreted anymore than white noise. Moreover, when you're talking about spells people adopt in the real world, they have a deeply invested interest in denying there's anything else to be said or learned. Every pissed off democrat decrying republican "hypocrisy" has no conception of the nature of the problem or the irony. Neither lens on the world can even imagine what a "crack" is.

Writing is me calling things out. It's received predictably and I don't expect that to ever change. I call things out that I need to better understand as "cracks" on my lens into the world or spells we're all under. I want to know what I can build into my anticipatory framework. If I think I see the same kind of meme too often, the same kind of show, hear the same punditry and propaganda, hear the same excuses, or silence, or not-so pleasantries I want to know if there's a way to navigate it so I don't suffer in ways I don't have to. I'm going to suffer, as anyone who's read one of my "manic-sounding" posts delights in pointing out, but the nature of it is intentional and incidental more than wanton or irreconcilable.

I don't know all the spells. I don't come from a place that presumes to intimately understand how compelling every narrative can be or the infinitely intricate ways it can be weaved together to preclude action or change. I just know there are spells. I know their nature. I know some of their patterns. I can't figure those patterns out "just thinking" in anxiety circles. There's no actual bell that rings once you've used a cliche enough times to constitute literally not thinking or maliciously antagonizing.

If I had to point to one culturally-compelling spell, it's denial. I think I'm the millionth person to speak to it, but there's an infinite list of things one could wish to deny in any given moment of their life. It's a sublingual instinct, "NO!" to keep yourself "safe" and "comfortable." If you experience revulsion or disgust, you've got a millions-of-years instinctual legacy to respect that or follow-up mechanisms for weaponizing it. We deny our capacity and potential more than anything.

When I first started writing, you would not have "persuaded" me that I would be doing it for 20 years. I didn't have the tools or the language to discuss the utility of writing. I was dismissive and judgmental to my own writing, let alone if I would have been presented to anyone else's. I was under spells of immaturity, hatred, desperation and loneliness. I was at the mercy of the cultural norms I grew up in. I had no concept that I could even have my own words or perspective and understanding of a situation. I could only suffer everything I didn't know or the rules I took for granted.

I knew I needed something "more," but I had no idea what that looked like. I think it's precisely here that people "find god" or "get spiritual," because the cracks amass, and you're alone, and you're incoherent, but you still crave the certainty and "perfection" of your perception that your doubts betrayed. I didn't become "autistically obsessed" with reading about religion or scientific refutations of religious arguments unless I was fighting against an all-encompassing, and wrong, series of notions about myself. Notions pertaining to the girl I liked too much and the assumptions about my inevitable future given my academic performance, looks, or demeanor.

What did I really need more of? Meaning. I needed things to make sense. I needed to see a consistent cause and effect relationship that helped me keep my mood and behavior oriented. I didn't understand the depth of the crazy-making contradictions of the sea of nonsense words I was swimming in. I didn't understand how we break ourselves along the rocks of generational trauma and unarticulated responsibilities. I had no idea what my role or "purpose" could or should be, let alone the notion that I'd have to dictate it, and do it persistently, alone, in evolving ways, or it didn't really exist. That's a fucking huge undertaking.

If I connect with anyone, ever, it's because piece by piece, over decades, I'm trying to puzzle together the nature of these stories we're telling ourselves and needlessly suffering. Are you really an "addict?" Is your "loving" relationship serving you? Are you "just saying" a series of empty or hateful epithets you can't even recognize as such? It's always yes and no, and it's always changing, and it only gets better when you can label the spell with your own words and trust that when you say them you mean them. You were the cause, and you expect a certain effect. If you're not getting the effect you desire, you have the power to recite a new spell, stop casting them altogether, or look for the intended effect to take place elsewhere.

If you fundamentally deny your potential and power of your words, so it follows the story of your actions. You don't understand the harm. You don't understand the conditioning it takes to carry out the meaningful work to maintain or improve. This is as real to me as it is the physical exhaustion I do or don't feel in attempting to work on projects on my land. Week 4 of hauling scrap, fence building, or rock dispersal feels dramatically different than days 1 or 2. It's easy to describe any task as fairly simple or straight-forward, until the weather isn't perfect, or the tool breaks, or you get sick, or literally any reason, or excuse, arrives for you to deny what it's going to take to get the job done.

Your posture matters. You need to demonstrate for yourself in a consistent way that walking "like that" is going to cause spine issues. Using the wrong tool is going to get you hurt. Making the same appeal to the same people in the same way and only finding yourself resentful and exhausted is a you problem. You're caught under the spell singing a very personal song only you can hear and the rest of the world thinks you look crazy. Can you even wake up from your own spell? Can you resist the urge, redirect the craving, to join someone else's? Yes and no. Can you exercise the process and language to identify and dispel versus deny regardless? Yes.

Welcome to the work. Each time you affirm and say "yes" you inch in a chosen direction more than you suffer one you didn't. Yes, I can. Yes, that may be true. Yes, there's a road to explore here. Yes, I grant that is your perspective and yes I hope we can both respect the limits and potential of perspectives.

"I am whatever you say I am. If I wasn't, then why would I say I am?"

[741] The Devil His Due

The last few hours has been a discussion and reflection on the different degrees and general pathologies of humanity. It's been a comparison of the kind of lives we lead, hope to lead, and lifelong pitfalls of thought and behavior people fall into. It's been a conversation that causes me a headache, and then a half hour goes by, and I start to feel a sense of overwhelming calm for both having got it out, and realizing again, that for all of the pathology and pain, the vast majority of it isn't mine.

One question me and Byron both asked ourselves was, “How did I get here?” Why, as people who can openly discuss bending people and exercising power, why aren't we just the most ridiculous and malicious and selfish people on the planet? Why doesn't he just invent some story to take kids away from objectively terrible people who just quite don't meet the criterion the State needs? Why don't I pull every lever of retaliatory power to bend addicts over my knee and punish them for their bullshit?

Or what about other realms of our lives? Why would I retreat into a mode of passive actor with regard to seeking sexual activity or adopt the modes and means of acquiring money I persistently regard as morally corrupt and naive? Aren't I a loose cannon who's too blunt and judgmental? Why not put on a million faces, like the perfect politician, and weave my way between the cracks of what look like gaping wounds in different groups and people I meet? Why don't I take every opportunity to squeeze all that I can from anyone, all the time, because I can, or because I can presumably make anything justified or simply lie about it?

What's demonstrated in that last paragraph is a kind of “mission creep” in the mind of someone who holds no regard for who I am or how I got there. The person who sees you as capable of having no high ground, in fact, doesn't have their own. The person who fears your questions and responds to inquiry with resentment, cedes the capacity for truth, therefore you are untruthful. The person who adopts the vagaries and accusations of a moment, abandons long-term goals and the responsibility of daily devotion, therefore you are devoid of inherent sanctity and forever non-specific no matter your language. The person with the most feeling, and the testimony of the mob, renders you emotionless, or incorrectly and not allowed to express your emotions, and so very, very alone. This is the tried and true method at the base of every rationalization. I know you are, but what am I?

I titled this blog The Devil His Due, because I always feel like that devil on people's shoulders. I can bring up the topic, or make the joke, or provide a suggestion, and then that suggestion lingers. You then proceed to spend your entire life avoiding the question, pretending you didn't laugh at the joke, or hold no sympathy for the suggestion as you physically fight back the tendency to agree. You'll marvel at the capacity to get in your head and stay there, while forgoing the exact tool you're perfectly capable of employing to find yourself in equal parts my head as I am yours. You could just try thinking.

When you start thinking, that's when you discover where you are or where you're going. The reason writing is thinking, is because you can't get each word without going over it first. No sentence is determined until the end. No “justifying” sentiment comes without the lines before and after it and hopefully paragraphs after those. How broken do you have to be to think that, of all people, I'm a liar, in a forthright manner? I can lie. We all can. We all do. But what do you understand, can you understand, are you ever willing or able to understand, why I don't want or need to? Can you recognize the difference between when you're lying and not? Because, remember, when you can't, I'm therefore reduced to the one who not only must be lying, but is doing so deliberately and maliciously. Not like you, no no, so innocent and on accident, but forever armed with the truth regardless.

This is a timeless pattern. This is why I need to take my potential judgments of people and angry feelings and lay them out. Why? Because I'm not actually filled with hatred. I have a brain that can provoke headaches and reacts with a level of anxiety I don't particularly care for, but I also have the contrast of my whole adult life with what I grew up with. I used to have several month long headaches from living under the general unresolved questions and stress of my domineering household. It was day and night to my mental health to be able to have a space I didn't regard as hostile and didn't cause me physical pain once I was able to leave.

Here we get to that painful irony of my being, and being that hot little devil on your shoulder and in your ear. My words cause pain. The ones meant to be painful cause pain. The one's that aren't, cause pain. The ones I regard as the “truest” or the best approximation of my feelings, those hurt the most and for the longest. I arrive at words today that have in some way been forming my entire life. That's truths that suck ass. That's descriptions of behaviors I'm not insanely proud of. That's motivations and misunderstandings I've let carry me through an ongoing mesh of complicated relationships, risks, and decisions. The only thing that has a prayer of making sense of it all is my individual sense of responsibility. I can't rely on your endorsement alone. I can't believe your words, let alone mine, as the absolute best and most reliable for all things at all times. I'm required to practice and reinforce unremitting doubt.

Doubt is not denial. Doubt is painful. Doubt needs to be rooted in something or you disassociate from all reality. Doubt that gets out of hand literally makes you insane, as anyone sacrificed to acid might attest. But doubt is also an effort and choice and exercise. Incidental doubt is fear. Fear is not what you need to practice, doubt is. Decrying the earth is flat is fear that you really are stupid as fuck and have no grasp of reality. Doubting the earth is flat is presenting information that can actually contend with all of the evidence otherwise. Healthy doubt is knowing there is no remaining argument and conceding the Earth is round, and moving on to doubt the next thing. In order to respect the example, one must imagine a child who's only as good as the information it's been presented. One should probably regard most people as children first and in a similar manner.

But then you get old. You don't have an excuse, barring mental deficiency. You need to start believing things for good reasons. You need to carry yourself and your words as if they have an impact. You need to build relationships on those kind of foundations as if your life depends on it. Because it does. Modernity helps mask this because the intellectual work has been done for us. You were born into clean water, you don't have a visceral memory of someone dying by drinking the wrong kind. You were born into a world where there is an organization that responds to emergencies, you don't have to adopt a whole host of self-preservation techniques or die. The world becomes a loose-knit game of interpretation, because no one's making it the right kind of painful. It's a pain either imposed, or one you can adopt in manageable pieces.

Pain itself then becomes pathologized. Instead of something that can be incidentally used incorrectly, it's wrong by default. “He made me uncomfortable!” The rallying cry of #metoo. Maybe you didn't know? Guys are insecure idiots with no idea too. They're uncomfortable. No guy, never, is going to carry the kind of vitriol for his being that is currently insisted upon without you exacerbating the problem. Guys respond to challenges with another challenge, or a breakdown. Broken men do crazy shit. And a physical or psychological challenging pissing match is not the way to improve the relationship between men and women.

So let's say I'm the devil. Let's run with the thesis that I'm as bad as it gets, cast out of God's kingdom. Relishing the souls he sends me after I've plagued them with sin and tempted them to sign away, for eternity no less, any right to their being for some fleeting delight. Okay, I accept. But the difference between me and you who might make that proposition, is that I don't give you the rest of my being or story. The last 3 sentences I typed before this immediately showed how quickly metaphors breakdown when you attempt to rationalize mythical beasts, so you get this instead, and we'll move on.

People blame me for expecting them to converse. Think about that. They think it's a “problem” that I should expect you to be honest in spite of the pain or difficulty of a conversation. They'll tell me to censor myself in descriptions of things I apparently did to someone, and am both remorseful and confused by the dialogue that surrounds it. They'll tell me you seem and ask what are you trying to say? Trying? Clearly, I'm trying to say literally everything I am. In fact, I'm saying it! I didn't try to tell you that, I did. Why isn't that enough? Why don't you know how to say, instead of try to say? I don't understand the question and I don't see the reason. Well, there was no real question, and the reason has to do with feeling something negatively about the words, not taking them in and recognizing what they say or responding to them.

This is why science feels like a threat to the faithful. They don't get it, they just know it doesn't feel good to think they're monkeys. This is why you can tell me what kind of person I seem like, but would never in a million years consider quoting me with something I actively chose to say. This is why you can get away with asking me questions that deserve an immediate answer and “taking responsibility” posture, but mine can go ignored. This is why relationships breakdown, and stay broken, because “you've changed” could never be, “I was never willing to listen to nor accept who you are.” You can't recognize the difference between an excuse and explanation. You don't have a concept of honesty. You don't have reasons, nor practice, how to be healthily skeptical or honest in your own life, therefore, no one is or can be. You justify, so they're unjustified.

I don't do that. I report to you your own words. I ask questions when I'm confused. I hold up your literal contradictions in thought next to each other because you've habituated not seeing them. That's painful, and you didn't ask for it. You only ask for it alone, in secret. You don't want to have an open public discussion because you know, not even deep down, that you haven't thought about it like you should. And if you did, you'd have to give the devil his due. He worked for your soul. He didn't recognize it as individually sovereign and held in the first place. The only reason you signed it away was because he was right.

My tone is so damming because I don't want a headache every day for months. My questions arise from the process, not because I thought, “This is going to be the best thing to fuck up your day.” It's a question because I don't know the answer. It's a question because presumably you don't know either, but you're acting like you do. Unlike you, I don't know how to resolve questions that go ignored. I don't know how to function even remotely healthily or orient myself in the sea of douche-bags unless I figure out my voice and behavior that isn't under constant assault to be molded by every pathology. I want to say something like, “Of course I'm a murderer, and rapist, and thief, and have anger issues, and would lie to save my ass, and on and on and on,” because that's true independent of everything, of everyone, about everyone. The rule is fuck, have kids, and die. That rule doesn't care about laws, or civility, or “civilization,” or the dreamiest love story or the most hopeful statistic.

You know how many of my well-meaning “intelligent” friends with their wedding pictures and good enough jobs and goals have had kids? NONE. You know how many children exist between the families I supervise for their neglect and abuses daily? No less than 2 each. There is no case to be made that we are anything but the hastily and mindlessly collected sum of our more often than not fuck-ups and animal instincts held together by some ingenious mental fuckery and self-delusion that pragmatically functions as preservation. That doesn't mean it doesn't need to get vastly better. That doesn't mean bad behavior is justified, or even inevitable, but it does mean you have a LONG long way to go on the road to “better,” if you can't even have the conversation or recognize more than one feeling-laden reason behind how someone or something functions in the world.

If you don't seek the failure point, you are the failure point. That's the new means of evolution. Active adapting to the new information. I was a lovesick child in high school. I learned the biology behind it, and said “open-relationship.” I learned the logic and utility of “enforced monogamy” and found the room to cut out “general monogamy” or my feelings as they pertain to sex verses trusting someone with my thoughts and intentions. I disavow language without the underlying ethic and without dismissing the effect of “love.” I eschew marriage with the capacity to respect and feel good for people who find ways to make it work for them. I concede there are problems and gray areas related to boys and girls and how they fuck, especially drunk, without condemning men and masculinity, nor denying someone their perception or story of feeling unsafe or violated. I don't give a fuck about the outdoors and will still look at your pictures and climb the mountain with you. I can have a point of view; I can have a well-researched and extremely thoughtful and painful point of view, and I can still wish endlessly, until the day I die, that you will fight it and change it and give me better reasons than the ones I discover while writing.

But I do the work. I take the risk. I face my behavior. I want the feedback because I use it to change. You don't, so you don't provide feedback, face your behavior, take risks or work, therefore, that must not be what I'm doing or capable of. I don't feel I understand your behavior, I'm turning you into a blog so you can be dismissed. A blog isn't an honest exploration and coping mechanism, I justify justify justify and preach preach preach and never find a way not to be “negative.” You see, I didn't think these thoughts, or spend a few hours on persistently aggravating ideas, I'm attacking you. Because if you were to write about me, or the negative influences in your life, you'd be attacking, lashing, because you're on the defensive. No one taught you the difference between explore and defend, pick apart and attack, doubt and afraid, honest and “truly feeling,” so it all just feels like a whir of incoherent ranting.

News flash, it's because that's what you sound like. We all do, but some of us are actually trying not to. Some of us invite the devil in to talk, because he can't make us sign away our soul. I'll never feel bad when I'm telling you that's precisely what you're doing. I'll feel pity. I'll feel hopeless. But I'll feel those things for you, not about me. Isn't that what we should be doing with feelings? Feeling for people, not about them? Shouldn't we be conjuring, or de-escalating, what we should feel? Aren't feelings impressively wrong, most of the time, so they should be as deliberate as we can craft them? Shouldn't they inform instead of dictate? Are you only hearing this as me advocating for abolishing all feelings? Are you even willing or capable of conceiving of me as having feelings that are well-earned and combated with? You certainly don't act like it unless they can be reduced to a reason to fight. You certainly don't include them in your “good-natured” tear downs of my intentions or awareness.

Ultimately, I get to know and behave like I don't hate you, in spite of all the good reasons to do so, because I don't hate you. You're disappointing, daily. You're bigger and whiter shells than I'll ever be. You'll keep reminding me of people who live at the logical extremes of your behavior that I'm paid to exploit. And I'll keep writing, and trying, and inviting, and claiming not to be a proper martyr as I die a little each day inside in service to my “naive idealism” that merely keeps me oriented towards trying to do better, do more, and finish the work. It hurts less than looking for your soul.