[1169] Chugga Chugga

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel satiated in reflecting on the dumpster fire that is my country, but in the meantime, the thoughts continue to flow.

I see a lot of parallels in my daily life map onto the broader culture. I’m someone who pursued his dreams. I did so while engaged in conversations with people who never intended to, but said otherwise. When my friend group got drunk together in college and talked about trying to build off grid or how we would respond to an economy that was not hiring nor paying adequately, I saved the money to buy the land. I didn’t know how much I was taking for granted, for years, as I entertained the idea of a future where we would work together, stay close, and certainly drink less, but keep the good times rolling.

The first thing I took for granted was that people meant what they said. I’ve often maintained something of an outsider status, usually as an outgrowth of my “blunt” assessments, comments, or expressively shared perspective. I genuinely thought I had a tribe for the first time in my life. I thought, “Oh, this is how normal people get together and accomplish things or support each other.” I thought what made us friends initially, kept us partying together each weekend, or what ensured it was cool to wander between our houses or apartments without knocking was robust and reliable.

I don’t know that there was any way to really grasp how far down a “words don’t mean anything” rabbit hole we existed at culturally during that time. My cohort discovered and was bored by 4chan by sophomore year. There’s no way to measure the amount of insincere detached irony that I suspect must have glazed everything. Sophomore year was the first year we were introduced to Sarah Palin, who I’ve always considered a harbinger of doom and too-telling about the nature of the country.

As relationships got strained, and the frequency with which you had to prevent yourself from gagging when someone said “adulting” increased, it became easier to feel how things were breaking down. Each event or invitation was either sparsely attended or turned down. “Secret” conversations and resentments built up. “Real life” was kicking in, I guess, and all of the workshopping and noticing during college resulted in unnecessary suffering of the ongoing consequences. Most people found under-skilled roles, rented overpriced places, used pets as surrogate children, and stopped even pretending to care about what you were up to.

I’ve listened to my dad talk about his sense of community growing up in the harbor and East Chicago. Neighbors helped each other and talked all the time. My grandparents supported single mothers, sent the kids to do chores, and bonded through the church. I’ll listen to older comedians and actors allude to their upbringings that ring similar bells of community, consistency, and support. It seems that anyone who’s gotten somewhere appreciable had a village.

Almost everyone my age that I knew had divorced parents. Almost everyone was tens of thousands in debt in order to go to school. Almost everyone waited until their 30s to have kids.

Let’s not skimp on parallels. There’s a reticence to actually solve problems. When you have an issue with someone, gossip, don’t bring it to them. Don’t weigh evidence. Go to the extremes of your emotion, assume, and carry on in self-righteous indignation for the bogeyman you’ve built.

I witness a “silent majority” all the time. It’s a majority of people who are too afraid to unionize. It’s a majority who throw up their arms and say “it is what it is.” It’s a majority who are literally silent upon every invitation to share their actual truth about how someone or something is hurting them. The majority believes in the performance. The majority wants to “help,” by virtue of saying, no, seriously, just how much they really really do. We are fundamentally not accountable, dishonest, and in denial about how much we hate and aren’t helping - at all.

I’ve talked endlessly about how many things I hate. I don’t do it blindly. I pick hate for things I think are worthy of hate. “Hate” is an approximate word and sensibility that combines a lot of negativity towards things that destroy my sense of self, ownership, potential, and dignity. I hate getting paid so little. I hate when people who profess to be friendly or truthful disappear or tear me down and take advantage. I hate excuses. I hate people who will, always and forever without irony, use demonstrably untrue and ignorant examples in their dance to justify their own hatred. That is, I don’t need to pretend or make anything up about the things I would point to to hate.

I live in one of the shittiest states, Indiana. I’ve watched them close schools and healthcare options. I’ve watched hundreds of clients who need life-saving care get neglected and saddled with impossible scenario after impossible scenario year after year. There’s “jokes” about how polluted The White River is. Our “senator” was part of the fascist coup and just became governor. We have incredibly shitty roads, almost no public transportation, were the poster-children for meth (although, so many states compete for that title), we’re a right-to-work state, we have the attorney general who wanted to criminally pursue the doctor who helped abort for the raped little girl who came from Ohio.

I submit that any and all horror stories going forward are blips in the sea of the poisoned ocean of our cultural zeitgeist. We don’t get better until we actually get better, or enough of us die that something new can grow. The ambivalence is also a symptom. The fact that you can say, proudly, always so proudly, that your vote doesn’t matter, that you don’t care, or that it doesn’t concern you tells someone like me that the game was over long ago. There is no “persuadable” battle because you’ve converted into a religious hopeless ideologue. You preach a certain gospel of complicit absurdity.

Every for-profit healthcare and addiction counseling company does not care about you. They care about keeping your insurance tied to their automatic billing. Thousands and thousands of people will tell you otherwise. You, desperate, lonely, addicted, exhausted, will burst through the doors and testify to how a company like Groups Recover Together “saved your life” by teaching you how to depend on them and Suboxone instead of heroin. You’ll be alive, but will you? You’ll say the things you’re supposed to say, but will they mean anything? How do you “reduce harm” for someone actively on fire where a discussion of water doesn’t exist?

This is the failing of government. Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, NAFTA, Citizen’s United, The Supreme Court capture. The actual solutions to these things have only been flirted with by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and a few members of “The Squad” when they’re not busy apologizing for religious zealotry. You don’t combat the proud seizing of power by “debate” and “negotiation.” The Nazis and the Japanese needed to be bombed into oblivion at the time. You are currently up next to suffer similarly if you refuse to understand why.

When you’re “fighting for $15” when the wage should be $25, you’re a fucking moron. When you’re wallowing in despair, instead you should be organizing a learn-party who tries to grasp what it means to be at the mercy of religious conviction that would march for 50 years until it could overturn Roe v. Wade. When you feel yourself getting smug and dismissive, it’s your first clue you’re missing a piece of the perspective puzzle that will unlock a way to meaningfully change something in a better direction.

I’m as annoyed by If Books Could Kill’s treatment of Sam Harris and Steven Pinker as I am Peter Boghossian of caricatured leftists. I think Bill Maher cozying up to hateful ignorance has the same downstream effect as Tony Hinchcliffe and Andrew Schulz normalizing the facade of “we’re all friends here” and “both sides.” We all pretend we’re as rich and famous as these people who will, in no way, suffer the reality of the decisions. You think the vast majority of celebrities and “intellectuals” weren’t the first ones out of Europe as war loomed?

We’re not all friends. It’s not what we should be normalizing. We don’t all have the same standards, or any standard at all. You’re not speaking to who you think and they don’t understand what it takes to preserve and protect and celebrate. The disconnect is as real and wide as it could possibly get. We’re in a sea of fanatics with their own isolationist infantile grasp of the playing field. Even if they’ll never choose to accept or understand that, they’re all smug. They’re all proud. They’re all hyperbolic in their language. You can adopt the heuristic that remains extremely skeptical and on guard when you meet people who are performing that act.

I don’t know how much has to die. It certainly feels like so much, but perhaps it’s not too much. Perhaps it’s just a necessary conclusion on the road of infinite revolutions. Maybe the water needs to be so poisoned the only ones who live will be those who choose an AI-generated inoculator. Maybe a third of the population needs to grow up in their parent’s basement, sexless, tiki-torched and decked out in camo before you’ll discover how to fire back. Maybe your best friend or sister has to die during perfectly preventable pregnancy complications. I don’t think any of it will work to clue you in, because it’s not about any given perfectly foreseeable atrocity. It’s about you, and you’re perfect just the way you are.

[1089] Tell Me That You're All Right

I'm hit with an idea, so let's see if there's anything there.

The thought was "Already Home Syndrome." When you engage people's pathological communication online, when you dive into particular social or political contexts, or if you just consider your individual family dynamics, the context has the same "form." It's a form manifested of feelings and expectations. You're "already home" and it's not clear how often you're able or willing to leave.

I flit about reddit. Recently, I attempted to contribute more responses to the /r/self page where 20-something lonely fat women and 20-something poor suicidal men talk about how hopeless their lives are in reddit-appropriate speak. This means "tl/dr" and infinite qualifiers so they don't sound "too whatever" that might elicit a wave of backlash. I discovered very quickly it's, like everything else, incredibly insincere.

I'm as sympathetic to the need or desire to bitch and moan as you can be. What I'm not, and never have been, is looking for sympathy and validation in spite of my shitty perspective and behavior. I've always wanted to try and better understand what felt like incomprehensible thing or behavior example after example. What "people" do is use their words to assert justifications and side-step the conversation about how they can be more accountable.

You can go to reddit and find immediately a paragraph describing "how fucked up my life is," and with almost no effort, each line will testify to glaring gaps in perspective, show a lack of appreciation, or build who is to blame into the conclusion. The more I've observed this, the easier it's become to detach and try to study it. It's incredibly human. Scaled up you get these flame wars politically. We make it noble and build it into religions. There's always always always a scapegoat. And you're mean or rude if you even suggest the problem is you.

We habitually fail to entertain the idea of context and history. When you're caught in a reddit dogpile of people's internal "yikes" sentiments regarding your replies or posture, it takes the opposite of effort to criticize a caricature of you, feel great doing it, and get validation from the errant barking. Say someone comes on to complain about their relationship. They aren't there looking for strategies to healthily navigate their dynamic. They're soliciting hundreds of votes in service to a new, more comprehensive, placating narrative to explain and excuse away the behavior.

Do you have any idea how many people are comfortable claiming their husband or boyfriend is "addicted to porn" before they'll entertain the simpler notion that guys will continue to find other women attractive, or even more attracted to others than them? They don't want to talk about other cracks or flags in their dynamic that would suggest a bad or dwindling relationship. They want the problem located in something seemingly external or slightly foreign to their experience like some kind of invader to an otherwise perfect picture.

I never thought I'd come to understand people who've learned just to not talk or share anything with anyone ever. I complain and excoriate how silent most people are on many issues I care about, but that comes from high, perhaps unreasonable, expectations of people I like to believe I've been witness to their better capacities. I don't want to hear from everyone all the time on everything. What I've learned, again the hard way, as that even when you come in patient, deliberate, informed and you got the lived experience and honed instinct, you're just asking to have it thrown back in your face. I've never raised a teenager, but I suspect it's close to the same thing.

With my ex, it didn't matter how patient I was, how long the conversation went on, what words I chose, what project I agreed to help with or pay for, how much time went by, what rules I asked her to follow so we could stay friendly and communicating…at the end of the day something was driving her emotionality, reactivity, and judgment that had nothing to do with me. It didn't, and I'm inclined to believe, still doesn't, see me or my perspective at all. By context-specific default, I have nothing to offer her or I have to be extremely cautious and conscious of what I am or am no longer willing to contribute to the dynamic.

So it goes for all of us in all of the contexts we share. Is it even worth making the same kind of appeals you have to the people in your life who've proven themselves intransigent? They're already home, and you're telling them to make renovations they think are ugly, move to a state they don't like, or keep the best (only slightly abusive) dick they've ever gotten out of their spare bedroom? You're crazy.

Reddit is a specific context. You're expected to conform to the horrible way people communicate on that platform. Spits and stutters and presumptive assumptions that validate feelings. It's longform Twitter with micro megalomaniacs policing speech more fervently than any authoritarian. And it teaches you to conform or not exist within its context at all. Then these people step out into the world and try to make it conform to the same online rules. I consider it literal fuel for fascist thinking.

Your "porn addicted husband" never gets a say. No book or researcher or statistic exists in these environments. The concept of "personal responsibility" doesn't take shape at all, and if it's remotely alluded to, baked into the newspeak connotation is an accusation and enemy you'll be shamed for not reflexively condemning! That is, you're only personally responsible, in crazy town Twitter world, if you adopt my catphrase, deplatform "violent" words, and encourage I emote in whatever direction and to whatever degree I see fit. Anything less, you're kicked out of the house.

This gets so complex because it gets conflated with "setting appropriate boundaries" or "communicating healthy needs and expectations." The key to these discussions being coherent and productive is respect for evidence and shared conceptions of reality. Otherwise it's a competition between gaslighting and ignorant narratives.

When my ex and I were arguing, if I bled her funds dry, withheld my tools and time, verbally berated her and picked at her self esteem, beat her up, threatened her stuff or cat, sabotaged her effort in the garden, spoke ill of her to friends, or did any of the shit I hear people do in their "normal" relationships, you'd have evidence to rightfully assert I'm the problem. If you don't have that attitude about your own behavior with regard to any topic, especially ones that piss you off or scare you, you're probably not doing what you're doing in a healthy or appropriate way. If you're looking for validation from strangers on reddit, you're definitely not doing what you need to be doing lol.

That we're so dispositionally biased to believe whatever it is we currently do is why so much is shit. There's an incredible amount of heinous shit built into our normative behavior and presumptive "value systems." You don't get millions for Trump, or Palin, or Putin, or Hamas in a world that fundamentally "makes sense." You don't suffer indefinitely under completely avoidable poverty without some powerful persuasive compulsions to protect greedy impulses. It's not abstract. Your husband isn't addicted to porn. You're not in a fanciful romantic love story where everyone is happy in the end after an hour and a half of animated wish-fulfillment and expectations built into you from childhood. Without irony, they scream, "Fuck your feelings!"

We're not humble. We're not curious. We don't volunteer for the necessary pain that draws out our best conceptions and potential realities we long for. We're just whiners. We're feeling more and more entitled to whine. We think, "Well that's how all the rich white privileged people won, so now it's our turn!" No. There have always been people willing to exploit and capitalize on their proximity to power or access. It's a historical fluke and your deliberate framing of the oppressor and oppressed to service your version of victimhood. It really is the same mechanism at different scales and contexts.

Don't you know men are x, y, and z therefore…

Can't you see how woke or privilege has…

He thinks…! Bitch, you don't know what he thinks, he barely knows what he thinks, and worse, you're both probably not even interested in finding the truth together. If you can get him to agree that you've remotely captured what he thinks, I'll start listening to you.

It feels like someone screaming, "I didn't ask to be born!" Sure. That's absolutely true. What do you think you're saying with that statement? How many concurrent ways can you imply you'd rather be dead before we move on and recognize you're saying it to justify behaving in a shitty way? A child who does that we might think of as "just following orders" from their developing lacking-in-control systems. A culture that builds on that propensity and protects and refines it we might think of as fucked up, sick, and doomed.

My brain's been echoing the "You make people feel small" accusation from my ex-coworker. I had a session with a new client a couple days ago in which I started in talking about "fight or flight." She didn't know what I was referring to. When I explained it, she said she understood and thanked me. I'm already home in my go-to proven sentiments that have helped people in the past or helped me better conceptualize myself. I struggle to think of a more ubiquitous and common piece of knowledge than "fight or flight," but here we had someone who didn't know it. I don't consider her dumb, ignorant, or "small" nor had an impulse to criticise. It shouldn't be controversial or read as some kind of unfair judgment or priviledge if we recognize the disparity in what information we have and how we're using it to address our relative issues.

It's just factually correct that we barely know anything about anything. That's as quick a test as you can offer someone to determine whether or not they're really worth spending your time on. Do they recognize their own ignorance? Can they entertain gaps in their knowledge? If that answer is no, ever, for yourself or about others, you might as well just make squawking noises back and forth. You're ideologically possessed. You're contributing to our seemingly inevitable collective cultural downfall. Your house is on fire, and you need to move.

[1005] Hush Hush, Eye To Eye

I’ve just completed an old episode of Vice Investigates where the founder of #metoo says, “Once you shine a light on something, you can’t unsee it.”

I work as a counselor. I habitually prompt people to, in their own words, start explicating things in their lives that are routinely under-illuminated. We might talk about how you constantly interrupt your spouse. What, precisely, any given person “sees” during or after that discussion is seemingly a large contributor as to why they can or can’t be bothered to change their behavior.

The boring, yet universal and infinitely impactful, truth about whatever it is you think is in the spotlight is that it is incomplete and perhaps wholly unknowable in a manner that will be emotionally salient. One person interviewed about her…4 years of discomfort…working for a restaurant owner had her explicitly state that it was unfortunate that he just couldn’t disappear and there was nothing in her imagination that would speak to forgiveness. Do you think she really sees the locus of her discomfort if it’s localized so viscerally in him?

It’s human nature to turn whatever we shine a light on into a fairy tale that helps us sleep at night. It’s just as much in our nature to turn the story into a nightmare. I’ve tried to spend less time bemoaning my experiences, negative as they register and perpetually uncomfortable, as though they’re only and forever my most damning indictments of how ambivalent and fucked life is. I invite layers of discomfort into my experience, be it in people who are miserable communicators, activities with endless questions I never quite find great answers to, or jumps into roles and responsibilities that no one beyond my ambition is asking me to take - if you don’t count the imploring screams of negligence.

Part of me is incredibly angry at people who allow themselves to be victimized by themselves. I’m not criticizing mental health or where you might be on your journey through trauma. But I’m incredibly put-off and almost insulted on behalf of every…child whose died via something preventable? Victim of a genocide? Anyone who’s ceaselessly punished for their existence, yet manages to dictate for themselves why they stay alive? People experience all sorts of crazy traumatizing things, big and small, and with some regularity. Creepy managers or crude commentary are not the bar to hang yourself over. It feels gross, entitled, and pretentious.

I’m absolutely fascinated that it has seemed to take years for us to culturally digest the idea that masculinity is not “toxic” by default. We are still reckoning with “competitions” between some of the dumbest and craziest people on the planet getting the keys to power. And we haven’t quite connected just how aggressively we attacked the foundation of how humanity rose in evolution through it’s interplay and connected dynamic. We’ve threatened something wholly foundational so aggressively we’re literally willing to forgo all semblance of reason to destroy the prospect of solving problems in a democratic way.

It’s the attitude. It’s the lack of expectations or end game. It’s not the “best” or “smartest” people who beat the addiction to their own bullshit. It’s people who keep their light trained on the next logical step for them to improve how they feel. When you’re entitled to your feelings and aggressively asserting the impact of “harm,” there is no indication that you have anything to contribute or anything to change. You just chant until the trance takes hold and carries you past any checks or balances.

I suppose after enough attempts to succeed at difficult things, whilst simultaneously watching dozens of failures every week, I see two dramatically different habits and patterns that distinguish people. Do you know how many times I’ve been “too busy” to do anything I want? I haven’t been. It’s a shitty excuse. I read about people who are actually busy doing huge things who still cut out time for their mental health. You, resident of Bedford, have the time. Do you know who gets all caught up in their feelings to the point it threatens not only their life, but of the people they care most about? People who tell you, automatically, every time, “I’m fine.” They lie, often, always, until they die.

We should be asking ourselves how many lies does it take to create the story that allows me to live with myself? Do I have to say I’m prettier than I am? Do I have to say I love my family until I’m blue in the face? Do I have to overlook a list of red flags about my partner that’s longer than any I’ve written for groceries? Could I recognize how dumb I was even if I asked the question? Can I reckon with my lonliness? Are my daily affirmations not juicing me like they used to? Did I live up to even 2% of what I imagined for my future as I was growing up?

We are a violent, ignorant, incredibly lucky species, and we carry on as though we’re all just trading answer keys to different tests. We are all trash, sniffing farts, and looking for the next excuse to crack the facade, en masse, so we don’t have to personally feel responsible for our behavior. Is my culture sick? Who cares, it lets me get away with countless lies about the state of my country, town, or capacity to change anything. I don’t need to shine a light on the gratifying feeling, in fact, it makes me shine so bright, it’s curious how many people can’t seem to see me. Even as I smear shit on walls, attempt to instantiate fascism, or couch my existence in an endless stream of infotainment memes.

You know I want a lot of money so I can run, right? I want backup plans. I want secured locations. I want to make my feeble attempts to build a better culture from somewhere safe. I’m trying to pull out. I’m trying to manage. I don’t have a living memory of feeling like I’m surrounded by adults who are in charge. I was in 6th and 7th grade when Bush was elected and found myself utterly confused that such a fuckwit could be put in charge, then teabaggers and Sarah Palin happened and it’s felt like the proverbial death by a thousand cuts right up until today.

I’m a victim too. I can still access incredibly low and dark spaces when I reflect on the examples that were set, on me, as to how to deal with innocence, ignorance, and vulnerability. Except, every time I shine a light on what’s happened to me or remind myself what I’m capable of, I also acknowledge the choice. Do I repeat the story to myself and make the feelings get more intense? Do I find myself trying to justify a lack of remorse and moves to exploit? Do I choose what I feel to be the wrong thing because it will be briefly gratifying? That’s what happened during my blow-up fight with my ex. I chose to chuck garbage cans, and yell and scream, and fuck her up mentally because she did not expect me to throw her the fuck out, and I knew calling that bluff would hurt as bad or worse than she had been making me feel.

Should I stay smug and entitled to how I felt leading up to that? During? What if I noticed I started taking pride in it? I’d be fucking sick. I would need guidance. I would need someone to hold me accountable if I was unable to do so for myself. I don’t want my amplified feelings dictating the rules. I don’t want the story of our dynamic to be of the inoperable discomfort where I’d start wishing she disappeared and that I’d never bothered. But this is what we’re currently doing, like, wholly trying to burn everything down and pretend we don’t exist in a larger context with greater ideals or hopes and prospects to do better. We don’t expect anything, let alone something remotely positive, to come from the larger experiment. And the day-to-day civility feels fragile and insincere.

I get criticized routinely for what I would describe as having standards. I need you looking forward. I need you to recognize and state what you need and share it honestly. I need you to incorporate perspectives that don’t agree with yours. I need you paying attention and trying. I need these things selfishly. I need to exist around people who are demonstrating and practicing the things that I must in order to remain oriented and healthy. I can’t be engulfed in your universe if it swirls with shitty excuses and the infinite void is utilized to dodge ever landing on a planet worth terraforming. I need you to say, “Yes, that thing is bad, and here’s what I’m doing about it, or deliberately not doing what would make it worse.”

I have a lot of ideas on how to personally survive in my own little bubble or chosen trajectory. I don’t know what “we” have going for us as wholly dependent on each other as we are. I feel empty and angry when I think about relying on you to speak, vote, work, or do anything but abuse your substance of choice, the narrative that keeps you precisely where you are. I’m hostile to the idea of collaboration. The way the world has trended suggests in my bid for more control or influence, I will court a new disaster in nearly every mind I try to incorporate. The unyielding pulse of existence will press me to seek control over cultivation. Will I be smart enough to devise a way around this? Will I choose a dozen tiny points of corruption until the driving ethos and mission statement transcend mockery? Either way, I’m keeping the light on the choice. Where’s yours pointed?

[979] So There

The last couple days have driven a point about my nature and how I’ve evolved. One of the more depressing and low periods of my life was when I spent the better portion of every day reading. I learned so much about the state of the world, history, philosophy, and cutting-edge science. I knew, down to the technical compounds and structures why solar panels were going to be worth the investment. You could name a country at random, and I probably had 2 or 3 facts about it. I remember being tested on that by Hatsam at Kilroy’s once. Man, was I knowledgeable, and very lonely and sad.

You see, in spite of my $10,000 or more in the bank, relative health, relationship, or concept of the associations I kept, the world was trending in the wrong direction. I felt a kind of duty to pay attention. My blogs are like a time-capsule sometimes depending on what I reference that’s been in the news. The Tea Party and Sarah Palin were big bold letters on the wall for me, and come to think of it, that was even pre time spent way too involved reading.

Often, I’m just tracking negligence. More than there are just so many “bad guys” out there, I recognized pretty quickly that the whole “evil prevails when good does nothing” was an understatement. Somewhere along the way, our concept of good and evil broke. I blame the internet, but I also blame silence. I see more sin in silence than anything. You stay silent long enough and forget that you have an obligation and duty to speak. You practice fear, and you let the definition of things like “evil” or “good” devolve into semantic pissing matches or absurd feeling analysis.

How does this speak to how I’ve evolved? Well, I’ve been spending. I’ve been “buying experiences” as those wise in the ways of the world profess. I’ve been to a concert or comedy show almost every weekend for several months, and have them scheduled through September. Even if I capitalized on a deal and got a lot of them for $25 apiece, they’re all an hour away. Gas ain’t cheap. The comedy shows are a two-item minimum. I’m usually in the city early and grabbing dinner or drinks. And a good portion of the shows were not $25.

One of the last concerts I went to, I mistakenly ordered a bottle of wine I thought was coming as a glass. It was $42. The bar tender, after I spoke to my error, was willing and making moves to sell me the glass. I thanked her and said something like, “I get paid tomorrow, whatever just give me the bottle. I have nothing else to pay for but increasing levels of indulgence. No kids. It’s not going to charity. I just bought some shit on Amazon. If not this, what do I think that money is going to turn into?” I have a fair number of conversations and commentaries around people that go on too long.

I expressed a fairly dismal and fatalistic point. Buying $42 bottles of wine, that I didn’t even want, not really, is the kind of personal faux pas or failure serving as the analogy for displeasure I have with “things” or “life” or my old “friends” at large. When I was working 3 jobs and staying up 20 hours a day, $42 represented maybe a week’s worth of cheap fast food to keep me barely alive enough to keep working. I wasn’t cooking in my “free” time. $42 is less than half a tank of gas in my truck. $42 is somehow way too much, yet incredibly little when your environment is ever-cultivated by a set of indulgences or “refined” and “earned” tastes and privileges.

$42 is not buying me healthcare. It’s not changing the minds of my politicians, local or otherwise. It’s not being spent to treat a friend to dinner. I’m not overindulging my cats who play with Starburst wrappers as enthusiastically as they do bread ties. It’s not building a school in an impoverished area. It’s not being invested in the future of the planet. It’s just there. It’s just mine to “do with as I please” because I’ve ascended to another peak. I can spend a couple thousand, build half a workspace, chill for a while, make the money back, or spend more because I can’t plan to save my life, and the only thing changing is the number and nature of options I give myself for staying entertained or chasing the idea that I’ve learned or achieved something.

I want to believe that $42 is earmarked for something “important” like a vital tool or part of the lessons on some music app I download. I want to think some negative emotion I might conjure about the $42 represents my respect for my past and the work and struggle it has been to achieve this level of stability. $42, in actual time spent and effort, at least this last two weeks, is less than 2 hours I was probably asleep because I’m on salary and have had almost nothing to do. I said in a blog recently I’m not a millionaire feeding $100 bills into a machine. I fed $42 into a wine machine with a guaranteed prize I didn’t want.

The U.S. has been on salary for way too long. My middle-to-upper-middle class friends/associations have been blowing their awareness, obligations, and capacity for real work in $42 increments for…at least since I’ve been writing about and imploring people to speak back or help out. You stay silent with something to say? $42 pissed away. You self-censor and play nice with genuinely oppressive danger and death? 42 regretful dollars not going into something, anything, but this empty pit where some inaccessible and increasingly hard to remember feeling should be.

I’ve worried for a while what might happen to me if I get too comfortable. I’ve had “too much,” yet hopelessly never enough, money for a good portion of my adult life. I’ve only made investments that have enabled that propensity to stretch even further. If I save for a few months and get another $10,000 or $15,000 in the bank, you know what I don’t have to do? Buy land, my shed, my tools, my truck or any of the other pieces and labor it has taken to get me typing from my home verses a couch or rental property. I paid attention to, and believed, the threat of what I was watching back then. I’m not anymore hopeful or with any less examples of how we need to operate and speak now.

Election denial is the standard of conversation. Roe v Wade just got overturned like we’re actually in a dystopian movie. Mind you, it’s just the latest in all of the rights and laws that have been getting attacked for many years, and for those paying attention, like so many Cassandras they go. We haven’t been getting more environmentally friendly, or has the weather felt “normal” to you? Housing and homeless crises are ballooning, you know, a problem that was fixed in the 70s for, I guess about, 30 seconds. You getting paid enough? You think about the next routine errand you’ll be on before staring down an assault weapon?

I’ve been the person habitually last to leave. I would play a videogame with a failing strategy, moving piece by piece until I could crack what I was getting wrong or until I became too physically exhausted to continue. Or, once until my RA came out to make fun of me. I wanted to party until the bar closed. I wanted to have hang-out breakfast sessions the morning after a party. I’ve historically won Risk or poker when everyone else got bored. I stick with bad television series because I started them, and if I know nothing else about it, I can say I saw it and completed it.

My hyper-angsty vigilance occupied that space. I feel like I’ve been trying to talk myself out of it for many years. So what if I knew things about many countries? No one’s talking to me about them. So what if I raise the alarm and hold up and celebrate those who are doing the work and paying attention? No one’s reading or sharing the articles to their circles. So what if I write? I garner likes here and there, but I swing pretty wildly. From barely-coherent entangling of disparate ideas and provocative disquieting sentiments to occasional earnest insight, I’m a mixed bag. No one’s asking me to unpack the unpacking or challenging my analogies or introducing the manner in which I engage with the world to their friends.

I spent $28 on sea food, then $5 on fancy chocolate, before a hilarious show by Stephen Lynch tonight. I spent $12.50 more on McDonald’s on the drive home. The show, in again peak irony, had me sitting next to a drunk, fat (her word, not mine), and screaming often and loudly enough woman that Stephen literally said, “Shhh, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I can’t even hear myself.” When she first sat down, she extended her hand and introduced herself and her friends. She said her husband was just deployed for a year and she was happy to be out. She asked me what my favorite song was and if I was a fan.  She told me she was going to make me her friend even though she’d been annoying me. At that point, I felt compelled to correct her that she hadn’t been annoying me. The silent part was “yet.”

Heedless in indulgence, tactless, classless, but sincerely hurting and very clearly low in self-esteem reaching out to shake my disinterested hand in some mockery of connection. It was a small-enough crowd in an intimate enough venue, and Lynch was so funny, that I ruled out just moving seats further away. It’s unbecoming to pity people, but I feel my embarrassment on her behalf was similar to her friend’s girlfriend also sitting at the table and having none of it.

I almost engaged in a goal-reiteration exercise instead of writing. It’s so fundamental to mental health and behavior-change. But for someone like me, it’s like doing jaw exercises. I’m talking enough, my shit is strong. I know my goals, I pursue my goals, and I put their achievement on display pretty regularly. When I claim to be disoriented, at least along what I want and work on, disorientation is not the word. The only thing I can’t get to align is a preponderance of people working with me on the same things. Be it indulgences, their purported goals, and certainly nothing we’ve conceived together. We can all change our profile pictures to The Handmaid’s Tale, but you’re not going to start listening to the podcasts and reading the books that are telling you of the next Roe v Wade catastrophes now. You didn’t care then, you don’t now, and the handful of naïve and incensed “youth” will get 10% back of what’s been taken away over the last 50 years in 30 years.

I’ve known more than intuitively for several years that I need to escape. We’re not getting better. We’re not “woke” to genuine injustice. We don’t “work” as much as exhaust ourselves in self-pity and ignoble sacrifices. We obscure and blame and wag our fingers and drink gallons of expensive whining. Why didn’t I want to get drunk? There was nothing to celebrate and no one to share it with. I’m extremely thankful for the friends and my dad who’ve shown up and come bowling or to shows. I might have a mini heart-attack the day some insanely informed and coherent article I share gets shared. Maybe when I have the money to pay people to work like I want them to I’ll create a powerful enough engine to turn things in as comprehensive a manner as I need them too. Maybe I just need to run to a part of the world not designed to thrive on greed and zealotry.

I’m only mildly concerned there’s more $42 bottles of wine on my horizon. I don’t want to be attached to the drama of it all anymore. I don’t want self-imposed guilt at carving out what I’ve previously described as excessively selfish spaces for me and mine while things around me burn. I’ve said many times I’m not a martyr, and that includes for any ideas that no longer serve me or prove to result in very little, if any, value. Staying informed and earnestly advocating wins no one. Providing space and leaning hard for time spent watching, laughing, or rocking out garners a touch of connection. When I finally cross over into making absurdist caricatures and ironic virtue-signaling with a hot dance and backing track TikTok videos, I’ll have legions.

If historically we’ve only just now flirted with the idea of liberal democracy, breaking the chains of gilded rulers, and the long arc of history is a myth, and the peasants ruminate in their misery because, to them, it’s psychologically satiating to consider the meat of the rich “unsavory,” what side of the gated-community would you want to be on? I don’t think God’s going to reward me for going down swinging in advocacy, social work, or sense of common decency in spite of the license our cultural ambivalence may grant me. I don’t see statistics suggesting we’re getting better, even with Pinker screaming global trends while ignoring asteroids. I don’t sense that anyone has time, attention, or enthusiasm. I know busy, quiet, psychologically isolated and insecure people, watching, just not too closely.

I posted an article recently talking about quantum mechanical experiments confirming the overlapping “everything is possible” or “simultaneous potential” status of existence until there’s something about consciousness to snap it into focus. The future where I type something other than this sentence literally doesn’t exist until I observe the matter in the computer, my fingers, and my brain arranged that way. It’s not that it can’t exist nor that it’s inevitable that it will or won’t. It’s that I consciously arrange the words, move my fingers, and collapse an infinite series of wave functions into “my” perspective and these words, noises, or connections, instead of every other “thing” they might be. I’ve consistently felt the “mechanistic” arguments and “simple cause and effect” positions lacking, and the science keeps moving in my direction.

Practically. I don’t see what I think needs to exist. I don’t see you collapsing your potential into the tools we need, the words we need, the awareness, investment, risk, and fight. I don’t see the resistance, the rally, nor hear the battle cries. I occasionally see waves of pictures, hashtags, and every few years or so someone will write something from their own perspective, and then immediately apologize for the “rant.” Because who wants to listen to them, right? Not anyone that matters. Not anyone who wants to simply follow their cultivated brand. Not me who’s imploring people weekly for 16 years to say more and try new ways to revolve. Why should they be an authority or have any esteem and pride in what they said?

You’re a bunch of fucking pussies, Americans. You’ve been courting death for so many years you don’t have a memory of the values the country was founded upon. You instinctively respond to challenges with avoidance and denial. You prefer addiction. You prefer to suffer because it’s all you’ve ever known. The punctuated incidences of happiness feel like shame and worthy of suspicion, so you insist on destroying the means by which it might happen again. You “believe what you believe,” and “won’t judge” in an effort to deny being stuck in the most damming and deadly judgment indefinitely. “It” won’t get better because you aren’t.