[302] This Is Your Warning

I love when serious problems arise so I can use my genuine pissed the fuck off tone addressing something important. First and foremost, who in their right mind ever thinks that the most belligerent, random, hurtful, or wtf comments I make are true!? How fucking ridiculous of a person do you have to be to believe that is the genuine level of discourse or thought I have about a particular person or topic?

For example, my friends could have died tonight. You know what I’d be doing if they had? JOKING. I’d be making horrendous jokes about death and who they were fucking with in heaven and what it’s going to mean for my rent. I don’t really know if it says more about me that this is my way, or you if you think I simply give that little of a fuck. If I’m ever in a situation like that, I EXPECT you to do the same thing. If I come out of something looking like I won first place in a burn victim contest, you better notice! This life is a terrifying, violent, random, fucked up place where reality T-bones you with a pleasant reminder it can be over now. I’ve accepted this and make light of it. Your inability to do so doesn’t give you license to judge where the fuck I’m coming from.

So let’s get even more personal. Maybe if I can be so callous and non-caring about the very life of my friends, I can’t possibly give a shit about the girl I’ve basically been with for 2 ½ years right? Obviously when I’m poking fun or making a comment, I really just like to make her feel bad or am such a loner and insecure, there’s some weird little pathological game we play back and forth that feeds into things. I don’t know who feels themselves so informed as to put someone in a position that they feel they have to “justify” why they’re with someone. This is such an immediately “what the fuck let’s stop and reassess” situation.

I know I’m a “bully” or pick on people or have an endless array of comments. I know how completely fucking annoying I can be. But fuck you in your fucking ass if you would think for a second that I’m going to allow you to harbor thoughts or commentary bordering on what you’d pull from a battered woman’s pamphlet. You know the first thing I tell anyone that remotely thinks they want to get close to me? It’s be prepared for me to do or say something that’s “the worst.” The worst you can feel, the worst you can imagine, the worst you might have to “roll with” and not “justify.” Do you know why I’m comfortable issuing such a warning? I don’t really have the capacity to understand how “WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK” something I say is ringing red flags in your head. I get I can set people off, I have no metric for what’s bad, the worst, “unsayable,” “too much,” or sometimes even “mean.” I simply know that people react, and say “I’ve adopted an ‘oh well’ mentality, you might like to as well.”

I am King Jaded. I’m stuck on sarcastic. I’m always going to default to what’s “the worst.” Being able to see through that is the very oddball connection I’ve managed with a handful of people. Kristen is one of them. If I ever was truly that fucking bad to the point where her/our friends or family were speaking up, I’d be the first to say she needed to get the fuck away from me. But this isn’t the story I hear. I hear that it’s both me being insensitive to how I’m perceived by other people, but also their concerns or worries that back her into a corner. I can tone down comments or address a genuine concern. I can’t sit and watch her be sad because people are giving her shit about me. You fucking come to me, or us, or you shut your fucking mouth. You don’t give her shit because you know she won’t bite.

Every day I remind myself that I don’t really believe or understand how I managed to have someone like her in my life. Someone who says they don’t want rules. Is willing to accept me for all the weird shit that I may say or the lack of feelings I may have towards things. That’s the relationship I’m concerned with keeping. Fuck all of you if you don’t “get it.” You can fucking rot. I’ll make sure things are right between me and her. You want the epitome of someone who cares and takes on the feelings or responsibility of things completely beyond what should be her problems, it’s her. The most fucked up part about people giving her shit, is that she would feel embarrassed looking like a “charity case” because her friends would get her something like a bed. Who the fuck would give someone the impression that your friends care about you and buying you something is anything less than your friends caring about you and buying you something? What kind of sick fuck?

I’m happy to take responsibility for the shit that I say. I’ll defend or change, it’s simple. I have no control over whatever extra noise comes in making the people I care about uncomfortable or sad. So this is my attempt to step in front of it all. If you feel like you have to “justify” anything about me, get the fuck out of my life. If you find fault with how I treat my relationships and it just bugs you to your core, find the balls to even whisper it in my direction. And if you think for a second I’m going allow simple misunderstandings, overblown feelings and reactions, utter speculation and judgment, or personal insecurities start to fuck with the relationships I care about the most…really think about ways you don’t want me to react.

[299] Blaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrg

I hope this is looooooooooong and that you’re disinterested now. Cus nigga, I’m just writing. [super drunk]

Where does my confidence come from? Is it an implicit understanding? Is it a sociopathic disregard? Why doesn’t it matter the “party situation” I walk into, I don’t feel anything but the compulsion to show you how you’re going to feel? I can’t say I’m a sociopath. I can say I’ve learned how to behave as a sociopath would to handle bidness. What all does that entail? Does it make my relationships any less honest? I don’t think so. As far as a self-assessment reaches in that regard.

I want “more.” I no longer genuinely understand insecurity, dishonesty, fear, or complacency. They just aren’t in my playbook. I love the ego ridden jock at the party; that’s the first mother fucker imma put in his place. Why? Why the fuck do I have the ability and compulsion? What about my personality is so hell bent on humbling people? Like, I’m only good at beer pong when I hate you. You are losing when I hate you. Something so trivial, but fuck me if I don’t show you how good I am at getting that fucker into a cup.

I don’t know where to go other than where I’ve been. I don’t perceive a secret or “specialness” to how or why we’re here. I have “nothing to look forward to” other than what I already see coming. Not to say I’m closed off to surprises, but god damn, they gotta be a surprise indeed. At some point, just putting so much time into being a certain kind of person is going to make you feel illegitimate. Like, the fact you haven’t “changed” or “grown” into something else, it’s an in laden doubt and vulnerability people wish to latch onto. They don’t know or care that ain’t nothing in question in your head.

In my efforts t be genuine I think it’s ripe with opportunity to be perceived as fake. People are not like me. I wish I could regard this as “special” but it’s really just kind of a pain in the ass. Niggas don’t talk in my tone, don’t mean what I say, don’t act on what they actually believe and feel. So something that doesn’t resemble what people are used to is default fake as shit. So I continue business as usual? I lament that vapid empty nature of the dishonest and afraid? Nah, Imma just keep playing like I play. Get on board or fuck off, not really giving a shit.

Like this party. FUCKING REEKED of what I hate about people thinking they getting “old.” Think they figured shit out. They know what’s up, they know how to drink, what they are or aren’t looking for in an interaction at a party. You little closed off secluded bitches! Your little band club is a suffocating pocket of existence that you fell into because you couldn’t let go of high school? I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking bout? Then why the fuck you so utterly closed to even converse or be marginally cordial to a nigga that ain’t on the field with you? That structure must feel nice. Don’t matter that they yelling orders at you, just the fact they telling you what to do is what’s up. Good for you ,you neurotic fuck.

The “I could count on one hand” mother fuckers that ain’t like that are the best. I wish they people could learn from their example. But no, as always, it don’t matter who you got, or what you know, or what you want to be, or anything of fucking substance and consequence, your bitch ass insecurities and know-it-all-ness is going to win. I fucking hate you. I legit would cut your fucking throats and save you the time living the rest of your sacrificial lives. Sheep ass niggas.

God, that makes me sound so bad. Am I just a fan of dramatic language? Have you managed to befriend a mother fucker that’s legit that fucked up and capable of pulling some nasty ass shit? (Hint: it’s option 2) I don’t know where else to go. Am I to ignore history? Am I to pretend I’ve learned nothing about the circumstances under which people behave certain ways? Should I forgo reason for “moral stomach feeling-ness…” fuck no. What, I’m a fucking retarded asshole now? I should start talking nonsense to “feel better” about myself which is just essentially trying to placate your feelings with language I can believe is going to make you feel better about me. What a game! What a pathetic empty game.

I feel like even people I’m not into, be it attractiveness or otherwise, I still try to give the benefit of the doubt. Imma judge, sure, but I’m going to stay how I treat you openly until I get a history and enough data to make sure that I ain’t sold you up the river cus I was feeling particularly dooshy that morning. It’s a form of humility. It’s a form of intellectual checks and balances. It’s so impossibly easy to judge, intrinsic doubt is the only acceptable ground floor position. Lazy bitch as disrespectful niggas just wallow in they feelings about shit. Naw, I gotta keep shit in check or why the fuck would you bother listening to what I’m saying?

Key fucking question! How the fuck is it that I ever have something to say? Why am I not fully me less I’m saying some shit I think is fucking relevant or spot on to “the conversation?” The massive overall reaching struggling grasp we have on what it means to be us and what the ever loving fuck we are doing with each other. Like, my charge in life is to literally NEVER SHUT THE FUCK UP! Is there not something peculiar about that? I will take a moment’s clarity and use that to justify a 5 page blog. I will take a refined sentence and extrapolate how that plays into the whole of existence. What the ever loving fuck?

At a weird and creepy and hard to define level, you all sort yourselves. It’s not me making top down judgments, no, you place yourselves into little categories that I may or may not be able to work with under varying conditions. I find myself unable to behave otherwise given your inputs. I find no position worth respecting but the one that responds to your behavior “as I do.” Somehow, I get to a deeper or more honest conception of myself when people have me expressing what feels intrinsically “true” about that nature. I’m the best me when you’re the best you. Blame it on the interconnectedness of all things, fuck if I know.

I hope we have a choice. Not just because I really want to blame you fuckers, but because I want something to believe in. If nothing else, just the option to behave otherwise. Then I’m right in a very important way. Then I actually get to claim dignity in my behavior. I’m standing for something. God forbid I’m just wallowing in a world complacently floating in an ambiguous fog of confusion. Fuck existence of you’re a circumstantial moron bound to the insecurity you picked up at 13 years old. It’s not that I hate everything, it’s that I hate everything fucking assholes endlessly choose to show me. I hate what they believe in. I hate what they reinforce. And as far as perception being reality is concerned, for all intents and purposes, that may as well be “everything. “

You won’t get me.

[301] Wondering, Blundering, and Thundering

Thank goodness! I thought I’d never find something to write about again. I feel like I’ve been doing something of a bad job living like I want the future to be. On one level it is laziness; on another, an intellectual indecisiveness. I think this stems from not finding enough stimulating or compelling ideas than the ones I already hold. I’m starting to move a little more into the philosophical underpinnings of economics and politics though, and how these play into how I may start conducting my life is worth exploring.

The illusion of my “peaking” comes from my being relatively healthy, fed, socially integrated, and basically educated with access to a litany of wants my forefathers could not have imagined. I see pushing the limits of peaking by taking an aspect of our shared and giant basin of knowledge and doing something so resoundingly useful or gratifying, and at the same time obvious, that presumably nobody could have done it like me. When you set yourself such a lofty goal, learning things for the sake of dinner conversation or making money for a new toy seems futile. As a result I lay dormant, get impatient with the little inefficiencies or inconsistencies. I get distant because the world around me starts to look more impeding, or complacent, than helpful.

Manipulating information can serve an infinite purpose. Whether you’re trying to feed the world or simply keep it hobbling along, you need to know the numbers. Increasingly, you need to know the feelings and opinions because a significant portion of your playing field denies things like heat melting ice. But how do we quantify them and turn them into a mere variable we can work with? How do I take this demoralizing and cynical view of our future and genuinely start to believe there is a place, which can have the humblest beginnings, and move forward? Hint: make it personal.

I seem to only ever feel motivated by data. When I learn the actual numbers of plankton we’d need to cultivate to maintain safe levels of oxygen. When I can say it will take X amount of hours to build so many green houses with the capacity to move X amount of food to the X amount of places that are still in need. But even there, things can be deceiving. It’s just as important to get the numbers behind how fucked everything is. The money, the amount and financial impact of legislation, the momentum of public opinion, the actual count and access to resources, and the unregulated and unaccountable interests in keeping the status quo.

This daunting task of counting, reporting, displaying, and formulating a way of teaching is entirely doable, but also potentially dangerous and likely easily corruptible. Therefore, any system that attempted to create something of such gravitas would have to not only need to use ongoing real time information to predict future fallout, but need to be prepared for a number of potentially distasteful courses of action if met with certain kinds of resistance. In fact I suspect this is the main form of deterrent for any overhaul of a so-named “system.” It would have to be fundamentally illusive and accessible.

“Common sense” only applies when it is in fact, common. If everyone were to take place in drawing a picture of the world on a single white board, they would all have a specific and common centerpiece in their description of it. You only have to go so far as to create a Christian and a Muslim board to cripple something mutually progressive. Here you can try to give people a common enemy or struggle to squeeze ideas together that appease enough of the people some of the time, but this only shuffles the burden around and is terribly inefficient.

My current semi-solution is to put them to work in smaller intermingling factions. There are very few things people understand like bringing home the bacon or taking care of their families. People understand it sucks to get sick and it sucks to be hungry. Also, people are getting used to be connected to everything, at all times, which has any number of consequences. If you can plug them into an economy that gets them everything they need and informs if not humbles them to their wants, you can focus on how to keep it sustainable and enduring. Let them grow their own food. Let them share infrequently used resources, Enable them to pursue the various end games of their ideas.

Here’s where “overthrowing the system” becomes ludicrous. Surely communes, co-opts, exchanges, etc. have proven to be helpful steps in the right direction. Show me how a small group of do-gooders recreates an Indiana University. How many of them are members of the volunteer fire department, police force, and teacher’s union? To ignore the federal and statutory role is a fool’s game. Start your movements or be an example of a different way to live, but if you genuinely concern yourself with the big picture, you need to tackle each layer in a way that makes sense of the ones above and below it.

The data will win if I can make it digestible to people. I’ll be able to live with people holding simply horrifying, ridiculous, and destructive ideas as long as I can make them data points. The forms of human manipulation take on an entirely different form at this point. Much as relatively current trends of thought permeate our economic and social structure already, I want to hijack that structure and shift it onto things that actually work. Not my opinion of how they work, just what counting and measurement say.

I want the coldest and most deliberate look at what people are actually good for. It would help in judging my action or lack thereof, and it may reformulate what we think of as moral or necessary. One thing I’m certainly tired of hearing though, is excuses. Whether it’s from myself or, more likely, from others over the pettiest of shit, it’s a wonder I find time to escape and think about the future at all.

I want to be an electric car driving, home grown food eating, social primate who works in a manner reflective of my effort and understanding who doesn’t need to take undue advantage and make excuses for my well-being over someone else who’s just as capable and likely wants the freedom to express themselves, be healthy, and pursue their interests as well. I currently can’t afford it, waste my time, engage with illogic and antithetical dribble, am constrained by monetary obligations in an overall society that plays by anything goes rules. I don’t know how to avoid dipping my foot into the corruption where that heinous word “compromise” comes out to play. Didn’t my government teach me not to negotiate with terrorists?

[298] No Point 'Cept One

It’s an odd duality being an utterly motivated drifter. Am I lazy, waiting, or both? Does it make sense to try and scrape together labels and descriptions when your ever waning conception of reality settles upon the word “is?” Maybe it’s not about what you do, but the level of fulfillment you get from engaging in it. And if that’s the case, I’m again dually blessed and screwed. I find that when you talk long enough, you’re able to justify anything. I hope I manage to describe instead of just talk.

What does it mean to force yourself to do something? Is it pushing against a previous moral concept? Is it submitting your will to power? Is it convincing yourself that what you’re doing is actually what you should or wanted to do all along? In any event, you’re fundamentally changing what it means to be yourself in that moment. Is it “buckling down” or breaking your own knees? Is it finally realizing or mental exhaustion? No will to keep up the fight, the line in the sand, the previously hard fought and won conception of reality that’s sustained until this point.

It’s one of the things that infuriate me about some old people and every dumb ass. The same mind that locks in how it works is the one that traps it there. How are you supposed to know the difference between trapping yourself and actually getting a grip on things? Obviously, so far my answer has been to simply decide. The reality that extends so far is in your mind, but that doesn’t seem like all the justification it needs.

So maybe that reality should be punctuated with ideas like “don’t harm others” or “plant a tree.” Common sense under a catch-all umbrella of good to thus in turn make us feel good; or some of us anyway. Then you leap into questions about what is harm, do they “deserve” it, how selfish are you being in your caring nature, public perception verses reality…it never seems to end. And surely you’ll find someone along the road to justify and chime in precisely when you needed them the most. Surely that’s “helpful.”

Maybe, and this would go along with no free will, we’re supposed to listen and wait for our cues. Also in line with the “is” conception of reality, that all you need and want to know is right here and always will be, you just need to find a way to access it. Which, on our way back to free will, presumably you could choose to do so. Or at least have the fog of potentials make you feel as if you had.

I’m really only excited when I get to show off. It was pure joy being the “smart kid” K-5. All that mattered was that I was recognized for doing better and being faster than everyone around. The closest opportunity I’ve had to that again was with the coffee shop. School homogenizes and commoditizes education and personality. I didn’t need 15 years in school to know my grades didn’t matter. I didn’t need insecure power tripping authority figures to set me straight, but that’s all that was offered. Stick the one “well-meaning super caring” teacher crap back up your ass.

Back then wasn’t knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It was recognition and praise for exercising my brain. It paid. Maybe I just got addicted to that at a young age. Maybe now I don’t regularly practice an instrument, or read as often, or really do anything to the kind of hyper obsessiveness I used to, because no one is noticing. Or if they do, they notice it like a YouTube video. But, as the hero with a fix, I can’t just drop the craving; I need to do something bigger, faster, and louder. I need to make a scene that takes me outside of myself. I need to be something that can hardly be explained if not for the collective neurosis of all these blogs.

There just doesn’t feel like a fucking point otherwise.

[297] I Are Robot

I think there is a superficial line between “us” and machines. I semi-consistently get accused of being a robot because I understand people's lives and relationships in terms considered cold, impartial, or somehow (given how deeply it cuts) utterly misinformed. Maybe I can run with an explanation of this robotic nature. Maybe I can explain that the picture is more complex, and frankly more meaningful, than you have the capacity to hear.

I’m not an advocate of circumstance. I don’t want to “fall in love” with someone because we grew up in the same place. I don’t want to “find myself surprisingly agreeing with” someone because we both found an angst ridden philosopher our freshman year of college. I don’t want to subject someone to the whirlwind of my feelings. I don’t want to constrain someone because I’m afraid they’ll leave me. I, in an important sense concerning your personhood, personality, well-being, and arbiter of your decisions, don’t want to be responsible for making decisions for you. I don’t want to trap you or guilt you, or exert a horribly conceived sense of power over you.

I just am. Whether I’m happy or sad, that is up to me. Whether I choose to find a way to swallow what I’m doing in life or not, again, up to me. My decisions, as long as I’m going to claim responsibility for them, I’m going to regard them as free, if only pragmatically. “I” am not “us” and don’t burden you with my little exploration of self, meaning, or place in the world. I think this is a position of respect, understanding, and freedom. If I openly state that I’m an ongoing puzzle to be put in relative space, far be it for me to be the judgmental stopping point on what to say about who you are.

And because it never gets old, apparently as a robot, I’m interested in strings of data. I like to let my brain process an input and see some kind of conclusion. Funny thing about drawing conclusions, nobody likes it when you “doom them to fail.” Now, I stress that I’m using their language, for us robots merely see things as “necessary consequences.” You may have guessed that we robots get the most flack when it comes to talking about how people get along with one another. It gets extra dramatic when they’re supposed to or have been “getting along” for long periods of time. Proposing a more nuanced and specific answer as to why that diverges from “because they love each other” gets quite a load of shit dumped on a poor merely processing robot’s head.

Now don’t go humanizing, this isn’t a pity party. This is one in a string of ongoing explanations. I understand this is the point to start touting a litany of feelings, and they’ve been taken under administrative consideration.

A little about robots; it isn’t that they don’t feel, it’s that they feel sparingly. And even when those feelings kick in, they tend to be fleeting and not overwhelmingly compelling. See, for robots, feelings inform. They’re like a lick from an enthusiastic puppy; “Oh, that was sooo cute! And a little wet lol” but it’s going to dry up and the dog will shit on the rug. This doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy the puppy licks, but robot memories are designed to store the smell of puppy shit. We understand the amount of work it takes to get that puppy to a happy and healthy place for both parties.

A robot is only as good as in the information available. My inputs come from hundreds of self-descriptions describing a million different versions of the same relationship! Even pointing this out to a fellow converser is a robots folly. Why, however could a robot know MY LOVE?! This seems to misunderstand a robot’s position. I have nothing vested in whether you work or don’t, I’m merely stating the experiential data and drawing an analogy to a seemingly similar situation. Live long and prosper for all I care, but why not contemplate the significance of your defensiveness?

I say loud and I say often how much I don’t believe in love. For those of you who understand this is almost my 300^th blog on or referencing the topic, I’ll save the rehashing why. Love, like all things in a robots mind, is constrained by how useful it can be used to compute an outcome or understand the data. Given enough conversation, explanation, and an indefinitely growing list of the definitions of love, it does not compute. However, all hope is not lost! Surely there is a positive swing that can be described as to why people relate the way they do.

So then we can traverse into the hard, pragmatic, and dare I claim “rational” world. With this streamlined sensibility, we take people’s words for it; we apply basic understandings of human psyches, and use some good old fashioned plain speech. Here, people don’t want to be alone. In this world, people are afraid of having nothing to show for their lives. In this magical place, people go through experience after experience and, if they're lucky, have lives play out like their favorite television drama provided no one ended up dying. Love comes as quick as you’re willing to say it. The “cutest” “smartest” “most amazing” guy or girl in the world is a mere Facebook status update and/or few years away from the last one.

Please note, simply being a pattern does not mean I lament the pattern, or that it’s a bad pattern, or that I don’t believe there is a large amount of genuine happiness to be derived from said pattern. BUT IT’S A FUCKING PATTERN! It’s this odd thrust of ego and hubris and self-importance that placates common sense and historical perspective that just throws this humble robot for a loop. If, and let me stress if, patterns can be, at least semi-relied upon to predict the future, why not try to live in that future and behave accordingly? Why not try to account for all the things people would like to ignore or forget, and own them now, get good at them now, and see what manifests from that?

Now, I understand I could just have a much fucked up conception of happiness or well-being. This is something I don’t heavily debate, so if that’s the resounding opinion, it hasn’t reached my ears. But part of my robotic perspective is to try and state things plainly, or at least as plainly as the data informs me. Yes, I like you. Yes, I get bored. No, boredom doesn’t mean I don’t like you. No, it isn’t always about boredom. Yes, I would absolutely like to keep what we have. No, I will not keep what we have it means I feel I’m made to start lying about myself. No, I don’t want anything resembling the kind of things people have been inputting me with since I found an interest in the subject.

Before something changes, it has the capacity to do so. It is “ingrained” with an ability to reformulate around new ideas, behaviors, or environmental settings. That’s my robot brain. I have little to no control over why it decides to see things as re-hashing the past, and little to no control over not wanting to fall in line with what has proven to be dismal denial ridden insecure and ill-informed relationship rings of the past. As far as I can tell, it just seems to make sense not to behave that way.

I won’t equate sex with your personality or our relationship. I won’t pretend you have a quota of texts or Facebook comments in order for me to really believe you like me. I won’t subject my infinitely joking and dismissive personality so you get an opportunity to feel insecure or pissed off for something that doesn’t even register once you care to slow things down and break them into their smallest obvious conclusions. I have this small, ever so small, robot conception of self that is responsible for how it thinks and what its thinking may do to or for the rest of the world. If I’ve managed to actually get somewhere in my processing, I simply can’t sacrifice it to sensibilities of a common man. After all, it’s only after enough of them that I’ve been driven here in the first place.

So when a robot manages to feel, it’s not an accident. When a robot is trying to be honest, it’s hanging its reputation on the line because it doesn’t believe you should accept what it has to say without understanding its reasons. When a robot is willing to talk about or fight for what it believes in, open your fucking ears and minds. As a robot, they need a closet and alcohol. Incorporating you into the mix might as well be an act of your god. It’s not whining, nor a threat; it’s just the reality as far as a robot can see. How ironic when the robot gets blamed for not being able to connect like all the normal people.

[296] Thoughts Upon Which To Hang Our Baggage

My “meta-idea” has to revolve around time. I think about how my time is being used and how I describe it. I think that well before you can engage in an activity or not, the consequences will carry, your thoughts will carry, well into what will inevitably be your current mind. I don’t, even when I’m doing conceivably “nothing” genuinely feel like my time is being wasted. Perhaps the only aspect to respecting and enjoying your time is making as many active and self-espousing decisions while you’re using it.

Time frames how I think about money. It frames how I think about the pursuit of money and what money is really good for. Money, to me, is more of an exchange towards a purpose. If you have no purpose, you have no reason to care for money. If you’re purpose involves redefining or re-purposing money, it becomes less of a burden marred by ideas about paying the bills or feeding yourself. I can do a lot with a little bit of money. Whether it means getting something priced cheap, the easy old way to look at something, or in the kind of dividends you get when you’re paying for a chance to express who you are.

So I don’t pay the back taxes just quite yet. The consequences just aren’t of the kind that would significantly negatively impact my life. I don’t work 80 hours a week. The dividends paid out from my psyche would literally start to change who I fundamentally was. I may splurge a little on dinner or a night out. Nobody spends their time talking about the hours they spent reading a book or studying a topic. Of course doing such things helps inform and shape the moment, but it’s snippets you’ll remember over time. It’s snippets you’ll reflect on that will be how you define entire years or people. There’s a million ways I’d like to be remembered than “eh, kind of a cool dude, I guess.”

An obsession with time frames how I think about time frames. I simply know how long it takes me to understand something or make things happen. Delays happen because people don’t pick up phones, answer emails, say they’ll do it tomorrow, spend time complaining or stressing about restrictions, were told not to from someone on high, were given conflicting information, didn’t understand what you meant, or deliberately slowed down because they’re a dick and why not. Therefore, I know what needs to happen so things happen now, or in an hour, or by tomorrow morning, or holy shit what did we just create this week.

This time-centric view puts things in perspective, provides a plethora of answers, and makes it easy to form rules. It helps mitigate risk, define what’s worthwhile, and decide the very reasons to even bother existing. I am playing a game after all, and games are either finite or infinite. My life is finite, the impact I may leave on existence though, who’s to say?

So I won’t spend that time pretending. I won’t believe in god because I’m not schizophrenic. I won’t call you friend unless I can see, feel, and think about the positive impact you have on my life. I won’t double-speak unless I’m pulling some 1984 shit. As long as I have a voice in my head that can be persuaded to make me feel shitty about myself, I need to be doing the kinds of things that can fight back. It’s a voice we all have. A voice I see so flagrantly expressed outward lately as the stress of life appears to be beating the ever-loving shit out of my friends.

An important component to “taking over the world” then, is to put you on my time. When the world around you operates in a manner that exudes my values, then I’ll be truly confused when too much ran awry. I’m already happy, and that’s my biggest problem. As Jay-Z would say, I’m already home. My existence therefore needs to extend farther. It needs to include more to think about, more contingencies and responsibilities. I need to inform my perspective in a manner that goes beyond being a basically functioning human being just getting along.

I can’t tell if this seems too hard to understand sometimes, or if it just comes in too abrasive a package. I don’t consider hurting feelings or “being a dick” to necessarily be a personality flaw. Wanting to make people feel bad is the personality flaw, but that only tends to happen when I’m addressing something that barely resembles what I’d describe as “people.”

I question because I am endlessly intrigued by how and why you spend your time. Mine isn’t riddled with damn near any of the bullshit that most describe as a waste of their time. I want to know about your relationships and the extent they keep you happy. I want to know the heart of your interest in a topic so I can understand why it’s worth my time to even hear about it or explore further. My mind is already in a million different directions and picking a specific path to focus on takes something or someone special. It has to be something/someone worthy of advocating across my interests or to anyone. Something story worthy.

The best stories can connect with a million people in a million ways whether it’s because of the moral it espouses or because it’s speaks so close to something you’ve maybe never had words for. I can write a million blogs that will never match what it means to operate that kind of machine I envision for the future. There will probably be a handful of people in the thousands I’ll meet that I’ll trust to work alongside with, to help write part of the story. Certainly, it will take people who know it can’t be about “them,” but us. Hopefully, there will be a kind of truth that wasn’t force fed, but always existed waiting to be accepted.

[296.5] Stupid Vs. Smart

This is a blog I should have written weeks ago so excuse me if it’s a little scattered. For just as important as thinking about time shapes my perspective, the eternal struggle between what I’d call “smart” and “stupid” rages on. I would love to be able to draw a strict demarcation between the two. As far as I can tell, everyone is both smart and stupid given a specific context, so how do we get to the “meta-smart or “meta-stupid” person?

Theoretically, we want to “grow” as individuals. If we look at a child, it’s generally preferred that we want them to learn the ABCs and how to count and how to walk and maybe one day look both ways before crossing the street. These are “smart” if not practical, life affirming, intelligence expressing ideas. They are growing. As adults we hope to find people who can share in another’s perspective. Hopefully they’ll accept people despite their color or sexual orientation. They grow to understand that these are not things which threaten them or account for the morality of the individual.

Surely, this growth caps at a certain point academically. We don’t really go around arguing about who is more PH.D.’d or fiercely debate the merit and number of books each of us has read. So we must be expecting, hoping, that people are growing “emotionally” or “spiritually.” What’s odd, is that we consider these areas to be “too personal” to really be discussed intelligently. We don’t get smart, as far as I can tell, about how or why you grow to accept different people, or how life works, and on what basis you should do so.

It’s this kind of emotional stupidity that we somehow match against intelligence. It takes work to get informed, but anyone can feel. In my experience, my feelings only bring me back to a point where I need to explain something intelligently. If I get super pissed, I need to talk out the details for why I’m not going to burn a place down. If I’m getting close to someone, I need to venture down what it means to be emotionally manipulative. Huh, I kinda have two settings, pissed or tepid.

It’s emotional stupidity that prevents me from having too many meaningful conversations about religion. If you weren't afraid to lose something, afraid of change, or even if you don’t feel afraid still unable or unwilling to take any and every question as far as they can go, it has something to do with stupid emotions, because I’m convinced your brain works. It’s like an overbearing mom speculating about all the crazy things that can happen if you stay out too late; you know you’re just wandering around Wal-Mart or bullshitting at Steak N Shake. Even if she knows this logically, she won’t accept it. Sooner or later she’s picking you up from jail or taking you to rehab, she just knows it.

The folk knowledge is that all teenagers are crazy. They destroy, can’t be trusted, and upon reflection of your adventures as a kid, you know all you need to. Even if 98% of the time you spent it on the couch playing Halo, you remember that one fire you lit that got a little out of control and ignore you had the foresight to bring the hose around. You remember trying cigarettes, but forget not liking them. Hanging onto these ideas is problematic, much as believing in anything BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS it to be true, because the idea is incomplete. Much as my time in school, it’s too easy. Easily offered and accepted.

Emotional stupidity I see as a hindrance; it’s anything that prevents you from growing into accepting more about the world. It’s when you could apply your “reasoning by way of feeling” to the world and see a measurable decline in the reliability of information. It’s believing in a god to the point of campaigning against science or to justify some atrocity of nature or personal depravity. It’s believing in love or a relationship to bring a kid into an unstable situation because you’re searching to be complete. It’s placating a person’s entire history by one act or what they look like. It’s being ruled by the fear of the unknown or of where the thoughts might take you.

Therefore, smart should be the opposite of that. It’s learning enough about yourself and place in the world to adopt a stake worth having in it. Understanding how small or big your decisions may impact the people in your life. Holding yourself accountable for how you feel and still managing to consistently go with what makes the most sense, if only at the time. To me, if I’m to be considered smart anymore, it’s not because I read and write, it needs to come from being personally responsible and accountable. It’s not to say I won’t do stupid things or allow a twinge of emotionality to creep in, but I’m capable of recognizing when it does.

Stupid follows a pattern of avoidance while smart explores. Stupid is afraid and smart perseveres. Stupid sums things up, smart is in the details. Stupid makes excuses, smart offers different theories. Most importantly, stupid is empty and smart is a kind of fulfilling that I've never been able to experience another way. Yes, I consider myself smart. Yes, I can do stupid things. There’s a mental happy place I reach when I’m doing something smart. It’s almost like a lifestyle, where shit just makes sense, even when you can’t tell why.

This might speak to why I have two settings. Either things “are” or are going well-enough, or there’s a threat. I can react so viscerally because if I’m threatened it has to be at a very fundamental level. Luckily, that’s usually only coming from myself and over-thinking I suppose.

But as to why I don’t think we’ll make it as a species and call most people stupid, it just seems smart given everything they say or do. Given the stress and drama presented to me, given their non-productive, emotionally driven squawking, their inability to answer anything or change anything without so much undue hassle. The smart thing to do just seems to be “get by” primarily and espouse a personal set of ideals about exploring the potential extent of an intellect. If that, by happenstance, tends to help people, then yay I guess, but to truly care that much would beget me being emotionally stupid about their judgments from the onset.

Funny how the exact same words can mean completely different things.

[295] Option 2

This is a laborious blog. I do not suggest you read it.

My new way of thinking…First and foremost, it’s pretty fucking weird that I should be able to adopt a “new” way of thinking in the first place. For sure, I should be able to view what I’m doing and be acting in relative accordance with my previous mode regardless of what I’d like to believe about some sort of “fresh start” or something “new.” Fuck it, you’ll have to trust that it’s actually different. All I can assure you is that I’m significantly more mentally fucked than you’ll ever want to give me credit for, and that capacity allows me even the preconception that I can pull off such a feat, which coincidentally, is enough. So there.

The first step I can tell for a new way of thinking, is to put aside all of the bullshit that I can consider old or beyond relevant modes of thought. I’ve been streaming Current TV and had the “duh mother fucker you should have realized this sooner” epiphany that I don’t need the Young Turks telling at me that giving money to the rich will not help the economy and that trickle-down economics is a fools idea. So, I put myself to task naming and thrusting aside the old conceptions of what people are arguing about. Screw your leftist or independent blog, the facts care not for labels. I don’t need more convincing on reality.

Human rights: everyone, no matter how intellectually infuriating and inept, is equal under the law and I don’t care who you fucking, what you’re snorting, what color you’ve dyed your skin or been born into, or even what magic you believe dictates our existence, you have a vote, you’re perspective matters to the extent that you can give it a voice, and I will be made to swallow it in an open forum debate as to the how we decide to govern society. BOOM, just wrote a four and a half line sentence, drunk, that is grammatically correct: eat a dick.

Personal goals: I want to open EVERY business. I want to be in your mind and up your ass. I want people to think Mystik or Nick P. or whatever conception I choose to thrust upon this world every waking moment because I want to be a process. I don’t want to be the rule or the ultimate dictum; I want to be the method by which things change. I want to be the discussion. I want to be a guide on the cycle. I want to be the endless pursuit of what could be, what can change, what it could mean, and what things could become. I want to black out and hit a fugue state state where things just rush into being in the order they are supposed to and to the needs by which they can serve.

I’m sorry, but I WIN. I will always win. I will put my mind and heart and whatever conception you have about a soul to it and I will win. I will talk till you have no choice. I will decide until something beyond me robs me of the ability. I will learn and follow the pattern. I will giggle at the idea that I don’t know what’s going on, like I don’t care, like I can’t change it, like it’s new, like it’s special, like I’m not capable of turning my thoughts to deconstructive tendencies. I will look like however I think you need me to look. I will fail in the ways you respect as failing. I can’t escape it! I can’t do anything but talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and fucking, fucking, talk. But that’s what I’ll do. I don’t know what else I could do.

So new way of thinking…It involves a greater resolve to “roll with the punches.” It lets people get away with a different and significantly greater degree of murder. It subjugates free will and marginalizes it to a variable point of obscurity. For as much as I think I want to be the arbiter of my fate, I do not pretend things didn’t come before me. Whether this has the proper bearing on where I’m to go and what I’m to do is yet to be established, but it’s important to play out as many scenarios as I can come to realize. Either something is dramatically wrong with this person who thinks that they have “all the answers” who wakes up at 2 and plays a game he hates whilst realizing he has a joke to show for the amount he wants to really express, or something deeper and significantly misunderstood is going on underneath it all that may be realized by shifting how I can manage to conceptualize myself. The very prospect puts butterflies in my stomach.

A significant part of me knows “to what end” is a ridiculous question. Any and everything I could accomplish can and will be erased by time. BUT to the extent that it existed in the first place, that can never be denied. To the extent it worked for what I advocated and worked for, fuck what happens a million years from now, I made the kind of world or developed a paradigm in which people didn’t have to hate what I hate. People, or moreover, the ones I give a shit about, didn’t have to struggle with the same shit I did. Forget the endless unbearable thoughts that I would love to say “you’re human now for suffering what I have.” Now I’ve really made the kind of world where one can simply exist and meditate and love and care and whatever hippie fuck idea you think should fit in next.

I need to be part of a cycle. I need to get used to the idea that I am simply part of a, potentially endless, trend of existence that goes from conscious to unconscious and back again and that merely observes what the fuck can happen. Maybe not what’s supposed to happen or what’s destined to happen, but everything that in fact can. The net energy level of the universe is 0. Not positive, not negative. Not hot or cold. It just “is.” So all the energy spent worrying, judging, pretending like we have a fucking clue, is merely balancing a bigger equation than we know. As infinitely up my own ass as I am, as much as I love to idealize Nick P. and what it means to be me and how no one has my history, I’m essentially an irrational concept thrown together by a confluence of inert forces that perhaps inevitably led to me writing this blog at this time. It’s more than a little humbling if such is the case.

You need to win too. You need to equate me, not de-thrown me. You need to realize just how much is and can be. You need to realize that you are the world. You are reality. You are the world! It’s the best defense against someone like me and it’s the only recourse to actually giving yourself a fucking prayer for the future or your meager conception of self in it. I will truly win when this is the message I get across. I will have beyond everything when you are drunk with power at a whisper of my words. You fuckers are just going to make me work for it though.

It’s ridiculous the amount you have to work before you can even get around to working. I would love to spend 23 hours a day on something that actually mattered and existed to forward the ideas I have come to believe can shape and change the actual landscape of reality. Turns out it’s not enough to graduate college, open a business, read and write until you can barely make sense of words, or maintain some level of moral high-horsery. No, you have to scrape. You have to take orders from absolute idiots who by virtue of being a little older or starting with a little more money put them in a position to try and tell you the kind of employee or person you need to be. You have to fight with your arms tied behind your back when representatives of a billion dollar company take bets on your success or failure and lie to you to the tune of thousands of dollars. You gotta have money to make money? By what method do you get that initial money without resenting yourself, the people you’ve worked under, and the very existence under which you struggled so hard to endure?

What if it isn’t about the lofty thoughts? What if it isn’t about the labor? What if it has nothing to do with “the future” or “potential?” What if always right now there’s something being completely overlooked or unaccounted for that puts the state of the world in order that can quell the disconcerting thoughts and align itself as the proper tract to walk? It’s not resolving myself to fate; it’s a commitment to ignorance. It’s “not even trying” (read: being effortless) because I’ll never actually know the extent of the consequences. It’s a commitment to less stress and judgment to see if my mind will still bring me round to where I’ve sat so comfortably inevitably anyway. It’s still a search for fulfillment, but I get to stop blaming myself so dramatically. It’ll hopefully find more words as I spend more time under its spell.

[294] Idealize The Man

What if complete and utter empathy is possible? What if it is not only possible, but required? Empathy as I understand it is about an understanding of feeling. It’s the infinite sadness of losing someone you love. Maybe it’s the awkward settling in to a new social scene. Some know the ability to be pushed to absolute rage that negates pain and the passage of time. You may talk to a therapist or best friend about your experiences and they’ll say “I understand” like everyone trained to engage/dodge where you’re coming from. But when is it the best talk? Is it platitudes and a rub on the back or when they immediately know what the next course of action is? Do you want someone to tell you they understand, or guide you through in a way that validates your feelings when the words are never enough? Understanding of feeling; true compelling empathy that moves someone in the way they know you need to be moved.

I argue (read: hold various strong stances towards or against things) constantly and talk a bigger game than anybody I know. I know that I do not translate my message that makes others feel it like I want them to. There is a lot of trouble you can get into if you relegate everything you think or feel to talk. Luckily, I act, but nowhere near the amount I talk. I sort of feel I’m in a perpetual dress rehearsal. It’s like one day I’ll get my TED talk and lay my case out so brilliantly and like Nick P, you will be forced to walk away from it moved to action. That feels like a worthy challenge or intellectual pursuit. I just have entirely too much theory and not enough data.

And that data can come in many forms. Before I’m anything, I want to be pragmatic. If I wasn’t able to pay the bills, maintain a friend, or even scrap the surface of pop culture or politics, I don’t think you should even bother with me. Data for instance with the turning my car into a cab thing. I already worked a cab job, I already know there’s room for more cabs and more getting drunk people home safe, and I know how much money there is to be made. Until I come home with a few hundred bucks in hand, I don’t even believe me. Granted, I find this odd, but if I didn’t believe it at least in some very important way, I wouldn’t pursue the endeavor in the first place. It’s a mismatching in understanding between expectations for the not experienced future and the ever present now. Maybe I just need to refocus on “ignoring the future.”

I wonder sometimes how much of my experience is because “I’m fairly certain this is the correct thing” played against “this is novel.” It really does take, what feels like something special, because it’s so few and fleeting, to get me excited. Accidents, taboos, spur of the moment decisions, stirring up emotions or conversations that I’ve forced into existence. It’s not so much “risk seeking behavior” as it is “something worth contemplating” or “something that might dramatically change the perspective of all involved.” When I think of the million and a half reasons people don’t do things, I always settle on the very fact of my decision to do so being the only one that matters. If I decide, I win. And people don’t empathize with that.

I can feel fear and uncertainty. I’m perpetually doubtful. I’m always going to go too far and have to make nice. But I’m still going to explore. I’m still going to take a chance. I’m still going to know that there is a simple enough take on a complex picture that can take the infinite uncertainty and see it tamed. It’s empowering in a way that you can’t help but be respectful. It’s “too much power” tempered by the endless perspectives it allows you work with and think about. It’s something I wish everyone felt. It’s something that should be freely exchanged via shared experience. In my mind, in many ways, it’s how I idealize humanity.

I don’t consider myself, necessarily, a good person. I know I’m frequently capable of going out of my way to be a bad one. Underneath these empty judgments about myself is a basic inability to call anything good or bad without a context. I have the freedom to forgive or condemn, not the obligation. I have the potential to flip a desk and crack a foreign fuck cab driver in the face equally to the potential to walk away. Whether you choose to accept circumstance or fate, given the many more ways I have to alleviate problems in my life, I found it “best” to walk away. May your god help you if you think I’d never do otherwise. With this in mind, I see my goal heavily characterized by a burden to create context.

For as good a shit talker as I can be, I need to make sure as many of my actions are far from judgments that don’t take into account how I think a future maybe healthy society should behave. This is a far cry from making excuses for peoples’ behavior. I’m not going to abstain from holding a door open for a fat person because “they need the exercise” for example. But as far as interpersonal relations go, I’m hard pressed to move much beyond basic civility, at least currently. This I think mostly comes from what I see from history. People need a thick skin, they used to have a thicker skin, being kind of dickish to dicks or dick-like things merely flavored the overall conversation. I also think it’s a nice spring board to the even harder conversations that require honesty, accountability, and introspection.

I suppose one of the methods I’m dying to see the results of is rewarding the personality. I literally want to enable people to be more of the kinds of people they are. I think there is a forgotten dividend to respecting respectable people and cultivating a culture of people you want in the future. I think there is a big guise we operate under where life is this thing that happens to us and we have to deal with. I mean, the very reason I don’t go insane is a commitment to creating something new and touting that which I find worth respect. I freely obligate myself to a world that could eventually make sense filled with people I don’t perpetually hate. I want to contribute to the pool of resources you can dip into to feel where I’m coming from. Because god knows it must be hard to follow a lot of these blogs.

In a weird way, I feel like when “I win” everyone does. And I’m not winning until everyone actually is. The fate of my happiness or action/inaction is intimately tied to the degree in which you actually feel it. I want to send a message that can be heard a billion different ways that results in a single thing; a feeling of infinite potential. I want us to arbitrate the context. I want us to write and rewrite and rewrite the rules until the exercise becomes as absurd as the presupposition. We need to feel what we idealize or we’re stuck with what we fear and hate. What we fear and hate will never “disappear” to the realm of merely informing our perspective until we know there’s something more. No, I don’t think it’s something that can be given to you by a sky daddy or guy in a fancy robe. So, that’s where I come in.

[293] Circle-Jerk

Humanity is a circle-jerk. I know I like to usually go with calling things patterns, but we’re much more passionate about jerking off. Take a look at a book store; “Here’s my struggle to success as a swimmer, tennis player, or minesweep champion.” You’re one dramatic picture away from taking a bunch of “cool and interesting” stories about yourself, slapping the picture on a cover, and calling it a book. Or look what happens to people when they reach a certain age. “Look how amazing my boy/girlfriend is!” Now is the time to start collecting as many other couples as we can so we can digress about those things couples do. How exciting! I initially started vocal musings about playing music. The most dramatic, up their own ass, incessantly focusing on their problems bands tend to be the “best” or get the most notoriety. Getting good at a sport, becoming a professional musician, or getting really good and fucking your spouse are these super “personal” things that become glorified and manifest as culture.

I’m not saying at this point that this is necessarily good or bad; I just want things to be acknowledged for what they are. Indiana University, for example, is a business. They may “bring the magic of music” for thousands of kids or help with scholarships, they also throw many in state students under the bus for Asians and kids from Long Island. Is it that you believe in the music program when you donate money, or do you fall in love with the atmosphere of prestige and project your personal experiences over the very obvious and business-wise pragmatism of the school? Recalling your experiences to obfuscate what actually happens is the kind of circle-jerking I refer to when I contemplate the demise of our species.

Now there is great utility in circle-jerking to be sure. God forbid everyone just remain completely unengaged or bored. I’m sure the quieting impact of videogames and music and relationships does a great deal for the masses. I just don’t know if the good outweighs the bad. I think the good can be thought of in a different way so the bad doesn’t get hidden away or made excuses for.

I’m concerned about this because I’m concerned for the well-being of people and how they organize their minds. If there is a more intelligent way to think about yourself or how and why you engage in activities, I think it should be preferred over defaulting to a set of behaviors that, upon reflection, only bring fleeting fulfillment, regret, or stress. It’s not hard to get into a relationship because that’s what you’re “supposed to do” and over a period of time come to lament who you’ve become or what you’ve perpetuated. You won’t have to look very hard for the kid who pursued most everything in their life at the beckoning of their parents, only to be shocked or horrified at the revelation that they may have had more of a choice the whole time.

If I don’t feel like I have anything to contribute, that’s when I start to get bored. If I didn’t seek to start a conversation or become better informed or challenge a perception for the goal of a clearer head and less stress, I wouldn’t say anything. The same reason I haven’t become dramatically better in guitar is the same I haven’t become insanely informed to the level I am/did with religion vs science stuff. I thought then that I could contribute something; so naïve, right? ;) When you’re not needed, and you really only get something from being someone for someone or about something, you just kind of sit back and watch. I simmer.

:: paused for 3 days and thusly picked back up ::

My current form of circle jerking is this cab job, real estate (to an extent), reading up on things that I hope upon hearing about them again later they will click a little faster, and brushing up on basic musical stuff. My position in society semi-forces me to do this because of bills. There always has to be something on the horizon or I can’t justify my life. Right now, I’m responsible to my friends and family who don’t really expect much more of me than what I’m doing now. It’s nice enough, but I can’t deny the utility of pressure. Many, if not most, people are “self-motivated” but the tools need to be there to incentivize.

I will however make a Declaration of Intent never to settle. The second I feel trapped or like some window is closing in over my life, I’m immediately hauling ass somewhere far and random. I’d rather get skinny not having too much to eat and sleep on a beach then feel complacent and complicit in an inadequate future I didn’t dictate for myself. If only I could get better at having other people tell me what to do. Or, what if I could just forget how to read and how to remember what I’ve read. No, magic forces of the universe, this isn’t a call to be maimed in a car accident to the point of full retarded or anything.

Can you tell I probably fell off my initial train of thought when this began? Go Cubs!

[292] Or, Such Is The Case Otherwise

Blaaaaaaahhhhhh. I write with a heavy heart. My “instinct” so to speak, is to just be mean. It’s kind of sad. Most of what I view in the world I pretty much generally hate, so I’m not terribly off in erring on the side of dick head. Alas, it is not always the case though and I need to find myself humbled in ignorance.

I assume. It’s a “necessary” evil to feel contented about your place in the world. I like to pretend that my perspective is informed after engaging in activities that most are not privy to. But at the end of the day I can be wrong. When you’re forced to be an honest person against your naïve initial interpretations, it’s a very interesting landscape. And that’s what I had to face tonight.

My fundamental hatred has its implications. My doubt and skepticism can be taken too far. I just so happened to unleash on a small business owner. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly quick to accept my retractions or clarifications, but still, I was selling myself as king asshole.

The problem was that I have firsthand knowledge of how much things cost. To me, “local” should by its nature be cheaper and more accessible, fuck the farmers market and the bullshit people will tell you. So when you’re selling something “local” for 2 or 3 dollars more than picking up the same thing form a Kroger shelf, I have a reaction.

It didn’t take dick for me to run the coffee shop, and that’s a part of the reason we were able to last as long as we did. Were it not for the rent, nothing would have prevented us from pulling in pretty nice figures. How am I to believe that anything else is so dramatically more complex or more expensive? If you own the land you’re farming, if you collaborate with other hippie fucks in town, and if you source and sample your menu form the readily available non-GMO esc foods around, forgive me if I think you’re a dick for charging 5 or 6 bucks.

I think small business is the key to jump starting the economy. I think the people making an effort to think locally and sustainably is important. But give me a fucking break, I won’t pretend that growing your own shit in you r backyard or sourcing form every hippie fuck within a ten mile radius justifies a higher price. It’s a bullshit argument. And the smug look of satisfaction staring back at my drunk or otherwise ass does not change the fucking numbers. Either you as the face is being scammed or everyone else is just as keen to the scene of how much you can milk the idea of local goods.

When I tell you, “You can eat a dick” it’s for this reason. I’m not convinced you’re thinking far enough. I don’t think you have the care to hold the people you source from accountable. I think at the end of the day it’s about your personal circle jerk. Whoopy fuck you decided to hit up every “organic” and “local” venue that touts itself important. How ever fucking blind you are to the self-righteous pride you’re feeling“ providing” the service that you do. How easy it is to look down on people who don’t know your numbers.

I’M NOT CONVINCED!!! Our default is to be fucked up! We fundamentally are going to strive for the bare minimum. We may try to feel like something more, something significant, but it’s all a dance. It’s a psychological playground of self-righteous indignation that we don’t believe or don’t fight for or don’t understand. I’m just as empty a pipe-dreamer in striving for my goals without the philosophical underpinnings that answer “why.” This is not an easy message to get across when your initial position is to tell someone to “eat a dick.”

But again, who fucking cares? It isn’t worth it. Even if it were it would be short lived and ill remembered. It would be the grandstand and folly to think my digressions and explanations of the day’s events translated into genuinely giving a shit.  

[291] Abstraction Distraction Attraction Reaction

I need to better define so as not to get lost in abstraction.

My basic needs are met, so in a way I’ve peaked. I can say that I don’t think you need to know strife and pain to appreciate being perpetually comfortable. I think strife and pain come out of boredom or when intellectual needs are not met. Whether it is working through a difficult problem or just a compelling distraction, engaging the mind seems to be one of humanity’s biggest projects. I’m currently interested in the “why” people pick the veins they do. I need to find a better definition for what I try to justify doing, because currently I’m doing relatively dick.

Patterns are my best friend and potentially worst enemy. How I choose to define something says everything about what role that thing will or won’t play in my future. If something is “just a job” I will sound and behave like someone who just wanders about town just doing jobs for petty cash. If something is “too big to be handled correctly/currently” by myself, it gets filed away like most of the problems I concern myself with. If something fundamentally feels like “spinning my wheels” or an “empty gesture” I may come across as disrespectful or non-caring.

I understand that it’s all a matter of what you work towards, the perspective you force your brain to have, or the La La Land you can trap yourself in. What I perceive are people who are comfortable enough. They have “a job.” They have “a significant other” or “their friends.” They are filled with “their opinions” and they’ve served them long enough to get the things “they want.” This system or pattern or basic M.O. makes me uncomfortable. Not the healthy skeptical level of discomfort, but the “maybe I should re-evaluate my entire charge in life and thoughts about people” kind.

It bugs me because this propensity in people may speak to something absolutely fundamental and absolutely overlooked by me. And I still may not have a way to define it that makes sense to me. I look at the opinions of the optimists. They say things like “when things get to the point of ultimate shittiness, that’s when we’ll do our best.” Or they’ll go on about how technology will save us all. Some just site all the historical examples of how we’ve managed to not go extinct or take their perspective of time and take for granted “one day and one way or another” things will look just as desperate and terrible then as they do now and we’ll “overcome” if only our imminent denial of the current problems.

To what end? I always go back to this. The only time in my life I’ve felt that loss of self in being so uber motivated is when I thought I had “all the answers” or at least “the best and most reliable” method for bringing about what was correct and true into the world. It was fundamentally coming from a position of naivety. The more I argued, the more I learned, the less people around me cared or knew what I was talking about. The intellectual leaders I went to seemed content to rehash the same speeches and move on to their next book. Then I get my view shaped more by brain and social science. I become disillusioned by how easy and quick it is to get lost in semantics and connotation. I decide friends are better to have than a fight. Then, boom, one day I kind of stop giving a shit after 3 ½ years.

The only steady parameter I have in life right now is to maintain a basic level of comfort. When I have the tools to endeavor into something new, I will do so, and I will treat it as a game. Everything I do has a flavor of superficiality and it’s not intentional. I know everything I change can be changed back. I know the story in my head is never the one someone is going to receive exactly as I tell it to myself. I know that most people are mostly concerned with themselves and what makes them comfortable. That comfort can be reached infinitely more ways and by infinitely easier methods than I may prescribe. But it all feels empty; logically and honestly empty. “Mattering” simply becomes the extent to which you can argue something does. My problem is that I appear to have nothing to argue that doesn’t feel like mental masturbation.

So much of the world seems self-evident to me that I’m losing that passion to keep saying the same things over and over. I’m not feeling like I have anything to prove. My justifications aren’t for you so they remain as explanations of me. The irony of knowing you can do everything and then feeling like you’re doing nothing. Simply knowing that the “everything” and “nothing” go as far as you’re willing to see them is the whole point. All you can do is ground your decisions in feelings; taking cues from your environment. How lucky to not be in complete control over how we feel…right?

[290] Open Source Manipulation

You should be able to talk about anything. My favorite topics are religion, relationships, and “real life.” All of which I hope to intertwine in a beautiful web of thought now. Stand back and be amazed.

I’m a manipulator. What it means to be a manipulator is to not come off as trying to manipulate. It’s the soul, deliberate spelling, rule. If they see what you’re doing, unless you deliberately made them see it, you’re doing it wrong. As a manipulator, I’m very sensitive to other people trying to manipulate. Mostly, because they do it horribly wrong. A fun fact about the manipulation game is that it is open to everyone to play. You can see the strings as easily as me. You can play the same cards because we all hold a complete deck.

My claim of manipulation gives me a very particular perspective on what it means to call something “real life.” I see the life I can infer about you. I hear what you tell me. I find out what other people feel about you and me. But mostly, I endlessly doubt that any of it is the complete story. To claim an informed perspective, it means I need to have one seemingly “beyond” or “outside” yours. There’s the natural one we have via our specific histories. Then there’s the one you choose to have to actively or passively shape your world. I like to err on the side of an active shaping.

Actively shaping involves honesty and responsibility most of all. Therefore, when I see people who passively get shaped, I’m skeptical of how honest or responsible they are being, namely with feelings. What are some topics that are just utterly feeling laden? You guessed it; religion and relationships. Interestingly enough, people tend to claim a lot of active shaping while being all but slaves to the various consequences of their beliefs and people in their lives. The shape this problem takes is…tricky.

Apparently, there are some people who are utterly terrified to talk religion with me. I use the word terrified because they must have a genuine fear that I could talk them out of their beliefs. Otherwise, offering such a sentiment wouldn’t really make sense. If you have undying faith, well, I gave up arguing rational verses irrational a long time ago, so you’ve nothing to fear. If you claim to be reasonable, then we both know going into it that I’m, if not persuasive, very likely to make you think, and likely not in the direction you wish to currently. The only real problem is your ability to be honest and cope.

Where’s this ego come from? Trick question, it isn’t about my ego or what I feel when making my argument. In the same way that I could get in a car, and subsequently run you over, is how I would deliver my message. Nothing about how you feel or think about cars that contradicted their capacity to run you over would matter. That’s how logic is supposed to work. When it doesn’t work, you move out of the way and tell me a god whispered in your ear to do so.

That ability to see things magically is dangerous. The inability to grasp the confluence of forces and influence the world has on you, and you have on it back, arrests and degrades your potential. Your relationship to a god is the exact same as your relationship to anything else. It’s an idea first. Ideas are intertwined. Ideas overlap. One bad idea can spark another bad idea and pollute aspects of good ideas. If you’re not willing to work on solidifying how to denote and be responsible for your good and bad ideas, I think this is a bad thing.

The expectations that come along with ideas seem to be the problem. We all feel them. We don’t all put them where they need to go. If you go into a relationship and you have all these ideas about love or boyfriends and girlfriends or the magic of a blessed union, how long do you think it takes to feel the first pains of anxiety? When do you start to realize that something just isn’t right? Is it the first fight? Is it what you whisper to yourself during the times that are supposed to be special? Is it amidst the regret of not getting something else? Not learning facts or caring to acknowledge human behavior can do that to you.

That’s why I’m persuasive. I know your fear. I know your anxiety. I know that when I’m having a conversation about god, I’m not really speaking to the intellectual stopping point of “well you can never actually prove otherwise.” I’m speaking to your emotionality. I’m speaking about the relationships you may damage. I’m thinking about the fear of reevaluating yourself or the fear of being alone. You don’t care how much I know about the bible or science stuff. You didn’t come for a history lesson or digression of logical fallacies. Well, you didn’t come at all, but that’s the incorrect sentiments you think I care about when talking with you.

When you make excuses, I’m concerned. When you’re afraid or angry the same thing applies. When you can’t talk about anything, I’m convinced you have a problem; an addiction to bullshit maybe, or phobia of self-exploration. Granted, I’m speaking to the habits of excuses, anger, and fear. It’s one thing to get into a heated discussion, it’s another to be perpetually put off from addressing something or creating problems where none need exist. I’m happy to adjust myself if you disagree with the language, but don’t use that as an excuse to run from the subject matter.

And isn’t that how religion, relationships, and “real life” are dealt with? This is all I’ve known, don’t attack it, because then you’re just an asshole. This is who I love so you could never understand it, you’re just a fool for even trying. This is what I’m afraid of and how dare you throw it in my face like I don’t have a protective unbreakable bubble. MOOOOM, HE’S BREAKING MY BUBBLE!

Working yourself out of a faith-based mindset takes time. Working yourself into a healthy relationship takes time. Mulling over shit like dying and failure and fear will consume a fair amount of head-space. I understand things to be a process with many layers. The more you unpack those layers, the more you see the patterns, the more you can address the problems, and the more you can put aside the fear of changing your mind. Once you get there, you hold the power, you’re the manipulator.

Your feelings become yours to address, not to suffer. Your friends are hand-picked, not the kids you happen to live next to. Your ideas get the time and attention they need to work on you positively. This is what I want for people, my friends. I care about your mental health and I don’t think living a lie is healthy. It doesn’t matter if you even regard it as a lie, it’s not semantics, it’s the effect you have on the world. If I’m a part of that world, and all you send is negative effects, I know you’ve something to work on.

If you’re willing to take on the invented problems: guilt over sin or sex or other people's stressors and bad ideas, you’d think you’d choose an effective solution. But, overwhelming people don’t. They stick with what’s comfortable and what they think they know. They hurriedly rush past, and thus bury curious thoughts. They regret, they get angry, and they make it your problem. If you care about them, it’s your problem, and if you don’t, it’s even more so. Be manipulative. Take control of your mind and don’t blame me for being right about something. Don’t be afraid of how you feel and push your limits. You know what you’ll find; something new to be afraid of. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

[289] Free Form Formulation

Fair warning: I think I have something to say. I haven’t sussed out explicitly what it is.

It all boils down to thoughts. It all boils down to the thoughts right now. Any discussion of reality that ignores what you actually think in this ever present moment just misses the point. It seems that the degree to which we respect and acknowledge the thoughts, right now, is our subjective conception of character. Whether we choose to act on them, is the story we lay out for others to tell of our character.

I feel trapped in a fundamental and inescapable duality. It is something I describe as A Game that I have simply no luck in explaining to people who aren’t playing the same one I am. The more I conceive of the conditions of the game, the more doubtful I am of the premise. As in, when I say my group of friends is the example, the projection onto the world at large, the more I feel I’m exploring my place amongst them over their general characteristics.

I may have an impossibly terrible conception of self. If only the logical conclusions are to be drawn from semantics and relative subjective experience are to be respected, the foundation of some personally responsible being with traits x, y, and z might as well be a fart you try to catch and paint blue. By all accounts of my “rational” and ever meager grasp on things, I’m fundamentally irrational. I’m inert material that can spontaneously explode. I’m presumably at the will of everything that’s come before.

One of the few things I trust is change. I don’t buy for a minute any strongly held opinion about anything given the right conditions to change it. In a small minded way this translates to “not caring.” It’s not a frustration or an inability to cope with the world that makes me want to throw my arms up. It’s not an utter disregard for “you” or how we may relate. I think this serves a dual purpose. One, it insulates me from taking undue advantage. Two, it allows me the “eh” elbow room conceptualize various judgments and behavior.

I don’t think this is how most people operate. I think, to the greater extent, people are self-conscious. I don’t want to undersell my conception of self-conscious. The anxiety and doubt associate with me me me is a vein. The prospective future you think you’ll acquire. It’s the endless fear that you’ll do something that’s so “beyond” what you feel capable of conceiving yourself doing. It’s a contingent existence. Given my x understanding of things and c constraints I can plot my life along y. It hinges you to the levels of distraction or comfort. It’s what you lament when you’re forced to deal with life after a tragic event.

Yet, it’s what we’re all reduced to as a default. To be pragmatically free is an exercise of will and disregard that, beyond the implications of destabilizing the system at large, could ironically preempt an expression of pure instability. And we humans need structure. Sooner or later you’re not really free to be a functioning heroin addict.

I suppose I want more people involved. When I speak of the game, I alienate. When I test waters, I make people angry. When I flirt with “truth” I feel marginally immoral and don’t respect myself. Of the many ways I can take advantage, I haven’t learned the secret of getting people the clue. I can’t tune them to a frequency. I can play, dance, scheme, and utterly shape the environment, sure. But an implicit understanding and connection may well be a fairy tale.

I don’t really know what to do beyond keep playing. The best and worst service I do to myself is to regard my actions as, hopefully and at the very least, mostly nondestructive. Will my boredom and disregard win out against my odd and potentially naïve views about respect? For anyone paying attention, the answer should be obvious.

[288] Judging Judging Judging Judging Judging

There is an artful and tactful way people can go about being passive aggressive. It comes from a perceived level of acceptance, or at least nonresistance, from the group. It latches onto an easily stigmatized subject, and it’s almost always shaded by laughter or superficial “shameful” bow of the head and grin. My concern is why people feel compelled to go passive aggressive in the first place. My thought is that it comes from some level of insecurity. In the spirit of this insecurity, I’ll digress.

I try very hard to be what I say about myself. Not all the jokes hit. Not all the ideas rest neatly in your heads. But the last thing I think you can say about me is that I’m faking it. Now this seems all well and good when you look at the surface bullshit things about me and think I’m professing my realness like some overzealous teenager. I’m not trying to flip the bird and scream I don’t give a fuck. I’m trying to say that I hope my example translates how I mean it to and not what people would project or assume.

I feel free, to the extent I’m able, but there is no better way to describe what I crave or wish for other people. Just, at the very least, be as much you as you actually can or have ever even hinted at wanting to be. If you’re cute, stop pretending otherwise. If you’re smart, sometimes it’s safe to shove humble up your ass. If you’re unsure, the amount of fear and anxiety associated is directly proportional to how often and whether you act in spite of it all. Own it all.

Now that I’ve established my friends as the case study, I feel it ever more important to state things plainly You are never and not alone. Do you understand that? Friendship is a support group. The ones who don’t support, don’t make it into the group. You’re not stranded on the highway. You’re not alone in a fight. You’re never too broke or without a second option or chance. This scrapes the surface of the commitment I want towards my friends.

Fun fact; Of course I’m talking about you, but I’m not JUDGING, dun dun dun, you. I may have to talk callously or freely associate and circle around until I get somewhere, but guess what, I’ve made peace, to the extent that I can, with the fact that people don’t reach the same places at the same time and I don’ t seek to make that your problem. I don’t want to add to your potential fears or insecurities. I don’t tell you I think you’re cute or intriguing because I secretly had some shitty thought I’m trying battle against. I’m not stoking an ego out of pity. My head isn’t racing with excuses for your behavior; I’m not trying to justify some action of mine that treats you differently. I’m hopefully, clearly, going to be me, and what’s apparently less clear is I genuinely want you to be you.

And there’s the rub.

I think I see more in you than you wish to reflect back towards me. I’d like to just claim “super perception” and put another sticker next to the word ego, but I’ll go self-conscious about it instead. Am I doing a bad job at being a friend? Am I not a safe investment? Am I a liar or impossibly naïve to an extent that it hurts me or my friends? Am I whitewashing my conception of myself as a person with an overbearing or over extended character? I think I do an injustice to my cause by scaring people away or giving them an easy out to compartmentalize my behavior. If such is the case, it simply won’t do.

Whether I’m dead on in my observations or experiments, I’m ever so rarely completely off the mark. My best guide is history. I notice curiosity or affection. I can hear doubt. There’s a difference between the “healthy skepticism” of being someone perpetually in thought, and the laborious monkey on your back reminding you to “keep it cordial.” Seriously, if that’s all you want, we’re never going to be that good of friends. I respect people who take risks, and honesty tends to carry with it a potentially high level for being risky.

I can’t be a better person if I can’t be kept in check or focused on the correct things. If you genuinely believe something about my character or commentary, we’re not going to stop being friends because you brought it up. I feel like there is a powerful fear that “things will change” or someone will flip a switch in how they treat you if things got too serious. I don’t want to feel that about you, and you certainly don’t need to fear it from me. Passionate discourse and self-exploration will only endear me to you more. But these things apparently take time, and very deliberate dialogue. If my understanding of most people is they barely grasp how or why they do things, try squeezing workable or motivated assessments out of that.

My issue is a false perception of peaking. It’s really just frustration for all I see and the interesting potential conclusions or conversations not taking place. I get too brazen and bored and just kind of destroy little bridges because they’re only gearing up to take me where I’ve been before. It’s severe enough for me to talk myself out of being a pervert or too flirty if that’s any indication. I can’t qualify myself as healthy if I’m making a game out of my friends. I can’t feel or give respect if we’re not capable of recognizing and discussing potentials. Neither of us is that special and yet potentially the most important persons to each other given some circumstance. Does that conception wax and wane like the feelings of a confused teen? Or is it based on something insidiously honest and intrinsic to the interplay of our characters?

I may not always be able to guess or infer what you’ve genuinely hidden away. I will always notice what you explicitly show me. I don’t think enough rules and understandings have been agreed upon in order to address some topics without them inevitably degrading into a fight or awkward situation; that only serving to impede conversation even further. But I don’t feel the need for the insecurity and thrive on trying to be trustworthy. The more “risks” you take in how we relate to each other, the better person I think I can become. I take a chance every time I open my play book and very often when I open my mouth. I’ll let you freely misinterpret or misunderstand me, but god forbid it hangs you up on some final judgment. We’re works in progress till the day we die.

Barring some unforeseen overblown mind boggling realization of incompatibility, I’m going to be your friend if you’ll have me. I want to know everything I’m good for. Test me. I'll just go to waste otherwise.