[1133] Fog Of War

You're born into a fog. It's little droplets of absolutely mystifying information sometimes cooling your face, sometimes collecting so thick you can't see and feel like you're drowning.

I find one of the defining factors of what I consider a "great" or superb-to-perfect piece of media is definition. The characters, good or bad, actually sit within the consequences of their strengths and flaws. They aren't randomly inserted at choice times because "the plot must go on." They aren't apologized for. They aren't treated like a schizophrenic episode manically punctuating a moment because a substantive idea couldn't be had. Things like "over acting" fall into this category, or the too-humbled place someone falls in being made an example of in your message-piece.

The analogy holds for the difference between a great and superb life. You can do a fair amount of "good" or "fair" things, and die without scandal or offense. But the people who lean into their characters seem to define precisely what we don't wish to be, or explicitly could. I think this is where ideas about "celebrity" versus "influencer" really diverge. A celebrity depicted timeless tropes and stories that have sustained us since we started telling them. We're drawn in. An influencer is trying to trap your attention. They're selling easy and accessible in a way someone pretending to be Hercules isn't.

Why should you want to be your character? I think about this a lot. My head echoes with the guy at a beerfest years ago who said, "You have celebrity energy." I feel like I know exactly what he's referring to, but have done next to nothing with it. I don't even know if he's actually met any celebrities, or if he's just unfamiliar with extroverts on a good day, but I'd be lying if I haven't, for years, rehearsed what I'd say on talk shows. But, what business would I have being there?

Famous chefs and political figures get their time in the sun without needing acting credits. If you spike in popularity for some viral moment, occasionally you can sucker well-known people into entertaining you for another 15 minutes when they're struggling for material. It's not something I really aspire to, but has always felt like it'd be something I should be prepared for. It may be one of the most irrational persistent thoughts I ever entertain. Bert Kreischer got mini-famous for partying. There was a couple years in college where people were shouting my name across campus still-enthused about one of mine.

Arguably, I'm more "blunt answer on the news" kind of "potential famous" at this point. I want to be known "in my world" whether it comes to social work things or if I manage to develop anything on the land. I listen to famous-enough people talk about how it's nice to not get mobbed, but it's never a bad day to have a stranger smile at you and tell you what an impact you've had on them. Garnering a certain notoriety tied to a creative approach or genuinely helpful fix to something is what I'd like most to lend my energy towards more than "look at me" or "let me sell you."

It's only exhausting to be the "life of the party" if you don't enjoy the party. If you're there out of obligation or desperation, it doesn't feel important or wise to invest in your character while you're there. If you're an appeaser who smiles and laughs at everything that doesn't earn it, or frame your existence as the thing other people need to enjoy themselves, I don't know how you refrain from resenting that immediately.

It's been about 2 days since I left off, and I've noticed another pattern that informs my foggy thoughts.

I look for people smarter than me to listen to. I like listening to nerds who specialize in some area to give me the details and history of topics I'll never have the patience or sustained interest in to research too deeply on my own. The thing about nerds, they usually only really know about that one thing. Even when they're talking about the logical fallacies or lapses in wisdom that "smart" people succumb to, breathlessly they'll mindlessly and unapologetically engage in said behavior if you give them 5 extra minutes to talk.

This makes me wonder what would happen if these people I enjoy listening to could get together and identify how to put a stop to that.

After 100 hours of Peter Boghossian interviews and videos, I can identify somewhere around 10 things he consistently does that feel like expressly poor framing, straw-manning, or frustration stoking that impede his ability to understand more about what upsets him.

The If Books Could Kill guys will matter-of-factly relay what they believe to be someone's, say Steven Pinker's, political opinions and conclusions to be and poo-poo qualifiers and context to endlessly insist there's a more insidious misstep occurring. Because they'll do so back-to-back with a genuine fact check that refutes bad research, it feels more right of a behavior and posture than it is. I think you get to score a point for calling out a bad, old, or piddling example used in service to the broader argument. You don't get to mind-read.

The amount of times Jordan Peterson is invoked as a kind of shorthand for alt-right nonsense is such a cliche lazy thing to do, he feels like the next Ayn Rand in the mind of a liberal who thinks reading or listening to him will make their head holes leak. He's become a king for speaking outside of his lane and religious apologetics, but he didn't start that way, and still sometimes recognizes when he's fallen off certain cliffs. That should matter. He's couched in so much stupid, but he's not Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, or even the most manipulative religious dicks he gobbles like Jonathan Pageau.

The religiosity of Chris Hedges and Cornel West keeps them perfectly blind to what you'll hear argued from Sam Harris and the guests like John Spencer who specialize in the history of urban warfare. Masih Alinejad, Yasmine Mohammed, and Maajid Nawaz are functionally silenced when it comes to an honest discussion about the practical and moral consequences of cultural ::ehem:: differences. Noam Chomsky will talk out of one side of his mouth about American imperialism, and downplay what funded his early career with biting defensiveness.

I think Coleman Hughes does a decent job of bothering to engage people on different topics while being less adept, than say Sam Harris, at knowing enough particulars of a given subject matter to undermine his fastest-talking guests. Coleman can get a side-stepping apologist or defensive Ph.D. to get caught in their errant missing-the-point loop which can be interesting in shedding light on how hollow the basis for many popular and too-many-books-about ideas really are.

I just listened to Yanis Varoufakis refer to what's happening in Palestine as a "genocide," after detailing a historical picture of how France and Germany have played out politically and economically. His penchant for insightful financial analysis or digestible conceptual frames stalls outside his lane like so many on the left who think this is the first time in history war has killed or starved children and continually forget who started the whole fucking thing.

Seth Meyers, who've I've gathered has cared about real shit, has a segment where he does corrections on what he's broadcast on his main show. John Oliver will do similarly, but you can feel him routinely skirt and downplay the brunt of a critical conclusion about the position he's explaining, and pawns off deeper responsibility like Jon Stewart used to do before his return on a sensibility that, "It's comedy first, after all."

I guess I want to know, what is it that makes the ability to reason, and reason so strongly, simply, and concretely just stop at a certain point?
Is there a mechanism in the brain that gets overwhelmed or hijacked?
Is there something we can measure at the level of emotion that prevents new or conflicting information to take hold?
Why does it feel impossible and unrealistic to get a standard for discerning and discussing information to as good as it ever can get, and then strike a dissonant note so simultaneously fluidly, and weirdly consistently in that extra bit of time you give someone to talk?

At a certain point in my "learn everything" behavior, it sank into my bones the futility of the effort. Whether I was trying to record every animal name in notebooks as a child, read/watch every book, lecture, debate, or online fight related to religion versus science, or do ALL THE THINGS when it comes to home projects, playing instruments, playing video games, listening to bands or podcasts, or seeing shows. You either learn to enjoy the ride, or you suffer the infinitely incomplete indefinitely.

It feels like the project of being a "public intellectual," is to professionally create a fog around yourself as you detail out someone else's. Are you both united by reason? Occasionally? Certainly more than you're united by a god concept, but a god complex instead? I'm not sure.

In my naming different people, I feel I should shout out to Naill Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. For the amount of subjects they can (or did) opine on, I've gotten the most consistent sense of that general respect for reason and its process. That Naill and Ayann Hirsi-Ali are married suggests to me your heart is clearly the most irrational thing, thus invoking "passion" for your position is always a loser. My pithy grievances with Sam Harris and "free will" I'll probably take to the grave like Dan Dennett.

We'll "believe" in "science" until it threatens our "identity." Our statistics are the one true statistics and not something to contextualize with dozens more at all times. I see another in road for why people adopt the perpetual high-horse-ery of a religious system. Is there any greater power than feeling no obligation to even state plainly what it means to butt-fuck your little boys or bag your women?

The intellectual wants to feel powerful too. I think they fuck up when they wish to cling to a certain "truth," like any religious apologist, instead of the truth of a process. You'll never lift the fog just by blowing your hot air.

[788] Information Age of Hysteria

Another day, another round of opinions on Jordan Peterson. I also read a killer piece by Matt Taibbi about the “Russia scandal.” I think maybe the easiest way to start is just to talk about labels.

Briefly, if you don't already know my reticence for the connotation and presumption that goes along with “trigger” words, nothing I write, nor will ever write, is going to register with you. The amount of times I put “truth” in quotes, attempting to discover the process of churning through my thoughts more than proclaiming the surety of my views, is instructive. I pick words that feel hot, and build a narrative around them. This is how we attempt to grasp the world around us. Is a tree a tree? Or is it bark, roots, leaves, etc. How you understand “tree” is going to determine many more things about how you use it or the place it occupies in your life.

How many words do you think we use that are much broader and more confusing than “tree” routinely? I've gone after “feminism” and “privilege.” I don't like when words that used to be pretty deliberate, like rape, become generalized indictments for miscommunication or unwanted and inappropriate attention i.e. “rape culture.” How many things in the news start with “the war on,” as if war is an easily accessible and sustained violent attack you can invoke with impunity about any imperiled topic? “Anti-Leftist,” “alt-right hero/darling,” “pseudo-intellectual,” the “ists” and “isms” of political shades, and general besmirching of character via scorn for alleged followers and “enabling” or “giving a platform.”

You can write, endlessly, using a combination of the same techniques to “critique” literally anyone or anything. Absolutely none of it does you any favors merely because you are able to deliver your “evisceration” with the pompous indignity that could only rise today to parody. There are many things that have contributed to what I'll posit as the “cultural decline in our capacity to speak and think clearly,” but a daily helping of unsubstantiated nonsense from our most popular news and info-tainment options doesn't help.

Even recognizing that we're playing into an ignorant hand becomes impossible, as “fact-checking” becomes a lurid task of retractions and nose-thumping a barrage of insinuations and accusations while the work to suss out truth goes ignored. “Whistle-blowers” and “alt-media” attempt to hijack the ceded space to tout their perspectives (more true because they're tinted with oh-so-justified doses of emotion and “outrage”), virtue signaling and dog-whistling Dixie.

There's such a stark contrast between the “hit piece,” and the methodical breakdown and cited explanation of a topic. There is no opinion piece you will find that casually refers to Jordan Peterson as “alt-right” that will have the examples demonstrating the label. They'll skim a phrase out of context. They'll poo-poo away hours of video expanding on where his grievances lie. They'll latch on to something misspoken or perhaps genuinely worth apology, and then proceed to ignore the apology.

This is the criticism popular thinkers are making of the Left. You can't continue to play judge, jury, and executioner who presides over the entirety of someone's life, and put them into a box of perpetual scorn and dismissal. This generalized habit reflexively dismisses not just what the other person you despise is thinking, but how they got there. If you refuse to attempt to understand how someone thinks, it suggests to me you're unwilling or unable to think for yourself. That's the impetus for free speech. That's surviving the cringe of listening to Ann Coulter or Alex Jones speak.

There are consequences to inciting anger and violence from positions of power. That is different from hearing the attempt to incite, and having a plan or disposition to put it aside. Censorship doesn't protect you from the obligation to learn why you're thinking is incomplete. The broader culture will always figure out a way to spite you, dig up the taboo, or act like it's the protector and purveyor of “unseemly truths,” while the snowflakes melt. This is the heart of my contrarian personality, and a psychological place I think we occupy at large (Trump is fucking president) when we've been fucked with and ignored for too long. The “right” is trending around the world. The self-righteous of every ilk zero in on “guns” or “transgender bathrooms/pronouns” as if those are the real topic.

It's your fundamental insecurity and lack of personal responsibility. That's the story of humanity. Justify for yourself, and pillory what you don't like or understand. We've psychologically distanced ourselves from accountability writ-large. Anonymous facebook hatred. “Self-taught entrepreneurs” and “influencers” serve to legitimize attention for its own sake. The only thing to learn anymore is how to exploit and brand. You label something “bad” with words that “trend,” or you capitalize on fantasy courting Pyrrhic victory. Who cares if the leaps and inferences you made didn't pan out? Who cares if you say it's “cute” an over-worked waitress needs 3 days on the job to afford your jeans? What's really lost if it gave me more followers, likes, clicks, and traffic?

I grow less tempted to be obnoxious every day because I don't believe there aren't consequences. No matter how you started something, if it was “just for fun,” that fire can get out of control. Just because every one else was doing it, doesn't mean they deserved the reach they got. I'm thinking of tech companies. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should or should be allowed to, the tacit approval of waves of ignorant masses notwithstanding. Here I think of Gavin Newsom suspending the death penalty. I don't care what the majority thinks either if it was my innocent ass on the line about to be executed. I care about wasting money and the grander cultural narrative regarding vengeance and State power, but in the immediacy, fuck all that noise.

I don't see it getting better. I actually see violence and other life-threatening or dramatically altering consequences before we find a “collective” chance at survival. You can't attack the basis for grasping existence and think “everyone” is going to get “wise” about their failed “wokeness” and start to zero in on the words that never bother to give them pause in the first place. When a narrative style becomes embodied, that's colloquial reality. Trump repeats. That's the “magic” of his madness. That's the secret of people slowly growing more and more insane losing the ability to reflect. We retweet, and carry the sentiments onto our “news” and otherwise sources of information. We're suffering a mass psychosis of our own doing by not taking a thousand beats to breath, parse, and prove.

Even with the best information still available, I don't think we'll be saved. Noam Chomsky is still speaking. Matt Taibbi is still writing. Spatterings of comedic and reporter voices are “doing their best” to summarize and explain without stoking insanity flames. So what? Me and the old people with time enough to go to book store reads and lectures will know? Hippies and Bohemians will get to scoff until their safe-spaces are in the crosshairs? We're all breathing the same air. The whole system's immune system is implicated. I'll be doing my best from a field in the middle of nowhere.

[745] The Distance

Today, I sat in my car, just a touch before “impatiently,” as a child cried in her mother's arms, her sisters gave her a hug, and as she stole away a few minutes to see young cousins of hers who she refers to as, “my babies.” Her sister walked with her arm in arm to the door of my car, and they reached out to clasp hands through the window telling one another they loved each other. The child cried out to her mother, “I love you mommy!” who looked at my car with tears in her eyes as she waved goodbye, telling her daughter that she loved her too. Every face was sad, and the weight of what this family was going through sat in the heaving chests of everyone there. Everyone, except me.

I don't need to make a point about how we tell stories or share perspectives to sound more or less dramatic. That's too easy and old news, especially from me. I don't need to ring the bell of my general lack of emotionality or indifference. I don't need to describe this family in all of my subjectively overly judgmental ways that would more than a little muck up the initial description of that scene above. And yes, I needed to lay out all the things I don't need to do, because my mind went to those places first in what I'm assuming was a shortcut as it's going to take some digging to figure out what I want to say.

Some more grounding, I watched a lecture on consciousness. In the presentation there were those fun visual and audio examples that show you how much of your experience is your brain's “best guess” as to what's going on. I immediately thought of writing. I thought of every indictment I get about some grand proclamation I've made no matter how much I insist I'm just poking around in the busy darkness. These words are my best approximation of a fleeting idea or feeling, always. They are “right” insofar as they provoke me to continue thinking. They are “wrong” as long as someone has something to contribute or contradict.

But let's focus on the brain guessing. You see more of what you've been primed to see. For people who think advertising doesn't work on them, they don't realize they don't have a choice. You've been seeing McDonald's commercials your entire life. Just like Coke or certain car brands. They have taken up residence in your head whether you like it or not. I think I pretty consistently ask people to examine the “spells” and other people's “hells” they've been primed and conditioned by. That might be an easier exercise by saying things like, “My brain guesses such and such is true after experiencing this think piece/podcast/opinion/etc.”

You can strip away the emotionality. I suppose you first have to desire to strip away the emotionality, but if you do, you gain access to what might be considered privileged knowledge by the rationally irrational or disingenuous. Let's ground that sentence. I've been listening to Mark Blyth. A political scientist, who as plainly as a political scientist can manage, lays out the assumptions and standards, or basically bullshit, our major institutions run on. He's not “above it all” in that he's got some secret knowledge. He's just blunt, and discusses as practically and mathematically as he can what happens when you have X and Y under Z conditions. He rids his discussion of “perfectly rational consumers” or worshiping at the foot of GDP.

Blyth discusses the plight of Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan, who persistently calls bullshit on how different institutions run, and was subsequently blackballed. It didn't matter if he was right. It didn't matter his expertise. He made enough people who make giant sums of money feel bad. Their perception, the businesses and schools they've been primed and conditioned by, were “more true” than what he had to say. A tale told a thousand times in my own life with considerably less damning conclusions or money at stake.

What I find compelling about people like Blyth, or Taleb, David Graeber, someone like James Baldwin, or the gangster turned reformer, or ideologue turned atheist is how in it they actually are. It's the people not criticizing from the outside, but who spent or continue to spend their lives immersed in learning about their particular worlds. They observe. They offer. They preach. And you can pick them out individually from a million different people because they've chosen a mode of being that tirelessly works to relate as much of the truth as they can see it.

I don't even think that impulse is “wanting to help” as much as it is being responsible enough to not play along with demonstrable harms. What frustrated “intellectual,” drinking or driving themselves mad, believes they help a good goddamn thing? No. They just read and write and conduct their affairs and for one reason or another, they're not arguing with it, they keep getting invited to talk. Jordan Peterson has made the point that he certainly has a number of topics he could talk about in a more coherent and informed way, but that list certainly isn't inexhaustible, and perhaps it's time to take a step back and learn more and formulate new lecture series. What a Chomsky thing for him to do.

Okay, so I've started this by describing a tearful goodbye, and we've gotten to the point of hand-jobbing my intellectual heroes. Is that where I wanted to go? I originally thought to title this blog The Distance, because it's always how I've felt in relation to things. Distant. Not “isolated” like the kid too scared to play the sport or show off his brains or ask out the girl. I'm not upvoting every suicidal /r/meirl or /r/2me4meirl post. I'm not walking away from my different conceptions of “friend” or “friend group” more scarred than informed. I don't begrudge people their happiness no matter how long I may testify to the underlying lie at the heart of “love.” I'm just removed from it. I play with it at my peril, not, as my friend was eager to point out, because I don't know what to do, but because I feel more responsible than to play along with what I can mostly describe as demonstrable harms.

We can take a less dramatic example than any individual family crying goodbye, or any one person's subjective experience of love, and just consider the nature of my job to begin with. I bought in, in some tired and pragmatic sense, to a fundamentally corrupt structure. Interject yourself into people's lives, at least for 22 hours a week, and pretend you've been given any direction or credential that can speak to their addictions, abuses, or otherwise neglect. Join up with the people saying, “We're helping!” in the face of everything they've never read about how our brains work, what environment these people are embedded in, or what's in store for them when we leave, or even as a country, as we ignore the roots of what contributes to their circumstances.

As a not idiot, I know I have to buy in somewhere. I know I'll die a measure of hypocrite. But I don't have to like it, and I don't have to call it anything but hypocritical, even and especially when I may be due less admonishment than I'd reflexively give. What people don't want to believe, and this is how they are “rationally irrational,” is that you can criticize and try to change your corrupt structure while you're working inside of it. That's the extra responsibility. That's the “fight” I get into in writing emails and letters detailing very fixable things that nobody gives a fuck about fixing. I do. You're going to know I do. You're going to know the reason I dislike or can no longer work with you before I go. That's important. It's not just bitching and complaining. It's opening a door towards something better, and inviting people in, or providing yourself with the exact proper reason to move on and try somewhere else.

And how often can you do that? You have to structure your life in a way that attempts to force through behavior in service to the most important things. For all of the pain that it's taken, when I have my land inching along, nothing else makes more sense in the world to me. Every last gripe I've ever had about the nature of the tasks I've been subjected to, the long-term consequences of ignoring the difficult truths, and the potential to cultivate a kind of creative and removed environment is embodied with every killed weed, new structure, or dug hole. The greatest good I could ever as an individual bring to the world will come out of the ongoing work I do to make that land into an analogue for my mind. When what I hope to shape people with, that I never might do with my words becomes manifest, now they can be as taken with it as I've been taken by my experiences.

I've been feeling it more recently. The “comfort.” I get paid regularly now. I've gotten over my indignant stance on “normal” jobs. Well, not really, but I've adopted the same attitude towards it that I did during school. I'm not an idiot, it's either this or poverty or I'm likely just going to be watching TV because I don't have the money or help to move like I want to. I've lived the infinite downtime study life, the work every day mania, and my “normal” has resolved to some measure of over-doing something somewhere no matter what, so I might as well play bureaucrat, right? At least I might get health coverage for a year or so.

But what I became more aware of was the dimmer on that desperate drive and belief that I could do anything at any time. I was just as earnestly going to start a moving business as anything else. I could get the truck fixed and engine paid for right now. I'm not running out to do so as I still need power, a bathroom, a driveway, and now a consistent time I could even bother to do anything but sneak in TV and times to shit. It's so, so quick and easy, to get comfortable. It's the underlying backbone of the perpetuation of our species. People don't think twice about having kids or what they are really doing to themselves or the world by engaging in their job verses “the work.” Because, you don't have to. I could keep a kid alive in better circumstances than the places I drive these people to. I would want considerably more for my children than them simply being alive. I'm not an animal.

I think this blog speaks to my “spirituality” for want of a better term. I believe in the transcendent. I think there are truths and uses of information that are timeless and important and worth pursuing. I think you can be persuaded to live against all objectively obvious reason to creep over the double yellow line or plunge right into the lake. And I think I find my “god” in the embodiment and manifestation of the story only I can tell, the environment I can create, and the relationships that very much need me there to taste like me. I want to be so immersed that while I'm flipping through people like reddit links, I'm more me than I could ever talk about, and more me to other people than some empty prostration or matter-of-fact description pretending to have a handle on it all. I don't want to be stuck in the past, I want to transform and evolve it. I don't want my head on a pike for all my sins without climbing up to redo the hair or gloss up the lips.

As the faithful signs read on my drive out to the land, “Jesus is coming, ready or not. Heaven is Real” Well, rationally irrational monkey man, so am I. And the world I create will certainly feel more real than Heaven ever has. Just ask the increasingly long line of people who just wish I'd shut the fuck up.

[740] Comes Crashing Down

I kinda knew I wasn't done writing after my sense of malice took over. Let's see what else is in store.

One of the things that persistently happens to me when I'm reading about the habits or methods of some Great Man of history, is that I think to myself, “Yep.”

Somewhere, at some time, I've worked some idea or assumption or methodology into my being that mirrors a ton of people I admire, or at least remain intrigued about. This could be sheer probability and easily calculable personality metrics, it could be baseless ignorant ego and self deception (I doubt it), or it could be an inevitable confluence of like recognizing like. The point being, the people I admire have built into their being things I've worked to build into mine.

Take the land. This godforsaken empty ton of work shell. It's an expression of potential creative freedom, a metric by which Chomsky says the “truly educated” are about. I want to discover things, not be capable of an endless mindless list of factoids. I want to create things. I want to figure out who I am as I'm working on it. Do task, get paid, play by rules has nothing to do with me. I don't think it has much to do with any individual really.

OH! I remember a thing from the biology torrent of information that seemed to mirror how I behave. Tit-for-tat, then tit-for-tat with forgiveness. I wait to be provoked or have justification. The most efficient mathematical models for behavior are often how I go about treating people in my life. I also tend to lead with the least efficient “trust first” position from people who don't regard the game they're playing as selfish. Every little “IS IT JUST ME?” quandary boiling down yet again to an infinitely played game with predictable outcomes.

I'm right that I'll never get shit done without cooperation. I'm right that the families that stick together, propagate (eyes wearily his backstabbing ridiculous bunch squandering what they've been given family.) I'm right in finding titles and money in and of themselves meaningless. I'm right for treating all people as equals. I'm so right about so many things I look for opportunities to be bad so I can bother to claim to be human. I relish the idea of “free will” and the improbability of everything and “my” moment in time talking about it. I almost feel like I'm searching for a route to “justifiable insanity.” Maybe I'll unlock the secret sequence of words that will let me flip the fuck out. Maybe I'll never undermine my position after one sentence more.

Do I want to be right? Sometimes I like to think that I was a disembodied “soul” who was allowed to program this individual avatar. I would get to borrow from my past experiences and try to make increasingly wise decisions about what trade-offs I'd want or the kind of life I'd like to lead. Have I already been famous? Because the trappings and pathologies there don't appeal to me in the slightest. I admire Jordan Peterson who says persistently he's always thinking any minute it's all going to blow up in his face. I'm certainly an attention whore, and I'd sign a fuck ton of autographs, but it's almost too easy. I mean, even Paulie Shore is still getting by.

So have I been abjectly poor? I must have. I'm way too comfortable “settling in” to the current perpetually ridiculous and oppressive moment. It's easy when you have nothing. I have a brief yet persistent “relief” that whatever was stolen is at least that much less I'll have to account for in the future. The vast majority of my mind begging to escape or be engaged is satiated with a TV, tablet, and phone.

Have I been ugly? That's almost too easy. If I was ugly, I'd only have that much larger an excuse to nerd out on things I already nerd out on. It'd be something I'd never think about losing. I might actually remember a significantly larger portion of character names from favorite series than I do now.

What then, of all the permutations and options and stats I might build into my person. What the fuck would make me pick me? Why be born to my parents? Why have the friends I do? Why learn lessons, lessons I pretty much figured out before I forced myself through them again, the way I have? What weird ass roller coaster did I set myself up on to glean that extra few points to add to the stats of my next iteration?

I see the potential utility in any kind of social behavior. That's a measure of the “relative sociopathy.” I've seen through childish superficialities that prevent me from taking action or feeling confident in myself. I eschew lying but for insisted upon ends to “get by” in some kind of working world pragmatic matrix. I risk money and time and spirit in pursuing the ground floor of the things I actually believe in, and sacrifice every speck of potential self-respect as I shit on myself daily for not figuring out how to utilize them as I imagine. Is the lesson that I'm alone? Is the lesson really to find some kind of “eternal patience?” For all the lives I could have ever lived, and all the metrics I could have improved on, the one thing that still hasn't sunk in is that it happens in “universe” time and not “my” time?

I'm not a mystic hippie type though, so all of that bullshit I just typed isn't fundamentally persuasive even a little. It's my metaphysic escape trying to understand why people can't seem to cooperate or try together to achieve something better. I went and explored the disorganized insecure hippies with expert levels of passive aggressiveness. Their indignant attitude to modern medicine or pretending it takes 2 people to harvest 15 minutes worth of food isn't what I need. I've tried playing games with townies who start to take themselves too seriously when it clicks this is the only thing they'll ever do. I'm not a child wandering home too drunk every other weekend anymore if only because my body would crucify me.

The handful of people I admire are either genuinely nice, or intelligent and verbose. I don't think I'll ever be nice, and your god knows I can talk, but we're hard pressed on whether or not it's intelligent. I'd like to be nice, but I don't feel nice. I don't feel a large enough portion of the world wants to be nice or sees the utility in it any further than I do. Nice is the waiting room labeled “waiting for an excuse.” Nice is something people grow resentful of if they're not a grandchild being fawned over by a grandparent.”Nice” tricked me into thinking the “group identity” I rolled with in college was anywhere near it. I'm nice in what I refrain from doing or saying. I'm “nice” insofar as I know how immediately willing and ready I am before staying my hand. So I must not be nice.

Should I just go spend $1000 on a lawn mower tomorrow, $150 on a battery, $50 on gas and see if my neighbor and I can get power out to the land? Will some good old fashioned retail therapy and grass cutting set me straight? I'd be doing it in a car with breaks that sound like The Wall in Game of Thrones coming down. I'd be doing it not getting paid until Friday and no way to get said lawn mower somewhere some new thief wouldn't be able to drive it away or defile it. Tell me world, my corrupted heart only knows how to move with the intermittently dramatic. What's remotely sensible in a world you've forgone assuming makes a lick of it?

[739] Catastrophic & Immediate Failure

I am a shell of myself.

Of the myriad thoughts passing through my head on the drive back, this felt the right way to start. Shell? What shell? I'm still me, no? I eat the same, I get my work done. I get stress headaches and wear more than a little wanting clothing. Am I not still racked with...guilt? for all that needs to be done that I find myself incapable of bringing to fruition? Just how many things can remain the same or concurrently true while the shell keeps it all trapped?

Lately, I've been inundating myself with biology. I catch a random series of lectures Stanford put out. I watch a BBC documentary on whether or not science can make us “perfect.” I watched or read or did something else that I pointed out at the time which I can't remember now. This persistent narrative about the underlying “rationality” and “causality” and “molecular history” or “gene expression” at the root of it all. All the politicking, all the anger, all the health conditions, all the addictions and excuses and quirks a series of tried and true adaptations or mutations. As you may well know, I spent several years getting this message when I argued science vs religion. It is not new.

What I don't like is the depersonalizing effect it has on me when coupled with my self-effacing job. I can only say or do so much. There's a deliberate and cordial manner in email. I have to go into full sociopath, or politicking, mode to ensure I draw out certain truths or stave off the suspicions of entitled white trash.

But let's back up. Because along with the biology, I've been listening to the advice of and histories of Great Men throughout history. I caught a Thomas Jefferson biography. I'm in the middle of an exploration of Churchill and Roosevelt's relationship. I read a small article about what it means to be “truly educated” according to Chomsky. People, not without their flaws and prejudices, doing people things, but donning a kind of mantel on the consequence dial for the whole human endeavor. The more you learn about someone, the more accessible they feel. The more their decisions are cataloged and mythologies stoked, the more they can be both revered and forgotten as the legacy transcends even the idea of who they really were.

When you find yourself depersonalizing, it can go one of two ways. You can remove stress and anxiety as you generally go about the flow of life, perhaps consistently doing what's been asked of you or acting with a kind of sporadic selfish energy as you float from one experience to the next. The second path is finding yourself indifferent to what may be regarded as malicious behavior. Unfortunately, or not, I find myself vibing with the latter.

Let me put it to you like this. I do a lot of work “behind the scene” to organize 8 people's schedules into a weekly visit. Those 8 people have 8 or more homes where their, never less than 2, kids live. Somehow, I can squeeze them into a coherent-enough structure that gives me days off, exceeds hourly expectations, and merrily pretends the sacrifices (like quitting their jobs) people make are going to one day see them back with their kids like normal. Then, one of these “clients” will get indignant and suspicious. I control if they see their kids. I want to squeeze them to make my life easier. One client in particular sucks the life out of her children and everything these people talk about is prison, pregnancy, or a measure of delinquency related. She's under the delusion her kids are coming back in a month while she can't stop doing meth. Her “super helpful” sobriety program is getting in the way of me not having to come home at 10:30pm on Friday nights.

So what can I do? I can email her case manager and ask if there are analogous programs. This one isn't required, but was suggested by their case manager, and allegedly they are going to it. It apparently doesn't run any other day of the week besides the exact time I want their visit to go. Seems like a nice and understanding person would trust them to keep with their program, right? But you see, these people are lazy and entitled pieces of white trash shit. They were 2 days away from getting their kids back before doing meth again. Their dad refuses all services and it was explained to the mom she won't get the kids back, or will have to choose between them and their father in the home, if he doesn't complete programs. He smokes at visits, against our policy, and I could at any moment decide the environment isn't safe and cart them back home. And just as icing, the kids are rude.

I'm pushing a point where I have the caseload and wiggle room where I can just drop a “fuck it, we're done” bomb to compel behavior. And I want to considerably more than not. I want these people to bend to me, because I exercise so little power elsewhere, this little “win” would get me home, stress them out, and hopefully speed up the inevitable so I can move on to my next pieces of shit. I've done nothing but make every appointment, increase their visitation hours, and politely inform them of our roles and responsibilities, and they say not one “thank you” or are willing to work an inch while blowing up my phone with inane presumptive bullshit. I want to hurt them further than they can hurt themselves.

That's a shell person right there. Harm for harms sake. What did I need to get back home for tonight? A friend to blow me off and to start writing this. Super good reasons to strong arm white trash into extending your weekend hours.

An aside: If you want to put a baby to sleep, sing a lullaby. If you want to put a retarded white trash teenage girl to sleep, put on an audio-book about presidential history. There's a much longer joke and stand-up set in there, but that baseline needs to exist somewhere for posterity.

It still feels real, my potential, to do more than fuck with idiot poor people. But there is a measure of compelling darkness to my being that I've little recourse in letting out. And don't they deserve it? And if not them, who? Anyone? Ever? Or is it just my job to be the general human toilet for everyone's shitty emotions and feelings? I genuinely want an answer to that.

My shell self breaths before writing a feverishly defensive and threatening text. In about 30 seconds, I'm going to have the perfectly apolitical words that get you to say exactly what I need. Now I'm waiting 30 seconds, or a day, or not even bothering to get angry at all. Where have I gone? Who is this placating non-invasive everyman? Who's humbly hunched in his ill-fitting shirt over his computer pretending not to fantasize about choking everyone in front of him with the swing chains? Who's the mockery of an over-enthusiastic and energetic fool who doesn't feel defeated by the prospect of getting not only another gas can to fill up his van, a battery, and a lawn mower so that he might get power this very weekend! And instead worries he's just going to waste more money chasing another dead end right before his car shits the bed? Why am I sitting here half-expecting the rest of my shit to be stolen the next time I go out to the land, instead of fervently making my way to defend all of this invested being unto the death!?

I don't feel like anything anymore. I just am. I just can or can't. For every Great Man I read about, who's left some indelible mark on history, there's several years if not my entire lifetime between me and when they became of note. Well, they lived storied lives and traversed the ups and downs of being born white, rich, and in the West in eras of vastly smaller populations and every new accessible frontier.

So maybe it is my place to “elevate” my “mere wage slave” status and be a “rockstar” who employs incredibly shady tactics to make my schedule and abilities look as good as I know how to make them. Maybe I parlay the “wows” and “nobody's every done that's” into the kind of fortune that lets me run wild on the land. Maybe I've never known anything about how to get what I want, and after the final capitulation, just be the shell, the world will open up as I've always assumed it should or would eventually, but stubborn old-world ethic me needed to be broken like the wildest of horses. Maybe power is to be exercised where you have it, not when. Maybe the universe is punishing me for too much deference and humility and indifference masquerading as patience. Maybe I'm meant to teach the exact kind of lessons in pain that I know how to to the exact people I'm interacting with in any one moment.

I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's the kind of story I should be finding compelling about myself, and whether there's anything that should be done about it. But it is the story I'm telling myself. It feels like a window back to “me.”

[530] I'm A Fake I'm A Fake I'm A Fake

I’m in a particularly cynical mood tonight. I can feel the irrational levels of hatred forming the front lines of an outburst. I loathe these moments for how informative they feel. My deepest sense of reality pressed at every pressure point. And it’s brought on by a stupid board game.

I see the rest of my life. I’ve met people like me, or more often read about them. The “go-getter” with an unassailable spirit to keep trying. The one who’s interested in everything and never backs away from a fight, especially ones he doesn’t need to have. I’ve been comfortable for some time with referring to myself as much a cliché as I may label someone else. It’s the healthy mix of naivety and wisdom that let’s you keep moving in spite of yourself.

The psychology I’m molded from has just enough drops of abuse and despair intermingled with selfless sentiment. Each moment I choose to make an opponent of myself, or “humanity,” or “your stupid stupid self who has no capacity to properly use words.” There’s no surprises. There’s nothing engaging. Whether I get on an old-man ramble how I’m going to be having the same conversation about the Middle East 25 years from now as my parents did 25 years ago, or if I get drunk and talk for 3 hours to a group of people on their porch in the middle of the night, to me, it speaks to nothing.

Because this is my voice, I don’t have a voice. Because those examples are when I’m loudest, when I pick up a megaphone, you’ll never hear me. The pen is only mightier than the sword in a battle of wits. It takes almost negative thought to exist as we do. I phrase it as such because I offer people the chance to read or recognize and they literally tell me they feel sorry for me. I don’t deserve to be as sure of myself as they are themselves. I’m not worthy of the game they’re playing.

I feel my grip loosen as each finger is plucked by the macabre man who oversees existence. How does one not dance about in the depravity? What’s worth it really mean anymore?

Depravity, for me, looks like taking the money and running. It says, rather insistently, fuck you, I got mine. No, you didn’t hear me, FUCK YOU, I GOT MINE, LIFE’S HARD ENOUGH NIGGA GET THE FUCK BACK. And then when the guilt or pity kicks in from time to time you donate to the dying children. Depravity looks like sleep. So much sleep I up my capacity for indulgence to induce it artificially. Why not? Although, lately, even my dreams haven’t been safe.

What’s left for me to believe in? That I’ll get my cool house or compound? That I’ll give more privileged travelers opportunities to mask the depravity of the “gig economy” and spectacle of dipping your toes into the homogenized commodities that are becoming the rest of the world? That I’ll “find someone” who so amazingly and wonderfully thinks like me! And it will all be okay again because we’ve been hurt before and learned so much!

The tragedy is belief. I believed in school. I believed in love. I believed in family. I believed in my work ethic. I believed in my intelligence. I believed in my interested and engaged perspective. I believed in conversation. I believed in sincerity. I believed in, practically unconditional, acceptance. I believed in selfishness. I believed in manipulation. And apparently I believe in an endless stream of disgusting words that speak to my snarled lip and furled brow.

I’m always lying. What to make of all the time I’m lying and I never even meant to. When I’ve bitched too much it wasn’t enough. When I stopped hitting the wall after the first hole or first few drops of blood I let myself off easy. When I set my computer aside and roll over thinking I was done writing and might be able to sleep it will be complete and utter bullshit.

I already told you, total cliché.

I’m being dragged around by life. It’s blowing me in every which direction and I’ve found nothing to ground myself in but wandering around, saving money, and complaining. I pick goals for their ability to retain my attention for longer than a few days. I form opinions on thousands of movies and shows so I can say, “you know, I forget that scene in particular, but overall I thought it was good.” Because what else is there? Start smugly goose honking like Chris Hedges? Seek academic sainthood like Noam Chomsky? Get ripped and fuck bitches because I am all that is man!? Act like I feel brotherly love and know how to translate that message like brother Cornel West? Buy it all like the rich kids of Instagram? Drink it all? Catch em all?

I’m nothing. I’m nowhere. In 2 days, I’ll be the QT/QTC microsecond data point from the ECG measuring what some pill has or hasn’t done to delay my heart. That’s why I went to college. That’s why I wanted to be an entrepreneur. That’s why the 180 degree reorientation of my life feels invigorating and definitely not manic because I no longer get to think someone else is the most important thing in my world. As if I wasn’t clued in to that self-inflicted drama years ago. Just keep swimming!

I’m a constant roll of the dice. Maybe I’ll wake up and you’ll all be gone. Maybe I won’t make it back off the highway. Maybe I’ll go bankrupt. Maybe I’ll get sick. Maybe the psychopath I pissed off online will find me. I’ll roll and roll and roll and only see two lifeless eyes fixed straight up affirming the only thing they’re good for.

What the fuck am I doing? My job clearly isn’t to keep close connections with like-minded individuals I met in school. It’s not to become some famous insightful writer, so full of RAGE and passion, Brava! It’s not to teach you fucking anything you’re not happy to dive headfirst into anyway. Or it’s not something I haven’t poorly reiterated from those on the ground or with photographic memories and a penchant for elegance. If I’m not here for anyone, I can only be here for me, and that’s the most depressing, horrifying, and life-ending thought I can come up with.

How to frequently resolve that without being suicidal? Or maybe I’m just incidentally suicidal, like in eating shitty food and breathing hours of basement air. Or in speeding on the highway and leaving my contacts in too long. Fuck my eyes, right? I’ve seen enough. Let’s not forget picking scabs. Nothing so on the nose than literally digging at yourself to pieces. It’s not that I’m just watching people “get by” and “make the best of it.” It’s not that they just leave this ooze I can’t wash off. It must just be me. They’re not killing themselves with my mirror neurons going apeshit. I’m just the only one that doesn’t get it.

So singular minded. So closed-off and resentful. I should broaden my horizons. Find the good in everything. Use my resources and thoughtfulness to turn this window into the world onto all that is good instead of icky knowledge of a nuclear holocaust, climate apocalypse, or rape porn. Which of those made you most uncomfortable to think about? It doesn’t matter! The world is filled with beautiful mountains and love and opportunities to be surprised every day! We’re all in this together!

[461] Lessons In "Fuck It"

Every day I feel a little dumber. The sentiment usually goes the other way. “You learn something new everyday!” The idea is that someone should always be curious and striving to learn, even if it’s from something like a word-a-day calendar. The world, an endless mystery with evolving technologies, myriad cultures, and new opportunities every day imbues the power to motivate and help you self-determine. Or so the sentiment at least hints.

So why do I feel dumber? With every new piece of knowledge you have a responsibility to recognize its sides. That doesn’t mean there’s always good with bad or vice versa. It just means that nothing is self-contained and you can run yourself ragged in pursuing the implications and influences. An easy analogy is to think of comic book arcs. You can read a single series that alludes to 6 different series that in turn each point to 6 more, all leaving a small but particular mark for those in the know.

When I learn, I pick up on the thousand ways I’m going to fail. I probably overuse the word “naive.” I think it’s the quintessential attitude, a sort of dispositional lifeblood if you will, underpinning most peoples’ motivations. Because in order to be naive, you only have to feel as if you’ve acknowledged dissent and then carry on. It’s where you get terms like “haters” and “naysayers.” Haters tyin’ to keep you down because they can’t appreciate the higher plain your actions and perspective exists on. People who don’t believe in you because they don’t share, or more likely aren’t capable of, your capacity for a vision for the future.

Essentially, it points to a difference in “acknowledgment” verses “internalizing.” Say you lash out in anger over some political point during a debate. Your opponent can quietly nod and say “I understand” as they move right into their point of view. They don’t feel your anger. You want them to feel your anger, because presumably then they’ll understand just how you got there, but they don’t. Like a practically neglected child, a random pat on the head or reaction to crying doesn’t in turn automatically manifest loving feelings.

I can acknowledge, for example, the many barriers to success in the political realm. From gerrymandering, rampant corruption, general voter ignorance, too many moving parts, historical perspectives lost to time, the cost of “doing business,” the grand timescales movements and revolutions rest on, what’s happened to the “best attempts”...the list could go on for a while. But until recently, maybe the last couple weeks, it hasn’t struck me as a kind of “existential lost cause.” I didn’t really feel it.

Notably, I feel it when I listen to my political heroes. When my leaders paint the world as a dramatic borderline chaos factory with little to no advice on how we get better barring an unforeseen miracle or catastrophe, everything I think to do in spite or to help feels very dumb, small, and pointless. It’s not a nutjob Tea Party member that scares me when they bang the war pots and pans together. I lose hope when Chomsky details perspectives and decisions over years from the people closest to the flames. I’d love to believe in Bernie Sanders, until Nader and Hedges lay out his position in larger contexts that laugh off capacity stadium attendance.

And yet, I don’t necessarily feel the desire to turn into a straight cynic. My understanding of a cynic is someone like Ben Carson. A person who can fluidly and perpetually lie about literally everything defines the kind of absurdity of our times. The fact that he’s a brain surgeon again shows God to have a sense of humor. A cynic would seek the attention for the sake of it. The cynic would seek to capitalize on the bluster and ignorance. I, on the other hand, want to just be left alone.

Who wants to fight for a lost cause? When you can feel so profoundly how screwed up the world around you is, how do you go anywhere but away? “The World” isn’t ready for and doesn’t deserve the kind of luxury and opportunity that’s on offer. We take it for granted. We assume things will work themselves out. We’re too “smart” for our own good.

I throw out the idea of being a kind of “sociopath” so often it’s lost all its luster for me. Another way of relating to how I feel might be characterized as an “overflowing empath.” I started in life feeling too much and just got paired with a crazy person long enough to learn when to shut it off. If I feel too much, and I just feel dumber, maybe the direction “in general” has won out. Maybe in my heart of hearts I know that whatever experiments I run, whatever resources I create, and whomever I meet or work with, will only be drops unable to quell a spectacular sea of fire.

It’s that I don’t believe in us, even a little. I don’t know if that’s being dumb, or self-preservation. I believe in me. I believe I can survive and ride out the times, provided I generally stay away from large cities. But the world from my corner has been shrinking for so long, I think this is a point where I say it’s swallowed me up. Bernie isn’t my savior. My heroes are old and detailed. The momentum is such that fighting all but provokes martyrdom. Revolution? We’re not evolved.

[428] Do Or Do Not

I think there's an important distinction between types of people that isn't often talked about. When attempts are made to talk about it we tend to regard people as “optimists” who contrast with the “pessimists.” I think the distinction has less to do with your positive or negative outlook on life. I think the distinction lies in how you are socialized to think about your circumstances. That is, it's the difference between people who “want to live” and those who are “waiting to die.”

I get hung up on old movies, shows, and documentaries about bands and political theater. You get the impression that there is a genuine underlying cultural sensibility and understanding. Regardless of what you can say about misogynistic and civil rights failures, people seemed to “get it” in a way that I absolutely cannot find today. This is surely part media bias and rose colored glasses, but at the same time, I think it's the same reason I tend to get along with older people in general if not old women in particular.

Old women seemed to be socialized to “take care of the family.” A very life affirming, always on the go, navigate a million moving parts including your children's needs, husband's emotional distance, and whatever the neighborhood gossip or family secrets. Men were just expected to work and provide. Being tired at the end of the day and teaching a few life skills was tantamount to good parenting. While I was antiquing the other day, a couple of older women lamented that you can't just get into a fight now-a-days without getting sued or put in jail and, no exaggeration said, “in my day things were different.”

It's often talked about “the simpler times.” When what you knew you knew and what you didn't you didn't. Information wasn't being uploaded to the cloud to be checked and debated endlessly every minute. You didn't have a million TV channels and competing sources for your attention like the 1000 people you follow on twitter or the hundreds of friends and their meme pictures and statuses. I genuinely think from a psychological standpoint, this was a better circumstance than what we have today.

I think this because I consider myself an educated person without a fucking clue as to what I should be doing. I spend so much time “doing everything” and absolutely none of it has felt like the “right” thing to do in anything but philosophical or health terms. That is, I don't want to be a wage slave if I don't have to, and I respect my time to a greater degree than my money. I feel a genuine sense of responsibility towards the world because I chose to adopt a stake in it. How I got to a point of adopting that stake is a long and complicated picture that I don't think the modern era makes clear.

Today, if you can even define “friend,” when you don't like them you click an "x" and add a new one. We'll have more jobs by the time we're 25 than our parents had their entire lives. What does that do for your conception of a relationship? A relationship to your job, your town, neighbors, coworkers, or how you conceive of your work? I used to think the words “union” and “collective bargaining” went hand in hand, but with union membership at like...7? 8? percent, and if you poll people, you'd think 1900-1935ish didn't exist in this country. We've destroyed respect for your effort, time, and health.

I was listening to a Jack White song where he says something like “we're not entitled to a single damn thing.” If that's true, does that mean we don't owe anybody anything? Because surely someone is entitled to my basic respect for their being. Perhaps you only get the idea of entitlement when you subscribe to wanting to be alive in the first place. But what is it to entitle something? You are held in trust. You should be living up to said title or taking responsibility for claiming ownership of something. Do we just overwhelmingly abdicate responsibility and therefore feel like we don't deserve things?

I've been wanting to shit on myself for trying. And I feel like that has way more to do with the overall culture than with me. It's that no matter what you're doing, you're being punished. I got the degree, for an exorbitant amount of money. I'll let you talk to my fellow graduate and friend what it feels like to apply for 100+ jobs, in the same field, and get nothing for it because I skipped that headache and went for opening my own business. There again, punished for not being able to afford a lawyer with better advice, or a lawyer to sue when you were lied to and sunk costs, also by “the terrorists,” often mislabeled as Islamic extremists, who gouge you on insurance, rent, and of any scraps of self-respect you might have left. You're certainly being punished in a minimum wage anything. And now, I'm finding a way to punish myself in the stress of trying to rely on my blood pressure and drug studies to even begin something resembling savings or investment.

And I'm still supposed to remember that by not being in debt and having my bills paid for a year, I'm doing better than nearly everyone on the planet. At such point I'm supposed to what? Bend the knee and thank the gods? It isn't about me.

It's concordantly hard to deal with having, barely, examples of people who “represent me” in the public eye. As far as the political realm there's maybe 4; Warren, Sanders, the Seattle Green chick, and Nader. With celebrities, Michael Moore on a good day and I suppose Russell Brand is a little batty, but he speaks true shit and gets his hands dirty.(edit 2024. Oh, how people change.) Writers like Naomi Klein, Chomsky, Hedges (most of the time), and Taibbi. I can give as much shit about Bill Maher as your fundie uncle, but when he's lucid I can nod along. Mostly, I prefer Jon Stewart or Colbert, and increasingly Oliver if we have to leave real reporting up to comedians. Thankfully, albeit very recently, Vice's HBO show is filling such a massive void their facebook editorials should feel ashamed of sharing the same name.

But each name or organization I could point to feels like a pebble. They belong to the old women, and me, who have the time to read their books and “educated liberals” who can laugh more than cry about what's being reported. It's for the people who can afford HBO or aren't so baffled by technology they can figure out torrenting is easier than Yahoo Mail.

My world feels so small. It's why when I like my friends, I really like my friends, drunk “fuck everything” blogs aside. It's why I'm really sad when one of them gives up or becomes too busy or writes off my genuine concern as “just what Nick P. does or thinks.” I'm pushing a full stop when it comes to existential exploration and the exhaustion that comes with putting yourself out there so often to ill or non-defined ends. I don't want to be Nader publishing a book about all my letters that didn't get answered and call that not giving up.

Literally all I can do is wait and learn more. But even if I figure out something new to try, I feel like I'm going to be doing it alone, and setting myself up for a new punishment. Still none of those personal wins or promises to yourself are gonna matter. If I don't consider it about me, I can't endorse you making it about you. But, I want to choose life. That includes how our culture helps or hurts, even and especially for those who feel like they're stuck waiting around to die.

[382] On Disillusionment

I'm interested in how quick the pendulum swings, and for what reasons. Of course I mean between when you're motivated, and when you couldn't possibly care less. I'm interested in this because of how I feel myself respond to something affirmative. How things that are in line with my perception genuinely motivate me to talk a little nicer, work a little faster, and excited to get on the path to learning more.

I just watched this documentary on Ralph Nader. Peeks into history that account for so many things that make our lives better today are invigorating. From the countless hours that a single man put into advocating, training, and campaigning, your life today has been altered in incalculable ways. It's a reminder of your obligations, ability, and potential impact.

I think about the people my age who've become disillusioned. They aren't getting the jobs they want. They're always at risk of getting sick or becoming a burden to their parents. They're bored as shit. Frequently lamenting that they didn't go into a different field or alluding to the external problems that keep them stuck. They feel as if they're in impossible circumstances after a few years of not getting the dream, and primarily for themselves.

Then I think of the people who lined up behind Nader. I think of the teams of people and the amount of legislation that was passed in order to protect human well-being. Years spent researching, writing books, advocating, door knocking, and testifying. And it gets railroaded and degraded piece by piece. Imagine not only having to work hard to get “common sense” things to happen, but then seeing your hard work deliberately targeted and torn down by monied interests. Imagine watching old friends turn their back on you and what you are fighting for because they no longer believe and blame you. Imagine people physically turning their backs to you and shutting you out because you won't play their political pandering game.

Would you keep going? Would you find resolve in some adage amounting to “if I can only help 1 person, then it will all have been worth it!” How many people have figured out or discussed their motivation before they lamented the paycheck or lack thereof? How much of your motivation to change something is tied to how comfortable you make yourself first? You don't need to be rich to read, to advocate, to organize. And that's the brunt of what's striking me so hard.

Nader shied away from the limelight and offers to run for president for a long time. He wanted to drive home the idea that people should be “professional citizens.” He didn't betray trust. He had people sending him all sorts of problems and help me letters, well outside of his purview, but it spoke to the kind of trust he could illicit from his fellow man. I feel like a kindred spirit; even if it only starts in my endless advocacy of people beginning to actually talk about things.

I catch the documentary while I'm in the middle of “The World As It Is” by Chris Hedges. One of the pleasures of writing is that you perk up and get to recognize when something you said is being echoed in different examples and tweaked words, but no-less your point. The idea that “how do we fix it if we don't know how to talk about it” is prevalent. Hedges consistently praises Chomsky for his attention to detail and pages of digressions into the minutia of some conflict. Chomsky's not writing to be relevant 100 years from now. He's testifying to the truth that wins debates. He's giving you tools where and when they're needed that the other side is too lazy to find or determined to avoid.

There's an idea of scholarship speaking to genuine emotional outrage for your circumstances. It's not just storming the street with a pitchfork. You're armed with the knowledge that you're right, the details matter, the consequences carry, and your obligation to the world and future are worth the struggle. That's another reason I want people to speak up. I want to feel that you're obligated to anything. Even if it's just a call for an answer to a question about something important. I want us to find more room to be each others' keepers, and not squander the opportunities to connect or brainstorm. The right ideas are always there, but do you feel them. The people who are crazy sure feel them, and that's why they move into positions of influence.

The day where we're all just comfortable enough to start on our high-minded liberalism's idea of how to change things is not going to happen. I'll never catch up to the intellectual dedication and rigor of people like Hedges, Chomsky, and Nader, but that doesn't mean my voice doesn't matter. It doesn't mean there isn't an uphill battle that is always worth the fight. Your testimony matters. Your voice gives someone else license. Exercise it.

It can't be done alone. You can be isolated, you can be demeaned and painted in various lights. But that only becomes a problem when you make society's problems yours and yours alone. When they need a champion who isn't given a loud enough voice to remind people that they're the champions. Our biggest, baddest, business as usual corruption factories are made out of individuals. They're “truth” is in morally bankrupt greed and corporate culture. We need to speak more truth to power. We need to hold ourselves accountable to the system that has fucked us, but a system that we help stay that way.

Just talk. Just start telling me what you see or what you'd want to do. Or what you're doing. Or why you think there's nothing to be done. Talk.

"I don't care about what they say about my legacy. What are they going to do? Rip airbags and seat belts out of cars?" - Nader.