[866] Bits

 

There's been a lot on my mind the last couple weeks. I almost thought I could write every day for the last one. I figure I'll try to capture the snippets and maybe be done thinking for a while.

My aunt, who the last time I talked to I asked to borrow money so I could handle some coffee shop closure related issues, asked my dad for my information in order to update her will. She decided to do so after my dad told her I'd be taking care of the family gravestones after my dad, who currently does so, dies. My aunt has had 3 husbands, all wealthy, 2 died leaving her everything, and has lived magnitudes of extravagance I could only imagine. She didn't give me the loan, but the idea that I might make her look good in death will get her pocket book to crack. I assume it will be just enough to buy flowers and maybe a solid lunch.

My family, on paper, had an extreme amount going for it. Three men that were my dad and uncles and one aunt born to two steel-working immigrants. All the building I'm doing out here, you'd think we might come together and knock some impressive shit out. All went to school and consistently worked. My grandparents set them, and intended to set their grandchildren up, for comfortable and cared for lives. The richest people in my family are millionaires. The poorest live in a stolen paid-off house, hoard, and refuse to even call repair people to fix things around that house. They stole money that was supposed to come to me. They exist in service to movies and their pet dog.

I couldn't help myself from thinking about some payout when my aunt dies. I consider it a kind of temptation that, for the sake of irrepressible thoughts I'll indulge, but I have nothing invested in getting any luckier. Some key ingredient was missing from the makeup of my family. Whatever my grandparents did to keep things together, perhaps they never really did, completely died when they did. I pretend our annual Cubs game outing with one of my uncles makes up for how fucking shady he is.

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I'm still trudging along in my quest to draw attention to DCS. I'm not getting the kind of feedback I think I'd appreciate. It's no matter, but I can't tell if I'm completely lost in the woods, or maybe new Facebook is taking away attention, or maybe people are exactly as they've always been, mute, with regard to anything that matters. My fliers are printed. I'll be going to The Hill maybe tomorrow or sometime over the weekend. I kinda like the idea of being a lone person standing in the silence. Dignifies it, kinda.

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I have a neighbor who epitomizes the difference between city-folk and country-folk. City-folk would be wholly unknowing that this man has, in his estimation, made hundreds of thousands of dollars across random ventures, but mostly trucking. He's spent all kinds of money on tools and equipment to turn his plot next to mine into a mess of vehicles, sheds-under-construction, and bought an excavator/loader “I really can't afford” but for the thousands he routinely seems to spend each day for projects maybe years away. He's 55 going on death, 3 heart attacks and a host of other health issues. He's rough, grungy, and sincere in his particular track of how he wishes to behave towards people. He keeps regular hired help who he refers to as “Retard Ricky.” It's unclear if Ricky appreciates this moniker.

I'm wary of my neighbor. My gut tells me that if things every go wrong, he's not going to be insanely keen to talking things out without some form of overt contrition. He's let us use his big equipment, and is routinely trying to give us things he doesn't think he'll have a use for. I don't want it to go bad, but these are the kind of entanglements I moved far away to avoid.

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I was thinking about how lucky I am to have been born during the transition from offline to online. My earliest habits aren't shaped by instant gratification and convenience. I appreciate having a working memory. I have the visceral experience of watching “the conversation” get stultified and “woke” as no one had received direction, no one was interested in giving it, save ideologues, and now we have overflowing buckets of anxious and depressed nihilists speaking to each other in memes. To be sure, the generations that failed them are adopting the same habits because they in no way know how to cope with the severity of the irony.

In my brief 32 years, I get to keep watching the same lessons play out as if it's impossible to learn. I wondered whether or not it was really possible to learn a lesson. To some degree, every single human interaction is different, and general rules of thumb might prove catastrophic throwing everything you know into question. I think of James Baldwin asking, “How much time do you want for your “progress?” When are you going to be comfortable enough with yourself and your responsibility to even speak? This is why I choose to have an ongoing “hate-hate” relationship with most people. It's always a constant dance around doing what you should, saying what needs to be said, or representing on behalf of the positive and vital forces that constitute why any of us are here.

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Every day I get a little more done on the land, I swell with pride. I point to my effort in service to my idea and ideals, not mock and cope with endless layers of otherwise oppressive forces. The key is to figure out how you're going to channel all of your obsessive and doubtful energy. I have debts too. Debts that feel less bad than the stress of working at DCS. I have pains and open-ended pursuits that may lead to good things, or may devolve into petty fights. They started in earnest. They started under a philosophy of exploration and options.

My girl has expressed concern that were her mother ever to come out here, she'd turn up her nose at the amount of “negotiations” we have to live like we do. While I know I live like a king, you may find yourself hopelessly lost in a hole of judgment at exposed drywall or extension cords in the rafters. To each there own. I'm fully, warm, and parlaying the expensive aesthetics into more living space, gardening tools, and business speculation.

More to the point, my capacity to recognize my king-like status is informed by the current status of the vast majority of how people live on the planet, knowledge of history, and honest evaluation of what it is I actually need to feel good about how I'm oriented and positioned in the world. I've always hated apartments. I don't want a mortgage.

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I say pretty often that I don't get how people can live “backwards.” I don't understand the appeal of being someone like Trump. I don't get being a sycophant aiding and abetting. I don't get how you think it's “just business” or like some iron law that you can hoard money, steal, and people suffer for no other reason than you're empty power games. When your concept of power is about how much destruction you can cause or attention you can bring to yourself.

I remember being an attention seeking kid. I'm still a fan of attention, but I want it to be for the right reasons. At least, each time I flirt with being the kind of person who could behave differently, it tends to lose its appeal. What's the wiring? Why do I remind myself that I need to build in struggle, I need to remain humbled by how things perpetually go wrong, and I need to cherish each moment, dinner, or laugh because life is short, while others can just take and break and scream, and seemingly live forever in our collective nightmares? Why do I think you have to start with a deep appreciation for how bad you actually are before you can ever approach being appreciably good?

There's no worse thought I have than in believing these people are choosing to behave this way. I didn't see bullies growing up as kids in traumatic households. I didn't see ego for how fragile it was. It wasn't until I started writing did I really grant myself the agency of my decision making and the ongoing consequences. I stopped taking it for granted that just because you reach a certain age important perspectives and valuable modes of being should have soaked into your bones. It seems people get to carry on as louder and louder indictments of their otherwise potentially better selves until they die and bequeath their license to the next one.

[709] Value Shuffle

An exercise I've wanted to do for a while now is to, instead of dig into some nagging in my brain and unpack things as they flow out, actively dismiss things that I haven't chosen for myself and try to see if a different, if not more complete, picture comes from the shooting down. 

 

The idea reinvigorated itself after getting into a very dumb conversation about what representatives do and don't do and whether the government is obligated to listen to its constituency. Seems an odd angle, right? Well the person I was talking to did the most ridiculous thing to me in conversation I've ever experienced. They took what I was saying, adopted it, and argued that it was me all along who had taken up their position. I explicitly dictated, word for word, what they said in opening the “debate,” 10 minutes later, “I didn't say that, that's what you said” with completely zero awareness he had even done so.

 

The conversation was ridiculous for a number of reasons, but what stuck out was a discussion of what and whether we had values. His idea was that your representatives have selfish personal values, indeed values barely if even exist, and they don't align with yours, so they can never stand for you, thus government always fails or is corrupt. This man is going to be a lawyer. My position was that values do indeed exist and that it's important to identify them and hold your representatives accountable so you can in fact see your environment as a reflection of what you actually think.

 

To not get lost in the minutia of what I swear wasn't worth repeating, I stated at one point that the reason I'm not on Wall Street or pursuing money at any and all cost was a direct reflection of my values. In my exercise of shooting things down, the irrational market dictated by insider trading, algorithm, and at the general abuse of law and the poor I feel would be a bad place to really feel like me and set the right kind of example of the kind of person suited to usher humanity into the future.

 

A discussion of values is an inexhaustible one. Things overlap and contradict. They evolve over time. But I frequently wonder if my behavior and ideas about “friendship” reverting to a more basic selfishness are a reflection of the people in my life, at least how I see them online and in their intermittently shoddy behavior in person, speak to me wanting to play the dismissing game of what I don't want to be like. It seems an exercise where a lot of babies will get thrown out with the bathwater, but at the same time, if those babies were best suited for parties and a few outings, out the window may be where they belong.

 

Why do I shit on jobs like mine even before I take them? Why am I kind of angry about the chance to make more money doing less work? Why did I never want to be a middle-manager climbing the ranks to be shuffled around different stores one day? Why am I no humble farm hand, chiseled and calloused with a set of particular skills? If I'm so smart, if I've so many ideas, why did I choose drug studies and unreliable roommate after unreliable roommate instead of something more suitable?

 

First, I think for something to be respectable, it needs to provide me a challenge. “Playing human,” or trading on my tall white male privilege, as some idiots would describe it, is extremely easy. I know I can solve most day to day problems that “regular” people seem to entangle their entire existence with. What's considered a challenge, let alone a worthwhile one, is particular to each person. You have to find a sweet spot where you can actually achieve some end, but not take it for granted. So any job that doesn't feel like a challenge is immediately a garbage job to me. I believe this so strongly, I work garbage jobs, sometimes multiple at once, until they become a challenge that forces me to stop.

 

Second, I'm always looking for things that can amplify “the best.” The vast majority of tasks that exist or that people will pay you for are valuable for a select few. This means that when you exhibit your best, the value generated from it is transferred to someone else. If I'm doing something the best, I want the money for it, I want the extra time to pursue other things, and I want to figure out ways to enable others to get the best out of their effort. How often do you think an opportunity like that exists? Because in my experience, practically never. Now we have a proper challenge, and once complete it will be a shining beacon of what I actually value. Seems a good enough reason to avoid what doesn't seem to speak to that.

 

In practice, the vast majority of jobs that exist I consider “wrong.” It's not that I don't want to make coffee or pick up trash. I just want to be doing it for myself. So if it's not mine, it won't do. And that doesn't mean there aren't people out there who do like me or espouse my values. But it might mean I'm not located anywhere near them to join up, or they have some other baggage I'm not willing to adopt.

 

I think the difference between a society on the brink, and one striving for the future, is one that feels attached and responsible for their work. Not just in doing it or being busy, but in the larger story and ongoing consequences of what they're bringing into existence. It's downright wrong to hamstring people with non-compete agreements or strip people of benefits and make them agree to be fired for any reason at any time. Just because that's “normal” in employment contracts doesn't mean we're setting a respectable stage for future performances. I think people who feel like “wage-slaves” adopt slave ethics that rarely revolt, are too tired to get educated or organized, and worship the scraps of existence.

 

A huge part of why I don't do what you do is because I don't want to sound like you. I don't want work drama always on my lips, as I pretend it's not so bad, and even get angry at you for pointing out how often I'm only talking about work drama. I don't want to romanticize my week vacation a year from now or slip into high-voiced pleasantries as we all probe for how and whether we've changed too much to be cool to hang out with anymore. I don't want my dreams to take a backseat to bills. It can happen while you're not paying attention. One small measure of comfort will consume you, and you'll be shocked to discover that things aren't so bad if you focus on this little happy place. I'll never love a pet enough to take a thousand pictures of it. No matter how good The Cubs play this year, I still don't know a single person on the team.

 

Really, what's your “job” if you're persistently concerned with learning any number of details about some globalized problem, industry, or psychology, and want to create, promote, and organize in ways that address them across societal layers? I don't know, but I do know it'd be a shame to waste what I've learned or insights I've gained playing along with the environment provided. I need a new standard and paradigm. I need people who've cultivated their own and could share or contribute new tools. I want the conversation difficult, the tasks varied, but the problems so explicitly accepted and recorded the path forward tends to show itself along the way. Good luck, you “entrepreneur.”

 

There's a huge and whole discussion about sounding or trying to be “above-it-all” where both the emotional and robotic alike like to wade in and temper what they see as a lonely and out of control ego with an apparent blindness to his general lack of impact so far. It's enough to say, that attempt is misplaced.

 

My struggle is so much less to do with some abstract question regarding who I am or what I should be doing, as much as it is how to get more people involved. I want checks on everything I persistently get wrong. I want a measure of communal understanding, trust, and cooperation. I'd go crazy for 5 people I work with who consistently answered their phones. The problem seems to be the world I'm working in. I need to work in and on it at the same time. I need to make enough money or create enough space without losing my soul, and increasingly, I need to do it on timeframes that have already swallowed up the initial motivation. Now, instead of “friends,” I need to do it for “the people I don't see fucking me for no reason” or perhaps “the youth.”

 

I don't know. This feels especially all over the place and my eyes hurt. Maybe a line will be a baby you don't want to toss.

[628] Cash Me Outside

Now I’m all worked up. I write a nice little diatribe about how much I can’t stand my brother, decide to send it to him, because, other than being antagonistic (you can only antagonize those incapable of introspection), but I don’t really talk shit behind backs and would want to know what people were saying about me. We go back and forth, I get all hot and bothered at the prospect of laying him out like a bitch, now I’m sitting here more excited than annoyed, but contemplating how many horrible relationships I have with people predicated on forcing some dishonest paradigm.

I insist on honesty. If I’m getting too fat, if you think I haven’t noticed, I could stand to have you tell me. If I’ve been stewing in my own sweat for 3 or or 4 days because my car doesn’t have a shower, it’s more okay for you to avoid hugs or pass me a bar a soap. If I’m a horribly antagonist evil degenerate who gets off on making people feel bad, you’re going to be the best gauge of whether or not that is more true or less true. If what I choose to focus and work on is a waste of my potential or too idealistic or some other facet that I’ve proven perfectly blind to seeing, it is your responsibility to help me see it. I’m not saying I won’t argue back, but if anything about me is niggling the back of your head (say, my insistence to use words you disagree with or every single time I move petty) consider it a cry for help.

There are people, in fact it’s most, and this is including friends, where I’ve never had a fight nor issue with. This isn’t because we forced smiles with each other and kept the conversation light. This is either because we’re so self-involved and disinterested in bullshit that it’s a fairly mute possibility, or it’s that we’ve every time chosen to discuss points of possible contention open and honestly and met discord with reason and patience eventually. While I’ve made pains to weed through people and pick the ones I’m willing to experiment with, thus rendering it a majority, this isn’t how life works. Life is uncomfortable forcing it, like at Thanksgiving, or in my life recently, a yearly Cubs game tradition.

I will never not ever applaud you if you’ve just made money. I will never look at you boasting about picking on a homeless man as worthy of my respect. It isn’t the right kind of sacrifice to “choke down” living in Indianapolis verses Chicago. So many times Jordan Peterson alludes to the idea of sorting yourself out, stopping saying things that make you weak, and the truth setting you free. You’re not sorted if the most interesting thing you can say is about nights out partying. You’re not sacrificing, and thus opening new roads to truth, by losing yourself in the details of your preferences. And if the worst things you can think to say about me are straight up lies or horrible misconstructions of your poor capacity to perceive relationships, I don’t need to know anything else about you to want nothing to do with that kind of mental slavery.

I envy those of you who got siblings you can get along with. I envy those of you with parents who both managed to not go insane and make it your problem. More power to you for having aunts and uncles who wouldn’t steal from you. You’re living a kind of truth that my family abandoned long ago. The irony of getting into pissing matches is that I don’t feel weak in expressing the truth of our fucked up dynamics. I feel emboldened. I feel motivated and significantly more likely to shine my light of spite on the godforsaken blight that constitutes my blood. I wear practically everything terrible I’ve ever done on my sleeve, and allude to the shit I still think I’d do, and the best you have is I do nothing and occasionally swap loans with my dad? Come on. How much easier of a target could I make myself?

I like that people like my brother make it so easy though. I like being able to make falsifiable checklists of when idiots speak to see who really has the upper hand in pissing the true straight line. If people are both unwilling to see what about them makes them weak, and those in their life have no capacity or desire to point it out, what to make of the appeal to stop saying things that make you weak? Who are you to decide, or as Jordan says, “What do you know?” if everything that constitutes you isn’t merely incidentally ignorant, but totally awash in a character immune to the outside world; possessed by ideology, religiosity, or the bro code?

[627] Brotherly Shove

I don’t make much of a secret or specific point of it, but I significantly dislike my brother. The root of it is knowing how we grew up and being unable to resolve that with how he speaks and who he calls friends. He’s the shining beacon of insecurity that fell in with your typical monied douche crooning about the money spent on clubbing, clothes, and fucking bitches. He’s slowing morphing into the older 2nd cousin we have whose wife’s pretentiousness makes sure he only makes contact with the rest of the family when someone dies.

I used to say that while he had that crowd he was still basically a nice enough person. He’s a runt and was always the weakling so he retains a kind of piddling sincerity in his goofy or awkward demeanor that people can find endearing. Anymore though, and upon every time I see him, it’s this feeble boasting and lewd stories on overdrive, repeated enough that you wonder if he’s rehearsed them in the bathroom mirror each morning. That “tight little Latina chick he fucked real good” is going crazy because she’s pushing 30 and isn’t wifed up with kids, so has been blowing up his phone. The sentiment in and of itself I don’t mind more than the scummy feeling I get as I hear how he describes it.

Have you heard about his paycheck? Along with some of his friends, who somehow despite the money they’re making are living the Chicago version of what the people I see in Bloomington are. 4 or 5 guys to a house, 60%-80% of their paychecks going to rent. While these guys are gentrifying neighborhoods, pissing off the locals, the only thing they can conjure as worthwhile expenditures of money are various barely affordable indulgences. One of his friends, in a story my brother took great joy in relating, crouched down next to a homeless man to ask about and belittle his experience and then tell him to get the fuck off his corner of the block.

The closest parallel to his and their behavior I can draw is to my own. I’ve certainly whored it up and would love to continue doing so. I’m not a fan of Bloomington’s homeless population anymore than the people who’ve actually been threatened or who have to deal with a dozen overdoses or fights a day. But I don’t feel I insist on describing for no one who asked the intimate details nor approach the problem of homelessness with drunk “wit” and ridicule. This faux “alpha” condescension and pretension derived from pounding the frat bro script is stomach churning.

Now, my brother has resented me for as long as I know. It’s why I’m so good at recognizing, and then antagonizing, the people who think I’m just a measure of socially blind. I was the smart kid picking things up easy where I have memories of him pronouncing “the” as “ta-huh-eh” when he was learning to read. His and my mom's mutual resentment meant that he didn’t just get away with antagonizing me as “the little brother” but was encouraged in a passive aggressive way through my mother. Now, as he’s got his job stuffing rich cunts with cum and his downtown Indianapolis apartment for over $1000 a month, he still resents me. He knows my attitude to my intelligence and life. He knows I’m quicker witted. But mostly he knows that he doesn’t live up to my standards.

Consider that effect in his bro mind when I’m comfortable telling you when and why I’m sleeping in my car. Where does someone like me get off looking down on someone like him? He can’t reconcile that superficiality well before he acquires the introspective tact to ponder how weird it is to repeat, “Wait, she’s 60!? She’s 60? Well, damn, she looks good for 60!” about my aunt to her brothers and me. Because, of course, if your first instinct isn’t to fluidly reduce the world into sexualized ranking, you don’t understand the bro code and language. You think Hitler 2 Trump wants to fuck his daughter because he views her as an autonomous person, or just another shiny pretty object he deserves?

As it is my nature, I pick choice moments to antagonize. I say I’d only go back to school for the joke and the ability to insist that people call me “Dr. Nick” in an allusion to The Simpsons. He got his master’s from Purdue Calumet (which he remembers as simply “Purdue”) and played his role as the indebted, hundreds of applications sending, basement-dweller until finding the in vitro clinic he works at now. He runs marathons with his bosses and relates a story of one of them hoping to venture out into consulting and wanting to bring him along as the business grows. I said, “Now don’t forget about me if you guys get real big! I don’t know the specific lab stuff, but every company has a marketing or back end logistics department!” He got real quiet. Aren’t I crashing in my car? Didn’t I fuck up the coffee shop? What do I know about his privileged place!?

He has a singular story of his worth or place that’s been adapted from a cadre of insufferably superficial and shitty people. He’s so steeped in it that he’ll never figure out that no amount of his “success” is ever going to speak to me like he really wishes he could. It doesn’t speak like he thinks it does to his bros, he thinks it does to my dad (who’s just happy if we’re happy), or to the world at large that is increasingly moving towards sentiments regarding collective survival over drunken chest beating.

I maybe see the the kid once or twice a year. The conclusion of this year’s Cubs game rendezvous had us gearing up to leave. We’re 3 minutes away from my house at a gas station as I get a text from my dad about a key I borrowed that’s still on my key ring. I tell him we need to go back. “Fuck!” He speeds back to our house, I drop off the key, get back in the car, and find him staring at me, mouth agape. 

“What?” I ask. 

“Thanks, Josh! For taking the extra time!” 

“If you didn’t return, you would have mostly just been fucking dad over.” 

“You know, I’ve been going out of my way for you this weekend.” 

“I didn’t even want to come.” 

“I didn’t want you to come! Now we’re taking even more time...” 

“Well do you want to talk about it, or drive?” 

“Drive!” 

I present his steering wheel to him. 

He didn’t care about the 6 minute detour there and back. He’d been looking for an excuse to say something to me all day. About anything specific? Probably not. He bought me a hot dog at the game. He drove, though no one asked him to. None of it out of the kindness of his heart, or because I asked for or needed anything from him, but because he needs to view me as lesser. He needs to diminish the scar on his brain I represent for him. In fact, I know he regrets telling me he never wanted me to come, because a few months ago he drunkenly texted me about hanging out and not seeing me enough; these plans of course he never really had any intention of following through with, but his brain plagued him nonetheless.

So the dislike I have might better reduce to a pity. We’ve never, I mean never, had a particularly good relationship. He’s filled with all the hopes and dreams and sentimentality that keeps him going back to our abusive mother he vehemently hates when I talk shit about. You know, because who am I if not the person who recognizes that and provokes the ever-strengthening of that head-fuck of a bond. The day I have at least as much material wealth as he (which, I’d be willing to pull out the calculator today given the amount of stupid shit he obligates himself to pay for), but it will be a day that he will wither. If I ever get my doctorate and persist in calling my time in school a joke, he might one day get the balls to haul off and hit me! Though, I suspect he knows that he can work out every day and it won’t speak to the anger I carry that would correct for his decision. If we don’t just want to rely on once bigger and older, always bigger and older.

And yet, it’s not even remotely that serious. It’s just a magnified example of the general tragedy that is my family. It keeps the thought in the back of my head that were I to ever have children, they could fall in with the Josh’s and no matter what I provided or imparted, I’d have to figure out a way to swallow (like that bitch he met last week) their path. He could drop the douche guilt and work less on self-aggrandizing and more on self-respect, because the difference is recognizing yourself with respect to the rest of the worlds you inhabit. He’s in his, I try to be in “the.”

[545] 3 Strikes You're Out

With the election drawing near, I’ve been thinking a lot about my immune system. Its contradicting name notwithstanding, the perpetual battles it engages to keep me alive is a marvel to behold. Whether processing the air filled with cancerous particles, navigating what accompanies my food, or keeping my spots clotted from picking and popping, it never gets a day off.

It also needs help. I had my shots as a kid so I wouldn’t develop old world diseases. When I shock the shit out of it by drinking too much or otherwise injuring myself, I’m desperate for a pill. My self-imposed guilt of eating poorly has me trying to boost my insides by massive increases in salad and exercising and dialing it back on the crap. 

This wondrous tool which has overcome countless illnesses and trained our human selves in the art of survival will still get overwhelmed. It’ll take on too much crap it can’t get rid of. It’ll miss connections or suffer catastrophic damage or some other competing cell system will find a way to corrupt it. As of yet, we’ve no way to escape this despite the futurists professing otherwise.

Scale it up, and I think of herd immunity. This is my concern for map making. I don’t know if the United States is a breed of animal that knows how to catch fascism and then find the proper medication. I then have to make the global herd appeal. Hitler didn’t take down the world. I wouldn’t expect Hitler 2 to be able to either. But would that kind of presidency act as a booster shot or form of cancer? Both can get you sick, but one in service to training you how to do better. The other taking over and corrupting until nothing we’ve devised can help.

My attitude towards my immune system is a lot like my political perspective. I do things to undermine it. I trust that the general system is still in fair working order. Sometimes I have to remind myself I’m still in my 20s because a minor ache or lesser ability to deal with hangovers can make you think you’re nearing the end by comparison. When I’m sick, I’m not the sickest. But I still have to take care of myself. I have to be mindful of what I allow into my body and into my head which translates into what comes out of my mouth and into my behaviors. You can drink too much, plenty of times. You can’t catch just a little bit of cancer.

I don’t know that we respect the difference. When you truly negotiate it has to do with taking manageable blows. When you’re fueled by ignorance and anger, you delight in destruction. You no longer get to borrow from the well of civilized words to discuss your grievances. People should treat you like dangerous children first, “politically opposed” far away in second, often if at all. Unfortunately and of course, they don’t. It’s because they’re “tolerant” and “polite” and “mature” etcetera. The effect on their health is too slow. Give them a pounding headache and they’ll rush for the pills. Couch an opposing grievance in rhetoric, showmanship, group identity politics, and genuine sympathy for relationships in their own life, they let the headache pound until they can’t see or think straight.

This is pretty old political and psychological news, by the way. A confused and angry population is easy to control. The myriad ways in which the mind is befuddled and tricked is literally built into our tools for survival and representations of the world. Our senses certainly don’t tell the whole story, nor are you capable of being aware of the millions of things that have to continue going right for you to keep acting in the world.

I suppose what bugs me so much is our lack of discernment. Destruction and death and sickness will happen. But why do we choose them so often? And I do mean to distinguish “often” from “at all.” Any glimpse into my inane fights online puts me in the same realms of “idiotic” things to do.

If you want to learn about the world, why pick the name-calling blowhard racist? Why do you trust his opinion more than the people out trying to do the work? Why pick your feelings instead of what actually helps? Anymore, I genuinely don’t understand it. I know we’re moving fast through history. I know we’ve resources our evolutionary history is ill-equipped to deal with. But the hallmark of our place in existence is our ability to adapt. It’s to learn and morph and change our DNA to tackle problems. How long should it really take the herd to learn from 2 different wars that we consider involving the entire world? Even if they didn’t we still figured that’s what was at stake. Just existing at all.

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The Cubs won the World Series yesterday. They did it after doing everything in their power to try and lose it. After the game, people said what an amazing series it was, how it’s one for history, and how people will be talking about it forever. They didn’t talk about whether it was nerves that made the Cubs forget how to infield. They didn’t talk about being down 3-1 and having smaller odds of winning than Hitler 2 becoming President. They emotioned all over the place. They celebrated in the streets. After 108 years, the out-pour, the release and celebration is all that was being offered. Sure, I’m a Cubs fan, and good for them.

I still find sports one of the loudest examples of our terrible discernment. We put so much effort into, even now inventing arbitrary stats and comparisons so long as we can follow them with “and that’s a new world record.” It’s an open secret that the “best” teams are often the ones who fronted the most money to buy up all the best players. It forces us to combine completely unrelated things into a shortcut identity that absolves us of any greater responsibility than to buy a ticket or jersey. I think when it comes to things to think about or spend time on, we genuinely would pick sports over functioning democracy. I find this unacceptable.

And perhaps as an aside, in some utopian vision of the future, I’d love for the worst thing we ever do to each other to be shitting all over a different areas’ team. If we had a hundred thousand more games a year and no war, consider me working to become the best sports fan ever. I’ve watched 3 Cubs games this year and still want to clap at strikeouts and yell at the TV per my culturally ingrained conditioning. It feels good. I get it.

We can’t keep picking sports. We can’t flirt so hard with getting cancer. We can’t keep “respecting” feelings. We can’t play pretend and with false equivalences that think like a child where evil is evil and that’s that so Hilary sucks and Hitler 2 is icky, but I like the slogan! Instead, understand what’s happening for what it is. Don’t be shy. Don’t be polite. You don’t have to be a rabid dog like the examples they are setting, but you are allowed to bite when someone literally threatens your survival. We toy around with the idea of who has the nuclear codes or whether it’s wise to refer to climate change in terms of “beliefs.” It means world war. This shit will kill you. It will kill your kids. It’s already killing others and their kids.

And let me clear, I’m only talking to the regular actual nice liberal intelligent people. This blog isn’t for the person who breaks their TV when their team loses. These words aren’t for people who talk to newscasters in clichés and through their incendiary signs and clothing. It’s for the adults in the room who, even if they’ve been waiting 108 years for their team to win, they still wouldn’t poison the other teams to get there.

I’m not trying to scare you or working to be convincing about the world. I’m relaying and reporting the unyieldingly obvious set of circumstances like a headache you’d take a pill for. And it really does give me a headache! It’s not pain I looked for. It’s not a choice I made like going out to drink. It’s the first stage of someone trying to kill me. Hitler 2 tried to take my thoughts by endlessly reciting his name, so I made sure he’d always be Hitler 2 to me. Greedy children poison water and mono-crop food, so I plan to learn how to garden and filter. We’ve been handed a very complicated and fast-moving economic and social system bolstered by infantile historical perspectives. So I try to share the absolute best materials I’ve read or watched to help cut through the noise and adopt goals that reshape our social and monetary responsibilities to each other.

You need a better grasp on who you really are as a part of the system. I’m a Cubs fan who feels compelled to find out how many of the players are even from Chicago and how much winning really costs. In an ideal world I could find deep connection and respect for my noises and gestures heaved at my symbolic brethren. Maybe the future will allow me to drink every day and remain in peak health! In the meantime, these mean times, I have to moderate. I have to be humble about my limitations. I have to take on even more responsibility for the example I’m setting, because unlike any other point in our history, I can go viral like cancer.

Are we only going to allow ourselves to see the celebration and feel the relief as we bask in the beauty of our collective achievement and identity!?  Or can we point out some peoples’ idea of winning is to scream while they destroy things and set cars on fire. Don’t let them get away with it just because you’re wearing the same human jersey. Your responsibility to the tribe needs to be more than you’ve given them to dictate your emotions and behavior. The stakes are the same every day and every year no matter what story someone tells you about some cursed goat they believe in.

[543] Meandering Brain

I'm very “blah” and it's in between other “blahs” so I'm just doing that stroll through the blah of my existence and thoughts to hopefully discover something a little bit more than “blah.” I doubt it will be much worth reading.

I was once told that I was a self-actualized person. This was supposed to distinguish me from the people who harbor every downtrodden excuse to explain away their existence and lack of achievement. One of my go-to cliches is to say, if only eventually, I tend to get everything I've ever really wanted. I don't think this plays too closely to some idea of beging, borrowing, and stealing to do so, but I've been willing to to do 2 of those when desperation or boredom took hold.

Is it such a good thing to get everything you want? It's certainly not that I've never been denied. It seems like a question with at least 2 layers though. Say you want to “survive” so you'll figure out how to manage a paycheck and feed yourself. In that same spirit, say you're willing to work endless hours at any job to save and live cheap so you can afford some toy or vacation. It's the noble sacrificial level. Then there's the psychopathic sense. So cunning and premeditated, you'll negate all consequences in service to your acquisition. You leave people crippled and retain no excessive memory of them.

Try as I might, I still never manage to convince myself of “pure” socio or psychopathy. In fact, I pretty-well hate the words as I find them clunky, all-encompassing, and dismissive of the ever-evolving emotional capacity (or lack thereof) that works out in real-time how to account of personal, psychological, and social reasons for how to respond. What used to be “survival” looks “psychopathic” in a modern civilized society. Shutting off an emotional response to maintain sanity will register as plainly “sociopathic” as anything you couple with some harm it has done you.

In any event, I don't take my lack of “emotional cues” as necessarily insidious or problematic. I think about this when I hear someone's, generally bat shit, interpretation of my being. We all retain the capacity to be unrelenting monsters. It's simple decisions. In the name of decency, we choose what superficial lines we'd like to walk to maintain a particular aura. If yours wants to be a little whiter or shinier than mine, it doesn't grant you special powers nor a brilliant perspective that makes you correct in attempting to assess me. I can barely assess me, but I'm probably not a simple-minded asshole who just loves to cuss real loud.

“Self-actualizing,” if I am indeed such a person, seems to be always in process. I wanted land, so I acquired it. Every study I did was in service to the longer goal and game. I don't want to do studies. I don't want a normal job. I don't even necessarily want to spend most of my time in cousin-fuck Indiana regardless of the comforts and freedoms it will afford me. I always preface it with “unfortunately,” but my goal still resolves to a communal identity. One way or another I'll need to figure out how to keep myself surround by friends. It remains a very selfish goal for those who think I'm being sentimental.

It seems a very loud idea to me that people like to be told what to do. They like it especially when what they're told to do doesn't interfere with what they think they want to be doing. You won't get the stone-cold sober person to drink who's still reeling from the emotional trauma of their alcoholic parent. You will get the shy person absolutely obliterated and making out with the cute person they saw across the room. I apply this metric to more important things. It's very Field of Dreams; if I build it, they will come. If I create an oasis in cousin-fuck Indiana even I want to live in, your excuses will diminish. If I reduce my bills to a few hundred dollars a year while I dick around experimenting with business ideas, the door will remain open for you to work along side me.

I feel I have to consider these things in a more concrete fashion now that I've found this land. I'm a restless person. I have to even accomplish stupid things like watching movies and TV shows because cheering for hours over the Cubs I find mind-numbingly boring. But soon, I'll be digging and building. I've already watched a movie on laying concrete foundations and have started compiling numbers for farmers who have equipment I've never heard of that helps them maintain that much space. By July I hope to be out of here, alternate work days with study stays until I can discover something to profit from that doesn't rely on confinement.

What if this time next year I not only have a solidly lived in place, a budding green real estate venture, a workshop, a brewery, and enviable vertical hydroponic garden/greenhouse? What if I start sowing the seeds for several potential income streams? I imagine my days will still look a lot like they do now, I'll just be dicking around with those things with a movie in the background. Less we forget about the map. How long do you think it really takes to compile the information I'm after? Even Adam Ruins Everything spoke to how hard it is to learn anything about local politics just by simply going to Google. I'd put money on the idea someone is out there creating a quasi-parallel system as to the one I want. It speaks to something I read about once in undermining the “revolutionary idea” idea. Things arise around the same times in different spots and then forces take over that turns one popular and kills the rest.

Switching gears a bit. I feel myself growing resolved to superficiality. I haven't been moved to really contact or talk to anyone. Each time I start reflecting on parts of my life I considered pretty good or what I'd want, I'm reminded they were built on lies. I figure it's my responsibility to keep carrying the torch for meager and over-burdened truth, even if it's the one that keeps putting distance between me and you. I'm not particularly convinced you much care either way.

Part of me has flirted hard enough with the idea of just sitting pretty. I don't have to sign myself up for the work it'll take to develop the land. I could just forfeit the earnest-money and barely feel a pinch. I could not just massively overpay to see Green Day, but do so in Italy. I could buy a new car or develop a sense of style. There's just that nagging fact that those things aren't the goal. I'd have them already if it was, as that shit is easy. It's just stuff. Tickets and bills. I've spent the last couple years washing myself of any former go-getter creative glory so I could cope with study life and basement dwelling. I need to learn, create, and build. I need to force a ridiculous heart-racing smile to my face as people cock their head and think, “Wait, what are you doing?” I'm way more obnoxious and motivated than anything I've done in recent memory can attest to. I miss me.

Just the idea that so much of it is still predicated on staying healthy and getting into well-timed studies is annoying. That's my paycheck to paycheck. My life still isn't belayed by collective ingenuity and resources, it's capitulating to for-profit medicine motives. I'm still a cog, one way or another. The one upside is, even if I never get into another study, now, worst case scenario in life, I have to learn how to camp, because even a McJob would still afford me my time, which is always in need of protecting.

Guess we'll just have to see how it all goes. I'll know what it feels like when the real goal has been achieved. It's this weird about-to-break-ground feeling that leaves me feeling “hopeful,” but I'm too old not to feel sober about the process. And even when I find the people to start playing along, they're going to find a way to fuck it all up anyway lol. Oh well.

[xx-15] Erroneous

I've only ever lived in Indiana.
I used to have a mini cooper (terrible cold weather car)
I've never been in a car accident except with a deer (poor deer, mini handled it like a boss)
I've owned 2 collies and 3 cats
I've traveled to Wisconsin, Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Colorado, Canada, and accidentally New York when I missed the exit for Montreal
I can play the saxophone and guitar well and the drums and piano less well
I write frequently
I was in student government, FCCLA, spell bowl, and chess club as last minute extra curriculars. Marching band as practically a job, and jazz band for fun.
I've graduated high school and college
I've had 12 jobs I didn't own, in order, usher, (later hourly manager), Target cart boy, high school woodwind teacher, IU Telefund operator, twice a website developer/promoter, cab driver, steak n shake grill guy, cell phone cover seller, real estate agent, liquor store cashier, landscaping/yard worker
I've never been fired
I've had 2 jobs I did/do own. Coffee shop owner, now coffee van delivery owner (currently in stasis)
I've done ~20 medical drug trials
I've seen at least 1,379 movies, not including documentaries, lectures, and debates
I've read or listened to ~200 books
I've seen every episode of over 300 television shows
I mostly stopped playing video games around 15, but play Little Big Planet and Smash 1 & 2 occasionally with friends
I've had both my tonsils and wisdom teeth removed
I've only ever broken my nose
I've played soccer, basketball, baseball, and dodge ball on a team, ultimate frisbee semi-competitively when it's warm
I've had sex with 30 women, and fooled around with 70 or so.
I've been a member of a gym, library, Kroger, and the Federal Body Inspectors club
I've got 2 best friends and a dad that I'm beholden to more than myself, might throw my brother in there if shit got too real
I've got about 15 people who are legit as fuck that I'd look out for more than the average Joe
I've had a restraining order filed against me by my mom that just expired this last Thanksgiving!
I've been pulled over ~35 times and only been given 1 speeding ticket (10 years ago) and one for not having my registration
I'm dramatically below the poverty line and you'd never guess it based on the sheer amount of nice shit I have
I used to be a thief (from big box stores), this is unrelated to the above point
I wear a yin-yang necklace everyday, not because I know really anything about Taoism, but because the idea of balance strikes me as right and proper
I've been to Ozzfest (when System headlined), Warped Tour a few times, a Beach Boys concert, Linkin Park and Incubus, Victor Wooten, Sara Watkins, Jimmy Eat World, Sum 41, Senses Fail, Shiny Toy Guns, Sleigh Bells, All Time Low in a dinky coffee shop in NW Indiana first before I knew of them, and then front and center for a Warped performance a few years later
I've been to So You Think You Can Dance's road show, seen the Madison Scouts, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the ballet something in Chicago, all the museums and the Shed Aquarium, the Taste of Chicago, the zoos, and Navy Pier
I've been to Cedar Point, Six Flags, and Universal Studios, Deep River and ridden every roller coaster and water slide
I've seen American Idiot's crappy road crew Broadway performance, and listened to Richard Dawkins give a talk at IU auditorium
I've seen Neal Brennan, Al Jackson, Marc Maron, Guy Branum, and Ron Funches live.
I've been to 9 Cubs games, and 1 White Sox game
I've tried cigarettes, shrooms, acid, cocaine, weed (likely allergic), molly, ecstasy, but currently just drink and not often enough :(
I used to have a stripper pole in my kitchen and a silky room with black lights and a ton of pillows dedicated to hookah
I survived drinking 31 shots in one night.
I have long curly hair, an eyebrow piercing, and a back tattoo.

I own 3 vehicles including a moving truck, coffee van, and neon, and 5 acres of land.
I've climbed to the top of a couple mountains, and been driven over the side of one.
My bills are $400 a month, including utilities, gas, and food
I'm 26, 6'2 and 205 pounds, healthy, but could stand to get healthcare
I view my aspirations towards greatness as intrinsically frivolous.

[293] Circle-Jerk

Humanity is a circle-jerk. I know I like to usually go with calling things patterns, but we’re much more passionate about jerking off. Take a look at a book store; “Here’s my struggle to success as a swimmer, tennis player, or minesweep champion.” You’re one dramatic picture away from taking a bunch of “cool and interesting” stories about yourself, slapping the picture on a cover, and calling it a book. Or look what happens to people when they reach a certain age. “Look how amazing my boy/girlfriend is!” Now is the time to start collecting as many other couples as we can so we can digress about those things couples do. How exciting! I initially started vocal musings about playing music. The most dramatic, up their own ass, incessantly focusing on their problems bands tend to be the “best” or get the most notoriety. Getting good at a sport, becoming a professional musician, or getting really good and fucking your spouse are these super “personal” things that become glorified and manifest as culture.

I’m not saying at this point that this is necessarily good or bad; I just want things to be acknowledged for what they are. Indiana University, for example, is a business. They may “bring the magic of music” for thousands of kids or help with scholarships, they also throw many in state students under the bus for Asians and kids from Long Island. Is it that you believe in the music program when you donate money, or do you fall in love with the atmosphere of prestige and project your personal experiences over the very obvious and business-wise pragmatism of the school? Recalling your experiences to obfuscate what actually happens is the kind of circle-jerking I refer to when I contemplate the demise of our species.

Now there is great utility in circle-jerking to be sure. God forbid everyone just remain completely unengaged or bored. I’m sure the quieting impact of videogames and music and relationships does a great deal for the masses. I just don’t know if the good outweighs the bad. I think the good can be thought of in a different way so the bad doesn’t get hidden away or made excuses for.

I’m concerned about this because I’m concerned for the well-being of people and how they organize their minds. If there is a more intelligent way to think about yourself or how and why you engage in activities, I think it should be preferred over defaulting to a set of behaviors that, upon reflection, only bring fleeting fulfillment, regret, or stress. It’s not hard to get into a relationship because that’s what you’re “supposed to do” and over a period of time come to lament who you’ve become or what you’ve perpetuated. You won’t have to look very hard for the kid who pursued most everything in their life at the beckoning of their parents, only to be shocked or horrified at the revelation that they may have had more of a choice the whole time.

If I don’t feel like I have anything to contribute, that’s when I start to get bored. If I didn’t seek to start a conversation or become better informed or challenge a perception for the goal of a clearer head and less stress, I wouldn’t say anything. The same reason I haven’t become dramatically better in guitar is the same I haven’t become insanely informed to the level I am/did with religion vs science stuff. I thought then that I could contribute something; so naïve, right? ;) When you’re not needed, and you really only get something from being someone for someone or about something, you just kind of sit back and watch. I simmer.

:: paused for 3 days and thusly picked back up ::

My current form of circle jerking is this cab job, real estate (to an extent), reading up on things that I hope upon hearing about them again later they will click a little faster, and brushing up on basic musical stuff. My position in society semi-forces me to do this because of bills. There always has to be something on the horizon or I can’t justify my life. Right now, I’m responsible to my friends and family who don’t really expect much more of me than what I’m doing now. It’s nice enough, but I can’t deny the utility of pressure. Many, if not most, people are “self-motivated” but the tools need to be there to incentivize.

I will however make a Declaration of Intent never to settle. The second I feel trapped or like some window is closing in over my life, I’m immediately hauling ass somewhere far and random. I’d rather get skinny not having too much to eat and sleep on a beach then feel complacent and complicit in an inadequate future I didn’t dictate for myself. If only I could get better at having other people tell me what to do. Or, what if I could just forget how to read and how to remember what I’ve read. No, magic forces of the universe, this isn’t a call to be maimed in a car accident to the point of full retarded or anything.

Can you tell I probably fell off my initial train of thought when this began? Go Cubs!

[234] Spilled Over

This has no point, no continuity, and is purely because I’m drunk and bored :p

Games can be fun. They can be taken too far, but they can be fun. After all, I run this whole life thing as a game. I try not to be too far up my own ass, but who’s to say sometimes haha.

It’s hard to state how much disdain I have for some things. I don’t let it weigh me down by any means lol but when my aunt, for example, has 400,000 in cash to deposit on a new house and I need maybe 5 grand to comfortably start this coffee venture, and I can almost certainly hope to hear some level of scrutiny and bullshit about lending me the money, the depths of my hatred tend to peak out.

I love opportunities to shine a light on the utter bullshit that consists of our life. Here’s some more from my “family.”

As previously stated, I have an aunt who is hella richer than I ever conceived. $400,000 cash on a new house, $90,000 on a new Mercedes, and get this: My dad asked either her and/or my uncles for $500 bucks to help pay some of the utilities because work is slow. Here’s where we enter the world of perspective.

My grandma, my uncles’ mom, aunt’s sister has been brain dead and dying in my living room for about four years. My uncles have “kinda” showed up to oversee her over the years; my aunts have practically never come to take care of their sister. My dad and step mom have taken the burden. My dad works as an iron worker, which means getting up at 4 in the morning to drive up to 2 or 3 hours away to a job site, and might get home around 9 or 10 before he has to go back again.

What assessment of my dad’s effort do his brothers and aunt have to give?

He’s a slug. (Their words.) “What the fuck are you doing with your money?” How can you expect me to pay for your living expenses…yada yada.

My uncles, who when they come over, are leaving the faucet running when they think it helps my grandma use the bathroom, do their laundry in my dad’s washer and drying, use the internet, watch the same ten programs on the history channel on cable…I just utterly hate everything about this situation.

Why have I played along? I wouldn’t mind a loan. I don’t dramatically need their money or anything, but I don’t want to live off of ramen noodles for the next year. Both my uncles have been primarily single their entire lives with better than average jobs and almost nothing to pay for beyond rent. My one uncle was living with my grandma until he was like 40 or something. I have realized that a couple hundred bucks a year a few cubs games aren’t worth not calling out the bullshit. But then again, I tend to have the balls to actually speak up.

It’s sick to get texts and calls from my dad who so endlessly believed in ideals about family only for them to be utterly shattered during times their true colors really show.

It’s peoples’ odd and sick games that are the reason things will never get better. It’s only one thing to know how to fix something. It’s only anther another to have the will to fight for change. At the end of the day, you will have someone literally one degree away who can fix practically any problem you could encounter, and they will still give you shit or deny you.

I hate wasting time. My stupid fucking hippie architect spending way more fucking time than I ever conceived getting these plans. My friends thinking college will last forever. What’s funny is how little that matters. I set a fucking goal. I will open a fucking coffee shop September 1^st, and regardless of what it costs me to build a kiosk or figure out my product, that’s what’s going to fucking happen. Who else feels so fucking powerful making a statement? Who else will make it come true?

I’ve had way too much on my mind lately. Do you think it’s funny or perhaps odd that I literally want to vomit with the degree and compulsions of my thoughts? I’ll go with odd because I’m never laughing when it happens haha.

It weirds me out to think that I have to live in spite of the world. That I would have to do things because you don’t believe in them instead of because they are the objectively correct and obvious things to do. It makes me uncomfortable. Granted, I’ll fucking live in spite. Fuck you and your ideas, especially if they are utterly shit ideas. But, I can’t help but feel a sense of loss or hopelessness because that’s what I have to resort to. Lol oh well I guess, fuck you. I suppose their’s a false duality or something here, but we’re speaking more to the feeling than the endless amount of labels we can ascribe to resolve feelings.

I’m nothing until I need to be. What the hell does that even mean? I don’t want to be a threat until you think I’m not one. I don’t want to be condescendingly right until you so hopelessly think I’m wrong. I sometimes if not semi-primarily don’t want to try until you think I won’t. This is fucking odd.

It’s ridiculously, if not almost and practically impossible to try and hold an objective position. I can never get overtly frustrated, or, I can never care that much, because I see and respect the end game. No, it’s not “death equates us all” for you despotic lazy mother fuckers. It’s localizing your priorities. I just don’t care about what you do. I can’t. I will never be able to be persuaded to. It’s hard to even conceive, outside of brainwashing, a scenario in which I would give a shit. And yes, this is vague, please feel free to comment or ask if you don’t get what I’m getting at. (Hint: general life philosophies, nomenclature, and method of being.)

I want a good reason to stop hating. I understand I’m capable of persuading and deceiving myself. I also grant how ridiculously happy a disposition I currently maintain and work to continue. Ideas?

I hope, I hope I hope, I so freaking utterly hope you understand what it means when I choose to be your friend. I literally need some reflection of the, ill-named, ideals I have about life reflected back at me. I need to be kept in check. I need to see what I’d like to believe about myself in the company I keep. My reality is a choice. I was born into a “family” but god for fucking bid be it that I’m constrained to that circumstance. I choose my shit. I work towards my shit. I’ll fight and defend what the fuck I actually come to respect.

I wanna be dramatic. I want to be loud. I want to be overcome by things I can’t put into words. I want to fight and I want to fucking scream. At the very least it’s exciting, and at the most, life altering. I’ll use my hatred. I’ll respect my happiness. I’ll die defiant and laughing.