[1000] Warped

As the year starts to feel like it’s winding down, and as I’m back home trying to recover from an immense amount of walking over the last few days in ill-equipped shoes, here we go on my (not-technically) 1000^th digression.

I would call my position in life extremely privileged. From small things to grand scheme, I can point to what I like about being me and, more important to me, what I wouldn’t like about being someone else. I can readily dream about becoming any number of things in manageable timelines and within different budget restraints. I’m almost always feeling healthy. I’m never hungry. I’m capable of learning new things, stepping back and thinking about difficult subjects, and confident in my ability to “go,” “do,” or “be” whatever example I wish to set in any given moment. I feel so powerful that I primarily worry about what happens if and when I let that power get out of hand.

Each thing I do to demonstrate that I’m more than under some debilitating delusion often serves as something that isolates me. Whether I turn on a capacity to, seemingly, over-indulge in seeing “all the shows” or dive into an interesting subject, I’m doing something I can’t really relate to others, or doing so in a superficial way. Take TV, where if I watch “everything,” and you have a favorite show you’re often quoting from watching it so often, I’m not watching it the same way, so even if we share liking it, it’s different. If we both work in the same field, I’m not haplessly trying to “help,” or make up for my childhood, or falling for the manipulations of the desperate and addicted. I’m trying to manage and hold accountable and utilize my perspective verses pray for mercy from it.

I like lists. I’ve posted my list of things I’ve been doing all year several times. Each thing I move to the “did that” category is a little dopamine rush. The lines on that list represent hours of driving, walking, singing along, laughs, money, good luck in weather and traffic, Instagram posts liked by the artists themselves, story reference points, food beforehand, solidarity, cultural appreciation, and inspiration. They, occasionally, represent a shared experience with anyone I’ve known for longer than a day. I have all the power in the world right up to the point after the invitation.

I try to be what I feel I don’t have. I’ll be very deliberate in how I speak to this. I have people who will invite me to things. I have people who will tolerate me. I have people who I think like me. I don’t have someone who would genuinely like to see me or extend an invitation to pretty much any show or activity like Cedar Point. I occupy a very specific place in people’s minds, and it’s not something “easy” that can just be around or part of whatever they’re doing. I, in an explicitly opposite manner, would think I’d died and found out I was wrong about heaven if any combination of anyone I’ve met or enjoyed were around in a reliable way to hang, meet each other, or otherwise buy-in to a series of life experiences that preferred togetherness verses being apart.

Jordan Peterson, his ongoing convoluted legacy aside, still delivers lines that keep me thinking, even if I find them more worth challenging than incorporating. He’s said to be the kind of person who is best for someone else as opposed to finding someone worthy of you. It was a sentiment offered to men who are struggling to find a mate. Peterson is a big proponent of marriage and recognizes a lot of the mental crisis space modern men occupy. I don’t share their plight, and I get what he’s getting at in offering the advice, but I also recognize how that would play out in someone like me. I, still, worry about persuading myself into being an unrepentant manipulator. The second I recognize what you need me to be, well, are we to disregard the details as long as we post smiling pictures and make an earnest attempt at an honest family?

Again, I try to be what I feel I don’t have. You don’t have to “discover” and “play to” what I freely offer up about what I desire or how I wish to go about getting it. You know I want companionship, honest companionship, built on a shared desire and individual perspectives drawing from and contributing what only we can. I don’t want to play you or spend our time together with me probing for vulnerabilities. I can’t really stress that enough, particularly because I’m so good at it, I fucking enjoyed being a DCS assessor. Playing on vulnerability, stress, ignorance, and with more power than damn near anyone should be trusted with is like checkers. You move in specific ways, hop here and there, but there’s only 1 of 2 ways the game is gonna end. I can’t figure out why people either pretend not to know the rules, get bored and give up, or don’t copy what I’m doing.

No one shares their intimate convoluted or seemingly contradictory and angry confused thoughts? Here’s my thousandth, one fucking thousandth, stab. It’s here I can iterate on how much I appreciate about my life in spite of what seems to come up short. It’s here I can explore why turns of phrase stay lodged or images from an endless ream of experiences stick out. The answer to “why,” is so often “for the record.” Just so I can record that I did so. I showed up. I saw. I invited. I tried. I’m still trying.

The “Is For Lovers” festival I went to is one of the several that have spiraled off from the ending of Warped Tour. I almost want to call the force that was that tour a “movement.” I think it’s as large a unifying marker of a certain style and sensibility that most of my cohort has and there’s a reason it’s having a cultural resurgence. All that angst and anxiety didn’t go anywhere. All the emotionality turned into fascism, and the still-arbitrary directions we’re headed have at least turned into a little extra in the bank after 15 years to “splurge” on an hour or 3 drive and $100 or less ticket to scream, “I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare,” in your 30s.

Ironically, the music starts back up after the pandemic, and you can still feel the hesitation to turn the numbers in any direction outside of the circle pit. Where do you want us to go? Up off our feet! Side to side! Along the wall of death! I will not be able to shake the dissatisfaction of attending female-lead shows where abortion or voting don’t make it through the mic after Roe. It’s not just girls who need to be speaking up, of course, but the only show I’ve been to that’s made even slight mention to the veritable pending dystopia, I forget, because it was almost in passing before firing up the next song. The viral Dropkick Murphys video trumps anything I’ve encountered in person.

We’re scared, or more specifically, you’re scared. You’ve been scared, for many many years, and you’ve been quiet for even more. Just like you don’t think to speak your mind about me until I’m months or years-removed from the picture, and then of course not actually to me, you don’t speak to the raging dumpster fire in real time. You don’t locate a hose, bucket, or even bother to spit at it. You grow psychologically “conservative,” trying to protect your precious concert, idea of family, or “empowering” opinion in spite of literally everything else. I call myself a spite engine, but what I’m contradicting is the fundamental existential spite that works to kill everything I try to be. I want the testimony to affirm, not struggle through choking and tears to defend and excuse the indefensible and inexcusable.

I’m not complacent about not having the kind of connection or solidarity I seek. I’m still sensitive to the resentment it conjures when I’m prepared to sacrifice in service to it. I’m mostly just confused, because time still feels illusory to me. I don’t know why you’d wait until tomorrow to do something better that doesn’t cost you anything. I don’t know why you’d prevent yourself from coming to the show or keep antagonizing yourself with my presence. I’m 34. You can’t tell me, “When you get older you’re gonna realize!” as though I don’t appreciate the use of my limbs or made a certain kind of peace with my impending heart failure. Like I haven’t been in relationships or worked consistently or been responsible for people’s lives.

We’re not really together, right? Like hundreds of isolated anxious bags of feels all at the same show, but finding no genuine peace or resolution as they bang their head or throw themselves against the pit.

I don’t really believe I’m ever going to find what I want. I know what I want is a process, and I’m practicing my process, and I’m making bets on ways I can turn that process into something capable of processing more. It’s not a “thing” or “person” to find. It’s not a few years away or “over there.” It’s no more lost than it is a secret to anyone who isn’t practicing the same thing as faithfully as I try to. I’m honestly sad that in all the years since college we haven’t figured out anything about what brought us together that would bring us back. I’m terrified that I could hold in such high regard people who won’t speak or answer back. I don’t think the insecurities or drama of this era are unique in the choices on offer for how to live and orient in the world.

I know the power of doing things poorly, with deception, or in secret. I know the insane impact of even one extra hand to help in doing something better or the right way. We’re not choosing the right way. We’re not fighting to put our energy into things we believe are worth the time and money. We don’t believe in each other, because we’re not speaking to each other, and even when we get the stage, we’re scared and unwilling to say what needs to be said. I don’t really see us getting better nor think the music will save us. I don’t think the lives you’ve cut out for yourselves thus far will have any more room for me or what I’m doing than they have so far. I don’t really think you know what I’m doing though, anymore than you know how to play checkers.

I’m sure you’d just tell me you don’t like checkers and tell me I can’t expect everyone to play my game like I invented the fucking thing lol on your way to blissfully ignoring the point.

[821] Orgasm Addict

I just want to write a bad blog because my head wants to hurt. I've been recording and organizing the books I got for free. The journey we've been on together has amounted to a fair amount of effort for so far indiscernible gain. I can't help but to view it as a larger persistent analogy.

I'm all about the probabilistic thinking. I very much doubt anyone's particular “brilliance” or special effort. I believe there's more luck involved even before I pick up a book making a case for just how much. As such, whatever the cost of these books in labor or space, the ideas they give me remain invaluable. I want to hold them hostage as a sales tactic. I want to create ways of quickly organizing and displaying them. I want to try to read some of them.

If life is a similar series of a kind of randomness, I want to set myself up for as many “what to do with all these books?” kind of scenarios. Ideally, the books are supposed to be a series of individuals with a capacity for honesty and introspection you don't otherwise find in a “normal” distribution of people. It's as much the experimentation in business running or marketing as it is toying with websites and general attention seeking. I think the secret to my success will be tying everything I do to everything else. You came because you read a crazy flier. You stayed, or you bought something, because I made it part of my world, and you wanted to be associated.

I think a lot about an infinite sea of associations. Whether I remember the character names or not, I'm associated with thousands of stories. I have a familiarity, or parity of experience. I think a lot about the confused, almost angry look I got from an acquaintance when I said I watch some shows sped up. She didn't understand opening as many small doors of connection as possible. I take it she's getting all she needs from her life.

I think about comedians who say they sounded like their favorites when they first started out. Who do you sound like if you don't put in the time and effort to differentiate? What happens when you no longer borrow from enough sources to push the needle on the topics of importance and interest? This is the concern I have for myself right now. I have a thousand worlds staring at me from the corner. I have books on construction. I have Oprah's book club stamps across covers. I have as many windows for new insight as I do in looking for lines that stick in my thousand TV shows. And they're heavy. Any they fall over when you stack them too high. And they're covered in dust and make me sneeze, and are in “good” to “acceptable” condition, waiting to waste their life on someone else's shelf who can shell out the four dollars.

I think about helping yourself before you can help others. For how many years have I tried to differentiate between the “right and wrong kind of selfish?” My thoughts came from what seemed like nakedly self-destructive acts meant to put distance and shame in the space where a conversation and personal responsibility needed to take place. As I get older, I feel I need to be more conservative with myself. It's harder to juggle things that aren't arranged in a way that makes things simpler. It's harder to have the patience for really bad words and wasted time where an adult or consequences are necessary. It's hard to watch yourself act in a way that seems to betray where your mind was most at ease. Does it have to get hard before it's easy? Or are we just trying too hard to run too many poorly conceived ideas at once?

Whether or not I get my bills paid in advance, the way my life is organized, I'll still need ten thousand dollars a year. Cars need registered and property taxes are a thing. I'm tied to the grid and can't share my piddling thoughts without the interwebs. I'm freer, but I'm not free. I've got people in mind I'd like to spend that extra time with. I've got less than the naive hope it would take to think it's going to amount to more than a weekend or so year without some perfectly random intrusions of money or impropriety.

So I think about the slog. I think about the little pieces I put in place for the families I interact with every day. I think about picking up the pieces and giving the direction they can't seem to find for themselves, and I think about having someone to do that for me. I think about how that plays into me not going to the gym unless it's with someone. I was recently invited to run, something I wouldn't have done on my own, so I ran. I think about wishing I had someone to call me a fat cunt every day, daring me to eat better, so I could have that push-back and accountability. Discovering or respecting that someone has intention or credible expectations of you is something I can get behind and find motivating.

Here I want to break off a bit and explore intention verses attention.

I like attention. I don't want it for its own sake, but I'm always seeking the laugh or the admiration and respect for when I do something better or different. I truly felt at home when I was on stage at Warped. I walk into rooms and theaters, and envision myself giving speeches. I rehearse what I'll say on Colbert. I know, just by virtue of my personality, I'm a literal aberration from the norm in ways that will garner attention. I speak different. I respect my feelings less. I approach problems from an assumed inevitable creative way it can be fixed or reduced. I always want to bite. Containing or organizing that is the task of life. Making it something worth courting those who would find their own intentions with it is the work worth doing.

When I intend to do something, the rest fades. The drive doesn't feel so long. The show isn't a painful marathon of intermittent focus. The day at work isn't the thing otherwise impeding my only route to happiness. It takes the smallest goal to get there. It's why I love food. Whatever else in your day, you get to have a goal with a high probability of a great pay-off and feeling. I don't know who's going to choose to yell at me instead of engage when I call people, but I do know how the burger is going to taste. I can prove the value of my intention.

The larger task? Can you pretend to know the influence of an intentioned life? Can you regard the consequences as “good” on faith? If it doesn't fill you up like a good meal, can the value be measured in other ways? I certainly find myself able to invest more of my time and effort into others' lives when I feel like I'm getting things done and organized in my own life. I remember just the act of doing my laundry made me feel considerably better about typing up the notes on a few cases a few weeks ago. So what's going to last longer than a meal or spin-cycle? With any luck, and some work, your relationships. Your investment and intention for other people.

I suspect this is why people express what having kids has meant to them. I suspect this is why so many kids are living out the consequences of neglect and people grow to resent each other. If you genuinely care, all of the adages about helping other people being the highest calling or way to draw the most from your lived experience may prove to be true. If you hate yourself and/or the space you occupy in the world, it's going to be someone else's problem, one way or another. This is the baggage I attempt to keep from dumping on people. I share what I hate or think you're doing wrong. Rarely are you in a place to engage or cope with that. I don't always react to being triggered in ways I respect either.

Existing in the space as someone else's problem is familiar to me. I've often felt like something to be dealt with or compromised around. If the mean wasn't paired with the funny, I'd be that much lonelier. If I wasn't smart enough to talk my way out of something ridiculous, how much more trouble would I find? If I wasn't large and angry enough to silence, at least to my ear, a degree of immature emotional dissent, how many ways would I find myself petty and distracted by fake villains or tyrannical justice? It's my intention to not be at the mercy of the world that gives me my value. I'll take the judgment as the worst if, by the numbers, I can prove to be better or the best. I'm certain I'll identify a stream of quantifiable problems related to you and your environment while you over-burden the value of your gut reactions or prescribed morality with regard to me. I can maintain my standard for friendships and allow myself the view from the eyes of the people who dare to say they love me (which I still discourage, though less emphatically than I used to) or make them think.

Perpetual good is the smallest shift when it's at the hand of the collective in the right direction. I alone might need ten thousand dollars a year in order to live minimally first-world. That's 5 months of my current time-stupid job. Together with your resources? I don't want to say I'll never know, but the divorces and mid-life crises definitely haven't kicked in yet. I also won't give you the credit to think you've got more you'd like to do than get by the way you are. I'll never be able to tell whether that's bad or good beyond the amount I'm able to lodge my way into your head as the problems I have with things wedge their way into mine.

[191] Post Show Thoughts

Sunday, August 2, 2009 at 12:11am

I went to warped tour, and can't help my propensity to ridicule.

First, your 200 plus pound 15 year old ass should not be crowd surfing under any circumstance. When that ass gets dropped on my head, pulls my hair, and leaves me concussed, I hate you. And when that ass is about to faint and it takes three security people, and 7 hands in the pit to barely pour you over the rail it's called a news flash.

It isn't a contest to see who has the most "frilly flick-out-of-your-eyes" type hair. Nor are your oddly placed piercing telling me your an individual. It's one thing to do it for you, a completely different thing to do it to show how "into the scene and music" you are.

There are a lot a lot a lot of weird looking people. I thought I could get enough just walking around the mall, but fill tweeter center and get a couple hours between shows and damn.

I'm severely burdened by the amount of parents willing to drop off their, literally 11-15 year olds at the concert. "Somehow" they can all identify the smell of weed, scream their stupid heads off that it's cramped and hot in the third fucking row of a pit of 8,000 people, and walk around barefoot after their sandals miraculously came off during the show.

Actually, come to think of it, I just hate crowd surfing period. Your so full of yourself and enjoyment that the only way to release it is to drop your ass onto the heads of people who just want to watch the show and focus on how they can position their bodies to breath. And it's usually not enough to just do it once and prove to your friends that your wild and crazy, no you go back, and keep tumbling through 5 or 6 times, even when there is no fucking music playing. Idiot assholes.

I hate Devil Wears Prada. I hate the idea of a christian screamo band to begin with, but I think it's extra stupid when you toss out at the end of your show that, "you know guys, jesus is your friend too...and that's not meant to weird anybody out or anything it's just what we believe and what we claim." If your deity ,so full of love and awesome, is there and you believe so strongly in him, you'd think enough of him to not have to make a concession that it would bother someone to bring him up. Something tells me all the christians in the audience who are screaming their obscenities and being all too teenager, give half a fuck about what you claim to believe in, and if their screams confirm you're doing it right, you're not just wrong and stupid, you're desperate.

$9.50 for a slice of pizza means I shouldn't have seen anybody with a slice of pizza, not at least 20 people.

When your at the front of the pit, and your friend is disconnected from you, don't turn around, claw into those around you, and try to reclaim your grip on them. Not only are you taking up space that isn't being used to enjoy the music, your being a complete bitch who's willing to hurt people for the sake of keeping a hand on someone in a situation where you can't convey anything to begin with. In the same vein, when I hear you say "someone's poking my boob, I can't feel my arms, it's hot, I can't move, who's touching me!?, I need to get out of here" at the top of your lungs for 20 minutes, you deserve to die for your stupidity.

I don't know how you can justify elbowing someone in the kidney, neck, or direct spine, no matter how cramped it is. It's such a basic courtesy in that situation to find some arm positing that isn't in the most painful places for everyone around you.

I might add to this later, but I had to get a least this out.

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Updated about 7 months ago · Comment · LikeUnlike

Kristopher Walker likes this.

Brandy Dieterle

Sounds like a very interesting experience. If I wouldn't be completely surrounded by strangers and be extremely uncomfortable I'd totally go. But that's a little much for me. I'd be one of those stupid people freaking out cuz of everyone in my space touching me and so on.

It is amazing the kinds of things people do with their children. Dropping them off at concerts and then the kids just being retarded once they get there. It seems people don't use their brains very often.

August 2, 2009 at 11:44am ·

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[115] A Speculative Guess

Saturday, August 2, 2008 at 11:42pm

Warped tour was bloody amazing. I definitely got to see a ton of bands and hurt myself squeezing between people. There were a few moments of rest between a couple bands so I got the opportunity to sit against a gate and watch the fifty thousand people walk by for a while. I had a bit of an epiphany when I saw this rocker looking girl, rather scantily clothed, with a cross tattooed on her back. This epiphany was later reinforced when I found myself rather enjoying a band called Family Force 5 who, really rock the fuck out, and are a Christian band. So what was this idea I had? Religion is a form of self expression that doesn't need to have anything to do with why it was originally implemented. Why I call people hypocritical and mentally enslaved doesn't seem to register or feel like a valid observation, because they hear me telling them something like, “Green Day is better than Reliant K and they are both gay and retarded for liking Reliant K more.” It isn't about immortal souls, angels, or eternal not-so-at-resting places, it's about viewing themselves as some reflection of what they've heard from the bible or about Jesus, and taking it on like a new band. I think it's important for me to point out that I don't think I have a problem with these kinds of people any more than I could be angry that someone liked rap over rock.

This speaks to a bigger point though. I don't think people are generally aware. When I can watch Shwayze semi-rap 7 songs about weed, then go across the lot to see The Devil Wears Prada express their faith though screamo, to me, it would feel like two conflicting mentalities. The next time you go to church for the pastor to scream throatily about how much love is there for you, you'll understand my confusion. I just can't help but think a venue where fuck is said every tenth of a second, girls boobs are popping out everywhere, and weed wafts though the air is the “best” time to show how awesome of a Christian you can be. So along with my usual comparison of religion to drugs, take with you a comparison to music. You can go to a rock concert, know your ear drums are going to get blown, people are going to hurt you, and you'll burn your face when you get home, but the amount of fun puts you in a mind to override that. With your religion, you know you won't be able to explain it, defend it, and usually won't know shit about it apart from the usual time honored tales, but it puts you in the mindset that may calm you down, keep you thoughtful, or make you connect with friends. I just ask that people be aware of that, before they pretend to know the facts. The more often they realize that they can be more honest to themselves and to me before they tell me their religious or really know truth, you know, because its true, because.

If you didn't go to Warped, you suck :p.

::Update::

I just read an article about another cartoonist being investigated and taken by police for "potentially offending Islam." In case you haven't heard, Islam is the new epidemic for Europe and any and everything that can be done to appease it, including taking down posters with unclean dogs and building indoctrinating schools, is being done. I really don't get this notion of taking offense, nor do I understand why people's ability to throw tantrums and hold signs grants them any right to walk all over the majority of people who only see a marginal social issue at best. Remember kids, those last pictures got a suicide bomber to kill 8 people at a Dutch embassy. These are the moments when I just wish it was my finger on the trigger to end these sorry lives who have forgone peace and understanding for ignorance and intolerance. I honestly don't understand why there isn't a bigger push from academics to tell these people how fucking stupid they are. Haven't we gone on long enough seeing what keeping people ignorant of the facts can do? When your legal system, as it is in Europe, is passing legislation to promote the religious views of a blatantly dangerous view system because they don't want to "offend," who's going to find the balls to go "HELLO, WAKE UP, this shit is ridiculous, no?"

It isn't all the "peaceful" practitioners of Islam that make it dangerous, it's the ones we read about in the papers. News flash though people, it wasn't the peaceful Christians who "just understood what things were really about" that led to the Inquisition and Crusades. Those times are relevant now as they were then. Stop excusing the works and history of your faith because that was then and this is now, and your not the one picketing funerals. When you look at the religions, again, it is simply blatant for why they can go either way when it comes to peace and love or terror and destruction. Yet, you people claim to know the absolute truths within them? We are living in the 15th century with 21st century weaponry. The same problem with them now is the same problem I've been bitching about for years. KNOWLEDGE, INFORMATION, PROVABLE TRUTH, OBJECTIVE AND UNBIASED ANALYSIS. The word "respect" doesn't register with me when you can pretend like it is okay to ignore those tenets of a productive society. While you may not regard yourself as stupid or as misguided as the "extremists," maybe you should tell me how keeping yourself in the dark is ever productive to anything.

1 comment

Updated about 3 months ago

Michele Elizabeth Zerbe wroteat 2:00am on August 3rd, 2008

you know what doesn't suck? yOuR cAr.

(sorry that doesnt really have to do with anything) :P