[1244] Lord And Savor

There is an infinite list of things I do not understand. If we’re to narrow that down at all, they often have to do with “the human condition.” I want to avoid too many empty and sweeping cliches. It simply doesn’t matter to me to say what we “could” be or belabor the depth of our atrocities. I might be trying to invent a concept for myself on the fly, so for now let’s call it “the loop.”

When people yearn for revolution, I don’t think they necessarily believe themselves to be going in a circle. Overthrow the powers that be! The problem, it’s assumed, could never be that now you’re in power and there’s something intrinsically worth being suspicious about its nature.

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

As an, alleged, individual, I think about the power of my feelings. I think about how for years I rode the energy of resentment and revenge. I delighted in the idea of who or what I could destroy, either materially or intellectually. It was a regular occurrence that I might make someone cry, and no part of me felt bad. What? I was just talking. All I did was use my capacity to see through the bullshit, locate your pain, and bring it into view for all to see.

You do things like that when your conscience is clear. I wasn’t evil. I wasn’t hateful. I was right. Moreover, I was making things better because I was wielding the weapon of truth. When you were either forced to do the same, or suffer the consequences of not doing so, I remained absolved of responsibility because the higher-order thing we all need was just doing its thing. That’s the nature of truth; it hurts.

I made no distinction between my subjective experience and “the truth.” I had no appreciation nor awareness of how my feelings might be coloring that truth. I was either basically dead inside, suppressed by years of emotional trauma, or confident in my activated capacity for anger over perceived injustice or silliness. My unarticulated assumptions gave me license to bull my way through many a china shop.

I’m still that person, but old. I’m more curious. I’m tired. I’m not the kind of tired that you hear from normal people who can’t be bothered to do “more” or “extra” than they do on any given day. I’m tired of seeing the same story. I’m tired of my own words. I’m tired of perceiving the loops. I’m tired of waiting for the revolution to arrive at a place where anyone acts like they’re capable of making decisions.

That was a key underlying insight about the nature of my power. It’s one that people pick up on and use to beat me over the head with how much is my fault. The parties in college, for the hundreds of people in and out of our house over years, fell to me. Was it “our” house? I organized it. I built things for it. I bought the booze. Greenlit the friend groups. Assigned roles. It was crazy how quickly people fell in line. If you got too drunk? I got you too drunk. If you had a questionable sexual encounter, surely we all know I raped you.

I’m used to being the excuse. It’s an outgrowth of me realizing my ability to choose in a more deliberate and conscious way than other people adopt for themselves. Their choices show up when…well, that’s the question, isn’t it? When do they choose? I don’t really know. I don’t, honestly, conceive of most people making real choices most of the time. I see people as animals first. When the automatic food dispenser drops, they run over. Were they even hungry? Have they ever known real hunger?

If you were starving, you might choose to kill for it, and, circumstances providing, anyone looking from afar might have a hard time blaming you. You might have the perfect excuse. Maybe the food is going to your young child. Maybe you just earnestly worked for days to get your hands on a previous morsel, and it was stolen before you could bite. Maybe you’re the last person alive with the blood that’s going to save the world if you can only get to the secret mountain bunker.

How fantastical of a tale do we need to rest within our excuses? I don’t think most people need more than an empty sentiment like, “I’m a Christian.” I don’t think most people need to do anything beyond point to objects they own of status or only need to tell you about ways they’ve suffered. The loop, the ritual, of invoking your excuse and then carrying on with business as usual is baked in. You deserve it. They deserve it. If you weren’t so dishonest, you could see the truth too. You could share in the dignity and pride of my perspective. You could atone for your sin.

I can feel myself when I’m begging for an excuse. Whether it’s to flip out or pick the naughtiest words. I know when I want to ride the righteous lightening of condemnation. I know when I want attention. I know when I want to get something for less than I hope to put into it. The superficial engagement of social media highlights it. The woe-is-me spirals of anxiety over what I consistently and explicitly call “not real problems.” I know how quickly the wheel turns. I know I’m hurrying up to slow down. I know it’s because I don’t fundamentally trust the impact and results of my choices anymore.

My old superpower was genuine belief. I was a level of naive that has probably had hundreds of people going out of their way to ensure I wouldn’t die prematurely. I’m not, “Sure, let’s hop in your van” kind of naive (true story), but I believed things made sense. I believed families love each other. I believed businesses hired and rewarded the best workers. I believed school challenged and emboldened. I thought friendships, when based on a kind of psychopathic approach to truth and accounting, could last forever. I thought I could think or argue my way in or out of anything. I thought I wouldn’t get “a version” of the things I was aiming for, but precisely what I was after. I had previously only ever been after extremely simple and superficial things.

Now I realize I’ve potentially been in something of a years-long crisis. I lost the plot. It was a story that might’ve only been a rough draft of what you’d need as a, hopefully unironically, “higher” functioning adult. I didn’t pick new or better goals. I didn’t search for what an evolved well of infinite motivation may look like when it’s not fueled by “fuck you” energy. Me, allegedly, so capable of responsibility and actually making choices, lost at sea?

I’m bored, but not because I don’t have things to do or because there isn’t a perpetual five-alarm fascist fire to put out. I’m bored of spirit. I’m bored waiting for something to happen as a result of choices instead of reactions. I can’t choose for you. I can’t invest of myself what you can’t realize. We weren’t partying together, I guess. We weren’t dreaming about the future we could create. We aren’t even able to talk about “the world” with the same level of awareness.

I feel like I choose to mock myself and my feelings by looking for things that challenge my perspective. I don’t care how I feel. It’s wrong. It’s incomplete and ill-informed. It’s automatic and antagonistic. I don’t “need” to feel “good” or “happy.” I don’t describe myself in terms of “needs” too often that don’t rest in things like eating or shitting. What “I need” is “us choosing.” I think implicit in that is me getting chosen in return.

I don’t feel chosen by anyone but my dad. I feel supported by friends, but certainly not chosen. I feel like their support often stems from places where they feel broken. It’s where I then have to be extremely careful that I’m not taking advantage and holding myself personally responsible for trying to square when it feels imbalanced. When I can’t simplify things in monetary ways, I get disoriented. Traditionally, I’m the free therapist-friend providing years of open-ended feedback, looping in and out of what they may “need” from me.

Do they know what they need anymore than I do? One thinks they need mushrooms. Another thinks they need less sex. Another thinks softball matters more than voting. I’ve watched from afar as friends choose their vocation, their equivocations, and their artfully crafted stories and reels celebrating their families. Just like I’m choosing to do TikToks and garner hatred from reddit.

To be sure, I’m meandering through the debased means of connection in a bid for the wrong kind of attention. I’m maintaining my status as a curiosity or piece of safe drama to watch, like a TV show you don’t care for but can’t look away. If the show gets out of line and asks you to really pay attention or start choosing your own adventure, can you imagine a greater betrayal? I’m yours to watch. None of this fourth-wall breaking bullshit.

I’m tired of waiting for you. I’m tired of hoping I’ll feel better or less anxious in the wake of something you finally figure out. I work myself up because I feel like, ultimately, it really does all depend on me. You won’t join me, but you’ll do what I say. You won’t shoulder the risk, but you’ll dump the resources. You won’t access the vulnerable disorienting nature of your power, but you’ll bask in mine. I don’t want that. I don’t know that it’s possible to get what I want instead.

No one sincerely doubts me. That’s part of the mythology. No one who has watched how I work or interact with the world thinks that, if I set my mind to it, I won’t get it. What they’re clocking is the exact thing about me that made so many people cry. I, like any other boring pathological megalomaniac, see your weakness. It’s the same as my weakness. It’s what we’re telegraphing when we’re not making choices. It’s our insecurities. It’s our cliches. It’s our desire to downplay and dismiss the catastrophic nature of our environment.

I live in a fucking shed. I love my shed, but I live in a fucking shed because I was born into a context that was cooking modern fascism. My shed used to represent freedom and possibility. It increasingly represents things to repair and clean up. It grows in its identity as a lonely white-trash island with each passing year. It has all my stuff that I haphazardly engage with. It has my cats which, I don’t exactly want eaten by coyotes, but I don’t want to have to think about if I leave for a week or what they cost me in vet visits.

It took 8 years, a divorce, and a friend moving back to this miserable state to find a consistent concert buddy. At least 10 people I used to party with several times a week for years live like an hour or 2 away. Who in their right mind would choose to shoot the shit over dinner or a beer even once a year? What former coworker would choose to share their new job stories or scuttlebutt after I left? It’s unthinkable.

The irony is such that “my power” isn’t mine at all. I can only tap into what feels like “choice space” to “break loops” in weird little pockets of acute awareness or frustration. I can reign in the feelings and chart a course of action when I seemingly align two oppositely charged magnetic tips and push back against the forces that are otherwise sending me for a loop. I can line them up whenever I want. I can disregard the waves. My mind need not shake. But I’ll still be the only one pointing and pushing towards…whatever it is I’m bothering.

I chose shed because at least the nature of its constraints felt closer to a place of true and actual choices than I otherwise tend to observe from people. I have very little external pressure to do anything out here. It’s all manifest evidence of my hairbrained ideas, effort, and in-processing. It’s a sanctuary where I’m not expected to perform. I’m not failing to live up to your needs out here. I can’t reasonably expect you to visit.

I don’t know what kind of example I want to set anymore. Demonstrating a degree of financial “freedom” has meant nothing. Efforts to salvage, create, or sustain garner 2 or 3 likes occasionally. Every job I ever get aggressively chases me away literally moments away from positive feedback and accolades. I’m funny, but never wanted to be “the funny guy.” I’m angry, but in this era every outburst is performative by default. I've been too big a whore to fall in with incels and worked too long in social work to self-pity.

I have this sickening sense that, somehow, everyone is watching what I choose, but not in an effort to actually see.

[908] Mirror Mirror

 “Right, but which truth are you going with?”

I feel like it's been a while since I've written. I'll lump this in with my blog from yesterday. At once, I've thought I've had so little to say and it wouldn't be worth it, and yet my entire world is still happening, still chugging in some kind of direction. Things still annoy me, and there is always some level of existential crisis to constantly unpack.

You never are really allowed to stop talking. That is, it's always very noisy. There's TV, news media, YouTube personalities, best-selling authors, and that nagging so-and-so in your life. Your kids never shut up. Your brain, plagued by anxiety or otherwise, reminding you or hinting at all of the things you're not giving the requisite attention to. It's an unconscious conversation with yourself at all times, manifesting as distracted or hurried moves in the world meant to assert or pacify.

Adam Curtis's latest documentary “Can't Get You Out Of My Head” just taught me Valium was trying to quell the emptiness in 1971. The Sackler's then kept on sacking. Today, I have endless discussions to nowhere with people addicted to opiates, trying to reorient their behavior into something “healthy” or “productive,” or in their words, “normal.” Curtis's documentaries are a meditation on the infinite amount of forces and ideologies permeating every thought we have. Coincidentally, I just saw the movie “The Sound of Metal” that ends on a scene where the main character shuts off his cochlear implants to finally take in a moment of stillness.

It bears remembering at all times that you will die. I think when death is fresh in your mind, you get more deliberate, more patient, and find more meaning. Your example is one you choose to set more than the one you are incidentally setting through circumstance. When you can own your death you can begin a life project you feel motivated to be responsible for. Death is hardly something people take a significant amount of time trying to define. Death is the thing to be protected from, reacted to. It's not something to bear proudly or exalted by anyone but mythological heroes who, in one form or another, get put right back through the human anxiety machine and are reborn or otherwise immortalized.

I think I understand power as a complex way of denying death. Whether you rise through the ranks of a particular organization or terrorize your household, you haven't sorted through your powerlessness in the face of death. You'll never terrorize to the degree you feel terrorized. You'll never control more than the law of entropy. You can lead the dance of your conversation and observation about death or things breaking apart, but you're going to trip. I think as with most ironically held desires, you get power when you don't want it or pursue paradoxical ends given the contexts in which it is sought. Who is more powerful, the dictator, or revolutionary? To me, both are undermined by the power of ideology, thus I feel the most powerful in my understanding of the broader context or nature of the human mind. It's on me to not let that become its own pathological ideology.

Thus a habit of persistent scrutiny and healthy doubt must be employed. An active discussion about balancing forces must take place. Without them, we become defaulted to the sea of indifferent and incidental forces of infinitely fluctuating power. If you believe nothing else about your place in existence, it's that you have the ability to speak to, examine, and shift what you think and feel. Perhaps you do it for the sake of the shifting. Perhaps you have grand designs to help others shift in different or easier ways than the current culture paradigms allow for. Regardless of your aim, it behooves you to understand the nature of the game and forces you are up against. Ignoring them is how the disillusioned fringe become the next tyrants.

So much of my effort is in pursuit of the privilege to be left alone. I don't want to fight. I don't want to have my brain hijacked by the chaos of people unable or unwilling to sip let alone gulp responsibility for how their miserable consciousness is manifesting in the world. I comfortably eschew your decision-making whilst still respect how little I believe there's much of a “you” there deciding to do anything. I tie that struggle to the practical options I wish to give myself in the world I'm bound to. Oh, you want fascism? I can probably buy my way out of its worst consequences. You're just super stoked to keep denying history and racism? Bet I don't use my future wealth to back minority-owned businesses or support immigration causes.

I think of my obligation to the world or myself as a form of asymmetrical warfare. I'm not gonna storm the capital like an insurrectionist dipshit. I want to create diffuse loci of power. I want to be off-grid. I want to be multi-lingual and counter-cultural in a perpetually subversive manner. I want to take the diffuse and abstract and meet it with an intentional greater abstraction driven by a tempered wisdom and playfulness about what it is I'm really after or how it might get there. I know I can't “control” in the colloquial sense. But I can acknowledge my identity, my mark, and witness my environment get shaped around my ideals. That's as close to peace as I'm going to find. That's how I get to die in my world on my terms.

My clients tell me often how their drug use did not make anything better. “It masked or numbed what I was feeling, but...” Same story every single time. Same truism, cliché, almost rehearsed lines. The response? Do the drug again. The mind's agency has been subverted. The compulsion capitulated to. The forces their brains formed around win again and again. They'll say, “Well everyone's addicted to something.” I can agree, but arguably in a deeper way than they're even speaking to, as they're employing the saying from an excuse-ridden place. It's dismissing their agency and responsibility verses acknowledging how someone else's addiction might mirror our own and then asking ourselves what to do about it.

I discover my responsibility every time I ask the question. It's no small feat to take it upon yourself to ask the question. It's any wonder how you build the resilience to keep asking every day or every moment. It's terrifying work on its face. It's the killing of ceaseless presumptions and pretensions that would otherwise occupy the space for the question. It's a space people are happy to fill in for you when you're not paying attention.

At some point, I think it was in early high school, it sunk in that my eyes were permanently nailed open. Whether I understood what I was watching or not, I had to keep looking and feeling and coping with it. I had to make peace or I would drive myself insane. I had to write. I had to read and question. I had to argue. I had to stand for the slivers of hope and peace I could cut out of otherwise ceaseless angst and pain. So I started writing. I started anchoring my experience in a sea of words that more often seem to make considerably more sense to me than anyone else. I observe myself trying and organizing and turning consciousness into a reflection. It makes me feel better and like I can begin moving again in the world; like I have a stake and ability to change and grow with as opposed to suffer from. It wasn't magic. I didn't start believing in mythical beings who granted me special privileges. I just paid more attention. In doing so, it becomes pretty fucking clear what other people are ignoring, and what, if anything, I can responsibly do about it.

[843] The Only Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think this is a wrong way to be human.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[584] Say Anything Else

I suppose one of the things I find more frustrating about persistent intellectual posture is how easy it is to ignore where and how it creates cramps. I can bend and balance boxes of 2-liters for hours and inevitably will start to feel a little knot form or a wave of pain. You sit down all day and need to lift your arms above your head and roll your neck or swivel side to side. An intellectual posture allows you to say the same thing over and over again, and instead of setting off a warning sign that there's a need to stretch or get a massage, the neural pathways you've created to work yourself into that position get reinforced each time you assert it or you hear that someone agrees with it.

As infinitely complex and confused perceptual beings, we're blind to the “true” nature of reality. I don't believe we will ever find the words, run the experiment, or dig up “42” in an act of cosmic comedic justice. This isn't what we want though. We want the explanatory power that infects and translates or gives us the groundwork from which to build. The more you understand about quantum systems, the cooler the devices you get to take pictures of your dick with. Find the evolutionary ingrained model for social being or mental pathologies, turn your abusive parents into categorically immature and unintelligent narcissists with oedipal complexes and mood disorders; the more adjectives, the easier to swallow and maybe cope with or develop a strategy for combating.

We want the story because whether we're particularly adept at articulating it or not, we want the story to mean something. We want it to reflect our values, what we've worked or sacrificed for, perhaps what many members of our tribe have died for. The problem being, there's no end to the amount of things any one person may find valuable or ways in which they'll choose to try and approach them. So you get extremely specific scientific disciplines arguing so minutely that maybe 3 or 4 people in the entire world even have a shot of knowing what the hell they're talking about, let alone be able to discern the truth of either one. The other side of the spectrum gets you an endless ethics debate regarding the relative imperative to behave in accordance with the tenants of the really peaceful religion.

Here I'll note a reason I approach writing the way I do. There's a very specific and infrequent utility I get from truly picking out the individual lice of insight on the infected head of some topic I'm exploring. 99 times out of 100, absolutely no one wants or cares to read the book I read, or the Jacobin article giving you the ten page history of why your modern union sucks ass, or the Guardians of the Galaxy comics so you can appreciate how disappointing I felt the first movie really was. They want an impression of my approach to whatever it is that concerns them. They either want someone to mirror and add, or swallow. 1 in 100 want to genuinely talk or debate and perhaps learn something new. It is true that I find details interesting and vitally important depending on your task. Details aren't going to give you an impression of “me” and my process, they're going to reduce me to a pedantic research paper “wowing” you with my capacity for citations.

Another way to state the above paragraph is that there is no point to how I write but to try. It has set with me for a long time the psychopath (and I use that term technically) who attacked the very idea that I would even bother at all when so many better philosophers have said it before. It's like an archetypal ignorance. I couldn't possibly phrase intellectual and cultural suicide better. Every morality story you hear in church has been passed down from “already figured out” sentiments our ancestors learned from fighting the environment and each other. Every step forward, be it technologically or in terms of morality, builds on the breaking down and reiteration then reorientation of models and experiences that, say every 40 or so years, 1/3 of the population hasn't necessarily experienced. In 2 years, how many younger obliterated freshman during Little 5 are going to stop and remember to make a reference to 9/11?

It seems stories about tragedy, war, and mass death are turning into failures of retaining and translating the meat of why they happened meaningfully. 9/11 will get a commemorative stamp. Someone will put a statue up memorializing the Pulse nightclub victims, naively inspired by a little girl staring down a bull as a statement regarding intrinsic value or consequence. What to do with the details, when they matter so so much but are often so many and so complicated they get lost to the lazy symbolism or furiously debated into pieces so small you can't really pick them up anymore?

I think you have to learn how to orient yourself in relation to those details. You have to get a higher consciousness perhaps about the nature of what it means to hold something as a distinguishable entity. Say at the level of the neurochemistry of your brain, it can't differentiate between the positive rush from coffee verses cocaine verses the best sex of your life. But you're not just your brain, at least, you don't act like it, so you impose a value and relative utility in how you choose to get the channels flowing. You can look for the hidden orientations of your mind with digressions like these. You can surprise yourself by stumbling forward into manifest value.

It's something of a confusing and seemingly perfectly arbitrary process. Why write...just anything? Whether I want it to or not, my brain is working. It's taking my experiences and matching them against my expectations of the world and of myself. And it's doing it with more (possible) neural connections than there are atoms in the universe. That I could distill a single sentence is a miracle. That I might give you an impression or insight by peeking so far into my mind I'm actually in yours is an act of God.

And you don't like that. Not one bit. And you don't like that because to take on the burden of what it means to be God is infinitely taxing. It's an obliteration event. You can't be “you” if you're God, as it's understood in modern terms. What an act of ignorant pride! You don't know everything! You are not everywhere! You are not the underlying Truth of MY morality! So you learn pretty quickly how intellectually deficient an ideologue is as they summarily dismiss you and often condescend to pray.

The issue being, you are God too, incidentally, the angry destructive one that no one seems to understand but keep sacrificing for. Surely one needn't know everything to know a significant amount about that which they are and how it tends to behave. Not a single person on the road deemed it practical or necessary to drive on the wrong side and cause an accident today. In all of my Godly wisdom, without ever saying it out loud, I predicted as much and it came true! How does one know the future if not by divine right? As to the morality of not running your car into others deliberately, how'd you learn not to do that except by the normalizing factors of your culture? Of course I'm your truth, because you haven't killed me off despite the murderous intent I can see in your eyes. A murderous intent that happens everywhere and in everything where Gods like me attack lesser Gods like you in manners like this.

We don't say our goals out loud, so we're constantly disagreeing about, literally, “nothing.” The goal of a “productive” conversation is to get the point of what the person is telling you and see if it has anything to do with how to better orient yourself later. When you get into an argument, and you assume it's about “winning,” it seems more a misfiring of your threat systems. Your goal isn't to escalate until you get a divorce or kill the other person to defend your opinion. Your goal is to be understood or achieve some form of reciprocity, when all you've done is offered a baseless proposition floating in the might-as-well-be-empty head-space of your mind.

This comes out with the phrasing of things like, “I was only trying to help!” Help what? Help who? Help how? You have a very vague feeling and notion of what constitutes “help,” and by not parsing it out, you're throwing yourself in to drown along with the person you think is trapped under water.

So you can think about this when people, in my view, very ignorantly attack the idea that science can't speak to human values. They point to the tenuous assumptions in science that the observable universe is fundamentally capable of being understood to the point of absurdity. It doesn't matter if we get to “42,” it matters that it's irrelevant your opinion of clitoral castration, for example, it's an unnecessary harm inflicted on vulnerable women where it should be obvious there's a meaningful reason to eradicate the process objectively. Science, the study and approaching-more-accurate accounting of the material world in which we operate, can help dispel the empty-headed idea that vilified genitalia. (Empty insofar as to what we understand today as it is reasonable to conclude much of our ingrained attitudes and relationships are influenced by the complicated dangers regarding sex as we progressed.)

Of course we're all flailing about in the infinite waters of confusion and entropy. But more of course our very capacity for, not just perception, but motivated and reproducible perception means we need to adopt a mode of starting from a shared place and stating a goal AFTER we've done the work like this to bounce around the universe of our own mind to figure out just what it is we're even bothering to talk about, worry about, or set out to fix or achieve. There's a very large list as to why that doesn't happen, presumably the confusion or frustration you might feel trying to follow a blog like this and immediately concluding, indeed mylinating, the “no point” circuitry top amongst it.

I get very dismayed when I hear spot-on heavily tested and investigated stories for either my own behavior or something I've noticed in my family. If I were to try and “bring this home” as it were, without hesitation you can rob yourself of your identity, and therefore responsibility, by couching your understanding too convincingly in any paradigm that relies on your capacity to make an ill-informed “truth” claim. It doesn't matter the doting mother scared of being alone provokes her only son to overcompensate, and indeed run far away, in EXACTLY the manner as has happened between my second cousin and aunt. My degrees of openness and conscientious thoroughly predicted I'd be writing this thought digression after 17 hours of practically nonstop work. But that doesn't remove my responsibility for what it says or choice to write it. It's one blog, one piece, of all that is me, I have been, or am trying to be. Like every detail, it informs, but it's only the Truth to the degree in which you want to deify me, which you don't want to do. But how many other ideas from other deities are you doing that with right now? How many variations of other people's hells are you roasting in? And can you articulate why you chose them, if you chose them, and if there's a way out? That's the kind of story that's meaningful to me.

[540] Things We Never Had

I have an increasing problem with language. The more I hear it, the more I just get frustrated or downright angry. For much of my life, I never really thought words mattered. I had a very simple view that a word won’t punch you in the face or shoot you. Needless to say, I was unfamiliar with neuroscience at the time. Your body can respond as if it’s experiencing physical pain. Words can scar you. Words can swallow you up in depression or make you burst with rage.

But at least when that happens you have something clear to work with. A pissed off person is to be restrained or ran from, or perhaps politely engaged with. A depressed person needs pills or to attempt therapy. What we don’t pay attention to is when words make us sick, but we don’t really feel sick. We don’t feel different at all. In fact, the more you try to point to the words that are responsible for the sickness, people think you’re the sick one.

We take talking and language for granted. Whether a word is male or female or “rooted” in another language. We don’t struggle with every syllable like it didn’t start as a bark or a scream trying to convey something from more primordial times. We assume the meaning is built in. We act like when I say “car,” the mental picture is the same across the board. It’s innocent enough, as in, who cares if you pictured a Hot Wheels toy or a Nascar racer, we can clarify with a few more questions or specific words.

Humans have more unidentifiable experiences and feelings though. They have complex relationships and institutions. Words that once had meaning float away or become something entirely different, and new ones pop into existence seemingly daily. And we don’t even notice. I’d put money on the idea that someone’s said something akin to “I took this selfie in 1995 before smart phones.”

It’s how we arrived at the all-encompassing nature of the word “love.” It’s why people have an impossible time finding the “truth.” It’s the struggle behind your relationship with “friends” and “family.” Most, in service to trying to feel “normal,” see no point in searching for a kind of excruciating exactness. “My mom’s my mom and I love her! That’s the truth!” And you’re hard-pressed to disagree, even if the person making the claim doesn’t know why or care to learn why they’re wrong.

I think a lot about this when I consider my relationships. I don’t believe my ex feels any real guilt that isn’t masked in a language of relief. The stakes weren’t as high for her. I don’t think she even grasped the nature of the problem. In the handful of things she was willing to type out and explain to me, you can see the contradictions written sometimes in the next sentence claiming something different. It’s not that her explanation doesn’t make a certain kind of sense in “normal” or “everyday” terms, but I would describe it as missing a soul. I think there’s more to be said about the lines, “I don’t believe we started off as friends. At least not honest friends,” and “I think the lying stemmed from a true desire to see you happy” than there’s time for here.

Consider planting a tree you don’t want. You hate this tree. You hate the idea of trees. Yet every day you water it. You watch it get taller and taller. Its roots start to crack your foundation. Its leaves clog your gutters. It attracts animals and bugs you’re constantly swiping at. You buy expensive equipment trying to blow them away and make repairs. Then your neighbor comes over and proclaims how hard you work and praises you for your dedication to taking care of your property. You look up, angry and exhausted and scream, “I wish that damn thing had never been planted to begin with!”

The “logic” of property maintenance requires the expensive tools and hours in the sun. You need trash bags and allergy medication. You need new gutters and a new foundation. But you hate trees, and you planted one anyway? But wait, you may think to yourself, trees are good! Trees help ecosystems. Trees suck up carbon. I like apples! Perfectly fair and valid points, just in an entirely different discussion. The root of your problem remains unaddressed.

This is why I write and ask people to pay attention. This is why I find it so weird that people are threatened by my mere descriptions of aesthetic things that are causing them a mindgasm. It’s why I urge you to run from judgmental language because it’s a hearty signifier that you probably have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Our judgments are fundamentally corrupted, and if we attempt to base our feelings on them, we’re throwing food at a wall trying to assemble an emotional meal from whatever sticks.

Why am I so “defensive” or “difficult” to talk to? Why is it so “exhausting” to answer my questions? I don’t feel responsible for the lies you’ve told me. I don’t accept the idea that my perspective is “less magical” or “normal” or “worthwhile” just because I call a mountain a mountain and you’ll cry or cum if you stare at it too long. That doesn’t make me angry at you or resent you. I climbed the stupid thing because I wanted to be around the people doing what they enjoy. It seems practically inhumane to ignore that motivation for the sake of a mound of dirt.

It speaks to why I don’t regret getting into a relationship as well. What if I had sacrificed myself, like I was prepared to in high school? What if I stopped partying and said “I believe!” when it only felt like torture? What if I hadn’t done all the work to really discover who I was and what was important or what I was willing to do? Because that’s all you really have at the end of the day. Trying to be true to yourself.

If I may borrow a phrase from a movie I just watched (even if I don’t believe in love), “The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” You can of course get half of the lesson right if others find themselves incapable or unwilling to acknowledge what’s worth loving about you. Your tokens can still represent true feelings. (I find it curious they’ve all been left behind.) You don’t have to adopt the same complacent exhaustion or judgment that denigrates the other person.

To be honest, I thought I’d feel more dramatic lol. But once I heard the foundation was a lie, I went out like a light. I was relieved. I could stop believing. I know how to treat liars, or, basically every person and “friend” I’ve ever met. Keep them at arm's distance. Maybe get something out of them. Play along and lie back as earnestly as they’re asking you to do so. Finally! Some direction.

Now I’m hung up on the “trying to be true to yourself” line. Because it’s the default language that people employ when trying to justify their behavior. I need to be more specific. Be true to what you’ve worked to discover. Be true to things you place higher on the shelf than the pit in your stomach. I felt nothing but excited and proud when she hooked up with girls. I felt absolutely terrible the first time my ex slept with a dude that wasn’t me. As compared to the 15 or so girls I’d been with since we were together. That means I’m a culturally programmed romantic sexist who literally embodied a painful hypocritical double-standard, not that there’s something wrong with sex and attraction or paying attention to history, human psychology, and animal behavior.

Important reminder, I didn’t blame her for my feelings. I didn’t think she was trying to hurt me. I believe she would have stayed home if I asked her to. She didn’t punch me in the gut. I put my trust in our life together and a spirit of sharing and honesty. Oops. And even still, if I may borrow a line from a song that I find spectacular, “Indiscretion is a blessing if you know how the truth is told.” Truth is told one line at a time. It’s every moment, and every word that captures where you’re at in time and spirit. That moment competes for the truth as it is against the truth that you’re desperate to justify. And while it’s extremely hard, if not sometimes impossible, to tell the degree and nature of how we’re lying to ourselves, I’ll catch you every time when you try to lie about me.

I’ll never blame anyone for feeling confused, angry, or hurt. It happens, it sucks, and it betrays our best conception of ourselves. But don’t blame me for you not recognizing what I find beautiful. Don’t tell me what I do and don’t see. Don’t allow yourself a second of pretending to know what I think if you’re unwilling to ask, and don’t tell me to respect your feelings when your misused words insulate you from experiencing mine. I chose trust when I wasn’t trusted. I chose ideals over butterflies. I choose friends even when I don’t believe they can see me. I choose writing to fighting, be it with myself, or you...mostly.

I think the only thing that brings people together or makes someone “right” for someone else is the decision to say so. Make no mistake, when you’re lying to someone, you haven’t chosen them. You’re not concerned with their happiness. You’re not in love. You shouldn’t trust what you’re finding beautiful. You’re not sacrificing anything anymore than Jesus did. The reality of your hard-sold godly standards will rise again until you can recognize them for the empty fairy tales of self-indulgence they are. And you’ll hurt a lot of people along the way. And at least if you’ve caught this and paid attention, we’ll both know it’s no longer innocent.

[491] Fear and Loathing

When do we get to stop being afraid?

I almost just want this to act like something of an exhaustive list. Why shouldn’t we be afraid? If you’re financially insecure, something as small as a flat tire can cripple you for months. Live in that place long enough and try not to think about getting hurt or sick. What if your life is at the apex of decisions you made long ago you didn’t realize were terrible? What if you never find the job? What if you never find the partner? What if the partner leaves? Isn’t it great that if things go well you’ll get to watch your family members die before you? 

What if you’re afraid of yourself? How are you going to get the depression and anxiety under control? You know how you are when you drink, what if you hurt someone? What if you think too long about why you drink? What if your friends or boss finds out you’re a fake? What if you can’t face how much your heart isn’t in it anymore? How can you deal with what people will think and say about you if you pursued what you wanted? How do you expect them to forgive you when you can’t forgive yourself? And what are you going to do about all this debt? 

Make the misstep of being a well-read person. Heard about our crumbling nuclear infrastructure? Read up lately on the long term fall-out of Fukushima or the Deep Horizon oil spill? Can you keep up with the number of going extinct species or what comparable state’s size describes the last chunk of ice that broke into the ocean? Think the government is spying on you? They are. Think we’re cultivating unrest and perpetuating terrorism? We are. Think your food and water is poison? It is. Are you afraid of Russia or ISIS and yet ignorant of how much more likely you are to die in a car crash? But at least the car isn’t actually trying to kill you, right? Unless you ask the quality control department at GM. 

Did you know that advocating for fascism from a national pulpit to an enraged and ignorant populace can literally have us replay instances from various Holocaust-adjacent scenarios? Did you know a Trump presidency is 6th on the highest rated threats to global economic security? How funny was his comment now? You were only laughing because you’re afraid though too, right? He can’t be serious...that’d be as insane as your support for him! And you’re not insane. Things aren’t your fault. You’re just scared and getting by. You could be randomly shot at like in Paris and Turkey! You could be on the next plane headed for a national icon! 

Let alone you just meditate on how quickly time seems to be going on and how you’re significantly more afraid of being alive and being full of shit than you are death. Gotta meet the celebrities, travel everywhere, compile the Instagram photos, put your heart and soul into a lost but meaningful cause. Why think about neglect, abuse, greed, and social security when you’re so fit and capable now? When your knee starts shaking another reason to be afraid. When your arm can’t raise as high you keep it securely wrapped around your stomach in an insecure hug. 

Infuse your being with your minority or sexual status. You have crazy people constantly targeting you as randomly as terrorists seem to. You have institutions who threaten to punish you more severely than one of the “normals.” You have an entire sex that can single-handedly kill you any time they get angry. You’re demonized daily for just being alive and then told things about how “great” the country once was when every “ism” was (still is) in state-sanctioned overdrive. You’re told a “just” god is inspiring language and legislation that will see your grandchildren eventually oppressed. 

And what do we do in response? 

As much as I reflexively feel like I don’t want to blame people, I feel forced to. We take pride in distracting ourselves. We chalk the real work and responsibility up to a few donations or volunteer hours here and there. Our job title more important than what it’s purported to do. We adopt every possible cliche about how life operates and how little our role in fixing it means. Or that role has to be “humble” and give you a quiet smile that let’s you carry on like you really care, don’t you, you do-gooder you. We point and blame and celebrate fringe details and ignore the all-encompassing smog suffocating reasonable paths forward. We pick and peck, looking for grains of food in a quicksand pit.

We distance ourselves. We smile too hard. We drink too much. We spend all day in front of our TVs or phones or desks as we project our lives “one day” against the office backdrop. We smugly shake our heads like “I could never” or we naively play with fire like all’s fair in this hopeless headless chicken race to the end. Could I possibly do or say anything as negative as the person who can’t figure out the difference between Trump and Sanders? I’m negative? How much do you have to hate your own sense of reasoning and how burdened by intrusive thoughts must you be to be suffering like that? How broken of a soul is willing to innocently inflict such impropriety upon their friends and family? How broken and negative do you have to be to entertain them in return? 

We campaign! We say “it gets better.” We say wait till you’re older and the bullies start to respect your affinity for science. Hell, they’re gonna be the one’s paying for your skills to be rolled into the next war machine. We proselytize for different gods and Eastern mysticism. Come into the moment and self-actualize. Find your direction and better digestion when your mind is at ease knowing it’s all about you and your ability to physically kiss your own ass. Know that god is love and this ephemeral ineffable thing is perfectly reasonable the more you stoke your sense of loss and helplessness. It’s not enough to have a scrapbook with personal photographs and cherished memories. You’re in marketing now. You have to be a cheerleader for your definitely happy life and pay deference to the struggle by lip service to how real it can feel but assure us it’s definitely still your bitch. 

Fear is a mental handicap to honesty, and honesty is the only way to learn how to not be afraid. Fear hijacks and makes excuses for your perspective. It literally lowers your capacity for intelligence. Fear beats your chest in the dark trying to chase away apparitions created by blood vessels racing across your eyes. Fear cripples humility and fairness. Fear taps into the life affirming response for why you’re here and another animal is not. In doing so, fear always feels justified. It always feels righteous. It’s maniacally invigorating because it seems to belay existence itself. 

Perhaps most disconcerting is the thought I have about someone reading this. An extremely loud and condescending “WE ALL KNOW THIS! WHY DO YOU EVEN BOTHER!?” 

I think we’re lying. I don’t think we know in the same way someone who experiences an epiphany and changes their behavior in an instant might. I think we pretend to know like we pretend to be friends and pretend to love our families. Because it’s a common narrative that brings order to the chaos. Because generations of people who were quicker to die with infinitely more accessible reasons to be afraid gave us stories and habits to pretend otherwise. As we currently exist on the precipice between human and whatever human plus Pentium chip will be called, we still refuse to do anything but play into the legacy of fearful thinking. We don’t demonize the universal roots of atrocity because they retain their utility in giving us every excuse to play our own selfish games with the mythical demons. 

Here though, I’m not going to tell you to stop being afraid. I’m not going to offer a fix. I’m just gonna say watch. It’s the thing we’re absolutely stuck doing no matter the amount of effort we put into fighting it. You can’t shut off your eyes. Watch Trump become president. Watch a bomb go off in a major U.S. city. Watch cities get swallowed. Watch your fellow ignorant monkeys adopt cartoonish faces as they bask in the glory of their demagogues. Watch every day as your reality and morality morph to excuse and accept the ethics of ignorance and fear. 

I’m negative? In trying to incorporate and work with the danger and fear, in mocking, in joking, in reminding, in building it into my proposed solutions and resources, in owning and tattooing the idea of it on my very being, I’m the negative one? We’ve been sold this mythology that evil is to be overcome like by becoming a champion of implicit quasi-religious morality. Like Jedi don’t turn to the dark side. Like angels don’t fall from heaven. 

Do you think my approach to fear is one of excuses, hand-holding, or avoidance? Because all I seem to ever see is people putting distance between me and their idolized version of what they consider constitutes life and their obligation to it. My biggest sins are what? Getting nit-picky in conversations? Getting a little too drunk and obscene sometimes? Trying to play the games offered to me despite a feeling of constant personal sacrifice to your own fears of starting a fight I wasn’t offering? 

The lack of perspective is our cultural sin. It’s our collective denial that turns non-issues into declarations about dramatic life-altering consequences, and genuine problems into cat toys we bat around the floor without irony. Kick up your feet and watch.

[488] Character Assassination

I was recently told that I was not people.

That's the first interesting thing. The second was that no one wants to become a blog. This meaning they apparently don't want to be the subject of mine specifically. While I certainly don't plan to name names, this thing has practically written itself.

I'm currently embroiled in a controversy. The main ideas floated to me have spoken to my propensity to be negative, defensive, argumentative, guilt-trippy, prone to exaggeration, and almost incapable of listening to try and better understand where someone is coming from.

On top of those charges, my responses are assertive, dismissive, belittling, and attempt to dodge or transform the conversation.

First, I must admit, I am attempting to transform the conversation. You'll see it in this blog unfolding. I want the conversation boring. I want it line by line. I want it to feel like I'm trying.

What you have any time 2 people are trying to relate is an, unfortunately often referred to “battle” of their perceptions, and the claims they make in service to them. A white person says “those hoodlums” were “acting shady” next to the expensive car, the hoodlums, incidentally black, immediately protest that person is racist and there's nothing shady about standing around admiring nice cars.

Who's right?

Traditionally, people say it boils down to perception and there is no fix. You can't argue perceptions. You can't ever get them to agree. More than that, it's pointless to try, and only a frustrating spin down the toilet bowl when, against your better demons, you try to anyway.

Non-traditionally, you can separate out where and why there would be points of confusion between the parties. You can introduce context. You can run counterfactuals. You can ask questions that get increasingly specific until you get at the heart of the matter.

How does the white guy define hoodlums? If it's just black people, a “more right” coin can be dropped into the basket labeled “he's probably racist.” Did the white guy see something that could be construed as shady even if it wasn't? If so, place a coin in the basket that qualifies how we define what shady behavior looks like. You can do this all the way down until you describe the physics that hopefully leaves everyone rested and assured that we are all one and language does a terrible job of making us feel that way.

I've spoken about stories and characters before. How a story isn't complete until the last line. New contexts and decisions can do a lot of work in describing everything you think and assume about your subject. You can almost think of an author as arguing with you. Perhaps the same with a movie director. This person is a killer, this person is a rapist, this person is the epitome of evil, and yet why are you rooting for them? Why is the memory of what they did for another character still on your mind while you're watching them slaughter a room? It's easy, in my estimation, to empathize with the complex nature of being a human animal in thinking about our relationship to media.

Now, what happens when we bring it into the real world? Does Tony Montana feel as evil and despicable as your ex? Provided it wasn't amicable, of course not. And don't get lost in thinking it's because one is fiction and one ripped your beating heart from your chest and threw it on the ground. A documentary depicting similar acts will lean your feelings more Scarface than break up.

In the real world, we're very quick to assert the “truth.” Here I feel it important to reintroduce the idea that, somehow, I'm not people. Maybe too often, I'm accused of asserting the capital T “Truth” about a situation. I don't know why this is. One, I think I'm human, and humans are impressive failures at getting things right. Hence why I write. Two, I think people, innocently enough, overlap claims about me or what they've assumed about me with their perception of me. After this happens, it becomes absolutely impossible, in my estimation, to breach understanding. Three, I'm semi-constantly trying to concede what I can while either asking questions, or offering to clarify where I was coming from.

And wouldn't you know it, number three is precisely where I fuck up...because I'm not people.

One thing I will never try to argue is your perception. If you think I'm negative or mean, I'm negative or mean. What I will try to pick at is the underlying assumptions or behavior you're using to inform your perception. Unfortunately, people do not separate the two, and it gets me in trouble.

When I'm told that I'm any number of damming sentiments, as far as people are concerned, I’m told it's best for me to shut up and accept it. The more and the quicker I accept, the deeper friends we'll be. As a not person, I habitually take issue with having my being recited to me while I'm perfectly aware that I wasn't in fact thinking or doing what you think I was. I don't mean I perceived differently than you, say in observing the beauty of a sunset, I mean, when you call me an asshole for not appreciating the sunset, I trust you think I'm an asshole, I don't trust you knew what I was thinking about the light it was providing me to read my book.

It boils down to skepticism. When you root yourself in skepticism, you're not so fast to make judgments about what someone else is thinking or feeling. You're not quick to describe their behavior in terms that automatically puts them in a defensive place. I accept that I often express negative comments and it weighs on people. I do not accept that I'm the only person responsible for any situation involving more than myself.

Here, a conversation about comfort often comes up. I've been told it's hard to talk to me because people have failed in conveying something they had a problem with. There's further decisions or conversations to be had here. Please, program me. Like my friend who didn't like racist jokes, tell me I can't say them around you, when I do, we have a clear and present failure point and you know I truly don't respect where you're coming from (provided it's not just a lapse in memory). We can then depart without mud-slinging and I can take proper responsibility.

There's a deep, deep, irony in what happens when I'm told I don't try. Whether it's try to understand or try to listen or try to empathize. While I certainly have the, likely damaged brain, that can't easily or fluidly express emotion, I do not know who else is willing to ask dozens of questions or write hundreds of blogs in trying to get to the bottom.

It's unhelpful to get into pissing matches about whether someone sounds defensive, is assertive, or embodies some other personality quirk that makes them a tough nut to crack. I literally have no control over how you feel. I can't stop your assumptions. I'll stumble over your particular definitions. I don't know how much slack you'll give me until it's just long enough to hang myself. When I do control things, we're not friends, we're not equals, I'm playing with you. We're going to approach conversations and social situations with different experiences and expectations, but in the retelling and understanding of those things, we can remain clear and positive in our language. We can give the benefit of the doubt before dipping our recollections into judgmental qualifiers. I admit I’m not perfect at it either. 

That deep, deep, irony applies when I'm told I don't empathize. The problem, no one believes I've learned how to fix those terrible horrible feelings that are used to relate all of my flaws to me in ways I won't do back to you. I'll accept what I did or said. I'll accept you didn't like it. I won't easily accept we're agreed on how we should approach the word “negative” or “defensive.” It immediately disavows how I feel while claiming how important feelings are. If yours matter, so do mine, let's stop labeling them and unpack them. Let's stop blaming each other for lapses in self-control.

I want to stress. This is part of the experiment of being in relationships and having friends. When I want to do what Byron does, we won't be friends. If I need to be a happy puppy bot who only says positive and reassuring things, tell me. Then accept I'm now your conventional human robot and we'll be best of “friends.” You'll feel better. I'll stop feeling like I need to defend myself, or patience and clarity, and you'll never feel another fight or challenge from me again.

I think many of life's cliches come out of the hopeless thrown up arms related to conversation. One of my cliches is to say people kinda like me for a bit and then they get bored or angry and disappear. I'm not naïve, blind, or unwilling to change, I'm desperately looking for other people to take responsibility for themselves and lay out what they want of me coherently. I don't want an act. I don't want to be coddled. And I don't want to pretend. I mostly don’t want to be told that I’m liked or accepted or understood when each time that’s put to a test, it fails. It doesn't have to be a fight. It doesn't have to be stressful. I'm not gonna yell or throw things. But it has to be understood. It has to be a mutually beneficial agreement. I don't want to be the king of my friends, I want to be their equally flawed, but equally lovable asshole, until they tell me otherwise.

No one wants to be a blog? Well, I'm a blog. I'm almost 500 blogs of stress-induced pursuing of empathy, understanding, and connection that I didn't have to mold. No word will bust your ear drum, spit in your face, or raise its fist. Everything, every conversation, can be broken down and explored and be made boring so we're not evil manipulative missed connections, but responsible accountants for our feelings provoking a potentially more fulfilling and accepting reality. If we can't play that game, consider me not playing yours.

[442] Just A Moment

I think it’s all that we’re really after.

I think it’s all that we really have.

I think it’s why we take pictures. I think it’s why we relish what makes us sad.

I just read an amazing article by David Graeber on play and having fun. Jon Stewart signed off from The Daily Show. I’ve been constantly trying to reconstitute “just what it is I do all day” in terms that don’t make me feel lazy, depressed, or genuinely proud of achieving critical levels of “boredom.”

No more do we want to be remembered for a violent outburst or social faux paus than we want to forget what it is that makes us great. You share wedding photos, outdoor excursions, nights out (up to a point), or graduations and new babies. I would argue you’re no more or less those things than the time you threw something through the window while arguing with your spouse, but footage of the latter you don’t voluntarily share to Youtube. I think we rarely discuss if not barely understand these “moments.” In the age of instant outrage and viral videos, we actively work to drown out subtlety. It’s very noisey. It partially speaks to how I became relatively comfortable with doing little else besides watching movies and reading. I’m living in one long and perpetual moment that suggests we should slow down, think a little longer, and find our inner boring.

It still constitutes a fairly bad way of describing my situation though. I don’t consider gaining perspective on topics I find interesting boring. I don’t consider having my time to do with as I please even remotely negatively. It just gets boring not having anyone around willing or capable of discussing or working with things. Literally everyone I know has a job. When they’re done with their job they rarely have the time or inclination to do anything else. A fairly tired and predictable pattern that my generation seems fated to adopt indefinitely.

Continuing to work backward, consider Jon Stewart or comedy in general. What is laughter in terms of timing or tearing up? A momentary reaction. It’s in a moment you find offense, wisdom, surprise, camaraderie, and empathy. People will remember Jon (like he’s dead or something) in his impressions of Bush or most shared videos where he can’t be funny because he’s feeling too angry. What deeper yearning (besides the one to actually fix something) can you have in years of ridiculous policies and people that lead to death and destruction than to try and laugh at it?

I think this is why he insisted on his title being “comedian.” His second to last show describing how things have gotten worse instead of better regardless of his mockery and pointing out of hypocrisy speaks to it best. When all you can really do is laugh, it seems stupid to ask that person to shoulder the responsibility for actually fixing something. That’s not his job. But then, how do we really make sense of his job? How do we make sense of our own?

I certainly don’t have an answer. When I stopped working to do drug studies I managed to get my rent paid almost 5 years in advance a few weeks at a time. Was my spinal headache worth it? Now that it’s on it’s way out, I can say I’ll relate to the stress of being taken advantage of for months at different jobs or years in general in a worse way than I’ll remember the headache. What did I feel was being asked of me before I started this method of obtaining the almighty dollar? To live up to my potential? To garner respect? To be an “adult?” To make enough money to take care of my old and feeble parents in the future?...chuckle chuckle...no...really…

I once praised my overbearing ability to disrespect. I prefer to think in terms of affirmation though. I don’t want to think “my friends do all sorts of stupid shit I don’t like or agree with, why bother trying to impress them?” My version would be closer to “I hope my friends realize the problems of having too much time on your hands pale in comparison to the kinds of stress they relate to me about their lives in general.” It’s not about pissing matches and arbitrary judgments. It’s a genuine desire to hear your voice honestly relating how and why you’re doing something. You can gauge who I am and what I do just scrolling through my facebook page, and definitely through blogs. I can barely see you.

More specifically, I can only see the small tailoring of your existence to facebook pictures or likes to statuses. If 95% of your online existence depicts .05% of how you spend your time, or what’s on your mind, I scream foul. It’s not that I think we should just wallow in some kind of hidden perpetual misery, specifically, but I think we refuse to engage with it in order to protect the status quo. We can’t find the fun anymore because “life.” Or the fun is handed out like doses of cough syrup attempting to deny a bigger cancer.

I would constitute that “cancer” as potentially suffocating because we’ve boiled all the plankton out of the ocean. I would call it the faux outrage we express about quasi-racists, assault, (sexual or otherwise) and dead lions. A “heavy” topic is what you make of it. I’d prefer a light-hearted Daily Show take and proactive sentiment as opposed to “this isn’t the right time,” “I’m just trying to unwind,” “It’s not that serious,” “I’m too busy,” “It’s really not my responsibility or fault,” “I don’t know! What do you expect from me?”

It’s about what you allow into your moments. It’s why I habitually look for the “bad” thing to say about some “perfect” picture. But we don’t think about our lives as simply playing with things. We need legacies and statements and purposes. Do we pursue them with deep appreciation for the words? Do we think anything is being sacrificed in how we pursue them? Is the picture really as simple as the language we’ve been given to describe our lives would suggest? Do our tools, which imply a purpose by design, build something better as opposed to merely more complex or time consuming?

I suppose I prefer to look lazy than be actively arbitrary. I beckon the robot revolution killing every unnecessary job. It was a doctor I reduced to a “fucking bastard” with my, presumably intimate, understanding of his culpability in creating my spinal headache. Reflexively throwing the peaks of human determination and knowledge under the bus for a fairly common outcome seems unfair. I’d rather blame a machine that didn’t sacrifice years of it’s life pursuing a doctorate, and will likely have a precision and technique no human could ever master anyway.

You’re lucky if you can consider it a game. Then the fun, knowledge, and experience of time is an end in and of itself. The more you examine our role-models and the language of “self-determination” and “goal-orientation” you can discover how we shackle our thinking about how it is we can achieve or pursue what we want. I don’t want money. I want to not have to live with my parents and to eat. I don’t even just want time. I want memories. I want a broader definition, but more specific goal, of our “work.” We’re predisposed to saviors, excuses, and rationalizations. We adapt instead of pursue. I don’t want to feel desperate for “someone” to “fix everything” while I ignore or deny why I’m the problem.

I figure, even if you refuse to believe we can play by the same rules, it’s still gonna end. As long as I keep death in my moment, it helps shape my attitude and approach to the game. Time always feels like it’s running out. Certain subjects feel worthy of more stress or worry than others. A deep seeded yearning for real connection and truth takes root. So be it if that truth is “reduced” to a set of probabilities, experimentation, and struggle-bus language, you can still make it fun. You can still try to work on it with people instead of next to them. It’s nothing personal, it’s just a game.

[392] Not A Fan

I think maybe I'm just not that big a fan of life. This is certainly not the same thing as wanting to die. I think I use the term “hate” excessively, in part, because I don't think I've gotten to the bottom of what ties each use together. Sure, there's an  underlying disposition and perspective, but I'm not sure how much of it is mine to claim. I certainly enjoy being indulgent, but I don't consider my ability to gratify myself “life.”

My “natural” rhythm is to criticize. It's sometimes as if it's almost impossible for me to regard something positively, even the things I like. I can't just like a TV show. I need to comment on the vapid extravagance of the industry which sends terrible messages about how we should conceive of ourselves. I can't genuinely cheer for a sports team because I'm thinking about branding, money, exploitation, ignored hurt players, and how unlikely it is for “your area's team” to be from your area.

I can't even leave alone concepts like “communication.” It's not enough that news is simple non-reporting, but they're also not reporting in the dumbest kind of ways. I hate that I can ask, what I think are straight forward questions like, “do we really need ultra HD 4G curved TVs?” Only to be met with the question, “What? Do you think that technology should just stop progressing?” Oh, I see now, loud and clear. I simply should have never opened my mouth.

As I said, the things I like to do aren't safe. I reach a certain level of competence or mastery and then proceed to lose interest. I reduce my “talents” to an equation. They're an inevitable conclusion of good habits over time. It's easy for feelings of hopeless or futility to kick in when you see how industries are programmed, like music, and what they pump out very independent of ideas like “time,” “work,” or “innovation.” 8 hours a day to get fast fingers or perfect micro twitches doesn't stack up to a recycled beat and auto tune.

Take my struggle with the idea of friends. To start from a point of thinking of people as sheep first and in terms of utility, to switching into trying “respect” or dignifying their humanity is a hard transition. It sounds egotistical, naïve, and petty, but it worked and is a “stuck” point that is a constant hurdle to be aware of. It doesn't help to watch very obvious and foreseeable mistakes unravel over years because “live and let live” in the name of “friendship” trumped what I might have played otherwise. BUT THEY'RE MY MISTAKES TO MAKE NICK! Sure, but then I'm confused how we're friends and not just spectators to our various train wrecks lol.

And it's because I often think, how am I to respect “them” when it's clichés, unnecessary drama, and sometimes the worst displays of some level of denial or fear that I could imagine. I understand we're all conditional, but most of us seem to go out of our way to fit in to a lot of bullshit. I feel like the only person who could have less of a feeling of “you” than me at that point, is you. Let's give one more shout out to the things you'd never think to do or say unless you're drunk, which is incidentally corrupted as well given that mid-20s is now perceived as too old. To be broke, lonely, and stressed is adult and responsible, after all. Especially if you have a job, partner, and plan.

It's important to note, I don't feel labored or stressed. I don't have to go out of my way to see problems. I don't have to devote any real brain power or do work. I think of it like actually listening to your elders, philosophers, and scientists and attempting to change or live accordingly. I'm super keen on not making exceedingly predictable mistakes. Often that comes hand in hand with being mindful of how many sucky things can result in a different outcome than you're looking for.

It's around here that the dramatic irony kicks in. You don't have to engage with or agree with my assessment of life. You, I'm assuming, love what you do! And often, you'd advise me to run along and find my own thing as well. The, aha! moment. The secret is to ignore everything and everyone around you while maintaining the ability to appreciate and understand all the choices the world has to offer. Take life for granted the same way you take love.

I listened to an interesting Tim Ferris podcast about figuring out what it is only you can do. These guys with 20-40 years on me talking about transforming their lives and pursuing the next project. The money comes and goes. The ideas manifest almost at random. If we leave aside “being this kind of person to these people”-esc examples, my thing just seems to be writing. It's using my voice my way. Only I can talk like me, even if there's a lot of people saying exactly the same things I think about. Most of what else I think I do well, or can do well, are to me, common sense. And even in writing, it's just to help me move on to shitting on the next thing.

I think it's that my sense of self is inextricably tied to so many things I fix or avoid personally that we can't grasp at large socially. Maybe I just want more people to be like me. ;-)

[372] Bang On The Drum All Day (Don't Wanna Work)

I can't tell if my headache is from too much on my mind or from eye strain, so if you see this, it means I didn't write several pages only to immediately delete it.

I keep thinking about the nature and utility of work. As the articles I've recently been reading keep reminding me, work has meant a great many things to many people depending on how it was marketed. The 8 hour work day was considered a step up. As early as the 10's to 20's one economist notes a shirt that campaigned for the 4 hour work day. Work is said to create "value" in that it contributes to the motor of society. It allows you to buy things and keep up with the Jones's. It allows you to provide for your family.

As the same piece pointed out, work is also about caring for people. Nurturing children or taking care of the sick aren't necessarily backbreaking, but arguably, no less mentally intense or laborious. We consider academic work pivotal to protecting and growing our databases of knowledge and to further technology. We respect artists and musicians who perform at levels so high if they were making mistakes the entire time, they'd be lucky to be in the same room with someone who could point it out.

But work is changing. Gone are the industrial jobs thanks to globalization. If you can get a car made by a machine, or modern day slave, you're not going to pay union worker. This article I read about lawyers losing out to new technology that can sort through and refer legal precedent in seconds as opposed to taking weeks with a team of associates. Soon our phones will be predicting when we're at risk for diabetes or blood diseases. While it will be a "slow" transition, so to speak, in the midst of an outcry about "jobs jobs jobs, we need to create more jobs!" It seems we don't really have a plan for what those jobs may look like, if they're worthwhile, or whether people will be capable of doing them.

What happens when McDonald's goes fully automated? There's one guy in charge to maybe restock the buns assuming there isn't some great technical leap that allows delivery trucks to automatically unload and stock. What happens when big box stores realize that aisles and aisles of clothes no one is wearing aren't worth the price of rent and the number of "service jobs" starts to plummet?

I'm more concerned with what we think of ourselves. I'm of the view that certain things should be considered "rights." Things like eating, having a place to stay, an education, or maybe the right to a fucking planet... etc. This especially because we have an overabundance that's poorly allocated. What happens when you don't need to work to eat? What happens when you can choose to interface with any subject, or perhaps physically plug into a computer with nano brain bots? Given how many people hate their jobs, I don't think it will be all that bad of a thing. It's the transition that's a problem. It's the poorly understood road to getting there that will make the future bleak regardless of what we've made available.

I think about this in the context of what I'm doing with my time. I don't give two shits about coffee, but rich people buy it. I've worked hard. I've played by the rules. I maintain my propensity to read things until I go cross-eyed despite my many attempts to shut off from the world. I'm one of the few "entitled" millennials who really does think he's done enough and should be seeing some form of dividends paying out for his effort. This in no way is an attempt to diminish the help I've had or to try and mock up my effort or work against someone else's. My dad's an iron worker after all. I haven't nearly died to take care of anyone. But, he didn't want me or my brother to have to be iron workers.

For as long-term as a lot of the problems we face as a country or, as I tend to go with, species, I think none more lasting than the impact of how we discuss and understand our circumstances. I've done such a good job with my language I get away with acting in seemingly sheer contradiction, at least for a time, with less angst ridden emotional scenes than I may let on. Also, I'm not even positive how much of it is "stuck" as a conversation amongst the masses while the general business as usual remains just that. I can be sure, it'll be a dumb conversation regardless, where I'll play the cynic messing with everyone's good vibes.

It's just that, I find myself sounding defeated about everything I do. "Was dinner fun?" Eh, we ate. "How was the pool?" The water was wet, cold, and we got kicked out of the first warmer wet bowl of water. "How's the van?" Paid for. The work I could do, can do, or contribute towards kind of means nothing outside of a lofty dream way down the line. And circumstances that I fully appreciate are well-beyond my control could dictate whether or not I'm ever able to even get realistically started on that goal. It's almost too sobering. For all my enthusiasm, effort, budgeting, and lack of sleep, I still feel the long dick of Simon Property Management and that lying bitch Terry fucking my will to keep trying. It's not even that it's hard, it's that it's stupid, petty, and you feel like you're shitting on yourself daily by playing along.

From my profile, way back when I read The Fountainhead:

"If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted---I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them---just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept."

The "adult" professional world certainly doesn't give a shit about you. Whether you learn that by trying to pay back debt with your degree in hand and minimum wage job, or in your future and health being squandered. What is the work for? What is the struggle about? You know you're not creating value. There's nothing valuable by rushing people's hot drinks to their desk. Not with the backdrop of what's going on at least. If the 1% employs us all to dust their furniture, will we be happier? Will it feel like we're existing for any sort of point or helping anything?

This is part of the reason the haunting silence is so hard to deal with. I don't want you to get unduly excited about something stupid because it's the only thing you've "really" done in months. I don't want you to have a positive outlook about something that's...even...at best. Every time it happens it just reinforces that status quo. It gives the green light for someone next to you to accept their circumstances or meekly justify their existence. Arguably, I don't want you to get as bad as me, but I digress... It's just sad that we can collectively get behind wiping out other nations, but not empowering people to be caregivers of each other.

It's just weird to think that people envy the idea of living at the beach and maybe being stoned all day. I've been on a proverbial beach for a really long time, and maybe I just fuck it up by reading all the time, but it really just leaves you with too much time to reflect. My "work" reduced to finding distractions until people get off work or the weekend hits. But who's going to blame me? I'm going to limp into getting the van going, because, even with everything paid for, nothing is ever fully paid for. (ooo cryptic) All the while dipping into money that could reliably pay my bills for the next 7 months. If you had your rent paid for the next 7 months, where are you spending that money so that's no longer true? For me, it's paying kids to advertise.

I guess I'm as decompressed as I'm going to get right now. What a shitty ending lol.

[371] We Don't Care

“We don't care” seems to cover the hundreds of different “bad things” I could point to that undermine any hope I have for the future. Professor X believes we need to believe in and ignite the hope that can forever invigorate the human spirit. Of course, when that hope leads to the end of most life on the planet, he gets to go back in time and try something else.

VICE is always a huge impact on my thoughts. It's just the worst examples we as a species set in life and how explicitly bad we are at even admitting to them, let alone pretending to fix them. “Mini” disasters all over the globe that span across every level of humanity. In some regard, to even report on these issues, and to feel an empathetic sickness in watching it, we're stuck “caring.” But, what it seems to do for me more is justify a very George Carlin-esc fuck it all it doesn't matter kind of sense.

We pretend radiation isn't a thing. We pretend we have more than one planet. We pretend that cultures are equal morally. We pretend to care about sacrifice or health. We pretend to care about war. We pretend to care about kids getting educated or honesty in reporting. We pretend to be outraged by scandals and racism.

Of course, when I say “we,” I mean progressive moral elites, and from my small window of the U.S. Bill Maher recently stated that you can't really be upset that someone didn't evolve on the same moral time line in the way you have. If they want to be racist or homophobic, that's just their opinion you have to choke down if you believe in free speech. We slut-shame people like that by every once in a while fining them or giving them a bad name in the press. We write about their toxic influence on modernity in books they'll never read. We mock them on shows they don't watch. We pretend that it's a worthwhile opinion nonetheless because we refuse the factual fuck-ups they're allowed to make in service to that opinion.

And it's because we don't care. We have our own lives. We need to take care of our kids. We need to stimulate our expansive and impressive knowledge banks. I'm not on the shores of where the next super storm hits because of course, I already knew that when you fuck with the planet it fucks back. They kind of got what they deserved. The VA can't get through records? Haven't you heard how abysmally wrong war is? What do I care if you blew your legs off and now struggle to get help for PTSD? What are you, an idiot? Shit blows up over there! Or did you hear the ocean is running out of fish? Ahh, I never liked sushi anyway and I have big plans for my porch garden.

I can't imagine what other kind of internal dialogue these people could be having. If it was “I need to learn more about this to enact change” you might see all of their hard work and reporting translating into something changing. You can literally find any kind of “just as correct” article arguing on behalf of compelling and creating leaders as you can find “everyone do something small.” No one knows. They can't know, so they can't care. And what they can know, only serves to justify how much more “reasonable” they'd be in not caring.

I was recently told to “let it go” when relating my experience with wasting time and money in school to a friend who'd asked. This came from a drunk older woman kind of under her breath as we were at a wedding table. This sentiment always seems to be the champion idea of people I find most hopeless. If I was broken down crying and pounding the table because of what transpired during school, I could see for a second what she might be speaking to. But even recalling and explaining something that happened, to someone that asked, was regarded as the opportune moment to be old-titty-slapped-with-wisdom about what I should no longer consider a problem.

But her's seems like the popular sentiment. It doesn't really matter what it is, eventually people find it “wise” to say and behave like it doesn't matter. Now, I'm all for existential crisis discussions, but I'm not for this kind of hopeless and dismissive sort of “fuck you” to a legitimate concern that, regardless of your opinion of it, had and continues to have consequences. She has a kid ushering the wedding after all, who I'm sure she wants to waste money on and hear about how his degree and time meant nothing.

Surely we learn to alleviate systemic problems and develop better ways to talk about things we choose to be collective amnesiacs about...right? What were we even talking about? Meh, it doesn't matter.

We're saved and condemned by how stupid we are. We can write off genuine potentially life-ending problems as mere accounting errors. Then, we're dumb enough to convince ourselves that things will be okay. Then, we develop entire philosophies and institutions to sometimes even physically condition us to never think differently! We'll sing and dance as we circle the drain, and no one will be the wiser, if we have anything to say about it.

You can justify putting out a shitty product because of “market forces and profit.” You can justify killing people, for any reason, because of “sand niggers,” or wait, I think we still keep it polite and roll to “Islamist extremists” and threats to “freedom.” You can justify throwing endless amounts of money at something you want to change if only to come to the lucid realization that “it's all about PR after all!” For good measure, why not justify a habit of denial and contradiction because “those beliefs bring them comfort!”

Did you know I read a book once on the difference between Sunni and Shia? Don't ask me to define it this precise moment, but dammit, I was so much smarter than the simple war mongers in the White House. At least for a day or two. Oh the attitude that the intellectuals or technology can save us anymore than the screaming lunatics. What undermines them all is a bad theory of human possibilities. Well, bad in that it probably doesn't genuinely assume most of us will have to die off before we see any “major leaps forward.”

“There are only 2 things you can do wrong on the path to truth, not starting, and not following it until the end.”

The truth, as far as it seems to me right now, is that little points of triumph and pride don't outweigh the amount of horrible things happening every second of every day. “We the people” aren't that. We're a bunch of animals running wild. Often, it seems, we have to be extremely lucky to even get people in our own goddamn families that care about us in any real, let alone constructive, way. We don't do things until we're forced. Until we feel threatened right to our faces. We talk about the brink, we calculate the destruction, we'll always plunge right over the cliff.

I need to find a way to brace for impact, or, you know, “just let it go.”