[1128] Save A Lot

I'm extremely tired. There might be a palpable level of incoherence.

Why should the truth matter?

I've written, no doubt, tens of thousands of words defending what I don't observe to be a prima facie obvious answer. The cultural instinct is to challenge the word "obvious," and immediately seek to make the discussion abstract or obscure. It doesn't matter how many practically applicable circumstances we ground the discussion in, the drive is to fundamentally suppress the truth.

Quick examples. The whole of law requires you to swear to tell the truth upon penalties of perjury. Journalists and whistleblowers are routinely killed for revealing often "boring" or "matter-of-fact" information about the corrupt systems within which they reside. There's no more familiar and tolerated root-for-the-victim scenario than when someone cheats in their relationship; entire networks have been built on the back of watching people weaponize and dance upon hearing the test results. The consequences of not having money for a necessities are immediately felt.

If you can say nothing else about the truth, it's that in its immediate expression, we believe it's going to be painful. Therefore, it has to be buttressed against something in order to maintain or measure our confidence that it exists altogether.

Are you willing to go to jail or be fined for, importantly, getting caught lying? For many people, yes, so good luck keeping that as your sole metric or practice for eliciting the desired truth. Are you willing to die to expose the nature of your government or corporation? For most people? Fuck no, and the ones that do often see their effort paid lip service to with no consequences. I can tell you as a literal counselor that functionally nobody is seriously examining the nature of their romantic attachments, as the second they do it's akin to inviting Jerry Springer into their living room.

These examples, more specifically in their celebrated failings, are what we train our expectations on. The truth comes with externally imposed punishment, is ignored, or is exploited. Where does the truth exist, if it does so at all in these scenarios? Or stated another way, what can be said that's most true, or least wrong, about them? Here we beg the contribution of emotions. Here we're introduced to the concept of "emotional truths" that are used explicitly to justify, obscure, denounce, or exploit the truth.

The truth, without quotes, includes and incorporates the feedback and consequences of emotions, without supercharging them. You can understand intuitively why someone would lie on a witness stand, cover up the money or weapons they steal, and pretend you are or aren't the father. You can matter-of-factly state that for any given conscious individual from now unto the rest of existence, those behaviors are immoral, unjust, and reliant upon dodging the many damning truths associated with that behavior. You can easily understand the benefits; monetarily, socially, and psychologically of suppressing the world that otherwise deliberately attempts to account for the consequences.

But we're only at the first level of abstraction. These are the most obvious and easy to understand scenarios. One might even try to argue for forgiveness and leniency for dipping into unhealthy behavioral places when it comes to matters needing court intervention or implicating the most powerful and resource-ridden people on the planet. It gets more subtle and dramatically worse.

We formalize and institutionalize lying. We build it into our concepts of connection, health, doing business, getting educated, and being entertained. We bake so many lies into the patterns our brains adopt, it is all-but literally impossible to maintain an eye or ear for what's actually true. If you're not formally instructed in logic or scientifically rigorous or habitually breaking apart your language and behavior and attempting to reassemble them in service to reliably repeatable pieces, you're at sea. You are at the mercy of the waves, weather, and floating device you may or may not conceive of as a seaworthy vessel.

Of course, here "emotional truth," with ingrained fluidity, does the heavy lifting to sweep in and deny the desperate truth of your circumstances. You don't feel adrift. In fact, you have an amazing story of not just the family you have, money you've made, planned vacation, hobbies and friends, but you're also deeply passionate and informed about the things someone of your cast and capacity should be.

Be on the lookout, because that's the pattern. Invariably, my clients lead with the, "It's embarrassing and confusing why I'm even here" story. They tell me all the good things they have going for them. They land on repeated choice cliches they've adopted, unconsciously, as justifying tools that obstruct the ability to fully account and otherwise infinitely impede the capacity to change.

Your feelings are the foundational lie. You don't allow yourself to accept them, and the truth of how powerfully they influence your thoughts and behavior. As a result, you build mega-structures of insecure pride.

I get exhausted by religious apologists for this reason. A 60 Minutes interviewer ass-kissing the Pope really honed in the feeling recently. It's emotionally gratifying for your modern cosplaying Catholic to celebrate the extremely moderate dance he's engaged with regard to homosexuality and bare-minimum response to fucking children.

I recognize when I'm tempted to make similar moves in my own life. The lazier I feel, I try to remind myself of how much I've accomplished and how I'm living within many of the desired goals and parameters I set out to achieve. The truth is that no matter what I accomplish, the second I dismiss or downplay my need to develop larger and even-more needing of accounting goals, I'm suffering sea sickness. If I lose sight of how much I'm explicitly not trying to be "happy" or "comfortable," I'm not "Nick P." anymore. I'm an antagonist. I'm an experimenter. I'm a creative. I'm explicitly and habitually attempting to consciously repudiate that which I find is fucking with me.

The truth hurts because it has to. You can't maintain healthy muscles if you're unwilling to feel them sore. You can't train your ability to register and respond to emotions if you don't entertain how they induce your crazy-making instincts. At bottom, you are no better than a wild animal that lashes out in predictably wild ways. We smugly joke about lion's eating faces while dismissing the smell of constantly shitting on our own rugs. It's all reliably animal all the way down.

I consider myself a considerably better-than-average truth teller solely because I do this. I look for understanding and to organize something I only had a tired and discombobulated notion of. I emotionally detach and release myself from the obligation to protect myself from any emotional response the exploration brings up. I can speak in a measured way about ongoing sources of misery, loci of failure, and dare myself to respond proactively to an otherwise endless bemoaning of circumstances. I'm both willing and excited to discuss and describe every single facet of my relationships and behavior in the most damning and forgiving terms.

The truth is the fluid complicated mix of both stories. Incorporating and resolving the learned behavior to emotionally placate instead of doing the work to form accountable narratives is the best place any one of us can arrive. Perfect is off the table. "Your truth" and "my truth" get ridiculed as the unearned faith-claims they are. The real nature of the pain and harm of floating along on a precariously placed raft of presumptions becomes strikingly clear. It will hit you as violently as the cuffs around your wrist, the pregnancy test results, or the fist of your "true love" who may control whether you live or die.

And what is touted as the most noble thing any one of us could do but to die for what we believe in? We pretend a mother fucker that comes back to life is a proper sacrifice! We pretend suicide bombers and your average everyday ideologue doesn't believe what they ritualize and chant! Sometimes I think we apologize for the faithful because we're jealous we can't be so irrationally convicted. You feel obligated to justify, infinitely, everything we kill within ourselves to protect the loudest and comfortably familiar lies.

If you don't, do you still have friends and family? Are the bills getting paid? Are you staying alive to any degree someone would desire to be so?

You are obligated, every minute of every day, to lie. To practice the party lines and be practical. To protect the familiar and those vulnerable to the dangerous and nasty suggestions from people like me to pull back and watch closer, or pull out altogether. You can't leave an environment you can't conceptualize. You can't consciously and deliberately change circumstances you don't recognize as both fluidly probabilistic and perfectly predictable. Until you do, your words and actions aren't really yours. Your feelings won't properly match what you're talking about or professing to create or strive for.

That is, it's not a mystery or secret to me why the story you tell yourself about who you are, what you have, or what you care about leaves you feeling empty, exhausted, or filled with dread. I know you're lying. I know how you're lying. I can take every single word or sentence you've used incorrectly and describe how it's actually the opposite in how it manifests. Do you feel your "emotional truth" bristling to sweep in again? Aren't you eager, so eager, right now to deny my faux super power? That's the real nature of your god, to protect you from what isn't actually even an attack. It just feels like it.

[1110] High On Believing

I've never felt so understood as when I watch Caveh Zahedi's "The Show About The Show." It mellows me out as a "simple" exploration and reporting on experience, and the emotional fallout from everyone around who does not like their behavior explored and reported on. It's as on-the-nose a piece of art as I've ever seen that matches my experience of the world.

I'm then drawn into this interview with someone who appears to be deeply aggrieved by the show, this character mrgirl, who interviews Caveh. It's like every conversational breakdown I've written about across 2.5 hours. mrgirl volleys some feeling-laden accusation, Caveh, extremely patiently, explains his perspective and relays why he doesn't agree or dismisses the assumptive premise the accusation builds in. I feel so deeply for Caveh trying to articulate something akin to, "Bro, you're making some harsh assumptions about me, moralizing what might otherwise be basic facts of existence I'm literally pointing my camera at, and if you had a better sense of honesty and decency you'd recognize the crippling projection exercise you're doing."

One of the best indicators someone is woefully dishonest is when they result in, "I know you are, but what am I." It's just the hallmark of a nonsense exchange when someone can't both qualify and explore to what degree they are something, but more in their immediate reactive "fuck you" that launches the comment after their behavior is pointed out.

One day I hope to be able to articulate this concisely or through a great story. It's a hard dynamic to talk about because I don't encounter very many honest people. More than that, I don't encounter honest people willing to put their sense of honesty into the world to be scrutinized. I can attempt to borrow from mythology or ear-wormy sentiments from pop culture, but building a comprehensive look that lands emotionally via scattered lines strewn about a thousand blogs is all I've got so far.

Sam Harris uses the term "moral confusion" to describe what's often people's loudest visceral reaction to something they poorly understand, but feel, beyond doubt, that they are on the "right side of history" about. How Israel is handling Hamas is the hot thing right now. Trump vs Biden for anyone confused about how fascism works. "Pro-lifers," always in quotes, think they're saving something that, allegedly, their savior already has. The hypocrisy and basic avoidance of defining words or evidence isn't even hard to do. There's aggressively motivated "reasoning" that tries to square truth and reality into your version of a moralized box.

But right there, the problem is much deeper than calling it "your version." Because, of course, it's not yours. It's "everyone's" to the degree you agree with and recognize how others are justifying in the same way. Any cultural movement grants you license to take liberties with the messy details or statistics that undermine a fundamental assumption that supercharges your righteously indignant feelings. Black Lives Matter kicked off that pendulum in some of the easiest ways to observe in either reflexively agreeing and enabling any version of a victimized black identity story, or being considered a complicit racist. Any individual that wrestled with evolving stories, details, or their own experience will all but certainly develop nuances and subtleties they'll feel "morally obliged" to stay silent about.

A big thing a dishonest person doesn't want to grapple with is how much "power" they're willing to cede to you in order to blame you. If you're the smart one, the rich one, the pretty one, or just the one with the idea and you bothered to say it out loud first, buckle up. If you're Louis C.K. you can mesmerize women who can't escape the force of your beaten dick energy radiating and hypnotizing. When I've tried to write about the worst accusations against me or my behavior, I was insisted upon, several times, to not even speak. Secrets were kept from me. It was if the "right" thing to do was to just shut up and take it. This, of course, because they already know how devious and articulate I am, therefore, when scrutinized I might not look so much like the demon they needed me to be. Can't have that.

Any given person's ability to see through you is bred from their practice of seeing through themselves. Whatever caricature you reflexively make about someone or something, there's at least 1,110 blogs of information about it, at least for me, you're not considering. You're not obligated to consider anything. I'm not obligated to respect or entertain you in turn. That's your power no matter how much you wish to give it away. That's an inescapable truth. I would also call it deeply unwise to teach yourself to avoid or attack conflicting variables. It's an uncomplicated point for people who can be honest with themselves about the power of, or holes in, their perspective. I know how much about you is unsaid, because I'm writing it. I'm speaking to it where you won't.

I appreciate how articulate Caveh is when he explores his own pathological behaviors and perspective of the people who feel "tricked" or "exploited" by him. In reality, they resent their own naivety, as though they are still children for whom it could be easier forgiven. We are infinitely naive and ignorant. That is the rule. There is an infinite amount of information we don't know, let's say for example, how we're going to feel after we try something or discover we're in over our heads. An honest person can say that and then hold themselves accountable to how they respond to or describe that discomfort.

If you pose nude for an artist and then recoil in disgust at their interpretation of your body, are you going to blame them? You thought it was going to be a flattering or emboldening and liberating thing, but it shocks you with a new reality to engage. You never imagined you "could be made to feel" like you did after seeing the work. So, what? The artist should apologize? They just manipulated you and you never wanted to pose in the first place? Of course not. Maybe they are a brilliant artist and nailed your form and expression perfectly. Now what? An honest emotionally accountable person simply states, "Oh, I didn't expect to feel this way. I should reconcile this feeling with my expectations or ideas about myself I took into this experience." 9 times out of 10, what do people do though?

In order to overcome or incorporate that discomfort, you have to be able to regard the artist as simultaneously fallible and harmless in the same ways you are. You have to make fundamental assumptions about intent or make peace with the degree to which everything is at least mildly mysterious and perfectly unknowable. "Why did he draw my eyes like that!?" You can drive yourself mad with endless "whys" to nowhere. And, what is "like that?" If it's a caricature artist, which you better not sit in front of if you aren't at peace with your own body, they did it because that's an exaggerated version of what we can all see. If you're asking from a desperate internalized sense of your own beauty and you think it's "ugly," maybe it's time to humble yourself or you've got a body dysmorphia thing going on like Megan from Megan & Jack.

It's hard not to feel trapped by this defensive, judgmental conversational environment. It's bolstered by everything from religion to TV. Most TV wouldn't exist were the entire plot not driven by a "secret" that doesn't need to be secret. It's "fun" and "funny" to artfully lie and parade yourself into ever-fantastical scenarios. It's a "compelling drama" to root for the consequences of doubling-down on the disingenuous dishonesties driving narrative arcs. Tony Soprano is a murderous family man, and so are you. The entertainment comes from asking if he's either/or indefinitely, and debating what side we're on, as if it's not both. In fact, it wouldn't be compelling television if it's not both combined with acting otherwise, because then we'd just accept and move to the next thing that sets us aflame or stop watching altogether.

The consequences of the superficial debate as it pertains to art feel safer. It's lazy and easy to project onto things that can't fight back. The imagination is being worked for you. Would you kill like they kill? Even the question might make you recoil. Would you fuck like they fuck? You don't want to entertain the thought. Would you risk the lives of the people you say you love and care about? Newsflash, you probably are already in myriad negligent ways, but you'll never entertain the thought looking for the next compelling narrative to glom onto. You won't figure it out while you're looking for the next person to blame. You won't arrive at some grand epiphany as you celebrate forgoing your agency.

There's nothing I've come to realize about myself that isn't available to you. That is, you can find the same things, or you can contrast the degree of difference. The patterns I point out I'm not generating, just accounting for. The language traps, and guilt traps, and blame cliches, and gut reflexes, and caricatured straw-men are waiting to be pointed out and felt and deliberately responded to. You can accept the responsibility and do the work in between dramatic scenarios or before you implicate others in your destruction and cover up. You absolutely can. That's going to depend heavily on whether you're reading this as some absolutely powerful mind-controlling attempt to get you to "believe" something nefarious about my intentions. Do I want you to have sympathy for my pathological compulsions? Am I unironically trying to escape the responsibility I insist upon others?

Sure, sometimes. But I bet you have a significantly harder time explaining when, where, and why than I do. And, I'm literally betting on the difference in our perspectives. That bet looks like every blog I write and word I define. It looks like the work behind getting the land developed. It looks like the effort and money I've put into the people I profess to care about. It looks like the emails I've written expressing the contradictions and moral confusions I could no longer entertain. It looks like the power I'm trying to harness with the company I started. And it looks like my continued ability to recognize and state my sense of obligation as I build more pieces into my awareness and practice.

[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.

[884] Stop The World

The temptation lately has been to list. I want to point to things that seem like they are part of a constant flow of “shit is fucked.” I want to denote them as such, and then point to how they could/should/might be provided a certain awareness or series of choices.

I'll once again qualify the “givens.” Things are cyclical, balanced, and ambivalent. Right and wrong exist when you get down to any level worth talking about. There are problems with every organization, structure, or manifestation of power, which does not make them evil, but their tyranny should not go ignored or denied. You choose to take responsibility, or you don't. We're not at the mercy of anything more than we are the story or spell we put ourselves under.

In what feels like record time, I've gotten a call from my regional manager about “something she's been made aware of.” I, unable to ignore my thoughts or sense of agency as I seemingly watch myself capitulate day in and out, sent an email explaining my perspective saying how I want the owners to pay everyone considerably more. There was more to it describing my perspective of work broadly and sense of history and numbers, but I stated plainly, as I do, a perceived injustice and why it lends itself to overwhelming hopelessness and futility.

Psychologically, I can't keep up the act. I've never been that good at it to begin with, but I'm not exaggerating when I say every single day I'm feeling pressured to speak out, rage, or just bring the fight for a conversation that doesn't center around deference or excuses. I feel like I see people in defeated states, often practically on the verge of tears, or indignantly lashing out over exceptionally petty things. That's it. I don't meet the ones who are angry. I don't meet that ones who have a plan for anything. I couldn't shake an opinion out of someone about their pay, nature of their work, or place in the world. Always, *always*, it's “moving right along.” It's a furled brow and needing to sit down for a talkin' to.

Don't I know the way things work?

THEY DON'T.

Not just yesterday, not ten years ago, today, we're dying in record numbers. We're 9-11ing every day. We're letting Kentucky get away with re-electing Mitch McConnell. We're, in no way, prepared to deal with the reality of 73 million Nazis stark raving mad about kids in cages, the tyranny of public health, and the right to be as racist and ignorant as their Dear Leader. WE ARE NOT HUMAN. We are a faceless mass of hysteria crashing into all levels of how society attempted to organize itself. We're exposing lie after lie, and it took how many YEARS before people were even willing to use the word “lie” with regard to Trump?

Truth matters. Right and wrong exist. It is not enough to get-by and exist as we are. If you can't wipe the fog from your eyes or clear your head on your own, the world is begging to kill you, today. I feel “radical” for wanting to make enough to live with a degree of comfort. It seems like a “dream” to not regret how I'm spending my time and in service to what. I feel obligated to “persuade” people they have an individual voice and responsibility to get angry, say something, and fucking DO. Join up and manifest. Do the math. Fight, bite, and scream!

If we're on the front line of this wave of fascism and stupidity, and we are, kill it! If we're trying to cling to some nominal sense of being and family we've clambered together in spite of the chaos, fucking defend it! If we shed a tear like some cliché commercial Native American over the environment dying and profit for profit's sake, throw yourself on the goddamn wheels and stop this fucking machine.

I'm violently indignant about your title, your presumption, or your placating held-harmless excuse engine. We're not all equal in blame. The people not paying you enough are. We're not all guilty. The people burning and cutting and polluting are. We're not all just at the mercy of greater forces, you, quiet co-conspirator are more guilty than me. You, person who feels the same anger and passion and swallows it need to stop listening at me and listen to your fucking self. You need to act!

I'm worried. I'm worried in the same way as when I crashed my car. I didn't consciously decide “I'm going to crash this bitch, I hate debt, it's not what I wanted, yada yada series of regrettable thoughts.” I drove it like it didn't matter, like I didn't matter, and like I wanted it gone. My deepest compulsions and beliefs manifest. If what's true of the world is the same that's true for me, nearly everything either wants me dead or is wholly ambivalent at the prospect. I need to find an outlet. I need to live in service to right and wrong, not self-righteous delusion, not accommodating coping, and not blind and deliberately ignorant posturing. I need an environment where right is right and wrong is wrong and if I work to be right I can expect to build and teach and create something worth protecting and fighting for.

I meant it when I said I needed to break things. Maybe it's “polite” society. Maybe it's my last barely clinging to the cliff idea about what's “pragmatic.” Maybe it's the “mature” governor that's toned down my behavior suspiciously at a time that coincides with what is an ongoing societal existential crisis. Like I'm running from the responsibility to be the Alex Jones-voiced character from Waking Life roaming the land with my megaphone. I live in a time that I can't invoke his crazy-ass horrible-person name without taking on his baggage before someone would bother to watch the fucking movie!

I think it's fitting that as I feel myself winding down on what else to say, Stop The World by Extreme is playing in my headphones.

If nothing else, I'm positive I will break a considerable amount before I get to me. Here's to hoping it's worth it and works out as well as my car crash did.

[877] Balk The Talk

Let's start what initially feels like it will be one of the most redundant things I've ever written.

The problem is dishonesty.

Always, first, and forever, the problem is dishonesty. Whatever your issue, whatever your concept of "oppression." Whatever your interpretation of "isms" or "ists" is. It's always dishonesty.

You can get hidden or blocked from something because you are a troll. Those people are easy enough to understand in their arbitrary behavior or antagonism. Conversely, you can get hidden or blocked because you have an exacting understanding of a situation that makes someone uncomfortable.

I suspect I exist in a realm of the latter kind of person on most issues most of the time. I suspect this because of my insatiable desire to explore the depths of my ass and get a remote grasp of the psychological underpinnings of humans at large. I think I get very explicit when I need to in picking apart words. I think my point can be succinct. I think I've done a lot of work scraping away vagaries related to conversational style, intent, and efficacy.

As such, I know, hours before I'm blocked or hidden, that what's being discussed is perpetually on the verge of being censored. There's a psychological line that people who are angry can't cross. It's familiar. It's universal. It's annoying when someone points it out. It's worse when they do so with "big" comprehensive words juxtaposed with calling you a cunt.

Religion, racism, trans issues, misogyny, feminism, pick your poison there is a long sordid history and dozens of books neither of us have read in service to them. You can try to be angry or sad and talk about these issues, but almost certainly you're going to devolve into calling the other person names and running away.

Trump doesn't become president unless we were hemorrhaging what it meant to be honest. It is so deep, we barely know what I'm talking about right now! Dishonesty is hidden in memes. It's the fabric of our social groups. It's the silent obligations and compelling feelings that have us conforming around modes of communication that destroy us.

My worst clients are the dishonest ones, not the ones cussing at me or making empty threats. Their dishonesty hurts them, their children, the annoying process, and their prospects of not having State intervention come back if they manage to close things. My work environments suck by capitalist definition because they are dishonest about their greedy motivations and lack of accountability in allowing people to own their work, sense of being, and time.

The honest estimations of "what's happening" get crucified and killed, routinely. It's familiar. It's universal. It's easy enough to write me off as getting off on "arguing." It's also dishonest.

The playing field isn't fair. We're up against the baggage of being dumb apes. We're up against being wholly ignorant of our own minds. We're not just dumb, we're complicated in how we've structured being dumb. We're bull-headed in defending that construct. We're actively seeking voices to help protect and reinforce that construct. It's merely a construct. It's a wild and broken one.

I write. I share what I write. I save my conversations and arguments and share those too. The truth is naked, painful, comes with a lot of dirty words, and the thing you don't want to look at you need to the most. You look at by quoting. You look at it by offering challenges and criticisms of it. I'm proud to shit on people indignant and hateful masquerading as crusaders for the oppressed. That's Trump. That's Nazis. That's "radical activists" who have zero appreciation for how to interpret people different from them.

You can't say, truthfully, I don't understand your emotions. You can't say I'm just blissfully unaware what my words do to a person already on the defensive. You are correct in that I'm aggressively trying to pet a dog who's been abused for years and just needs time alone. Except, people aren't dogs. They need to be accountable for their barks and bites. They need to be shit on. We've taken our knowledge of trauma and used it to pretend pain is a selfish and noble thing to be protected from criticism. And when I say that, I'm giving too much credit to the people who behave that way, because I don't think they understand a goddamn thing.

I persuade people to peacefully part with their children. I can't persuade an angry keyboard warrior to quote me. The mediums come with their own handicaps or strengths, but both require honesty. I prefer the typing pissing matches because, at least when I do it, the words remain. You can go back and analyze. You can rephrase. You can ask questions. You can build and progress. You can expose yourself to what hurts at your own pace until you mold yourself into something better from the inside out.

But you have to mold yourself. You have to face what hurts. No one can force you. I can choose to stop calling you a cunt. You can't choose to make me feel bad about something I said. You can't force me to consider myself a "transphobe" or "bigot." You can honestly engage with what those terms mean to you. You can read exactly what I've said with regard to a topic, and pick it apart or ask for more detail. That's not what you do. Not doing so is dishonest.

I didn't stop feeling an overwhelming desire to "fight" with people until I examined the dynamics of my emotionally abusive childhood. I can differentiate between needing to react and overcompensate, and a genuine longstanding and worthwhile concern. I know what to focus on and break apart. I'm not plagued with guilt and doubt about the righteousness of my words or actions. I've detailed them out. You can read why. You don't have to pretend or even give me credit! You just have to look at what's already there.

I don't consider myself explicitly right or wrong. I'm curious. I'll keep asking questions. I'll keep probing for what motivated your behavior. I have nothing to win or lose that way. I "win" to the extent my work and words shape behavior, and my behavior first. Behaving as if you're the first person to feel a certain way and all your words are the best words is Trumpian. It's ignorant. It's dishonest.

Do fucking better. We're days after a wholly inadequate neoliberal mess is being dishonest about the impact of their policy and words. We're content to think we've "won" anything. We're still fucking lost.