[1060] Copying Mechanism

If I had to bet, I would put money on the vast majority of people falling into a camp described as, "I can't trust myself." It doesn't mean they haven't opted for a form of living that looks functional, feels stable-ish, or would pass as "adult" to a random onlooker. It doesn't mean they are racked with medical-grade doubts about every little thing they may choose to do. It doesn't mean that any given moment may be an opportunity to "lose it" or "break down," as the basic throughline or coherence one needs to exist gets erased.

It does mean most people aren't inviting the counter narrative into their personal story of experience. Only the morbid, or "mean," or socially disingenuous and disabled do things like that. You're not even going to let your subconscious whisper "divorce" on your wedding day. Your baby isn't going die before you. Every statistically likely consequence of your eating and driving habits aren't going to kill you like you're really part of that majority.

The horror. The horror. When we're introduced to this horror in the infinitely creative ways from early drug use, abuse, medical trauma, general neglect, or by virtue of our miserably encoded genes, we cope or die. What we've discovered as we iterate on the DSM is that pretty much everyone is getting their ass kicked in measurable and consistent ways. It's from things we can more or less approach methodically, therapeutically, and with an eye towards consistent accountability. Can approach. We don't really, but the option is there.

I have the precise opposite problem of the vast majority of people. I trust the fuck out of myself. I trust I can engage in unspeakable terror. I trust I can accomplish things people routinely regard as "dreams" or "exhausting" with a persistent "matter of fact" attitude and growing mountain of evidence. The shocks to myself are derived from compounded ignorances or unlucky and ill-timed grievances stacking too close together. Maybe I wake up sore with a headache, step in cat shit on the way to the bathroom, go to flush and water's not flowing, try to get it working and break a nob. My phone goes off with the dumbest of dumb work emails dragging a corpse of a conversation from a week ago…Stuff like that.

I can certainly imagine that, but it's a lot harder to cope with it in real time, especially if it's that slow creep that doesn't tip you off that you need to stop and breathe or redirect. That isn't so much horror though. That's not imagining people close to you dying. That's not watching your body tumble down the highway after a semi-truck oopsie.

The thought doesn't actually kill you or them. But we treat it like it does. We fluidly dip into language like "karma" and the power of "intention." As if we routinely watch those who we chant "burst into flames" towards spontaneously combust. Challenging, painful, or difficult thoughts are met with reflexively coping. Whether you find a chemical to grow physically and psychologically dependent on, or another person, or a hobby, the reflex to survive gets to work.

I want to make next week in my groups about "commitment." What are you committed to? How? Why? I have a good number, about a quarter, of my people with terrible attendance. You can chalk some of that up to "life" and kids, but the vast majority is people who, instead of being honest with themselves about what it takes to be of sober mind, still prefer to defer to their feelings. They wish to employ the usual methods, the familiar, the rehearsed, ways of feeling better.

You see, maybe they're "too tired" today, so they'll make up for it at a later group. "With everything gong on," it just slipped their mind. Maybe they have a particular grievance with me they're less than bold or honest in relaying. Either way, the story of their sobriety or sober thinking needs to conform to the coping patterns already in play. They're still going to get their medication. They don't even really connect with those people in group anyway. What's the big deal?

I've been doing this job for 1 year and 3 months now. I've never missed a day that wasn't allotted to me. I've never missed a group that wasn't an obligation I planned for that coincided with extra work on my plate outside of work hours. Incidentally, I'm not "committed" to Groups. I'm looking for any route away from it that I can find. Importantly, I'm committed to myself. My needs, my desires, and my narrative is what is under threat through my obligation to Groups. (Or, capitalism when you want to get large and abstract.)

What is it, do you think, that separates me who can make it to 12-18 groups every week for 15 months and the person who can't make it to 1 every week for a month? Bear in mind, these are virtual groups. You don't need a car. You could be on any wifi. You can use anyone's phone, computer, or tablet. We offer a program that gets you a free phone.

Do you think I enjoy every single person and every single group every time? Do you think I'm wide awake and motivated every day? Do you think I don't have a dozen other things on my mind or things I'd like to accomplish? Why, it's a serious question, am I able to pull off this obligation in a way that garners consistent positive feedback from both client and leadership alike, but you might not ever meet me sometimes your attendance is so bad and you've hopped from make-up to make-up until I discharge you?

I'm there for me, not you. I'm there for money. I'm there because the schedule allows me to maintain my behavior towards attending shows, getting work done around my house, and facilitates me meeting and building rapport with what I hope is a huge number of clients I eventually steal. My sober mind is fundamentally rooted in a picture of what I need to maintain what I have, grow, challenge, indulge, and hopefully continue to honestly share. You not showing up isn't saying anything about me, it's the attitude you have to yourself. It's why you don't trust yourself. You can't even be trusted to run a program for an hour from your phone and keep it together long enough to hear ideas that are different from the ones you already have about yourself.

That defensive posture kicks in. You'd rather just not hear it at all, because to you, it's not an open exchange of new ideas. It's a damning indictment. It's an unfair judgment. It's an attack. It's a challenge when you're already too busy and too exhausted and never asked for it. It's work, and you're busy justifying working yourself to death at whatever it is you're already doing. Where do I get off telling you you shouldn't work 14 days in a row? Don't I understand you have bills and a family!? How dare you say I should put distance between me and my abusive mother! I love her!

The stories we tell ourselves matter immensely. I suspect it's the heart of why no matter what someone has accomplished or people they touch they still get suicidal. David Draiman, with his incredibly sad eyes, explained he almost killed himself in February were it not for his son and the Disturbed fans. I don't know all that he can or can't imagine about his life and place he holds in others', but I do know that level of sadness and isolation is available to us all. We drink from that poisoned well without acknowledging it as a series of suicidal acts.

Dipping in and out of this book on masochism (Thanks Brandy) has detailed for me what I've spoken to in the past, but this has elaborated it further. There's sheer joy and positive emotion we can generate from pain and self-destruction. I watched a video of suicide bombers picking which hand had a rock in it so they could get the honor of blowing themselves up. The, donkey-looking dude, was beaming. He was getting hugs and cheers from his brothers. He is (was) utterly convinced of where he is going, the righteousness of his action, and how to solve his problem with whomever the bomb was slated for.

Suicide is a commitment to a narrative about how you feel. There is no "disease" that pulls triggers. There is no infection that makes you crave too many pills. There is no pathogen that drags razors down your wrist, ties knots, or turns exhaust fumes into your favorite scented candle. You should be very careful about how and whether you subscribe to any narrative. You need to be actively participating in writing one. You should be deeply suspicious of the ones that make your sense of personal responsibility abstract. You know, like how "sin" is bad, and in the mind of the faithful, at least one on my caseload, that means equal parts butt-fucking children or being gay. Jesus doesn't obligate you to think critically or make distinctions.

If your sense of commitment looks like "extra" energy to get things done that matter to you, I can vibe with you. If your commitment makes you kinder and more patient, it makes a certain sense to me. If your commitment isn't pie-in-the-sky about what you can do or how you may feel, then I may start to trust you're grounded and genuine. If your commitment is time-bound, specific, open to being criticized, and accountable, then maybe we can agree it's real and worthwhile.

Conversely, if your commitment is exhausting your capacity for truth, we might say you've been committed to the mental asylum of your situation. If your commitment has you offering dozens of excuses and attempts to make it sound better than it is, you're just at its mercy, of which I promise you it has none. If your commitment prompts you to be reflexively arguing for why you're continuing to persist, a good part of you knows you shouldn't stay, but the broader narrative you've concocted gives you ample, if not infinite, opportunities to keep the justification game running.

My narrative is constantly evolving. I want it to. I need it to. I've had incredibly small-minded ideas about what should constitute my commitments and why. I have incredibly damming suggestions regarding what the narrative of my behavior or perspective should mean about me. At bottom, because I show myself the ongoing story and work to develop an individual window and nurtured nature, I can continue to land on points I trust. Sorry not sorry, it's not all of you, my hoards of fans, nor would it ever be my theoretical children. If and when you all die, including my phantom offspring, what's left? If and when you all leave me or stop talking to me or stop giving any remote fuck about spending time together or sharing anything (Oh shit, 99% of everyone I've ever thought to call friend?) where do you think I'm gonna go? Hang out with Chester?

I'm committed to whomever I may be right now. What I do or don't know gets to show up here. I'm committing my time to this exploration. I'm entertaining the horror of being ignored and abandoned. I'm letting the depth of the isolation give me pause to find how to capture the void. I've murdered my non-existent children. I've parsed and separated what I'm doing for money or as a series of obligations, from what I feel needs said and done.

 
Every single concert I go to almost everyone is there with their partner, family member, friend, or half a dozen other people. I'm there for the music. After watching and overhearing, now 93 shows this year, I think they're after a story about what fun or healthy people do. I think they need eyes or someone's hand to hold or someone to be in a picture with. I don't trust that it has anything to do with whatever individual they're with. I think there's a reason the most populated non-festival shows I've gone to this year are "themed" drug use (Dead & Company) and depression/suicide (Disturbed).

It's a bother to know "too much" regarding yourself. It doesn't always make a "reason" and an "excuse" or "self-justification" perfectly clear. But this is why you work to keep talking. This is why you look for people who trust themselves enough to offer you fair observations of yourself. Because we're still all made of the same shit and plugged into the same environment. Getting some clarity on that I'm working to make it only cost $5 instead of $60 or $110.

If I'm not suicidal and I feel like one of the loneliest people on the planet in a way I'm tempted to call distinct, but wise enough to know is cliché, how? If I'm angrier than anyone you've ever met and keep nearly all of my conversations clam and civil, what's going on? If I think life is mysterious, but mostly a goddamn ridiculous joke, game, and you're perfectly reasonable to kill yourself in dozens of tiny joy-inducing ways a day, why do I opt for yard goals, business goals, show goals, and wish to refocus my attention on the 1% yet to flee?

I have a really good ongoing story. I'm not suffering that much in any accumulation of pointy parts of my day and I allow myself to slow down and taste the subtleties in my expensive coffee. I'm listening to the music, not turned towards the crowd drunkenly trying to get the attention of my party or passers-by. I'm open to hearing something new from a band I'm not that familiar with instead of screaming my dogma and treating what they're attempting to communicate as so much background noise. If I were a character in something I was reading, I'd be curious what I was going to say or do next. I'm committed to the character development. Are you?

[1025] Bang

Do I have to talk about it? No, not really, but it’s probably more unique and entertaining than what you’ve been up to today.

I feel like it never fails. When I think I’m going to be “done” with my day, wrap up the last of my responsibilities and psychologically transition into the headspace that anticipates drinking beer at Winterfest and seeing a comedian, pain and tragedy knee cap me at the finish line. Mine is a profession where I’m walking the razor’s edge of others’ sense of stability. A “normal” work day might end with someone genuinely expressing how convinced they are that today is the day to die.

There’s procedures, of course. When someone tells you in 5 different ways with a tone that leads you to believe they’re serious that they’re on the suicide train, you’re supposed to get their answers to a questionnaire! The questionnaire will then determine if you need to create a “safety plan.” The ensuring that you have this timely documented will protect you from liability when you’re otherwise ill-equipped counselor might open themselves up to (not really) consequences if they botch the engagement.

This is what I’m paid less than inflation-adjusted minimum wage though for, right? Not to just cope with derailing where my head wants and needs to go for “self-care,” but juggle life and death? You know what you tell a person who’s on the verge of killing themselves? It’s a gamble. You’re not in a conversation or negotiation, you’re on the other end of a desperate confessional. And your alleged supports are tried-and-true social-working despots who know well in advance that they can’t really save anyone nor is it necessarily their fault if someone dies. It’s not an unpersuasive or unreasonable place to come from, but it is woefully incomplete.

This is the kind of danger you run into though when you take this “wide net” cavalier approach to admitting people under the auspice of “some help is better than no help.” It’s presumably better for profits or for your self-conception that you’re reaching more people, but it plays out as a series of cascading mini catastrophes. We attempt to “counsel” people in groups sometimes comprised of people who haven’t been in the program for even 2 months. During that 2 months their attendance might be miserable, and we might discover they have some pretty severe mental health concerns that this environment is in no way equipped to deal with.

What happens to the group? They see someone “nodding,” and they have no idea if they’re just tired or high. They hear someone slurring. Is it a speech impediment, or are they drunk? They hear someone manically ramble. Are they just high energy? An anxiety disorder, unmedicated, turns a member incredibly hostile. Depression, abusive relationships, and ongoing illegal activity in the misappropriation of medication gets downplayed as mere details undermining the broader effort.

This last week I’ve had people do a timeline exercise. They put emotionally compelling instances from birth until today on a list, their ages next to them, and then we proceed to develop questions to unpack what’s on the line. If you have a traumatic memory at 6 and then the next one at 18, what was going on in those 12 years between? If you have 7 tear-inducing thoughts all coupled over a short period, who was around? Who died? Did you move? Did you drop out? Did you switch from incidental use to harder things? It gives you a chance to create a flow that unpacks deeper memories and magnify areas of your life you’ve condensed in the stories and habits of your self-conception today.

I’ve talked with some of my clients for 7 months. I’ve learned more about them in one week with this exercise than I have the entire rest of my time. Everyone’s been molested. Everyone’s had their favorite and most important emotional support die on them. Everyone’s witnessed or on the receiving end of violence. Everyone’s still blaming themselves for things they did as children. Human depravity knows no bounds, and it’s working its way through our bodies and minds like air and water.

You know how you conquer addiction? Incorporating the feelings associated with all of your disassociated memories. You break, by recognizing and redirecting, the automatic response to mask, blame, hide, or self-destruct. You know what you can’t really do surrounded by people you don’t trust 5 to 15 minutes at a time once a week? That isn’t to say there aren’t productive groups or people who take thing seriously and consistently attest to the utility and appreciation they feel. But we’re playing doctor. They have brain boo-boos, I provide the Band-Aid version of surgery.

My suicide-ideating client said she needed to be locked up somewhere. She had been thrown into her dark place by getting treated incredibly unfairly by probation, a therapist at shithole-doesn’t-begin-to-describe-it Centerstone, and against her best effort to keep it together in spite of her mental health problems and relatively new introduction to the program. She needed to take a call from probation while we were talking. She didn’t respond to my texts for 10 or 15 minutes, so I called in a wellness check. She didn’t meet their criterion for forced detainment and transportation, and she agreed to go to the psych ward. She told me she lived 20 minutes away and would text me or have the hospital do so when she arrived. She had packed and said she was leaving as we hung up.

An hour later, I text her asking if she made it, she responds she’s in the town that’s about halfway there. I’ve heard nothing else back.

As with most people, I can usually identify when you’re cursed with being too smart for your own good. She’s highly emotionally intelligent and intuitive. She’s one who came into groups swinging with awesome contributions and no pussy-footing about discussing explicitly what she needed. That kind of gusto and confidence is, unfortunately, a red flag in these kinds of environments. She’s not an entitled rich person with every reason to believe undying delusional self-confidence is going to result in continued unearned prosperity. She’s desperate. She’s like my guy who complimented and thanked me for how much help my advice was contributing to fixing his marriage, and wouldn’t you know it, he wants to be a counselor too! And he would greatly appreciate any information I could provide.

The next day, he’s calling me and the office over and over again, before work, and while I’m in group, panicking over slipping up and failing a drug test while on probation.

Then it comes out his mental health, that he was in control of on medication, is not where it needs to be because he can’t find someone to prescribe him what he has been taking for 6 years. My advice, 15 steps ahead of what he needs to focus on, is twisted into this “help” that realistically barely, if ever, accesses the roots of any given individual. I’m expected to maintain a certain level of persistent positivity and “support,” as the waterfall of unaddressed and potentially un-addressable issues eeks out over months while we’re otherwise talking ourselves in circles.

While you’ve been reading this, have you just been screaming to yourself the “obvious” answers and conclusions I should draw from this? Are you so deeply thankful that the people I describe aren’t you? Do you thump your own tale of tragedy and mental health struggles that keeps anything new neatly boxed in and away from your responsibility? I do. I call every person their own black hole for a reason. I write dispassionately, forever, because they are variables on the stream of what I’m conscious of, but not to be blamed for. I care, right? At least enough to not let my “intellectualizing” turn into the psychopathic antagonism or negligence of my colleagues and colleague-adjacents.

The struggle is not the notes. The struggle is not the hour or two I have to do something annoying, be it in service to the housekeeping of the job or to try and get someone pointed in a not-dead direction. The struggle is with the shape systems are destined to take when people are at the helm. Is this the best we can do? If she’s dead tomorrow, do I shrug it off and say, “Hey, I tried!” and point to the risk assessment I attempted to do? You know, the thing that’s hard to interject between each line that might then signal a “click” and destroy your ability to keep her talking after reducing her to the paperwork.

I don’t take any special pride or feel some sense of nobility as a feeble Band-Aid. If, and it’s a big if, you encounter people genuinely interested and capable of “fixing” themselves or “stabilizing” and creating whatever their version of “better” is, they’re still human. They can persuade themselves they’re worth nothing, the effort doesn’t matter, no one cares, and it all ends as the inevitable heat-death of the universe. And they’re right. They’re not more or less right than if they described the exact opposite opinion of themselves on some transcendent upward spiral. But they’re right enough for them in any given moment that they wish to be convinced of what they say or feel, and wish to justify their next act.

That we feel equally justified to persist in our ego and psychological trappings forces me to consider the desperate psychosis of the culture writ-large. You see, in reality, we’re complicit co-conspirators in the unsustainable exploitation of literally every resource. You can chalk it up to law-of-the-jungle and natural cycle dynamics if you please. You can extoll the virtues of capital and technology to obscure the underlining intentionality and machinery. You can maintain a persistent moral delusion and solipsism or be born dumb enough to never find yourself even considering. We must wish to die too if this is how we’ve chosen to go about caring for one another.

[984] Dance Monkey Dance

I don’t know that it means anything, but it feels worth mentioning. Today, in two of my groups, two members expressed they were feeling suicidal. They gave full-throated explanations of either the extreme guilt they felt about the people who have been hurt, or their overwhelming depression and anxiety that was making it so they couldn’t get up or out of the house. Neither, mind you, is on the brink of suicide, but both were trending poorly and needed some redirection, questioning, and encouragement. Both looked focused and like something clicked when I told them to put everything on their mind on paper and we can parse through each thing until we get to smaller and smaller bits that feel manageable. Then, I went to see a band who has a famous song that goes, “I wish you would step back from that ledge my friend.”

Seeing so many concerts back-to-back or in relatively quick succession is provoking another series of thoughts. The Third Eye Blind frontman invited the crowd to turn to their neighbor and introduce themselves, and later to put your arm around the person next to you and sing together. One of the HAIM sisters from a few weeks ago said something akin to, “I want you to have the best night of your life!” Few bands not located deep in the metal genre aren’t going to encourage you to clap your hands as the band pulls back and riffs on what an amazing tour it’s been, how strange covid lockdown was, or the privilege of rolling with their supporting acts.

Both scenarios are a show.

In the first show, I play counselor. I use my genuine connection to a hopelessly embittered and resentful existence and certain enthrallment with death to hit a tone of voice, type of word choice, and borrow from my earned experience dealing with a lot of sad people to turn you from desperate chaos into littlest productive or uplifting bite. It’s unfortunate I don’t feel a certain way about that ability. I just know I’m playing my part. These people need healthcare, money, and individual therapists. I’m so much duct tape.

In the second show, there’s a degree of custom and lack of options. Instead of clapping, what? Squawk? I could see the likes of Steaksauce Mustache eliciting a raucous parrot chorus, but that’s not most bands’ vibe. I find encores generally bizarre. There’s the suggestion that, because we all know some or most of the words to a song that’s been playing on the radio for 20+ years, we’re all connected by something real and meaningful as opposed to merely familiar. I did not take a stranger in my arms, for several reasons before implicitly rejecting the premise.

Music is personal. I can sing along to hundreds of songs. I might have a few dozen that have conjured any real excitable or puncturing feeling. If I thought too hard about that, it might be less. But my experience of music isn’t why hundreds of bands I’ve never heard of in genres and languages I don’t listen to can still greatly succeed. Put out 300 songs over 20 or 30 years, keep touring and advertising, and buy off a radio station, you’re likely to get a plurality of people just working the playing field.

Your experience of your feelings is personal. This is why when you tell us you’re feeling suicidal, we don’t panic and try to get you committed, we run you through a few questionnaires. You have the language of “not feeling” or “thinking about suicide” in the manner that you have the songs on the radio or words you’ve been taught in how you relate to the world.

Why am I thinking about this? I’m not searching for anything more or less from my job or the concerts I attend than the money, the “I did that” points, and the ability to talk about new facets and patterns of my experience. My experience of music is not necessarily diminished the more I feel like a scene head or find the live renditions of favorite songs lacking. Nor am I less likely to try to keep someone alive and moving just because I can.

I think I’m attempting to illustrate once more how I’m after that “real” shit. I want to go to a concert where I’m feeling so good and the music is so moving that the crowd starts spontaneously hugging each other. Is that going to be your typical show? Are most people going to be sober? If you’re being honest, is even your favorite band pulling that off? (Okay, maybe Jacob Collier.) You know why I don’t feel like hugging my neighbor? I live in Indiana, and there’s a decent chance they’re a fascist. Because the venues I go to, for their thousands and thousands of people, aren’t a collection of diverse agreeable people singing in unison. It’s people with money, and free time, and sometimes an infuriating degree of ambivalence and entitlement with regard to those around them or what’s happening on stage. I’ve counted like 6 black people and 2 Indians in the 20 thousand I’ve encountered the last few months.

We’re not all in this together. The ones pretending to are sitting down and chatting away through any song released after 1999. Maybe this is why raves and DJs got so popular. You can all take molly and bounce around without even having to pretend to mouth the words to engage in the pageantry.

On the drive, I was watching The History of Comedy. I appreciated Dick Gregory talking about how he knew he was not going to turn the racist tide of America by telling jokes. They discussed Chappelle experiencing the wrong kind of laughter at one of his skits. So many comics discuss their pill regimen or addiction history and the ones who died too young. We’re unified in laughter! So goes that genre and familiar lore. Or, we gravitate towards what we already agree with like we listen to preferred genres of music. Not everyone is in on the jokes or appreciates the art form, but if you’re first to a niche, and you grind, if you don’t ascend to legend, you certainly fit like so many opening bands.

You’re not struggling through the music you like. They aren’t doing you a favor. Insofar that you share networked radio stations or shaky fond memories associated with an album or track is the extent of the connection. There is no shared sacrifice or journey together. You may cling to certain bands as the soundtrack for your whole life, but I’d start speculating something weirder was going on there. I just find myself thinking I’m not going to like the song or artist anymore or less the harder they sell or more completely explain what they think they’re doing or signifying.

You wouldn’t find me crass for claiming to save people’s lives every time they don’t die after saying they want to? For how much time we spend and words we dedicate to describing our experience as some kind of way, we work to ensure it actually is that way so little. You know how you get depressed no matter how much you affirm your love for your kids as the reason you’re still alive? You don’t work to love yourself, so onto entertaining the idea of death and gambling on what that example will set for them. Brilliant.

Listen to your music. Sing your song and tell your jokes. Feel your feelings, and if it helps you find or move on from them, you can write like me. You know what my blogs aren’t doing? Rallying us around thoughtful actionable coalitions working to discuss and move on the ideas nor discuss the themes. You know what you can’t be? The first to say anything you’re soaking in word for word from those around you. You know why we don’t know what really brings us together? We don’t accurately identify, let alone actually try to do the work to share and receive or mutually sacrifice in service to a greater end. It won’t be the bandleader, your counselor, nor Jesus who can do the work for you despite so much of our experience acting incredibly thirsty for so many mythological scapegoats. All you have to do is cut ties with all the lies that you’ve been living in.

[746] Hit By Pitch

I hope I can make this quick.

 

Suicide is in the news again. Chester, Robin Williams documentary, and not-quite-the-same I just sat through a presentation talking about LGBTQ youth and their rates of suicide and particular problems related to inclusion. In the set of presentations they also included a story of a baby born with cancer who died a little over the age of 2, and a sentiment that “God puts people in our lives for a reason.” Also, wholly unrelated but for it happened to me in close proximity, I went out to see someone away, and they were less than excited at my presence.

 

How do we unpack this and mash it all up? Let's start with the idea that people are in your life for a reason, or you in theirs. The second half I can at least speculate some divine role I was “supposed” to play. I've talked about it before. Being something of a “destroyer” or “anti-particle.” Things collide with me and never seem to come out like they imagined on the other side. In a world of tight-lipped and tight-assed people, I would serve a palpable function. If you're squeezing on to your conception for dear life, I'm the devil. Isn’t it properly avoidant and convenient of God though? Without him, how could you humble yourself in the presence of your dead child? Good thing you’re so important for him to focus on you so specifically; just what you needed. 

 

In talking about the dead gay kids, the point was stressed that the difference between life and death can be a feeling of inclusion and support. It can be having just one person who accepts them for who they are. It can be opening their eyes to a timeline for if and whether they want to come out so that they're safe and supported. We're in southern Indiana after all, that point needed stressed. Included. Part of the greater pack in which you depend on for survival. No finer point could be put on it than a suicidal child whose identity is being denied.

 

To make that “unfair” and “terrible” and “what the fuck man?” analogy, every time you strip someone of their identity, you're playing the suicide game. I consider myself lucky to no longer be a child. I like that I don't lay my well-being on the hinges of how people decide to think of me or whether or not that want to engage or talk. One must wonder how many people are truly teetering on that ledge though when you consider the music of Linkin Park. “Somewhere I Belong” has been on repeat in my head for a few hours. I'm not the only big fan. I've never connected so strongly with millions and millions of people to still fall under the weight of my demons.

 

Is that a choice of mine? Am I just better at constructing a story that externalizes? I was thinking about my proposition to try and stay “generally happy” for a week. I mean, I'm pretending like me shitting on things doesn't make me happy. I don't hate my jokes. I don't pretend I'm at the mercy of my mistakes. I don't glom on to people but for the remnants of neural connections I can't untangle. Why is the darkness my playground when it's just the damning destroyer of worlds for everyone else?

 

I suppose I feel I'm ramping up a bit. I've beaten my head into submission, and now our awkward hug or song and dance about friendship leaves me as empty as I always wished as an anxious child. A memory hit me early of a time when my mom took us to The Taste of Chicago, I had no desire to go, she had complained of having little money earlier, and in my angry pouting she said, “Crucify me!” and I replied, “Gladly.” The look on her face left me as dead inside as I've ever felt. Not dead embarrassed or filled with regret. But in that moment, it clicked how useless and nothing you were going to mean to me as a person if my words were going to get you so crazily worked up or break your face to look like an African war mask. Bitch, you threw the pitch and are shocked by the home-run? You're playing my game.

 

I don't seek redemption or forgiveness. I'm proud that I've the constitution or manner that keeps focus. I drive all over this godforsaken state and see thousands of people just living their lives, voting for Trump, spending money they don't have, coming up with excuse after excuse for why their lives do or don't look the way they do. All of it boiling down to modes of being that have nothing to do with me. The only people who are my people do the shit I do. They risk. They're screaming the truth. They take the beatings for their behavior. And they know they are nothing without the ongoing conversation. Maybe if someone got to the work of telling these gay kids they will always and forever be the exception they'll swallow their fate and stop hurting themselves in service to shitty rules. Maybe if we stopped romanticizing and perpetrating depressing environments we'd get to listen to the ongoing creations from our artist heroes. Maybe it's my embrace of the darkness that makes me feel entitled to the world and my conception of myself well in spite of you.

 

Try not to die, I guess.

[732] I Hurt Myself Today

There's a character named Nick in the series “I'm Dying Up Here.” Nick is a junkie. Nick's been molested. Nick fucked the girlfriend of one of his friends. That last one though, the girlfriend fucked him back so don't yell at me #feminism. Nick was one of the first ones to make it to Carson, though he didn't get the couch. Nick's got some of the edgiest or brutal off-the-cuff commentary about the crowd or the various ways in which his life is going to shit at that moment. Nick couldn't stop himself in front of the police, nor a judge. Nick is under the spell of his demons.

Earlier today I watched “Bill Nye Saves the World” as well. One episode was about addiction. Addiction isn't just being genetically disposed to finding yourself robbed of the decision to engage in a specific substance. There's behavioral addiction. That's compulsive gamblers or binge eaters. Addiction is when you keep doing something not because it feels good, but to keep from feeling bad.

I've been consistent in saying I'm not addicted to things. The largest “compulsion” I've had towards any activity brings me back to youth and video games or the collecting and listing of things. I've speculated those habits arose from being treated like a juvenile delinquent in spite of my knowledge or effort and the resulting stress. That abusive frame of reference gave me my edge. I've justified or explained a torrent of my behavior in the context of being fucked with for too long too early. If I adopted #mommyissues to launch every blog for the last 14 years, it'd be safe to say we could all see the nature of my addiction.

What if the language of addiction can still be instructive? What if the form it can take is more subtle? I've never gone more than maybe a week without sugar, likely since I was a baby. What schedule of horribly grumpy moods and headaches might that withdrawal look like? I can, somehow, always talk myself out of the patience and calm of taking everything in stride and giving myself a little time to eat something or wake up before I damn my lamentable fate. What irrational animal got addicted to that kind of shitty behavior? I've made it to the gym 2 days in a row. What line of “reasoning” persuades a person who sleeps maybe 4 hours a night he doesn't have the time to go and figure out his shower routine? It must be close to the language that sends me to White Castle straight from the gym, you know, because change doesn't happen overnight or I need to control the terms of my pursuit of marginally better health.

I know I'm under a surfeit of spells. I was recently told a story about someone marveling over the wonders of my town. Did you know? You can walk the streets here without getting stabbed! This relayed by a plastered civil engineer who blames himself for the calamity of traffic during road construction. Little does he know my friends and I all carried knives walking around our home town too. It took me a year or so before I didn't feel like leaving mine at home was akin to leaving my wallet. 

What stops me from doing the right thing? What stops me from doing the right thing all of the time? Besides the immediate confusion about what may constitute “the right thing,” why do I ever, for even one second, give myself the room to not go to the gym, not prepare the meal (or look up the handful of easy and affordable recipes for variety), or not just do simple shit like buy binders and transparencies and build a literal highlighted back up of what I read and plan on doing in the future? Why do I waste moments on distractions? Or, why don't I have the right kind of disgust or aversion to that behavior built into my mind more rigidly?

These next few bits are either the excuses or the context. That degree of focus takes a huge amount of energy and has proven to alienate me. Ph.D focus in a C and D world puts you at odds with everyone all the time if you bother talking. Just like nobody is going to listen to you intensely rattle on about proper chemical names and neurophysiology, nobody gives a shit that your cause or concerns on the ground motivate you to do whatever the things it is that you're doing. Outside of academia, it doesn't hurt to behave “normally” and try to have friends.

Pursuing, ceaselessly, a measure of “perfection” regarding your behavior or being seems to lead to self-destruction. It's not “you” anymore doing things, it's the number you have to hit, the attention you can garner, or the soap box from which to preach. How much of my writing is me bitching about how people aren't as concerned about the same things I said I was? How unsympathetic I was if you couldn't find the time to read 5 articles totaling 50 pages a day. I understood colloquially, but I didn't get it. “Real-world” regular jobs are soul-sucking. The call of death is real. Investing in friends and family in real ways are as entirely capable of becoming addicted to too.

The last bit of context is the one place I think nobody who's under that pursuit of “good” “all the time” and “no excuses” ever wants to realize. Once you get what you want, it might feel good for a second, you don't want to pursue it or do it all the time any more, and the achieved goal has transformed into a perfect excuse. That seems about the best way to describe my mental position.

Why pursue connection or affection; I've already been the biggest whore AND dated a version of my ideal. Why practice, even poorly, one or dozen instruments every day; I've already made my fingers do what I wasn't able to even imagine AND gotten bored as shit listening to variations on those advanced themes. Why join a sports league or make new friends at work; I've already routinely managed to scare, piss off, or offend away around 2 friends a year AND can get a dozen phone numbers and several dozen more laughs any night of the week. Why get in shape; the car crash is coming just around the corner, I just know it. I stopped playing video games because I beat and perfected the ever-loving shit out of so many growing up. I think I might have generally stopped looking forward to things.

I framed my expectations in ways that were either easily thrown in my face or designed to meet a substandard absolution of those around me. What else is there to gain in that kind of environment? People are at the mercy of our objectively terrible times, don't keep in touch, don't come through on even their most piddling words, look at you exasperated, angry, and/or dejected about every “negative” thing you say which wholly override all you're attempting to do. So blame them in blogs they don't read and live to gripe another day. Forgive them their priorities and pathologies. What example is left to set that isn't an ego-driven mad lunge for faux-immortality? What example is left to be set?

There's plenty of hard bodies already out there to cream over. My concept of “being nice” isn't the gleaming lying assess of the masses people seem to prefer. To be sure, I still have 15 things I want to do on the land practically overnight, but now I have a better handle on the time and cash behind them. I can't run like I did with the coffee shop. I don't mean to suggest I didn't trip or didn't wish for places to pause and show caution. I mean blissfully ignorantly into the future predicated on a foundational belief in my capacity. I got tempered. Temperance feels like death.

Leave it to me to recklessly abandon my physically self-destructive job for a mentally degrading one where the people wear their addictions and excuses on their sleeves! Trapped and spiraling away from further obligations in order to stave off feeling truly bad. I can only imagine the withdrawal of missing out on my children. I can just peek back into one or ten blogs spiraling out about the loss of “friends” though, and bet you turn that shit up to 11 before nailing through your hand to affix the dial.

What I had in the past wasn't about me. I was feeling my dad's support, Wendy's, Hatsam's, the friends who helped unpack and decorate, the people who volunteered to hand out booze or Schroeder not expecting to get paid to DJ. My grandma used to insist I could be whatever I wanted to be and doing well in school wasn't just money, but accolades and protection. Hell, there's my addiction to over-achieving, I still think if I'm not bringing home at least As and Bs I'm unloved or going to get the shit beat out of me. Then, so wisely, I tied my habits and capacity to a “responsibility for the whole world” and remain stubbornly indignant I can't find anyone to help me save it. I'll tip my hat to Bill Nye and the scientists he features at the end of each episode. I'll return to my hole cheerleading the 1 in 5 “families” with a chance to go back to using and abusing without supervision.

And could I blame them? Doesn't addiction truly have a claim to fame in transcending boundaries? Well, I guess not racial boundaries, but for those not right up against being bred for hopelessness? Is the world still not in shock over Anthony Bourdain? Aren't there a million articles speculating about his motivations, his exhaustion, or his behavior? Aren't we all so ready to ball up our “favorite” celebrities as something we can understand in lieu of accepting our own moments of wanting to die? When the connection doesn't feel there. When the attempts go ignored or are unwelcome. When we're so caught up in one isolated epiphany that feels so true and clear it may as well be as compelling an awakening as any revelatory drug.

You die alone.

In your grief, in your fear, in your confusion, with your wild eyes staring back in every reflection, with every memory and regret and in spite of your last doubt, you die alone.

Maybe that's as real and alive as he's felt in years.

[650] Man, Over, Bored

I am infected. I'm infected like grandpa who can't help but to refer to them as “the blacks.” I'm an Olympic judo master who knows your neck might be broken if you come at me from behind. I'm a horse that will turn left or right just by you draping the reigns across my neck. I've an underlying habit, a notion, and drive always accelerating, and I can't put the energy, the stress, and the training anywhere meaningful.

I've always considered myself hard to diagnose. Even if I'm in a “depressive state,” which I almost certainly am, just like the most heated anger, just like the quivering sadness, I'm going to pick it apart. I'm going to whitewash the churning inhumanity that wants to turn me inside out. Sure, I have nowhere to go. Sure, I'm as close to an “adult” as I've ever been with my dead-end job, resentful living circumstances, and actual debts with an opened-ended payment schedule. And sure, I wrote a 3 page poem making a case for suicide.

But isn't that right there the point? I think so little about everything around what I'd actually like to be doing. I understand the danger I might cause to someone at the wrong place and time. I'll be as quick or quicker to ridicule and diminish any level of strife I might be experiencing because something something Niger's next. It's that it's very hard to be actively destructive. It takes a lot of energy and time. When everything around you feels destroyed already, now it gets easy. Now you just have to play along.

This only speaking to my ongoing lamentation with life in general. We don't have little boxes made of ticky-tacky anymore. Now we have seas of apartment complexes and The Real World's number of roommates. It'd be dumb to romanticize the suburbs, but there's no denying you live in a different world when you're responsible for your shelter and land. When the onus is on you to feel useful and learn how to take apart the washing machine. When you can decorate with more than a dollar store skeleton on your door for Halloween.

The land represents a sort of last frontier for me. Remember, getting a “regular job” and going into debt and hating my life were a last resort for a reason. There's still a measure of freedom and growth and creativity that can be explored there that never not ever will I get on a delivery run. So, of course, it's getting cold, and my car wants to act up harder and harder, and I obligate myself to poor taxes because everything fucks and gets fucked in compounded ways. Do you know where the real me is? Apparently able to have a smooth and charming completely blacked out conversation with a girl for 45 minutes. He was right in front of me!

I feel lucky when I can latch onto a few quotes. Willie Nelson apparently said, “If you fail long enough at something, you become a legend.” I think that's my goal with writing. Suck so much at getting anywhere or helping anything that some naive cave dwelling humanoid who stumbles across a pile of my droppings can mistakenly call it the find of the century. In this scenario I've made thousands of copies and distributed them through crazed ramblings in the streets spitting through my dangling gray hair.

I use the word naive a lot. That either means I see the same shit too often, or there's a better word lingering. I suppose you can only be naive when you actually believe something and there's an objective means that will summarily shut you down. Then you could reduce any hope or chance anyone ever believes in to a measure of naivety. That might be unfair.

I'm just always waiting. I don't know if it's a psychological hole or what. I'm waiting for what I already had. I'm waiting to start something real again. I'm waiting for a measure of control and security that underpins actual progress. It's like I'm stuck in a fog of incoherent political babble. Bloviating bullshit bolstered by bastard bitches. And I listen and scroll. I take in a book. I watch all the TV. I return to my article reading to discover I actually had already figured it out before. I've nowhere to go and nothing that matters. Just sit, and wait, and try to avoid provoking jeers from the “other” accidental roommate.

I could use some help in figuring out how to blame myself. Recall I spent over a years rent and utilities in the last 3 months trying to get the house livable. I've contacted 25 different contractors or meth-heads with varying and fleeting degrees of success. I can't stop my car from blowing up. I won't really be headed in a good direction if I adopt too high of a car payment and insurance charges. I'll never let myself live it down if I actually manage to have a heart attack or rupture something serious by spending too many hours working. Not like I'd have the health insurance to keep me out of another hole that would dig me in. I make more money than many of my age group's “big boy” jobs with all the extra time to resent my own self in not knowing how to spend it better.

I'm just a mouthpiece at this point. Even my “little” goals like learning different instruments feel impossibly far away. I was supposed to be able to practice any time I wanted out in the middle of nowhere, you see. Now I just chauffeur a few around as I slowly beat my car into submission one drum rudiment at a time. I've been toying with getting a gym membership again. You know that smooth conversation I got into? Well, apparently that girl was down to mess around and I quickly decided she should go with my friend who was on leave and started to walk home. The sex drive is under attack! I haven't lost the charm and smirk and jokes, but...eh, if you ever once thought you had something real, that shit kind of sticks in you. One more worthwhile and fun distraction being slowly led out to pasture.

I'm trying to find a way to breakdown that doesn't negatively affect you. That would be something. Crazy self-hating people do that cliché thing where they go on the attack. It doesn't take me getting sad or losing my mind to argue against all of your Snapchat and Instagram lives. Before it started affecting me so directly and consistently, I've offered enough of my suspicions regarding the Giant Lies by which you all conduct yourselves and charade I play in trying to glean the runoff benefits. The art would be in making you feel good about it. Not relieved, of course you'd feel relieved, but good. I don't want to you to feel like I'm a lifted tax burden, I want you to feel like you had a good trip.

That's not quick bullet after a drunk night and angry blog. In fact, that's not any method that might've sprung to the front of your mind or perhaps have envisioned for yourself. That would take some sleight of hand and real magic shit. Think of the preparation and coordination. Now, You Don't See Me Too.

But enough about my imminent death of my ideals and motivations which is considerably worse than the loss of whatever embodied phantom I might resemble in the halls of your mind. It just happens when the rest you want has nothing to do with sleep. Like, I'll sleep better when the lies aren't winning. I'll want to get back up when I can meet a day that's going to give back what I put into it. I want to feel myself believing in things again, not the bare minimum survival of helpless kicking in the air. I really really miss me. I miss seeing the future I wasn't going to be dragged into. I miss feeling like an advocate with clear and present examples to refute your pessimism and negativity charges. I'm just an old guy with random pain flares, dwindling friendships, and compounded obligations. If the situation regarding cooperation was dire back when I first mentioned it, I've well tumbled over that cliff and am hoping not to break every finger trying to cling to the wall on my way down.

[510] Drip

Just troll and down vote now. You won't care to read this, I promise. (reddit disclaimer)

I'm so fucking sick of being lied to. It's so loud. It's an endless cacophonous barrage that beats its way into my head despite every effort to fight. Or worse, I don't fight and try to avoid, or maybe play along, and the insidious fear and anxiety burrows into the pit of my chest.

It feels like "everything." Logically, I can pull back and know some things or people remain consistent. They are the clear exceptions to the rule. I do not believe culturally we have a grasp on what it means to be truthful. I don't mean the truth as you see it. I don't mean some throwaway comment about opinions being like assholes. We don't understand the transcendent value of striving, fighting, and sacrificing for what is true and real.

I know this because I struggled to not put "truth" and "real" in quotes like just now. Because I know what I mean by them. I get the feeling previous eras had fairly strong conceptions of them. Talking at the jaded fuck tards in a shit hole forum has me sensing their desperate desire to pounce. Their insecure "wisdom" meant to perpetuate compounded lies about their capacity for perception or clinical diagnosis. My capitulation to addressing the non-existent impersonal and presumed "hive mind" in jaded fuck tard shit hole forums.

It's easy to shit on people when they present as whiny cliches that compose the various relationship and life advice subs here. "I just don't believe in myself." "My upbringing was terrible." "I'm super stoked about my spouse, but should we be fighting this much?" "My suicide ideation has reached critical mass." "It's just, I'm not that old, but I feel..." "Mostly it's that I'm out of shape and unmotivated." "My friends left, my girl left, I'm in recovery." "The one book I've read this year really opened my eyes."

I find cliches useful only insofar as they promote genuine and nuanced change. You can't blame your brain for phrasing things like you've grown up to hear them. But cliches aren't the answer. We'll all talk ourselves into someone else's all-too-familiar corner. How'd you get there? Can it change or inform for the better? Do you really care, or are you just pretending; have you been told you should care and found yourself here by accident?

I reflexively shit on cliche people and stories because I don't truly identify with them. I'm confident in my looks, even if I could stand to be more active. I don't try to lie and hide my faults behind the mirage of happy and healthy relationships. The last girl I was with we were together for 5 or so years. It might have been day 2 that I voiced constantly why it was going to be her to leave and all the reasons that would start to add up in her head.

I don't root for failure, but I genuinely attempt to be honest. I try to acknowledge the oncoming train and actively prepare for fallout. My life tends to not arbitrarily and unexpectedly blow up that way. It still hurts when things go bad, but it's the loneliest place on the planet being Cassandra.

It's hard enough to point outside of your relationships and start noting what's wrong. It's even harder to feel intimately every failing and foreboding point of your day to day. The first time, that you're aware, that your partner lies to you in years. The laundry list of things they say are wrong with you or they don't want. A list strikingly similar to character flaws and strategically negotiated characteristics you've had since day one. Did they not know what they wanted? Were they lying all along?

I'm willing to believe people are dumb first. I think it takes time to figure anything out about yourself, let alone many things about yourself. But what we do control is what makes me feel like death. We do control our approach. We don't have to lie. You can feel as sad as you've ever been and come to it honestly even if you feel you deserve to feel as bad as you do trying to lie.

But relationships will always be a clusterfuck. How about at large? Again, we can defer to cliches to write off people that don't try. I do. Unfortunately, I try. I experiment and say yes. I invest. I engage in conversations with people I would instantly judge and write off. I explore entertainment or other topics in the same fashion. I hate Arrow, and I hate it after watching every episode of it. It's real. I can provide truthful examples of its brand of stupid without lazily proclaiming the folly of The CW or kitsch superheroes.

Media gets to lie. The most popular gets that way why? For the same reason we're flirty with fascism. Repeat something often enough, you get comfortable. You get persuaded, even against your will. I never wanted the name Trump to pass my lips. It's hard to imagine being a functioning human being if I hadn't adopted a position on him today. Lazy, cynical, and ham-fisted attempts at "entertainment" or "journalism" become our standards for conversation and beguile our capacity for evaluating information.

We learn to accept it. We learn to breathe the deception. Personal public relations departments take up office space in our heads to spin the filth of our circumstances clean. We're not struggling, we're fighting. We're not sick, we're poised for revolution. We're not dying, we just can't be bothered to care.

Honesty, for me, I practically worship. I'm so "meh" or "even" that by the time I feel sad, especially sober, it's a glorious invitation for me to mine personal truths and find words for why I'm tearing up. It's a privilege to be moved to create. It's a privilege to abuse your perspective in service to try and understand or connect. Honest feeling leading to honest reflection, if only back at yourself, when the ones you wish could see it aren't able or are unwilling.

I hurt for my craft. Every area of human engagement requires some kind of street cred. If your hands aren't burnt and cut up, you're probably not a real cook. If you haven't broken a bone, what are you doing at the X-games? If you're a stark-raving mad doctor of anything who experiences borderline PTSD upon reflecting on grad-school, you owe it to yourself to insist people use the proper title.

My sacrifice is different, because it always seems to manifest in relationships. I always have to be prepared to lose the friend even if I don't want to. I'm not allowed to believe I can't see where something is going. I have to eviscerate my privacy and notions of "taboo personal thoughts" or a different, and worse, machinery kicks in. I have to really think and work with suicide. I have to really play with and tempt certain kinds of fate, or I'll never find the truth. You certainly don't have it. The collective wisdom I employ to manage train wrecks still leaves the trains crashing.

I don't like looking angry or "crazy." I don't like being picked apart by people with no capacity or respect for what I try to create. From writing to my relationships, it's all meant to strive for truths you can rely on. It's never and not for some naive or perpetual "happiness." I'm not hoping we polish and politicize our avoidance mechanisms. I don't want the "implied" demeanor and level of conversation. I'm so fucking sick of being lied to.

I'm so sick of it, I find myself empathizing with my bat shit mother. I've taken more slaps to the face over lies as a child than anything else. She vehemently hated when we lied. If she felt as broken and insane as it's making me, maybe I understand why she'd fuck us up. We were persistent and easy enough targets. Certainly I currently feel like a number of people could stand to be slapped.

I want more people to sound like me. I want them to start any and every discussion with "now, I could be perfectly upside down on this issue." "My feelings are super compelling and probably shit right now, perhaps we should talk later." "I respect and acknowledge your perspective and see your point, can you offer it with regard to my next question?" "I will talk to you as long as it takes for us to find common ground." In today's world, the first one to scream, throw up their arms, or accuse the other side of something wrong "wins." Take the last quoted approach, say in "debating" with a fundamentalist. Someone who re-asserts the same lines over and over isn't willing to talk, but their lips will keep moving. They can't be honest, but they certainly feel like they're saying something.

It's the liar that perpetuates the self-fulfilling feedback. You can rely on nothing if not for things to fail. With a simple adoption of that idea, you've set things in motion. To distinguish how and why something or someone fails as opposed to categorically dismissing them as inherent failures deserves the widest distinction. I could take my Cassandra plight and refuse intimacy, scorn women, and levy endless blame on my ex. Because, of course, pick your favorite cliche about humanity in general or women specifically or condescendingly "kids" perpetually.

Instead, I can talk about the moments it sinks in how bad I feel. I can identify the strategies and ideas I think should permeate every relationship, intimate or otherwise, and pick out when those stopped functioning. When the lies come out. When the conversation stops. When the positive characteristics and good habits get ignored so the looming monster can be made to look all the more necessary to be killed.

And I don't think it will get better. I don't think I'll meet many more if any people who don't fall right in line with a kind of failure I'm pressed to call even spoiled and bratty. I took my racing heart and bout of kicking my bed over a culmination of frustrating forces, and turned them into a boring procedural explanation. I allowed myself to be human, and then attempted to approach my actions as an adult.

My life feels stagnant. My life constantly has parts of it breaking down and away. Much, if not nearly all of it, is predicated on lies. I try to respect and explain how I feel concurrent to the fact of my friends' recent and terrible hardships. The false comparisons and pissing matches would be the liar's game. As long as I can't find honest assessments and self-reflection, per my mother's instruction, I'll just continue to beat it out of me. I'll have to rely on my torrential television and foreboding literature. I'm losing my ability to cope with engaging people much further.