[923] No Fair Don't Care

 Let's talk about “fairness.”

Immediately, one might think, “life's not fair.” It's as cliché an aphorism as exists. I contend the person offering it is often clapping back in a defensive dismissive way towards someone who's put voice to a perceived injustice. A condescending parent might employ it to shut down their child. Notice, the truth of whether or not the situation is unjust doesn't factor in at this level. “Life's not fair” is something of knee-jerk reactionary “fuck you” to someone. I think it's a viscerally powerful and familiar reminder as well as short-hand for how we treat each other, and thus life broadly.

Why ever offer to say it? Simply, you feel life has been unfair to you. You feel like something isn't adding up or playing out like it should. You can consciously know that perhaps “existence” moreso than “life” isn't “fair.” It might be better to say existence is “ambivalent” more than “fair.” Who's trying to contend with existence in every response to yet another problem passing through their awareness? Hardly anyone, so here you go, life's not fair, existence doesn't care about you, and here I am to remind you while I practice reinforcing my insecure self on the back of your misery.

To talk about any coherent meaning in the word “fair,” you must have agency and accountability. It's anyone's guess where you'll get those, but they're prerequisites. If cookies are to be fairly distributed, you need to account for whom and how many, you need to decide on why, and upon review or reflection, the reasoning and actions should be a consistent and shared set of behaviors you can repeat in the future. If you have 3 kids, 3 cookies, all well-behaved and having eaten their dinner after which you promised they could have a cookie, you best get to passing them out. Both your and their sense of agency is mitigated by a deal and relationship with cookies at the nexus of your shared conception of the world. Thus, it's fair when you provide what's been accounted for.

You could state that another way. In a household where cookies are out of the question because of your views about sugar, the situation above is modified dramatically. Now, you don't get to talk about fairness without discussing a new deal. Do you have 3 cookies at all? Do you wish to reward finishing dinner? Superficially, watching from the outside, you may have an instinct about how or whether the parent should distribute the cookies. What kind of lunatic would make this more complicated than it needs to be? Surely, regardless of your ideas about sugar, one cookie isn't too much, right? Children have an uncomplicated relationship or feeling towards sweets, maybe you do too. Maybe the baggage of knowledge, access, and guilt of what sweets have done to you blurs what would be “fair” in this scenario considerably.

A more forgiving way of thinking about “life's not fair” would be to say there's an infinite amount of things you can't attend to, thus you can't make any real deal with anyone else about them. It's not up to you who gets the cookies or what the sugar content in them is. If you tried to play baseball without lines on the field, you couldn't blow up at the umpire for making his best guess about balls hit right down the line. That's the kind of game you're playing with life, yet I suspect you feel your capacity to call foul balls is on point. You think there are lines on the field, or at least those lines conveniently appear the moment you need them.

As someone who likes to claim his own agency, I'm constantly trying to suss out what I think is “fair.” It rarely coalesces until I'm able to either understand myself and what I wish to bring to the situation, or get a shared idea of what someone wants from me. If you don't want anything from me, I'm not gonna gripe about what is or isn't fair. If you want something abstract or communal or colloquially understood, I may reflexively clap back with one of my comments or jokes because it's unlikely I've made the same deal with that space as most others. Maybe I don't understand or respect your reasons you want me to behave or speak like other people. My agency feels under threat, and what I wish to bring is a provoking jab or invitation to communicate another way.

Think about asking someone at work, “How ya doing!?” “Okay, thanks!” There's an argument, a fair one to me, for those kind of interactions a dozen times a day for the sake of a manner of “professionalism.” I won't spin-off and reiterate all of my problems with the word “professional,” but you do want the business of the day to trump an impromptu therapy or bitching session. There's reason to play along if you've accepted the broader deal of that work environment, having subverted some agency by default.

But what happens if you don't have that agency, don't make any claims, deals, or hold any responsibility to share anything? What if you're blind to the asks you're making? What if you're allowing your agency to be as ambivalent as existence? Surely that's the default state. You aren't born “enlightened” or on your way to matter-of-factly accepting your death. There's no class you take parsing through the litany of formal and informal asks regarding the society or era of time you inhabit. You're conscripted into existence, whether or not you decide how to conceive of the war you're fighting, your role in it, or whether it's even a war, comes much later, if at all.

We ignore the many contextual layers we exist in at our peril. If you hear someone disagree with “systemic racism,” consider what context they're coming from. An immigrant fleeing Afghanistan might conceive of the oppression and force used to keep a minority in check vastly differently from a third generation minority student growing up in a white neighborhood. The nature of red-lining is different and not equal to the nature of slavery. That's not a controversial thing to say unless you have a kind of “one drop” psychology and language for how to talk about things. That is, while absolutely not enforced this way, one drop of Jewish blood could give the Nazis license to exterminate you. One act of oppression or contamination of the narrative becomes license to declare the most extreme aspects of the problem and prompt disproportionate action.

We have to return to the idea of what or whether you're going to bring anything to a situation. Most people stay silent about most things. Most people who speak up, tend to inflame the flame war. It's why there's an appeal for mediums in which time is taken to discuss things. Whatever you think of any given talk show or podcast, it's perhaps the only time in someone's day they aren't otherwise subjecting themselves to whatever the ambivalent forces of life are errantly dictating. I can attest to how impossible it is to focus on a good book or lecture when I'm occupied with work responsibilities. I know how the mood or feel has to be right in order for me to get engaged or think I'm capable of learning or remembering something.

What's fair in this new business I'm trying to start? The rate at which Medicaid pays? The things they are and aren't willing to cover? The time it takes them to review paperwork? That I cobbled together my circumstances, certifications, and relationships into something at all? Will it be fair to ask for 2% or 10% of the gross from anyone I invite to be a part of it? They are questions without enough context. They have no input from the person I'm asking to sign on. I have no access to the forces that turned our health care system into what it's become. I know what I want to bring to the table regardless. I know what I'd be able to accept were I to sign up with someone like me. I know that whether I'm getting paid $15 or $1500, my next steps are what's going to allow me into the room about what's “fair” given the constraints, intentions, and needs as far as we can discern them.

The task is to check your impulse for fatalistic “life's not fair” thinking, and continually ask yourself what it is you can bring, why you're doing so, and whether a deal can be worked out so that while you're subverting your agency for some rules, you haven't submitted altogether. This will ease the anxiety or inner-conflict about when to speak up at work or why. This will keep you from working yourself into a froth in comment threads. This will keep you from resenting your partner. Because it's so abstract and indirect, it's nearly impossible to convince someone that their intentions, as much as their actions, matter. It's even harder to get them to understand how much goes into informing an intention. “I didn't mean to hurt you!” You might insist. From experience, I can tell you, no one ever believes me when I say it. (see: discussing trans issues, religion, my sense of humor, lashing out, or basically anything I touch or speak to ever.)

Do I need you to believe me? Do I need you to treat me “fairly?” What's at stake? I know what kind of friend or thoughtful person I wish to be. Do you? I know what lane my style of boyfriend or business owner or antagonist sits in. I know when I want to set a bad example, reveling in my depraved feelings, exhausted in searching for a sense that I share anything with anyone or that I could ever be understood. I know the different mes, what provokes them, what inspires them, and how they help or hurt my ability to find my center. I have to work out what's fair for me and myself just as much as we have to figure out what will be fair between us.

That's why fascism, unfair. Occasional emotional outbursts, incorrect word choices, time to breathe, and as many mistakes as need be made in service to the shared direction and terms, can all be fair. That's why you stay in abusive relationships, constantly changing the deal in a one-sided way. Abuser and abusee can make the same error. Who's responsible for what remains infinitely obscure even before something definitive, perhaps violently, happens. We have laws and protective orders and normative notions that trick us into thinking it's easy to understand or how to respond when the worst of the drama unfolds. We have statistics on how often we return to the abuse. There's a reason I had to assess your situation and unpack your details and discuss with others before a decision was made to remove your children. When a person, let alone institution, engages in one-sided power mongering, disinterested in the discussion, or is instinctively reveling in flames of the drama stoking the coals of their pathological past...you can feel how far removed a discussion of what's “fair” is from that clusterfuck.

If I use my awareness of what's prompting me to speak and act, dictate a goal for doing so, and imagine that abstract roundabout way in which what I put out comes back, it tends to mitigate things. I maybe choose a less “harsh” word. I maybe find a little more patience to explain something. I maybe feel a little more at ease and like life isn't rushing away from me. It's a fun little game for me to pretend to be a newscaster under my Nazi senator's facebook page. When it's not a fun little game and I play it fast and loose with the rules, I start making comments that get me banned for 30 days. If I want to bemoan a loss of agency when they ban me while submitting to a totalitarian facebook system, without irony, I'm creating stress and a contradiction in my being.

So what are the rules of the different systems you're in? Is there a conscious agent on the other side reinforcing them? Does it matter if the rules are fair? Betraying your kids on a cookie deal seems like it could have drastic ongoing consequences from fomenting distrust to provoking disobedience or even threatening how the children conceive of themselves. How could a person who cares, who they rely on, do them so dirty?

I habitually flirt with the rules and lines. It's a flirtation, not a rejection. I may drive my trailer without extra brakes, lights, a license plate, or registration papers...a dozen times, but that is considerably more a testament to my relative poverty and priorities than it is a brazen disregard. In the larger contexts of my life, if I don't have health insurance, I'm sure as fuck not spending more at the BMV first. And until I get ticketed, this conditional “unfair” space I choose to operate in is just that, a choice to roll those dice given my anecdotal experience of Indiana's general ambivalence towards licensing trailers. I may not feel great about that ticket, if it comes, but I'd be foolish to rush home to bitch for 3 pages about how fucked up the cops are.

We need to share. We need to feel like we're choosing and making decisions, at some level, in whatever context we might exist. How does someone like me survive in a place like a State institution and endless contradictory rules and policy context? I choose to do the job, but I pimped out my desk area to facilitate my needs and efficiency. I don't have to add “fuck” to every sentence to speak to real people in real terms about what's going on. I advocated for myself to get the role of assessor verses permanency because I knew I'd kill something if I felt chained to the office environment. I wrote my emails arguing for what I thought was right or where people were fucking up, and I left when the context decided it was time to overwhelm the agency I was expressing, probably a little too late. The terms of the deal, if ever they were, changed, and I still live out the consequences of that betrayal.

If I have any say in how you conduct your life, don't be like the people that, I must assume unconsciously, drive me away from the good examples I'm setting. Don't let yourself feel threatened and insecure by not taking responsibility for the words you're choosing to keep yourself or others down. Do you say, “Life's not fair?” Do you reflexively go to, “It doesn't matter” or, “Who cares?” Can you tell the difference between the you who might try to be funny in the face of fascism and the you who is about to be banned? One is an ignorant, judgmental destroyer of worlds, and the other ruminates on what causing and observing the destruction is going to do to undermine their own being.

What kind of power do you have if superficially, if not often practically, it's none? You have the power to envision and work towards a broader grasp of what's “practical” or “professional.” You have the power to keep yourself aware of what it takes to even discuss “fair” in a way that makes sense. You have the power to learn about how best to describe yourself across domains and obligations and the power to define what needs to remain steady and protected within them. I don't lose my creativity or voice even working for the State. I don't lose the fight in me. I don't lose the ability to incorporate everything I learned and every relationship I made into the next thing. I'm not forgoing the opportunity to write about and explore my time there. Hopefully, in the most roundabout way, it contributes to a more deliberate, intentional, agency-driven environment broadly, and I don't have to reduce myself or what we're capable of to “hope.”

Fair enough?

[922] Night Terrors

Fucking cat woke me up and apparently whatever I was dreaming about is now keeping me up with my jaw clenched and mind racing.

While it's not to the degree when I was younger, I have obsessive and obtrusive thoughts. It's part of the reason my humor goes so immediately and persistently dark. Had I not learned a way to incorporate every ridiculous and hurtful thing that races through my head, to no end, I'd lose my mind. The fact that I'm writing now, at 2 in the morning, testifies to my inability to shut it off when it gets going without being more exhausting in writing until it reaches a dull rumble.

In these compulsive episodes, things I'd otherwise feel generally “resolved” about play on repeat. The fight or word choice around my recent break-up. Thoughts about what a pain in the fucking ass the cat is. The spending habits of my clearly traumatized aunt and uncles. The greed of my dead and dying other relatives. The pain of being taken for granted. The irony of my stated project and the pointless roadblocks along the way. My demonstrated effort and capacity constantly squandered and ignored.

 

Why now? Why all at once? Why is my most recently salient dream about being caught in a tunnel high above the ground with no retreat, no way across to the rest of it, and no way down?

I don't know how to make peace with the idea of fucking up the easy things. I just heard recently that my aunt has spent 60 to 70 thousand dollars to keep a functionally dead dog alive for many months past his due. This is an aunt who years ago withheld my grandma's piano intending to give it to step-kids who didn't want nor would appreciate it, who then rejected it, so it's spent years in her garage and her foyer until now she's ready for me to come take it off her hands. Not when I had the energy, space, and means of engaging with the piano, but now, when I've added a room addition, it's rotted in the garage, and I don't have the money or manpower to fuck with it. You think she'd drop the money to fix the thing and get it delivered? I bet the thought hasn't even crossed her mind.

We have an endless array of stories touting what it means to be virtuous or triumphant in the face of evil. I've watched 14 or so movies over the last few days. The hero kills the bad guys. The hero overcomes the miscommunication or grudge. The bad guys kill for fun. The bad guys are extremely greedy. The bad guys can even be good guys when faced with even badder guys! We're supposed to unite with or avenge our families and utilize our friends. We're supposed to connect with our true loves and fight for our passions. To the degree you can submit to the avaricious feelings, why, all the more compelling to watch and emulate.

So much of who I am is directed by how little I wish to be like other people. I don't want to be like most of my family. I don't want to be like the people I've worked with or companies I've worked for. I don't want to be like the “friends” I no longer talk to. I don't want to be “religious” or “spiritual.” I don't want to be rich just for the sake of it. I don't want to pretend I'm going to be all-consumed by "love" or a woman. My pet is not my child. The nature of my help for other people is the many hours I've spent working out what it means to be “the right kind of selfish,” not me being deluded about how much my heart bleeds or blind to what my responsibility can or should be in a given situation.

I need some new language or approach to what can be easy. “It” can. I'm certain it can, because the things that are easy for me, I keep letting be easy. I take my simple and small pleasures. I take my time. I hit the page when the things that can't be easy, like sleep, try to dictate the terms. It hasn't been easy for me to find an angle on how to deal with how other people prioritize things. I don't get why we don't throw ourselves on the gears and stop the stupid machine or focus on pain caused by the delusion that has made reckless indulgence a way of life.

Do you have any idea the amount of things I would do with $70,000 before torturing a functionally dead dog?

[921] Bad Philosophers

I have about a dozen disparate sources of thought I'm trying to synthesize, so don't think too hard and come along for the ride.

Some of the criticisms I've received from writing, if you can consider them as much beyond a personal attack, is that I maintain this posture as offering the capital T Truth of a situation, and that I'm something of a two-bit or wanna-be philosopher. I bring these up not because I find them compelling, but because they are persistent. I certainly don't believe the people keen and quick in offering these sentiments are concerned about the reasons I'd started writing or when I think it necessary to continue.

I don't claim to be a “philosopher” in some kind of formal way. Pythagoras came up with the word to mean a “lover of wisdom.” Anyone can be that, and my demonstration of that love is to search for and attempt to embody the wisdom in the many areas that keep me thinking. The charge about offering the Truth of any or all situations I find exceptionally pernicious and disingenuous. Informally, I've referred to it as “I know you are, but what am I” syndrome. I can say it every day, bookend it on every blog, I don't claim to have the Truth. I have my experience to the best of my ability to articulate and remember it. I'm engaging a process, not dictating a mythological ethos.

I'm watching Awakening from the Meaning Crisis with John Vervaeke. I'm about halfway through the 52 hour course. He provides a broad overview of many different philosophical ideas and religious traditions. He puts titanic figures in context and shows how their ideas responded or incorporated who came before. I've read a number of philosophical works, taken classes in college, and written papers or blogs in service to what I've read. You know what never stops? Your need and desire to think about and practice what other thoughtful people have brought to the conversation.

Whether or not you read a book or an argument doesn't mean you understand them, and certainly doesn't mean you've experienced anything like what they're getting at. I recall getting an A on a philosophy paper where I deliberately felt I'd “fuck around” with some modern philosopher's position. I was praised for not merely regurgitating what he was saying, which also would have gotten me an A in a “safe” way, and which the grad student grading the papers was sick of reading. I don't remember the philosopher, or the argument, or how I fucked with it. I just got a deep sense that so much of these “thought experiments” and “professionals” was considerably more loose or playful than you'd suspect at first pass.

Most often, as I'm in the middle of some lecture or hear some salient point made by some nerd on a podcast about climate change or the supreme court, I'm met with how dissatisfied I am with people broadly. I'm struck by how little they think. It's like the whole world opens up as this plaything because I can influence or direct my understanding of what's driving or sucking people up. Are they draped in the nihilism of endless consumption? Probably. Are they exhausted, angst-ridden, anxious, or otherwise adrift looking for a new religion or meaningful supplemental occupation? You tell me, how many people refer to or treat their pets like children? I don't just “dislike” things like Tik Tok or memes, I worry for our collective “soul” that so much has been articulated, but can't find its way into our practice or language. We're addicted to the shortcuts and dopamine flashes.

I've tried to make the deliberate and ongoing point that this process, this writing, whatever it amounts to, is necessary. It's useful. It's how I work to “embody” the things I say and empower the things I do in the world. I can look back through blogs and see what has stayed the same while I've been under constant bombardment from errant criticism, endless distractions, or misguided notions of who I am to people or what they are to me. There's no Dewey decimal system in my head where I can just bring up where and when my ideas of “love” have gone wrong or right. I can't begin to explain what “friendship” has meant or evolved into over time like turning to an illuminating chapter of your favorite book without it being written down.

You may be thinking I'm making some kind of pretentious and overstated claim about how little people are thinking. You, in fact, are very thoughtful, and you have a lot of strong opinions about not just the state of the world, but how I talk about it. For the longest time, I wanted to grant this special privilege to the people able or willing to read what I might discern from the cultural ether. I dropped that. It's not that I haven't experienced you as such or on an appreciable level of awareness or enlightenment, it's that I've watched it fall prey to things I can't reconcile with maintaining respect.

I don't respect silence, for example. I don't respect meme-speak. It's not to say I'm not silent on a great many things or have never shared a meme, but the days where my feed is ten pictures you found mildly amusing, maybe, I don't know where you exist. I feel like I bring this up a lot because it bugs me a lot and I think it's a massive cultural psychosis we've worked ourselves into in normalizing not-think. I want you to hesitate before sharing the picture, then I want you to turn a series of hesitations into a long enough pause to explore what's really going on with you in sharing.

I think about this with regard to my last relationship. In a real sense, this is one of the cleanest, at least emotionally, breaks I've ever had. I had expectations for our interactions that had absolutely nothing to do with some elevated level of “love” or historically romantic notions of our time together. I don't care who you are, if we're going to be “close” or “intimate” or “trust” each other, that's not going to happen if you can't be a friend. My friends aren't routinely yelling at me, giving me the silent treatment, or conjuring memories of growing up where I was hyper tense and aware of the mood-shift so as to avoid getting knocked around by my mother. My friends let me speak without interruption, and I grant them the same courtesy. My friends tell me they're going to do something, and then do it, and if they're going to use me or my things, they express appreciation or know they're on the hook for fucking something up.

I took my time getting into the relationship, and I suffered the things wrong with it until I broke. It's a break that I will learn from and do better next time by not allowing myself to ignore the escalation or mask it under the guise of “accepting someone where they are.” I understand people as having no clue where they are, and it's something I downplay or express some faux humility about at my peril. I understand people as having the kind of mindless irony of an arrested teenager struggling to cope with their incomplete brain and personal trauma. It's not a gratifying point that my home has returned to a place of peace and comfort after removing someone I care about. It's an existentially critical point about how we quell our sense of loneliness or emptiness despite superficially having everything we could ever want.

I'm extremely impressed with many of the book passages and sentiments from Daniel Sherrell who was featured on the Know Your Enemy podcast. He discussed the conditions under which you embody something verses just knowing intellectually. You have to let in the depths of the dread and despair and marry it to the action you take in your day-to-day or long-term, if not infinite, project. Dorothy Fortenberry, also featured in the episode, discussed having kids with no expectations of them ever thanking you or even smiling with regard to your efforts in service to them, and yet knowing you had them for reasons not to do with your own gratification.

What resonated so deeply was a sensibility that I've had to cultivate over time. It's a form of acceptance, not of fate, but of known and unknown conditions. Whatever hell you may be suffering, I can only choose to roll the dice with engaging or not. I can only open myself up, tolerate the vulnerability, and live the consequences of sharing my honest experience. I can't make you accept me, be patient, swallow any of my “reasons” you may regard as “excuses.” My harshest judgments of you either lend themselves to changes in my behavior or mood, or they get used to beat you to death. I can claim a certain awareness of when I'm choosing to beat you to death, like in blowing up at my ex, but it's a wasted awareness if I didn't want to do that and chose to anyway. There's areas in which I'm bound to the notion of getting “license” or “permission” to access parts of me predicated on granting you the agency and responsibility of inviting me in. If I'm bound to a blood-lust like a vampire, I'm forgoing my agency, and thus cannot grant you my honest impression of your agency. I'm then eschewing the responsibility for my actions.

I want responsibility, and begrudging the conditions under which I might yield it doesn't serve me. So that means I don't get “normal” relationships. That means I get to feel “alone,” and any orientation I maintain that baits people or tests people is about me, not them. I don't really know how to reconcile this with what it would take to create or empower a new culture or zeitgeist. I'm not actually a god nor claim some special enlightenment. At some level, it feels like I either maintain expectations I regard as self-preserving, reasonable, and practical, or I drop all expectations and just work people like I know how to work them. Think about it, how many people have you had thank you or shake your hand after you explained you took their children? How many strangers' homes have you been invited into? How many children have you been trusted to drive all over the state with? How many hundreds of people have you invited into your home? How many codes have you had to switch or topics have you had to incorporate to create things that represent your highest ideals?

If you believe, and I use that word liberally, anything less than me about yourself or what you're capable of, by my understanding and definition, you're at my mercy. I can provoke you. I can work you. I can convince you. If you don't know what you're capable of, whether or not you're doing anything for good or bad reasons, I do. I'm not under the illusion that everything I do is for a good or coherent reason. I couldn't take myself seriously if I regarded what you told me as some threatening Truth claim or if I reflexively felt ick and sought to write you off as some lazy airhead. All I can do is make peace with using you until you “wake up” and buy in.

That sounds so crass and cold and feels like the heart of a many years long project I've been trying to avoid. I dance around what I'm capable of precisely because I know what I'm capable of. A cultural project needs the people who are going to be a part of that culture. I didn't party alone, but I garnered all the resentment for the consequences of the party environment, earned and unearned. I can invite you to my land, but you can be stuck linguistically and psychologically reiterating to me it's my land, so nothing you do or invest in is going to matter or be safe from my arbitrary whims. That's fine, but you don't get to retain your skepticism for my aims or good will when I offer it freely or am willing to bind myself to a contract. I want checks on my power and reflection on my aims. You either don't give yourself the power, and thus don't claim the responsibility, or aim at dumb shit.

If what you're accepting about yourself leaves you complacent in what you're willing to discuss or examine, you haven't accepted anything. You've punted your obligation and likely adopted some posture about how busy you are. You've probably reflexively found a way to recognize the faults in others that you can't imagine manifest in you. It's precisely because I am an intractable cunt with an extremely, aberrant, loud mouth and fluidity to his inappropriateness that I've been driven to the desire for an exacting conversation about the forces at play and who is using them. I get snippets of resonant and compelling moments. I get glimpses into the people I wish you were and the person I want to be. But I didn't build my house, start my businesses, or take a chance in my relationships because I lacked a direction or ideal I wished to embody. I don't find patience, and healthy skepticism, or respectful deference from listening only to the feverishly antagonistic demons that foresee and enact every catastrophic end drawn from inferences of your every utterance.

I have everything. My brain works. I'm full. I laugh hard and make jokes. I study. I work on things that are easy for me and hard for others so that maybe they can be free to better handle hard things I can't help them with. I can't recognize the “love” you don't demonstrate. I can't respect negligently wasting power you wish you had, and do have, especially if I show you how it works or give you the opportunity to do the same kind of work I had to do in order to be the one presenting the opportunity. I don't resent people with something to teach me nor am I only willing to learn something on my own terms. I can only work with what's on offer.

I'm offering you 921 insights into my head, 5 acres, my tools, my back, my efficiency, my experience in high stress and high responsibility environments, and my spirit and style of engaging with the world. And who am I to pretend that you want or need any of that, right? Save the handful of my regularly cited exemplars, what is it you think you're offering me? A like? A follow? What are you offering “the world?” Do you want to be just something I keep feeling good or operating well-enough until you've exhausted your utility? Are you my afterthoughts and naive idealism codified by the silence, our histories incidental verses entwined?

I'll weather the scorn or isolation, to be sure. Every shit example I set or shit “friend” I've taken a chance on is quickly followed by the waterfall of prosperity and better examples set by others. I need to maintain the memory of the standards set by you, not me, in how I've been treated. I have friends who don't judge me. I have friends who laugh easy. I have friends who respect my time and effort. I have friends who show up in emergencies. I have friends I start businesses with. I have friends who demonstrate their grasp of their own wickedness or sense of responsibility and maturity without making it yours or my problem. The structure and system are there, because again, I have everything. You find a way to vibe with that or make peace with how you incorporate it, or not. If you're unworthy of what's on offer, well, you're my mom lol.

[920] Pitter-Pattern

The ability to recognize patterns may arguably be the best explanation of “consciousness” we have. Without a pattern, there's chaos. Whether we can mathematically account for that pattern, or superimpose the very idea of “pattern” onto the chaos, is what's at the edge of scientific investigation. We know the very act of observing photons denotes a pattern that otherwise looks like a probability wave. We have ancient philosophers developing the language of how to describe the “form” or what's “analogous” in our experience. It's such a fundamental feeling and discussion that we have lost, at least colloquially, the history of our species exploring the patterns that seem to run through, if not control, our lives. We have myths we're still flocking to movie theaters to watch on repeat, but how many liken their motivations or actions in the world to that of The Avengers?

A lot of my confidence is derived from speaking to patterns. When my world gets too small, I look for historical trends. When my effort feels lacking, I describe my story over months or years. I can see trends in my behavior that have little to do with many of my individual days. I hunt for free items on facebook. I retrieve free items, maybe, once or twice a month on average, which means I own dozens of free things. It's a good habit, or type of pattern to have, when you're trying to save money, believe in conservation, and wish to keep practicing the search for opportunities. It's a pattern that, unmitigated, can lead to hoarding, anxiety about “missing out,” and compulsive scrolling.

The patterns that manifest for all to see, one imagines, are the easiest to recognize. We know people who are reliably grumpy or dopey or even oddly satisfied. Your continued deference to capitalism creates a pattern around “worker” or “responsibility.” It's “obvious” the patterns you need to fall into in order to account for your “needs.” You may fall into relationship patterns that are informed by what you witnessed between your parents or what was imprinted on you from romantic stories. You eat certain things consistently, greet people with familiar phrases, seek enjoyment or distraction from a handful of activities. You jostle the fairly rigid patterns of your life to keep things mildly interesting, and you can follow them until the day you die.

For as many patterns as we may follow, it's psychologically antagonizing to know we're still at the mercy of chaos. A car can crash into you. A looming disease is working its way to a dreaded doctor's visit. Natural disasters take advantage of our collective indifference and inability to be accountable. Our underlying psychology sucker punches our hopes and dreams. What a cruel twist of fate that you might do something to elevate the experience of millions, but you'll attune to the anonymous negative commentary. You're practically required to ignore 99.9% of existence outside of your particular brain and its pattern-seeking behavior to even function, however haphazardly. You're literally ignoring the things your brain is doing to keep you alive in order to live! Fun!

My understanding of patterns is how I tend to escape “guilt.” I look at whether things I do constitute a consistent shit thing about me, or an incidental example drawn out from a series of other patterns. Deliberately moving away from a semantics discussion regarding guilt or shame, I'm more interested in what it takes to recognize patterns of negative emotion and how that underpins our behavior. For me, that recognition is built from writing. I don't just happen upon epiphany after epiphany and change accordingly. I need to find words. I need to take root. I need to explore the infinite probabilities and slowly coalesce. I need to find the ironic indirect direction that doesn't fill me with woe and unsavory contradictions.

As such, it's often non-verbal. I write so I don't have to clench or hate or interrupt my flow. I'm writing now because I woke up with an agenda. I want to carry on with that agenda without getting distracted more than I have to. I've decided today is going to be a “productive” day, and that means from errands to business organization, I need the kind of focus that only happens when I'm done brain-speaking. I've watched my insane amount of TV. I've made my lists. I'll get to places while they are open. I've decided the coffee shop I'm going to sit in and focus. I know I'll use the library as a back-up when the coffee shop no longer feels tenable.

Compelling reading, right? But I have to do it. I have to say it, now. I have to make it real in a parallel way. I have to speak to the effort that's going to make it so I can succeed across the different dimensions of my being. I have to make whatever conscious agent that sees me also tend to think of me in the terms I'm trying to lay out. The hypnosis of totalitarians isn't unfamiliar or hard to understand. Having a “totalizing” experience is a default state either deliberately attended to or ever-hijacked. You have to keep bringing yourself back to what you want and letting your auto-ignore work for instead of against you.

I learned how to let my patterns want things in ways that were better for me. I stopped pairing my sense of overwhelmed exhaustion to a signal that I was “good” or “better.” Plenty of people are killing themselves for nothing more than misguided ego or misunderstood notions of “help.” I want my contributions to be timeless. I want to tap into patterns at the deepest level of reality. I want what I mean about that sentiment to be felt in a way that no language could undermine the work it does consciously or unconsciously. That means “being” a certain kind of person, now, and listening to myself about the next move that will speak to those deepest desires.

Goals are no small endeavor. Creating one, however small, is an act of “God.” It's a conscious rearranging of the infinite sea of “potential.” Does the goal push your behavior to change? Does the goal enable goals that take even more organization and attention? Does the goal liberate you from the draw of everything poised to pull you away from its pursuit? Is the goal explicit enough to move your fingers yet fluid enough to account for the many small acts that can service it?

I'm so distractable. That is, my attention isn't mine until it is. I'm getting pulled constantly. We try to diagnose this and medicate it. We build media that caricatures the consequences of having no direction or grasp. I'm building a relationship to how my attention moves. I'm trying to not fight it. I'm trying to accept what's at the edge of my jaw being clenched or not. I know that next level I wish to be on that is not ambivalent about where I go or how I manifest. I want all of the forces otherwise to flow through too. I want the shroom trip without the shrooms. I want it because it's not enough to intellectually speak to all of the relative conclusions. I want it because nothing speaks like a feeling, and I can see how what I make people feel manifests in the world. It manifests in a way that nothing I ever speak to does.

So, if the words themselves are less than how I say them, I say them “like me.” My style is “relaxed,” and I refrain from biting back until you've damn near chewed through my arm. I write, and reread, and piece together how I think I want to work and what I think is fair much slower. It's not because I'm not anxious or not able or unwilling to “do more.” It's because it has to feel right now and forever. If I build all of the baggage of my heightened states into what I do, it'll come back around. If I can't make peace with everything I won't accomplish, with everything that needs to be ignored even after it's been brought to my attention, I'll keep missing everything I have that's worth just as much as everything I want or could create. I'm just setting an example more than bearing an unrealistic burden to an ever-obscure standard. Truly, what do I really recognize when I call Nietzsche “a real mother fucker?”

If you have a notion that your being is weighed on some cosmic scale of justice or righteousness, I assure you, you're the only one who can determine that such a scale should exist at all, let alone which way it leans. The questions at the heart of your being, your motivations, your movement, will always be obscure, but to be obscure is vastly different from being a liar. To “practically capitulate” or sublimate your being to the conditions as best you understand them is to occupy an entirely different world from the one where you're striving to live in service to what transcends your limitations. Keep fighting, or flowing, or whatever you need to do to keep you oriented towards whatever sense and order you can recognize. Here's to recognizing your example.

[919] Slap

Many of us are taught “the basics” when it comes to engaging each other. Say “please” and “thank you.” Shake hands. Say you're sorry. Where and why these ideas came into being each have their own history and confluence of forces that pushed the behavior into our consciousness. You may have heard that shaking hands was a way to demonstrate you were unarmed or that it gives either person the ability to gauge nervousness. You might have had it beaten into you that apologizing is required if you're going to reside in a peaceful household.

When you're a kid, at least when I was a kid, none of the “normal” or “basic” things people did made much sense to me. When I was told to apologize, I wasn't sorry. When I said “thank you,” I arguably felt entitled or that it was “obvious” that my caregiver would feed me or buy me something on Christmas. My family meets and kisses on the cheek. It's a habit I never picked up. We know now a lot of the things we've built into how to interact are carried over from poor understandings of trauma as much or more from tradition.

By adulthood, I want to believe you develop an appreciation for why you do or say the things you do. I want to hear “thank you,” and I offer what I appreciate about people or situations regularly. The world feels bleak, and to know you were even acknowledged becomes a little lifeline. I figured out how to relate to being “sorry” and under what circumstances I actually was. Being a going-through-the-motions liar has never sat well with me. I know how to shake your hand, but I prefer flashing a peace sign, and I'll tip my hat to the pandemic for helping normalize that.

I'm watching this series discussing the “meaning crisis.” A neuroscientist and teacher of enlightenment practices explains why there's this drive to be “mindful,” and dozens of pop-psychological misunderstandings about how to attain enlightenment. He covers a wide breath of history and literature. Sometimes he's more intelligible than others. At bottom, he cracks open just how many “basic” ideas and definitions we had to come to before our language continued to evolve and confuse or distract us today.

You can listen to a dozen teachers tell the allegory of the cave. None of it will compare to being the person trying to tell the other fools what the shadows on the wall really are. How many doctors and nurses were prepared for this level of vaccine “skepticism?” How many scientists need to cry foul before something more intentional throws its body on the gears of mindless mass consumption? We're children without the basics. We have timeless myths that we don't feel for ourselves and don't weave into our lived experience. We take so much for granted. We leave ourselves one option, to be “shocked” by preventable tragedy after preventable tragedy.

I think about the ideas of mine I considered basic or foundational and why or if they have changed. I've never been particularly “passive” or “non-violent,” but it's never been persuasive to me to fight or beat up women. Do I know there are crazy bitches out there? Sure. Are there large and trained ones who I wouldn't have a prayer in a fight with? Absolutely. Even at the height of the violence perpetrated on me from my mom, if I wanted to hit back, it would have been more to get the point across than the first of a series of blows until she was dead. We probably lucked out that I only had to catch her arm one day to send the message.

I never believed I'd encounter a circumstance that would have me act violently towards a girl, let alone a girlfriend. I never had the language of a “spectrum” of behaviors or the idea that corrosive emotional slights and outrage build over time. I took it for granted that I'd heard, felt, or seen it all before, and that certain things were simply off the table for me. It was a dangerous and incorrect position to hold.

Much is to be made of “harm” today and who is causing it. I had to get exacting about the conditions under which I could and could not take responsibility for what feel most often like presumptive claims to my willingness or capacity. Were the series of reasons that led to me slapping a previous ex hidden from me? Being drunk didn't help. Do I remember what I was thinking? I was shocked and panicked. Did I do anything to escalate the situation? Well, I functionally dared her, handed her the razor, and watched her drag it 6 inches down her wrist. Different than being a little man who gets off on beating women? Sure. Considerably worse than that in other ways? I lean towards words like “absurd” given the cartoonishly inappropriate “solution” I landed on for “she's out of her mind and needs to be slapped back into reality,” like in the flash of TV and movie scenes that scrolled through my head. It wasn't going to work without the actual “pop” noise, and I miffed it landing the tips of my fingers, so tried from the other direction with my left hand with more, but still inadequate results.

There's a very neat and forgone conclusion you can tie that situation up with. Drunk boyfriend hits girlfriend, bad, fuck that guy, we always knew what he was capable of... It doesn't ask where either of us was coming from. It doesn't account for the months, if not years at that point, of being emotionally invested in attempting ways to bring peace to her mind. A mind that was entertaining suicide seriously enough to describe to me how she'd go about it in detail. The moment doesn't speak to the amount of times you ask the person you care about to seek help, try different pills, take time off, or take your money when they cite concerns for the cost. If I told you I was crying, wrapped her wrist up in my red blanket (you know, because red) and immediately called the police, that would be me trying to garner sympathy and downplay my otherwise violent soul, right? A few days later I offered to let her stab me, only half-jokingly, because...eye for an eye? I had no tools and no ideas for what, if anything, makes that situation “better.”

It's been like ten years from that night and I still ask myself questions. Was I angry at her? No, I was terrified. Could I have done anything better? Not been drunk, not handed her the razor, not let myself be consumed by the hopes and dreams I had for our relationship that had been cracked and peeling for quite some time. I don't deny my actions nor expect anyone close with her to associate with me or really bother to understand how or why things played out. I've never been anymore or less tempted to fight or hit anyone, let alone girls, before or since. I just have a new outlier data point I use to contextualize when and whether outbursts of emotion seem more likely. If I'm angry enough to hit anything, there's likely a pretty serious underlying problem that's not being attended to. The irony then hits that even if you can identify, for over a year, the habits of an unhealthy dynamic, it doesn't mean you're going to immediately sever the tie and not find yourself punching a wall or throwing recycling bins.

What is a “basic” notion of “love” or “civility” that isn't understood, isn't embodied, and functionally doesn't mean anything? Why do we have “harm-reduction models” of “care?” Don't people who care try to “fix” problems, not drag scarred skin over slightly less jagged rocks indefinitely? I still don't see myself punching a girl in the face for any reason but self-defense. I don't think it's very “loving” or “civil” to try and partner up altogether if we're going to remain perfectly ambivalent to how our behavior plays out on the brains of our partners. We might not always know how things will play out, but also, as we find the language and identify the feelings before we just react, we need to acknowledge whether or not we're deliberately working to share an effort, or merely resentful our minds aren't being read.

That's how I differentiate my behavior and sense of responsibility, at least. I don't hate you for not being like me. I don't get angry that your interests or perspective is different than mine. I get angry when you tell me where I'm coming from before you show any interest in reading a blog or dozen. I get angry when nothing I say or do can return to my ears as an accurate account after passing through your lips. I know I can practice, through this, examining how to find one more day, if not hour, of patience or decision to make more in advance of things getting escalated in a less controlled way. I didn't drag out the drama of my last relationship, but I also didn't insist 3 to 6 months in that she stay primarily in her trailer. I didn't refrain from buying more expensive pieces in service to her garden I knew she couldn't appreciate.

I think sometimes people wish they could “take it back.” I wouldn't forgo my perspective for anything. There's plenty of people living in pain and daily screaming or violent situations that haven't learned what I have. I'm not better or worse then them but for my willingness to keep talking and trying to measure what and whether there's something better. I don't hate myself. I don't even necessarily blame people as consciously responsible for the conditions under which things deteriorated. When the flames die down is where I look for blame. Are you willing to own it? Can you keep exploring? Has it changed your behavior in a way anyone but you can recognize?

It's incredibly hard to balance your own confused, contradictory, internal state and dialogue well before you try to introduce someone else's. Complicate things with your culture's norms. Become extra-informed about all of the words you've been using incorrectly your entire life. Try to see the contextual forest for the tree of any aberrant display. It might not be gratifying to think of yourself as weak and conflicted, but those feelings can lend themselves to openness and humility. They can feed your propensity to take responsibility and power an otherwise dead or excuse-ridden tongue. It's how you build a “basic” engine for turning the things that happen to you into the things you can actually do. I can't take it back, and neither can you, and I'm not asking anyone to save me. Not even Jesus.

So where does that leave us? I'll be here, in my writing, in my field, trying to keep speaking and working towards what I wish to embody. It's not someone unsympathetic to how you feel, but you'd be a pretty fucked up person if you flatly accepted my behavior just because I told you, “I felt like it.” We have the same impulse and ability to check our behavior, even if we only want to trust it when it's employed against someone else. And at your core, only you're going to know if you're lying. That is, if you've managed to figure out how to speak to and own yourself at all.

[918] Act The Part

I've tried to write about embittering things over the last few days. I thought, hungover, mildly reeling from an answered drunk text regarding harm I've caused a different ex-girlfriend coinciding with the new ex showing up to pick up her cat for the last time, I was going to proceed down some sorrowful road of regrets and woe. Then a curious thing happened. My first swigs of Dayquil start kicking in. I lose the ability to keep typing after six or seven sentences, and something clicks.

I'm not sorry.

I'm not full of woe I don't have people in my life to any greater or smaller extent than I do now. I know where I was coming from in my shitty or otherwise behavior, own it, trust it, and can describe in detail the generally aberrant or absurd circumstances under which I break down. I don't take some special pride in anything I haven't worked for, which has not been someone trying to cause harm, but either can't help himself or finds people on their own little paths of self-destruction and is unwittingly enlisted.

I don't feel bad about reaching out to old acquaintances drunkenly expressing what I wish I could have done better. I think it's kind of funny and me, feebly crying out for help and connection in the face of my clearly lacking capacity to do so. I'm not scared of the consequences for doing so. I'm not one who bends to notions of “awkward.” I think I texted like 20 different people last night, and on the whole have like 3 dinner/lunch/beer plans. It's not that serious whether or not you're deeply up the ass of the people you claim to be close to. When I get to be more human, drinking, and I'm not calculating the gas and time and weighing them against my budget or daily obligations, I'll reach out, and we'll either eat or won't.

That's the kind of friend I am. It's maybe the only kind I'm good at being. I'm your fading memory of my obnoxiousness who drunkenly texts you every few years when he's feeling lonely and questioning every interaction he's ever had with an ex-girlfriend.

That's not quite right though either, is it? I'm not really questioning my interactions. If anything, I've gotten dramatically more patient, deliberate, and forgiving in my posture towards people. I'm relieved I get to come home and not be obligated to a fight. I'm thankful I've been on top of the math and reasons I came out here so that my whole life wouldn't blow up when the “inevitable” blow up happened. This was literally my plan all along. Offer, trust nothing until it happens, make peace with manageable losses in advance.

What I take to be a weird and broken part of me like yearns to be more sorry or sad than I am. It's another reason to drink when you can like trigger emotions that I've functionally talked my way out of fluidly experiencing. I can't get over the irony though, of how people approach their emotions, particularly with regard to me. I'm, oddly, often, accused of being manipulative for doing just this. I'm implored to consider the depth and consequences of how people feel.

Meanwhile, I lend myself to being emotionally leveraged perpetually, and if or when I express mine, it's time to beat irony to death again. People won't talk to me again, ever lol. I'll give them room for dozens of angry emotional outbursts, laundry lists of judgments about me, gossip trials, distance, resources, but one thing must remain absolutely true at bottom. I'm the enemy beyond redemption. My perspective is just this mess of garbled words and excuses in the face of your true and noble feelings. It's not all people or all of my friends who do this, but when I think about it, an incredibly large amount relative to how many I had, I've subjected myself to.

So maybe I should cut that out. Maybe that's the nature of this calm I'm tending to find on hangover days where there used to be panic about what I said or to whom. Wake up, Nick. You moved to the middle of the middle of nowhere, on purpose, and spent many hours and dollars trying to get away from the impact those kind of relationships have had on you. You know you're a dick with a heart of gold and black soul. Stop pretending you're suited for some familiar or common idea of togetherness or a relationship. If people want to be emotionally manipulated, just do them the courtesy, and stop this game of seeing who can balance on this conceptual “level” you have about who's a “real” person.

[917] Succor Punch

 

Considerably more needs to be said on this notion of “helping.” I felt it when I ended my last blog, but I knew the phrasing was incomplete. I've criticized vague notions of “help” in the past when I watched Kristen in particular seem to come home, daily, exhausted and suffering her shitty work conditions at Centerstone. I think it's one of the fiercest drives of evolution and most exploited if not misunderstood as well.

What does helping mean to me? Help is differentiating between what I think I want and need from what someone else may tell me. Help is working in service to proven modes of being that exist above or beyond current turmoil. Help is attempting to be prepared for things we will all inevitably need help with. Help means to not cripple myself with bad ideas or behavior before I even begin. I can't help if there is no coherent notion of what “I” am bringing to the table. I can't help if I couldn't pretty quickly come up with a comprehensive account of how help manifests. I can't help if I can't recognize or acknowledge when something isn't helping.

I think it's really easy to see when you look at social work contexts. The difference between a seasoned, hopefully not jaded, case worker and someone just out of college is their notions of what can and can't help. Sending service providers to the door isn't a quick fix. Berating or chastising someone in crisis is a chosen punitive naivety too many feel unpersuaded to stop. What helps? Your word choices, body language, and ability to recognize who or what you are actually speaking to opens the door to helping. Your ability to remain healthily skeptical verses insecurely judgmental keeps you on a helpful path. Can you hear a genuine cry for help or specific need without imposing one you think you're most situated to employ?

I've been tasked with “helping” at a couple food pantries. Food pantries exist because of presumptions about food insecurity, guilt over lazy mishandling of waste, and no doubt the people volunteering feel some kind of way regarding the help they are providing. The vast majority of the food gets thrown away. The waste, potential compost, might go into raised garden beds installed around the properties from which a handful of people nibble. Is it broadly a “helpful” thing to do? Is it helping the “right” people in the right way? When the pantry has an overwhelming amount of fruits and vegetables, no one's eating them.

A thinking person might get the idea to hold food preparation classes on how to make fruits and vegetables into something palatable to the American diet. Maybe the compost fuels flowers or native species conservation efforts. Maybe less ambitious, there's a tweak that ensures the disabled aren't forced to inch back to their homes in the rain, spilling their food in the yard and struggling to pick it up. You could go your whole life given narratives around what people need and hearing of the organizations tasked with helping those in need, and miss the underlying issue completely. It's only recently dawning on us the extent to which income inequality has ruined basically everything. While a system overhaul appears needed to help that, how can you localize your effort to remain helpful up and down the layers of your potential influence? I think a lot of basic income experiments are currently speaking to this awareness best.

Help comes not just “in” defining a problem, but how you do so. For the longest time, I conceived of my problem as a lack of money. While, factually, I don't have the money to snap my wildest dreams into existence, I feel I've grown up and can better define or drop altogether my notions of the “real problems.” Am I dreading the ever-crushing fascism? Sure. Does it have anything to do with the extremely dirty house I helped clean or disabled gentleman I helped carry his shit for in the rain? In probably the most abstract way possible if you don't have a solid conception of “us” and how we treat each other. I'm currently providing counseling to anti-vaxers. I've fought persistently to prevent or close DCS cases for Trump supporters.

I don't think the problem of persistent existential crises are solved begrudging any one ignorant individual. I think you have to identify the drivers, both internally and externally, that instantiate the behavior. I think Bezos knows considerably more about what drives our suicidal gilded consumption than the poor person who “prefers” instant macaroni to cucumbers. I think the hard task is sussing out for ourselves new notions of help before we lose ourselves in “passion” projects “assisting the needy” through countless hours of bureaucracy or power mongering.

For most of my life, I've had very little idea of what I might actually to do help myself, let alone anyone else. I get criticized for my advocacy of writing and touting its cascading benefits. “I don't like to write!” “It doesn't work for everyone!” “No one wants to become a blog!” I think these ideas are quick to miss the point. It's not the writing in-and-of itself that's useful. It's that I go into it looking for what to do. Bezos doesn't just organize a factory a certain way, he's looking to become efficient in his exploitation and process. He's trained our “now” impulse to track with buying shit, so “help” looks like the myriad layers that go into facilitating that. I've certainly thought that in order to feel better I just needed to buy that next thing.

If you look at my actual spending though, I've done a lot of work to dial back action in service to that impulse considerably. “Toys” and “Entertainment” have accounted for around 6% of my budget combined over the last 5 years. My understanding of my biggest problem was not having a long-term affordable means of stabilizing my entrepreneurial impulses, so, functionally all of my money has gone to “Home Maintenance/Utilities,” “Automotive/Gas,” and “Restaurants” in the same period. If you're lost in conceiving of your own problems, look at what you're spending.

I've tried to turn my life into a question of efficiency and what it might speak to. I wanted to “hurry up to slow down.” I was constantly, feverishly, trying to “work” or “help myself” with things like the coffee shop. I wasn't making nearly enough money. I wasn't giving myself any time to enjoy anything. I was becoming hyper-aware that energy is not an inexhaustible well from which a body that's not sleeping or eating right can draw from. I had to train myself not to feel guilty about being stuck in “on” position, whether it's my brain nagging or just being up and out in the world doing something.

Learning how to engage or cope with “now” is the infinite task. I'm all of me that ever was or could be in this moment. It's changing. It's overwhelming. It needs to be attended to actively, patiently, and with the grace and civility I would grant a child learning something new.

I haven't quite felt right all day. I'm in a role as “assistant” to the resident coordinator for the housing authority. As far as I can tell, it's my job to babysit a printer, and help unload a pallet for a shanty food pantry. It's 12 hours a week at $12 an hour. The idea was to use the role to be on the front line of public housing's transition to not-so-public housing. I would be an on-site service provider, either doing case work in helping people get signed up for things, counseling, or more intensive engagement like DCS prevention. When half a dozen people want to skip right over the dirty home, if I can wrap it into something that Medicaid would pay for, I can comfortably and confidently just get to work before the problem gets bigger or your children are removed.

It's been about 3 weeks of...office. I sit around. I've had 5 or more discussions about my calendar. It took 2 weeks just to get into my email, where no relevant information resides, besides questions about my wackadoodle schedule. I'm told they have a general purpose or mission to get all of these metrics recorded about the neighborhood and records put in about what we helped them print. They have on-site volunteers who regularly do the pantry. I'm supposed to be moral support? We throw out several hundred pounds of food at the end of each pantry. People aren't hungry here.

In any event, I'm struggling to keep myself oriented on all of the little things I could be doing in service to the actual small service provider business we started. You know what's hard to do when the schizophrenic non-resident shows up to speak to herself in front of the computer for hours at a time? Parse through Medicaid policy. There are people who need transportation. There are people who need signed up for disability and SNAP. There are people who threaten their ability to stay in their home because they associate with violent offenders who have been banned from the property. There are people on the verge of getting kicked out for cleanliness. Why am I babysitting the sign-up sheet and peaches?

I'm also in the middle of watching this lecture series on the “meaning crisis.” John Vervaeke explains the history of how we came to all of these notions about ourselves and how or where we fit into existence. He discusses the ways in which we can bullshit ourselves around compelling sophist rhetoric and remain unable to map our thinking and behavior onto the actual world. In practical terms, it's my struggle with constantly having to navigate and play to people's feelings verses speaking to and working with people on the “real” page able to articulate and move towards a shared goal.

You see a dirty home as “administrator” and file a report, send out an inspector, leave a threatening letter, and wait. I see a dirty home and say, “We should clean the home and learn why it got that bad.” I can hear all of the trauma-thoughts and rationalizations from the home owner, and remain non-judgmental nor paralyzed as I see how it fits into greater and more comprehensive contexts. You can arrest your action because of limited license you think your role boxes you into. I'm a person who takes as many things as he can, and works them into higher-order working models of how I think you should be.

That is, when I actually can. Right now, I can blow $15 going to town, hit plasma donation in a mild-panic for the time constraints on my lunch break, then sit and sweat on the patio as people saunter in dismayed there's only fruits and vegetables and high-end organic milk or cheese they'd never touch. I come home, and I'm alone. The call of “chill” or sleep is increasingly loud. I'm trying to take back my space for all of the tension and fervent energy I was constantly trying to turn away from resentment. I'm unhappy at how relieved I'm able to immediately feel that I'm not coming home to a fight. Being alone isn't great, but it's better than fighting.

My head hurts. I've got little energy. All of the little projects or house chore I might do aren't disordered enough for me to feel bothered nor of any immediate impact once they're done. I don't have the brain space for more lectures as all of the new terms I'm hearing aren't settling in nicely. I barely want to watch TV. I'm worried that were I to try a video game, I'd find a way to piss away the next three days straight. Did I mention my head hurts?

I'm working with this family that has seemingly done everything in their power over the last two years to enable the worst behavior of their 18 year old. He was a month away from graduating from the army. He doesn't have his license. He's got his own shitty background with a negligent mother, but today, he weaponizes his personality and his parents' weakness to be generally shitty and entitled and emotionally destructive. I'm there to be the “bad” guy who gives them license to take away his video games and get him working, get his permit started, and have him eventually out of the home. I don't know that I trust the parents to actually holding the line and sending him to the homeless shelter if and when he does not meet his obligations.

This family has a dying mentally handicapped daughter they have to center their world around her care. The daughter has breathing issues. They aren't vaccinated and “have their reasons.” The absurdity really knows no bounds. I feel considerably less guilty at whatever rate we may be able to bill their Medicaid.

[916] Are You Ready

I've had a lot on my mind lately. This provoked in no small part from recently splitting with my girl. I had several long and reflective emails, a blog with scaled back viewer access, and now this. I keep noticing little lines calling out. Let's see where they go.

I think it's incredibly short-sided to lose track of your environment. As much as any individual wants to believe they are doing their best to live their values, you can be corrupted and subverted. I read an article from a woman who was trapped in the Chinese prison camps for Uyghurs for 2 years. She said she finally knew what it meant to be “brain-washed.” Her individuality was broken down. Her punishments were arbitrary. Her imposed silence all-consuming. In a radically oppressive environment, the consequences are swift, visible, and for the rest of your life built into whatever manages to come out of the other end.

It's easy to lose track of the idea that the story from above is the modern-era. In one form or another, we have an environment with totalitarian governments that kidnap and imprison people. They do it from a set of cultural values derived from their experiences and narratives carried out over generations. The world, left to its own devices, is kill or be killed. Whether one can psychologically get the notion of existing in an otherwise “polite society” to comport with the extent their ideas are deadly, is a world deconstructing then rebuilding task few are prone to do.

A few more refrains from modernity are about representation, who has the power, and instantiated repressive and traumatizing systems. White people, men in particular, are told to maybe shut up, contemplate their complicity, and realize the broader nature of their tastes, humor, or privileges. Whether and how any of them do so is measured by anyone's guess, but participating in show-trials or guilt-signaling language appears to quell Twitter somewhat. I think for all of my privileges, earned and unearned, I'm still first-world poor, have a credible fear of getting sick, and have felt “oppressed” by the normative language, willful blindness, and expectations laid out for me. My experience, not-black, not-woman, not-Uyghur, should be a cry for a gospel of unity sung by Sly and the Family Stone, not a game of oppression bingo.

I think it's the habit of most, if not all, culturally momentous movements to get co-opted by a subset of particularly privileged or radicalized adherents. You got the money or smooth tongue? I bet you find your way to the head of something that forgets who's still on the ground. You willing to be violent? I bet you swallow the news coverage. We don't ask ourselves what makes us like our oppressors. We don't contemplate the environment as a subset of larger environments all with their own dominating forces or tendencies. We don't account for the parts of our nature that ravenously subvert and consume.

It's exhausting. It's hard enough to deal with a bad day, break-up, or the in-your-face fascist symbolism daring you to put up too much of a fight. What if you're sick? What of your unrealized or recognized trauma? How do you work in service to some “largest context ideal” at all? Doesn't it require a kind of privilege or extreme naivety to begin with? Even if you try given the resources at hand, your larger contexts are creeping in. The series of things that would make you fail get added to the “let's not discuss that” list. The denial, resentment, or catastrophic oversight will make themselves known, and then familiar narratives about the inevitability of failure or corruption go to work.

The fact that I can watch or read about any era of history and see direct parallels today suggests to me the “themes” of history or humanity are eternal, and the work always the same. “Waking up,” or acknowledging and building as much of the context into something salient and not-arbitrarily or incidentally powerful seems to be the task. What's that mean in English? You have to know and accept that you are good and bad. You have to know that you are perfectly arbitrary and perfectly exist with as much agency as you can claw from that existence. You are oppressor and oppressed. You have to start seeking failures you intend to learn from. You know the wisdom and purpose of being truthful in spite of your fears. No one is keeping score, not even you, in this game, and the temptation to “give it up God” is no excuse or path for taking as much responsibility of the largest projects.

What I'm trying to do with the land, or at least through my work and speech about it, is provide evidence that the environment can change. The environment can suggest to you 30 projects that embody ideals in service to the largest projects. The environment has visceral and pragmatic asks that remain infinitely obscured by modernity and hashtag-activism. My environment, in spite of recent trauma, is still my land. It's still with a budding counseling business. It's still surrounded by my words attempting to process, not merely cope, with its changes. It's a privilege I've worked for and never been tempted to apologize about.

Last week, I sat with a client who has no-less than a dozen severely traumatizing incidents from her life that have wholly subsumed her present. I spent two-hours with her scrubbing dog and cat shit off the floor of just one room of her house. Hers wasn't the worst house I've seen nor cleaned. Before I got there, half a dozen people, including the building inspector and a social service agency worker, were witness to the crisis. None of them got the inclination to start helping clean.

It's not any more or less complicated than that. Do you try to clean, or not? Do you recognize as much as you can about that environment? Can you recognize her trauma? Can you feel yourself reeling at the prospect of the work that clearly needs to be done, and then do it anyway? Can you remain encouraging, pro-active, and realistic about the consequences? Can you enlist or create the kind of help that's screaming to exist?

So far, my environments suggest, “no.” Unless I do it, it doesn't get done. My help most often resents me. My consequences remain contained to my budget or back. I keep trying to create and demonstrate otherwise. It's not “noble” or “nice” or “moral” or bending an historical arc. It's trying to count. It's trying to feel myself for all of the different contexts I inhabit. How often I talk about wishing to be left alone. How thankless and low-paying if not negative-paying it is to try. The worst narratives and inclinations don't have to win or dominate. They don't. You can work differently. You can try what you don't recognize anywhere else. You can acknowledge where your project fails or was blind, and then persist. You have to keep tapping into what's already there, celebrate it, and keep the invitation open.

What I can't decide is whether or not it happens “alone.” We all seem perfectly willing to lend ourselves to the oppressive environment. I've worked myself to proverbial death both for myself and for organizations happy to exploit me. You're taking risks and making sacrifices in everything you do. Are they ones you choose or ones you're forced to swallow? Are you patient and methodical enough to do the math behind the “revolution?” Are you humbled by the nature of your task and service you provide?

Persistently, I see an unhealthy ego. It's not an ego grounded in doubt that keeps you open and exploratory. It's an insular protection mechanism. It's a selfish, defensive, and insecure pride for the ignorance of your larger environments and how they're shaping you. The Chinese know you can literally beat that ego to death. Why leave it up to them? Why leave it up to Trump to play with? Why let it arrest your attention with memes and “news?” Maybe the infinite task and nature of all work is to be able to fluidly change to meet the needs of any given moment and sublimate the ego in service to the task. Maybe what we need altogether is poorly understood and rarely appreciated. For my part, I “just” want to help and be helpful.

[915] Eyes On The Prize

This is as about as low as I ever manage to feel. It's the final scene of the movie of my relationships. It's part of a cycle. It's painful and traumatizing each time.

I struggle with “niceness” or “help.” I'm eager to please and get taken advantage of. I see someone help or feel the impact of their help, I never want to consider us square until their wildest dreams are being attended to. Allie helped me at an extremely stressful point in my life. I was making appeals to smug and rich relatives. I was sleeping in my car. She loaned me $2000 to pay off my house. I drove straight to her when she confirmed it was a real offer.

I thought we had the right amount of different but similar characteristics. She played with fire, I play with fire. She is thoughtfully critical of the world around her, I say “fuck that thing” about a lot of things. When she gets an opportunity to work at something she cares about, she does it.

We moved in kind of accidentally, which is a repeated pattern from Kristen who specifically denoted moving in as a poor choice for her back in the day. When me and Allie did it, the pandemic was locking everything down, and we were both under the impression she was going to be living out of her trailer. Well, we ended up functionally on top of each other in the shed.

Country life, let alone bachelor-shed-life comes with a host of negotiations in order to stretch those pithy paychecks. I go into “attempt to attend to needs” mode. I buy an expensive tiller. I look to explore ways to cultivate the space so she feels like she's not completely alienated.

I have no less than 30 projects I'm considering doing at any one time. There's 30 on the board right now. There were at least 30 on the board back then. They all took time, money, overcoming the learning curve, and often some shared concept of what either of us where going to contribute. We eventually decide to pick our particular projects and generally go about them alone.

We never really got to communicating well. Before there were any work tasks or dreams together, it was just going to classical concerts, dinner, and sex. It was the getting-to-know each other dragged out over the distance to Kentucky. We had a really fun time at her cousin's wedding, which shortly after is when I asked if she'd be my girlfriend instead of my “Kentucky girl,” as though I had girls all up and down the Midwest.

Eventually, every few days, then every two weeks or so we'd have some version of the same argument. We tried writing out discrepancies on the white board. She was not a fan of that method. I eventually demanded we parse through things and email each other, as recording our fights and maintaining civility were not seemingly possible. We cut each other off. We reacted and doubted verses listened and questioned. The emails didn't seem to resonate with her either.

The fights? The classics, “I want you to hang out with me!” “I do want to hang out with you.” “If you wanted to you would X, Y, or Z!.”

“I do more chores than you!” “I'm not sure that's true, let's count them and redistribute them.” “You never just believe me and support what I feel!.”

She zeroed in on aspects of my personality that she does not like or thinks I have little reason to express, like arrogance. She spoke to the relatively big game I've talked and compared it to the amount of TV she's witness to.

For my part, after many months of feeling hopeless, I started losing my patience. I punched a hole in my white board and have punched my door. Today I threw the full-enough recycling bins, certainly not attempting to hit her, but definitely close enough for it to not be worth splitting hairs. I emotionally leveraged and antagonized her until she ripped off a piece of the small porch pillar and busted through my front door demanding her cat, then grabbing the piece of broken wood as though prepared to stab me. When I asked her about this, she said I made her afraid, and it was self-defense.

Situations like these are why I have so little faith in myself, intentions, or long-term “fixes” to anything. We'd been talking across purposes for so long, I consciously decided to turn on what I understand about emotional leverage. I was desperate for an honest exchange, risking everything for it. I've felt ignored, caricatured, taken advantage of. I felt like I've spent hundreds of hours and thousands of words attempting to grasp where she was coming from. Only after I induce her to rage-quit my door frame does she capitulate and start speaking honestly?

For greater context, for reasons unbeknownst to me, we'd frequently be in some disagreement right before work, where there's no hope to take the time to try and find a resolution and it can devolve over text on the drive in. Or it would happen while I'm in the middle of talking to people about how there is hope for some resolution if they stick to the plan and remain responsibly accountable to what we've all agreed upon. I talk about irony so often it's lost all meaning.

I know I'm not normal or an okay person. I know whatever aptitude I have for approaching people to bring them ease or hash out their issues is because I'm so deeply enmeshed in my own. I will never be able to outrun, or out think, my feelings, or the cycles they provoke in me. There's something deeply life-affirming and meaningful when you are connected to people and able to invest in them or see them grow. I don't have any guilt or shame for that desire, but I really want to live in a certain kind of fantasy too.

I want to believe people with shared goals, personalities, or the general inclination to get along and work together can do so somewhat “easily.” I want to believe things can be talked out. My experience is shaped by dozens of “friends” I'm no longer connected to in any real way, having a psychopath best friend who's statistically more disagreeable than me, and now three relationships that have ended all with similar narratives about how I'm just not quite capable or willing or worth engaging in all this blogging nonsense that has apparently made me so set in my ways I'm just unable to “people.”

The worst thing about me is when I get the desire to burn something down. It speaks to my sensitivity to condescension. I hated nothing more than feeling erased and ignored. The story of my life was so often dictated to me in spite of all reason or contradicting information. I could move seamlessly between daily tension and drama into chill and video games and food in different divorced parent environments. I know which I preferred, and today I know my brain formed patterns around both environments independent of my preferences. I've seen enough instances of going crazy for “no” reason. I am someone who can do the same.

At the peak of the emotionality, and the wave of whatever washes over you as you're coming down, I felt I was finally able to have an honest exchange with her. I asked questions, she answered them, and not with another question or statement about me. In my writing, I've recognized that when I'm at my peak of some emotion, and in the feverish exploration, I find the most flow, insight, and useful actionable material. Today she told me, if I really knew her, I'd know she was “weak.” She understands weakness as not being able to trust.

Functionally, we have a recipe where anything I say, by default, isn't trusted. I'm feeling constantly on the defensive trying to unpack statements like “don't tell yourself you're doing me any favors” or “you only consider this one thing.” I use the word “dishonest” a lot when it comes to trying to understand where people are coming from. If they can't articulate it, which is often perfectly reasonable or understandable why they wouldn't be able to, then I ask to formulate something that can be observed by both parties. You think you do more chores? Let's define chores, count them, and explore. If you refuse to do that, confidence in my charge of dishonesty grows. You're either lying that it's about chores, afraid to be caught learning you don't do more, or unconsciously or otherwise presenting the situation because you already know how I'm going to respond, and are betting on me to fail you.

It's not about the chores, and basically never is. It's about whether or not you're going to change the subroutine that responds to their perspective. It reminds me of when I was supposed to just skip along with being accused of rape. Like, no, I have many questions, and while I'm perfectly willing to entertain or accept the depth of your feeling, we're gonna need to sit down and explore. I'm a “take accusations seriously” significantly more than “believe all women” type, and think we should all carry ourselves the same way.

I like the idea of being helpful and meaningfully contributing. I like the idea of questioning and searching until you break through into new behaviors or insights. I like the myth that I have an infinite amount of time and patience, at any point in the day, to parse through something after it feels like bad faith, distracted character jabs or lazy assumptions. I want you to bite the bullet and tell me you don't like me, don't trust me, and think you fucked up trying to do big things with me.

If you ever, for a second, delude yourself into thinking I'm a “good” person or think particularly highly of myself, you're not paying attention. I'm good at this. I can talk to myself in a way that quells the faint desire to just sleep and not come back. I can simultaneously crack the joke, and cry somewhere deep in my chest as I've practically forgotten how to sustain any real tears. I'm violent. I'm angry. And in one of the hardest ways to cope with, alone. I don't handle what feels like preventable disappointments and disagreements well. I don't like going into relationships waiting for them to fail in spite of everything I do or say. Or is it because of those things?

This is the only way I know how to approach what I consider “responsibility” and “owning my feelings.” I felt and carried out the worst of me today. I demonstrated, sober, in the pure light of day, why I insist on this forum, honest answers, and an inquisitive posture before the moves to mind-read, caricature, or demean. You think you can talk shit? You think you can scream? You think you're annoyed or afraid or alone or full of conflicting and complicated feelings no one understands? Watch this.