[1093] Doom Forecasting

I'm confused again. I can string together a series of arguments or read a few books that provide reasonable explanations. I can look inside myself and explore how I arrive at "irrational" conclusions. It doesn't terminate into a sense of being that I can sit with and resolve. I'll start with the political climate.

I can't really understand a bigger difference between Trump and anything else you wish to state about a corrupted democrat or imperfect and failing democratic system.

I understand disillusionment. I understand being mis or deliberately ill-informed. I understand outrage, anger, and resentment. I understand tribalism. I understand "fuck it." I understand the desire to destroy. I understand the quiet desperation of being punished for your values or when you muster up the courage to advocate for yourself. I understand the exhaustion of working endlessly and feeling like I'm getting nowhere. I understand trauma. I understand the difficulties in translating or marketing a message. I understand the frustration of feeling stuck, targeted, and undermined. I understand being betrayed, isolated, and ridiculed or gossipped about. I understand being ignorantly proud and brazen and certain. I understand wanting to hurt yourself and the exhilaration that can come from doing so.

I don't understand persistently, and forthrightly, declaring moral bankruptcy.

I understand respecting certain cultural differences. I understand the differing relative weight the connotative impact of words can have. I understand the superficial contradictions of seemingly in-conflict value judgements. I understand the myopic subjectivity of preferences. I understand the in-built genetic predictable brain differences. I understand the myriad reasons one might be ambivalent about death, their own or anyone else's. I understand how pride manifests in who or where you came from.

I do not understand persistent personal denial.

I understand the "utility" or "pragmatism" of suppressing the truth broadly. I understand a pull or inclination to leave out details. I understand being plagued by a guilty conscience. I understand feeling like you don't have a choice. I understand feeling obligated to one thing at the expense of everything else. I understand how fragile an understanding of ourselves can be. I understand how compelling a desire to fit in or belong is. I understand the catastrophes that have been brought by "good intentions."

My head is a flutter. I've read an opinion article trying to explain to the "youth, who definitely read The New York Times, that allowing for a second Trump presidency is cutting off your nose to spite your face. I'm watching "Top Boy" where the values of gang members are tossed about as loosely as the cash they can never get enough of or the dramatic scenarios that never offer peace. I'm working against a poor-sleep-posture-induced headache.

For the infinite amount of things I don't know, I am "saved" by a relatively small series of questions and practices routinely. I don't need to know precisely how or whether I would murder my problems away when watching gangster fiction. I do need to know how to examine myself were I to end up in that situation. I'm perfectly capable of murder, and there's certainly people I feel, in the right circumstances, I'd feel incredibly great about getting the chance to do so. Big but, that's, in no way, representative of my value system. It doesn't represent what makes me feel good over time when I imagine myself having done so. I want a world where no one is getting murdered.

Snap back into the, allegedly, "political," environment. Millions of people think abortion is tantamount to murder. Millions of people are concurrently perfectly content to explicitly ignore how to define "murder," "abortion," "fetus," or "rights" as they pertain to women or children born to those who don't want or can't handle them.

I think there's no bigger moral behavior that you can engage in at this moment. You either define the words and share a perspective, or you break the foundation of understanding anything. Words have to matter. Definitions have to be true and reliable between beings that perceive and share the world. We, literally, all die if that can't prove to be true the vast majority of the time.

Every single thing you can ever talk about operates this way, or it doesn't really operate at all. If you refuse to define "child welfare," you'll lie to a judge and steal someone's baby. If you're in charge of oversight of that person and you forget to define "trust" or what constitutes "oversight" altogether, you'll find yourself complicit in behavior that no sober-minded reasonable person would accept from themselves or others.

It starts with the definition. If the definition isn't clear, you can't act in defined ways. Any temptation to smuggle bad behavior into how you operate can be entertained indefinitely. This is one of the most utilized ways I can tell immediately who is or isn't full of shit. You either are driving towards trying to better account, define, and find the angle your behavior is contributing to a situation, or you move away, keep things obscure, blame, and provide excuses.

I get panicky when I can't define something. That doesn't make me what to double-down and experience compounded panicked feelings. I said above that I don't understand persistent personal denial. If I'm feeling panic or my stomach drops, there's no pretending otherwise. I have to engage it, or it takes over my system. As a kid, I didn't feel I had this choice to engage or suffer. I'm not a kid. I'm a 35 year old man. It's not a "new" feeling. It's not your fault when I feel it. Whether or not I want to label it "irrational" or "justified" or "confusing" or "complicated" is up to me. Whatever series of definitions I choose, what's important is that I choose them.

I may never be able to define something. I can always define something "well-enough" to apply a behavior. Even if that behavior is abstending or stopping. I don't think there will ever be enough words written to capture the economy of cultural psychosis that portends self-destruction. I do know we have a robust history on different scales of how destruction plays out. I can create a framework of those demonstrations and choose to behave like that, or not. I can acknowledge there's a robust history or not! That's part of my moral system. I allow relevant basins of information into how I form an idea of how I should behave.

I think the word "evolution" is used so routinely and inappropriately we've forgotten that we are merely "best-suited," not "actually the best." We're playing dress up with values we don't know or don't care how to demonstrate. We claim we want "equality" as we attack comedians for making light of how genuine bigots or terrible ideas and forces of evil keep us apart. We claim we want "freedom," but refrain from the conversation about the consequences of exercising it irresponsibly. If you've "evolved," like an Ayann Hirsi Ali, who's so exhausted and afraid of defending a universal moral value that you give up and accept merely what makes you feel better, you've suited yourself to an intellectually-deficient value system governed by mob-rules and propaganda.

I don't understand not wanting to get better.

I understand complacency. I understand feeling lazy, sick, or tired. I understand being distracted or resource deficient. I understand not recognizing or respecting the roads offered to "better." I understand the difficulty, at least initially, in defining "better." I understand how hard it might be to believe someone you're engaging even cares to do or get better. I understand self-sabotage. I understand low self-confidence or self-esteem. I understand the pitfalls of extremely context-specific advice.

I spent years "debating" and "persuading" religion vs science. That framing, now "obvious" to me is miserable, incomplete, and inadequate. It took me years to figure that out. I "sincerely believed" I was "helping" or "working" to "change things for the better" in the broadest cultural zeitgeist conception as I needed to excuse my behavior. My behavior was to engage reading, lectures, and online pissing matches obsessively. I persuaded no one. I "won" nothing. All of the information I used to recall like a robot with a bad itch to refute is barely remembered, now a stack of dusty books I haven't opened for 15 years.

It happened interpersonally as well with my "best friend." Honestly, the moment he first said that to me I got suspicious, because we weren't the kind of friends who got into the hokey bullshit. He could abstract-out his behavior towards a "best friend" in a way that were he to contend with the real basis and dynamic of our friendship, would have suggested we needed to part ways sooner. His growing capacity for laziness and lies resulted in escalating damage to my time, bank account, and eventually personal safety. I kept showing up, trying, speaking to how I was getting fucked, and believing the foundation was there. There's no "right" amount of time or rope you're supposed to give someone to still hang you, but your decision-making can still take place while there's oxygen left going to your brain.

I want to do better than friends that exploit me. I want to do better than friends that don't talk to me or invite me to things. I want to do better than "family" that financially and emotionally undermine me. I want to do better than scream at ideologically possesed animal-look-alikes genuinely considering themselves to be upstanding moral and righteous humans. I said earlier that I don't understand persistently, and forthrightly, declaring moral bankruptcy. It's morally bankrupt to lie to yourself.

There's not a single example from my life in which outright bad or remotely questionable behavior I can't acknowledge, speak to, articulate my perspective, and accept that someone else's was different, even if I don't agree with their conclusion or word choices. My ex-friend's kid pulled a gun on me. I triggered the kid after yelling to slow down from 130 MPH after hours of appealing to my friend to take over driving and getting ignored. When the cops call asking if the kid pulled a gun, the answer is yes. Then you tell them you think it was an airsoft gun - one of those extremely realistic high-powered ones, and that the kid has access to real guns with his wanna-be gangster cohort, and that the kid has pulled real guns on people in the past - not ignore the call.

Like any idealogue, they don't want to do better, they want to feel better. Better in the moment. Better about shirking responsibility. Better about keeping things blurry. Better insofar as they mash it into a box called "justified." They want to feel "just." How many times do you hear, "Well I just wanted!…" "I was just trying…" "I just don't understand!"…"You just seem" It's linguistically fluid to seek and adopt justification and reduce detailed complexity into liquid "justice." You don't have to engage someone's actual argument or perspective when you can caricature them as acting the same as you, from a righteously-indignant hole of self-justified emotion. I know you are, but what am I?

I don't really know how to define my current moment, in a manner of speaking. It's part of why the panic sets in "randomly" and I must write if I'm going to get my head and gut back. I'm in debt, unless you weigh my total assets against it. I have a company, provided you respect my handful of clients over 2 years and thousands I've spent trying to get it established in a more self-perpetuating way. I have land that I occupy or do anything on maybe 10% of, increasingly occasionally given the endless rain or cold. I think I need a job, but not enough to take one just because it's hiring. I don't regularly see in person, literally anyone, in my life if "regularly" might be constituted as even once a month.

I'm adrift and alone and that's not your fault. It's not an invitation to myself to get spiteful and judgemental given all my so-called dreams or desires unrealized. There's as much to say about my deliberate decision making as there is the cultural context I'm operating within. I can ask an infinite series of unanswerable questions and set myself up for failure about how to think about my circumstances or potential. Instead, writing is my first, ongoing, pass at defining my perception of those things. It's incomplete. I've succeeded when I feel better, not having denied or downplayed that I had the feeling. It doesn't dictate the future nor justify lashing out in continued panic, insisting you accept my behavior as a "different opinion" on how we should engage the world and our feelings.

I never deny the potential. I can be the worst or best, so can you. My circumstances can change dramatically in an instant, and so can yours. I think this obligates me to practice whatever I can to squeeze as much predictable and consistent well-being as I can from my environment. My messy, ridiculous, irrational, superficially contradictory, deadly, gracefully limited yet infinitely iterative environment.

I don't understand how you can grasp that sensibility for even a moment and ever choose to return to a time when you didn't.

[749] Unjust Hearing

This is just going to be one of those nit-picking blogs about what I consider lazy word choice. A response to one of my statuses from a new acquaintance has stuck with me, and I want to stop thinking about it. You should be bored already, this is one of those “extra for me” kind of digressions.

Certain phrases come up that seem to immediately betray what's been said. In this instance, it's the tag “just saying.” It usually comes after someone thinks they've made a kind of colloquial truth point or mom-esc “told ya so” notion. It's really a very weird thing to employ because it seems to try and do so much contradictory work at once.

Consider, aren't we all, always, just saying? I'm just writing. But, of course I'm not. I'm scratching an obsessive compulsive mind's itch. I'm disagreeing. I'm “arguing” and picking apart. I'm reflecting. I'm hoping to convey a message that I'll understand now and into the future, and hey, maybe someone will gain an ounce of utility from. “Just saying” seems to desire to be let off the hook for all of that.

Surely one should respect what they say, no? Often there's an intention? I'm not saying the average cliché adopter and pleasant appeaser are mindless without their throwaway safe sentiments, but would they deny they had a goal in mind when they employed them? “Oh, you know, life's not fair!” Depending on the tone either trying to make light and or silence someone from carrying on. “Can't we all just get along?” Everyone's smart enough to know the question wasn't really asked, but the desire for a quelling of hostilities is there. How dumb would it sound to put “just saying” after something like a common cliché or aphorism? “You can't judge a book by its cover, just saying.” “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, just saying.”

Just saying is meant to downplay. It's kind of attempting to avoid a perhaps biting tone you actually feel. Just saying protects you from your angrier-than-you'd-let-on self. You've no need to skirt past something in the examples above, they exist to do a certain amount of work for you already. “Just saying” becomes misplaced and inane redundancy.

Yet, I think it goes deeper.

If you take a particularly “deep” or philosophical approach to the nature and power of words, you get an added layer of drama. You said something! That's something of a miracle. You put your voice into the mix and tried to build something or tear down something else. You entered the war of words and ideas. Was what you said “just?” The very nature of speech at this level is divine, so what's left to be said about it is whether it was divine fuckery or divinity worthy of worship and emulation. Of course, not a single person in a regular reasonable discourse is engaging this way, but again, this is for me.

My answer is almost always and certainly “no.” When you use “just saying,” I think you betray yourself. I think what you wanted to say, and what came out, don't match, so you don't give the person you were “just saying” to the respect to “just hear” what it is you actually wanted to say. In the example that was used towards me, I immediately thought of a dozen ways to “fight” the particular point raised that was just being said, but the human in me wisely figured out it wasn't worth it, and lazy or ill-conceived retorts can be dealt with, well, later (now) without necessarily implicating or breeding bad blood. (He said pretending no one's ever told him “NO ONE WANTS TO BE A BLOG!”)

It occurred to me that I have practiced, so hard, being sensitive to words and ideas coming from me that are ridiculously suspect and bullshit, that my normalized radar is set to reflexively and viciously attack any degree of bullshit I catch a whiff of. I write things as a series of individual sentences I could more or less defend, maybe not so much drunk, but way more often than not. I speak from that quasi-indignant gutterally honest place, particularly when I'm not primed to be pseudo-professional about something. As a result, insincerity, lazy catch-alls or throwaways, or general placations of a moment I've no real patience for. If you disagree with me, strongly disagree with me, and then be willing to get lost in the woods. If you don't, which usually it's a measure of either not really disagreeing and speaking too quickly, or it's not really caring and pretending you did, then I look significantly less like a pedantic dick, and more like someone who has a problem in which you've contended with his method of best coping.

But, after all, I'm only just saying these things. Who's to say if I believe them, or if they reflect a degree of emotion or lack thereof. Why did I bother? My mind was just saying some formulation of these words to me endlessly for the last day or two. Can't we just dismiss this all since it was just said and had no other impact or reason to respect there was a mind suggesting intentionality? We can all offer one or dozen things we may or may not believe in and walk away nonchalantly because where does it all go anyway and words are just weird.

Really, I'm just saying.