[979] So There

The last couple days have driven a point about my nature and how I’ve evolved. One of the more depressing and low periods of my life was when I spent the better portion of every day reading. I learned so much about the state of the world, history, philosophy, and cutting-edge science. I knew, down to the technical compounds and structures why solar panels were going to be worth the investment. You could name a country at random, and I probably had 2 or 3 facts about it. I remember being tested on that by Hatsam at Kilroy’s once. Man, was I knowledgeable, and very lonely and sad.

You see, in spite of my $10,000 or more in the bank, relative health, relationship, or concept of the associations I kept, the world was trending in the wrong direction. I felt a kind of duty to pay attention. My blogs are like a time-capsule sometimes depending on what I reference that’s been in the news. The Tea Party and Sarah Palin were big bold letters on the wall for me, and come to think of it, that was even pre time spent way too involved reading.

Often, I’m just tracking negligence. More than there are just so many “bad guys” out there, I recognized pretty quickly that the whole “evil prevails when good does nothing” was an understatement. Somewhere along the way, our concept of good and evil broke. I blame the internet, but I also blame silence. I see more sin in silence than anything. You stay silent long enough and forget that you have an obligation and duty to speak. You practice fear, and you let the definition of things like “evil” or “good” devolve into semantic pissing matches or absurd feeling analysis.

How does this speak to how I’ve evolved? Well, I’ve been spending. I’ve been “buying experiences” as those wise in the ways of the world profess. I’ve been to a concert or comedy show almost every weekend for several months, and have them scheduled through September. Even if I capitalized on a deal and got a lot of them for $25 apiece, they’re all an hour away. Gas ain’t cheap. The comedy shows are a two-item minimum. I’m usually in the city early and grabbing dinner or drinks. And a good portion of the shows were not $25.

One of the last concerts I went to, I mistakenly ordered a bottle of wine I thought was coming as a glass. It was $42. The bar tender, after I spoke to my error, was willing and making moves to sell me the glass. I thanked her and said something like, “I get paid tomorrow, whatever just give me the bottle. I have nothing else to pay for but increasing levels of indulgence. No kids. It’s not going to charity. I just bought some shit on Amazon. If not this, what do I think that money is going to turn into?” I have a fair number of conversations and commentaries around people that go on too long.

I expressed a fairly dismal and fatalistic point. Buying $42 bottles of wine, that I didn’t even want, not really, is the kind of personal faux pas or failure serving as the analogy for displeasure I have with “things” or “life” or my old “friends” at large. When I was working 3 jobs and staying up 20 hours a day, $42 represented maybe a week’s worth of cheap fast food to keep me barely alive enough to keep working. I wasn’t cooking in my “free” time. $42 is less than half a tank of gas in my truck. $42 is somehow way too much, yet incredibly little when your environment is ever-cultivated by a set of indulgences or “refined” and “earned” tastes and privileges.

$42 is not buying me healthcare. It’s not changing the minds of my politicians, local or otherwise. It’s not being spent to treat a friend to dinner. I’m not overindulging my cats who play with Starburst wrappers as enthusiastically as they do bread ties. It’s not building a school in an impoverished area. It’s not being invested in the future of the planet. It’s just there. It’s just mine to “do with as I please” because I’ve ascended to another peak. I can spend a couple thousand, build half a workspace, chill for a while, make the money back, or spend more because I can’t plan to save my life, and the only thing changing is the number and nature of options I give myself for staying entertained or chasing the idea that I’ve learned or achieved something.

I want to believe that $42 is earmarked for something “important” like a vital tool or part of the lessons on some music app I download. I want to think some negative emotion I might conjure about the $42 represents my respect for my past and the work and struggle it has been to achieve this level of stability. $42, in actual time spent and effort, at least this last two weeks, is less than 2 hours I was probably asleep because I’m on salary and have had almost nothing to do. I said in a blog recently I’m not a millionaire feeding $100 bills into a machine. I fed $42 into a wine machine with a guaranteed prize I didn’t want.

The U.S. has been on salary for way too long. My middle-to-upper-middle class friends/associations have been blowing their awareness, obligations, and capacity for real work in $42 increments for…at least since I’ve been writing about and imploring people to speak back or help out. You stay silent with something to say? $42 pissed away. You self-censor and play nice with genuinely oppressive danger and death? 42 regretful dollars not going into something, anything, but this empty pit where some inaccessible and increasingly hard to remember feeling should be.

I’ve worried for a while what might happen to me if I get too comfortable. I’ve had “too much,” yet hopelessly never enough, money for a good portion of my adult life. I’ve only made investments that have enabled that propensity to stretch even further. If I save for a few months and get another $10,000 or $15,000 in the bank, you know what I don’t have to do? Buy land, my shed, my tools, my truck or any of the other pieces and labor it has taken to get me typing from my home verses a couch or rental property. I paid attention to, and believed, the threat of what I was watching back then. I’m not anymore hopeful or with any less examples of how we need to operate and speak now.

Election denial is the standard of conversation. Roe v Wade just got overturned like we’re actually in a dystopian movie. Mind you, it’s just the latest in all of the rights and laws that have been getting attacked for many years, and for those paying attention, like so many Cassandras they go. We haven’t been getting more environmentally friendly, or has the weather felt “normal” to you? Housing and homeless crises are ballooning, you know, a problem that was fixed in the 70s for, I guess about, 30 seconds. You getting paid enough? You think about the next routine errand you’ll be on before staring down an assault weapon?

I’ve been the person habitually last to leave. I would play a videogame with a failing strategy, moving piece by piece until I could crack what I was getting wrong or until I became too physically exhausted to continue. Or, once until my RA came out to make fun of me. I wanted to party until the bar closed. I wanted to have hang-out breakfast sessions the morning after a party. I’ve historically won Risk or poker when everyone else got bored. I stick with bad television series because I started them, and if I know nothing else about it, I can say I saw it and completed it.

My hyper-angsty vigilance occupied that space. I feel like I’ve been trying to talk myself out of it for many years. So what if I knew things about many countries? No one’s talking to me about them. So what if I raise the alarm and hold up and celebrate those who are doing the work and paying attention? No one’s reading or sharing the articles to their circles. So what if I write? I garner likes here and there, but I swing pretty wildly. From barely-coherent entangling of disparate ideas and provocative disquieting sentiments to occasional earnest insight, I’m a mixed bag. No one’s asking me to unpack the unpacking or challenging my analogies or introducing the manner in which I engage with the world to their friends.

I spent $28 on sea food, then $5 on fancy chocolate, before a hilarious show by Stephen Lynch tonight. I spent $12.50 more on McDonald’s on the drive home. The show, in again peak irony, had me sitting next to a drunk, fat (her word, not mine), and screaming often and loudly enough woman that Stephen literally said, “Shhh, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I can’t even hear myself.” When she first sat down, she extended her hand and introduced herself and her friends. She said her husband was just deployed for a year and she was happy to be out. She asked me what my favorite song was and if I was a fan.  She told me she was going to make me her friend even though she’d been annoying me. At that point, I felt compelled to correct her that she hadn’t been annoying me. The silent part was “yet.”

Heedless in indulgence, tactless, classless, but sincerely hurting and very clearly low in self-esteem reaching out to shake my disinterested hand in some mockery of connection. It was a small-enough crowd in an intimate enough venue, and Lynch was so funny, that I ruled out just moving seats further away. It’s unbecoming to pity people, but I feel my embarrassment on her behalf was similar to her friend’s girlfriend also sitting at the table and having none of it.

I almost engaged in a goal-reiteration exercise instead of writing. It’s so fundamental to mental health and behavior-change. But for someone like me, it’s like doing jaw exercises. I’m talking enough, my shit is strong. I know my goals, I pursue my goals, and I put their achievement on display pretty regularly. When I claim to be disoriented, at least along what I want and work on, disorientation is not the word. The only thing I can’t get to align is a preponderance of people working with me on the same things. Be it indulgences, their purported goals, and certainly nothing we’ve conceived together. We can all change our profile pictures to The Handmaid’s Tale, but you’re not going to start listening to the podcasts and reading the books that are telling you of the next Roe v Wade catastrophes now. You didn’t care then, you don’t now, and the handful of naïve and incensed “youth” will get 10% back of what’s been taken away over the last 50 years in 30 years.

I’ve known more than intuitively for several years that I need to escape. We’re not getting better. We’re not “woke” to genuine injustice. We don’t “work” as much as exhaust ourselves in self-pity and ignoble sacrifices. We obscure and blame and wag our fingers and drink gallons of expensive whining. Why didn’t I want to get drunk? There was nothing to celebrate and no one to share it with. I’m extremely thankful for the friends and my dad who’ve shown up and come bowling or to shows. I might have a mini heart-attack the day some insanely informed and coherent article I share gets shared. Maybe when I have the money to pay people to work like I want them to I’ll create a powerful enough engine to turn things in as comprehensive a manner as I need them too. Maybe I just need to run to a part of the world not designed to thrive on greed and zealotry.

I’m only mildly concerned there’s more $42 bottles of wine on my horizon. I don’t want to be attached to the drama of it all anymore. I don’t want self-imposed guilt at carving out what I’ve previously described as excessively selfish spaces for me and mine while things around me burn. I’ve said many times I’m not a martyr, and that includes for any ideas that no longer serve me or prove to result in very little, if any, value. Staying informed and earnestly advocating wins no one. Providing space and leaning hard for time spent watching, laughing, or rocking out garners a touch of connection. When I finally cross over into making absurdist caricatures and ironic virtue-signaling with a hot dance and backing track TikTok videos, I’ll have legions.

If historically we’ve only just now flirted with the idea of liberal democracy, breaking the chains of gilded rulers, and the long arc of history is a myth, and the peasants ruminate in their misery because, to them, it’s psychologically satiating to consider the meat of the rich “unsavory,” what side of the gated-community would you want to be on? I don’t think God’s going to reward me for going down swinging in advocacy, social work, or sense of common decency in spite of the license our cultural ambivalence may grant me. I don’t see statistics suggesting we’re getting better, even with Pinker screaming global trends while ignoring asteroids. I don’t sense that anyone has time, attention, or enthusiasm. I know busy, quiet, psychologically isolated and insecure people, watching, just not too closely.

I posted an article recently talking about quantum mechanical experiments confirming the overlapping “everything is possible” or “simultaneous potential” status of existence until there’s something about consciousness to snap it into focus. The future where I type something other than this sentence literally doesn’t exist until I observe the matter in the computer, my fingers, and my brain arranged that way. It’s not that it can’t exist nor that it’s inevitable that it will or won’t. It’s that I consciously arrange the words, move my fingers, and collapse an infinite series of wave functions into “my” perspective and these words, noises, or connections, instead of every other “thing” they might be. I’ve consistently felt the “mechanistic” arguments and “simple cause and effect” positions lacking, and the science keeps moving in my direction.

Practically. I don’t see what I think needs to exist. I don’t see you collapsing your potential into the tools we need, the words we need, the awareness, investment, risk, and fight. I don’t see the resistance, the rally, nor hear the battle cries. I occasionally see waves of pictures, hashtags, and every few years or so someone will write something from their own perspective, and then immediately apologize for the “rant.” Because who wants to listen to them, right? Not anyone that matters. Not anyone who wants to simply follow their cultivated brand. Not me who’s imploring people weekly for 16 years to say more and try new ways to revolve. Why should they be an authority or have any esteem and pride in what they said?

You’re a bunch of fucking pussies, Americans. You’ve been courting death for so many years you don’t have a memory of the values the country was founded upon. You instinctively respond to challenges with avoidance and denial. You prefer addiction. You prefer to suffer because it’s all you’ve ever known. The punctuated incidences of happiness feel like shame and worthy of suspicion, so you insist on destroying the means by which it might happen again. You “believe what you believe,” and “won’t judge” in an effort to deny being stuck in the most damming and deadly judgment indefinitely. “It” won’t get better because you aren’t.

[978] You Pull Me Down

I went to another concert today. In my totally absent-minded approach that’s increasingly taking over my life, I didn’t even register where its actual location was until I was sitting in a restaurant 40 minutes away. It probably could have been held where I thought it was going to be, Mr. Josh Groban didn’t draw that large of a crowd for a Thursday, but that’s not important. The sequence of events in my body and mind during it was, at least briefly. Bitches be talking.

You might know, I’ve complained about how we seemed to have collectively forgotten that you need to shut the fuck up in a movie theater. I lamented that I could readily predict one in three movies I was going to have to “shush,” say, “Shut the fuck up,” or otherwise adjust my posture relative to some dumb cunt sitting near me. Well, this last time, as two whispery, coughy, and ever-undulating obese people carried on as they found the last Jurassic Park movie more and more boring, I just moved to the other side of the theater.

At the concert, at all concerts, I wear earplugs. If I didn’t, I’d probably lose my hearing within the course of a year. If I can hear you talking, laughing, or otherwise being an oblivious and entitled cunt, on top of the music no less, you’re being too loud. If you’re that way for song after song, and I’m growing more and more agitated, that I managed to respond to it in the way that I did I’m rather impressed with. My adrenaline shot through the roof as I stared them down, which, of course, they didn’t notice. I literally turned around and just watched them for 3 minutes.

Let’s set the scene. They’re about 7 seats away and 2 rows back. 3 middle-aged women, and one who brought her daughter. I could sum it up with, “It’s Karens, you know the type,” we are in Noblesville, after all, but that feels cheap if still correct. I’m getting jittery. I’ve accidentally purchased an entire bottle of wine for $42 which I had zero desire to finish. I’ve also just eaten the world’s soupiest snow-cone.

I got to thinking. I didn’t want to make them about me. I, pretty habitually, can turn things about me well without my desire or intention. I rehearse the lines I might say. “Hey! Shut the fuck up!” Classic. Do I look like a dweeb around all of these ageless greys and just make an exasperated shush and add my finger to my lips to really sell it? I shouldn’t have to be thinking about any of this shit! I’m not even some major fanboy of Josh Groban, but fucking gas is expansive, and I live an hour and a half away, and I’m pissing away even more money on wine and sugar, and I just want to sit here in the moment with a good singer without constantly jerking my head over my shoulder to investigate your dumb fucking ass.

Finally, I snap. I jerk around and yell out, “Hey, are you enjoying the concert!? It’s good right!? You enjoying yourself? Can you hear it okay!?” They get Karen-face and one attempts to turn it into a conversation about how they’ve been talking the entire time…I turn around and reinsert my earplug. They talk even louder for the back half of the song. They don’t speak for the next. They continue, ever-slightly muted for the rest of the concert afterward. I still want to fucking stab the one in particular.

It’s not that “all people” are a certain way. It’s that today, the worst of what it means to be a person has been given such license that we all carry on like that bitch isn’t in the wrong. And not just in the wrong, but wrong in a deep and profound way. She came to a concert to disrespect the artist, the people around her, and when confronted, doubled the fuck down. Can I think of a more on-the-nose analogue to this Faustian nightmare that is Trumpism? My blood pressure is skyrocketing trying not to be the sore thumb about the raging bloody cunts bleeding into our collective experience. I remain extremely confident that no one else is going to say anything, and if they feel the same pulse and stress that I did, they won’t handle it in as contemplative or a proactive way.

I’m very disoriented. It confuses me when I reach out to 3 to 5 people, and get no response all day, particularly if I know their phone behavior. I’ve had next to nothing to do in this “training” period, so I’ve had a lot of idle time at home, cleaning and rearranging things, and ordering more not-precisely crap from Amazon. I spent, and this must be a form of self-deceptive theater, YEARS avoiding reading this manga I find very interesting, and with the books in front of me, I’m dragging it out. The goal isn’t to get it done, like so many bad TV shows. I enjoy it. It’s intriguing where so little else is. I want to sit with it and think about it and escape into its lurid landscape.

But, that’s what I want out of my life. I want books to be a playground, not an alternate reality I’m desperate for. I want to live in a world where people shut the fuck up and respect each other, and none of us need finishing school to figure that shit out. I want to live in a world where the minority zealots don’t capture the majority psychologically. But I don’t. I live in a quiet place, by myself, in a tick-ridden field and occasionally pop my head out at the prospect of capitalizing on the misery or distracting myself with a shiny new stage performance. And they’re coming for that too, like they’re coming for libraries, and fucking water!

When is it over? When will the deluge of opinions about how to conduct life coalesce into either enough death that whomever is left over can try something new, or we just stop letting the mouthy cunts dictate the noise? There’s a goddamn performance and work on display every day that we just cede or ignore. Like so many texts and so many blogs with so many words that speak to who?

[977] Idle Stands

I wonder what I would be like were I to grow comfortable with idle time.

I’ve gotten my first peaks into the practical obligations of my new job. I can’t pretend I have some genuine “enthusiasm” for it. The same conditions about how or why I am inclined to “help” people are in play. I’m still in this teeter. Will I get the call tomorrow that we’re working for DCS? Will disability accept our rounded and refined application, opening the door to thousands a week with a handful of clients? Do I need to make one more concerted push to “work myself to death” for the next 6 months or so before I’ve allocated or organized in a way that after 18 years I’ll have stumbled into “passive” income?

I had a solid weekend. I played volleyball. I saw a decent comedy show. I drank with a friend, talked to strangers that bought me shots, and was apparently getting hit on by a former client I am in no way interested in complicating my professional standing over. If I could have managed to feel a little less tired and hungover, the next day would have spelled grilled delicious food and more company. I’m trying to remind myself that I’m already living some version of it.

But the time is still idle. It’s 2:15 AM on Tuesday, and I don’t care if I’m drowsy in the morning because so little is being asked of me. If I want to keep paying the bills, this is the task. I didn’t use any portion of the day to continue building, not because I was busy before my 2:00 PM Zoom meeting, but because I am expected to be available and responding to emails as though my salary is justified. I’ve managed to hit TV-watching levels akin to when I was doing drug studies.

I’ve considered reevaluating my goals. My major hang-up remains an inability to respect attempting to do less than I already am. Can I really not just enjoy myself? Or am I allowing ingratiated anxiety dictate? I know it’s easier to conceive of my place when I pull back and see myself on the continuum or journey. I know it’s about the nature of your work more than the award or next purchase. I guess I’d just like to see the dividends more often.

Unless I’m right in the middle of shit, I can’t know the outcome. I don’t know if the words I said or impression I left reverberates like I’d like. I’m not content to tout my title or field and cross my arms that by default I care or am doing something meaningful. I want to feel like there’s some kind of robust and perpetuating fix or creation that’s recognized as worth protecting. I don’t know if I exist around the psychological makeup for that to be possible. That is, money will perpetuate; familiar and connected legacy institutions will too. Are they any good? Do we have the tools to evaluate and hold accountable?

It’s an extremely uncomfortable position to hold that most people seem perfectly happy to not think. I see an immense chasm between doing whatever’s in front of you to survive, and thinking about it. I appreciated the sentiment from a meth-addicted person from one of the Louis Theroux documentaries I just watched. “When you’re deep in your addiction, there is no choice. When you been clean for a little while, then you can choose.”

I choose to go about my capture with little debt gambles, hobby and food indulgences, and increasingly gas and entertainment. These still take precedence over any contribution to charity, and well before your ill-fated political campaign. There’s something about my ego and priorities that wants lawn seats for a band I barely know before I try to “fix” some bigger issue. This is a ridiculous framing of who’s hurting, what exists to help, and whether it does, but the disconnect is there. All of our actions, charitable or indulgent, exist contradictory to the suggestion there’s any collective will or wisdom guiding them. It all boils down to whether or not I feel good or bad about myself. But what’s good and bad in ever-isolated, ambivalent, and arbitrary environments?

It confuses me sometimes when I hear thoughtful people talk about the statistical unlikeliness of getting shot in school. To remain silent or stuck on how we ever arrived at a place where that’s the topic of conversation, let alone the meat chunks those children were blown into, I think is about as large of a cultural sin as you can commit. How many things have to fail for extended periods of time before the “start” of the conversation is, “It’s hopeless, let’s arm Mrs. Gipp.” None of us could be doing, saying, thinking, entreating, showing up, organizing, brainstorming, or investigating in this idle time?

I feel like a crazy person. I know facebook isn’t the hot platform, but I think out of 56 people, 3? Maybe had anything to say about Uvalde? It’s old news. It’s not really anything to do with today’s problems in my life and my state. I can’t help, fix, or say what hasn’t already been said. It is what it is. Let’s laugh off the continued march towards fascism, so 15 minutes after the midterms when AR-15s become standard issue at the beginning of the school year (to threaten raped classmates thinking they were about to abort) we can exclaim about the absurdity, injustice, and horror we never saw coming.

Maybe I haven’t talked about it for a while, but you know what I really want a lot of money for? I want to build teams to utilize data and organize around the principles I’m trying to bring to the land. I want to know every single office up for election, how it operates, and who’s trying to fuck with it. I want to know the most efficient door-knocking routes and send people along them 15 times until everyone’s been reached. I want to have the busses that get people to polls. I want to have small oasis that are off-grid and working on power dynamics that can grow independent of the chaos. I don’t want to wait idly at some institution indefinitely until I rise to a level of incidental power. I want to actively beat the fuck out of what exists and see it change NOW.

I can’t do it hovering over my email. I can’t do it with whiny naïve and entitled faux-Left activists pretending their version of screaming at the machine works like the Tea Party and Nazis. I can’t do it with some personal cache of information dumps and spreadsheets. I can’t do it when my air dies and truck needs work. I can’t do it alone. It can’t be done just because I think it would work or I draw on lessons and history. It can’t be done because we don’t treat ourselves as though we’re worth the fight. We won’t do the work to account. You literally won’t even talk to me.

On and on I’ll opine about my TV shows, not ours, not that they’re making us think or share anything. I’ll work my half-dozen projects. I’ll collect my bricks. I’ll encourage addicts and the poor to refrain from killing themselves too quickly. And we’ll all hold our collective breath as the water rises. I mean, we’ll probably get by. We’ve got networks and money. We’re educated. Things can get so much worse before we really have to do or say anything.

[976] Taut

While this kicks off after an inspiring Peter Boghossian video, the topic is more to do with “tension.” I haven’t been able to get to my rolfing appointments during this “training” period and have noticed some jaw clenching. I’ve had a few tenuously suggestive emails whispering towards later strife. As I continue to run with “the environment shapes us” as the prominent beat of my thoughts, I notice the tension that acts on the psychological construct.

 

I hear it from prominent writers and famous people who often say they don’t wish to even brush against “trans” issues. They anticipate a backlash. They know they’re going to get labeled a “transphobe” regardless of what they say or how they feel. The power of the radical vocal minority is just as vicious from the faux-Left as it is the Nazi-right. There’s a “cultural tension” around whether or not “we” as a “society” are able to put prejudices and “systemic injustice” aside, and “progress” in our conception of each other’s identities.

 

Lately, myself and others, have been plagued by the tension carried in their bodies. Most people, according to my rolf guy, carry it in their shoulders, neck, and upper back. This suggests to me it’s concentrated as a result of thoughts physically manifesting around where you think. Maybe you scrunch your face when you concentrate or recede into your seat after defeat, folding your posture to stress your neck. Somewhere, you’ve probably got knots or spots that need attention because your stress didn’t hold as an intellectual abstraction.

 

I’m winding up into my new job. Twice, I’ve gotten emails that carried the tension of, “Can you read between the lines?” It’s subtle, polite, reminders that I’m not “free,” and that if I keep up too long or push too hard with using my “reasoning” to try and not suffer or conform, things will surely escalate. This week, I have literally nothing to be done in person at the office an hour and a half away. I email last night asking if there’s anything in-office that needs to be done, and if not, I’d appreciate not adding to my gas bill for no reason. I didn’t get back “That makes sense, just stay home.” I got back, “As a hybrid counselor you will be expected to spend half your time at home and half in the office yada yada…., but for this week you can go ahead and stay home.”

 

Do I know my role and responsibilities? For the most part, yes. Do you remind people what those are when you’re agreeing after you’ve heard and understand them? To me, no. But that “professional tension” is used to keep yourself corralled in as much as the people you’re attempting to supervise. You can’t talk plainly about oversights about how to respect time or…? I think your body reminds you the tension is going to manifest somewhere regardless. I think the frothier the fearful ideologue gets the more you see negative implications and other physical indications of how much stress and tension there really is.

 

Like most kids who grew up with an abusive parent, I’m someone who is too-attuned to that tension. Shifts in body-language, tone, or how you put the key in the front door were things I learned how to react to at a subconscious level. It’s part of why I’m generally an effective communicator today. I can get yelled at, cussed at, talk about your dead kid (like I literally did 2 nights ago) and you’ll find yourself drawn in, comforted, and like I’m on your side. And, I am. I feel it too. Maybe not the extent of the sorrow or the anger, but my fight or flight is working, and I’m pairing it with different behaviors.

 

Unfortunately, most people don’t want to lean into the tension. Their body is signaling that they are going to get hurt, ostracized, or otherwise embarrassed and humiliated if they even allude to the “wrong” opinion or attitude about something. I think this speaks to why people adopt caricatured versions of themselves. If you’re a “mean girl” or a “cowboy” or an “uber-fan” of something, you side-step the internal analysis and opt for the reshuffling of qualifiers of your worth. You can stay at a shitty job with the right awards or summary comparisons. Those so quick to the “You’re phobic!” accusations are utterly terrified of being contradicted or losing how they orient and identify themselves. I keep finding the irony to tell the underlying story.

 

The imposition of this tension is what I have come to routinely malign as the wrong form of selfish manipulation. You don’t want to talk about something? Scream it out of existence! You don’t want to own your complicity? Deny, deny, deny, and then put all of your energy to imposing your denial into controlling those who don’t believe you. We’re still seriously having to deal with fascism with ever-elevating lies rooted in election-denial. I don’t think it’s a coincidence this coincides with attacks on women’s autonomy or civil rights. The more you’re radicalized, the more “we” are. You know what you need to shape institutions or build a stable society? Radical patience and a deep understanding of how power flows.

 

Whether your family expects you to act a certain way, “society” or your “institution” and its rules are overbearing, or you’ve conjured up a wholly pathological set of expectations and standards for yourself, it’s seemingly always the tension doing the work. I think this is how you bolster the argument against “free will” as it’s colloquially understood. Your biological imperative overriding common sense about your budget or sense of commitment. Your history and culture impressing upon you certain spiritual or financial obligations. Your fledgling conception of yourself keeping you rooted in familiar social or intellectual patterns.

 

I acknowledge how tense I am by default. It starts there. I’m not actually “not thinking” about the things that piss me off or the many futures I might occupy. I can’t “just believe” things are going to go a different direction than the evidence suggests to me. I can’t create more tension of self-denial on top of what’s already on offer. In pointing out the discrepancies and nuances, I tend to feel better or capable of recognizing my capacity and responsibility to move through it. How many of you have shared anything related to trans issues, race, “rape-culture,” wages, fascism or otherwise that hasn’t been in meme form? Are you thinking about things? Do you care?

 

You just know, like I know, that even world-renown scholars on any of these topics will get ushered off college campuses and questioned for their motives. It doesn’t feel worth it. But, somehow, it feels worth it to embody the stress of not methodically dealing with complicated things. Maybe because it’s familiar, it’s the default, and it only kills you slowly until it kills you all at once.