[975] Mo Mo Mo

I need to spend some time thinking about my motivation. In no way will I be able to synthesize the thoughts before now because I’ve passed up at least 3 times I probably should have started writing.

I do things, often enough, after being backed into a corner. I create debt for myself so I can get a “real job” and provide the justification to submit myself to the pain that entails. I might physically exhaust myself on some task so I can shake off the “I’m not doing enough” feeling. I create these kind of high-stakes social dynamics that pit your sense of cordial duty against my righteous indignation, so by the time we’ve disassociated, I don’t have to pretend there’s a bridge worth repairing.

I had a lot of energy when I was in high school, college, and right after college, to push an incredibly strong notion of “excelling.” It could be attached to anything. I could take pride in the sheer amount of TV I was able to watch, or the efficiency with which I made money doing drug studies. Academically, the designation of “A” had lost its muster, so I tested how A/B-ish I could be with the least amount of effort possible, and I decided to get really good at partying. I was pumping a certain kind of psychologically gratifying, albeit arbitrary, stats. Who cares if I can go from zero to coffee shop in 4 months? Just me.

I seem to do things in a disproportionate way, just not precisely the things I’d really rather be doing. When I get the chance to do what I’d rather be doing, the rules of life are still at play. This speaks to an underlying motivation at play at all times. I want to exist in a way that renders those life circumstances mute. I want to always have the money, the time, or the help. I can’t change the weather, but I can build a considerable amount indoors. If there’s a rule that would stop me, I want to have the means to undermine or circumvent it. This could also be a complicated way of describing the drive towards creative self-expression.

The desire to accomplish “small” things plays by more viscerally practical rules. I almost never leave trash laying around. Shit’s in the way. I don’t have a lot of space, and I don’t want shit in the way. I may dawdle on doing dishes because until they’re in the way of me eating or making food, they’re where dirty dishes belong. When you own a house, something’s always broken or missing, but it gets ridiculous to think that you’ll account for it all in every moment you notice that the milk is low or bugs’ nest isn’t easily accessible. There’s less “do it now” with those things, and they get grouped for weekends or those days where you’re just really into getting things done.

I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast, and he brought up how we’re always looking for the next thing, living in this illusion that obtaining it will make us happy. I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary as a compulsive millionaire gambler blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a few days. I’ve noticed the eyes of the bewitched with their hollow desperate and craving emptiness for recognition of their suffering when their persona wears thin. I suppose I’m lucky to have maintained a kind of motivation to not end up perpetually in that state.

I don’t like to feel bad. This may seem like a weird thing to have to state so plainly. I think it’s important to do so though. It’s more than obvious. I don’t like to feel bad so much, that I will write for years until I feel a little bit better. I don’t like to feel bad to such a degree, that I will work myself to death to ensure the thoughts in my head align with a decent-to-exceptional conception of myself. I might habitually bite off more than I can chew, but I took the bite, and I’m still chewing. The moment I felt what rolfing could do for my physical well-being, that money was gone. My food budget is so high because the shittiest I tend to feel is when I haven’t eaten enough. Again, we could describe this as being up against a kind of pain-threshold wall.

When I think about how we evolve, it’s selection pressure. What is the environment selecting for? What genes are being activated under the current constraints? If we talk about different “classes” and the cultures they entail, is it down to the biology that iterating obnoxious selfishness plays out in superficially different ways? You can complain about black-on-black violence as a loud example, but how many people suffer and die as a result of greed? Why is greed good in rich culture? The environment dictates the conditions for remaining in said environment. You might not consider yourself rich, certainly not Bezos-rich, so the nature of your greed, familiar, common, is hardly noticed. You’ve got an HOA to answer to, and you earned your privacy fence.

I’ve removed a lot of the walls in my journey through this shed-life thing. It’s sweltering outside, and cool in here. I’m still inconvenienced in my bathroom and kitchen setups, but I’m not flinging shit out the window nor going hungry. All of my effort to build more is in service to creating new corners to get backed into. I have the tools, now they need a home. If they’re not running, why did I buy the tools? Indefinite hobby and selective guilt await. If I think someone is special or unique, well, surely, they deserve my effort to create something cool! I get to take it a step further. If I don’t dictate, complicate, or imbue my work into a larger context, I just sit and wait for things to happen. I refresh facebook and reddit. I marathon TV and don’t think too hard about the gross juxtaposition of “marathon” and “TV.”

It’s been insufferably hot lately. You think I’m building my workshop in that? I already barely drink enough water or eat right, let alone wear sunscreen or generally go about things that would suggest to you I don’t like to feel bad. If I feel faint upon opening the door, game over for that idea. Are there things that need to be done indoors? Kinda, but no, not really. If I choose to rearrange the furniture again, it’s hard to say what’s been accomplished beyond it feeling good to pretend exercise and experience the different room flow.

This is a restatement that the vast majority of my “problems” are, not. I’m not a jaded and broken millionaire feeding machines hundred-dollar bills, but I’m also not a millionaire. I’m not cripplingly sick or in mental turmoil, but I don’t have health insurance. I know how to swim, I’m not drowning, but the only race I’m in is against death, which serious as it might sound, I can’t win.

I really do feel like I have made a concerted effort over time to be okay with whatever “this” moment is. I affirm my health, wealth, comfort, kitties, conveniences, computers, and capacity for compartmentalizing my competing conceptions. It doesn’t take away from my desire to proverbially “take over the world,” but it does mean I don’t suffer the anxiousness or depressive guilt by not “excelling” via being busy or “above” in my concerns for how I’m spending my time. If I had millions of dollars right now, you know what I’d probably still be? Alone. It might be with someone(s) happy to spend my money with me in the next room of fancier architecture in a distant locale, but people I consign to my larger goals would be just that, paid for.

Part of me feels like that’s an incredibly real scenario because of how hard it’s been to get people to join, with weeks or months-notice or otherwise, what I’ve been up to. I do have friends and my dad who are down, it’s not a desert in spite of what the weather suggests. But I’ve had people kind of flirt with the idea of spending time together or doing stuff. I’m not their priority, which is perfectly fine, it just naturally translates that will continue to hold whether I’m inviting you to Fiji or a comedy show. You’ll have a life and obligations that I’m supposed to what? Pay you to put aside like any good capitalist?

It feels like I’m talking about that sneaking suspicion we all might have that there really is no “our” page, goal, or reality. That doesn’t mean reality won’t kill us all the same or that we don’t rhyme, but it does heartily explain the appeal of religion. You don’t want to go through a series of thoughtful, accountable, and painful evolutions in thought or behavior? Check out this brand-new forgiveness for sale! Just give it up to God! You can be as free as Sam Harris in his disposing of free will! Good is good, evil is evil, and we’re all just along for the circularly-reasoned ride! Yee-haw! I still believe “consciousness” is the “what” that makes the indeterminate determinate, so I struggle, or futilely refuse, to be a happy cog. I didn’t will myself into existence, but if I maintain my faculties and shoot myself in the head anyway, you’re gonna get an attestation of the nature of my will, messily depicted and ironically incomplete in its finality.

The last time I used “motivation” in the title of a blog was in January 2013. A few lines from that blog stick out to me, but as I started to mine them, it seems inadequate to the task. You should read it after this one. What’s clear, is that at least 9 years ago, I still hated the idea of getting a normal job, knew no one would respect me or my time like I might, and I acknowledge the conditional nature of my being. I was aware of the clarity that having a goal provides. I was suspicious of the form my potential impact on the world could take. I lamented people who couldn’t pair their best ideas with any practical actions.

Do I even remember what I was doing in 2013? 2 years after college I was probably failing at the mobile coffee van and circling the pillow of the loner-in-the-basement status I was about to adopt. A month later I was speaking to the comfort I felt thinking Kristen and I were in the same kind of relationship and I was understood lol. Maybe we were at that point, who knows, I only have one-sided small and garbled snapshots.

It’s easy to get lost. I repeat myself a lot. In going through and scanning some old blogs I’ve like reignited the memory of the “stuck” and anxious place that I fairly-well grounded into the center of my being. 9 years ago? I was in a long-term relationship. I was just starting to do drug studies. I had a lot of ideas and energy to put behind my informal “retire by 30” plan. Was my motivation fundamentally different than it is today? In the greatest sense, no. I still want the same non-physical things. I don’t feel like I have any less “energy” than I did then, it’s just not sporadically involving itself with more than I can reasonably address in any given moment.

I think I feared that if I calmed down, I would start to “settle” and look and sound like all of the people I grew a severe distaste for. The ones who have every excuse not to move to the middle of nowhere and try to get out ahead of our modern fall of civilization. The ones who blow superficial smoke up every ass of interaction because that’s what polite society expects. The ones who just stay silent and suffer indefinitely and live vicariously through comedian commentary or the pleasant pictures whirring by. It was harder to recognize or accept my “alone” status because I was with someone. I wasn’t so far removed from college and there was still a fair amount of people left to drift away. My environment dictated, for as much as I was talking about it.

That I’m where I am in life now, I think speaks to how much I’ve maintained a sense of self and orientation in spite. My capacity, happiness, or direction isn’t fundamentally dictated nor rooted in “you.” I choose friends. I chose to suffer the discrepancies and loss. All these new babies hitting the scene are going to die. You knew that when you got into baby-making mode. They may even die before you, and isn’t that colloquially understood as the worst kind of tragedy? Surely it wasn’t thoughts like those that fed your motivation to have a child. I thought, probably incorrectly, that I envied people who found their deepest sense of purpose and drive to ensure their children grew up and passed those genes on. What a burden to carry if you don’t know why you’re doing it.

You can linguistically reduce all efforts to procreate or proliferate literature to the same nihilistic absurdity. You can ignore that it might just feel good. It doesn’t have to be deep. You may just exist to be personally gratified, at least the conscious part of you, for as long as you can. A kid gets wrapped up in that? All the more collateral damage. I mean, child brides are still a thing, and I don’t know if you know how many kids are molested growing up, but you’re not gonna find a statistic that won’t remind you how woefully under-reported the 25-30% of the known cases are speaking to.

Have you noticed the drift in this blog? How did I get to child molesting? Isn’t this about motivation? As I continue to describe my spite engine as moving me right along, it’s no wonder the sheer amount of atrocity that’s pressed right up against how I conceive of my effort and best conception of the world. To talk of “my motivation” or “spite engine” is just a personal understanding of the marriage and dance at the conflicted ever-changing heart of existence. I think about death constantly, and it makes me want to live a certain way. I still don’t know that the reasoning I apply for my own existence I would use in service to a new child, but I also don’t think early-abortion cells, or any persons, are going to an afterlife.

Motivation feels like a calculation. I want many things at once. I want them in perpetuity. I’ve both experienced intellectually and emotionally the reality and diminishing returns of the mere acquisition. You can’t just make a friend. You have to celebrate, and work with, and evolve together. You can’t just buy things or amass wealth; you have to put them to work. Things like Amazon and SpaceX are incidental giants who need to create giant corners to get backed into like I need to pile up a few dishes and turn 2x4s into adult building blocks.

We’re shaped by these unconscious desires to belong to something “more” and beyond ourselves. The endless irony being, we perpetuate circumstances that keep us isolated, angry, and feeling almost perfectly misunderstood. We keep up the façade that we can’t learn or connect, share in our goals and motivation, by staying silent unless it’s to say something disparaging or superficial. My motivation is inextricably tied to my awareness and the demonstration and repeatability of that awareness. I know I’m going to die not feeling really any more or less happy than I have for the last 9 if not 18 years since I started writing.

I don’t make it a secret that I want you to speak, or that I’m going to. I won’t be surprised if things turn out as bad as those who’ve been paying attention say they will. I won’t lose my motivation to fight or create or move the hell out of the way. There is no illusion about life I need to paint over how I actually feel and think, even if I didn’t “will” every impression I could extract. I will the words. I will the movement. I’m not at the mercy of my chaotic and contradictory heart. I dance with the chaos, and in so doing, create an order that suggests balanced direction. Who could get tired doing that?

[782] Dildo Bars

Let's try something different. Here we're gonna be mildly tipsy, take the first launch-pad thought, and try to get something down before I make a series of poor drunken decisions in going out. No rambling teary-eyed angst fest wondering how my brain decided to capitulate at the zero hour. No lamentation I didn't decide to sleep with someone I wasn't into. No guilt over my propensity to manipulate and smile too big about the absolutely boring nothingness you told me, but are convinced I find fascinating. Oh man, I'm changing the whole game with this one.

 

Anyway. I just watched a man play piano for elephants. One of the captions said, “They say elephants never forget, maybe they'll remember Paul forever!” Or something close. Forever. What an idea. What a persistently reassuring thing. Forever you'll reside in heaven. Forever your impact will be felt by those who come after you. Forever the universe undulates and resets because, as you're certainly well aware, “nothingness” is too unstable, and after enough quantum fluctuations, something akin to everything we've ever known is not just inevitable, but infinitely so.

 

Shooting for the idea of “forever” I don't think is necessarily bad. The day your baby is going to die is not what's on the mind of parents. Underwritten is the expectation that humans will colonize the stars, or at the very least they'll have that same kind of bitchin party you once called the greatest night of your life. Selfish genes be damned! If forever wasn't a thing, I wouldn't be made to suffer the infinite hole of my perspective, if my solipsistic argument would be sufficient alone.

 

But on to better things. Are there? You can really feel the arbitrary free-form to this bullshit tonight, no? I'm trying incredibly hard to have the basement division of my subconscious brain persuade me that “hefty” middle-class wife/life is as good or equal to the kind of Bezos-adjacent (I'm in no way as moral as I suspect Elon's Asperger's compels him) kind of life. I was seriously entertaining the idea of being a slumlord-esc person the other day. Whether it's attract poor people to the land I already own, or invest in other properties and put up affordable, hard to destroy green-based things elsewhere.

 

Think, I'm still bitching, but I'm bitching about more and more minute things. My air conditioning isn't set up! Well, the whole house is, and it's paid for, and so is the land, and everything I need less maybe a water pump. I'm down to the particulars. When I had the coffee shop, it's analogous to complaining about not having 15 varieties of tea instead of 3. My first-world ass is showing. I'm finding myself moved to want to make that happen in a big way at the expense of people I have no respect for. It's not money=value in some strict fashion. But I'm ever-more convinced the world looks the way it does because there are people who actually embody the kind of people depicted in places like Atlas Shrugged, and those who do everything in their power to absolve themselves or attempt to hijack the work. My work is bordering on making me insufferably smug.

 

I don't fear repercussions. That is, I know how to navigate the world at large, and get that people can hit back, and know there are laws and whatnot. But I don't think there's a kind of “cosmic comeuppance.” I don't believe in Karma. I don't think anyone gives a shit or there's any manifestation of consciousness that could accurately do the math, let alone long enough to ensure the result was an accurate one. So, I'm tempted to pursue those kind amoral rich cliches. You know what happens when DCS shows up to your bed bug house? We foot the thousand dollar bill for your slumlord. Go us! And we didn't even fix the problem because they exist in more places than your house alone.

 

I know you can't get crazy with it. I don't even want to get crazy with it. But I want white people entitled reparations. I want the kind of life I was “promised” or envisioned for myself. I want all the lost time between when I was 20 and now that I could have shaken my youthful ass and went about whoring that didn't have to be coupled with a mature and measured tone of my “adult” 30 year-old self. It sucks knowing better! I want to be an idiot and confident in that, or at least, I want to take what I couldn't squeeze out of it from somewhere else. This is a horrid thing, don't get it twisted. You shouldn't behave this way, nor should I. I just, I don't know, don't really care. Or, if I care a little, I can feel it slipping.

 

The only reason why it would is from a misguided sense of pride and ego as well. There is no respectable “individual” without one, I'm sorely convinced. The “damage” left to account by your God I imagine. The idea that I would unlock that kind of “cheat code” freedom to explore those darker exploitative corners is really dawning on me. Who's going to stop me? Haven't I, in my own long-form convoluted way, been begging you to?

 

Lol, this is goofy and long enough. I'm gonna finish these beers, take a few shots, and find a way to the bars for a series of ridiculous and dumb conversations, and I'm not even going to sabotage myself if there's a decent-enough honey who's trying to mack. And 90% of the reason I framed it that way is the smirk it caused on my face. Peace, ninjas.

[769] Holier-Than-Thou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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