[875] Oh Beautiful

“I feel sick.”

The votes aren't completely in, but as of this writing, 67 million Americans are proud to be Nazis. They're proud to be fascists. They are proud to be "white." They are proud of the story they have told themselves about why they are better or smarter than you.

You see people talking about how sick they feel that so many of their brethren could somehow justify this behavior. You see people literally getting sick and dying from covid. Still, after 4 years, we have not learned the mechanism for preventing someone like Trump like we could have prevented the worst from covid. Still, the story is at the mercy of all-out chaos and destruction, and we're waiting to be subsumed by a hail of bullets or alcohol when the misery won't put us quite over the edge.

For however many words this turns out to be, I'm again “at a loss.” There are no words, there is only death. There's been so much death for so long that it's now time to culturally celebrate it. That's what this “election” tells me. That's what years of campaigning tried to convince you to do. Celebrate the death of the middle class. Celebrate how much you hate yourself and how that hate comes out as racism. Celebrate you get to start “owning” people again for being dreamy or high-minded about what a proper piece of crusty shit you are.

I don't hear people “getting it” that the behavior exhibited from Trump isn't “the other side.” On a universal and indifferent scale, yes, any and all “merely changing” words or behaviors is going to build or destroy. Human, though? “Democracy?” It's not the held-harmless position of a functioning person. It's the stuff that would get you fired. It's the things they used to prosecute and jail for. It's too simple.

The psychology papers abound telling you about sunk-costs and cognitive dissonance. These people haven't lost anything nor wrestle with demons psychologically. They are proud. They want to die and they want to kill you and those feelings empower them further. These people are a collective lynch mob, wondering where the beer and barbecue are so they can top-off the carnage.

There was no rebuke. There was no persuading the country that Biden would be “easier” to convince and push in the direction of what we need. There was only the continued anger, hopelessness, and fear. There were only more lies. There were only whines and excuses and a moment arrested by how you think you might survive in spite of it all. We are not a country, we are a bubbling pit of blame and insecurity. We are a legacy of perpetuating around the world the rot we're suffering right now.

Obama touted “hope” as he deported families back to countries where gangs targeted them. He was the droner-in-cheif. Bill Clinton signed as much legislation as he could to bankrupt the working class. Jimmy Carter was shit on for his foresight and frankness about the forces taking over. The people in power now have spent their entire lives picking away at order and gaining power for its own sake. The real war has never been “close.” The underlying circumstances doomed you from birth.

I'm 32 years old and never had a person represent me in my “democratic republic.” My degree meant I could make less than minimum wage and feel better than most if I lived in a shed in a holler. I've never seen a democratic candidate even sniff at the shit hole county I live in. This country isn't for me. This country was a set of lies predicated on even worse actions to perpetuate the pretense.

The way I figure it, I have maybe 6 months to get my affairs in order and figure out how to buy a humble plot somewhere in the world that can at least pull off “boring” for a while. Until I die, I'll need something to look forward to and invest in. I need to stop believing I can make this country into something it's aggressively decided it is not.

[764] Placeholders

When I'm working this hard to avoid writing, I guess I have to start. I think I kind of want to talk stupid. I also think I want to make that stupid talk analogize to movies and songs. (Neither of which I ended up doing?...)

I've been thinking a lot about relationships. I glance at my blogger page and see the tag “relationships” is 8^th from the top of 427 tags I managed to pull out as mild coherence reference points in my usual blog soup. They mean a lot to me, but apparently not as much as Jordan Peterson, though they're tied with Obama.

For the longest time, every single conception I had of a relationship was about what I could get out of it. Maybe I wanted to be friends with dickhead kids because I wanted their power. I could play the ethical know-it-all in school because of the attention and accolades. I would garner a certain type of crowd to create a certain kind of fun or that could be controlled in specific ways. Basically, I didn't simply “not understand” relationships, I didn't have any.

That isn't to say people didn't try to relate to me. My general nonplussed demeanor or mild excitement at mostly-playful delinquency many depressed and “finding themselves” people are consistently drawn to. It's easy not to judge someone you're not invested in. And people, whether they're comfortable admitting it or not, like when the confident person filled with praises and gifts for them shits on everyone besides them.

That was a big part of my dialogue in my romance language regarding friends. They were “different” because of some ill-defined disposition that could tolerate me for longer periods than most. To be sure, I still think this speaks volumes, but I think I was willing to give out too much credit, and I was doing it at an unfair expense to my own self-conception. I wanted actual relationships. As such, I allowed other people's stuff into and onto mine.

Other people, for as much as I don't generally like them, can be something of a huge motivation. There's people who self-sacrifice in extremely unhealthy ways, and people who do for others out of loads of guilt or fear of themselves. I genuinely want to reward people I consider persistently better than me in some aspect of their life I'm not doing terribly well at improving. Perhaps even better said, there are people with qualities I find as equally valid and important as and I hold, but I want nothing to do with behaving like them. Arguably, given how actively I've sought to cultivate my crowds, words, and direction in life, that's basically everyone.

Here is where I think the word “unconditional” comes up. This is around the space people start to throw out the stupid love word. Unconditional, of course, doesn't really mean unconditional as much as it signifies a kind of persistence and determination through what are hopefully healthy and manageable levels of shit. It's the divine standard by which to set your own inadequacy watch. It's the kind of irrational place a parent may occupy in service to their serial murderer son or wife's devotion thrice beaten a day year after year.

That kind of place seems to pair well with irrational pride. The more you are unduly boastful about something you don't understand or don't deserve, the likelier it seems you'll go down with it. To simply call it “ignorant” betrays the very real motivated energy it conjures in you. The “deeply personal” feeling is everyone's scream for things to matter in a way that transcends the ups and downs of their emotions or tumultuous lives.

In that sense, it's not “irrational” for your stomach to drop when you look at a picture of someone you care about who's gone. They were more real to you than you have the words for. Their impact could have made you feel in ways you'll never experience on your own. Sure, those feelings are playing on survival instincts and deep-rooted fears about the tribe abandoning you, but we're also intelligent enough to extract a greater ethos and example who's death we're allowed to mourn as well.

That's the “heartbreak.” It's not any one person and what you did or didn't say or the details of some regrettable fight. It's the timeless example you thought meant something “special” proving otherwise. Or the proud presumption you have the capacity and wisdom to know what example that relationship was really setting. Or the selfish resentment you have for the work it takes to remain vulnerable and honest. Or the pain of knowing you were working hard, unsure of towards what, to death, conscripted into a cultural fairy-tale.

I miss my relationships that went bad to the extent I allow myself to forget what got them started to begin with. I long for days of old when I pretend I made the mistake of pulling a trigger I never intended. Relationships need people willing to discuss and respect each others' decisions. This is as true between you and every insane-but-savable Trump voter as it is you and those difficult friendships or relationships that blew up for, probably, wholly ridiculous and nonsensical reasons. Check the record, I've never said, “I'm done talking about this.”

My best relationships aren't just time spent, but people who seem to respect that the time we have is limited, and the person in front of you is all you're going to get of them. My deepest sense of connection is when I allow that sentiment to embed itself into my moment. When people talk about things like “no expectations,” the wrong and lazy way to understand that is as the shirking of responsibility. No expectations needs to be making a plan, while knowing you can't control the weather. It needs to be something akin to that AA mantra about having the wisdom to tell the difference between things you can and cannot change, and then drilling down on how or if you really want to. It's me knowing I could blow thousands of dollars getting nowhere trying to create and be independently wealthy, and can only expect from myself to act as well as I can to the extent of my knowledge and ability.

That's the kind of leeway it gets easier to grant when you're older. I'm still a top-notch shit-talker, but if my first impulse was to roast everyone at the office, dear god. As life has felt both more and less in my control, I'm not so quick to throw people's baggage into their face. I still think I prefer to relate in that kind of “mean because I like you” space, but I understand I live in the wrong place for too much of that. I want room to “fail as a person” as much as anyone else. I'm significantly less apologetic or insecure than what's normal, statistically, but I don't want to believe in lost causes, thinking we'll cobble together some misshapen gluey Popsicle stick existence together.

I'm not sad people who want to leave, leave. My first drunk instinct isn't to blow up ex's phones. I don't think I'll create the same (it'll only get better) magic of parties. It bugs me to think that I didn't matter to them as much as they did to me. That my kind of “fucked up” is “too,” but what I accepted as them presumably only someone better than me could really understand or they could bother with in perpetuity. The things I like about them seem to lose out to the things I hate. It's parts of them I think they hate as well, but only they're allowed to suffer them on their own. Their depression wins. Their insecurity reigns. Their conspiratorial gossipy child runs amok. I don't end friendships in screaming and pissing matches inventing a dozen explicitly untrue things to say about you before never talking again.

The things people use to lament me are the things I take pride in. I like having worked for my views and methodical needling down on things. I like being sexual and fighting jealous impulses. I like cussing, and being blunt, and “rough” messy friendships where everything is at once a crisis and immediate celebration that it will all still be over soon enough, so relax. I like knowing what part of the imperfect whole I'm getting more comfortable accepting, and discussing what needs to change. There's a gigantic hole at the center of how we conceive of each other as “right” or “the one” or “best.” This isn't to dismiss people who's styles and experiences mesh more than others, but it's to allude to a lost spirit of entanglement. The kind that happens when “what if you can't get divorced” or “this child is yours forever” enters the picture.

I'm still celebrating. Every forgotten name from my parties frequently lives on in the spirit they conjured in me. Every lost friend or girlfriend occupies at least words on the page, even if the swirl of their influence will never fit neatly into a waffle cone. And I'm still working to create even better and refined circumstances to build the fleetingly small amount of relationships with impacts worth considering and preserving indefinitely. That's the kind of friend I want to be, and misfired regrets over people less willing than me serve no one and never recognized me to begin with. And I'm just the smallest part of everything else we're missing.

[748] Weeds

I must be weird.

In an interview to work for The Department of Child Services, the interviewer relayed to me a quote from a long-time judge. “A cop can be on the job for 31 years and then retire, and they'll see less trauma than your office will in 6 months.” I didn't blink.

Death, trauma, evil, pain, exploitation, lies, and otherwise wanton destruction or violence make sense to me. I thought I was mis-remembering a video I saw once of Mexican drug cartel members getting beheaded with a chainsaw, looked it up, and forgot it was only one who got the chainsaw, the other a knife. I couldn't recall if the chainsaw grazed the 2^nd guy's arm, but I thought it did, and I didn't see him flinch. Odd as it may sound, I think those, former, Mexican gangsters and I had something in common. They'd clearly accepted something about their circumstances. While I'm still flinching in the face of chainsaws, so have I.

What's striking to me about this disposition is how often and vehemently it's labeled or discussed as “negative” or “nihilistic” or “dark” or “pessimistic” or “inappropriate” or whatever analogue that is the opposite of life, joy, or the pursuit of something affirmative and lasting. And for the thousandth time I've referenced the irony at the base of everything, I think we're striking a bedrock psychological example. Some might find it as easy as asking yourself, how better to stay alive than understand as many ways in which you could die?

There's dying in the fun ways, like as many times as it takes to watch your favorite violent movie. We reenact famous plays where the characters die for love or power. We play fight and die as children. We employ a vague notion of death at a level of embarrassment or shock and intrigue. We make a game out of killing bacteria or shedding old skin in personal hygiene. Video and carnival games pick off people and ducks. Death is playful, when we want it to be.

There's ideological death. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” In the face of technological and social upheaval, many a foundation are shaken. Who you were as a believer can be as dramatic a personality shift as the alcoholic turned stone sober from “giving it all up to God.” A part of you that was protecting something died, or a part of you that was never quenched decided to kill. Maybe you were viciously hurt in love and now live in the wake of the sewage of your emotions. Maybe you were neglected and couldn't spell the word “family” or “mom” if your life depended on it. Maybe you're just realizing that no matter what you do, you'll never be the child you remember, and it's time to sober up to the “real world.”

But here again, I think I must be weird. All of that seems very familiar. I didn't really have to explain how we play with death or understand the consequences of polluting someone's mind with abuse or their naive notions of love. I mean, we literally call them “plays.”

What kills me is how (successfully?) we're pretending we're not hyper-obsessed with death. Isn't all of existence speaking to it? Isn't it the root of self-sabotage? Isn't it our addictions? Isn't it our complacency? Isn't it our entertainment, or undue celebration for personal victories, and betraying our pithy grudges? Aren't we alive as a result of all the other things we're willing to kill around us? Personal preferences held up as badges of honor. Friendships unburdened by truth or struggle. Vicious internet opinions, like so many assholes, meant to defend and defame, who? For what? In the first calculations, save the final, where does it all go? It's what we feed off of. It's nourishment.

I think this speaks to the romance narrative of death. Something has to die so others can live. We need to be proper Donner party members. I feel I watch this play out everywhere, all the time. School ate us alive. The mall ate my coffee shop. My aunts and uncles ate my grandparents, dad, and stepmom. My brother wishes he could eat me. Our country was eaten by the rich and vitriolically opportunistic. And we cheered them on because we saw so much of ourselves in them. A concert of Little Deaths, in an endless blinding sequence of pleasure.

Think how closely this mirrors and pollutes the idea of sacrifice. The death of a sacrifice isn't superficial. It's payment. It's respect. All you have to do in order to hijack it is claim you've put up whatever your particular god thinks is due, and bask in the glory. “I worked for everything I have! Fuck the moochers!” You killed your time, after all, in presumably much harsher circumstances and with greater loss than those struggling to get by now. The truth of who you've eaten be damned.

How do we “get better?” Think about it. How will the economy improve? Once we get people to eat more! Eat more Iphones, cars, and prepared meals. Eat your heart out at a generic “job.” How do we fix loneliness and boredom? Eat more Netflix and video games! Eat this new hobby and finely tuned pill. How do we celebrate in spite of every-day personal folly and failure? Eat this World Series win! Eat this master of his craft! Eat this pre-approved algorithm of characters in this most popular genre! As long as something is lined up to fill our bellies, we presume “everything” should otherwise fall in to place.

I'm in a struggle for my life right now. That's what this blog is. I'm 6 months into the throes of “comfort” of a regular paycheck, menial task, and handful of things I'd like to get done each weekend or after work. I've been describing myself as Hank Hill. I've been saying, “We can spring for the extra to get that VIP, we're old!” Am I a function of my age? I have severe doubts about the nature of time for sure, and I suppose in small ways my body feels older, but I'd argue I'm significantly more all of the mess that spews out of me in disorganized angst-ridden energy. So how does that guy put on business clothes and sit in a cubicle? I suppose I'm starting with acknowledging all the different kinds of death, and seeing if I'm buying into them.

I can 8-4 it and still build. I can sit in a cubicle and call it analogous to the living room or basement I'd otherwise be sitting in. I gave myself all the free time in the world, no one wanted to play with me, I already know without a certain amount of money or vastly different group of friends, there's nothing outside and no greener grass. There's ideological death if I've ever seen it.

I've also been working on the narrative that might make me finally bored of TV. I'd like a proper “obsession” to be sure, but any type of work and otherwise worthwhile task makes something as stupid as finishing Arrow out of spite feel more than pointless. I probably still would anyway, as I feel my TV habit has morphed into a bigger point about how many hours are really in a day, but a budding desire for a dispositional death is still there. I don't really get lost in TV or movies like I used to, but then again, that's not really why I'm watching anymore.

I don't know where to introduce it, so it's now. All the death-talk and everything that comes with it being easy makes the appeal of what seems to be so hard inevitably compelling.

How often do you find the people going out of their way to bring about goodness? This is a question that's going to need a few different phrasings. Who goes out of their way to help people succeed? Who sacrifices themselves, in a healthy way, for the benefit of others? Who gets immense joy and pride out of helping? I mean actually helping, not lip service and “good intentions,” like picking the biggest and hardest things they think they can fix, and diving in? Would you even feel comfortable saying something like that about yourself? Or would it be in the form of something personal, like child-rearing? Perfectly noble to want to rear a healthy and happy kid in spite of the broken home they were born into.

“Nice” is something of an all-consuming novelty to me. I let my ideas of nice bite me with regard to friendship. We let it perpetuate myths of people like Mother Teresa or in Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Nice is there for the exploitation. At least, that's my instinct that I'm trying to correct. I have and have had actually nice, sacrificial, genuinely good and helpful examples in my life. I've been “saved,” not by God, but by my grandma and my dad. I know there are at least 2 people in life who never have and never will try to fuck me over with their “niceness.” That's fucking important.

The flip side of that is that for every dad I have and dead grandma I have memories of, I have half a dozen other family members not like that at all and significantly more acquaintances and former “friends” who are nothing like that. This is the battle. This is the burden of the genuinely good. The person who lives and creates life because of the celebration of what it can be, not for the exploitation of what it can give them. If anyone less “blunt” or “jaded” or “cold” or “intellectual” or “funny” or “persistently indignant in his railroading and intransigence” is dealing with the same numbers of shit verses nice as I am? Get right out of town. I don't employ my “I don't have hope” mantra on a whim.

Now, for the friends reading this who've bailed me out of something or stood by through a measure of bullshit, chillax, you're deeply rooted in my mind, you just weren't first. And the larger point remains, for every one of you, there's a dozen who've shit the bed in important and consequential ways.

I want to be the genuine article of things that surprise the every-loving fuck out of me if I ever see them in other people. That's in jokes. That's in endless exploration and nit-picking until something is understood and internalized. That's in 7 months of 13 hour days to get off and load up your ill-equipped car with wood to drag out to your pitch black field in the middle of the cold night so you can inch along progress on the thing you actually care about. That's letting go without forgetting. That's recognizing and holding your precious sacrifice out in front of you before you kill it, instead of taking for granted your mere discomfort is enough to supplement the dirty work you've yet to do.

That's where we're at right now culturally. “I'm uncomfortable.” The room gasps and those weak of stomach and will run for the doors. Someone is out to eat us. Batten down the hatches and prepare to be bombarded with waves of insincere pomp and incredulity. Birds chirp, “butwhatabout butwhatabout.” Prepare a victim, anyone, and feast on what falls out. Definitions are for the power mongers! We're hungry, dammit, and if I can't get that house, or car, or job, or the girl, or the right pills, or even just my way, then I'll take every ounce of you.

What's hard to cope with is the idea of being an NPC or non-playable character. In a virtual environment, you sort of reflexively believe they don't hurt anything, even if that's absolutely not the truth. They perpetuate the story. They steal your dragon egg. They present challenges and side-quests. You're the passive agent at the will of what these pre-programmed problems drop in your lap. You're of every consequence. You're not the hero. The hero is the myth. The hero is one who has to literally die and be reborn, which, I'll remind you, isn't fucking possible. You need missions that otherwise random idiots would be wandering around in the dark killing things if they weren't a part of. When you figure out what it is you can provide, you'll stop endlessly feeding.

This is at the heart of what I don't like about “normal” jobs. I don't want to feed off the teat of established norms. I don't provide “easy.” There are millions of people paycheck to paycheck with familiar narratives about what their responsibilities are and how to “fix” or meet them. I have work-arounds. There are endless creative paths to addressing problems across societal and psychological layers. I can do none of them in the environment presently offered. I find people who like to feed off of my honesty or “taboo,” because to embody where it comes from takes work they're not interested in. I give thousands of miles for every inch I try to take back. I'm on a mission to not lose myself across the many worlds I may inhabit. But I'm not in a video game, and I doubt someone's going to walk up to me to try and join my quest.

“A working-class hero is something to be.”

I look for the people who challenge me. I look for the orators I want to be like. I look for the papers I dream of writing and shows I wish I developed. I look for lines in songs that come up time and again. I force myself to think through the words that aren't there yet, and beyond the feelings that make me want to feast on everyone around me. I pursue what I actually picture in my mind's eye. If you're anything less, then you're less. I won't let you eat me.

[681] My Conservatism

Months ago, I watched a video of Jordan Peterson explaining 12 rules for a new conservative movement. I don't recall most of them, but his explanation of borders stuck with me. Borders distinguish. You don't need to have a negative opinion of refugees or be racist and afraid of being “taken over” by migrant workers to want to respect what the things around a border you've drawn represent. In as many years as I've been hearing about “sides” regarding politics, a “principle” of the conservative side was never been explained to me like that.

For the longest time, I've never felt particularly aligned with any camp, let alone the implications of being forced to pick between the democratic or republican ones. I think I know what they used to stand for. I know what they campaign on. And I know that all evidence points to the only real party being that which money dictates. Those with the resources create the conditions to protect or expand their influence. Whatever else may be said of greed and the stark ignorance and disconnect policy makers have with regard to the poor, the powers of wealth merely described can remain independently true.

I've seen a theme across a number of different thinkers lately. It's a call to be more specific. The campaign slogans promising “hope” or “greatness” are designed specifically against this. The person who gives themselves over to the narrative subjected to arbitrary ways in which it unfolds. People still love Obama not because they have a position on drone strikes and wiretapping, but the short-hand representative intelligent black man substitutes for their own responsibility to adopt similar qualifiers.

You can try and zero in at different levels of distinction. A border is a familiar and easily rooted for idea. You push or defend borders. You get to make claims about what happens in your backyard. This distinction is lost on some extreme leftist groups who think there are no implications to putting pockets of ethnically minority people in an area. Many European neighbors can attest to what happens, as well act as a lesson if you attempt to do it half-assed. The distinction of course isn't “that” they're different, or there's some inherent evil or malicious intent to them, it's “but they are” different. To the extent you want to weaponize those differences is a measure of your personal folly.

The picture grows more complicated when you consider potential ideological possession. You don't want clusters of Nazi's anymore than you want actual believers in Sharia. First, I'd challenge you to accurately define what it is you think you're afraid of, tellingly when you can't, you've got your first clue that you're ideologically possessed. It would still remain foolish to pretend there is no difference between demanding women cover up their bodies or resorting to stone-age punishments for improprieties as “no different” than differing opinions on what it means to live well. And hey, maybe take a plate to the Pence's of the world.

I think it becomes increasingly hard to make distinctions when you're unwilling or unable to grant yourself any. I think this speaks to my frustrated and perhaps hatred with “meme speak.” A disarming chuckle shared 50 thousand times isn't any one of those individuals being funny. The ability of the meme to become infections speaks in no way to its truth or its audience's ability to understand it. You didn't create the meme, hoping to arrange your individuated thoughts in an interesting or intelligent way. It's a way to try and take credit for a joke just because you found yourself laughing.

Small recap. You can distinguish at the level of normative tangible examples, like a border. You can distinguish at the level of too-compelling words as they pertain to your personality. Or, you can forgo the exercise of distinguishing, and be a go-between for every incidentally infectious idea that scares you or makes you smile. We're in the throes of the second Women's March. Whatever individual reason each person is at their respective rallying point, the consequences of a larger generally malicious ideological position are being felt. To the extent you want to blame “patriarchy,” may suggest a measure of your own possession.

I try to do distinguishing things. I try to live my life in accordance with what I've come to relative conclusions about. I'm often at the mercy and whims of things like my car or job or depreciated social construct, but I nonetheless have a considerably more complicated answer as to what I'm doing, or where I think it's taking me, than “it pays the bills” or “that's just how it is.” I belabor examples of my past because I've found it incredibly hard to create the conditions of mutual safety and opportunity that a paid-off college environment provides. I no longer have the enthusiastic zest to exhaust myself at a job that doesn't appreciate me. I've allowed myself the leeway to learn how I can or can't rely on people.

As such, I've found myself growing more persuaded and comfortable with a kind of “conservative” posture. I really do want to protect what I have that, over so long of a middling existence struggling to achieve even a basic mutual acceptance of a shared goal or responsibility, the fight for it seems considerably more prolonged, dramatic, and important. I want a second front opened in service to things getting better, but the bit that has survived that's allowed me to even get this far feels as worthy of praise and protection. I struggle to demonize broad “capitalism” and don't think I'm a complicit cog in predatory patriarchy.

A lot of things still work. If you have too hard a time figuring out what they are, it suggests there's something more wrong with your broad skirting conception of your identity politics first. I no more bow to a man than I do his ideology. I think the work of critical thinking and collecting evidence are flirting with being relegated to a new dark age. I'm always going to blame the individual populist before I mindlessly swat at the air of ideas.

[665] Jingle Bells

It’s 17 minutes before Christmas, and all through the house, two creatures are stirring, each the size of a mouse.

I feel the buzz of the holidays. (Christmas, for you non-heathens). I can feel people trying to loosen up. The radio station is blaring the “wrong” version of the Christmas song I thought I knew better. Being in The Region, I’ve gotten to contend with a perfectly timed snow storm ensuring the whitest of Christmases. Of course, the setting is right, the food is delicious, and the company I don’t care to talk to is just as happy to not talk to me either. It couldn’t get better.

In the spirit of the holiday, let’s try excruciatingly hard to write with that upbeat contented smile you see from all of the family pictures hitting the feed. If I want to get into a “sensitive” or “negative” topic, I’ll take extra care in showing that it’s not so bad and there’s a way out. Just because I want to write, after all, doesn’t mean you need to suffer. I won’t grab the back of your head and beat your face against the screen until you’re paying the right kind of attention, like I did all those other times.

When you cut out the magic sky baby stuff, I believe the spirit of the season is about giving. Just because we’re living in the throes of the Republican cult giving your future away to big business, doesn’t mean you can’t devote your time and attention to people and causes worse off than you. With so many simultaneous things going wrong though, it can be hard to figure out just what it looks like to be an effective giver. To care so much, or to try in earnest, can get exhausting. Rarely are we given the tools, or prone to the discussions, that see our best efforts become manifest.

Historically, I haven’t been the best at accepting gifts. People being nice to me feels...off. This doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate them. This doesn’t mean they are wrong for doing so. There is nothing inherently bad about buying gifts for someone or feeling yourself compelled to get me one. But, I have everything already. I can think of no greater gift than to be listened to and understood and to see and hear your thoughts in how or whether they motivated you to get involved or speak up. I want what is rarely on offer and I mostly tend to ask for it in blogs. I, of course, need extra hands for the dirty work, but if wants aren’t particularly forthcoming, needs slipped out the hole in a back pocket.

Not everyone is as simple as me. Very few people will genuinely believe themselves if they say, “Don’t get me anything.” Well, perhaps it’s easier to believe it when you’re older and are sick off all the crap you’ve accumulated. Slight difference for me personally too, I can always use money, and it’s why that’s always been my gift since around the age 13. But still, simple. Not everyone is in a position to always know what they need either. You can genuinely surprise a child with a toy they never knew they wanted. The clothes they unwrap might be their favorite thing to wear one day.

What about bigger scale? What about the giant donations to impoverished areas? What about the money being slipped into the boxes with jiggling elves? These are opportunities to give back and feel good. These are a show of solidarity to the underlying caring human spirit that always has a little change to spare. Considerably more is known today about which charities actually turn money into well-being for who they’re advocating for so you don’t even have to feel guilty if you skip right past The Red Cross. Much has been studied about the impact of cheap clothing donated to areas who eschew a local economy in anticipation of the U.S. scraps.

I can feel myself getting all over the place. That’s sort of the point. The “spirit” of the time of year isn’t any one song, one present, one dinner or favorite movie. It’s not in the passing deference to the Jews or jokes about Kwanzaa. It’s not the snow and other assorted imagery. It’s the overwhelming all-at-once force of culture that wraps up the willing in a comforting blanket of warmth and positivity, and pushes the lonely and the suicidal over the edge. It’s the power of a collective narrative. It’s the spell of togetherness.

There’s so much talk about the “divisive” age we live in. I think this, as with most things, is precisely backwards. When a “side” manifests, it’s precisely because people are rallying behind something. The energy they don’t know what to do with rallies in spite of themselves. As such, it can work in service to things that actively harm themselves. You cheer for sports teams where none of the players are from where you live. You fall for TV shows for their hype and meme-ability. Christmas and Hanukkah aren’t in competition, dividing up the faithful. One “side” just doesn’t bother to care enough about their immortal souls.

No narrative wins until it gives people a focal point. After that adoption, it can spiral off into the myriad ways people personally interpret everything. I’ve asked before, what did Obama’s “hope” get us but the chance to ignore the millions willing to vote for Palin in any capacity. It was truly the re-reading of the “argument” I got into about Twin Peaks, and the seeking out of a few other negative reviews, the pushed me over the edge to start writing this. My biggest issue with the show is its fundamental lack of coherent narrative that makes it incredibly boring. The hardest core advocates turned disenfranchised make passing praises to the initial mystery and individuality it had in 1991, but don’t have any more a clue than I do why it continued after the narrative wrapped in the middle of season 2. People keep seeing what they want to see.

The hardest core continuing fans, like those most in love with Christmas, like the intimately familiar with fighting injustice, prop up their preferred narrative. It doesn’t have to be completely devoid of reality, and it doesn’t mean there’s no utility in doing so. But you have to recognize it’s a narrative. It’s a spell just like any other. It’s the same spell that makes me “negative” before we ever start talking or you recognize anything I’ve actually said. It’s a spell that knows every quarter or dollar you drop into the box is going towards helping someone and not corrupt leadership or advertising. It’s undying faith in your team colors, because nothing about how they make their money erases the fun you had attending games with your dad as a child.

I wish that everything you give or get can be done in earnest. I don’t want holidays to be taken for granted anymore than any other day. I don’t want you to rate your time together like a show designed to trap mindless dupes who’ve invented a 10/10 narrative to supplant the soupy malaise of incoherent writing. If you want something, ask for it, work intelligently towards it. If you have nothing to give, don’t force it, keep yourself from sacrificing your truth for a worse story. If you don’t know where you reside, in your family, in life, start talking and asking questions. Give yourself the kind of gift that Santa can’t bring. Be a charitable force of time and attention. In my experience, it’s the only thing that’s kept me remotely sane or bothering to carry on in spite of my overwhelming capacity to complain or break things down. It’s also the only force I see that we can rally behind in trying to piece back the fabric of reality that’s been obliterated by our access to so many competing narratives.

[571] Sleepy Time

I don’t know if I can describe it well, but there’s an uncomfortable place I reach when I think I’ve come to “the end” of something. It’s in letting something that pushed me forward die. It’s cutting out a habit or an argument I might have used passionately for years. When people describe profound changes in who they are or are becoming, I think it centers around these kinds of emotional pivots in how you’re willing to engage with your world.

One of the first times it happened to me was reading The Will to Power. The concept of exhaustion struck such a cord that I experienced a wave of calm and just put the book down and nonchalantly went about my day. How I found myself reading that book was a long emotional story that started with falling for a religious girl. After I’d written the whiny blogs, argued until I could pop, could quote the bible and prominent scientists and philosophers, and this well past when I felt so compelled to be with her, here’s Nietzsche talking about all the effort and time and what it amounts to and I was able to just turn it off.

Without diving too far back into memory lane, I started to feel it again right before starting this. I was watching a Frontline episode chronicling Obama’s presidency and the divide that’s grown in this country. The endless nauseating illogical ideological bullshit from people screaming in the streets and over the airwaves has to cultivate that same exhausted sense in any thinking individual. Compound your initial reaction to a lunatic chanting “death panels” with thoughtful breakdowns from an aspiring “rationalist” who says your approach to conversing with that person needs more nuance than “you’re batshit and stupid.”

They’re right, but I think they’re also more wrong in your approach to that person in general. A body loaded up with terrible ideas that will obstruct or kill you is just that, a deadly and dangerous vehicle you need to control or avoid. This isn’t my lazy stab at defending an offshoot of communism or authoritarianism. I’m trying to zero in on the psychological implications of being ceaselessly berated by the incoherent and angry. I never feel more changed, and for the worse, than in contemplating the hoops one must hop through in order to “appease” someone who wants you dead.

Part of the issue is in feeling like you’re alone. This is why we see these rallies and marches. Silently suffering alone people need something, anything, to suggest they have allies as the narrative swirls around polarization. A fetal heartbeat later the pro-life feminists are arguing with the main event organizers and black women wonder if wearing pinks hats at the BLM meeting will cause a fight. Everyone feels like their particular insight or soundbite is loaded with extra wisdom. If someone does in fact have more wisdom or insight, it can’t be recognized by any shared metric of value or truth. You want to think the details matter, but the more people start to rattle off what they consider details, you can no longer bring yourself to listen to any more.

This is why I take long periods off from reading. I’m not learning anything new. I’m seeing humans do human things over and over again and pretend like they’ve learned anything. You understand how naive and foolish leaders can be. You see the same froth at the mouths of past opposition as you see in the streets today. You see brilliant minds with brilliant analysis and analogies herding us all together into treatises someone will assuredly accuse you of not reading close enough. Inevitably someone else will come along and group the various thinkers into categories and offer short-hand digestible bits of their work that most align with the ways in which they remember them, and thus new shortcuts, cliches, and errant quotes are born. All of it for what? To me, just to speak the futile struggle with being human.

I’ve been so bored with myself for what seems like forever. I’m tired of my lack of story. I barely watch the shows I put on. I can’t bring myself to read another article about how Hitler 2 is destroying something I hadn’t thought about yet. I can’t express myself through music and while there’s a fleeing chance you might get something out of what I write about, I keep seeing the same things showing up more palpable and worse worded. When I’m “done” elevating over and assessing the mess of existence and just need to “do” things, what’s afforded me is minimum wage bullshit like stocking shelves or delivering food. It’s not depressive or incorrect to think of yourself as not mattering on those terms.

Again I just want to sleep. Watch me just drop whatever I’m holding in the middle of a night shift stocking episode and stoically walk out of the door. Watch the weight of the futile struggle bring me to my knees and the relief I’ll feel just being able to bow to the pointlessness of it all. I’m so tired.

[523] The Body Politic

I need to readdress the idea of good, gooder, and best. When I first spoke about it, as time provides irony with a field day, it was with regard to relationships. I see, or at least pretend to see and sometimes argue for, a difference in relationships of convenience, abuse, or mutual encouragement as existing on a kind of sliding scale. You can be in a good relationship that “keeps the lid on” something about you or perhaps opens you up to new experiences, but remains couched in crippling insecurities about being alone. Depending on what level you want to look at or what you want to be steered by in life, the description can change fairly quickly.

This time around, it's about politics, as the conversation keeps swirling around Hilary or Hitler 2. As a habit, I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with often false dichotomies. Literally nothing exists that's “only” one or the other. Besides me begrudging people for introducing bad philosophy into their “pragmatic” conversations, I see a sort of “fundamental” concern that keeps getting ignored. I don't believe any reasonable person thinks it's hard to distinguish the nuclear fallout of a Hitler 2 presidency verses the, albeit very bad, neoliberal warmongering wall street jerking of Hilary. I get it, sorry poor children of the world, America doesn't really give a shit about you, Hitler 2 is right around the corner.

My concern is about where does the hard and fast line exist between “practical” and “idealist” show up? I contend that things change, almost randomly, for any number of unforeseen reasons. To maintain that the “only” way forward is to remain complicit in systems that are broken seems so ridiculously callous, lazy, and unwise but I hear it over and over again from politicians I admire or celebrities I enjoy, and I'm trying not to adopt a kind of doublethink about where they're coming from, and why I'm not voting for Hilary.

Say you never have to make a decision. Say your whole life is carried out for you by servants or a level of extravagance reserved for royalty. How would you make your decisions? What's most distracting? What's most pragmatic? Do these words even mean something to you at that point? Your attention is already whatever you want it to be. Your desires are met and there's nothing to “sit and deal with.”

Now you have to introduce some outside force. You get in a car accident. You decide to not just buy, but build the most amazingly safe car ever built and mandate the roads be cleared for your travels. You get sick. You build the most amazing hospital and import the world's doctors. You're reacting to your fears. You're making decisions in service to combat the dangerous reality that surrounds your extravagance. Consider what Hitler 2 promises and how his solutions, solutions for fear mind you, are as fanciful and hard to imagine as the person given all the resources in the world insulating themselves from danger or death.

To state the above explicitly, when nothing exists that concerns you beyond fundamental truths of existence, you can choose to live in fear.

Here, the hard work of discussion and philosophy needs to remind us that advocacy and sticking by what's best can remain worthwhile and viable in a world absolutely consumed by hatred and fear. Because make no mistake, the business as usual is complicated legalese that spells out someone in power's hatred for your being. Hatred for your rights, bodies, opinions, or even presumption that you have something they don't. And they have so much, and it's never enough, and it's because it's rooted in fear.

You're royalty. No bills to be paid. No wars to be fought (that you're not creating for amusement.) You're not hungry, you're not even bored. You can choose to live for other people or ideals that exist outside of your safe space.

In order to do that, you need to not just be aware of how good your life is going, you have to be able to explain, in due detail, all the forces that have to come together to make sure it remains a safe space. The millions of minds that lend credence to your royalty. The advances in science that will help keep you alive. The guards and caretakers and entertainers that you devour. You have to introduce guilt. You have to hold yourself accountable to something that nobody else can. What you've learned, what you've argued for, what you'd like to see in the future. It's when you've actually done the work to become something more than what you've been born into.

It's a tall order when all you have to do is react to remain complicit with the other side. How easy is it to fear Hitler 2? It's a cliché. You don't even have to think about it. In fact, I would argue, the ethos and purpose of modern society is to be able to label Hitler 2 as such without irony. Of course, I'm afraid of him. Of course I want to laugh more than cry when I see footage of his followers. But I'm not going to live my life in anymore fear than is necessary. I'm not going to pretend Hilary speaks for the same things Bernie does. What are synonymous vote percentages in lieu of a conscious or basic awareness of the problem?

That's what bugs me. I understand there's a political game always afoot. I get that there's sometimes inconvenient truths about the balance of power and influence. I do not understand approaching a system so dominated, by what used to be incidental quirks, as it now completely renders the desires of the population mute with your “vote” for what's going to keep it that way. Even if you're vote is symbolic. Even if it only has the fleeting impact of a set example. Are we going to get where this irrational, angry, and afraid animal needs to be by exercising it like the hateful planners at the top figured we would?

And honestly, I feel I'm not even explaining it as compellingly as it feels. If you want a child to do something, you can threaten them or you can encourage their best behaviors. I view humans as perpetual children. Hilary is threatening us with Hitler 2. Hitler 2 threatens everyone and encourages people to as well. If it's “my” vote, I choose die in the self-righteous flame of actual progress. I've been saying I don't believe in progress, which seems as of late to speak to the deficiency of language. There's things I want over other things. I want Bernie over Hilary, practically anything over Hitler 2, an informed and rational population over oligarchy and capitalism. And what I want is still out there, and it needs advocates. It's realities want a shot at being the new “practical reality” (you know, unless you're already there as a different civilized country.)

If Hitler 2 wins, it will be your fault. You don't know what you stand for and you deny your fear. You took it easy on your racist uncle. You adopted a catch-phrase about undocumented workers. You refused to read links I often provide offering context or numbers that soundly destroy some mythology shat out over pundit bickering or Hitler 2 himself. You allowed yourself to be swallowed, as we're all swallowed, by the system and then resolved yourself. You got tired and didn't ask why. You gave away all your time and then clung to the weekend that much harder. You threw personal pity parties and trumpeted your shallow conception of self-worth and righteousness as waves of ignorance and guilt washed out the notes.

My vote for Obama was because I hadn't figured out what I stood for. I was raised in a Democrat household. I believed minority opinions needed to be elevated and by that metric alone might help things. I thought the system was “basically good.” By all comparisons, my life is a breeze, the breeziest of breezes, and it's because of this country. But the foundation of my life is not because of the politics of today. It's because the people before me stood for something that we've lost all institutional memory of. How does it come back for my grandkids? Not with my vote for Hilary Clinton. How will I know I don't want grandkids? When you show we've accomplished so much only to elect Hitler 2.

[459] Ctrl + X

All things being equal, what if you had to reduce your friends to a single sentence? Maybe make it harder and use a single word. Would this exercise help you better understand them? Or perhaps, would it better clarify your feelings about them?

The word “judgment” has been on my mind for several weeks. I'm finding myself unable to solidify it's meaning and consequences. It's a word that seems to extend the word “perspective.” People innocently share perspectives, but levy harsh judgments. We alter the connotation to suggest judgment is meant to perhaps shame or correct for something that sounds wrong.

A judge, in theory, is an impartial observer meant to toe a line determined by the collective wisdom of past judgments. They're supposed to follow the laws enacted in order to alleviate situations judged as harmful or unjust. They speak to a kind of idealism. That with enough trial and error, or moral gumption, we'll progress past our human failings and towards something more fair or equitable.

People as well think of judgment when it comes to “lifestyle choices.” Usually felt by the oppressed who yell “don't judge me!” for their actual style or very sense of being if they're in a racial or sexual minority. Even, if not especially, amongst believers who feel the implicit judgment at all times by their fellow churchgoers to live up to the, if not godly, churchly or familial expectations.

Invariably, given that our perspectives are limited and often flawed, our judgments remain fundamentally corrupted. This isn't the same thing as saying they are totally and absolutely wrong, but it does mean that if you don't adopt a kind of scientific manner in your opinion and exercise of judging, you're going to end up in a bad place.

Take the idea of assessing a room. I've been in instances where the person next to me will genuinely say something racist or sexist because “all of them act like that.” It's weird and uncomfortable, but they're none the wiser, to my discomfort, or especially about the target of their comment. So what do we have and what do we do? Reflexively, most want to call him ignorant, get angry, maybe escalate things to violence or throwing him out. Does that help? Maybe the vibe in the moment, but in general, is our understanding of that situation going to be understanding and preempt growth, or reactionary and stagnant?

Or maybe a less inflammatory example. Look at the biggest muscle bound guy in the room. Is he an insecure bro? Are you scared if he gets too drunk something bad is bound to happen? Do you feel insecure assuming he's bound to attract every girl in the room? If you can stop yourself from ceaselessly asking open-ended subjective experience questions, can you begin to speak to a kind of underlying truth of the situation? Are there better places to look than in your insecure mind?

I think there are plenty of places to look. I think you can look at history. I think body language is often forthcoming. I think you can rely on rules and ideas you've personally cultivated for different situations. And I think you can dip into the cultural tide to err on the side of “more accurate assessment” instead of “frank ignorant judgment.”

Now, this can be extremely hard to do. It's almost impossible for a vast array of people I've met. It may sound extremely old hat for my facebook crowd, who will get yet another gold star suggesting more in common than our pretty faces, but it seems a general cultural failing I certainly don't hear discussed.

You have to think of all the things that can get in the way. One, you're own reflexively insecure mind starts the bad feelings and wrong-headed questions the moment you encounter someone new. Two, you may not acknowledge or be aware that there are cultural waves and imprints that suggest certain types and certain behaviors roll together. As Chris Rock puts it, your slutty dress doesn't make you a ho, but you are wearing a ho's uniform. I know my long hair and full beard has prompted plenty of folks to make assumptions and comments about my obvious levels of marijuana consumption, much to their dismay when I explain otherwise. Three, we have past evidence of gut-feelings proving correct and confident friends ready to reinforce our position, filtering out or diminishing conflicting evidence.

I hope it's becoming obvious that for a stranger, you're only going to be able to get so far. Far enough? If you're deciding who to offer a shot or strike up a conversation with, perhaps. In contrast, if you take your friendships, you can play the same kind of game, but take from so much more specific history. I'm fairly confident I call someone an asshole practically every day. I'm also fairly confident that when my friends refer to me as an asshole it's not the same superficial idea I'm expressing to whomever cut me off on the highway. I also don't think it's the singular word they'd settle on when assessing me.

In my own practice of the one sentence or one word exercise I notice something peculiar. The “problem children” reduce to a word or sentence of sympathy. The people on my mind when I raise concerns about the future or being immersed in a series of, hopefully not regretted later, decisions aren't “just an asshole” or “just being stupid.” But in our day to day, in our spatterings of communication or stories about each other, we're forced to shortcut. We innocently forget. We practice judgment, pretending to draw wisdom or value from our mere assessment.

I struggle with ideas about how impressively bad we are at speaking towards what it means to be human. It bugs me to hear “the first black/woman/muslim yada yada” like it's a celebration we've “fixed” something about race, sex, or religion. The fix is to stop referring to race like someone is an alien. To that end, I support and understand the logic and purpose of Black Lives Matter, and it's the blunt instrument for our blunt times, but attempting to pull back, I think they're marching with a nail in their toe. The idea that you would support neoliberal Hilary Clinton because she's a woman is both sexist and politically disingenuous when you compare her to an old-fashioned votes his conscious liberal like Bernie Sanders. Am I happy we tout someone's religious affiliation when I find it the height of an irresponsible and terrifying proposition that someone is speaking to an invisible infallible man in the sky to help them make decisions?

But in attempting to assess and not judge humans, you can nonetheless say there is some measure of progress in Barack Obama being elected, even if his blackness has nothing to do with his ability to govern. You can look at someone's actions and see to the degree in which they conform to sense or caring before you arbitrarily malign their faith. I'm not saying the scale isn't weighted against or my opinion is any less negatively shaped about religion, but an “incidental” faithful person speaks more to the human condition than the crazy ideologue.

As we get older and move farther apart, I think we lose the opportunities to practice how we can think about people in general. None of you who don't live around me are sharing your thoughts or blogs with me lol. But more to the point, I want there to be a bigger line between small and snappy and informed and comparative. I think practice becomes permanent and I don't know how we last into the future permanently ignoring or hiding behind a real conversation about what it is to be human.

[417] Talk Down To Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[391] Spatterings Pt. 1

This could be several blogs, so I'm going to just split it into sections. With so much time to reflect, and actually having access to the news, on cable, ick, there's too much crossing my mind to wait or try to compact it into some mega post.

My god is the news horrible. I really truly didn't appreciate just how bad until it was on screen at all times no matter where I went. If you watch the news, stop. Never put it on again. It's making you stupid. Not like, “I'm not getting the full story” stupid, like “this is how people are expected to talk to each other and about things” stupid. It makes me want to throw things at the screen.

3 independent autopsies? Is this because we've lost all semblance of what's to be trusted and reliable, or because it sounds “fantastic” that 6 bullet holes needs 3 different medical examiners to explain that bullets all over your body, including your head, likely meant you suffered and do indeed “cause the blood to flow out.” That's almost a direct quote. Someone was on television explaining that there are 2 ways you can stop a human. Incapacitate them, or make it so their blood runs out.

Every other statement is a random speculation, arbitrary question, or simple “non-statement” amounting to the kind of crap you see above. If I tallied the amount of times a “reporter” said “I don't know” my page would be black with ink. This is only so striking given how much they don't know to then have words to fill every second of screen time.

“Should Obama go there and fix everything?!” Yes! Just like he should be airdropped into Gaza and finally bestow peace to the Middle East. Duh. This is the level of discussion! 100 people have provided conflicting testimony on the shooting, so we'll be here to reiterate that fact for the next several hours. Here's officer Friendly's best friend explaining how he's never been racist or even killed a mosquito his entire life. Repeated over and over and over and over and over and over and over and, I'll give you a guess.

CHANGE PLACES!

The death penalty. People think it's between two sides. Either you're something of an over-sympathetic pussy with no capacity to empathize with the family of the deceased, or you're a blood thirsty monster who would see society devolve into anarchy and chaos.

To me, it's people deliberately avoiding parts of their perspective that would speak to all the extra they are saying in “simply” advocating for one over the other. At the level of the interpersonal, who isn't going to empathize or understand vengeance? Who wouldn't want to kill right back? At the level of society, why do you think that places with the least advocacy for violence or vengeance also tend to have the least amount of murderers? In a way, the more you need to kill the person who's done you wrong, the more you're setting up families to go through what you just have later.

But this speaks more to an overall absence of social competence and cohesion to me. Crazy people tend to have histories. Every kid who grew up in an emotionally abusive home or joined gang life did so for reasons that, in part, hark back to the environment that's been set up for him. Most horrible things and habits of humanity boil down to economic and conditioned responses. This isn't an argument against personal responsibility. But it seems you don't credit your own capacity to hold yourself responsible when you understand another person to only be another immoral manifestation of the devil.

This topic continually interests me because I have no sympathy for people who kill others, deliberately or otherwise, but I consider myself so much better than them as to espouse something independent of what horrible things I'd like to do to and see them experience. Even more than that though, upon a bit of further reflection, I don't really want to do anything or see them experience it. It doesn't speak to my bottom line. I think we shit all over conversations that are complicated and detailed and potentially powerful to carry longstanding consequences. To watch myself capitulate to “angry monkey” status is headache inducing.

This involves a conversation about the justice system, social psychology, personal responsibility, the economy, and general conception of the dialogue and methodology surrounding whether or not a death sentence is carried out. Or, you know, an eye for an eye. What are we, fuckin' saints?

MOVING ON DOWN.

We must be saints! Lest we forget the ice bucket challenge. Let's part with the things that don't matter.

Of course no one is denigrating charity. Of course it's not a pissing match between who's suffering more and from what. Of course “bringing awareness,” on the surface, isn't an ignoble endeavor. And of course I'm not going to dump water on myself if given the opportunity to signal anything about my morality.

I am on the side that isn't terribly impressed or happy with these challenges. Why must charity, awareness, or advocacy have to turn into a “viral phenomenon” before something is done? Why does there have to be tears and a poster child with the disease of the month before it registers that people are suffering, constantly, from any number of things, disease related or otherwise? Why do we flock to showy campaigns instead of build into our system a way for significantly more money and accomplishments to be realized?

I do think it's more distraction than action. Yes, money went out. For this short period in time some money will be lumped towards some cause more frequently than it did otherwise. We still don't really give a shit about the different diseases that may one day plague us or the fact of suffering as a result of national policy or waste on other things we spend our money on. These videos allow us to feel like “we can all just take it for granted that we really are nice! We really do care!" Even if our bleeding hearts can only do so for the length of a YouTube clip.

To me, lazy and superficial trump happy-go-lucky show of solidarity. Let's find a way to help 'disease' before a teary-eyed ALS patient is used to distract us further.

[373] Middle Ground Zero

I want to talk about the idea of “the middle way.” I also want to criticize ideas and statements that masquerade as the reasonable adult way of understanding the world.

Initially, I think about the ideal political situation. The idea of negotiating a center that keeps extreme positions at either end, and the reasonable people basically being able to agree on a common premise. In a democracy, it's theorized that rational actors with the perfect information would make decisions in service to their best interests. Clearly, that works every time. I think there are places, like our political realm, where that idea, that there is indeed a middle ground, does a lot of work in misleading our cultural conversation.

Another easy one is health. Would you rather be healthy or have cancer? Why not shoot for the middle ground and we just give you diabetes and a broken leg. It's manageable and not immediately life threatening, right? But no, you'll insist that you want to be healthy. Most sane people would because when it comes to the stark reality of “I feel like shit” it's so very clear what an ideal situation would look like.

I was reading over a reddit thread, specifically this one “hate the liberals” guy's comments to people expressing frustration over Obama's new bill to lower student debt interest rates. Examples of his comments amount to “you were an adult, you shouldn't have signed the loan,” “You're a fucking retard thinking the government owes you anything,” “Education is not free (n)or a right,” “I made better decisions than you, studied something better than you, I don't want to pay for you,” and “you entitled parasites don't seem to understand life isn't fair and that not everyone succeeds.” There are severely worse comments, but this will do for now.

Let's respond line by line. This idea that “you were an adult” seems to say that “now that you're a reasonable and wise individual with no unfair barriers and perfect information, you picked the objectively worst thing to do to yourself in this situation.” I, at least, had about as much choice to go to college as I have to currently work at McDonalds. It's amazing how many parents bought the idea that college meant job and opportunities well before their kids did. It amazes me to think that we'd admonish someone for, what's been touted as the “adult” thing to do, go to college, for incurring the costs that became normalized at all levels of society, in order to do so.

It's not being “reasonable” to lean on the idea that “well, people are adults!” Adults in a context. Or children who are as old as adults who've never been taught or engaged with by a reasonably better interpretation of the word “adult.”

The idea that the government doesn't owe you anything is particularly interesting. In a representative democracy, the government owes you everything. The government owes you its very jobs. If the majority of people with unreasonable crippling debt call on the government to do something about it, the government should respond. This accounting and thought experiment has been done hundreds of times. Things like relocating agribusiness and oil subsidies. Why begrudge the guy who tried to get educated and be responsible instead of writing angry letters to the banks? What did the government owe them? Whatever it was, it's still being paid.

Education not being free nor a right is a statement of fact. But, more to the point, nothing is a right besides the right to die. And then, only if you don't drag that phrasing into the political arena! Rights are bread from understanding and struggle. When you have access, ability, and intention, a “right” starts to manifest in louder and louder fashion. How many blacks and women have been explained to them the rights they don't have in our democracies over the years?

There are things you state because they are true. There are things you state, while incidentally true, only serve to promote the status quo or deliberately ignore other avenues. To say something like “don't touch that pot, it's hot” is not the same kind of factual claim as “don't complain because the government doesn't owe you anything.” The second statement is the kind of folded argument “logic” you get from religious types. “Well, you can't prove there's not a god!” Okay...true, but that usually has absolutely nothing to do with why you think that god doesn't want me to have an abortion. If you don't want to get burned, you don't touch the pot. If you want a different financial obligation, allegedly you appeal to your representatives.

The next lines are about personal responsibility. I don't know how you can talk of responsibility without speaking to what society considers responsible. It goes back to simply going to college in the first place. That's what higher paying jobs expect. That's what they did, that's their standard, and for a great many things, college isn't simply a giant waste of money. But, not only are kids in schools screwed going in, but when they're out, a lot of the jobs they were shooting for, say in medicine, are proving less than useful in paying back their loans anymore than the art student can. There's an underlying societal/governmental problem that makes a truly “responsible” decision, at best difficult, and at worst practically arbitrary.

Finally, the idea that not everyone succeeds and that life isn't fair. Maybe you come across someone who's been in a serious car accident. Do you pull up next to them and yell “life's not fair fucko!” and speed off in celebration of your ability to better avoid being in accidents? Probably not. It's a statement of “fact” that doesn't really speak to whether or not the accident happened on a bridge that wasn't reinforced or a road that wasn't properly paved. It ignores the poor car quality standards that could have reduced it to a fender bender instead of someone bleeding out on the pavement.

There are levels of responsibility and “fair” that we install. Also, we install them for reasons. If you want to speed, you don't argue with the cop that it's not fair he pulled you over. Why make the care able to go so fast if I can't use it! It's fair to assume that most people most of the time should try to drive in ways that don't make it more likely for you to die arbitrarily. We'll leave aside Montana's odd speed experiment, imposing speed limits and seeing an increase in death, with that analogy.

There is a, I don't know what else to call it but “religious zealotry” that people, at some level or another subscribe to that they coat in unhelpful and unnecessary “facts” to try and sound reasonable or advocating for “something in the middle.” These are idealists not because they understand what's actually ideal, but because they are allowed to create and defend to the death what they personally define as ideal. They subscribe to axioms about age or habits of “good leaders” instead of describing the context under which different ideas are formed. They appeal to reputation and common ethics above cause and effect evidence.

These are the people who say one of the dumbest and most popular statements right now, “there are some scientists that don't believe in global warming.” If you watch the episode of “Years of Living Dangerously,” try not to throw something through your TV when the pastor of one of the country's biggest churches argues that “because you haven't addressed my points!” He's neither convinced nor impressed. It's a guy you can't persuade ice melts, but you'll try, until you don't know whether you hate him or yourself more.

The “middle way,” to me, is not making these empty aphorisms about “life” or “how it works.” Nor is it taking a bath in shit, then in honey, and showing off how beautiful you look and awesome you smell. Put the shit in the garden and the honey on the toast. Understand that every time you say “Democrats suck” you're not really saying anything. The middle is about perspective, not leveraging bad or empty ideas against each other. It means you can advocate for equal opportunity without bankrupting potentially vital pieces of infrastructure. It means you're influenced by history and examples that aren't feeling laden anecdotes. It means you can respect when the responsibility is truly yours, you know, like for going to school, and when you should expect the burden for certain things, like how it's paid for, to be on everyone. Every old person on Medicaid who complains about entitled millennials should unironically drop dead on the spot.

“Objective” is not a negotiation. You don't want just a little bit of cancer. In the same way you don't track increasing tuition for 30 years, for no other reasons beyond corruption, and blame kids for “being adults who made the poor decision to pay for an education.”

[274] Cause Your Friends Don't Dance

I’m a media junkie, if you haven’t heard. The news didn’t help my mental disposition during my whole “down week.” I don’t actively go out and look for shitty things to read about to reinforce my concerns about the world, I merely try to accept the implications of an article. 16 people gunned down by a trooper? Here’s my line. We’re at war, and the rest of the world doesn’t want us in to control resources that will make rich people richer and destroy the planet. We have a corrupt government that allows politicians to be bought and lie their way into staying in power so they can vote for such a path. Our behavior has, by the numbers, reduced what used to be the “greatest country in the world,” so to speak, to a declining and naïve military empire. The people who died will be remembered as a “tragic circumstance” if remembered at all. We'll ignore all discussion of human rights. I haven’t checked a Kardashians’ twitter feed in a while…

That’s just the pattern. That’s what we are as a species and I can stomach that. The long term implications of remaining that way are what concern me. The not really seeing a “majority” of people who recognize what we are and maybe how to change it concerns me. If you can hold one contradictory or nonsensical idea, you’ve the capacity to hold every one. That’s why “how you think” is always on my mind. It’s why I get people whose thoughts I can rely on to talk me down when shit gets out of hand. It’s why no matter how polite I may want to be when talking about a “sensitive” issue, I’m certainly not feeling pleasant when I hear something absurd.

There’s a huge duality to everything. You get the burden of which side is supposed to “win” with any problem. You get the ideas about family against how your family may actually treat you and make you feel. If you needed another reason to despise the world love it’s for that conflict alone. You get the arguments or a feeling of needing to protect yourself verses the moral implications of killing. Huh, even typing “moral implications” right then felt absurd to me. We don’t even consider moral implications! It’s not even a thing! As long as it feels good in the moment, that’s what you’re going to do. It’s not an excuse if you genuinely believe you’re into it. You don’t excuse a god’s lack of intervening or providing evidence, you genuinely think he doesn’t need to operate that way, AND HOW DARE YOU FOR THINKING OTHERWISE…wag of the finger.

It’s fun to think of Type 1 or 2 civilizations, but I think a grounding component of something like that is massive cooperation and obligation to “what is” and not your “opinion of what is.” It’s not that we’re incapable of realizing or behaving a certain way. We just don’t want to. It feels too good right now to squeeze life into whatever conception is burdening us this moment. I mean look, I’m writing a blog. A key difference in when I write verses when I tend to hear people’s excuses is that I want to change. I want to be wrong. I’m prepared to argue my points only as far as they go and then flip on a dime when I’m wrong. I can maintain and claim my sovereign mind and be prepared to wildly change my conception of what that statement even means any day. The harder it is to change my mind should find evidence in the effectiveness of my ideas, not because I’m being a stubborn asshole.

Even a commitment to phrasing and acknowledging before we move past a topic would speak towards a grasp of the conflict or nuance in a situation. “I’m against war, but I can’t pretend to know the agenda of the military or what may be putting us in danger, so my criticism I hope you take with a grain of salt.” “I believe life starts at conception, but I also understand I’ve literally never been in a situation that people say I need to empathize with when they chose or needed one.” “Guns are bad and only meant to kill people! But I remember shooting once as a kid and it was kind of fun…” I know I go on and on about the “stupid people” and that’s every bit the mantra of someone in the service or HR industries, but I know there are bastions of support if I ever get around to working harder at the positive ideas I hold as well.

Here’s a secret, I don’t completely know what I’m to do. I have friends who would sooner drop and hate me instead of even bring up a topic they don’t think I’d either understand or be able to handle with kid gloves. I don’t know how you go to the Deep South and “persuade” a 50 year old racist biker who even having felt the burden of taking care of family members not covered by insurance that Obama passing the health care bill is not a sign of the apocalypse or America’s decline. This is how they feel. That being the only thing I’m equating by juxtaposing those examples. #safe. Given that constraint, all I can do is make them feel, which I explained in my last blog. Is it the “best” way? Will it teach anything? Is there a better way? Will it allow for long standing results? I have no clue.

Currently we engage in beating a dead horse. We simply haven’t had enough people claiming “Islam is a religion of peace” for people to buy it in the same way they do from the Christians happy to wage war. How long did it even take to get some states, not even all, to accept gay people getting married? It’s not about marriage being sacred, it’s that gay is still “icky.” Is there a method, process, pattern, you can put people into where things like human rights and peace are streamlined? Is there a model for psychological development and financial distribution that keeps ideas both sacred and in check? That’s what I’m after. That’s why I’ll always have something more to say and another question to ask. What’s the formula for “saving yourself?”

[231] Death To America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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