[1171] Kill Your Pets

I don’t know if I’ve tried this approach. I get heated. Like, I get taken back to childhood levels of dramatic emotion and readiness to break shit when I’m watching something that’s inverting words. If you were to take a quote from MLK Jr. or Nelson Mandela and slap it on a Nazi poster to somehow suggest they were on Hitler’s side, it’s that level of absurdity that still manages to get my blood boiling.

Academically, we’d talk about exploring “rhetoric.” It doesn’t matter if the words are true, just that they’re persuasive.

One of the major motivators that got me started writing was waking up to the nature of manipulation. I was into a girl who was in a typical bad relationship with an insecure boy that did all of the insecure boy shit that imposes guilt, intimidation, and control. As well, I looked at myself, and the relative ease with which I was able to navigate the world through smiling, jokes, or being generally cute. I’m also dispositionally a leader. It’s something people pick up about me immediately and is why I’m constantly asked to teach others, take supervisory or managerial roles, or am capable of maintaining order in a group counseling session.

Another way of stating this, say, even if I was a terrible leader, is that people are eager to thrust the responsibility of things onto me. This can look like blame for the worst things that might happen in a party environment if it's "my" house with 5 roommates. It’s, I would estimate, 99% of the emotional reaction I might illicit from someone after I’ve explicitly stated my assessment of their being if it's less than flattering. I’ve been told, as early as I can remember, some version and at some level that it is always and forever “my fault." Your perception of me is my fault, and as many of them consequences as you need to feel correct.

Now, this is absurd. We’re all to blame all the time, but that’s a specifically incomplete and unhelpful framing meant to equivocate instead of investigate.

There’s a way in which I would be extremely to blame, though. Let’s play out the thought experiment.

I recognize vulnerability. I know how insecure people are. I know how lonely people are. I know they’re looking for excitement, direction, novelty, and acceptance. They think they’re “weird.” They think they’re the only one who is going through their personal story of hell. These are all things I know explicitly and have watched play out in thousands upon thousands of people in one form or another. I don’t care about your job, title, friends, upbringing, I will locate what breaks you almost immediately. It made me an incredible DCS assessor and also lends itself to counseling because I know where not to step too aggressively.

What might I want from someone? Money? Sex? A bubble that affirms everything I say or do? Does it even matter what I want? Is it not already enough to consider me a terrible, evil person by just clocking what I know and finding the comfort and license to let the cards lie as they may?

So you can look for the ones that kind of like you or are intrigued by you. I catch more looks from chubby middle-aged women than windows do from window-shoppers. I make more people chuckle with my turns of phrase and random commentary than I can count. Now, I have your attention. I could ask 1 or 10 questions about you, and elicit months of ways to build rapport. I could innocently start inserting myself into your life, doing favors, picking you up when, again, you’re facing a problem that you and only you have ever encountered ever. And you need me to validate.

We don’t need to really share or talk about our dynamic. It’s something special. It’s crazy how we even found each other, right? Who knew that someone could see right through to your soul and become such a huge part of the directions you can start to see yourself going.

This, mind you, is how I witness a large majority of people’s “loving relationships” playing out. If you look closely at the details or listen to your mouthiest friend, he’s an emotionally abusive child and you’re a codependent internally-ever-crying mess. But damn if you don’t look passable taking a picture at the top of a mountain! The bible of cliches that lend themselves to a “happy marriage” is stapled to your tongue.

Okay, weirdly, we’re still only at the first few stages of how depraved this gets. You don’t really have someone until they’re not just doing things for you, but subverting their entire self in service to anything they even think you might want. That’s proper mind control. Do you want to go to your 9-5 every day? Of course you do, you have to pay the bills, feed the kids, keep your health insurance. Wait, why can’t you get those things any other way? You’ve been bred to follow a certain set of rules and order, so before you’ll learn anything about taxes or blame a billionaire, you’ll get a second and third job.

it’s not large accomplishment to get someone emotionally invested in you. That’s why it’s so cheap and easy to pick out the ones, like a cult leader, who will fuck you first and groom your future child brides. We’ve never established what the goal of doing all of this is because that’s also what makes it so nefarious. The goal is self-gratification and “because I can.” People who do this like this just wish to embody the fact that they’ve done it.

If you own a pet, you can snap that pet’s neck right now. You’d also probably get away with it. Why would you do that? It’s evil, unnecessary, ridiculous, you love it yada yada. Well, you’ve never done it before, and maybe you’re at a point in life where everything feels ambiguous and arbitrary, so, snap? The world doesn’t end. You don’t have to tell anyone. Your other cat doesn’t even blink.

Now, what if you did it because I told you I don’t really like cats. It doesn’t even live with me and I never see it. You’re just so in love with me, so convinced by the narrative we’ve been sharing together, and the emotions are so true and compelling. Is it even really a cat? Does it matter? Is there even a remote chance that I might notice your clothes have less and less cat hair over time, and that might make me happy?

If this feels far-out and gross, as far as I can tell, this is a 1 to 1 correlation of what apologists and con-men and ideologues are doing with every breath.

Who is to blame in this scenario?

If we have healthy minds, we’d instead be asking, at what point can you claim responsibility. When is the above scenario my responsibility? Well, I wrote it. From the jump. If the next time you see me and I’m missing a cat under suspicious circumstances, I can’t blame Trump, or my god, or some level of depression and existential angst. I choose to keep the little fuckers alive, and recognize and respect my capacity otherwise. If I don’t have robust, reliable, good reasons for keeping them alive, I guess all you can do is pray for them?

We’re going to spend, at least, the next 2 years trying to find anyone but us as individuals to blame for what may be the stupidest fascist takeover in history. Who killed my cat!? We will scream at anyone willing to listen. You did, bitch. You looked it dead in the eye, noted how soft its fur was, and with the smallest twitch, cracked that little bone that separated you from the monsters.

Every intellectual who’s out there lending their same awareness that I have to make excuses and apologize for Trump is killing cats left and right.

They aren’t doing the work of killing them though, you are. You tear down our ability to be safe, coherent, accountable, and human. You adopt their hyperbole in tern, you dutiful fulfill  your roles, real and imagined, that you think will service the dear leader.

Guess what, at that point, my work is done. All I have to do now is see how long I can last until I eat myself alive or someone capable of bringing consequences shows up. But, I’ve already established that people are incredibly and endlessly eager to thrust responsibility onto me, didn’t I? No one’s coming. If I don’t stop, it doesn’t stop. And why would I stop?

[890] Lesser Gods

I've been trying to write a certain kind of blog for at least two weeks. Maybe after watching “I Am Greta,” I'll be able to find it.

There are problems big and small. We address them, or don't, in the same fashion. We regard them as big, and respond inadequately. We regard them as small, and perhaps ignore them. Rarely, perhaps in war or specific disease eradication, can I recall gigantic problems being addressed in gigantic ways. In fact, when you look into the details, it's a dogged and select few who get about the organizing and persuading to make the rest work.

There's an idea that you don't want a king who wants to be king. It should be a begrudging obligation and responsibility. It should come with the “divinity” bestowed upon revelous privilege. For so long we've only known the power of kings as something to abuse. We're kings of our own story, insofar as we ignore our neighbor and history. We tax the planet insatiably. We use the language of war until the words indefinitely obscure the violence they retain. We look for heroes and scapegoats.

I identified a lot with Greta. She speaks, the world imitates. She learns, the world hurls opinionated condescension. She doesn't want to be a person who says one thing and does another. She's an extremely begrudging leader. She responds reflexively, “No, we're here together.” when praised for coming to give a speech. She knows that for every increasingly angry or emotional talk she might give, it's going to take us all. She does not falter on this point.

As I've gotten older, I've had to reevaluate what it means for me to be a leader. I have a lot of not-exactly-empty words about being a loud, combative, and obnoxious voice, if nothing else. I dream of driving around with a mega-phone and fact pamphlets. I rehearse what I might say on stage in a talk or to reporters. The things that I've learned about my capacity to cause a fuss and draw attention are ripe to be exploited by the media noise machine. I could see myself dance and smile and laugh about whatever bumbling following or accolades I might receive. I'd then sit back and watch Trump get elected again or some other oligarchy-based right-wing tragedy unfold every day.

My understanding of myself, power, and my relationship to it has changed. I don't think attention means anything in and of itself. Attention is cheap. Commitment, focus, dedication, and truthfully serving an ideal? That changes the world. It changes it in dramatically terrible ways, and makes incredible saves here and there.

I think it's easy to confuse my conception of truth. Truth is ambivalent. The power of it indifferent. I don't try to speak the truth to obtain some kind of badge or out of a sense lording pride. I try because I decided I wanted to make my individual impact on the world in spite of how impossible and shit I think most things are. It sucks to feel abandoned and naive. It sucks to be poor and always in struggling to catch-up. It sucks when your water smells like sulfur and when everything you own seems to break at the same time. It sucks talking about it for as bad as it sucks, and hearing silence suspiciously disguised as tinnitus.

If I were ever in a leadership position of my design, it would be to first lead with the ideals and practice of what I believe in. That's writing and the land. That's my budget being hyper focused on paying off debts or bills and investing in tools. I'd want to be in a world, small as five acres, of people leading themselves through the ideals and work they stand for. If and when it draws attention, I don't want it to be for its novelty. I want it to be as a provocation. I want what I build to make you feel like shit and then immediately feel like you need to create something like it in your world.

Greta is finding out the hard way, just like I had to, how much of it is talk and pageantry. They'll cheer you on. They'll fixate on your image or at least their caricature of it. They won't, you know, do anything after the splendid walk through the city streets. 10 or 20 will try. 1 or 2 will succeed, kinda, before being wrapped up in the greater artifice as they learn the language of “compromise” and “maturity.” What are you supposed to do then besides carve out your little space that you hope fills with water and one day becomes a river?

I like to think I'm ready for it. I think I can handle the bad reviews, the thousands of opinions, bot, troll, or otherwise, about how I sound, something I've said or done in the past, or just how incomplete and wrong-headed I am in being soooo whatever the adjective. At the same time, I want none of it. I want to be smarter than to get sucked up in that kind of attention hole. I want to overwhelm with my force, not get battered around by rage and hype machines. I want the example I set to be as strong as I genuinely feel about what I'm trying to accomplish in the world and who I believe needs to be standing next to me.

The “argument” for driving on the correct side of the road makes itself. I want to be understood at that deep psychological and normative level. I want to infiltrate and divert power across so many mediums, I hear my talking points on your lips and in your headlines. I want to blithely wave my hand at what I'm doing when asked for a comment. I want to turn privileged and poorly dressed information into instantly accessible resources like a tool you might see on Star Trek. They don't have time to argue with user-incompetent software!

I think this takes the kind of “reflective grind” I've been in what feels like indefinitely. I lost the zealotry to sacrifice everything in service to my most compelling ideas. I don't have the energy to fight every battle. I have what I intend and believe, and as many alters as I can erect in service. There are so many churches, humble and ornate. If nothing else got built, people ensured a church did. I'd prefer a star ship, but the same underlying mechanism is what's at play. What do you believe in?

I have brief moments in my day where I can sometimes see the information I've given someone has actually helped them. They had no plan, I told them what to do. They had no understanding, I spelled it out until they almost get as bored with the details as I am. I believe what I'm doing is a good thing. I think people need organized, practical information that will help them gain control of their lives. I think that while I'm supposed to be dealing with a “difficult” population, I just see people as ridiculous or boring as anyone I've ever met with a little less money, tact, or luck. I use this understanding to knock everyone down several pegs.

I'm never tempted to exploit these people. I want to shit on the leadership of places I work. I want to get angry at coworkers who put in less than an appreciable amount of effort or respect for themselves and the nature of the task. My world gets better when people are accounting for each other, and when I see myself actually helping. It's brief, and why I'm not suited for ongoing empathy-based work, but it's there. I'm not willing to act that by virtue of my title or experience, I'm anything more or less, in a fundamental way, than anyone around me. As such, the artificial and empty words used to justify how the world looks stick out as the disproportionate source for the generalized misery that burns people out and makes the future look bleak.

I think people deserve to lead their lives. I don't think this comes without a consideration for the world they inhabit. Never in the history of our species have we been so unequal, faced challenges so large, and faced the kind of catastrophic consequences of inaction, denial, and mindless fighting over what side of the road we're driving. I think you are obligated to lead. I think you need to take bigger steps in service to your voice and perspective, and I think you need to defend it when no one's around to hear or support you. I think more people need to hear what's wrong, the truth about how wrong it is, and what's going to happen if it doesn't get fixed.

It's not Greta's job to save us. I've already pulled out of the “argument.” We continually serve our heroes up to be devoured by the attention-machines; “follow me!” What's your daily devotional after you concede God's not there? What's your understanding of “the problem?” I need to see it. You need to see it. We are built around saying one thing and doing another, while the arbitrary swings of power maybe, kinda, work here or there. Where are we going to get the appreciation for the divinity in the work that needs to be done without talking about it, deliberately, with a plan, and a sense of responsibility to get it done? Is it space we're going to continue to cede to the most delinquently faithful and ideologically possessed?

I go back to “work” tomorrow. I did “better” in staying on top of my notes and mileage this week, but it's still not complete. I get to scramble for a few last-minute hours in service to my wage-slavery. I get to carry on like the sliver of “help” I provide, be it in visitation or information, is supposed to sustain me until I find myself with enough paychecks saved to call it quits. I find the world outside of genuine effort and creation absolutely miserable. I hate myself slogging through it. I hate every time I'm compelled to use the word “practical” in service to it. I hate every wasted minute and repeated thought about abuses of power, money, and someone's otherwise good nature and skill. It's going to take considerably more than my voice or effort to change that. I won't pretend I believe help is coming.

[881] Whoooosh

I have an hour.

I've made some calls, changed supervisors, attempted to coordinate getting my car towed from my neighbor who used our morning conversation to pitch me on buying his plot. Now, I have an hour before I'm off to a home with Trump literally mounted above the TV and every propaganda sign running down along the sides.

I have an hour “to myself” or of “free time” in which I'm writing, because I feel like most of my “off” hours consist of hours like these. They are sandwiched. They consist of the mid-stream catch of thoughts, not the ones I managed to remember after I got home. There's still things to do today. I'm not shaking off the fog of just waking up, and I'm not worked into an exasperated tizzy trying to piece back some picture I can recognize.

One thing I've dramatically underappreciated about myself is how much I need something to look forward to. All of the chaos kicked up by the proverbial “shoulder shrug” I tend to get in response to my complaints, inquiries, or asserted goals is often mitigated when I know I've got something I genuinely want to do or know I'll have the time to approach correctly. I don't want to pack in 7 articles to read in this hour, even if I look forward to reading them. I'm not going to start toying with raising the corner of my little room, I'm liable to cut open my work clothes.

I differentiate “tasks” or chores from things I'm looking forward to doing. Paying attention is work, so even reading things I want to, it's a task or chore to remain remotely informed or in touch with some level of art or media appreciation. Getting my room built was what I looked forward to. Mitigating all of the details to not have it flooding are chores. Cuddling up to watch a movie Allie mentions is something to look forward to. Marathoning an arbitrary list from some ill-informed pseudo taste-maker is a chore.

Whether it's work or home, I like to create a flow. It's a psychological state of doing instead of thinking about the doing. I don't want to think about erroneous details on top of coping with whatever stress comes along with being around annoying people. I don't want to start a project on the land, only to be missing any means of addressing issues without a 2 hour foray into town. Flow only happens when you have the details accounted for. Do you know when you're going to input your notes? Then you don't have to think about when you're going to. Do you know you have an array of screw sizes and the drill bit heads on hand? The tools then lend themselves to experimental fixes when the first plan inevitably goes to shit.

Without flow, life looks like a series of stuck or stopping points with way too many words employed to describe what's going on. I'm writing to hopefully continue my flow. I'm searching for more things to look forward to as my dumbass species ensures we keep needing to lock things down. I have my plan for the rest of my evening. I've confirmed my usual supervised visit for tomorrow. I've got my supervision setup for the day after. I don't know what the hiccups will be, from prolonged unnecessary conversations to the weather or, god forbid more car trouble, but each of those can or should have ways of being mitigated.

Whether or not they can or should is the mess we get into on the whole. If you're stopped or stuck at needing basic necessities, obviously life feels much worse than it has to and you're looking for who to blame. Whether you actually parse out what's your responsibility or “the world's” is anyone's guess, but I'm solidly in the “you won't parse that out” camp. What I choose to hold up as worth looking forward to in light of that becomes an ongoing and difficult task. Can I help myself? Can I find the will and desire for increasingly minute pieces of a complicated puzzle? I still believe I need to escape the country and in the next thought consider what details I need to consider for a soffit. It makes my stomach knot.

These kinds of hours are a lot of directionless contemplation. Could I settle in to watch another episode? Should I do some light cleaning? There's different modes of thought and mental prep that make any option feel more or less appropriate. We're not like flipping switches triggering on “do the dishes” or flipping to “dig a hole” in an instant. I think this is an important point that I'm not sure I have enough words to elaborate on more, but here's a seed.

When I'm doing “yard work,” my habit is to start one thing, and find myself picking away at other little things. I might drag over a shelf, start stacking things on it, grab the rake, and decide I need to spread out an ash/dirt pile. While doing so, I'll cough, grab my wholly inadequate face mask, and while inside notice a misplaced box of screws. Those screws now need to be returned, and the table they're sitting on better arranged. I trip on the hose, pull the hose into a coil, and realize the head needs replaced, where one might exist on the “wrong” shelf, so I return to the new shelf I'm filling up to designate as a place for hose heads like “this” one. Add in little construction things and whether or not different equipment has been gassed and primed, and over the course of a few hours, I'll do a dozen things, and only planned to do 1 or 2. The area will look nice, and Allie will come home wondering why I have a sander in my hand and am going on about my plans for the fire pit.

It's a clusterfuck up there that generally translates toward the direction I want to go. It's a kind of natural selection applied to my thought process. I drift in the direction of my available resources, time, and oriented thoughts. I'm almost perfectly ambivalent about any one thing I might do until it serves a particular purpose. Why complete the fence until the neighbor is uncomfortably leering? Why spend the money in service to (x) without some relatively quick turn-around and satisfaction with regard to (y)? There's always "everything” to do, and I'm not “just doing” things to remain busy or distracted, I'm trying to get to that flow space. I'm trying to work in a manner that suggests purpose and foresight.

I think my personal exploration of my process speaks to the whole because we don't know nor are inclined toward one thing over the other. We have many catastrophes at once. Who's in charge? We celebrated and elected people who said “no one” on purpose, and worse, we'll break everything you might use to try. We based our potential flow on a giant mythology about who we are and the influence we have on the world. We transferred our agency and capacity for self-reflection onto that mythology. There's no flow but around the drain. There's not a framework that you can do a dozen-pieces-at-a-time kind of yard work style. There's no trust that the effort is going to translate to an appreciable amount of positive feeling or status. An election is not a switch that will flip all of that around.

Leadership is important. I think that premise alone has been degraded immensely. “Managing” something is not the same thing as leading it. People who attempt to manage me get burned severely. People who join in the leading mindset to proactively address something find me the easiest person on the planet to work with. I'm not a series of problems, but an agent of interpretative and creative problem solving. Whether or not you, I, or the environment we're in has the resources to address those problems meaningfully is the often shitty circumstances that say, “No.” You shrug your shoulders and stare blankly as a manager because no one directed you to do anything. You learn to accept what you must, while thinking otherwise as a leader. You're still trying when you lead, despite a level of implied victimization or martyrdom.

I want a kind of “total flow.” I want enough money to move on quickly. I want enough connections to know exactly who to call. I want enough plans that can be spoken to in big or little ways every day. I don't want to be digging myself out of constant panic. I don't want to get lost in petty personality battles or left to decide to what degree I'm willing to manipulate or entertain your complex. I want to wake up and get to work, not desperately cling to my agency in spare moments or hours. I don't want to stack an impersonal stream of information on top of my sense of futility in an attempt to suppress or suffocate the truth of the pain of my deepest despondency.

I have about 20 minutes. I'm going to take my borrowed car to a visit in my neighborhood. I'm going to demonstrate that I'm capable, safe, and worthy of ensuring a child gets to see her father. I'm not going to get paid “enough” to do it. I'm going to get home later than I want to. I haven't discovered what I'm looking forward to, except I'm pretty sure Allie plans to make breakfast for dinner, so things are probably alright.