[975] Mo Mo Mo

I need to spend some time thinking about my motivation. In no way will I be able to synthesize the thoughts before now because I’ve passed up at least 3 times I probably should have started writing.

I do things, often enough, after being backed into a corner. I create debt for myself so I can get a “real job” and provide the justification to submit myself to the pain that entails. I might physically exhaust myself on some task so I can shake off the “I’m not doing enough” feeling. I create these kind of high-stakes social dynamics that pit your sense of cordial duty against my righteous indignation, so by the time we’ve disassociated, I don’t have to pretend there’s a bridge worth repairing.

I had a lot of energy when I was in high school, college, and right after college, to push an incredibly strong notion of “excelling.” It could be attached to anything. I could take pride in the sheer amount of TV I was able to watch, or the efficiency with which I made money doing drug studies. Academically, the designation of “A” had lost its muster, so I tested how A/B-ish I could be with the least amount of effort possible, and I decided to get really good at partying. I was pumping a certain kind of psychologically gratifying, albeit arbitrary, stats. Who cares if I can go from zero to coffee shop in 4 months? Just me.

I seem to do things in a disproportionate way, just not precisely the things I’d really rather be doing. When I get the chance to do what I’d rather be doing, the rules of life are still at play. This speaks to an underlying motivation at play at all times. I want to exist in a way that renders those life circumstances mute. I want to always have the money, the time, or the help. I can’t change the weather, but I can build a considerable amount indoors. If there’s a rule that would stop me, I want to have the means to undermine or circumvent it. This could also be a complicated way of describing the drive towards creative self-expression.

The desire to accomplish “small” things plays by more viscerally practical rules. I almost never leave trash laying around. Shit’s in the way. I don’t have a lot of space, and I don’t want shit in the way. I may dawdle on doing dishes because until they’re in the way of me eating or making food, they’re where dirty dishes belong. When you own a house, something’s always broken or missing, but it gets ridiculous to think that you’ll account for it all in every moment you notice that the milk is low or bugs’ nest isn’t easily accessible. There’s less “do it now” with those things, and they get grouped for weekends or those days where you’re just really into getting things done.

I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast, and he brought up how we’re always looking for the next thing, living in this illusion that obtaining it will make us happy. I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary as a compulsive millionaire gambler blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a few days. I’ve noticed the eyes of the bewitched with their hollow desperate and craving emptiness for recognition of their suffering when their persona wears thin. I suppose I’m lucky to have maintained a kind of motivation to not end up perpetually in that state.

I don’t like to feel bad. This may seem like a weird thing to have to state so plainly. I think it’s important to do so though. It’s more than obvious. I don’t like to feel bad so much, that I will write for years until I feel a little bit better. I don’t like to feel bad to such a degree, that I will work myself to death to ensure the thoughts in my head align with a decent-to-exceptional conception of myself. I might habitually bite off more than I can chew, but I took the bite, and I’m still chewing. The moment I felt what rolfing could do for my physical well-being, that money was gone. My food budget is so high because the shittiest I tend to feel is when I haven’t eaten enough. Again, we could describe this as being up against a kind of pain-threshold wall.

When I think about how we evolve, it’s selection pressure. What is the environment selecting for? What genes are being activated under the current constraints? If we talk about different “classes” and the cultures they entail, is it down to the biology that iterating obnoxious selfishness plays out in superficially different ways? You can complain about black-on-black violence as a loud example, but how many people suffer and die as a result of greed? Why is greed good in rich culture? The environment dictates the conditions for remaining in said environment. You might not consider yourself rich, certainly not Bezos-rich, so the nature of your greed, familiar, common, is hardly noticed. You’ve got an HOA to answer to, and you earned your privacy fence.

I’ve removed a lot of the walls in my journey through this shed-life thing. It’s sweltering outside, and cool in here. I’m still inconvenienced in my bathroom and kitchen setups, but I’m not flinging shit out the window nor going hungry. All of my effort to build more is in service to creating new corners to get backed into. I have the tools, now they need a home. If they’re not running, why did I buy the tools? Indefinite hobby and selective guilt await. If I think someone is special or unique, well, surely, they deserve my effort to create something cool! I get to take it a step further. If I don’t dictate, complicate, or imbue my work into a larger context, I just sit and wait for things to happen. I refresh facebook and reddit. I marathon TV and don’t think too hard about the gross juxtaposition of “marathon” and “TV.”

It’s been insufferably hot lately. You think I’m building my workshop in that? I already barely drink enough water or eat right, let alone wear sunscreen or generally go about things that would suggest to you I don’t like to feel bad. If I feel faint upon opening the door, game over for that idea. Are there things that need to be done indoors? Kinda, but no, not really. If I choose to rearrange the furniture again, it’s hard to say what’s been accomplished beyond it feeling good to pretend exercise and experience the different room flow.

This is a restatement that the vast majority of my “problems” are, not. I’m not a jaded and broken millionaire feeding machines hundred-dollar bills, but I’m also not a millionaire. I’m not cripplingly sick or in mental turmoil, but I don’t have health insurance. I know how to swim, I’m not drowning, but the only race I’m in is against death, which serious as it might sound, I can’t win.

I really do feel like I have made a concerted effort over time to be okay with whatever “this” moment is. I affirm my health, wealth, comfort, kitties, conveniences, computers, and capacity for compartmentalizing my competing conceptions. It doesn’t take away from my desire to proverbially “take over the world,” but it does mean I don’t suffer the anxiousness or depressive guilt by not “excelling” via being busy or “above” in my concerns for how I’m spending my time. If I had millions of dollars right now, you know what I’d probably still be? Alone. It might be with someone(s) happy to spend my money with me in the next room of fancier architecture in a distant locale, but people I consign to my larger goals would be just that, paid for.

Part of me feels like that’s an incredibly real scenario because of how hard it’s been to get people to join, with weeks or months-notice or otherwise, what I’ve been up to. I do have friends and my dad who are down, it’s not a desert in spite of what the weather suggests. But I’ve had people kind of flirt with the idea of spending time together or doing stuff. I’m not their priority, which is perfectly fine, it just naturally translates that will continue to hold whether I’m inviting you to Fiji or a comedy show. You’ll have a life and obligations that I’m supposed to what? Pay you to put aside like any good capitalist?

It feels like I’m talking about that sneaking suspicion we all might have that there really is no “our” page, goal, or reality. That doesn’t mean reality won’t kill us all the same or that we don’t rhyme, but it does heartily explain the appeal of religion. You don’t want to go through a series of thoughtful, accountable, and painful evolutions in thought or behavior? Check out this brand-new forgiveness for sale! Just give it up to God! You can be as free as Sam Harris in his disposing of free will! Good is good, evil is evil, and we’re all just along for the circularly-reasoned ride! Yee-haw! I still believe “consciousness” is the “what” that makes the indeterminate determinate, so I struggle, or futilely refuse, to be a happy cog. I didn’t will myself into existence, but if I maintain my faculties and shoot myself in the head anyway, you’re gonna get an attestation of the nature of my will, messily depicted and ironically incomplete in its finality.

The last time I used “motivation” in the title of a blog was in January 2013. A few lines from that blog stick out to me, but as I started to mine them, it seems inadequate to the task. You should read it after this one. What’s clear, is that at least 9 years ago, I still hated the idea of getting a normal job, knew no one would respect me or my time like I might, and I acknowledge the conditional nature of my being. I was aware of the clarity that having a goal provides. I was suspicious of the form my potential impact on the world could take. I lamented people who couldn’t pair their best ideas with any practical actions.

Do I even remember what I was doing in 2013? 2 years after college I was probably failing at the mobile coffee van and circling the pillow of the loner-in-the-basement status I was about to adopt. A month later I was speaking to the comfort I felt thinking Kristen and I were in the same kind of relationship and I was understood lol. Maybe we were at that point, who knows, I only have one-sided small and garbled snapshots.

It’s easy to get lost. I repeat myself a lot. In going through and scanning some old blogs I’ve like reignited the memory of the “stuck” and anxious place that I fairly-well grounded into the center of my being. 9 years ago? I was in a long-term relationship. I was just starting to do drug studies. I had a lot of ideas and energy to put behind my informal “retire by 30” plan. Was my motivation fundamentally different than it is today? In the greatest sense, no. I still want the same non-physical things. I don’t feel like I have any less “energy” than I did then, it’s just not sporadically involving itself with more than I can reasonably address in any given moment.

I think I feared that if I calmed down, I would start to “settle” and look and sound like all of the people I grew a severe distaste for. The ones who have every excuse not to move to the middle of nowhere and try to get out ahead of our modern fall of civilization. The ones who blow superficial smoke up every ass of interaction because that’s what polite society expects. The ones who just stay silent and suffer indefinitely and live vicariously through comedian commentary or the pleasant pictures whirring by. It was harder to recognize or accept my “alone” status because I was with someone. I wasn’t so far removed from college and there was still a fair amount of people left to drift away. My environment dictated, for as much as I was talking about it.

That I’m where I am in life now, I think speaks to how much I’ve maintained a sense of self and orientation in spite. My capacity, happiness, or direction isn’t fundamentally dictated nor rooted in “you.” I choose friends. I chose to suffer the discrepancies and loss. All these new babies hitting the scene are going to die. You knew that when you got into baby-making mode. They may even die before you, and isn’t that colloquially understood as the worst kind of tragedy? Surely it wasn’t thoughts like those that fed your motivation to have a child. I thought, probably incorrectly, that I envied people who found their deepest sense of purpose and drive to ensure their children grew up and passed those genes on. What a burden to carry if you don’t know why you’re doing it.

You can linguistically reduce all efforts to procreate or proliferate literature to the same nihilistic absurdity. You can ignore that it might just feel good. It doesn’t have to be deep. You may just exist to be personally gratified, at least the conscious part of you, for as long as you can. A kid gets wrapped up in that? All the more collateral damage. I mean, child brides are still a thing, and I don’t know if you know how many kids are molested growing up, but you’re not gonna find a statistic that won’t remind you how woefully under-reported the 25-30% of the known cases are speaking to.

Have you noticed the drift in this blog? How did I get to child molesting? Isn’t this about motivation? As I continue to describe my spite engine as moving me right along, it’s no wonder the sheer amount of atrocity that’s pressed right up against how I conceive of my effort and best conception of the world. To talk of “my motivation” or “spite engine” is just a personal understanding of the marriage and dance at the conflicted ever-changing heart of existence. I think about death constantly, and it makes me want to live a certain way. I still don’t know that the reasoning I apply for my own existence I would use in service to a new child, but I also don’t think early-abortion cells, or any persons, are going to an afterlife.

Motivation feels like a calculation. I want many things at once. I want them in perpetuity. I’ve both experienced intellectually and emotionally the reality and diminishing returns of the mere acquisition. You can’t just make a friend. You have to celebrate, and work with, and evolve together. You can’t just buy things or amass wealth; you have to put them to work. Things like Amazon and SpaceX are incidental giants who need to create giant corners to get backed into like I need to pile up a few dishes and turn 2x4s into adult building blocks.

We’re shaped by these unconscious desires to belong to something “more” and beyond ourselves. The endless irony being, we perpetuate circumstances that keep us isolated, angry, and feeling almost perfectly misunderstood. We keep up the façade that we can’t learn or connect, share in our goals and motivation, by staying silent unless it’s to say something disparaging or superficial. My motivation is inextricably tied to my awareness and the demonstration and repeatability of that awareness. I know I’m going to die not feeling really any more or less happy than I have for the last 9 if not 18 years since I started writing.

I don’t make it a secret that I want you to speak, or that I’m going to. I won’t be surprised if things turn out as bad as those who’ve been paying attention say they will. I won’t lose my motivation to fight or create or move the hell out of the way. There is no illusion about life I need to paint over how I actually feel and think, even if I didn’t “will” every impression I could extract. I will the words. I will the movement. I’m not at the mercy of my chaotic and contradictory heart. I dance with the chaos, and in so doing, create an order that suggests balanced direction. Who could get tired doing that?

[974] Bloody Needs

I may have lingered a little too long to capture what’s been on my mind, but here we’ll attempt to piece together what’s still floating.

I’ve found myself more capable of “disengaging.” I used to be pretty plugged into the active gobbling up of information. I was ready with details, history, citations, and rehearsed arguments for why “things” “should” look, sound, or operate one way over another. My first bite of it was arguing about the nature of healthy relationships, then I had mounds of religion versus science exchanges. The primary reason I know anything about any philosopher was a manic search for knock-out insights or phrasing for how to conduct life. I didn’t have a specific or parsed understanding of what my problem was. I just knew I needed “more.”

Conversational patterns seem to be the ones I’m most attuned to. I take in so much from TV, books, or news that I can readily recognize when you’re being a parrot verses thinking through something for yourself. A unique, albeit common, perspective literally doesn’t sound like anyone else in an important way. It has a kind of novelty that keeps you hooked when your perspective has that same “more” hunger, and someone is speaking to what’s on your mind in a more individuated and personal way.

A FOX viewer isn’t only “dumb” or “misinformed,” they’re inarticulate about the mess of angry and afraid feelings, so they seek out the confirming narrative to do the work for them. I was drawn to Jordan Peterson not because he was telling me anything necessarily “new,” but he was articulating it in a personal way, imbuing the story with his experience as a clinician and personal struggle trying to understand human depravity. Elon Musk struck me in how he approached acquiring knowledge and the emotional pain of being misunderstood at a fundamental level.

This is why I find criticism akin to, “We’ve heard this all before,” so severely lacking in honesty or depth. If you can so quickly write-off a show because it’s a “cop drama” or a person because they’re “famous for nothing,” you’re making a similar error. This doesn’t mean you have to respect or enjoy those things, but it does mean you’ve handicapped your capacity to understand what draws in other people. Provided you’re still a person, you’re missing a way to tune into yourself.

I think a lot about when I first learned why toddlers watch the same things over and over. Surely the propensity of algorithmic media engagement preys upon that. A movie has demonstrative and predictable patterns, and even still, you can find different emotions or things you missed with each rewatch. This is training. Just like when you remember something, even if .0001% of the memory or retelling changes, it’s not the same each time. Each stroke of a FOX-induced hate-boner is fractionally different and reinforcing. Each chant of a radical mantra or prayer recitation the same thing.

The fact that we have so much to consume information-wise suggests that, whether it be biological or some perfectly obscured mythically epistemological concept, “more” is universal to the human experience. Whether you want more love, sex, or food, it seems extremely rare, if truly in existence at all, that one is just “okay” in or “at peace” in whatever manner they are. I read old blogs and think about how desperately I felt the desire to get power, clean water, air conditioning, a way to communicate from the middle of nowhere, my tools, time to get things done, and the various piles of things I’ve acquired in service to future builds. I couldn’t shut off my “more” valve if I wanted to.

What more do you want when you’re parroting someone else’s script? What if it’s something you can’t get or can’t conceive of how to get? Maybe it’s self-esteem and brainpower. You’re only born with so much brainpower, and maybe you’re surrounded by people who give zero shits how they make you feel. Maybe you can’t begin to understand how to carry a positive conception of yourself independent of their imposing views.

What if you can’t even recognize that you’re running on someone else’s script? This feels like a lot of the tension in generational differences or the thirsty ideologues clinging to post-modern obscurity. A right-wing Christian conservative antagonist should not be able to get so many doctors tripping over their tongue about the question, “What is a woman?” One of the quickest ways you know someone isn’t thinking rationally is circular reasoning. “A woman is however she defines herself.” No. A woman isn’t that, any more than anything is anything because you add more words that still reduce to, “The thing is the thing because it’s the thing.”

An unwillingness to define a “thing,” is a pillar of not thinking. It’s why I hate talking in “ists” and “isms.” You need a PhD in “feminism” to figure out which sect and era’s position you might be speaking from. Do this messily, and you might not even understand if you’re being an advocate or in opposition. That fascist-speak can summarily dismiss “radical feminists” attests to this both, in their irrational fallacious claim, and the in-built weakness of conceiving of your position under the moniker. When you stick to asking questions like, “Do you believe in equal pay” or “Do you hate men?” you figure out the individuated position.

I don’t think a lot of us like to recognize how often we’re not thinking, or how often we notice it in the people we’re feigning closeness towards. I’ve experienced people driven together by mutually shared not-thinking narratives regularly. It’s a behavior that’s rewarded and reinforced unironically. The group can’t be a group if you’re popping your head up too often commenting on the unhealthy nature or inadequate capacity of the group.

I challenge you to count how often you say something like, “Because that’s how I feel.” You feel it “because,” or you feel because you feel. The insistence is to respect feelings that, by regular demonstration are not reflected upon, not given to understanding, and often have pretty dramatic and ongoing consequences. If my mom lost her temper, my shit’s getting broken, I’m getting beat, and we’re building in another layer of generational trauma to explore with indefinite therapy. But I need to respect how she felt? My experience is the same as someone in college challenged to think harder about what some “controversial” speaker is “violently” discussing at a podium or on the street?

The landscape feels locked in this word-obscurity and language of feelings. And the march from someone reasonable and healthy towards the high-stakes chaos of “cancellation” and “de-platforming” I think played out like an abusive relationship. If he only yelled at you in a scary way once in a year and a half, hit you just before year 3, and all-along had made seemingly reasonable arguments at the time to chip away at your autonomy, the drift was almost imperceptible.

If you tried to chronicle the shifts in our cultural dialogue as it pertained to individual well-being, happiness, indulgence, capitalizing, or decadent self-expression, and you’re 7-years old a few years after “greed is good” becomes subconsciously instantiated in the cultural milieu, you don’t have a prayer. “You need a college degree” or “middle-class house, wife, etc.” as laws changed to exploit and prey upon you didn’t get noticed. You’re always being supplied a narrative. You’re always being influenced by your biases and ingrained practices. It’s incredibly hard to dig “you” out of all that.

I tend to write people off who I can’t recognize as their own “You.” You have a problem you speak to time and again and refuse to change how you approach it, perhaps. You have a “strong opinion” about something you’re absolutely incapable of hearing conflicting or rounding evidence about. You engage in things like questioning the person you’re talking to’s motivation for bringing something up or asking at all. You find yourself incapable of drawing a conclusion that isn’t the most damning interpretation of what’s been said or flat out ignores or denies there’s anything else often literally in front of both parties.

It gets old. It doesn’t seem to get old for most people as fast as it should. Everyone seems to have some topic in which they’re as quick to circle up their reasoning as the “irrational” or “asshole” over there. All you have to do is poke something they’re insecure about. Getting old, fat, or ugly? Like a flash! Body-positivity narratives wash over conversations about health and beauty standards. Feeling oppressed? Here’s a hashtag drumbeat for shouting down critics. You can lament the number of “phobics.” You can start a campaign to overthrow the “violent” enemies who use their words in ways that did not respect your feelings.

Meanwhile, big portions of reality appear, to me anyways, like they’re trending towards some catastrophic reshuffling of who lives and dies and whether we really continue down a path that nets more freedom, safety, and self-determination. It’s hard to even recount the number of times I’ve been functionally shouted down or isolated for talking, and I’m just an individual example of what we’ve watched in the media on a global scale. I get incredibly frustrated when I watch otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people invite cunts like Kellyanne Conway to spin and spin and waste time like we don’t already know the fascist playbook. We don’t need to reimagine “doublespeak” and invent the straw-man.

As much as I want “more” money, time, or freedom to fuck off and do whatever strikes me in a given moment, I have a deep hunger for time around people who have found themselves, or are making a genuine concerted effort to figure out what parts are missing. I suspect I’ll be typing this same kind of story from an increasingly regal circumstance I occupy in the future. I don’t really believe that the culture I’m plugged into will provide me much beyond more stuff. I’m incredibly thankful I can eek out the friendly individual here and there, but I do, most often, feel the chill on connecting or speaking at all, let alone to what’s really on my mind. I don’t find it valuable or worthy to share with people who can only mindlessly consume and relish in the absurd antagonism of obscurity.

[973] Invitation To Destruction

I can’t say that anything is pressing, but we’re due for a quick jaunt through the old mindscape.

The last few weeks my primary focus has been the building of my workshop. As with most things I endeavor to do, it’s been harder and more complicated than I anticipated. But, given that I’ve resolved myself psychologically to $10,000 or so in debt provided I have a workshop (and maybe working pool), it’s more a question of the weather and my will to get things done. Well, I also took a 5-day detour to help assemble a gazebo, and then to Kentucky Kingdom. Now, I’m home, the weather’s perfect, but damn is it feeling right to just exist by myself and collect.

For the trip to Kentucky, an acquaintance joined us, Byron’s adopted kid, and 3 of the kid’s friends. This is an acquaintance I’ve lived with and known for several years. He’s one of Byron’s charges who has been “nudged” away from the wholly self-destructive and immature tracks that he was on when we first met him, only to drift back. He now has a good job, bought a house well outside of his resources, and is slowly trending towards killing himself because he can sense how trapped and irresponsible he has made his circumstances. He has a girl who’s much younger than him, and acts like it, and has tried unsuccessfully to address his issues with extensive acid use.

He tricked me. We went to lunch and began talking about how my buddy’s kid, in coming from a poverty and hood-rat setting, associates with at least one who sells guns, or these bootleg poor-quality gun-adjacent things, to get by. That kid has no parents. Another of his friends is 16 and alcohol dependent. Some line or another struck me as the conversation began to be about how to logistically and legally assist the transportation of weapons and to what lengths we might “excuse” how they deviated from the trip plans to acquire and smoke weed. We’re adult men in our 30s. I’m not going to employ my brainpower to sort ratchet shit for teenagers.

I began to point out the discrepancy in what I thought the example we might set could be, and what our conversation had devolved into. This made the acquaintance quite incensed. To him, these kids are nothing. He’s never going to see them again, he said. We can’t “save” them, and it’s not our job to interject ourselves into their lives like we’re their parents or can fix anything. Leaving aside that these kids are 1 degree away from the one my buddy needs to protect, he was striking at a bigger denunciation. He disagrees, seemingly, with the larger scope of what adult men are to be responsible for.

Both Byron and I have seen first hand what mild interventions can do to course correct someone’s shitty direction. It’s not a “theory” that if you provide guidance or a consistent standard, people will fall in line behind it. From a purely practical and experiential place, there’s reason enough to say something, do something, or be present and the one denying them when they ask for alcohol. On top of this though, this acquaintance is literally the product of being redirected. Moreover, to the extent that he has eschewed that larger responsibility to own his shitty reasoning and dismissal of intervening where he could, the sadder and more chaotic the life he has led. I at one point just asked him how he finds himself arguing against attempting to help idiot poor kids do better. It’s a weird position to try to defend.

Eventually, as he denied he was saying anything unreasonable, got louder and talked over everything attempting to be said, and it turned into a level of immature inanity I didn’t sign up for, I literally walked away from the table, and eventually restaurant, when it continued outside. A bit of a stroll around Louisville and 45 or so minutes later, we reconvened at the car and returned to the park.

Other news, my ex has reached out to me after almost a year. She wrote perhaps half a dozen pages suggesting some serious self-reflection and growth. There were apologies, nice things said about me, and an invitation to keep investigating how she might both better understand herself or get me on the same page about the depth and nature of her feelings. It almost immediately turned to chaos when, as she later pointed out, she responded to my response to her from a place of emotion. She got very judgmental and accusatory, I got pissed and wrote a thing I was happy to amend before sending, and then more clarity and apologies were introduced.

It’s been a reminder that this whole process of introspection and being honest with oneself is literally a skill that needs to be practiced. It doesn’t matter if you’re smart, hard-working, good-looking, or from some kind of background, you might have absolutely terrible words and thoughts about how you relate to others. You don’t have to be arguing against gun-running addict children to struggle with the task of orienting yourself.

I consider myself at something of the other end of that “what’s my responsibility” spectrum. Whether I’m perfectly feeble or inadequate to address the needs of addicted youth, befuddled acquaintances, or sincere and dramatic ex-girlfriends, I do accept that given my awareness and work, I have something of a responsibility to all of it. That responsibility often looks like keeping my cool and finding the patience or walking away. I’m not going to hit suicidal sad boy, ridicule emotional instability (unless it’s coming from my mother), nor pretend that I deserve to run a fucking addiction clinic if I personally am acquainted with someone, a child no less, who I’m willing to ignore (even in thought!), because…it doesn’t serve me? I don’t believe we’re all connected? I don’t have anything to offer in what I’ve learned? It’s hard to conceive of myself as so small and naïve.

I find myself feeling a touch overwhelmed in the number of things I try to be responsible for. Who says I need to get the workshop done? Me. Who says I have to say yes to invitations to help or talk? Again, me. Who says I need to keep reaching out and exploring avenues for my own business and the things I hope to generate over time? Who says I ever have to open my mouth when the topic of conversation appears to violate a whole host of my best conceptions of myself?

In one sense, yes, I’m invited to fights I don’t want and each individuals’ brand of self-destruction. But also, I’m constantly swinging. In my manner and in what I respect, speak to, or work on, it’s a threat by default. It’s why you feel small when you feel small. I spend more time trying to improve on my hobbies than I’m witness to people in their careers, relationships, or sense of ownership and well-being. Even if I don’t and won’t do what I think I’m capable of each day, I slumped outside and at least arranged the pieces to about where they need to be so when the moment strikes to get the fuck back to work, I can own the inches I moved in between. 

[972] Just Watch

I can’t help but feel as though something is still missing.

I say “still,” because over the last few weeks, I’ve found a high degree of comprehensive flow and achievement of my goals in relatively quick succession.

I’ve played my guitar long enough to hint at my peak capacity.
I’ve started building an area that is larger than my main house and bathroom combined.
I’ve hung out with friends at the Moose Lodge, bowling, and for food.
I’ve bowled almost every weekend reaching scores that suggest improvement.
I’ve salvaged about half of the pallets.
I’ve been super caught up on shows.
I’ve started using more of my woodworking equipment.
I’ve read a book from a manga series I’ve been wishing to for quite some time.
We’ve got the application submitted to potentially be a disability provider.
I’ve spoken with someone who is reaching out about ways in which we might be able to partner with an existing counseling operation, and had some networking conversations with a few local people.
I’ve seen a couple good movies, comedians, and have concerts almost every week through October.
I’ve had absolutely amazing and painful rolfing sessions that have dramatically improved my posture, circulation, and flexibility.
I’m still full, still healthy, and still 3 to 4 months of perpetually away from being out of debt.

So much of it is to do with me though, doesn’t it? That’s not like “bad,” but there’s nothing new or exciting about how I stay preoccupied. I don’t have to learn anything, help anyone, or feel anything but whether or not it’s time to screw in another beam or switch on another show. None of the above, save the potential in the networking conversations, speaks to the largest goals and direction, and that hasn’t happened because of my effort or ability, but because my friends reached out to both me and their friends.

I haven’t noticed that before, but it might speak to this unease. This thing about “connection” and “ongoing conversations” and just showing up and being present is the only track that has me visualizing a kind of light at the end of the endless tunnel. It’s not hard. That’s the constantly striking thing. It’s not hard if you talk, share, connect, and then show up and do.

I’ve also been watching Louis Theroux documentaries throughout the day. He talks to everyone, but mostly those in worlds with particular controversy or stigma. I didn’t need to watch the ones on poverty or drug use. Those were my clients. I could hear the bullshit miles away. I registered the catchphrases and felt the naivety in his questioning. Sometimes, though, someone would state things plainly like, “The pain of the lifestyle isn’t as bad as the pain of whatever drove them there.” For all of the drama or culturally degrading lore about addiction, it’s just a heightened story of whether or not you choose to engage with the requisite level of pain.

It hurts to learn things, but it’s nothing like a pain of not knowing and being at the whims of things you don’t understand. I was willing to change how I understood myself, and my perspective on the power of words, when the pain of thinking things were up to some deity or fate drove me mad. It hurts to be out in the sun building things, but paying 5 times the amount for the same amount of space hurts too. Getting my muscles worked to death has hurt in new and exciting ways, but cramps and chronic headaches are worse. It really sucks to feel a certain kind of perpetual isolation, but staying silent and pretending I’m not witness to so much bullshit is a kind of self-destruction I can’t stomach.

I’m missing a culture that vibes and speaks like me. I’m told “the majority” has the vast majority of my values. Apparently, this stops at the moment I suggest we literally kill the literal fascists. What do we make of those other values? My instinct is to blurt out “feckless,” for what is a value you can’t celebrate nor defend?

If nothing else, I believe in trying. That’s something that can operate as a “belief,” because you still have to do something with your trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something, if we take the Google definition. Another goes, “An acceptance that something is true or that something exists.” Perfect. I accept there is trying and that it can be truly demonstrated.

I don’t give a lot of people credit that they’re trying, not because they don’t feel like they’re trying, but because they don’t admit what they’re trying to do. They’re often trying to gaslight and lie about me lol. But that’s a little too easy to recognize because, well, the words are often written down and can be reviewed when the volume of feelings have been turned down. They’re trying to convince themselves that playing guitar, and building rooms, and taking trips, and being fed and entertained, and looking socially acceptable and relevant, and finding a happy place in hobbies is the point. It’s not. The more I merely indulge in said activities, the more the hole opens up.

The point is to push, challenge, own, incorporate, and protect. The point is to raise the fucking child. Whether it’s the one in you, or the ones you’ve started spitting out. You know the areas you can work more on. You know the injustices in your field. You recognize when you’re not being accountable to the responsibilities on offer, or if they don’t live up to what you can and should be responsible for. Can you genuinely tell me you wouldn’t be ashamed of me if I chose to return to Kroger and stock shelves for a living? It’s not about the job or denigrating the work, but what kind of bullshit would I be on to shirk what I’m capable of?

I’ve never needed more indulgence, I’ve needed a few righteous stabs at the dragon plaguing our culture. More than the recognition that this is the immutable overarching goal, I’d like to hear how you sort and work the details of killing our mutual problem. In the meantime, the school shootings and lack of healthcare and general exhaustion and disillusionment are literally killing us. Are you talking about your breakfast? Your magic spells and convoluted impractical theories? Or do you have a goddamn idea how to sharpen a blade?

If you don’t, can you recognize you don’t? Can you talk about it? Can you explain why you’ve never felt the need to learn how? Can all you do is listen to others sharpening theirs and point out the sound of the “screeeeeeeed” they are indulging in like so many public masturbaters?

[971] You Big Fat Phony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[970] Sticking Points

I think I want to talk about getting educated. I’m not sure, but that’s all I can come up with as an opener. I’ve had the last few days to kind of sit and do nothing. The rain has made it so I couldn’t work on building. I read or listened to dozens of my old blogs. Yesterday, the weather improved and I got a decent amount of work done outside. Today, the weather is also nice, and I’m hesitating to get back at it. There are a few things that have been informing how I feel the last week.

I cramp pretty easily. I suspect as a result of my less-than nutritious diet. When I’m out working, even if I’m not physically exhausted, the tension on certain muscles starts to make me woozy. I don’t think extended time in the sun contributed positively to that feeling either. While I greatly enjoy the cardio and feeling stronger in my capacity to move big and heavy objects around, it’s not without pain. How much I wish to continue pursuing the flow of working and accompanying pain is more informed by each day before that felt it.

That I want to pursue activities and investments like this is informed by things more intellectual than physical. I’ve liked building things since I was a child. My dad is an iron-worker, and there’s a certain appeal to be like your parent. I’m budget conscious, and after the $3000 it will likely take me to get my new shop in order, that’s $15,000 I didn’t spend on the same amount of prefabricated and delivered space. I want to be flexible in my capacity to create and be useful in tangibly physical ways.

My experience of engaging in things, my thoughts collected and impressed upon me over time, and then how I speak about and record the journey are in a constant dance. One of the things that strikes me about reading old blogs is how little I’ve moved away from what they’re saying. I’ve improved word choices or tempered some degree of fatalism or pessimism, but the fundamental point often remains the same. The desires remain the same. The things that are missing are often still missing.

It's a little depressing, but more informative, that I’ve been looking for “help” for almost as long as I’ve been writing. It obviously comes in spurts, but at the base of my being, I wish to be plugged into “something” or “someone” in which we’re headed in a similar direction. It might be understood as unconscious fixation. My first instinct in answering, “What’s your motivation?” might illicit, “I want to be independent, I want my time, money, etc.” But, under that, it seems like I want a kind of indefinite connection or reciprocity that I don’t feel as viscerally as cramps.

For as many times as I’ve felt “stuck,” you can skip a few blogs, then suddenly a new opportunity or show or project arrives. I’m not catching as many hiccups to my flow for any given activity. I spent the money, and just reach in and grab the tool. Or I fire up the resolve to drive into debt because, well, I’m always in debt, so what am I getting for it?­

I could borrow from the language and study of trauma and say that I have attachment issues. I could speculate on the opaque problems of “humanity” and its inability to organize behind anything that isn’t ironically self-destructive. I could make pains to convince myself any momentary preoccupation is as meaningful and purposeful as I need it to be. I could take it a step further and extract a self-righteous proclamation about the one person who I might reach to make it all worth it.

I’m also constantly on the attack. I’m always going after “you.” It’s rare that I name drop in a blog or have some explicit fight I want to parse out line by line. They happen enough, but I don’t really seek out drama for its own sake, and I definitely bore of the patterns insecure people play out at my feet. If I had to personify “you,” the two most defining characteristics would be dishonesty and silence. I might have to look up a fun way to combine the words or the roots of their origins so I can move the conversation forward in my head. My draw to Jordan Peterson was how often he said the exact same things I was feeling instinctively, or arriving at by writing, but tying them to his experience as a clinician and study of literature. Now, his brand is meme summations like, “If your life doesn’t look like you think it should, try honesty.”

Is he talking to me? Well, no, he’s talking to “you,” who has remained silent or dishonest in your silence. The featured comedian I saw yesterday spoke to getting to her 40s and realizing the secret to happiness was to stop pretending to like things. This, a point I feel I’ve diverged on since birth, as I can’t pretend to like things if I try, which I don’t.

The wild swings in my perspective find a mean regardless. I can’t stay feeling desperate and alone. I can’t work myself to death. I can’t spend all my time in someone’s presence I enjoy. I can’t find the drive or enthusiasm for any hobby to keep it up indefinitely. I can describe myself as a “whore” psychologically and not be prowling the bars or joining the sex websites in free moments or to assuage boredom. The harder you push, at all, in any direction, the insistence of balance makes itself known. When you overstep there’s a cue to pull back. Maybe this is why I’m not a regretful person in paying attention before I have to jog backwards as opposed to creep a few inches.

I don’t know where I would be without writing. I’m the opposite of silence, and if all I did was take to the page to spew bullshit, I couldn’t take anything useful away even reading 10 or pushing 20 years later. The only way I could envision my life being any better is by incorporating more people into forms of security and indulgence. I don’t know how to do this. Or, I don’t know if I’ve only been able to go about doing it in ways that are selfish and make sense to me. I think a major reason I don’t know is that people are dead silent about their perspective, at least to me.

I don’t find it confusing why. When you start speaking, you beget that underlying responsibility to do something about it. You can get challenged. You might discover you’re very wrong and dumb. You might unlock a lot of drama you’re not prepared to deal with. I talked myself into ticks and garden shed over years. It wasn’t manic epiphany. I’ve consciously plunged into debt for an envisioned future, not because I feel great “right now” with fleetingly low bills. I mean, that feels great, but my goal isn’t to pay bills lol, it’s to have a little enclave, then dozens, and then the world.

If you don’t keep that conversation going with yourself, you don’t have a reason. You don’t have a direction. You don’t know what’s missing, how to get it, or whether it’s worth it. It’s part of the reason I get very frustrated when some project stalls, especially if it does so for reasons, in theory, I can control. What more in life could we ask for than to follow the path laid out before us? Especially if we got to choose the path!? It’s like turning your life into a vacation. You picked the destination, wandered into whatever shops seemed intriguing, ate and drank to your satisfaction, then on day 5 of 7 just slept in the hotel all fucking day? Did you forget you were on vacation, have a shitty reason for going to begin with, or are you lying about the purpose it’s serving and whether you know how to enjoy yourself?

I enjoy building shit. I enjoy learning new things, reading and watching everything, playing music, discovering new artists and shows, and maintaining a preparedness to play at a moment’s notice. That’s my center, acknowledging, sanctifying, and protecting the “go” and “do” and “right now” capacity of any moment. That’s how writing allows me to get “unstuck.” That’s how I can keep enjoying the pain, obligation, and debt while I bowl or bemoan the weather. That’s why no business venture is “failed” when it’s done in that spirit of adventure and exploring the boundaries of what you know.

In a way, my collection of un-utilized dodgeballs exists as the standing analogy for my life in general. I bought the balls shortly after college. I had played with a group of guys on the dorm, and then some kids for a few weeks. I thought if I had my own, I’d be able to get my friends together and be able to play more often. Maybe even construct a mobile netted enclosure. In my naivete, my friends weren’t about that play life. I created events, brought it up in conversation over and over, and most often got something akin to, “I’ve always hated dodgeball” or, “I’m not very good.” So, they have sat, in a dodgeball bag, all-but deflated in and amongst my things for maybe 10 years. I tell the people I counsel if they can’t get the little things right, they don’t have a prayer for the big things.

I can’t get people to play. Before that, I couldn’t get people to speak up and be honest with me. I could get them to party, and then have that converted into resentment and accusations. I can seek out sports leagues and meet-up groups, but you quickly discover the nature of the game you’re playing and the one on the field isn’t the same. That is, at every adult softball game I’ve attended this year, I don’t know that I’ve witnessed someone not smoking or drinking during it save one or two people. There are large men trying to recapture younger glory years, out-of-shape and been warned by their doctor to make lifestyle changes types, former generally athletic and social ones, or loners who pick softball instead of the bar.

I don’t begrudge their reasons for coming, but “play” doesn’t capture it. Fear of dying young, insecurity about getting old, justifying an unhealthy puff with a healthy jog, or mitigating loneliness sounds like a more honest and complete picture to me. Surely playing happens, and it can be fun, and you can gain rewards for doing something beyond wallowing in whatever drove you there. I wish everyone was out playing sports in service to their demons before doing anything else. At what point does the play get to trump or incorporate the demons though? When are you ready to build the playing field?

Does it make sense why I would glom on to an Allie who has a whole fucking garden out there? I’ll subject myself to a year of mental turmoil under the impression I’ve found someone to play with! Lol. I will put in a floor and paint and pat myself on the back right through Christmas convincing myself the effort will mean I can play in the next house just around the corner and not have to keep taking jobs that mean nothing to me.

Why it’s so vital to know what something means to you is clear. You can’t really be happy, have fun, or play otherwise. The idea that you’re running from something becomes a too obvious and compelling story. The nature of how you’re being exploited stays felt and rarely spoken to. The lack of connection or empathy or drive for an actionable belief in changing your circumstances turns into fate. I knew what my friendships meant to me. I know what my work on my house tells me. I know why I show up to hang out or send the invitation in spite of the endless canceling, silence, or lack of enthusiasm. I know what I mean to me or what I can mean to those who play along. It’ll never be meaningful to you, because you don’t exist. You’re an abstract ironically disembodied construct representing dishonesty and silence. You’re busy, tired, sick, and broke. You’re bad at dodgeball. I’m ready to go right now.