[1112] The River

There's a theme from Star Trek, Buffy, and Angel that is sticking out to me. The whole crew is under a spell, and maybe one character isn't affected or is the first to see that something is off. Because it's TV, that character devines a way to gain allies, break the spell, and explain the anomaly. No matter how many times it happens, whether the arc is resolved in a single episode or over several, no one ever seems to remember that this precise thing has happened before. They can't seem to build it into their wisdom banks and offer it as a first hypothesis about what's happening this time. They don't build systems or protocols that anticipate it happening again.

Exploring that narrative arc or the pitfalls in the people afterwards feels like it could be its own short-story. I think part of the reason it's sounding bells in my head is with each "random" or "lazy" response I get to my reflections about my nonprofit efforts. My blog auto-posts to reddit as I must be something of a curious and lightly masochistic beast. Invariably, there's someone who says one of the handful of same things over again. "You sound manic." (or other armchair diagnosis) "I didn't read all of that." "I don't know what to say, but here's a lot of words anyway."

It's instinctively dismissive, reductive, condescending - - the internet. But also, it's the same attitudes I encounter in social work. The people who beg for court intervention or involuntary confinement are the ones who adopt the same attitude about their perspective and behavior. They occupy a "safe" or familiar and protected universe where their actions and words make a certain kind of sense to them, and in fact their whole crew, and you're the only one who has a problem with them. The elixir, unfortunately, often came in a compellingly-worded appeal letter to the judge and sometimes years of involuntary therapy before we could put a child back in your custody. For some, the spell is absolute, and they fuck up large enough to stay incarcerated or lose their parental rights altogether.

As with everything, there's a spectrum. We're all under different spells and happy to reinforce them well past a healthy point. I've read the Vulture article on Joss Whedon which discusses the power of fandom. Joss is a person, complicated, "good" and "bad," and not everything he's done in 57 years is perfectly respectable, mature, or with a deep appreciation for his experiences that drive his behavior. If you're wearing a "Joss Whedon is my God" T-shirt, you're likely going to find every excuse one does for any god to dismiss or situate their divine behavior.

One thing that never works against the spell is to just call it out. That, by itself, doesn't understand the nature of spells. It's to create a wholly different world of meaning from whatever you might say about a truly universal or objective and "mathematical" conception of existence. If you talk normally, and the rest of the cast can only understand you through song, "You're all singing, and it's crazy," literally doesn't translate. It can't be interpreted anymore than white noise. Moreover, when you're talking about spells people adopt in the real world, they have a deeply invested interest in denying there's anything else to be said or learned. Every pissed off democrat decrying republican "hypocrisy" has no conception of the nature of the problem or the irony. Neither lens on the world can even imagine what a "crack" is.

Writing is me calling things out. It's received predictably and I don't expect that to ever change. I call things out that I need to better understand as "cracks" on my lens into the world or spells we're all under. I want to know what I can build into my anticipatory framework. If I think I see the same kind of meme too often, the same kind of show, hear the same punditry and propaganda, hear the same excuses, or silence, or not-so pleasantries I want to know if there's a way to navigate it so I don't suffer in ways I don't have to. I'm going to suffer, as anyone who's read one of my "manic-sounding" posts delights in pointing out, but the nature of it is intentional and incidental more than wanton or irreconcilable.

I don't know all the spells. I don't come from a place that presumes to intimately understand how compelling every narrative can be or the infinitely intricate ways it can be weaved together to preclude action or change. I just know there are spells. I know their nature. I know some of their patterns. I can't figure those patterns out "just thinking" in anxiety circles. There's no actual bell that rings once you've used a cliche enough times to constitute literally not thinking or maliciously antagonizing.

If I had to point to one culturally-compelling spell, it's denial. I think I'm the millionth person to speak to it, but there's an infinite list of things one could wish to deny in any given moment of their life. It's a sublingual instinct, "NO!" to keep yourself "safe" and "comfortable." If you experience revulsion or disgust, you've got a millions-of-years instinctual legacy to respect that or follow-up mechanisms for weaponizing it. We deny our capacity and potential more than anything.

When I first started writing, you would not have "persuaded" me that I would be doing it for 20 years. I didn't have the tools or the language to discuss the utility of writing. I was dismissive and judgmental to my own writing, let alone if I would have been presented to anyone else's. I was under spells of immaturity, hatred, desperation and loneliness. I was at the mercy of the cultural norms I grew up in. I had no concept that I could even have my own words or perspective and understanding of a situation. I could only suffer everything I didn't know or the rules I took for granted.

I knew I needed something "more," but I had no idea what that looked like. I think it's precisely here that people "find god" or "get spiritual," because the cracks amass, and you're alone, and you're incoherent, but you still crave the certainty and "perfection" of your perception that your doubts betrayed. I didn't become "autistically obsessed" with reading about religion or scientific refutations of religious arguments unless I was fighting against an all-encompassing, and wrong, series of notions about myself. Notions pertaining to the girl I liked too much and the assumptions about my inevitable future given my academic performance, looks, or demeanor.

What did I really need more of? Meaning. I needed things to make sense. I needed to see a consistent cause and effect relationship that helped me keep my mood and behavior oriented. I didn't understand the depth of the crazy-making contradictions of the sea of nonsense words I was swimming in. I didn't understand how we break ourselves along the rocks of generational trauma and unarticulated responsibilities. I had no idea what my role or "purpose" could or should be, let alone the notion that I'd have to dictate it, and do it persistently, alone, in evolving ways, or it didn't really exist. That's a fucking huge undertaking.

If I connect with anyone, ever, it's because piece by piece, over decades, I'm trying to puzzle together the nature of these stories we're telling ourselves and needlessly suffering. Are you really an "addict?" Is your "loving" relationship serving you? Are you "just saying" a series of empty or hateful epithets you can't even recognize as such? It's always yes and no, and it's always changing, and it only gets better when you can label the spell with your own words and trust that when you say them you mean them. You were the cause, and you expect a certain effect. If you're not getting the effect you desire, you have the power to recite a new spell, stop casting them altogether, or look for the intended effect to take place elsewhere.

If you fundamentally deny your potential and power of your words, so it follows the story of your actions. You don't understand the harm. You don't understand the conditioning it takes to carry out the meaningful work to maintain or improve. This is as real to me as it is the physical exhaustion I do or don't feel in attempting to work on projects on my land. Week 4 of hauling scrap, fence building, or rock dispersal feels dramatically different than days 1 or 2. It's easy to describe any task as fairly simple or straight-forward, until the weather isn't perfect, or the tool breaks, or you get sick, or literally any reason, or excuse, arrives for you to deny what it's going to take to get the job done.

Your posture matters. You need to demonstrate for yourself in a consistent way that walking "like that" is going to cause spine issues. Using the wrong tool is going to get you hurt. Making the same appeal to the same people in the same way and only finding yourself resentful and exhausted is a you problem. You're caught under the spell singing a very personal song only you can hear and the rest of the world thinks you look crazy. Can you even wake up from your own spell? Can you resist the urge, redirect the craving, to join someone else's? Yes and no. Can you exercise the process and language to identify and dispel versus deny regardless? Yes.

Welcome to the work. Each time you affirm and say "yes" you inch in a chosen direction more than you suffer one you didn't. Yes, I can. Yes, that may be true. Yes, there's a road to explore here. Yes, I grant that is your perspective and yes I hope we can both respect the limits and potential of perspectives.

"I am whatever you say I am. If I wasn't, then why would I say I am?"

[756] Positivity Doctrine

I think this can be more of a “for the record” kind of reiteration and blurb.

Once again, someone who does not know me and can't help but hear me has used the “n” word about me. (This being the disembodied voice of whomever sits next to Byron's cubicle.) I said some disparaging thing about a piece of shit person doing a piece of shit thing, and the party line was recited. “Think positive! Positivity!” I learned later that she expressed to Byron that my words signaled a red flag for whether or not I would survive in a job like that given the nature of the work and “if he doesn't care” about the people. Byron laughed it off, reassured her he's known me for 20 years, and that my outside gruff exterior is probably just some form of coping mechanism not to be taken too seriously.

Clearly, I still have someone not exhausted yet at the prospect of defending me, but her concern raised a different angle to the question of my “negativity.” She was worried I didn't care. For her, the words mattered more than anything I might accomplish or how I actually feel. There's similarities to how it's usually deployed, but at least this one was literally thinking of the children lol.

I'm learning that the “most negative actually most positive” method of approach to the world is utterly wasted on people at large. Little did she know or care that the person she was talking to, and his supervisor, and the people in our little pod, are all cut from the same cloth. Me, slow to office politics, didn't realize there's a special corner and offices for general comments and sentiments like mine.

The larger giant and most important point remains the same. Whatever I say, and damn knows I can constantly and annoyingly continue to say it, both in spite and celebration of things you never want to talk about, my DOING and general life circumstances are still regal. Have you forgotten I spent a good portion of my time after college sleeping and waking up whenever I wanted? That's as magnificent as cats have it. You know I'm still on the trajectory to having a jokingly small conception of “bills?” I'm too fat. I'm typing this on a big screen from a custom computer loaded with 6 hard drives and plugged into an external power supply just in case I need an extra hour or so if the power goes out. Opulence doesn't begin to describe it.

And every day now I get to interact with people who have roaches, smell weird, struggle to take care of kids, and get put through a system that maybe evenly splits the ones it might help verses exploit. Can you have that much sympathy when my extraneous stuff I've left in a moving van for almost 2 years in a field goes missing? It's immoral and makes you feel vulnerable, but then now aren't I more in line with the general circumstances of the world? Do any of my, often mocked and poorly regarded “problems” ever make the radar? The pants buttons on both of my dress pants popping off? The hassle of returning things to Amazon? My new shoes getting stained? My shampoo running out without time to get more at my hotel?

Nothing, never, that I do will be less than an incredibly rich person making a series of gambles on how he can make even bigger bets and investments. My parents commute/d an hour or more to work every day, and they didn't come back to their paid-off home. When I can actually start stockpiling and investing again, every cent that helped me I'll be able to start turning back out in repaying or whatever else. Mostly, I'll get to celebrate the perspective that taught me I could do a fuck ton beyond merely survive with $500 to $2000 if I did the math and stayed realistic about what life did or didn't owe me.

I don't know man, the prospect of the next economic crash and knowing that I'd have a hard time fucking up my circumstances even if I tried just has me excited. I wish more people could be a part of it. I guess they're too busy being positive and living their best lives.

[540] Things We Never Had

I have an increasing problem with language. The more I hear it, the more I just get frustrated or downright angry. For much of my life, I never really thought words mattered. I had a very simple view that a word won’t punch you in the face or shoot you. Needless to say, I was unfamiliar with neuroscience at the time. Your body can respond as if it’s experiencing physical pain. Words can scar you. Words can swallow you up in depression or make you burst with rage.

But at least when that happens you have something clear to work with. A pissed off person is to be restrained or ran from, or perhaps politely engaged with. A depressed person needs pills or to attempt therapy. What we don’t pay attention to is when words make us sick, but we don’t really feel sick. We don’t feel different at all. In fact, the more you try to point to the words that are responsible for the sickness, people think you’re the sick one.

We take talking and language for granted. Whether a word is male or female or “rooted” in another language. We don’t struggle with every syllable like it didn’t start as a bark or a scream trying to convey something from more primordial times. We assume the meaning is built in. We act like when I say “car,” the mental picture is the same across the board. It’s innocent enough, as in, who cares if you pictured a Hot Wheels toy or a Nascar racer, we can clarify with a few more questions or specific words.

Humans have more unidentifiable experiences and feelings though. They have complex relationships and institutions. Words that once had meaning float away or become something entirely different, and new ones pop into existence seemingly daily. And we don’t even notice. I’d put money on the idea that someone’s said something akin to “I took this selfie in 1995 before smart phones.”

It’s how we arrived at the all-encompassing nature of the word “love.” It’s why people have an impossible time finding the “truth.” It’s the struggle behind your relationship with “friends” and “family.” Most, in service to trying to feel “normal,” see no point in searching for a kind of excruciating exactness. “My mom’s my mom and I love her! That’s the truth!” And you’re hard-pressed to disagree, even if the person making the claim doesn’t know why or care to learn why they’re wrong.

I think a lot about this when I consider my relationships. I don’t believe my ex feels any real guilt that isn’t masked in a language of relief. The stakes weren’t as high for her. I don’t think she even grasped the nature of the problem. In the handful of things she was willing to type out and explain to me, you can see the contradictions written sometimes in the next sentence claiming something different. It’s not that her explanation doesn’t make a certain kind of sense in “normal” or “everyday” terms, but I would describe it as missing a soul. I think there’s more to be said about the lines, “I don’t believe we started off as friends. At least not honest friends,” and “I think the lying stemmed from a true desire to see you happy” than there’s time for here.

Consider planting a tree you don’t want. You hate this tree. You hate the idea of trees. Yet every day you water it. You watch it get taller and taller. Its roots start to crack your foundation. Its leaves clog your gutters. It attracts animals and bugs you’re constantly swiping at. You buy expensive equipment trying to blow them away and make repairs. Then your neighbor comes over and proclaims how hard you work and praises you for your dedication to taking care of your property. You look up, angry and exhausted and scream, “I wish that damn thing had never been planted to begin with!”

The “logic” of property maintenance requires the expensive tools and hours in the sun. You need trash bags and allergy medication. You need new gutters and a new foundation. But you hate trees, and you planted one anyway? But wait, you may think to yourself, trees are good! Trees help ecosystems. Trees suck up carbon. I like apples! Perfectly fair and valid points, just in an entirely different discussion. The root of your problem remains unaddressed.

This is why I write and ask people to pay attention. This is why I find it so weird that people are threatened by my mere descriptions of aesthetic things that are causing them a mindgasm. It’s why I urge you to run from judgmental language because it’s a hearty signifier that you probably have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Our judgments are fundamentally corrupted, and if we attempt to base our feelings on them, we’re throwing food at a wall trying to assemble an emotional meal from whatever sticks.

Why am I so “defensive” or “difficult” to talk to? Why is it so “exhausting” to answer my questions? I don’t feel responsible for the lies you’ve told me. I don’t accept the idea that my perspective is “less magical” or “normal” or “worthwhile” just because I call a mountain a mountain and you’ll cry or cum if you stare at it too long. That doesn’t make me angry at you or resent you. I climbed the stupid thing because I wanted to be around the people doing what they enjoy. It seems practically inhumane to ignore that motivation for the sake of a mound of dirt.

It speaks to why I don’t regret getting into a relationship as well. What if I had sacrificed myself, like I was prepared to in high school? What if I stopped partying and said “I believe!” when it only felt like torture? What if I hadn’t done all the work to really discover who I was and what was important or what I was willing to do? Because that’s all you really have at the end of the day. Trying to be true to yourself.

If I may borrow a phrase from a movie I just watched (even if I don’t believe in love), “The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” You can of course get half of the lesson right if others find themselves incapable or unwilling to acknowledge what’s worth loving about you. Your tokens can still represent true feelings. (I find it curious they’ve all been left behind.) You don’t have to adopt the same complacent exhaustion or judgment that denigrates the other person.

To be honest, I thought I’d feel more dramatic lol. But once I heard the foundation was a lie, I went out like a light. I was relieved. I could stop believing. I know how to treat liars, or, basically every person and “friend” I’ve ever met. Keep them at arm's distance. Maybe get something out of them. Play along and lie back as earnestly as they’re asking you to do so. Finally! Some direction.

Now I’m hung up on the “trying to be true to yourself” line. Because it’s the default language that people employ when trying to justify their behavior. I need to be more specific. Be true to what you’ve worked to discover. Be true to things you place higher on the shelf than the pit in your stomach. I felt nothing but excited and proud when she hooked up with girls. I felt absolutely terrible the first time my ex slept with a dude that wasn’t me. As compared to the 15 or so girls I’d been with since we were together. That means I’m a culturally programmed romantic sexist who literally embodied a painful hypocritical double-standard, not that there’s something wrong with sex and attraction or paying attention to history, human psychology, and animal behavior.

Important reminder, I didn’t blame her for my feelings. I didn’t think she was trying to hurt me. I believe she would have stayed home if I asked her to. She didn’t punch me in the gut. I put my trust in our life together and a spirit of sharing and honesty. Oops. And even still, if I may borrow a line from a song that I find spectacular, “Indiscretion is a blessing if you know how the truth is told.” Truth is told one line at a time. It’s every moment, and every word that captures where you’re at in time and spirit. That moment competes for the truth as it is against the truth that you’re desperate to justify. And while it’s extremely hard, if not sometimes impossible, to tell the degree and nature of how we’re lying to ourselves, I’ll catch you every time when you try to lie about me.

I’ll never blame anyone for feeling confused, angry, or hurt. It happens, it sucks, and it betrays our best conception of ourselves. But don’t blame me for you not recognizing what I find beautiful. Don’t tell me what I do and don’t see. Don’t allow yourself a second of pretending to know what I think if you’re unwilling to ask, and don’t tell me to respect your feelings when your misused words insulate you from experiencing mine. I chose trust when I wasn’t trusted. I chose ideals over butterflies. I choose friends even when I don’t believe they can see me. I choose writing to fighting, be it with myself, or you...mostly.

I think the only thing that brings people together or makes someone “right” for someone else is the decision to say so. Make no mistake, when you’re lying to someone, you haven’t chosen them. You’re not concerned with their happiness. You’re not in love. You shouldn’t trust what you’re finding beautiful. You’re not sacrificing anything anymore than Jesus did. The reality of your hard-sold godly standards will rise again until you can recognize them for the empty fairy tales of self-indulgence they are. And you’ll hurt a lot of people along the way. And at least if you’ve caught this and paid attention, we’ll both know it’s no longer innocent.

[417] Talk Down To Me

I'm plagued by a thought that the whole of existence rests on contradiction. Alone, this sentence sounds ridiculous and I'm hopefully going to make it less so as I carry on.

The image that comes to mind is Oprah.If her face doesn't exist somewhere on a brand of tampons, I'd be surprised. She's a wave of influence about really almost anything.But she's a kind of bat shit. Because she's doing what she's doing in the name of charity or happiness though, the people who ended up screwed on their taxes by claiming their “free” car stories are generally ignored.

It's' a a language of wide-eyed wonder and motivation that tends to placate what's actually happening. I never see the kind of enthusiasm and push genuinely without this shiny veneer. A beautiful new city gets built on the backs of slaves. A fervent political movement seeks to “protect our values” and “promises it's not racist.” A handicapped baby is god's plan to teach me patience and understanding.

I just read an old piece of mine echoing George Carlin sentiments. Carlin will never be Oprah. He can be insanely more reliable and correct than Oprah could dream of, but he won't take on godlike status outside of the cynical comic culture. Hell, it was Robin Williams who took on the larger than life position, and maybe take a moment to think about what we did to that conversation.

It makes me immediately turned off to things that are “flowery,”“metaphysical,” “cheesy analogy about awareness, being awake,or how goddamn beautiful and exciting everything is.” It seems like such a deliberate act. And yet never will you find more energy and praise than when it's done at full throttle. It's a religious energy.“Righteousness” justified, even if it's only done so by tricking your perception.

You can state the facts of our complicated existence and it can still never be magic. I'm more water than meat, more space than water, more bacteria than human cells, and have had experiences I may never find the right words to (on or off acid). But because you're not speaking about what people want to believe you're never going garner the same kind of support. We “hoped”for “change” with Obama, but we weren't specific about what things were supposed to change into. Don't read too far into some political ideology. The point is the language and preying on perception verses reality.

Maybe it's “forbidden love.” Boundless, all-forgiving, let alone so consequentially obvious! Yet speaking to every level of drama and strife that often stand as some of the worst experiences in your life. Calling it a naive endorphin rush is no fun.

I'm fairly tired of hippie guru bullshitters trying to intellectualize via not-that-modern metaphysics or beautify steaming piles of shit. I don't consider the exercise worthwhile, honest, or helpful. And the idea that it's only after people “meditate” and “reflect” on those “lessons” and “truth” from hence springing motivation and enlightenment is sickening.

[389] Pivot

To even construct a sentence is something of a wonder.

Every adjective, noun, and verb have some relative connotation. Your mind condenses the whole of your experiences into a workable function. Be it the voice in your head or the directions to act, conveying messages is as taken for granted as breathing.

We get to layer our labels! I didn't just tell you something, I declared it. You weren't asking me something, you accused me. Is it any wonder conversations either have to be simple and polite or immediately turn into fights?

I think it's a good habit of communication to avoid and disavow ambiguous language. Granted, inevitably you're going to be talking about something you don't quite understand and haven't found the words for, but there are ways to make that conversation go from being difficult to impossible.

Take the word “soul.” You can find any number of books or websites that advocate for your soul. They'll tell you how to make your soul fulfilled or why your soul is incomplete. They'll say your soul is damaged or it can be saved. I, for one, have no idea what a soul is, even if I'd like to believe I know what they're getting at.

I'd rather empower words that are supposed to mean the same thing. What if we stopped using “soul” and started using all the words that comprise it like “personality,” “well-being,” and sense of “happiness.” That brings it back to Earth. You can adjust your personality or recognize traits of your personality while your ever-ephemeral soul slips past. You can make your happiness about your next meal or making someone smile. You can tie your well-being to actions that keep you healthy.

I think people use the ambiguity of language and I don't think they admit to the amount of things they get away with in doing so.

Just today I read someone accuse someone else of “being outside of reality” while they were arguing politics. Truly, if you believed someone was outside of reality you wouldn't spend your time pretending they knew what you were talking about. What would words mean to them anyway? You might as well throw at them a bowl of alphabet soup. There's a shift away from “the topic.” Politics is certainly a broad structure from which to discuss something, but it doesn't include people speaking Martian languages.

The idea of caricaturing has been heavily on my mind. Many things come across as total jokes of themselves. Debates are screaming matches. Republicans become Nazi's. It's all about the he said she said as if these back and forths don't take place via text...which can be quoted...and immediately sourced. Maybe it's reality TV or your “nerdy” blog post, it all becomes this game of who can be more ironic or self-aware than the last guy. It's how you always know the book was better.

I think this shift is as much a habit of people as it is engineered. You don't volunteer information that would make you look weak. You buy into the beautiful scenery that accompanies an advertisement for shitting easier. You can feel when something gets too far from where it began. You just have to be paying attention to what you were after in opening the dialogue.

But there seems to be the problem. I don't think people know what they're trying to say. Years of therapy are sometimes reduced to “I am afraid of sex.” Why would it take someone years of their life to come to that conclusion? It was hidden in the wrong language. Often people are touted as stupid, evil, or in a severe state of denial. I think those often reduce to becoming conscious of the pitfalls in our language.

It certainly doesn't help when a compelling emotion provokes you into saying or doing things that take the point ever farther away. And how do you think we can hope to wrestle with or discuss those feelings when they suffer from the same problem? Are you sad, or depressed? Are you jealous or feeling a sense of loss? Are you angry, or perhaps terrified?

I think you can establish pivot points. You can create rules for how you're going to engage in certain conversations, with certain kinds of people, with specific people, or with yourself. I use writing as a way to ground potentially scattered and incomplete ideas somewhere so I can look back and remember why I stopped or started some behavior. If someone pokes me and wants to discuss politics or religion, I root myself in first defining terms and clarifying language and intent. 20 minutes spent explaining to me all the cool things that will happen to my soul when I die is dramatically wasted. So is trying to rationalize which President is most responsible for “how shitty things have gotten around here.”

Do you have a form and a habit? Are you comfortable just ignoring all the confrontation altogether? At the very least, because this can be done silently and secretly, can you recognize how quickly something goes from pivoting around a subject to traveling so far away you forgot why you're even playing? If you can, so many conversations get immediately boring. So many fights dissolve because you'll find no reason to care. Not because you don't care about the topic, but because you don't want to waste time pretending like you don't with such banal squabbling.

A calm disposition is often a learned one. It's a conscious decision not to hit people and yell. Extend that consciousness onto how and why you talk. Figure out why you're provoked to act one way over another. I think then you'll start to feel like you have a place in the discussion and aren't just walking headlong into the dizzying array of worthless opinions. My hope is that it would also give you the confidence to speak about what's on your mind as well. Playing it safe is not the same as playing it smart.

[383] Tricky Language

I have a complicated relationship with language.

There is a significant part of me that throws caution to the wind and frequently chooses to say what's on my mind, however I want to say it, and regardless of what you feel about it. It's the part of me that is desperate for the point to come through more than the specific words. It's the part of me that pokes at and tests your disposition. It's where I have to be when I'm exploring something new or going on a long drunk diatribe saying fuck every other word and inhaling a pack of cigarettes. That place is where anger or confusion tends to trump simple inquiry.

I think one of the reasons that place exists is because I want answers and discussion, but people are not keen on offering them. It must be understood how many hours I've spent attempting polite and reasoned discourse. Often, the situation feels dishonest and encumbered. I'm going after what people fear or what they structure their lives around. It frustrates me to think that a discussion or topic is not beyond their capacity, but instead beyond their honesty.

I need to draw the line between “personal honesty” or “personal truth” and actual honesty and truth.

My conception of honesty is that thing we can't ignore. Or, better said, we know when we're actively trying to ignore it. For every amazing and moral thing you think you can claim in and of your beliefs, it's undeniable that when you believe “anything” for “any” reason, you unleash a whole host of consequences that inevitably fall back on a shoulder shrug and “well that's what I believe!” Any topic and any idea where you can't be shaken, I find that a problem. I find the power and pride in your inability to discuss or defend horrible. Just flat out wrong and dangerous.

Incidentally, it's not just with religious ideas where this battle plays out, but it's easiest to paint my relationship towards them.

The religious people I tend to get along with most are either the ones who say “Yeah, I know I'm basically making this stuff up, but it makes me feel good and there's some good lessons here and there.” They lead with the truth. They're at least advocating for something, albeit a kind of odd faking it. They acknowledge discrepancies and contradictions. It's something of a masquerade. They almost wear their faith as a cape, but you aren't going to see them jumping off of buildings thinking they can fly. It's still bad to me, but at least they feel like mostly their own worst enemy more than mine.

I can also manage to get along when I lie. When I pretend that I respect a shit idea, mostly by remaining silent, we're besties! Because that's the idea that gets lofted to me most often. Just respect other peoples' ideas because people are different and apparently, when you disagree, you're simply going out of your way to demean those differences or make them out to be something terrible when “it's just who they are." This to me shows an extreme disregard for both parties and the capacity for people to change.

It's as if “respect” is used to equate bad ideas and something like race or sex. You're born black or gay; that doesn't automatically make you think a freshly inseminated egg has a soul.

The religious people I tend to very much not get along with are the ones who make factual claims about magical things we can never know. These are people where, if it doesn't somehow reduce to a god or something metaphysical, it doesn't register on their moral sense. It's where any and every thing is possible, because the points don't matter and we're all just here to sing and throw our arms around until judgment day.

So, sometimes, I elect more explicit and potentially demeaning language to draw deeper contrast. Dawkin's opens with “The God Delusion” for the same reason I imagine. It's not “The Comforting Idea That Some People Don't Abuse To Do All Of The Batshit Things I Think Are Dangerous.”

It gets more complicated when I think about the interplay of language and culture. They intertwine and reinforce each other. So, one would think it would behoove you to speak very deliberately any chance you got, no? But therein lies the problem. What's deliberate to you is “left up to interpretation” by someone who's walled off their thought process. I've told religious people I'm not necessarily angry, searching for anything, or have ever had a magic voice pop into my head to help me manifest my destiny. Ten seconds later they're praying for me hoping I can be happy, find what I'm after, and will hopefully hear the same voices.

So then the words I use need to elicit feeling. I can't politely explain to them my reality or frustration over their ignoring me. I don't do good with being provoked with wording, so when I digress “flatly” or “ignorantly,” in a way, I kind of got somewhere if you're a little pissed off. That, or at the very least if you're confused and asking me to clarify.

I try to relate the sheer terror of bad ideas “calmly and rationally” and people don't engage or talk, or if they do, they're very quick to paint those ideas in very rosy language backed not by history or example, but their beliefs. If I get pissed off and call your god a magic sky daddy, it's because I think you're advocating for magic, and most traditions depict that father figure living in the sky. It's as literal as I can be. And then, people still don't really engage or talk, they explain to me how I'm misrepresenting my own anger and purpose with indiscriminate language. I'm also now a representative for every person who's used the same terms or raised the same concerns. I am, in an extremely weak sense, but less so when I ask over and over for us to get deeper and specific.

It's part of the unending irony that I should feel better about or more respectful to the dominating powers. Non-believers still aren't terribly popular in most places, if you hadn't heard. And, at least for me, I don't want to get into pissing matches about whether or not “sky daddy” is appropriate, I want to know if you're capable of engaging with the details, or following the reasons. Can you empathize with “just dealing with life” without the bells and whistles? And if you can't, at least concede that the fear you're experiencing is the same one I can't run away from and feel morally obligated to talk about.

[231] Death To America

I want to see certain people dead. I want them punished for thought crimes. I want them to feel the impact of letting their blatantly destructive and psychopathic thoughts provoke or inhibit their actions. We’re protected from our potential to think in this country. We all get to wear the same clothes and hide how little money we have. Wouldn’t want to let troubling ideas about poverty in now would we? We get to go to supermarkets and pick from an endless stream of food that will certainly still be there next week. Who could be hungry with so much abundance? We get “debates” about some of the most serious issues facing our planet which help to confuse yet superficially involve us just enough to feel “informed.”

I don’t want to die. This is my starting point. Before I want a business, before I want to enable my friends and be creative and spend my life blissfully unaware of how many honey bees are left on the planet, I don’t want to die. Whenever I learn just a tad bit more about some massive company or environmental issue or, god forbid, a comment from a politician, I’m depressingly reminded of how this may not be just a taken for granted meager goal. Bad ideas, your ideas, can and will kill people. If I have to force feed one idea into every person I meet, I want them to appreciate that one.

I just got done watching Gasland and Collapse. These are two documentaries about fracking and oil. I am just floored at the amount of things that can be going wrong at any one time. I wrote once that I wondered why people couldn’t just be “fill in the blank” problem, but instead compounded their stupidity with failure after failure really trying to convince you of your naivety in befriending them. At least that terminates to just being annoying or some fight. When a company is destroying the planet, it isn’t like they just cut down a few trees or accidentally squashed a rabbit with a tractor. They kill ALL the trees, poison ALL the fish, contaminate the air, their employees, and the animals that are destined to be your next burger.

You know when I say things like “this isn’t my opinion” and “I think?” I should make a greater effort to reference or link to the reports and documentaries so you can maybe understand what I really mean is “the numbers say” “common sense says” “so and so actual scientist points out” and “you’re dumb if you try to argue against…”

Do you understand even the concept of interconnectedness? There is no just doing one isolated thing. You are jointly personally and collectively responsible for everything. When you hold even one horrendous idea, it colors everything you think and say. When you become so emotionally invested and argumentatively entrenched in an idea, and absolutely refuse to change or understand even one reason that you should, you’re the kind of person I want to see dead. This is not the same as saying I’m going to go out of my way to kill you. I just want you to experience the consequences of your thoughts.

But let’s make this more pleasant. Oh don’t worry; I’ll get back to dramatic in a minute. Let’s run with dual personal and collective responsibility. If I’m to understand my position in life correctly, much of my present happiness relies on the unseen, untraceable, massively complex interplay of the world at large. My food, shelter, entertainment, and less I forget porn are practically handed to me on a silver platter. Therefore, while I want to see bad ideas punished, I don’t want to fall to my own edict by genuinely thinking that death always is or is even necessarily the best method to go about fixing things. While it can be effective, it doesn’t translate well as an acceptable option.

So I can blog. I can learn. I can read more, grow my fat pretentious head and struggle to contribute. Key word there is struggle. Do we forget that people lie? They do it comfortably, to our faces, to our congress, at the expense of themselves and others all the time. It is these people that we are struggling against. It’s when a scientist has to defend facts about environmental impact against a lobbyist or hopelessly ignorant politician. It’s when an investigative journalist gets threatened or mocked by fanaticized media outlets. But it’s especially when we don’t even voice how and why we support something or someone.

I read statuses all the time about shitty days, forgetting phones, delicious food or some random comment that you “probably had to be there” for it to be supremely funny. I get maybe two or three friends who post about things they support or people they respect. Does this mean you don’t care? Probably not, but it does mean there is something going on culturally or personally that is either distracting, fear inducing, or generating what I think may be a dangerous level of apathy. I want you to be an expert in something and flood facebook with what you think is most relevant and most helpful. I would love for ideas about how and why to share information to change.

I want things to change because I’m capable of identifying problems. Something tells me you might have a knack for it too. For example, is it a good thing to pollute drinking water? No? Good answer. So when someone can light their water on fire because of fracking in their backyard, we can agree a problem exists. I think every problem we face is this simple. I would even invite the exercise of breaking down moral questions and ideas into economic and psychological terms. Our well-being absolutely rests on keeping a balance between what we fuck up and what we do right. It depends on us actually understanding and knowing the consequences. It’s not how we feel about the subjects; it’s what we can show to be true. The fundamental laws of nature are at play and will react.

What are your priorities? Is it just getting out of school, or finding a job, or becoming the next leader or member of some group? Do you want to resolve some conflict with your boy/girlfriend or family member? Do you want to keep hidden some secret? Do you care more about the injustice to Cambodian tree frogs more than life itself? Are you concerned that maybe you haven’t even sat down and prioritized what the hell it is you’re doing and why? Would you still manage to respect yourself if you were honest with what you would find and are currently finding to be answers?

I’m always asking because I’m frequently shocked and dismayed by the answers. I get people who are confident and comfortable telling me they want to be ignorant. I don’t really care what the topic is, the capacity to feel comfortably and confidently ignorant scares the living fuck out of me. That’s my competition. I get people that just want to grow balls enough to tell their parents about a tattoo. I get people who are concerned about problems that I can’t even define because they are so particular or nuanced it would take weeks or months of study to find a clue. There’s the “kind-of-right” people who may hold a view I can agree with or see some logic to, but have convoluted, contradictory, or simply back-assed ways of arriving to their position. “I’m an atheist because Mark chapter 5 conflicts with Luke chapter 2, and because all Catholics are pedophiles.”….so close.

I need help. I don’t have the patience for scenarios like the example of above. I can’t learn every detail about every problem alone. I need help drawing the interconnectivity map so that we can isolate the specific problems and actually change things. I want to stop hating everything and everyone and be a part of something greater than any one hero’s effort. I don’t want to see our food run out, water get rationed, or the atmosphere disappear before you’ve found the motivation. If you could maybe do me a courtesy as well and defriend me, tell me to fuck off, and/or disappear if this is too hard or dramatic a proposition for you.

We are a society that champions death. How often are we collectively cheering for something? I don’t see 100 statuses hoping to usher in the new clean burning fuel into their cars. I see cheers and hear fireworks for when 10 years of death and economic strife “culminate” in the alleged death of a “mastermind” who said, “use box cutters to run planes into buildings.” Sending such a dramatic message about greed and hypocrisy is worth noting beyond racist country songs and redneck pronouncements of your target shooting proficiency. There are STILL people who would deny or never care to know how we used to support Osama amongst the myriad of other random thugs and dictators around the world.

We don’t want peace. We want our naïve ideas about peace. We want to be idealists and to simply state our ever-lacking opinions. We want to leave everyone blind with an eye for an eye. We want everyone to know how angry we are and for them to play along like it isn’t a reflection of how sad we are. We want to stop being bombarded with this seemingly endless stream of problems and wait around for “them” “they” or “someone smarter than me” to fix it. We want to be right beyond reason because it makes us feel good. We want mommy and daddy to pick up after us. We want to create personal drama to feel involved and important. Fuck your feelings and fuck you.

I say death to America because America is killing itself, and the rest of the world, with its bad ideas. The country started for reasons. It lasted and progressed and became an example by extending and fighting for freedom and equality. It used to respect science and had its points where the environment mattered as well. We currently get so caught up in buzz words and catch-phrases that identifying, let alone solving issues, seems non-existent. Obamacare, socialism, death-taxes, death-panels, and drill baby drill are not acknowledging the failings of health care, taxing the rich appropriately and preventing an economic collapse, or protecting the environment. We don’t punish the liars or the propaganda. We punish ourselves and the people we pretend to care about.

I want to stop playing this kind of game. I want to start from “Look, I know you’re an asshole, ignorant, non-caring, lazy, afraid, and eventually going to kill me, so these are the conditions you have to play under in order for that not to happen.” Your “rights” are as valuable as money. They exist when there is an illusion of control and order; it’s only when enough people adopt a relative standard. Your quality of life is up for grabs. More importantly, so is mine.

And clearly, I have no capacity to be a diplomat, so I could use an expert in that as well.