[648] Family Treason

I’ve been thinking a lot about family, and more specifically, in the context of media. As far as how family does or doesn’t operate in my own life, I think I’ve refrained from seeing a connection that helps explain my approach to who I’ve let in my life and why. Let’s talk this out.

TV is reliable. For hundreds of episodes you can tune into the same faces. No matter the levels of betrayal or craziness, the characters return to each other. No one is ever too dimwitted or angry or caring or wacky. They serve a purpose and have a role. They play off and round out until you get a picture of something that persists. Modern Family is never going to seriously discuss divorce nor is Blackish ever going to have Dre wake up to a burning cross in his yard.

TV isn’t just reliable in that way, it’s what we flatten out with a rolling pin to make it easier to consume. Depression can be touched up by endearing quirks and not-too-off-color jokes. Obesity gets a backstory of excuses and room to understand. Entitlement sits at the head of an overflowing dinner table. Rage gets redirected towards off-screen or low-tier entities you’re not invested in. Every time a TV show tries to get “tough” and “deal with the real issues,” it is, by being designed, serving to undermine the stated goal in service to the reason it ever became such a powerful reflection in the first place. We care about the story, not the truth.

Think about what happens when a character dies. When a “beloved” character is ripped from our expectations, we revel in the surprise. Game of Thrones is nothing if not for its “shocking” deaths, now so numerous it’s a built in joke and expectation. If half the cast were killed in the opening episode of the new season, the show would go on. Our TV families are expected to go through everything so we don’t have to. Let them negotiate peace. Let them forgive. Let them cope.

TV is an indirect measure of where “we” collectively reside as a culture. The ever-expanding diversity of television and networks acts as though it speaks towards a measure of progress or that we’re hearing new and marginalized voices. I don’t think so. I think we’ve always been prepared to hear the black story, or gay story, or woman’s story, because the story absolves us of any real responsibility to any real relationship with someone who’s black, gay, or a woman. Somewhere, deep down, are more representations of different people a good thing? I think so. Is it the kind of work that traverses deep cultural divides and fosters togetherness? I think not even close.

There’s a weird irony constantly at play. The closer you look, and the harder you try to capture, the more likely you are to corrupt. I’m criticized for my “direct” nature. I hate dancing around pleasantries and speaking in code. People often think I don’t understand the kind of mistake I’m making. Our culture is predicated on that indirect approach. You don’t tell the girl you like her, you feign like you’re not interested. You don’t tell the boss to go fuck himself, you accomplish something that impresses the person above them. TV is a natural extension of this. You don’t make a gay friend, you reference something funny Cam said to signal you’re not an overt hater. You can’t be racist if you love watching Insecure.

The writers are usually trying to accomplish something real in any series that takes itself seriously. They lived those moments. They had those almost exact conversations. They didn’t have the lighting and the timing, but here’s as close an approximation to what happened when I came out at Thanksgiving, where’s my Emmy? But they wrote the episode. They lived it. They did the work, so you don’t think you have to.

It’s the indirect pose that I think gives us our baseline ideas regarding our own families. People put up with the worst kinds of abuses. They shoulder the responsibility when nothing is ever returned in kind. Family sticks together, right? Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. At the end of the day, all you have is family. It works for the Mafia! If you weren’t paying attention. I was told growing up, “You’re brothers, you should love each other.” No doubt a sentiment passed to my father as earnestly as he tried to pass it onto us.

But where is the love? I don’t recall a single week my entire life me and my brother got along particularly well. My dad’s siblings have done everything in their power to resent and take advantage and steal from him. My mom was all forms of abusive towards him well before she got around to taking things out on us. But we’re family? Right? My dad and stepmom are currently shouldering the major portion of the fallout from my uncle’s recent cancer diagnosis. A task I wouldn’t put into the hands of any of his siblings were he on the receiving end. If it were an episode of TV, my dad would be the resilient everyman who’s capacity for forgiveness knows no bounds, and my uncle might see the light of his actions previously for just a second before dying off serenely surrounded by tearful, artfully suggestive of caring, family.

I tried to be more explicit in my concept and approach to “family.” I started picking friends. Where I screwed up was in the assumption family in and of itself meant anything, let alone that anyone would hold similar ideas to me as to how they would function. I think this is a major component to my confusion and frustration regarding my relative expectations about them. I had said out loud that they weren’t going to be playthings, they were different, I choose them to be as good or as bad as they are and we can all agree that this is how it works. I tried to cast a show that didn’t know it was filming. I directly dictated a puzzle that could only fall apart after it slid together while no one was looking.

Here I think about your “first love.” I certainly didn’t expect to be taken for a ride, and then I was on it. My “second love” did exactly the same thing, but it took a lot longer. I was paying attention this time. I was fighting back. The puzzle didn’t start with the edges and fill in quickly, it slipped a couple together here and a couple there until I saw a completed picture with nowhere to go but back in the box. It’s easy to be with someone when you’re letting whatever it is be. Then you turn them into your TV character with predictable, reliable, patterns to reinforce a feeling. That feeling has to be a good one, as I persistently learn my very presence instantiates negativity in many people.

Part of what I considered me “maturing” was adopting the ability to let people be who they were. The problem is when they don’t know, or don’t care, to figure out what they are. I’ve said a number of times that for as much of a roller coaster as I think I’ve put on display in blogs, “I” still remain “me” in some perverse impossible to nail down individuality. You’re not writing this, I am. It seems that the indirect habit applies as much to our own experience as much as anything else. We already know our eyes are a lie. We slowly lose the ability to hear and taste and smell. Why not forgo the mind it takes to pay attention and make choices? You don’t have to be you as long as you surround yourself with people telling you nice things about who you are.

I wanted to pick my family, but they had other plans. I still want the people I desire and look out for and heap endless praise and resources at to represent more than time spent in school together or partying or blood. And because I’m me, I know what I know and recognize what I’m after. I’ve done the work. I lay my TV characterizations of who you are to rest and try to engage the human who’s at least as convoluted and contradictory and confusing as I am. We have to be on the level. We have to choose each other. It’s an impossible and miraculous feat that most are barely willing to get a glimpse of.

The sickness is that you can attach yourself to an endless array of things and people that do nothing for you. They don’t help. They don’t teach. They don’t challenge. They leach while they let you leach. They hide you from yourself by making you all about them thus hidden in return. You can’t share with those resentful of you. You can’t save someone by cutting the noose when they’re dangling over a cliff. Here you get to make what you think is my fatal flaw. You pop into action and focus all of your time and energy. You advocate and celebrate and encourage. You take from the very finite yet always giving well of energy to keep the television on.

I don’t feel like this often, but I’ve been ashamed to think that I think many of the people I care about, the ones I would consider family, are cowards. I’m usually immediately fashioned into some kind of “that guy” who’s coming in hot or “doesn’t get it” or is so stubborn I’m only able to undermine all of my best intentions. But I’ve given those ideas room to breathe. I’ve talked them to death and invited commentary. I can’t function as your character who represents the things you don’t feel you have the permission to say. It makes me feel cheap and inhuman, and it’s dishonest. I can inspire, but I can’t substitute. Just like all the “nice” people in my life I envy aren’t going to determine my attitude to new acquaintances.

When I think about the amount of times some relationship in my life has “failed” and put it in terms of who the person is verses who they’re projected to be, a lot makes sense. I’ve “failed” many fuck buddies by not blossoming into “husband material.” They used to be friends, but now they’re fuck buddies, because when I wasn’t a character, they wanted nothing to do with me. By trying to accept certain friends as “who they are,” I came across as the overconfident judgmental blowhard who doesn’t leave room for anyone else to breathe as I offered scathing commentary about all of “them” out there, so how couldn’t I think those things about my friends as well? Our familiar familial connection turned to static. TV-me doesn’t have friends and family. TV-me is trapped in a time warp oozing Howard Stern in his 20’s energy. Off screen, we assume he’s okay with his books or his shows, wearily shaking his fist at the fall of man.

I’m not a character. More importantly, I’m not your character. I’m never going to treat you like you’re one of mine. I’ve chucked the longing and sentimentality and gone back into my selfish obnoxious preservation, but that doesn’t mean you’ve been demoted. That doesn’t mean I don’t suffer your cowardice or dishonesty in service to my attempted “maturity” with regard to our friendship. Because that’s just how you are, right? I say mean things, not you. Your brother is your brother, not me. Your story is the one you’re picking and fighting for, not a theme and skin that feel “good enough” for you to ride things out. You have things to say; you’re not a cordial parrot with teeth. Now there’s an animal fit for the screen.

[647] Fast & Frivilous

Free association, go.

Me, too. Every girl who’s ever lived has experienced sexual harassment. My theory, something something stupid apes mired in millions of years of evolutionary history. What I don’t think will happen is anything resembling “it getting better.” Share. Keep sharing. I think the guys who sexually harass will say, “Remember when Tracy said she was sexually harassed? Let’s see if she’ll post another status.” This isn’t to sandbag my female friends, but I think statuses like that are part of that cultural mythology I hate. Let’s pretend we haven’t figured anything out about where we come from or how to do cause and effect. Everybody playing along? Okay, cool, now pat ourselves on the back.

It doesn’t get better. If getting older has allowed me anything, it’s the impossible to ignore perspective that adults are just dumber children. Children, we like to say, don’t know better. Adults just don’t know better with dozens of more excuses as to why. Key word, excuses. They can read the statistics and ignore them. They can hear the morality parables and scoff. They can cry and laugh with hundreds of characters across the ages and turn right around into feeling like the loneliest most self-important thing that ever did live. You’re not finding your dream mate. You’re not getting that financially secure. You’re not going to status update away eyes from your tits or lecherous creeps from going too far. Do you want to help, or is the camaraderie of collective mockery what it’s really about?

While I’m not going to hold a candle for the dead or carry on like I’m somehow trying to defend sexual assault, I have my own crosses to bare and naive flickering flames too. I don’t mean to dismiss any shot you take at solidarity or in “bringing awareness” as completely pointless. But I can’t help feeling it’s mostly pointless. Like being a TV or movie critic. Hundreds of negative opinions just like yours aren’t going to stop them from making Fast and the Furious movies. There are deeper financial and cultural perspective qualifiers at play of greater consequence. Are you willing to look for them, or simply admit to yourself it’s not really worth having too strong of an opinion about a movie that’s not made for you?

“Sexual assault isn’t movie preferences, asshole.” Nothing is something it’s not, so fuck ever making analogies, right? They’re influenced by money, no? The richest are rarely prosecuted. The poorest are completely ignored. There’s a resource allocation underbelly that gets completely bypassed. Do you know what prevents sexual assault? If you don’t have an answer reflexively, it’s a wonder what links of support for educational and data driven advocacy groups could do instead. I’d like to see discussions about better ways to condition or reprimand that doesn't devolve into petty dissections of one particular idiot’s lack of tact. But, don’t let me carry on too long, I’m not of the opinion that “anything” gets “better.”

Recursive problem solving. The idea being that you use a past solution to a problem and apply it to the next set of problems until they’re all solved. For those who think the universe is some kind of simulation or algorithm, think of how horrifying that process could be. An impartial universe with no connotative care for “sexual assault” running through every lamentable sexual experience between every person who has or will ever live. Only to find out what? What any one individual could have told it from one unwanted sexual encounter.Yet, don’t we seem to adopt a stupid computer-like approach to solving the problems in our own lives? We address the lies with more lies. We claw at the wind and then ball up our fists to give it a good whoosh. We run from difficult questions and feelings into ever-complicated problems that leave us lost in a new rush of questions and feelings.

I fashion myself a pattern seeker. I try to hurt myself in ways that make it so I don’t hurt the same way again. This stops me from viral empty status sharing. This stops me from reflexively throwing 5 bucks at Puerto Rico. This stops my allegedly liberal or woke heart from bleeding out. Do I avoid all stupid patterns? Next time you catch a drunk blog, obviously not. Am I trying to fix anything but myself for its stupid feelings in the moment? Not really. Do I think you’re trying to fix sexual assault with a status update? Of course not. Do I think you want to reduce the care or concern you might have for the issue to the level of disregard I have in posting a drunk blog? God forbid.

It can only come from a selfish place. You can hunt down the kind of men that are exceedingly unlikely to make you feel violated, but the others aren’t going away. You can think you’ve spoken up and been brave and advocated for a lifetime, but you’re competing with structures in the brain older than trees. I’m not speaking as to whether shitty behavior is justified, nor do I think it is. I am trying to shine a light on the fast and furious forces that will continually profit until there’s nothing sexually motivated left on the planet.

[646] Identi-please

I’ve written the first few lines of a dozen different blogs over the last few days in my mind. When that happens, it’s like an animal is scratching at the door to be let outside. You assume it has to pee, but it could just be restless or saw the neighbor’s dog and wants to play. My simple-minded dog brain rarely distinguishes some level of “suffering” from “boredom” from “overwhelmed” from “exhausted,” so I dig my toe into the dirt and meander around a point until I can land on a hard description.

The last 2 days have proven as great or greater a measure of progress on getting my house done as the last 2 and a half months. I still find myself at the mercy of my “basically by myself” programming which seeks and finds Craigslist morons instead of asking around the circles of people I know. Consider, it takes me reaching near breakdown mode before I think to ask a coworker or text a friend. My ingrained assumption reflexively dismisses the idea that the people I come in contact with are good for anything. Perhaps more specifically, good for what I need versus what I think I might be able to get out of them.

A large portion of my mental space recently has been ruminating on how I find myself, again, annoyed and put off by people’s terrible communication. They don’t show up on time. If they make a definitive statement, I know precisely what is not going to happen and exactly the steps they aren’t going to take to ensure nothing happens. People ignore me until it’s convenient, or they’re on a meth induced fervor, and then expect me to meet their conditions after they’ve strung me along or lied about something.

And then another reflex kicks in. I tell myself I don’t deserve this. I’m pressed to statements about not being able to find a single reliable person in the entire state. I’m impressing upon acquaintances my relative impoverished state. None of it, by approximation, having really anything to do with me and who I try to be.

I had the thought that I was perhaps losing my subjective self. My company is so routinely superficial or self-destructive, I’ve nothing to reflect upon that isn’t a level of complaint or frustration. I meet kids at the bar. I have 2 minute pass-bys at work. I make the same endless appeal for grabbing a beer or help on the land to general silence and indifference. The one person acting closest like me to show up and get shit done, reinforce the idea that my goals and projects are as achievable as I’ve been describing? My dad. He shows up, we work, I almost have all my walls. He’s agreed to drive me to the hospital Tuesday should I prove unable to navigate constructing my solar array.

There isn’t enough “there” there for me to really be moved one way or another. I used to think people grasped how special it was to have more than a handful of friends, actual friends, to hit the bar with. That of course dwindled out. The “celebration” reduced to edge dampening and pleasantries over bummed cigarettes. Receding deeper into my gut is that loud and excited pursuer of all things. It’s a weird place where, maybe I want to make you laugh, maybe I’m actually more concerned with setting you up to be disregarded after whatever I’ve said. I’ll call it being lightly poisoned by my new favorite phrase “middle class mediocrity.” You don’t need to shoot for the moon or experience a belly laugh, a chuckle will suffice.

I took off work a little early. I’m losing the “pride” of making as much money as soon as possible. I met a kid at the bar who immediately talked about how much money he wants to make and that’s why he’s in school. I just felt a little sad for him. So much enthusiasm and he didn’t even try for a more rounded or meaningful answer. I, still, want considerably higher amounts of money too, but I’ve learned I can barely buy friends a beer with it. I can pay people just enough to provoke a blowback that disproportionately impugns my time and patience.

Increasingly I’ve been taken by the idea of wanting the struggle. A character in the show Better Things described her father getting older. In normal life, you’re used to framing your troubles as something you can keep working to make better. As her father aged, he just kept getting more broken until he was gone. I think I treat my day to day life like it’s an aging person, while normal middle class mediocrity sees the potential for a fix for everything. Today I could die with sworn blood oaths to loathe certain actors in my life. Today I could meet an incredible person I’ll somehow regret not searching harder for and finding sooner. Today I could be reminded of the endless opportunities tucked underneath the waves of endless pretension and scorn. The newest, shiniest, or most terrible thing all just one more crumbling piece falling away. An arbitrary up and down eroding.

I’m going to go grab a beer now. I’m going to pay more for it than it’s worth. I’m going to scroll through my phone and stare too long at a hot waitress with all the tact it’s impossible to do that with. I’m going to do it alone because I’ve been trained to know better than to bother inviting people without weeks of advanced notice and mild pleading. Then I’m going to return to my car, drive to the top of the parking garage, and sleep until it’s time to go to work again tomorrow for another $150-$200 I kinda need to maybe move an 1/8th of an inch in some direction I doubt amounts to more than a prayer or fart in the wind. You know, real me shit.

[645] Blink Drive

Because I don't spend much time “doing anything,” I do spend a lot of time putting myself through thought experiments. It's one of the few ways I can trick myself into feeling more than the low hum of my general existence without alcohol. Then I poke around for what moved me. When you're busy, it's hard to zero in on where any one feeling may be coming from. Some very long days working became better dealt with overnight when it occurred to me I wasn't eating enough. But on days like today, where my car has died again, I'm forced to exist in a space that doesn't really want me here, and I can choose to read about the world, watch tv, or mindlessly scroll through pictures, I decided instead to do the thought experiment game.

I wish every day I was more like the people who seem to be generally supportive and caring about what others are doing. The people who can use “passion” without irony and smile super bright because, I don't know, you saw a tree on a different mountain this weekend. I think about what it would take to get me there. I also think about what anchors me in aversion to acquiring the ability. Immediately it's apparent to me “all the things that aren't done yet that are more important.” My mind registers “escaping” into the woods as “too easy” and therefore “bad.” To be sure, of course the picture isn't that simple, but I have to start somewhere. More interesting to me is when I consider where I'd have to be to not care about the “bad” feeling. It's usually after I tell myself that nothing can be fixed and nothing matters.

Days like today are a microcosm of my “year of being boring.” Even if I've been mentally preparing to make a big payment to get my car fixed again, I'm not under immediate threat of dire financial circumstances. Whether I work all day for the next week or just enough to keep making shed payments, I'm still not going to find myself in ideal social interactions or make consequential steps in something entrepreneurial. I'm forced to believe, no matter the money, no matter the motivation, no matter the time, that nothing can be fixed and nothing matters. I actually had the thought that part of me secretly wanted my car to cost more because then I no longer would have to be burdened with the choice of where I should spend my time. I don't know what to make of that beyond a kind of exhaustion with my perceived levels of general freedom. Perhaps a dramatic scaling up of that is our current political climate. The gun is to our head.

The goal is to provide yourself with a road to adopting something you don't think is a good idea. The ideal realization is to do it in a way that doesn't make you resolve to a nihilistic cliché. I don't want to get bored with opposition and then let that be the metric by which I can see your point of view. I want to understand what puts you doing what you're doing over what I'd rather be or think we should be doing together. It's something like the idea where, if every selfie replaces a page of Nazi history you could have read, “we're” not going to fix the backdrop under which I trust your smile or see the wisdom of your vacation. Again, it's not linear or as directly causal as I've presented it, yet the general mode of being seems to be resolved fatalistic escapism. Easy enough to understand, hard to respect, anymore than I “need” a few $7 beers after “forcing” myself to drive all day.

Another thing I've tried to persuade myself of is to lean towards more “traditional” behaviors and advocacy of marriage. Here though, it's not exactly the same feeling of opposition, but a kind of disgust with myself for throwing what I've learned under the bus. There is no facebook montage version of the cutest, most well liked, and most respected set of couples. They are human. They have brains and life experiences at least as prone to driving them towards everything I've experienced and into a “reduction” of statistics of the billions who've come before.

I start having to denigrate myself when I think about getting married. “Oh, you're just as susceptible of being afraid of being alone as anyone else, might as well settle down.” Is there an indignity in fearing being alone? No. Is it logical to think companionship in and of itself speaks to your real problem or longing? No. “Oh! you don't want to be a dirty old man staring down a new crop of 18 year olds as long as you live in a college town, do you?” Well, yeah, kinda, I do. Hot shit is hot, oh well.

In order for me to advocate for marriage I have to morph my conception of what it symbolizes. To the degree it's understood as evidence of commitment seems such an obvious joke. Obviously I'm not persuaded by sanctity, sexual fidelity, or to be used to justify ugly children. For me to be an advocate, it would have to be so everybody knew I was doing what the person I put first in the world wanted to do. I've said a number of times if my ex had asked me, I would have said yes. I can see the point of having a goal to as often as you can put the needs of the ones you care about above yourself. To the degree your marriage means that is the degree I understand where you're coming from. Quick, hurry up and tell me that's in fact what your marriage really means...

I find it funny, and I don't think it's an accident, that often enough when I use some theoretical example in my writing about the “ideal” person “doing what they do” I actually have that person in my circles. I've made the “best video gamer” caricature before, perfectly unaware I had a friend who was in the 1% of the world at like 12. I'm always trying to point out the doctors and “unbelievably nice” people as models for the rest of us to live by, and overwhelmingly have that crowd who's, at the very least, refrained from deleting me from facebook. Long ago, I was made aware of how much I am attracted to or tend to move towards the people who have what I'm missing. Perhaps better stated, are comfortable doing and being what I gave up a long time ago, but still see why it's needed. I'll need the outdoors kids when most of my money can be positioned behind extravagance or food. I'll need the contended loving descriptions and looks after I'm looking sideways at an iffy one night stand.

I think there's an overarching theme at play. It's again the difference between the freedom to choose and being compelled. If the hobbies you love are all that you could afford. If the love of your life is the only one who would have you. If your celebration is a desperate escape from the history and literature and responsibility to be more of consequence. That's what always remains unclear to me. I run headlong into fires I create or otherwise. I do it because before the fire was lit, I did the work of preparing the plan and my mind to carry it out. I don't want to find myself writing when I'm old about all the things I did out of desperation or fear. I don't want to have a thousand questions about my impact, framed in ways I can never answer, by planting their roots in someone else's shitty opinion. Maybe I'll never know “what it all means” or what dumb words you'll pick over the dumb words I chose instead, but I'll always be able to at least watch what it's doing to you, and what it's doing to us. I'd rather close my eyes.

[644] A Quick Fuck You

I think for all the work I do to obscure definitions and try to provide context and whatever else to obviate a point, I’m a veritable king at definitive statements.

I like nice people. Even if I think you’re naive and dumb, I like that it’s nice. I like when you match your word to your actions or goals in life. It’s never really a secret to me how I want or need to behave in service to some proposition or idea. I know what’s nice. I know what’s good. I know when you’re fucking it up.

Let’s beat it again, why you’re my friend. I might be one of your 1000. You’re one of my 70 or so. I think the world doesn’t get better if you don’t figure out your own “little” world. That’s the trick though, right? It’s not little. I fucking hate everybody. If I don’t hate you, you’re of dramatically more consequence than anyone with their idiot heads could ever guess. I need to figure out how to get to YOU.


I think this is one of the ground floor conceptions of my potential brilliance that is rarely if ever acknowledged. Consider that when you think about your circles.

I know I bitch. I know I bitch a lot. I know that I can take something quasi-innocuous and blow it up for months or years. Not the point. The point is, YOU ARE THE IMPORTANT VARIABLES.


I don’t like or love accidentally. I don’t front. I don’t play. I’ve lived the consequences of my own disposition. I’m not theory. The real fucking magic is what happens when you snort me.

If I don’t die unexpectedly soon, I absolutely promise to show you.

What I like about me is the capacity to trust that you rarely find. Like, I trust my dad. I trust no one else. Even people I thought I could trust I do not where I thought it counted. But me? I’ve always been trustworthy of me. I don’t have to make the caveat “trust you to be as you are” as I have for other people. I know me. I know what I need to see and feel. I know you’ll be as excited as I am when I make shit manifest.

And I guess that’s enough. It is sad. But I guess it’s enough. I want more for you than you do. I want the world. You want...middle class mediocrity. I hate you for that, but I love you for all the shit that’s good that I want to put on blast and render what I hate about you mute.

I complain like it’s years. It’s days. It’s weeks. I’m on the brink of the start of myriad worlds of meaning any number of things. Guys. Wake the fuck up. All it’s ever been is right now. It won’t just be blogs and drunk ramblings. It’ll be my ass on the phone. It’s soon. It’s way sooner than you think. Are we friends? Does 16 year old version of you like you? Want to create with you? Want to invest in you? We’re dead tomorrow, get it through your thick fucking skulls.

I’m not even that angry, I’m just desperate. I want you to get it, and when you don’t, I guess it’ll just be me and Hatsam or Byron drunk begrudging you. So stupid and such a waste.

[643] Invisible Pants On Fire

Can you even know when you’re lying?

I first think of a courtroom. “Do you swear to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” It wasn’t until relatively recently that we could make definitive claims about the complete unreliability of “eyewitness testimony” and “experts” relating the “plausible degree of scientific certainty.” People were trained to detect patterns in blood and fingerprints. DNA is still considered practically infallible. Even in the best faith, with an entire profession and schooling dedicated to something, it can be an outright lie.

The persistent criticism to my use of the word “lie” is that, as long as the person doesn’t know they’re lying, it isn’t a lie. It’s this kind of smudge that creeps into reporting. During an interview, a person will outright lie about what they knew or who should take responsibility, shortly followed by the reporter saying something like, “But according to someone else, that statement may not be so certain.”

For some reason, we’re extremely put off by the idea of calling someone a liar. I can only speculate that it has to do with being afraid of being called out ourselves. The problem, if modernity is any indication, is that it gives us this false licence to regard most things as generally true. We succumb to the idea that because “everyone has an opinion” that it’s an okay measure by which to judge information. We’re complicit in our own laziness to look up or define a situation better, so we swallow the shortcuts under the overwhelming deluge of information from our online streams.

But this has dire implications. Your mental health and sense of identity is at stake. Social cohesion and the ability to trust are laid to waste. To abide by “any” information and be physically conditioned to normalize lies is to undermine your survival. But what if the entire time you’re testifying to your life and truth and purpose or perspective, and you haven’t the slightest idea that any of it is untrue?
In a discussion with a friend recently, I criticized him for language that I contended was flirting with “bat shit.” He came back with the idea that we should all think critically about the lies we’re told through the media. It’s an easy enough sentiment to espouse, and a considerably harder task to parse out when you try to get specific and consider the problems at the individual level. He, rightly so, wondered how do you even evaluate information in this landscape to begin with?

If we’re going to drill down on that sentiment, we have to first accept certain conditions about life that can’t be introduced to derail any possible road to coherence. First, nothing is perfect or complete. That doesn’t mean it can’t be complete “enough.” My car is a piece of shit, but if I let the less than 1% of the time it doesn’t work to dictate my opinion of it as “it doesn’t work,” I’m lying to myself and not going to get anywhere. Second, conspiracy does us no favors. “The media” isn’t a thing anymore than “big government” or “the deep state.” Any move to an impersonal mass of devious actors in the background, by definition, is without evidence or reason to introduce to the conversation. It’s also logically incoherent to think an extremely small group can account for the preponderance of forces affecting any one life or place in time. The CIA did do some background crazy shit. They often sucked at it. Who knew that even at the “highest levels” or “most secretive” areas, when you stock it with humans, you get human results. Do they have no impact? Of course not. Are they master hands? Only at persuading you to have a lack of imagination about the degrees of human fallibility.

This seems very basic, but it keeps coming up. Nothing feels real anymore, so you have to beat into people that an objective world still exists.

So what do you do when that objective world is morphed by your, divinely christened by modernity, subjective experience? Are you really whatever the news anchor said about you or what some combatant online has to say? Or are you a “staunch conservative” with principals and rationality who’s just as lost in the ideologue world as your liberal compatriots, who you assure me, you have the utmost respect for? 

Whether it’s your politics, or your movie tastes, I feel you have to approach with a skeptical, not unbounded into the relative abyss, mind. That’s it. Maybe you have bad taste. Maybe you have a poor conception of “the economy.” More assuredly, of course you do. You’re one idiot in a sea of hopefully greater idiots. The only thing that is going to help constitute you is a persistent attack on anything that seeks to destabilize the pursuit of finding out what’s true. Once you know the DOW is a useless metric by which to judge the economy, STOP REPORTING ON IT. Once you know there’s more than a few problems with GDP or “the unemployment rate” DROP THE CONVENTION. Yes, it takes work, it’s different and new and hard, but you help absolutely nothing by playing along.

I bring it up often in blogs. Who’s this "me," really? I’ve offered every voice on the spectrum besides downright mindless mania or psychosis. Am I the super-engaged smart guy who always has to try and say the next funny thing? Am I the violent sociopathic patriarch who’s hell bent on being overbearing and judgmental? I find it best to approach descriptions like that with a strong modesty. We’re processes and probabilities. We’re histories and choices. It doesn’t do you much of any good to wrap up anyone in a handful of cobbled together connotations from your chosen language.

But of course, people can tend in certain directions. It’s why I get pissy when I feel someone does a bad job of labeling me, because honestly, who’s going to approach their assessments of people with the same kind of deference and perspective I expect out of myself? My general being and life isn’t a story of a “negative” person. I can’t even recall the amount of times I’ve picked to keep refuting that assessment. For as fucked and stupid as the world is, it’s any wonder why people insist on foisting that shit on me and can’t see the environment in which we all exist. That’s the point right? They don’t even know they’re lying. They’re so used to it, I’m the problem, not a Nazi sympathizer in the White House. My judgmental attitude isn’t an attempt to better assess and navigate the world and my relationships, it’s an attack on the lie in their heart. Well, it is an attack, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong for attacking.

Any domain, the same story plays out. “You speak too harshly!” An entire generation growing up on coddling and historically unprecedented safety is driving us to the brink. We need a return of the old ways. “You didn’t think hard enough about your decisions!” No one’s offering anything else. What haven’t I considered? You don’t know? Then what the fuck are you talking about? “You’re getting so angry at me!” You should be angry at you. Am I “just an angry person” or is every single day of my life spent trying to persuade you that it’s extremely simple metrics predicated on self respect and responsibility that would shut me up until the day I die? I know the kind of people that behave in the ways necessary, and you don’t hear me complain about them.

Your personal self can tend toward objective measures of truth and an excess of words trying to account for and pay deference. Your sense of the world, or of yourself, doesn’t need to be perfect and carries with it all the liabilities one would expect. I don’t think anyone wants to do that work. I don’t think anyone really respects the amount of time I spend thinking and doubting and changing and writing hoping to get to a place where I can maximize the most out of my life and those I choose to have in it. Everything else is going to tend towards destruction and obscurity and the easy way out. Can you even recognize that? Can you figure out how little that has to do with any “opinion” I might hold?

I know when I’m lying. I didn’t always. I know when I should preface a statement with “If all goes perfectly” before I say I’ll have a house in 2 months. I know I said to my ex, “Now don’t take this shit the wrong way, because you know I hate the word, but I kinda love you too,” because both truths regarding my feelings and my hatred for stupid words can exist at the same time. The story and ongoing narrative of your place relative to the people in your life or history in general is constantly changing. Account for it. Capture it with as close to an approximation as you know for sure you’re not lying about. Anything less will bite you and hurts everyone around you. My smallest of small, seemingly totally inconsequential lies, find a way to creep back into my mind and cause problems if I don’t resolve them. It’s my experience people will outright deny there’s a giant lie at the center of their being in the first place. They aren’t an expert witness. They’ve lost the capacity to evaluate. And they refuse to understand the process before invoking the “scientific” nature of their opinion.

Just spend the rest of the day paying attention to how many times you might be lying. Think about how much you might have to rework in how you speak to the world and to your experience. Feel how stressful it is to be that person if there’s no one around willing to confer and do the work with as well. Then come back and talk to me about being judgmental or negative. Then try and give me a full account of your love and understanding. We’ll live or die as a species solely on whether we figure out how to take responsibility for ourselves. How much longer are you willing to be part of the problem?

[642] In Search Of A Problem

I want to write a speed blog. 

Right now, I’m a solution in search of a problem. I have money. I’m not sick anymore. I’m not hungry. Everyone around me generally remains shit, but that’s true regardless, and has little to do with me personally. I don’t have to be anywhere. I don’t have to work. I’m just waiting for more things to go wrong where I’ll have to begrudgingly fix them. 

I also can’t apply myself in any direction that isn’t “personal enrichment” where I won’t be making it worse. The things that need to be accomplished at the land, I can’t do alone. I’ve lined up people to do them, in fact, they’re already paid for, now the ball is in their court. I’m probably not going to “really” see my friends again until they start getting divorces, so I’m not obligated to show up somewhere and play along with middle-class mediocrity. I had the thought the other day about how many fewer weddings I would have ever attended or been invited to were I not with my ex. 

I’m probably going to go to work. I don’t know how long I’ll stay. I honestly forget that with my accounting style and amount of time I’ve put in, even when I’m “struggling,” I’m literally complaining about that specific day or that specific moment. I try as hard as I can to work in real time. If I have the “spare” $500, better talk to me right then, because either my car, some task, or a whim has their sights set on it. 

I also like about this particular moment how little I care about Vegas or Puerto Rico or Texas, or really anybody else in dire need right now. I think I’m finally persuaded that “my” impact doesn’t matter, or at least, hasn’t mattered as I felt it should for all of my knowledge and advocacy and whatnot. This will remain true if I get shot at the next concert I go to, or if I haven’t planned to get the fuck off an island with a hurricane heading towards it. There’s no reason for “us” to be suffering in the ways we are but for allegiance to greed and stupidity. We’re not helpless refugee children, so I’m not pledging my dollars to you any quicker than my sympathies will be played upon for them. 

The idea of being too keen to look after people has struck a chord with me as well. This notion that I can be a quasi-savior for everyone who didn’t see the catastrophe on the hill. That with my money or freedom or whatever it will sink in and “help.” This could be a solid reason people are defaulted to a kind of selfishness until it’s convenient. Overwhelmingly it seems you need to help yourself. You need to fix the obvious things about you before you can search for the unconscious plagues. Every single one of you is surviving well enough. If you wanted differently you’d be choosing differently, it is supposed. 

On a point about choices, I think about how many invitations to things I don’t get. I actually think about it quite a lot. This isn’t to dismiss the ones I do, but it does mean I invite people who I don’t suspect would ever think of me. This happens a lot, and I don’t know if I’m a glutton for punishment, or if I’m just crossing my fingers I’ll annoy the truth out of someone until they tell me to stop and go away. It’s the second thing. I want to annoy you for how annoyed I feel. 

I know I marked the transition back into a more high school version of myself a few months ago, but I think I still managed to forget some of the finer points to that disposition. I’m a train. I’m going to go back to not even pretending to be subtle about crashing into something, most often your disposition and opinion of me, and I’m not just going to feel less than nothing, I’m going to use it as fuel to crash even harder next time. And you know what? It’s going to make me look like the stunningly confident and knowledgeable popular dooshbag that’s attracted all the right people for the wrong reasons, and I’ll get lost in a little hedonistic hole for a spell. “

People” were a mass of impersonal overwhelming failures to me well before I managed to articulate it better. I suspect the “niceness” of my friend group in college had persuaded me to approach them differently for a while. I’m not going to fetishize nice people anymore. Fuck you, fuck me, I don’t care, I guess I’m back. It really doesn’t mean anything.

[641] Dream Fever

It’s late. It didn’t used to be late, but now it is. My eyes have seen enough for the day. The movie reel of my mind is smacking the end of the tape over and over again against the inside of my forehead. I find myself, per usual, writing because I have to. Because I have words stuffed somewhere in there that have to be coaxed out like a frightened animal. They’re stuck. I’m stuck. And I suppose if you don’t know how to get somewhere “out there,” the only place left is traveling inside. Spelunk the cavernous soul and try not to provoke all the bats to fly out at once.

It’s getting weirder. My days don’t so much run together as they “are” together. My past feels as bright and relevant as the days I lived it. I’m back in my old bedroom. I’m walking my high school hallway. I’m in the fight, zoned out in front of the TV, and crying as I piss myself 10 steps from the bathroom. It’s one thing to have a good memory, or god forbid enough trauma growing up you can’t ever forget, but how do you describe when it changed. How do you say, “I didn’t live it, I am living it?”

It’s as if something is out to get you. Not catch you. Get you. Like you represent something. Like you actually are something. Asking about whether or not that something is “meaningful” seems to miss the point. Imagining some kind of god or advanced civilization powering on your program just feels vain.

You must consider how perfectly delusional it sounds. How perfectly delusional you actually are. So what? You have a handful of flashbacks or compelling memories. And? The past is the past, and my poor understanding of quantum mechanics blah blah blah. It’s not like you can remember every single day. It’s not like your brain is like a videocamera. It’s not as though you can even process that amount of information, let alone have someone you expect to believe it’s running you like you’re poorly describing.

It’s not words though. It’s a sense. It’s not an itch or a faint echo. It’s a whale. It’s an intense pressure and [BOW] that twists you up like you’re being looked at as though light is bending around you. It doesn’t pulse. It doesn’t sound. It just encompasses. It is, here, deal with it.

It’s not just to do with the past though. The future also feels here too. All of it, any of it. I can feel myself rich and I can feel the pavement of me sleeping on the street. I’ve seen my death countless time in countless ways. I have the most beautiful family that started under the most inauspicious circumstances, and I’m as lonely as anyone has ever been. It’s all true. It’s all real.

My heart is racing. I have no power to stop it. It’s excited about all there is left to accomplish. It’s dreadfully afraid the worst has come true. It longs to be trapped in the moment where it complimented the butterflies instead of wishing to set them ablaze. My chest is always so full. Fuller than my stomach could ever be. Full of rage and heartbreak and desire. Full of hope. Full of every possible future it feels in earnest and wishes could spill out like a broken dam. My head pounds away for the answer, some way to release the pressure valve. Some way to zero in on the infinity. Some voice that holds true in the blur of noises and colors.

I scowl. I snarl like a dog who knows what his teeth are really meant for. Beneath a somber and pathetic brow I breath through my nose and twitch as the lasers from my eyes attempt to transfer the debris to the page. I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. Each utterance sends chills and water wells. I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. I have to believe it? I mean, it’s not suspicious that I said “have to” instead of “I do.” I’m okay. My hands slow down wondering why I’m bothering with one more. I’m absolutely not okay.

How can you be okay when you’re everything? How does one (1) class human male (xy) 6’2” 220 pound bag of meat and hair and electricity and water feel he’s in every moment of his past and feel every possible future? This delusional fucking liar! What’s the angle? What do you get out of this? You’ve made a brand out of being a nutcase? But you’re not angry about it. You’re scared. You want an identity. You want to believe even one thing about everything remains the same. You want the words where they don’t exist and direction in the void.

But you’re chasing a shadow. Your perspective is off, and the closer you look the farther away it becomes. It’s not about your gaze. It’s not about your brains. It’s not about your wishes and feelings or hopes and dreams. It’s that. It’s that thought. It’s those words. THESE WORDS. Right here is as close or far as you’ve ever been or ever will be to anything you remember and everything you could ever be. It was true then, and it will be true again. True is as you as is. True was that, is this, and is moving right along to now. You’re the hero! You’re the despot. You’ve got a future! You’ll be fixing your car every week until the day you die. You’re a ball of confusion and anxiety well beyond your conscious control. You’re abject power to dig and beat and bite that ball until it becomes a choking hazard. You don’t have to make sense. You don’t make sense. You are sense. You make words. You make. That’s what you do.

You make tears. You make shit. You make food and people laugh. You make up stories in your head about how you might relate to the stories other people have made. You make excuses and predictions. You make the world around you fall into the same existential black hole until they’re dying to get away from you because you make 10 minutes feel like 10 years. You make your stomach rise and fall when you make yourself focus on your breath. You make clicky noises as you make yourself...finally just pick this way to end this sentence.

If there’s anything that makes you different, it’s that you're undyingly aware that it’s all coming from you! You know what you make! You know how much more you can make! You know why it’s necessary and worth it to be scared. You know how much harder it is to make some overflow of love or acceptance, but it’s not impossible. You know you can make the hate dissipate. You know the migraine can subside. Your heart has figured out how to get bored with itself in the past, and maybe one day you’ll figure out how to get there again. Except, it’s already there. It’s already as scared or as calm as it ever was or is ever going to be. You made it that way. For your own reasons, but it was you nonetheless. Why don’t you trust your own work?

Because it hurts.

[640] Pretend Smart

(This has a very small chance of making more sense if you’re drunk and you read each paragraph like a self-contained poetic rant. You can always just skip it.)

If I were to pretend I were smart, I’d take it upon myself to know what was best for everybody. That would have to be the first hard and fast rule. Practically by definition, the smart person has the capacity to know, actually does know, and will in fact use that knowledge in a proactive way to improve our assumed impoverish circumstances. I honestly can’t think of a better way to define and understand smart. Anything that deviates turns you into a Jeopardy novelty or pretentious piece of shit. People call you smart because they assume it combines with a measure of morality and ipso facto the world becomes better.

I’ve been told I’m smart A LOT. Growing up it happened. When I make some point about a country or human psychology that no one in the room knows about it happens as well. When I write a hopelessly contrived blog that I would put money on there’s me and half of Byron that could even discern what the fuck I was talking about it strikes again. Smart is looked at as a kind of gift. It’s the gateway to a level of...one has to assume survival...that is still quietly respected while everything about what we popularize seeks to mock or caricature. You hate immigrants until you realize 9 of the last 10 best techniques for fighting the cancer you developed came from the nerdiest kids in India. The irony circle churns.

I think about “smartness” in a kind of “savior complex” way. Most people don’t seem to care if you’re smart until it turns them on, you save them from themselves, or you make a considerable amount of money. And truly, with the last one, the illusion of being smart sufficiently covers for many roads to riches. We’re taken in by the characters in movies who “read people” or who describe in detail how the next 45 minutes of the movie are going to play out. In utter contrast lies reality where the smart theory is the one that makes an informed prediction that actually comes true after building on thousands of failures. It’s not enough to read the words on the page, you have to know what came before.

This is why I have a hard time not thinking I’m smart. I feel like I see the future particularly when I study the past. I’ve complained heavily about my Cassandra complex. I’ve taken it for granted that by virtue of being human we sort of all had an insight into body language and word choice. I figured it was biologically programed to have a basic fleeting grasp of what kind of storms humanity could handle and how to orient yourself in your own sea of idiots.

The title of the blog came from me refuting Byron about my capacity for intelligence. I got into a stupid conversation with a manager of the company I work for about how he could help me and what steps he was taking. Immediately I dismissed his inability to play therapist and called out his outright lies about the measures he was taking. Byron, watching, blamed this on me being smarter than him. I said that if I was smart, I wouldn’t be working for yet another company that wasn’t my own.

I’m sympathetic to circumstance. I know you can literally work to exhaustion and have no real power to change the place you’re in. I know I’m maybe a week or 2 away from my totally idiot proof sustainable lifestyle that let’s me dick around at levels I don’t even know I’m prepared to deal with. I still struggle to call it “smart.” To me, any idiot who’s been paying attention to the myriad stupid decisions made that have constructed my circumstances would try to do most of the things I have in life. It took no special ingenuity or insight to try and live sustainably. You don’t need a throbbing temporal lobe to sit in your car and deliver food for 13 hours a day. You don’t need to deconstruct Nietzsche to pay for a plot of land or solar panels.

To me, if I were to pretend to be smart, I’d not only take my presumptuous posteur about what it is everyone around me needs, but I’d frame it in a way they could understand. I’m often accused of not speaking down to people. Let me rephrase that. I’m often accused of not taking the obvious fucking truth and putting it into terms idiots can swallow. Clearly, an actual smart person would speak the same language as those they wanted to convince. Hell, I’ve argued there is nothing if not respect for the very capacity for the message to even be translated.

I think about that a lot when I think about the advice I was once given to make my ex happy. “You know how to make her happy,” in that tone. But I didn’t want to make her happy. I wanted her to be happy. I never want to be with somebody where I turn on my “This is how I know how to work you” machinery. Some would call that unintelligent. I had what I wanted, why didn’t I keep it? Well, it wasn’t an “it.”

A big reason I started writing was how astonished or baffled I was at how easy I seemed to have it. I could turn on whatever people needed to hear. The horrifying part wasn’t so much doing so, but that they knew who I was or that I was doing it and were super keen to play along. The world gets so terrifyingly boring at that point. What are you going to say today? Who cares! Make them smile, make them laugh, or just make them feel at all, and then pinch and turn. They’re begging you to pinch and turn!

To persist in your playing and pretend, you have to keep an open-ended goal like “the perpetual survival of the human race.” In this way, you can couch every single thing you do, say, or think under the mighty noble umbrella of SAVIOR who de facto has the timeless respect for all culture and creation and therefore should be given the keys to drive home. So now I’ve told you what’s best, made it into a catchphrase, and crowned myself as your savior on the waves of your enthusiasm. Still with me?

Here’s the rub. There isn’t an end goal. There can’t be. Logically, whether the sun swallows us up or we carry on until we can’t see anymore stars in the sky, there is no such thing as “perpetuity.” At least, not in the sense that we’d like to believe. Every single particle in your body is probabilistically doing it’s own thing. Here again, I could take up the mantel of pretending to be smart and add a layer of intentionality or placating sense of immortality in referencing your soul. It’ll make you feel better. The smart guy got there in a convoluted way you don’t have to worry too much about.

I think that I have no real desire to be “smart.” I just want to be right. I want to know I felt the things I did for the right reasons. I want to know I picked the right friends and right fights. I want to know that the principle of THE WHOLE THING that I could never let go of had nothing to do with my obsessive or immature nature and was correctly rooted in why we should bother to fucking exist in the first place.

Then, I could pretend to be smart about how that whole system works. You see, if you’re actually right about “how it all works,” now you make the right kind of enemies in the right kind of predictable patterns. Instantly, not just your perspective, but your feelings and priorities and actions in the world become something manifestly magical. You’re not just acting. You’re not just of consequence. You’re right. You’re needling into the heart of everything less than right who has every ounce of your capacity to figure it out as well, but for one reason or another refuses to do so.

I feel lucky to have spent so much time exploring. To say it’s not about the dollar amount isn’t some rap lyric or hippie sentiment to me. To know not only why you picked the friends you did, but what’s worth mourning when those relationships die is a gift. You can pretend until the day you die that you have the best conception of “honesty” and that you’re capable of discerning the “love” of your feelings towards other people. You can call your efforts in life and at your job “noble” or “selfless” because, in all your worldly wisdom, picked the exact right thing to orient the whole of human existence in the proper direction. Even better than those people though are the ones who turn inward. In solipsistic grandeur, of course! It’s always and forever been about you and whatever the fuck it is you think! Ain’t no proof anyone else exists anyway.

I suppose it’s weird for me in that I accept and like to pretend. I don’t really care if I’m wrong about having such a deep-seeded sense of equality and dismissive attitude about connotation that each utterance of “nigga” leaves me as hollow as you might be enraged. I don’t care if you argue “market forces” and “budget concerns” in the face of my ideas about access to healthcare. I’ll die loud and proud about how you should have bought solar panels before they were cool and efficient the day someone told you fossil fuels were fucking dumb. We’re all just pretending anyway, right? That’s the nature of my delusion, and I find it better than yours.

[639] Of Two Minds

This may turn into a hodgepodge, but I got tired of reciting the title in my head.

I’m increasingly aware of how often I’m in a state of “total empathy,” so to speak, about two seemingly opposing views. As logically as one imagines you can be, I can take in the details, agree with the facts, and find myself in the “center.” To be sure, I hate the language we use to describe differences. Left, right, and center pretend like something sensible or mathematical is concerned with your ideals. Unfortunately, to the extent that you try and express your “mathematical” or “impartial” or “who gives a fuck?” viewpoint, you’ll be inevitably driven back into the more ignorant and incomplete language.

Let’s take the concept of having a conversation. One of the hippiest and peace-loving ideas is that we can always talk and work it out. If we want to couch things under a giant umbrella named “conversation,” it’s hard to say I don’t think that working through the details in your own mind is helpful at the top of a blog. I’m conversing with myself, probing for the words that have come and gone over the last few days. That “side” of my mind clearly agrees with the hippies. Talk, get specific, provide examples, and bolster your point of view with the ideas of those who’ve caught your attention.

And yet, I have zero faith in conversation. It’s getting increasingly frustrating when I attempt to speak to people. It’s not what you might lazily suspect about a forceful and insecure desire to foist “negativity” into something. It’s merely the persistent pattern of people with nothing to say having no capacity to recognize how little what they’re attempting to amounts to. This happens after they become emotionally invested in a particular facet of their identity. The feminist can’t talk to you unless it’s through the domineering rape glasses of her male oppressors. The parent figure can’t help but condescend to youth. It’s the person who reflexively claims to hear every ounce of your subtext or “real” conversation, but then wants to nitpick your specific word choice in service to derailing the conversation.

This happens at high “academic” levels, most notably for me when you watch atheists “debate” the faithful or two competing economists where one likes to pretend some version of the “trickle down” system works. This happens in the stupid drunk trash talk outside of the bar. This happens between exes picking every past grievance they can remember. None of us can be “perfect” explicit speakers, perhaps like someone on the spectrum, but the moment we shift into insisting “you’re just not listening!” or “you’re completely missing my point!” the less we’re working to actually form that point better or willing to give any credit that someone has actually heard us.

Perhaps we look at death. Here again, I’m of two minds. I think a considerable amount about death. I put myself at all of my relatives’ funerals. I imagine the fiery crash on the highway. I can see me purple and bloated hanging from an extension cord regretting not thinking more about the outfit I wanted to shit myself in. I don’t find death particularly fascinating or interesting, but by virtue of it being so “secret” or taboo, my mind reflexively likes to play with ideas about it. I don’t necessarily want to die, but I also don’t know that I care as much as people want to assume “we all do” about staying alive.

The other side of my death mind uses it to fuel all the shit I want to create. It makes me unduly excited to meet someone I don’t hate. It has me yearning for “truth” as best as it can be approximated. I want real relationships. I want honesty. I know I can weather stupid financial storms or the inherent frustrations and indignities of dealing with “the masses” at large. How else do you decide to move quickly if you aren’t counting the grey in your beard? How do you achieve obtaining “the world” if you put off working to do so until tomorrow? Against my will I’m racing to the finish anyway, might as well pursue the heights of your potential happiness or achievement, because the lowest of the lows are coming no matter what.

Let’s move onto relationships. How many words have I dedicated to completely shitting on and then completely showering praise on my friends? That’s also mostly how I conceive of relationships. I don’t actually think there’s much difference between the “best” friendship statuses and just your willingness to accept and work with the people you have in your life. We’re extremely good at romanticising those connections when it’s been awhile since we’ve seen each other. It’s better than using words like “convenience” and “acquaintance” which doesn’t seem to adequately capture the love-slung drunken professions and outings. Your happiness, well-being, and until recently survival, is predicated on your ability to form these connections, right? You live longer. You get more Instagram pictures.

A natural extension of my relative indifference to myself I’m sure speaks to how and why my relationships break down. Well, some of my relationships. Unless I’m drunk, I’m not the feeler, and that constantly registers as “negative” in the minds of the feelers. I merely describe something I see or attempt to relate as much, oh no but wait, what I was actually doing was trying to bring down the vibe...or something. I don’t heap your emotional burdens onto myself, which prevents me from dancing around and using language you’d prefer, which has me looking cold and indifferent and impossible to talk to when neither of us is willing to define my horribleness beyond your choice epithet.

Here it might help to explain an interaction that happened last night. Again, I find myself hanging out with someone I don’t particularly enjoy because they’re actually the old guy who enjoys being constantly out at the bars or drunk and the one time I go out this month or over the last 3, of course I see him. He insists that my disposition is bred from a deep insecurity. He thinks he only hears me negatively describe things, and condescend, and deflect, but it’s a familiar story. When I ask him what I’m insecure about, first, he doesn’t know. When I ask him to expand on a definition, he says I’m deflecting. When I explain to him how I would attempt to answer that question based on observations about him, he takes a comment I made about looking younger if I shaved as evidence I’m insecure about my age.

It seems to me if you’re going to try and point out someone’s insecurities, they need to account for something that they feel genuinely guilty about or negatively affects their lives in ways they don't want or couldn't anticipate. You hate your hair, so you spend more money than you really should or have to keep it straightened or done up in a way that will keep your mother’s comments at bay. You think you’re too fat so you wear clothing that pretends you aren’t or does a lot of work in trying to mask how you present yourself to the world in photographs. I honestly have a hard time trying to work in the language of insecurity because the strongest times I’ve ever felt it was when I was a child. I used to hate my hair because of the constant compliments and people wanting to play with it. My mom made me feel insecure about my smile with “Gumbalina” comments when it was too big. It’s why I dreaded picture day.

If anything, my current personality is a complete rejection of the concept “insecure.” If I think I’m getting too fat, I say so, then I stick to salads and hit the gym. If I cared too harshly how I looked, I wouldn’t be wearing a “vote for Pedro” neon shirt referencing a movie I don’t like and high school class president campaign from my brother’s year. My “problem” is a marked lack of shame and insecurity. I’m not willing to pretend I don’t stink if I’ve worked too long or haven’t showered like some hippies I’ve met who’ve insisted on hugs, but I’m not nervously sweating it out in my interactions with people hoping they don’t comment.

At this moment you can sense the failure point. You see, offering explanations or honest tellings of the goings on of your mind are PRECISELY THE EVIDENCE of your insecurity! Duh! Can’t you feel the after school special, “We all have things we’re insecure about! Don’t worry kids!” Just like if you explain you’re not a “feminist” you’ve tacitly endorsed the subjugation of women or if you reference police shootings you don’t respect the danger cops put themselves through. It doesn’t matter the topic, if you don’t conform to how people need you to be, every single word, the act of bothering to look for them, becomes a shovel full.

The most pervasive level of my two-minded problem is about that overall general disposition. The drunk or high person walks next to me with their hand up for a high five, my instinct is at once, “fuck that guy” and “I’ve been that guy, here’s a high five.” I gave it, he was pleased. The guy today who yelled from his car that he loved me, I decided to ignore. I’m at once that open and gregarious bucket of fun and acceptance and the harshest critic even of the things I like. This is something that is proving impossible for most anyone to understand. I’m not “negative” anymore than I’m “positive.” I’m both. I’m happy to be both. I suspect we’re all both, but I’m not scared to flow fluidly between the two without emotionally leveraging or needing to encapsulate your being with my nicest or meanest comments.

Being everything and nothing is confusing. Seeing yourself as the author of your own story while acknowledging the forces that have shaped you is not a pretty picture. I see the wisdom in generalized peaceful approaches to things, and I’ve never been more invigorated at a handful of times where I was in position to be violent. I can understand the need for border security while endlessly shitting on a wall. I can desire a passionate and deeply connected relationship while acknowledging no flame burns the brightest at all times and changes in dynamics are inevitable. I can see myself withering away in a hospital bed the moment my heart is racing at the prospect of building out my house or an entrepreneurial idea.

If anything, I want more direction. I want more accurate judgment. Find and exploit what you think to be my insecurities. Make me feel anything, let alone bad lol. It’s precisely why I manage to get myself in “trouble” with people I don’t really care for on nights I didn’t really want to be drunk. In my view, I’m killing it, and the things that go wrong are either me pressing my luck, like with my car today, or me introducing a semi-controlled chaos, because otherwise I’d just be making money or completing my goals...too early? That’s a vastly different thing about me over the “average.” I put my feet to the floor. I take the responsibility. I already know everything is my fault and nothing will change if I don’t do it. It’s impossible to be “insecure” when that’s your default setting. I’m too old to care what you think, just fat enough to have had “too many” hook ups, smile so big you wonder how my teeth don’t get swallowed up, drive such a stunner car it’s met with all the biggest tow trucks in town, and am so fancy I’m pimping out a garage to live in. I don’t put my inherent value at the dollar amount in the bank and I don’t let my “negative judgmental attitude” get in the way of working with or pursuing people who aren’t shit.

The irony is in something needing you to be insecure. It’s not just in bad taste, but impossible you don’t have something that’s crippling you or holding you back. These people who need you to be negative that it wouldn’t matter if you raised your voice once a year, game over. These people who look at their own fat bodies or terrible relationships or unmet goals and say, “You’re human, just like me!” No. I’m not. I’m Nick P. I’m the point and the abstract. I’m my best and worst blog and all of them combined. I’m my shitty childhood and incalculable wealth. I’m my relationship to you, and the faux-resentment of incidental accusations when you aren’t helping me or talking back. I’m the thief who’s been stolen from, the murderer who’s so far stuck to insects, and Romeo Casanova. And who are you? Nothing to me? Everything to me? Certainly never more or less than you, doubtfully, “choose” to be when we interact.

[638] Willing & Able

I'm struck with an insight. It's almost never “how,” only “that” something is willing and able to be achieved. We spend considerable amounts of time arguing semantics or criticizing styles. We bring “alternative facts” to the table completely immune to the evisceration of language. We inject “isms” and “ocracies” to guide invisible psychological hands in sweeping along taken for granted trends. It's at the heart of our conception of ourselves, and we don't even put a voice to it.

I never let things go. I shut up about things. I add a million lines of perspective to them. But I never let them go. I rarely think about my “first love,” and my current ex is significantly more of a point of intrigue than the harbinger of uncontrolled feelings forcing themselves into my attention. The physical memory of my experiences with them still exists. The ability to smile or cry (well, maybe not cry) upon reflection is real. It doesn't really matter “how” I feel though. It didn't matter at the time, and I hardly think it will matter how it “resolves” to be felt moments before my death. What truly mattered was “that” I was willing to put myself through it.

I like to argue. This is to distinguish from “fighting.” I'm perfectly aware that words don't change people's minds alone. I learned that the hard way trying to talk down a swinging mother. I learned it the hard way reading books and citing evidence for ideologues. I learned it from psychological literature about how people base their decisions and what their very brains are wired like to keep them from changing too often or too quickly. We act under the collective delusion that words are more powerful than they are, because we irrationally defer to our feelings to describe their purpose. It's easier to offer a short-hand quote from an “inspiring” and “emotionally compelling” orator, than it is to parse out the complexity of the person themselves. “How” they said it has significantly less to do with “that” you've managed to use it for your feelings. (Think of every paraphrased version of “I have a dream” or misquoted movie.)

I like to experiment and create. I'm not afraid of “failure.” This at times looks like running headlong into the wind before accounting for everything that might make my life easier. But to spend too much time in research mode is to miss the point. There's an infinite amount of ways you can try to achieve something. You can think one dollar at a time, insured or not, cold or comfortable, with one trusted ally or a dozen piddling peons, and while you might inspire a biopic, it will only be “that” which people can point at which you've achieved from which they'll shower praise or condemnation. When you're willing, you try. If you're unable to recognize, you can't discover the will, therefore you'll never try. To speak to the point in the opening language of the blog, if you're primarily concerned with “how,” you'll subvert any capacity to create “that.”

It should be obvious, but it's not, this isn't an argument for the complete disavowing of details. This doesn't mean you shouldn't prefer a strong future accounting foundation where you can properly flood Houston in a way that doesn't require destroying houses. Here we must make a distinction between known and unknown. It wasn't some kind of moral or social imperative to develop flood plains in the way that one is implored to sort themselves out psychologically in their relationships, or in their creative orientation in the world. You don't know how important it is to break down fear or anger barriers like you know if you put a house in a stupid spot, something stupid can happen to it.

When it comes to confrontation, it doesn't even begin as a properly defined confrontation until both parties are willing to acknowledge “that.” You can argue with the best intentions. You can feel up and down. You can pick every word as deliberately as you might chocolates after biting into the wrong one. It simply does not matter. You won't get your girl back. You won't get your legislation passed. You won't convince the teenage Russian troll you're anything more than fodder for their paycheck.

“That” can take on infinite forms. If you want to try and be coherent, you reduce “that” to a set of observations about the psychical world or maybe root it in the terms of your surrender. If I'm willing to see a dozen projects try to be operated at once, “that” has to be my budget and tolerance for failure. Maybe I sell some t-shirts and eventually make analogous money to my step-mom. The barely considered hassle of what it means to find, wash, press, picture, store, list, and ship all became secondary to “that” phrase, “$50 is worth the try and first hand knowledge gained.” That I retain the will to try something new is what's important to me. That I understand my road to solvency as many diverging skills and interests trickling in at once underlays my energy to power through what may have been overlooked.

In an argument, “that” should conceivably be what has you bothering to speak to each other in the first place, let alone be together if you're arguing over your relationship. “How” you love someone or communicate is most often secondary (not saying it should be) to “that” they feel a certain way about it. Their willingness to feel hurt, or offended, or to make assumptions about you is significantly more real than any positive qualifier you could use to describe “how” you're relating to one another. You could count more good than bad? Little did you know each bad was a knife inextricably lodged in her heart! You might as well take your pencil recording the numbers and ram that in as well.

I listened to a book recently about how to get people to like you in 90 seconds or less. A line that has stuck with me from it is, “It depends on whether you want to adopt a productive or not attitude.” This book is clearly geared towards those who are socially angry or resentful and perhaps derail their interactions before they ever get started. This guy is a big shot photographer who has to evoke the proper emotion and head tilts from beautiful women who might not even speak his language. So he mirrors and probes and body languages and wah-lah, keeps getting the next gig. One might be tempted to say his effectiveness is in “how” he describes what is essentially manipulating people. I think this is wrong. It's “that” he's willing to do whatever it takes to get the shot that counts.

I think about this when I ask for help. I know “how” to get money out of people. I know “how” to “pitch” and “sell” myself, or some shitty product, for someone else. I know “how” to pay the bills or get girls to like me. I know “how” to “better communicate” depending on what's at stake. I knew precisely “how” my heart would react when I tried for another doomed study stay. But no matter how many times I describe the intimate details that go into the things I'm most proud of creating, all that matters is “that” I had my party house, “that” I created the coffee shop, “that” I stay open and honest with those I wish to be closest to, and “that” I work every day, and try, and sneak into my off hours the rounding up of free or cheap shit to try and sell. “That” garage needs to be renovated on “that” land, and I'm “that” willing to sleep in my car, to keep speaking to important underlying truths about “how” we may one day lean in describing society, let alone my specific efforts.

An ideal is only an ideal in that it can be recognized. As such, without a shared one, we're never going to see what you mean when you describe how you're getting fucked every day.

[637] The Future

This is going to be the speculation one does when they grew up quasi-lower-middle class enough to have their dreams tempered, but remain in that sweet spot of aspirational innovative motivation that drives the future.

The last 3 days I worked 39 hours. I made $662. As a “poor” person, this means more than 3 “rent payments,” 3 months of health insurance, a new phone and a year of payments, the internet bill for almost a year, most every expensive item I have in my amazon wishlist, and way more than enough to impress drunk idiots at the bar as who’s got us all covered; just keep smiling and poorly dancing.

I feel I can start to do that rich person thing where I flirt with the future. I don’t think my circumstances are long for the world of being compelled by the immediacy of some daming obligation and mental rental box.

So what does my future look like?

To be sure, I still need to buy all of the things like farm equipment, and the work to make the garage livable is a solid weekend I haven’t taken the time for, but why should we pretend those aren’t forgone conclusions?

The week after I’m comfortable, I call up Jeremy and get his girl Kari to do the next iteration of the map. What’s $500 to a poor person without bills? About 2 days of open to close order delivering.

If I don’t immediately do that, I pack up and visit Wendy, HatSam, Gough, and Rachel for a week. Plane tickets are less than $300 round trip, I can not only buy the drinks, but not regret fancier meals that I’m sure Mike and Rachel have become accustomed to given their rich white stature.

Okay, so I’ve made some progress on my website, visited some people I was supposed to a few months earlier, then what? Well, $650 is way more than necessary to build an extension on my house with straw bales, so I do that. We’re at about a month, month and a half total time, only 3 days each week. So maybe every month or so I build a new room? Weather and will permitting, why not?

3 solid weekends is fixing the moving truck and getting it on the streets. 2 days is the cost of contacts or a visit to the dentist. 2 or 3 months is new smaller plots I can expand or develop. 1 month is most of what I envision for the greenhouse combined with what’s already stockpiled, Jake. Let me get the workings of the Tough Mudder course from Erin (you really need to put Rin back in your name) and price the wood and heavy equipment rental fees. Let me branch off into salvage, recycling, or simple reselling of things I show up to pick up for free first habitually.

The train is moving. Fuck studies, I still work like a dog and sacrifice lifetime and limb to make it as immediate as possible. Creativity is bread from struggle? Then I aspire to be the most boring fuck you’ve ever met here shortly. When I’m like 35, maybe 40, having lived too many lives and am ready to die except for the part that goes through with anything, it’ll be because I saw myself as I am right then as I am right now. Aside from all the built in random surprises and opportunities you can’t see coming, I’m already doing the work and making the money to explore the myriad ideas I have that could go everywhere or nowhere. This is ungodly liberating and simultaneously my death sentence. Like Louis C.K. getting famous, your problems and perspective just aren’t the same.

The real question will be, who’s on board? When I post that status, “Hey, I have a couple grand just sitting here, who wants to travel to Torino and chill for a bit?” Will you say yes? Or will we have to plan months in advance and exchange “info” and dance? When you have an idea that you’ve always wanted to pursue and I’m like, “Dude, take this and work” are you going to chuck that weird white guilt thing out and just do what you and I both want you to do without having the word “handout” echo in the back of your head? But probably the most serious question, when I fly you out to party, are you actually going to drink like you’re not a bitch?

This remains to be seen. But if you’re getting as old as I am and years feel like months feel like days, then you’re going to read this blog when you do, and tomorrow you’re going to see me harping on the instances I’ve raised and we’re going to find out if you’ve done the mental homework to roll. Just to reiterate, we’re not talking theoreticals anymore. I worked for 3 days and made more in those 3 days than I would have spending 3 nights at a study. My catalyst is firmly rooted in my propensity to work, which is firmly rooted in spite and condemnation for how little my ethics compare to the world at large. The future I describe is going to happen. Are you as there already as I am?

[636] Just Wrong

I feel like I’m spreading myself too thin. I also feel like this is only the kind of thing you can write after getting off of a 13 hour shift with nowhere guaranteed to go that won’t cause problems.

It’s piling up. The harder I work and the more money I make, I feel the resentment and speeches growing. I start the dress rehearsal for all the bullshit all of the bullshit people need to hear. I stop looking at the things in my life that are going right as an egregious leg up bestowed upon me by birth. I stop walking the fine political lines you might’ve established to keep the peace.

It’s my sense of fairness that’s pissed. It’s a well-documented trigger for apes and monkeys. One feels like it’s getting fucked, it’ll throw what you offer it back in your face. I feel like an indignant monkey ready to throw back people’s entire lives and feckless dialogue used to justify them.

Standard disclaimer, I’m going to overspeak and there’s people in my life willing to help. My point is stronger in lieu of them, because they’re often fucked in the exact same ways I am by the exact same kinds of worthless people.

Many people work hard. They put their lives in danger. They wake up early and go to bed late. They provide in 2 or 3 jobs. Obviously, and often, this isn’t fair. It’s simply not right. I don’t mean electricians shouldn’t fear getting electrified, but we’ve gotten to a point where we pretend there aren’t distinctions and just rewards for what it takes to keep the motor of society running.

I always put an asterisk next to my work ethic no matter how hard I feel I’m working. I’m not an ironworker. I’m not a police officer. My work is “service” hell bent on finding a way to “passively exploit.” The money I make feels earned, but I’m hardly going to go out of my way to work any harder to make considerably less doing something else. The cramps in my back and shoulders aren’t going to touch a construction worker’s, but I feel them nonetheless.

Without engendering a pissing match regarding whose job means what to whom, we’ve lost a basic sense of humanity and dialogue that one imagines used to help mitigate circumstances that are fundamentally not right or unduly unfair. You need a hand? Of course I have one. You’re working hard to fix something? I’ll do a heck of a job recognizing your effort and offering what I can.

I’ve tried to be that person for more than I know how to count. One of my friends actually specifically messaged me to tell me after reading about when Colin stole from me how she took it for granted how willing I was to offer her cash when I was study money flush. She thought it was pretty cool that I was so willing to look out for and try to plan for things in a way that accounted for my friends.

And you know what? That is cool. It’s that kind of shit that makes me wince when I’m too quick with the word “sociopath.” It’s what gives me confidence when I dive into something, knowing it’s hardly whether or not I’ll find my way up, but whether or not I’ll be able to bring anyone with. I remember every gesture of friendship I try to uphold that I don’t expect from anyone else. If you were to quiz me, I could probably recall most if not all of every drink or meal you’ve covered for me. It registers deeply how little I tend to expect from anyone.

I try to speak to my life like I do my balance sheet. The numbers on there reflect the harsher side of reality. $50 is missing for 2 full tanks of gas automatically. $50 more gone to “spending” like the emergency overpriced antifreeze I had to buy today. I’ll hide $100 in the paypal account and call it untouchable or a jump start on next month’s greenhouse savings. I’ll pay my “rent” 2 months in advance. By the time there’s a number for all the money I really have, it looks depressed no matter how many hours I worked that day.

Thus, when I have a goal in life, I can certainly start with a picture, but what all has to be glued to it or cut off in order for it to work? I get my garage livable and start my quest to keep practically all the money I earn. I’ll try to be hood rich until I can figure out what to invest in that pays back quicker without me having to be present. So what then? Throw a party? For the 4 or 5 friends I still have in the area that are working all the time? Or maybe for the friends practically turned acquaintances that found their townie rut that never needed it to contain our dynamic.

I’ll need a whole show. I’ll need to razzle and dazzle new souls into a more “mature” form of the flashing lights and sick beats of a choice party house. I’ll need to have money in the bank to fly out or fly out to the people I’d still take a chance on our hanging out not being forced.

But that’s a ways off and drifting a bit away from the point. Right now is where I’m frequently moved to say “stuck.” Right now I had adopted a floor to sleep on, my car when things got pinched. Right now I’m working open to close most days of the week and sneaking about Byron’s apartment. Right now I’m waiting for someone to accompany me to the land so I can pretend to be an electrician in the off chance something goes terribly wrong and a ride might prove vital. Right now, after all the resources I’ve freely offered in my life, all the souls moved through where I’ve lived, all the opportunities I’m still focused on trying to include people in on, despite an excessively heavy list of shit I need to buy to even have a place to live, I get the side eye.

Byron’s roommate charge is an inept and insecure child. By virtue of me simply being a man, he acts like my presence is an overt problem. He’ll burst into the house, and Byron’s room, in the middle of the night to whine about his problems. I don’t think he could recognize a light switch or what it does. He’ll take the garbage out to the porch when he lives across the street from the dumpster. (You know, he reminds me of my brother…) He’s managed to untrain Ike if you leave the dog alone with him too long. And he’s angry that Byron told me, “As long as I have a place to live, you have a place to stay.” Words I relied on to my peril.

I’ve never needed that kind of help. I don’t overspend. I’m not an addict. I often over-offer for what I’m hoping to obtain from someone. I wouldn’t even need that kind of help if Colin and Byron would have better communicated. The idea that people who, literally need Byron at times to keep them alive, would look down on me like I want to be in their worthless presence is appalling. The idea that people I’ve looked out for in so many goddamn ways would leave me to have to pivot between parking lots and floors is just fucking wrong.

People act like my “ego” or intransigence is some kind of personality flaw or in-built defect I have trouble taming. Never can they imagine that I work until I pass out. Never does it occur to them that you can form a “strong opinion” when you’ve read a dozen books on the topic or 60 articles that week that you saved and intend to take further notes and better organize. Why would anyone ever suspect that what they said or did was actually a shitty thing to do or be and that’s why I called them a cunt? It’s NEVER, and I mean fucking NEVER YOUR FUCKING FAULT.

You didn’t leave me hanging, I just didn’t plan right. Of course, I should’ve suspected that I’d be fucked no matter what and I’d have to lean on finances owed for years or money that luckily came in because worked picked up for my dad this month. I’m not trying to make the garage livable, I’m leeching off Byron’s apartment for as long as I can, biding my time until I can throw Rob off the porch and claim his room. I’m not a man of my word who tries to support what he believes in and people he thinks have a good idea, I’ve just wasted money dicking around pretending to be some businessman who’s all-over-the-place mind and poor organization has had me pissing away thousands!


Wanting to help shouldn’t make you want to die. Working hard needs to pay out more than monetarily. I keep cashing in on people's’ resentment, and it’s turning me into them. I don’t want any more. I’m full.


I want to give up. I want to say fuck group projects and fuck where you get in life. I want to pull my money together, do reckless but profitable things, and just mind to my business like a faceless IU football fan wandering back from the game. I want to pretend, just like you, that nothing else matters but my personal budget and enough-to-deal-with interpersonal problems. I want to be fucking done with you. Because if you offered your floor, I don’t feel I could trust it. Not like you could trust mine, have trusted mine. My extra bed, my living room, my food, my alcohol. My careful attention to dance around your feelings because we lost whatever happened to bring us together in the first place and speaking plainly around you isn’t okay anymore. My time. Did you know I worked for free for Rob? Or you think anything remotely grateful pops into his head when his friends can crowd around my big screen that occupies his living room?

I just want somewhere I can lay down and not be fucked with. If this is the universe’s way of getting me to too closely empathize with the homeless, add that to the reasons the universe can go fuck itself. Tomorrow I’m going to try and eat my breakfast at 8:15 instead of 8:00 so maybe Rob will be gone and won’t have to see me or feel uncomfortable eating (because I promise you, the secret and purpose of life is irony) MY old oatmeal next to me. Or, I won’t.