Whether it's a book, or a YouTube series, there's something about argumentative patterns I'd really like to explore. I've noticed, for as long as I can remember, these habits we get into when we're trying to sound reasonable. We presume it's "the following list of reasons" we offer that "make sense" or "justify" where we're coming from. From what I can see, it's the exact same internally emotional places using language in a very particular way.
My sensibility was kicked into overdrive when I listened to a Bari Weiss podcast where she's interviewing 3 people who switched from voting democrat to Trump. They were all deeply political types who march, volunteer, run for things, etc. These aren't the arbitrary "undecideds" who can't spout a book-length answer to questions. If you have the patience to strip down the extremely feverish rhetoric, it's hard not to see that they're each just hurt or confused emotionally, and there's choice phrases and redundancies that clue me in.
And here's where I get to be disappointing because I don't want to re-listen to the podcast right now and pull them all out.
What I can do is provide the process and mechanism that people use to justify breaking their capacity to reason.
One has to assume they are coming from a "first principles" place when they make a declarative or moral statement. Something, at bottom, has to be "true" or practically assumed for anything else to follow. Whether that something is coherent or consistent is an extremely open question.
It doesn't matter what the issue is. That's the key thing to keep in mind. You can't understand how the mechanism breaks if you listen to someone's line of reasoning down the track they take alone. If someone tells you "I don't like her answer on foreign policy!" That's not the operative information. What matters is that they feel a certain level of fear, despair, exasperation, and/or other things that emotionally persuade them to start carrying water for what was previously unacceptable about the opposition.
It then becomes exceptionally easy to write-off literally anything you need to. You also get stuck to a handful of reasonable-sounding reiterations.
I've learned that it doesn't matter how "smart" you are, or how quickly you speak, or how many references you can make, you are at the mercy of your feelings until you choose not to be. A "first principle" that is conjured by your feelings is neither first, nor a principle. It's the needy, hopeless, ridiculous child of insecure instinct and ego that is constantly begging to be appeased.
You can see a snapshot of this articulated brilliantly with Ben Shapiro as a person in general, but especially when he's talking to(at) people at The Oxford Union. The clash of alleged first principles is on display explicitly from the people arguing against him. They operate under the working assumption that Israel doesn't have a right to exist in the first place. Ben, to his credit and seemingly only in this area of life, manages to ensure this is brought to the forefront of the "debate" they're trying to have over history or who's "more genocidal."
As to the "true impact" of religion? That's going to antagonize Ben's internal irrational animal, and he'll speed-run his mountain of apologetics that are perfectly unpersuadable. I don't believe he, or anyone, needs magic sky daddies to come up with moral frameworks or good reasons to tow certain lines because I have a first principle about the nature of pain and consequences. If I can see something coming or don't want to get fucked up, the universe "magically" shows me the way to keep my hand out of the fire.
You know when a comedy show goes into a crowd of radicals and starts on-the-spot questioning? The loops people go into. The honest ones will betray their emotions and state explicitly they don't know something they're allegedly angry about. The rowdiest ones will return to their catchphrases or megaphones. Well, "intellectual" people will do that too, but they'll use a particular interview or quote from someone with the right letters and credentials. Both demonstrate that, what's at bottom, is how they feel, and literally nothing that comes out of their mouth is the kind of truth they wish it to be.
To develop a first principle you have to believe certain things about what it is to exist altogether. You have to ask yourself, constantly, what your individual responsibility is to that existence. If you don't develop that belief system, or don't defer to a falsifiable metric in your attempt, nothing really matters. It, in fact, can't matter, because it's not rooted or defined. It's a constant abstraction of your feelings, dressed up in so many words or justifications. This is why we're so hungry to "just accept" religious doctrines, and celebrate "faith" because they pretend to do the work of that first principle formation for us.
This is where you'll find every level of equivocation, precisely without irony. When someone exists as anything they need to to get away with anything they desire, without even realizing it, they will offer you the format of technical and philosophical "bullshit." It's an attempt to persuade, without regard to the truth. The target of persuasion? The person touting the bullshit themselves. They're searching, infinitely, for the words to match their emotional truth. Emotional solidarity and polite looking the other way becomes the only currency.
Of course, they're never going to define their emotional truth as an irrational screaming child suffering a sense of betrayal and disorientation. That would clash dramatically against their self-conception as a Harvard graduate or community organizer delegate, or serious person who memorizes pivotal historical dates like a preacher does bible verses. But, the truth, as far as I can tell, is they are, like most of us, screaming, scared, irrational animals first.
I think mental murder is achieved when you pretend like "all politicians" anything. You have not even the remotest first principle about the definition, importance, history, or purpose of "organizing" as a concept. Why would you? It's not taught in school. Your day to day life is provided. Your road to "serious person" with appropriate title was laid out clear as day. When you pretend to care about what a politician "lies" about, you're not literally counting lies and saying, "By the numbers, I'm going with the democrats because Trump lied 30,573 times over 4 years." That would be too dispassionate and grounded.
When you pretend to care about lies, you're elevating your token issue. When someone is "incomplete" about how they'll "support the Jews," they will exist in that state indefinitely until you've gotten your emotional revenge. One way you can be extra sure this is where someone is psychologically is when they can't stop repeating some hateful label about what you are or what your beliefs mean. When challenged, they'll just repeat themselves and say something like, "Why would I talk to an (x) altogether?" Tried and true strategy in maintaining a stupid bubble.
A first principle around communication with the "other side" would be capable of developing a tool for discerning a troll versus partner in conversation. It would concede more alikeness than difference if only because you're human or sharing a language in spite of its many connotative conceits. It would remain sensitive and qualifying when it moved to make a caricature or assumption about where someone was coming from. There's a soft pedantry for the sake of clarity. You're not trying to "gotcha" when a colloquialism or fair-enough sentiment betrays a dictionary.
If I could ever get paid to do like "take down" videos parsing out conversations and podcasts, that'd be fun. I appreciate those with like advanced degrees who refute, with deep technical prowess, morons. I know there are plenty of logical fallacies and psychological terms related to everything I'm talking about, and I think it's a lot harder to see just how quickly and fluidly they manifest in what otherwise presents like a reasonable adult or professional conversation.
I get the jarring experience of listening back-to-back Left and Center-right podcasts/people which helps inform how I see the pattern too. The dismissive quips offered by the If Books Could Kill and 5-to-4 crowd feel irksome when they're doing exactly what they'd accuse a Bari Weiss of with regard to a given author or "deeply personal" subject matter like Gaza or trans activism. It's funny to see how earnestly Anthony Scaramucci prioritizes a piece of Tim Walz on the debate stage versus how the Pod Save America guys do. The "secret" value statements of their class and character pop out.
To my mind, I've listened to them all sound not-batshit and agreeing on what I would consider my first principles, but their emotions don't allow them to say so. I've heard both If Books Could Kill and Bari Weiss podcasts say, for example, that the science around trans stuff is incredibly sparse, and there are meaningful reasons to be skeptical about the DSM and implementation of diagnostic criterion. Why not start there and have a conversation? Why, ever, introduce the language of "mutilated children," like the increasingly myopic hyperbolic rabbit holes of Peter Boghossian's universe where he "can't find anyone on the other side" to talk to." Coleman Hughes manages to, somehow. Neither side wants to mutilate children. Neither side agrees on the number who have been. Those seem foundational for coherence.
Like me, I think people who vehemently argue for anything are implicitly trying to synthesize. It's very disorienting to be fielding a constant stream of information and never feeling like you land somewhere. It doesn't feel right to be rooted in dispassionate skepticism. It doesn't feel right to use your emotions as one, relatively small, informer of your overall viewpoint. It doesn't feel right to find common cause with something "disgusting" or "hateful" or hellbent on "erasing your identity." It's nearly impossible for most people to accept that that's precisely what they are and where they're speaking from. It's nearly impossible to accept because emotionally defaulting to black and white thinking, either/or, in-crowd out-crowd, is the default.
I'm disgusting, hateful, and trying to erase self-conceptions all the time. That's not something I "admit," it's just a true series of things. Devoid of context, the hundred other things I can say about myself, they'd carry all they needed to for anyone disinterested in understanding me. More to my point, they won't understand themselves. Then, hours and hours, and often lifetimes, will be spent trying to fill something that was never a wholly conceived capable-of-being-filled "thing" in the first place.
Showing posts with label If Books Could Kill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label If Books Could Kill. Show all posts
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Thursday, June 20, 2024
[1133] Fog Of War
You're born into a fog. It's little droplets of absolutely mystifying information sometimes cooling your face, sometimes collecting so thick you can't see and feel like you're drowning.
I find one of the defining factors of what I consider a "great" or superb-to-perfect piece of media is definition. The characters, good or bad, actually sit within the consequences of their strengths and flaws. They aren't randomly inserted at choice times because "the plot must go on." They aren't apologized for. They aren't treated like a schizophrenic episode manically punctuating a moment because a substantive idea couldn't be had. Things like "over acting" fall into this category, or the too-humbled place someone falls in being made an example of in your message-piece.
The analogy holds for the difference between a great and superb life. You can do a fair amount of "good" or "fair" things, and die without scandal or offense. But the people who lean into their characters seem to define precisely what we don't wish to be, or explicitly could. I think this is where ideas about "celebrity" versus "influencer" really diverge. A celebrity depicted timeless tropes and stories that have sustained us since we started telling them. We're drawn in. An influencer is trying to trap your attention. They're selling easy and accessible in a way someone pretending to be Hercules isn't.
Why should you want to be your character? I think about this a lot. My head echoes with the guy at a beerfest years ago who said, "You have celebrity energy." I feel like I know exactly what he's referring to, but have done next to nothing with it. I don't even know if he's actually met any celebrities, or if he's just unfamiliar with extroverts on a good day, but I'd be lying if I haven't, for years, rehearsed what I'd say on talk shows. But, what business would I have being there?
Famous chefs and political figures get their time in the sun without needing acting credits. If you spike in popularity for some viral moment, occasionally you can sucker well-known people into entertaining you for another 15 minutes when they're struggling for material. It's not something I really aspire to, but has always felt like it'd be something I should be prepared for. It may be one of the most irrational persistent thoughts I ever entertain. Bert Kreischer got mini-famous for partying. There was a couple years in college where people were shouting my name across campus still-enthused about one of mine.
Arguably, I'm more "blunt answer on the news" kind of "potential famous" at this point. I want to be known "in my world" whether it comes to social work things or if I manage to develop anything on the land. I listen to famous-enough people talk about how it's nice to not get mobbed, but it's never a bad day to have a stranger smile at you and tell you what an impact you've had on them. Garnering a certain notoriety tied to a creative approach or genuinely helpful fix to something is what I'd like most to lend my energy towards more than "look at me" or "let me sell you."
It's only exhausting to be the "life of the party" if you don't enjoy the party. If you're there out of obligation or desperation, it doesn't feel important or wise to invest in your character while you're there. If you're an appeaser who smiles and laughs at everything that doesn't earn it, or frame your existence as the thing other people need to enjoy themselves, I don't know how you refrain from resenting that immediately.
It's been about 2 days since I left off, and I've noticed another pattern that informs my foggy thoughts.
I look for people smarter than me to listen to. I like listening to nerds who specialize in some area to give me the details and history of topics I'll never have the patience or sustained interest in to research too deeply on my own. The thing about nerds, they usually only really know about that one thing. Even when they're talking about the logical fallacies or lapses in wisdom that "smart" people succumb to, breathlessly they'll mindlessly and unapologetically engage in said behavior if you give them 5 extra minutes to talk.
This makes me wonder what would happen if these people I enjoy listening to could get together and identify how to put a stop to that.
After 100 hours of Peter Boghossian interviews and videos, I can identify somewhere around 10 things he consistently does that feel like expressly poor framing, straw-manning, or frustration stoking that impede his ability to understand more about what upsets him.
The If Books Could Kill guys will matter-of-factly relay what they believe to be someone's, say Steven Pinker's, political opinions and conclusions to be and poo-poo qualifiers and context to endlessly insist there's a more insidious misstep occurring. Because they'll do so back-to-back with a genuine fact check that refutes bad research, it feels more right of a behavior and posture than it is. I think you get to score a point for calling out a bad, old, or piddling example used in service to the broader argument. You don't get to mind-read.
The amount of times Jordan Peterson is invoked as a kind of shorthand for alt-right nonsense is such a cliche lazy thing to do, he feels like the next Ayn Rand in the mind of a liberal who thinks reading or listening to him will make their head holes leak. He's become a king for speaking outside of his lane and religious apologetics, but he didn't start that way, and still sometimes recognizes when he's fallen off certain cliffs. That should matter. He's couched in so much stupid, but he's not Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, or even the most manipulative religious dicks he gobbles like Jonathan Pageau.
The religiosity of Chris Hedges and Cornel West keeps them perfectly blind to what you'll hear argued from Sam Harris and the guests like John Spencer who specialize in the history of urban warfare. Masih Alinejad, Yasmine Mohammed, and Maajid Nawaz are functionally silenced when it comes to an honest discussion about the practical and moral consequences of cultural ::ehem:: differences. Noam Chomsky will talk out of one side of his mouth about American imperialism, and downplay what funded his early career with biting defensiveness.
I think Coleman Hughes does a decent job of bothering to engage people on different topics while being less adept, than say Sam Harris, at knowing enough particulars of a given subject matter to undermine his fastest-talking guests. Coleman can get a side-stepping apologist or defensive Ph.D. to get caught in their errant missing-the-point loop which can be interesting in shedding light on how hollow the basis for many popular and too-many-books-about ideas really are.
I just listened to Yanis Varoufakis refer to what's happening in Palestine as a "genocide," after detailing a historical picture of how France and Germany have played out politically and economically. His penchant for insightful financial analysis or digestible conceptual frames stalls outside his lane like so many on the left who think this is the first time in history war has killed or starved children and continually forget who started the whole fucking thing.
Seth Meyers, who've I've gathered has cared about real shit, has a segment where he does corrections on what he's broadcast on his main show. John Oliver will do similarly, but you can feel him routinely skirt and downplay the brunt of a critical conclusion about the position he's explaining, and pawns off deeper responsibility like Jon Stewart used to do before his return on a sensibility that, "It's comedy first, after all."
I guess I want to know, what is it that makes the ability to reason, and reason so strongly, simply, and concretely just stop at a certain point?
Is there a mechanism in the brain that gets overwhelmed or hijacked?
Is there something we can measure at the level of emotion that prevents new or conflicting information to take hold?
Why does it feel impossible and unrealistic to get a standard for discerning and discussing information to as good as it ever can get, and then strike a dissonant note so simultaneously fluidly, and weirdly consistently in that extra bit of time you give someone to talk?
At a certain point in my "learn everything" behavior, it sank into my bones the futility of the effort. Whether I was trying to record every animal name in notebooks as a child, read/watch every book, lecture, debate, or online fight related to religion versus science, or do ALL THE THINGS when it comes to home projects, playing instruments, playing video games, listening to bands or podcasts, or seeing shows. You either learn to enjoy the ride, or you suffer the infinitely incomplete indefinitely.
It feels like the project of being a "public intellectual," is to professionally create a fog around yourself as you detail out someone else's. Are you both united by reason? Occasionally? Certainly more than you're united by a god concept, but a god complex instead? I'm not sure.
In my naming different people, I feel I should shout out to Naill Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. For the amount of subjects they can (or did) opine on, I've gotten the most consistent sense of that general respect for reason and its process. That Naill and Ayann Hirsi-Ali are married suggests to me your heart is clearly the most irrational thing, thus invoking "passion" for your position is always a loser. My pithy grievances with Sam Harris and "free will" I'll probably take to the grave like Dan Dennett.
We'll "believe" in "science" until it threatens our "identity." Our statistics are the one true statistics and not something to contextualize with dozens more at all times. I see another in road for why people adopt the perpetual high-horse-ery of a religious system. Is there any greater power than feeling no obligation to even state plainly what it means to butt-fuck your little boys or bag your women?
The intellectual wants to feel powerful too. I think they fuck up when they wish to cling to a certain "truth," like any religious apologist, instead of the truth of a process. You'll never lift the fog just by blowing your hot air.
I find one of the defining factors of what I consider a "great" or superb-to-perfect piece of media is definition. The characters, good or bad, actually sit within the consequences of their strengths and flaws. They aren't randomly inserted at choice times because "the plot must go on." They aren't apologized for. They aren't treated like a schizophrenic episode manically punctuating a moment because a substantive idea couldn't be had. Things like "over acting" fall into this category, or the too-humbled place someone falls in being made an example of in your message-piece.
The analogy holds for the difference between a great and superb life. You can do a fair amount of "good" or "fair" things, and die without scandal or offense. But the people who lean into their characters seem to define precisely what we don't wish to be, or explicitly could. I think this is where ideas about "celebrity" versus "influencer" really diverge. A celebrity depicted timeless tropes and stories that have sustained us since we started telling them. We're drawn in. An influencer is trying to trap your attention. They're selling easy and accessible in a way someone pretending to be Hercules isn't.
Why should you want to be your character? I think about this a lot. My head echoes with the guy at a beerfest years ago who said, "You have celebrity energy." I feel like I know exactly what he's referring to, but have done next to nothing with it. I don't even know if he's actually met any celebrities, or if he's just unfamiliar with extroverts on a good day, but I'd be lying if I haven't, for years, rehearsed what I'd say on talk shows. But, what business would I have being there?
Famous chefs and political figures get their time in the sun without needing acting credits. If you spike in popularity for some viral moment, occasionally you can sucker well-known people into entertaining you for another 15 minutes when they're struggling for material. It's not something I really aspire to, but has always felt like it'd be something I should be prepared for. It may be one of the most irrational persistent thoughts I ever entertain. Bert Kreischer got mini-famous for partying. There was a couple years in college where people were shouting my name across campus still-enthused about one of mine.
Arguably, I'm more "blunt answer on the news" kind of "potential famous" at this point. I want to be known "in my world" whether it comes to social work things or if I manage to develop anything on the land. I listen to famous-enough people talk about how it's nice to not get mobbed, but it's never a bad day to have a stranger smile at you and tell you what an impact you've had on them. Garnering a certain notoriety tied to a creative approach or genuinely helpful fix to something is what I'd like most to lend my energy towards more than "look at me" or "let me sell you."
It's only exhausting to be the "life of the party" if you don't enjoy the party. If you're there out of obligation or desperation, it doesn't feel important or wise to invest in your character while you're there. If you're an appeaser who smiles and laughs at everything that doesn't earn it, or frame your existence as the thing other people need to enjoy themselves, I don't know how you refrain from resenting that immediately.
It's been about 2 days since I left off, and I've noticed another pattern that informs my foggy thoughts.
I look for people smarter than me to listen to. I like listening to nerds who specialize in some area to give me the details and history of topics I'll never have the patience or sustained interest in to research too deeply on my own. The thing about nerds, they usually only really know about that one thing. Even when they're talking about the logical fallacies or lapses in wisdom that "smart" people succumb to, breathlessly they'll mindlessly and unapologetically engage in said behavior if you give them 5 extra minutes to talk.
This makes me wonder what would happen if these people I enjoy listening to could get together and identify how to put a stop to that.
After 100 hours of Peter Boghossian interviews and videos, I can identify somewhere around 10 things he consistently does that feel like expressly poor framing, straw-manning, or frustration stoking that impede his ability to understand more about what upsets him.
The If Books Could Kill guys will matter-of-factly relay what they believe to be someone's, say Steven Pinker's, political opinions and conclusions to be and poo-poo qualifiers and context to endlessly insist there's a more insidious misstep occurring. Because they'll do so back-to-back with a genuine fact check that refutes bad research, it feels more right of a behavior and posture than it is. I think you get to score a point for calling out a bad, old, or piddling example used in service to the broader argument. You don't get to mind-read.
The amount of times Jordan Peterson is invoked as a kind of shorthand for alt-right nonsense is such a cliche lazy thing to do, he feels like the next Ayn Rand in the mind of a liberal who thinks reading or listening to him will make their head holes leak. He's become a king for speaking outside of his lane and religious apologetics, but he didn't start that way, and still sometimes recognizes when he's fallen off certain cliffs. That should matter. He's couched in so much stupid, but he's not Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, or even the most manipulative religious dicks he gobbles like Jonathan Pageau.
The religiosity of Chris Hedges and Cornel West keeps them perfectly blind to what you'll hear argued from Sam Harris and the guests like John Spencer who specialize in the history of urban warfare. Masih Alinejad, Yasmine Mohammed, and Maajid Nawaz are functionally silenced when it comes to an honest discussion about the practical and moral consequences of cultural ::ehem:: differences. Noam Chomsky will talk out of one side of his mouth about American imperialism, and downplay what funded his early career with biting defensiveness.
I think Coleman Hughes does a decent job of bothering to engage people on different topics while being less adept, than say Sam Harris, at knowing enough particulars of a given subject matter to undermine his fastest-talking guests. Coleman can get a side-stepping apologist or defensive Ph.D. to get caught in their errant missing-the-point loop which can be interesting in shedding light on how hollow the basis for many popular and too-many-books-about ideas really are.
I just listened to Yanis Varoufakis refer to what's happening in Palestine as a "genocide," after detailing a historical picture of how France and Germany have played out politically and economically. His penchant for insightful financial analysis or digestible conceptual frames stalls outside his lane like so many on the left who think this is the first time in history war has killed or starved children and continually forget who started the whole fucking thing.
Seth Meyers, who've I've gathered has cared about real shit, has a segment where he does corrections on what he's broadcast on his main show. John Oliver will do similarly, but you can feel him routinely skirt and downplay the brunt of a critical conclusion about the position he's explaining, and pawns off deeper responsibility like Jon Stewart used to do before his return on a sensibility that, "It's comedy first, after all."
I guess I want to know, what is it that makes the ability to reason, and reason so strongly, simply, and concretely just stop at a certain point?
Is there a mechanism in the brain that gets overwhelmed or hijacked?
Is there something we can measure at the level of emotion that prevents new or conflicting information to take hold?
Why does it feel impossible and unrealistic to get a standard for discerning and discussing information to as good as it ever can get, and then strike a dissonant note so simultaneously fluidly, and weirdly consistently in that extra bit of time you give someone to talk?
At a certain point in my "learn everything" behavior, it sank into my bones the futility of the effort. Whether I was trying to record every animal name in notebooks as a child, read/watch every book, lecture, debate, or online fight related to religion versus science, or do ALL THE THINGS when it comes to home projects, playing instruments, playing video games, listening to bands or podcasts, or seeing shows. You either learn to enjoy the ride, or you suffer the infinitely incomplete indefinitely.
It feels like the project of being a "public intellectual," is to professionally create a fog around yourself as you detail out someone else's. Are you both united by reason? Occasionally? Certainly more than you're united by a god concept, but a god complex instead? I'm not sure.
In my naming different people, I feel I should shout out to Naill Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. For the amount of subjects they can (or did) opine on, I've gotten the most consistent sense of that general respect for reason and its process. That Naill and Ayann Hirsi-Ali are married suggests to me your heart is clearly the most irrational thing, thus invoking "passion" for your position is always a loser. My pithy grievances with Sam Harris and "free will" I'll probably take to the grave like Dan Dennett.
We'll "believe" in "science" until it threatens our "identity." Our statistics are the one true statistics and not something to contextualize with dozens more at all times. I see another in road for why people adopt the perpetual high-horse-ery of a religious system. Is there any greater power than feeling no obligation to even state plainly what it means to butt-fuck your little boys or bag your women?
The intellectual wants to feel powerful too. I think they fuck up when they wish to cling to a certain "truth," like any religious apologist, instead of the truth of a process. You'll never lift the fog just by blowing your hot air.
Friday, November 24, 2023
[1082] Dead Kids
We're post-Thanksgiving where many are reminded of the family members they wish had died in the womb or gotten mercifully aborted. If you haven't heard the "joke" about fighting with the "conservative uncle" 4 to 10 thousand times by now, you're probably lost in the woods and better off.
I was listening to a boring article on who artists thank in their Grammy acceptance speeches. At the end, the author links to a Nail Horan music video called "Heaven." It's a good song.
The first comment says, "my son passed away 2 weeks ago and we came out of the funeral home and heard it in the car. . . .I cried my eyes out and thought it was my son telling me hes in Heaven ."
Of course they did.
This isn't the first dead child scenario in the last couple weeks I've been a party to. In one of my latest facebook pissing matches, a guy referenced his daughter dying of cancer and him getting an "undeniable" sign that she had manifested for him shortly after. On my ride home from the movie theater, I was listening to "If Books Could Kill," which was excoriating Mark Manson for speaking to the personal responsibility for your feelings you might have to take in the face of, you guessed it, your child dying.
The hosts were clumsily trying to side-step hearing any explicit advice from Mark's (lazy) reiteration of different philosophical or religious schools of thought. To be sure, it's unclear if Manson even knows what schools he was pulling from, but that's not the point. They ridicule him for "relitigating a comment on his blog" and proceed to assert a definition for trauma. Then they claim they don't believe you can take your pain and segway it into something else or change what you're feeling. The other host chimes in, "It's actually much better advice to give yourself permission to feel the way you feel." This is a separate concurrent idea on how you heal and "move on," not a competing one.
I can forgive two sides completely un and ill-informed about trauma-informed care with competing agendas and audiences. I can't help but notice how stark of an example this feels. It's these misalignments that get baked into the air-headed zombie-jokes about holiday fights. It's the pithy attitude we adopt alongside catastrophized language. The real opportunity is lost. Namely, when you're discussing dead kids, the chance to access how much you don't really give a fuck about them.
The most harrowing example of the dead kid theme has been watching "20 Days in Mariupol." How do you get the haunting sound of parents grieving over their dead children out of your brain? How do you wash the images of the blood and missing body parts? Well, there's a few ways, and they start with the idea Manson spoke to and the podcast hosts belittled. You accept responsibility for your feelings on what you're hearing and seeing.
What does that look like? What is the practical first step you take? Here, I've stood in active fascination and wonder about every parent. When you have your children, are you, somehow, under the impression they can't die? I ask this question in all sincerity, because it's the most "boring" fact I can land on when discussing the reasons for having children. Depending on how or whether you bother to ask and accept the litany of questions regarding the morality, responsibility, or fallout of your children says considerably more about you than you may have intended.
Do you want to "accidentally" find yourself in league with the most ardently irrational and proud conservative Christians touting the sanctity of life as they let mothers die and children suffer neglected indefinitely? They aren't taking responsibility for the death and destruction they cause because they aren't owning how little they give a fuck about anyone besides themselves and their narrative.
We treat dead kids as political footballs. We're ambivalent to how many of them die for preventable reasons. We don't care how many are in foster care. We don't care, after we've assumed the worst about a given family, what we do to their bonds or how we approach "helping" them. I'm lucky enough to have seen this first hand at DCS and then get to compare it to our cultural narratives and responses from different media and entertainment outlets.
Why did The Sound of Freedom get so much press? Because it was true? Certainly wasn't lol. Because anyone knows the statistics or cares about abducted kids? Definitely not that. I had to literally do the math in one of my addiction groups to explain that if what the movie and media outlets were reporting was true, it would be like 1 in 4 kids that would be going missing every year. I then asked the group members if they knew even one person who had a missing kid or could recall the last story about one. Crickets.
I can watch the horrors of war and remain "unphased" because it's not lost on me how fucked everything is. It's not and never a surprise. I can kick around baby heads in my brain and recognize those as "just thoughts" I don't need the veneer of horror films or speculative nonsense "news" to depict for me. We exist on that line of remotely cordial progressive evidence-based inching into the future and utter annihilation every single moment. You have to take responsibility for how that plays out in your own mind, or not. You can suffer under the illusion your children can't die and let it turn you into someone who feels noble for attacking those who speak otherwise.
If you cared about dead kids, or suffering kids, or kids under greater threats than you've ever experienced you know what you do? You get honest about what they need, and then you pay for those needs. You track and report on progress, and you punish people who undermine your effort. You accept what role you may have played, even just in your ignorance, in why some of them died. Your household probably employed the "There's starving kids in Africa…" idea for generations having never donated as you practiced waste and gluttony.
These mythical narratives regarding our own nobility and perspective keep things the way they are. If you believe, at any level, a bird landing on your shoulder or Nail Horan's latest belief-adjacent track is evidence of the afterlife, you're just doing denial work. You're justifying how little of fucks you give verses accepting it. You're not actually comfortable with yourself and the choices you'd have to make to do better. You're an addict for the bullshit. You're running.
I want one dead relative to unambiguously write something that has nothing to do with nature, religious imagery, or a song to indicate they are "somewhere." Give me any piece of evidence I can't find in a cliche Hallmark movie. It's like everyone's "haunted house" stories where no ghost can be bothered to indicate how scary or unresolved they are except in ways that suspiciously sound like drafty basements, attics, and house's settling or breaking down.
You are a monster, and that's okay, because you have agency. If you deny your agency, we all suffer the monstrous consequences of your behavior. You don't care about damn near anything but yourself. You don't work on things you "intellectually" know you need to, but don't feel particularly inclined to even see, let alone act on. You could watch Donald Trump shoot a child in the face in the middle of the road, and your brain would scroll past that as quick as the next meme. We'd keep on scrolling and scrolling until we're into Putin levels of fascism and Hamas levels of pride and certitude.
I was listening to a boring article on who artists thank in their Grammy acceptance speeches. At the end, the author links to a Nail Horan music video called "Heaven." It's a good song.
The first comment says, "my son passed away 2 weeks ago and we came out of the funeral home and heard it in the car. . . .I cried my eyes out and thought it was my son telling me hes in Heaven ."
Of course they did.
This isn't the first dead child scenario in the last couple weeks I've been a party to. In one of my latest facebook pissing matches, a guy referenced his daughter dying of cancer and him getting an "undeniable" sign that she had manifested for him shortly after. On my ride home from the movie theater, I was listening to "If Books Could Kill," which was excoriating Mark Manson for speaking to the personal responsibility for your feelings you might have to take in the face of, you guessed it, your child dying.
The hosts were clumsily trying to side-step hearing any explicit advice from Mark's (lazy) reiteration of different philosophical or religious schools of thought. To be sure, it's unclear if Manson even knows what schools he was pulling from, but that's not the point. They ridicule him for "relitigating a comment on his blog" and proceed to assert a definition for trauma. Then they claim they don't believe you can take your pain and segway it into something else or change what you're feeling. The other host chimes in, "It's actually much better advice to give yourself permission to feel the way you feel." This is a separate concurrent idea on how you heal and "move on," not a competing one.
I can forgive two sides completely un and ill-informed about trauma-informed care with competing agendas and audiences. I can't help but notice how stark of an example this feels. It's these misalignments that get baked into the air-headed zombie-jokes about holiday fights. It's the pithy attitude we adopt alongside catastrophized language. The real opportunity is lost. Namely, when you're discussing dead kids, the chance to access how much you don't really give a fuck about them.
The most harrowing example of the dead kid theme has been watching "20 Days in Mariupol." How do you get the haunting sound of parents grieving over their dead children out of your brain? How do you wash the images of the blood and missing body parts? Well, there's a few ways, and they start with the idea Manson spoke to and the podcast hosts belittled. You accept responsibility for your feelings on what you're hearing and seeing.
What does that look like? What is the practical first step you take? Here, I've stood in active fascination and wonder about every parent. When you have your children, are you, somehow, under the impression they can't die? I ask this question in all sincerity, because it's the most "boring" fact I can land on when discussing the reasons for having children. Depending on how or whether you bother to ask and accept the litany of questions regarding the morality, responsibility, or fallout of your children says considerably more about you than you may have intended.
Do you want to "accidentally" find yourself in league with the most ardently irrational and proud conservative Christians touting the sanctity of life as they let mothers die and children suffer neglected indefinitely? They aren't taking responsibility for the death and destruction they cause because they aren't owning how little they give a fuck about anyone besides themselves and their narrative.
We treat dead kids as political footballs. We're ambivalent to how many of them die for preventable reasons. We don't care how many are in foster care. We don't care, after we've assumed the worst about a given family, what we do to their bonds or how we approach "helping" them. I'm lucky enough to have seen this first hand at DCS and then get to compare it to our cultural narratives and responses from different media and entertainment outlets.
Why did The Sound of Freedom get so much press? Because it was true? Certainly wasn't lol. Because anyone knows the statistics or cares about abducted kids? Definitely not that. I had to literally do the math in one of my addiction groups to explain that if what the movie and media outlets were reporting was true, it would be like 1 in 4 kids that would be going missing every year. I then asked the group members if they knew even one person who had a missing kid or could recall the last story about one. Crickets.
I can watch the horrors of war and remain "unphased" because it's not lost on me how fucked everything is. It's not and never a surprise. I can kick around baby heads in my brain and recognize those as "just thoughts" I don't need the veneer of horror films or speculative nonsense "news" to depict for me. We exist on that line of remotely cordial progressive evidence-based inching into the future and utter annihilation every single moment. You have to take responsibility for how that plays out in your own mind, or not. You can suffer under the illusion your children can't die and let it turn you into someone who feels noble for attacking those who speak otherwise.
If you cared about dead kids, or suffering kids, or kids under greater threats than you've ever experienced you know what you do? You get honest about what they need, and then you pay for those needs. You track and report on progress, and you punish people who undermine your effort. You accept what role you may have played, even just in your ignorance, in why some of them died. Your household probably employed the "There's starving kids in Africa…" idea for generations having never donated as you practiced waste and gluttony.
These mythical narratives regarding our own nobility and perspective keep things the way they are. If you believe, at any level, a bird landing on your shoulder or Nail Horan's latest belief-adjacent track is evidence of the afterlife, you're just doing denial work. You're justifying how little of fucks you give verses accepting it. You're not actually comfortable with yourself and the choices you'd have to make to do better. You're an addict for the bullshit. You're running.
I want one dead relative to unambiguously write something that has nothing to do with nature, religious imagery, or a song to indicate they are "somewhere." Give me any piece of evidence I can't find in a cliche Hallmark movie. It's like everyone's "haunted house" stories where no ghost can be bothered to indicate how scary or unresolved they are except in ways that suspiciously sound like drafty basements, attics, and house's settling or breaking down.
You are a monster, and that's okay, because you have agency. If you deny your agency, we all suffer the monstrous consequences of your behavior. You don't care about damn near anything but yourself. You don't work on things you "intellectually" know you need to, but don't feel particularly inclined to even see, let alone act on. You could watch Donald Trump shoot a child in the face in the middle of the road, and your brain would scroll past that as quick as the next meme. We'd keep on scrolling and scrolling until we're into Putin levels of fascism and Hamas levels of pride and certitude.
Friday, July 21, 2023
[1049] Loose Bolt, Complete Machine
I already have a penchant for writing incredibly random crap, but my head keeps returning to a few things I need to try to synthesize.
I listen to a handful of podcasts. If Books Could Kill discusses books that have gotten popular over the years, and the basic absurdity, lies, and lack of reasoning we tend to digest without question. It wasn’t anything about any particular book that struck me though. A comment about J.K. Rowling from one of the hosts did. He, in as pious and pithy a manner as one is capable, dismissed a podcast series by Megan Phelps-Roper trying to explore communication barriers associated with all that drama.
It’s stuck with me because, dude, you’re literally hosting a podcast attempting to critically think, but when your token issue is addressed methodically, purposefully, and masterfully, you default to the same dismissive arrogance and snap judgment that fuels the popularity of ridiculous books for ridiculous people.
No matter how confident we get in our intellectual posture, we’re a fucking joke. No one, literally no one, should be trusted, ever to speak beyond the bounds of what they specialize in, and then, other experts in that specialty need to be actively criticizing and humbling and rounding out the picture. You can’t be “generally intelligent” if you’re going to eschew the wisdom of asking questions and working with the specific claims of the material you otherwise deign worthy of instant dismissal.
Shuffle.
For as much as I worry about manipulating, I’m a professional manipulator. I get a handle on your behavioral pattern, apply the right tone and words, and you walk away, more often than not, at least thoughtful, if not inspired, provided you’re not fundamentally hostile to me or the task at hand. It’s so deep an instinct that I used to black out and have people tell me all of the wonderful and caring things I would say that I had absolutely no memory of.
As such, I have developed a partner instinct to instantly recoil at too much praise or if I see that you are “too into” whatever I’ve done or said. This most highlighted last year when, for the first time in my life, I wished my step-mom a happy mother’s day. It meant something to her. I care about my step-mom. I like her. I want her to succeed. I wish I could do more to contribute to the incredibly cool things she’s doing with reselling and crafting. I didn’t wish her a happy mother’s day this year because I pulled so far away from her reaction last year, I felt I’d be getting into that dangerous space of “too much” endearment.
The distance protects you as much as it does me. If, and I still consider it a strong if, I’m more autistic than not, I’m literally incapable of matching the depth of the feelings I can illicit, at least for prolonged healthy “normal” ways, if that’s the goal. You have to understand, I’m outside. My feelings are either compulsive, or working to be controlled. There is no “simple” version of liking or “loving” anyone that doesn’t have a whole world of context and trust built around it. My dad’s known me my whole life. He’s not going to find himself “under my spell” that I didn’t intentionally cast in the first place, nor do I have to explain and walk back when things have gotten out of hand.
The closest memory I have that pairs with pulling back on happy mother’s day sentiments is when I told my friend Brett that he must have caught me on a good day when I said something encouraging about him going to bed early on a night we were partying in college. He felt a certain kind of way that I respected his decision and drew on that memory years later when I was at his wedding. I discouraged the positive association. To me, I’m just as likely to call you a bitch (in good spirit, but still, especially back then) as find myself in the mood to be like, “You know, that’s respectable, good for you!” My “real” friends would maintain that kind of disquieting skepticism or qualify any positive emotion they’ve drawn from me, THEN take away the fact that, I was sincere. You don't just get the feel-goods by themselves.
It sounds like a weird mind-reading immature game based on my inability to trust myself, right? But I do trust myself. I don’t trust your perception of me. So I try to train your perception with good and bad examples of my behavior to hopefully provide insight as to how it works. I’ve slowed down on doing this as it’s become easier to keep a more informal notion of “friend” in my head, but if I actually like you and wish we were cool or want to invite you to the next party even if we haven’t spoken in a few years, it’s a whole thing.
A simpler version of stating this is, I have an easier time trusting assholes. Feelers and empthas are raw meat in a sea of sharks. Assholes don’t let their resentments linger and sneak up on you. “Assholes” is also a misnomer as it basically just delineates people who are prepared and confident in their boundaries.
I see, literally every day, how viciously weaponized people’s feelings are. Whether it’s against me, against themselves, or against just basic sense and decency, well in spite of our best selves. I don’t want to practice that, enable that, or act blind to it in some bid to be “more normal” in my well-wishing or cordiality.
I’ve managed to bite myself in deliberately ignoring the feedback from the faces and body language and gossip of so-called “friends” I wanted in the past. I’m too familiar with psychologically abusive patterns relayed to me in dozens of versions of the same story. I get consistent positive feedback on the impact I have on people’s lives, and “You help more than you know!” as though I’m not actively telling you/the void how much I do know and don’t take it as a default good thing about me more than a statement about you.
When you can inspire, intrigue, or demonstrate your understanding of me, I get out of that mode. I think my dad gets me in a way Tammi never has or will. I look up to people who are, not just “smart” or “articulate,” but humble and comprehensive in their analysis. They’re showing me a way to work or speak that I haven’t found that is useful and perhaps marketable or scalable. Otherwise, it’s anyone’s guess which mood I might confidently assert in your direction. You may think absolutely nothing of that and consider it an awkward vague wanna-be threat of “something.” It’s my obsession. I’m wholly subsumed by the idea that I am either working you or working with you. Outside of that, it’s simply to avoid altogether.
Clear goals for our dynamic helps me too. Informal chatting? Sure, I can lay off. Did I invest hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars attempting to enable you? Well, fuck. Guess I can never really get that alignment of goals locked in. It’s an extension of the sensibility I use with regard to myself. When the goal is work, I work until I can’t anymore. When it’s indulge, I spend as much on shows, flying, parking, 2-item minimums, and gas as I ever have per year on home projects or car repairs. When I decide I want peace of mind, I’ll retreat indefinitely until the urge to nonsense fight resurfaces.
I don’t want to jinx my flow. I’ve been really feeling it the last week or so. I’m getting my house in order. Very annoying projects are registering as doable. I’m practicing music. I’m looking forward to maybe making my own. My notes aren’t feeling like they’re taking hours when, at their worst, it might take 2. I’m still beasting through shows, performances and TV. I’m rooted in an enjoyable now and looking forward to, perhaps an outwardly dismal future with regard to politics and the weather, but I think I can carve out an ironically decadent place.
Shuffle.
Bert Kreischer has been on the rise for a minute now, and is bringing along a band of like-minded comedians he admires. He said recently how he knows there are people who are way more brilliant and better stand-ups than him, but he puts in the work and utilizes the business minds/advice of people like Tom Segura and Joe Rogan. There is, of course, a model you can follow. There are posting guidelines and cross pollination strategies. While seemingly "anyone" (with money) can "go viral" (game the system) and the barriers to entry are lower, there are still structures akin to what might be understood as major labels of the past if they're nonetheless more diffuse and abstract than a particular studio, king-maker, or locale. Crazies like RFK Jr. know the series of podcasts to hit to make it onto Sam Harris' lips questioning the wisdom of allowing him to do so. Propogandist "news" is still working as intended.
I still fundamentally believe in work. I do think it's the thing that tends to win regardless. Whether it looks like what others consider work is where it gets complicated. It's work to keep Hussain sane enough to deal with the functionally impossible barriers to opening our own practice. It's work to maintain my own patience and positive orientation indulging in building fun memories verses stoking anger and resentment towards "the system" designed to ignore and kill us. It's work to continuously humble ideals while maintaining them anyway. It's work to stay skeptical and creative and preach better behavior than the environment is begging from you. This is work. This is also self-care. This is evidence I wish to keep on keeping on without just emptily saying that and pretending we both know what I mean.
I think I'm going to invite a headache related to tearing down the shed into my day. When that gets to be too much, I'll come in and shower, see if Hussain is free, when he's inevitably enmeshed in his chaos, I'll see about either seeing IMAX Oppenheimer, hitting The Comedy Attic, and certainly grabbing food. I have a few errands to run I suspect will wait until Sunday. If you catch this early, you're welcome to join, but I know it's pretty silly of me to continue inviting. Didn't you just see what I said about practicing the ideal in spite of the environment? Pay attention.
I listen to a handful of podcasts. If Books Could Kill discusses books that have gotten popular over the years, and the basic absurdity, lies, and lack of reasoning we tend to digest without question. It wasn’t anything about any particular book that struck me though. A comment about J.K. Rowling from one of the hosts did. He, in as pious and pithy a manner as one is capable, dismissed a podcast series by Megan Phelps-Roper trying to explore communication barriers associated with all that drama.
It’s stuck with me because, dude, you’re literally hosting a podcast attempting to critically think, but when your token issue is addressed methodically, purposefully, and masterfully, you default to the same dismissive arrogance and snap judgment that fuels the popularity of ridiculous books for ridiculous people.
No matter how confident we get in our intellectual posture, we’re a fucking joke. No one, literally no one, should be trusted, ever to speak beyond the bounds of what they specialize in, and then, other experts in that specialty need to be actively criticizing and humbling and rounding out the picture. You can’t be “generally intelligent” if you’re going to eschew the wisdom of asking questions and working with the specific claims of the material you otherwise deign worthy of instant dismissal.
Shuffle.
For as much as I worry about manipulating, I’m a professional manipulator. I get a handle on your behavioral pattern, apply the right tone and words, and you walk away, more often than not, at least thoughtful, if not inspired, provided you’re not fundamentally hostile to me or the task at hand. It’s so deep an instinct that I used to black out and have people tell me all of the wonderful and caring things I would say that I had absolutely no memory of.
As such, I have developed a partner instinct to instantly recoil at too much praise or if I see that you are “too into” whatever I’ve done or said. This most highlighted last year when, for the first time in my life, I wished my step-mom a happy mother’s day. It meant something to her. I care about my step-mom. I like her. I want her to succeed. I wish I could do more to contribute to the incredibly cool things she’s doing with reselling and crafting. I didn’t wish her a happy mother’s day this year because I pulled so far away from her reaction last year, I felt I’d be getting into that dangerous space of “too much” endearment.
The distance protects you as much as it does me. If, and I still consider it a strong if, I’m more autistic than not, I’m literally incapable of matching the depth of the feelings I can illicit, at least for prolonged healthy “normal” ways, if that’s the goal. You have to understand, I’m outside. My feelings are either compulsive, or working to be controlled. There is no “simple” version of liking or “loving” anyone that doesn’t have a whole world of context and trust built around it. My dad’s known me my whole life. He’s not going to find himself “under my spell” that I didn’t intentionally cast in the first place, nor do I have to explain and walk back when things have gotten out of hand.
The closest memory I have that pairs with pulling back on happy mother’s day sentiments is when I told my friend Brett that he must have caught me on a good day when I said something encouraging about him going to bed early on a night we were partying in college. He felt a certain kind of way that I respected his decision and drew on that memory years later when I was at his wedding. I discouraged the positive association. To me, I’m just as likely to call you a bitch (in good spirit, but still, especially back then) as find myself in the mood to be like, “You know, that’s respectable, good for you!” My “real” friends would maintain that kind of disquieting skepticism or qualify any positive emotion they’ve drawn from me, THEN take away the fact that, I was sincere. You don't just get the feel-goods by themselves.
It sounds like a weird mind-reading immature game based on my inability to trust myself, right? But I do trust myself. I don’t trust your perception of me. So I try to train your perception with good and bad examples of my behavior to hopefully provide insight as to how it works. I’ve slowed down on doing this as it’s become easier to keep a more informal notion of “friend” in my head, but if I actually like you and wish we were cool or want to invite you to the next party even if we haven’t spoken in a few years, it’s a whole thing.
A simpler version of stating this is, I have an easier time trusting assholes. Feelers and empthas are raw meat in a sea of sharks. Assholes don’t let their resentments linger and sneak up on you. “Assholes” is also a misnomer as it basically just delineates people who are prepared and confident in their boundaries.
I see, literally every day, how viciously weaponized people’s feelings are. Whether it’s against me, against themselves, or against just basic sense and decency, well in spite of our best selves. I don’t want to practice that, enable that, or act blind to it in some bid to be “more normal” in my well-wishing or cordiality.
I’ve managed to bite myself in deliberately ignoring the feedback from the faces and body language and gossip of so-called “friends” I wanted in the past. I’m too familiar with psychologically abusive patterns relayed to me in dozens of versions of the same story. I get consistent positive feedback on the impact I have on people’s lives, and “You help more than you know!” as though I’m not actively telling you/the void how much I do know and don’t take it as a default good thing about me more than a statement about you.
When you can inspire, intrigue, or demonstrate your understanding of me, I get out of that mode. I think my dad gets me in a way Tammi never has or will. I look up to people who are, not just “smart” or “articulate,” but humble and comprehensive in their analysis. They’re showing me a way to work or speak that I haven’t found that is useful and perhaps marketable or scalable. Otherwise, it’s anyone’s guess which mood I might confidently assert in your direction. You may think absolutely nothing of that and consider it an awkward vague wanna-be threat of “something.” It’s my obsession. I’m wholly subsumed by the idea that I am either working you or working with you. Outside of that, it’s simply to avoid altogether.
Clear goals for our dynamic helps me too. Informal chatting? Sure, I can lay off. Did I invest hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars attempting to enable you? Well, fuck. Guess I can never really get that alignment of goals locked in. It’s an extension of the sensibility I use with regard to myself. When the goal is work, I work until I can’t anymore. When it’s indulge, I spend as much on shows, flying, parking, 2-item minimums, and gas as I ever have per year on home projects or car repairs. When I decide I want peace of mind, I’ll retreat indefinitely until the urge to nonsense fight resurfaces.
I don’t want to jinx my flow. I’ve been really feeling it the last week or so. I’m getting my house in order. Very annoying projects are registering as doable. I’m practicing music. I’m looking forward to maybe making my own. My notes aren’t feeling like they’re taking hours when, at their worst, it might take 2. I’m still beasting through shows, performances and TV. I’m rooted in an enjoyable now and looking forward to, perhaps an outwardly dismal future with regard to politics and the weather, but I think I can carve out an ironically decadent place.
Shuffle.
Bert Kreischer has been on the rise for a minute now, and is bringing along a band of like-minded comedians he admires. He said recently how he knows there are people who are way more brilliant and better stand-ups than him, but he puts in the work and utilizes the business minds/advice of people like Tom Segura and Joe Rogan. There is, of course, a model you can follow. There are posting guidelines and cross pollination strategies. While seemingly "anyone" (with money) can "go viral" (game the system) and the barriers to entry are lower, there are still structures akin to what might be understood as major labels of the past if they're nonetheless more diffuse and abstract than a particular studio, king-maker, or locale. Crazies like RFK Jr. know the series of podcasts to hit to make it onto Sam Harris' lips questioning the wisdom of allowing him to do so. Propogandist "news" is still working as intended.
I still fundamentally believe in work. I do think it's the thing that tends to win regardless. Whether it looks like what others consider work is where it gets complicated. It's work to keep Hussain sane enough to deal with the functionally impossible barriers to opening our own practice. It's work to maintain my own patience and positive orientation indulging in building fun memories verses stoking anger and resentment towards "the system" designed to ignore and kill us. It's work to continuously humble ideals while maintaining them anyway. It's work to stay skeptical and creative and preach better behavior than the environment is begging from you. This is work. This is also self-care. This is evidence I wish to keep on keeping on without just emptily saying that and pretending we both know what I mean.
I think I'm going to invite a headache related to tearing down the shed into my day. When that gets to be too much, I'll come in and shower, see if Hussain is free, when he's inevitably enmeshed in his chaos, I'll see about either seeing IMAX Oppenheimer, hitting The Comedy Attic, and certainly grabbing food. I have a few errands to run I suspect will wait until Sunday. If you catch this early, you're welcome to join, but I know it's pretty silly of me to continue inviting. Didn't you just see what I said about practicing the ideal in spite of the environment? Pay attention.
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