[1149] Everything's My Fault

I want to linger on a few cultural buzzwords and see if I can dig out a more coherent relationship to them.

The first one is “identity.”

It seems to me that major shifts in culture swirled around this word. More specifically, the more you could parse your identity into different categories of race, sex, or trauma, you gained a certain license. You could not only empower and weaponize your identity, but denigrate others without really looking like you were doing so in a superficial and prejudiced way. I genuinely think a large portion of the rise of fascism was in direct proportion to the idea of “straight white male” becoming a caricature divorced from a discussion about class struggle.

When I think about my identity, it’s this constantly undulating blob of influences. To lean into any one aspect is often to betray what’s now the majority of my otherwise being. The most pain and stress I’ve dealt with is when someone utilizes a bad thing about me, or even a good thing reimagined in a bad way, to pigeon-hole my entire being and draw ridiculous conclusions. Indeed, the worst I can make myself feel is when I belabor a mistake or act as though my first and worst impulse maps onto some larger story of fate or karmic justice.

“Identity” is the first word to explore because I’m watching “The Dark Side of Comedy,” and the idea that so many “troubled” comedians struggled to “live their truth” is echoed constantly. Often as a result of “trauma,” they would abuse substances, disappear into characters, withdraw and self-destruct, or otherwise suffer their insecurities no matter their level of success. These problems often exacerbated by our culture’s ignorance or ambivalence at the time.

This brings us to the word “trauma.” You’ll still read or hear about trauma dozens of times before you are invited to recall “resilience” is also a word. Trauma became the seed from which an identity could grow. “As a such and such…” and the explicitly poor relationship to the systems and powers that be, listen to me become an authority overnight. In the spirit of being “modern” and “progressive” the ground was ceded to what was presumed to be “evolved” and “woke” ideas before woke became a caricature.

When your identity gets rooted in trauma, it begs a question of how far you’re going to dig for the roots that inform your description of that trauma. Are you just at the mercy of terrible systems today? Or are you historically oppressed? Are you sure it’s just racism or is your oppressor also sexist, ableist, and any amount of “ists” and “isms” you can sneak in to really sell it? Almost by definition, trauma suggests victimization, regardless of the 2-second-later thought experiments where you could tally an infinite list of things that may destabilize you that are perfectly impersonal.

I think it’s easy to get lost. That’s the first thing. It’s easy to lose track of anything. We have, and this was true even before the internet, a nonstop vying for our attention. We have overgrown children in our families who never figured out how to get their needs met. We have all the obligations that come with owning stuff or wishing to be a part of things larger than ourselves. We have the diffuse ever-confusing personal quirks that are hard or impossible to articulate nagging on even our best days. And all we can do about it, most often, is ride it out.

Here we arrive at the last word to linger on, “agency.” Agency carries with it the implication of responsibility. If you exert agency, you made a choice, you’re more culpable, and the story can be better understood about the consequences. Kill someone while you’re texting and driving? Negligent manslaughter. Create a serial-killer-esc map with yarn and cash-bought supplies over months? Murderous psychopath who gets documentaries and series investigating your “reasons.”

Slowly I think we’re coming about and realizing again as a culture that we’re all suffering. It’s built into our religious doctrines, but modernity offers a major disconnect. It doesn’t really look or feel like the suffering of the past for most people. We’ve had quick and dirty fixes provided by technology that have worn down our humbling influences from disease, hunger, or the weather.

You have to go out of your way in the vast majority of spaces to not hit “basic survival” levels, pervasive injustices around inequality and greed aside. I say this as someone who routinely threw out hundreds of pounds of unwanted or unneeded food at a food pantry every week. We have enough houses for everyone, but people who own them, regulate the economies around them, or mythologize and pathologize the stories of those who need them ensure they stay empty.

There’s a major disconnect in what we conceive of as “basic survival” though. Just like our identities, our truest, basest selves, they’re amorphous undulating blobs under the influence of too much to process. Maybe you’re uniquely suited to thrive in a Naked and Afraid scenario. Most people today would reflexively talk about the modern amenities like phones, cars, and healthcare as “basic.” You can’t get a job, drive to said job, or get your often-needed medication, so obviously those things are foundational, right? It’s not complicated.

How do we get our needs met? We belabor the story of our traumatized, victimized, impossible-to-exert agency. And because that story is constantly shifting, muddy, or plausible from an infinite sea of gray areas, it lingers in our cultural conscious more that we’re mostly stuck on this ride, and the most we can do is lash out, self-destruct, or look for simple catastrophic narratives and fixes.

Much is made of “the addiction crisis.” Being a social worker from DCS to addiction counseling for hundreds of people, I’m of the opinion that there’s so much spillover of our current cultural victimization narrative, it’s highlighting very normal and human tendencies to adopt those methodologies for meeting meaning-sized and agency-implicating needs. If you’re a little less mentally quick, a little extra broke, a little more surrounded by emotionally abusive or exploitative people, your normalized suffered environment makes the concept of exerting any control that much harder if near impossible.

That is, we need to feel like we’re in charge. We need to believe we have control. No one is typing these words for me, and if I’m born with the “problem” of a contemplative brain that won’t shut off as it nags me about every wasted moment or mistake of my life, I can choose to organize it like this and feel better. Feel “good?” Feel my “best?” Absolutely not, but I can orient myself away from the compounding consequences of thinking I’m stuck and at the mercy of unforgiving and uncontrollable forces indefinitely.

[778] Signal and Flow

Standard disclaimer for ones I think will be mostly random and an odd attempt to tie very disparate things together.

Shared depravity. While I don't recall phrasing it that way, that's often where my deepest connection with people lies. Jimmy and Gretchen in You're the Worst portray it well. There's a constant sort of joke made out of just how horrible you are on the inside, and the ways you can't seem to expel it from how you conduct your life. You think by making the conscious choice to open up or attempt to connect and build something “normal” or “mature” will win, but at some point, inevitably, you find yourself getting your dick sucked in the bathroom after goading yourself into proving a point about your fundamental absurdity.

There's both a wise and desperate point to be made here. The wisdom is that the absurdity is actually there and is as real and consequential as you on your best behavior. The desperation comes from feeling like a slave to it or being unable to account for the fallout when it comes out to play.

The most obvious example to me seems to be in looking at open relationships. I think it's dumb to think you don't want to fuck other people, even if it's rare, and just as dumb to think one person could possibly be all things to you at all times. You acknowledge your limitations and can potentially work out a system specific to your relationship needs and goals. When you're desperate to ensure a perfect happy picture or story related to your relationship is what's on offer, the enslavement by your other proclivities increases.

One place that I look for new ways to think about things is in science shows or documentaries. Some theoretical physicist has a way of understanding the world I'm never going to hear in my day to day. I heard the line, “Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.” In Quark Science, Kip Thorne explains that somehow the difference in how time flows is 1 second in 100 years between the surface and high altitudes, but that such a small difference is enough to account for massive differences in how we experience acceleration and gravitational pull. If you don't know what to make of that sentence, trust it took me several replays of the clip and attempts to word it to make it that far.

I take a much simpler point from it. Enough small over time means big. Evolution speaks to it. The reason things fall apart or get more complex are a build up, not generally a single dramatic event. Notably, because things are probabilistic and not easily predicted, you can't know what the complex iteration is going to look like, but you can make it trend a certain direction.

So take the kind of person you are. Is it one who avoids things? That can build on itself. Are you someone who white lies all the time? They're probably grayer than you think. I'm slowly eating my way into a heart condition I'm sure. The messy pieces of the life I'd like to be living are still scattered about my floor and yard and moving truck. You can't reverse the flow that's carrying you to more probable places in life that you had no vote on, but you can stake the ground at places that flow is going to have to bump into and work around.

This is why I look for voices and individuals. This is why I'm an active participant in trying to protect or dig up what my actual voice is in the sea of memes and complacency. This is why I'm happy to be “alone” and state frequently, “I have no friends” or am found to be annoyingly consistent in the things you consider wrong or right about me. Blogs are stakes. Relationships are stakes. The unshakable anxiety or condition your brain has been molded into is a stake, and it needs to be accounted for in the little ways it helps or hinders you every day.

It's only just so lamentable that I consider myself something of a chaotic and annihilating force. I'm not a slave to it, but I can feel its pull. I always recognize the boundary I'm always tempted to push. If I didn't introduce measures of chaos into my life, it would manifest in spite of me. Last minute steal finding a couple hundred pound engine hoist that needs to be transported in a wholly inappropriate vehicle for the task? Sign me up. Job that introduces me into stranger's homes routinely as we discuss whether or not their children require a different kind of oversight? A snore compared to the stress relayed by those frequently in and out of the field. An unjust ticket? I'm just emboldened enough to face my accusers, cops or otherwise, in court.

I believe it's from the kind of controlled chaos that our best versions spring forth. A certain degree of conservative regimentation is required to exist, but to flourish and commune, you need to find yourself on slippery boundaries. This is how lessons get instilled verses lectured and ignored. This is the field of insight that can find peace or motivation. This is where you can come to accept things “as they are” and decide what about the flow you can use, and what needs to be staked.

Chaos is by definition a threat to an ordered and understood way of doing something. It feels dangerous no matter how objectively real and in-built to the structure of everything it is. Therefore, it's avoided and denied. Act chaotically, you're wrong or bad. Introduce something new, and be prepared for retaliation. Look as though you can't garner the support or likes, and be presumed guilty, maybe they're not even sure of what, but damned if you're not guilty of it.

Consider the chaos of feelings that lurched for the “strong man,” if nothing else a stable archetype and cliché. Or how about the identity politics and “social justice” that wants to damn perfectly innocent descriptions of how you look, and paint them as an ordered list of blanket privileges and historical atrocities. One wonders if racism and its consequences were invented in The U.S. a few hundred years ago. How about the chaotic “media,” now a hodgepodge of voices spanning whatever you're looking at on your phone at any given moment, causing a retreat into safely held familiar beliefs or fueling biases via sympathetic baiting for your attention. Where should you plant your stake?

I think people simply refuse the obligation. I think a bashful dismissal of the charge to participate in a loud way against “small” points of corruption or failure are the reasons the world looks the way it does. Wars don't start overnight. Fascism doesn't foment in a vacuum. Inoperable cancer starts with a few cells. I'm 30 years old. I'm “old” in every conception I had of “old” people when I was kid. Already. It's happening, and has been doing so for 7 months! Things look as good or as bad as they do for every reason I chose to do or not do something in the days leading up to this moment. It only feels bleedingly obvious until you consider the amount of times you didn't plunge into the chaos to try and shape the world to look a little more like you'd prefer. Think of the chances you still have that you've already forsook.

I think to bond over mutual depravity is a kind of foolish game you play when you haven't really figured things out and you're under the illusion that you're responsible for writing someone else's story. When I simply count, the amount of my “friends” who were/are seriously depressed, lazy, self-involved, or persistent liars gets up there. This isn't to absolve myself of my depravity, but it does mean I didn't “surround myself with motivation and accountability” as the popular catchphrase suggests is a key to transforming your circumstances. I'm literally playing the same game I've accused everyone else of for years in peacocking empathy and “shouldering the burden” of ensuring those less well-off than myself are fleetingly safe and accounted for, and I still know, if not even louder, that it's not enough to sustain what I really am alone.

If everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, for me, that's dancing along an edge with injections of randomness and obscenity. Time has flown and been an utter dragging suffocation simultaneously, and the more I lose myself in the tasks rooted to “practically” make “enough” money, the more I feel things have slipped past me. It's the most kind of horrifying to think I could lose myself to the background noise.

[504] Milking It

What's your first inclination when you hear someone complain about something?

It seems there are the empaths who deeply hurt right along with you and always know what to say. There's the “take it like a man” types who wouldn't be caught dead wincing about their arms being ripped off let alone some personal or mental struggle. I find the people who, in a sense, find a way to offer their problems in an enduring sentiment related to hope or faith the most interesting. They forgive themselves, you, and manipulate the word “complaint” into a life affirming resilient statement.

It seems to vary depending on what's being complained about. The other night a girl who spent a solid 10-15 minutes flirting with me turned and disappeared after I innocently said the way the bartender had tried to hit on her had been working for him for hours. This was before she pulled him in to explain how she doesn't appreciate it. I didn't mean to condone his style, or in her view, lack thereof, but there's a chasm between me and her concerning what we'll regard is worthy of special or perpetual indignation.

I'm not even sure if there's a right or wrong about it. Worse than that, I'm provoked to think I have a diminishing conception of things as “inherently wrong.” The harder you play the empathy game, you give yourself opportunities to grow and understand. With that said, I think that's where my concern lies. We're not an understanding bunch. We don't really care to try. We react and then seek justification.

Consider complaints about identity. I just watched “Lemonade” and read a piece about it being about black and particularly black women's identity. That they have to play the support role. It quotes Malcolm X when he says, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” I then tried to read a piece complaining that there isn't powerful art like Beyonce's that represents fat black women femme something something other qualifiers, and couldn't she have invited American Horror Story's Queenie to the party.

I started to think of the delusions of grandeur rich white dudes hold about their business savvy or political acumen. I started to think about Native Americans.

Surely you have the right and obligation to use your soapbox when you feel compelled to do so. You can never stop giving attention to a societal ill without sacrificing yourself in the process. I suppose I'm worried about the kinds of divisions we create in the kinds of identities we claim. You can be as defined by what you assert as you are what you're leaving out. Responses like “why aren't there any fat black women in your videos?” articles seem to ironically compound the problem.

Hopefully I can unpack this. You can say Beyonce is about anything. A celebration of capitalism, black women and identity, celebrity, love, empowerment, on and on. You can recognize how and why identities have been marginalized and the importance of artwork like hers. You can deeply empathize with her messages about family or infidelity. And it should be obvious, that in order to create or say anything, you have to leave many things out. How you talk about what's been left out makes a difference.

So you're concerned about fat black women not making the final cut. Are you trying to say you're more worthy than the disabled black women that didn't make it either? Are you saying Beyonce deserves blame and your community's anger? Why don't you feel compelled to create art celebrating yourself?

Humanity is the game we're playing together, inroads to a conversation are made in either noisily reacting to someone's creation, or taking what it affirms and incorporating it into our lives. One splits the identity further, the other provokes understanding. Just as I can only write as a white guy, I'm not saying fuck everyone who isn't me and you don't belong in my experiences with pain. In the reactive fervor we seem to weaponize our identities. We focus on the potential for scandal in Beyonce's personal life and tip our hat to her marketing team. We'll make claims we're contributing to the “cultural conversation” when we're really stewing in our defensive jealousy.

Do I agree with Malcolm X about the state of the black women? No. Am I capable of pulling back and seeing behind the words to know what he's getting at, to try and feel the level of pain that compels him to say it, to adopt the identity for a moment that's genuinely angry and hurt and feels that way? Absolutely. Do I think his words are an indictment of other oppressed people? Kinda sorta. What we need to ask ourselves when we get the microphone is whether the conversation is helped or hurt by not speaking to “one love” so to speak. By respecting all the nuances and potential for connection in the word “identity” when it's coupled with “black” “native” “fat” “disabled” “gay” or whatever.

For all the happy white family shows that are supposed to represent me and celebrate whiteness, those people don't feel like me. I'm not a CEO. I don't have that much money. I don't seek to constantly reinforce or believe in the strict lines about what it means to be white. I see bigger lines between rich and poor than I do black and white. Are the poor people coming out to complain they wish they could afford a car nice enough for Beyonce to consider smashing it?

I think by looking for an unsubstantial qualifier, you end up accidentally caricaturing yourself. To be black is as fluid a game as who's got the microphone. But that's the case for every individual. What you pay attention to. What you choose to incorporate and respect. Does “Lemonade” speak to me? Not really. I don't care about infidelity and don't believe in marriage, so the first half is out. I got a quasi-emo vibe from some of the poetry that felt overwrought and had me smirking. Slow motion shots alone didn't do it for me. And who cares? None of my views or criticism really matters, even to me. She's good at what she does, so props.

I'll remain concerned about how we think of identity going forward. How we think about the racist reactions. How we think about celebrity. How we'll hijack and piggy-back and shoot ourselves in the foot as we innocently claim to be enjoying or offering “constructive criticism.” Yes, to everything but ourselves.

[501] Tales To Astonish

I’m struck by my lack of identity.

As I study more history or learn about the traits and ideas different countries hold, it becomes ever-apparent how much of “you” has been shaped in the motions of our histories. The rarely forgotten war or trade dynamics are often cited in joking or criticizing one another. The taglines in tourism brochures hope to intrigue you about a point of pride regarding a nation’s identity or self-determination. It just leaves me feeling like, with so much at play, how does one ever really define and come to accept things about their personality?

This feels like it wants to start-off sounding very high school. This is also something I often brush against in hoping to get people to unpack their language and look harder at the source of their feelings. But I want it pressed on harder and to explore the source of my own frustrations when it feels like “my identity” is being ignored or disrespected.

I sit here writing. Pull back and I’m 1 of 3 roommates, in 1 of 4 townhouses, in 1 of dozens of townhouse clusters, in 1 of hundreds of apartment complexes. Perhaps in a Nordic country this gives a sense of calm as I likely know or am related to nearly everyone in every one of those complexes. Here, I don’t know my neighbor’s names. Immediately there’s going to be a huge cultural influence regarding trust and how it can or can’t be employed.

To trust is to be able to look forward to something. It’s rarely framed in a way like you trusting your car to start. You trust your kids are going to grow up. These are things, provided there’s not some extenuating circumstance, we sort of take for granted. If we break them down in the language of trust though, it seems to provoke, quicker than anything, the question of “why?” The most straightforward answer I can think of is “because it’s generally done so.” 

If you take that answer far enough back, it tends to betray everything. Surely, you can always invent a layer of bullshit justification for the things you do, but if you’re working with an incomplete puzzle, fundamentally, you have little reason to trust anything, let alone your capacity to assess and evaluate an ingrained yet fluid personality. Ingrained in that you didn’t have to teach your eyes to see or brain to fire upon doing so. Fluid in that your tastes change, your attitude wanes, and if you’re lucky there’s always room to surprise yourself.

It’s extremely disorienting, and I’d argue probably unhealthy, to carry on like you can’t trust anything. Pragmatically, you’re not going to have a panic attack questioning the probability each time you start your car, but what if, as I fear has happened to me, a fundamental shift happens and arrests your perspective? What if you become stuck, unable to see yourself as freely obligating yourself to anything, now merely at the whims of change? It’s almost something of an argument against free will, but that’s not the direction I’m going.

I feel myself compelled. Whether it’s to write, or read, or watch, or just generally try to be learning at all times. I can speculate it came from being incentivized as a child. I can grasp at the strings of random potential conversational connections. (As it turns out, I hardly ever haven’t read at least something about what you’re into.) I can get all hippie-speak and claim some internal philosophical wisdom I’m drawing from my connection to the hive-mind. I can play faux-physicist and borrow explanations that describe me as a single neuron or experimental synapse of a higher intelligence’s simulation. But do you call your compulsions “you?”

You could as easily describe my examples in cold bio-socio-political terms. There will be a map one day of every synapse in my brain and when it fired depending on what I engaged with. Rarely do people let it sink in just how much of their approach to the world has been shaped by pop culture. I encourage you to read as much as you can about the little engine that could churning in your subconscious the next time you think you’re really making the decision. What does learning about these things really afford me? Why do “I” invite the stress of knowledge when I even know the science that says homogeneous and stupid breeds the most contentment?

The idea that I have ever arrived at a goal, for any reason beyond survival, becomes an endless speculative road. It harks, in my mind, to fundamental questions regarding existence in and of itself. Why not be some simulation meant to live out my selfish conception of the world? I’m perhaps just the latest in things the universe doesn’t know yet. Simple enough.

Why should I be frustrated that my time is being wasted when I know time isn’t really a thing? Why am I concerned about achieving some grand level of wealth or intellectual accomplishment when, the farther we pull back, the universe, let alone the world, let alone my country, let alone my town or even apartment complex is really going to blink once I’m gone? And then once all your friends die, you’ll be lucky to be properly quoted as anything that ever accurately described you or what you contributed. And you won’t care.

I don’t know that there’s some fundamental truth about the value of American elitism verses Nordic conformity that unites us all besides ignorance. It’s the ego-ridden who feel suffocated when transplanted north, and the reserved who feel embarrassed for you for sticking your neck out. People concerned with the long-term feasibility of humanity lament that content people aren’t terribly innovative or motivated. The content watch the mania of being the smartest and richest tear people apart, and often the world along with them. There’s always some opposite, diminishing, word to describe what doesn’t feel embedded in your genes or heritage.

It’s like I’m always looking for permission. I don’t know what to be really upset about. Unless I’m fabulously drunk I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do things like cry. Without a semi-constant reciprocity I have no way to describe how I value friendships. I can’t point to the precise moment I found myself capable of saying yes to initially fear and panic inducing things. Like I’m waiting for my programmer to input the coordinates of where I’m to end up next. I can claim I’m the one typing, feel each key, sound out each word, but there was no plan for this. Nor do I have a goal but to feel comfortable stopping. I could even invent a goal, like persuading you of adopting socially responsible pride. But it’d be a lie. I don’t give a shit.

I latch onto an idea of a kind of tornado. Billions of potentials swirling in the back of my head, condensed to a joke, blog, or decision to approach some topic. That “I” am the swirling, and everything I kick up and spit out the experimental results. Perhaps often if not fundamentally results I can’t read correctly or even access. I’m necessarily evolutionarily programmed to seek out cause and effect, and I operate under a grand illusion those effects are much to do with my perception or will. No matter the degree of scrutiny and doubt I interject, no matter the scientific insights I use to infer, and well independent of mystical hippie language, I’m no less compelled, and feel I have no control. I find it equally liberating and absolutely terrifying.