[1251] Earth Turns Slowly

What does it take to "genuinely believe" in something?

We hear things all the time. We say things constantly. We've developed entire systems of law trying to parse how much we "really meant" to do the bad thing. We claim "deeply held beliefs" reflexively and defensively.

I consider myself a deeply skeptical person. There's a deep and abiding irony about that, because to a lot of people I come across exceptionally arrogant and sure of myself. To my mind, they're reacting to a scrutinizing methodology more than accurately diagnosing me. At the same time, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be skeptical, and the curiosity I lead with often registers as a threat.

I ask questions. I ask a lot of questions, first of myself, and then about the world around me. I get very few answers, but the ones I do tend to be consistent in their character and patterns. I don't land on "right" and "wrong" very often, but if I do, it's because it feels like the answer starts to exist well beyond my opinion of the situation or my feelings. Racism? Wrong, full stop, all the time. Not jokes, actual racism. Actual discriminating behavior based on innate superficial differences is an artifact of our fear-based animal natures, not some defensible thesis to be debated indefinitely.

Yet, you see how I allow for racist jokes in my reasoning? Surely, I'm aware that modern discourse pushed heavily to regard words as violence. "Normalizing" probably popped into your head. And slowly, but surely, the drift starts to happen. The ambiguity of words, intent, and primacy of our subjective experience of the cultural landscape takes over.

Think of the implications! The slippery slope. Am I so dismissive of your lived experience!? To me, we arrive at several answers to several questions in this moment. People will assume your intent. People will react. People will draw dozens of conclusions in a catastrophized vision that summarizes your entire being and the state of the world. Do they genuinely believe in these moments? I don't think so. I think there's real consequences to contend with and behavior they'll engage in that can't be ignored. But I remain skeptical that your reactive self is your believing self.

I think we under-appreciate and are not that aware of how often we're reacting. It's why we feel helpless so often. That's a real reaction to circumstances that haven't been articulated. We haven't seen, heard, or felt our power, so as a consequence we start to believe we have none. We're abused children, battered wives, or otherwise cogs in abstract machines and isms.

I've felt decently politically helpless my entire life. I live in Indiana. No one has cared about the environment here. No one cares if there's money for a good education and teachers. No one's bothered to pressure businesses to pay workers fairly or make healthcare accessible. This state has nearly criminalized labor organizing entirely. I'm pushing 40. My whole adult life is hearing, "It is what it is," about every problem under the sun. You put your head down, work harder, focus on the little things, and move on.

That's psychologically insufferable for someone like me. I don't accept your flaccid reaction. I don't accept that I can't find a way. I want to fight for what I know does or can exist all the time. I'm stuck deeply skeptical that "the world" will bother to stay together moment to moment, let alone conform to your typical cliche truisms at the mercy of your uninterrogated perception. You didn't even ask what could be.

Whether you read one or 100 self-help books, they will boil down to "act." Do something. Move in the world, little by little, consistently, and you will start to see, hear, and feel something that contrasts with how you've been conditioned. Take the small walk. Deliberately smile. Put on the show you enjoy and consciously sit down to take it in for that 20 minutes or hour of your day that can actually feel like it's yours. Agency takes practice. To practice agency, you need to recognize and concede how often you're not acting like the agent of your own life.

Conservatives take this sentiment too far. Liberals, not far enough. This is why both are necessary in active healthy debate over debatable things. I can't decide tomorrow that my job, any job, should pay me enough to live like the middle-class lifestyle of my parents. I'm not rabidly inclined to hoard my privileges or legacy because of my poor preferred judgment about poor people.

I'm someone who likes to employ the words "first-world poor." I have a lot of stuff. I'm healthy enough. I have a degree. I'm fed. I have a support system. I indulge and try to invest at "my level" of, technically, poverty. What do people believe about me when I'm dropping off their DoorDash order? What does "society" believe of someone who is unmarried, chaotically organized, and boasts of watching every episode of thousands of TV shows?

Catch the framing drift? Catch the assumptions?

I'm society. DoorDash is an inelegant solution to several systemic and practical problems. I can count on one hand the amount of marriages I'd consider flirting with "healthy." Does it matter that most of my TV watching has occurred between 9PM and 5AM at twice the speed and often while I'm doing other things simultaneously?

The agent that is me is choosing how to spend his time, and often choosing differently than the defaults the moment they become viable. You call me to hang? I'm out the door. There's a show in Chicago? See you in a few days, cats. Something needs built? I work until I physically have to stop.

I've been as critical of A.I. as anyone. I've played with it here and there, thought it was shit and over-hyped. It got better. All of a sudden, in spite of what I feel is still derided as "vibe-coding," I was able to create things in my mind's eye that had practical application to my life. I've tried to get my music organized for literally decades. I built a music organizer that 15 different ones haven't been able to accomplish in a couple days. I wanted a better way to track the 200 or so comedians and musicians I've been following for the last 5 years. It became real. I have calendars based around where I live or if I'm around Chicago that show me every pending show I could go to. It's not "hard" or that "complicated," it just didn't exist yet how I wanted and needed.

What I learned in creating those I started to apply to civic-mirror.com. It's my latest bid to demonstrate what I think. When you're someone that asks a lot of questions, you can create a lot of problems for yourself. When you plug that process into "politics" as a broad catch-all idea…well, good luck to you.

I know, from my own life, the power of my agency. I've built my own home. I've started businesses. I've gone to 439 performances over the last 5 years. I can, and do. That agency is betrayed often. It doesn't matter what I can do, I exist along with other people and in environments that undermine it. The distinction is real. I don't let myself off the hook. I respect what's fucking me.

A.I. is the latest testimony I have of what happens when what I think I can do is functionally unrestrained. It has cost me more money than I realistically have. It has resulted in me feeling light-headed and "behind" or like it's never "enough." But it's a real living example of me trying to fix what I think is broken created, exhaustively, the moment I found the path to try and do so.

There's a significantly painful thing about being someone who does things or tries to create things. "No one," seems to appreciate the struggle or what it has "really taken" to get as far as you have. I'm going on 3 months of almost constant "tending." Learning how to navigate the A.I. drift. Learning the back-end infrastructure to make the features I want work. Finding ways to pay for it. I had it print a list of "problems solved" that is several hundred entries long, mostly forgotten, because there's a hundred more staring me down. I've worked on it while door dashing and eating Easter dinner. It's working right now as I type.

Another answer I find in a regular patterned way is, "Oh, cool," or "that's nice," or "you should…" or "why didn't you…?"

Even if, presumably, people have felt like me, can see the utility, can flirt with the hope of a meaningful difference or change, they still don't access their agency. There's a distance. There's an instinct and a reflex that they are already too-taxed, too-tired, too-busy, and this, too, is more than they can handle or deal with. Do they truly believe that? I don't think so. Anymore than I think they can't afford to come with me to the $10 show, that they haven't in 5 years. Anymore than they don't have the time to watch the 20 minute episode.

What you do, or especially don't do, becomes who you are. You are training yourself, every moment of every day, to believe that you don't matter, can't choose, and can't manifest what you think and feel needs to exist. In woo-woo land, I think "anything" exists precisely because of whatever you may wish to describe as that creative force. For "spiritual" people who want to terminate at an undulous and diffuse "god," why not? For excuse-ridden ideologues who bemoan the concept of "god" to judge and replace personal responsibility? Go fuck yourselves.

Because none of us can ever know what someone else "truly believes," we're left with what they do. I build. You can't argue with that. I try. You pretend there's a real "you" in their playing devil's advocate and picking stupid fights to some discernible end. In reality, as far as we can share it, you're defensively lying and reacting in lieu of exerting your own agency.

I see this in addiction, whether your problem is work-a-hol or alcohol. I see this in your sentiments about "politics" or "the world." I see this in the reticence to try and fail and sacrifice. I see this in stuck ruminated narratives about obligations and standards you hold to such an extent they become weaponized against you. Maybe your "care for a family member" is at the heart of what's destroying you. Your "work ethic" is ripe for the exploitative capitalist preying indefinitely on your nature. Your "exhaustion" has nothing to do with the nature of your tasks, and everything to do with the inability or unwillingness to figure out if you're really choosing, or would really choose them altogether.

I sacrifice a lot of otherwise "comfort" or "normalcy" in service to what I believe in, which leaves me often alone or feeling alienated. I can usually recognize a good parent from afar when it's clear how much they give up to ensure their kids are in as good a position as they can make them. I can feel that, "What the fuck is up with this guy?" in practically everything I do or say about how I live or what I think. But I can manage because I'm just navigating reactions, not hearing what anyone genuinely believes. I find this incredibly sad and a lonely place to be.

Thankfully, it's not "everyone" and it's not "always." I have people I care about and they care about me, and they don't just say so. I have people who are thoughtful and intentional, sometimes, often, or more often than not. I have examples they've set and histories I can rely on when my own story starts to feel acute or wobbly. Do I genuinely believe they care about me? I don't have to, anymore than I have to argue about what is or isn't racism. There's a transcendent reality I feel and appeal to that doesn't waste time reactively undermining what's consistently demonstrated.

When my "best friend" consistently undermined my trust in increasingly escalating ways, I stopped engaging. It wasn't a faith-based relationship. It wasn't, "But 25 years!" It was, you stopped holding your end of the bargain, and changed your behavior. He, unlike a lot of people, knows better. His relationship, truly, didn't change towards even "me" per se, it changed towards the truth. I'm not going to sacrifice myself in service to people who unburden themselves from telling the truth. You can be confused about the truth. You can wrestle with the truth. But you can't forgo it entirely if you're going to get anything from me. There's no "But my subjective experience!" sympathy over here. Did you start with a lie? Yes? Cool, go fuck yourself.

I'm the kind of person who wants "the world." I want "everything" to be "better." I want to clean up the trash in the drainage ditches along Cline Avenue because it's there and I can and it should be cleaned up and the dozens of people who threw trash out of their window are wrong and lazy and ridiculous and will be for the rest of time. But also, that we don't have a system that reliably pays someone a livable wage to clean up after those cunts is a problem. It's easy to say, see, and understand. It's apparently fucking impossible to get people to feel and act as though that's the reality.

The excitement over A.I. I think is rooted in the people who've suffered experiences similar to mine. I don't need your permission to do and fix and manifest. I don't need to field your excuses and navigate your feelings. I don't need to court your reaction. I don't need Reddit irony. I need my will and creativity and persistence clawing away each inch of achievement that hopefully speaks to people as willing and capable as I am. If I'm a business-owning tech guy, do I need Jim Banks's racist tropes about non-English speaking truck drivers? Or my autonomous fleet? Do I need hillbilly opinions about water use? Or pay off 7 city council members?

In comparison to, and hopefully unlike those who've been corrupted by power, mine is relatively muted. I don't fear or shy away from my capacity to build or destroy, but I also don't pre-emptively look for the excuses and license to do either. I had the idea first, so it's right to do and how I'm doing it by default? I had the money so however I spend it is fine? I suffer delusions of being the best, smartest, most just, etc. therefore…? I'm willing to entertain and believe the idea that I'm catastrophically wrong. It's why I write. One of you, one day, may actually think along with me and go, "You know, this was really fucked up right here." Polymarket puts that at less than 1% likely.

I could see civic-mirror turning into "the" tool, like our shitty social media environments have turned into "the internet." I could see it going nowhere but being fleetingly useful to me and a few nerds. But the point is that I actually see it. I created it first. I demonstrated what I believe about myself and the world I want to live in. In what obfuscating arbitrary universe can that be regarded as "failing?"

[1246] Bear Minimum

I don’t even want to proofread this. That should tell you whether you should bother with this one. No, I didn't mean "bare."

Everything I’m going to attempt to talk about is complicated by the cold and snow. I need discipline. I can feel too many things competing for my attention. It’s been preventing me from finding the peace I can usually get a sip of from writing. I think I’m going to avoid spending any time contextualizing something for “the random reader.”

I find myself returning to an idea that anymore, I want the bare minimum. My life has swung back and forth between austerity and indulgence. One was a project in service to a sense of long-term stability or growth. The other a reaction to the creeping understanding that I no longer believed I was going to achieve either.

I owe money. Not really, but according to criminal institutions, thieving family and friends, and the capricious greed of former employers and my state. The processes afforded to me in order to discharge debts have lied, wasted time, and are now salivating to squeeze me for every single penny I already don’t have.

You can only exempt $450 in Indiana of money in your bank account. Doesn’t matter if you have a $316 electric bill, $520 due to a credit card, $1800 in legal fees you borrowed, and $650 more you needed thinking you’d get your water running. if your account says more than $450, “It’s complicated,” according to my lawyer as to why actually filing still hasn’t taken place. Gotta make sure those transactions aren’t pending if you’ve moved to pay the bills too. Kentucky? You can have $8,000 in cash. But, I live in Indiana, one of the shittiest states in the country.

But it gets dumber. I’ve been telling my lawyer for weeks how much my “business” is worth. You know, the LLC with no assets that’s renting a house on the back of good graces from one of its partners. Super stable. My 25% stake gets me, anymore, a couple hundred bucks a month, maybe. Less now with a couple relapses and disappearances. This, another hiccup for the attorneys who can’t seem to understand I’m not trying to hide from them a house my business does not own, I certainly don’t own, and I can’t even expect a consistent meaningful profit from.

What are the fixes? Sell things? Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Also, the whole country is aggressively bleeding people dry, so it’s not like there’s too many itchy buyers for your old broken vehicles. I’m trying to get into a drug study. I’m poised to check in Monday. There’s a chance I flame out because my anxiety gets the best of me and my heart rate is too high during the final screen. That’s why I stopped doing studies for 10 years the last time. All I need to do is get to Cincinnati, not be one of the unlucky who isn’t chosen to dose, and then there’s a consistent income for 6 months with each trip back.

I haven’t been able to leave my house for 5 days. My car can’t get out of my driveway. My truck, with its precarious battery, was dead. Why haven’t I fixed the battery by now? It’s one of 20 things I could spend money on that need fixed, and until I absolutely needed to drive the truck, why spend it back then? Did we get more snow in 2 days than has snowed in 8 years? Oops. Now I’m underprepared, again.

The truck is currently, hopefully, being charged, and will retain that charge long enough to drive into town and get a battery that will eat up approximately 25% of my current capital. Then I’ll get some food; sandwich stuff, potatoes, and sausage are the usuasl. This is provided I can navigate the tundra road that is my rural neighborhood. I’ll try not to think about how my truck costs 3 times what it does to drive my car. I’ll almost certainly have to drive the truck to both Chicago and Cincinnati.

My best case scenario is that I’m filed this week, granted access to the study next week, taken to be as poor as I am by the treasurer's office, and in 3 months I’ve paid back my dad, fixed my water, and caught up on other bills related to my credentialing, insurance, and remaining credit card.

In the story my life seems hellbent on trapping me within, I continue to get “Weeeelll, we were talking” hiccups to getting my paperwork filed. I psych myself out of the study, or am not picked at all, making a mockery at that point of whatever I managed to do to reign in my anxiety and heart rate. I’m unable to get my car out for weeks leaving me to be potentially door dashing in a truck. When it’s time for the hearing, I get picked apart or delayed because they want to exercise every "fuck you" move they can. In the meantime I’m trying not to make “too much” money that makes them more powerful. I’m arguing with myself if I can or should try to go to the next show. And that plays out for months until I’m forced into Chapter 13.

I have to refrain from sliding out on what I’m hearing is large amounts of black ice and overturned semis, from what I’ve experienced, as generally negligent road clearing efforts. I have to spend most of my time in between the drives and decision-making from on high in my very cold poorly insulated home that hasn’t had running water for over a month. I get to smell bad for longer because I was showering at Planet Fitness before dashing. Those are 45 minutes away not in snow and ice, mind you.

Moving out here altogether used to be my bare minimum. I’ve been able to go to shows because “the basics” were well enough in place. Now? It feels like my home is not living up to what I need. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older and less resilient. I don’t know if I’m just opening up to more liabilities as I struggle to keep things maintained when they all want to break at once. I don’t know if I’m just tired of fighting the backdrop of constant attack. I can’t get left alone. I’m never “good enough” to just ride my little corner of the world.

I want the decisions already. I want to know what it is I have to navigate. I work quickly because I hate ambiguity for its own sake. I hate feeling dependent on forces and people I can’t respect nor would ever carry myself like.

It’s hard to play your instruments when you can’t feel your fingers. It’s hard to wood work when you’re hotboxing dust. It’s hard to yoga, or sew, or whore bathe. So I sit, write, make tiktoks now, and wait until I get little bursts to get up and pee, eat, or fuck with the 10-steps between me and starting the real also-complicated, also-annoying process. I still have to go check on the battery. What happens if I can’t get it to start? Which of my neighbors do you think wants to cart my stank ass into town? My friend that lives in town is in Florida for 3 months dealing with problems that make mine laughable. My next closest friend lives an hour away.

Can the cats go, perhaps a whole week, unattended? I think the most I’ve done is 5 days. If the power goes out and their water freezes? I can’t even sit here and think about what to say next without my foot freezing over. The cold shows me how poor my circulation is and what areas of my body are poised for arthritis like my dad and grandpa.

What do I even want to do? Nothing. The bare minimum. I want to feel, again, like there is absolutely nowhere I have to be, no one knocking, no disaster needing cleaned up, no hand reaching its way into my pocket. I want to do that for so long that the next thing I do after that registers as the best thing I’ve ever done.

But I need to get back to being broke. I need to get the bills paid a year or two in advance. I need to be the friend who’s able to buy the tickets, dinner, drinks, parking, and tickets to the next thing between sets or intermission without blinking. I need to be able to decide I have the energy to do a little bit with a hole and concrete, so let’s capitalize on the moment and not weigh the $40 in materials against the gas prices. My life needs to more consistently feel as good as it actually is. I can’t feel better or good until I’m meaningfully distanced from all of the forces I clock as wanting me under heal or dead.

I’ll then scroll through reddit and read stories, maybe true, of people pissing away, winning, or making more money in an hour than I’ve ever been in debt, ever made a year, or would even be worth if I sold everything I owned. I’ll compare my laments to the people with health struggles, ICE’s fascism, considerably more invested-in and more respectable roles and lives than I’ve managed and I’ll self-impose a “go fuck yourself” sensibility. I’ll type in circles. I’ll go back to TV. I’ll click between windows. I think it’s about time to get disappointed by the battery again.

[1213] Stupid Monkey

Part of me feels like what I want to say could fit on an index card. It’s a part that doesn’t need articulation. It’s the face a monkey makes when he sees he’s being paid unfairly for the same task as another monkey.

There’s a “common sense,” I find is rarely lost on anyone at the level of “feelings.” This isn’t to say that the feelings, in and of themselves, are “reasonable” or “justified.” But they bind what is an otherwise vast array of different cultural expressions or norms. It’s so common, even when a monkey does it, we get it immediately. No doubt you’ve seen videos of other animals who can also, not-so-miraculously, clock when they’re not treated fairly.

I think this is no small point to linger on. As we’ve psychologically fractured into individualized scrolling-hellscapes of errant opinion and trolling hatred, it’s the hate that binds. It’s the confident ignorance that universalizes. It’s the fear, insecurity, and desire to control that gets fed.

Today’s reddit scrolling felt acutely dismal. I’m on team, “we’re literally trotting down the road to fascism.” I don’t read headlines about “jokes” about cancelling elections or redistricting as “just politics.” I see and listen to the death by a 1000 cuts nature of decline every day. I’ve made comments for years that I always hoped to be “the first Jew out of Poland” when the next global war takes place. History rhymes, and there’s echoes all over the place if you’re one of the handful of people still reading books and studying reality.

I’m like most people my age, first-world broke, but incredibly rich relative to the rest of the world. There’s a version of my life that ducks and covers as more and more suffer, and I, probably, remain one of the ones who talks about the camp they set up just down the road in Shoah 2. I’m not pretending they won’t or can’t come after me, but I’m decently far down the list if I don’t pop my head out.

I think a lot of people in similar circumstances are making that same calculation. The problem, of course, is that is precisely how we all end up dead. I’m also very loud, angry, and want to fight wherever a I can. Practically, this often translates into exactly this. I’m using my voice where I see relatively few others doing so. I’m trying to capture the contradictions in my behavior, goals, and perspective so I don’t sit paralyzed and making excuses.

While “the world” feels like it’s burning down, I’m sitting on the edge of an opportunity to distance myself from it even further, potentially making a lot of money starting a sober-living house. I’ve never needed that much money to conduct my life in the first place, and this opens me up (at least my thoughts) to levels of luxury, security, and indulgence I dreamed about as a greedy kid. It’s hard to square that with my deeper desire to just exist in a state and country that even pretended to have “common sense.”

Instead, I feel baked into a cake of helpless ignorant hatred and excuses. It feels like “natural license” to exploit and extract as much as I can before I run away to somewhere “safer” or “better.” To me, the “homeland” is wherever the ideals are being expressed and defended. “America’s,” alleged, ideals are often in considerably better shape and display elsewhere. I’ve never felt like the kind of person who would just go along with being drafted into a war I didn’t choose.

At the same time, again practically, I’ve felt for years the disconnect between what I might be able to do on any given day that meaningfully accounts, combats, or changes the overall circumstances I’m embedded in. I vote in every election, and it’s meant what? I get the consequences of ideological capture of institutions and redneck pride indefinitely. I listen to dozens of podcasts and used to read a minimum of 30 articles a day, for years, about the world. What did it get me? Low-grade depressed and ever isolated as I struggled to clock why no one wanted to talk to me.

I think my confusion, outrage, and sense of helplessness in spite of the growing localized evidence of my capacity and nature is something that can be universalized. I think if I, of all people, am calculating I need to extract and run, your “average” person with myriad more obligations, mental health struggles, and financial woes…I mean, they’re so tortured and lost they’re cheering on a fascist takeover, environmental destruction, and every attack on science and history they can muster. In addiction-speak, millions of people have caught the “fuck its,” and are burning everything down around them.

The ”non-voters” win every election. The people who are looking to be led around by the nose. Most days it feels like the best I can do is ensure I don’t get trampled and try to pass along more than an enfeebled joke to the next leading farm hand. I don’t actually think, my pretentions as they are, I’m actually licensed or called to exploit people. I don’t feel good about the prospect of abandoning ship, but I’m not going to pretend I don’t know how to swim. Millions and millions of people until the end of time are going to deny we’re in the same boat as we all slowly drown.

The monkey will scream and fight and struggle against someone trying to drown it. You’ll tell me the researcher was joking. You’ll tell me it’s normal to drown a monkey from time to time. A majority of onlookers will then say something like, “I don’t get political about monkeys or water.” I feel like it doesn’t take a big brain or moral courage to figure the absurdity out and why you don’t want to be a monkey-drowning cunt or lazy apologist for the ones that do.

[1156] Tragic Quip

It might just be a quirk about me, but I find it almost impressive how terrible people are at arguing for something.

I can be just as quick to “clap back” at someone’s comment or shitty opinion of me. That’s not “arguing.” I would call that more “shit talking.” Because of the internet, we’ve created this kind of hybrid shit-talking attempt at argumentation that is like the beating heart of most interactions online.

For as much as I distaste emojis, I think they got so popular because we instinctively knew our conversations were devoid of important context our faces, tone, and even ability to look basically coherent betrayed by spelling errors, otherwise provided.

Enough, too much, I get into some kind of back-and-forth with someone who I perceive to be oozing a substance described as “middling.” A reddit moderator. An HR person or supervisor. A first-order call-in representative. The kind of person who occupies exactly one area in life in which they have any remote authority or power, and if it’s under the threat of your observations or inconvenient perspective, they feel it’s time to sit you down and tell it like it is.

I post these digressions on reddit. Sometimes, my word choices trigger the automatic moderators. I message the mods asking for reviews. Almost always they get posted without issue a day or so later, and/or I have to go in and put [reddit trigger word] in place of a political figure name or you know how people will say “unalive themselves” in Youtube videos? Goofy shit like that because every day has to mock the reality of life in some way or we don’t get our ice cream.

Who decides they want to moderate a subreddit, let alone a popular one, I have no idea. That’s a very different person from me. One of the ones I caught recently complained that my posts are too long, they aren’t paid, and (after 4 emails) eventually quoted where I used the reddit trigger word, dismissed the context of it, and then went on to say my posts are inappropriate for a sub called “/r/self.” I’ve made about 100 so far over the years, but today, they’re inappropriate. The moderator also cited my “low engagement,” as though were I to garner enough internet points, I could spend them somewhere, or your average engagement on reddit is anything but obscene and hateful.

/r/self is a place where people mostly just go to ask teenager-level questions, quip about awkward situations, and stress over relationship issues. You know, my posts really spoil the pot of, “when ur naked in bed then he starts ranting & u find out he’s racist” and, “Is it weird for my younger brother (16) to stay in my room for a weekend?”

You would be making a strong and compelling argument for me to not use reddit (or even much of the internet) at all, let alone for the amount of time I do. I wouldn’t even feel compelled to argue back. I would describe my context of being mostly alone and functionally fishing in the ocean for the oft positive comment or interaction and person who feels like they found something useful in what I said. I have garnered 130-something followers on a blogging site before, have just a handful on reddit, and had people leave encouraging comments or send DMs. It also doesn’t really cost me anything to post depending on how you quantify dignity and time otherwise clicking between webpages.

Many people have described the kind of wimpy tyranny of these kinds of interactions. I liken it to the day that I was working at the liquor store, and a clearly decently drunk older lady came in. I could have denied her immediately. Instead, she came up to pay, was missing a penny, and I gave an extremely poor and unreasonable excuse that she needed to go back to her car and get me that missing penny. She gambled, showed up with a level of disingenuous entitlement and made a “Are you serious?” comment, that I would have said, “Of course not,” to anyone who didn’t put me in that position. She ambled out, back in, and got her booze. I can’t stop you from destroying yourself, but I have a say in how we interact together.

We have to interact with the systems on offer if we’re to maintain a certain level of awareness and superficial connection. You can spend hours finding alternatives to the giants of the internet, but it’s the same logic behind why people subscribe to major TV and music providers instead of torrent. You can make a wholly disingenuous argument about “theft” or find it too confusing, but ultimately it’s familiar, readily available, you’re bad with money anyway, and you already know “your show” is “right there.”

A handful of not the worst people on the planet are here. Sometimes we interact and it’s smile-worthy. They’re not going to flock to the alternatives with me. I’ve spent 20 years not-learning Linux.

I think we should all be mindful of that, “Now now, child” syndrome when it comes to discussing our issues with what someone has said or done online. You’re, almost certainly not, an authority. Even if you were, you probably unconsciously relay your perspective in a manner that isn’t just uncompelling, but antagonistic, condescending, and self-refuting. I know this because I write a lot and feel all of those things in my argument to the avatar of this collective voice. But, I can also feel the argument against things I’m saying in real time. It leads to qualifying, googling whether I’ve chosen the right word, struggling to analogize my instincts to real-world examples, or describe explicit easy-to-understand patterns.

My power isn’t in keeping the nonsense fight alive indefinitely. It’s incorporating it into how I engage going forward, or comfortably putting it aside in the future. For every 1 time I might write a digression about a particularly jarring or indicative-of-something-worthwhile interaction, I move on from 100. That wasn’t the case when I first started online, nor how I carried myself in life.

I don’t force you to read anything I ever post. You do sign up to have it pass by your eyes if we’re connected on these mediums. It’s worth figuring out why it bugs you so much.

[1121] The Friendly Ghost

Today feels like a day that could be described as "crazy-making."

Am I sick, hurt, or otherwise dramatically impaired? No. There's been a theme and a confluence of forces though. Let's go.

This week, literally everyone has canceled on me. For work, for fun, for things I was anticipating to use to feel useful and good. I spend pretty much all of my time alone, talking to no one, blazing through TV, playing my instruments, reading, or getting myself into some trouble playing with something I shouldn't because I can't stand feeling idle and useless anymore.

I lay this at no one's feet. I could, theoretically more than practically, invest a considerable amount of time attempting to connect to other people, organizations, or things to do so I don't feel as reliant upon others and their consistency or capacity to manage. And, in fact, that's what I've done in getting started with CASA, and hopefully seeing that spin-off into more first-hand interactions with clients, other volunteers, and the inevitable messes that will bring.

First, one of my attempted hires to fundraise ignores my outreach. I thought she was on the verge of stealing $1,200, tracked her down, got a brief invitation to her life's blow-up, and she's since refunded $500, on what she's proposed is a schedule to refund the whole on her paydays. In the meantime, I patiently idle and refrain from catastrophizing her silence, and now 6th missed scheduled discussion, and who knows how many ignored texts.

Ok. I got an early text that client 1's phone is broken and needs to be rescheduled. I attempt to call client 2 around our meeting time, no response. I text if they are okay. I get a "Not at all, can we talk later today?" I text later in the day, no response. That whole day was designed around another person supposed to come out and talk about plans to upgrade my space. They had other life complications with family illness to deal with, so the project lingers.

I'm left with more idle time. We need to be incredibly clear that whatever I feel about that time, it's not being laid at the feet of "everyone" or anyone I refer to. I do not blame a single person ever for focusing on their sick loved ones or deprioritizing whatever we had planned.

I proceed to go about my days. I go to the symphony for the live music playing of Star Wars as the movie runs. An entire section of kids talked, crinkled pop cans, and just generally made it about them for the entire film. No usher told them to shut up. No seething patron closer to them said anything. They just took what could have been a pretty straightforward enjoyable experience, and my inability to mute them turns them into a few aggrieved lines in another bitching blog.

Before the show, I walked around the continues-to-be-miserable city a bit. There's "cowboy" bars with country music that mostly surround the symphony. There's healthy servings of homeless people ranging from decently aggressively shouting to sleeping in places it's hard to tell if they've closed early or closed permanently. At one point, I'm almost certain a dude was following me. I'm in a "major" city, wandering, feeling isolated and arbitrary, and oh, look, there was also a pro-Palestine protest on the circle where they're screaming an anti-semitic chant and parroting empty party lines.

On the ride to the city, I was listening to some of Peter Boghossian's videos. He's known for setting up hot-button questions and agree/disagree lines he asks people to stand on and defend their position. He's, in a world that made sense, simply trying to remind people that we're here to engage ideas and should have a remote sense of what we're talking about or what might change our minds. Overwhelmingly, the people who brave his exercises are not that articulate, nor claim they can be moved, at least in the moment.

I'm now back home, where a comment I wrote on, arguably one of the worst places on the internet, reddit, was removed because I described getting into a "pissing match" in a comment to another person who was asking for feedback on what people might want in a new TV-related website. The term, in and of itself, I was told is the #1 rule that's not allowed and the person wrote "p - - - ing" like that as though it's particularly aggressive language or like I said, "I'll piss in your face, cunt!"

It just echoes that ideological capture and perverse power dynamics that I feel plague pretty much every level of my experience.

I know, as much as I know anything, that no one holding a sign on that boring and sad circle is persuadable. I know that no elderly usher at the symphony feels they are obligated and empowered to insist and correct inappropriate behavior. I know those who are eager to belong, be it through their status as a victim or the oppressed, are going to die on a hill that transcends parody when mocked up against real life. I know that my clients who cancel have a vastly different concept of "get better" than I do. I know the "innocent enough" obligations and life circumstances that relegate time someone might spend with me to be practically incidental.

I also know that I feel that I need to escape this overwhelming belief that I can't trust or look forward to things. It's a feeling that stifles my capacity to invest both in myself and in what I can only speculate others get to feel for what's captured them. I don't believe it's worth it, whatever "it" might be, that I'm going to plan, try, or work on for more than a day or so. It's a hollowness that haunts whatever I might do to prepare, or when I stifle one thing and rearrange another, trying to be there and be present and not suck you into this ever-hollowing sense. I can't fill it with the manufactured drama and concern that appears to fuel so much of other people's experience.

Whatever I do or think I can create, I can't erase the context I'm working within. The world's best talker in a country where they don't speak the language is flirting with homelessness and starvation. The shared values and understanding that comes with an ongoing relationship or dynamic of cultural expressions and sets of experiences I just don't really have. It's not "never," but is 6-10 times a year I might get to spend time with my dad or a friend doing something fun count as the kind of fabric I'm trying to weave?

I'm like a ghost. I feel like I just kind of haunt things or memories. You have to think, I'm drawing on my experience of the last decade. It's not just been a particularly lonely or disappointing week or something. This week was just the same record blasted about as loud as I can take. But also, I clearly don't know how to "fix" it. I don't really believe it's a thing I can fix because my efforts to do so only seem to teach me ever-nuanced ways in which the problem compounds and reinforces itself.

You can't afford it? I'll pay. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about being able to afford it. You don't have the time? I'll come to you, work around your schedule. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about not having time. It doesn't interest you? I'll do whatever you want to do, I'm open and amenable like that. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about their lack of interest. When you're feeling good and fun and free, I'm not the one on your mind to call or invite. You were desperately waiting for that window so you could "catch up" on the "fun" you're otherwise indefinitely denied. Every moment where you can feel remotely human or "free" is not one you're trying to interject a bunch of Nick P.-ness into.

There is no striking-up conversations with strangers and informal friends anymore. Maybe that's just a problem with me? Feels bigger, but I don't know. My "best friend" I gave my terms to and they still haven't been met, so I'm not lending myself to get back into his spin. My business partner, who I also see maybe once every 3 or so months, has been barreling towards a crash for probably over a year at this point, refuses to slow down or establish better boundaries or utilize me in any way but to - very maybe - decompress an inch when he bitches about something? I have to tell clients all the time there's a difference between indefinitely complaining and still being a ball of stress and actually coping and incorporating whatever it is that's getting at you and changing your behavior.

I have another friend I see maybe once every 2 or 3 months whose dad might be dying, and she has her own health issues, so it's like where would I get off thinking we should bowl more often? lol I don't know, it's this weird thing where you're invited to pit your desire to feel like you belong or have a friendship against their given tragedy or circumstances. It feels like it would be infinitely unwise and unfair to "blame" as though they're any less stuck within their contexts than you are, but you happen to be the loudest example of anyone you know on how to defy circumstances and work towards what you might actually want and need.

Blame language is overwhelmingly a move to adopt nonsense framing, but emotionally, you're like, am I just supposed to kinda glide through the air until I happen to crash into you? To be extra clear, this feels like an existential thing with everyone to some degree or another. I do not get the sense there's any remotely deliberate care and focus to cultivate and protect a mutually beneficial dynamic. It's like every hangout is getting away with murder or their mind is physically unable to be present because it's been captured by the superficially "chosen" drama.

I mean it in a more damming way than that, which implicates this litany of sick family members. I think we're also gluttonous. When you're not choosing the drama, you're feeding on the familiar sensibilities of your relationship to it. Aren't you needed? Doesn't that maybe scratch the itch that I'm taking 9,000 words to articulate? I'd like to feel useful and needed and like a "good boy" for doing what I'm supposed to by way of expressed care. I don't. No matter how much people tell me I help or what I say makes sense, it does nothing for me, and I don't think a single person has even tried to articulate to me they understand why.

It's pretty easy to disregard everything you're not doing to gain control or a sense of personal responsibility and agency by attending to everyone else. There's also the unyielding irony where I'm witness to what appears to be people who will go to the ends of the earth for especially the ones who don't deserve or can't truly receive what's being offered. Almost like each party knows what's on offer isn't made of what either of them needs, but this perverse Munchausien bargain is struck. What kind of massive deserves-to-be-alienated cunt would try to turn your lovingly devoted heart into the problem!? You're right, I see it now why no one wants to hang out lol.

[1103] Good Dog

Something I have a very strong reactionary sensibility towards is "injustice." Before I might ever say it like that, I've written plenty of times about how much I hated, and still do, to be condescended towards. I was made to be very aware and very sensitive to power imbalances with my unstable and abusive mother growing up. She would make a game out of demonstrating what she could do to me if she thought I was deviating from what she expected. To speak of her "reasoning" behind that behavior is to totally misunderstand how people work. My job feels like it then becomes resolving my understanding with people with my overwhelming desire for justice or retribution.

To be sure, we're all getting fucked in big and small ways constantly. We're at the mercy of policy decisions a fleetingly small group of often greedy or ignorant actors make on our behalf. We're at the mercy of people's general negligence and motivated blindness. We're expected to work our lives away. We're expected to conform to norms around what's "appropriate," or "usual" in spite and mockery of what makes sense. Whether you're talking daylight savings time or the rules of the parent who will beat you because you forgot something, there's a set of things, and a way to frame things, that make the best course of action "obvious." Yet, so little feels that way, and you're often punished for even speaking to what's fucked up.

One of the more recent indefinite blood-feuds I've developed is with DCS. There is a right and wrong way to treat people involved with the system or when you need to investigate them. I don't care where the order comes from, if you're directed to lie, threaten, or harrass, you're not "just doing your job" or "doing as you're told," you're threatening the fabric of trust as it pertains to civil society. Somewhere, you're acting like a crazy cop who feels like they can speed everywhere with their lights on and point their gun at anything that looks at them sideways. You need to be watched, called out, and corrected or fired, every single time.

I don't know if I see enough or can reflexively think about a series of demonstrated responsible decisions and accountability. Now, any decent suburb might refute that sensibility on its face. Everyone there is paying the bills, keeping the lawn mowed, raising their family, or stacking and maintaining middle-to-upper income toys over time. If you zero in on the household in the neighborhood I grew up in, I'm getting terrorized. My smart "professional" mother deeply influenced my desire for an equally robust vocabulary as she did to flinch any time someone's arm moved around me; a habit I wouldn't break until college. Certainly, she had a story of her responsible decision making and accountability.

There's something deeper one must tap into or aspire towards. It's mostly discussed as a form of religious or spiritual sensibility. If everything about your environment is training, informing, or molding you to essentially "be a good Nazi," what is it, in your heart of hearts or conscience, that recoils when it's time to tell your superior there are Jews hiding in the attic? We've made this way more complicated than it needs to be, utilizing culture-specific or religious-indoctrination excuses. We eagerly defend our "reasoning." The justifications have famous names and extremely convoluted technical philosophical concepts. I would argue, simply asking yourself, "Would I want to be sent to my death over how and where I was born?" cleans up decades of motivated denial and pageantry.

I ask myself questions like that as it pertains to my behavior. Would I want to be forgiven, understood, or talked to? Almost always. Can I see how that thing or that behavior is something I might do? Often, but honestly less so the more I wrote and attempted to bring my blind spots into the light. I still have certain catastrophic impulses and sensibilities, but persisting in them for "too long" or to the point where I've lost all sense as to why I'm bothering I'm lucky to not really suffer. There are a fuck ton of things I don't do, haven't done, or can't see myself sincerely doing over a long period of time to anyone I regard as a friend or family member. So when one of them does that shit, or does a series of those shits, it's like, okay, I need to redefine my boundaries and not get lost in some abusive story that justifies and excuses the bad behavior.

I've been watching Ms. Pat Settles It. So many extremely dumb people and "characters" enter her fake courtroom to lay their family issues on the table. An idea that comes up in several episodes is that people will only treat you as you let them. In what feels like direct contrast to that idea, Ms. Pat and her panel will also say things like, "That's your mother," or "You only get one sibling, family, etc." Occasionally, she'll award money to the entitled mother who's not-precisely stealing, but certainly misappropriating given funds. The reasoning she offers is rarely consistent with why she'll deny someone else's claim who shows up with the same attitude and reasoning as the momma about what a friend or family member owes them. It's a fake reality show cheaply put together for some laughs. It's also a snapshot of how we go about pretending to reason and hold ourselves accountable, made more compelling by turning it into a fun and laugh-worthy game. Like, I laughed, and I love Ms. Pat.

I hope the side-step tendency is starting to come about. My mom could "play the game" like anyone who shows up to a televised "reality" show. Anyone who puts on a uniform and adopts a certain attitude and expectation to do the heavy lifting of their reasoning dances past the real questions and real work. You might pass the test, but you're not accountable. It's doctors that prescribed our modern drug-addicted environment. It's major, perfectly informed, companies that have steered us towards environmental catastrophe. It's corrupted political figures who stick to party lines and financial allegiances as you develop a coping complex that internalizes and teaches the values of maintaining an oppressed state.

This is why free speech is so important. That's, most often, all you have. So, if what you're saying is just an iteration of what "they" want you to be saying, you know you're not free. You're not free to even begin the project and work of responsibility and accountability. If you can't even access the words or the feelings that speak to what you're actually mad or sad about, you are playing someone else's game. If you're unable or unwilling to speak, there's your first clue about the true nature of your problem. If upon speaking you find yourself just repeating the same mantras, hatreds, or prejudices, there's your next clue. If you're incapable of pairing those hate and ignorance-based words with counter-narratives, fixes, or creative and comprehensive contextualizing, the third clue pops into view.

To be sure, someone stuck in this place can't really hear or see what I just said. That's more for those who wish to do better or wish to save themselves time when they recognize what someone they're engaging with is doing. I take it a step further and claim 9 out of 10 people, in every realm, at every income level, is doing more by way of staying stuck and game playing than otherwise. I look at my own family and see the anchors that were my grandparents and became my dad and stepmom holding the remote family coherence idea together. I look at elected officials who, perhaps moreso at the local level, cut through the noise and speak to the practical for-all-to-see details that get things done or not. Sure, we're all implicated and all to blame, but someone's holding the keys, money, or the bill hostage.

Ms. Pat's show made me think about what my case would look like or what I think she'd tell me. "You been friends for 25 years? Why now throw away a relationship? There's something deeper here isn't there?" Like, yeah. I'm not going to entangle myself with one more person who will consistently demonstrate to me just how far I'll let someone take advantage of me. I don't need to feel rage or an obsessive-compulsive itch for retribution like I might for the players at DCS or like I did as a kid when I got fucked. I do need to protect what it means to be accountable and responsible so I don't let the story and performance do the work he's proven unwilling or unable to do for years. I'm not going to bless that and play along.

My good faith effort to get the house flipped and trust in the payday worked out against me. My tempered advice and caution regarding enabling and rewarding the kid resulted in my life getting put in danger. My naive assumption that I would have any real amount of help or time spent in service to the things I've tried to create or do was refuted time and time again. Even now, he sends me a link to a grant to fill out, pretending that's the same thing as doing something for me or getting money donated. He's got a powerful delusion and story about his rich friends and political circles. Where's the actual money? I don't need Ms. Pat to order him to pay it, I need people in my life who understand what they've gotten and I'm always prepared to give to my real friends and family is invaluable. If you forget how to figure that out, start with $20K, and I'll reopen the discussion after I direct you to my 3 clues stated above.

I hate, very deeply, when people who don't have the power or the tools, or when it's an animal, and it's getting taken advantage of, beaten, starved, or bankrupted. I've met hundreds of incredibly hard-working, sincere, and worthwhile people at the mercy of this terrible-stories playground. I get particularly incensed when those who can more consistently do better, give up. I get particularly pissed when you arrive, or we do so together, at the "obvious" place your decision should land, and you side-step.

I think "the world" looks the way it does because 1 in 10 people aren't reflexively side-stepping. I think we fluidly find some familiar story of our value, self-worth, or obligation and want to pick-and-choose moments of "realness" that validate the version of ourselves we prefer. That's how people like my mom can throw their decision to have children in those children's faces and Ms. Pat can feel no contradiction in justifying a mother's entitlement while repudiating someone else's. "You're fed and the bills are paid!" Okay, but you're fat, sad, angry, causing us and everyone you profess to care about emotional and financial pain, indefinitely, and even speaking about that violates your perverted sense of power and justice and makes you feel entitled to retribution.

I don't want to punish. I want to help enable people to better self-correct. It's taken me years to get to whatever level you wish to call this in "refined" of my ideas and process. I don't have to spend any more of my life yelling to know I don't want to and can choose not to. I don't have secret guilt or unaired doubts that keep be quietly milking a relationship or excusing my behavior. My friend just donated $10,000 to my nonprofit. You know what I'm going to do if I, for some fantastical series of reasons, can't build the case loads, find other sources of funding, or explain how the money can be responsibly used? Give it back.

I think she understands the work I've done and am trying to do. I think she's one of the most personally accountable and responsible people I know. I think she knows everything I've done or offered to do for her was based on our friendship over 20 years and not me hand-wringing and plotting and waiting for a chance to play on her sympathies. My other 20+-year friend? That's pretty much the basis of our dynamic, remarking on our capacity to psychopathically manipulate or him manage his stable of white boys. Or we're looking for opportunities to gain power or capitalize on the political and bureaucratic environments he prefers. The story of either his desire to maintain or capacity to achieve along either metric trumped what I thought was understood and shared between us. Like I don't have enough things on my plate, I'm not re-explaining the game to him like he doesn't know.

A big reason this blog felt necessary was how I felt after seeing a reddit post of puppies abandoned and tossed in the back of someone's truck. I initially felt my stomach drop a bit, seeing two of them with either eye infections or what my imagination jumped to as their abusive overseer being right handed. As I read the predictable comments, a few remarked how lucky the puppies were to not have been tossed in the trash or river. I've been a social worker long enough that I can have both the catastrophized reflexive thought and almost immediately imagine a more or less positive series of things you could say about the person who didn't drown or trash the puppies.

The person acted as an analogy for the side-step in search of the 1 in 10. Even the reddit posts acts as a point of side-stepping validation bolstering the story that helps the poster pretend they're not one of the 9 or like whomever left the puppies. "I DIDN'T KILL PUPPIES! LOOK AT ME DOING THE BETTER THING! GIVE ME INTERNET POINTS! DON'T THEY LOOK SAD AND STARVING?" I'm not even trying necessarily to shit on the poster, but this habit is subtle and fluid and everywhere. There's something existentially important staring you in the face right now akin to "take the starving puppies to the shelter" that you are not doing, and not even speaking to first. I'm not going to celebrate you or upvote you or validate you for wiping-your-ass level of obvious shit to do. That's not interesting, or what I mean by accountability or responsibility. Do it for children, and then expect more from yourself and the adults.

[1101] Resistance Is Futile

I want to do something a little different and muse a bit about social media, and one comment I've received in response to my writing in particular. It follows:

"See that? Yep, those are your guts, spilled randomly on the internet. I see them too.

Have you gotten enough out?

I don't really understand why you involved me in the whole thing though, seems the kind of conversation you have with *you,* but I hope you got something out of the process.

Anyways, well... okay, that was interesting, but I'm off to my own life again.

For the record? Seems like you are probably harder on yourself than you need to be, and hopefully you also take as much effort giving yourself grace.

Wait, hold up, no, before you're tempted to summon up another 1000 words, I didn't say I wanted to hear about it...I'm just saying."

This feels like a masterpiece. It strikes me as convoluted. It feels embarrassed. It succinctly captured the energy I feel one must anticipate in trying to do anything creatively or self-constructively and put it online. He's trying to detach himself, but also seems to feel provoked. I have to go over it line by line.

"See that? Yep, those are your guts, spilled randomly on the internet. I see them too."

I hear Daniel Stern's voice in Wonder Years. Almost like he's trying to add a bit of whimsy to the idea of him bothering to speak at all. I imagine some version of him is either actively patting my head or desperately resisting the urge to. This is the initial distance creating sentiment. Eeewww, dude, look icky guts. Now we're all a party to your gross guts! But maybe you couldn't help yourself, so take a seat and listen up.

"Have you gotten enough out?"

This isn't a sincere question. This is whomever failed to guide this person mocking them, now channeled at me. The blog he's responding to I state several times over is the 1,100th I've written over 20 years. He's existentially exhausted by the idea of being this thoughtful regarding anything. Incidentally, if you scroll through his posts, he's offering old-guy wisdom after having seen it all himself. He's cooked, in his mind. It's time to dole out advice in the last place anyone's willing to listen, but then what else is probably new for him?

"I don't really understand why you involved me in the whole thing though…"

This part is the most telling, not about this guy, but what the internet does to you. Philosophize This does a good job of explaining Byung Chul-Han's description of our narcissism bred from our internet circumstances. Who can even flirt with saying a sentence like this if they're not compulsively self-involved? I don't know who anyone is that responds to anything I say. They're a disembodied voice from either the vague hate or vague mildly-encouraging camps that pop up. Charitably, this could just be a really poor phrasing of, "I don't understand what I was to take away from this." But, I put this to every reader of anything someone has written, figure out why you bothered in the first place. Don't throw that the writing exists in the writer's face and act like something's been done to you.

"seems the kind of conversation you have with *you,* but I hope you got something out of the process."

So, yes, obviously, and this is also stated in the blog. I'm literally, every time, showing what complicated introspection to keep my head straight and values expressed looks like. Maybe you don't need to do all that. I'm jealous. Sometimes, in fact only ever drunk and in years-apart fashion, I get told how much I help someone else think about their own circumstances. It's unnatural to spend as much time as we do up our own asses and not just be mindlessly pumping out TikTok videos or craving sad music in response.

"Anyways, well... okay, that was interesting, but I'm off to my own life again."

I hear versions of this a lot. I'm called "interesting" a lot. It's less pain-inducing than when someone wishes me luck, but they're in the same spirit. I'm some "thing" that the person engaging it shouldn't really be handling but for it's quaint novelty and clear struggle with itself. They don't know how to help me release my head from the proverbial fence or bucket, so they have to still say something right? So, interesting you had all those…*thoughts* ::shudder:: Why don't we put them in their own special place waaaaay far away from what all us normals are doing over here.

"For the record? Seems like you are probably harder on yourself than you need to be, and hopefully you also take as much effort giving yourself grace."

Here's where the crack in the ironic armor shows up. A person who was simply and merely in touch with their own perspective, struggles and incompleteness and all, would just say this. It wouldn't have to be qualified and buried in all of the other inanity. This is the decent person who connected with something in the writing he's too tired or down on himself about exploring any further. People read thinking things out in this way as some kind of outsized effort. And it is, for them. Most of us are thinking ourselves in circles, getting paralyzed, and then doubling down on our crippling depression and anxiety, addictions, or fucking meme speak. If he'd just said this, this blog wouldn't exist.

"Wait, hold up, no, before you're tempted to summon up another 1000 words, I didn't say I wanted to hear about it...I'm just saying."

Now here's the internal rejection and reaction to doing or saying something nice and even the remote idea that I would recognize, respond, and try to connect. Can you think of anything more distasteful in the modern environment than to say or discover something *real* being said and exchanged? Let's strangle that baby in the crib, allude once again to "just how many words there are, gosh." And pretend like we didn't enter the arena of a "social network" where the rules are to crash your siloed thinking into someone else's and pretend there's no consequences and no real person on the other side.

After all, he's "just saying." 

All of that said and explored, I posted my living arrangements online. I played by the internet rules and was handsomely rewarded in internet points. The overwhelming sentiments were, "This is why I come here." I, robustly and unambiguously a male, have created a living space unlike many others. The novelty was enjoyed and reviled. It was judged as both dangerous and about to burst into flames, and as paradise. Both a genius hacker and musical prodigy live here as likely as a serial killer basement dwelling end of the world prepping troll. The only things that really made it through were one or two genuinely sincere people willing to explain in more depth the hazards of extension cords, and the people who recognized how much my inner-child never died.

That post got some 1,500 upvotes, and 645 comments. None of those comments warranted their own blog. Those people weren't engaging with me in the same way someone who reads what I'm thinking about how and why I create the things I do. They weren't engaging with me at all. They were nicely surprised by their niche subreddit delivering at continued just-enough intervals. A few were worth some fun exchanges. It started to get redundant and lazy with people who weren't reading what others had said before.

And in a day and a half, it's on to the next thing. I can't even say "I" liked or didn't the attention because I wasn't the star of the show. All I did was get a little bit more inside my head about how soon and what it's going to cost me to get normal outlets. But, ultimately, it could be argued I "did the internet right." I let a superficial glance at my circumstances field superficial engagement to everyone's "delight." It didn't garner enough attention to make the news. It didn't prompt any of them to think, "What else has this guy posted?" If I'd taken slightly better pictures and added more with an ability to read the titles on my books, video games, or band stickers, I bet I would have driven just a touch more engagement lol.

I think the internet has made my experience of people even worse. That is, the ironic detachment craving the next thing, fake performative relationships protecting informal "rules" to conform to, and the airs people take on in trying to politely belittle you for "not getting it" were exhausting before we built that brand of nihilism into how we understand the zeitgeist. We're not serious thinkers or actors on the world. It's always a qualified and calculated performance.

If you can talk real fast and make influential people feel validated, they'll platform your Ben Shapiro stick-up-my-ass charade and you'll be celebrated and rewarded with money. If you can tie yourself in knots justifying every nakedly stupid fascist comment and move your Nazi wanna-be dictator or insurrectionist "representative" makes, you'll get to feel like you're a part of history and doing something religion-level righteous enabling them. And then somehow again in defying them every time the bare minimum leaks out of you! This is how you can listen to people genuinely be flabbergasted that their actions resulted in pain or death. They were just performing. None of this was meant to be taken seriously.

For better or worse, in the fairyland you might occupy that suggests you should interpret me with some kind of flattering filter or wisened birdseye distance, I aspire to be a serious person. Not self conscious, but to act like what I do and say has consequences. I want to be consistent. I want to have reasons. I want to really connect and really create and really change the things that piss me off, confuse me, or seem to feel as perfectly avoidable catastrophes if we pay closer attention and talk and think better. Welcome to the process. Resist the urge to blame me for stapling your eyes open and forcing you to recite it.

[1089] Tell Me That You're All Right

I'm hit with an idea, so let's see if there's anything there.

The thought was "Already Home Syndrome." When you engage people's pathological communication online, when you dive into particular social or political contexts, or if you just consider your individual family dynamics, the context has the same "form." It's a form manifested of feelings and expectations. You're "already home" and it's not clear how often you're able or willing to leave.

I flit about reddit. Recently, I attempted to contribute more responses to the /r/self page where 20-something lonely fat women and 20-something poor suicidal men talk about how hopeless their lives are in reddit-appropriate speak. This means "tl/dr" and infinite qualifiers so they don't sound "too whatever" that might elicit a wave of backlash. I discovered very quickly it's, like everything else, incredibly insincere.

I'm as sympathetic to the need or desire to bitch and moan as you can be. What I'm not, and never have been, is looking for sympathy and validation in spite of my shitty perspective and behavior. I've always wanted to try and better understand what felt like incomprehensible thing or behavior example after example. What "people" do is use their words to assert justifications and side-step the conversation about how they can be more accountable.

You can go to reddit and find immediately a paragraph describing "how fucked up my life is," and with almost no effort, each line will testify to glaring gaps in perspective, show a lack of appreciation, or build who is to blame into the conclusion. The more I've observed this, the easier it's become to detach and try to study it. It's incredibly human. Scaled up you get these flame wars politically. We make it noble and build it into religions. There's always always always a scapegoat. And you're mean or rude if you even suggest the problem is you.

We habitually fail to entertain the idea of context and history. When you're caught in a reddit dogpile of people's internal "yikes" sentiments regarding your replies or posture, it takes the opposite of effort to criticize a caricature of you, feel great doing it, and get validation from the errant barking. Say someone comes on to complain about their relationship. They aren't there looking for strategies to healthily navigate their dynamic. They're soliciting hundreds of votes in service to a new, more comprehensive, placating narrative to explain and excuse away the behavior.

Do you have any idea how many people are comfortable claiming their husband or boyfriend is "addicted to porn" before they'll entertain the simpler notion that guys will continue to find other women attractive, or even more attracted to others than them? They don't want to talk about other cracks or flags in their dynamic that would suggest a bad or dwindling relationship. They want the problem located in something seemingly external or slightly foreign to their experience like some kind of invader to an otherwise perfect picture.

I never thought I'd come to understand people who've learned just to not talk or share anything with anyone ever. I complain and excoriate how silent most people are on many issues I care about, but that comes from high, perhaps unreasonable, expectations of people I like to believe I've been witness to their better capacities. I don't want to hear from everyone all the time on everything. What I've learned, again the hard way, as that even when you come in patient, deliberate, informed and you got the lived experience and honed instinct, you're just asking to have it thrown back in your face. I've never raised a teenager, but I suspect it's close to the same thing.

With my ex, it didn't matter how patient I was, how long the conversation went on, what words I chose, what project I agreed to help with or pay for, how much time went by, what rules I asked her to follow so we could stay friendly and communicating…at the end of the day something was driving her emotionality, reactivity, and judgment that had nothing to do with me. It didn't, and I'm inclined to believe, still doesn't, see me or my perspective at all. By context-specific default, I have nothing to offer her or I have to be extremely cautious and conscious of what I am or am no longer willing to contribute to the dynamic.

So it goes for all of us in all of the contexts we share. Is it even worth making the same kind of appeals you have to the people in your life who've proven themselves intransigent? They're already home, and you're telling them to make renovations they think are ugly, move to a state they don't like, or keep the best (only slightly abusive) dick they've ever gotten out of their spare bedroom? You're crazy.

Reddit is a specific context. You're expected to conform to the horrible way people communicate on that platform. Spits and stutters and presumptive assumptions that validate feelings. It's longform Twitter with micro megalomaniacs policing speech more fervently than any authoritarian. And it teaches you to conform or not exist within its context at all. Then these people step out into the world and try to make it conform to the same online rules. I consider it literal fuel for fascist thinking.

Your "porn addicted husband" never gets a say. No book or researcher or statistic exists in these environments. The concept of "personal responsibility" doesn't take shape at all, and if it's remotely alluded to, baked into the newspeak connotation is an accusation and enemy you'll be shamed for not reflexively condemning! That is, you're only personally responsible, in crazy town Twitter world, if you adopt my catphrase, deplatform "violent" words, and encourage I emote in whatever direction and to whatever degree I see fit. Anything less, you're kicked out of the house.

This gets so complex because it gets conflated with "setting appropriate boundaries" or "communicating healthy needs and expectations." The key to these discussions being coherent and productive is respect for evidence and shared conceptions of reality. Otherwise it's a competition between gaslighting and ignorant narratives.

When my ex and I were arguing, if I bled her funds dry, withheld my tools and time, verbally berated her and picked at her self esteem, beat her up, threatened her stuff or cat, sabotaged her effort in the garden, spoke ill of her to friends, or did any of the shit I hear people do in their "normal" relationships, you'd have evidence to rightfully assert I'm the problem. If you don't have that attitude about your own behavior with regard to any topic, especially ones that piss you off or scare you, you're probably not doing what you're doing in a healthy or appropriate way. If you're looking for validation from strangers on reddit, you're definitely not doing what you need to be doing lol.

That we're so dispositionally biased to believe whatever it is we currently do is why so much is shit. There's an incredible amount of heinous shit built into our normative behavior and presumptive "value systems." You don't get millions for Trump, or Palin, or Putin, or Hamas in a world that fundamentally "makes sense." You don't suffer indefinitely under completely avoidable poverty without some powerful persuasive compulsions to protect greedy impulses. It's not abstract. Your husband isn't addicted to porn. You're not in a fanciful romantic love story where everyone is happy in the end after an hour and a half of animated wish-fulfillment and expectations built into you from childhood. Without irony, they scream, "Fuck your feelings!"

We're not humble. We're not curious. We don't volunteer for the necessary pain that draws out our best conceptions and potential realities we long for. We're just whiners. We're feeling more and more entitled to whine. We think, "Well that's how all the rich white privileged people won, so now it's our turn!" No. There have always been people willing to exploit and capitalize on their proximity to power or access. It's a historical fluke and your deliberate framing of the oppressor and oppressed to service your version of victimhood. It really is the same mechanism at different scales and contexts.

Don't you know men are x, y, and z therefore…

Can't you see how woke or privilege has…

He thinks…! Bitch, you don't know what he thinks, he barely knows what he thinks, and worse, you're both probably not even interested in finding the truth together. If you can get him to agree that you've remotely captured what he thinks, I'll start listening to you.

It feels like someone screaming, "I didn't ask to be born!" Sure. That's absolutely true. What do you think you're saying with that statement? How many concurrent ways can you imply you'd rather be dead before we move on and recognize you're saying it to justify behaving in a shitty way? A child who does that we might think of as "just following orders" from their developing lacking-in-control systems. A culture that builds on that propensity and protects and refines it we might think of as fucked up, sick, and doomed.

My brain's been echoing the "You make people feel small" accusation from my ex-coworker. I had a session with a new client a couple days ago in which I started in talking about "fight or flight." She didn't know what I was referring to. When I explained it, she said she understood and thanked me. I'm already home in my go-to proven sentiments that have helped people in the past or helped me better conceptualize myself. I struggle to think of a more ubiquitous and common piece of knowledge than "fight or flight," but here we had someone who didn't know it. I don't consider her dumb, ignorant, or "small" nor had an impulse to criticise. It shouldn't be controversial or read as some kind of unfair judgment or priviledge if we recognize the disparity in what information we have and how we're using it to address our relative issues.

It's just factually correct that we barely know anything about anything. That's as quick a test as you can offer someone to determine whether or not they're really worth spending your time on. Do they recognize their own ignorance? Can they entertain gaps in their knowledge? If that answer is no, ever, for yourself or about others, you might as well just make squawking noises back and forth. You're ideologically possessed. You're contributing to our seemingly inevitable collective cultural downfall. Your house is on fire, and you need to move.

[1076] Hum

I'm positive I'm going to lose all of the compelling thoughts I had before I left the house and while I was driving, but let's try anyway.

I like being voracious in my consumption of media. It allows me to see. I almost wanted to make that sentence longer, but it really starts there. You can't get a perspective on what you can't see. You can't be made aware of what you're unable to see unless you're open to new information. You may not even have a perspective on what it means to be "open" until you engage and are challenged by whatever the information may be.

That is, I've known plenty of people who confidently describe themselves in terms of their political affiliations or what they do or don't like, but it's unclear they've ever even attempted to really bring something new into their mind. Maybe I get a TV recommendation from someone who watches 3 whole shows a year. Ok, so what we're actually talking about is something that jives with, or joyously betrays, your disposition more than whatever might constitute the quality of the show.

All sitcoms on "safe" networks are kind of the same for that reason. It doesn't mean they can't be funny, speak to important representation and cultural growth in values, or evolve as the technology does, but having now watched thousands of episodes from hundreds of sitcoms, I have a pretty strong view that they're fundamentally the same. They run the same pattern. The style of jokes are the same. The personalities cultivated for each character may resonate bigger, but Urkel is a sitcom character first. He can't imagine telling Carl to go fuck himself.

We have a baseline humanity disposition. Things that violate or betray that disposition fall into categories we mostly act as though we can't see. At least, I call it out as an act. For many, maybe they literally can't. The tricky thing about that disposition is that it oscillates or is a coin flip between what we learn and what we're made of. We know that statistically. You're as much rabid beast as you are your culture's version of civilized. The choices that exist for you to behave as though you occupy either realm can feel more or less like they even exist at all.

Real, wanton, jihadist level violence is on display. Megalomaniacal totalitarian violence as well. The ones who, not too long ago, tried to transform the culture into believing dirty looks and words were violence look particularly foolish. Our animal side prevailed in demonstrating a reality that betrayed what they were trying to cultivate otherwise. At what appear to be "pivotal" moments like this is where I believe we have choices.

When you don't perceive a choice is when you double down. Say, when your emotions are hijacked and you see an injustice. Then, not only are words violence, but there's some that are "the worst kinds" and doing "the most harm." Literal violence won't compel you anymore than one faith group's adherence to their god cares what yours has to say. This is why so much is reduced to either/or, in-group/out-group false dichotomies. It gives you a great excuse to refuse the responsibility of learning or changing.

This is how I conceive of people as helpless. Pretty much uniformly when you push on something, someone will double down. They "can't believe" or "can't understand" how this new idea could possibly operate or be true. It's not part of their lived experience or language even if it's baked right into their daily reality. It's one fish asking another as they swim in the ocean, "Isn't it crazy the amount of water?" and the other confused, "Water? What the fuck is water?" They don't know the narratives they're swimming in. They don't recognize them as narratives. It's not particularly deep or complicated the idea that someone has a story to tell you. If you don't have or use the tools, or even care, the most compelling story wins. Not the truest or best or most convincing story, the one that compels. The one that results in action and consequences.

The overwhelming majority of your life is not a series of choices. Not choices like you have in picking each word after another. I'm making hundreds of choices in writing this, but I'm also bound by a linguistic culture and style I was taught. You can only hear me in English and it's the only language I profess to have enough of a grasp on to try and seek mutual understanding. That's an innocent, but extremely important detail as we scale up the structures we're plugged into that operate like our language.

Every culture has a model for how you should behave. Every religious framework tries to box in your potential to service its god. Your individual family, school, and friend group is reinforcing norms every second of every day. It is functionally impossible, both by design and just because you are incidentally a mammal that needs a pack, to astutely judge the health of your particular system. You have a dual problem of almost no data arising from your limited and perhaps handicapped perspective, as well as too much data coming in from how different corners of the entire world engage with your example. This means you're stuck comparing apples to oranges, say your positive subjective notions about your nation or faith, against the catastrophic harms you're eager to dismiss as bad apples more than layers you need to peel off your own orange soul.

I think I have a decent perspective. The only reason I think that is because I literally demonstrate the work I'm doing to keep it. I can deeply appreciate why, if you're not aware of how ideas work and where you fit in them, you might believe Israel killing civilians is the same thing as Hamas. You're wrong, but you're not really prepared to know why because, without irony, like "deeply held" religious beliefs, your version of events is foundational to your identity, your sense of decency and morality, and how you wish to be perceived in fitting in. Is your identity a good or healthy one? Probably according to your friends, family, and institutions. You want the world to bow at the feet of your good intentions as you dismiss the reality of other's perception of the goodness and righteousness of their own.

I think about this when I'm feeling "critical" of something or someone deigns to criticize me. Are they even remotely equipped to judge what I'm doing? Do they have the same amount of hours logged introspecting, if nothing else? Do most of us have even 10 genuine hours having studied any part of the world and the nature of its conflicts? Have we put any real effort into identifying our psychological and interpersonal pitfalls? Do we feel the challenge of ideas that undermine our assumptions, or do we profess to be "open-minded" by betraying the sentiment with every act that follows?

I went and saw my aunt recently. She'd fallen down and broke her hip. She's in her 80s I think, but still spry, better with technology than people I know in their 30s, and plugged in. We were talking about my recent foray into Vegas and time with my brother. She's been struggling a bit with the pain of rehab and getting recovered and had some thoughts regarding forgiving people that wrong us and making sure that we love ourselves. She recently converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, which for me registers as a distinction without a difference, but it's prompted her to reflect. She's a cool aunt and I've never had a problem with her.

She's got a pretty limited perspective boxed into kind of superficial and cliché sentiments you hear from a blog post on the top 5 things people who are dying say. She's not even "wrong" in what she said, but it's a truth wrung out of her encroaching wretched circumstances. Did she adopt the ideas into her bones after deep consideration and practice? Or did she "find god" on the way to the ground after jumping without a parachute?

What you don't want to look at is staring at you every moment of every day. Maybe it's your addiction. Maybe it's injustice. Maybe it's entitlement. Maybe it's guilt and curiosity. Maybe it's a smoothie of what feels like too many things to explicate, so the insistence that you get specific and analyze becomes the beast to shutter away. You don't get wise by default. You don't act accountably due to a divinely inspired nature. You can't trust dying words from someone who spends their whole life as though they'll live forever.

But that's what we do. If there's something about nature or matter that persists forever, we refuse the evidence and math that might describe it for our interpretation and thoroughly bred and beaten dead horse mythology. You set up fence posts around what you "believe" to be true and the fight ensues indefinitely. An entire world of beliefs create a knotted mess of "identity," and the example gets set about what you can or can't weaponize within that identity. Your "authority" (I mean, author is written right there in the word) follows as naturally as the air your breathe until it crashes against a more compelling author. That's why you live forever in religion when death comes knocking. That's why you eschew specificity and your actions, or lack thereof, can exist in perfect justified obscure excusability. That's where "he made me" and "following orders" or "I didn't know" overcome "I admit" or "I might be wrong" or "I don't know."

Note the meaningful distinction between "don't" and "didn't" when you're describing personal responsibility. One suggests you're aware your perspective is lacking and you're willing to own it. The other equivocates like "there's so much we can't know" or because you were never told therefore whatever you in fact did was okay.

I think more people than not don't seek any real power. I think they want to be accepted. I think they want to feel safe. I think they want their concept of power to remain a messy amalgam of people's opinions about them. It's an endless source of fuel towards whatever complex you wish to maintain about yourself. I think there are dozens of things you can do every day that "the world" can react poorly to and make you feel like you are wrong or don't belong. The incentive to sound like everyone else is as high stakes as it gets. The impetus to follow the rules speaks to deep evolutionary behavior. If you don't, you may be abandoned, and starve, and you certainly won't be fucking and passing on genes.

I have all this time to sit and think and practice and reflect while I'm not working. I'm still trying to build something that locks me into this place. I want my narrative to expand into more and more things I've seen or places I've been. I want to meet people not stuck on "Indiana." I want to cultivate environments that are hostile to complacency. I want to feel free to play my guitar, not guilty or distracted because I feel I'm not saying or doing "enough" to deserve and enjoy my little corner of the world.

I'm living the consequences of challenging prevailing narratives. Punks in the 80s were literally hungry for their ideals, getting beaten up, and mostly at war with the embittered narratives assuming things from the outside only watching the worst examples that confirmed what they already believed. I look around at all of my stuff and manifestation of my work and focus, and it suggests to me that even when they don't, things still are decently going my way.

Can I practice the appreciation for that in a way that keeps me evolving along my own selection pressure lines verses the ones I'm still embedded in? I know I need and want money, but I'm willing to tour in a van that needs repaired every day, get ripped off by venue owners, and humble myself in how I act resourceful. I need the energy and message from the music I'm playing more than your empty or hateful opinion about it.

If you really wanted to, you would. This is a sentiment I heard reiterated recently from /r/askwomenover30. It was speaking about partners who fail to communicate or answer texts. If they wanted to send you a lovey dovey text and try to make you feel good about yourself, they could. The fact that they're not tells you at least one thing about where their head isn't. I have a therapist that can't seem to be bothered, for a week, to change a fucking password or respond to a text. Her head's not in it, and hasn't been for a while. She won't share that with me, but I don't need to be a jealous girlfriend wondering all sorts of fantastic excuses. I can just see that I need her for something small, quick, and relatively painless, and she's not offering it.

If you really want to change something about your life, who you're interacting with and how, or you wish to take on the responsibility of trying new things or challenging an injustice, you do something about it. You do some version of sending the text. You quell the anxiety and fog of procrastination and you turn on and move in some direction. Like magic, instantly you start to feel like your words matter and your actions ripple through time. You can achieve the same awakening on psychedelics, but I tend to look for reminder mile markers at points of exhaustion.

I get sick of myself sitting around. I get sick of thinking like I'm saying the same shit in a thousand different ways with "nothing" to back it up. I can literally within the same ten minute period of that sick feeling spend the money to hire the help, work on one of the many things I'm perpetually working on, organize, clean, write, get ready to head to a show, and my irrational insecure circumstances will nag once again with the same tired expectation for "more." It's baked into my brain. Whether I raise 1 or 100 houses from a cornfield, work 1 or 100 crisis situations or environments, or write another 10,000 blogs trying to get a handle on it all, the feeling will persist. The wrong, ridiculous, painful feeling is not going away.

Everything I'm trying to do about that have the same things in common. They aren't looking away. They aren't denying. They aren't quiet. They aren't easy. They aren't dependent on the recognition from the blind. They aren't bred from religious conviction. I'm extremely persuadable, but I have to trust we're defining terms and identifying both the problems and the potential. I have to watch you practice what you preach like you can me. I have to hear you say back to me what you think I'm doing and believe you get it. Otherwise we're just fighting for a turn on the soapbox, or playing keep up with the Jones's, or making deafening "shush" sounds.

[971] You Big Fat Phony

I’m a little annoyed that I feel I have to write right now as I’m a hot second from heading outside to build some walls. I subscribe to the subreddit “askwomenover30.” I came across a post that extracted a title from a 5-page PEW article on dating. It briefly describes how a majority of single women have pulled out of the endeavor for the first time since they started recording such data. The comment I left, which garnered 22 downvotes, is as follows:

“I think a lot of men have lost the thread of what it means to be both a man and in a partnership. As I read through some of these top comments I'm just generally embarrassed that these have been your experiences. Men have gotten scarier? Maybe I just live around a weird area, but I can't really tell the difference between the men and women as I'm walking down the street. I don't know if that's scary or trendy or what.

I've never been a "dater," per se. It's either been straight to the drunken fooling around or mixing with friends until something longer-term kinda spills out. The idea that there's a litany of people who just exhaust you to the point that you hold your errands up as something "better" or "more productive" to do is a travesty. There's a meek and mild level that empathizes (I'm in social work), but at the same time, I feel like the drive and motivation I have in being with someone I can do things for/with is a different kind of energy. This, provided you differentiate it from codependency and insecurity of course.

Like, I definitely think the culture has shifted into a "softer" or "whinier" or awkward and "entitled" kind of space. I do think men of a certain age probably struggle more than they should with not being aggressively sexually inappropriate. But I also think the conversation has moved away from discussing how and why we partner up or what the expectations are.

You want to be left alone to do your own thing in a way a 1950s housewife wouldn't dream of? Tell the people you date. You have a boundary a "typical man" is "unbelievable" in his willingness to cross it? Make yourself as explicit as humanly possible if only to save yourself time if not disappointment. I've spoken to thousands of people who do a really really bad job of honestly relaying their wants and needs if they can genuinely define them at all. Combine that with the myopic isolating influence of the internet, it's hard to say how deep the real person is really buried.

It can be a little too easy to pillory a given sex. I don't write off the women I meet for their mental health concerns, anxiety, children, or thickness, even if that's the vast majority of who presents as available. I like the person who highlighted the lack of social skills. That makes sense to me more than "men are x y z." I also don't think a dating app is wise enough to factor in the ways and reasons people get together. Women sexually select for the species. They didn't do so by swiping away all the unsolicited dicks, but in that the means exists, we just carry on like it's the normal or appropriate app to use.

I don't know (wo)man, I'm a dude who's been in 3 longish (1-5 years) relationships, 2 ending because we were young, and 1 over unyielding anxiety turning every interaction into an opportunity for resentment. Anymore, I just ask that whomever I try to partner with be "cool." Can you just be honest? Can you not scream at me? Can you be remotely in shape? Cus I've got a fat ass too, but only when I do next to absolutely nothing physically for months at a time. I don't need you paying the bills, cooking, cleaning, bolstering my ego, pregnant, nor sexually exclusive.

Can you just be chill? Even with this bar, which to my mind feels both fair and incredibly low, maybe because I'm meeting people in the social work realm, it's a struggle. I don't need you madly in love with me, but like, can you be nice? Can you talk and share your perspective on the day? I don't care if you like the same shit I do, it's more interesting if you don't. Please, be free, go do you, and then like maybe we can do some cool shit together and enjoy each other's company. It just doesn't seem like it needs to be as hard as people are making it.

Maybe I'm weird, but like single remotely attractive honest chill girls are few and far between. And if you do find one, settle in, because we're old, and processing the trauma of our abusive pasts has little to do with feeling sexy or emotionally available to run yourself through a new thing lol. Anyway, I just try to be a friend anymore. It's just easier all around to suck any remote expectation out of the dynamic and take conversations or time together on its face as something appreciable. Emotional investment is a risk worth taking, but maybe you know people more in touch with their emotions than me.

tl:dr no, no you cannot be chill lol.”

The only response beyond the downvotes was from someone who said, “Thank god a man has arrived to tell us to be more chill and less fat.” Then some tit-for-tat and she adds, “I wrote a flippant one sentence comment in response to your eight paragraph screed, so which of the two of us seems more upset?” I say, the person without the patience or honesty to see anything but a screed. I wake up today to a temporary ban lol.

I guess this stands out to me as indicative of my experience in general, neatly packaged. I write a whole thing with a dozen claims bred from my perspective. I’m then “understood” as a one-sentence summation extracting the most emotionally-triggering sentiments rephrased to sound more damming than intended. That’s pretty much my interactions with most people conversationally online as nutshelly as it gets. This is my former coworker when she said, “That was a lot of words to say ‘fuck you,’ just a different subject matter. This is everyone who impresses upon me how I’m overlooking how an incensed person feels when I question the facts or veracity about literally any topic of contention.

You’ll notice, the “solution” to not garnering the anger is always to be quiet. I’m over here impressing people to speak up more, and also showing them what it gets you lol. If I don’t want to get banned, don’t bother explaining lightly, but explicitly, that a man who’s not attracted to you is not by default every caricature you’ve lent to the pile-on discussion. Someone in the thread said, “I’m tired of all the men with fat-phobia.” Phobia? Just like I’ve been accused of transphobia? Like, no, not afraid, just not attracted, and don’t think J.K. Rowling is the enemy.

Mind you, I’m not “upset” by this, I’m just increasingly fascinated it’s the default setting, and how we double-down. One of the top posts on reddit today is a satirist interviewing someone claiming more people die from hammers than guns, and when they Google it and show he’s wrong, he reiterated his second amendment right and scoots right past. The “liberal” or “enlightened” reddit crowd loves the hypocrisy on the right, but is equally blind and unwilling to engage with their muddy thoughts.

Is there really anything else to be said? I hope to not be a The Daily Show analogue, where I spend my whole life pointing out the contradiction or decline, and then can only step away with the knowledge that things have gotten worse, and the best I can do is a 60-minutes spin-off and maybe help get a bill passed every 10 years. I mean, good for Jon Stewart, but he knows he can’t fix “us” anymore than I can.