[1245] Call Me Maybe

I think this is going to be decently self-indulgent. If that’s not the headspace you’re in, please avert your eyes. PSA: Fuck ICE. General strike now. This digression has little-to-nothing to do with those topics, even if everything, in some way, does.

I’ve never been that good at being “one of the guys.” I’ve been told since I was very young that I was a leader.  Well before I had any conception of what that meant, it worked its way into my expectations and approach to life. I’m the roommate that finds the roommates, pays the bills, and throws the party. I’m the group project presenter. I’m the one at work who gets promoted to supervisor or manager. You know how at fast food places there’s a 22 year old managing 30-50 year old rough-looking line-cooks? I was that 22 year old, dispositionally at 15, and actually at 18.

I’ve had friend groups. Every time I reflect on them, they’ve felt less and less like they should be described as such. I’ve had people I’ve spent a majority of my social time with for at least a couple year periods at a time. I haven’t spoken a word to 95% of any individual from any of those groups in at least 5, probably 10 or more years. There’s passing glances on what they may post to social media. Many stopped using it entirely. One just declared he’s exhausted by the hate on “both sides” and said to reach out individually before he deactivates. I liked the post and declined to do so.

As “mental health” became a popular buzzy thing, a lot of people started asking questions like, “Does this person serve me?” They started conceptualizing their life in terms of “needs.” The “toxic” and “gaslighting” narratives were getting examined and the locus of “power” reimagined. A lot of people, at least superficially, appeared to be waking up to the power they have and the nature of their choices. That’s, broadly, a good thing.

What was hidden in that newfound awareness was a perfect selfish self-justification narrative. When you’re concerning yourself with your needs, perhaps for the first time ever in a meaningful way, you’re not going to be open to challenge and contradiction. Probably, when it’s new, rightfully so. But once you’ve made some obvious readjustments, there’s a temptation to think the work is over. Like, once you get dunked and saved, you’re going to heaven, right? You don’t have to actually practice your faith provided you believe in earnest. Don’t get hung up on, “faith without works is dead.”

My instinct is that I’ve been Marie Kondo-ed out of many lives. It’s incredibly rare that even tipsy I’ll bother to message someone I used to hang with or call a friend. What did I serve that person back then? Maybe they laughed. Maybe they liked the party environment. Maybe we had good conversations. Maybe they liked to fuck around. But, as we grew up and priorities changed, increasingly you start to register as just a kind of annoying bag of opinions. You don’t fit the narrative of what it takes to look after a family or succeed at work. When you’re reminiscing it registers as a kind of exhausting and pathetic appeal to what no longer exists.

I’m not a trapped in the past kind of person though. I’m a student of history. I’m also deeply investigative about why right now looks and feels the ways it does. Your “past” brain and all its memories exist today, morphed every time you access them, and signaling as safe or dangerous to entertain. To the extent that I’ve caused psychic injury, it might as well have been yesterday, and I think it goes a long way to explaining the disingenuousness of reaching out or trying to “stay connected,” if we ever really were.

I also know the power of lore and gossip. I’ve been a genuinely mean or ridiculous person in the past. I’m inclined to argue against that being my default setting or indicative of my broader project bent on hurting people. I’ve got a couple acutely dramatic and damming stories that I’m certain have made their rounds and would disincline most from hearing my perspective. At one level it’s perfectly understandable. At what I think is a more important and reasonable level, it’s the precise kind of unreasonable we unironically crave and claim in service to our “joy” or “mental health.”

I’m someone who struggles to conceive of “forgiveness.” I’d rather be understood. I’d rather there exist a series of things we can both point to that show contrition, change, or evidence we’re moving towards some mutual aim. When I was younger, almost every time I was asked to apologize for something, it just conjured resentment. I wasn’t sorry. I couldn’t understand the reason to be. You want me to lie? I used to get viciously beaten for lying! Certainly as a kid, I wasn’t coming from a place of personal responsibility nor grasping the impact of my words or actions. Apologize? But YOU MADE ME!

I’ve heard it said that forgiveness is about you more than the other person. If you can forgive, you drop the weight of that resentment and judgment. This selfless act regarded as the pinnacle of Christ’s love is actually a selfish tool to let yourself off the hook in learning how to cope and conceptualize your pain. You can adopt that methodology an infinite amount of times, sacrificing as many relationships, narratives, or responsibilities as it takes to feel like your needs are finally being serviced.

I’m an antagonist. If I were the villain in a story, I would be regarded “simply” as the necessary component to a compelling tale. No one is cracking open a book to read hundreds of pages about people just hanging out and living their lives without conflict. They have to conquer the monsters. They have to overcome the dramatic tragedy. They have to forge a new identity and unlock powers they never knew they had.

I’m not a monster. I am, but it’s a capacity, not a hard and fast sole and coherent designation. I’m not a monster because you say so or because you can point a finger. I’m not a monster because of the pain I’ve caused and will take responsibility for. I’m a monster because I’m not actually “human” or “a friend” in the mind of most people first.

I find this ironic because we’re living in some catastrophic fascist times where people I’m more inclined to understand as “animals” or “as monster as it gets” are shooting people in the back and face. There are people murdering us in the street, kidnapping children, and lying for millions of dollars and more license to destroy literally everything that made our society what it was.

Would it be overstating it to say that I’ve felt a kind of coldness and anger that’s been more consistent and resolute than I’ve ever heard former friends or partners voice about what’s been happening over the last 10 years? I don’t think so, and that feels properly insane to say, but I don’t feel like I’m lying. Is that not more evidence of my actually monstrous and conceited nature?

I work in counseling. I’ve worked for DCS. I’ve been a general case manager and social worker. I’ve worked in prison. I’ve been face to face with people for years who have fucked up in ways you can’t imagine for yourself. They have been fucked by details that don’t show up in the most dramatic of TV shows or movies. None of them feel like monsters. None of them feel like people it’s not worth talking to or teaching. None of them feel beyond the capacity to be redeemed, so to speak, even if it’s unclear or unlikely the confluence of core wounds will actually resolve.

My professional life has added considerably to my understanding of how and whether people actually practice their humanity. It’s not clear to me most people are inclined to treat each other as real human people. For the longest time I wanted to personalize that. Blame my argumentative and explanatory style as “too much.” But while that can certainly be annoying and tuned up or down, what’s happening first is people want to be appeased and agreed with, regardless of what they’re doing or saying. Your value is directly proportional to their internal calculation of your capacity to do that.

Doesn’t that sound like the instinctual unarticulated practice of asking out loud whether something serves you or brings you joy? Does it look like we’ve just repackaged our animal nature into something that sounds more polite and professional?

I think there’s a direct line through the alienation I’ve experienced to the sense of helplessness about what’s happening culturally. I think people’s inability to truthfully discuss the painful details and work within the practical confines of what it means to do something meaningful is why they can only increase in their suffering of that condition. You get cancer, you say, “Thinking about this sickness doesn’t serve me.” You jettison the thought. The cancer grows regardless.

It’s not true to say that I want people who were friends to be friendly again. The truth is that I want people who I thought I saw evidence of what they were or what we were together to see the same thing I did. That’s a very different kind of longing or desire. I don’t just want to be accepted or tolerated. I don’t want to wear you down or conjure pity. I want you to feel the same kind of patience, affinity, respect, and hope that I have in working with people in earnest. I want you to be as discerning in your decision to never talk to me again, where the conditions for that to be true rise beyond gossip or incidentally hurt feelings.

I cut my mom off, for example, because 30 seconds into any conversation you’re transported into a world of mental illness, racism, religious dogma, and victimhood that’s beyond parody. I’m regularly setting the example of patient parsing and question asking. I’m making choices. She’s rabidly barking. It’s bizarre to be treated with the same tool or like we’re the same kind of bad thing. It’s, thankfully, hard to feel like you’ve been iced out when you start to recognize that you were maybe never seen in the first place.

I then wonder about how deep or whether it’s always been true that “things” or “culture” has been so superficial. I watch my dad seemingly pretty regularly interact with friends he grew up with on facebook or sometimes they’ll show up to a funeral. If I died tomorrow, I don’t know that I’d get to 20 people outside of immediate family. I cared too little? Fought over the wrong things? Crossed the line too many times? I’m not pitying myself, I’m seriously curious. And I kinda think I’m going to go the rest of my life never getting the answers.

[1244] Lord And Savor

There is an infinite list of things I do not understand. If we’re to narrow that down at all, they often have to do with “the human condition.” I want to avoid too many empty and sweeping cliches. It simply doesn’t matter to me to say what we “could” be or belabor the depth of our atrocities. I might be trying to invent a concept for myself on the fly, so for now let’s call it “the loop.”

When people yearn for revolution, I don’t think they necessarily believe themselves to be going in a circle. Overthrow the powers that be! The problem, it’s assumed, could never be that now you’re in power and there’s something intrinsically worth being suspicious about its nature.

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

As an, alleged, individual, I think about the power of my feelings. I think about how for years I rode the energy of resentment and revenge. I delighted in the idea of who or what I could destroy, either materially or intellectually. It was a regular occurrence that I might make someone cry, and no part of me felt bad. What? I was just talking. All I did was use my capacity to see through the bullshit, locate your pain, and bring it into view for all to see.

You do things like that when your conscience is clear. I wasn’t evil. I wasn’t hateful. I was right. Moreover, I was making things better because I was wielding the weapon of truth. When you were either forced to do the same, or suffer the consequences of not doing so, I remained absolved of responsibility because the higher-order thing we all need was just doing its thing. That’s the nature of truth; it hurts.

I made no distinction between my subjective experience and “the truth.” I had no appreciation nor awareness of how my feelings might be coloring that truth. I was either basically dead inside, suppressed by years of emotional trauma, or confident in my activated capacity for anger over perceived injustice or silliness. My unarticulated assumptions gave me license to bull my way through many a china shop.

I’m still that person, but old. I’m more curious. I’m tired. I’m not the kind of tired that you hear from normal people who can’t be bothered to do “more” or “extra” than they do on any given day. I’m tired of seeing the same story. I’m tired of my own words. I’m tired of perceiving the loops. I’m tired of waiting for the revolution to arrive at a place where anyone acts like they’re capable of making decisions.

That was a key underlying insight about the nature of my power. It’s one that people pick up on and use to beat me over the head with how much is my fault. The parties in college, for the hundreds of people in and out of our house over years, fell to me. Was it “our” house? I organized it. I built things for it. I bought the booze. Greenlit the friend groups. Assigned roles. It was crazy how quickly people fell in line. If you got too drunk? I got you too drunk. If you had a questionable sexual encounter, surely we all know I raped you.

I’m used to being the excuse. It’s an outgrowth of me realizing my ability to choose in a more deliberate and conscious way than other people adopt for themselves. Their choices show up when…well, that’s the question, isn’t it? When do they choose? I don’t really know. I don’t, honestly, conceive of most people making real choices most of the time. I see people as animals first. When the automatic food dispenser drops, they run over. Were they even hungry? Have they ever known real hunger?

If you were starving, you might choose to kill for it, and, circumstances providing, anyone looking from afar might have a hard time blaming you. You might have the perfect excuse. Maybe the food is going to your young child. Maybe you just earnestly worked for days to get your hands on a previous morsel, and it was stolen before you could bite. Maybe you’re the last person alive with the blood that’s going to save the world if you can only get to the secret mountain bunker.

How fantastical of a tale do we need to rest within our excuses? I don’t think most people need more than an empty sentiment like, “I’m a Christian.” I don’t think most people need to do anything beyond point to objects they own of status or only need to tell you about ways they’ve suffered. The loop, the ritual, of invoking your excuse and then carrying on with business as usual is baked in. You deserve it. They deserve it. If you weren’t so dishonest, you could see the truth too. You could share in the dignity and pride of my perspective. You could atone for your sin.

I can feel myself when I’m begging for an excuse. Whether it’s to flip out or pick the naughtiest words. I know when I want to ride the righteous lightening of condemnation. I know when I want attention. I know when I want to get something for less than I hope to put into it. The superficial engagement of social media highlights it. The woe-is-me spirals of anxiety over what I consistently and explicitly call “not real problems.” I know how quickly the wheel turns. I know I’m hurrying up to slow down. I know it’s because I don’t fundamentally trust the impact and results of my choices anymore.

My old superpower was genuine belief. I was a level of naive that has probably had hundreds of people going out of their way to ensure I wouldn’t die prematurely. I’m not, “Sure, let’s hop in your van” kind of naive (true story), but I believed things made sense. I believed families love each other. I believed businesses hired and rewarded the best workers. I believed school challenged and emboldened. I thought friendships, when based on a kind of psychopathic approach to truth and accounting, could last forever. I thought I could think or argue my way in or out of anything. I thought I wouldn’t get “a version” of the things I was aiming for, but precisely what I was after. I had previously only ever been after extremely simple and superficial things.

Now I realize I’ve potentially been in something of a years-long crisis. I lost the plot. It was a story that might’ve only been a rough draft of what you’d need as a, hopefully unironically, “higher” functioning adult. I didn’t pick new or better goals. I didn’t search for what an evolved well of infinite motivation may look like when it’s not fueled by “fuck you” energy. Me, allegedly, so capable of responsibility and actually making choices, lost at sea?

I’m bored, but not because I don’t have things to do or because there isn’t a perpetual five-alarm fascist fire to put out. I’m bored of spirit. I’m bored waiting for something to happen as a result of choices instead of reactions. I can’t choose for you. I can’t invest of myself what you can’t realize. We weren’t partying together, I guess. We weren’t dreaming about the future we could create. We aren’t even able to talk about “the world” with the same level of awareness.

I feel like I choose to mock myself and my feelings by looking for things that challenge my perspective. I don’t care how I feel. It’s wrong. It’s incomplete and ill-informed. It’s automatic and antagonistic. I don’t “need” to feel “good” or “happy.” I don’t describe myself in terms of “needs” too often that don’t rest in things like eating or shitting. What “I need” is “us choosing.” I think implicit in that is me getting chosen in return.

I don’t feel chosen by anyone but my dad. I feel supported by friends, but certainly not chosen. I feel like their support often stems from places where they feel broken. It’s where I then have to be extremely careful that I’m not taking advantage and holding myself personally responsible for trying to square when it feels imbalanced. When I can’t simplify things in monetary ways, I get disoriented. Traditionally, I’m the free therapist-friend providing years of open-ended feedback, looping in and out of what they may “need” from me.

Do they know what they need anymore than I do? One thinks they need mushrooms. Another thinks they need less sex. Another thinks softball matters more than voting. I’ve watched from afar as friends choose their vocation, their equivocations, and their artfully crafted stories and reels celebrating their families. Just like I’m choosing to do TikToks and garner hatred from reddit.

To be sure, I’m meandering through the debased means of connection in a bid for the wrong kind of attention. I’m maintaining my status as a curiosity or piece of safe drama to watch, like a TV show you don’t care for but can’t look away. If the show gets out of line and asks you to really pay attention or start choosing your own adventure, can you imagine a greater betrayal? I’m yours to watch. None of this fourth-wall breaking bullshit.

I’m tired of waiting for you. I’m tired of hoping I’ll feel better or less anxious in the wake of something you finally figure out. I work myself up because I feel like, ultimately, it really does all depend on me. You won’t join me, but you’ll do what I say. You won’t shoulder the risk, but you’ll dump the resources. You won’t access the vulnerable disorienting nature of your power, but you’ll bask in mine. I don’t want that. I don’t know that it’s possible to get what I want instead.

No one sincerely doubts me. That’s part of the mythology. No one who has watched how I work or interact with the world thinks that, if I set my mind to it, I won’t get it. What they’re clocking is the exact thing about me that made so many people cry. I, like any other boring pathological megalomaniac, see your weakness. It’s the same as my weakness. It’s what we’re telegraphing when we’re not making choices. It’s our insecurities. It’s our cliches. It’s our desire to downplay and dismiss the catastrophic nature of our environment.

I live in a fucking shed. I love my shed, but I live in a fucking shed because I was born into a context that was cooking modern fascism. My shed used to represent freedom and possibility. It increasingly represents things to repair and clean up. It grows in its identity as a lonely white-trash island with each passing year. It has all my stuff that I haphazardly engage with. It has my cats which, I don’t exactly want eaten by coyotes, but I don’t want to have to think about if I leave for a week or what they cost me in vet visits.

It took 8 years, a divorce, and a friend moving back to this miserable state to find a consistent concert buddy. At least 10 people I used to party with several times a week for years live like an hour or 2 away. Who in their right mind would choose to shoot the shit over dinner or a beer even once a year? What former coworker would choose to share their new job stories or scuttlebutt after I left? It’s unthinkable.

The irony is such that “my power” isn’t mine at all. I can only tap into what feels like “choice space” to “break loops” in weird little pockets of acute awareness or frustration. I can reign in the feelings and chart a course of action when I seemingly align two oppositely charged magnetic tips and push back against the forces that are otherwise sending me for a loop. I can line them up whenever I want. I can disregard the waves. My mind need not shake. But I’ll still be the only one pointing and pushing towards…whatever it is I’m bothering.

I chose shed because at least the nature of its constraints felt closer to a place of true and actual choices than I otherwise tend to observe from people. I have very little external pressure to do anything out here. It’s all manifest evidence of my hairbrained ideas, effort, and in-processing. It’s a sanctuary where I’m not expected to perform. I’m not failing to live up to your needs out here. I can’t reasonably expect you to visit.

I don’t know what kind of example I want to set anymore. Demonstrating a degree of financial “freedom” has meant nothing. Efforts to salvage, create, or sustain garner 2 or 3 likes occasionally. Every job I ever get aggressively chases me away literally moments away from positive feedback and accolades. I’m funny, but never wanted to be “the funny guy.” I’m angry, but in this era every outburst is performative by default. I've been too big a whore to fall in with incels and worked too long in social work to self-pity.

I have this sickening sense that, somehow, everyone is watching what I choose, but not in an effort to actually see.

[1169] Chugga Chugga

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel satiated in reflecting on the dumpster fire that is my country, but in the meantime, the thoughts continue to flow.

I see a lot of parallels in my daily life map onto the broader culture. I’m someone who pursued his dreams. I did so while engaged in conversations with people who never intended to, but said otherwise. When my friend group got drunk together in college and talked about trying to build off grid or how we would respond to an economy that was not hiring nor paying adequately, I saved the money to buy the land. I didn’t know how much I was taking for granted, for years, as I entertained the idea of a future where we would work together, stay close, and certainly drink less, but keep the good times rolling.

The first thing I took for granted was that people meant what they said. I’ve often maintained something of an outsider status, usually as an outgrowth of my “blunt” assessments, comments, or expressively shared perspective. I genuinely thought I had a tribe for the first time in my life. I thought, “Oh, this is how normal people get together and accomplish things or support each other.” I thought what made us friends initially, kept us partying together each weekend, or what ensured it was cool to wander between our houses or apartments without knocking was robust and reliable.

I don’t know that there was any way to really grasp how far down a “words don’t mean anything” rabbit hole we existed at culturally during that time. My cohort discovered and was bored by 4chan by sophomore year. There’s no way to measure the amount of insincere detached irony that I suspect must have glazed everything. Sophomore year was the first year we were introduced to Sarah Palin, who I’ve always considered a harbinger of doom and too-telling about the nature of the country.

As relationships got strained, and the frequency with which you had to prevent yourself from gagging when someone said “adulting” increased, it became easier to feel how things were breaking down. Each event or invitation was either sparsely attended or turned down. “Secret” conversations and resentments built up. “Real life” was kicking in, I guess, and all of the workshopping and noticing during college resulted in unnecessary suffering of the ongoing consequences. Most people found under-skilled roles, rented overpriced places, used pets as surrogate children, and stopped even pretending to care about what you were up to.

I’ve listened to my dad talk about his sense of community growing up in the harbor and East Chicago. Neighbors helped each other and talked all the time. My grandparents supported single mothers, sent the kids to do chores, and bonded through the church. I’ll listen to older comedians and actors allude to their upbringings that ring similar bells of community, consistency, and support. It seems that anyone who’s gotten somewhere appreciable had a village.

Almost everyone my age that I knew had divorced parents. Almost everyone was tens of thousands in debt in order to go to school. Almost everyone waited until their 30s to have kids.

Let’s not skimp on parallels. There’s a reticence to actually solve problems. When you have an issue with someone, gossip, don’t bring it to them. Don’t weigh evidence. Go to the extremes of your emotion, assume, and carry on in self-righteous indignation for the bogeyman you’ve built.

I witness a “silent majority” all the time. It’s a majority of people who are too afraid to unionize. It’s a majority who throw up their arms and say “it is what it is.” It’s a majority who are literally silent upon every invitation to share their actual truth about how someone or something is hurting them. The majority believes in the performance. The majority wants to “help,” by virtue of saying, no, seriously, just how much they really really do. We are fundamentally not accountable, dishonest, and in denial about how much we hate and aren’t helping - at all.

I’ve talked endlessly about how many things I hate. I don’t do it blindly. I pick hate for things I think are worthy of hate. “Hate” is an approximate word and sensibility that combines a lot of negativity towards things that destroy my sense of self, ownership, potential, and dignity. I hate getting paid so little. I hate when people who profess to be friendly or truthful disappear or tear me down and take advantage. I hate excuses. I hate people who will, always and forever without irony, use demonstrably untrue and ignorant examples in their dance to justify their own hatred. That is, I don’t need to pretend or make anything up about the things I would point to to hate.

I live in one of the shittiest states, Indiana. I’ve watched them close schools and healthcare options. I’ve watched hundreds of clients who need life-saving care get neglected and saddled with impossible scenario after impossible scenario year after year. There’s “jokes” about how polluted The White River is. Our “senator” was part of the fascist coup and just became governor. We have incredibly shitty roads, almost no public transportation, were the poster-children for meth (although, so many states compete for that title), we’re a right-to-work state, we have the attorney general who wanted to criminally pursue the doctor who helped abort for the raped little girl who came from Ohio.

I submit that any and all horror stories going forward are blips in the sea of the poisoned ocean of our cultural zeitgeist. We don’t get better until we actually get better, or enough of us die that something new can grow. The ambivalence is also a symptom. The fact that you can say, proudly, always so proudly, that your vote doesn’t matter, that you don’t care, or that it doesn’t concern you tells someone like me that the game was over long ago. There is no “persuadable” battle because you’ve converted into a religious hopeless ideologue. You preach a certain gospel of complicit absurdity.

Every for-profit healthcare and addiction counseling company does not care about you. They care about keeping your insurance tied to their automatic billing. Thousands and thousands of people will tell you otherwise. You, desperate, lonely, addicted, exhausted, will burst through the doors and testify to how a company like Groups Recover Together “saved your life” by teaching you how to depend on them and Suboxone instead of heroin. You’ll be alive, but will you? You’ll say the things you’re supposed to say, but will they mean anything? How do you “reduce harm” for someone actively on fire where a discussion of water doesn’t exist?

This is the failing of government. Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, NAFTA, Citizen’s United, The Supreme Court capture. The actual solutions to these things have only been flirted with by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and a few members of “The Squad” when they’re not busy apologizing for religious zealotry. You don’t combat the proud seizing of power by “debate” and “negotiation.” The Nazis and the Japanese needed to be bombed into oblivion at the time. You are currently up next to suffer similarly if you refuse to understand why.

When you’re “fighting for $15” when the wage should be $25, you’re a fucking moron. When you’re wallowing in despair, instead you should be organizing a learn-party who tries to grasp what it means to be at the mercy of religious conviction that would march for 50 years until it could overturn Roe v. Wade. When you feel yourself getting smug and dismissive, it’s your first clue you’re missing a piece of the perspective puzzle that will unlock a way to meaningfully change something in a better direction.

I’m as annoyed by If Books Could Kill’s treatment of Sam Harris and Steven Pinker as I am Peter Boghossian of caricatured leftists. I think Bill Maher cozying up to hateful ignorance has the same downstream effect as Tony Hinchcliffe and Andrew Schulz normalizing the facade of “we’re all friends here” and “both sides.” We all pretend we’re as rich and famous as these people who will, in no way, suffer the reality of the decisions. You think the vast majority of celebrities and “intellectuals” weren’t the first ones out of Europe as war loomed?

We’re not all friends. It’s not what we should be normalizing. We don’t all have the same standards, or any standard at all. You’re not speaking to who you think and they don’t understand what it takes to preserve and protect and celebrate. The disconnect is as real and wide as it could possibly get. We’re in a sea of fanatics with their own isolationist infantile grasp of the playing field. Even if they’ll never choose to accept or understand that, they’re all smug. They’re all proud. They’re all hyperbolic in their language. You can adopt the heuristic that remains extremely skeptical and on guard when you meet people who are performing that act.

I don’t know how much has to die. It certainly feels like so much, but perhaps it’s not too much. Perhaps it’s just a necessary conclusion on the road of infinite revolutions. Maybe the water needs to be so poisoned the only ones who live will be those who choose an AI-generated inoculator. Maybe a third of the population needs to grow up in their parent’s basement, sexless, tiki-torched and decked out in camo before you’ll discover how to fire back. Maybe your best friend or sister has to die during perfectly preventable pregnancy complications. I don’t think any of it will work to clue you in, because it’s not about any given perfectly foreseeable atrocity. It’s about you, and you’re perfect just the way you are.

[1151] Friendly Refiner

 A good portion of how I understand the world is extracted from conversations and observations on relationships. I’m a pretty big believer that you can get to know a ton about yourself through introspection, but it’s still less than half of the necessary information if you don’t invoke who is, has, or you’d like to be shaping you.

For many years, before I ever knew what it actually symbolized or its history, I wore a yin yang necklace. I was literally drawn to it, noticing it dangling from a display at the Lake County Fair when I was in middle school. To this day, 25-ish years later, I’ve never read that deeply into Chinese philosophy, because the interconnected and counterbalanced symbol itself pretty much matched my intuition. It helped to have a kind of reminder imprint.

Balance is a much different place from dependence. “Codependency” is when there’s an excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner, and the other enables. These are not distinct and discreet measurements when you’re attempting to assess “excessive,” and as a matter of basic existence, one might argue we psychologically rely on our loved ones, networks, or imbued sense of self bred from our culture.

One of the things I’ve had to practically discuss and work out is how to balance healthy doses of traumatizing and often nakedly destructive forces against the appropriate level of State intervention, or against an individual’s sense of self and safety and security. At DCS, with a policy for children to remain with family if at all possible, that’s remaining with a sometimes wild cast of characters. In addiction counseling, you get clients describing physically and emotionally abusive partner dynamics all the time, and yet, they’re so otherwise unstable, that the abuse becomes “less bad” than being alone.

I think this is a really hard thing to understand for most people. One reason, life might not be as bad as it definitely is if you’ve occupied a certain level of wealth for a certain level of time. The exact same kinds of drama and mental health issues do not play out the same between the people attending their remote counseling session from the bench they slept on, and the people who can go to adult summer camp indefinitely. If you tell a story of someone’s impoverished circumstances to a “regular” middle-class person, they’ll tell you and them exactly what to do based on their sense of horror about it all.

Thankfully, I’ve had limited exposure in my personal life with cop-show plot levels of relationship dynamics. It’s not zero, but it’s never been remotely close to chronic. This means when I’m reflecting on what I think a “healthy” relationship is, I have the prolonged explanations and explorations of dramatic incidents from my life. I also have the dynamics, few and far between, that have sustained my more positive and prescriptive behavior.

One of the places I’ve landed is the question, “Do they even treat you like a friend?” I’ve struggled with the word “friend” for a long time, but even my proved-to-be-superficial relationships were friendly in a way that I often see missing in people’s dynamics. It’s like a movie trope to see two outwardly hateful people speak terribly to one another or occupy their own physical space, and then something weird happens that sheds a light on their deep and abiding love for one another. I think that’s a horrible and entirely misleading picture.

You can’t really see how someone is being a friend if you don’t know what constitutes you being one. I have a knack for being everyone’s “not-therapist.” Being up my own ass, reading all the things I do, and desperately trying to cling to my life values each day has lent itself to an awareness and perspective that I’ve received a waterfall of feedback suggesting it’s helpful. Getting certified as an addiction counselor was a pretty natural extension of my practice already, and if I had the money I’d become a therapist just because.

I’m also “too giving.” I want to be wanted. So when you need something from me, I’m extremely likely to go out of my way or do anything I can to help. I’m so like this, that I can recall the handful of times I’ve ever told someone no when their issues had reached a point that I would no longer be able to balance.

These two pieces alone give me enough of the half of a relationship puzzle to inform whether or not I think you’re being friendly in return. I don’t think you need to be a not-therapist to me nor be willing to give me any and everything at the drop of a hat. I do think you need to respect and recognize those things about me, and not take advantage of them. What would taking advantage look like? Attempting to use me to justify, instead of explore and fix, the things on your mind. Attempting to squeeze my effort and goodwill until I’m threatened financially or my life ends up in danger.

The third thing about me is that I’ve developed a really good ability to read and connect with people. That’s a deadly tool in the hands of someone who isn’t concerned with being transparent, friendly, or balanced. It follows then that I’m my best version of being a friend when I listen, give as much as I can, and refrain from unduly utilizing what I know about how you operate.

We make this very complicated for ourselves. An example that stuck out for me once was a speaker talking about how if our pet got sick and we picked up a prescription, we’d make sure it got the whole thing at the same time every day with the right food and cuddles until it was better. We won’t take our own prescriptions, if even go to the doctor. Now, this example is royally fucked by the practical issues of the American healthcare system, but the sentiment rang true at the conceptional level and in my experience working with people.

I know people who will work two jobs, take care of kids, put up with endless bullshit from their emotionally unwell parents or siblings, get demeaned by a boss, deal with health issues, and the impending psychological terror of whatever anniversary that’s coming up that they’ve never coped with. They’ll simultaneously struggle to take even 30 minutes for themselves a day to breathe, relax, or watch their favorite show. It’s a package of guilt, chronic stress, and “survivor mode.” They forget how to be friendly to themselves.

One of the things that confused and bugged me for a very long time was how to wrap my head around my friendships petering out. Beyond the ones that just went silent, there’s the ones that went out with someone lobbing some observation or judgment about who I was or what I was thinking, as if they ever really cared to know in the first place. I wasn’t giving myself credit for both the kind of friend I was trying to be, nor recognizing that simply existing around each other or being polite is not the same thing as establishing a friendship.

I discovered “normal” people were mostly in the pageantry and pretend game. They need you to perform and defer your actual sense of self and agency to their insecurities. I’m the type of person where literally anyone I might recognize or have enjoyed their company for an hour, I would invite “back in” in a heartbeat. I’ve been pretty confident in myself and who I am for a good portion of my young-adult to adult life. My perception of your, at the time, positive energy or influence is the thing I’d seek more of. I’d know it’s there. You can’t deny it, even if you’ve drifted into normal life morass as we’ve gotten older.

Maybe a way to illustrate this is to think about Christmas cards. If you or your family sent those out, how many people made the list that you might never talk to for years? It’s like your friend’s list on facebook. There’s like 10 people that sign on anymore, and if you’re lucky, 1% of them will notice when it’s your birthday. That kind of superficial engagement passes for normal “friendship.” It always felt fake and like a waste to me, and even when I tried to spice it up with personalized and creative messages on birthdays, they seemed to fall flat or get ignored over time.

I’ve got a lot of practical behaviors that inform my sense of friendly behavior. I’m not trying to yell. I don’t expect you to do anything for me that I’m unprepared to do for myself. I’m not lying to you about what I feel or don’t. If and when I have the money, I’m excited by the prospect of buying your ticket, meal, the gas etc. I’m one of those people who is physically unable to stop himself from voicing what he thinks is fucked up, and if that’s something about you or how we’re relating, I’ll do so out of respect and hope it can be fixed, and in a respectful way. I’m not going to ghost you after years nor stay vague and passive aggressive about the road forward. If only! I was treated the same way.

I believe it’s important to living well that you find your center independent of anyone else. The moment I return to the kind of teenager I was ensconced in limerence, be it with a person or too-compelling idea, I’ve hit a codependent state and am looking for ways to enable it. The adult version is to belabor the story of how many years you’ve been with someone, or employ a cliche about not knowing who you’d be without them, or reflexively listing all of the services they provide you that justifies whatever you need them to.

I do not think you can truly be of service to other people if you’re unable or unwilling to figure your own shit out. What happens when someone you care about dies? They’re going to. Sooner than you think. Mostly sooner than you think because you never think about it. What happens if you get critically injured? I think about this one all the time. If I lose a hand, I’m thinking about how to get a chip that let’s me write with brain waves or a robot one that types faster than I ever could. The point is about looking forward and rooting in the idea that life, my life, is worth it for it’s own sake, despite what may happen or my inability to square my ideas with my actions in any given moment.

I think we collectively reel at the idea of abusing animals. We’re animals. We’re our own kind of confused, dumb, and helpless. Give yourself pets and treats. Find habits and ideas you can cuddle up next to. Ask yourself what the people who treat you best would do, and then if you’re doing the same for yourself. If not, that should give you pause. If you don’t have people treating you that well, that should inform some larger shifts in your behavior or priorities. They will become you way more than you’ll become them, because they don’t have a real and friendly relationship with themselves, so neither will you.

[1142] Best Friend 2

My relationship, or lack thereof, with my  “best friend” has been on my mind. I listened to a Saosin live performance where one of the band members said something to the effect of “squash that shit, whatever it is, even if you’re not responsible for it.” He was describing some difficulties he was having back in the day with the band that spoke to how long it took for them to get back together and make music.

It’s a fairly common sentiment. Put it in the past. Forgive and forget. I still think about the drunk mom at the wedding where I was a plus-one to and with strangers. “Let it go!” She exasperatingly said under her breath as I shared a short story lamenting the wasted money of college to the person I was with, not even looking or talking to drunk mom.

The “wise” awakened and enlightened place you’re supposed to arrive at goes something like this:

Life is short. You’re only hurting yourself. Are any of us blameless or without faults? Don’t throw away all that time. Wouldn’t you want to be forgiven? The good outweighs the bad.

Later, maybe 5 minutes or 5 years, it moves into downplaying, denial, and eventually pretension. It wasn’t that serious. It doesn’t matter. Who you really mad at, bro? I couldn’t live like that.

In the modern era where seemingly all the talkers and influencers fashion themselves armchair-psychologists, you hear a lot of psychology terms used incorrectly all the time. I don’t see a concept get used more often than “trauma.” The “abuse” people suffer from “gaslighting” and “narcissism” and yada yada, a ton of people have pointed out this broader point.

I prefer to think of things in terms of “taking advantage.” For most people, I suspect they would only and ever claim to be “enjoying the advantages” of whatever their relationship, family, or friend dynamics are. It’s logical and reasonable to be with someone for different things you enjoy, and provided you consistently speak and understand in those terms, there’s little else to think about. An unconscionably rich person says every day, “I’m just enjoying a vacation!”

That lack of a relationship is on my mind because I’ve been spending a considerably larger portion of my time with other friends and my dad. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel or join a bunch of new groups. All I had to do is shift my attention towards people already in my life who have, not for a single day, taken advantage of me. They’ve supported my entrepreneurial efforts either physically or financially in ways my “best friend” never did, and still has not chosen to. They’re down for the hobbies and shows in a way that was pulling teeth or needed to coincide with established interests otherwise. I’m feeling myself looking forward in a way that doesn’t also feel wary of impending betrayal.

That’s the thing to stay conscious of. It’s not dissimilar to how I can maintain such a negative opinion and snappy things to say regarding my mom after maybe 10 or 12 years? since I’ve last spoken to her. There, in about 30 seconds, you’ll experience the betrayal of any hopeful or romantic ideals you might disingenuously maintain about reconciliation or people’s ability to change.

When you have what you’ve been playing apologetic games with for decades, it’s a lot harder to see if and when to draw deep boundaries and contrast. It’s very easy for me to describe the benefits and practical take-aways from my dynamic with my “best friend.” It’s good to have the person who will pick you up when your car shits the bed in the middle of the night. It’s good to have someone more “normal” in their professional and job prospects to get you in the door. It’s good to have overlapping senses of humor and jokes that might go back to childhood. I’m not unwilling or unable to tell the positive story of our dynamic, indeed, I was telling it for almost 30 years.

I think people even vaguely acquainted with me register a certain “hunger” and excitability I have. I spend a lot of time trying to be plugged into different realms. I can talk pretty fast, I will start a project or pursue a goal that minute, and I’ve been carrying on about my largest dreams and goals my entire life. I am primed and eager to be doing and moving every second, which carries a certain vulnerability because the wants are so obvious.

In the span of a few weeks, I’ve had one friend instinctively, consistently, support where I’m coming from in a way that my dad, Hatsam, and Wendy have and a way my “best friend” hasn’t figured out how to in going on a year and a half? This is if we’re only counting past the point where the dynamic got particularly egregious.

Now, of course, you don’t have to spend money on me or unduly burden yourself “just” to hang out. And I’d be a shitty friend if I didn’t recognize putting you in an unfair position to “meet my needs” or more accurately, squeeze what I needed out of you.

Here’s where you need the key piece of self-awareness. What do you need?

In my “best friend” dynamic, I think I can reasonably speculate that he needed license and justification. I know enough about myself to recognize my capacity as gasoline on a fire raging already. The fire may come across as subdued, colloquial, “normal,” but I promise you, my “best friend” is raging. Like recognizes like. I’m almost certain he read one of my blogs explaining the proper tragedy of what was lost between us, so he used our other friend as an excuse to call and try to capture. You know why I think that? That’s what I would do if I was still suffering what was catastrophically wrong with me and not trying to be accountable or genuinely helpful.

You know what I don’t have to speculate about? Not a single person who was also either responsible for the kid or has a stake in how my “best friend” behaves was told the truth about the extent of the kid’s behavior. When you’re willing to lie across the handful of people who might otherwise hold you accountable, you’re the one in the wrong. You’re lying to yourself, first. Therefore, I don’t expect you capable of maintaining an honest dynamic with or about me. That’s why I mostly treat people as the addicts they are.

That said, to avoid pitying and unironic pretension in reactionary turn, that’s why you set standards and boundaries. Can you behave like the people who don’t take advantage of me? Can you regard me in the same esteem that I do my friends? It’s not about the ups and downs of aggrieved feelings on any given day at that point. It’s not about encapsulating and insulating narratives to protect shivering self-conceptions and broken senses of well-being.

I have people who support me so I’m able to offer free counseling and casework services every month. I have people who are investing in me being able to learn and do more woodworking. I have people who get drunk and go to shows with me, and who will buy me dinner for my birthday tomorrow. I have people who come with me to play my hobby sports and invite me to theirs.

My own brother wouldn’t drive me 15 minutes up the road to an Airbnb before he took off on a 9 hour drive. My uncles have stolen $20,000 or more from me. My mom has weaponized every ounce of her self-loathing and malicious intelligence in artfully abusive ways. Why not my “best friend” letting his demons attempt to turn me into one of his lost-boy toys like I forgot who I am as well.

[1121] The Friendly Ghost

Today feels like a day that could be described as "crazy-making."

Am I sick, hurt, or otherwise dramatically impaired? No. There's been a theme and a confluence of forces though. Let's go.

This week, literally everyone has canceled on me. For work, for fun, for things I was anticipating to use to feel useful and good. I spend pretty much all of my time alone, talking to no one, blazing through TV, playing my instruments, reading, or getting myself into some trouble playing with something I shouldn't because I can't stand feeling idle and useless anymore.

I lay this at no one's feet. I could, theoretically more than practically, invest a considerable amount of time attempting to connect to other people, organizations, or things to do so I don't feel as reliant upon others and their consistency or capacity to manage. And, in fact, that's what I've done in getting started with CASA, and hopefully seeing that spin-off into more first-hand interactions with clients, other volunteers, and the inevitable messes that will bring.

First, one of my attempted hires to fundraise ignores my outreach. I thought she was on the verge of stealing $1,200, tracked her down, got a brief invitation to her life's blow-up, and she's since refunded $500, on what she's proposed is a schedule to refund the whole on her paydays. In the meantime, I patiently idle and refrain from catastrophizing her silence, and now 6th missed scheduled discussion, and who knows how many ignored texts.

Ok. I got an early text that client 1's phone is broken and needs to be rescheduled. I attempt to call client 2 around our meeting time, no response. I text if they are okay. I get a "Not at all, can we talk later today?" I text later in the day, no response. That whole day was designed around another person supposed to come out and talk about plans to upgrade my space. They had other life complications with family illness to deal with, so the project lingers.

I'm left with more idle time. We need to be incredibly clear that whatever I feel about that time, it's not being laid at the feet of "everyone" or anyone I refer to. I do not blame a single person ever for focusing on their sick loved ones or deprioritizing whatever we had planned.

I proceed to go about my days. I go to the symphony for the live music playing of Star Wars as the movie runs. An entire section of kids talked, crinkled pop cans, and just generally made it about them for the entire film. No usher told them to shut up. No seething patron closer to them said anything. They just took what could have been a pretty straightforward enjoyable experience, and my inability to mute them turns them into a few aggrieved lines in another bitching blog.

Before the show, I walked around the continues-to-be-miserable city a bit. There's "cowboy" bars with country music that mostly surround the symphony. There's healthy servings of homeless people ranging from decently aggressively shouting to sleeping in places it's hard to tell if they've closed early or closed permanently. At one point, I'm almost certain a dude was following me. I'm in a "major" city, wandering, feeling isolated and arbitrary, and oh, look, there was also a pro-Palestine protest on the circle where they're screaming an anti-semitic chant and parroting empty party lines.

On the ride to the city, I was listening to some of Peter Boghossian's videos. He's known for setting up hot-button questions and agree/disagree lines he asks people to stand on and defend their position. He's, in a world that made sense, simply trying to remind people that we're here to engage ideas and should have a remote sense of what we're talking about or what might change our minds. Overwhelmingly, the people who brave his exercises are not that articulate, nor claim they can be moved, at least in the moment.

I'm now back home, where a comment I wrote on, arguably one of the worst places on the internet, reddit, was removed because I described getting into a "pissing match" in a comment to another person who was asking for feedback on what people might want in a new TV-related website. The term, in and of itself, I was told is the #1 rule that's not allowed and the person wrote "p - - - ing" like that as though it's particularly aggressive language or like I said, "I'll piss in your face, cunt!"

It just echoes that ideological capture and perverse power dynamics that I feel plague pretty much every level of my experience.

I know, as much as I know anything, that no one holding a sign on that boring and sad circle is persuadable. I know that no elderly usher at the symphony feels they are obligated and empowered to insist and correct inappropriate behavior. I know those who are eager to belong, be it through their status as a victim or the oppressed, are going to die on a hill that transcends parody when mocked up against real life. I know that my clients who cancel have a vastly different concept of "get better" than I do. I know the "innocent enough" obligations and life circumstances that relegate time someone might spend with me to be practically incidental.

I also know that I feel that I need to escape this overwhelming belief that I can't trust or look forward to things. It's a feeling that stifles my capacity to invest both in myself and in what I can only speculate others get to feel for what's captured them. I don't believe it's worth it, whatever "it" might be, that I'm going to plan, try, or work on for more than a day or so. It's a hollowness that haunts whatever I might do to prepare, or when I stifle one thing and rearrange another, trying to be there and be present and not suck you into this ever-hollowing sense. I can't fill it with the manufactured drama and concern that appears to fuel so much of other people's experience.

Whatever I do or think I can create, I can't erase the context I'm working within. The world's best talker in a country where they don't speak the language is flirting with homelessness and starvation. The shared values and understanding that comes with an ongoing relationship or dynamic of cultural expressions and sets of experiences I just don't really have. It's not "never," but is 6-10 times a year I might get to spend time with my dad or a friend doing something fun count as the kind of fabric I'm trying to weave?

I'm like a ghost. I feel like I just kind of haunt things or memories. You have to think, I'm drawing on my experience of the last decade. It's not just been a particularly lonely or disappointing week or something. This week was just the same record blasted about as loud as I can take. But also, I clearly don't know how to "fix" it. I don't really believe it's a thing I can fix because my efforts to do so only seem to teach me ever-nuanced ways in which the problem compounds and reinforces itself.

You can't afford it? I'll pay. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about being able to afford it. You don't have the time? I'll come to you, work around your schedule. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about not having time. It doesn't interest you? I'll do whatever you want to do, I'm open and amenable like that. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about their lack of interest. When you're feeling good and fun and free, I'm not the one on your mind to call or invite. You were desperately waiting for that window so you could "catch up" on the "fun" you're otherwise indefinitely denied. Every moment where you can feel remotely human or "free" is not one you're trying to interject a bunch of Nick P.-ness into.

There is no striking-up conversations with strangers and informal friends anymore. Maybe that's just a problem with me? Feels bigger, but I don't know. My "best friend" I gave my terms to and they still haven't been met, so I'm not lending myself to get back into his spin. My business partner, who I also see maybe once every 3 or so months, has been barreling towards a crash for probably over a year at this point, refuses to slow down or establish better boundaries or utilize me in any way but to - very maybe - decompress an inch when he bitches about something? I have to tell clients all the time there's a difference between indefinitely complaining and still being a ball of stress and actually coping and incorporating whatever it is that's getting at you and changing your behavior.

I have another friend I see maybe once every 2 or 3 months whose dad might be dying, and she has her own health issues, so it's like where would I get off thinking we should bowl more often? lol I don't know, it's this weird thing where you're invited to pit your desire to feel like you belong or have a friendship against their given tragedy or circumstances. It feels like it would be infinitely unwise and unfair to "blame" as though they're any less stuck within their contexts than you are, but you happen to be the loudest example of anyone you know on how to defy circumstances and work towards what you might actually want and need.

Blame language is overwhelmingly a move to adopt nonsense framing, but emotionally, you're like, am I just supposed to kinda glide through the air until I happen to crash into you? To be extra clear, this feels like an existential thing with everyone to some degree or another. I do not get the sense there's any remotely deliberate care and focus to cultivate and protect a mutually beneficial dynamic. It's like every hangout is getting away with murder or their mind is physically unable to be present because it's been captured by the superficially "chosen" drama.

I mean it in a more damming way than that, which implicates this litany of sick family members. I think we're also gluttonous. When you're not choosing the drama, you're feeding on the familiar sensibilities of your relationship to it. Aren't you needed? Doesn't that maybe scratch the itch that I'm taking 9,000 words to articulate? I'd like to feel useful and needed and like a "good boy" for doing what I'm supposed to by way of expressed care. I don't. No matter how much people tell me I help or what I say makes sense, it does nothing for me, and I don't think a single person has even tried to articulate to me they understand why.

It's pretty easy to disregard everything you're not doing to gain control or a sense of personal responsibility and agency by attending to everyone else. There's also the unyielding irony where I'm witness to what appears to be people who will go to the ends of the earth for especially the ones who don't deserve or can't truly receive what's being offered. Almost like each party knows what's on offer isn't made of what either of them needs, but this perverse Munchausien bargain is struck. What kind of massive deserves-to-be-alienated cunt would try to turn your lovingly devoted heart into the problem!? You're right, I see it now why no one wants to hang out lol.

[1116] Cornholio

Today has started out with a decent potential for the presumed ADHD to "win." It's a perfect day to work outside, I've slept well, and the tasks calling out to me, from hole digging to starting a new job training and evaluating A.I., are feeling accessible and not too taxing. I've also, for the last few weeks, been having "the universe speak to me" with lines from songs and television shows speaking about friendships, relationships, and the things you should hold dear. Today, I reached out to my "best friend" who I haven't meaningfully spoken to in months after I landed on a few conclusions.

I'm exceptionally eager to cut bullshit people and unproductive soul-crushing lies and games out of my life. I haven't spoken to my mom in at least 10 years. I didn't wish my brother a happy birthday a few days ago. Living alone in bum-fuck cornville has proven to bring more relief and focus than any day I've spent with any amount or type of roommates. That fact alone means I should build in a check when the instinct is to cut one more person off.

I have another friend who said, almost word for word, "Even if you tried to rape me, I'd probably still be your friend and forgive you." Talk about setting the bar simultaneously and unreasonably high and low at the same time, but I understood and appreciated her sentiment.

My "best friend" and I are statistically 2 of the least agreeable people on the planet (we've taken the test) and aggressively manipulative. We're either both/and autistic or psychopaths. Not necessarily mean-spirited or evil ones, but ones with the capacity to wholly uncheck where those propensities might lead us. Until recent history, it never bled over into me feeling at the no-mercy end of his propensities. We've been friends since 5th grade, and we're in our 30s now. It creeps up on you.

That said, it means I've never necessarily set a particularly strong boundary to help refine and determine our dynamic. Most people would understand this in terms of "family." I've dispatched with most of my family, and the ones who remain I'm mostly civil towards in service to my dad. As a counselor, it's, of course, people's families who provoke and inflame their addictive poor-coping tendencies. As a former DCS assessor, it's your family that's touching you inappropriately, beating the fuck out of you, or defiantly donating you to the State when their lack of personal accountability gets particularly egregious. I have no respect or innate positive feeling for "family," as such.

So I set terms. I don't really carry ongoing emotional animous, but I've been fucked financially. I would give, and still do, all of my time and funds that I could to real family and friends. No one who I'm going to designate that way "owes me" for that. When that dynamic gets exploited, thrown in my face, or taken for granted to such an extent I get scared I might die in the dumbest way possible? I can lament so far something I had previously taken for granted, cut it off completely, or set terms for repair. I'm not going to present terms to my batshit mom. I'm not going out of my way to make my brother feel better about his unresolved anxieties and resentments. I'm not going to kiss any of my thieving aunts' or uncles' asses.

My "best friend?" He's been more adrift, than deliberately malicious, in my view. I'm not entirely sure he recognized anymore than I had how much the dynamic had shifted. It took me literally popping off emotionally not wishing to be dead potentially crashing at 135 miles an hour to kick off this latest saga. Some of the chickens regarding his dynamic with the kid seem to have come to roost, but I'm not privy to details, just the grapevine. Ultimately, if I have a handful of friends, each finger I might cut off deserves above-average or beyond base-instinct doctoring.

My job is to set and relay the terms. I talk to enough people who say something like, "Well, if they don't already know…!" about their fights as if that person is thinking about them, mind-reading them, or you told them anything remotely achievable and coherent. I reach out. 99 times out of a 100, I get silence and the chance to imagine how "weird" and "awkward" I made it for someone who thought they'd never hear from me again. I'm considerably less inclined at this stage in my life to hold a grudge, at least with any emotional weight precluding any action steps to bring about a preferred resolution. I'll still cut you off completely, but that doesn't remove my obligation to listen to the universe, do and say what I can, and weigh the balance of my dynamics.

This is the work. This is the living by example. I don't want to be isolated, resentful, and unreasonably angry. That said, what I want rarely, if ever, jives with how people treat me or what they want for themselves. Oh well. There's a reason we get paid to do the work no one else wants to do. I'm not going to continue choosing for myself unreasonable and unnecessary financial or emotional burdens by downplaying or making excuses for an unhealthy relationship. I'm not going to let the pull of "normalcy" or "familiarity" playact as forgiving and forgetting.

[1103] Good Dog

Something I have a very strong reactionary sensibility towards is "injustice." Before I might ever say it like that, I've written plenty of times about how much I hated, and still do, to be condescended towards. I was made to be very aware and very sensitive to power imbalances with my unstable and abusive mother growing up. She would make a game out of demonstrating what she could do to me if she thought I was deviating from what she expected. To speak of her "reasoning" behind that behavior is to totally misunderstand how people work. My job feels like it then becomes resolving my understanding with people with my overwhelming desire for justice or retribution.

To be sure, we're all getting fucked in big and small ways constantly. We're at the mercy of policy decisions a fleetingly small group of often greedy or ignorant actors make on our behalf. We're at the mercy of people's general negligence and motivated blindness. We're expected to work our lives away. We're expected to conform to norms around what's "appropriate," or "usual" in spite and mockery of what makes sense. Whether you're talking daylight savings time or the rules of the parent who will beat you because you forgot something, there's a set of things, and a way to frame things, that make the best course of action "obvious." Yet, so little feels that way, and you're often punished for even speaking to what's fucked up.

One of the more recent indefinite blood-feuds I've developed is with DCS. There is a right and wrong way to treat people involved with the system or when you need to investigate them. I don't care where the order comes from, if you're directed to lie, threaten, or harrass, you're not "just doing your job" or "doing as you're told," you're threatening the fabric of trust as it pertains to civil society. Somewhere, you're acting like a crazy cop who feels like they can speed everywhere with their lights on and point their gun at anything that looks at them sideways. You need to be watched, called out, and corrected or fired, every single time.

I don't know if I see enough or can reflexively think about a series of demonstrated responsible decisions and accountability. Now, any decent suburb might refute that sensibility on its face. Everyone there is paying the bills, keeping the lawn mowed, raising their family, or stacking and maintaining middle-to-upper income toys over time. If you zero in on the household in the neighborhood I grew up in, I'm getting terrorized. My smart "professional" mother deeply influenced my desire for an equally robust vocabulary as she did to flinch any time someone's arm moved around me; a habit I wouldn't break until college. Certainly, she had a story of her responsible decision making and accountability.

There's something deeper one must tap into or aspire towards. It's mostly discussed as a form of religious or spiritual sensibility. If everything about your environment is training, informing, or molding you to essentially "be a good Nazi," what is it, in your heart of hearts or conscience, that recoils when it's time to tell your superior there are Jews hiding in the attic? We've made this way more complicated than it needs to be, utilizing culture-specific or religious-indoctrination excuses. We eagerly defend our "reasoning." The justifications have famous names and extremely convoluted technical philosophical concepts. I would argue, simply asking yourself, "Would I want to be sent to my death over how and where I was born?" cleans up decades of motivated denial and pageantry.

I ask myself questions like that as it pertains to my behavior. Would I want to be forgiven, understood, or talked to? Almost always. Can I see how that thing or that behavior is something I might do? Often, but honestly less so the more I wrote and attempted to bring my blind spots into the light. I still have certain catastrophic impulses and sensibilities, but persisting in them for "too long" or to the point where I've lost all sense as to why I'm bothering I'm lucky to not really suffer. There are a fuck ton of things I don't do, haven't done, or can't see myself sincerely doing over a long period of time to anyone I regard as a friend or family member. So when one of them does that shit, or does a series of those shits, it's like, okay, I need to redefine my boundaries and not get lost in some abusive story that justifies and excuses the bad behavior.

I've been watching Ms. Pat Settles It. So many extremely dumb people and "characters" enter her fake courtroom to lay their family issues on the table. An idea that comes up in several episodes is that people will only treat you as you let them. In what feels like direct contrast to that idea, Ms. Pat and her panel will also say things like, "That's your mother," or "You only get one sibling, family, etc." Occasionally, she'll award money to the entitled mother who's not-precisely stealing, but certainly misappropriating given funds. The reasoning she offers is rarely consistent with why she'll deny someone else's claim who shows up with the same attitude and reasoning as the momma about what a friend or family member owes them. It's a fake reality show cheaply put together for some laughs. It's also a snapshot of how we go about pretending to reason and hold ourselves accountable, made more compelling by turning it into a fun and laugh-worthy game. Like, I laughed, and I love Ms. Pat.

I hope the side-step tendency is starting to come about. My mom could "play the game" like anyone who shows up to a televised "reality" show. Anyone who puts on a uniform and adopts a certain attitude and expectation to do the heavy lifting of their reasoning dances past the real questions and real work. You might pass the test, but you're not accountable. It's doctors that prescribed our modern drug-addicted environment. It's major, perfectly informed, companies that have steered us towards environmental catastrophe. It's corrupted political figures who stick to party lines and financial allegiances as you develop a coping complex that internalizes and teaches the values of maintaining an oppressed state.

This is why free speech is so important. That's, most often, all you have. So, if what you're saying is just an iteration of what "they" want you to be saying, you know you're not free. You're not free to even begin the project and work of responsibility and accountability. If you can't even access the words or the feelings that speak to what you're actually mad or sad about, you are playing someone else's game. If you're unable or unwilling to speak, there's your first clue about the true nature of your problem. If upon speaking you find yourself just repeating the same mantras, hatreds, or prejudices, there's your next clue. If you're incapable of pairing those hate and ignorance-based words with counter-narratives, fixes, or creative and comprehensive contextualizing, the third clue pops into view.

To be sure, someone stuck in this place can't really hear or see what I just said. That's more for those who wish to do better or wish to save themselves time when they recognize what someone they're engaging with is doing. I take it a step further and claim 9 out of 10 people, in every realm, at every income level, is doing more by way of staying stuck and game playing than otherwise. I look at my own family and see the anchors that were my grandparents and became my dad and stepmom holding the remote family coherence idea together. I look at elected officials who, perhaps moreso at the local level, cut through the noise and speak to the practical for-all-to-see details that get things done or not. Sure, we're all implicated and all to blame, but someone's holding the keys, money, or the bill hostage.

Ms. Pat's show made me think about what my case would look like or what I think she'd tell me. "You been friends for 25 years? Why now throw away a relationship? There's something deeper here isn't there?" Like, yeah. I'm not going to entangle myself with one more person who will consistently demonstrate to me just how far I'll let someone take advantage of me. I don't need to feel rage or an obsessive-compulsive itch for retribution like I might for the players at DCS or like I did as a kid when I got fucked. I do need to protect what it means to be accountable and responsible so I don't let the story and performance do the work he's proven unwilling or unable to do for years. I'm not going to bless that and play along.

My good faith effort to get the house flipped and trust in the payday worked out against me. My tempered advice and caution regarding enabling and rewarding the kid resulted in my life getting put in danger. My naive assumption that I would have any real amount of help or time spent in service to the things I've tried to create or do was refuted time and time again. Even now, he sends me a link to a grant to fill out, pretending that's the same thing as doing something for me or getting money donated. He's got a powerful delusion and story about his rich friends and political circles. Where's the actual money? I don't need Ms. Pat to order him to pay it, I need people in my life who understand what they've gotten and I'm always prepared to give to my real friends and family is invaluable. If you forget how to figure that out, start with $20K, and I'll reopen the discussion after I direct you to my 3 clues stated above.

I hate, very deeply, when people who don't have the power or the tools, or when it's an animal, and it's getting taken advantage of, beaten, starved, or bankrupted. I've met hundreds of incredibly hard-working, sincere, and worthwhile people at the mercy of this terrible-stories playground. I get particularly incensed when those who can more consistently do better, give up. I get particularly pissed when you arrive, or we do so together, at the "obvious" place your decision should land, and you side-step.

I think "the world" looks the way it does because 1 in 10 people aren't reflexively side-stepping. I think we fluidly find some familiar story of our value, self-worth, or obligation and want to pick-and-choose moments of "realness" that validate the version of ourselves we prefer. That's how people like my mom can throw their decision to have children in those children's faces and Ms. Pat can feel no contradiction in justifying a mother's entitlement while repudiating someone else's. "You're fed and the bills are paid!" Okay, but you're fat, sad, angry, causing us and everyone you profess to care about emotional and financial pain, indefinitely, and even speaking about that violates your perverted sense of power and justice and makes you feel entitled to retribution.

I don't want to punish. I want to help enable people to better self-correct. It's taken me years to get to whatever level you wish to call this in "refined" of my ideas and process. I don't have to spend any more of my life yelling to know I don't want to and can choose not to. I don't have secret guilt or unaired doubts that keep be quietly milking a relationship or excusing my behavior. My friend just donated $10,000 to my nonprofit. You know what I'm going to do if I, for some fantastical series of reasons, can't build the case loads, find other sources of funding, or explain how the money can be responsibly used? Give it back.

I think she understands the work I've done and am trying to do. I think she's one of the most personally accountable and responsible people I know. I think she knows everything I've done or offered to do for her was based on our friendship over 20 years and not me hand-wringing and plotting and waiting for a chance to play on her sympathies. My other 20+-year friend? That's pretty much the basis of our dynamic, remarking on our capacity to psychopathically manipulate or him manage his stable of white boys. Or we're looking for opportunities to gain power or capitalize on the political and bureaucratic environments he prefers. The story of either his desire to maintain or capacity to achieve along either metric trumped what I thought was understood and shared between us. Like I don't have enough things on my plate, I'm not re-explaining the game to him like he doesn't know.

A big reason this blog felt necessary was how I felt after seeing a reddit post of puppies abandoned and tossed in the back of someone's truck. I initially felt my stomach drop a bit, seeing two of them with either eye infections or what my imagination jumped to as their abusive overseer being right handed. As I read the predictable comments, a few remarked how lucky the puppies were to not have been tossed in the trash or river. I've been a social worker long enough that I can have both the catastrophized reflexive thought and almost immediately imagine a more or less positive series of things you could say about the person who didn't drown or trash the puppies.

The person acted as an analogy for the side-step in search of the 1 in 10. Even the reddit posts acts as a point of side-stepping validation bolstering the story that helps the poster pretend they're not one of the 9 or like whomever left the puppies. "I DIDN'T KILL PUPPIES! LOOK AT ME DOING THE BETTER THING! GIVE ME INTERNET POINTS! DON'T THEY LOOK SAD AND STARVING?" I'm not even trying necessarily to shit on the poster, but this habit is subtle and fluid and everywhere. There's something existentially important staring you in the face right now akin to "take the starving puppies to the shelter" that you are not doing, and not even speaking to first. I'm not going to celebrate you or upvote you or validate you for wiping-your-ass level of obvious shit to do. That's not interesting, or what I mean by accountability or responsibility. Do it for children, and then expect more from yourself and the adults.

[1087] You Really Like Me

I hope this one does the trick. For weeks I've felt like I'm floundering. I can't commit to the process of finding a job. I can't feel "more serious" about pursuing my hobbies or side-projects that might eek out a means of profitability with enough investment and focus. I can't justify sitting back and just watching TV or looking for the next show to attend. My mind has been all over the place, and for someone who exists with that as a standing condition of existence, it's felt acutely elevated.

Evidence of this state of mind is me making a doctor's appointment. I don't really know anything about ADHD beyond the amount of kids I came across with the diagnosis and the increasing cultural awareness of the behaviors associated with it. So much of it is as familiar to me as the feelings of when I read/learned about autism. I've never been one to much care for many people's claims regarding a diagnosis or the implications that followed. The more I start to meet "pathological" impediments to my sense of well-being or capacity to get shit done, the more my sympathies grow.

I discussed recently how I can manage well-enough with structure. In a closed-enough environment with rules and consistency, it can be really easy to downplay or ignore what about you that looks to derail. Most jobs pretty much insist you have to get up at a certain time, pay attention to the commute, fall within the guidelines for behavior to not get fired, and keep the threat of not keeping the bills paid hot enough to justify indefinite suffering or excuses. The longer I go left to my own devices, I feel consequences of a lack of structure compound.

One way that happens is the "drama" of the space between doing things gets elevated. If I'm not otherwise plugged into something, it lends itself to irrational negative emotion. This gets complicated further because I'm, on the whole, generally muted emotionally. Whether we want to chalk that up to a learned behavior trauma response to my upbringing, autism, or deliberately cultivated practice given age, wisdom, and the nature of my professional responsibilities, I'm willing to entertain it's all that and more. Practically, it means I will never be persuaded by the "passion" or "depression" or "anxiety" or "angry" that others claim moves or motivates their behavior.

In fact, particularly with the word "passion," I regularly discuss how much I hate that fucking word and how stupid or misleading I think it is. It's employed to downplay the circumstances and privileges that enable someone to pursue one route over another. When you don't have these swings in emotion, very little signals to you to change, dramatically or otherwise, whatever you're currently doing. I'd like to believe it makes a certain amount of sense the reasons I build through writing and conversation to do one thing over another. Whether or not that's the case you only care to the extent it affects or entertains you.

Broadly speaking, you're not invested in my well-being because you have your own life and things to suffer and barely figure out as well. That sentence feels like a major part of "the rub."

I feel myself envying anyone with a community. Even shitty communities, there's a sense of togetherness, belonging, understanding, and consistency that I sorely lack in my day-to-day. For most of my life, I've felt explicitly on the outside playing observer to how people treat each other, what you're "supposed to" say, or trying to figure out what "really matters" in the dynamic.

If I thought to myself, "How do you get a girlfriend?" No exaggeration, 9 out of 10 relationships I would observe would be explicitly abusive. No, not everyone was beating the shit out of their girlfriend, but yes, both parties were using emotionally manipulative and personally guilt-inducing behavior to maintain that dynamic. In fact, the older I get and the more I've watched relationships maintain or falter, it's not like that pattern has gone away, but the "healthiest" couples realize, maybe in their mid-to-late 30s that they have been behaving in those fucked up ways towards each other and start therapy.

This kind of disconnect permeates pretty much every level of my life. I'm not, nor have ever been, "normal." Yes, I exist like all things, and there is nothing new under the sun. I'm not claiming "special." I'm claiming "aberrant" or "noticeably and consistently different." I'm the only Vulcan on board. There's a whole fucking planet of Vulcan's, but I'm the only one on my particular ship.

This means when I sit here, contemplative, with a level of "anxiety" that I will never score higher than a 1 or 2 on a scale from 1 to 10, I may or may not address that by a dogged pursuit to "fix" what is probably 10 different things nagging that at one time. I've been paying extra attention to how all-over-the-place my mind is when I've got nothing in particular I care to focus on. I can start vacuuming in the middle of making a sandwich. I'll start a movie in the middle of another paused show.

Incidentally, as I finished that last line, my dad calls me and we talk for a half hour.

My dad is my most consistent force in my life. When people are acting like complete shit-heads, I'm not looking over my shoulder for my dad to fuck my life up or take advantage of me or threaten my safety like my "best friend." When I talk about the projects on the land I wish to focus on or when I needed to get things done to make the house livable, like how I imagine some people's friends and families work, he offered and continues to offer to come down and help me. If I were to strip away a lot of the nonsense related to my approach to work or fantastic dreams and what I am or am not doing every day in service to them, it makes an incredible amount of sense for me to spend more time in the region with him trying to grow the gravesite cleaning and yard work business.

My closest friends continue to maintain different forms of distance. They have their own families and paradigms. Very much to his credit, I do believe Hussain would help me with a project on the land and has offered to do so. That's not, like, the only or most important criterion for whether or not I can call someone friend, but it's akin to the question of "Who helps you move?"

Who enables your expression and embodied physical manifestations of space? The drywall in my house was a result of my dad helping. My nice electric guitar my dad again. He's also the most frequent one coming along to shows. The..whatever's left of it…garden outside and room extension have everything to do with Allie. The vehicles that have gotten me all over the midwest have been worked on, for free, or bought from Hussain. Jess, Hussain, Brandy, and before the break Byron came to shows. That's pretty much my network of people I see or interact with in person with any remote regularity until I get a job and meet coworkers with no desire to unionize or talk about anything that helps us transcend our capture.

I also feel like it's not for lack of effort or compromise that I find myself most-often alone and wondering what to do next. I've tried to start the regular meetups with not just the people from college, but different coworkers over the years and with Hussain and Byron. Whether it's just to grab a drink or hit the bowling alley, or see a movie. I want to be clear, it's not that I can't or can "never" persuade people to hang out or chill, but doing so is distinctly not the priority. One might disingenuously personalize and take it a step further to consider themselves the lack of priority, and while that is practically true, it's not an honest way to comprehensively understand the dynamic. People care about themselves waaaaay before they "don't care" about you or what you're up to.

The psychology of this is spoken to by too many things to account for. We blame the isolating echo-chambers online. We can point to the dire economic situation where "the jobs report is improving" has nothing to do with even the concept of a living wage, savings, or what it means to live day-to-day. You have dedicated institutions meant to obscure how we talk about or understand how to "fix" anything, and overwhelmingly you meet people who are just exhausted and adopting versions of "slave ethics" in order to cope and squeeze what little positivity they can out of their circumstances. If that comes with waterfalls of denial, compulsive abuse, or sweet smelling stories of personal dignity and direction, all the more comfortably they sit with no one bothering to notice or care how they play out.

I think about the conversation I got into with Smash, and at one point I said something that triggered "that face" that people get when they are convinced you can't be persuaded or have said something so egregious they both feel sorry for you, angry at themselves, and abjectly hopeless in considering there was a point to beginning the exchange at all. What, of course, separates a Smash from a regular person is that she pushed through it and we found a better place to resolve whatever the discrepancy was at the time. That's a special capacity and awareness we don't practice culturally. If we're already suffering, working incredibly hard to deny or downplay it, what purpose does more serve?

I put it to you that I'm just an extension of my circumstances first. Before I can ever attempt to "personalize" something or claim some power of "will" and freedom to express it, I'm just reporting on the cold, the silence, the self-reports, and variations on the theme of "I'm confused and struggling." I'm not a lowly detached desperate-for-any-kind-of community person flinging out theories about how life works or doesn't. I'm reflecting on my own, not-comfortable-enough or not-comfortable-in-the-right-ways circumstances as well as the literally thousands of pieces of input I've received professionally.

I think there is a palpably different experience between "life is hard" sentiments and "there's a concerted effort to keep you feeling empty and desperate." I think we're suffering the latter. I don't think it's precisely a "conspiracy," but I do think it has a lot to do with us losing a sense of honesty and ownership regarding what we allow to pass as acceptable from each other. I think we're like Byron, allowing the consequences of our behavior to pull guns on each other, and without irony or malice, remain perfectly baffled about what we should be expected to do to be accountable to that.

The "middle-ground" Nazis play the same role. The vast majority of Germans were not in the S.S. or filling up mass graves. They were still Nazis. Apologists for Trump, fascism broadly, religiously-motivated persecutors, and every single time you point your finger before you recognize your own hand plays the same instrument. This is how people get so comfortable ignoring atrocious behavior. At absolute bottom, they know they're doing the same thing. Or, they know they don't care.

"I'm not doing the same thing!" You protest. No, you're not butt-fucking children, but you thought about it, because I just typed it. You didn't enjoy the thought, but the more specific I get about that old Catholic dick inching towards that blonde-haired innocent little booty hole, I take over your mind. Your infinite sea of ridiculous and random thoughts is a source of infinite guilt, denial, distraction, and confusion by default.

If you expose yourself to information often enough, you might think to yourself, "Man, I have a problem with how often I think about butt-fucking children? Does that make me a pedofile?" Of course not, you just work at DCS. The problem is not the thought in and of itself, as any meditative practice will teach you. The problem is not recognizing how much your environment is disconnecting you from a feeling or capacity to get your thoughts organized and acted upon. You're being intruded on. But, worse, you're intruding on yourself with algorithm-assisted means to make you feel good about it.

The best person who has ever existed is still a mammal, a person, and completely fallible in the ways you are. What better way, Jesus story, to comprehensively justify and placate all "sin?" You are born, often enough, into a culture that insists you don't question the dictates of your prophet, lord and saviour, or all-powerful "mysterious force" that absolutely must "make sense" when infinity is over. It's an analogy for your infinite potential. It's a way to not fall into literal insanity trying to calculate the combinatorial explosion that is existence.

Say I return to my younger self. Say I ask "innocent" questions like a child would and tried to analyze the current landscape in front of me. "How do I be an adult?" Take a job that doesn't pay enough, fall into debt for literally any reason, but definitely for school, health issues, and car or mortgage payments. "What does it mean to love your family?" Put up with them just flatly and consistently disrespecting you, from your sobriety to anything you've accomplished, and make sure you show up to any and all gatherings regardless of the gossipy hateful things that have been said and done every day in between. "What does it mean to be a 'good Christian or Muslim?'" Protect pedophiles, cheer Hamas, deny science, control women…

Our narratives are generated from broken internal systems. We don't identify how they break. We double down on mistakes until we turn them into virtues. We act confused and innocent when asshole autistic-types like me bite down on these discrepancies and shake them with as much or more religious conviction than you've ever experienced. Appeals to do things "differently" or "better" are viewed with hostility and suspicion. We'll find ourselves undermining others in their effort to do so just in how we talk about them. Extolling the pageantry over what practically happens.

Then, I need to come full-circle and figure out how to blame without blaming. I need to figure out what's the next piece to take responsibility for and hopefully more deliberately than not choose a course of action that accounts for how perpetually harmless you're going to hold yourself for our collective dynamic. Consolidating and sacrificing aren't optional for "things" to start changing for the better. We're not hungry, there's certainly plenty of food, but we're absolutely starving. We show up when it's "convenient" or if we're desperate, which means we're not showing up at all.

I need a robust network of both accountability and potential. I'm so at the mercy of that need that I've tolerated years of emotional abuse. I want friends so bad I'll talk about them in quotes for dozens of blogs for years and years before it sinks in they aren't friends. For every tool at my fingertips, I'm not inspiring anyone to join me, play music with me, build anything, or contribute in any way to the effort of creating a means to own the work we put into the world. It's not exactly that the more I look the less I find, but even some of these Upwork hires are helping me compare and contrast what they've accomplished in a few weeks compared to me and "my network" over years.

Intellectually, I'm comfortable with things constantly in flux. As a human, I would appreciate stability and predictability along certain metrics until the day I die. I don't ever want to be confused about the location and safety of my food. I don't want to feel like I'm gambling on whether or not I'll get to keep my stuff or have my house burn down to humble me and teach me the value of still being alive. I don't want to occupy an environment that's Mad Maxing every time I leave my house because the collective psychology is arrested by violence and in-group out-group primal instincts. We either drag what we want the future to be into the present, or we suffer the fallout of machinery that compiled all of the survival mechanisms naturally-selected to keep us alive so far. The infinite vacuum of space is "natural." Not good or bad by itself, but wholly antithetical to life as we know it or would prefer.

[1069] Knock Knock

This may be one of my more weird and off-putting digressions. I'm feeling weird and off-put. As my time at Groups winds down, it's giving my mind more room to breathe into the next things to focus on. It's giving me time to sit in and reflect on well-worn spaces regarding how I've spent my time and who with.

I genuinely wonder how "dumb" I truly am. I don't mean in an intellectual sense. I mean in terms of what it is supposed to mean to exist as a friend, man, "leader," or "basic human being." I primarily feel like I'm watching. I still find things confusing that I was watching when I was a child. Every day I'm presented with some new confounding, "I could never…"-esc situation that feels like there's a driving absurdity. I refer to it most often as an "unyielding irony" or series of consequences bred from immutable spite.

I simply don't know what I am. I don't know if I'm a good friend, or an eager puppy looking for pets and validation. I don't know if I'm actually causing some immense amount of harm or stress to people in how I exist. I don't know how I'm perceived, and when someone offers to tell me, it's too familiar or predictable and functionally devoid of any real depth.

The number one thing I hear from my clients as feedback that glances with anything to do with my actual personality is, "When I first met you, I didn't like you and thought you were a dick. Then I realized you were pushing me or making me uncomfortable because you cared or were trying to help." I have heard that half a dozen times this week alone. They acknowledge a negative feeling, the utility of doing so, and working through what I was asking.

To explicate this further, say you tell me you want to be "mindful" about "not yelling at my son" or "spending more time with my kids." When, each week, I ask you how many times you recorded noticing that you yelled at your son or how many times you recorded making more time for your kids, if you say "zero," I'm not an asshole. I'm opening the door to exploring why you're yelling or wasting your time. This, predictably, makes people uncomfortable, but it's the first step to any form of progress along any dimension in your life you wish to improve. You can't fix what you're not even aware of.

This feels like my dilemma. I feel like I'm missing something very deep and fundamental about how, why, or whether I interact with people. I have friends who I've given a hundred or more dollars to who've never invited me to dinner. I have friends who I've answered the call or text for in the middle of the night who I'm almost certain were I to reach out in the same manner it would fundamentally alter how or whether they bothered with me again going forward.

I'm certainly not saying I have some giant list of friends and I'm just naive about the nature of hundreds of superficial connections. I'm saying when I reflect on what are supposed to constitute my "closest" or "longest" dynamics, not all, but the vast majority simply don't seem to have ever existed? What, then, am I even trying to capture or refer to?

My closest friends at present are H, who is pathologically helpful and industrious. It's great when you're trying to promote an empathetic hard-worker in service to your company. It's dangerous when he's seeing the heart doctor because he can't draw effective boundaries about how to use his energy. We're both "desperate" to make money, though I've enough lived experience "failing" at entrepreneurship, I'm just as active in trying to enjoy the ride as I am in achieving anything. He's helped me immensely with my vehicles, in having an exchange regarding business ideas and distributing work, and just demonstrating that there's genuine people who deserve to be enabled instead of taken advantage of.

I've spent the next most time with J. She's fun to be around and funny. She's more intuitive and potentially hard-working than she wishes to follow-through with, and this lends itself to a kind of chaos. She cozies up to people with major issues. Whether it's because she sees herself in them, or because she doesn't feel she deserves more than the places they're at is unclear. Either way, she wants to be told what to do and fit into a dynamic that lets her "play." Her blasé attitude towards her health contributes to aggravating old sports and substance abuse injuries, and it's not clear how long she could be relied upon in a role of too much responsibility, as I continue to talk about ways to do just that.

I role with B, and have off and on since high school. She's as smart or smarter than anyone I've ever met, makes and follows through with plans, and is getting a handle on her emotional patterns and drives. We live in very separate places. When we do get to hang out, it's for a few days at a time, or for dinner. I've never gotten the "game playing" vibe from her. She's in touch with her damage, and I think doing so pre-empts what defensive and insecure people do to obscure or blame. I've never felt I've had to censor myself or hesitate talking about anything with her.

My dude HS is in a similar position across the country, growing in the depth of his understanding of himself, and fitting neatly into more leadership roles. I didn't really feel a beat was skipped even not having seen him in person for several years. In my perfect world, he's my first and perpetual neighbor who I know can be relied upon to, you know, actually get drinks or go dancing or hit a show without it registering as an obligation or some extra effort.

To be sure, if I'm ever writing about you, it's either because you occupy a very special and privileged place in my head, or you're fucking up royally and in a very confusing way. Even when I'm attempting to be specific and discerning, it's never meant to beat you over the head or blame you. I just don't know enough. I'm not in regular conversation with nearly anyone. No one messages me out of the blue wondering what I've been up to. I don't get emails from old work connections who happened to incorrectly type something and my name popped up. I'm not invited. I'm not getting "just wishing you well" or getting Christmas cards. I'm not reached out to by my family, save my dad and step-mom, anymore than I am the hundreds or thousands of people I've gotten to know over the last 30 years.

That's like the first thing, right? The people mentioned above text or message me. They don't have anything approaching months of effort, thousands of dollars, or gun-pulled-on-me levels of betrayal. It's literally cheaper to cut dead weight and budget to fly around the country to spend time together than it is to waste away in an unhealthy and exploitative dynamic.

Conversely, I've reached out to damn near everyone I've ever remotely called friend. It's not as precisely unreasonable as it sounds on its head, but does mean I've sent at least one "test the waters" kind of message to the people who a short time later get defriended or deleted. When my idealism bumps against their, "Why is he messaging me?" it's time to go.

I'm drifting. I need to talk about how my experience contrasts. I've been accused of heinous shit. I've owned and written about actual things I've done, from hitting my cat in the eye with a Creepy Crawler snake as a kid, to being very-certainly too much at parties or in hitting on people and being handsy, to slapping Kristen. When I contextualize those things, I feel I understand them, it gives people a chance to compare instances from their own life and explore their own emotions, environments, ignorance, or motivations. In the minds of those who don't grown, learn, or own anything, it won't even take my actual behavior and ownership of such to put distance between us. They need to think of me as a rapist, Machiavellian, catastrophically ego-ridden, or phobic and angry in ways no genuinely moral person should have to entertain, let alone contend with.

I find this fascinating in an going way because I'm a literal counselor. I have hundreds of stories of people's absolutely terrible behavior to each other, and they turn it into a lovable routine! For the thousands of shows I've watched, there's nothing like the hellish dramadies of any given individual's life.

That is, if I panic-slap Kristen trying to bring her back to reality after a cartoonish reconstruction of what my mind jumps to after too much TV and watching her wrist bleed out, that's irredeemable. If you get beat, threatened, or controlled every day, and have so through a dozen partners for years of your life, I will never hear more "but I love them" sentiments. Sentiments protected and reinforced and defended by both sides and by onlookers. Sentiments echoing the pain, usual-ness, and shared expectations of that dynamic. We belabor a caricature of a "battered-wife" and completely ignore the context that smooths and justifies and condones.

If your friends and family have, with regularity, stolen from you, verbally demeaned you, or otherwise predictably and reliably taken advantage, you say nothing, except to maybe a therapist who's 50/50 not insane. I don't get invited to your wedding, but the abuser does. You don't do like me and say, "This is fucked up, Byron, and I'm not okay, and you haven't made it right," until the relationship passes reasonably salvageable. A crisis must ensue. An epic battle of crippled wills needs fantastic displays of hate-filled language, property destruction, self-destruction, and orgiastic guilt to cycle ad infinitum.

 
If I'm not yelling at you, stealing from you, beating on you, sexually exploiting you, or otherwise meticulously working a manipulative angle so that you're less and I'm more, how could I ever be trusted!? Why would you want to be "friendly" or "committed" to a monster that doesn't drink from the same sacrosanct smirkingly apologetic fountain?

 
Think back on my consistent feedback. "I thought you were a dick, then realized you were trying to help." What do you suppose gets someone there? Most seem to stop at the first half, then carry on into the sunset. I'll tell you, because they never actually started listening to me. They were never persuaded by how I spoke. They didn't "wise up." They had some experience with their own family or life they felt. Maybe they only caught themselves once refraining from yelling at their kid. Then they noticed the fear and dejected look on their offspring and it gave them pause and made them feel bad or for the first time connected to the causal nature of their behavior. I just invited them to even look at the door. Most will still take 6 months-to-forever to bother knocking or entertain taking a step through.

I'm "stuck" in this, "Sure, but look at this too," place. I need to see many many doors. I need options. I need creativity. I need license to explore and make hazy but demanding proclamations about what I want, who I am, or where I think I'm going. I need to trust myself to engage that process in a faithful, honest and consistent way when every friendship dies or evaporates. I don't wish to ever make it personal because we're not vulnerable in the same ways. If you hear me, or really anything, as gospel, our problems and perspectives occupy different universes. I consistently see what appears to register as an annihilation of your universe when it comes into contact with mine. You don't like that.

My universe is kind of cold. It can be pretty lonely, even if there are a lot of positives to being by yourself. My universe is work, patience, and significantly more questions than answers. My universe is critical, but not mean-spirited. My universe is being crafted with each line, and is hopefully setting some kind of example people are benefiting from or drawing on that, I'm trying to make peace with, I'm never going to hear about. Or I'll hear about it in "fluffy" ways, and no one will care to work together on more of a shared one.

Within 10 feet of me I have months of "entertainment" or "practice" or "study" or "meaningful work" insofar that it intrigues me or will color how I speak and whom to. I don't play in a band. I don't debate the books I'm reading. I'm not playing video games online. Any skill or business experiment will cost money I don't really have and time begging to be occupied by a new soul-consuming occupation. I'm literally alone with this "stuff" of existence almost all of the time. I'm functionally or practically in almost complete isolation in what I can only ignorantly describe as a kind of "spiritual" way. There are many jealous, pious, and righteous gods I observe people worshipping, and over here a decorated non-believer. Naturally, I deserve my exile.

The more poetic and ethereal you get, the more dramatic it sounds, right? I'll be happy if I can get the bills paid in advance, war stays off my lawn, and I can regularly bowl with my dad or find a decent club to join. My arguments and perspective is fundamentally rooted in a place of exceptional privilege. I want more I can't obtain by myself. I want more from you. I want more conversation. I want shared universes. I want creative fixes and chances taken to achieve things previously not even considered. Some of us might "kinda" get there with perpetual therapeutic structured and light suggestions that a fucking door exists altogether. Most of us don't have a prayer for anything more than we're already getting. Shame.