[1006] Line Dancer

Occasionally, I get these little glimpses into the future. They’re more like an embedded sensibility after my imagination has run an experiment thousands of times. I’ll try to describe it using my recent year of going to shows pretty much every weekend. It is reminiscent of some of the epiphanies or conclusions you might reach while tripping, something deeply resonates that this thing perhaps is and isn’t “the point” of what you’re looking for. I like shows and have seen some incredible performances, but I haven’t structured my life around going to them, writing about them, or reflecting on them independent of a larger context. I’m not looking for “perfect” performances or to transcend my circumstances each time I bob and sway to a beat. The artist isn’t my salvation, the lyrics nor joke the answers to my questions.

I talk a lot, at least to myself, about what my life looks like when I have a lot of money. The indulgences might exist in equal or greater measure, but the goal of the money is to create new, better, and different culture. I want to feel safe. I want to feel like the future is worth looking at. I want to feel. This, I think is what I have in common with people who are otherwise pathologically driven to satiate their feelings. We want the feeling to change or be different, but some of us find ourselves lacking the agency, patience, or honesty to approach what it would really take to get what we want. I’m so angry by default and reasonably suspicious that a country seemingly ambivalent about fascism is going to be where I wish to stake my future.

I’ve been to 51 shows this year, 9 of them with someone else, 5 my dad. I’m down to keep going to shows with my dad, of course, he’s a baller who will fuck you up at a punk rock show. But it also indicates I don’t have a peer group. I don’t have a social network of people who I regularly do anything with that isn’t in some professional vein. The people I’m closest to are often extremely occupied with their jobs or family, and truly no priority is made for regular engagement. It’s incidental and when things are convenient. This has been the story for as long as I can remember. I’m not crazy about that, but I’m also not really about laying that at the feet of those I claim to call friends.

In any event, all the more reason I look to change the broader culture. I want my people happy and free to associate. I’m also cognizant that this alone is not enough and has drummed up resentment in the past from those not keen to take responsibility for what they’ve been free to engage in. As such, it’s less about the freedom in and of itself, and more a discussion of the ever-balancing act. I don’t expect to be indulged every time I profess being bored or lonely. Nor do I expect a sympathetic ear if I stifle an inclination to join a club or meet new people. But, we’re all still plugged in to the larger alienating and exhausting context. I haven’t created an alternative yet. I gather it’s not your goal to try.

This writing partially exists because a client messaged me to show me a bald eagle he saw. He then asked me how far away I lived from a state park. When I didn’t respond, as it’s Saturday and I was sleeping in, and it’s not a crisis situation, he sent “Hello,” a few hours later, like I’m, in his mind, of course meant to respond as though we’re friends. We’re not, and he’s someone who has carried on for months about not getting out more and doing things to occupy himself who, instead of messaging another client or inviting a neighbor, tried to carry on informally with his counselor. I explained the boundary, which he called, “bullshit” and then said he “just wanted to meet and shake my hand.” Extra no. That this was your inclination and expectation is an improperly set boundary that needs attention.

Attending to our needs is not easy. You may not even know what you need. You know what you’re getting or what you’re familiar with. You know the immediate gratification or regrets of substance use or cycle of violence and abuse you might engage in with your partner or family. But what do you need? Even if it’s a friend, it’s not an enabling counselor who will blur the line of appropriate conduct so you can feel better about yourself that moment or day. I have other members send me their accomplishments, and I go “good job!” and the conversation ends there or I ask them to take the next step and let me know when they’ve done so. At bottom, they have to do the work on themselves and for themselves.

So if I want to change culture, it’s as much me keeping the necessary boundaries as it is providing an environment where you can build on your awareness and responsibility. It has to be a robust and consistent enough space to compete with every other culture you’re plugged into. And if you’re someone who habituates unconsciously drifting between what each of those cultures offers you, my lines and expectations are going to feel like a threat, insulting, or otherwise difficult and unreasonable. I’m okay with that, because I’m discussing them regularly, soliciting feedback, and pushing myself into unfamiliar and uncomfortable realms as often as I can. I’m just a guy. I can only do so much with my attention, time, and energy. Do you think I’m that unsure or unclear about how to direct it?

My concept of “the work” when it comes to how to address yourself, your culture, or your desires is not something I conceive of, anymore, in terms of “have to” as it pertains to my own feeling and sensibility. Intellectually, I can state you “have to” in order to not go extinct, but emotionally, I’m excited to. I want to. I crave doing things that are fun, hard, together, creative, or going to set an example worth setting. I want to move fast. I want to leave an impression. I want to be remembered as having used my perspective and spite in as laudable and profound a way as possible. That’s how I shake off your offense. That’s how I examine your accusations. That’s how I continue to explore and reiterate points I’m stuck on in different ways over years. In that sense, I’m thankful for the entitled clients, news on Nazis, national trends, and silence from friends. I get to explore just where the fuck I really am and if it’s worth continuing to spend time there.

For example, I’ve already said “no” with regard to any job that wasn’t my own years ago. I’ve shed my romanticism about the college group. I don’t struggle to maintain professional boundaries or a sense of what I am or am not prepared to be for a client or as an employee. I don’t need to keep up with the neighbors nor pretend your opinion trumps the numbers nor my agency. 4 sentences capture thousands of words and years of work.

I don’t want to keep going to shows alone, but I also don’t want to attend them with people who aren’t really at the show with me either. I recall the spell of thinking I had a great friend group, including way more under that umbrella than I should have, and basing it on nothing more than our time together independent of any given individual’s headspace or priority. I think this is why people like cults and religion so much. You all get to align on some basic tenants until feds start knocking, but it’s the story of what you agree upon, not that you actually agree. It’s a means of quelling uncomfortable feelings and empowering a kind of conceptual meta-agency that’s still on auto-pilot, and has lost any connection to someone who would point it out in a compelling way. Whether you’re using drugs, smearing shit on walls, sex trafficking, or whipping yourself, “you” aren’t really there. And that’s the point. I want to be here. I fucking hate that a lot of the time, but I do. I want to be at the show. I want to be in your presence. I want to be given fodder for making jokes or thinking about things. I want to be attacking the biggest problems from as many fronts as I can lay my eyes on like I’m back grinding Kessen II to unlock the secret hardest and hidden levels.

Where do you want to be? I want to be at the next show anywhere in the world whenever it takes place. I want to be, occasionally, on telehealth calls or in organizational meetings before being on my way to an expensive and delicious eatery. I want to be building an organization that can create my antagonist environments. I want to be in the presence of people using power in accountable and meaningful ways. I don’t want to scream into the abyss at ghosts of my past. I’m thankful a long time ago I established that I needed to keep writing for me. I’d choke on the self-indulgence as though I actually felt my happiness or well-being depended on your engagement like a thirsty tik-toker.

[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.

[924] You're A Shining Star

 I think there's a lot left unsaid about what it means to all have cell phones. Or, the things said are of a constant refrain. Hearing Drew Barrymore and Stephen Colbert talk about the 90s as the last time it was great to be famous has stuck with me. How much are we prone to being anxious by default because, unconsciously, we functionally can't fuck up anymore? How many people really want to go viral for losing their shit? How long have we been under the veil of "cancellation?" I think it's psychologically important to be able to not just have the room to fuck up, but cope and grieve with it in a way that isn't being scrutinized at the same time. In writing, I've clearly taken the opposite approach, but I recognized my need for accountability and sense that I had any remote control over what I was feeling or how I moved in the world. Most people ain't trying to write.

Our entire set of cultural narratives regarding redemption, forgiveness, or growth are knee-capped from the beginning. You're pre-scared of any bad thing you could do or what bad things you've done will say about you decades later. People have generally treated me as a poster child for what's to be shamed and erased, at least those with whom I perhaps had a more superficial relationship than I felt. What if I never learned to adapt and move on or incorporate? What if this passionately anxious bubble is squeezing every interaction and it's altogether impossible to orient after the path towards meaningful relationships has been obliterated?

How have we adapted? We've turned the arrested perpetual shame into fascism. We've decided to double-down on the bad bits and try to force them into something to be proud of. We've tried to distance ourselves from personal identities or cultural norms in service to brands and algorithmic destinies. The only currency left is attention, whether it takes the form of shame, grievance, or entertainment doesn't really matter. The point is to let yourself be hijacked or create the next hijacking thing. Can you spin or market instead of embody? Can you read the pre-approved script and do your time in negative attention jail? Rest assured, we're all waiting on the story of your comeback well-independent of what or whether you've learned or changed anything along the way.

You're not allowed on the path to "responsibility" or "accountability," not just because it wouldn't be recognized were it to still exist, but also no one is interested. Here, a fun irony to what I've pursued in writing. Practically, we're generally first-world poor, stressed, forcefully humbled by the world we've inherited, streaming, and doggedly trying to bolster that brand narrative that makes it fun to dance on Tik-Tok and talk depression. This is not to belittle the means in which people are trying to cope and connect, but doesn't it just feel way sadder, desperate, and misplaced than we're acknowledging? I'm imagining a judge do a hand dance as he explains why he's decided to grant the removal of your children. Simply calling that a terrible and uncomfortable statement of their judgment wouldn't begin to cover how we arrived at that display.

For many years I've been playing a game of ongoing reorientation and reassessment. I've been trying to figure out if the pieces in front of me could lead to the kind of world I imagine. I've been “hopeful” and getting myself worked up as my head turns over all of the potential things I could be or who we could be to each other. I've tried incredibly hard to “accept people where they are” and gotten dramatically more polished in how I speak to people. I've looked for ways to approach the most difficult situations that, obviously doesn't exhaustively cover how they might be understood, but allows for healthy doubt and a sense of progress. By default, that project is a “forgiving” one.

Forgiveness is a concept that has definitely evolved for me. I read or heard something recently that “the kingdom of heaven” is to be recognized here on Earth and within yourself when you exercise your capacity for forgiveness. I find the notion insightful and a considerably easier sell than all the metaphysical bullshit. To forgive used to mean that I just understood something well enough that I didn't have to obsessively think about it anymore. That's what put a barrier between corrosive thoughts about my mom and my otherwise better mental health as I learned more about generational trauma. Do I forgive her as a person? Nah, she'd need to discover and define accountability and responsibility alongside what might be explained by her upbringing, just like I try to.

There's a similar line I take with the “friends” I romanticized. I don't hold petty resentments about how often or not we talk. I watched the series of decisions to talk or not in deliberately shitty ways. I've watched in-group out-group and fear takeover. I've been an array of caricatures. I feel the silence. In my heart of hearts, I know what I wish for in terms of things being “better” or how I wish I didn't reflexively hang my concept of what could be better on anything requiring their input. But isn't that the rub and contradiction again? We don't have a shared path. We don't have articulated if remotely salient goals, let alone ones we share. I can't be your friend without you. Why I want anything less of a friend than what I'm prepared to be is my baggage to unpack.

Our community, our friendship, or what draws our attention cannot continue to exist rooted in this diffuse shame and fear. You can't be primed to fight or flee without wholly degrading your faculties needed to assess and feel embedded in the world. I know I need other people. I know I can only get so far, if you can call it “far” at all, by myself. I know I desire the understanding of what's happening to me, why I take courses of action, or what I choose to pursue. I know I've managed to understand, forgive, and incorporate the worst parts of myself independent of outside judgments. Are we capable of doing that on the whole? Will privacy, ambiguity, or what it means to really struggle and prevail instantiate as mockery and romantic tropes?

The ease of access and interconnections is always haunting. Don't you want to be reminded of your difficult past and follow the people who've left? They're right there, a click away. Haven't thought about them in months or years? We can fix that. Thought you were over it and moved on? Even if you have, let's suggest just intermittently enough that you haven't. Let's re-fire that drama you've otherwise incorporated or hashed a dozen times. For a brain like mine, I'm in a kind of eyes-stapled-open hell if I can't spit out what's vying to stay stuck on repeat. I even know it's going to get stuck and how I need to respond, and it doesn't make it any easier to feel my brain baste in those juices.

I try to build the kind of environments and maintain the kind of relationships that will better serve that mental propensity. Wherever I'm looking or whatever I'm working on, I want it to be something that adds, helps, or is relevant to one or hundred goals I'm pursuing in any moment. When you do that enough, you significantly weaken that which is lesser or distracting in it's power to overtake your attention and ongoing cognition. You're not reduced to a cliché or a meme or mindlessly reenacting the trauma patterns your brain may have trained on. Whether you write or just have the best people to talk to, I think we all need to up our effort in recognizing what we're paying attention to and why. We have to rebuild the path and consider that we may have yet to even bothered with traversing it.

[921] Bad Philosophers

I have about a dozen disparate sources of thought I'm trying to synthesize, so don't think too hard and come along for the ride.

Some of the criticisms I've received from writing, if you can consider them as much beyond a personal attack, is that I maintain this posture as offering the capital T Truth of a situation, and that I'm something of a two-bit or wanna-be philosopher. I bring these up not because I find them compelling, but because they are persistent. I certainly don't believe the people keen and quick in offering these sentiments are concerned about the reasons I'd started writing or when I think it necessary to continue.

I don't claim to be a “philosopher” in some kind of formal way. Pythagoras came up with the word to mean a “lover of wisdom.” Anyone can be that, and my demonstration of that love is to search for and attempt to embody the wisdom in the many areas that keep me thinking. The charge about offering the Truth of any or all situations I find exceptionally pernicious and disingenuous. Informally, I've referred to it as “I know you are, but what am I” syndrome. I can say it every day, bookend it on every blog, I don't claim to have the Truth. I have my experience to the best of my ability to articulate and remember it. I'm engaging a process, not dictating a mythological ethos.

I'm watching Awakening from the Meaning Crisis with John Vervaeke. I'm about halfway through the 52 hour course. He provides a broad overview of many different philosophical ideas and religious traditions. He puts titanic figures in context and shows how their ideas responded or incorporated who came before. I've read a number of philosophical works, taken classes in college, and written papers or blogs in service to what I've read. You know what never stops? Your need and desire to think about and practice what other thoughtful people have brought to the conversation.

Whether or not you read a book or an argument doesn't mean you understand them, and certainly doesn't mean you've experienced anything like what they're getting at. I recall getting an A on a philosophy paper where I deliberately felt I'd “fuck around” with some modern philosopher's position. I was praised for not merely regurgitating what he was saying, which also would have gotten me an A in a “safe” way, and which the grad student grading the papers was sick of reading. I don't remember the philosopher, or the argument, or how I fucked with it. I just got a deep sense that so much of these “thought experiments” and “professionals” was considerably more loose or playful than you'd suspect at first pass.

Most often, as I'm in the middle of some lecture or hear some salient point made by some nerd on a podcast about climate change or the supreme court, I'm met with how dissatisfied I am with people broadly. I'm struck by how little they think. It's like the whole world opens up as this plaything because I can influence or direct my understanding of what's driving or sucking people up. Are they draped in the nihilism of endless consumption? Probably. Are they exhausted, angst-ridden, anxious, or otherwise adrift looking for a new religion or meaningful supplemental occupation? You tell me, how many people refer to or treat their pets like children? I don't just “dislike” things like Tik Tok or memes, I worry for our collective “soul” that so much has been articulated, but can't find its way into our practice or language. We're addicted to the shortcuts and dopamine flashes.

I've tried to make the deliberate and ongoing point that this process, this writing, whatever it amounts to, is necessary. It's useful. It's how I work to “embody” the things I say and empower the things I do in the world. I can look back through blogs and see what has stayed the same while I've been under constant bombardment from errant criticism, endless distractions, or misguided notions of who I am to people or what they are to me. There's no Dewey decimal system in my head where I can just bring up where and when my ideas of “love” have gone wrong or right. I can't begin to explain what “friendship” has meant or evolved into over time like turning to an illuminating chapter of your favorite book without it being written down.

You may be thinking I'm making some kind of pretentious and overstated claim about how little people are thinking. You, in fact, are very thoughtful, and you have a lot of strong opinions about not just the state of the world, but how I talk about it. For the longest time, I wanted to grant this special privilege to the people able or willing to read what I might discern from the cultural ether. I dropped that. It's not that I haven't experienced you as such or on an appreciable level of awareness or enlightenment, it's that I've watched it fall prey to things I can't reconcile with maintaining respect.

I don't respect silence, for example. I don't respect meme-speak. It's not to say I'm not silent on a great many things or have never shared a meme, but the days where my feed is ten pictures you found mildly amusing, maybe, I don't know where you exist. I feel like I bring this up a lot because it bugs me a lot and I think it's a massive cultural psychosis we've worked ourselves into in normalizing not-think. I want you to hesitate before sharing the picture, then I want you to turn a series of hesitations into a long enough pause to explore what's really going on with you in sharing.

I think about this with regard to my last relationship. In a real sense, this is one of the cleanest, at least emotionally, breaks I've ever had. I had expectations for our interactions that had absolutely nothing to do with some elevated level of “love” or historically romantic notions of our time together. I don't care who you are, if we're going to be “close” or “intimate” or “trust” each other, that's not going to happen if you can't be a friend. My friends aren't routinely yelling at me, giving me the silent treatment, or conjuring memories of growing up where I was hyper tense and aware of the mood-shift so as to avoid getting knocked around by my mother. My friends let me speak without interruption, and I grant them the same courtesy. My friends tell me they're going to do something, and then do it, and if they're going to use me or my things, they express appreciation or know they're on the hook for fucking something up.

I took my time getting into the relationship, and I suffered the things wrong with it until I broke. It's a break that I will learn from and do better next time by not allowing myself to ignore the escalation or mask it under the guise of “accepting someone where they are.” I understand people as having no clue where they are, and it's something I downplay or express some faux humility about at my peril. I understand people as having the kind of mindless irony of an arrested teenager struggling to cope with their incomplete brain and personal trauma. It's not a gratifying point that my home has returned to a place of peace and comfort after removing someone I care about. It's an existentially critical point about how we quell our sense of loneliness or emptiness despite superficially having everything we could ever want.

I'm extremely impressed with many of the book passages and sentiments from Daniel Sherrell who was featured on the Know Your Enemy podcast. He discussed the conditions under which you embody something verses just knowing intellectually. You have to let in the depths of the dread and despair and marry it to the action you take in your day-to-day or long-term, if not infinite, project. Dorothy Fortenberry, also featured in the episode, discussed having kids with no expectations of them ever thanking you or even smiling with regard to your efforts in service to them, and yet knowing you had them for reasons not to do with your own gratification.

What resonated so deeply was a sensibility that I've had to cultivate over time. It's a form of acceptance, not of fate, but of known and unknown conditions. Whatever hell you may be suffering, I can only choose to roll the dice with engaging or not. I can only open myself up, tolerate the vulnerability, and live the consequences of sharing my honest experience. I can't make you accept me, be patient, swallow any of my “reasons” you may regard as “excuses.” My harshest judgments of you either lend themselves to changes in my behavior or mood, or they get used to beat you to death. I can claim a certain awareness of when I'm choosing to beat you to death, like in blowing up at my ex, but it's a wasted awareness if I didn't want to do that and chose to anyway. There's areas in which I'm bound to the notion of getting “license” or “permission” to access parts of me predicated on granting you the agency and responsibility of inviting me in. If I'm bound to a blood-lust like a vampire, I'm forgoing my agency, and thus cannot grant you my honest impression of your agency. I'm then eschewing the responsibility for my actions.

I want responsibility, and begrudging the conditions under which I might yield it doesn't serve me. So that means I don't get “normal” relationships. That means I get to feel “alone,” and any orientation I maintain that baits people or tests people is about me, not them. I don't really know how to reconcile this with what it would take to create or empower a new culture or zeitgeist. I'm not actually a god nor claim some special enlightenment. At some level, it feels like I either maintain expectations I regard as self-preserving, reasonable, and practical, or I drop all expectations and just work people like I know how to work them. Think about it, how many people have you had thank you or shake your hand after you explained you took their children? How many strangers' homes have you been invited into? How many children have you been trusted to drive all over the state with? How many hundreds of people have you invited into your home? How many codes have you had to switch or topics have you had to incorporate to create things that represent your highest ideals?

If you believe, and I use that word liberally, anything less than me about yourself or what you're capable of, by my understanding and definition, you're at my mercy. I can provoke you. I can work you. I can convince you. If you don't know what you're capable of, whether or not you're doing anything for good or bad reasons, I do. I'm not under the illusion that everything I do is for a good or coherent reason. I couldn't take myself seriously if I regarded what you told me as some threatening Truth claim or if I reflexively felt ick and sought to write you off as some lazy airhead. All I can do is make peace with using you until you “wake up” and buy in.

That sounds so crass and cold and feels like the heart of a many years long project I've been trying to avoid. I dance around what I'm capable of precisely because I know what I'm capable of. A cultural project needs the people who are going to be a part of that culture. I didn't party alone, but I garnered all the resentment for the consequences of the party environment, earned and unearned. I can invite you to my land, but you can be stuck linguistically and psychologically reiterating to me it's my land, so nothing you do or invest in is going to matter or be safe from my arbitrary whims. That's fine, but you don't get to retain your skepticism for my aims or good will when I offer it freely or am willing to bind myself to a contract. I want checks on my power and reflection on my aims. You either don't give yourself the power, and thus don't claim the responsibility, or aim at dumb shit.

If what you're accepting about yourself leaves you complacent in what you're willing to discuss or examine, you haven't accepted anything. You've punted your obligation and likely adopted some posture about how busy you are. You've probably reflexively found a way to recognize the faults in others that you can't imagine manifest in you. It's precisely because I am an intractable cunt with an extremely, aberrant, loud mouth and fluidity to his inappropriateness that I've been driven to the desire for an exacting conversation about the forces at play and who is using them. I get snippets of resonant and compelling moments. I get glimpses into the people I wish you were and the person I want to be. But I didn't build my house, start my businesses, or take a chance in my relationships because I lacked a direction or ideal I wished to embody. I don't find patience, and healthy skepticism, or respectful deference from listening only to the feverishly antagonistic demons that foresee and enact every catastrophic end drawn from inferences of your every utterance.

I have everything. My brain works. I'm full. I laugh hard and make jokes. I study. I work on things that are easy for me and hard for others so that maybe they can be free to better handle hard things I can't help them with. I can't recognize the “love” you don't demonstrate. I can't respect negligently wasting power you wish you had, and do have, especially if I show you how it works or give you the opportunity to do the same kind of work I had to do in order to be the one presenting the opportunity. I don't resent people with something to teach me nor am I only willing to learn something on my own terms. I can only work with what's on offer.

I'm offering you 921 insights into my head, 5 acres, my tools, my back, my efficiency, my experience in high stress and high responsibility environments, and my spirit and style of engaging with the world. And who am I to pretend that you want or need any of that, right? Save the handful of my regularly cited exemplars, what is it you think you're offering me? A like? A follow? What are you offering “the world?” Do you want to be just something I keep feeling good or operating well-enough until you've exhausted your utility? Are you my afterthoughts and naive idealism codified by the silence, our histories incidental verses entwined?

I'll weather the scorn or isolation, to be sure. Every shit example I set or shit “friend” I've taken a chance on is quickly followed by the waterfall of prosperity and better examples set by others. I need to maintain the memory of the standards set by you, not me, in how I've been treated. I have friends who don't judge me. I have friends who laugh easy. I have friends who respect my time and effort. I have friends who show up in emergencies. I have friends I start businesses with. I have friends who demonstrate their grasp of their own wickedness or sense of responsibility and maturity without making it yours or my problem. The structure and system are there, because again, I have everything. You find a way to vibe with that or make peace with how you incorporate it, or not. If you're unworthy of what's on offer, well, you're my mom lol.