[1173] Workin' On The Railroad

I think I recognize a point of major confusion when someone is attempting to explain the “reason” they did something. We tend to think that a choice is discreet, or that one thing naturally follows to another. I choose to hit the cue ball into the 8 ball. Incidentally, we have an idea of the physics that will cause the ball to fall into the pocket, but it’s not predetermined. There’s an underlying chaos and probability matrix seemingly calculating indefinitely in real time.

I read once that to accuse someone of being a hypocrite was one of the weakest forms of both criticism and argument. The reason being, no one ever, ever, feels like a hypocrite. The moment a personally gratifying or sense-making opportunity is presented, a deeply personal choice gets made and the seeming contradiction is resolved by the new embodied person. You can see this during interviews with killers, or Daily Show maga man-on-the-street interviews. This is what every “modern religious” person does. It’s how I can “resolve” being a hyper-focused go-go-go-type person who maintains the capacity to sit around all day watching TV. We’re complex things.

This, I suspect, is where the wisdom of “hate the sin, not the sinner” came from. When we choose to be, we can be as discerning as we wish in painting a picture of the many things that influence behavior. You can love people in your family, it’s said, while you hate everything they do during the heights of their addiction, perhaps. I’ll refrain from speculating and dismissing the messy or haphazard definitions of “love” one might adopt there, but the superficial contradiction and hypocrisy are no less highlighted.

We have evolutionary systems that, one way or another, need the world to “make sense.” That is, you would not be here if your nervous system confused the sensations of pain and bleeding out with the taste of honey. So much of your being is attempting to resolve that sensibility with the abstract nature of language and ever-confusing nature of your experience.

I think I got considerably better as a thinking individual when I adopted an “all at once” and “yes, and” mentality about my power, motivations, intentions, and potential. It started with learning how to shit talk. You can’t become a good shit talker if you’re not observing the things about you that you would use on someone else to cut them down. If I didn’t know I had a receding hairline, big ass, or serial-killer beard when I don’t shape things up, it’d be really hard for me to make fun of you if the second you responded with one of those things I broke down.

No one or ten things you can pick out about yourself or someone else’s looks make the whole person, and the seasoned genuinely comfortable shit-talker knows this. They know it’s attractive to be funny and laid back. They know it’s cool to project power and intelligence or wit. They know that any deficiency they may have will pale in comparison to how someone next to them feels about themselves and what’s wrong with them.

Comics understand that trading barbs is a show of love. In a different context, with someone who doesn’t understand the culture and language, you might make someone cry. To them, you’re being mean, even if in your world you’re not even in a mean ballpark and are genuinely trying to connect. If you try to defend yourself and say, “No no no, I like you, that’s why I said your tits were saggy so be careful they don't get caught in the door jam!” Who says that to someone they like? You’re going to look like a hypocrite who claims to like someone, but says mean things to them. It’s entirely a product of a superficial understanding of where either person is coming from.

To me this feels like an area that’s both extremely personally familiar, but one that many people still misunderstand with regularity. I think the problem has only compounded with characters like Trump in our minds.

The comic who makes fun of you isn’t lying about where they come from. Someone like Trump is lying about everything all the time until it’s a transaction that personally helps him. And then, he’s still lying about whatever feeling he may express about you. He’s not gratified to know you, he’s gratified he got something out of you.

But what’s a frequent defense you hear from Trump’s apologists? “He’s just joking.” You have someone like Jordan Peterson trying to liken him to actual comics and claim they’re making the same kind of jokes. Absolutely not. One class of people are making jokes, professionally. When they step off stage they are normal-enough people with standards of conduct and a shared reality. It’s part of what allows them to reach the heights they do. Bill Burr hasn’t cut down and destroyed everyone in the comedy world like Trump cuts down and destroys everyone who doesn’t service him.

When you don’t want to accept the basic reality, you shift the conversation. You let the words mean something else. You move the goal posts until new norms of behavior and connotative baggage can be shaken or adopted.

There’s several thousand posts trying to explain why Trump got elected. The ones I caught, none avoided the trap of equivocation and nice, neat, or indignant summaries of familiar talking points. One person, Tressie McMillan Cottom actually and accurately spoke to the feelings that drive people on The Daily Show. The equation looks something like this:

Clock vibes –> Create excuse –> Call it “reasons” –> Passionately double-down –> Clock self-fulfilled prophecy vibes –> continue cycle indefinitely.

You know why the whole country moved towards Trump? We’ve been gagging on those fumes for almost a decade. No kid who grows up under that is going to fear fascism. Fascism is the new norm. No media that never learned how to cover or convey information in the first place is going to be a protective 4th estate. Our “norms” have only recently evolved to try and get used to surviving past our 30s. We can devolve into a considerably more ambivalent and blood-thirsty version of ourselves almost over-night. That’s the vast majority of our internal infrastructure.

I don’t want to drift too abstractly. You can stop the cycle at any point by just adopting better questions. You have to ask them of yourself and whomever you’re desiring to connect with.

Do you feel some kind of way when you’re discussing whatever the topic is?
 If you can’t recognize or own the feeling, it’s saying everything for you.

Can you recognize and accept whatever the last point I made was?
 If you are unable or unwilling to quote someone and recite back what they  said, you’re not talking to each other. You’re not sharing language or some  version of reality.

I suggest ceasing any conversation that can’t establish these two conditions if you’re genuine goal is to get somewhere useful and actionable.

One of the digressions I read from someone trying to front that they’re a “reasonable” split-ticket person criticized the border bill because of one out-of-context line about how many people it would allow into the country a day. To this person’s mind, they’ve got a reasonable criticism and wouldn’t vote for a bill that has that in it. The huge but, all bills are going to have things in them that one side doesn’t like. The fact that one came together at all, and was ready to be passed, and was deliberately tanked by the person you voted for says an incredible amount about how “reason” fails.

For that criticism to make sense, I would need that person to answer yes or no to a series of questions about the nature of my reality and perception of what a monumental accomplishment the bill was altogether. I’d also want to know their awareness of the history and context of our immigration issues against what the rest of the world is experiencing. What I’d discover within 2 questions is that this person has no idea how immigration works, what details needed to be negotiated, what future bills others were aiming for once there was a floor, etc. I’d also discover that they were not interested in those details fundamentally, because they’re engaged in backwards apologetics trying to justify a bad decision, not look to build reasons into one they think is good.

This kind of “reasoning” and behavior is something you see in social work constantly. I remind my clients often that there’s a huge difference between living in fear and avoidance, and living in an affirmative and accountable way. When they tell me, “I just don’t ever want to think about using again!” I tell them that’s building failure into their expectations. They’re going to think about using again. They’re not, yet, necessarily going to grasp the nature of their power not to do so. They’re not going to have an understanding and awareness of how their environment and self-talk and daily practices inform or impede their ability to reach years-later goals.

So it goes with everything we do. We live in avoidance of the psychological pain of superficial contradictions and difficult conversations with the forces that, having become too abstracted, we don’t respect as killing us. Fentanyl will drop you dead the first time you get the wrong dose. Rage? You’re not even angry…you claim. Fear? You like scary movies! You assert while I’m trying to talk about the consequences of you escaping an abusive dynamic. Faith? With god, all things are possible. Conveniently, “all things” in my head are something positive and not a global flood.

I’ve thought about taking as many posts as I can and sorting them into the categories of excuses, linguistic gymnastic rhetorical bins, and fallacies. It’s what I used to do back when I was “debating” religious ideologues. It’s the exact same mechanisms regardless of the topic of conversation. That’s what kinda kills and yet excites me, because it feels understandable and teachable. Michael Shermer has his books, but I don’t see enough people wrestling with the conversations in real time. I don’t see us as competent to both recognize and know how to redirect or call out in a way that keeps an exchange on the rails. Like, we don’t have a concept of the rails broadly.

I think for my purposes I need to continue speaking mostly to myself and my fleetingly small audience of people who aren’t reduced to reactionary pedantry when they pretend to understand what I’m talking about. If I can refrain from unironically engaging in the errant pissing matches as I’m searching for a compelling way to convert errant pissing matches into something useful, that will serve me best. We need more people demonstrating the value of methodically and purposefully approaching conversations while maintaining expectations for the nature of the exchange. This is incredibly hard to do, not least because I’m unsure how even most of the smartest and well-intentioned have the ability to recognize the problem.

[1171] Kill Your Pets

I don’t know if I’ve tried this approach. I get heated. Like, I get taken back to childhood levels of dramatic emotion and readiness to break shit when I’m watching something that’s inverting words. If you were to take a quote from MLK Jr. or Nelson Mandela and slap it on a Nazi poster to somehow suggest they were on Hitler’s side, it’s that level of absurdity that still manages to get my blood boiling.

Academically, we’d talk about exploring “rhetoric.” It doesn’t matter if the words are true, just that they’re persuasive.

One of the major motivators that got me started writing was waking up to the nature of manipulation. I was into a girl who was in a typical bad relationship with an insecure boy that did all of the insecure boy shit that imposes guilt, intimidation, and control. As well, I looked at myself, and the relative ease with which I was able to navigate the world through smiling, jokes, or being generally cute. I’m also dispositionally a leader. It’s something people pick up about me immediately and is why I’m constantly asked to teach others, take supervisory or managerial roles, or am capable of maintaining order in a group counseling session.

Another way of stating this, say, even if I was a terrible leader, is that people are eager to thrust the responsibility of things onto me. This can look like blame for the worst things that might happen in a party environment if it's "my" house with 5 roommates. It’s, I would estimate, 99% of the emotional reaction I might illicit from someone after I’ve explicitly stated my assessment of their being if it's less than flattering. I’ve been told, as early as I can remember, some version and at some level that it is always and forever “my fault." Your perception of me is my fault, and as many of them consequences as you need to feel correct.

Now, this is absurd. We’re all to blame all the time, but that’s a specifically incomplete and unhelpful framing meant to equivocate instead of investigate.

There’s a way in which I would be extremely to blame, though. Let’s play out the thought experiment.

I recognize vulnerability. I know how insecure people are. I know how lonely people are. I know they’re looking for excitement, direction, novelty, and acceptance. They think they’re “weird.” They think they’re the only one who is going through their personal story of hell. These are all things I know explicitly and have watched play out in thousands upon thousands of people in one form or another. I don’t care about your job, title, friends, upbringing, I will locate what breaks you almost immediately. It made me an incredible DCS assessor and also lends itself to counseling because I know where not to step too aggressively.

What might I want from someone? Money? Sex? A bubble that affirms everything I say or do? Does it even matter what I want? Is it not already enough to consider me a terrible, evil person by just clocking what I know and finding the comfort and license to let the cards lie as they may?

So you can look for the ones that kind of like you or are intrigued by you. I catch more looks from chubby middle-aged women than windows do from window-shoppers. I make more people chuckle with my turns of phrase and random commentary than I can count. Now, I have your attention. I could ask 1 or 10 questions about you, and elicit months of ways to build rapport. I could innocently start inserting myself into your life, doing favors, picking you up when, again, you’re facing a problem that you and only you have ever encountered ever. And you need me to validate.

We don’t need to really share or talk about our dynamic. It’s something special. It’s crazy how we even found each other, right? Who knew that someone could see right through to your soul and become such a huge part of the directions you can start to see yourself going.

This, mind you, is how I witness a large majority of people’s “loving relationships” playing out. If you look closely at the details or listen to your mouthiest friend, he’s an emotionally abusive child and you’re a codependent internally-ever-crying mess. But damn if you don’t look passable taking a picture at the top of a mountain! The bible of cliches that lend themselves to a “happy marriage” is stapled to your tongue.

Okay, weirdly, we’re still only at the first few stages of how depraved this gets. You don’t really have someone until they’re not just doing things for you, but subverting their entire self in service to anything they even think you might want. That’s proper mind control. Do you want to go to your 9-5 every day? Of course you do, you have to pay the bills, feed the kids, keep your health insurance. Wait, why can’t you get those things any other way? You’ve been bred to follow a certain set of rules and order, so before you’ll learn anything about taxes or blame a billionaire, you’ll get a second and third job.

it’s not large accomplishment to get someone emotionally invested in you. That’s why it’s so cheap and easy to pick out the ones, like a cult leader, who will fuck you first and groom your future child brides. We’ve never established what the goal of doing all of this is because that’s also what makes it so nefarious. The goal is self-gratification and “because I can.” People who do this like this just wish to embody the fact that they’ve done it.

If you own a pet, you can snap that pet’s neck right now. You’d also probably get away with it. Why would you do that? It’s evil, unnecessary, ridiculous, you love it yada yada. Well, you’ve never done it before, and maybe you’re at a point in life where everything feels ambiguous and arbitrary, so, snap? The world doesn’t end. You don’t have to tell anyone. Your other cat doesn’t even blink.

Now, what if you did it because I told you I don’t really like cats. It doesn’t even live with me and I never see it. You’re just so in love with me, so convinced by the narrative we’ve been sharing together, and the emotions are so true and compelling. Is it even really a cat? Does it matter? Is there even a remote chance that I might notice your clothes have less and less cat hair over time, and that might make me happy?

If this feels far-out and gross, as far as I can tell, this is a 1 to 1 correlation of what apologists and con-men and ideologues are doing with every breath.

Who is to blame in this scenario?

If we have healthy minds, we’d instead be asking, at what point can you claim responsibility. When is the above scenario my responsibility? Well, I wrote it. From the jump. If the next time you see me and I’m missing a cat under suspicious circumstances, I can’t blame Trump, or my god, or some level of depression and existential angst. I choose to keep the little fuckers alive, and recognize and respect my capacity otherwise. If I don’t have robust, reliable, good reasons for keeping them alive, I guess all you can do is pray for them?

We’re going to spend, at least, the next 2 years trying to find anyone but us as individuals to blame for what may be the stupidest fascist takeover in history. Who killed my cat!? We will scream at anyone willing to listen. You did, bitch. You looked it dead in the eye, noted how soft its fur was, and with the smallest twitch, cracked that little bone that separated you from the monsters.

Every intellectual who’s out there lending their same awareness that I have to make excuses and apologize for Trump is killing cats left and right.

They aren’t doing the work of killing them though, you are. You tear down our ability to be safe, coherent, accountable, and human. You adopt their hyperbole in tern, you dutiful fulfill  your roles, real and imagined, that you think will service the dear leader.

Guess what, at that point, my work is done. All I have to do now is see how long I can last until I eat myself alive or someone capable of bringing consequences shows up. But, I’ve already established that people are incredibly and endlessly eager to thrust responsibility onto me, didn’t I? No one’s coming. If I don’t stop, it doesn’t stop. And why would I stop?

[1170] Chew Chew

I don’t actually trust, The United States in particular, but humanity broadly, to protect what got us this far. Few things highlight this distrust more than the Surrounded “debates” where online flame-wars get personal representatives. If Crossfire signaled a precipitous decline in how we conceived of meaningfully disagreeing, Surrounded seems to have found extra gasoline for the fire.

Let’s start broad, and try to grasp what it means to “share reality.” This is an ongoing foundational fight where we invoke the consequences of information silos from the internet, the language of academics versus “real America,” and where you exist on a dispositional spectrum from staunchly authoritarian conservative to adventurous brain-fell-out level of open-minded liberal. In a world that flirted with making sense, you could make the reasonable argument for both types working in concert in their respective lanes. But that no longer exists.

Surrounded presumes the same folly of the rest of our conversational landscape. It presupposes that everything can or should just “simply be debated.” It presumes a degree of good faith, capacity, and understanding. If 30 seconds into an hour-long series of increasingly incoherent exchanges you’re already dialed up to 11 and “I know you are, but what am I” or “Why won’t you answer the question?!” You’ve chipped that much more away from establishing a shared broader reality that isn’t the endless errant bickering and self-destruction.

I don’t trust us to protect what’s important because I’ve been in social work and regularly watch people commit self-righteous suicidal acts. Your body can absolutely become dependent on a substance, but I promise you what unites all addicts has nothing to do with their drug of choice. People who huff Trump are doing the exact same thing as those who downplay their meth use. Incidentally, so are the people who refuse to parse the word “genocide.” So are the people who refuse to act morally without consignment from their sky-daddy. So are the people who use smarmy pride to indefinitely avoid. If you read this last paragraph and felt yourself uncontrollably react…guess what.

When you kill your capacity to choose, opting instead to obfuscate, scapegoat, destroy, or ignore, first you kill yourself, then you kill the rest of us. This simple recipe can be enjoyed thousands of times a day. Every inflammatory picture that whizzes past your eyes. Every disconcerting interaction with someone not on your level. Every detail of the story about your victimization. You will have a permanent shit-eating grin massaged into your face, a dumbfounded brow, and a tone dripping in ravenous excuses.

Every high-minded concept like “democracy” and “rights” will be perpetually humbled by the human animal. It’s why your sky-daddies magically conform to the norms of a given era. Ramy Yousef gets to say in a stand-up special he doesn’t care if you’re a Jew…today. Jesus gets turned into a white guy. We’re gonna always default. I think those of us who can stay aware of this should find a kind of reassurance and simply build it into our models for trying to survive, if that in fact remains the goal.

Do I need democracy and rights if I can meet my needs other ways? This is at the heart of every rich person’s attitude and calculus when they’re co-opting a “populous” message. Bear in mind, you’re as “rich” as you are imaginative about your options. Can you make it to Colorado to have an abortion? Most people I know, sure. So, how important is bodily autonomy really? Do I live in a flood prone area? No? So, do I give a fuck if Florida drowns?

People are reluctant to say these kinds of calculations out loud, but again, they’re making them 1000 times a day, landing, roughly, and what they feel in any given moment. In a population that’s perpetually aggrieved, feeling victimized, angry, and proud of how stupid they are, you’re always going to land somewhere close to “Fuck them, I got mine.” What you have, more than anything, is a personal narrative of how correct and righteous you are. The hostility you’d adopt against that analysis? Perfect hostility, absolutely required. The only thing more perfect was Trump’s phone call looking for votes.

We genuinely have lost the distinction between what makes a plane fly and what gets your heart racing. I don’t think a species incapable of separating those two things will survive. I just don’t. I don’t think it is foundationally trustworthy, anymore than I trust my animals to stay out of the trash.

Our ship sailed when we lost the distinction between “expert” and “I saw it on facebook.” We jumped right over the cliff when we ignored the power brokers for the narratives they literally served us. We dug an inescapable hole when we refused to defend even basics of civility, accountability, and common sense. The game has been over for so, so long. I can’t count the amount of posts bragging that they voted for the first time this cycle after such and such pretend-reason.

I hate to say it, but I’m feeling more or less content to let it die. We’re built on a skewed-enough narrative about what America really stands for, and we’ve only invited an infinite sea of incoherence to continue bathing in. It’s just reaction against reaction against reaction against reaction until it all falls down. We don’t believe in anything. Those who do believe in something do so on no evidence besides feels and vibes. They feel like they want the power. They feel correct. They feel justified. Back and forth.

You’re not thinking. You’re not even trying to think. You’re not on a team or part of a coalition. You can’t name the game. You do not, fundamentally, at all accept the nature of life and death. It’s all a series of personally gratifying abstract concepts that fuel your self-conception. You do not actually give a fuck about anything else but you. That’s why Trump is your president. You will not, under any circumstance, concede and sacrifice what you must to wield the kind of power that de-fangs excuse-ridden authoritarian behavior. Now, again, you get to experience how it makes you pay.

[1169] Chugga Chugga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1168] All Aboard

I'm really struggling to believe in anything. This is a fairly longstanding tradition, but it manifests as anxious butterflies during what I perceive to be key inflection points. I’m familiar with being constantly, chronically, fucked with. I am intimately aware of what it feels like to feel absolutely helpless indefinitely. It taught me how to become a bully. It showed me I can functionally black out and numb all pain during a violent reaction. It rendered everything worthwhile and good about me as something to pick at, ridicule, or resent. I’ve teetered on the edge of ending up in prison or hospital before I figured out how to put words to what was happening in me.

None of us can predict the future. I don’t think anything is predetermined, nor do I believe in fate or karma. I might invoke them jokingly or colloquially, but I think at bottom, so much of the best and worst things that happen to any of us are a direct result of choices. They might be choices made under duress. They’re almost certainly choices made with so little information it’s hard to conceive how it’s appropriate to invoke “choice” at all. A choice, by definition, is going to be a binary proposition. You affirm, or you deny. You bring into your awareness, or you eschew further contextualizing. Our brain automatically shortcuts most information in service to this process.

I can tell an extremely damming and deliberate story about how I’m in a decadent 2024. I can point to instances from history that kicked off the degradation of “the middle class,” our education systems, our sense of civic duty, etc. I can point the finger at the internet and the technologies we can’t wrap our ape brains around. I can cite heart-wrenching story after story of the consequences of being intellectually lazy, personally indignant, and in denial about the depth of hatred and fear. I can blame. I can explain away. I can hedge. I can intellectualize and attempt to stomach how all of the stuff “out there” isn’t really what we are or who I am.

And it would all be a lie. It would be a lie that others around me would be eager to celebrate and expand upon. It would be the kind of lie that would keep me divorced from the nature of how I utilize my hatred and my exhaustion in service to taking less accountability than I could. Because my shock and horror are too intense or morally righteous, when I condemn, when I seek to destroy, it would be okay. This is the mind of a fascist.

It’s 12:30 AM on Wednesday after election day. Again, millions of people have sat out. Millions of people have celebrated rape, racism, greed, pride, indefinite 4chan-esc detached irony, and the wholesale lack of accountability. It’s the rot everywhere. It’s the one thing that truly unifies us all. We’re all correct. We’re all entitled to our tears, our hatred, our means of acquiring whatever we want in whatever way we discover. Steal? Why not, I’m just smarter. Kill? Negligently ignoring something is soooo many syllables.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the women who have already died from the abortion rollback. It’s peak insanity. It’s peak Christo-fascist power and control. The smartest, most empathetic and best-equipped people and healthcare tools sit idle as those in power threaten prison and fines for helping. It doesn’t get worse. It just gets more frequent. That’s something I don’t think really sets in for people who wish to point at any individual tale of woe or absurdity. It’s already, right now, as bad as it can get mentally, in how we talk about it, and how we aren’t approaching fixing it.

I remind myself regularly to not be a reactionary. I don’t want to just sit in my fear and pain and speculation. That’s what was happening as I watched the country maps turn red. As I watch the numbers in support of detached yet vigorously hateful and spiteful ignorance march its way forward once again. Pride comes before the fall, and I can think of no one more proud than the people who apologize for belief systems and representatives that mask and hide the broader reality of consequences.

Van Jones famously said Trump was a “white lash.” I think he was dead wrong. The whole country was denying the story of how their needs weren’t being met, denying themselves a chance to own their complicity, laziness, hatred, and insecurities. You’ll hear often about “the extremes” of “either side.” I would put to you that you exist as an extreme of what those people put into action. You can be extremely lazy and feeling intellectually inferior. You can be extremely entitled to your “small town” views that don’t concern themselves with anyone but you and yours. You can be extremely angry and indignant that something didn’t go your way. The story of how your extremes manifest are as individual as it gets.

If we need a heuristic, you can look at voting. I’m the kind of person that can literally never justify endorsing Trump. Him as a person is antithetical to everything I try to be. I don’t want to be “rich” like him, slap my name on everything, sexually abuse women, fuck my family, lie with every breath, provoke and incite violence, pretend to be ambiguous about my relationship to explicit hate groups, cozy up to dictators, find myself getting supported by people like Ben Shapiro or any sycophant building their brand on the right. The “reasons” people use to vote for him are overwhelmingly incoherent lies. He is their representative.

I mention Shapiro because he’s the fanciest dancer claiming to support Trump’s policy independent of everything he’s ever said or done otherwise. This, again, is how fascists, apologists, extremists pretend to think. Provided there’s something “bigger” or “practical” or “the real goal,” everything, your death and ruin included, gets sublimated in service to it. Why protect the planet when Jesus is on his way back? Why quibble over poor people having rape babies or women controlling their bodies when we’re gonna return to the ways of God? Why trust the science of vaccines when I have a right to kill you when I’m in power? This is the conclusion, the unyielding ambivalence in service to selfishness.

We get Trump because we deserve Trump. We’ve been trying to have a mythical future that refuses to directly combat the forces that broke our government. We’re suffering the fissures of recycled propaganda. We don’t teach in compelling ways. We don’t hold people accountable. We don’t model behavior. We don’t reign in our worst impulses. It’s all wish-fulfillment. What was Kamala going to do with a broken Senate and wholly corrupt Supreme Court? Trump faced no consequences for encouraging people to kill people. What do you think is really and actually going on in your country? You haven’t conceded what’s really been lost anymore than Trump did the last election.

Hope is fickle. Change is arbitrary. We’ve only demanded the performances of each other, not the work. We’re all addicts at the group meeting carrying on like its fun and games and our lives are going so smooth since we found each other. 5 seconds after we leave we’re screaming at the people in our lives, crying over our circumstances, and building more chronic conditions for which to seek an addictive fix.

You hate as deeply as any fascist Trump supporter, as any “Christian,” as any “religious” nut job talking a million miles an hour like Shapiro constantly justifying justifying justifying because the fact of their limited, scared, irrational beast at the heart of their behavior can’t be contended with. They don’t own it anymore than you do, it’s just their time to be attaching language to the nature of the self-destruction. What did the Left do? Reacted with DEI, defund the police, and trigger warnings. They didn’t figure out how to get Bernie in charge, they looked for the next coolest victim narrative to attach their identity to.

It’s hard not to feel like we deserve it. We deserve to keep dying for no reason. We deserve to keep talking in circles with fanatics. We deserve to eat the scraps of oligarchs and submit to wage slavery. We are addicted to the grind, consumption, excuses. We want to hear the same story every day and feel proud and confident in each recitation and share. We want the awkward, evil, rich bullies to win, because those are our gods. That is who we wish to be in a world that’s treated us so unfairly by asking for anything accountable.

I’m not giving myself to the fear, ignorance, and hatred no matter how often it’s on offer. I own the hatred I have for fascists of any stripe and era. I will never be okay with the patterns of thought and behavior, so, so smug, and confident that bring nothing but shame and embarrassment and death. I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand or feel like they do. I’m going to take what I feel, and choose to operate like someone knows his power and responsibility, even in the maddest of worlds. Maybe in a generation or two, if I last that long, my example will mean enough to be of better consequences than the ones I’m suffering.

[1165] Bottom Feeding

Whether it's a book, or a YouTube series, there's something about argumentative patterns I'd really like to explore. I've noticed, for as long as I can remember, these habits we get into when we're trying to sound reasonable. We presume it's "the following list of reasons" we offer that "make sense" or "justify" where we're coming from. From what I can see, it's the exact same internally emotional places using language in a very particular way.

My sensibility was kicked into overdrive when I listened to a Bari Weiss podcast where she's interviewing 3 people who switched from voting democrat to Trump. They were all deeply political types who march, volunteer, run for things, etc. These aren't the arbitrary "undecideds" who can't spout a book-length answer to questions. If you have the patience to strip down the extremely feverish rhetoric, it's hard not to see that they're each just hurt or confused emotionally, and there's choice phrases and redundancies that clue me in.

And here's where I get to be disappointing because I don't want to re-listen to the podcast right now and pull them all out.

What I can do is provide the process and mechanism that people use to justify breaking their capacity to reason.

One has to assume they are coming from a "first principles" place when they make a declarative or moral statement. Something, at bottom, has to be "true" or practically assumed for anything else to follow. Whether that something is coherent or consistent is an extremely open question.

It doesn't matter what the issue is. That's the key thing to keep in mind. You can't understand how the mechanism breaks if you listen to someone's line of reasoning down the track they take alone. If someone tells you "I don't like her answer on foreign policy!" That's not the operative information. What matters is that they feel a certain level of fear, despair, exasperation, and/or other things that emotionally persuade them to start carrying water for what was previously unacceptable about the opposition.

It then becomes exceptionally easy to write-off literally anything you need to. You also get stuck to a handful of reasonable-sounding reiterations.

I've learned that it doesn't matter how "smart" you are, or how quickly you speak, or how many references you can make, you are at the mercy of your feelings until you choose not to be. A "first principle" that is conjured by your feelings is neither first, nor a principle. It's the needy, hopeless, ridiculous child of insecure instinct and ego that is constantly begging to be appeased.

You can see a snapshot of this articulated brilliantly with Ben Shapiro as a person in general, but especially when he's talking to(at) people at The Oxford Union. The clash of alleged first principles is on display explicitly from the people arguing against him. They operate under the working assumption that Israel doesn't have a right to exist in the first place. Ben, to his credit and seemingly only in this area of life, manages to ensure this is brought to the forefront of the "debate" they're trying to have over history or who's "more genocidal."

As to the "true impact" of religion? That's going to antagonize Ben's internal irrational animal, and he'll speed-run his mountain of apologetics that are perfectly unpersuadable. I don't believe he, or anyone, needs magic sky daddies to come up with moral frameworks or good reasons to tow certain lines because I have a first principle about the nature of pain and consequences. If I can see something coming or don't want to get fucked up, the universe "magically" shows me the way to keep my hand out of the fire.

You know when a comedy show goes into a crowd of radicals and starts on-the-spot questioning? The loops people go into. The honest ones will betray their emotions and state explicitly they don't know something they're allegedly angry about. The rowdiest ones will return to their catchphrases or megaphones. Well, "intellectual" people will do that too, but they'll use a particular interview or quote from someone with the right letters and credentials. Both demonstrate that, what's at bottom, is how they feel, and literally nothing that comes out of their mouth is the kind of truth they wish it to be.

To develop a first principle you have to believe certain things about what it is to exist altogether. You have to ask yourself, constantly, what your individual responsibility is to that existence. If you don't develop that belief system, or don't defer to a falsifiable metric in your attempt, nothing really matters. It, in fact, can't matter, because it's not rooted or defined. It's a constant abstraction of your feelings, dressed up in so many words or justifications. This is why we're so hungry to "just accept" religious doctrines, and celebrate "faith" because they pretend to do the work of that first principle formation for us.

This is where you'll find every level of equivocation, precisely without irony. When someone exists as anything they need to to get away with anything they desire, without even realizing it, they will offer you the format of technical and philosophical "bullshit." It's an attempt to persuade, without regard to the truth. The target of persuasion? The person touting the bullshit themselves. They're searching, infinitely, for the words to match their emotional truth. Emotional solidarity and polite looking the other way becomes the only currency.

Of course, they're never going to define their emotional truth as an irrational screaming child suffering a sense of betrayal and disorientation. That would clash dramatically against their self-conception as a Harvard graduate or community organizer delegate, or serious person who memorizes pivotal historical dates like a preacher does bible verses. But, the truth, as far as I can tell, is they are, like most of us, screaming, scared, irrational animals first.

I think mental murder is achieved when you pretend like "all politicians" anything. You have not even the remotest first principle about the definition, importance, history, or purpose of "organizing" as a concept. Why would you? It's not taught in school. Your day to day life is provided. Your road to "serious person" with appropriate title was laid out clear as day. When you pretend to care about what a politician "lies" about, you're not literally counting lies and saying, "By the numbers, I'm going with the democrats because Trump lied 30,573 times over 4 years." That would be too dispassionate and grounded.

When you pretend to care about lies, you're elevating your token issue. When someone is "incomplete" about how they'll "support the Jews," they will exist in that state indefinitely until you've gotten your emotional revenge. One way you can be extra sure this is where someone is psychologically is when they can't stop repeating some hateful label about what you are or what your beliefs mean. When challenged, they'll just repeat themselves and say something like, "Why would I talk to an (x) altogether?" Tried and true strategy in maintaining a stupid bubble.

A first principle around communication with the "other side" would be capable of developing a tool for discerning a troll versus partner in conversation. It would concede more alikeness than difference if only because you're human or sharing a language in spite of its many connotative conceits. It would remain sensitive and qualifying when it moved to make a caricature or assumption about where someone was coming from. There's a soft pedantry for the sake of clarity. You're not trying to "gotcha" when a colloquialism or fair-enough sentiment betrays a dictionary.

If I could ever get paid to do like "take down" videos parsing out conversations and podcasts, that'd be fun. I appreciate those with like advanced degrees who refute, with deep technical prowess, morons. I know there are plenty of logical fallacies and psychological terms related to everything I'm talking about, and I think it's a lot harder to see just how quickly and fluidly they manifest in what otherwise presents like a reasonable adult or professional conversation.

I get the jarring experience of listening back-to-back Left and Center-right podcasts/people which helps inform how I see the pattern too. The dismissive quips offered by the If Books Could Kill and 5-to-4 crowd feel irksome when they're doing exactly what they'd accuse a Bari Weiss of with regard to a given author or "deeply personal" subject matter like Gaza or trans activism. It's funny to see how earnestly Anthony Scaramucci prioritizes a piece of Tim Walz on the debate stage versus how the Pod Save America guys do. The "secret" value statements of their class and character pop out.

To my mind, I've listened to them all sound not-batshit and agreeing on what I would consider my first principles, but their emotions don't allow them to say so. I've heard both If Books Could Kill and Bari Weiss podcasts say, for example, that the science around trans stuff is incredibly sparse, and there are meaningful reasons to be skeptical about the DSM and implementation of diagnostic criterion. Why not start there and have a conversation? Why, ever, introduce the language of "mutilated children," like the increasingly myopic hyperbolic rabbit holes of Peter Boghossian's universe where he "can't find anyone on the other side" to talk to." Coleman Hughes manages to, somehow. Neither side wants to mutilate children. Neither side agrees on the number who have been. Those seem foundational for coherence.

Like me, I think people who vehemently argue for anything are implicitly trying to synthesize. It's very disorienting to be fielding a constant stream of information and never feeling like you land somewhere. It doesn't feel right to be rooted in dispassionate skepticism. It doesn't feel right to use your emotions as one, relatively small, informer of your overall viewpoint. It doesn't feel right to find common cause with something "disgusting" or "hateful" or hellbent on "erasing your identity." It's nearly impossible for most people to accept that that's precisely what they are and where they're speaking from. It's nearly impossible to accept because emotionally defaulting to black and white thinking, either/or, in-crowd out-crowd, is the default.

I'm disgusting, hateful, and trying to erase self-conceptions all the time. That's not something I "admit," it's just a true series of things. Devoid of context, the hundred other things I can say about myself, they'd carry all they needed to for anyone disinterested in understanding me. More to my point, they won't understand themselves. Then, hours and hours, and often lifetimes, will be spent trying to fill something that was never a wholly conceived capable-of-being-filled "thing" in the first place.

[1161] Blind And Silence

This might be easier to read and follow than my instinct suggested as I began.

I've been thinking about "having my back against a wall" versus "having a goal."

As I've scrambled to take (nearly) any job that will higher quickly, I'm feeling the familiar waves of panic, motivation, relief, dread, and comfort - all tentative - and on rotation over the course of each day. It's not unfair to say that for most of my adult life, I've had something of a plan, contingencies, and emergency pull-switches for ensuring I could keep a certain standard and platform for my life. The plan is always lacking, but has been acutely felt recently.

Back when I had considerably less perspective, I took it for granted things would be about as easy for me in life , as it pertained to jobs or professional obligations, as it had been for me in school. I was lucky enough to be born with a big enough brain that allows a solid amount of what life asks of you to come pretty easy. It is exceptionally rare that I'm at a job for even 3 months before being ask-told to learn the next thing, take on more, or become a supervisor or manager. That is, provided I'm not trying to cross into an upper-class environment.

Here, thoughts about "showing versus telling" come up. I can get pretty dramatic in how I describe my feelings or what I think the "inevitable consequences" will be of a course of action. It's not that I don't feel intensely. It's not that I'm talking purely irrationally and just routinely predict incorrectly. It's that when I pull back and look at my behavior and pair it against my most ridiculous or hyperbolic writing, or most compelling and exhausting stomach-dropping, headaches, and jaw-clenching, I almost without-fail do the things necessary to appropriately and accountably respond to the moment.

The first of which is writing. I'm exceptionally rarely going to actually scream, hit something, or drive a little too fast a little too buzzed around a blind corner. I don't oblige people to "handle me at my worst," nor do I take some kind of secret undue pride in the amount of chaos I can embody. This is showing, to myself first, that I'm thinking more carefully, deliberately, and acknowledging each wave of feeling or choice word as it hits me. The words aren't hot, sharp, heavy, or dangerous. At bottom, they don't inherently mean anything, except to me, and except if they can be construed in a way that I calm down, pick a direction, or make a certain amount of peace with my antagonized moment.

I think it's important to point out that it's never "fixed" or "settled." I'm, forever, processing. I'm weighing the last thing I demonstrate against the next thing I feel, and am constantly balancing.

It's the first day of early voting in Indiana. My two closest friends in the area pay next to no attention, if not actively avoid politics. They aren't fascists, but they could easily "forget" to vote. I'm incredibly sympathetic to their feelings, and wholly angered by their ambivalence. I can't trust they would vote without my intervention. Whether or not they "believe" in the consequences of participating in the maintenance of the country, their actions, and the reason we're friends, suggest they don't want to sleepwalk into fascism. Materializing the consequences of ambivalence for someone is nearly impossible.

So it goes for all of us about the infinite list of things we aren't paying attention to. You don't pay that close attention to the words you choose or friends you keep? I've watched that turn into chronic addiction attempting to cope with instantiated abuses and excuses. You don't pay attention to how much time you spend at work? I've watched that balloon family and child problems because a narrative about "taking care of your family" doesn't include the time to foment emotional well-being after being reduced to a desperately-sought dollar amount. A dollar amount often explicitly not even budgeted for, so people will work over-time or several jobs and not register they are making sometimes less than if they worked less after gas, taxes, and other opportunity costs.

Here we can bring it back to an examination of class. Rich people, significantly more often than they'll ever admit, work less and earn more. There are plenty of hyper-focused talented and particularly-skilled people who deserve every penny of every minute they spend exercising there worth. For every one of those people, there are tens of thousands more who simply own everything. They indefinitely benefit from their family history, adjacency to privileged places, or other circumstances invariably downplayed in their autobiography/self-help book.

It would be foolish, for example, for me to pretend I'm not, as measured by many tests, "generally intelligent." It doesn't mean I'm wise. It doesn't mean I'm likeable. It doesn't mean I'm suitable for your team or can figure anything out I please. It just means I'll be able to describe and execute how to navigate all of those deficiencies in a way most won't. Whether I find the will, capitalize on an opportunity, or manifest the luck that sees my circumstances improved remain indefinitely open questions. General intelligence, in and of itself, doesn't mean shit if people don't like you, trust you, or recognize and respect what you're showing them.

I can show myself the work to remain "sane" or "stable," but that doesn't mean it translates. I can work myself to death accomplishing tasks at a job, but it doesn't mean I'm emanating pride in my work that anyone looking at won't simply resent or seek to undermine. I thought, incorrectly, if I showed you could move to cousin-fuck Indiana, build something from limited resources, and then carry on describing the math and timelines for more indulgences and opportunities, people would join or follow. I've described every beat of how I've gotten to now. It is perpetually unpersuasive and uncompelling.

What is it people want to see? Themselves? Maybe, sometimes. Maybe at an instinctual basic animal level. We do pack together. Girls with about the same levels of attractiveness or similar body types certainly do. Frat bros flock like migratory birds. I feel like I can smell most pictures from a gaming conference or Comic-Con. I'm suspicious people can see at all. I think in order to be able to see, you have to have an idea of what you're looking at. We spend most of our time having the idea of what we're looking at filled in by other people.

I didn't discover I was smart. I was told it, constantly, growing up. I didn't know I was cute. I certainly didn't feel I was cute, and therefore didn't carry myself with the confidence or attitude of someone "worthy" of engaging attraction games. I was told I was cute, didn't believe it. I cut off my hair. I dug at my skin. I bemoaned not having abs. I refused to smile in pictures. What was I looking at? The caricatured, resented, and made-fun-of target of my mother who turned her weight issues and low self-esteem into lessons on how to emotionally abuse. I was looking at the opposite of the kids wearing Abercrombie and playing sports. This, in perfectly unrealized contradictory irony, as I also played sports and wore a bit of Abercrombie.

I think it's easier to conceptualize "not having an identity" or "not knowing what you're looking at" in the context of kids or childhood. We start practically feral and are at the mercy of our circumstances, genes included. So many of my clients at the prison started using things like meth or heroin when they were in their teens after being introduced to drugs while being in the single digits. Many had no idea what it even meant to be an "adult man" because they severely got their brains fucked with before they ever had the chance to learn what that could mean.

The class you're born into comes with it a certain narrative. Maybe it jives with your sensibilities, maybe not. Maybe it compliments your inherent capacity, or maybe it stands as a constant source of antagonism. Maybe you don't have the industriousness and high-achieving capacity of your parent who immigrated. Maybe you don't have the emotional intelligence to surround yourself with people who compliment and redirect your negative self-regard. Maybe you don't have the capacity for ambivalence and pretext to play politics in elite circles. If you don't know you're born into a certain vein and are described by an existing, evolving and diffuse story, you can't figure out how, or why you'd even bother, to change it.

Neither of my parents are dumb. My mom is insane, my dad is Tim Walzian. It's a reactive distinction I've felt emotionally my whole life, and took years to understand intellectually. My dad has been an iron-worker almost my entire life. When his parents immigrated, you could raise four kids, put them all through college, and retire working at the steel mill. If, like so many families in our middle-class existence, you wanted to keep repeating the pattern of my grandparents, we've watched how the systems have declined and devolved into nascent fascism. We fundamentally can't conceive of the magnitude of what we're embedded in and looking at, so a reactionary posture foments.

Back we return to having your back against a wall versus having a goal. Here is the reason so much feels like life is binary instead of probabilistic. The binary exists, but it's at the level of choosing altogether. It's not "Trump vs. Harris." It's asking what probably happens when you enable and support one version of existence over another. Do you compound the pain and absurdity? Do you make it harder to see and believe in things getting better? We can equivocate literal dumb fascism with perhaps a valid laundry list of complaints and criticisms about any other form of democratic politicking. Why?

We don't know what we want. We don't know how to articulate it. We don't practice the patience to deeply appreciate when we've gotten it. We look at our work and feel exhausted because we've been exploited and punished for trying, trusting, and caring. Our backs are against the wall, so anything we do or say as the bullets barrel towards us is justified. We're linguistically and psychologically trapped. Our concept is so distorted that the work of how to make things better is unrecognizable and takes too long to be realized emotionally. Or, worse, we've crippled our capacity to train a positive feedback loop at all, introducing proverbial meth into the system too early to fully repair.

Your voice is the most powerful thing in finding a prayer for dealing with "everything." It's the first fucking amendment for a reason. Those who had something to say were violently and perpetually silenced. I believe you have something to say, and are violently and perpetually silenced. But your goal hasn't been articulated like theirs was. Their imprecise, imperfect, ever-evolving goal was written down and given a place to start informing whatever beautiful or damning thing you wish to say about our place and country today. You hear the goals of the craziest and most vitriolic people every day. The "corrupt" part of that system is you pretending not to hear them. It's you pretending not to have feelings about them. It's you pretending you're not baked into the cake with them.

My life doesn't get better the more I hate something. I might need to describe my ongoing hatred and accompanying feelings, but ultimately my behavior has to look like hope. It has to look like I'm reasonably trying to fix the big abstract bad feelings with day-to-day exercises patching all the holes life pokes through my sense of agency and well-being. I will never not be an angry ape, raging and afraid. That will never excuse my decisions to reward instead of correct for how that manifests. I can acknowledge the infinite list of things cornering me, trying to shut me up, or attempting to hijack my attention. The consequences aren't "more true" than what probably happens in how I do or don't respond.

[1152] And The Horse You Rode In On

 Here’s the thing, because for the first time since Trump ever entered the political area, I’ve professed to facebook that I would literally buy guns and kill Nazis - that explicitly.

Life is not actually a game. I’ve said it is as an analogy plenty of times, but it’s life and death at all times. Whether you get stopped by  your ailing heart or a car coming the wrong direction, you need to be paying attention to the right shit and proactive to survive in any manner beyond “animalistic.”

You are a fucking animal first. That this is so willfully denied is how we will all end up dead by our own hands. Animals are fucking dumb. Animals are fucking violent. Animals are reactive, arbitrarily horny, and at the literal mercy of circumstance. THIS IS YOU. YOU ARE FUCKING DUMB. YOU ARE FUCKING VIOLENT. YOU ARE REACTIVE, ARBITRARILY HORNY, AND AT THE LITERAL MERCY OF CIRCUMSTANCE.

Whether you deny this about yourself or about the “other side” you’re pretending to engage with, this is the operative fucking narrative and detail that will adjudicate existing altogether. Neither of us needs to maintain an “opinion” on that shit. Neither of us needs to fight over “just how much” we’re plagued by these conditions. You are a wretched, scared, naked animal, first.

Whatever incredibly fair and mean-spirited things you can say about the democrats, they are entirely different categories of awful when you play with fascism. This shouldn't be hard to understand, and it’s not, when you stop acting like a dumb fucking monkey. You don’t get The United States of America when you cede to fascist thinking. It literally no longer exists. When you double down on being fucking stupid and PROUD of your stupidity, everything fucking burns. And you know this, and your evil stupid animal self will do it anyway.

It can get worse. You might literally see the world where you have to kill in order to survive. WHY THE EVER LOVING FUCK WOULD YOU PLAY WITH THAT?!  Why would you apologize for it? Why would you downplay? Why would you hold your tongue against your cliche “right-wing uncle?” Our literal capacity for a remotely coherently modern and stable existence is at stake, and has been, since we started ushering in this fatalistic avatar and hyperbolic bullshit back with Reagan and Thatcher.

It’s a single fucking thread through history. Learn from this shit. Today. I’m not excited about the prospect of some morbid culling of the dumb, lazy, and proud.

[1147] Class Hole

Apparently, I’m stuck in a considerably more thoughtful place than I had planned for the day, so let’s digress.

I want to talk about class and character.

I tried to go to a comedy show in Chicago on Saturday. I had to drive my F-150 4 hours there. Parking was $16. I got there hours early because I’d never been to the venue and wanted to scout the area and know where I was going. I find out when I arrive that the show had been cancelled. No notice came out on social media. No email blast was made.

I reached out to the artist, who somewhat surprisingly, responded and said it was the other guy who he was performing with that was supposed to put out the cancellation. He offered to refund the money and apologized. He showed an understanding and courtesy that I feel has become something of a coin-flip in general. It speaks to a class of character.

He’s not responsible for parking in Chicago, and I think it would be very not-classy to bundle that cost into a request about what I’d get back for the ticket. So I reach out to SpotHero. Turns out, by virtue of my spending habits and use of their app, they’re happy to credit my account! They must insist that this is normally outside of their policies, but, me being me, they’ve got me covered.

Can you spot the difference in each piece of how that scenario was addressed?

There’s a version of that story where I’m simply shit out of luck. The “non-refundable ticket” is sunk. The parking I needed for 30 minutes but paid 9 hours for is gone. The gas, old truck wear-and-tear, and time and effort just part of an unfortunate scenario that most adults are going to understand, but also encourage you to move on from pretty quickly. Especially in the era of discussions on “privilege,” I’ll be invited to appreciate more that I even own a vehicle, could afford the ticket, or have any number of qualities that do a terrible of job of acknowledging and entertaining the actual discussion I’m hoping to have.

I belong to a certain class. It’s not rich, but it is first-world and informed by some upper-asshole sensibilities. I have rich family members (who, to be sure, want nothing to do with me). I’ve dated girls with even richer family members. I own stuff, including land. I’ve got a college degree. I have hobbies that involve big-word books and expensive tools or instruments. Most of my “problems” fall between a set of safety barriers that would have to work pretty hard to approach something resembling real poverty or struggle.

If I weren’t regularly spending the money, how classy would SpotHero be? How supportive of my character would they be inclined to build in to their business model? Is the money I spend and frequency with which I use the app a good or the best measure of said character?

By our capitalist logic, yes it is. I clearly do something worthwhile that affords me either the cash or credit to play along the lines I do. And, to be sure, I do and have worked to make money, subjected myself to many forms of job types and punishments, and actively campaign to maintain every inch of gained privileges or access I achieve. Is it “fair” more than “fair enough?” No. It’s just fair enough for a practical means of approaching an otherwise impersonal mode of operating.

It gets sticky and complicated, particularly with modern also-narratives about who is suffering from what and why. It’s gotten so dramatic that, without irony, people were trying to cancel the police and downplay getting car jacked and mugged from positions of leadership in major cities. Rich or poor, when you steal someone’s shit, it’s not classy and demonstrates poor character. Yet, we’ve seemingly allowed rich people to steal with impunity for generations. Our instinctive moral compass that would snap into action within a tribe gets twisted and broken when abstracted across a nation.

What you’re left with is resentment for those who can get away with it, and yet a perverse desire to be more like them. Don’t you want to be rich enough to get away with murder? Millions and millions of people vote for Trump on precisely that desire. They’re the “privileged poor” who have to deal with customer-service headaches, prices they can’t control, health care they can’t afford, hard to afford and maintain vehicles that technically work but are ill-suited, and every nagging detail that contrasts poorly against your imagination born from an episode of The Wonder Years.

There isn’t a lot of room to be “classy.” We’re in a fundamental death match of an eroded social contract, so it remains, tragically, something of a surprise when someone does the right thing. It reminds me of The Walking Dead, in that you never know what you’re going to get with the next stranger you come across. Even if you wish to claim the ones who almost immediately try to steal or kill your favorite main character are doing it wrong, you still begrudgingly understand where they’re coming from.

We can contrast my experience of getting a refund for this show with getting refunds from Ticketmaster. I shouldn’t have to climb the chain, implore the minimum-wager to not get unnecessarily verbally berated, or write heartfelt letters of my circumstances in order to get money back for a rained-out event. If I paid exorbitantly to see 4 bands, and half of them aren’t going on, and I’ve driven 2 hours and stood in line for 2 more, just give me the money back when I never enter the venue and the circumstances have materially changed beyond my control. It shouldn’t be a fight, but it always is. When you monopolize a space, you’re seemingly less-inclined to find civility or class.

Of the many shows I’ve gone to over the last 3 years, I’ve created giant playlists of clips I’ve taken from most of the shows. I haven’t had a single issue doing so, uploading to YouTube, and just playing them when I clean or sharing with friends and family. Yesterday, I get 2 copyright strikes from George Gargan and his Damnably label for Otoboke Beaver videos I took when the opened for the Chili Peppers in Noblseville. YouTube has a pre-scan thing that tells you if your video is copywritten. It says, “Copyright-protected content found. The owner allows the content to be used on YouTube.” It said that for the Otoboke Beaver videos, or I never would have posted them.

YouTube tells you to either reach out to the person who filed the strike, and ask them to withdraw it, or you can do some kind of legal retaliatory option. I did both. The email exchange was devoid of class. Whether it was George himself or a representative using his Hotmail, all I got was a series of bizarre condescending hoity-toity moral posturing and nonsense trying to justify filing the strike. It didn’t matter that I told him I’m perfectly happy to just take down the videos. It didn’t matter that I explained how I found the band, why I appreciate them, the merch I bought, or that they’re celebrated along with hundreds of others I’ve encountered no issues with for 3 years. Nope, he’s going to fold his arms and use vague truisms about what he thinks all bands in general believe about why he’s justified.

Naturally, I’m going to hold that grudge and avoid supporting his label going forward and cross my fingers the one band I care about on it drop him.

This intersects with notions about the appropriateness of recording anything from a show at all, what rights artists do or don’t have with regard to their work, and the monopolized means we’re offered by which to experience it…but I’m not getting into all of that.

The point is, I think a person who appreciates music and artists like I do to such a degree he’s spent thousands in support of them over the last few years, shares moments from one of their performances, and isn’t in any way making money from or misrepresenting them is the opposite of the one you try to moralize and punish for…trusting YouTube’s pre-check? It’s not classy and shows me your character is misaligned and petty.

I think one of our largest moral failings today is regarding each other as simply one of a pack of dogs wreaking havoc across our otherwise pristine and perfect palaces of leisure and indulgence. Are there healthy doses of entitled disingenuous and immature assholes pissing in the overall soup we’re trying to enjoy? Absolutely. Does that give you license to treat everyone like they’re coming for your last meal and head during the apocalypse? Not even a little.

You’re not classy or have a good character just because you have money, the keys, or the presumed duty to carry out some unjust and ill-conceived rule for its own sake. If you remain persistently unable to think critically, give the benefit of the doubt, or see and listen to circumstances that, often enough, don’t require a dozen tit-for-tat emails or tired digressions about “policy” where common sense would do, you damn us all.

I have 25 more shows on the horizon. I can create another channel. I’m healthy, fed, and technically not in debt, but definitely in debt with several means of alleviating it. I just saw Green Day at Wrigley Field. I’m not looking for sympathy. I do think one of their lyrics should rattle around more heads of those who try to shuffle the wrong targets back to their place.

“Do you know your enemy?

[1137] You Had It All

If you're seeing this, I didn't delete it after never finding the point or remote satisfaction.

The word "heuristics" is sticking in my head. If you're not a word nerd, you may not know it simply means the process or method that is "good enough" to be practical. It feels almost personal to someone like me. My living environment is mapped along a heuristic of "functional" as opposed to "aesthetic." If in doubt, I want it to work in service to one or more of my goals 100% more than I care if it looks good.

I apply heuristics when I think about conversing or arguing with people, as well as when I register that I'm being lied to. I can't meticulously go through every individual's thoughts and flag discreet lies. I can reliably gauge how or whether to approach my next question or piece of advice based on a dozen different things related to your word choice, body language, and tone. I've watched people turn extra self-conscious when I say the quiet part out loud in what I'm reading from them that informs what I'm going to say next.

I've been watching a few more interviews and drifting into "debates." Familiar themes about the pitfalls of tribal allegiances get referenced and so many times do the participants wax about "what people in such and such circles do" as opposed to just answering the fucking question presented. Even good faith discussions can't resist pedantic urges and infinite qualifiers when it's not clear if doing so even adds clarity as it contorts fluidity.

I'm skeptical of debate at a conceptual level. I think an array of ill-defined metrics need to be assumed and it's any wonder how one goes about evaluating the "benefits" or "achievements" afterwards. When you're done, does it lead to, say, enacting a new policy or provide instruction on how to change minds about a given subject? Are you sure each participant was qualified to talk on the, perhaps dozens, of subjects that might come up? Is anyone flagging logical inconsistencies and straw-men besides autistic onlookers wringing their hands and screaming at the screen?

I think you can engage in a self-evaluative dialectic exercise to something of a greater effect. Or I think you can engage in a therapeutic exercise with someone versed in helping you organize how to better argue with yourself. I can feel immediately when a question I pose to myself is going to produce, essentially nonsense, no matter how I answer. Whose "foreign policy" is better, Trump's or Biden's? It's an insane question. It skips even the idea of an accessible and generalized heuristic that you might adopt for any given country or because of specific reasons related to your country.

Maybe some years "police the world" makes a lot more sense than others. If you operate under the idea of "no war, ever," you might be perfectly comfortable abandoning Israel and letting Putin take Ukraine because "other people" or "Western values" or "irreconcilable strong-man" don't comport with your heuristic for understanding the world. Maybe you shortcut anyone from the middle east as "terrorist," so Muslim travel ban? Yes, please. Either way, it's your personal preferences, prejudices, and blind spots pretending to be evidence evaluators.

For the question to make any sense to me, I want to be presented with the list of policy decisions that were made, broken down by country, and contextualized with the reasoning or history. That's likely several books long and the reason we have career experts informing these decisions. It's also why I think it's performative and unhelpful to get two, perhaps technically versed individuals, by virtue of their popularity or propensity to talk fast, blazing on through the question in any given "debate." Do we try to "contain" Iran, or find any remote common cause with the Ayatollah? It's a better question than "Whose foreign policy…," but it still requires defining "contain," exploring how it is or is no longer working, and maintaining healthy doubt about his intentions.

I argue with myself all the time. There's a temptation to fall into a form of listless despair. I think a little too highly of myself and what I hope to achieve, so literally every moment in which I can't get a glimpse of how that person should operate, I tempt a certain kind of despotic fate. Writing about it is part of my heuristic. The dread never leaves, but it quiets and I can get back to doing one of the general somethings that keep me occupied or contented-enough. I'm always fighting with myself about what the next thing to do should be. Relax? Definitely when I'm lightheaded after working in the yard. Maybe a little when I go up north and hang out with my dad or with a friend. Almost never when I've sat for a touch too long and the white board with its lists is staring at me and my dozens of projects are screaming that I'll never be any younger and I'm not a professional "whatever" yet.

I'm under a delusion that because I've developed somewhat more consistent of principals and actions I take in service to them, and like, one day, "the world" will make sense and "get it" like I do. It's not a delusion I want or practice, it's seemingly built into my broader and base character. I look around at this space that I've had something to say about every inch of, and it continues to make the kind of sense it needs to for me and how I wish to use it. I rearrange and organize things CONSTANTLY. I try to build my space to flow with my intentionality that whips around with a disorienting viciousness. I don't think I start a single thing, ever, and just do that thing all the way through. Movies and shows? Paused and stopped, or done with Candy Crush or brushing my teeth. Weed whacking? Better stop real quick and pick up trash or fight with random thing that needs to be moved over there exactly now for some reason.

You can chalk this up to ADHD if you want, but I do have the capacity to focus, and focus extremely deeply, when I "truly give a shit." What do I give a shit about? That's anyone's guess. Sometimes it's a particular guest on a show like Real Time with Bill Maher. Sometimes it's me desperately trying to experiment with some disingenuous money-making scheme. Sometimes it's a particularly engaging discussion with someone on the brink of breaking through a particular point regarding a chronic condition. Sometimes I'm drunk and the band is playing the song I know all the words to. I hyper-focused on books I was reading as I was mining them for argumentative ammunition during the god v science years. I obsessively focused on the injustice of depraved "leadership" targeting families, and then me, at DCS.

There's a certain ironic freedom from your ego when you can make it about anything else. It's their fault. It's the messiness of "the world." It's the isms and ists. It's some born-with deficiency I insist you write off, but also never demand an apology for. I think I'm just tired of never feeling like "it's enough."

I'm staring down the barrel of another meaningless, low-paying, unstimulating, and time-wasting job. The thought alone would be suicide-inducing if I didn't have so much I enjoyed living for. Hello again irony. You can continue to live for the things you enjoy provided you sacrifice functionally all of your time in service to what slivers of it you can cut off. Give them your time, your mind, your luck, your chance encounters, and let them box in your dreams and expectations. If you let your head and heart get too big, you'll not only alienate your supports, but yourself.

I don't think I accept the implicit argument of modern life that we need something of a perpetual humbling and modesty regarding the amount of wealth floating around. I don't think we're made better when "the struggle" is over whether we can describe literally anything as "essential to human flourishing," let alone a decent basic healthy and hopeful life. We start at the question of, "Who do you want to be in debt to?" Your followers as you bank on captured attention? Your sponsors? Your overseer because your health insurance is on the line? Your hospital when you don't have said insurance? Your credit card? Predatory home lender? Info-tainment-bubble-makers?

I try not to see just an utterly foolish child when I write something like, "I'm trying to live my values." Any random reader is surely going to scoff and say, "Yeah, aren't we all, asshole?" My extreme doubt after thousands of conversations aside, we come full circle to whether or not the question posed makes any kind of internal sense as stated, and then whether it can be parsed and defined at book-length detail. What are my values? In what order? Do I value my free time more than my horrible mood and thought process when I feel trapped in a bad job? Every day? Every hour? I played my last job day by day and left consciously and deliberately when "it became too much." I'm confident I can do that again, it just feels so pointless.

I was in debt before I ever chose to get more. I'm operating under systematic heuristics that have captured our imaginations. If I do something, like live in a shed, or try to start my own business in direct competition and defiance, my projects are already under water; drowned out by the noise of opinions, egos, fears, judgments and condescending "good luck" sentiments. What I want to do is continue to access and celebrate a feeling that I don't often get from other people, and when I do, it's overwhelmingly betrayed. I keep the faith, do the work, iterate, and crave the next failure so I can learn. I get left to my own devices to do so.

But I've committed one of the biggest sins in the eyes of a system heuristic. I'm not a part of the group, the family, the fan club, or the company. My values don't map to colloquial conversation as I'm not trying to get along and fit in. In fact, I'm trying to destroy much of what you instinctively hold dear. I'm trying to live, and work, and create in such a loud way you find it fucking impossible to unhear or unread me. That's what different writers and thinkers have done for me over the years.

I can cope with failure. I can cope with chronic uncertainty. I can cope with the pain of learning curves and financial burdens. I can't cope with an insistence I performatively shit on my values. I don't care if it's in the form of polite passive aggression from someone disinclined to fight with me about it. I don't care if it's the company I work for trying to hijack my language to justify their negligence. I don't care if it's lazy policy prescriptions and laws designed to nudge you away from adopting agency or holding people accountable.

But I can only viscerally feel the hatred and remain sensitive to when I'm under attack because I want the truth to win. I want the priorities to make a certain kind of sense regardless of your born-to disposition. I want it to be easy to identify when someone is being a lying lazy piece of shit versus utterly hamstrung by a culture of myopic ho-hummers pointing fingers and neurotically rocking in anxious safe spaces. I want us all to have reliable heuristics for bloviating suicide-inducing posture that makes even entertaining the concept of fascism as a governing prospect too stupid and boring to even whisper to your best friend.

Most things don't, and shouldn't, require us to get into the weeds unless we've wholly forgone some shared notion of why we bother to stay alive. Is it to wake up every day eager to find the next person to get shitty with online? Is it to exhaust yourself with endless punditry about who's on the verge of destroying the world? Is it to work so much you tell everyone "I would, but" or you only find solidarity with a tribe you simultaneously can't escape?

I need to stay escaping. I need to feel the connection between my choices and my well-being. I will begrudge every system, of thought or otherwise, that continues to fuck me. I will also continue to strive for those feelings of possibility, stability, and sense that I can barely, if ever, find in my corner of the world.

[1126] System Processing

This may be more outlining different things in little blurbs to talk about later.

I think about what would happen if Biden lost on the basis of Israel/Hamas. Typing that sentence alone will get this post banned from /r/self on reddit. You know, the self page where you can only reflect on approved topics if they don't get too "political." Trump, who enabled Israel in dramatic and unprecedented ways, who also happens to be trying to overthrow democracy, is your alternative? And alternative, not to what is actually happening or a deep understanding of the nature of the conflict, but alternative to your new religious fervor in service to your miserable concept of what a victim is. It's almost too dumb for words, but then, so is all religion.

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I got some stuff done today. Not a ton of stuff, but some gross stuff, some stuff that won't properly complete until probably around midnight tonight, and some stuff that's been flirting with paralyzing me in an ADHD stupor. I'm happy about it. This is the 2nd weekend this year I don't have a pre-scheduled show to head to. I noticed the surge of energy I had upon waking up almost immediately dissipated after I ate. Usually I forget to eat before I get in the middle of some yard work or project, so I deliberately tried to fuel up, and it worked against me.

I'm almost through the 4th episode of 601 shows, or that's the closest approximation, with some much further along, and some I just added to my list. I went from feeling stuck and overwhelmed at the prospect of watching the shows I had backlogged to feeling energized to add more and more now that I'm approaching them like TV of old times. There's 20 of those 601 I've put on their own playlist to watch sooner. There's 60 that are currently airing that I'm staying on top of. I've used ChatGPT and Advanced Renamer to give me code to make the titles easier to sort, name, and pull from shortcuts. I've been recording clips that either make me laugh, I think I can send as inside jokes, or I imagine I might use if I had a commentary/clip channel. I also signed back up for Drumeo for a 2nd time due to El Estepario. I should spend a lot of time practicing tonight and recording lessons so I don't have to keep paying.

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I'm deep enough into the woods of CASA to start having stronger opinions. It's filled with Lisa Simpsons. If you're curious why volunteer organizations that require high-level organization and competence can work, it's because the already overworked, brilliant, but deeply insecure people who run 1,000 miles a minute to avoid working at their core issues self-select. I say this having been born and bred in that same vein. The problem, and I can't really overstate this, my job is literally, one-for-one, what an assessor and permanency worker, if they were competent, paid enough, and properly supported, would do.

I'm not learning anything new. I'm not getting any special powers. In fact, I'm learning just how over-burdened your average DCS worker is from a new angle. This program takes what I'm finding to be an unbearable (not really) amount of time to over-explain what your life should look like with one case. One singular family. In a month of one day, three hour, online learning courses together, some modules to barely fill out, and a couple in-person base touches, and you get sworn in to "advocate for the child."

They go head over heels to pretend your job isn't actually to be an assessor or permanency worker. But you are doing literally the exact same things I was doing, just for free, and for one family instead of 12-15 at once every week, or maybe 20-30 on your permanency caseload. There's 725 kids who don't have CASA representatives. The existence of CASA altogether is a judge's response to inadequacies he saw in the system back in the 70s. I advocated for children's best interest my entire career. That apparently comes so not-naturally to so many people that no one is willing to hire and pay anyone enough to do so in a sustainable way, and the only way we can even pick at the correct solution is wait for the MCATS-taking, master's graduates with 3 jobs, and wildly successful retirees to step up.

I think I can do more of my inside stuff now and fire back up the squawk box.

[1093] Doom Forecasting

I'm confused again. I can string together a series of arguments or read a few books that provide reasonable explanations. I can look inside myself and explore how I arrive at "irrational" conclusions. It doesn't terminate into a sense of being that I can sit with and resolve. I'll start with the political climate.

I can't really understand a bigger difference between Trump and anything else you wish to state about a corrupted democrat or imperfect and failing democratic system.

I understand disillusionment. I understand being mis or deliberately ill-informed. I understand outrage, anger, and resentment. I understand tribalism. I understand "fuck it." I understand the desire to destroy. I understand the quiet desperation of being punished for your values or when you muster up the courage to advocate for yourself. I understand the exhaustion of working endlessly and feeling like I'm getting nowhere. I understand trauma. I understand the difficulties in translating or marketing a message. I understand the frustration of feeling stuck, targeted, and undermined. I understand being betrayed, isolated, and ridiculed or gossipped about. I understand being ignorantly proud and brazen and certain. I understand wanting to hurt yourself and the exhilaration that can come from doing so.

I don't understand persistently, and forthrightly, declaring moral bankruptcy.

I understand respecting certain cultural differences. I understand the differing relative weight the connotative impact of words can have. I understand the superficial contradictions of seemingly in-conflict value judgements. I understand the myopic subjectivity of preferences. I understand the in-built genetic predictable brain differences. I understand the myriad reasons one might be ambivalent about death, their own or anyone else's. I understand how pride manifests in who or where you came from.

I do not understand persistent personal denial.

I understand the "utility" or "pragmatism" of suppressing the truth broadly. I understand a pull or inclination to leave out details. I understand being plagued by a guilty conscience. I understand feeling like you don't have a choice. I understand feeling obligated to one thing at the expense of everything else. I understand how fragile an understanding of ourselves can be. I understand how compelling a desire to fit in or belong is. I understand the catastrophes that have been brought by "good intentions."

My head is a flutter. I've read an opinion article trying to explain to the "youth, who definitely read The New York Times, that allowing for a second Trump presidency is cutting off your nose to spite your face. I'm watching "Top Boy" where the values of gang members are tossed about as loosely as the cash they can never get enough of or the dramatic scenarios that never offer peace. I'm working against a poor-sleep-posture-induced headache.

For the infinite amount of things I don't know, I am "saved" by a relatively small series of questions and practices routinely. I don't need to know precisely how or whether I would murder my problems away when watching gangster fiction. I do need to know how to examine myself were I to end up in that situation. I'm perfectly capable of murder, and there's certainly people I feel, in the right circumstances, I'd feel incredibly great about getting the chance to do so. Big but, that's, in no way, representative of my value system. It doesn't represent what makes me feel good over time when I imagine myself having done so. I want a world where no one is getting murdered.

Snap back into the, allegedly, "political," environment. Millions of people think abortion is tantamount to murder. Millions of people are concurrently perfectly content to explicitly ignore how to define "murder," "abortion," "fetus," or "rights" as they pertain to women or children born to those who don't want or can't handle them.

I think there's no bigger moral behavior that you can engage in at this moment. You either define the words and share a perspective, or you break the foundation of understanding anything. Words have to matter. Definitions have to be true and reliable between beings that perceive and share the world. We, literally, all die if that can't prove to be true the vast majority of the time.

Every single thing you can ever talk about operates this way, or it doesn't really operate at all. If you refuse to define "child welfare," you'll lie to a judge and steal someone's baby. If you're in charge of oversight of that person and you forget to define "trust" or what constitutes "oversight" altogether, you'll find yourself complicit in behavior that no sober-minded reasonable person would accept from themselves or others.

It starts with the definition. If the definition isn't clear, you can't act in defined ways. Any temptation to smuggle bad behavior into how you operate can be entertained indefinitely. This is one of the most utilized ways I can tell immediately who is or isn't full of shit. You either are driving towards trying to better account, define, and find the angle your behavior is contributing to a situation, or you move away, keep things obscure, blame, and provide excuses.

I get panicky when I can't define something. That doesn't make me what to double-down and experience compounded panicked feelings. I said above that I don't understand persistent personal denial. If I'm feeling panic or my stomach drops, there's no pretending otherwise. I have to engage it, or it takes over my system. As a kid, I didn't feel I had this choice to engage or suffer. I'm not a kid. I'm a 35 year old man. It's not a "new" feeling. It's not your fault when I feel it. Whether or not I want to label it "irrational" or "justified" or "confusing" or "complicated" is up to me. Whatever series of definitions I choose, what's important is that I choose them.

I may never be able to define something. I can always define something "well-enough" to apply a behavior. Even if that behavior is abstending or stopping. I don't think there will ever be enough words written to capture the economy of cultural psychosis that portends self-destruction. I do know we have a robust history on different scales of how destruction plays out. I can create a framework of those demonstrations and choose to behave like that, or not. I can acknowledge there's a robust history or not! That's part of my moral system. I allow relevant basins of information into how I form an idea of how I should behave.

I think the word "evolution" is used so routinely and inappropriately we've forgotten that we are merely "best-suited," not "actually the best." We're playing dress up with values we don't know or don't care how to demonstrate. We claim we want "equality" as we attack comedians for making light of how genuine bigots or terrible ideas and forces of evil keep us apart. We claim we want "freedom," but refrain from the conversation about the consequences of exercising it irresponsibly. If you've "evolved," like an Ayann Hirsi Ali, who's so exhausted and afraid of defending a universal moral value that you give up and accept merely what makes you feel better, you've suited yourself to an intellectually-deficient value system governed by mob-rules and propaganda.

I don't understand not wanting to get better.

I understand complacency. I understand feeling lazy, sick, or tired. I understand being distracted or resource deficient. I understand not recognizing or respecting the roads offered to "better." I understand the difficulty, at least initially, in defining "better." I understand how hard it might be to believe someone you're engaging even cares to do or get better. I understand self-sabotage. I understand low self-confidence or self-esteem. I understand the pitfalls of extremely context-specific advice.

I spent years "debating" and "persuading" religion vs science. That framing, now "obvious" to me is miserable, incomplete, and inadequate. It took me years to figure that out. I "sincerely believed" I was "helping" or "working" to "change things for the better" in the broadest cultural zeitgeist conception as I needed to excuse my behavior. My behavior was to engage reading, lectures, and online pissing matches obsessively. I persuaded no one. I "won" nothing. All of the information I used to recall like a robot with a bad itch to refute is barely remembered, now a stack of dusty books I haven't opened for 15 years.

It happened interpersonally as well with my "best friend." Honestly, the moment he first said that to me I got suspicious, because we weren't the kind of friends who got into the hokey bullshit. He could abstract-out his behavior towards a "best friend" in a way that were he to contend with the real basis and dynamic of our friendship, would have suggested we needed to part ways sooner. His growing capacity for laziness and lies resulted in escalating damage to my time, bank account, and eventually personal safety. I kept showing up, trying, speaking to how I was getting fucked, and believing the foundation was there. There's no "right" amount of time or rope you're supposed to give someone to still hang you, but your decision-making can still take place while there's oxygen left going to your brain.

I want to do better than friends that exploit me. I want to do better than friends that don't talk to me or invite me to things. I want to do better than "family" that financially and emotionally undermine me. I want to do better than scream at ideologically possesed animal-look-alikes genuinely considering themselves to be upstanding moral and righteous humans. I said earlier that I don't understand persistently, and forthrightly, declaring moral bankruptcy. It's morally bankrupt to lie to yourself.

There's not a single example from my life in which outright bad or remotely questionable behavior I can't acknowledge, speak to, articulate my perspective, and accept that someone else's was different, even if I don't agree with their conclusion or word choices. My ex-friend's kid pulled a gun on me. I triggered the kid after yelling to slow down from 130 MPH after hours of appealing to my friend to take over driving and getting ignored. When the cops call asking if the kid pulled a gun, the answer is yes. Then you tell them you think it was an airsoft gun - one of those extremely realistic high-powered ones, and that the kid has access to real guns with his wanna-be gangster cohort, and that the kid has pulled real guns on people in the past - not ignore the call.

Like any idealogue, they don't want to do better, they want to feel better. Better in the moment. Better about shirking responsibility. Better about keeping things blurry. Better insofar as they mash it into a box called "justified." They want to feel "just." How many times do you hear, "Well I just wanted!…" "I was just trying…" "I just don't understand!"…"You just seem" It's linguistically fluid to seek and adopt justification and reduce detailed complexity into liquid "justice." You don't have to engage someone's actual argument or perspective when you can caricature them as acting the same as you, from a righteously-indignant hole of self-justified emotion. I know you are, but what am I?

I don't really know how to define my current moment, in a manner of speaking. It's part of why the panic sets in "randomly" and I must write if I'm going to get my head and gut back. I'm in debt, unless you weigh my total assets against it. I have a company, provided you respect my handful of clients over 2 years and thousands I've spent trying to get it established in a more self-perpetuating way. I have land that I occupy or do anything on maybe 10% of, increasingly occasionally given the endless rain or cold. I think I need a job, but not enough to take one just because it's hiring. I don't regularly see in person, literally anyone, in my life if "regularly" might be constituted as even once a month.

I'm adrift and alone and that's not your fault. It's not an invitation to myself to get spiteful and judgemental given all my so-called dreams or desires unrealized. There's as much to say about my deliberate decision making as there is the cultural context I'm operating within. I can ask an infinite series of unanswerable questions and set myself up for failure about how to think about my circumstances or potential. Instead, writing is my first, ongoing, pass at defining my perception of those things. It's incomplete. I've succeeded when I feel better, not having denied or downplayed that I had the feeling. It doesn't dictate the future nor justify lashing out in continued panic, insisting you accept my behavior as a "different opinion" on how we should engage the world and our feelings.

I never deny the potential. I can be the worst or best, so can you. My circumstances can change dramatically in an instant, and so can yours. I think this obligates me to practice whatever I can to squeeze as much predictable and consistent well-being as I can from my environment. My messy, ridiculous, irrational, superficially contradictory, deadly, gracefully limited yet infinitely iterative environment.

I don't understand how you can grasp that sensibility for even a moment and ever choose to return to a time when you didn't.