[694] Don't Know How To Hate That

Lately, I've been feeling a little lighter. I can usually only tell such things based on how many times I refrain from cursing students not showing up on time or from leaving my car horn alone. Still, I find I clench my jaw a fair to excessive amount regardless, so nothing's perfect. What's weird, I suppose, is that I'm looking forward to being broke. Like, just broke. In $80 I won't even have credit card debt. I won't be bleeding. I won't have something quite yet in works, but I'll be broke, and that will be basically okay. The last chain I adopted is $95 a month on an installment plan to keep tax assholes out of mine. I could beg for more money. I could pay that in plasma.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be an “entrepreneur.” It's kind of a stupid word to me. How I've conducted my life has had exactly nothing to do with a job title or some sort of “free” or “independent” spirit and connotation. I just want what I do to manifest in as great a measure as I can make it. When I was hauling ass at my first jobs, I expected raises and promotions and free shit. People were happy to give them to me. When I was doing my homework before the first bell rang and amassing a small fortune, my first spark as to what I was truly made out of flickered on.

Recently, I've heard accounts of people who knew they were going to be on a famous stage or knew they wanted to become some arbiter of justice or peace after they encountered a hero when they were younger. It's a familiar conviction. What is it about some kids that just know something about who they are or want to be? Why do some stories look like this massive build up of compounding forces until the inevitable finally clicks?

I've also been reading about how randomness effects whether or not people as “talented” or “smart” or “motivated” and “gritty” manage to get anywhere in life. The role that luck has to play is not inconsequential. Born with more money and better contacts? Get a “small million dollar loan?” For me, I had to wake up to the reality of my situation pretty quickly. I have support, but not fail spectacularly and bankrupt everyone around me kind of leeway. As time goes on and people grow comfortable or more precarious, there is no few grand hiding just around the corner to fix a big issue.

So then I think about my lifestyle. I take care of my shit. I live within my means. I guilt trip myself over indulges. I had an older acquaintance tell me that I should take more time to stop and smell the roses. I explained to him that I've already lead a perfectly self-indulgent life, and I could bother to be steeped in meaningful work more often. My concept of what that looks like has changed considerably over the years.

The biggest bit though is how I look with all of my built up potential hanging out in my field. Everything I do I try to treat as a down payment or investment. Money spends easy. Building something that generates it and enthusiasm is considerably harder than anyone bothers to cope with. It's why I hate forums and attempting to reach out. You learn extremely quickly that, well, at this point, literally no one will even take a hand out of the chance to buy into property. I try to wrap my head around what I'd be filled with if I stumbled across a post where someone said, “Here's my field, what can we build in it? You get your half, I get mine.”

When this kind of shit happens, where I'm made to feel, not just “different,” but like out and out wrong or perfectly backwards and annoying for going about things the way I do, I start to mythologize myself. Like, surely, I can't be the only one! I have so many examples of people doing what I want to do well. I didn't conjure this shit from the ether. And what part of any money-making endeavor, particularly if you didn't come from money, is supposed to be easy? No one talks about the last minute trips hauling supplies in the middle of the freezing night on your ill-suited car so you can help get something complete on a time crunch. And maybe while you're doing it, you come back covered in ticks, and you dropped a board on your foot, or shit car decided to die on the ride back. That's what “entrepreneurship” means to me. You do what needs to be done, now. You take it in stride. You ask for as much failure as quick as possible for as little money as you can make it cost you, learn, change, and try again. I'm not “gambling,” I'm barely “speculating,” and I'm not taking any more or less risk than I would with my life as it's managed to look so far.

The “failure” of the things I do comes to mind at this point. You know what a “failed” coffee van venture is? A great work van with a generator and equipment to work with whenever the time comes. The “failed” coffee shop was proof of concept for even shitty business, and a shit ton of supplies that don't just disappear. You know what happens when you buy land and build on it? The value increases dramatically. You know how you live comfortably when you're old so you don't end up working until you're 70 after your pension got wiped out and now you're waxing your poorly conceived business ideas to the enthusiastic “kid" at the bar? You start now. You invest now. You try and fail and work right fucking now. You accept that you're already dead, and your only shot at heaven is this life. If you can do better, do better. Be better. Fix the obvious, then fix the subtle, then double down on the exact right thing you should be doing to get the best out of yourself every chance you get. To the best of your ability and understanding is what you owe yourself. Anything less is death.

What else in life offers that kind of perpetual effort for self improvement? I saw a post on facebook about a famous pianist getting asked why they still practiced at 90. They said, “I think I'm getting better” or something similar. Do people feel that in their day to day lives? Are you practicing and improving and learning something new with your job? It's great if you are, I just have never managed to figure out how to feel the same way about anything I've ever been employed to do. There's usually “the way we do things” which, try as you might, there's usually pretty severe consequences for pushing against too hard.

As I'm rounding 2^nd base on my way to 30, I'm wondering, what's the alternative? If I wasn't navigating the things I am now in service to my desire to own and create with relative freedom and abandon, how else could I have gone about it? No “real job” has provided me the kind of mental security or self-respect to think something as drastic as, “I can totally do this, just for these (x) amount of years, and then my real life begins!” Like, at least I'm killing 2 or 3 birds with one stone in marathoning TV, books and podcasts, and drumming when I do ClusterTruck. It's basically just the thing that interrupts my otherwise attempting to be occupied attention.

A weird hard part about going about things the way I do is the endless waves of bullshit enthusiasm. I don't mean from people who've been following along or friends I know who are up to their own important things. I mean if I post some Maron-esc rant describing the kind of partner or help I need, and then 2 idiots chime in with how cool and motivating I am. Am I? Motivating? You read my story, my begging appeal from my knees, and your take away was 5 empty lines about your new motivation? Don't talk to me about your dreams, work on them. Incorporate them into what I'm doing. Stop wasting our time.

Here too I think about if differences in people just become more pronounced over time, or if they were already huge and there to begin with, but each either succumbs to their particular life forces or not. I could be 5 roommates deep, gaming all day, working IT for IU, have a car payment, and resolved myself to the excessively-average girl in the office after I watch the carnage between the rest of the pack failing with her. That's something I could've done. I could have screamed “fuck it” and went buck wild with my land cash and traveled or gambled or bought something showy under the deep understanding that “you only live once.” I could have catfished lonely OKCupid girls with dyed hair and nose rings into thinking I was deep and super nice and then moved us towards some kind of family unit. Try to be “normal” and “resolved.” It's in trying to imagine myself doing anything else that I start to question “free will.” I literally don't know how else I can be for it to seem even remotely “correct.” When I actually get back to practicing music every day, lose 30 pounds, and find where I left my half-inch of hairline, I'll be like 90% of my best self. It's presumed philanthropy and political engagement that might round out the last 10%. My honest desire and pursuit does most of the work for me already.

My ongoing freak-out concern about time notwithstanding, I have 1 month out of the year I need to work to live as well or better than I have lived since getting out of college. There's no gun to my head that says I need to spend $1800 RIGHT NOW to fix the moving truck. More than half of my yearly bills aren't even due until the fall, or don't necessarily need to be hooked up in the first place. It's just by definition lighter. I've erased variables that work to clench my jaw. I've consolidated the big mess of expenses into a story about number of days and hours, and how I'm going to corrupt those days to fit my agenda even if I'm forced to work in service to someone else's. I don't know how to hate that.

Here seems an important point. How often do I talk about things I hate? My driving force is about moving to a place where I'm as befuddled as I could possibly be in trying to regard my circumstances as anything more than impossible to hate. That's the voice in the back of my head. That's what sees me through drama and broken relationships. People won't talk or help? You can't find a reason to hate ones that will. Want to complain about your job or future prospects? Better get to creating in all this empty space you gave yourself. Better use your former rent money to promote and build. Tired of being surrounded by idiots? I suppose a desert would be more remote, but no one's going to bother you there. I can still find plenty to hate about my circumstances for sure, but it is possible for it to fall away. I can subject myself to a different environment that hopefully breeds the best kind of me. And since no one cares to build it for me, and I can't change for the better without doing so, nothing really matters that doesn't speak to that. Smell the roses? Help me learn how to grow them, and I'll smell the hell out of our effort.

[550] One Bite

There’s a feeling I’ve spoken about before that I often get as I’m driving in and around cities or meandering through neighborhoods. I’ve taken stabs at trying to better define it with language that already exists and obscure German words that may or may not exist given how hard they are to rediscover through googling. It follows me when I think about Hitler 2 supporters. It strikes me when I read and hear condescending comments on the feasibility of an idea. I’m awash in it every time I see footage of a refugee talking about not being able to see their family or describing their poor living conditions.

Part of it has to do with the imposition of shame. When I go do a drug study I become a textbook example of “white coat syndrome” in that my heart rate and blood pressure will increase as I think about the implications of both getting into the study as well as failing. I’m not scared of doctors. I’m extremely anxious that several thousand dollars relies on 20 seconds of a cuff that displays misleading activity regarding my resting heart rate. The shame comes in when I wonder how I manage to get myself so worked-up at the pivotal time when people live lives of perpetual woe that face actual problems.

Here’s always the rub though, as people don’t find it particularly wise or helpful to compare yourself to others and their circumstances. “Your anxieties and worries are real and valid!” They’ll profess from friend to therapist alike. “Fix what you can, don’t stress about what you can’t!” They don’t know any more than I do about how to fix something and their lives are often filled with considerably more stressful and time consuming concerns than I try to adopt. So often “life” is to be blamed or “history” or many people are frankly “unlucky.” Working in cahoots with those sentiments is the idea that “change doesn’t happen overnight.”

We’re a species of hypocrites and contradiction. This is taken as short-hand gospel for the dispelling of shame. We can talk about “human rights” till we’re blue in the face and be aware of maybe 2 places where we consider them under threat and would struggle to name a dozen that we’re supposed to be exercising as “free citizens.” We endlessly consume stories about the strength and importance of friends and family as we hunker down in lonely corners of the world and check-in from time to time. We can organize a team of nerds to thread the needle of placing a car-sized rover on Mars, and in the celebration, go in for the high five and miss theatrically.

When it’s our responsibility we want to believe it can’t happen now. When “society” gets invoked, we point to the immediacy of terrorist threats, environmental disaster, and economic woes. We begrudge a lack of budget, will, responsibility, or clarity on what to do moving forward. A story that illustrates this is a group at IU recently delivered a petition to make the campus a “sanctuary zone” for undocumented immigrants going to school. The comments under the article were terrible. Why should THE TAXPAYER be responsible for THESE ILLEGALS! WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY! YOU’D BE CRAZY TO DEFY THE REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP!

This method of viewing the world as it is right outside the tip of your nose I simply hate. I’m not just unable to understand it. I think it defies being human. You carry yourself like a deer sipping from crocodile infested waters, opting for precariousness and being a reactionary because you disavow the other tools you have to dig a fucking well.

I’ve read any number of explanations about people like this. They prefer “order” and strictly defined roles. They have brains that are less plastic than their liberal counterparts. They’re “justified” in their fears, because the fear is real after all, so the things they do in service to those fears need to be swallowed. There are class distinctions. There’s artless apologetics and punditry. Most, if not all of these professions, only serve self-satisfied smugness. As long as you think you have the answer, the waves you send out into the world must be dealt with on their own merits and your responsibility to them dies.

The question on my mind is how do you shame a nation? We elected Hitler 2. We have no capacity for shame. The protests aren’t shame. The myriad explanations aren’t shame. The naïve nostalgia and nose thumbing certainly aren’t shame. How do you force a perspective that isn’t bred out of increasingly horrific circumstances? It’s not just the U.S. It’s the rising right-wing in other nations as well. It’s the stronghold money has on government in general. Our human cultural anti-bodies are in full attack mode against ourselves, and worse, they seem to be growing.

It’s such a stupid giant pendulum swinging from one extreme to the next. WE’RE AFRAID KILL THEM ALL! EVERYONE CAN BE TAKEN CARE OF WE JUST REFUSE TO DO THE MATH! I WANT TO GO BACK TO THE 1950’s! I WANT TO LIVE ON MARS RIGHT NOW! I BUILT EVERYTHING I OWN! NOT THE ROADS, TRUCKS, BUILDINGS, TAX LAWS, AND CULTURAL ATTITUDES, FUCKO!

You don’t speak about protecting a few hundred “illegal” students in terms of the budget when your campus erects new buildings almost every year. You shouldn’t shit your pants about finding the money when you disregard the rise in tuition and student debt. You don’t talk about what’s “illogical” about your defiance of your DEMOCRATIC leadership, if you don’t agree their position qualifies as being a leader worth respecting.  You always have to chase back the problem in order to remain internally and externally consistent. People don’t start from a point of coherence, so the things that come out of their mouths are every ounce of doublespeak they feel deserving of respect and consideration.

Do we even have a “pure” democracy so we can actually attempt to gauge what should be “legal” and “illegal” regarding students and their immigration status? No. Are we insulated from the “tyranny of the masses” that might help explain the electoral college? Absolutely not. Do we spend massive amounts of taxpayer money subsidizing projects that die slow painful deaths and inflate big business coffers? Way more than anyone should ever feel comfortable with. The irony being, if we paid attention, we could not only cut back on waste and government oversight/lobbying, but we could conveniently pay to protect human rights *shrug* and provide an environment where we could raise people to be more informed and coherent at a fraction of the cost.

We don’t for deliberate reasons that you exercise every time you refuse to chase “your opinion” back to something fundamental. I tie us to together with my knowledge about how our brains fail us. I tie us together by your clichéd habits and ideas. I tie us together by mentally putting myself in a refugee camp and thinking “I don’t like this, what do I need?” It’s not even hard to imagine. It’s not some grandiose and complicated math equation. It’s basic shit for basic bitches.

I’m all the more emboldened to learn how to self-sustain. I can do the most good in the world when I create the means for which I can live and translate that to someone else. I think this is the grand underlying failure of modernity. We don’t care to teach so we forgot how to learn. You learn with an open mind and it’s spurred on by a deep curiosity for what you don’t know. It’s the alternative way to seeing positive change when you’re devoid of shame. What a nuclear option looks like to invigorate and encourage, I have no idea, and my chest tightens with the idea it may involve actual nukes.

When I think about my contradictory nature, I have no clue how I could be moved to become as intractably ignorant as the rest of the species. I often talk about being “on the level.” It’s not the highest pillar. It’s a balancing act. I know the worst demons of my nature and I know the best of me that I rarely ever get to live up to. If we’re just mathematical simulations, then I watch my life as it travels and sometimes diverges from the mean. It’s being open enough to not let your mind fall out and conservative in a way that isn’t hoarding. It’s thinking all lives matter and respecting why a minority group’s interest doesn’t lie in agreeing with you. It’s not demonizing people for the actions of a radical few. It’s not getting lost in poorly defined parameters of alleged social acceptability. It’s pursing your personal goals through the window of the rest of the world. It’s respecting what about you has been shaped and when you’re doing the shaping.

You don’t get there without paying attention. You can’t pretend you’re the only car on the road as you complain about traffic. If your favorite movie made 100 million dollars, maybe your interests aren’t that complicated or novel. Maybe everyone is just a different version of you that isn’t having some need met because you remain unwilling to take the time to figure out what those needs really consist of.

You’re never just killing yourself. You’re never just wasting your own potential. And I feel it. I’ve heard plenty of times where I can stick my dreams and ideas. My personal concerns are every ounce of privileged. And yet, all I can do is talk about how broken my community is. It takes my breath away trying to account for the dripping hatred and ignorance we protect. I’m not merely suggesting every single one of you should be writing and imploring each other. It’s necessary for our survival. You have to try harder. You have to fumble over the words. You have to identify what matters and how you’re going about it. It can‘t be private. You can’t be embarrassed. We are ending ourselves because we’re not sharing what matters.