[565] Lights, Camera, Cut!

One of my favorite things to think about is the media. We talk a lot about how much we're saturated to the point that we're strangled and cut off from what it used to mean to be human. We say that the Golden Age of television is bringing us world class art from all walks of life and allowing for voices to be represented that never were before. We don't really know what to feel about it all because it moves quickly and everything about how we develop is slow and reactionary. We at the very least think that it speaks to the ever-obscure idea of “we.”

I've criticized the idea of “we” before. I usually state that “we” don't do shit, and that it's a small group of intentioned or riled-up individuals who enact changes with sometimes lasting consequences. “We” is often the scapegoat for when we didn't show up or put in the work. That's “we's” psychological utility. You know it pretty explicitly with your experience towards sports or maybe your allegiance to school or perhaps you're fairly patriotic and subconsciously have really taken in the ooo-rahs and chest beating of your native country. The mystics and homeopaths take it a step further and transform the we into things like a “collective conscious” that gets all sorts of powers as it gets “raised” or wishes hard enough.

In areas of moral ambiguity we rely on we. It doesn't have to be asked where the behavior came from or why it started, we're all doing it, so it's cool. One of my favorite observations of monkeys was them training new members in their group not to do something that no monkey in that current group ever experienced first hand. Say they'd get shocked trying to climb a ladder to grab some bananas. The first group sees the brave monkey get hurt enough times, spreads the word, it's now common knowledge. Slowly remove the monkeys that know and replace them with one's that don't, sooner or later, before a new monkey even tries to climb the ladder, the others will step up and slap him down.

When you think about the evolutionary origins of man and the endless amount of experiences species go through, it's a marvel that we ever coalesce into relative agreement at all. Me begrudging “we” when no two brains look alike but for the physical properties of the matter they consist of seems inadequate by itself. Of course, when and where there's reason to celebrate what “we've” accomplished, we should. It's shared goals that brought us our largest wonders of the world and allowed us to explore what's beyond it. And it's right there you come up against the important ingredient for whether or not “we” succeeds or fails.

You have to have a goal.

Despite what motivational posters or inspirational memes might try to allude to, a goal in and of itself isn't de facto a good thing. The angry tea-bagger's goal was to get you to suck on their angry nuts, and we're sucking away. The goal of the whole movement that “looked past” the magnificent show of bigotry, hatred, and incoherence was to appease their nerves and ideas precisely like a child will scream...and scream...and scream...until someone engages it. A constant refrain in the news right now is that democrats have “lost touch” with the “regular people.” One might muse about their increasing coziness with lobbying groups, or their smug bubbles of the kind of entitlement those happy white family shows that go on for way longer than anyone understands why. Their goal simply had little to do with a “we” that actually included those who felt they could play the game.

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TV absolutely fascinates me. I don't see just wildly creative and nuanced depictions of life in every episode. I don't go through the best kind of existential crises that allow me to celebrate while reevaluate all of the fictional influences in my world or how they mock up against the real people in my life. It fascinates me because I want to keep watching. I want to see thousands of people come together and tell a story. I want to see fundamental truths about what it is to exist get filtered through Police-Doc-Lawyer-Firefighter drama. I want to see bravery in the face of dragons, murderers, and pregnancy tests. I want to see someone reliably do just what I knew they were gonna do, and I want to be shocked when they deviate. Before it's some medium that seemingly secludes and depresses us, it's a story box.

Maybe the problem with TV is less to do with there being too much of it, but that there's nothing else available instead of it. It's filling an immense cultural void. It's a void I constantly talk about in my angry finger-pointing about friends not pulling together to create their own show. How could they? Who's buying them the cameras, the lights, the food, coordinating the rehearsal dates, schooling the children, keeping sets clean and consistent and out of the hands of crazies and thieves? Who's the actual job creator and not just the brazen figure-head credited with endless empty lip-service? That's always who I wanted to be. It is my base desire to set the conditions, if I often fail at the standard, and watch the show of my dreams play out. And I've been absolutely stuck for what feels like forever.

I've been trying to understand what it means to be a “high anxiety” type of person. Like, I know I'm cool, but I've never been the cool kid so to speak. Those people who's blood-pressure you might take while their house is burning down and while their heart pumps at an even 45 they use the flames to light a cigarette. Not me. I'm cursing myself for not having bought insurance and then the line of circumstances that ensured I never really had the money to buy insurance, even if I did, but it's a predatory industry, and the one time I tried it bled me dry and yada yada yada my brain takes off.

That lack of cool though has never really held me back. I'm not afraid to stand up for myself, even if being a large and tall person helps. I take calculated risks like trying to run the coffee stand, or get 100 kids drunk under my roof, or spend the cash to buy land and figure out how to build a house. I keep making the inappropriate jokes, dance like no one's watching, karaoke the fuck out of songs I don't know. I whip my Deva Curled hair back and forth and I've ran around naked in public on more than a few occasions. You never get to see how slow or fast my heart is beating. If I am in fact a high anxiety type person, it shouldn't or doesn't matter.

That is, until now. Now I caught the feedback loop of anxiety about my plans and future and tied it to my cheater method of obtaining cash. Now, because my day to day is endless lounging and binging I have nothing that rips my mind away from my next screening appointment or thoughts about disaster back-up plans when I can't get it under control. In the most important sense the stress, the danger, and the consequences are all as fake for me as they are for a character about to get eaten by a dinosaur, but you'll watch someone get chased and worry about them every time even if you've seen the movie and know dinosaurs don't exist. My brain doesn't care. It's reliving the drama of the first episode of “Nerves” like it's stuck on repeat and someone locked the door to leave.

In that way, my brain fascinates me as much as any TV show might. Why are you watching? There's a significant argument that says I don't really have a choice. I don't begrudge myself for the amount of media I consume because the alternatives are to freeze, wander around, or adopt any of the behaviors one might associate with the awkward loner guy who's way too into conversing with you at the bar. I try to put in a fair amount of caveats when I'm harping on you to change something about whatever life you lead for analogous reasons. The difference is the imagination for the goal of alternatives.

Certainly there are actors that take roles to keep the bills paid. The millions of terrible movies you've never heard of that exist for that reason, and it's why you get to make fun of “tough guys” from a classic blockbuster who appeared overseas hocking candy in a colorful outfit. It wasn't a discussion about whether the role would help them understand themselves or inspire other thespians. It's still a business, you gotta eat. The problem is thinking of yourself in purely business terms. You can't just be a commodity to be priced and dressed and positioned for some insidiously obscure notion of “maximum effect.” By all means feed yourself, but keep going to auditions because you know there are rolls that we will talk about for as long as we survive.

Right now, my story may involve delivering pizzas or learning to be a bank teller. I may stock shelves or wash pets. I need to keep the bills paid, and if my brain wants to watch a stupid show instead of let me walk in and pick up a check for a few thousand and move on, then so be it. In my imaginary world where I get to create elaborate sets and cast brilliant inspiring people, I never wrote that it would happen without the montage of everything demeaning and distracting in between. The main character can be relatable for any number of reasons, but who says the negative aspects won't prove to be the most compelling?

And really, it's no more or less frustrating than the last forever years I've been resigned to my television screens. I know the story I want to tell. I know my goal isn't malicious or nearly as naïve as any singular profession or decision I make in service to it might suggest. I know how expensive it is to buy all the cameras and how much time it takes to set up the lights. The rest of the crew, cast, writers and producers though, seem to be on strike. Why would they want to watch my show? What about it couldn't they pull themselves away from? It's not even paying the bills.

I have a lot to prove. I still need to be much bigger and louder than I've ever been. What I expect out of myself will never die donning the “wrong” outfit getting paid more and less than anyone ever deserves. It won't taste any less sweet in my thirties than if I get it by next year. People won't need it any less whether they feel too old already or haven't gotten here yet. And I want to be able to feel the sense of pride and accomplishment that any show-runner must have to create a hundred episodes of something you think is absolutely terrible. Without that mission, that shared conception and goal, we're not even extras, as “extra” implies there was enough of something there to begin with.

Anyone got a better show in mind than mine?

[564] Easy As Pi

As my conception of “progress” has been obliterated, I now turn my eyes to the word “success.” If progress falls apart because its reality is already realized yet not acknowledged, then success fails in how it highlights and celebrates all the parts we’re not willing to pay attention to. Adversity ill-defined is often necessary or equal parts what made up the shimmering successful whole. You only need to think about how we delight in stories where the winner finds out things aren’t always as good as they’re chalked up to be.

I try to conceive of a successful conversation. As of late, I primarily disavow the alleged utility or purpose we may claim in engaging with them. For me personally, I can draw a lot of personal insight or maybe develop a new tact for engaging with different kinds of people. This blog starts out picking apart a singular word after referencing another singular word I’ve devoted a few blogs to picking apart previously. The details matter, to me. Taking all the time it takes to diffuse the inflammatory connotations, quell the beating heart, or disperse a headache will almost always be the one-sided therapy session.

This is how I can confidently claim that I never have won nor will “win” a conversation. I win by writing blogs instead of putting holes in walls or drinking too heavily. Another way to state that is by coping with stress in ways that don’t result in physical damage. Who knows the toll it’s taking on my brain, but at least the outside world can still look pretty enough.

The reason I don’t win is because I zero in on topics people do not deal with and I do not concede points that aren’t explained. You can’t just call me a liar, you have to quote me. You can’t just sidestep answering something and claim nothing you offer is good enough. An answer would have been good enough. You can’t constantly strum the refrain about something you think is wrong with me if you’ve no ability to maintain the topic at hand. This is all crap I’ve stated many times before, if we need even more evidence that there’s never been some measure of “success” I’ve achieved in trying to talk about this.

Take the rationale out into the world though. You can have “successful” lobbyists who dismantle protections for the greater population. The groups with the most money are celebrated. Say you get the high paying job while everyone beneath you gets fired. Mind you, this isn’t me pivoting and arguing for equality. We simply measure success as superficially as anything else, or not at all. Is it success when you convince people to adopt your dogma? Am I a “successful friend” or perhaps “mate” in allowing my relationships to flourish on harmful lies?

Yes. For most people, the answer is absolutely yes. They’ll say everyone has their thing, it’s no more or less harmful than someone else’s, for the sake of sanity and togetherness, yes. That’s good enough for you, it isn’t for me. I don’t suffer “loneliness” by needing someone in my life to fawn over or in needing them to fall madly in love with me. I suffer a loneliness of spirit. That spirit lives and dies by its ability to recognize and work and perhaps semi-obsess over discrepancies and details. It’s a scientific ethos. It’s never going to be 100% and the more often you insist that’s the position I hold, it’s only your fault for thinking we’re getting nowhere.

Maybe you’re familiar with Less Wrong. If not, and you’re patient, you’ll find the kind of people who do like I do and maybe you’ll stop feeling so defensive when someone approaches how you speak like a case study. We’re collectively, blissfully, angrily, unaware of how little we’re saying. I try to warn you, if what I’m saying cuts you and what you’re saying is “never good enough,” try acknowledging there’s a knife.

[563] Escape From New York

What do we make of a voice that can’t be heard? Already I start off, “if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” But what is the hard and fast reality to our reaction to voices that aren’t heard? Or what if it’s one of your many voices that you didn’t even realized stopped talking?

I saw a heat map of schools and their performance on the SAT in New York City. The poor neighborhoods looked abysmal, the rich shiny and bright. A map like that isn’t really displaying performance though, is it? A map like that displays our cultural attitude. You already knew the poor, likely black, areas were going to underperform. You intuitively can exist anywhere in the world and infer correctly any number of things about the populations.

We pay so much lip service to being smarter, moral, or caring. We prefer the abstractions of hope and change as opposed to the work. I’m not putting down this computer to rush over to New York and figure out a way to move the money around. In fact, I have no control over that even were I to try. You’re watching the extent of capacity and impact. I can talk about it. I can tell you I don’t think it’s fair. If you gave me a petition I might sign it. If you marched on Washington, I’d try to make it. But you, and I, would have to be voices that were heard first.

We elected Hitler 2. We did it because people only know how to speak in the language of anger, fear, and distrust as the default. They knew their voices didn’t matter anymore than mine, so they optioned for burning everything to the ground. This also isn’t a joke. Climate change is burning or flooding somewhere in this moment, and our “leaders” pretend otherwise. There’s the feeling that if we can’t get what we’re due, no one should. What we’re due of course still predicated on our mythology regarding how smart, moral, caring, hopeful, and capable of change we are.

I know my best hope in life is to go down swinging. I don’t think “we” do anything nor will save ourselves. I think the handful of people with access to underground bunkers will do their best to populate space or keep the memory of this species alive until it can fully integrate with computers. I think our fundamental irrationality about our place and specialness will proudly work in service to our undoing. It’s the weirdest kind of crisis of identity to try and have a voice in such a noisy and disorienting mess.

I can always point to the superficial nature of my existence. Say I genuinely never figure out how to get back into another study. I’ve oriented my life so that 10 hours a week making what I did back in high school still pays my bills. Mind you, that’s my worst case scenario. As long as I’m still healthy I’ll keep referencing that. I haven’t been so motivated as to get cash advances or start selling my shit. One way or another I’m going to find 1 person in the 350 million in this country who will pay me to farm my land. Despite this, none of my presumed security and planning is really living yet.

What is the language of a friend group that only exists online? Who are we to each other in popping in and out a few times a year? I call it an old cliche, but it is a choice. It’s a statement about what’s more important than hanging out or banding together. For me, the sacrifice is to eventually put that ability at the forefront. I’m not working a dead end job so I can safely proclaim lack of funds and time over and over. I’m not traveling this year so I can afford the land that hopefully lets me travel indefinitely. I don’t talk about maps that speak to how we routinely don’t give a shit about the poor or minority groups unless I genuinely try to support the effort to better account for and help them.

Because again, what is a like and share? What other part of your nature gets silenced to the routine and box you’ve been put in? Are our anxieties even ours? I always say I’ve been driven to things like drug studies. Many of us got the degree first, I tried opening the business, I tried working for a number of start-ups, I tried working multiple jobs on top of each other, and while the experience is certainly indispensable, the reality is that many forces larger than me are making it extremely hard to thrive.

Thriving is the operative metric for humanity. To thrive suggests an underlying health and reassurance that simply doesn’t exist without planning and accountability. As long as business moguls wince and cringe at the idea of putting money into the system they endlessly exploit, neither can thrive. Superficially you’ll hear boasting of stock prices or lines around the block, but in the real world it’s a brain and spirit suck to a suicidal degree.

Am I the same person who can run up and down theater rows for an entire usher shift? Can I spend 6 months with one other person showing up every day to sell coffee and then almost every night to flip burgers? Will I cobble together thousands of sources into something actionable and coherent and not just an opaque mess of “data?” Will I ever find myself in a position that affords people license to dream and experiment in a way not unlike a compelling movie? As far as my conception of myself is concerned, that’s what it is to thrive. Byron adopts charges not to just power trip and tell them what to do. It’s the ability to wake them up to an instilled mindset about their capacity and worth that’s only handed down in a corrupted form from the wealthy and reinforced by the poor.

I can’t get over the idea that with better collaboration or group discussion, real or big things could have been moving already. Nobody wants to take risks. Better, nobody recognizes the true degree of the risks they’re taking already. I don’t want to see another market crash and half my friends end up jobless. I don’t want to see the health effects of demoralizing work and strained relationships. I don’t want to see every wildest dream and necessary struggle to get us to a place that’s safe and sustainable be subsumed by insecure nihilism masquerading as strength and maturity. And who cares about my voice that can’t be heard or that that’s all I believe is in store? Strike that, the smartest people in the room who track and speak on these things routinely can elaborate on why that’s in store.

I get so conflicted when I read entrepreneur forums that have some millionaire talk about what they managed to pull off in 2 years “with a few hundred to bootstrap myself initially.” No matter how pretty the post looks or details they fill in, success like that is contingent on so much more than working your ass off. Every trip you take across town is gas money. Every friend you nonchalantly asked for help someone else may not have. The “niche” you carved out wasn’t niche and you didn’t carve, you just had access. It’s not even enough for me “just have land” as I’ve been on the phone with every organization remotely related to farming trying to identify and stockpile people who’d know what to do in an instant. If things ever worked as straightforwardly as success stories proclaim, theirs wouldn’t be the 1 post in several hundred or thousand that gets so much attention. If I ever get to a point of lofty comfort and ignorant proclamations, see my writing history about how many shitty desperate and confused days my success really cost.

Sorry if this didn’t amount to much. I don’t really know what I should be doing. I’ve made the calls. I’ve got another screening lined up. I don’t have anywhere to be that isn’t going to just be a rather pointless waste of money. If I could escape this moment, I would.

[562] I Want It All, I Want It Now

I may have just stumbled into a bit of insight about myself. Now on something of a mad dash to leave no stone unturned in finding someone to rent or farm the land, I discovered several pages of people looking for different farmland related properties. A divorced dad wants a place for his daughter to be able to play with her horse. A family wants to get away from their shitty school system. People want to raise all kinds of animals or build something reminiscent from their youth.

In the “click every link” strategy you find all of the poorly laid out after-thought websites that act as classifieds. From the page you’re sure hasn’t been updated in 12 years, but you still post to just in case, to the page that’s probably the standard bearer despite being clunky and buggy at best, peeking into everyone’s world caused me a moment that happens so rarely, I decided to try and speak to it now.

The current crisis is the “irrational” anxiety that has my blood pressure and heart rate skyrocketing. I’ve been searching for a way to approach it or describe it so that the next time I get a cuff put on me, it’s the last thing on my mind. Obsessing and manipulating my body for artificial fixes proves unhelpful. I switched to actively searching to do or think about anything else in order to push the thought to the back of my mind. Something I’m historically bad at, so I figured in the spirit of practice, no time like now to try.

While that had some effect, I still test myself to see if the feeling arises when I get reminded about the impending fateful moment. While I could feel the tension rising, I started to read an ad from a woman who wasn’t interested in considering small plots, had money to burn on any improvements the land would need, and just carried a tone of possibly justified pretension. By the end of her post, for a moment, the rest of my life with the potential to be like her set upon my chest.

I felt being so rich and so direct that nothing could excite me anymore. She can’t possibly feel like her whole life rides on anything. She’s playing with numbers and refining her attitude. And for a split second, I felt like her, and the tension immediately dissipated. I got bored with myself. I saw what happens after I’ve traveled everywhere, put my hand in every honey pot, and still didn’t manage to save the world. I looked at my rich friends and knew there was little we could do but hunker down or move if Hitler 2 ruined the country. I felt old and tired and set.

It speaks to the tricky nature of anxiety. Will that moment reassure and save me when the time comes? Even writing this I struggle to feel as desperate as I did. What was I really scared of? That I actually mattered or had some awesome individual storied life to lead? Who am I the day years from now I’m writing the post “No little guys need apply, prefer to only spend 250-300 thousand, will supply own alpacas.”

The anxiety is tied not to monetary concerns, but the idea that I’d never be useful or perhaps something different. Farming isn’t different. Having more money than you really know what to do with isn’t either. Different seems a commitment to using your ideas and resources to bettering the environment for everyone. The idea of being stuck terrifies me. The idea that I could spend so much time exploring what’s on my mind, digging up dreams and expectations, excelling at whatever task was put to me, and then because of my stupid heart rate I have to force myself to start considering some form of “normal” life at a slave-adjacent job again?

Of course there’s always options, but I haven’t faced any pressing ones in years. I’m at the same time reintroducing a bit of a time crunch to the genuine prospect of being on the precipice of long term financial security. As far as my body’s concerned, I’ve just got the world on my shoulders and tried developing this habit of dropping it.

These kind of moments are worth talking about because it’s the same kind of thing that has happened when I’ve gotten over (well-enough) heartache. I just got fucking bored with myself. I read enough posts that could have been written by 16 year old me. I got tired of hearing how unbelievably special everyone’s spouse was and how they could possibly do whatever they did to turn horrible. The best thing for me would be to listen to a bunch of complaining and failed dreamers. I suppose condescending rich people might be easier to find and would work as well.

While it’s not just “poof!” and gone (just like any proper heartache), this is the first time I think I’ve found footing on reinstating my generally normal state with regard to getting my blood pressure taken. I suppose we’ll see if the feeling can last or be reinforced. Or, perhaps, lack of feeling. The goal is to become a cold profit-driven actor who seemingly tries to fix the world with his experiments and investments. “The world” and the people in it will ultimately have to save themselves, because there’s plenty of money and cliched brains out there that aren’t doing shit but getting by. That infinite well from which to draw resolve will hopefully suit me in the short term.

[561] Evacuation

I’m either too high or not high enough to hit you with what the opening line originally was.

I think a lot about acting. I think about how sometimes no matter how hard I look I don’t know if I can tell the difference between good and bad. I think about method acting. As if faking it real hard is as real or more real than faking it sorta. I think about what motivates an actor. Is there some deep relationship they have with life they feel better portraying verses actually living? Or is it much simpler? They want to be seen!

The person starving for the limelight wants every bit as much to be seen as the 19th assistant programmer wants to be listed on the credits with dozens of film studios that added glossy to droids on the latest Star Wars. Stand and be recognized. To put on the show of human emotions must be evidence of one’s capacity to feel them, right? Or to make them into the be all end all grand celebration! Endless love! Noble heroes! It’s the mythology; the lifeblood.

Whether we talk about it coherently or honestly, we’re always pressed to mock ourselves up against “ourselves.” I have as much a mythology about “Nick P.” as you might. I’m still influenced by the naive child with a new internet connection reading about what Leos are like or people born in the year of the Dragon. I remember that my name means “victory of the people.” I mean, I have a mane.

And even while you’re sitting right in the middle of it, it can be hard to tell who you are. I took some very old acid earlier tonight. It had/has me tweaking out just a little bit, but enough to know that I shouldn’t have stared too long at myself in the mirror. Yet, not enough that it had me breaking the glass so I could use a shard to cut out the crazy person behind my eyes. So we can call it a win.

In the midst of my doozy I’m watching art. I’m taking in, what in some circles, could be considered the very pinnacle of human achievement. To conceive of and tell a story that’s entirely “fictional” yet oh so real. Can we only access ourselves ironically? I’m searching for a way past my anxiety about never getting into another study and wasting money on land in a dying country and I can approach it “rationally” all day that I should “just show up and take the money,” but I genuinely find the more productive course of action was to see what the acid could tell me. Truthfully, I only regret it wasn’t a more powerful dose.

Just like the actor, I want to be seen. It’s not enough to just call me an egomaniac, as I’m fond of referring to myself. I want to shine for all of my character flaws. I want to be scared first by my eyes before I show them to you or try to tell you about them. I want you to feel my heart pounding every beat through every hesitant breath trying desperately to figure out a way to calm the fuck down and just handle business. I want you to feel as scared and alone, even when the danger isn’t real.

I don’t understand it. I clearly barely even know how to approach it. But I know I have to. I know I have to either combat and subdue this change or construct a new mythology to cope with it. I need to stand and be seen as someone trying as he doubts it’s worth it. I need to be so convincing at acting it out you can’t tell if it’s real anymore. I need to feel like my star on the walk is worthy. I need to know I’m contributing something only I can to the roll. I need to be absolutely sure I’m not gonna get recast by some fobish bloke.

Alas, we can’t be miscast or ever denied the part. Every flop registers as loudly if not moreso than every hit. I don’t know why I’m picking so many bad roles. Who’s casting this thing? Tell that guy to go back to the good old days when things were easy and my mind was elsewhere. Back before I had any illusions I could be a star and was just kidding around with some friends. Just hit reset and let me play that again.

[560] Keep It Together

This will likely consist of contradictory, disconnected yet redundant, accusatory, self-indulgent whiny blathering half-truths that only suffice to round out the immensity of the dread, stress, and sadness I’ve felt all day thinking about my life.

I failed another screening. For those counting, that’s 4. My blood pressure read 171/92. I’ve never come close to that number before. After relaxing for 15 minutes, I got it down to 154/78. I went online to learn how to keep your heart rate down. The thing that seemed to work was engaging the core and acting like you had to shit. Upon relaxing, low and behold, my heart rate slowed down. Tensing your body up as if you have to shit does you no other favors.


Studies are me cheating. I’ll be old and echoing how I don’t want to be taken advantage of at a minimum wage anything job again. I hate being recognized with faux-appreciation for working harder and smarter than those around me. I hate sacrificing time to someone else’s bottom line. So I cheat. Or, increasingly it looks like I used to.


Now that I got the land, it’s like there’s been a signal shift. Like I’m not doing enough to profit off of it, whatever’s controlling my body realizes that, and it refuses to let me walk in and out with a cool few thousand dollars anymore. So I’m taking my environment’s advice. I’m going to be out there hand-sheering 5 acres of weeds and digging up roots and digging a hole to burn it all. I’m going to make part of it look presentable and drag out salvaged wood and whatever else I can find to create “anything” in the meantime.

That must be where I belong. Dicking around in a field exhausting myself because I can’t afford the proper equipment. I have no other plan. There’s no other signal. Across all areas of my life, I keep getting told the same story. The best actors in my life get dealt the same kind of misery.

My dad and step mom take care of my grandma, could use $1000 for a couple months, my aunt who has $500,000 cash for a new house and car scolds him for daring to ask her. My uncles use the utilities and eat the food, don’t contribute, for 7 years. They steal my grandma’s house when she dies, live in it rent free, screw the rest of us who were supposed to divide up the sale of the house. Lesson, care for your dying mother, everyone in your life shits on you.


If I hadn’t looked out for people over the last few years, I’d be sitting on an extra 6-8 grand depending on how you want to slice it. Am I big rich baller who just throws money at things and people? Certainly not. So when time comes to make the big purchase and years go by and people can’t pay back debts, you can’t help but feel like your generosity is a recipe for disaster when you had 5 years security, and now it’s a struggle to get back to 6 months ahead.

I was with someone for 5 years and it ended abruptly with the sound of the last fart of a deflated balloon. I’ve watched nearly every one of my friends in long or longer term relationships fight as much every month as we might’ve every year. I’ve played marriage counselor for months if not years for some of these people. I’ve watched people STILL figure it out or fight it out or at the very least recognize and want to protect something good. But someone weasels their way into my goddamn head and makes me beg to give my time, money, and attention to, that’s the situation that’s the hopeless one. Makes sense.

Everything I’ve ever experimented with I’ve done under budget and never gone in debt. Does that bode any confidence in your surrounding family to help support you? Family that can spend thousands and thousands on clothes and weaponry that they literally use to hoard, but not even a small time loan to build a house? Your “family,” your motivated, intelligent, respectful, hard-working, hasn’t become an alcoholic or had a nervous breakdown yet nephews are as dismissable as the poor examples their older cousins have set. Again, makes sense. I’m entitled, after all, I lived with my parents...never, after school while one uncle stayed until his mother died.

You’d think I just wanted to take advantage of people. You’d think I just want money and opportunities so I could...I don’t know...sit around and watch TV all day and brag about how my bills are paid. You’d think I haven’t done everything in my power save literal begging to fund and create and fight back against the amazingly ignorant and depraved atmosphere I know we’re all suffering. You’d think I dropped out of school or worked out my insecurities by picking you apart in hateful ways. You’d think I woke up everyday and prayed to a real God to throw every possible fucking barrier that exists in front of my capacity to just be a functioning basically moral and helpful fucking individual.

OH! I’m reminded that it’s often as well that when I do fuck up, PEOPLE REMEMBER THAT SHIT! Got too drunk? “I mean, I know there was a little heartache, but come on man.” A comment about a night I probably should have been in the hospital given my failure to cope at the time. Was my behavior fucked? Probably somewhat. Should I expect a deferential tone TO ANY FUCKING THING I’M EVER FUCKING GOING THROUGH ONCE! God fucking forbid.

Talking to these people is inviting the constant threat of being judged and gotten angry at for having any question or working through a bad example. The feeler and finger pointer garners all the necessary support and “wins.” I think of the different random other entrepreneurial things I’ve worked on for other people. The ones who extorted the project and paid for bullshit get to lead the way and if you opine on the terrible job they’re doing in private, you get the lecture and dismissed when they put it on blast. They’ll take all your time, all your good will, any extra effort and summarily throw it back at you the moment they feel the threat of their insecurities or poor planning.

I shake off or excuse soooooo many peoples’ shitty behavior or “quirks” or “that’s just thems.” But, somehow, when the time comes for an ounce of leeway, pick the worst fucking time about the worst fucking subject and wham bam thank you ma’am FUCK YOUR FUCKING FACE WITH IT NICK! I find more respect and connection with random hookups from OKCupid than I have with some of my “friends.” I don’t know if that’s a “people over time” thing, or a you thing.

I’M EVEN TRYING TO BE POOR. In an important sense, I’m trying to revel in and celebrate ingenuity and recycling and sustainability, AND I CAN’T DO THAT! I need half to a third of my well below poverty wages and income for the last 3 years to finally not have extortionary bills breathing down my neck. On the verge of this, I have the blood pressure of an over-inflated sex doll.

And then I try to learn. I try to read damn near fucking everything. I try to watch damn near fucking everything. I look for every connection. I get random certifications and credentials. I talk to all different kinds of people. I post across dozens of forums. I have a dizzying array of appeals across income and age levels. NOBODY’S THERE! Oh, they’re in the streets “protesting” and pretending they’re helping. They’re behind their desk “adulting” away waving me off as an eccentric. They’re lonely and sad as fuck at home or in the ghetto compromising. They’ve got their own mental health issues, lack of funds, or body part that didn’t used to ache until now.

I’m almost relearning how to be sad. Most shit pretty much rolls off or doesn’t matter. Now it’s all just sticking to me. It’s every insane stupid person. It’s every condescending or indignant look and comment. It’s every blown off lunch or drink date. It’s every non invitation because, I’m not on your mind, why am I letting you occupy so much of mine? Every dream that gets pushed back another few months, then a year, then maybe if I ever come across...whatever. Every hours long trek through traffic for the opportunity to sell my body for, if we’re talking hourly, about 12 bucks.


I don’t belong anywhere. I shouldn’t be at the bar, because I’m in no mood for fun and lately definitely don’t have the money. I’m not supposed to be hanging out with you, you’re too busy or, more simply, never thought of me. I don’t belong with the “working poor.” NO ONE DOES! GET THE FUCK OUT! I’m not the happy downsy kid at the checkout just happy to be involved. There’s no seat at the table for me. I’m not a couch surfer. I may literally throw my couch off my back porch as if it did something wrong. It doesn’t matter what I know. It didn’t matter what I want to create. It doesn’t matter if I see the future for the next 100 years.

So I’m going to go to a field. I’m going to cut, and freeze, and dig, and burn, and freeze, and cuss, and just try to exist doing those things. There’s nowhere else for me. I’ll pretend to know how I’m paying the bills past March. I’ll desperately cling to the idea that one day, maybe when I’m like 50 or 60 and enough people have died in my family to leave me some final pity, I’ll get to humbly and with no aplomb embark on what’s passed me by years ago.

Is a dark sense of humor really that hard to relate to? You think it’s an accident that the world feels indifferent and we obviously mean nothing? When you try, you are punished. When you know nothing, you also get to be so stupid you don’t even realize you know nothing. The selfish win. The ones who hate themselves the most get the most opportunities to piss away. Those who have too much are given more money and more access. There’s nothing in it to give a damn. There’s nothing in it to try. I get why you don’t.

[559] Gon Girl

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about “spiritual” exercise. It’s a word I perpetually put in quotes because I think our general working conception of the word is as stupid as our best efforts. I think when I attempt to employ it, it has much to do with a phrase I employ sometimes, “seeing the truth between the lines.” It’s the thing I’m always searching for when I write. It’s that elusive point or theme I chase around the page. It’s putting all the pieces of a puzzle together where the picture is an impression or feeling or “vibe.”

I perpetually look for inspiration. I started wondering what that really means. I already have goals. To the best of my knowledge I’ve employed the most practical and efficient methods for achieving them. The pressing reality remains. Is there not some other way I could go about it? Is there not something more I could be doing? For every action you have to consider the fallout, which has stayed my hand from diving into motivated, but perhaps fundamentally wasteful behaviors I’d be tempted to claim are moving me forward. A random odd job would dull my spirit. I have to seriously consider if knocking on perceived rich people's doors is sending the right message, because I’m not above oddball things like that.

Again though, that use of the word spirit. That impressionable and egotistical “you” hesitantly looking for acknowledgment in the face of cold infinite impartiality so defined by it’s very perception of measurement. One of the reasons I watch so much TV is that I find myself genuinely more empathetic towards the characters and their struggles than I do the lazy hoard of cows “getting by” and “adulting.” I find not just inspiring lines and new tattoo ideas to consider, but a genuine invigorating and wise ethos in a well-crafted show. These characters ask more of themselves in the span of an episode than I think most people do in several years.

Connecting with a “spiritual” dimension is what set my house parties apart. We cultivated a crowd over time. I set a pace. We set the conditions for behavior that people pretend they’re not capable of. Regardless if the bad actors decided to eventually resent everything and tear it all to shit, I can never forget the impact that setting had on my conception of friend or what is possible with the right crowd and right set up.

I suppose it’s merely unfortunate that when people pursue their “spiritual” side or claim they have achieved some measure of it, it’s often couched in smelly hippie shit and pseudo-scientific health claims. I have a friend who’s “practiced reiki” because something something healing energies. A large reason we maintain that friendship is because I’ve learned to bite my tongue better. But I suppose it’s the kind of example that she sets that begins to speak to what makes me so upset about other people’s attempts at pursuing their spirituality. Why pretend that’s what you want if you’re going to start with bullshit?

For the majority of people, life is immeasurably stressful and often terrible. It seems this is the first hard and fast rule before you ever get somewhere worthwhile. In my estimation, literally nothing is better by fooling yourself. What you think you’re helping when you’re lying is poisoning the well. In some small measure, I’m hurting my friend if I don’t even offer a passing comment about the joke that is healing people by playing hover hands. I break windows of self-reflection by playing along at family gatherings I want little to nothing to do with or in inviting myself into homes that have done nothing but invite stress and drama into mine. This isn’t some naive ethic of the loner or child, all you have to want is the truth.

I have a friend I recently blew up on because I got tired of their game. This soft spoken toothy grinned go-getter has all the makings of a future politician. When I complain my friends don’t write, he does. But at the same time, it’s hard to trust any conclusion he’s ever come to. When the opportunity arises to try and be clearer, he avoids it. When pressed to accept the weakness or contradiction of his examples, he ignores them. When his “inclusive,” “polite,” and “reassuring” atmosphere is challenged, he does the exact same thing every other person does, and that’s blame me for being mean and run. After 10 years of talking to someone about religion, politics, or ethics in general, you need to see them crack even once.

But that’s not the reality of the spiritually deluded selfish world. That world creates edicts. That’s a world where I’m forever and always defined as the problem for my style so the words will always get ignored. It’s better to call me confusing than ask about what confused you. It’s better to call me mean, than embody the feeling my sentiment tried to instill in you. When you deny yourself that extra realm of communication, you subvert all capacity to ever truly learn or grow. It’s why I generally hate outward professions around holidays when you know they’re superficial or forced. Checking in is nice, 200 uncapitalized “happy birthday” messages should see you all shot.

Important to me in defining my “spirituality” is achieving again that sense of community. I have to know nothing about consciousness to know it works better together. Piecing together the random thoughts or shows or books and one-liners I’ve heard each week is practice for when I go out into the field and start looking for people to pluck. My “singular” and “simple” goal is to establish a sustainable environment built from my intention, perspective, and will indefinitely. I think the “cultural” approach to our ignorant and life-threatening nihilism needs a holistic approach untampered by naivety and marketing.

Truly, the only thing that keeps me going is maintaining and recognizing the truth. It is sad, sick, and depressing to piss away your youth, so while I have the energy I’m looking for ways to keep my mind and body exercised. Without even noticing you can consign your life to an empty dictum that makes decisions for you and codifies your value in money or “productive hours.” I’m not filled with anxiety or angst because my day to day is on fire, except, it is. Even when I’m fed and marathoning a show, my environment is boasting about a nuclear arms race, going extinct, and melting away. If I don’t think a protest sign or letter to my congressman is going to do the trick, here’s me waving the flag for roundabout maneuvering.

I believe we don’t get along because we’re a society of liars. I prefer to go down alone than with someone telling me we could never drown. I’d rather break the friendship, I’d rather have the fight, I’d rather get you as angry as you could ever get now, so I can drop the dead denialism and not fall into your trap later. The pure joy, and the brilliance of the vision made manifest are what you’re after. You wish you laughed as hard as me or talked as excitedly. I wish you did too. I wish you struggled even half as much to believe in what I’m pursuing as I do with you to just recognize and speak. No, I don’t mean “be happy for me.”

Even the most insignificant side character can be given the time to show how they contribute to the complex story. I find myself pivoting between who I think it’d be coolest to be in a great story. Why don’t I feel that way about the people in my life? Do I blame them or the conditions we were born into? Is it a generally stupid ego driven exercise that just robs them of their humanity, or did they sacrifice it well before I got around to thinking about them?

There would be a real danger if I ever work up and thought I had some kind of monopoly on truth. It’s available to anyone willing to look at it. Independent of your meager perception are habits and behaviors that suggest you’re at least pointed in the right direction. If all you’re doing is acting, I notice. If all you can do is clam up and scapegoat, I don’t trust you. If you devote hours or years of your life to the facade, you may not even be able to recognize how deep a hole you’ve dug yourself. You’ll still feel it when the spit I let drop hits you, you'll just be calling it rain.

[558] Different Strokes

I no longer think I fundamentally believe in conversation. I don’t think it serves the purposes people purport. In fact, I think in a majority of instances, it tends to make situations worse. Despite this, I think conversations all follow the exact same patterns across all topics, and it’s one of the greatest disservices we perpetuate against ourselves to not explore and acknowledge how things break down.

I want to distinguish what I hope to explain from “persuasive rhetoric.” You can take classes that will coach you in polite engagement with your Congressmen who deny climate science. It’s where you go to learn not to assert facts and truth, but instead hide what you want to do in language they understand. This whole game I’m hoping to avoid. It’s not my contention that people can’t be convinced of things or that they don’t operate under “different rationality” that takes into account the protecting of their oil money donors.

I contend that we never start on the same page. The presumption of a shared language keeps the initial ground for conversation obscure. After all, you’re under the impression you read English. These lines are passing by and you’re hoping I’ll get into the meat or towards a point. This is precisely where we screw up first. You have assumptions, unconsciously or otherwise, that you take into reading this. If we know each other, the weight of your opinion about me remains. If we don’t, and this is on a public website, 3 paragraphs in I can already hear Youtube vine compilations calling your name.

Words are not concrete, literally and figuratively. You may it take it for granted that words are wide, but when you use them, you have a pretty definite feeling for what you mean, even if no one else does.

“People can be rational.”

Leaving aside that there are volumes of philosophical and psychological works that deal with that “simple” premise, the gist of it is that we should be able to relate to each other. It’s a huge should. I certainly don’t agree with it as a premise because I carry philosophical and psychological baggage to my conception of rationality. I get picky and say “can” has nothing to do with it. I can take a shit. I can watch TV. I can vote for fascism. So? I would never propose an idea to you that I wanted seriously discussed by insisting “something can happen!”

We’re not on the same page. Rationality, let alone the conscious agent claiming it has it, needs rules. Rationality needs to be contingent on something besides “merely existing.” The neighborhood cat is rational in that it doesn’t routinely dart out into traffic. Does a cat that does run into traffic get stripped of its rationality? Or is the conversation more coherent when you set down rules and reasons for its behavior? The cat isn’t “more or less” rational because of how long it lives avoiding getting hit.

I feel pressed to keep discussing animals, because people like to pretend they aren’t animals. I was literally told that people can’t be trained like dogs. It was never walked back. The idea being that people are “better” or “more rational” than dogs and that by virtue of it being rude to equate the two, there’s nothing else to be said about how they behave. I honestly have so few words for this; if you don’t see how it doesn’t work, just stop reading now and never read anything I write again.

You are not rational. I am not rational. We have incomplete malleable mounds of meat that will happily carry on in whatever direction they’ve been set. Without knowledge, without intention, without understanding, they can just “be” and in a world that needs knowledge, intention, and understanding, that “simply being” is negative. It’s the idiot smiling at the row station when all hands need to move us through the storm.

For one reason or another, I posit undue sympathy, apologists for this lazy and simple non-rower will get very indignant if you’re not happy about their goofy smile. They’ll insist, “He has so much potential!” They’ll say, “His arms are so big! His capacity to row is so great!” The moment you call him a lazy stupid smiling idiot, they’ll attack you! He’s not rowing and they’re attacking you! The storm is coming, we’re going too slowly, and you’re to blame insisting this idiot needs to get to work and they need to stop protecting him.

That barely describes the disconnection in how we discuss things with each other. It’s so needlessly tired to keep blaming me for sounding angry or shitty. Angrier than your fucking fascist President? Angrier than your state representatives who want to bury fetal tissue? Am I shittier than the people who made money speech and don’t believe we share the environment? Because those are the stakes. It’s life and death whether you can figure out how to pull your head out of your ass and recognize those who aren’t rowing for what they are. Dead weight that ensure we’re going to kill ourselves.

I will never feel sympathy if you can’t do that. I will never change my mind if you can’t put the square block through the square hole. I refuse to be gaslit. Because that’s what you’re doing. In service to your own dogma, you refuse to call out what the real problem is. You can’t see it because you predicate your whole window into the world on it. “It’s not my responsibility, God will save me.” “I was taught this way, and it’s the only way I know or respect.” “My feelings deserve to be heard! Especially because I honestly cry myself to sleep each night worried about what will happen to all the white children forced to mix with the little nigger scourge!”

I think I’ve just been lying to myself the whole time. I mean, I was able to stop discussing religion with people. But perhaps it’s for everything. We already know thermometers don’t work when you represent oil companies. Why should this stress me out any more than it seems to those poor thermometers? If they could speak, right? Imagine the smear pieces of the elitist condescending hot heads who just need to understand not everyone’s been socialized to see the merit of discussing things in Celsius.

I’m not wrong. I’m justified in my anger. I’m not going to apologize for being smarter or more informed than you. If you don’t know how the brain works, keep beating your dick to the idea that humans can’t be trained, and trained to do the wrong thing. If you think your definition of “rationality” is all-knowing and perfect and that you’re the only one with the capacity for wisdom, here’s the keys to the crazy pants building, I’ve literally bought 5 acres in the middle of nowhere because I don’t have the mental capacity to deal with you anymore. You’ll spend your entire life watching people live and die by the bat shit proclamations any ignorant monkey who hasn’t had their face rubbed in enough shit can make. The alternative is to run and pray any hitchhikers desperate to get away as well won’t need to be shot before you get somewhere safe.

[557] Untitled

I’m full.
Often it’s almost unbearable.
My head might be packed with ideas or snot.
The veins through my scalp and temples pulse with too much blood.
My throat is clogged with a fat tongue flapping too enthusiastically.
Hot air fills my chest and pushes my diaphragm.
An array of foods with too many calories fight their way through my stomach and intestines.
I’m packed like a suitcase that’s never coming back.

I’m abundantly aware.
I saw what you saw.
I found the loose change as we walked through the mall.
Yet finding the dollars to perpetuate my state proves elusive.
Their state lives on; mine remains a memory.
It’s a memory of what I wanted and how it has had to change.
It’s a memory that dims each year.
It’s a memory constantly under attack from the beat in my head meat.
It plays me like I used to play you. It knows me better than I know myself for it knows nothing.

“I coulda been something!”
I could have been a king.
I could have been awash in luxury.
I could have been a thing.
Yes a thing to be passed around and praised and drank from.
A bottomless well of hope and inspiration.
A thing you could caption and memeify and transmit over the air where I could fly and disappear.
I could have been an abstraction always up for interpretation while the jury’s on strike.
I could have tried.
I could have tried harder.

I lost my stories.
I’m back on the first floor digging the grave I call my basement.
It’s hard work shoveling so much shit up and over.
I’m dirty, but it feels good to belong.
I’m tired, so I appreciate the darkness.
My swollen muscles can relax when I no longer think I’ll be able to climb out.
I lost my heroes.
I sent them on a trip and they came back distorted.
They got the shakes and don’t walk so straight.
They get loud in all the wrong places.
They don’t smile in fact, they barely have faces.
No more revolution.
No justice or league to keep the peace.
No tomorrow.
Just no.

[556] Wait But Why?

I want to discuss a question that I promise doesn't bug me. I want to discuss it because it comes up over and over again with, I can only assume, every one of my friends at one point or another. I don't find it insulting or necessarily hard to understand. I think its roots can be explored and I have a few ideas I think are plausible.

“Why are you friends with Nick?”

To be honest, the best answer I have for anyone being friends with me is because they see an important part of themselves reflected back. I've fashioned myself for a long time as something of an expression of almost pure id. I used to point to monetary benefits when it came to pimping out the house or my access to a car and willingness to chauffeur people around. That stuff is always weak and superficial of course, but for the pragmatist it might be easier to look past my mouth.

Perhaps I should slow down though. It's a question I'm asking just as often to my friends about who they associate with. Say you come home from work and have nothing positive to say about your coworkers, my first question certainly rings with the memory of your frustrations before you hit the town with them. It's easy to blurt out the question of friendship when you've no context for the long history a pair or group might have. At the darkest end you could be asking about the pure emotional or tangible extraction someone is getting out of stringing their prey along.

With regard to me though, I find it gets a little more complicated for the ones asking. Say they asked Kristen. Sweet, innocent, Kristen. Their mental model for her didn't jive even remotely with what they think of me. The confusion, though superficial, speaks to those disingenuous mental shortcuts unthoughtful people take when considering potentially complex human beings. In other words, it's a failure of imagination more than necessarily something insidious. This crowd would make sweeping generalizations about open relationships or draw an uncrossable line that protects their judgment from your explanation. Childish, boring, moving on.

Then there's people who genuinely can't appreciate for a moment my brand of exceedingly dark humor. I make the spousal abuse or cancer joke, they're looking around the room at all the people not up in arms or shuffling me out the door. These are moralizers. They seek less to protect their judgments than to impose and control with them. Flippant or funny disarms those who want to move against you. If they're fuming in the corner and you get even one person to crack a smile, their confusion rests in the disconnect between their pseudo-reality where things are good and make sense, and mine where I guess I'm just trying to hurt people or something. Who could befriend such an untamed beast?

The excessively hilarious one is when they ask Byron why he's my friend. There's almost no words for the level of irony. It's hard to explain knowing someone who basically inhabits your brain. In the deepest possible sense that I've encountered in life, it's like asking why you would bother liking yourself. Our style differences are not brain or disposition differences, but the clean cut politely spoken professional that holds your hand or speaks your language is a jarring contrast from the curly haired ripped jeans despot cursing for what you're positive is absolutely no reason.

Objectively, were I to give reasons for someone to be or not to be my friend, well, pick your favorite drunkest and craziest sounding blog. It's not that I think I'm special or particularly worse or “crazier” than anybody else, but there seems to be a key to my madness. I know my shit.

There's different ways to know your shit, and not all of them are equal. For many, confidence springs forth from their resolve to accept their lot. Whether it's their average or lacking look, motivation, or general mental state. I find it no coincidence that OKCupid matches me highest with every punk rock looking girl with dyed hair and a septum piercing who's rebel attitude and crass jokes make her the life of her small world...if she can be bothered. Smart people in general get a whiff of how they can run something and settle pretty nicely into “know their shit” status.

Then there's bookworm types. They can learn every fact in the world or the particulars of their job, but if you tried to turn them inward you're begging for a substance problem or major depression. The isolated academic types speak a very particular language to a particular crowd and understand the world through an endless stream of books and theories that help shield them from any personal insight that might leak through. Maybe think of Ben Carson. A man who could literally save your life by cutting into your brain, but can't figure out the deadly consequences of playing with fascism.

Then there's that last page of self-help books kind of knowing your shit. When you've therapied to death your past trauma or daily anxieties and you stumble from one realization to the next until you float out to sea on a contemplative island. This speaks to my brand. I'm not just confident in many things I do, I've done or will do a lot of work in explaining the story of how I got there. I'll do it to such a point that you'll start questioning why you got upset in the first place. I sit so deep in my own world that you'll start blaming me for your back pains on the seat you chose.

This is the best explanation I have for people I've know for years or managed more than an acquaintance with who just go radio silent. I was simply comfortable with our dynamic, refused to read minds even when they were begging me to, thus I am to blame. This helps me explain people who actively spoke out against me with, to my knowledge, no if even negative provocation. The girl roomy who re-befriended our other roommate who choked her while disavowing me, who threw him off her, will always be illustrative. She fashioned herself as someone who knew shit, but when faced with the reality, she's just choking against the wall, and how dare someone like me step in and remind her.

The irony of being my friend is that I'm exceedingly transparent and easy as hell to disarm. Well, that is, if you're a person. If you're an insecure husk who's needlessly provoked, I'm a nightmare. If you have an opinion of yourself that you value which allows you to see through my superficial behavior, we get along seamlessly. And yes, this is in utter spite of any and all of the worst shit I can be or have done. I'll always find it odd and unfair that people approach me as if my day to day is setting fires or seeking out people to make cry. At bottom, the reason I'm making you uncomfortable is because you're not comfortable with yourself.

This means that when I make a racist joke, you haven't worked out your relationship to race, so you scoop from your general knee jerk impression of what you think “the culture” would do. If I insult you or your family, you might have deep seeded issues with your big ass ears that even 30 years on the planet never helped you with, and a friendly gathering over drinks is not where you wanted to cope with your thoughts about your dad. To be clear, there is more than a little difference between dark and cold jokes and being genuinely mean-spirited. It does exist. If you don't believe me, you're suffering from something I'm the absolute last person to help you deal with.

Never forget, if you're not laughing (which you usually are) I'm cracking the joke for me. I repeat that shit to myself when my mind wanders and lose my shit days later. I love my humor. I love it so much and it brings me so much joy that I revel in the resentment and anger it conjures from those who think it has anything real to do with them. Of course, when it does, when it feels real, you can take that as a chance for introspection or exploring context, or you can keep blaming me like my joyous coping mechanism will be cried or sneered out of existence. My best guess, it's here to stay, but feel free to slut shame.

It gets deeper though. Because a bad or mean joke is still a pretty wimpy metric for judgment, right? You don't have to know anything to be crass. The dirty part is feeling yourself concede. It's your smile betraying your indignation. It's your stupefied look as my half-drunk comment cuts you in two. You thought I didn't see your look? You thought I didn't notice the tone? You thought my questions weren't a bit leading? Did you think your posture found an invisibility cloak? Did you pretend there was something secret I couldn't figure out about you that I haven't already dug out of myself ten times over? That's when it truly bites.

Then you have no choice but to accept I both understand and legitimately disrespect how you're going about where you're coming from. There is no protest or negotiation. I'm not going to find myself enlightened about how I went about speaking to you. I'm not on your emotional level and that makes you feel bad. You haven't sought out my brand of knowing shit, and that makes me feel nothing about you besides fleeting frustration of a classist air. Engaging with that kind of person then becomes this exhausting negotiation and navigation of the febrile feelings. One I'm brilliant at when I adopt the style you're familiar with on Byron. I still just find it in me to always pick on children.

That's a hefty amount of rationalization there Nick, but why? Why does any of it speak to being your friend? What do you really bring to the table but bad words and explanations I don't buy!?

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, sincerity wins. I don't just dream about the best parties and making movie moments, I build them. I don't pretend to hold you in high or low esteem without having tested our relationship for what I hoped to get out of it. When I say I want the same mental and financial security for my friends that I seek for myself, I get my spine tapped so I can afford the land to invite people to as a refuge or for experimenting. If I call you a cunt, I think you're a cunt, but more importantly, you're probably actually a cunt. 

Whatever you hate about me, you can trust it. When I'm in an out-pour of goodwill and sentimentality, you can trust that too. I'll be dammed if I'm ever as confused as you about how and why I approach my relationships. At least as dammed as you, that is. And I think people like to be able to trust, as I very well know, nothing ever seems like it can be trusted. My worst self isn't some outward display of stupidity or negativity, it's when I stop inviting you in to read about it.

I'm a person who laughs until it hurts about his demons, routinely, practically daily. I put on display as much truth as I can discover in the moment. I work with and engage my contradictory and confusing nature instead of merely suffering it. You tend to learn a lot more shit than people ever want to give you credit for because they can't really see or hear you over their own issues. I might as well have a superpower in my capacity to recognize or disarm them. Why I don't use it to smooth everything over and make everyone happy, like they perpetually fail to do, is somehow baffling. As if I should sacrifice the path to my best relationships to their selfishly small conception of being.

I think there's any number of areas in your life you're wishing you could be a little more like me. So rarely do people give me a reason to believe the relationship can go both ways.

[555] Climate Silence

A series I find wildly inspiring is Years of Living Dangerously. It’s not because it ever teaches me anything I don’t already know. It’s that it takes a camera into the meeting room where climate activists discuss details and field questions from the masses. You can begin to peel away much of the nonsense that obscures why there is or isn’t action taken and the, in my view extremely hopeless, mental pits people fall into to protect their views.

A basic premise I assume when I go into an argument or approach learning about some topic is that everything is connected. When Wikipedia first arrived I remember clicking though every word I didn’t know and being fascinated about just generally learning and reading in no specific direction. To fluidly access windows and doors into worlds I’d never seen before held little utility but to keep me intrigued or distracted, but it’s a shared window that analogizes how our brains work.

A gentleman holds a presentation to talk to Texans about climate change. Their concerns are that “Tax feels like someone’s taking something away from me” and “If the oil companies’ costs go up isn’t it going to cost Texas jobs?” One person pointed the finger at China. The presenter’s father said, “We need fossil fuels” ten seconds before saying he’d absolutely use renewables yet does not have access to them.

Without fail, people think small and selfish yet don’t draw from the larger world to help fix their true concern. You can’t only care about your little farm and your oil industry job. The deeper truth, in the scheme of things, is that your job isn’t secure and the planet you inhabit will eventually force your hand. The gentleman whose conception of taxes resembles that of a child is going to have an even harder time dealing with these conditions because his feelings are always going to be in the way.

I suppose for me these scenarios make me think of hypocrisy. I’m every ounce of an armchair humanitarian. I try to move my mind into spaces that I think might shed light on better ways forward. I look at the motivated and urgent students holding meetings for their townsfolk and think it’s generally in vain. Stupid and insecure people have never been fixed with logical discussion of hundreds of variables to consider. They just have their feelings. In that the presenter brought his family along maybe spoke to his only real impact in that they’re sympathetic to him if not the world of facts.

To extend this further, this is why I always blame people for their silence. Your family and friends are moved by you. You’re responsible for them. When I write, even if I bitch until the day I die about not seeing your impact reflected in the social media space enough, I have to believe you take something with you into the rest of your worlds. In actuality, I could set up a table and grab a megaphone and recite statistics and urge people to care, but I’ve never seen the problem as a lack of that kind of quasi-activism.

The problem is that we don’t concern ourselves with the whole. We pretend one area of our lives is off limits. We think there’s dignity and safety in cordoning off the parts we’re scared or ashamed of. If I think I’m perhaps a hypocrite in how I exercise my time, now you’re hearing about it. If I’m seeing a connection about my concerns regarding fascism, ignorance, laziness, and quickly evaporating time and spirit, you get to know the roots of my disappointing study attempt. By allowing yourself a holistic view of your problems and place in the world, while you carry more weight, it’s also more powerful when you try to swing it around.

Maybe then you’re not just poised for “dumb internet fights” you’re protecting shared intellectual space from complicit ignorance. Maybe you’re not busy and hopeless, but invigorating the mundane with your heightened awareness. For that, I think of the last concert I went to. An hour and a half was spent by most of the crowd waiting for the band to show up. I read articles and listened to a podcast. Yes, it was weird and yes I stood out, but staring at an empty stage for that long seemed even weirder. Much of what I think a person consists of is as much what they’re prepared to do and are aware of that they can do. I can read and listen and then rock the fuck out and then have a salient conversation about ethics on the walk back to the car. The superficially different realms are connected by my agency.

This means it’s always the right time. You can respond to this blog and we can talk for a solid week digging up sources and making plans. You can share this with your more motivated and talkative friends. You can seriously consider in a deeper way things you may feel hypocritical about or afraid of. Every moment, right now, the world is ours to engage with or ignore. If you’re not even aware of your larger obligation, let alone the endless utility you can derive from engaging as such, you’ll be the lowly conservative cliché who only knows how to feel their way about in the dark.

Guilt seems key. Do you wait for something external to force you and then try to cope and change? I suppose it’s anyone’s guess if you invite the pain in now if you’ll be able to alleviate it. I’m perhaps a standing example of that. I’m worried about the conversations I’ll be having with myself at 40 or 50 about my actions or lack thereof. Does my writing ever suggest I’m particularly happy or healthy lol? Of course I am, but I don’t take to the page to wax about butterflies. I think I’m better at coping and continually talking about soul-crushing and harrowing things, if only because of the visceral reactions I get from all the people who aren’t.

Or maybe you are, so do it even more. Maybe you have your own roundabout way of fixing something you see as integral to the general cultural problem, so let me know about it. I’m with Jordan Peterson who says the religious underpinnings, the moral truths and motivations that bound us together have been blown apart and it speaks to why we’re ravenous for Harry Potter or Marvel stories to help realign us. I love the idea of music being disparate harmonies speaking to something transcendent and spine tingling. That’s how I can retain respect for story tellers and musicians; when you tie your work to your honest struggle for an individual voice and perspective that retains all the humanity that birthed it.

Perhaps the myth is that there’s no telling your impact. I’m telling you your impact every time I write. It’s frustration. It’s loneliness. It’s denial. It is pain and death and fear that are hardly hidden by the next celebration. Part of me wishes it would at least be idealism so we could respect that an idea was even represented. If you hate to “fight” and “debate,” then just talk. Talk to your secret followers and admirers. Talk yourself in and out of emotional and intellectual holes. Talk to show yourself that you have something to say or shed some light on why you don’t.

[554] Study Me

I failed!

I failed spectacularly in getting that money. I failed because I don’t know how to control my heartbeat. I failed in forwarding my general existential strife to emulate people like Elon Musk. I failed my paralyzed body as it sat staring out to nowhere thinking about everything I want to do and be. I failed after 2 previous failures that at least had the decency to close the door handily immediately after screening and not let me in the door and into scrubs.

I’ve been mulling over how to approach this the entire drive home. I think it may be best to approach it as quasi-self-contained paragraphs that all speak to some aspect of my anxiety. The tricky thing about anxiety is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be irrational. It could prove to be all sorts of hazardous to be able to shut down your mechanism for being worried about shit. Unfortunately for my brain at least, I’m never just worried about one thing. I can’t just relax or distract myself because you, or the phlebotomist, or the doctor tells me to.

I’m still stuck on the screaming contradiction of my existence. I was in the lobby reading article after article about places Nick Turse has travelled filled with death and destruction. It was a buffet of information about just how fucked Hitler 2 is going to leave us. It was one story after the next of corrupt people, institutions, regression, hatred, and stupidity. It’s happening every moment of every day. It’s worse than you think, and then you realize it’s worse than you’ll ever be able to fully conceive. And my biggest problem in life is getting my heart to beat a little bit slower?

When framed like that it sounds ridiculous. Now home, embarrassed, mildly annoyed, but mostly just returning to my resolved meandering angst, I’m calling another study center tomorrow. My rent is still paid up for a few months. I still own the land that’s worth at least double what I paid for it. As far as I know, given that I didn’t make it to the blood test results, I’m still healthy. My worst case scenario is 4 few hour drives in bad weather; a feat many I know achieve before midweek every week.

But what does my mind do? It maps the delay in my plans onto the entire world. I’m here worried about working myself up and out of studies? What about the myriad travesties that had to take place for me to discover this kind of lifestyle in the first place? This kind of shit is a dozen steps back then haphazard lurches forward when a little luck and timing kicks in. These places were meant to take advantage of the mother of 4 who has to bring her kids to her outpatient visits. These are supposed to be for bored retirees and quasi-homeless people. The first time one of the girls taking my blood called it my job, I practically choked rushing to proclaim the joke of our responsibilities in light of someone like my iron working dead.

It’s only a tinge of guilt when I think it, but it still rings true. I feel so alone. I’m generally at the end of peoples’ priority list. No one is going to be a part of this land until I put up even larger amounts of money. My ideas and experiments won’t be able to be entertained until a half dozen or more studies are saved up for. And I’ll have to keep telling myself over and over that it’s not your fault. I won’t believe it, but I’ll keep telling it to myself because I know how fucking trapped we all are. I know how broke and paycheck to paycheck goes. I know the stress and uncertainty. Despite all the hell, what I never hear is the truth.

You don’t blog. You don’t share anything but pictures or often enough weird memes. I’m painting with a broad brush because I’m speaking to the majority. I see you coping, not thinking. I see you passing the time and spreading likes and congratulations, not collaborating. Every day it’s a reminder that I’m alone. No one is going to save me. If we’re living out the end of the country hurdling as a fireball from hell towards economic ruin and intellectual suicide, there’s like 2 or 3 really laying it out there leaving aside a spattering of writers. If I can’t live sustainably, make a fairly large amount of money, acquire all form of seemingly random skills, I’m going to be severely fucked. On top of that, when I see my friends who are still trying for that “normal job” or habitually avoiding dealing with the true depth of their precarious lives, all I’m going to be able to do is watch.

My heart didn’t really slow down from the moment I woke up. The week preceding this morning, I kept saying “if” I get in. The “if” felt so loud. It’s like I was anticipating sitting here after failing the entire time.  I then invent all sorts of scenarios that might’ve played out to feel better about it. Maybe my blood wouldn’t have had me pass anyway. Maybe it’s going to be a hella storm one day I’m supposed to drive down, so the universe intervened before my impending crash and death. Maybe I’m supposed to be back at that Podunk school teaching marching because some impression I’m to leave means more in the long term. Maybe there are 2 higher paying studies I can do at the same time I won’t know about until tomorrow.

Either way, the reason I’m always anxious and absolutely desperate to give myself options that aren’t dependent on something like my blood or heart is because…the world. The world where I don’t ever see your freak outs or parse through your reasoning and then our connection dulls. The world where we stopped drinking together. The world where even when I get everything I want, I’ll still be offering it to people in no position to take it. The world of fogged over eyes and wretched smiles as we see what life has done to us before we peak over our shoulders looking for a way out. No amount of money I make, buildings I build, or toys I acquire is going to fix that. I can’t make you believe in yourselves. I can’t pretend to know what risks you’re capable of taking.

Most disturbingly, part of me feels like I punish myself because not enough real things go wrong in my life. There’s not enough general anxiety for me walk in cool-headed and knock out studies like I’m not thinking about anything. If I wasn’t here writing this right now, what? I’d just be getting even more money to spend on things that aren’t health insurance or a better car? I’d most likely end up paying too much for a handful of things that get me no further in any real or monetary sense until the next study anyway.

It feels like a dream. I watched myself from afar fail the heart rate monitor. I wasn’t there cheering it on and working hard to pump the blood. It beat hard and fast without my vote. I had to do nothing but show up with my brain that attaches itself to an even more abstract future dream when it can’t even make sense of or control the present one. I can’t connect into a larger world than myself. The ones provided are lies or downright trying to kill me. Think I’m giving it up to a god? Think I sway with your subtle suggestions and encouragement? Think I just want to be distracted or drunk all the time? If all went to shit I’m sure I’ll always be able to find a couch, but in reality, nothing about the world I want and we need is happening without me. I don’t know if you understand it’s not happening without you either.

Is your heart racing?

[553] Not Saying You Should

This is an attempt at rationalization. It assumes the very basics of moral truths regarding survival and an indifferent universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s catch-phrase bids us to, “Keep looking up.” On a planet that feels like it is losing its charm, if not its habitability, the heavens can occupy every waking moment of an intrigued and adventurous yet lowly mammal like the human. We’ve dozens of movies about meeting new life forms or books on the priorities of advanced civilizations. We dream of the technology that might have us existing in some form or another until we either answer every Ultimate Question or reach the end of the universe.

I understand that any and all anxiety that I ever feel is bred from ego. I get that, whether I like it or not, whether I want to be alive today or not, I’m built to be up my ass and keep it protected. Literally every day I can bring my perspective closer towards someone who has it dramatically worse, and my nervous system doesn’t care. I’m arrested by me. I go as far as my genes and my environment and a fledgling desire to believe in the veracity of my will in making choices.

It seems that in order to get along in this world, you have to learn to perpetually let go. You have to let go of your false friends. You have to let go of your poor language that divided them up as such. You have to let go of every naïve assumption that, even if it at some level seems to be keeping you alive or well-adjusted, is wrong and isn’t yours. This means letting go of every animal that’s gone extinct. It’s letting go of ideas that you can protect your health. It’s letting go of everything but the utter burden of your inured existence and experience.

Here’s the important part. You let go not because you should, but because you don’t matter.

Take this blog. Whether you conceive of it as a persuasive argument, an incoherent ramble in the dark, or something in between, whatever your response, it’s not because you should respond that way, it’s that it doesn’t matter. It exists in spite of you. It exists in spite of me. I can’t tell if it’s “good” or “bad.” I won’t know if I’ll like it years from now. The prevailing reason for its existence is because I couldn’t help myself. “My” thoughts, provoked by science fiction and an obsessive brain sought relief so I could go back to watching movies. It’s not that I should write this; it’s that it doesn’t matter.

The tendency is to always scream from our assholes though. You may like this, so you’ll press the button. You may hate it, and tell me to kill myself. Both are a struggle to matter in vain. Because whether I live or die, the words will still be there. Your reaction will have had nothing to do with “me” specifically, as much as it will speak to your poor conception of both me and you in the scheme of things.

Now, I know this liberation of your ego from any responsibility to the world around you is dealt with in different religions. Where they go wrong is in then suggesting what should be done. Giving it up to your god is just a roundabout way of protecting your fragile and naïve ego. In fact, every transfer of individual perspective to a “higher power” suffices as the same thing. Oh humble academic or middle manager whose hands have ever been tied! It’s not that you should spend an hour arguing about a discount code, it’s that neither of you matter.

The true irony of embodying this idea is that we’re angry getting exactly what we ask for. We’re finally getting to die and silence our egos from insisting we should be afraid and sad. Who wants to be 117? Let the cancer take me at 65. Who needs clean air? I’ve been smoking since I was 14. Who gives a shit about polar bears? There’s starving kids in Africa I didn’t give a shit about first. Who needs the oceans? I don’t even like to swim and fish is disgusting. Who needs books? Wait until you see this dude get totally pwned and you won’t believe what this cat did. Who needs elitist politicking and 5 dollar words? We get by just fine on our own.

Deep down we know we don’t matter, so our mass suicide is taking shape in the form of arbitrary violence and nonsense words. We don’t want to live, how could you expect us to believe in someone else’s “right” to? We have nothing to say, so who gives a shit if you end up in prison for using your voice? Oh you think you’re scared? Let me show you my advanced weaponry and rain hellfire down upon you. What to make of democracy? We don’t want to learn or make decisions, Heil Hitler 2! Again, this isn’t how things should go, it’s because it doesn’t matter.

You may want to invoke the children, but the children will die every day like the 107 billion people that have ever lived have died. We’re just a species who got a little too big for its habitat and ran up against its limits. Should you care for your children? If you’re being honest, that wasn’t really your concern before you brought them here. You were just the unlucky end of an unconscious biological imperative that mindlessly played on your fears and disposition. Then all sorts of cultural forces, sometimes literally, forced you to adopt the obligated language and time.

I wish I could tell you what to do, but it doesn’t matter. Donate, or don’t. Escape to the woods, or don’t. Watch television and play video games or climb mountains and pray. It doesn’t matter. Sooner than later you’ll get to shake off all the anxieties about the world you live in, because even if you can’t face it right now, it’ll catch up. Even if you think your plans mean shit, your humanitarian soul will reach just one person, your passion for some activity keeps you afloat, you don’t matter. The universe cares nothing about you. Your god couldn’t save if it switched to Geico.

I’m not saying you should believe anything I’ve said. It just doesn’t matter.

[552] Hungry

There is no good place to begin. I suppose I mostly just want to talk about the fall of man. This fall plays out every moment of every impersonal lie we subject our perception to. Every "joke" you read in this forum speaks to it. It's every "fight" that plays out most dramatically within the confines of your blood pressure more than anywhere to do with the "real world." It's like a forced obsessive compulsiveness given that one way or another, the internet can remind you that nothing goes away. Whether you were dealing with a difficult problem or simply flew off the handle, these cobbling together of words suggest a permanence to your being that overwhelmingly skews negative.

What this does is it breaks down our empathy and honesty. There's a difference between someone like Hitler 2(Trump), for example, who gets a national pulpit to express views engendering racial hatred and the internet troll. Well, in the world of adults with perspective, there would be. One acts on impulse and immaturity, the other is a guiding beacon standard bearer, who, incidentally, acts on impulse and immaturity. Otherwise responsible adults feel bad when they've done or said something irresponsible or shitty. I feel we've crossed over into a world where standard metrics of decency are perpetually up for debate. This isn't because they should be, by any means, it's just we play so fast and loose with our conceptions of power we tend to destroy even a general communal identity structure.

For me personally, reddit will always be a place that I'm dragged back into the worst kinds of habits and arguments. I've had someone dig up my personal information and write an entire diatribe about how batshit they think I am, cherry picking some of my worst experiences I chose to write about over the last 12 years. Think about that, 12 years. How many fights have you been in in 12 years? The handful of mine stuck out and I wrote about them. How many depressed or angry thoughts might you have in 12 years? Mind you, they're formative years as well. Years that everyone rides out emotional roller coasters from time to time, let alone finds the capacity to retain them as mini explosions you see people carry out in their adult lives.

Not only is it a sheer lack of respect for the complicated existence we have with ourselves and how to process it all, it's abusing the wanton nature of influence on the internet. It's not just you who can make me look bad by going through my thoughts and picking the worst. I can do it to. In the same way you can pick apart news sources to turn anything into the worst or best thing you've ever heard or wanted to project. Now, at least for some institutions, there's a vested financial and moral payout for accountability and accuracy. In our personal lives? All we need to do is feel good about it. We don't have to accept basic truths about humanity and complex emotions or thoughts. That person is crazy.

Here we bump into the heart of the issue. We've lost the tools to figure out who's crazy and who isn't. Even if there were a fleeting capacity to diagnose someone from their words, judgments and prescriptions are offered at a blistering pace. One person's boredom and immaturity is another's protective order. I personally draw stark lines between making violent threats and expressing endless streams of bigoted hate speech, but then it's practically impossible to explain away or dial back the time you take a ho-hum attitude towards calling a random person a nigger. It's always in bad taste, that was certainly the point at the time, but genuine fears regarding that person's specific racism are arguably misplaced.

But of course, they can't be. We don't want them to be. It's not that literally everyone is probably what we understand to be racist, unconsciously or otherwise, it's that they've handed you the tool to be the self-righteous hero of an internet beat down. The only context is the voice you're reading their words in your head with. It's not your burden to take your time with their words or be patient with your initial reaction. They slipped, you won. Of course you both lost and you stained humanity, but thus is life with too much time and impersonality.

Let's make it more complicated. What if you're a fiction writer? What if your words are a caricature of how you feel and you blow them up? Like when someone screams, "I'll kill you!" and in any honest world you can be assured that anger isn't going to blow up into murder. What if a strategy for dealing with your life and thoughts is to adopt a character that likes to write. Now this character can shoulder the burden of these troublesome thoughts and put them down and away somewhere. Who's to say? Do we indict the fiction writers for their depictions of soulless or tasteless acts and words? Do we have any idea that these words are coming from somewhere honest and truthful despite endless professions they might be?

It's pretty easy to solidly say "no" on both counts. If I told you I murdered a homeless man in Florida in 1998, it would be not just wildly unreasonable to take this digression to the criminal records division and find a case that matches up. You shouldn't insist on my alibi. You shouldn't do whatever it takes to tie my reddit profile to random sites that may pop up on google and implore my ISP to give you a name. We can leave aside that I would have been a child in 1998, just think about how not even skeptical you are right now in reading this! My very explanation makes you want it to be true. You're reacting to a random thought and the very idea of plausible deniability as if I'm guilty. Does that make any fucking sense?

That's the world we live in now. We look for "moral high ground" as it exists in personal speculation and empty judgment. We don't know things. We don't think about things. We don't take responsibility for things. We don't let things die natural deaths and we prevent things from growing that would displace the feeble ground we've established for ourselves. Someone slaps your mistake to a picture or name and you can be memed. You can get in trouble years after the fact. You can be denied for all the work and thought you put into getting past that moment. Is it any wonder people feel so depressed by staying online? Is it impossible to admit the "polarization" will never go away as long as we don't address the basic assumptions about how this medium changes our emotional state with regard to knowledge and each other?

If you're a little crazy, the online world gives you space to be insanely moreso. If you're a little illogical, someone has taken your doozy and written a manifesto to its defense. If you're a little correct, you'll be able to find thousands of people to give you kudos like you just won a major award! Highest rated comment here I come! I guess reddit likes duck puns! And now your thoughts are awash in achieving such glory again one day. The worst part of this accelerant nature is that it rarely identifies or celebrates the a little bit crowd. The craziest of crazy gets to the top. The hardest to think or cope about gets buried very quickly. The one's who've figured out the empty pretentious "adult voice" that never really speaks to anything but the myth of civility and intelligence prevails as a standing denial and indictment of the reality. It's not all bad, just hide the haters!

You're the hater. You're a person who's capable of as much or as little hatred as you read into someone else's words. You swallow every word like you hope everyone is swallowing yours. It's just a joke to you. It's just you offering your honest opinion. It's just the internet. You find ways to distract yourself and silence the harm you cause yourself and other people. And don't be mistaken that it's just in your words. No no. The words by their nature are a level of ambiguity you try to use to absolve yourself. That is, humans can be complicated and ambiguous, but they can also know when they're lying. The words themselves can't.

Think about that when you're trying so hard to condemn "the other" or "the crazy." If you're working too hard, you're scared of your true nature. If you can't escape your past, it's because it's not in the past. Just like my worst professions of writing. They're there for me to stare at today. They can and will be used against me to hijack my struggles or insecurities and supplement them with yours. You didn't take my words as a process or an honest opportunity to reflect and empathize. You scapegoated. I'm sacrificed on your alter of impersonal depravity as your name and your face have no defense. We're equally as desperate. We're equally as bored. We hurt ourselves implicitly or explicitly. But I'm willing to keep talking. I'm willing to keep working and reflecting.

So I pity you, anonymous voices. I pity you for how much you believe in yourselves and the consequences of your power. If you pretended to have the best intentions, you'd still be doing nothing but destroying. The harder you feel you're behaving in earnest, the farther down an oblivious hole you tumble. The real world fallout is greater than you could imagine (well, presumably before the election of Hitler 2).

I'm so scared, not for my own safety or prospects because of the stupid shit I do online mind you, but because of how few people can even relate to my fear or figure out ways to relate to it honestly. We're still going to go around diagnosing each other. We're going to take snapshots and think they've anything to do with historical trends or the preponderance of evidence to the contrary. We're going to muster the resolve to fight and fear "controversial opinions" instead of actual fascism or personal insecurities regarding the endless series of empty words we use to suit our interests. And then what? We'll keep blaming each other into circles of mental and physical violence. When someone stops and admits it's their fault. When responsibility tries to take a breath, we'll pile on, ravenous.

[551] A Mess

It's terribly confusing and terribly annoying to be such a contradiction.

Yesterday was a day filled with good news and productivity regarding my future plans. I was dancing around or singing most of the day. There was prep for Thanksgiving. I suppose we already need to speak to the annoying aspect of being a contradiction in that it wasn't yesterday, but the day before. Yesterday I literally spent all day in bed sleeping off a hangover. At the last minute I decided my energy needed to be out, as if spending money and random drunken stranger conversation is favored to be a positive.

That setting is probably the easiest when it comes to speaking towards contradiction. There were a group of people who I've probably partied with before, and for what is probably the 5th time I've forgotten their faces. Ironically, they remind me of the old days of getting together before everyone got old and resented each other, but I can't seem to persuade my brain to retain a longer or more appreciative memory of them. The idea of being out together and celebrating with something that ensures you'll forget, or will kill you early in excess, I still can't say I understand. The alternative to being out of course would have been to just stay home, like I usually do. Just watch another movie or 5, sleep in or maybe play around on the guitar. Of course I find it in me to complain about all the "nothing" I do each day and hashtagged a year of my life with #yearofbeingboring.

Let's address just a general list of agitating contradiction to get it out of the way. I talk about saving money and spending wisely and yet manage to find myself in the middle of nights like 2 days ago. I could make my own meals and prepare them a week in advance and save, but nah. I could drink in my house and keep myself contained or entertained. That's not what I picked. I buy land to learn how to live sustainably, but I can't tell you the last time I recycled. I'm writing this and feeling like it's beyond pointless and overblown to explain my feelings...in the face of 550 other blogs over 12 1/2 years. I know I need structure, but actively work against its introduction into my life. I disavow my words and advice as I argue vociferously and secretly hope someone manages to do better with them than I manage. I fall prey to "one day" thinking despite that day literally being today where I get to speak to all that I am trying to accomplish.

I'm sure there's considerably more things, but I've forsaken the idea that this blog will live up to anything too coherent or comprehensive. If you consider as well how long we've been living in a world of doublespeak and emphasis on the faux-gray impartiality we've applied to the circus of Hitler 2, the places one might try to find their footing that exist beyond the befuddled and manic depressive mind break away. "I may not feel great, but at least someone's looking out for me!" No, no they're not dear, I'm sorry.

I'v gotten told a number of times to come hang out in a Blue state and surround myself with friends. While I haven't shrugged off civility, I forget how long ago I dropped the notion of what a friend was or wasn't supposed to mean. I don't seek to find my validation in offering honesty they don't want. (as long as I keep getting likes!) If I spent time traveling to do that, I wouldn't have been able to afford my land. If I didn't generally save and live a boring existence, I wouldn't be able to achieve binge nights. If I didn't open up with the chance that random bar conversation might be fun or worthwhile, I wouldn't have the opportunity to keep forgetting people let alone experience the guilt-light.

I want to believe things aren't binary. I want to think that my friends or family aren't as "whatever" as I might say they are. But then that opens the risk of me treating them like I do myself. Taking highs that have you singing and dancing and dashing them against the rocks of superficial drunk-i-cality.

Oh! More contradictions. I find "heroes" who put out good videos or books and then look for every reason to hate them. I watch everything in an attempt to be "in the know" but can barely recall plot lines or why it was significant. The more I think to myself how cool it would be to bring more people together, I find myself provoked to create more divisions as a sort of "get it over with" band-aid ripping of emotional ties. I honestly don't know if I'm a "miserable" person given that I don't find people like me for which I can make reliable comparisons, but still manage to identify with precision what's eating away at someone else as if I'm perpetually intimately familiar. One might just point to the burden of existing at all as each day marches you towards inevitable death.

Whatever. This was a mess.