[1241] Cut It Out

My brain has been packed. I’ll be lucky to put a paragraph together for what feels like a dozen different subjects. My head no less compiling and looking for the patterns.

They killed an average, normal, sparkling white woman. Just now. Just NOW people are arriving at, “It could be me!” Not people who pay attention. Not people who read history. The people who can’t be bothered or can’t handle what it takes to be enmeshed in the political landscape. And who can blame them? It’s one impossible, unprecedented, and seemingly intractable problem after the next every single day. They’ve already killed innocent Americans. They’ve been Nazis all along.

We fought world wars over this shit. It wasn’t that long ago. My grandpa killed Nazis. We established a world order to try and avoid ending up like 100 million people who had to die because hatred and a desire for power ran amok. I’ve been asking for years, how bad does it need to get? How many people have to die for the worst reasons imaginable before we’re back at some iteration of a world war footing? How many lies are we not going to call lies? How often are we gonna play the “both sides” game? How many criminals are we going to pardon and reward?

At a certain point, you have to stop blaming “the algorithm” and recognize the nature of the manipulation. There’s not a single sentence on my feed that isn’t highlighted if not for its capacity to sound like the craziest thing anyone has ever said about what would otherwise be shared reality. If it’s a picture of a red square, the first comment with 1,500 “likes” says something like, “You’re ignoring Green squares because you know Jews deserve what they get.” What? Doesn’t matter, must be “refuted” and batted around indefinitely for engagement.

Increasingly, it feels like “the culture war” is literally addiction. It’s one of the reasons I struggle with the idea of calling addiction a “disease.” I get the argument in the broadest stretch of the word and what you can measure between some addictive brains versus not. But all things being equal, if I was sitting here with cancer, I can’t choose to recognize that cancer in any other way than as the thing that’s going to eventually kill me if I don’t correctly identify and eradicate it. The angry and hateful/irrational/bot-driven words can’t eat you if you don’t let them.

Nor do any series of “crazy,” “gaslighting,” or “powerfully framed rhetoric.” I’m so utterly confused by people who can’t see through words that are expressly meant to radicalize. I can’t tell you how many parrots I hear pretending to “argue” things they explicitly learn nothing about in service to their mouthpiece act. I don’t care how many times the lie is told, it’s not persuasive to someone like me. It’s not compelling. It’s not something I’m eager to repeat. But that’s only because I care about the distinction between the truth and a lie.

Why? Why do I care about that distinction? Lying makes you money. Lying gives you so much power you can kill by the thousands and face no real consequences. Lying makes you famous. Lying helps you fit in. It’s a one-stop shop of solutions to the biggest problems we face as lonely desperate animals. So, again, why? Why not play along? What’s it matter to you?

It’s a selfish impulse I have. If I felt as good lying as I do living truthfully, maybe I’d be able to lie like them. I like being able to see through lies. I like being able to accurately predict what’s going to happen. I like the result of consistent work and building upon a foundation I don’t have to worry when everything around it is burning down. Most of the most stressful and ridiculous things I have to navigate personally and professionally boil down to lying. Whatever the person, or organization thinks is being protected by doing so is the same naive pretense that puts the smug condescending tone behind the vitriol of those in power now.

I don’t think anyone is genuinely afraid of, “What goes around, comes around.” Plenty of Nazis didn’t get tried at The Hague. Plenty of people spend a large portion of their day carrying out physical and verbal abuses towards vulnerable people and animals they’ll also claim to love. Occasionally, someone bites back, but most cower, defeated, praying the person will get theirs in Hell. Or, and I think this is key, they don’t want them to end up in Hell; they’re so nice and so forgiving it becomes a kind of noble self-delusion to suffer indefinitely and perhaps even think you deserve it.

Is that where we are as a species? We deserve this? I’ve certainly felt that. We’ve neglected so much for so long. We’ve stopped caring, at all, about the big picture or about the obvious consequences. We stopped insisting on the rules that literally a hundred million people had to die to get established.

I’ve started TikToking. It’s a desperate act. It’s not a performance. I’m not a “content creator,” nor “influencer.” I’m not trying to make “reaction” videos. I’m not trying to speak from some kind of righteous indignant authority beyond the place of common sense and experiences I genuinely feel. I’m not a comedian. I’m not a philosopher. I’m trying to scream more into the world in the way that the 60% of Americans who can’t read at a 6th grade level might understand. I know they aren’t reading blog posts.

Anyone and anything has the potential to break through like a bullet through a suburban mom’s windshield. “We” have an infinitely better chance of breaking things through by exercising our voices. You have to be real. You have to state the obvious so many times that we work it back into our collective memory and behavior. I don’t need another world war to have learned many lessons from it. Masked private police with SS tattoos is a non-starter. 85-ish years ago my grandfather would have, literally, slit that person’s throat. My job might be to find the non-violent means of rendering the same result, but it’s also to keep saying, proudly, what my grandpa accomplished.

These big problems make small problems feel so… misplaced? Misaligned? Whether it’s my difficulty doing menial jobs, broken water, itchy toes, debt, or concerns about my car or house, it’s like, didn’t the Vice President just say they’re gonna go door-to-door? So they’re gonna shoot people in their own homes because there will be more stuffed animals to spray blood on? Because this keeps us safe? I’m, it must be “impressed,” that the collective hasn’t started shooting back. It’s an incredible amount of strength and resilience. The Nazis never gave up, and the Japanese only broke when the most dangerous thing ever invented was dropped on them twice.

Resolve goes both ways. It just feels like we need to speed things along. We need consequences faster than fascism operates. We need people who are criminally exercising their power punished here and now, not, “When we get power, hopefully, one day.” We should be stripping Supreme Court judges of their positions. We should be investigating people who slow-walked insurrection activity. We should be imprisoning people who have destroyed our institutions in service to their greed and conspiracies. And we should be doing it today, tomorrow, and every single day until we can breathe again.

Every single time you’re drawn into a “debate” over things we figured out as pre-humans, they win. Just don’t. Just don’t respond. Don’t bother. Don’t feed the trolls and bots. Identify an action move, like with Stacey Abrams’ podcast, and do something suggested there. Write. Do this. Explain, in detail, how you’re not crazy and things you observe are wrong or right for thoughtful reasons. Identify the people who are playing the wrong game. The liars. The gamesmen. The ones who shift and play to the rabble in their bid for the kind of power other fascists believe is worthwhile and sustainable. That’s the “only” way out. Literally every one of us doing the smallest bit, every day, in service to each other, not the errant barking of the puppy killers, convicted rapists, and proud.

[1152] And The Horse You Rode In On

 Here’s the thing, because for the first time since Trump ever entered the political area, I’ve professed to facebook that I would literally buy guns and kill Nazis - that explicitly.

Life is not actually a game. I’ve said it is as an analogy plenty of times, but it’s life and death at all times. Whether you get stopped by  your ailing heart or a car coming the wrong direction, you need to be paying attention to the right shit and proactive to survive in any manner beyond “animalistic.”

You are a fucking animal first. That this is so willfully denied is how we will all end up dead by our own hands. Animals are fucking dumb. Animals are fucking violent. Animals are reactive, arbitrarily horny, and at the literal mercy of circumstance. THIS IS YOU. YOU ARE FUCKING DUMB. YOU ARE FUCKING VIOLENT. YOU ARE REACTIVE, ARBITRARILY HORNY, AND AT THE LITERAL MERCY OF CIRCUMSTANCE.

Whether you deny this about yourself or about the “other side” you’re pretending to engage with, this is the operative fucking narrative and detail that will adjudicate existing altogether. Neither of us needs to maintain an “opinion” on that shit. Neither of us needs to fight over “just how much” we’re plagued by these conditions. You are a wretched, scared, naked animal, first.

Whatever incredibly fair and mean-spirited things you can say about the democrats, they are entirely different categories of awful when you play with fascism. This shouldn't be hard to understand, and it’s not, when you stop acting like a dumb fucking monkey. You don’t get The United States of America when you cede to fascist thinking. It literally no longer exists. When you double down on being fucking stupid and PROUD of your stupidity, everything fucking burns. And you know this, and your evil stupid animal self will do it anyway.

It can get worse. You might literally see the world where you have to kill in order to survive. WHY THE EVER LOVING FUCK WOULD YOU PLAY WITH THAT?!  Why would you apologize for it? Why would you downplay? Why would you hold your tongue against your cliche “right-wing uncle?” Our literal capacity for a remotely coherently modern and stable existence is at stake, and has been, since we started ushering in this fatalistic avatar and hyperbolic bullshit back with Reagan and Thatcher.

It’s a single fucking thread through history. Learn from this shit. Today. I’m not excited about the prospect of some morbid culling of the dumb, lazy, and proud.

[1087] You Really Like Me

I hope this one does the trick. For weeks I've felt like I'm floundering. I can't commit to the process of finding a job. I can't feel "more serious" about pursuing my hobbies or side-projects that might eek out a means of profitability with enough investment and focus. I can't justify sitting back and just watching TV or looking for the next show to attend. My mind has been all over the place, and for someone who exists with that as a standing condition of existence, it's felt acutely elevated.

Evidence of this state of mind is me making a doctor's appointment. I don't really know anything about ADHD beyond the amount of kids I came across with the diagnosis and the increasing cultural awareness of the behaviors associated with it. So much of it is as familiar to me as the feelings of when I read/learned about autism. I've never been one to much care for many people's claims regarding a diagnosis or the implications that followed. The more I start to meet "pathological" impediments to my sense of well-being or capacity to get shit done, the more my sympathies grow.

I discussed recently how I can manage well-enough with structure. In a closed-enough environment with rules and consistency, it can be really easy to downplay or ignore what about you that looks to derail. Most jobs pretty much insist you have to get up at a certain time, pay attention to the commute, fall within the guidelines for behavior to not get fired, and keep the threat of not keeping the bills paid hot enough to justify indefinite suffering or excuses. The longer I go left to my own devices, I feel consequences of a lack of structure compound.

One way that happens is the "drama" of the space between doing things gets elevated. If I'm not otherwise plugged into something, it lends itself to irrational negative emotion. This gets complicated further because I'm, on the whole, generally muted emotionally. Whether we want to chalk that up to a learned behavior trauma response to my upbringing, autism, or deliberately cultivated practice given age, wisdom, and the nature of my professional responsibilities, I'm willing to entertain it's all that and more. Practically, it means I will never be persuaded by the "passion" or "depression" or "anxiety" or "angry" that others claim moves or motivates their behavior.

In fact, particularly with the word "passion," I regularly discuss how much I hate that fucking word and how stupid or misleading I think it is. It's employed to downplay the circumstances and privileges that enable someone to pursue one route over another. When you don't have these swings in emotion, very little signals to you to change, dramatically or otherwise, whatever you're currently doing. I'd like to believe it makes a certain amount of sense the reasons I build through writing and conversation to do one thing over another. Whether or not that's the case you only care to the extent it affects or entertains you.

Broadly speaking, you're not invested in my well-being because you have your own life and things to suffer and barely figure out as well. That sentence feels like a major part of "the rub."

I feel myself envying anyone with a community. Even shitty communities, there's a sense of togetherness, belonging, understanding, and consistency that I sorely lack in my day-to-day. For most of my life, I've felt explicitly on the outside playing observer to how people treat each other, what you're "supposed to" say, or trying to figure out what "really matters" in the dynamic.

If I thought to myself, "How do you get a girlfriend?" No exaggeration, 9 out of 10 relationships I would observe would be explicitly abusive. No, not everyone was beating the shit out of their girlfriend, but yes, both parties were using emotionally manipulative and personally guilt-inducing behavior to maintain that dynamic. In fact, the older I get and the more I've watched relationships maintain or falter, it's not like that pattern has gone away, but the "healthiest" couples realize, maybe in their mid-to-late 30s that they have been behaving in those fucked up ways towards each other and start therapy.

This kind of disconnect permeates pretty much every level of my life. I'm not, nor have ever been, "normal." Yes, I exist like all things, and there is nothing new under the sun. I'm not claiming "special." I'm claiming "aberrant" or "noticeably and consistently different." I'm the only Vulcan on board. There's a whole fucking planet of Vulcan's, but I'm the only one on my particular ship.

This means when I sit here, contemplative, with a level of "anxiety" that I will never score higher than a 1 or 2 on a scale from 1 to 10, I may or may not address that by a dogged pursuit to "fix" what is probably 10 different things nagging that at one time. I've been paying extra attention to how all-over-the-place my mind is when I've got nothing in particular I care to focus on. I can start vacuuming in the middle of making a sandwich. I'll start a movie in the middle of another paused show.

Incidentally, as I finished that last line, my dad calls me and we talk for a half hour.

My dad is my most consistent force in my life. When people are acting like complete shit-heads, I'm not looking over my shoulder for my dad to fuck my life up or take advantage of me or threaten my safety like my "best friend." When I talk about the projects on the land I wish to focus on or when I needed to get things done to make the house livable, like how I imagine some people's friends and families work, he offered and continues to offer to come down and help me. If I were to strip away a lot of the nonsense related to my approach to work or fantastic dreams and what I am or am not doing every day in service to them, it makes an incredible amount of sense for me to spend more time in the region with him trying to grow the gravesite cleaning and yard work business.

My closest friends continue to maintain different forms of distance. They have their own families and paradigms. Very much to his credit, I do believe Hussain would help me with a project on the land and has offered to do so. That's not, like, the only or most important criterion for whether or not I can call someone friend, but it's akin to the question of "Who helps you move?"

Who enables your expression and embodied physical manifestations of space? The drywall in my house was a result of my dad helping. My nice electric guitar my dad again. He's also the most frequent one coming along to shows. The..whatever's left of it…garden outside and room extension have everything to do with Allie. The vehicles that have gotten me all over the midwest have been worked on, for free, or bought from Hussain. Jess, Hussain, Brandy, and before the break Byron came to shows. That's pretty much my network of people I see or interact with in person with any remote regularity until I get a job and meet coworkers with no desire to unionize or talk about anything that helps us transcend our capture.

I also feel like it's not for lack of effort or compromise that I find myself most-often alone and wondering what to do next. I've tried to start the regular meetups with not just the people from college, but different coworkers over the years and with Hussain and Byron. Whether it's just to grab a drink or hit the bowling alley, or see a movie. I want to be clear, it's not that I can't or can "never" persuade people to hang out or chill, but doing so is distinctly not the priority. One might disingenuously personalize and take it a step further to consider themselves the lack of priority, and while that is practically true, it's not an honest way to comprehensively understand the dynamic. People care about themselves waaaaay before they "don't care" about you or what you're up to.

The psychology of this is spoken to by too many things to account for. We blame the isolating echo-chambers online. We can point to the dire economic situation where "the jobs report is improving" has nothing to do with even the concept of a living wage, savings, or what it means to live day-to-day. You have dedicated institutions meant to obscure how we talk about or understand how to "fix" anything, and overwhelmingly you meet people who are just exhausted and adopting versions of "slave ethics" in order to cope and squeeze what little positivity they can out of their circumstances. If that comes with waterfalls of denial, compulsive abuse, or sweet smelling stories of personal dignity and direction, all the more comfortably they sit with no one bothering to notice or care how they play out.

I think about the conversation I got into with Smash, and at one point I said something that triggered "that face" that people get when they are convinced you can't be persuaded or have said something so egregious they both feel sorry for you, angry at themselves, and abjectly hopeless in considering there was a point to beginning the exchange at all. What, of course, separates a Smash from a regular person is that she pushed through it and we found a better place to resolve whatever the discrepancy was at the time. That's a special capacity and awareness we don't practice culturally. If we're already suffering, working incredibly hard to deny or downplay it, what purpose does more serve?

I put it to you that I'm just an extension of my circumstances first. Before I can ever attempt to "personalize" something or claim some power of "will" and freedom to express it, I'm just reporting on the cold, the silence, the self-reports, and variations on the theme of "I'm confused and struggling." I'm not a lowly detached desperate-for-any-kind-of community person flinging out theories about how life works or doesn't. I'm reflecting on my own, not-comfortable-enough or not-comfortable-in-the-right-ways circumstances as well as the literally thousands of pieces of input I've received professionally.

I think there is a palpably different experience between "life is hard" sentiments and "there's a concerted effort to keep you feeling empty and desperate." I think we're suffering the latter. I don't think it's precisely a "conspiracy," but I do think it has a lot to do with us losing a sense of honesty and ownership regarding what we allow to pass as acceptable from each other. I think we're like Byron, allowing the consequences of our behavior to pull guns on each other, and without irony or malice, remain perfectly baffled about what we should be expected to do to be accountable to that.

The "middle-ground" Nazis play the same role. The vast majority of Germans were not in the S.S. or filling up mass graves. They were still Nazis. Apologists for Trump, fascism broadly, religiously-motivated persecutors, and every single time you point your finger before you recognize your own hand plays the same instrument. This is how people get so comfortable ignoring atrocious behavior. At absolute bottom, they know they're doing the same thing. Or, they know they don't care.

"I'm not doing the same thing!" You protest. No, you're not butt-fucking children, but you thought about it, because I just typed it. You didn't enjoy the thought, but the more specific I get about that old Catholic dick inching towards that blonde-haired innocent little booty hole, I take over your mind. Your infinite sea of ridiculous and random thoughts is a source of infinite guilt, denial, distraction, and confusion by default.

If you expose yourself to information often enough, you might think to yourself, "Man, I have a problem with how often I think about butt-fucking children? Does that make me a pedofile?" Of course not, you just work at DCS. The problem is not the thought in and of itself, as any meditative practice will teach you. The problem is not recognizing how much your environment is disconnecting you from a feeling or capacity to get your thoughts organized and acted upon. You're being intruded on. But, worse, you're intruding on yourself with algorithm-assisted means to make you feel good about it.

The best person who has ever existed is still a mammal, a person, and completely fallible in the ways you are. What better way, Jesus story, to comprehensively justify and placate all "sin?" You are born, often enough, into a culture that insists you don't question the dictates of your prophet, lord and saviour, or all-powerful "mysterious force" that absolutely must "make sense" when infinity is over. It's an analogy for your infinite potential. It's a way to not fall into literal insanity trying to calculate the combinatorial explosion that is existence.

Say I return to my younger self. Say I ask "innocent" questions like a child would and tried to analyze the current landscape in front of me. "How do I be an adult?" Take a job that doesn't pay enough, fall into debt for literally any reason, but definitely for school, health issues, and car or mortgage payments. "What does it mean to love your family?" Put up with them just flatly and consistently disrespecting you, from your sobriety to anything you've accomplished, and make sure you show up to any and all gatherings regardless of the gossipy hateful things that have been said and done every day in between. "What does it mean to be a 'good Christian or Muslim?'" Protect pedophiles, cheer Hamas, deny science, control women…

Our narratives are generated from broken internal systems. We don't identify how they break. We double down on mistakes until we turn them into virtues. We act confused and innocent when asshole autistic-types like me bite down on these discrepancies and shake them with as much or more religious conviction than you've ever experienced. Appeals to do things "differently" or "better" are viewed with hostility and suspicion. We'll find ourselves undermining others in their effort to do so just in how we talk about them. Extolling the pageantry over what practically happens.

Then, I need to come full-circle and figure out how to blame without blaming. I need to figure out what's the next piece to take responsibility for and hopefully more deliberately than not choose a course of action that accounts for how perpetually harmless you're going to hold yourself for our collective dynamic. Consolidating and sacrificing aren't optional for "things" to start changing for the better. We're not hungry, there's certainly plenty of food, but we're absolutely starving. We show up when it's "convenient" or if we're desperate, which means we're not showing up at all.

I need a robust network of both accountability and potential. I'm so at the mercy of that need that I've tolerated years of emotional abuse. I want friends so bad I'll talk about them in quotes for dozens of blogs for years and years before it sinks in they aren't friends. For every tool at my fingertips, I'm not inspiring anyone to join me, play music with me, build anything, or contribute in any way to the effort of creating a means to own the work we put into the world. It's not exactly that the more I look the less I find, but even some of these Upwork hires are helping me compare and contrast what they've accomplished in a few weeks compared to me and "my network" over years.

Intellectually, I'm comfortable with things constantly in flux. As a human, I would appreciate stability and predictability along certain metrics until the day I die. I don't ever want to be confused about the location and safety of my food. I don't want to feel like I'm gambling on whether or not I'll get to keep my stuff or have my house burn down to humble me and teach me the value of still being alive. I don't want to occupy an environment that's Mad Maxing every time I leave my house because the collective psychology is arrested by violence and in-group out-group primal instincts. We either drag what we want the future to be into the present, or we suffer the fallout of machinery that compiled all of the survival mechanisms naturally-selected to keep us alive so far. The infinite vacuum of space is "natural." Not good or bad by itself, but wholly antithetical to life as we know it or would prefer.

[1032] Bullseye

 Again! I am quite tired, but less so than when I last tried to write. I think what put me over the edge for writing this time was watching the combat footage of the Nashville police clearing the school and shooting the shooter.

Power.

If you can conceive of it as a fluid instead of a solid, you won’t trap yourself under the same conversational patterns. Is the population capable of enacting laws to stop school shootings? It, like every question begging the reflexive and same responses, is framed incorrectly. It’s rooted in abstraction and obscurity. Those who ask what “we” or “people” can do aren’t wrestling with reality.

Do you have power?

I do. I prove it to myself every day. I have the power to write and speak the truth of what’s on my mind. I have the power to make myself feel better by doing so, going to shows, and recasting the things I do to occupy my time as opportunities more than financial or guilt-ridden burden. I call my Nazi Senator Braun a Nazi regularly. I vote, regardless of my “belief” about its efficacy, I know definitely not doing so is of worse consequence holistically. I create and build relationships. I listen to people testify to my good advice and encouragement. I feel capable of destroying at least as much as I might create.

I feel it. I practice it. I speak to it. I brag about it. I lay it bare to be scrutinized (ignored). I recognize when I’m hesitant to gain too much of it, and I watch as it shapes, most often for the worse, people I’ve admired. The conversation around power, in my observation, isn’t happening. Power is something relegated to the de facto consequences of Christo-fascist nationalism, ignorance, and fear.

I talk to 100 or more people regularly every week about the things they feel powerless to control. That doesn’t mean they don’t work. That doesn’t mean they don’t have dozens of things I’m excited and proud to hear about and discuss. Not a single person has used the word “powerful” to describe how they feel in service to their recovery or achieving goals. It’s not on their mind or tongue. It’s, of course, powerful to maintain goals, fight, take care of your family, honestly get a deeper handle on how your brain works and what the words you’re using are doing to you. But do they claim it? Do they feel it deep enough to celebrate and speak to it?

We’re culturally addicted, and it’s not to drugs. We’re addicted to abstract notions of how power manifests and how it can be used. We swing between extremes in self-serving narratives about abstract enemies while the knife in our heart continues to turn. Any sentence that starts with “guns” isn’t talking about guns. It’s a nonsense abstraction about “tyranny” or “rights.” It’s a fear for the killing potential, often realized regularly upon children, minorities, or the sad. You don’t know how to deal with your fear of guns or a fascist’s fear of everything. So, from either perspective, it’s all crazy, must be condemned, and no amount of violent coercive demonstration or law, let alone statistic, will be persuasive nor account for the broken heart of the issue.

To recognize the amount of power you have is to court madness. I’ve never been closer to empathizing with religious believers and why they need a god than the more I saw the impact of my power. If you don’t have a rooted “why” for your behavior, it defaults to “because I can.” You can lie, because to you, the ”greater truth” often becomes manifest in a more obvious and consequential way than you, or anyone you’ve been lying to, is going to bother to recognize. Is Trump in prison? Are any insurrectionist Senators being removed? Don’t you “keep the peace” and “pay the bills” by lying a thousand times a day about things big and small? Isn’t it “easier” to pretend that you have simple one-off feelings that aren’t important or “that big a deal” and aren’t worth exploring? You have the power to deny you exist at all.

Every kid will die. There’s literally a war this moment in which the rampant shelling of civilians in schools, hospitals, and homes is the strategy. It’s creeping up into “debatable” to some in the abstraction that is “The West” whether we should bother caring about all that, what with our clear and present series of errant death scenarios playing out at home. Don’t you see? Those in that conversation don’t care anymore about a concrete expression and demonstration of values in service to Ukraine than they do children here. The dance is the point. There’s nothing to win, only an obligation to perform, even as a ragged and exhausted zombie as every other voice collapses around you.

You don’t have power. I do. How’s that make you feel? Angry? Empty? You gonna “argue” with me about it? Your power is memes. Your power is silence. Your power is finding secret nobility in being a self-righteous exhausted do-gooder in service to your extremely personal ethic and cultivated awareness. Your power is to treat yourself as an abstraction at the whims of people like me. You can’t be my cheerleader when we don’t operate the same means of power. I can’t take your advice when your window to the world is coated in sticky fingerprints and stuck open just wide enough to fit a whisper through. I can’t trust and respect what you can’t recognize about yourself with regard to chaos or control. That’s why I have power, and you don’t.

School shooters are the visceral example of the thought process depicted above. You can’t encourage and empathize with their plight because you don’t operate within the horrid reality where they know how “obvious” and “easy” it is to exercise their destructive power, but you act, speak, and legislate otherwise. Those capable and willing to speak honestly about how fucked things are aren’t whispering and still never get heard. They’re screaming, pleading, and arguing articulately indefinitely, and you’re calling them “just the wind.” What is an “innocent child” in a psychological world that can’t acknowledge what a gun is? What is a world that can’t reckon with its fear and lack of control the gun represents?

Everyone has to die until all who are left no longer wish to continue killing themselves. That’s what we’re doing, always. That’s my opposition to the death penalty. It’s not because I can’t or won’t kill someone, it’s because I feel, deeply, just how many I could get a taste for killing. There are many things about me that could stand to die, but my hesitation to destroy someone forever shouldn’t be at the top of my list.

I have power and you don’t because I don’t rely on you as the primary sources of my power. I work to discover and recognize what I need. I maintain my license. You wait for me to act so you can perform a reaction. You look forward to what I have to say, right or wrong, because you’re not engaging with me; you have a fantasy where what I say and do gets situated for you to ogle like an expensive piece of art. Somewhere, you know “my” power isn’t mine at all. My work ethic demonstrates a matter-of-fact set of consequences, obligations, responsibilities, and points of awareness that you believe would drive you mad. You’re too busy. You’re too tired. You have too much on your mind. You’re barely keeping it together, and you don’t really know why or for whom, but you’re absolutely certain whatever it is I’m talking about certainly has nothing to do with “you.”

It's not that you or I have too much or too little power. You either don’t have any, or you have all of it, and the examples you set as a result of either condition dictate the ongoing landscape. I assert again you don’t have any power because your meme is not your voice. I say loud and proud that you do not have power because you don’t do ANYTHING that isn’t on the back of someone else. The celebrity gives you license. The work environment sets the rules. The habit courts justification. You’ll “try” and “hope” and “would like to” and “it’d be nice” and “we’ll see” and “one day” or “I’m waitin’ on” or “if I could just” as if you’ve lived a singularly just day your entire life.

You don’t care and can’t cope. You’re not brave enough to admit it, too lazy to explore what happens after you do, and too guilty and ashamed to account for the consequences of operating that way for so long. So keep watching the kids die, every day. Watch the despots grow in power as your silence and complicity become all-consuming. The nature of your power is as obvious as a bullet through a child’s brain, and yet only shooters seem capable of figuring that out.

[1006] Line Dancer

Occasionally, I get these little glimpses into the future. They’re more like an embedded sensibility after my imagination has run an experiment thousands of times. I’ll try to describe it using my recent year of going to shows pretty much every weekend. It is reminiscent of some of the epiphanies or conclusions you might reach while tripping, something deeply resonates that this thing perhaps is and isn’t “the point” of what you’re looking for. I like shows and have seen some incredible performances, but I haven’t structured my life around going to them, writing about them, or reflecting on them independent of a larger context. I’m not looking for “perfect” performances or to transcend my circumstances each time I bob and sway to a beat. The artist isn’t my salvation, the lyrics nor joke the answers to my questions.

I talk a lot, at least to myself, about what my life looks like when I have a lot of money. The indulgences might exist in equal or greater measure, but the goal of the money is to create new, better, and different culture. I want to feel safe. I want to feel like the future is worth looking at. I want to feel. This, I think is what I have in common with people who are otherwise pathologically driven to satiate their feelings. We want the feeling to change or be different, but some of us find ourselves lacking the agency, patience, or honesty to approach what it would really take to get what we want. I’m so angry by default and reasonably suspicious that a country seemingly ambivalent about fascism is going to be where I wish to stake my future.

I’ve been to 51 shows this year, 9 of them with someone else, 5 my dad. I’m down to keep going to shows with my dad, of course, he’s a baller who will fuck you up at a punk rock show. But it also indicates I don’t have a peer group. I don’t have a social network of people who I regularly do anything with that isn’t in some professional vein. The people I’m closest to are often extremely occupied with their jobs or family, and truly no priority is made for regular engagement. It’s incidental and when things are convenient. This has been the story for as long as I can remember. I’m not crazy about that, but I’m also not really about laying that at the feet of those I claim to call friends.

In any event, all the more reason I look to change the broader culture. I want my people happy and free to associate. I’m also cognizant that this alone is not enough and has drummed up resentment in the past from those not keen to take responsibility for what they’ve been free to engage in. As such, it’s less about the freedom in and of itself, and more a discussion of the ever-balancing act. I don’t expect to be indulged every time I profess being bored or lonely. Nor do I expect a sympathetic ear if I stifle an inclination to join a club or meet new people. But, we’re all still plugged in to the larger alienating and exhausting context. I haven’t created an alternative yet. I gather it’s not your goal to try.

This writing partially exists because a client messaged me to show me a bald eagle he saw. He then asked me how far away I lived from a state park. When I didn’t respond, as it’s Saturday and I was sleeping in, and it’s not a crisis situation, he sent “Hello,” a few hours later, like I’m, in his mind, of course meant to respond as though we’re friends. We’re not, and he’s someone who has carried on for months about not getting out more and doing things to occupy himself who, instead of messaging another client or inviting a neighbor, tried to carry on informally with his counselor. I explained the boundary, which he called, “bullshit” and then said he “just wanted to meet and shake my hand.” Extra no. That this was your inclination and expectation is an improperly set boundary that needs attention.

Attending to our needs is not easy. You may not even know what you need. You know what you’re getting or what you’re familiar with. You know the immediate gratification or regrets of substance use or cycle of violence and abuse you might engage in with your partner or family. But what do you need? Even if it’s a friend, it’s not an enabling counselor who will blur the line of appropriate conduct so you can feel better about yourself that moment or day. I have other members send me their accomplishments, and I go “good job!” and the conversation ends there or I ask them to take the next step and let me know when they’ve done so. At bottom, they have to do the work on themselves and for themselves.

So if I want to change culture, it’s as much me keeping the necessary boundaries as it is providing an environment where you can build on your awareness and responsibility. It has to be a robust and consistent enough space to compete with every other culture you’re plugged into. And if you’re someone who habituates unconsciously drifting between what each of those cultures offers you, my lines and expectations are going to feel like a threat, insulting, or otherwise difficult and unreasonable. I’m okay with that, because I’m discussing them regularly, soliciting feedback, and pushing myself into unfamiliar and uncomfortable realms as often as I can. I’m just a guy. I can only do so much with my attention, time, and energy. Do you think I’m that unsure or unclear about how to direct it?

My concept of “the work” when it comes to how to address yourself, your culture, or your desires is not something I conceive of, anymore, in terms of “have to” as it pertains to my own feeling and sensibility. Intellectually, I can state you “have to” in order to not go extinct, but emotionally, I’m excited to. I want to. I crave doing things that are fun, hard, together, creative, or going to set an example worth setting. I want to move fast. I want to leave an impression. I want to be remembered as having used my perspective and spite in as laudable and profound a way as possible. That’s how I shake off your offense. That’s how I examine your accusations. That’s how I continue to explore and reiterate points I’m stuck on in different ways over years. In that sense, I’m thankful for the entitled clients, news on Nazis, national trends, and silence from friends. I get to explore just where the fuck I really am and if it’s worth continuing to spend time there.

For example, I’ve already said “no” with regard to any job that wasn’t my own years ago. I’ve shed my romanticism about the college group. I don’t struggle to maintain professional boundaries or a sense of what I am or am not prepared to be for a client or as an employee. I don’t need to keep up with the neighbors nor pretend your opinion trumps the numbers nor my agency. 4 sentences capture thousands of words and years of work.

I don’t want to keep going to shows alone, but I also don’t want to attend them with people who aren’t really at the show with me either. I recall the spell of thinking I had a great friend group, including way more under that umbrella than I should have, and basing it on nothing more than our time together independent of any given individual’s headspace or priority. I think this is why people like cults and religion so much. You all get to align on some basic tenants until feds start knocking, but it’s the story of what you agree upon, not that you actually agree. It’s a means of quelling uncomfortable feelings and empowering a kind of conceptual meta-agency that’s still on auto-pilot, and has lost any connection to someone who would point it out in a compelling way. Whether you’re using drugs, smearing shit on walls, sex trafficking, or whipping yourself, “you” aren’t really there. And that’s the point. I want to be here. I fucking hate that a lot of the time, but I do. I want to be at the show. I want to be in your presence. I want to be given fodder for making jokes or thinking about things. I want to be attacking the biggest problems from as many fronts as I can lay my eyes on like I’m back grinding Kessen II to unlock the secret hardest and hidden levels.

Where do you want to be? I want to be at the next show anywhere in the world whenever it takes place. I want to be, occasionally, on telehealth calls or in organizational meetings before being on my way to an expensive and delicious eatery. I want to be building an organization that can create my antagonist environments. I want to be in the presence of people using power in accountable and meaningful ways. I don’t want to scream into the abyss at ghosts of my past. I’m thankful a long time ago I established that I needed to keep writing for me. I’d choke on the self-indulgence as though I actually felt my happiness or well-being depended on your engagement like a thirsty tik-toker.

[923] No Fair Don't Care

 Let's talk about “fairness.”

Immediately, one might think, “life's not fair.” It's as cliché an aphorism as exists. I contend the person offering it is often clapping back in a defensive dismissive way towards someone who's put voice to a perceived injustice. A condescending parent might employ it to shut down their child. Notice, the truth of whether or not the situation is unjust doesn't factor in at this level. “Life's not fair” is something of knee-jerk reactionary “fuck you” to someone. I think it's a viscerally powerful and familiar reminder as well as short-hand for how we treat each other, and thus life broadly.

Why ever offer to say it? Simply, you feel life has been unfair to you. You feel like something isn't adding up or playing out like it should. You can consciously know that perhaps “existence” moreso than “life” isn't “fair.” It might be better to say existence is “ambivalent” more than “fair.” Who's trying to contend with existence in every response to yet another problem passing through their awareness? Hardly anyone, so here you go, life's not fair, existence doesn't care about you, and here I am to remind you while I practice reinforcing my insecure self on the back of your misery.

To talk about any coherent meaning in the word “fair,” you must have agency and accountability. It's anyone's guess where you'll get those, but they're prerequisites. If cookies are to be fairly distributed, you need to account for whom and how many, you need to decide on why, and upon review or reflection, the reasoning and actions should be a consistent and shared set of behaviors you can repeat in the future. If you have 3 kids, 3 cookies, all well-behaved and having eaten their dinner after which you promised they could have a cookie, you best get to passing them out. Both your and their sense of agency is mitigated by a deal and relationship with cookies at the nexus of your shared conception of the world. Thus, it's fair when you provide what's been accounted for.

You could state that another way. In a household where cookies are out of the question because of your views about sugar, the situation above is modified dramatically. Now, you don't get to talk about fairness without discussing a new deal. Do you have 3 cookies at all? Do you wish to reward finishing dinner? Superficially, watching from the outside, you may have an instinct about how or whether the parent should distribute the cookies. What kind of lunatic would make this more complicated than it needs to be? Surely, regardless of your ideas about sugar, one cookie isn't too much, right? Children have an uncomplicated relationship or feeling towards sweets, maybe you do too. Maybe the baggage of knowledge, access, and guilt of what sweets have done to you blurs what would be “fair” in this scenario considerably.

A more forgiving way of thinking about “life's not fair” would be to say there's an infinite amount of things you can't attend to, thus you can't make any real deal with anyone else about them. It's not up to you who gets the cookies or what the sugar content in them is. If you tried to play baseball without lines on the field, you couldn't blow up at the umpire for making his best guess about balls hit right down the line. That's the kind of game you're playing with life, yet I suspect you feel your capacity to call foul balls is on point. You think there are lines on the field, or at least those lines conveniently appear the moment you need them.

As someone who likes to claim his own agency, I'm constantly trying to suss out what I think is “fair.” It rarely coalesces until I'm able to either understand myself and what I wish to bring to the situation, or get a shared idea of what someone wants from me. If you don't want anything from me, I'm not gonna gripe about what is or isn't fair. If you want something abstract or communal or colloquially understood, I may reflexively clap back with one of my comments or jokes because it's unlikely I've made the same deal with that space as most others. Maybe I don't understand or respect your reasons you want me to behave or speak like other people. My agency feels under threat, and what I wish to bring is a provoking jab or invitation to communicate another way.

Think about asking someone at work, “How ya doing!?” “Okay, thanks!” There's an argument, a fair one to me, for those kind of interactions a dozen times a day for the sake of a manner of “professionalism.” I won't spin-off and reiterate all of my problems with the word “professional,” but you do want the business of the day to trump an impromptu therapy or bitching session. There's reason to play along if you've accepted the broader deal of that work environment, having subverted some agency by default.

But what happens if you don't have that agency, don't make any claims, deals, or hold any responsibility to share anything? What if you're blind to the asks you're making? What if you're allowing your agency to be as ambivalent as existence? Surely that's the default state. You aren't born “enlightened” or on your way to matter-of-factly accepting your death. There's no class you take parsing through the litany of formal and informal asks regarding the society or era of time you inhabit. You're conscripted into existence, whether or not you decide how to conceive of the war you're fighting, your role in it, or whether it's even a war, comes much later, if at all.

We ignore the many contextual layers we exist in at our peril. If you hear someone disagree with “systemic racism,” consider what context they're coming from. An immigrant fleeing Afghanistan might conceive of the oppression and force used to keep a minority in check vastly differently from a third generation minority student growing up in a white neighborhood. The nature of red-lining is different and not equal to the nature of slavery. That's not a controversial thing to say unless you have a kind of “one drop” psychology and language for how to talk about things. That is, while absolutely not enforced this way, one drop of Jewish blood could give the Nazis license to exterminate you. One act of oppression or contamination of the narrative becomes license to declare the most extreme aspects of the problem and prompt disproportionate action.

We have to return to the idea of what or whether you're going to bring anything to a situation. Most people stay silent about most things. Most people who speak up, tend to inflame the flame war. It's why there's an appeal for mediums in which time is taken to discuss things. Whatever you think of any given talk show or podcast, it's perhaps the only time in someone's day they aren't otherwise subjecting themselves to whatever the ambivalent forces of life are errantly dictating. I can attest to how impossible it is to focus on a good book or lecture when I'm occupied with work responsibilities. I know how the mood or feel has to be right in order for me to get engaged or think I'm capable of learning or remembering something.

What's fair in this new business I'm trying to start? The rate at which Medicaid pays? The things they are and aren't willing to cover? The time it takes them to review paperwork? That I cobbled together my circumstances, certifications, and relationships into something at all? Will it be fair to ask for 2% or 10% of the gross from anyone I invite to be a part of it? They are questions without enough context. They have no input from the person I'm asking to sign on. I have no access to the forces that turned our health care system into what it's become. I know what I want to bring to the table regardless. I know what I'd be able to accept were I to sign up with someone like me. I know that whether I'm getting paid $15 or $1500, my next steps are what's going to allow me into the room about what's “fair” given the constraints, intentions, and needs as far as we can discern them.

The task is to check your impulse for fatalistic “life's not fair” thinking, and continually ask yourself what it is you can bring, why you're doing so, and whether a deal can be worked out so that while you're subverting your agency for some rules, you haven't submitted altogether. This will ease the anxiety or inner-conflict about when to speak up at work or why. This will keep you from working yourself into a froth in comment threads. This will keep you from resenting your partner. Because it's so abstract and indirect, it's nearly impossible to convince someone that their intentions, as much as their actions, matter. It's even harder to get them to understand how much goes into informing an intention. “I didn't mean to hurt you!” You might insist. From experience, I can tell you, no one ever believes me when I say it. (see: discussing trans issues, religion, my sense of humor, lashing out, or basically anything I touch or speak to ever.)

Do I need you to believe me? Do I need you to treat me “fairly?” What's at stake? I know what kind of friend or thoughtful person I wish to be. Do you? I know what lane my style of boyfriend or business owner or antagonist sits in. I know when I want to set a bad example, reveling in my depraved feelings, exhausted in searching for a sense that I share anything with anyone or that I could ever be understood. I know the different mes, what provokes them, what inspires them, and how they help or hurt my ability to find my center. I have to work out what's fair for me and myself just as much as we have to figure out what will be fair between us.

That's why fascism, unfair. Occasional emotional outbursts, incorrect word choices, time to breathe, and as many mistakes as need be made in service to the shared direction and terms, can all be fair. That's why you stay in abusive relationships, constantly changing the deal in a one-sided way. Abuser and abusee can make the same error. Who's responsible for what remains infinitely obscure even before something definitive, perhaps violently, happens. We have laws and protective orders and normative notions that trick us into thinking it's easy to understand or how to respond when the worst of the drama unfolds. We have statistics on how often we return to the abuse. There's a reason I had to assess your situation and unpack your details and discuss with others before a decision was made to remove your children. When a person, let alone institution, engages in one-sided power mongering, disinterested in the discussion, or is instinctively reveling in flames of the drama stoking the coals of their pathological past...you can feel how far removed a discussion of what's “fair” is from that clusterfuck.

If I use my awareness of what's prompting me to speak and act, dictate a goal for doing so, and imagine that abstract roundabout way in which what I put out comes back, it tends to mitigate things. I maybe choose a less “harsh” word. I maybe find a little more patience to explain something. I maybe feel a little more at ease and like life isn't rushing away from me. It's a fun little game for me to pretend to be a newscaster under my Nazi senator's facebook page. When it's not a fun little game and I play it fast and loose with the rules, I start making comments that get me banned for 30 days. If I want to bemoan a loss of agency when they ban me while submitting to a totalitarian facebook system, without irony, I'm creating stress and a contradiction in my being.

So what are the rules of the different systems you're in? Is there a conscious agent on the other side reinforcing them? Does it matter if the rules are fair? Betraying your kids on a cookie deal seems like it could have drastic ongoing consequences from fomenting distrust to provoking disobedience or even threatening how the children conceive of themselves. How could a person who cares, who they rely on, do them so dirty?

I habitually flirt with the rules and lines. It's a flirtation, not a rejection. I may drive my trailer without extra brakes, lights, a license plate, or registration papers...a dozen times, but that is considerably more a testament to my relative poverty and priorities than it is a brazen disregard. In the larger contexts of my life, if I don't have health insurance, I'm sure as fuck not spending more at the BMV first. And until I get ticketed, this conditional “unfair” space I choose to operate in is just that, a choice to roll those dice given my anecdotal experience of Indiana's general ambivalence towards licensing trailers. I may not feel great about that ticket, if it comes, but I'd be foolish to rush home to bitch for 3 pages about how fucked up the cops are.

We need to share. We need to feel like we're choosing and making decisions, at some level, in whatever context we might exist. How does someone like me survive in a place like a State institution and endless contradictory rules and policy context? I choose to do the job, but I pimped out my desk area to facilitate my needs and efficiency. I don't have to add “fuck” to every sentence to speak to real people in real terms about what's going on. I advocated for myself to get the role of assessor verses permanency because I knew I'd kill something if I felt chained to the office environment. I wrote my emails arguing for what I thought was right or where people were fucking up, and I left when the context decided it was time to overwhelm the agency I was expressing, probably a little too late. The terms of the deal, if ever they were, changed, and I still live out the consequences of that betrayal.

If I have any say in how you conduct your life, don't be like the people that, I must assume unconsciously, drive me away from the good examples I'm setting. Don't let yourself feel threatened and insecure by not taking responsibility for the words you're choosing to keep yourself or others down. Do you say, “Life's not fair?” Do you reflexively go to, “It doesn't matter” or, “Who cares?” Can you tell the difference between the you who might try to be funny in the face of fascism and the you who is about to be banned? One is an ignorant, judgmental destroyer of worlds, and the other ruminates on what causing and observing the destruction is going to do to undermine their own being.

What kind of power do you have if superficially, if not often practically, it's none? You have the power to envision and work towards a broader grasp of what's “practical” or “professional.” You have the power to keep yourself aware of what it takes to even discuss “fair” in a way that makes sense. You have the power to learn about how best to describe yourself across domains and obligations and the power to define what needs to remain steady and protected within them. I don't lose my creativity or voice even working for the State. I don't lose the fight in me. I don't lose the ability to incorporate everything I learned and every relationship I made into the next thing. I'm not forgoing the opportunity to write about and explore my time there. Hopefully, in the most roundabout way, it contributes to a more deliberate, intentional, agency-driven environment broadly, and I don't have to reduce myself or what we're capable of to “hope.”

Fair enough?

[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.

[891] Salty

“Can I come out now?”

I want this to be very broad. As something of a fundamentalist when it comes to the method of discerning and repeating factual information, there's a sense that literally anything, big and small, is playing some version of the same song. I think there are functionally foundational methods to not just orienting yourself in a conversation about the natural world, but about what it means to be human. I think a lot of those fundamentals have been dressed up and confused in the manner in which they've been shared in school or between cultures. The truth of them, and the consequences of playing in concert or discord, play out predictably.

To be a little thirsty is familiar.

Everything, everywhere, needs to replenish itself in order to survive or perpetuate. You don't get life on Earth without a closed energy system constantly raining down from the sun. The light doesn't know nor care if it's illuminating a book or a torch. Heart disease is the biggest killer in the world. You clog the rejuvenating system, it prematurely ends. Your body is a closed system that can only work with what's been put into it. So far, we haven't learned how to scrub our veins and arteries so we don't feel burdened by the effort or expense it would take to eat healthier. We prefer instead to adapt by adopting a “you only live once” mindset that makes poor attempts to cope with death in every onerous bite.

In one of the last episodes of Vikings, a group is lost at sea. Slowly, they begin to die, and one boy hastens his death by drinking the salt water. Hopefully, if you're reading this, you've never been someone so thirsty you would deeply empathize with his plight. For all of the things these adventurers were excited and motivated to discover about the world, they already figured out it's foolish and deadly to drink from the sea. What goes through a person's head, so desperate, so deluded and bereaved, to do it anyway?

Our biological systems are a wealth of knowledge. Before we began the conspiracy to persuade ourselves we were ever “safe,” we built a complex series of understandings that tracks straight from our genes to our hero stories. That understanding was meant to provoke us to react to danger, real or imagined. It said we can take a thousand cuts to our skin in service to protecting what lies deeper. Practically overnight, those systems were subjected to modern environments they weren't designed for. When the physical plain or jungle disappeared, a new stomping ground was created in the mind. Now, convoluted philosophy or religious ideas shape and bind. Needs multiply in keeping with ever-iterating abstractions, to be saved, to follow rules, tithe, consume, or otherwise obligate yourself to your neighbor.

I think at every single moment, since the beginning of time, and at least since the beginning of consciousness, it's the same tools, same game, and same decision as to whether or not to drink the sea water. As deadly as it may be, a little won't kill you. This provided you drink 2.8 units of fresh water for every 1 unit of sea water. It will never be “safe” anymore than drunk driving, but each time you make it home without killing yourself, someone else, or ending up in prison, you have a visceral reminder of what *seems* to work. That fresh water is coming is taken for granted. Unrealized consequences, in fact, aren't consequences.

Water, at least, you can tell whether or not it's salty. Whether that's enough to deter any one person is its own question. What to do about murky ideas? What to do about abstract or deliberately convoluted ideas taking years to impact? You just got away with drunk driving yesterday, sipped a little sea water to celebrate, and now you're being told to ponder what happens to children you don't have 10 years from now when billionaires get tax breaks? Meanwhile, it's completely lost on you that the reason you were out drinking is because you feel generally miserable from your low wages now impacted from what was done to you maybe 40 years ago! How can you be expected to wrap your head around this game or these timelines? Especially because you've been told never to trust who's told you about them.

The more you own your complicity, the easier it is to understand. That is, say you've been given an opportunity to join something, say something, or build something, and you don't. First, and this is the insidious yet most meaningful detail, you have to recognize you had the choice to join, say, or build in the first place. Much of the modern discourse seems wholly engulfed by the idea that we're all just along for the ride. (Choo choo Trump train!) It's not me, it's my boss. It's not me, The State is all-consuming. It's not me, the rules are *clearly* written down. We're afraid to get called out or be held accountable. We're, pathetically, afraid of disassociating with the worst perpetrators. We don't want the burden that comes with holding and fighting for what it means to choose to be a rational and responsible actor in the world.

A little, dumb, coup attempt took place not 2 days ago, and there was an infinite saltwater sea of moments between certifying the election and going home to “debate” whether or not a president inciting insurrection should be removed. His vice president isn't on board with the idea, and the cowards and opportunists he hired resigned before even chancing getting asked the question. These aren't people. These aren't leaders. These are the result of previously unrealized consequences filling a power vacuum when you don't join, speak, and build.

So much of the narrative over the last 5 to 10 years has been about “canceling” or extirpating “problematic” ideas from our thoughts. We learned the dangers of social media, and continued to sip at regular intervals. We learned that absurd math of “trickle down” and devoted cherished Disney classics to the folly of greed and pride, sip sip sip. Mollify the angry Whites, don't condemn. Beat the Blacks for daring to claim their lives matter. Fake news and foreign interference. Nary a nod to the misdeeds in our own backyards when it comes to spying, environmental destruction, war mongering, or entertaining a unique racist brand. It's as simple as representation! Don't you know words like “qualified” are toxic and maybe violent and sexist?

By default, we are wrong, and nothing about how we engage with the world tries to reckon with that save scrupulous scientific pursuits. By default, we are thirsty, and we can be persuaded to drink sea water. We can squeeze it drop by drop, or gulp by the handful. I see people who swim or surf that perhaps accidentally drink it. I know some people make a game or guilty pleasure out of downing a cup here or there before racing to the water fountain. They go on to pretend like it didn't happen. Then, they pretend they can't see dehydrated people on the verge of death gleeful and delirious as they reach once more over the side of the boat.

The Nazis become the Germans we know them as today because we gave them a plan, dignified work, and an opportunity to buy-in to this increasingly precarious global experiment to prevent the extinction of humanity. (Or at least to get them all shopping.) They were very thirsty, and those as equally informed by history and human psychology as anyone else of their day opened fire hoses of sea water. These same monstrous fools are in every third house in your neighborhood. They're still thirsty, and no one is turning on the water. They don't know of any good wells. And whatever you're drinking has made you quiet, afraid, and unironically entitled. Onto the infinite negative feedback cycle you go, justifying your ongoing posture as the threat escalates sip by sip.

[882] You're Standing On My Neck

I'm going to do my best to put a lot of distance between how “I” might use or understand a word, and how “we” colloquially approach it. I'm also going to try to tie those definitions to a broader picture of what I see as a problem with “politeness.”

T.B.L. is the most emblematic of blogs where I've echoed this.

Certainly, we need a sense of decorum or rules. We need to know that by and large we're going to be met with a helpful or polite tone when we engage one another. Your server shouldn't be cussing you out anymore than your insurance agent because of a normalized social contract. There's a baseline for “moving things along” and getting things done. None of what I'm going to try and argue is ignorant of this necessity. None of what I say will be a referendum on how you feel about your willingness or ability to be polite or under what circumstances. I will not be arguing it shouldn't exist or is “wrong” in an explicit manner.

I will try to argue that how “we,” at least in U.S., understand this politeness is warped and does more harm than good. I will argue that I think there's a fundamental lie that goes routinely ignored at the bottom of our conceptions of “politeness” or “civility.” I think the heart of that lie is personal to each individual, more than some faux objective analysis parsing opinions on tactful engagement.
I've referenced the phrase, “Bless your heart” in the past as emblematic of the lie I'm speaking to. You're neither seeking to bless someone's heart in saying so, nor making an attempt to empathize. It's shorthand. It's common, easy, and considered a “polite,” perhaps Southern, way of implying there's nothing left to say, there's something wrong with you, and conversation or players currently involved are not going to be able to handle it. Bless your heart, and good day.

We know when we need to “escape” a conversation and sentiments like this are employed. As someone prone to “ranting,” I see the reservation and stress start to set in as the words are searched for from someone not used to me. I can appreciate when they signal the flow needs to end, and don't consider it “lying to me” because they are feeling overwhelmed, bad, or incapable of helping. I, too, encounter people who have many many words I don't know how to deal with on top of my already complicated head space.

I think one of the varied and complicated reasons I don't get “help” or “conversation” when it gets too “deep” or “convoluted” is because the mechanisms for doing so effectively have been eroded. I think “critical” thinking has reduced to “reactive scrutiny” for a generation or more. Ideas simply aren't shared or understood. They are default “fights.” They are stressful. They are personal. They threaten our sense of being. And the larger the threat they became, the more refined in our dance moves to avoid them. We implore people to not hurt our feelings, don't name names, and don't dare scar an interaction by what's actually happening. In fact, nothing can ever be happening! So there!

It's old news that people criticize form over substance, burn straw-men indefinitely, and never feel more proud or smug than when they can tout their dodging and bullying as righteous defending. That doesn't make it okay. It's “normal,” at least in our culture. It's so routine as to become something for which we're perfectly blind. We take for granted rules for engaging information and each other like we do shopping or our health. It just is what it is, and by god, here's where the person taking them for granted pivots to my opening “this isn't what I'm arguing against” points like I didn't bother to get out in front of them.

I worry that people don't pay close enough, let alone any, attention to what these habits of politeness or decorum are doing. If you're unable or unwilling to see a difference between practically functioning with these habits and “how to engage with the world,” I think they supplement your responsibility for respecting deeper truths. I think you begin to think being polite or following rules is the be-all end-all. I think when you're pressed to engage that, very broad, “deeper truth,” you react viscerally. That reaction is because you're not willing to build it into the balance of your concept for politeness. Your feistier will, perspective, or impulse is subsumed verses incorporated.

I'm pretty regularly accused of aggressively asserting my impulse. I'm oriented towards the “fight,” to be sure, but I've tempered how I go about doing so over the years. It's perhaps easier for me to recognize the rolled-over conciliatory moves, which I happen to often find gross and disingenuous, even when I often agree about their efficacy and appropriateness. The issue is when I try to drill down on any one specific situation and shift the introspective burden onto you. That's when the politeness goes out the window and the accusations flow. That's when the fight (you knew I was aiming for all along!) begins. It's unfortunate and familiar.

I think a lot of us are dramatically and chaotically more angry than we let on. I think every single person I've ever deigned to share a blog with could write as much or more than me. I think every single friend who has shared with me the depths of their depression and anxiety knows what I'm getting at in my fever-dream or drunk blogs. I think on top of the things we might intimately be able to share of our experience, there are a dozen “normal” things related to family or insecurities or shitty living and work environments plaguing you more than me as well. I say again, for the several thousandth time, I hear NONE of your opinions about your existence unless they are in the form of mischaracterizing something I said, or immediately sharing and hovering over the “unfriend” button when you can't be bothered to unpack why you're doing so.

You're not “handling” me by avoiding anymore than you're handling yourself by pretending things don't drive you fucking crazy like they do me. Also, you can't accuse me of mindlessly bitching and never going anywhere, mostly, because I try to work and create things that combat “my” issues big and small. When you put up an unflinching resistance to examining your habits, it signals to me that you're not just “disagreeing” or being “different” in how you're engaging the world, you're denying it. You're shitting on the very idea that we could get somewhere better and build better habits. I demonstrate, through writing if nothing else, my desire and thought process. I try to get more specific. I try to account for the panic.

You don't have to write pages on pages and feel like complete shit. You don't have to remotely agree with my elevated levels and “word twisting” to find out where you're coming from. You do have to signal, at some point, that what I'm speaking to is remotely relatable, reasonable, and, if only eventually, understandable, so that we're not just two crazy people talking past each other. You have grant me the license and understanding to positions you've raised that I already agree with, and then move onto what I've put forward. You can't do that when modern cultural “polite” metrics are the means by which you're going to engage.

In league with this is the endless open-interpretive sea of “favors” and “good will” that comes along with interpersonal relationships I have no patience for. My neighbor offered to tow my truck. He won't say out lout how much money he wants to do so. This will be the last time I allow him to do me any favors. He has a “polite” way of expressing his desires which I don't find polite. It doesn't express his wants and leaves me wishing I'd just paid the premium to hire a tow company. He's not explicitly “wrong” in his 52-year exercise in communication, but it's not truthful, it's truth-ish, and I don't find it helpful, fair, or productive. I'm not wrong for my disposition, but I'd be wrong in matter-of-factly expecting him to conform to my disposition. So would he. He's not likely to self-obligate himself to that understanding, nor is anyone subject to the rules of “politeness” currently employed.

It's a problem big and small. Who's on board with neoliberals negotiating with the fascists and domestic terrorists? Yes, we employed Nazis and there's a practical necessity for obligating the hopeless and angry to new work and rebuilding. How quickly did we “politely” just try to forget they were Nazis? Did that do us any real favors? Did that instantiate a healthy and rounded perspective to pretend “it can't happen here?” We know Germany is a living memorial with reminders everywhere of how badly they fucked up. We can't stand to face our shitty facebook comments! We habituate making “me” the enemy for pointing out when your words don't seem to match your otherwise forlorn or angry body language, tone, or word choices.

It's important for me to differentiate a sickness from a symptom. I need to recognize something as a tool verses a hasty fix. You should feel skeptical when something feels familiar. You might be rehearsing a pathological response, or you might be employing a failing strategy in your understanding of how things are playing out. I explore my hiccups in argumentation and conversation for that reason. I practice trying to keep it impersonal. I think our culture is deeply sick and we're all poisoned by it in different ways. I don't think we're getting better if we're content to remain on different planets in how we talk about it.

[877] Balk The Talk

Let's start what initially feels like it will be one of the most redundant things I've ever written.

The problem is dishonesty.

Always, first, and forever, the problem is dishonesty. Whatever your issue, whatever your concept of "oppression." Whatever your interpretation of "isms" or "ists" is. It's always dishonesty.

You can get hidden or blocked from something because you are a troll. Those people are easy enough to understand in their arbitrary behavior or antagonism. Conversely, you can get hidden or blocked because you have an exacting understanding of a situation that makes someone uncomfortable.

I suspect I exist in a realm of the latter kind of person on most issues most of the time. I suspect this because of my insatiable desire to explore the depths of my ass and get a remote grasp of the psychological underpinnings of humans at large. I think I get very explicit when I need to in picking apart words. I think my point can be succinct. I think I've done a lot of work scraping away vagaries related to conversational style, intent, and efficacy.

As such, I know, hours before I'm blocked or hidden, that what's being discussed is perpetually on the verge of being censored. There's a psychological line that people who are angry can't cross. It's familiar. It's universal. It's annoying when someone points it out. It's worse when they do so with "big" comprehensive words juxtaposed with calling you a cunt.

Religion, racism, trans issues, misogyny, feminism, pick your poison there is a long sordid history and dozens of books neither of us have read in service to them. You can try to be angry or sad and talk about these issues, but almost certainly you're going to devolve into calling the other person names and running away.

Trump doesn't become president unless we were hemorrhaging what it meant to be honest. It is so deep, we barely know what I'm talking about right now! Dishonesty is hidden in memes. It's the fabric of our social groups. It's the silent obligations and compelling feelings that have us conforming around modes of communication that destroy us.

My worst clients are the dishonest ones, not the ones cussing at me or making empty threats. Their dishonesty hurts them, their children, the annoying process, and their prospects of not having State intervention come back if they manage to close things. My work environments suck by capitalist definition because they are dishonest about their greedy motivations and lack of accountability in allowing people to own their work, sense of being, and time.

The honest estimations of "what's happening" get crucified and killed, routinely. It's familiar. It's universal. It's easy enough to write me off as getting off on "arguing." It's also dishonest.

The playing field isn't fair. We're up against the baggage of being dumb apes. We're up against being wholly ignorant of our own minds. We're not just dumb, we're complicated in how we've structured being dumb. We're bull-headed in defending that construct. We're actively seeking voices to help protect and reinforce that construct. It's merely a construct. It's a wild and broken one.

I write. I share what I write. I save my conversations and arguments and share those too. The truth is naked, painful, comes with a lot of dirty words, and the thing you don't want to look at you need to the most. You look at by quoting. You look at it by offering challenges and criticisms of it. I'm proud to shit on people indignant and hateful masquerading as crusaders for the oppressed. That's Trump. That's Nazis. That's "radical activists" who have zero appreciation for how to interpret people different from them.

You can't say, truthfully, I don't understand your emotions. You can't say I'm just blissfully unaware what my words do to a person already on the defensive. You are correct in that I'm aggressively trying to pet a dog who's been abused for years and just needs time alone. Except, people aren't dogs. They need to be accountable for their barks and bites. They need to be shit on. We've taken our knowledge of trauma and used it to pretend pain is a selfish and noble thing to be protected from criticism. And when I say that, I'm giving too much credit to the people who behave that way, because I don't think they understand a goddamn thing.

I persuade people to peacefully part with their children. I can't persuade an angry keyboard warrior to quote me. The mediums come with their own handicaps or strengths, but both require honesty. I prefer the typing pissing matches because, at least when I do it, the words remain. You can go back and analyze. You can rephrase. You can ask questions. You can build and progress. You can expose yourself to what hurts at your own pace until you mold yourself into something better from the inside out.

But you have to mold yourself. You have to face what hurts. No one can force you. I can choose to stop calling you a cunt. You can't choose to make me feel bad about something I said. You can't force me to consider myself a "transphobe" or "bigot." You can honestly engage with what those terms mean to you. You can read exactly what I've said with regard to a topic, and pick it apart or ask for more detail. That's not what you do. Not doing so is dishonest.

I didn't stop feeling an overwhelming desire to "fight" with people until I examined the dynamics of my emotionally abusive childhood. I can differentiate between needing to react and overcompensate, and a genuine longstanding and worthwhile concern. I know what to focus on and break apart. I'm not plagued with guilt and doubt about the righteousness of my words or actions. I've detailed them out. You can read why. You don't have to pretend or even give me credit! You just have to look at what's already there.

I don't consider myself explicitly right or wrong. I'm curious. I'll keep asking questions. I'll keep probing for what motivated your behavior. I have nothing to win or lose that way. I "win" to the extent my work and words shape behavior, and my behavior first. Behaving as if you're the first person to feel a certain way and all your words are the best words is Trumpian. It's ignorant. It's dishonest.

Do fucking better. We're days after a wholly inadequate neoliberal mess is being dishonest about the impact of their policy and words. We're content to think we've "won" anything. We're still fucking lost.