[1117] Down!

I'm something of an angry person. That statement alone doesn't mean much, but it's the one to kick off with. I have a standing steady state of anger that's waiting to be provoked. I've learned where it comes from, so it's infinitely easier to name and manage as an adult, but it's no less there. I think it was a School of Life video that helped round out my perspective of the underlying "hope," so to speak, that lies underneath it as well.

I'm someone who is very quick, and keen, to see the potential in something. I can see the catastrophe just as quickly as the celebration and implications of doing something well. It's "obvious" to me like watching someone's muscles grow from consistently lifting heavier weights and maintaining a proper diet over time. There's also an intuition born from experience either physically attempting something, or in speaking with thousands of people. Over enough time, I consider myself to, literally, "never have a good excuse."

Yoda said, "Do or do not, there is no try."

I think of the many lessons we're abjectly failing at culturally, this is one of the biggest. I don't think we see our potential, good or bad. I don't think we're living for something. I think we're reactive, addicted, and compulsively doubling-down on inadequate responsibility-obscuring coping methods.

I don't care how old you are, "professional" or "educated" you consider yourself, accomplished, monied, or socially ingratiating you may be. I care about what you do and your ability and willingness to account for its consequences. You either lock the flood victims out of your church and unironically beat your Christian chest to hear a righteous tone, or you feed, clothe, and house people.

I'm not a "dreamer," per se. I draw a straight line from the available funds, opportunities, working backs and tools until I reach a place the resonates as "healthier" or "stable" or "feeding even more potential" into my life. I hesitated for a very long time to even use the word "hope" because I never felt that's what I was doing. I was working. I wasn't "trying to work," I was literally working. I was stating my goals, putting up the money, putting in the time, and piecing together each part of a greater whole.

You can do that every day as an individual. You can account for something. You can build on questions you ask yourself about your fears, anxieties, or behavior. You can act as though everything you do and say is "just," or you can recognize how you're not living up to your potential and act definitively to contradict.

Much of what used to drive me was pure spite. I, compulsively, needed to refute your opinion of me. At least half of the drive to get good at my guitar was an off-handed comment from an acquaintance in high school that I'd never be as good as him. Teenage me can be forgiven for not recognizing his myriad drivers of behavior. Adult me would have a serious problem if I had to "one-up" everyone who lazily threw a faux challenge or comment my direction.

When I evaluate spite deliberately for its potential, it eventually runs dry. If I give myself permission to ignore people, particularly unreasonable and immature ones, it's silly to invite them into the disingenuous internal fight I'm looking to have to get something done. I must ask, can I feel good without riding this spite wave? That wasn't clear. Thankfully, the answer is yes, because I do in fact feel good doing a wide array of things.

What if you don't feel good? What if you're depressed? What if you're trapped and antagonized by an environment or family that undermines your capacity to pursue feeling better? What if that doesn't feel possible from the jump, let alone the wildest possibilities of it compounding? I think this is precisely where the majority of people find themselves, consciously or unconsciously. I think this is the entrance to an unhealthy spiral and compulsive reiteration of our exhaustion, confusion, or fear.

If you can tap into and anticipate a pattern, you can break it. That's the potential. You can tap into patterns through speaking about them, writing about them, reading about them, or literally just recording each instance you notice "the same thing" is happening. Every single feeling you have operates this way. There's an infinite list of occasions that might provoke the pattern, but at bottom, it is still a pattern. My anger pattern runs when my hope is betrayed. My anxiety pattern runs when I'm thinking about wasting time and money. I get sad the more I'm inclined to talk about the big bad abstract "world," and all its failings, instead of practicing asking myself what my responsibility to it might be that day. I practice contentment in watching shows, playing video games, playing music, and reading. I can get excited getting drunk and going to an energetic or funny show.

To the extent I feel any given thing is the interplay of my standing health, the environments I plug myself into, and the actions I take in any direction. I can't control whether I wake up with a headache, but I can stretch the muscle that likely antagonized it, take the Advil, and write about how the headache is making it hard to consider what I wished to obligate myself towards that day.

What I witness people do doesn't look or sound like that last paragraph. I witness people "blame God" for their headache. That is, it's often "just the way it is." Period. Or, it's so-and-so's fault because of what they said last night. Or, it's because of a dozen perfectly hallucinated reasons from the weather to 5G. "Why, me?" They ask. "How could my head deserve to suffer such a fate?" It is not that a headache is a human universal to be handled in stride. It is the latest thing to be used as a weapon, an excuse, to not handle it effectively.

We're dual creatures. We're infinitely mysterious, and nearly perfectly predictable. We're our best stories of care and accomplishment, and genocidal. If you choose to accept the project of piecing together your dual nature, you must be prepared to accept every level of superficial contradiction. It's superficial because if you actually contradicted, you couldn't exist. You're alive or dead, as far as we understand life and death. Your feelings and your words will be indefinite gross approximations of where you're "really coming from."

To act is something I consider sacred for this reason. Barring all else, you get a chance to leave an indelible mark on the world that others can utilize or be scarred by. You can't know for certain what your impact will be, but you can know as well as you know anything that planting an apple tree is going to be better than slipping razor blades into apples. If you don't know that, you're lying, and you're practicing a disingenuous self-serving game to stay smug and sarcastic in your complicit laziness. And you live in a time where you're one click away from a whole family of people who will make you feel good about that. Then you've an algorithm that recognizes what to feed you so you can seek that feeling unconsciously indefinitely.

As much as my betrayed hopes might piss me off, I act to contradict and defy the automatic places my feelings may land. If I catch myself saying "I'm too tired," I get up. If I know the process is going to be complicated and take "forever," I ask myself what I can do in the next 5 minutes. Sometimes that looks like doing an initial search or opening a spreadsheet. Sometimes it's 2 or 3 few-sentence emails. Sometimes it's digging one hole in the remaining daylight, staring down the barrel of 14 more and incoming inhospitable weather.

I'm not powerless. I, always, have a choice. Sometimes that choice feels as impossible as anything ever has. The next action resolves the contradictory feeling. That doesn't mean I feel "good" or "happy." It just means I set an example of my potential. If I was conscious and deliberate, the example speaks to my values and hopes more than my words ever could. The more I'm objective and articulate in those values, the more potential they have to survive in a world that is otherwise forgoing to express and defend what I think we need to survive and live well.

A real example that highlights this for me is around "pro-life" ideas. I don't hear pro-life arguments that concern themselves with what the science says about embryos. I don't hear pro-life arguments that care about DCS or adoption statistics. I've not heard about longitudinal studies pro-life people tout regarding care and consequences of unwanted pregnancies. Pro-life doesn't entertain your life as an individual woman once it believes you've loaded yourself up with their concept of a baby.

If I was "pro-life," here's all my choices. I choose to flatly ignore the science. I'm going to choose to call that ignoring "disagreeing." I'm going to choose to ignore statistics. I'm not going to adopt myself, but I'm going to choose to use someone's story of adoption in my argument. I'm going to choose to "blame god" for your whorish nature, but not for the neglect inflicted upon the child throughout its life. In fact, I'll choose to co-opt that suffering as even more evidence of God's plan. I'll choose to vote for politicians who bankrupt social services. I'll choose to decry the importance and sanctity of my deep and personal feelings about this issue, and treat you as though you don't have deep and personal feelings.

This is a caricature, as all mind-reading exercises are. But, I don't have to mind-read the actions these people take and consequences we're currently suffering. It's the exact same self-justifying process that empowers and emboldens them as disables you. It's riding the ambiguity of disquieting feelings into an abysmal abyss where anything can happen because we're all pretending choices aren't being made.

I promise you, in more ways than you are paying attention to, you're locking flood victims out of your church and calling yourself a Christian. You have a lot of complicated fancy ideas about your value and potential I challenge you to draw a straight line from your day-to-day actions to its realized manifestation. Closing your eyes, and crossing your fingers, and wishing real hard is getting us all killed. Whether you want to call someone like Putin pragmatic or psychopathic, anyone willing to exploit how we condition ourselves will, and literally is, killing everyone in their path.

People accusing Israel of "genocide" are decrying "That's God's baby!" like a pro-lifer about the jizz in your uterus. How do I know this? They aren't interested in the actual definition of genocide. They aren't interested in what Israel is or has been fighting against since its inception. They aren't going to let things be complicated and comprehensive enough to talk about religious extremism and psychological conditioning. They're at the mercy of their spite engines, compulsively reacting to a visceral sense of indefinite and inflammatorily defined injustice.

Big and small, hot or cold, an infinite list of issues can all be scrutinized similarly.

"What emotional pattern does touching on [this issue] kick off in me?"

If you don't understand or can't define that pattern, you're at the indecent mercy of propaganda and "arguments" that fuel your preferred emotion. If you don't care to understand that pattern, you'll compulsively double down on it until you're exhausted, interrupted, or forced to abstain. Broadly, we imprison indefinitely repeat offenders and punish harshly those without the means to control and account for their most violent potential, especially if you're poor. Shittily trained dogs bark at any and everything for no reason, except the barking feels like the right thing to do.

[581] Smash Complex

I'm so filled with rage. The perfect time to talk about it is when you're not teeming with anything in particular that has set you off. My rage is that of The Hulk's. Mark Ruffalo's, “That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry” rings true in too real a way. While writing has always proven a way to express my hatred toward any one particular thing, I don't know that I explore enough the basis from which all the hatred flows. I've quoted before some line I picked up in a blog that said, “all hate is self-hate” and while I think I agreed with it at the time, I'm more under the impression my hatred is significantly external. The School of Life video on how not to be angry all the time has a certain truth to it and it will be underlying much of what I have to say I'm sure.

Did you notice that? I just caught myself. I immediately equated “hatred” with “rage.” To line things up properly, it is perhaps best to say an unrelenting rage provokes hateful sentiments. I suppose then rage and anger are close enough for my purposes to still rely on that video.

So why ever be angry? As with any feeling, there's a presumption that it is justified. You deserve to be angry. You sometimes deserve a pass if you say or do something that goes beyond the limits of generally acceptable behavior. I think of a bereaved parent who kills the murderer of their child. That person isn't normally a killer (at least, not any moreso than anyone else generally is) and there are few who would desire that person to suffer a life in prison or be put to death for their action, terrifying and morally complicated as it was. Less dramatically, you've probably said something terrible to someone you care about in the heat of a fight. You knew it would be terrible, and yet it felt so right in the moment, even if the proceeding moment threw that elation immediately into question.

Like normal people, I get angry when my expectations aren't met. Unlike normal people, I seem to have higher expectations and aspirations than the norm. This is a dispositional disaster. In a sense, it means you can never let up on yourself, and in practical terms, it means people are failing you literally every second of every day. You're failing yourself. You've missed something or haven't played the game right.

Consider what just happened between this paragraph and the last. I get email notifications whenever someone posts under the “free stuff” list on Craigslist. Someone posted a ton of free books. There's a pile of free books stacked up in my living room right now, I go to pick up the rest at 2. I expect that I can catalog and throw up a basic seller site either under a domain I own or through a place like Ebay. I said “yes” first, picked up the books, and opened a door of opportunity that cost me a few trips across town. Eventually I'll need a shed, but if your problems can generally be fixed with $50-$100, man hours, and a disposition that looks forward, it's hardly a problem. And if it seems like a fruitless waste of time, burning books has come back in fashion these days if I can't re-gift them to a better equipped seller.

A sense of anger comes from knowing I'm constantly in transition and allowing myself to morph and fold to my circumstances while I watch people pretend like what they're presenting is all that they are. Moreover, they get defensive and accusatory when you push, or they get lazy and full of excuses when you option them an opportunity.

They say the struggle is real. The problem is that it's a struggle for the wrong reasons and affects the wrong people. I've been looking for a foothold for what feels like forever. I want one thing I can rely on that allows me to then sell books or coffee or create websites and research. I want to have the mental time and space to play instruments, not sneak in expensive lessons on my day off while I'm thinking about other obligations. I want to have one day where the news isn't 400 things that have gone wrong and an incidentally unsustainable piece that looks marginally okay.

The rage stems from a deep appreciation for the general “problems” and watching people fail in their daily lives to address them. I'm too poor too. So I picked up 2 jobs immediately, am gunning for 3, once an app gets fixed on my phone that let's me do another one I'll have 4. I don't need 4 to pay the bills, but I need 4 to live a life that resembles the one I grew up with and in order to develop my land.

This is a ridiculous situation, and I'm a ridiculous person. Compounding this circumstance is that I don't really have any help. I have people who would definitely sign on if they had something specific to do or were handed the keys to the candy shop, but it's me who has to pursue the extra jobs and synonymously maintain a quasi-normal happy-enough life to get the ball rolling. It's me that did/does the drug studies in order to buy the land in the first place. It's me who has to transfer things to the land, pay for the gas, replacement tire, etc. to hopefully form the basis for creating something larger later.

To that point, it's less about whether or not I ask for help. I can cajole someone into helping me transport boxes of books or fencing to a storage shed. What I can't do is engender people to do “I'm pursing 4 jobs as well”-esc behaviors. I don't have a pool of saved Biolife money to address a shared goal. Why? I brought it up, but unless I sometimes physically drive or daily remind my roommates, they're not going to go. I feel like a girl “I want you to want to do those things with me!” As my last 4 paychecks sitting in the wings can attest, my problem is less to do with a lack of money than it is commitment and shared energy.

I also constantly put myself out there. I took the basic-bitch stocking job and spoke with the district manager about doing something intellectually worth my time. He gave me his email. He hasn't responded to the 2 I sent him after telling me to “give it a month.” He neither recognized nor respected what I had to say or what I could contribute to the company. I didn't expect him to. I tried anyway, and still need to have a more explicit shooting down before I step away from the matter.

I see how scatter-brained most start-ups and franchises are run. It's exceedingly hard to find organized competent people who can juggle scheduling and money in a way you can trust. I pitch it to people, let me help you. I'll work on the cheap. I have management experience. I'll be your little outsourced person for small tasks here and there. Let me get my foot in the door in a way you feel most comfortable. Resounding NOPES.

People crave that struggle. It's a kind of entitlement. “Hey! I'm the MANAGER of this little corner of the world, no one is gonna tell me what's what!” We're so generally socially and mentally insecure that we feel compelled to protect our ever-meager and precarious standing. Someone comes in presuming to be smart or motivated and it's best to run or forget or diminish and attempt to keep them humbled or harassed. We ignore how much of our lives has been dictated by our associations and deleterious sacrifices. The smell of our own farts invigorating to a point of delirium.

The shorthand lazy way to discuss my rage is to say something like, “I hate stupid people.” What we would agree makes someone stupid I think would massively diverge. I think it's stupid to get comfortable. I think it's stupid to find happiness in ignoring the underlying problem. I think it's stupid not to define the underlying problem. The pursuit of those definitions are something people run so hard and fast away from. They won't even discuss it. They won't answer questions regarding their own words. They won't concede when they've contradicted themselves. They literally won't think.

The parade of non-thinking never ends. They don't think about when they'll get sick or if disaster strikes. They don't think about how their shows of solidarity, backed up by the same ignorance and fear that got them into the street, will continue to be their downfall the day after. They don't think about every day they spend away from the people and circumstances that helped form the best things about themselves. All the books they read in high school they'll never touch again. All the sports they played they'll never find the time for. All the friends they used to talk to, resolved to adages about dying with a handful who actually give a damn. 

I hate that I have a desire to thrive while the world just wants to hang on. Or, what I feel even more, that the world wants to die. The only people who want to live are those who feel directly threatened in that moment. And when the problem can't be fixed quasi-immediately, they in turn resolve themselves to die. My battle isn't with bill collectors (fuck you IRS), annoying homeowners associations, district managers at Kroger, or the growing amount of problems I'll have to navigate by loading up my house with free shit. My battle is with a society that pretends it wants to live. Society pretends it gives a damn. And everyday we don't actively feel bad about it, remind ourselves, or say something, we give it license, and it kills us.

It doesn't get fixed with a march. It doesn't get fixed. That's probably the deepest truth. It's not going to get fixed, it never has progressed. Every baby born is as capable of being nothing more than as ignorant or susceptible to every horrid thing about life as our species' first iteration. And I fucking hate that, because for the first time in existence, we're actively choosing it. We're choosing “the struggle” “the title” and “the ignorance.” Every day that isn't some form of bliss is a societal decision to kill each other and thus ourselves. Every stupid “how ya doing!” at work when you know I fucking hate it and now I fucking hate you for asking. Stop talking to me like an idiot, strike, read, form a meet-up group to discuss change. I don't want your joke about how crazy you have to be to work here with what they're paying you.

Arguably, my habits and disposition are maladaptive. You could comfortably say I'm failing my genes by concerning myself with a kind of growth/sustainability that fundamentally hates the pool from which most of society is based in. I'm writing myself out of existence. I'm “yes, and-ing” over a cliff. It's not that I can't knock someone up, it's that I refuse to raise a kid where the only thing they know of the world is what I can't provide them and their suicidal culture fills in the blanks.

The only time it will ever get easy is when I get that baseline. When I can filter through the jungle of monkeys calling themselves people and stick 5 in a room, virtual or otherwise, who operate like me, I'll be able to rely on things happening in ways people don't think exist. Right now, all I have is “Nick P.” this array of complaints, formless, tired, full of hatred and rage, angling to add “book dealer” to his range of experiences, on a whim, because nothing else feels more or less likely or worthy than the last thing.

I read and watch so goddamn much. I read what the billionaire CEOs say about success. I read the entrepreneur forums. I've heard the same advice, same start-up struggles, same energetic enthusiasm for ideas, character descriptions, market conditions, cliches, contradicting strategies ad nauseum. Whatever I'm missing, I'm actively looking for. The problem, in a sense, it has to be handed to me. I need the keys to the castle before I can defend it. I need an opportunity to shine for more than my “go-getter spirit! Huzah!” or ability to forget the details of the endless strain on my disposition for a time long enough to keep going. What's worth deeper consideration is that we all need the same thing.

I don't plan to work my businesses with employees. I plan to have partner-owners. I don't expect anything out of you more than myself, and I refuse to perpetuate the myth that you're anywhere more or less than you choose to be. If you don't want the responsibility, then I'll take a bigger cut. If you're willing to have your phone on day and night, come with me to pick up free stuff, and just generally maintain a mindset of killing it all the time, that's yours. I refuse to take from you as much as I feel has been taken from me, from my generation. I refuse to perpetuate the myths that protect greed and mock what grandiosity actually looks like.

I hate that the people paying me, the people I have to ask for permission, the people I have to interview for, and the people making the rules don't think like that. I'm watching legislation get passed that I know will cripple the nation indefinitely. I know enough history to not believe it's getting better. I can't forget or ignore. I can't put my “faith” in crossed fingers and petitions. The burden has only grown and the only way out is something that doesn't exist yet, or in such a small capacity its message is suffocated by the larger picture. If you don't believe that, you don't believe in me. You don't think I'll make it, you “hope” someone like me gives you an excuse to feel good about “things” because “someone” will step up and course correct eventually. I don't have a hero complex. I don't think there's much worth saving.