[769] Holier-Than-Thou

I have a superpower. It's true. I have something that sets me apart from the rest. Wanna know what it is? You might already know. It has to do with mind control. I can't make people dance like a puppet. I can't brighten their day with a subtle linguistic or body maneuver. No, my superpower is more insidious. You'd think it would be a consequence of “negativity” or me touting my diligent pursuit of knowledge, but those are just habits. My superpower is the ability to not just make people merely dislike me or be annoyed. I provoke longstanding and downright hatred.

To ring in the new year, my general antagonism in the past played a nice reminder as to why I don't get along. I may have talked about him before, but a friend of a friend came out to visit maybe 2 years ago. We proceeded to get drunk on winery tours. This fellow had a story about his dad being unable to grow some plant, to which I responded, “Is he dumb?” The timing and tone was that of a joke, but, as a normal wretched person, instead of hearing it as a joke, he heard, “I think your dad is dumb.” These kind of distinctions are always of the sort that get us all in trouble, but me more frequently. To speak to the fickleness of his offense, 2 hours later sitting around a restaurant table, I switched gears and started asking in “earnest” about his time spent in Africa with bomb-sniffing rodents. The report from our mutual friend was that he had changed his opinion and decided I was actually great and maybe worthy of friendship.

This same person, through facebook algorithm-fuckery, had him and one of his acquaintances appear in my feed. I spoke against some downright illogical or destructive claim (think healing potions) to which he felt he needed to step up and defend his friend. He called me out for, in his words, “showering at the Y” and discussing my housing plight, both more and less severe, but still ongoing. I tagged our mutual friend in congratulations for finding a pet project with teeth, petty and disingenuous as he may be. That's the extent of our history. A day-drinking adventure where he got to highs and lows, and a facebook comment. Turn to last night, when I asked to tag along to his ex-girlfriend's house, I was denied. The reason being, he hated me, and had polluted the mind of his ex about the kind of person I am, and my friend didn't think it appropriate to test the polite face she might put on.

I'm consistently struck by how easy it is for me to find myself in this position. I don't have to steal, hit, or bring up a single thing about you personally, to be a kind of all-encompassing frustrating focus in the mind of someone. I've explored this enough to pretty comfortably say that it's never about a particularly off-kilter or dark joke or comment you made. I know in a very complex way most people's issues have as little to do with an “individuated me” as they do with insecurities and projections of their own generation. It's why I struggle to take it personally, no matter how demoralizing it is, when I can't play along in crowds deemed too sophisticated for my tenor.

I thought that I might be approaching these kind of scenarios in the wrong way. I must be hurting people. As such, don't I get to claim pain as well? Aren't I offended and scorned when I'm not invited? Aren't my feelings worth considering? Don't you just feel grossed out right now? Find better friends. Don't interject yourself into scenarios not meant for you. Enjoy your time alone. My current struggle is to literally embody moving away from “the masses.” This is such unbearably old news, the reasons I'm drawn back into it I can barely grasp.

When it's explained to me my impact on others, importantly, I'm never offered a way of contrition. I can never be forgiven. In order for something like that to take place, I'd essentially have to become a different person, presumably through traumatic brain injury or self-delusional spiritual revelation. My apologies wouldn't be believed, nay, haven't been. My asks for routes forward go ignored. My indifference to the bites and claps back are perhaps the cherry on the mountain of offense. How dare I not be phased! How dare I reconceptualize and breakdown my response, or lack thereof, into another whine session.

How does one get my superpower? I didn't come to it by way of nuclear accident. As far as I can tell, apart from being comfortable with a degree of obscenity I think most genuinely comedic spirits jive with, all I do differently is write. I take the time to actually observe the process of my being. I deconstruct and blurt out the pieces. This habit is universally hated save a few very specific domains. If you're going to be a psychopathic titan of your industry, parsing out precisely how you're going to do something lies at the foundation of your effort. Having an exacting sense of how and why is the heart of the most dominating structures society has to offer. I'm finding that in a social work job like mine, the dominating and explicit tone is a natural remedy for the abject chaos many I encounter embody. You don't get to be a crazy abusive meth-head in my presence, or else. You don't get to scream and railroad the conversation, or further interventions will take place.

I'm not getting to the meat of the hatred though. It's got too many layers. For some, they let things foment for years and pick some random instance to call crossing the line. That's the girls who fell for me that I didn't turn into husband material for. That's friends who, in lieu of a discussion about their relative debt and poverty and creative or collaborative ways to address it, savagely horsewhipped their hobbies and became overtly sensitive to a perceived critical tone where it didn't exist. Some it just takes seeing even the remotest confidence in yourself or how you go about the world to seethe at the idea that they'd be the one finding themselves while you presume to have figured it all out. It all speaks to that either/or ignorance where “realistic” is equated to “negative” and you're not allowed to voice (or even not voice!) something resembling the contrary. I've literally run this experiment in deliberately remaining silent or picking moments to interject explicitly affirming things, and a friend, unprompted, claimed “I bet he thinks such and such damning thing about what we're doing.” I fail before I begin!

There is of course something to be said about your reputation preceding you. There is considerably more to be said about a propensity to lock people into little boxes and treat them unfairly after you feel you've been burned. I feel wholly disrespected, judged, and explicitly hated by people who, when you break it down, I struggle to feel how they're justified even remotely for that level of response. It reminds me of when I had my Ipod taken in high school by an assistant principal whose car I subsequently planned to blow up. I still kind of want to, but are any of you going to get on board with that course of action? Does my lingering years-long irrationality deserve your respect and understanding? Don't you understand? He took it while I was doing homework in an empty hallway outside of my 2^nd period class because I was so smart, I didn't have to go to school the whole day! The nerve of his targeting one of the best! Fuck his car!

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

People consider that line to be about kindness or charity. They don't follow it. Moreover, they don't take nearly as much shit as they give. You know what I would not hold against you? Everything you already do that I don't. AND YOU HATE THAT. That's the heart of it. I genuinely understand you as weak and fickle, and don't take too complex a route in explaining what that looks like. Then, I proceed to pursue my dreams, live like a king, and maintain the creative and demeaning edge that confounds and belittles. Even when I'm hurt or “offended,” I understand those as weak approximations of incorrect thinking. Even when you throw years of shared experiences under the bus, I detach and conceptualize, and pat your head and say it'll be over eventually. I own where I'm failing, or again, it's not that hard to understand what I can and can't control and you don't have any answers as to how to move faster or smarter. And arguably, you can't hate so dramatically that which you don't understand as something you're intimately familiar with. You know when you sound dumb. You know when you lied. You know what the apology should look like. But that would only strike another “win” in my column for the game I'm not even playing.

I make the same “bad” jokes about myself as I do you and talk about my own life in “harsh” terms. I take the literal most “private” and embarrassing things about myself and break them down. I can't stand when people invent things to hate me for, so I don't do that about you. I wish I was invited to as many things as I've put out invitations for. I wish people were offering me opportunities to save money and create and live sustainably. I wish I had a 3 page blog to read about every one of the people I wanted to keep in my circle (Bezos requires his top management to write essays). I don't want to be lied to, so I try not to look or sound like anything more or less than I am in the moment. When it's your turn, you ask me to be as facebook-promotional and Insta-famous and picture filtered and as “positive” as the donations I'm asking for instead of a birthday present. You want me to justify, not actually be justified. As long as the moral ambiguity of our actions can be maintained, we're all safe. Stop rocking the boat.

Fuck you. I tell myself “fuck you” when I feel I've sat and complained and not done enough for too long. I say “fuck you” to the idea that I can dwell on how hopeless it feels to be at the mercy of car debt, the weather, or a strained capacity to deal with the creeping rotten air between us. If I'm so bad and all I am is the rehashing word pile of things that either plainly exist and shouldn't be controversial, or sentiments that don't even register in the minds of the adults or Europeans in the room, maybe you're more dramatically fucked up than even I'll ever be able to speak to. You want me to kill you, because you're responsible for why everything's dying. The meth-head gets that, so please authority, sublimate me. You refuse to acknowledge the bullshit you're addicted to. You hide your shame like you're wise and capable enough to handle it alone.

There's never any one instance of “waking up.” “Being present” is standing to be counted for the eternal war over the forces that would tell your story for you. The fat people who wanted to lose weight started when they were genuinely inspired on a Wednesday in August; they aren't the ones rushing to the gym today. It pains me to think about what becomes of the person who never finds the reason to stop turning me into the enemy. It's pitiful to not understand hatred as a fear-ridden fluke from more evolutionarily dramatic times, and it's not a righteous platform for dictatorial policy. I'm not saying “it” or “you” can't get better, but you won't. And as long as you keep letting me retain the dialogue describing the ongoing consequences of that truth, you'll maintain it was my rules and my faults all along that destroyed everything. So be it.

[762] Fisti(n)cuffs

I'm about a half hour away from the end of BlackkKlansman, and want to take a moment.

I occupy a weird space. To be sure, unless the person my mother told me she cheated with was mixed or black, and I'm not actually my father's, I'm not actually black. A large proportion of black people in my life have said things like, “You're darker than my dad,” or, “Nah, you ain't white,” or “I'm so confused by your skin,” or “You know you my nigga” alluding to a kind of empathy with “the struggle.” As such, I've always felt a kind of solidarity and awareness that I've certainly occasioned to ignorantly betray. No less, when I go to the symphony, giant white crowds of very comfortable rich people make me uncomfortable in a way “being the only white guy” at a black friend's Thanksgiving does not.

That baseline reality that seems to permeate black culture is precisely what I gravitate towards in storied depictions of that struggle. There's something deeper about the language, the danger, and nature of the consequences in this movie, just like there's brilliant dialogue and entire worlds to chew on in a show like Dear White People. You can't shy away from things and exist as a “real” black person in this country. People are out to kill you for dumb-ass reasons and you are disproportionately affected by racist policies and a history where you're considered inhuman.

It's that deep hatred that can't be escaped. It's the pride and perpetual insistence of a damning and degrading narrative. As a purely intellectual question, I'm baffled at how anyone could be so sure and so loud about anything, let alone that degree of hatred of someone because of the color of their skin or how they dressed or talked. As a person who's been at the receiving end of someone's sheer irrational hatred and ignorant pride, perhaps that's the kind of desperate and low place real people connect with across differences.

I understand hate. I understand how much work it takes to fuel flames for people or a world that disappoints you at every turn. I understand the stress and headaches. I understand that there will never be enough words or screaming matches to account for how full a heaving chest feels when you want to obliterate the oppressive force, and yet that force never leaves. I've said I've wanted to kill things or certain people. I felt relieved the day Scalia died, naively enough. There is an immense waterfall of hatred spewing from as many corners as you choose to look.

Here's an example. I recently picked up a washer/dryer combo from Coatsville, IN. The guy was nice, a kind of outdoors man's man. We shoved that thing on the hood of my car, I went to pull out the steal of $100 to give to him. He hands $40 back and says he's a Christian, he's just happy to see it gone, and that “I don't mean to sound faggy, but do you mind letting me know you got back home safe?”

What do you call that? Complicated, to say the least. Is this the kind of Bill Maher “house nigga” comment, but for gays? Do I think this guy's disposition would have changed wildly if I got out of my car with a lisp and said I worked in something he considered perverse as opposed to child welfare? He literally gave me a discount on what was already a steal. He put out to a stranger that he cared that I got back safe. Do we call it a deep abiding hatred for gays, or a confused cultural aversion to something he doesn't understand? Do we react by ridiculing and sanctioning?

I understand hate, but I've never been proud of when it hits. I don't brag about the relationships in my life that have managed to end terribly. I don't routinely work in to conversation how insane my mom is, how shitty the conversations with ex-friends have went, or persistently espouse some level of violence towards all of the people in power I legitimately think are trying to kill me each day. For me, these are incidental feelings of being mashed up with people we barely ever understand or are given an opportunity to work productively with. But then it seems it's one thing to understand your own capacity for hatred, and another entirely to forgive it. And god forbid you practice apologetics.

One thing I persistently worry about is that “impulsive” decision to break something that feels fragile. I want to get it over with. I hate the anticipation of betrayal. I hate the idea of putting yourself out there and believing in something while someone else was just waiting for their opportunity to flip. Hatred pragmatically addresses that too. It preemptively blames people before they get the chance. You get to emote all over the place and proudly profess cathartic rage for all the “others” and “idiots.” This is about as close as I can figure in describing the thinnest of lines between hate and fear.

Fortunately enough, I've spent enough time writing that I don't walk around like a ball of rage anymore. I still pretty fluidly claim to hate things, but not in an obsessive and deeply painful way. All the tragedies of conversation I've neatly packed into blogs or examples. All the dreams stalled or things stolen occupy intricate webs of justification and pithy perspective. My fragile sentimentality is reserved for brief lucidity during infrequent intoxication.

How do you contend with hate? Is it embodied in the all-encompassing abstractions of identity politics and storied victim-histories? Is it individual instances of poor judgment more or less spurned on by a deep abiding racial or sexual hatred? Is it the general lashing against all that makes you afraid and that's hard to understand? A call for peaceful protest or truth and reconciliation isn't to deny these forces or their consequences. Asking for the conversation and the acknowledgment of pain is not an encroachment on freedom or rights. The effort in life should be towards mellowing of that hate impulse. The dialogue should be calling it out for what it is. And people who are actually filled with hate need to be reminded as often as they can that that's what they're full of. That's the face of their “Christian love” or “purity of intention.”

Stay cool, my brothas. We're already dead. Some of us just know that a little more than others. And everybody's terrified.

[581] Smash Complex

I'm so filled with rage. The perfect time to talk about it is when you're not teeming with anything in particular that has set you off. My rage is that of The Hulk's. Mark Ruffalo's, “That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry” rings true in too real a way. While writing has always proven a way to express my hatred toward any one particular thing, I don't know that I explore enough the basis from which all the hatred flows. I've quoted before some line I picked up in a blog that said, “all hate is self-hate” and while I think I agreed with it at the time, I'm more under the impression my hatred is significantly external. The School of Life video on how not to be angry all the time has a certain truth to it and it will be underlying much of what I have to say I'm sure.

Did you notice that? I just caught myself. I immediately equated “hatred” with “rage.” To line things up properly, it is perhaps best to say an unrelenting rage provokes hateful sentiments. I suppose then rage and anger are close enough for my purposes to still rely on that video.

So why ever be angry? As with any feeling, there's a presumption that it is justified. You deserve to be angry. You sometimes deserve a pass if you say or do something that goes beyond the limits of generally acceptable behavior. I think of a bereaved parent who kills the murderer of their child. That person isn't normally a killer (at least, not any moreso than anyone else generally is) and there are few who would desire that person to suffer a life in prison or be put to death for their action, terrifying and morally complicated as it was. Less dramatically, you've probably said something terrible to someone you care about in the heat of a fight. You knew it would be terrible, and yet it felt so right in the moment, even if the proceeding moment threw that elation immediately into question.

Like normal people, I get angry when my expectations aren't met. Unlike normal people, I seem to have higher expectations and aspirations than the norm. This is a dispositional disaster. In a sense, it means you can never let up on yourself, and in practical terms, it means people are failing you literally every second of every day. You're failing yourself. You've missed something or haven't played the game right.

Consider what just happened between this paragraph and the last. I get email notifications whenever someone posts under the “free stuff” list on Craigslist. Someone posted a ton of free books. There's a pile of free books stacked up in my living room right now, I go to pick up the rest at 2. I expect that I can catalog and throw up a basic seller site either under a domain I own or through a place like Ebay. I said “yes” first, picked up the books, and opened a door of opportunity that cost me a few trips across town. Eventually I'll need a shed, but if your problems can generally be fixed with $50-$100, man hours, and a disposition that looks forward, it's hardly a problem. And if it seems like a fruitless waste of time, burning books has come back in fashion these days if I can't re-gift them to a better equipped seller.

A sense of anger comes from knowing I'm constantly in transition and allowing myself to morph and fold to my circumstances while I watch people pretend like what they're presenting is all that they are. Moreover, they get defensive and accusatory when you push, or they get lazy and full of excuses when you option them an opportunity.

They say the struggle is real. The problem is that it's a struggle for the wrong reasons and affects the wrong people. I've been looking for a foothold for what feels like forever. I want one thing I can rely on that allows me to then sell books or coffee or create websites and research. I want to have the mental time and space to play instruments, not sneak in expensive lessons on my day off while I'm thinking about other obligations. I want to have one day where the news isn't 400 things that have gone wrong and an incidentally unsustainable piece that looks marginally okay.

The rage stems from a deep appreciation for the general “problems” and watching people fail in their daily lives to address them. I'm too poor too. So I picked up 2 jobs immediately, am gunning for 3, once an app gets fixed on my phone that let's me do another one I'll have 4. I don't need 4 to pay the bills, but I need 4 to live a life that resembles the one I grew up with and in order to develop my land.

This is a ridiculous situation, and I'm a ridiculous person. Compounding this circumstance is that I don't really have any help. I have people who would definitely sign on if they had something specific to do or were handed the keys to the candy shop, but it's me who has to pursue the extra jobs and synonymously maintain a quasi-normal happy-enough life to get the ball rolling. It's me that did/does the drug studies in order to buy the land in the first place. It's me who has to transfer things to the land, pay for the gas, replacement tire, etc. to hopefully form the basis for creating something larger later.

To that point, it's less about whether or not I ask for help. I can cajole someone into helping me transport boxes of books or fencing to a storage shed. What I can't do is engender people to do “I'm pursing 4 jobs as well”-esc behaviors. I don't have a pool of saved Biolife money to address a shared goal. Why? I brought it up, but unless I sometimes physically drive or daily remind my roommates, they're not going to go. I feel like a girl “I want you to want to do those things with me!” As my last 4 paychecks sitting in the wings can attest, my problem is less to do with a lack of money than it is commitment and shared energy.

I also constantly put myself out there. I took the basic-bitch stocking job and spoke with the district manager about doing something intellectually worth my time. He gave me his email. He hasn't responded to the 2 I sent him after telling me to “give it a month.” He neither recognized nor respected what I had to say or what I could contribute to the company. I didn't expect him to. I tried anyway, and still need to have a more explicit shooting down before I step away from the matter.

I see how scatter-brained most start-ups and franchises are run. It's exceedingly hard to find organized competent people who can juggle scheduling and money in a way you can trust. I pitch it to people, let me help you. I'll work on the cheap. I have management experience. I'll be your little outsourced person for small tasks here and there. Let me get my foot in the door in a way you feel most comfortable. Resounding NOPES.

People crave that struggle. It's a kind of entitlement. “Hey! I'm the MANAGER of this little corner of the world, no one is gonna tell me what's what!” We're so generally socially and mentally insecure that we feel compelled to protect our ever-meager and precarious standing. Someone comes in presuming to be smart or motivated and it's best to run or forget or diminish and attempt to keep them humbled or harassed. We ignore how much of our lives has been dictated by our associations and deleterious sacrifices. The smell of our own farts invigorating to a point of delirium.

The shorthand lazy way to discuss my rage is to say something like, “I hate stupid people.” What we would agree makes someone stupid I think would massively diverge. I think it's stupid to get comfortable. I think it's stupid to find happiness in ignoring the underlying problem. I think it's stupid not to define the underlying problem. The pursuit of those definitions are something people run so hard and fast away from. They won't even discuss it. They won't answer questions regarding their own words. They won't concede when they've contradicted themselves. They literally won't think.

The parade of non-thinking never ends. They don't think about when they'll get sick or if disaster strikes. They don't think about how their shows of solidarity, backed up by the same ignorance and fear that got them into the street, will continue to be their downfall the day after. They don't think about every day they spend away from the people and circumstances that helped form the best things about themselves. All the books they read in high school they'll never touch again. All the sports they played they'll never find the time for. All the friends they used to talk to, resolved to adages about dying with a handful who actually give a damn. 

I hate that I have a desire to thrive while the world just wants to hang on. Or, what I feel even more, that the world wants to die. The only people who want to live are those who feel directly threatened in that moment. And when the problem can't be fixed quasi-immediately, they in turn resolve themselves to die. My battle isn't with bill collectors (fuck you IRS), annoying homeowners associations, district managers at Kroger, or the growing amount of problems I'll have to navigate by loading up my house with free shit. My battle is with a society that pretends it wants to live. Society pretends it gives a damn. And everyday we don't actively feel bad about it, remind ourselves, or say something, we give it license, and it kills us.

It doesn't get fixed with a march. It doesn't get fixed. That's probably the deepest truth. It's not going to get fixed, it never has progressed. Every baby born is as capable of being nothing more than as ignorant or susceptible to every horrid thing about life as our species' first iteration. And I fucking hate that, because for the first time in existence, we're actively choosing it. We're choosing “the struggle” “the title” and “the ignorance.” Every day that isn't some form of bliss is a societal decision to kill each other and thus ourselves. Every stupid “how ya doing!” at work when you know I fucking hate it and now I fucking hate you for asking. Stop talking to me like an idiot, strike, read, form a meet-up group to discuss change. I don't want your joke about how crazy you have to be to work here with what they're paying you.

Arguably, my habits and disposition are maladaptive. You could comfortably say I'm failing my genes by concerning myself with a kind of growth/sustainability that fundamentally hates the pool from which most of society is based in. I'm writing myself out of existence. I'm “yes, and-ing” over a cliff. It's not that I can't knock someone up, it's that I refuse to raise a kid where the only thing they know of the world is what I can't provide them and their suicidal culture fills in the blanks.

The only time it will ever get easy is when I get that baseline. When I can filter through the jungle of monkeys calling themselves people and stick 5 in a room, virtual or otherwise, who operate like me, I'll be able to rely on things happening in ways people don't think exist. Right now, all I have is “Nick P.” this array of complaints, formless, tired, full of hatred and rage, angling to add “book dealer” to his range of experiences, on a whim, because nothing else feels more or less likely or worthy than the last thing.

I read and watch so goddamn much. I read what the billionaire CEOs say about success. I read the entrepreneur forums. I've heard the same advice, same start-up struggles, same energetic enthusiasm for ideas, character descriptions, market conditions, cliches, contradicting strategies ad nauseum. Whatever I'm missing, I'm actively looking for. The problem, in a sense, it has to be handed to me. I need the keys to the castle before I can defend it. I need an opportunity to shine for more than my “go-getter spirit! Huzah!” or ability to forget the details of the endless strain on my disposition for a time long enough to keep going. What's worth deeper consideration is that we all need the same thing.

I don't plan to work my businesses with employees. I plan to have partner-owners. I don't expect anything out of you more than myself, and I refuse to perpetuate the myth that you're anywhere more or less than you choose to be. If you don't want the responsibility, then I'll take a bigger cut. If you're willing to have your phone on day and night, come with me to pick up free stuff, and just generally maintain a mindset of killing it all the time, that's yours. I refuse to take from you as much as I feel has been taken from me, from my generation. I refuse to perpetuate the myths that protect greed and mock what grandiosity actually looks like.

I hate that the people paying me, the people I have to ask for permission, the people I have to interview for, and the people making the rules don't think like that. I'm watching legislation get passed that I know will cripple the nation indefinitely. I know enough history to not believe it's getting better. I can't forget or ignore. I can't put my “faith” in crossed fingers and petitions. The burden has only grown and the only way out is something that doesn't exist yet, or in such a small capacity its message is suffocated by the larger picture. If you don't believe that, you don't believe in me. You don't think I'll make it, you “hope” someone like me gives you an excuse to feel good about “things” because “someone” will step up and course correct eventually. I don't have a hero complex. I don't think there's much worth saving.

[502] Hate By Any Other Name

Is there a single, more motivating, more prevalent, and more accurate assessment of why humans do anything than out of hatred? Know that I ask this sincerely, and am not just trying to stick with some theme for the sake of it. When the tides feel like they're turning and the world you knew starts to become unrecognizable, I feel I must argue that it started with hate. While the only truth may be change, the more significant facts seem related to what accelerated or provoked that change. I'll argue two-fold; I'll describe why I think it's hatred, and I'll speak against those who would claim it's about love.

I want to add an initial caveat. For the sake of this argument, I'm forgoing any presumptions about “balance.” I think it's an artful word often employed to swallow bullshit. Anyone who wants to point to the grayness of life and decision making, needlessly leaning on “how complicated it all is” or the amount of give and take involved I'm not going to find persuasive if merely asserting that is the extent of your argument.

So, as I often do, I want to give examples big and small and hopefully throughout history. For a small example, consider weight, both loss and gain. For me, when it comes to loss, I'm never more motivated than when I think about how much I hate and constantly make fun of ridiculously out of shape or gargantuan people. Claims about my immaturity or civility aside, all I have to do is think of each successive pound gained and the amount of things I'm ignoring, forgoing, or hating about myself to get that large in order to zap away my sympathies. I don't mean to unfairly clump moms, people with conditions, or the otherwise basically healthy person who finds themselves gaining as they get old.

For the above, I consider culture. Why is it when an area adopts a “western diet” do they start to die earlier, find all forms of disease they never had, and help contribute to the destruction of the environment? Is it because “they absolutely love shitty food?” It's an easy way to state the problem, absolutely. It's a way to overburden our sensory reward systems and make it sound like a good thing. But what's really happened? I would argue, some executive and dialogue concerning profits and the free market are held in greater esteem than a concern for humanity or the planet. Someone hates you. Someone with significantly more power and influence than you can appreciate has shaped us into translating their hatred into lovable language regarding your preferences and presumed decision making.

Now, you get to love being fat while pretending and ignoring just how much you probably really hate it. You hate knowing that people like me can tell non-stop fat jokes for hours. You hate breathing hard. You hate worrying about your health or taking it for granted that you'll be dead a little sooner anyway and won't have to worry for as long. You rely on the language concerning sabotaged “choices” to both reinforce your sense of ownership of your circumstances and distancing yourself from notions of anyone behind the curtain.

This bridges neatly into a discussion about capitalism and the free-market. It's a religion by any other name. Companies hate losing money more than they like to put on some shiny veneer about some “revolutionary” and “necessary” new gadget or food. They hate competition. They hate notions of equality and sharing. They'll, to their dying breath, espouse the “morals” and “freedoms” that you lose by not having big corporate brother to dictate what belongs in your home or body. The Hayek or Friedman ideologues who, even when given the chance to run their neoliberal experiments, ignore the human suffering caused because they can't own and be honest about the amount of hatred they have about losing their station.

“Nation building” is all about subverting wills and keeping people dead or ignorant. “Energy independence” couldn't take foot until the profit margin could be realized. The New Deal was people reacting to the hatred they felt towards starving and a predictable, arguably planned, market crash. When new presidents are ushered in, it's because the population is often too stupid and forgetful to understand that what they hate started 30, 100, or 1000 years ago, and the president isn't outside of gas stations manipulating the price. It's an elite hatred that condenses and protects power with psychopathic efficiency.

Why do we genuinely have to fear a Trump presidency? It's not because people tap into the energy of love or the stream of youth consciousness fighting to keep his name relevant. It's because hatred, blind ignorant hatred for you, for themselves, for the history and facts they'll never understand, is the most powerful force. I've asked how so many Tea-baggers got into congress. Racism is more powerful than any liberal idealism. Bernie or bust? They hate Hilary, not love Teddy and FDR. Let it all burn if you can't get your way. Because it's easy. Because it's normal. Because until we started inventing notions of high-society and worldly-inclusive mindsets, it's been a couple hundred thousand years of instilled habitual hatred towards the other. It's been ignorant fearful animals lashing out in order to stay alive or revel in the glory of conquest.

You will never and not fix anything until you appreciate the depth of our cultural hatred. You will never escape the negative feedback wheel of adopting that hatred, protecting that hatred, and spreading that hatred. You “choose” between Target and Wal-mart, with an ignorant smug smile while you say “Tar-gjaaay,” you know, because you're fancy, with the thought that every indebted food-stamp using worker doesn't deserve to be freely educated or have access to healthcare because they're not you who's really had it rough and deserves a lifestyle and attitude befitting.

One of the best tricks that's ever been played is getting you to adopt the attitude and hateful extravagance of the rich without getting any of the benefits. You think being able to afford a gym membership or to be able to vacation once in a while is something to be proud of. Spending and acquiring to put distance between you and your hard-fought modern sensibilities and “the rest” who don't or can't access your resources. It's not your love of poor people that provokes the charitable donation. It's the hate and resentment you hold for what you have, that you know, in some important way, you don't really deserve.

Ask yourself what happens to people that do love. Where do the advocates end up if it's not in jail or to obscurity? Dead? Often enough. Immortalized in a facebook quote, statue, or documentary? Whoo-hoo. Manipulated and re-interpreted or reimangined to promote the exact opposite of what they intended? If a slurry of religious myths doesn't come to mind, take away how easy it is to ignore how much God hated what he had done and the award-winning re-branding there. The language of love used to ignore the sheer depravity and depth of the hatred. You love your country that would rather pay middle men than keep you alive? That sends your poor to unnecessary war? That bilks you for tax dollars while daily reports show the rich stocking and hoarding? That literally has a paper trail describing how they plan to keep you down? (I encourage you to read as much as you can about the Powell memo.)

It's the anecdote of immigrant parents who, escaping more visible and dramatic hatred, sought a place where they could comfortably instill the mythological powers of achievement born out of a specific time and place. That part itself wasn't done maliciously, but when given the opportunity to expand and become aware of larger forces that helped shape their “self-made” image, they recoiled like the rich and said, “No! Fuck you, fuck them, it was all about me!”

[500] Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself

This is my 500^th blog over 12 years. I'll wait here while you sound the trumpets. If I'm evidence of even one thing before I die, it's that a lot can go through your mind, and probably most of it you shouldn't put online.

I wanted to write this because, in this moment, I'm not particularly moved by anything. I've also tied my blogger account to a ton of other social media outlets and want to come across even fleetingly normal, if you're a new reader, before you catch something that makes me look like a raving lunatic. I was building the idea of this blog up in my head, and decided to remove the stress by just writing so as to put it behind me. I wanted to provide something of a course overview of what you'd be studying in sifting through my blogs. I also wanted to talk about hate.

I wonder why we create. Lately, I've been thinking it comes from hatred. I think the harder you hate yourself, the more creative you can be. I phrase it as “hating yourself” because of a line I caught on a random blog that said “All hate is self-hate.” This, incidentally, is an idea I can agree with, and have written about in the past. Undoubtedly, the things I hate about life or other people are things I'm guilty of as well.

I find hate inspiring. In fact, most of what I write is a reflection on something I hate. “I” as a collection of hateful thoughts projected about the world, presumably because I think I would do it better or have some evidence in my own life as to the value of progressively differing. Once we move past the word itself you start to unpack the dozen tiny things about a conversation or excuse that bolsters the feeling. You dig up the history and cultural tide that has framed your discussion. With any luck, you start to engage with people who aren't going to blame you for the hatred you're feeling, and then will try to understand where you're coming from.

I started writing because I hated how a boy was treating a girl I liked. I continued writing because I hated what I was learning about religion and how people spoke to each other. I found mountains of hatred exploring how “loving” family and friends treated the offerings and people in their lives. As I get older I get to hate what I used to have and changes I can swear are making us worse off. I don't know if I'll ever stop hating silence and excuses, be it for hangouts and texts or how you treat something of greater consequence. I once described myself as always feeling “on.” It may be stated another way, that I'm always aware of what I hate.

That awareness begets need. I need to write. Whether I pat myself on the back for 216 followers on one profile, from hearing admissions that you like to get drunk and read my stuff at night, or from some other form of emotion or connection you've found in me, I'd still have to write. It's why I've always struggled to consider this “content” like I sat down and formulated some plan to keep you engaged. Like I wanted to perversely promote as much as genuinely share how fucked I was feeling. The utility I've found in putting it all “out there” to be scrutinized line by line verses being a ball of stress and confusion is incalculable. Detailing where you're coming from and hope to go, even when you can see how it can fail, isn't mindlessly stumbling through the dark needing to fear the unknown.

Any line can ring a bell. That's something I consistently overlook in my criticism of the amount of “content” coming in from self-promotion junkies. In a significant way, you are what you're beholden to. If you're controlled by deadlines and desperation, before I care about some product you're hocking, I see you selling the value of deadlines and desperation. I feel like I'd have to stop writing if that were me. Lying, if it's not to save my ass from something terrible, is torture to me. This is where the blowhard ironic bad boy goes, “Yeah fuck these shoes, but they're paying me, so buy them. It's part of my shtick to shit on things before I sell myself out, so they're cool with it.”

I'm after the right kind of attention. I don't want to Kim Kardashian my way through Twitter “impressions” and delicately staged Instagram photos for likes. Popularity is a dangerous tool we seem to lunge after without a second thought. Why achieve “celebrity” status when you actively attempt to reduce yourself to something wildly unworthy of being celebrated? How attached do we become to our “brand?” How hard are we fighting to keep the pleasantries up by tailoring ourselves to what we think people will like?

I'm different. I don't throw up my middle-finger and scream I don't give a fuck in a socially irresponsible way. I just know how I feel when I feel it and talk. And that, I wouldn't mind getting more popular. There's reality television and professions of “realness” abound. I stand in contrast. I invoke only the small lens from which I can see the world. My persistent ask is for other people to do the same.

Within this reintroduction, I hope to promote the idea of change. I hope to always change in significant, but not arbitrary, ways. I was a fairly picky eater, and loosened up. I've made countless statements with regard to my shallow nature, but am fairly acquainted with alcohol. I ridiculed Candy Crush and Miley Cyrus and eventually had to admit they were not the enemy. I used to believe in what I grew up with, be it about family or love, and I can honestly say I'm better for having reasoned through many terrible assumptions that I think we are still culturally strangled by. I think the human mind needs the idea of progress even when the universe suggests indifferent balance or eventual obliteration.

So hello to new people I'll be courting through a more active sharing, and hello again to old readers who never or rarely do or speak to anything I ask, and wonder why I've found a new rigor for self-promotion. I hate much about the world, therefore I must hate much about myself, and I need it to be talked about like I talk about it.