[1257] Working Girls

I want to tell you a little bit about my job. To me, it’s not a very complicated job, but it has as many moving parts as exist within the people involved. I think it’s odd to call it “social work,” given the people who need to do all the work are the ones I’m tasked with inviting to do so.

“Social work,” is very broad terminology wise. I used to be an assessor for DCS. I’ve done visit supervision for a few companies. I’ve done “case work” in every role, including prison. I’m a CADAC II counselor in an environment that’s so overwhelmed I get routinely called “therapist,” and have been explicitly told by many therapists I’ve worked with who have audited my classes I’m “basically a therapist.” I take this to mean both therapists and I use the same models and strategies, yet are equally helpless to do any real work for you.

I’ve been out of social work for a few months and just got a new job. It’s like riding a bike. It’s a source of perpetual fascination to me that “the problem,” while manifesting in individual ways, is exactly the same whether you’re in prison, in-patient, IOP, or the infinitely grey sea between IOP and OP, or in just maintaining sobriety. It doesn’t matter the drug. It doesn’t matter if you have “too many” rules or “too much” freedom. I’m never without what needs to be done in my approach to the infinite list of what’s presented to me.

At bottom, what most people are suffering in any given moment is a lie.

The suffering is real. Don’t deliberately, or otherwise, mishear me, as is so routine throughout my day. The suffering is anxiety and depression, a series of traumas in the not-so-distant past, medical conditions due to use, aging, or violence. All those things hurt, truly.

The lie looks something like an excuse. The lie operates like a tool that removes the obligation of slowing down or examining your role. The lie looks like the reflection in a funhouse mirror. Technically, if you’re standing in front of it, that is, in fact, you reflected back. The story of refraction, perception, and complicated subjective experience is something of an infinitely long digression approximately 1 in 10 people are interested in exploring long enough to get it.

If you zoom out and take a broad picture of “addiction,” you start the see the pathologies in your clients manifested in your colleagues. Whatever you wish to make of their protective factors, it becomes blindingly obvious that there’s an irresolvable blurriness between “good” and “bad” habits. You can absolutely find yourself compulsively working, eating, “helping” by diving into the infinite flow of drama, peacocking, or blaming your behavior on your ADHD.

If you’re good at boundaries, this leaves you practically hoping to meaningfully contribute to an environment so that it’s less self-destructive, but you might be the most significant observer of what’s already an extremely thin line. Moreover, those, in good faith, that you work with, might not even realize or be that keen to learn about how they’re threatening the whole endeavor.

I think stupid political actors operate the same way. I, who listens to hundreds of hours of political commentary and pays some attention to global affairs, occupies a different semantic universe than someone who can’t tell you who the acting attorney general is. Any subject takes the time, attention, and basic interest in order to be learned. When you learn it deeply enough, you can start to see deeper implications and patterns. If you “don’t care,” you get to ride the lie that your acts, or lack thereof, are of no consequence or significantly less consequence than they actually are.

Frustratingly, unfortunately, ridiculously, because the god you claim to believe in is hysterical, you matter. I can’t fucking stand it. Because in my world, my brain, it means I have to work hard, pay attention, tell the truth, and figure out even basically what the fuck I’m doing with myself any given day. I don’t really get a choice unless I want to suffer like someone addicted to a bad, incorrect, and woefully incomplete story.

I have to traverse the universe of differences between myself who has intimately mapped the degrees to which he matters for decades, and a population who has practiced implicitly and explicitly the idea that they do not matter. And they’ve likely practiced even more aggressively than me to establish their instincts and habits. I think the world of silent complicit “moderates,” suffers the same condition.

I don’t bring my job home with me often. I can respond to a crisis or hit a snag with paperwork, but the souls I’m wrestling with don’t haunt me. I’m very clear about what I want, what it takes, and what I’ll contribute to help. I don’t want anything for you you don’t want for yourself. I will never pretend otherwise when I’m there, and what you’re doing in sober living, it’s work, all the time. We’re not hanging out. We’re not best friends. I’m not your boss or keeper. I’m your opportunity to slow down and your reminder that the work can be done in spite of how you feel.

I’ll help fill out forms. I’ll provide rides. I’ll re-frame the most damming things you’ve shocked yourself by admitting for the first time. I’ll let you cry. I’ll stand in perfect detached non-judgment as we walk down whatever path we must or can. I can’t make you want to live. I can’t make you honest. I can’t make you “believe” in the consequences of your actions and how they make you, or us, suffer. I can’t tie words to emotional meaning if you are unable or unwilling. It’s not my job to save you, trap you, or merely occupy your time with jargon and obligations in a bid to avoid dealing with what I need to work on.

So it goes in the “normal” or “non-addicted” landscape. Do you think we get fascism if most people aren’t just lying, but doing so in such a catastrophic and compulsive way that we’re functionally suicidal? I don’t care what flavor or era of fascism you look at, at bottom, it’s lies. Lies about purity and purpose. Lies about “them.” Lies about capacity and consequences. We know, intellectually, the fire raging that we set. Emotionally, we’re dead. There’s no real and meaningful response to the chaos we’ve sowed. So we take another hit, point the finger, and undermine what little those with the awareness and capacity might yet be able to save.

What I’m describing often manifests in complacency and complicity in the people I work with who might be better at it than average. They use the statistics as license to phone it in or drag quick things out over weeks or months because it keeps the paycheck coming. They tell a story of what they would build or do differently, but they want the same things our clients do. They want the easy win. The functional disability check. They want to bill the state regardless of whether they actually believe they’ve done all they can for someone. Why? They have more official, more standard and socially acceptable lies to maintain.

I’d bet and win every time that you’re so tired and never have enough time. I know that you don’t think I’d ever believe the drama from your so and so! These gas prices, these groceries, and these no good dirty politicians basically fucked your spouse and killed your dog! You're just thinking of the children! You’re the hero. You’re entitled to exacting your revenge with every fired shot across a comment section bow. You know, the realpolitik of purity tests, ironic dismissal, and increasingly AI-generated astro-turfing.

I used to suffer the lie that I could save the world. I was poised to do it by speaking intelligently, getting attention, and leading a charge. Little did I know. I can save my world, not yours. I can write this blog, not your entry. I can eat my food, watch my shows, play my games and instruments, rock out with my friends, blast my music, drive my car, build my house on my land, and choose the shape my suffering takes. And I can know that I want it that way compared to the alternatives. And I can save and protect and advocate for the ways to get there because I know they exist independent of me, but also die with me, if you’re not practicing the same things.

I find this incredibly empowering, humbling, and energizing. I find this pretty easy to understand because I’ve reached a point in life where the work I do I take for granted. I’ve done more than “try.” I’ve embodied the consequences like a muscle stuck throbbing after an intense workout. It wasn’t an accident. No one granted a wish. I didn’t magically come upon a secret. I worked, and continue to work, one line at a time, one day at a time, one choice to meet my needs, demonstrate my world of values and desires, in any given moment.

I wasn’t able to shut up when I didn’t understand that silence was a choice. I’m never able to empathize with those who seemingly choose to stay silent about the fire daring to engulf us. I couldn’t hear until I recognized the choice to listen. I couldn’t be honest until I recognized the choice to be responsible for maintaining the integrity of words and a shared reality. And now I can’t go back even if I wanted to. For me to want to, I’d have to behave as insistently self-destructively as I observe addicted and non-addicted alike.

So, what’s my job? Is it anything like yours? Are you truly living in service to a world that you actually want to live in? I’m invigorated by Scott Pelley and Stephen Colbert getting fired. They aren’t dead. They’re more alive than their their audiences can recognize. They’re burning hotter than the fascist forces clear-cutting the forest of once trusted institutions. If you’re paying the requisite attention you’ll connect their work to what yours must consist of. You’ll feel it like they feel it. You’ll practice as you preach.

Or, you won’t. I get paid either way.

[1150] Seething Is Believing

I want to talk about lying.

A couple days ago, I somewhat accidentally brain-dumped on one of my friends. I was reflecting on my efforts over the last few years, and the conclusion I came to was that I was first and foremost severely affected by lies.

If you’re a long-time listener first-time caller, you’ll know that lying was a particular pain point for my mother. She would flip the fuck out and engage in the most dramatic displays of violence or breaking my shit if she felt she was being lied to. As an adult, I can figure out that she was very poorly coping with how often she probably felt betrayed in life, but it no less left an imprint on me.

But I’m not here to talk about the past. I want to provide a framework for understanding lies. I think between lies and the truth, it’s much easier to discern lies. Often, they’re as simple as the exact opposite of whatever it is someone is telling you. Most insidiously, they’re something we “deeply believe” is the truth, only betrayed by a faint whisper that, for me, manifests in my gut.

Let’s begin.

We’re familiar with the idea of “white lies.” These are presumed moral behaviors to save someone unnecessary pain. When I was deep in my god vs. science debating, inevitably you’d get challenged on whether or not you’d lie to your dying grandmother if she professed that she would see you in heaven. Are you, atheist cunt, so devout in your lack of belief you’d stamp on your grandmother’s sentiment? It’s an absurd scenario that most remotely human people would navigate without issue, white-lying because not believing in something doesn’t give you license to be a dick.

We have what I call “political lies.” These are the kinds of lies you literally have to tell to occupy certain positions of leadership, or any time you’re speaking to more than 1 person. It’s a fool’s errand to blame a politician for “tacking to the middle” for this reason. It’s in the job description to compromise. It’s the nature of democracy and new information. You’re going to be lying, but it’s not even your fault more than it’s the nature of the incredibly complex arena we’ve constructed to mitigate our differences.

Modernity has hopefully shed some light on the distinction between these kinds of lies and the next batch, “operative lies.” These are lies that work. Work for what? Work for you. They can be about anything, for anything, as long as you feel they are keeping you safe. That’s their primary function, to keep you locked in mentally to “wherever you are” that you deem is where you need to be. Any arena can be abused for your purpose, be it national politics, your family, your job, or your artfully cultivated circle that might even only contain you and your pets.

Operative lies are the important ones to parse further. An operative lie becomes pathological when most outside observers would judge you to be self-destructing along normative metrics. This is where addiction falls. The sense of “this is where I’m safe” bar gets set too low, so all of the operative lies you employ end up servicing destruction to your relationships, finances, and health. This is part of the reason I am professionally suspicious of literally anything my clients tell me. Addiction shuffles your whole self-concept and what constitutes lying.

Here’s where it gets even trickier and scarier. Operative lies are how we house a collective and cooperative society. It’s not just out of the mouths of our campaigners and would-be leaders. We’re each baked into “normative lies” that operate to keep things copacetic.

This feels almost “too obvious” to speak to, except we confuse how to relate to these different levels of lying all the time. I can also personally attest to how often I’m punished for violations of these normative lies, and it’s no small part of why I’m choosing to explore now.

One of the biggest normative lies I’ve been at the mercy of was an implicit understanding after explicit commentary about the inevitability of my successful future. It’s the “go to college, get a good job, you’ll be set” lie. It wasn’t said maliciously. They weren’t saying it to a kid who was flunking school or unmotivated. But it was a normal expectation bred from incomplete information. I’m certainly one of millions who’ve been through that rough awakening.

For my generation, it seemed to be the start of a major transition away from functional operative lying guiding fair-enough norms of society, into the chaos of pathological lies that only serviced the operations of those with power. The bar got set too low. We collectively began shifting our language around self-destructive new norms to operate at this unsustainable level.

In this new jungle of habitual pathological lying, every playbook for success has a sort of standing refutation built into the brain of everyone you might engage. And they don’t even realize it! Because the self-destruction doesn’t look like an overdose. It doesn’t look like self-harm that needs hospitalization.

What does it look like?

It looks like my time at DCS, where a catch-phrase like, “I care about the children” placates over aggressive, illegal, and policy-violating behavior, while the state massively under-pays and under-trains those tasked with keeping them safe. People who do care and behave as they should get punished and chased away. The underlying shameful cheeky sick satisfaction of those who embody Mean Girl bullshit are ultimately steering the ship.

It looks like the dozens of people who advertise themselves as having the specific set of skills you’re looking for, and 2 of them proving capable of doing what they advertise. Yet, they get paid, get reviews, and leave you feeling incredibly confused by how they command such a high hourly rate to not help you accomplish what they said they could.

It looks like friends who devolve into acquaintances and then into memories. There used to be a village. There used to be friends you held on to your whole life. The bar for engaging or working together got set somewhere in the story of the sanctity of your individual dreams and capacity, and we’ve slowly eroded the meaning of belonging to anything bigger than ourselves. We don’t think we exist past whatever is in our head, and don’t bother being shaped by influences vastly different, but vital to illuminating our depths.

It looks like the thousand and one “I’ve got a secret!” Instagram ads about making money, reaching the “next level” of whatever your hobby, and any commercial that’s telling how you must spend more money and acquire more things.

The thing I believe cuts through all the noise is inside us all.

Maybe you think my broader and somewhat hastily conceived categories are confusing and woefully incomplete. That’s fine, I literally just made them up based on my operating instincts. What I do in response to each of the categories is what makes them easier to understand. I listen to my body in how it feels to try and believe in one of the lies at each level.

Let’s go back to dying grandma. “I believe you’ll disappear into nothing and there is no god, let alone heaven!” If you can say that, full-throated, and not recoil, okay, you, psychopath, there is no deeper truth for you than seeking the consequences of that behavior in that moment. A normal person is going to feel like they’re lying. They’ll pull back. They’ll feel “off.” The truth is illuminated, how much they care about grandma, in shutting up and playing along.

Take an extra moment and think about the truth being illuminated from the lie. How you manifest your care for grandma is through silence or nodding along.

Let’s look at political lies. “I’m anti-fracking!” There’s too many competing and convoluted truths to be revealed. Is it true you care about the environment then? Is it true you’re concerned about corrupt corporate capture of energy? Is it true you need to align your views with the party? Is it true based on information today, or information that might be changing faster than we can process? The only truth that can be reliably revealed is that the person saying it thinks it helps more than hurts their chance to get elected.

How about these personally operative lies? What do you need to tell yourself to get by every day? Some of my classics are about being smart and still decent-looking. I point to the stuff I own, interests, work I do around the house or stuff I make. I talk about the struggle to create and stay cheerleading for unknown possible positive outcomes. These things aren’t lies, but taken as a whole, can give me pause and a reason to reflect on if that day, in that moment, I’m living up to the story or including enough humbling detail. I know when I don’t feel like a champ, king, or boss no matter how well I eat that day, how many shows I’m headed to that week, or storied my accomplishments on an instrument or weed whacker.

That said, whatever my personal failings to find focus, motivation, or the ability to account for a consequential detail, I’m not less embedded in a deeply sick and delusionally lying era. At this rate, I’m probably not going to be much richer than I am now, but you’ll hear routinely how “the average American” still suffers from the complex of being a “temporarily embarrassed millionaire.” We’re still teetering on full-blown, albeit incredibly stupid, fascism. We’re praying for a long and jovial ride on renewed “hope,” as a nice substitute for investment, sacrifice, and accountability.

To me, we’re still stuck at the misplaced bar. We’re still addicted. We’re operating under lies that tear us apart, little by little, and then all at once, as they infect each new thing we care about or took for granted. And it feels impossible to combat because we don’t even listen to ourselves. We’re getting super-charged algorithmic ways to play someone else’s game and learn someone else’s language. It’s self-reinforcing through the lies underneath pretension, gate-keeping, language-policing, and every instance of cliche insecure lashing out.

The truth of my circumstances has come out through my genuine adoption and beliefs in the lies. I keep learning the hard way. I keep putting my time, my money (credit card debt), my energy, and my future in the hands of people and systems who can’t understand how to hear the truth of themselves, let alone me.

I’m constantly looking for a way to establish a true and persistent “floor.” A place I can work from and believe in that isn’t riddled with the kinds of lies that tear down what they profess to build. I’m leaning deliberately towards my friends and family that haven’t played on what I got conditioned to feel was normal. I’m every ounce of every hopeful, forward-thinking, genuinely believing in himself asshole who has appeared on 1,150 blogs over 21 years. I won’t let myself forget how to recognize a lie.

I swear, on everything, I’m trying. Nothing about me recoils over that.

[1036] I Hate You, You Hate Me

I've been listless. You wouldn't think to notice were I not saying it. I'm still "busy." I still work full time. I still see, or attempt to see, clients in service to my own business. I'm tending to my bills and house chores, though apparently not close enough to have enough replacement litter after meeting the scent of my house when I opened the door this evening.

Let's just start there. I came home after seeing Hussain and him showing me how my car needs an alignment after the work he's done. He's predictably frustrated with our therapist who can't be bothered to communicate with us why a 20 minute task is going on 3 weeks to complete. The car has needed $150 or so in parts, he doesn't charge me labor, but it also needs tires, which I just bought for $270. Add in the cat litter, air fresheners, toilet cleaner, and some other "house supplies" things, almost $400 of crap, not fun crap, not wholly-unnecessary crap, just crap to live, drive, and clean, is on the way. Also, all the bills email me at once. $106.50 for the internet, and finally a nice surprise a radically reduced $150 for my electricity as the weather has improved. $8 for my seedbox. and $800 to my home insurance company because I figured, why not keep the spending ball rolling and avoid installment fees? I've been home for approximately an hour, and it only took me 20 minutes to spend $1400, $1600 on the day if you add the IMAX movie, gas and food I bought earlier. I also discovered a leak in my roof, and the rubber tape I suspect I'll need to fix it, $50.

I didn't buy truck tires. I don't have kids. I didn't have to pay my insurance for the year all at once. I didn't have to spend an obscene $17 on a bacon, egg, and sausage sandwich and large vanilla latte. I didn't have to see a movie. I could cross my fingers and pray for a few more months regarding my tires or just replace the worst ones. Do I absolutely have to have $5 air freshener? Of course not. It's not that any one piece of my day can't be sacrificed, or excused for, or defended in the spirit of living once and simple pleasures. It's that the whole premise and project that I'm working within, in my view, is irreparably broken, so it all feels futile and arbitrary fundamentally.

I'm smart and did well in school, and it doesn't matter. I've worked myself near to death across various industries, and it doesn't matter. I've attempted to start my own business several times, and it doesn't matter. I've lived as broke and hermit-like as you could reasonably expect a person to live, and it hasn't mattered. I'm as honest as a person can get without it becoming pathological, and it doesn't matter. I can get all the praise and positive feedback in the world, and it doesn't matter. I can be as giving and forgiving as you'll ever find in life, and it doesn't matter. I can live without things like running water, working toilets, air conditioning, or a bed, and it doesn't matter. I can create as open and freely accessible environment to live easier, play, experiment, save, or create, and it doesn't matter.

Nothing I do fucking matters. I'm not going to get paid enough, I'm not going to get recognized. There is no reward at the top of the hill. I'm not maintaining my access to heaven. I'm not winning friends and influencing people. I'm just telling a story of a wretchedly ironic caricature of the hero's journey. Perhaps in an anime you'll see them training. Each session they level up, or after they nearly die fighting a bad guy, they unlock new powers and potential. In One Piece the truly destined get a conqueror's aura that can paralyze or incapacitate through sheer will. Everything they do matters. Everything contributes towards them building strength, a reputation, a team, and a story that will transcend any given life or death struggle.

When I say "it doesn't matter" I don't mean "there's no consequences." I'd rather be in my paradigm than my paradigm but a little dumber, a little poorer, a little sicker, a little less well-connected, or a little more psychologically at the behest of my mother. I mean for you to think that the answer to "Everything happens for a reason" is "Yeah, shitty, shitty reasons." My schooling was a joke designed to extract money. My job(s) over the years the same thing. The business environments I've attempted to work in keep the tradition going. I could blame a most-encapsulating notion of capitalism, but I prefer to not obscure the simple greed at bottom. It's the greed of "convenience fees" and "transfer fees" and "processing fees" and "installment fees" and creeping ever higher interest rates. It's the greed drawn from an infinite well of insecurity that what you've created and how isn't actually good for anyone, fulfilling, or a worthwhile expenditure of time.

We were watching Kitchen Nightmares. The failing kitchens were all filled with greedy people. Their lost loved one needed never be dealt with as "their heart was no longer in" keeping the business alive. Gordon Ramsay comes in, points out the obvious, but then also magically resolves years of trauma and resentments in neatly packaged 40 minute episodes. 21 out of 105 kitchens are still open. That is a 20% success rate. If you're on Suboxone, there's a 90% chance you will still relapse. 10% of 21 million addicts actually seek treatment. I can't tell you how 1-to-1 the parallels in the worst kitchens matched the language of many of my clients. You're only twice as likely to save your kitchen as you are to "beat" your addiction, which is resting comfortably at 10%.

It's the behavior. It's your behavior that's fucked up, that sets the conditions for indefinite failure. Whether you want on-the-nose examples like millions of votes for fascism, or the, somehow, "abstract" fallout of your perpetual silence about things that matter, no one can succeed under these conditions without heavily sacrificing things none of us should think are acceptable. Did I describe such an extravagant and wasteful existence above? It's the first time I've claimed to spend money on anything that wasn't concerts or comedy shows in a while. Would I, could I, should I have the money if I dialed back trips around the Midwest and $50-$200 ticket prices? Sure. I could also die tomorrow. I'm on the road a lot, and that's where a lot of people die.

Specifically, the bad, wrong, always-fucking-me behavior is the lies. It's the pleasantries, the pageantry, the omissions, the red tape, the "good luck," the "I've just," the positive feedback backed by no more money, access, freedom, or power. I'm lied to constantly. It's the thing I hear most often every week. It's every sentiment offered to pretend "things" are "better" than they are. It's hopes and wishes and dreams side-stepping even acknowledging there's a problem, let alone exchanging ways on how to fix it, let even more alone fix it in perpetuity. We don't know what we're aiming at, why, what it could feel like once we got there, or what we're to draw on as we project its impact into the future. We have children we don't want and then somehow don't viciously punish the ones who would rather they go neglected or hungry than aborted. We take jobs we don't want and buy shit we don't need because slavery has been rebranded and taken us out of the sun if we're not a beleaguered minority. We pretend your human rights should pair with your access to capital; yours, or what's been mostly subsidized by everyone else.

We just lie, all the time. We pretend to be mentally stable as we shower the internet in stupid fucking memes. We pretend to be financially stable provided we never get too sick or downplay our cortisol levels that pay for must-have insurance. I am the absolute last person who should ever be in debt for really any reason. I live alone, in a shed, in one of the most affordable states, with a job paying considerably more than you'll find nearly anywhere. Even before I made the decision to go to all of these shows, my year-to-year trending spending was showing getting ever-indebted. All I was doing was driving and eating and working and I was losing. Could I have made more meals for myself? Sure. Could I have invested in a more fuel-efficient vehicle or diligently searched for a job closer to home? Maybe. Should I be expected to, every waking minute of my fucking life contemplate what I could do without so I can tend to basic fucking necessities to feel like a normal fucking person?

We're addicted to these bullshit fucking stories, and the kitchen-owners among us, with some professional celebrity help, have a 1 in 5 shot of keeping the miserably misplaced dream alive. The addicts have a reliable and predictable A- shot of keeping us collectively spiraling down the bowl of our fragile ego. You're depressed. You're anxious. You're angry. You're alone. You've given up your creative and motivated vision of who you imagined you'd be right now. You're tired. You're fat. You're every word is to be taken as fluff. You don't answer the call. You don't listen to the voice that nags you. You don't own anything, especially not even the very fucking fact that you don't own anything! It's all gone as quickly as you, or the people after you, can click submit.

I've wondered if I should go back to school, or learn a trade, or double-down on my debt and approach my business and potential from some creative angles. I've wondered if I should commit to retightening the purse strings and see if I can actually get within a paycheck of being out of debt verses cling to the story of the "few months away" that isn't true-enough to adequately describe the ambivalence and forlorn frustration undergirding my behavior. I'm enjoying my shows, TV, comedy, and music. The drives can be a literal pain in the ass, but..."What else would I be doing?" I'm not a real person in the environments I'm forced to adapt to or die. Nothing about me or my idea or my potential means a goddamn thing. So I'm going to laugh as often as I can, disappear into as many fantasies about family or friendship that will have me, and shake my fucking hair hard enough that my neck is sore for a week. I'm going to eat the food I like, spend obscene amounts of money on band T-shirts, and tinker on professional-level instruments.

I'm just as selfish as the next person, but I don't have to lie about it. In fact, I'm more selfish. I won't just let you have the story of yourself or your behavior. I won't just let you keep the peace. I won't be like an episode of Frasier where I step into the room and immediately continue to run with the lie. An 11 season 264 episode show ran through the 90s into the early 2000s built on insufferable caricatures habitually lying to themselves and others, and yet they're rich! And love finds a way! And the memories serve to remind them. And it can all be diagnosed and addressed as neatly as Gordan can turn around a kitchen. This is the kind of thing our brains have trained on our entire lives. This is why you're looking for a Disney prince or princess instead of a partner to work with. This is why we can get so lost in our own assholes we can turn ideas about being accepting or "woke" into compelling parodies.

You're still confused after reading this. You think I'm under some illusion that I'm more "real" than you or have some special insight into the nature of your pain and reasoning that I don't. You think I'm performing and am looking for sympathy or attention. You don't understand what the work of attempting to cope with a suicidal environment looks like. You don't actually access the depths of how hopeless and lost and fucking angry I am pretty much all the time. You will literally discuss your own issues through a series of fucking pictures and emojis or ensure your mental health struggle PSA has the best pictures of your tits and meta-data-ready hashtags. You don't fucking get it because I'm not lying to you, so none of this translates. It never has. It never will. It doesn't matter to you or the environment we're plugged into. It's for me, so I don't kill you or myself. You would never! you exclaim as your murder porn drones in the background. You can't imagine? You have a "quirky" fascination? Drawn to glamorized depictions of death is as ironically Freudian as it gets. You don't have the time or inclination to learn what I mean by that, so let your brain insert a belabored caricature. Freud is as real to you as he is to Frasier.

You believe your version of events. I don't believe what I'm saying right now, it's just what I feel and think. Show me something more. I have this version of events combined with the 1030 I've written already and the ones still to come. What do you think? Sorry. Can you think? What do you feel? Considerably more hopeful and joyous and connected and appreciative of our environment than me? I'll never know, because you'll never say it. You'll perform it. You'll Snap-it and Insta-it. You won't have a so-so time. You won't recall how you regret not missing someone more you designated as "best." You won't weigh the evidence of your satisfaction or direction of your existence; you'll filter what you're even willing to count as evidence, and reiterate it over and over again for the internal judge already on the take.

What can I control in all of this? I can keep typing until I'm done. I can keep going to work, running up the credit card, limping through my next business goals, filling up the tank, eating what I want, and beating the shit out of the infinitely abstract "you" for all of your silence, indifference, lies, and pain you cause in ignoring any word, let alone line, that might speak as whispered echoes of what was your capacity for honesty. Dumb or smart, you can choose to lie. Rich or poor, the story of either is a magnificent tapestry of bigotry or prejudice, or a holistic accounting and presenting of opportunities to act in service to discrepancies. Tax the rich and pay for literally everything we could ever need, or don't. Differentiate "poor" from "entitled," or rage-watch talking heads debate either abstraction indefinitely. I'm not pointing my finger at anything or anyone, because nothing is there. You're not there. You don't exist. You don't matter. You just won't admit it like me.

[1020] Missed You

I hope I can take my time with this. I had a lot of fun and helpful ideas on the drive home, but I don’t know that I’ll recall them all. First one is easy. I’m allowing myself to use the word “hope” again. I haven’t found a good substitute, and I think I’m aware enough to not allow hopes and dreams to supersede any amount of work it would actually take to get something. I think I’m fundamentally a hopeful person, but that always felt like a kind of shameful notion. Fuck hope, work. Why bother hoping if you can do? And then as you pay attention to so many things you can’t do anything to help or fix, the desire for them no less antagonizes, and you’re hopeful, if not still helpless.

I almost posted a tipsy status saying something like, “I want to do big things.” It’s a stupid statement. It’s the first pass of an idea, vague, nonsensical, and empty for its very “hopeful” sensibility not backed by any tangible commitment or sacrifice. I felt like it bubbled up as a reminder. I want to make a discernible impact on the whole of experience. I want to shift “things” and demonstrate an awareness or capability with power that you can measure independent of opinions. That hasn’t stopped being true no matter the seemingly infinite series of humbling scenarios I’m meant to swallow with regard to my budget, time, or energy.

There’s a chance for a role at work to be fully remote. I want it, but of course I don’t. I want it so bad that I continue to work to create my own business, again. What kind of “exotic” locales could I be in while I conduct my groups? How much “freer” would I feel if I could literally plan to spend more time with friends located much farther than 20 minutes from me? I bet I spend less on gas to and from the airport with $9 a day parking than I do driving to bumfuck Bedford.

Today has been weird. I haven’t felt anxious in a bit. Once I figured out it was my righteous “fuck you” impulse that spoke to my difficulty doing “easy” notes for work, I pretty much mellowed out. Then, ex-girlfriend comes back into the picture, and I’ve just been off. It’s not even confusing or complicated to me, but I’m in this observer state. I don’t feel seen by her. The last time I reached out, I was admonished, and it was made clear to me that if there was going to be any kind of “friendship” going forward, it was going to be on her terms and at her pace. Umm, great, but friendship is an exchange. What do you have to give to the person who can’t see you?

She suggested we walk around a trail at the dam near my house. I’m tired, don’t give a fuck about trails, it’s cold, and I’ve been less than adequately active for months. It felt like an analogy for our dynamic on the whole. I was just along for the ride. She spent a year or so discovering more about herself and finding the capacity to apologize. Cool, good for her. It has nothing to do with me. You want to spend time with me and have a “low key” or chill environment? Come bowing or let’s get food. That would suggest you have a remote inclination about what I’m into or would put me more at ease with you.

And I could just say “no.” I could just be like, look, I don’t trust you, I’m not angry at you, but you don’t make me feel good and I don’t want to have a dumb forever non-conversation about what it takes to look and feel like a friend, but I appreciate your effort or the direction you feel you’re trending. What does that get me? I couldn’t begin to pretend to understand how that might register to her. So, instead, I’ll be tired and complicit in my own caricature, walking along the forest path small-talking like I’ve recovered from the severe blow to my hopes and dreams come back to manifest as a perhaps more self-aware ex who confidently dictates the means by which we might relate.

Whatever.

I both enjoy and am a touch worried about how much I’ve learned to shut the fuck up and let things go. I’m literally too old. I’m 34. I really don’t need to say anything most of the time. I’ve seen it before. I see you coming. I’m not lacking in confidence or direction. I’m not an insecure or proud know-nothing powering through idyllic fantasies. I just want to hang out, build some shit, laugh, watch my shows, and not entertain too deeply the thought that were my plane to go down, I’d be getting off easy.

I’m taking more planes. I’m barely in less debt than I normally am, and I’m being way more deliberate about booking the flight, getting the place to stay, and just manifesting that “do shit and see people” ethos I wanted to be at 10 years ago. I don’t care about the debt. Even if I have money in the bank, I’m still in debt. There will always be utility bills and property taxes. I’ll always have to eat. My car…is a car, and I have 3 of them. So, debt? Oh well, at least I visited wherever, saw the band or friend, and get to talk about it again in whatever blog comes next.

I’ve been refreshing myself on different philosophers lately too. So many seemingly concerned with finding the best ways to live and think about things. Meta questioners by default mostly folding their arms after a quasi-circular reasoned thing registers as a novel way to state the obvious by the onlookers.

It's two days later.

I’ve been listening to Philosophize This! segments. I’m reminded in simplified ways that the vast majority of remotely “novel” insights I’ve ever infused into my perspective are pieces of what stuck from classes in college or reading. Each philosopher answering and undermining and substituting their words and versions to help explain just what it is we’re made of and why we bother.

I’m here at the beginnings of the last couple days where faint anxiety has started to creep back in. For a while there I was pretty smooth, working out why notes were such a chore and resolving myself to work at my own pace and/or in advance. My stomach still drops a little at the prospect of working each day, but it registers as an insult to the idea of suffering to bother mentioning it (over and over and over again). I feel bad I missed my friend’s text. Part of me heard my phone 2 hours ago, but a larger portion of me was in my own head. I put on a cheesy movie from 2002 and proceeded to play with sewing a pair of pants I’ve been saving for several years for repair because they fit so well. They deserve a person who actually knows how to sew or with the patience to watch more Youtube videos.

I tried to go to the gym today. My body was reaching that odd state of discomfort that knows it needs to be pushed in a way that I haven’t in a while. I thought I had the clothes packed and discovered otherwise in the parking lot. My plan was to use the energy working out tends to give me to come home and work some notes in advance. I act as if I’m not going to be up until 2 or 3 anyway. I’ve been fighting the temptation to maximize a level of debt to spur myself into more movement. At bottom, I know I need to move, I just rarely seem to identify what that’s supposed to look like each day.

For all of the different schools of thought and means of describing the same restless-human-syndrome, I find myself drawn towards the “everything at once” and “all is connected” sensibility. I think it’s why writing persuades me in a persistent way that it’s actually working at doing something. It’s an analogy for the perpetual process. The words can be infinitely translated and reinterpreted. Every time I return to them, they mean something just a hair different to me than they did before. They’re an embodied “form,” mathematically described, yet perfectly abstract and inaccessible until you activate your machinery for determining meaning. It really is a fascinating “thing.” When I’m dead, they get to act as different reincarnations. In summary of everything I’ve written, you might gather I’m rather angry and don’t like jobs.

It’s the next day.

I’ve just gotten off another dumb interaction in the world of sales. I find it fascinating there are people who have been in business for decades selling crap to idiots with cliches and soulless imploring who don’t have the persuasive skill and coherence I intuited at 15 fucking up your credit with Target red cards. I’m too sharp a weapon, man. I need to take your kids or go at 35 felons at once. I recognize my capacity to make “instant-friends.” Why can’t I get introduced to ones with money or influence lol? Is there truly nothing of value that needs introduced to someone who could use it? It’s always got to get gross and kinda forced or hidden under the corporate-speak that doesn’t let you engage with thoughts about how you’ve abused their ignorance or sold your soul?

I have to end this thing at some point. This week already feels incredibly long and I have a party I was invited to Thursday, Louis C.K. Sunday, and didn’t realize I’m off on Monday. I’m caught up on notes.

I say often how I’m lied to dozens of times a day. I think people mistake this as though I feel I’m somehow on the receiving end of deliberate attempts at deception. No no, it’s the colloquial language lies. It’s body language lies. It’s professed standards and competencies with no discernable measurement or distinction worthy of holding. I’m awash in lies and they make me extremely sensitive to when there are attempts to cajole me with them. I find commercials often psychologically tortuous. I hear on repeat the “wrong” word like “opportunity” you’re calling the cold-calling bait-n-switch “sales” job. Your acronyms and mission statements mean nothing to me. All the hyper-insisted upon “I’m sorry” “I don’t know” and “good luck” sentiments fogging your mind and air.

If I’m a philosophical cliché in being ever-restless and striving to individuate or manifest my power as described in dozens of works and religious traditions, so be it, but whatever I’m after I’m wholly convinced is impossible to achieve while under the spell of so much bullshit. If nothing else, no matter how obscure what it means to exist may be, you don’t do it better lying. You don’t do it better calling those lies “pretending” or “professional” or “mature” or anything that helps conceal and disguise the intention to hide.

[931] Got You On The Run

I must continue to explore my unease.

I understand what it's like to deeply believe in something and wish to protect it. I broadly conceive of life, and the many ideas we might concoct during it, fragile. Fragility does not mean we can't weather blows or questions, and frankly, I've decided for myself a long time ago that nothing is so taboo or sacred that it can't be joked about or spoken to honestly. Expressing myself, exactly as I feel, as earnestly as the moment persists, is almost wholly responsible for me not being in jail or depressed and low-key suicidal. Every ounce of intense pain or instances of regret I have churned through every word they took to express. The intense scrutiny, reminders, reiterations, and recurring themes aren't just important in terms of coping; they are necessary for a life I consider worth living.

I'm moved to write a few hours after unpacking another one of my “you just had to go there” kind of digressions and explanations. I ripped through all of the superficial goodwill and fake smiles. I had to turn my critical eye to the things that failed instead of carry on like life is beautiful and because we're all friends here, no need to remark on the smell.

I don't understand why a habitually “corrupted” view of things and “good-natured belief and enthusiasm” need to be married. The food tastes bad? Say you like the silverware and compliment the chef for staying in business so long. I don't mean expressing “looking on the bright side” or “glass half full” sentiments. I mean when something is persistently and demonstrably wrong, there's immediately an impulse to cover it up. The dog shits in the floor, we lay a towel over it, and move right along with the more pressing calls of the day. I worry a lot when I see this behavior play out. I almost confused it for guilt.

I'm extremely sensitive to being put on edge. For better or worse, I've been highly trained in attuning to the rotten smell at the center of the problem which must not be named. I literally have a persistent stress response, like a creaky knee in the coming rain, when the truth of the pain and drama in your body refuses to be vomited out like so much poison. That was my mom, choking, endlessly, on her own vitriol, unable to clear the despair. If you didn't judge correctly how much had piled up behind her teeth, she might kill one of your friends or beat the shit out of you.

It is deep my disdain for this deference to the unmentionables. It provokes all sorts of chained memories related to the spilling consequences. What I find so much worse than how I physically feel or mentally suffer, is how shockingly ambivalent people are to acknowledging how much dog shit is festering under so many towels. When you wish to clean up the dog shit? HOW DARE YOU HURT MY FEELINGS! I encourage you to spend an afternoon in a mentally unwell person's home literally cleaning dog shit up, and perhaps the extent of the aberrant end of consequences will move your cowardly heart to stop letting the little piles fester.

When I think of the things people are struggling to discuss, I can only conclude we've gotten way too comfortable as a species. You won't own your poor time management skills? You won't bite the bullet of an expense made in haste that turned to waste? You won't cop to the idea you might communicate the wrong things at the wrong times, if at all? What you can't say about me, regardless of what you think of my communication style, is that I'm unwilling, late, or unprepared to get way more detailed than you may care to hear. I can also be concise if the moment calls for it. Blogs don't call for it. Work directions do.

I know fascists have co-opted the idea of “woke,” and I don't exactly struggle, but hate to even flirt with sounding like them, but so much has been made of “discomfort” over the years. White people uncomfortable with black people call the cops in bids to get them killed. Challenging subject matter in schools threatens rich kids paying out-of-state tuition, so it's gotta go. Bullying campaigns and trauma awareness causes the pendulum to swing so far the other direction it's unclear how much has amassed on the “things you can't say/joke/think about” board, but I assure you, it's literally anything that's ever given someone pause or freaked them out. I can genuinely feel it oozing into so many of my interactions, the sensitivity, the dare, and the kind of anxiety I couldn't imagine it would ever occur to the person on the other end to tackle proactively.

I have a right to offend you. You have a responsibility to handle me. That's my claim and cause every time I say the truth, you agree it's the truth, and then you fall back to the idea of what your pathetic bitch ass feelings are telling you. Be strong, grow up, and fucking deal with it. Better yet, own it. Own the fucking thing I said, that you agreed with, that you know is fucked up and needs to change. I don't need to stop telling the truth. I don't have to adopt every occasion under every circumstance to provide you what I consider the truth, but goddammit, I'm not a child. I speak up when I need to. I speak up when I can see the consequences and the proverbial shit that's about to get beat out of me.

You know what I don't do? Just levy empty judgments and accusations at you. I don't just spill mindless hate because nothing happened, I just hurt, and I'm lashing out like a trapped animal. I sit back, watch, listen, ask, reflect, reflect again, re-read, ask again, ask different people, rephrase, write shorter, write longer, wait, wait, wait, play nice, and then finally, I don't get paid, and I turn the heat up to 2 on a scale that goes to 20, and all of a sudden you're suspicious of my motives and long-term feasibility or loyalty? Fuck that noise. I'm loyal like an abused fucking dog, and I'm sick of that getting preyed upon through negligence or disingenuous posturing.

You know why I'm so prepared to flirt with boundaries or say what you won't? No one else will. No one else will, and we have to. You have to know how you're fucking up before you can contemplate the magnificent effort it usually takes to change. You have to have accurate-enough data informing your long-term planning and decision making. You must demonstrate more than a basic grasp on the concept of accountability if you want to do more than be feverishly kicking as your head barely remains above water. I have to speak to everything good or bad about me, or I don't find the motivation or direction to see my life and plans through.

I have YEARS worth of things I could engage in to “kill time” that are not a pointed persistent direction providing a meaningful example to set. There is a reason for the things I do or don't do. There is a running conversation in my head trying to put always new, but more-often old, information into the right categories provoking or tempering my behavior. I do almost nothing reflexively or “lightly” anymore. I've got some set of guiding principle or game or goal in place for every moment of my day. Nowhere on that agenda is “start lying to myself for you.”

It's a rage-inducing thought to be presented that choice so often and so fluidly. I'm not about exchanging knowing glances with my other corrupt cops as we convene to convict the innocent. I'm not prepared to sum up my conception of yours, mine, or our collective problems with aphorisms and exhaustive smiling. I don't fuck up when I say something you don't like or make you doubtful or afraid. I fuck up in treating you like someone remotely concerned with owning, learning from, and dealing with your fear in an adult way. Everyone's their own little mob boss, courting “loyalty” and killing snitches, as the dogs cake the rug in shit.

You know what I never did in two years working for DCS? Lie. I didn't have to. I know what the job is, and it's not to put up a false notion of the circumstances in service to my assumptions, biases, or in reaction to people who've pissed me off. By not lying, I never have to worry that when I'm subpoenaed for an old case I'm gonna end up perjuring myself or a file I tried to bury will magically appear. I don't fear some aggrieved family rolling up on me at the gas station ready to kill. I don't have to avoid eye contact with anyone I've worked with or under. I know people whose lies ended up in front of judges who had to call them out. I know people who didn't get fired for letting that happen.

I'm under no illusions about how dangerous liars are. Before commentators made it cool, I already coined The Big Lie. I know what lies add up to. I know they double-fuck you in that they first deny, then preclude, whatever you might rightfully do to make the situation better. Again, I refuse the invitation. Again, I need to reconcile myself and the angle with which I will or won't fuck with your liar's game, a pithy spin-off of the business-as-usual world writ-large. I refuse to believe that everyone I meet and everywhere I go is like this as long as I keep championing the standard I need to keep. I still exist. I can own if I fuck up payroll, meeting times, or didn't provide copy. If you call me on what I've fucked up, I'm not going to question your motives. I'll then apologize, pay you, and get to work getting you what I should have two weeks ago by my own admission. Fucking emotion addicts.

[892] Death Cult For Cooties

I'm annoyed. I'm watching “The Vow,” where Scientology-lite ex NXIVM members functionally recreate Leah Remini's series with, somehow, even more exposition. I don't know if I even really appreciate the amount of catch-all nonsense cliches people employ to describe their time under the influence, but I know I'm losing my patience for this narrative that seems fit to start and end at, but how could I know!? This could happen to anyone!

The cult leader started as a multi-level marketing scammer in the 80s. If that's not enough to sound the alarm, say, because back then the nature of those organizations was less understood or you were young enough for him to consider you a target, there's more to explore. Hell, I've fallen under the allure of an MLM. I was 16, made one pathetic attempt at sending my dad to work with an energy drink catalog, cost myself like $20, and thus ended my career in “being my own boss.” I've also fallen for an Ebay scam, and believed I had a shot at girls I absolutely had no shot with. I characterize a good portion of my 16-25 year old self as something of a wide-eyed idealist verses deliberately naive.

As such, along those lines, I can empathize with these people. They had their own social and emotional issues. They were “looking for something,” and a nice-enough crowd with a persuasive personality coaxed them along. I think as someone who recognized his own capacity for manipulation and concern for the potential consequences, here's where I dramatically diverge. I start writing. The narrative used to justify the different environments that were making me miserable needed to be explored, not justified.

Part of the reason I didn't and still don't feel naive about the parts of my life that haven't gone as planned or didn't feel like they “should” was because I was actively examining them and making decisions in spite. You hear the same thing from the cult members though. They don't consider getting branded a bad thing. They don't think the bad press is anything but nay-sayers and people threatened by their growth and influence. What makes my conception of examining my life better than theirs? It seems too easy to point to the things any one member might have been convicted of, right? We were definitely drinking heavily, drugs were all around, and clearly not everyone experiences the party or sexual energy the same way.

I don't know that there's an “objective” analysis here. I think one of the reasons I insist on constantly writing, sharing, and exploring, is because with the ounce of sympathy or empathy I might have for any one member, I can't shake this sense that there's something dirty not being addressed. I can't believe they wouldn't be having the same kind of conversations I was, internal or otherwise. I can't stomach the amount of silence and circles one would need to let “everyone I know is starving themselves and exhausted” go unexamined.

Easy enough to think of the cult of Nazi Trump supporters, no? How many interviews have you watched of them just sounding dumb. And it's a deliberate dumb. It's a proud dumb. It's the kind of dumb that is servicing a disregarded maliciousness. That maliciousness is ravenous to see how much it can get away with or devour. That's what I feared about my awareness of my capacity to manipulate. Even before I had any real sense that I could go about it deliberately, I knew simple things like, smiling a certain way defused or disarmed people. Humor works pretty much always. To what end?

Maybe if most of your days are doing workshops and yoga classes, it's a little easier to be dragged along in a more-or-less agreeable way. What's the fat, drunk, gun-toting basement dwelling retard's excuse? Do you think he subjectively views his life as one worth living? Do you think there are a few, pretty easy, hard truths to wrestle with before you find yourself face-painted and shitting in the halls of Congress? There's a scene in The Vow were an old actress says her mom is second cousins with Prince Charles and he needs to do her a favor to get the Dalai Lama on the phone. Cletus T. Dickhead would certainly spell it llama and accuse him of being a pedophile. These are superficially entirely different worlds.

What unites the two is ritual lies. Shitty families operate this way too. They lie about the impact they have on each other. They lie about what holds them together as though blood is sacred enough to divine kings and soak up the mess of incest and emotional abuse. We're all shaped and shape culture, as much as we wish to deny the latter. “Generational abuse” exists as a term because we've come to understand that trauma travels over time. To the extent you are made aware of this and then proceed to ignore the obligation to examine how it's almost certainly playing out in your life, any asshole who gives you enough reason to distract from that line of inquiry is going to become compelling.

This is a big reason why I don't hero worship. I have people who I tend to admire, briefly, and then I start to let what's human about them creep in. Jordan Peterson is an easy target. I've gorged myself on the podcast 5-4 the last few days. If you ever make the mistake of letting your favorite band's members speak, you're in for a ride. Every thing and every one can be credibly criticized. They can be subsumed in your subjective estimation or they can be incorporated into our collective objective measuring. Nothing about what we should seek to understand in our enjoyment or promotion of something needs to rest in an angry or defensive space. It's disingenuous cowardice or intellectual narcissism otherwise.

Accountability is something that's just not here anymore. I think accountability is often thought of as “someone” “out there” who needs to “do something.” Like there's indeed something to be done, a hero is on the way, and whatever our obligation, it's to squawk like the morality is in sounding the bells everyone else has already been ringing. This is why your silence is terrifying to me. This is why when in the days after the literal attempt to overthrow the government, dumb as it was, gave license for these fucks to escalate further, why am I not seeing every single one of you demanding the assholes be arrested?

I can speculate that you don't hold yourselves accountable, not really, to anything of consequence or sacrifice, so it feels really hard and like some undue burden to add what you might only perceive as noise. Okay, and what else does your cult leader tell you you're not allowed to say? How many millions of psychological cults have you joined that have so many of the features of the Nazis? Dressing up fear and shame as pride? Seems likely. Wishing for death? Pretty much my constant thesis for the last few years. Deliberately isolating yourself in a deadly comfort zone from any further obligation to the world around you? Please, stop me if this shit all feels made up and reaching.

[843] The Only Way

The broad theme of this is communication. I'm going to try to not shoot too high in how I connect the scattered lines I'm hung up on. The major question is whether or not there is a right way to do something.

We make the argument, often enough, that there is only one way. Implicitly for most things, but explicitly when the danger is more immediate. You are silent in a theater. There's a correct and incorrect side of the road. Jesus.

The deliberateness or explicitness of the task is a dependent variable. It depends on the abstract frame you use to decode the world. If you have nowhere to be except to “transport” yourself, you may walk, ride a bike, be carried, send yourself through the mail, or take mushrooms, and the goal - transportation - is achieved.

This very blog has the goal of quieting my mind as its largest abstract framework. I define what “quiet mind” is. The next layer down is the careful word choices that hopefully you can digest. Together we might frame and conclude if anything has been translated. I hope you can identify your frames and see how they bump into others. I hope to provide resolution to how you and I orient ourselves and decide on goals.

I want “security.” A knee-jerk fear-based response might mean buying a weapon. This boxes “security” into the two hero-story scenarios everyone defaults to when they pretend they are a “good guy with a gun.” A model U.N. participant might regard stabilizing an entire region of the planet as the just and proper means of attaining “security.”

We know the ambiguity in communication so well that we tend to disregard the perpetual pain and consequences of misaligned meaning as “normal.” We settle for “different ways to skin a cat” sentiments instead of digging. We beg to be understood for what was “plainly said” with “common sense” and plead with people to tell us “what you really mean!”

I find business books constantly alluding to psychological studies on why your pitch or good idea doesn't resonate with a big boss's lizard brain. Relationship and self-help books prompt you to define your personality and style to categorize and depersonalize what your frustrated partner might have regarded for years as, “That's just Bill!”

Politically we bicker beyond the point of feeling sick about the ways to “defend the country,” and very often decide there are “sides” that cannot be resolved, somehow both perfectly reasonable, moral, and with their own kind of “rationality.” The consequences, often excessively felt by those hardly represented, serve less to teach something we later correct for than to punish those we disingenuously regard as “merely disagree with.”

As with most positions I try to take, the idea is not to bemoan the very circumstances of life to make some fatalistic throwaway comment. Yes, you can be right and wrong across many dimensions or layers of focus. Yes, we're always seemingly in some form of contradictory position. No less, I think there is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things, at the most abstract levels I can imagine. Specific is easy. Right side of the road, or crash. Eat, or starve.

Abstract is whether you should drive at all. This is a broad historical story predicated on the ethics, ignorance, and selection pressures at the start of the combustion engine era. There were angry environmentalists in those days, but it could be easy enough argued that the prosperity from working in a car manufacturing factory at that time, contributing to the boom and technological development of vehicles, and being an earnest part of modern society outweighed the impact of the pollution.

Can you be right about this issue? Immediately, the impulse is to cite individual justifications and get defensive. “How else can I get grandma to the hospital!?” The effort to lose the point makes itself known. I ask myself, if I were offered another means, a sustainable and reliable means to stop driving grandma to the hospital, would I take it? Yes, that's the right way.

This is a huge hurdle. The way we do things, talk about things, and orient ourselves in the world is our entire world. It works, for better or worse, in “maintaining life” as miserably as we conceive of it in any moment. What are you introducing that's more reliable than my car? What problems does it bring? Where's your proof it works as well? While we lose ourselves to the details and fight, poor grandma is left with all the time she has left to contemplate if, in the abstract, she was really the kind of person who should have had children.

Individually, we don't spend a lot of time attempting to frame things for other people unless maybe we're a parent or supervisor (and even then who knows). The trend of recent human history is to cultivate individual frames and feedback loops. Without ever thinking about the consequences of doing so, we start to regard this as the correct mode of interacting and obtaining information. After all, “information obtainment” and or “being entertained” are ends unto themselves, right? What's being communicated doesn't matter as much as that it exists at all. Thus, naturally, it follows we should compete as entertainment or for other resources.

I think this is a wrong way to be human.

Humans are conscious. Consciousness is awareness. “Awareness” is abstract. How to be “abstractly aware” the “right” way? This is the junction where people default to prescribed religious doctrines or a hodgepodge of mangled philosophy with “ist” and “ism” monikers doing the work of lived experience.

Claims of awareness abound. Pastors are aware of what God said to them. Environmentalists are aware of the impact of fossil fuels. Situational awareness is bestowed to the most paranoid or trained. Reliably though, we find ourselves only just-so aware and often tricked by those who understand the underlying forces at play. We'll be able to fool people with the monkey dancing between people passing a basketball video indefinitely.

It already feels impossible to be aware correctly, no? Even the phrasing feels weird.

This is where the humanity comes in. You qualify with acts. Immediately, your awareness coalesces around specific acts. You can arrest other's attention. If and when you become aware of something, you can choose to act in service to your understanding, or lack thereof.

We're about to get in trouble. What do you know? What kind of understanding doesn't beget a feedback loop of isolated self-satisfaction and justification? For before you can get to whether or not you are behaving in the “right” way, you have to find the impulse for truth and honesty.

Uh oh, I did it again, didn't I? I offered two exceptionally boundless words that we routinely treat with every possible interpretation as bedrocks. I didn't put them in quotes, though. I think they exist as far as you can throw them, sure, in varying degrees of focus and relevance, but also as an indomitable consistent base in each of our hearts. Absolutely none of my indignant posture towards other people makes sense without this broad abstract assumption I lay across everyone.

The thing is, I don't know what it is to be human if I ignore that impulse in myself. When I lie, it's disorienting. It's in service to something impersonal, primal, and probably reactively and unduly destructive. If I approach all of our interactions like you're perfectly understood and honestly relaying your experience, I betray the lies in you that I recognize in myself.

Practically, this means I occupy two very different conversational, social, and emotional worlds, and from the outside, they're impossible to differentiate.

You don't have to believe when I write that I'm being as honest as I can muster. If a part of you knows that I am, and you refuse to believe that, we're occupying different plains and I find it impossible to conceive of you as “doing human right.” This is not the same thing as struggling to contend with conflicting information or holding two competing ideas in your head at once. This is about whether or not I have the capacity to speak to, and you have the capacity to hear and recognize, whatever it is at bottom that connects us. I'd like to call it a science without cheapening science.

So you make the decision to be honest and tell the truth. First, impossible, hurdle and footing is done.
Next, you start denoting what you're aware of and stating where you exist relative to it.
Last, you act to change your relative place or in service to consequences the study or science of your experience can reliably predict.

This is doing human correctly and being aware in the right way.

When you hear an “intellectual” tout a series of catch-alls and vagaries that tangibly and reliably beget death and destruction, don’t get lost in their weeds, as they deliberately lead with lies. They pick untruths. You have to believe this about people, just like you can believe it about yourself when presented with the magnitude of your mistakes all at once.

People will deliberately choose death before they will choose honesty. They will do this because a life suffering the consequences of the reality of their decisions would be worse than death. Ironically, they only know this because their bottom-line communication science that understands blogs like this tells them so.

The problem, as our coronavirus times can no doubt attest, is that their choice to die in service to their demons, when scaled up, kills us all.

Thus, you need to return to the exercise. Is it honestly hard to believe people are willing to die and kill those around them, so recklessly, as you consider our violent past or watch them do so every day? Are you allowing yourself to be corrupted, in so many ways, by sympathies and physical or emotional burdens that have entangled themselves to those who are going to get you killed? Can you move in a way that maximizes your chance to survive?

Only once you frame the game and its different layers can you play it. If you're unwilling to do so, it's hard to consider you human. If you're unable to do so, you're likely the kind of person that needs protecting. If you're unable to find protection, you'll be the first to die. Maybe you don't care about who dies, but then again, I reflexively call you inhuman and a liar.

[829] Crazy-Z-Bich

If I'm going to remain stuck in the moment, I might as well write about it. Let's start easy.

There's different kinds of liars. I tell people often that mostly, my job is to get lied to. It sounds weird, but it's true. My job is not to “ensure safety” for children. My job is to ask questions, get lied to, and then see how often I can prove those lies and combine them with fancy inflammatory words to get you caught up in the State.

Today I was lied to by a most insidious type. There's the general pieces of shit who fluidly flow from one nonsense lie to another, often in the same breath, and you can't shut them up. They're like a waterfall of bullshit, and everyone involved, unless you're their case manager, learns to let it wash over them as streams of bullshit will. The type that lied to me is what I consider a cancerous cousin of this type. The stream of consciousness bullshitter is warped in a pitiful manner. The cancerous cousin is malicious.

This kind of liar wants to see you dance. “I CAN'T MEET! MY SCHEDULE IS SOOOOO BUSY!” Always exasperated and insistent. This liar will tell you they couldn't be bothered to answer you for over a week, send you a text before the ghosting suggesting good will for the holiday, and then throw their own cancellation of plans in your face. This person will knowingly tell you “yes,” anticipating the next minute’s “no” to the same question, after you've pulled out the form, and after they've reiterated their “very serious” concern about signing anything.

This person feels like they need to attack, but they're broken, so the attack is broken. They won't lash out, because they don't really believe in anything. They have to act dumber than they are, put up walls not because they feel defensive, but because they're angry the world might ever direct its attention at them for any reason, let alone the genuinely concerning ones. I realized as I was getting heated twice with this kind of person, there's something special about how fucked they are and what it speaks to in me.

I try incredibly hard to keep it together. I'm a short fuse when you hit the right buttons. It's literally a categorized character type and nothing special, but it's something to be aware of. Not much will set me off, like it takes straight up violence most often, and even then it's a toss up. More often than I'd like, I'll flare up when it comes to how we're approaching the “truth.” I get lied to all day every day, why was her approach so unsettling? Different quasi-parallel circumstance that comes to mind: why did I get snappy at my girl when she kind of dismissively was writing off something I was saying about myself and perspective?

I want to be recognized for how much it's taken to get to be who I am. I want to be seen for all of the words and effort and pulling-it-together after the teeth grinding and panic and incredible amount of rage gets distracted by a cheeseburger. To disingenuously play with that isn't just rude or bitchy, you're fucking with my functioning foundation for fucking with life. I can recognize a scared bitch, an angry cunt, a stupid fuck, the insecure, defensive, sad, or a wanna-be “crazy.” But what do you make of a chaotic condescending malicious piece of trash who, so ashamed of themselves think it best to, not cope, not implode, or not speak with humility, but turn on the very concept of accountability or those who represent reasonable caution and concern?

It's a different, extra shitty animal. They aren't looking for sympathy for their poverty or past. They are daring you to acknowledge their depravity at any moment so they can invite you into it. I found myself relatively speechless because every word becomes an opportunity to be squeezed beyond comprehension. I meet a lot of pieces of shit, but when they go above and beyond, it's absolutely necessary to parse out their demon. You gotta know what you're fucking with and who's trying to fuck back.

[798] T.B.L.

Here's one where the title came first.

I want to describe what I'm deeming “The Big Lie.”

The Big Lie is a shifty beast. Its defining character trait is an ability to become literally anything. It's practically a fundamental force of the universe. Colloquially, you might understand it as a grand illusion tantamount to “we're all gonna live forever!” Its quality allows us to persist indefinitely in (a) direction, independent of external qualifiers attempting to describe the nature or moral of that path. The Big Lie is a tool, perhaps a necessary one, that acts as a defiant buttress against the onslaught of indomitable Truth.

The Big Lie is polite, because, what if? What if you slam the door on an opportunity? What if they got the wrong message? What if you betray your motives and disclose something you never intended? It's okay, sweetheart, everything will be okay. You're a fighter. You'll figure it out. Don't let your story end here! We believe in you.

The Big Lie is romantic. Its love will last forever. Its butterflies can fly straight through the sun. It's anticipating the ending of a movie you've seen 1000 times, with a refreshing tear and sigh for what's nowhere else reflected. It will wine and dine, carpe that diem, and burst out in song at the chance to be here and now and with you, where nothing outside matters, and we're in this together.

The Big Lie is pragmatic. You gotta pay the bills. The kids can't be left in such a state. I wouldn't dream...

The Big Lie has so many plans. 3 months from now, abs. When this debt is paid, relief! My grandmother didn't find my grandpa until she was 36! With this election, we'll right this ship.

The Big Lie is pretentious. How dare you phrase it that way? Don't you understand how much I've given and how deeply I care? If only you had my perspective, things would really start to get better. There is no “I” in “team,” but let's not forget who brought us all together now.

In order for something to constitute The Big Lie, it has to lie at the heart of all of your insecurities. It's a long and loud bellowing you pretend is a whisper. It's the nagging that makes you cry for “no reason” when you've been pushed against a wall or otherwise triggered from stress. It's the argument you're not willing to have because you're not willing to think about the consequences of doing so. It reinforces itself as it gains momentum across lax disciplines.

I tend to feel like I sound dramatic with many things I say. I, really, don't want to live a lie. I want whatever form my Big Lie takes to blindside me and burn the lesson into my skull. I live by the contradictory or contending thought. I breath the counter-example. I turn every best thing about me into a story of my failure to utilize them properly, and I shape every shitty misstep as a piece of the broader contextual whole.

I think the constant dance of not adopting The Big Lie is literally the voiced, written, and acted out consequences of the world. The responsibility is yours, to suffer or accept. I watch meth kill people and destroy families. Don't you know it “makes them feel better” and “isn't that big a deal?” I watch as we STILL do not comprehend that extinction-level suicidal forces are weaving their way past our collective psychological mechanisms that pull up. We're battered wives, isolated, without agency.

I think every drop of poisonous deception you allow, covers the surface and penetrates deep. A battle for hearts and minds so drowned in contemptuous seas is not a battle worth fighting. To even look for land, let alone a moral high ground, as the security The Big Lie provided proves an inadequate buoy induces panic. Feverishly afraid, we reach for heaven before going under.

We were asked today to go around the room, say who we were, and why we loved what we do at our job. I was the only one who led with, “I don't love what I do.” Was everyone around me lying? Only they'll know, but I suspect from some of their answers, it was easier to play along. This kind of thing happens dozens of times a day. How much do you like that blouse? Do you think you can do what's best for this family? Are you really that friendly and invested? The one note, played until you're dizzy with glee. If I never see you sad or angry, is that why you think I'm “negative,” and can't see or understand what makes me happy?

We're trapped into some form of illusory experience. Our brain takes shortcuts. We reinforce biases and fill in blanks meant to be blanks. This isn't The Big Lie, this is just the consequences of biology. Biology set conditions, we laid The Big Lie on top. Biology gave us many many pitfalls, and we celebrated them. The world bred us through death and sacrifice, and we called it GAIA, put Gods in the clouds, and worshiped the sun thinking it all eternal. And in our fear masked in deference, and praise scarred by resentment and scorn, we practice the rituals with withered shreds of dried hearts, for nothing beats. Music played for our ears only.

I'm going to continue to testify. I'm going to show what it means to be primed and prepared for everything to change in an instant. I'm not someone who should ever be believed in, just watched. I even hate that song, and now it's mine. The truth happens, and The Big Lie allows it to.

[741] The Devil His Due

The last few hours has been a discussion and reflection on the different degrees and general pathologies of humanity. It's been a comparison of the kind of lives we lead, hope to lead, and lifelong pitfalls of thought and behavior people fall into. It's been a conversation that causes me a headache, and then a half hour goes by, and I start to feel a sense of overwhelming calm for both having got it out, and realizing again, that for all of the pathology and pain, the vast majority of it isn't mine.

One question me and Byron both asked ourselves was, “How did I get here?” Why, as people who can openly discuss bending people and exercising power, why aren't we just the most ridiculous and malicious and selfish people on the planet? Why doesn't he just invent some story to take kids away from objectively terrible people who just quite don't meet the criterion the State needs? Why don't I pull every lever of retaliatory power to bend addicts over my knee and punish them for their bullshit?

Or what about other realms of our lives? Why would I retreat into a mode of passive actor with regard to seeking sexual activity or adopt the modes and means of acquiring money I persistently regard as morally corrupt and naive? Aren't I a loose cannon who's too blunt and judgmental? Why not put on a million faces, like the perfect politician, and weave my way between the cracks of what look like gaping wounds in different groups and people I meet? Why don't I take every opportunity to squeeze all that I can from anyone, all the time, because I can, or because I can presumably make anything justified or simply lie about it?

What's demonstrated in that last paragraph is a kind of “mission creep” in the mind of someone who holds no regard for who I am or how I got there. The person who sees you as capable of having no high ground, in fact, doesn't have their own. The person who fears your questions and responds to inquiry with resentment, cedes the capacity for truth, therefore you are untruthful. The person who adopts the vagaries and accusations of a moment, abandons long-term goals and the responsibility of daily devotion, therefore you are devoid of inherent sanctity and forever non-specific no matter your language. The person with the most feeling, and the testimony of the mob, renders you emotionless, or incorrectly and not allowed to express your emotions, and so very, very alone. This is the tried and true method at the base of every rationalization. I know you are, but what am I?

I titled this blog The Devil His Due, because I always feel like that devil on people's shoulders. I can bring up the topic, or make the joke, or provide a suggestion, and then that suggestion lingers. You then proceed to spend your entire life avoiding the question, pretending you didn't laugh at the joke, or hold no sympathy for the suggestion as you physically fight back the tendency to agree. You'll marvel at the capacity to get in your head and stay there, while forgoing the exact tool you're perfectly capable of employing to find yourself in equal parts my head as I am yours. You could just try thinking.

When you start thinking, that's when you discover where you are or where you're going. The reason writing is thinking, is because you can't get each word without going over it first. No sentence is determined until the end. No “justifying” sentiment comes without the lines before and after it and hopefully paragraphs after those. How broken do you have to be to think that, of all people, I'm a liar, in a forthright manner? I can lie. We all can. We all do. But what do you understand, can you understand, are you ever willing or able to understand, why I don't want or need to? Can you recognize the difference between when you're lying and not? Because, remember, when you can't, I'm therefore reduced to the one who not only must be lying, but is doing so deliberately and maliciously. Not like you, no no, so innocent and on accident, but forever armed with the truth regardless.

This is a timeless pattern. This is why I need to take my potential judgments of people and angry feelings and lay them out. Why? Because I'm not actually filled with hatred. I have a brain that can provoke headaches and reacts with a level of anxiety I don't particularly care for, but I also have the contrast of my whole adult life with what I grew up with. I used to have several month long headaches from living under the general unresolved questions and stress of my domineering household. It was day and night to my mental health to be able to have a space I didn't regard as hostile and didn't cause me physical pain once I was able to leave.

Here we get to that painful irony of my being, and being that hot little devil on your shoulder and in your ear. My words cause pain. The ones meant to be painful cause pain. The one's that aren't, cause pain. The ones I regard as the “truest” or the best approximation of my feelings, those hurt the most and for the longest. I arrive at words today that have in some way been forming my entire life. That's truths that suck ass. That's descriptions of behaviors I'm not insanely proud of. That's motivations and misunderstandings I've let carry me through an ongoing mesh of complicated relationships, risks, and decisions. The only thing that has a prayer of making sense of it all is my individual sense of responsibility. I can't rely on your endorsement alone. I can't believe your words, let alone mine, as the absolute best and most reliable for all things at all times. I'm required to practice and reinforce unremitting doubt.

Doubt is not denial. Doubt is painful. Doubt needs to be rooted in something or you disassociate from all reality. Doubt that gets out of hand literally makes you insane, as anyone sacrificed to acid might attest. But doubt is also an effort and choice and exercise. Incidental doubt is fear. Fear is not what you need to practice, doubt is. Decrying the earth is flat is fear that you really are stupid as fuck and have no grasp of reality. Doubting the earth is flat is presenting information that can actually contend with all of the evidence otherwise. Healthy doubt is knowing there is no remaining argument and conceding the Earth is round, and moving on to doubt the next thing. In order to respect the example, one must imagine a child who's only as good as the information it's been presented. One should probably regard most people as children first and in a similar manner.

But then you get old. You don't have an excuse, barring mental deficiency. You need to start believing things for good reasons. You need to carry yourself and your words as if they have an impact. You need to build relationships on those kind of foundations as if your life depends on it. Because it does. Modernity helps mask this because the intellectual work has been done for us. You were born into clean water, you don't have a visceral memory of someone dying by drinking the wrong kind. You were born into a world where there is an organization that responds to emergencies, you don't have to adopt a whole host of self-preservation techniques or die. The world becomes a loose-knit game of interpretation, because no one's making it the right kind of painful. It's a pain either imposed, or one you can adopt in manageable pieces.

Pain itself then becomes pathologized. Instead of something that can be incidentally used incorrectly, it's wrong by default. “He made me uncomfortable!” The rallying cry of #metoo. Maybe you didn't know? Guys are insecure idiots with no idea too. They're uncomfortable. No guy, never, is going to carry the kind of vitriol for his being that is currently insisted upon without you exacerbating the problem. Guys respond to challenges with another challenge, or a breakdown. Broken men do crazy shit. And a physical or psychological challenging pissing match is not the way to improve the relationship between men and women.

So let's say I'm the devil. Let's run with the thesis that I'm as bad as it gets, cast out of God's kingdom. Relishing the souls he sends me after I've plagued them with sin and tempted them to sign away, for eternity no less, any right to their being for some fleeting delight. Okay, I accept. But the difference between me and you who might make that proposition, is that I don't give you the rest of my being or story. The last 3 sentences I typed before this immediately showed how quickly metaphors breakdown when you attempt to rationalize mythical beasts, so you get this instead, and we'll move on.

People blame me for expecting them to converse. Think about that. They think it's a “problem” that I should expect you to be honest in spite of the pain or difficulty of a conversation. They'll tell me to censor myself in descriptions of things I apparently did to someone, and am both remorseful and confused by the dialogue that surrounds it. They'll tell me you seem and ask what are you trying to say? Trying? Clearly, I'm trying to say literally everything I am. In fact, I'm saying it! I didn't try to tell you that, I did. Why isn't that enough? Why don't you know how to say, instead of try to say? I don't understand the question and I don't see the reason. Well, there was no real question, and the reason has to do with feeling something negatively about the words, not taking them in and recognizing what they say or responding to them.

This is why science feels like a threat to the faithful. They don't get it, they just know it doesn't feel good to think they're monkeys. This is why you can tell me what kind of person I seem like, but would never in a million years consider quoting me with something I actively chose to say. This is why you can get away with asking me questions that deserve an immediate answer and “taking responsibility” posture, but mine can go ignored. This is why relationships breakdown, and stay broken, because “you've changed” could never be, “I was never willing to listen to nor accept who you are.” You can't recognize the difference between an excuse and explanation. You don't have a concept of honesty. You don't have reasons, nor practice, how to be healthily skeptical or honest in your own life, therefore, no one is or can be. You justify, so they're unjustified.

I don't do that. I report to you your own words. I ask questions when I'm confused. I hold up your literal contradictions in thought next to each other because you've habituated not seeing them. That's painful, and you didn't ask for it. You only ask for it alone, in secret. You don't want to have an open public discussion because you know, not even deep down, that you haven't thought about it like you should. And if you did, you'd have to give the devil his due. He worked for your soul. He didn't recognize it as individually sovereign and held in the first place. The only reason you signed it away was because he was right.

My tone is so damming because I don't want a headache every day for months. My questions arise from the process, not because I thought, “This is going to be the best thing to fuck up your day.” It's a question because I don't know the answer. It's a question because presumably you don't know either, but you're acting like you do. Unlike you, I don't know how to resolve questions that go ignored. I don't know how to function even remotely healthily or orient myself in the sea of douche-bags unless I figure out my voice and behavior that isn't under constant assault to be molded by every pathology. I want to say something like, “Of course I'm a murderer, and rapist, and thief, and have anger issues, and would lie to save my ass, and on and on and on,” because that's true independent of everything, of everyone, about everyone. The rule is fuck, have kids, and die. That rule doesn't care about laws, or civility, or “civilization,” or the dreamiest love story or the most hopeful statistic.

You know how many of my well-meaning “intelligent” friends with their wedding pictures and good enough jobs and goals have had kids? NONE. You know how many children exist between the families I supervise for their neglect and abuses daily? No less than 2 each. There is no case to be made that we are anything but the hastily and mindlessly collected sum of our more often than not fuck-ups and animal instincts held together by some ingenious mental fuckery and self-delusion that pragmatically functions as preservation. That doesn't mean it doesn't need to get vastly better. That doesn't mean bad behavior is justified, or even inevitable, but it does mean you have a LONG long way to go on the road to “better,” if you can't even have the conversation or recognize more than one feeling-laden reason behind how someone or something functions in the world.

If you don't seek the failure point, you are the failure point. That's the new means of evolution. Active adapting to the new information. I was a lovesick child in high school. I learned the biology behind it, and said “open-relationship.” I learned the logic and utility of “enforced monogamy” and found the room to cut out “general monogamy” or my feelings as they pertain to sex verses trusting someone with my thoughts and intentions. I disavow language without the underlying ethic and without dismissing the effect of “love.” I eschew marriage with the capacity to respect and feel good for people who find ways to make it work for them. I concede there are problems and gray areas related to boys and girls and how they fuck, especially drunk, without condemning men and masculinity, nor denying someone their perception or story of feeling unsafe or violated. I don't give a fuck about the outdoors and will still look at your pictures and climb the mountain with you. I can have a point of view; I can have a well-researched and extremely thoughtful and painful point of view, and I can still wish endlessly, until the day I die, that you will fight it and change it and give me better reasons than the ones I discover while writing.

But I do the work. I take the risk. I face my behavior. I want the feedback because I use it to change. You don't, so you don't provide feedback, face your behavior, take risks or work, therefore, that must not be what I'm doing or capable of. I don't feel I understand your behavior, I'm turning you into a blog so you can be dismissed. A blog isn't an honest exploration and coping mechanism, I justify justify justify and preach preach preach and never find a way not to be “negative.” You see, I didn't think these thoughts, or spend a few hours on persistently aggravating ideas, I'm attacking you. Because if you were to write about me, or the negative influences in your life, you'd be attacking, lashing, because you're on the defensive. No one taught you the difference between explore and defend, pick apart and attack, doubt and afraid, honest and “truly feeling,” so it all just feels like a whir of incoherent ranting.

News flash, it's because that's what you sound like. We all do, but some of us are actually trying not to. Some of us invite the devil in to talk, because he can't make us sign away our soul. I'll never feel bad when I'm telling you that's precisely what you're doing. I'll feel pity. I'll feel hopeless. But I'll feel those things for you, not about me. Isn't that what we should be doing with feelings? Feeling for people, not about them? Shouldn't we be conjuring, or de-escalating, what we should feel? Aren't feelings impressively wrong, most of the time, so they should be as deliberate as we can craft them? Shouldn't they inform instead of dictate? Are you only hearing this as me advocating for abolishing all feelings? Are you even willing or capable of conceiving of me as having feelings that are well-earned and combated with? You certainly don't act like it unless they can be reduced to a reason to fight. You certainly don't include them in your “good-natured” tear downs of my intentions or awareness.

Ultimately, I get to know and behave like I don't hate you, in spite of all the good reasons to do so, because I don't hate you. You're disappointing, daily. You're bigger and whiter shells than I'll ever be. You'll keep reminding me of people who live at the logical extremes of your behavior that I'm paid to exploit. And I'll keep writing, and trying, and inviting, and claiming not to be a proper martyr as I die a little each day inside in service to my “naive idealism” that merely keeps me oriented towards trying to do better, do more, and finish the work. It hurts less than looking for your soul.