[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?

[1081] First, Fist Fuck

Sometimes I'm tempted to regard myself as just flagrantly "ungrateful." It's not the right word, but it starts with that idea. I'm going to avoid citing every horrible circumstance that is or has happened that isn't happening to me. I'm trying to hone in on a good way to describe this sense of myself.

I'm constantly thinking about, or bitching about, the discrepancy between our descriptions and actions as it pertains to "reality." That theme goes back to some of my first blogs ever. I wanted "on the level" people who could 2+2. As an adult, I get to see the ongoing consequences of that discrepancy, often what feels like outright betrayal, play out with sickening regularity. My go-to phrase bemoaning all that "doesn't make sense."

Take my foray into attempting to be a "content" creator. To me, it's a sad and pathetic desperate stab in lieu of just…you know…saving children, or being a counselor, or working on my sustainability and off-grid goals. Wouldn't it be grand if each day I woke up secure in both my finances, focus, and sense of what the future could hold? But, for nearly my entire existence, that's a considerable fairy-tale more than registering as "realistic."

My parents had debt. They had debt so long that it was taken out of what my dad was to inherit from I believe my grandpa dying. The only period I wasn't in debt was when I was doing drug studies, and the second I went to buy a thing to live in, that was gone. But, I was also renting and at the mercy of ever-shit roommates, so the debt was on it's way or slowly churning through my resources in one form or another. Mortgages have always sounded insane to me. Student loans. Car payments. I have a very unpretty car. I own that car.

Debt is reality. It's a chosen one through millions of betrayals each day. My "ingratitude" for whatever comforts or freedom I enjoy is born of having my face rubbed in that fact indefinitely. The fact that I can pit my remote sense of joy/engagement against whether or not I should maintain a certain debt ratio is insane. I haven't' gone to 135 shows every year of my life. I've been in debt the whole time well before I decided it should count towards invaluable memories and experiences.

In a world that made sense, I would just be able to do good. I would just use my skill as a talker, people would like me, I'd have earned respect, and I'd use my money to see shows, eat, and live a fairly straight-forward and peaceful enough life with my little dad-projects and hobbies and series of forays with divorcées until I died.

But no. I, with all my "potential," and in like some constant mockery or that ill-begotten spite of my work so far am left to contemplate if I'd rather Door Dash, gamble on a YouTube venture, or break myself over some new miserable nonsense job that wastes and exploits me in lieu of at least making it remote. And it's not so much that there's some expectation of "sympathy," as though I have zero awareness of how fucked everyone and everything is. It's that I feel like I'm the only one who wants more.

My mind thought of the union pushes. It's all good news. These pussies aren't fighting for enough. Our politics aren't demanding enough as we slowly warm up to the idea of not having crypt keepers continue to defy nature. I wonder if I'm not demanding enough of myself, but then just watched myself spend 30 hours aggressively digesting and working to try and escape my paradigm with something "new" or "different" or that challenged me, until I found it's failure point and contradictions and deceptions and source of its power….the same mythological, "This isn't so bad!" nonsense of seemingly every fucking thing else. Glossing over details. Excusing away the negligence. And pretending like you didn't just lie to my fucking face and charge me for the privilege of listening to you!

It's bad. It's real bad in a lot of real serious ways. I just finished Hyperbole and a Half (I know, many years after it was popular), but Allie Brosh ends her book by realizing she's as bad as she is in spite of her wishes and stories and confusions as to the consequences of being bad. It's hard for her to not be selfish or violent or judgmental. When she's practicing otherwise, it's hard. It's just a bad core that needs active attention and decision-making to rise to the level of author and accountable fleetingly-normal and respectable person.

It's bad when I can graduate, work the kind of jobs I do, work the kind of hobbies and life goals I do, work harder and longer on random shit over 2 days than most might on their primary occupation over weeks, and I'm feeling like a fucking chump. I'm sitting and spinning on the existential dick that claimed my asshole before I even knew it was there.

We all fucking deserve better, not just and especially me. What the fuck is there to lose by trying to do better? Is the fucking story of this shit heap played out enough? It's like "cancel culture." We all got scared there for a minute. Now Matt Rife is on the rise. The zeitgeist is over it. Let people say "retarded" and "fat shame" and just generally understand what a joke is before they fuck off back to their life, right? We figured that shit out, why not something more important?

I found myself envying Planet Earth documentarians and photographers. Do you have any idea how insane that is? Fuck the jungle. Fuck the mosquitos. Fuck the diseases in different countries. Why the fuck did I want to trade places with the asshole chasing the chimps? I mean, chimps are cool, but fuck chasing a goddamn chip around the jungle.

But their lives have snapped into focus. The mission is clear. He's doing "good" just by being there arguing with a primate and contemplating ways to get them to accept his presence in their tree. Should all of our missions be so clear? Should we so reliably be able to trust our task and the payout? Chimp guy is at the mercy of what the animals want to do that day. He's free. Me? You? We have to fist fuck ourselves with the most selfish and greedy cunts of our species, every day, in big ways and small, no matter how much we bleed.

Oh, wait, EXCEPT WE FUCKING DON'T, AND WE DO SO ANYWAY.

We take our very nasty and guilty feelings over what our gaping asshole looks like, and then proceed to fistfuck ourselves, the people we claim to care about, and keep fucking until we're positive the future gets as thoroughly fucked as we've been. We class it up and call it "generational trauma." We play act like anywhere is safe. You think it's a mental health crisis and opioid epidemic? HA! Our very concept of mental health is defined by its pathological norms. We don't even know what "better" is. It's not a real registering feeling for nearly everyone. There's no motivation, no direction, and in that forever irony, even those who profess to help you get there don't have a fucking clue.

Every single thing I own or do is in perpetual standing of some kind of defiance first. It's precariously placed, waiting to crash and break or get taken away. If I can't pay my bills, I get to imagine selling my cars. After 20 years and helping thousands or specializing in areas almost no one is equipped to deal with, I need to stay on my toes. I can't get lazy and think I've earned a sense of security or deserve a savings account and multiple streams of income.

It's a fucking joke. It's a fucking scam. It's all one giant diffuse lie that seeps into every. fucking. thing. It doesn't get better. We're not going to change. I'll never be able to "just play" my instruments and sing the song on my heart because I'll never get a chance to stop screaming.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, "reality" would still be fucked. I'd still be trying to work all these broken levers and I'd start to learn just how useless money truly is. The bills would be paid, sure. I'd have more "fun" useless shit and set goals like seeing 365 shows one year, but "it" would still be fundamentally broken. My "best friend" would still be a story of Shakespearean betrayal. My extended family would still be selfish cunts. My brother would still be whatever weird state he's in about me. I'd still be alone out here or wherever I chose to go. The things I wished to fight, like DCS, would be because they are still acting horribly.

I don't own my life. It's waiting for me at the company store. I check it in and out at the mercy of their needs or demands. My time is spent thinking about how they're gonna fuck me next. It's spent praying my car doesn't break down. It's spent dreading the next empty hopeless conversation I have about my next work environment. It's doing the math on the money I don't have to do the project I'm perfectly well capable of exercising my ability otherwise. I can sit here all day and bang the drums, or read my comics, or watch shitty Star Trek, and it's all just grains of sand ticking away until the inevitable newest actualization of the death I'm embedded in.

How can you be ungrateful for something that isn't yours? I don't rule out the role of chance or the infinite creativity you must explore with your agency. Those do very little to assuage choking on the thick atmospheric bullshit. The world is horrible. You're horrible. I'm horrible. It's just not in the way you've baked into your self-serving story. You have to figure this shit out and fight it. You fucking have to. We're going to be stuck here for eternity otherwise.

[1080] Look At Me

Let me give you a snapshot of my last 2 days.

I'm feeling desperate. Whether I'm "actually" desperate or not, the feeling is growing. From a purely financial perspective, my comfort with levels of debt remains the same, but the practical animal in me wants pretty much anything to suggest that money can or is flowing the other direction. The grant process is still processing, including the credit card to keep the people working. I'm almost certainly going to be Door Dashing for a spell here in a week or two. My resume rewriting is just a headache I've already gotten partially refunded and will probably go for more.

I'm interested in many, many things at once. I don't talk about them all because it gets overwhelming. One area I've almost never mentioned is exploring content creation and ad monetization. I'm genuinely jealous and resent the dopey, wide-eyed, plastic copy-cats who make hundreds or thousands by creating "content." I know there are various ways to game the system. I know there are dozens of "niches" that make themselves known after a few questions. I know that I consider myself a very adept pattern learner.

So I bought a $1,066 course from one of the biggest content creators. I've spent 20 hours doing what, on his provided timeline, it's suggested should take 2 weeks. I'm compiling and sorting data. I'm taking key words and style tips. I'm writing down every remotely interesting thought or niche to explore when my initial efforts prove futile. I've already even gotten into an errant pissing match with another content creator on the private group who talked right past the concerns I raised and was looking for guidance on! I'm in the weeds, guys. I also have 60 days to get refunded.

I picked this guy because he gave me the exact opposite of the impression of all the genuine scams. The ones situated on infinite-scroll pages telling you vague nothingness and promising the world and then providing you a check-out page to buy 1/10th of their program. This isn't that. He has many, many hours of practical, actionable information that I'm seeing the future with fairly clearly. He's not always consistent and articulate as it may pertain to your specific niche, but the playing field is fair.

There is a genuine conflict between the idea of "quality" content, and content that gets views and clicks. One of the main reasons I drifted away from Youtube as a source of my entertainment was what felt like a massive waste of time. If I want to learn something, I don't need your diary for 2-7 minutes at the top of the video. I don't need hundreds of quick cuts and arm-chair philosophy. I don't need guitar Muzak and delightful fonts. What I don't need is precisely what Youtube desires and what keeps the consumer draining their life away on Youtube.

I've been at this less than a day and I can tell you the recipe for success is to mine those trending buzzwords, combine them with insights from your-niche tracking programs. Create a video with 5-10 tips or insights regarding "x," If you're a late 40s or remotely attractive upper-middle-class female, you can say just about anything. Use approximately the same gentle guitar music, reference books everyone has heard of, steal Alan Watts quotes, cut together whatever it is you may be doing or samples of things adjacent to your subject matter.

100s of thousands of views, with some luck, timing, and system-gaming will follow. Then you can get sponsored. Then Youtube will put ads on your video. Then you can become an affiliate hocking other crap. Whether any of this is "good" or "valuable" is not for yourself to judge, just to achieve.
Here we reach how you know I'm feeling desperate. I'm leaning into that cynicism. For as much as I've felt genuinely inspired to maybe make useful-to-me or practical compiled best practices and insights, that all has to come second. First, I need the eye-balls. First I need to be carbon-ish-copy. First I need to flood the already distracted, depressed, and confused landscape with bait before I can entertain the idea of creating a worthwhile brand or example. It's capitalism 101 with ambivalent systems dictating the attention rules.

I think this makes me a bad person. I think I'm a desperate person first, bad one second, but a bad one nonetheless. It makes me envious. I want everything these rich idiots have. I can't win for losing in trying to do "genuine good" in the world in my social work roles. I can't sustain my off-grid or sustainability goals for the land when I'm otherwise occupied, alone, or broke.

I'm going to be more or less locked into this project for the next 2 weeks. I had to stop because my procrastination was manifesting when I hit what appeared to be a contradictory roadblock regarding what the course was telling me and the feedback from the facebook group. I had a 20 hour flow before that hiccup. I didn't feel my muscles tighten. I wasn't sleepy. I kept getting flashes of inspiration on what to do next. It was a good time and quite the ride.

I have 17 more ideas I need to conjure based on these key words and recently trending videos. Once I do that, I'll write scripts, do voice-overs, schedule releases, and then hopefully collect and refine good data for what to zero in on. I might have to release as many as 100 videos in the niche before I find traction or useful patterns play out. I may have to switch and experiment with entirely new niches. Who knows. I just know I've given something to do with all of my angry waiting-around energy, and if it pans out I'm going to be about as angry as I've ever been for 1 extreme moment before I begin my redemption practice.

Every "motivational" or "this is the secret" kind of book, video, or lecture boils down to "do the thing." I'm doing it. I'm going to do it quicker and precisely as I'm told, and I'm going to use my instincts and pattern recognition to try and infiltrate where maybe it hasn't been yet. I'm just another idiot like all of these dumb hopeless cunts beautifully packaging and selling their cynical desires as "content." Surely those who might consume it are wholly indifferent to my opinion of myself in creating it.

[1007] The Long Com

I want to explore what I mean when I say I want to experience “everything” by way of popular culture, TV, or more. This isn’t true, obviously, on its face. There are plenty of popular things that I have no interest in, but happen to catch because, maybe the mood is right, or I’m otherwise not focused enough to care what’s whizzing past my eyes or in the background. Over the last 5 hours, I’ve caught myself “holing out,” where I find myself falling down an infinite series of thoughts regarding actions I can take in service to this little “project” I’ve been engaging in; I’m building TV channels.

It’s another “weird” and “particular” thing that I’m doing that I can’t really discuss or share with anyone else. The closest analogues are going to be whatever Netflix cultivates for you, or your particular set of subscriptions on YouTube. Everything I’m using for my “channels” has been downloaded, renamed, shuffled about my hard drives, and been a kind of time investment that courts a confused dog head tilt. The “purpose” also feels terribly obscure until I get this contented feeling as my vision comes to life. Were I a programmer, I could probably build something to do what I’m doing by hand in a manner of moments. I’ve tried to find and pay for someone to do what I want for these channels in the past.

I’m organizing and ordering my shows to play in order and by how I conceive of them per my interest and emotional salience. Given there’s an incredible amount of TV, most of it is only going to resonate at the level of it’s structure. When an individual show sticks out, I get an opportunity to reflect on why. I’m searching for thought-provoking surprises and insight into myself. I just watched the first episodes of about 30 different shows over the last few days from I Love Lucy to the modern One Day At A Time. I went on ahead to complete One Day At A Time, as well I noticed Malcolm in the Middle stuck out to me.

Something is invariably lost in watching an older-than-you show. You can’t experience what audiences at the time did when something was “revolutionary” for its era. What you can do is gain insight into how long certain themes have been on people’s minds, and see how far we have or haven’t come in dealing with those issues. I don’t underestimate the impact of TV on its ability to mold minds, particularly with the current circus and psychosis we’ve been going through with fascism flirtation lately. I’ve listened to a number of Trump biographers and historians who are convinced without his TV shows, he never would have been president.

What resonates with me about any particular show? Is it familiar? Is it personal? I vibe with Bernie Mac and Malcolm because it feels more “real” than most shows. Ms. Pat is a modern analogue. One Day At A Time and pretty much every Norman Lear show aimed to have real discussions where a lot of artifice and cheese would otherwise dominate. We all want to bask in the glory of some lie or another, even if it’s that our preferred TV show is more or less “real” than the drama we experience in actual life. You don’t really find a tension-ridden, yet still happy and respectful conversation with fascists, no matter what the last episode of One Day At A Time suggests. It, like all TV, leaves you with a dream. They suggest you can always fade to black with an open-ended imagination and “perfect family” in tact without feeling the consequences of things going wrong or staying neglected.

Perhaps that speaks to my interest in TV broadly. The more debased and simple our media, the more we can surmise that the population lusting for it is basic and simple-minded. I can’t really stomach most of reality TV, and haven’t been able to since I was a child. My mother was almost obsessed with Anna Nicole-Smith. She liked 90210. She’s an absolute lunatic pushing 60, and was emotionally immature and abusive to me growing up. Does “dumb” TV “cause” that? Of course not. Could I design a test with better-than-average predictive capacity that assessed your TV watching habits and the health of your relationships? That’s something much further down my rabbit hole, but it’s not hard for me to imagine.

For a good portion of my life, I thought I only watched “good” things. You know, the preferences of a young boy with goofy comedies and action movies with the biggest stars. Subtitles? Miss me with that. Slow, conversational, or romantic things? Boring. You get older, and you realize more and more not just the appeal, but what each “weird” or “different” or “bad” movie is attempting to speak to. You find yourself drawn to rom-coms? Maybe there’s an immense loneliness. Or maybe there’s an intense childhood naivety that’s positively inflamed with each stoked memory of the beautiful faces tacked to the first time you saw them. Was your first crush Anna Chlumsky from My Girl, or one of Kevin’s girlfriends from The Wonder Years, or Topanga? Or were you not a straight white guy like me? [2022 gotta qualify everything!]

Now, I watch TV from an analysis and almost researching place. If I have no interest in The Flash, or the vast majority of what DC has ever produced, I want to figure out the qualitative difference for me and the culture at large why I’ll put up with the weaknesses and cringe moments of Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. but struggle, if not almost get angry, at any isolated 10 seconds of an Arrow or CW show broadly. A line from Bill Maher recently was about not forgetting, “We’re entertainers, and what we create needs to be entertaining,” (not a direct quote.) Your brain has been worked on a great deal to be persuaded that a certain style, format, word choice, and subject matter is entertaining. One way you can observe that is by watching TV that all “fits” in its genre or style across time. The Black family, Latino family, Asian family, white families, rich people, poor people, working-class people, gays, country folk, city folk, and even dinosaurs and aliens all speak the same language!

You get a Larry Sanders who breaks the 4^th wall and then you get to ask if it’s a case study in subversion or a meta-subversion of the impetus to think for yourself and individuate once more. Is any real insight or success built from an individuated voice? Is it just the dawning of familiar clothes and walking down familiar streets reminding us all that we’ve been here before, will be here again, and don’t need to worry about ever moving or changing into something new or unfamiliar?

There are “individual” voices. People stick out from the baseline, and they get famous or infamous. I’m a fucking individual, whether I can chuckle at an array of sitcoms or not, and whether I occupy a dozen cliché boxes about men or otherwise. I think it’s often read into a certain kind of dignity and obligation when one invokes the “individual.” Individuals are supposed to be “aware” and “real” and it’s the individual who will recycle and sacrifice their comfort or benefits of joining the herd to stand for a beleaguered minority opinion. Being an individual has no inherent dignity in and of itself. See: Kanye West.

Marc Maron, Al Jackson, Bert Kreisher, Kyle Kinane, Jessica Kirson, and others are individuals who have provided me pain-inducing laughter. Are they not popular or good at what they do by tapping into universally-relatable themes? Are they not mining the stories from their lives and shaping them around comedic timing and language? I barely, if ever, remember what any given comedian was actually talking about, no matter how much they’ve made me laugh. I’m immersed in how they’re telling it. I notice the difference in how Bert Kreisher tells a story from the first time I heard it, to the 100^th time he has to perform it, and how it does or doesn’t make me feel each time I hear it.

We know internally that a certain pacing, structure, predictability, and familiarity sell. It’s why we buy tickets and subscribe. It’s why we find ourselves perpetually frustrated when “I thought!...” doesn’t match up with reality. Our thoughts are continually subverted by different narrative structures ever-aligned with what’s most entertaining. You get generational trauma from habituated denial and abuses going unaccounted for. You get generational stupidity from the habitual subversion of any accountable and meaningful engagement with the information patternizing your mind.

I’ve drifted a bit away from the exploration of the hole I find myself in. What does it serve me to develop a “deeper” and “more comprehensive” opinion of media across ages? Why occupy my “idle” time with The Golden Girls and not another phone call looking for a referral for my new business? It’s not an either/or and is a different class of ways to engage my time, but another way of phrasing it might be, aren’t there considerably more useful ways to exercise my time? Doesn’t my business mean more to me than seeing what generic caricatures are arguing about?

I’m someone who recognizes how little interest he has in TV the moment there’s anyone to do something actually real with. What I seem to discover over most minutes of most days is that those opportunities don’t exist that often for me. What’s “actually real” mean? Exchange with other conscious entities. Whether it’s conversation, dinner, traveling, or vibing to the same tunes. When you don’t have that, or you don’t recognize the quality of it, I think the TV characters take on a new perverse kind of meaning. They are where you find a happy home. They are where you find a reliable and consistent setting. They are where you find trust, growth, resolution, and predictability that is otherwise never on offer unless you’re courting familiar misery.

I don’t watch TV while you’re sitting next to me unless I’m trying to introduce you to something I find compelling; unless I’m trying to share something. Why I’m sharing it is most often to see if you’ll laugh too or have something interesting to say about how the drama is portrayed. My TV-watching habit may have started as an OCD accounting for things I enjoyed when I was younger or desire to claim more of that “everythingness” I’m after, but it’s turned into this preoccupation with trying to “connect” with people in the only way on offer. I can’t pretend to care about my regional sports team to the extent people do, but the disconnect and superficiality is deadened when it comes to shows we may have both seen. It was good, wasn’t it? Like that throw to 1^st base…or that comment from the new demagogue.

I think creators need to bear in mind the contexts on both sides of their own mind. “You,” eager to breakout and make a name for yourself, and “you” modeled around your heroes and cliches of your preferred mediums. What do “I” ever want to say? I’m mostly discovering that with each new thing I write, after whatever I’ve watched pushes me to do so. I have ever-vague, until the decision needs to be made, concepts of what I value and think I/we need to survive. So I watch TV indefinitely until you call me to do literally anything else. I know, through examining my own circumstances, that you aren’t feeling like you’re doing anything particularly more or less “meaningful” than me, or your version of watching TV, so you feel like there’s nothing to exchange. Like there’s nothing to protect or insulate from the influence of our different contexts. I think this is an ongoing torture and tragedy of what it means both to us as individuals and our potential relationship. Our obligation to use our voice is indefinitely sublimated.

In fact, this blog is what I want from all of my TV watching. I want to find what moves me out or away from the task of building a 150-show channel and spending money and time looking for programmers so I can keep a running dialogue of family-friendly and network-approved ways to not-discuss things in my head. Why do I need their jokes? I’m not hearing any of yours. Why do I need their drama? They engage and resolve it in a way you don’t and seemingly never will. Why do I need their structure? We’re not building anything together. Why do I need their family? You want nothing to do with me, as such. My character needs to fit into a narrative you can stomach and summarize. That I’m still being written, and doing the writing, doesn’t work because it naturally obligates you to do the same. You might whisper that obligation to yourself in private, and then proceed to never do so, so then it’s any wonder why I’m able to conjure so much resentment and silence.

A TV character is always going to have the right thing to say. Right for them. Right for the era. Right for the family dynamic. An arc begets an inevitable conclusion. We don’t engage the consequences of an abstract “perpetual conclusion” we’re living within. This moment is that conclusion where you take responsibility and obligate yourself to a purposeful engagement with the world, other conscious beings, or not. This moment you seek inspiration, or you don’t. This moment you’re living in service to your highest ideals, or you’re at the mercy of the neglected end of so many consequences. Evidence of your awareness of this moment is in the utilization of your speech. When you don’t speak at all, you conscript us to death. Perhaps the most sincere and impactful TV producers recognize their feeble attempts to communicate this in any other manner than the familiar formats so practicality requires acquiescence.

Perhaps, whether it’s the cheesiest TV show or the most convoluted yet on-point philosophical digression, the question of what drove it to exist and the impetus to understand it for how it impacts the culture or individual remains the same. I don’t think you can understand either unless you understand both. How does your individual move and orient in the world? What is that individual over there attempting to move you or orient you around instead? Are you or they malicious, ignorant, or both? Are you or they consistent, and in what? Will you allow a de facto ignorance to let you off the hook for taking more responsibility, using your voice, or seeing clearly the mess you’re making?

I’m not going to find “me” or “my personality” in a TV show. I’m not going to join the family. I’m not going to let myself off the hook of building what I know I need or speaking to what I think is missing. I need accountable individuals speaking to how they’ve brought themselves a little bit more stability, predictability, trust, and meaning into their day. Where do you think I’ll find that?

 

[485] You Read Me?

What’s left after you’ve given every concession? How can anything progress when every attempt at challenging a point of view is met with a tangled mess of derision and posturing? If you’re concerned about communicating, how fine does the line between what needs to be said, and what may translate to their level, have to be drawn?

Say I provide an exhaustive list of everything I’ve ever done wrong concerning writing or communicating. I grant I often come across blunt, mean, or rough. I concede that rambling drunk is rather disjointed and violently weird. I appreciate that my experience or knowledge about something can go over some heads. I’m deeply aware that many people are simply pretending to care and trying to look passable. I’m often prompted to unpack a superficially confusing metaphor. I know I get provoked and derail conversations in a cut off my nose to spite my face fashion.

What if you spend so much time conceding that you never manage to say anything?

One of the reasons I like data is that by itself it isn’t emotional. It cuts both ways though. You’ll respond to a starving child ad with a mini biography in a way you won’t to “x amount of civilians killed in airstrike.” At their base, the same cold message is attempting to get out. People are needlessly suffering or dying. One plays on guilt to provoke you to help. One gets regarded as a matter-of-fact sentiment about seemingly necessary and endless conflict.

Something that persistently bugs me are true and honest attempts at saying something which must be couched in a greater absurdity. “That Kendrick Lamar Grammy performance was powerful,” says every rich white person the next day after over-reading the room. You attend the party of millionaires patting each other on the back for working in an incidentally infectious industry to get deeply moved by the powerful statement regarding black lives and society. Praise be they have Saint Kendrick to absolve them of their day to day by giving them something real to talk about in sound bites for a few days.

And think about all the messages that supports. It suggests an audience, an, is important regardless of how they’ll treat the work. It’s a symbiotic pursuit of legitimacy and value. If he performed it on the street, then we might get a pass thinking this one is a little overzealous for his cause. But for the value and tradition of celebrity he gets due regard. It teaches us to seek out the same stages quick to usher him off for the next award category. It suggests this is the most popular, the most effective, and the source of the most legitimate value one could aspire to. Because it owns the cameras.

I think it’s pertinent at this point to think of the irony of Youtube. I’m still in an uncomfortable place when I see how turning the camera on yourself and going about your day can garner millions of followers. I view entertainment, generally, as a form of escape. I view it as escape first, genuine appreciation second, if that ever happens. That millions of people want to see what you eat, what you’re packing for vacation, or what you’re wearing truly scares the shit out of me. I don’t think it’s a discussion about tastes and preferences. I think it speaks to what’s fundamentally going to constitute being human.

When you have the lens, you’re showing people what they’re not. They’re not popular for their quirks or jokes. They’re not getting endorsement deals. They’re not able to forget about and ignore the haters. They’re not going on your vacation or dancing in your music video or have 5 friends to make gay jokes while streaming a Pokemon game. You’re granting licence to that escape. And that, in and of itself, I don’t think is the problem.

What gets to me is the conversation that follows in trying to justify it all. “Hey, people are choosing to watch me or pay for my book.” “I’m providing content.” “People are opening up and sharing with me in a way they can’t with anyone else.” “I’m just doing me, what’s wrong with that?” We live in a world where turning on your webcam and being loud or obnoxious gets referred to as “content” with the same attitude and bravado a network executive might refer to a million dollar investment in a TV show. The equating and all-inclusive message, “what matters is that they’re watching.”

We remain blind to reciprocity. We remain ignorant of history. We stop stunted as the noises and funny pictures curtail exploration and follow-up.

Our mediums are evolving and overlapping and accelerating in their capacity for message transmission. We still barely know how to talk to each other.

I think we don’t know how to talk to each other because we don’t talk to ourselves. We don’t ask and truly consider just how big racial issues are. We don’t think what happens to the person talking to the Youtube star about their depression 2 weeks later. We don’t ask who’s pulling strings behind what’s allowed for a “mainstream audience.” And nothing about what we’re watching is going to suggest that we do.

Here I’d like to move over to what happens if and when we do manage to talk.

Consider our classic education system. I remember the boring quasi-discussions in philosophy classes as most pretended to understand the material. The challenge is to talk long enough to get a participation grade, not necessarily say anything of value.

Or think about when someone is brave, it literally takes bravery in our culture to speak if that isn’t sobering enough, but opens their mouth nonetheless to question something. If comment sections are to be believed, they’re immediately attacked or inanely questioned for their motives or capacity. Did they have a legitimate question? That was never a question the masses were willing to entertain before they went in.

Ideally, you find someone presumably knowledgeable and enthusiastic to talk. Now you have to navigate personality and style. This 1/100 shot at something mutually helpful and informative becomes a high stakes game regarding legitimacy as neither of you chose to engage because you think you’re wrong. As far as my experience goes, I think I’m only wrong with almost helpless words to barely scratch at what I mean, but I’m rarely met with mutual deference to humility.

Ding! Fight’s on.You make an analogy that’s a one to one wording of something they’ve said. They immediately tell you to drop your analogy and it doesn’t connect with them but refrain from addressing why you used it. What makes the analogy wrong? They don’t like it. Why did you think to employ it the way you did? Oh come now, they’ve moved so far onto what they insist needs to be said, why are we still asking?

They employ “what everyone knows” regarding how a particular institution is really supposed to operate, and pepper that explanation with aspects they assure you they don’t like, but are the reality nonetheless. You concede that such an explanation goes down easy or is what we classically entertain as a function of our cultural narrative. Attempting to move beyond that and describe forces that betray convention now serves as a jab to pull them away from their comfort zone.

Now time to duck the incoming hay-maker. You see, anything can have any number of things that shape it, so aren’t you just being too philosophical and nonspecific and therefore basically wrong with nothing meaningful to say about the real world?

Here you’re sort of stuck. You’re under the impression that this person was willing to talk. When you quote back to them their language trying to better understand, you’re denied. When you try to enlarge the scope, not dismiss the circumstances or details, but allow for context, you’re dismissed. You’re pressed to meet them at their level, which to you feels like it often isn’t saying enough or enough accurately, or “agree to disagree” about points you don’t think were ever even established.

This is just what happens when it goes “well.” Ignore what happens when you’re rushed or trying to be “polite.” Ignore underlying emotions that provoke any number of conflicting responses and contradictions. Ignore the inherent difficulty at arriving at the proper words or unpacking an analogy before regarding it as summarily useless. Forget how quickly small becomes big or that nothing exists in a vacuum. Consider yourself lucky if you’re not forced to navigate condescension, name calling, and numerous left-field assertions attempting to turn the duel into a battle royale.

It’s in holding an idea and following it that matters. Just saying it means nothing. “Just do it” is an empty slogan. You have to acknowledge your agency, for all of its dramatic pitfalls, before you can obtain the capacity to acknowledge where someone else is coming from. The suffocating superficiality of our lives that swarms around the popular, familiar, or addicting seems at the heart of miscommunication.

Ego gets in the way. Insecurity turns you deaf and blind. Selfishness begets denial and excuses. You would like to pretend you’re not one of us. You think you didn’t come from a place of more consequence than your reported cleaned up short-cutted biography would have us believe. Your explanations must resonate absolute while our infantile babbling should refrain from offending.

Whatever you want to call it, however you believe you feel about it, whatever you think you know, just remember, you’re wrong. When you refuse to accept and pursue how wrong, you’re not just bound to repeat history, but rob people of the chance to better understand and shape their own. If you don’t learn what needs to be said as opposed to what’s popular or keeps people “happy,” you reduce yourself to an empty talking box of “content” to be digested like excess carbs on an overflowing dessert tray.

It’s not wrong to indulge. It’s not wrong to escape. It’s not flatly meaningless to create anything. It’s wrong to ignore consequences. It’s wrong to deny responsibility. It’s wrong to pretend like you shape the environment and it doesn’t shape you.

[325] Talkin' Bout My Mo-ti-va-ti-on

Let’s talk motivation. Say you’re interviewing a psychopathic killer. If they worked for the mob, their reasons to kill can range from “he pissed me off” to “I was getting paid.” There isn’t an emotional component; it’s simply about what they were expected to do or what they were going to get out of it. But, say your killer is the Iceman, who has a clear emotional attachment to his family. He can choke a guy out over his back and not bat an eye, but the idea of not being with his family while in prison makes him tear up.

I want to know why people are so pushed to go places in their heads. Why is the brain so segmented into seemingly non-overlapping parts? Where did I go and why did I choose to be so motivated to learn about something in the past? How and why does that motivation change with new information, and are those changes good, bad, or arbitrary?

I’m dreading the idea of getting a normal job and working all the time despite my bigger motivation to make and save money. When I look at my capacity, I’m not allowed to doubt myself. Now, I understand Jay-Z believes it ain’t about where you been it’s about where you goin, but if I start pretending I know where I’m going, things are just going to get messy. I’m a conditional being after all, with maybe the worst case of presumptive intentional ego and free will that can exist.

It’s just the clarity with a goal in mind is unmistakable. You don’t read, you search and prepare an argument. You don’t talk, you persuade. You don’t suggest, you order, and people listen. It’s brilliant. I think what might put me back in that mode is currently a goal that feels out of reach. At least, out of reach if I’m to go about getting it while also adhering to a set of conditions that tend to bode happiness and are fairly easy to defend. Let that shit go and I’m practically a slave were it not for all the money I’d be making.

The “emotional” component to my motivation is more of an invigoration. It’s not “this makes me happy.” It’s cycling through the laundry list of implications and potential and never being able to shut it off. It’s something I know I can use to motivate or educate other people. It’s the precursor disposition for what’s needed to dramatically change someone.

Is it worth it to “mock” that for something that simply isn’t worthy? By what “right,” if we’re to believe in such things and maintain a semblance of order and respectability, do I subject that or ignore that or hand it over to the highest bidder? No one will value my time like I do, so why should I play along? I think I might just have a big problem with a limited perspective on ANYTHING else I could do to find a work around. Problem being, everyone else seems to be out of ideas as well. There’s a million ways to make money and spend time, there’s like a handful of ways to do it correctly.

How you define what’s correct is all about what you decide to obligate yourself towards. If killing people equaled a paycheck, sure you got what you wanted and didn’t get caught, but it’s hard to say you got the money in the right way. Is “killing yourself,” or at the very least suffocating or ignoring ideas for money, worth it? See Wall Street, or lawyers.

My concern is the realm of ideas, and I’m supposed to knowingly trample on mine and expect people to find good reason to stick behind theirs? I’d have a kill switch against anything I’ve ever advocated for at the level of mind. Talking myself into a shitty situation is not the same thing as acknowledging “how things are” and it is likely better to consider something as beyond the reach of my circumstance than capacity.

The clichés don’t work. Persistence is most likely to get you somewhere, it’s not guaranteed. Every one person you see loving what they do, there’s thousands who didn’t know what else they were going to be able to. It’s not enough to be smart or motivated. It’s not enough to be nice or genuine. There’s a whole world to contend with. The day I “get my shot,” which is a horribly small way to state it given the circumstances I was born into, it will be because someone with a little (or lot) more money sees that I’m a workhorse or have thought a lot about something. I’ll be only and just as good as when I threw on ankle weights to run through and clean theaters.

And then what? I do something that catches on and I run the media circuit? Two idiots in Colorado get to put all the tv channels on their budget web page because they’ll cook you a burrito and clean up after a party. Brilliant entrepreneurs? I bet you’re dying to look up their interviews on Youtube this second. Or maybe I just do something personally gratifying. Let’s cross our fingers I’ve got a moral core in tune with what will also logically and calculably account for the positive change I bring the planet. This, just so it can inevitably change again. Because who knows if we’ll ever decide to cement things like honesty or accountability into our culture for good.

I can’t seem to find those middle ground people. Ones who start with a philosophy but don’t ignore what may be required practically. You either get hippies or whatever it is “normal” people say and do. Or you get people with excellent advice if we pretend they didn’t have a giant backdrop to suggest, provide, and work in for their “insight” that isn’t always readily available or scalable to your problem.

Keep in mind, I’ve all but signed away everything but the memory of a flame on the candle I hold in my heart for humanity. That could change, but it doesn’t seem like it will any time soon. It’s only the sheer weight of demoralizing sadness with the idea I can’t shake off. Lucky me.