[293] Circle-Jerk

Humanity is a circle-jerk. I know I like to usually go with calling things patterns, but we’re much more passionate about jerking off. Take a look at a book store; “Here’s my struggle to success as a swimmer, tennis player, or minesweep champion.” You’re one dramatic picture away from taking a bunch of “cool and interesting” stories about yourself, slapping the picture on a cover, and calling it a book. Or look what happens to people when they reach a certain age. “Look how amazing my boy/girlfriend is!” Now is the time to start collecting as many other couples as we can so we can digress about those things couples do. How exciting! I initially started vocal musings about playing music. The most dramatic, up their own ass, incessantly focusing on their problems bands tend to be the “best” or get the most notoriety. Getting good at a sport, becoming a professional musician, or getting really good and fucking your spouse are these super “personal” things that become glorified and manifest as culture.

I’m not saying at this point that this is necessarily good or bad; I just want things to be acknowledged for what they are. Indiana University, for example, is a business. They may “bring the magic of music” for thousands of kids or help with scholarships, they also throw many in state students under the bus for Asians and kids from Long Island. Is it that you believe in the music program when you donate money, or do you fall in love with the atmosphere of prestige and project your personal experiences over the very obvious and business-wise pragmatism of the school? Recalling your experiences to obfuscate what actually happens is the kind of circle-jerking I refer to when I contemplate the demise of our species.

Now there is great utility in circle-jerking to be sure. God forbid everyone just remain completely unengaged or bored. I’m sure the quieting impact of videogames and music and relationships does a great deal for the masses. I just don’t know if the good outweighs the bad. I think the good can be thought of in a different way so the bad doesn’t get hidden away or made excuses for.

I’m concerned about this because I’m concerned for the well-being of people and how they organize their minds. If there is a more intelligent way to think about yourself or how and why you engage in activities, I think it should be preferred over defaulting to a set of behaviors that, upon reflection, only bring fleeting fulfillment, regret, or stress. It’s not hard to get into a relationship because that’s what you’re “supposed to do” and over a period of time come to lament who you’ve become or what you’ve perpetuated. You won’t have to look very hard for the kid who pursued most everything in their life at the beckoning of their parents, only to be shocked or horrified at the revelation that they may have had more of a choice the whole time.

If I don’t feel like I have anything to contribute, that’s when I start to get bored. If I didn’t seek to start a conversation or become better informed or challenge a perception for the goal of a clearer head and less stress, I wouldn’t say anything. The same reason I haven’t become dramatically better in guitar is the same I haven’t become insanely informed to the level I am/did with religion vs science stuff. I thought then that I could contribute something; so naïve, right? ;) When you’re not needed, and you really only get something from being someone for someone or about something, you just kind of sit back and watch. I simmer.

:: paused for 3 days and thusly picked back up ::

My current form of circle jerking is this cab job, real estate (to an extent), reading up on things that I hope upon hearing about them again later they will click a little faster, and brushing up on basic musical stuff. My position in society semi-forces me to do this because of bills. There always has to be something on the horizon or I can’t justify my life. Right now, I’m responsible to my friends and family who don’t really expect much more of me than what I’m doing now. It’s nice enough, but I can’t deny the utility of pressure. Many, if not most, people are “self-motivated” but the tools need to be there to incentivize.

I will however make a Declaration of Intent never to settle. The second I feel trapped or like some window is closing in over my life, I’m immediately hauling ass somewhere far and random. I’d rather get skinny not having too much to eat and sleep on a beach then feel complacent and complicit in an inadequate future I didn’t dictate for myself. If only I could get better at having other people tell me what to do. Or, what if I could just forget how to read and how to remember what I’ve read. No, magic forces of the universe, this isn’t a call to be maimed in a car accident to the point of full retarded or anything.

Can you tell I probably fell off my initial train of thought when this began? Go Cubs!

[292] Or, Such Is The Case Otherwise

Blaaaaaaahhhhhh. I write with a heavy heart. My “instinct” so to speak, is to just be mean. It’s kind of sad. Most of what I view in the world I pretty much generally hate, so I’m not terribly off in erring on the side of dick head. Alas, it is not always the case though and I need to find myself humbled in ignorance.

I assume. It’s a “necessary” evil to feel contented about your place in the world. I like to pretend that my perspective is informed after engaging in activities that most are not privy to. But at the end of the day I can be wrong. When you’re forced to be an honest person against your naïve initial interpretations, it’s a very interesting landscape. And that’s what I had to face tonight.

My fundamental hatred has its implications. My doubt and skepticism can be taken too far. I just so happened to unleash on a small business owner. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly quick to accept my retractions or clarifications, but still, I was selling myself as king asshole.

The problem was that I have firsthand knowledge of how much things cost. To me, “local” should by its nature be cheaper and more accessible, fuck the farmers market and the bullshit people will tell you. So when you’re selling something “local” for 2 or 3 dollars more than picking up the same thing form a Kroger shelf, I have a reaction.

It didn’t take dick for me to run the coffee shop, and that’s a part of the reason we were able to last as long as we did. Were it not for the rent, nothing would have prevented us from pulling in pretty nice figures. How am I to believe that anything else is so dramatically more complex or more expensive? If you own the land you’re farming, if you collaborate with other hippie fucks in town, and if you source and sample your menu form the readily available non-GMO esc foods around, forgive me if I think you’re a dick for charging 5 or 6 bucks.

I think small business is the key to jump starting the economy. I think the people making an effort to think locally and sustainably is important. But give me a fucking break, I won’t pretend that growing your own shit in you r backyard or sourcing form every hippie fuck within a ten mile radius justifies a higher price. It’s a bullshit argument. And the smug look of satisfaction staring back at my drunk or otherwise ass does not change the fucking numbers. Either you as the face is being scammed or everyone else is just as keen to the scene of how much you can milk the idea of local goods.

When I tell you, “You can eat a dick” it’s for this reason. I’m not convinced you’re thinking far enough. I don’t think you have the care to hold the people you source from accountable. I think at the end of the day it’s about your personal circle jerk. Whoopy fuck you decided to hit up every “organic” and “local” venue that touts itself important. How ever fucking blind you are to the self-righteous pride you’re feeling“ providing” the service that you do. How easy it is to look down on people who don’t know your numbers.

I’M NOT CONVINCED!!! Our default is to be fucked up! We fundamentally are going to strive for the bare minimum. We may try to feel like something more, something significant, but it’s all a dance. It’s a psychological playground of self-righteous indignation that we don’t believe or don’t fight for or don’t understand. I’m just as empty a pipe-dreamer in striving for my goals without the philosophical underpinnings that answer “why.” This is not an easy message to get across when your initial position is to tell someone to “eat a dick.”

But again, who fucking cares? It isn’t worth it. Even if it were it would be short lived and ill remembered. It would be the grandstand and folly to think my digressions and explanations of the day’s events translated into genuinely giving a shit.  

[291] Abstraction Distraction Attraction Reaction

I need to better define so as not to get lost in abstraction.

My basic needs are met, so in a way I’ve peaked. I can say that I don’t think you need to know strife and pain to appreciate being perpetually comfortable. I think strife and pain come out of boredom or when intellectual needs are not met. Whether it is working through a difficult problem or just a compelling distraction, engaging the mind seems to be one of humanity’s biggest projects. I’m currently interested in the “why” people pick the veins they do. I need to find a better definition for what I try to justify doing, because currently I’m doing relatively dick.

Patterns are my best friend and potentially worst enemy. How I choose to define something says everything about what role that thing will or won’t play in my future. If something is “just a job” I will sound and behave like someone who just wanders about town just doing jobs for petty cash. If something is “too big to be handled correctly/currently” by myself, it gets filed away like most of the problems I concern myself with. If something fundamentally feels like “spinning my wheels” or an “empty gesture” I may come across as disrespectful or non-caring.

I understand that it’s all a matter of what you work towards, the perspective you force your brain to have, or the La La Land you can trap yourself in. What I perceive are people who are comfortable enough. They have “a job.” They have “a significant other” or “their friends.” They are filled with “their opinions” and they’ve served them long enough to get the things “they want.” This system or pattern or basic M.O. makes me uncomfortable. Not the healthy skeptical level of discomfort, but the “maybe I should re-evaluate my entire charge in life and thoughts about people” kind.

It bugs me because this propensity in people may speak to something absolutely fundamental and absolutely overlooked by me. And I still may not have a way to define it that makes sense to me. I look at the opinions of the optimists. They say things like “when things get to the point of ultimate shittiness, that’s when we’ll do our best.” Or they’ll go on about how technology will save us all. Some just site all the historical examples of how we’ve managed to not go extinct or take their perspective of time and take for granted “one day and one way or another” things will look just as desperate and terrible then as they do now and we’ll “overcome” if only our imminent denial of the current problems.

To what end? I always go back to this. The only time in my life I’ve felt that loss of self in being so uber motivated is when I thought I had “all the answers” or at least “the best and most reliable” method for bringing about what was correct and true into the world. It was fundamentally coming from a position of naivety. The more I argued, the more I learned, the less people around me cared or knew what I was talking about. The intellectual leaders I went to seemed content to rehash the same speeches and move on to their next book. Then I get my view shaped more by brain and social science. I become disillusioned by how easy and quick it is to get lost in semantics and connotation. I decide friends are better to have than a fight. Then, boom, one day I kind of stop giving a shit after 3 ½ years.

The only steady parameter I have in life right now is to maintain a basic level of comfort. When I have the tools to endeavor into something new, I will do so, and I will treat it as a game. Everything I do has a flavor of superficiality and it’s not intentional. I know everything I change can be changed back. I know the story in my head is never the one someone is going to receive exactly as I tell it to myself. I know that most people are mostly concerned with themselves and what makes them comfortable. That comfort can be reached infinitely more ways and by infinitely easier methods than I may prescribe. But it all feels empty; logically and honestly empty. “Mattering” simply becomes the extent to which you can argue something does. My problem is that I appear to have nothing to argue that doesn’t feel like mental masturbation.

So much of the world seems self-evident to me that I’m losing that passion to keep saying the same things over and over. I’m not feeling like I have anything to prove. My justifications aren’t for you so they remain as explanations of me. The irony of knowing you can do everything and then feeling like you’re doing nothing. Simply knowing that the “everything” and “nothing” go as far as you’re willing to see them is the whole point. All you can do is ground your decisions in feelings; taking cues from your environment. How lucky to not be in complete control over how we feel…right?

[290] Open Source Manipulation

You should be able to talk about anything. My favorite topics are religion, relationships, and “real life.” All of which I hope to intertwine in a beautiful web of thought now. Stand back and be amazed.

I’m a manipulator. What it means to be a manipulator is to not come off as trying to manipulate. It’s the soul, deliberate spelling, rule. If they see what you’re doing, unless you deliberately made them see it, you’re doing it wrong. As a manipulator, I’m very sensitive to other people trying to manipulate. Mostly, because they do it horribly wrong. A fun fact about the manipulation game is that it is open to everyone to play. You can see the strings as easily as me. You can play the same cards because we all hold a complete deck.

My claim of manipulation gives me a very particular perspective on what it means to call something “real life.” I see the life I can infer about you. I hear what you tell me. I find out what other people feel about you and me. But mostly, I endlessly doubt that any of it is the complete story. To claim an informed perspective, it means I need to have one seemingly “beyond” or “outside” yours. There’s the natural one we have via our specific histories. Then there’s the one you choose to have to actively or passively shape your world. I like to err on the side of an active shaping.

Actively shaping involves honesty and responsibility most of all. Therefore, when I see people who passively get shaped, I’m skeptical of how honest or responsible they are being, namely with feelings. What are some topics that are just utterly feeling laden? You guessed it; religion and relationships. Interestingly enough, people tend to claim a lot of active shaping while being all but slaves to the various consequences of their beliefs and people in their lives. The shape this problem takes is…tricky.

Apparently, there are some people who are utterly terrified to talk religion with me. I use the word terrified because they must have a genuine fear that I could talk them out of their beliefs. Otherwise, offering such a sentiment wouldn’t really make sense. If you have undying faith, well, I gave up arguing rational verses irrational a long time ago, so you’ve nothing to fear. If you claim to be reasonable, then we both know going into it that I’m, if not persuasive, very likely to make you think, and likely not in the direction you wish to currently. The only real problem is your ability to be honest and cope.

Where’s this ego come from? Trick question, it isn’t about my ego or what I feel when making my argument. In the same way that I could get in a car, and subsequently run you over, is how I would deliver my message. Nothing about how you feel or think about cars that contradicted their capacity to run you over would matter. That’s how logic is supposed to work. When it doesn’t work, you move out of the way and tell me a god whispered in your ear to do so.

That ability to see things magically is dangerous. The inability to grasp the confluence of forces and influence the world has on you, and you have on it back, arrests and degrades your potential. Your relationship to a god is the exact same as your relationship to anything else. It’s an idea first. Ideas are intertwined. Ideas overlap. One bad idea can spark another bad idea and pollute aspects of good ideas. If you’re not willing to work on solidifying how to denote and be responsible for your good and bad ideas, I think this is a bad thing.

The expectations that come along with ideas seem to be the problem. We all feel them. We don’t all put them where they need to go. If you go into a relationship and you have all these ideas about love or boyfriends and girlfriends or the magic of a blessed union, how long do you think it takes to feel the first pains of anxiety? When do you start to realize that something just isn’t right? Is it the first fight? Is it what you whisper to yourself during the times that are supposed to be special? Is it amidst the regret of not getting something else? Not learning facts or caring to acknowledge human behavior can do that to you.

That’s why I’m persuasive. I know your fear. I know your anxiety. I know that when I’m having a conversation about god, I’m not really speaking to the intellectual stopping point of “well you can never actually prove otherwise.” I’m speaking to your emotionality. I’m speaking about the relationships you may damage. I’m thinking about the fear of reevaluating yourself or the fear of being alone. You don’t care how much I know about the bible or science stuff. You didn’t come for a history lesson or digression of logical fallacies. Well, you didn’t come at all, but that’s the incorrect sentiments you think I care about when talking with you.

When you make excuses, I’m concerned. When you’re afraid or angry the same thing applies. When you can’t talk about anything, I’m convinced you have a problem; an addiction to bullshit maybe, or phobia of self-exploration. Granted, I’m speaking to the habits of excuses, anger, and fear. It’s one thing to get into a heated discussion, it’s another to be perpetually put off from addressing something or creating problems where none need exist. I’m happy to adjust myself if you disagree with the language, but don’t use that as an excuse to run from the subject matter.

And isn’t that how religion, relationships, and “real life” are dealt with? This is all I’ve known, don’t attack it, because then you’re just an asshole. This is who I love so you could never understand it, you’re just a fool for even trying. This is what I’m afraid of and how dare you throw it in my face like I don’t have a protective unbreakable bubble. MOOOOM, HE’S BREAKING MY BUBBLE!

Working yourself out of a faith-based mindset takes time. Working yourself into a healthy relationship takes time. Mulling over shit like dying and failure and fear will consume a fair amount of head-space. I understand things to be a process with many layers. The more you unpack those layers, the more you see the patterns, the more you can address the problems, and the more you can put aside the fear of changing your mind. Once you get there, you hold the power, you’re the manipulator.

Your feelings become yours to address, not to suffer. Your friends are hand-picked, not the kids you happen to live next to. Your ideas get the time and attention they need to work on you positively. This is what I want for people, my friends. I care about your mental health and I don’t think living a lie is healthy. It doesn’t matter if you even regard it as a lie, it’s not semantics, it’s the effect you have on the world. If I’m a part of that world, and all you send is negative effects, I know you’ve something to work on.

If you’re willing to take on the invented problems: guilt over sin or sex or other people's stressors and bad ideas, you’d think you’d choose an effective solution. But, overwhelming people don’t. They stick with what’s comfortable and what they think they know. They hurriedly rush past, and thus bury curious thoughts. They regret, they get angry, and they make it your problem. If you care about them, it’s your problem, and if you don’t, it’s even more so. Be manipulative. Take control of your mind and don’t blame me for being right about something. Don’t be afraid of how you feel and push your limits. You know what you’ll find; something new to be afraid of. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

[289] Free Form Formulation

Fair warning: I think I have something to say. I haven’t sussed out explicitly what it is.

It all boils down to thoughts. It all boils down to the thoughts right now. Any discussion of reality that ignores what you actually think in this ever present moment just misses the point. It seems that the degree to which we respect and acknowledge the thoughts, right now, is our subjective conception of character. Whether we choose to act on them, is the story we lay out for others to tell of our character.

I feel trapped in a fundamental and inescapable duality. It is something I describe as A Game that I have simply no luck in explaining to people who aren’t playing the same one I am. The more I conceive of the conditions of the game, the more doubtful I am of the premise. As in, when I say my group of friends is the example, the projection onto the world at large, the more I feel I’m exploring my place amongst them over their general characteristics.

I may have an impossibly terrible conception of self. If only the logical conclusions are to be drawn from semantics and relative subjective experience are to be respected, the foundation of some personally responsible being with traits x, y, and z might as well be a fart you try to catch and paint blue. By all accounts of my “rational” and ever meager grasp on things, I’m fundamentally irrational. I’m inert material that can spontaneously explode. I’m presumably at the will of everything that’s come before.

One of the few things I trust is change. I don’t buy for a minute any strongly held opinion about anything given the right conditions to change it. In a small minded way this translates to “not caring.” It’s not a frustration or an inability to cope with the world that makes me want to throw my arms up. It’s not an utter disregard for “you” or how we may relate. I think this serves a dual purpose. One, it insulates me from taking undue advantage. Two, it allows me the “eh” elbow room conceptualize various judgments and behavior.

I don’t think this is how most people operate. I think, to the greater extent, people are self-conscious. I don’t want to undersell my conception of self-conscious. The anxiety and doubt associate with me me me is a vein. The prospective future you think you’ll acquire. It’s the endless fear that you’ll do something that’s so “beyond” what you feel capable of conceiving yourself doing. It’s a contingent existence. Given my x understanding of things and c constraints I can plot my life along y. It hinges you to the levels of distraction or comfort. It’s what you lament when you’re forced to deal with life after a tragic event.

Yet, it’s what we’re all reduced to as a default. To be pragmatically free is an exercise of will and disregard that, beyond the implications of destabilizing the system at large, could ironically preempt an expression of pure instability. And we humans need structure. Sooner or later you’re not really free to be a functioning heroin addict.

I suppose I want more people involved. When I speak of the game, I alienate. When I test waters, I make people angry. When I flirt with “truth” I feel marginally immoral and don’t respect myself. Of the many ways I can take advantage, I haven’t learned the secret of getting people the clue. I can’t tune them to a frequency. I can play, dance, scheme, and utterly shape the environment, sure. But an implicit understanding and connection may well be a fairy tale.

I don’t really know what to do beyond keep playing. The best and worst service I do to myself is to regard my actions as, hopefully and at the very least, mostly nondestructive. Will my boredom and disregard win out against my odd and potentially naïve views about respect? For anyone paying attention, the answer should be obvious.

[288] Judging Judging Judging Judging Judging

There is an artful and tactful way people can go about being passive aggressive. It comes from a perceived level of acceptance, or at least nonresistance, from the group. It latches onto an easily stigmatized subject, and it’s almost always shaded by laughter or superficial “shameful” bow of the head and grin. My concern is why people feel compelled to go passive aggressive in the first place. My thought is that it comes from some level of insecurity. In the spirit of this insecurity, I’ll digress.

I try very hard to be what I say about myself. Not all the jokes hit. Not all the ideas rest neatly in your heads. But the last thing I think you can say about me is that I’m faking it. Now this seems all well and good when you look at the surface bullshit things about me and think I’m professing my realness like some overzealous teenager. I’m not trying to flip the bird and scream I don’t give a fuck. I’m trying to say that I hope my example translates how I mean it to and not what people would project or assume.

I feel free, to the extent I’m able, but there is no better way to describe what I crave or wish for other people. Just, at the very least, be as much you as you actually can or have ever even hinted at wanting to be. If you’re cute, stop pretending otherwise. If you’re smart, sometimes it’s safe to shove humble up your ass. If you’re unsure, the amount of fear and anxiety associated is directly proportional to how often and whether you act in spite of it all. Own it all.

Now that I’ve established my friends as the case study, I feel it ever more important to state things plainly You are never and not alone. Do you understand that? Friendship is a support group. The ones who don’t support, don’t make it into the group. You’re not stranded on the highway. You’re not alone in a fight. You’re never too broke or without a second option or chance. This scrapes the surface of the commitment I want towards my friends.

Fun fact; Of course I’m talking about you, but I’m not JUDGING, dun dun dun, you. I may have to talk callously or freely associate and circle around until I get somewhere, but guess what, I’ve made peace, to the extent that I can, with the fact that people don’t reach the same places at the same time and I don’ t seek to make that your problem. I don’t want to add to your potential fears or insecurities. I don’t tell you I think you’re cute or intriguing because I secretly had some shitty thought I’m trying battle against. I’m not stoking an ego out of pity. My head isn’t racing with excuses for your behavior; I’m not trying to justify some action of mine that treats you differently. I’m hopefully, clearly, going to be me, and what’s apparently less clear is I genuinely want you to be you.

And there’s the rub.

I think I see more in you than you wish to reflect back towards me. I’d like to just claim “super perception” and put another sticker next to the word ego, but I’ll go self-conscious about it instead. Am I doing a bad job at being a friend? Am I not a safe investment? Am I a liar or impossibly naïve to an extent that it hurts me or my friends? Am I whitewashing my conception of myself as a person with an overbearing or over extended character? I think I do an injustice to my cause by scaring people away or giving them an easy out to compartmentalize my behavior. If such is the case, it simply won’t do.

Whether I’m dead on in my observations or experiments, I’m ever so rarely completely off the mark. My best guide is history. I notice curiosity or affection. I can hear doubt. There’s a difference between the “healthy skepticism” of being someone perpetually in thought, and the laborious monkey on your back reminding you to “keep it cordial.” Seriously, if that’s all you want, we’re never going to be that good of friends. I respect people who take risks, and honesty tends to carry with it a potentially high level for being risky.

I can’t be a better person if I can’t be kept in check or focused on the correct things. If you genuinely believe something about my character or commentary, we’re not going to stop being friends because you brought it up. I feel like there is a powerful fear that “things will change” or someone will flip a switch in how they treat you if things got too serious. I don’t want to feel that about you, and you certainly don’t need to fear it from me. Passionate discourse and self-exploration will only endear me to you more. But these things apparently take time, and very deliberate dialogue. If my understanding of most people is they barely grasp how or why they do things, try squeezing workable or motivated assessments out of that.

My issue is a false perception of peaking. It’s really just frustration for all I see and the interesting potential conclusions or conversations not taking place. I get too brazen and bored and just kind of destroy little bridges because they’re only gearing up to take me where I’ve been before. It’s severe enough for me to talk myself out of being a pervert or too flirty if that’s any indication. I can’t qualify myself as healthy if I’m making a game out of my friends. I can’t feel or give respect if we’re not capable of recognizing and discussing potentials. Neither of us is that special and yet potentially the most important persons to each other given some circumstance. Does that conception wax and wane like the feelings of a confused teen? Or is it based on something insidiously honest and intrinsic to the interplay of our characters?

I may not always be able to guess or infer what you’ve genuinely hidden away. I will always notice what you explicitly show me. I don’t think enough rules and understandings have been agreed upon in order to address some topics without them inevitably degrading into a fight or awkward situation; that only serving to impede conversation even further. But I don’t feel the need for the insecurity and thrive on trying to be trustworthy. The more “risks” you take in how we relate to each other, the better person I think I can become. I take a chance every time I open my play book and very often when I open my mouth. I’ll let you freely misinterpret or misunderstand me, but god forbid it hangs you up on some final judgment. We’re works in progress till the day we die.

Barring some unforeseen overblown mind boggling realization of incompatibility, I’m going to be your friend if you’ll have me. I want to know everything I’m good for. Test me. I'll just go to waste otherwise.

[287] Drunk Mind Sober Heart

Haha if you haven’t read my last blog, please do. It probably presents my drunken mind state better than this one will manage to lol.

So I talk, a lot. I say completely (better word that inordinate which was here) things that probably make you question what the ever loving fuck could be going on in my head. Totally understandable. I find that the more you allow me to talk though, the easier it is to grasp what the fuck’s up.

Patterns. (for all you avid followers). They are something I will never escape. We’re all “locked in” so to speak, to how “life” is supposed to play out. For example, when I tell one of my damn good looking friends that literally every person they talk to at the bar is trying to sleep with them. I’d be genuinely surprised if upon an interview someone I brought that shit to said, “Nah, that hot ass chica ain’t really what I’m feeling.”

To me, this speaks to something important. I know I’m all hell bent on taking the excitement and surprise out of things…but really. Personally, it doesn’t really matter if I’m feeling a girl or not. If she isn’t feeling the same way back, you’re basically a rapist if anything happens. Yes, I totally understand that many people are comfortable being rapists in this scenario, but I mean, really that’s not the take home message.

I suppose I’m bored with fake people and games. My conception of reality allots for an ever growing amount of possibilities. This means, I’m literally, never worried about your judgment. I mean, isn’t that straight disrespectful? Shouldn’t I qualify your humanity to the same extent that I see mine? And yet, the fact is, I don’t. Deal with that shit, right?

But to allay worries that I’m ever upepth my own asseth, I pursue these blogs.

Why is it so hard for people to just lay out “Hey, I’m attracted to you” or “Hey, it’d be nice to fuck around?” This is such a recurring thing I’m just so elated I have genuine excitement to digress upon it endlessly. It’s what makes me to so…careless...in my handlings of things.

I just simply can’t respect being an uppity pretentious cunt about things. Your pussy isn’t magic. (Laughing too incredibly hard right now)

Try being a person. Try developing a personality. Try being responsible and accountable to someone. You know why love is a joke to me? Love is a process. Love is a game. If you choose to disavow the rules, it’s open season. You wanna pretend you know the game and it’s niggas like me who are going to shit on you for days. It’s just so impossibly stupid, kinda fun from time to time, but fucking impossibly stupid.

Look out for my sincere assessments. That shit’s gonna fuck you up. I mean, unless you a bitch.

[286] Congradufuckinglations!

I’m a little weird. Okay, fine, whatever. I sat next to a homeless, or at least he was really good at pretending to be homeless, guy and asked him what he thought of the world and/or the drunken rabble that pretended he wasn’t sprawled out belly up on the street. You know what he told me? He tries not to sin because the bible prophecy stuff is going to come true.

I want to kill everything.

My hope stems from ignorance. It’s with the knowledge that my perspective is limited that there may be whole worlds of potential a mere conversation away. The horrifying truth, the more I put myself out there, the more I ask questions and attempt to adopt “friends’…the more I fucking realize that people are exactly as I assume them to be. The old homeless fuck with barely a grasp of the English language is explicitly and nothing more than an old homeless fuck with barely a grasp of the English language. It doesn’t matter that we made him that way, it just matters that that’s what he is. That’s his impact and “contribution” to what we’ll denote as society.

How do fucking people believe there is a plan? How do you cling to this hope that we are all magic sky fairies who will live forever if we just live by some relative moral code that makes us feel good about ourselves? I genuinely don’t fucking get it at all. You have a purpose? Is it to ignore the empty, pathetic, superstitious dreg of a homeless man I talked to today? You’re so high and mighty and moral that your god will just play things out with this “plan?” and account for Mr. Pathetic Homeless Fuck once we all die? That’s fucking deplorable and morbid.

But, I bid you congratulations, friends of mine. I’m using you as a case study for the whole of humanity. What I think of you will serve as to what I’m to project onto everybody else. If you’re potentially horrified by this prospect, no worries, I’ve taken that into account. Turns out, I’m ever convinced you’re everything I thought of and more, and coincidentally that's just enough for the future tasks at hand. I know, what an honor right?

I really don’t want to know everything. I don’t want to be the ego maniac (necessarily). I don’t want to be too smart for my own good. I don’t want to be as judgmental as your gods on high. In fact, I wish I didn’t give a fuck! I wish you were all tools. I wish you were all just fucking bags of fucking meat who I fuck from time to time to talk to (rant at) and you somehow manage to stay till the end. I wish that all the “necessary conclusions” I drew from incessant thinking about the world and my place in it didn’t have to make the cards fall as they did. And yet, I never fucking escape it. It’s always just as “it is.”

Whether you’re homeless, the hot dog vendor, the drunk frat boy, or the pissed off bar tender, you are EVERY FUCKING THING I could ever think you are. You’re not a surprise. You aren’t an anomaly. You aren’t technically even worth considering past your meager moniker. Take that American idealization of the self! To be clear, I find this utterly demoralizing. It makes me want to just bust down the doors and take over like a Nazi socialist party 2.0.

In the midst of my self-serving fuck everything haven’t you heard how smart I am the world can go fuck itself blog, I should point out how much I’m sick of fucking qualifying everything. NONE of you mother fuckers just bitch. You don’t just sit and complain and really fucking shit out how fucking shitty you may think or feel about something and it makes me fucking insane! For as much as I talk you mother fuckers up, I have not even a handful of mother fuckers who are a willing to “risk” sounding like a belligerent asshole in some blog at the end of a 15c beer night. It’s fucking sad and I wish that would change.

Let’s see how much money I can make in this real estate bullshit and then try and gauge the dent I make in the culture at large in the coming years. I’ll be the first to admit I’m completely full of shit until you can point and exclaim “that nigga did that.” Hopefully one day I’ll transcended the fucker who says fuck too often and you’ll actually feel what the fuck I’m after. Here’s to fucking trying. Clearly, I'm fucking spent thinking about shit so finding some "rut" to distract me for a while might be a nice escape. As if.

[285] Double Edged Sword

The bigger I allow my perspective, the more and less I give a shit.

You can pick your favorite issue, or just care about “everything;” either way you’re inviting yourself to take a moral high ground on an issue you spend little time putting a stake into. The inaccurate statement being “I don’t care.” The more accurate statement “I’m constrained to bitching.” Like all patterns, to some degree I just get bored and stop caring. And the more you learn, the harder it is to justify imposing the stress or anger that classically is used to motivate change.

But this is all terribly non-specific. Let’s take something easy, like whores. How one can live the life of a genuine “seek-and-destroy” whore confuses me. It’s hopelessly boring. You learn the lines, the body language, you get into the drab and calculated conversations, and then you conceivably go back to some level of sleazy fuck nest and inevitably never see each other again after awkwardly stumbling over your words and out the door. It’s quite boring. No challenge, no build up, no investment, no fantasy, no real consequence or learning experience were you to fail. Not that I’m arguing against one night stands, I just don’t know how you can make that your mission.

Let’s take an activist group. Each day is spent trying to deliberately spike a conversation with your hatred of some evil corporation or force in the world. You attend protests and make signs. You scour the internet for pictures and arguments to show just how righteous your cause is and how much the rest of the world needs to change. Less you think I’m over selling this, I encourage you to camp outside of few hipster hot spots around town for a few hours. Ultimately they create a feedback loop where as long as they keep voicing how much they care, they’re doing their part and their hands are clean. Again, this a boring pattern.

My current pattern problem involves caring and trying. I do it with my small perspective, which, I understand the potential consequences, but it’s hard to let them weigh too heavily before you try or care. I genuinely want to change the world. I mean, of course I do. Who the hell talks like I do for so long without having either a mental impairment or an actual mission? But I keep getting reminded the same lessons, like:

The world is BIG. Many people don’t care, if not most, and that’s not necessarily even their fault. While you may get things done very quickly, the rest of the world is convinced “things take time.” You’re always a year too young and a year too late as far as “they” are concerned. There is an extreme amount of luck to even get what is arguably a meager reward. The chase is often better than getting what you want. The one piece of missing information, that you could never have known, can bring it all crashing down around you. Someone, well before you even sniffed at the thought, has had it before you, was in a place to do/say something about it, and things still turned out like you see today.

There’s a more exhaustive list of course, but these are free flow blogs right? Why bore you with too many details? I mean, what I want more than anything is for things to make sense. I want this with the full knowledge that people don’t make sense and they create situations and institutions every day that amplify just how little sense they can make. Knowing this, I start to get a shift of priority. Less and less I’m motivated to get specialized knowledge; at least, any more than the subconscious philosophy of my dreams, and the more I want to destroy. If I dramatically analogize something to cancer, the answer is to remove the cancer.

The world that makes sense to me has free health care because we decided to abandon “survival of the fittest.” From this naturally follows that these healthy people got that way from eating and drinking things that don’t poison them. Of course we’re talking about “people” not specifically “blacks”, or “gays”, or “women”, which means if we’re going to invent a word like “right” every person should be able to do the same things as anyone else. Splintering off seems to undermine the message. All these people live on the only planet we can currently survive on, so when working out priorities, keeping it healthy and habitable aren’t a debate. We like to reproduce and pass on our knowledge, which to me, it only follows that you want that knowledge to be correct and useful, so a scientific metric to judge it on would be paramount. You get the point…you better get the point…

If I’m as much a part of this world as anything or anyone else, how do I win? I can’t integrate ideas that kill. I can’t go through the motions of how things currently operate unless I want to wait in line for hundreds or thousands of years. And I can’t ever really give up or I volunteer myself into stoic slavery.

It occurs to me I’m not in ongoing talks about these things with most people because, apparently, they think I’m trying to argue with them. I ask that this be a moment where you pause and think if your perception is lost to the reality. I can’t remember the last time I was arguing with someone, if only because I’m so very hazy on facts and sources which is the only way I feel comfortable arguing. Or I've managed to alienate myself from conversation with all but a handful of people and never managed to realize it. That'd be freaky, but I digress…

History is my biggest issue. There were plenty of smart, motivated, and informed people with lasting ideas or behaviors…that ultimately lost out to time or idiots. We need the drama, we need the change, and that means we never have everything we need no matter how big the “I” in irony gets. I suppose that speaks to why I think we’re ultimately fucked. Why I might need to ride it out and take everything I “accomplish” as an “accident” of my circumstances. My will be damned, at least as far as you’re concerned. Rest assured my ego finds this an extremely hard sell. I only flirt with stuff like that in self-sabotaging the small things. Ironic?

[284] Caution: Road Map on Fire

Let’s see if I can bring down the mood.

I want everyone graduating to pay close attention. I’m extremely intrigued by your prospective futures, and if you could do one thing, it is to focus in on how you feel and think as the years pile on quicker than you thought they would. I’m asking this because of how many “old people” I hate. I’m asking so that maybe I can do two things; either figure out why so many clichés exist about life, “I gave up on trying to save the world,” “it’ll be over before you know it,” “that’s just how such and such works” and/or devise what it takes to escape those clichés.

You see, fundamentally, I’m worried. I’m bugged that you’ll end up saying things like the rest of society or feeling as lonely or complacent as the millions of match.com members. I lucked out in my cynicism and hated college and what it stood for two weeks in. This whole “real world” thing has had too much of my commentary and scorn, so graduation for me was just another day. I already expected the worst and low and behold, it can get even worse than my approximations. I think you’re all generally more optimistic about life than I am, and if you go from higher than where I get, to as low as I can go, that’s unsettling.

But, thus is my theory for many if not most dispositions. “I tried, I thought, I hoped, I prayed, I changed, and then it all went to shit.” After a while it’s really easy to want to find a rut. The idea of “settling down” is appealing, not for its truth about your nature, but for the prospect of even the semblance of stability. Or maybe it’s in climbing the ranks of a job; I’m all for loving what you do, I think it’s very easy to forget all the other things you love to do and sometimes easy to start hating what you love to do without even realizing it till things get hairy.

Now, you’re my friends because overwhelmingly you don’t tend to act or think like how I conceive of most people. BUT, you are not immune. I certainly wasn’t and I realize how hard you have to work and how deliberate you have to think in order to avoid “life as we know it” or “life as it is” and keep with “life that I want.” And at least for me, it’s what I hope for you, it just takes so much more time and practice than I think we as a society are even used to. We certainly don’t teach it in school and it’s not what we’re celebrating at commencements.

I know regardless of how things turn out, you’ll survive. It’s hopefully about more than merely surviving and that’s what I wish to keep working at. If/when the world our actual old people created goes to shit or has set us up to live a quarter of the American Dream as it was sold, I’m all for trying to work on something different. Be it a different kind of network or family or work structure or modes of thought or whatever to escape the “comfortable” ruts people find themselves in avoiding having to think about things too much.

Alone, you may be just another college kid with loans, maybe living back home, or maybe starting a job in your field, yet practically an intern to all the scared broke people who’ve been doing it 10 or 20 years longer than you. Just don’t become a slave to that paradigm. And if you start to feel trapped or isolated or bored, I hope you start to think about what can be done together. I see people screwing things up because they feel empty. They lost their ability to decide for themselves. They lost what it means to care. They’ve settled. Please don’t get comfortable. Don’t allow their excuses to become yours. Please don’t squeeze a pebble’s size of happiness for all it’s worth because a bigger rock is too heavy or you’re too tired. This is too important a stage in your life to let it get stolen.

[283] Practice Makes Permanent

I want to paint a despotic picture. I want to do it through the lens of my meager and small perspective. I hope if you care to tag along on this journey, you’ll get the same things I’m after in writing it.

I’ve been everywhere, or at least, that's what it feels like. I remember what it feels like to have a small, but strong enough conception of family. I remember what it’s been like to be insecure and scared. I’ve never felt so alone than when I thought I was in a kind of love that no one could understand. I have punctuated and deliberate memories of times when I “woke up” to who I was when things needed to change. I reached a point where I could not bear the anxiety and stress of holding a bad idea. I didn’t need to keep relearning the consequences of my behavior. I didn’t have to deny my feelings or thoughts.

You can read through old blogs where I’ve been an emotional train wreck. You can read depressing and dramatic professions of confusion and doubt. You can probably hear the inflection I give the word “fuck” in some of my most pissed off rants about religion, relationships, or general tom-fuckery from various people I’ve occasioned to know. I feel it necessary to bring this up when it comes to my digressions about people and their motivations. I don’t exactly seek to wear street cred on my sleeve. I operate under the assumption that we’re all human. What good is my advice or meddling disposition if not to see results! Why get a little cocky about getting laughs or part-timing as a therapist if there isn’t something to be said about my potential insight?

The thing that I’d love to be too arrogant about were I not so humble, my personality, my perspective, my genuine understanding of something you may not be as keen to as me, is what I look for in other people. There’s the default personality you get by being born under your circumstances and your history. Then there’s what you get to shape when you start making decisions. I think the problems that will extinguish us as a species lie between those two different “Yous.”

I have a relatively psychotic mother. I can take my childhood and know all of the enraging, depressing, demoralizing, and humiliating places it can send me. I can feel them right now just trying to pass on by. That’s the history me. The one who’s, calmly, writing through the heartbeats is the decision me. There are feelings, staples of our beings, which we may never shake. Whether there are physical reactions, winding thought patterns, or little ticks that, for all intents and purposes, dictate us at that precise moment. How we conceptualize them, how we break them down, or where we put them in our chosen mental framework, I think, will dictate our very survival.

It’s easy to feel. It’s too easy to feel. For the better part of our existence, it’s our feelings that meant life or death. Run or fight. Are you afraid, ferocious, or both and the adrenaline rush doesn’t care to split hairs. I very really hate when people take the easy way out. Stated differently, I hate when people don’t think. For surely, thinking is taken for granted. You can’t even get up in the morning without thinking about how to get out bed. Obviously, if it feels good or the people around you agree with it, how fine a comb do you expect needs to be run through it?

The one and only thing that makes me “cool” or “informed” or “Nick P.” is the exercise of my brain. Only when I sat and thought a fuck ton about what it meant to love or be in love did I find myself upon a defensible position on the matter. Only after I assessed the likely consequences of my future with certain people in my life did I start to form strong opinions on ideas about family or what it means to be in a relationship. After 283 and counting blogs of self-exploration can I even regard what have truly been traumatic and compelling moments with oft fondness and purpose to inform and hopefully better the life of someone who’s been there as well.

And that speaks to the consequences of the thinking individual. It’s not to preach, but to educate. It’s not to self-deprecate, but to conceptualize. It’s a move towards freedom of expression and a celebration of choice. It’s exalting knowledge and respecting its ability to, if not erase, draw such an immense picture around the pain and confusion, it becomes a mere compliment to the artist’s overall motif.

This is how I judge character. This is where I play with my internal scale regarding my level of interaction with some person, idea, or endeavor. This is how I choose my heroes and what I “waste my time” with. And like recognizes like. And when you’re not a certain way, it’s jarring; it sticks in my head and troubles me in ways that take it well beyond my probably already spent conception of you. Now it’s at the idea level. Now it’s about the implications. The “what if society at large” questions arise. The uniquely human psychological dispositions and interplay of personalities is a never ending snowball.

It’s how I learned to make a distinction between you and your so-called ideas. It’s why I softened up arguing so vehemently about religious topics. It’s why I try not to automatically stigmatize something and ask a million questions. I feel like this isn’t particularly new behavior, but I haven’t stated it like this. And I’d totally understand why someone would think me hard-lined as for or against. To say that I’m anti-religion or spirituality or whatever else is to simply get me wrong. I’m against unhelpful or incorrect ideas.

But what arrogance! How can you have an incorrect idea? When it doesn't take you where you were trying to go. If you make a claim about yourself and nothing about your actions or feelings reflect that, your idea is incorrect. If you're not prepared to recognize how easy and often the incompleteness of your knowledge on a situation can corrupt your ideas about it, you're not doing yourself any favors.

What we see and do pragmatically is ultimately dictated by the philosophical underpinnings that either enable or inhibit potential courses of action. If the decision makers believe that pursuing carbon emitting fuels is better than sustainable energy, the likelihood of an extinction event rises past a point people concerned with living should be comfortable with. It doesn’t matter how much you may recant your actions faced with the reality of your decision, it’s no longer really an option for this particular group of 7 billion people to carry on into the next few hundred years.

It’s not my concern that there aren’t enough smart people out there or enough personalities. I don’t think everything is fucked up. I think there are different layers to the game. It’s a numbers game, it’s a group psychology game, and it’s an information gathering and translating game. But mostly, it’s a game people are playing incorrectly, and it’s hard to really measure how much blame lies with them and how much is the field that’s been narrowed before they got there.

What’s most disturbing to me, and hopefully it’s just a symptom of my small perspective, is what I find the solution to be: thinking. Taking lessons to heart, adopting and trying ideas, and forcing yourself to an actual platform or informed opinion. I find this disturbing because I know how subtle and nuanced our behavior and thoughts can be. I know we can say one thing, do another, and be on a completely different planet mentally that justifies all of it. I can say that my friends are better at not being like this than most, but they’re not immune. Certainly I could be under a spell about my future or capabilities given my ignorance of the state of the world at large.

But is this not how we learn? Hold an idea, fight for it, and see it through until the consequences? Was it not necessary for me to have and hold a host of terrible ideas in my past in order to garner the kind of perspective and habit of reflection I hold today? How do you fix a necessary precondition to enlightenment? How can you account for the infinite veins through which someone may learn a lesson? Surely an ignorance of the future, or even the here and now should not arrest our decisions or make us any less beholden to our ideas! At least, this is what I hear, time and again, and all I have is an emphatic well, maybe it should!

You see, we have a metric for judging ideas that takes us out of the ignorant monkey brains we’re stuck with. That metric is science. To talk of all the things science doesn’t know is for you to insult yourself, and the collective conscious that was overwhelmingly aimed towards making your life a little bit better, at least sometimes. There isn’t a single vaccinated person with an i-anything that has a right to speak against the advancement of information and technology or the impact it’s had on their lives. But then, why do we make it a controversy?

It only makes sense to me when you bring it back to the very real and much ignored human failings of thought. If we’re bored and want controversy, just pick a topic. If we’re confused or afraid of a subject, there’s a chemical fix in merely reacting. When you feel allegiance to a group, then what a great feeling to know your decisions can be made for you. We have personal, compelling, life-altering lessons that need to be translated en masse. It doesn’t matter how much they’ve sang and written about love, you don’t know MY KIND of love! My family, my experience, my small mind is more compelling, more understanding, and more accepting of what YOU and YOUR BIG world would call my failings, and that makes you wrong!

Just think of the children. I feel like any parent can relate to being in this situation and probably any teacher too. You don’t need a special kind of arrogance or sense of privilege to know when you can be an authority on something. Reduce our politics to overgrown children, and what happens? The people who cry, fold their arms, lie, and name call, with no one to keep them in check, win. We’re whiney children with no parents. And when we adopt a parent, let’s call it “God” for shits and giggles, no way, it tends to think like us! It believes in us, it will save us, we just have to provide no more reason to believe in it than because we wanna! We can get even more ridiculous and project onto a faceless entity called The State or Big Government while living in a democracy!

We crave being justified. It doesn’t matter if we’ve picked a reasonable topic to feel validated over. The very fact that we’ve found someone to agree is enough. The very fact of our compelling feelings is sufficient to keep the motor running. Being skeptical and checking your ideas are conscious and deliberate acts. You aren’t born with the knowledge that you can be profoundly and perpetually wrong. What that means for how you behave in the world I think can overwhelm every best and informed intention. It’s the habit, the norm, the default position and therefor the most likely and easiest.

What we prescribe for ourselves we paradoxically won’t advocate for our neighbor while they take our examples and react in kind. Human rights don’t extend past the front door. We can kill, but when killed it’s the most atrocious. We can steal but when stolen from it’s a threat to democracy and the free market! Today we have policies from 1984. Today we are causing irreversible damage to the planet. Today our numbers paint a grim picture for us and our offspring. Today we are arguing about demonstrable facts against magic. You aren’t separate or better than the discourse. It will come back around and affect you.

Our normal doesn’t work. Our normal is to fight. Our normal mishears, misreads, and distrusts. Our normal is fairly lazy. Our normal is about convenience and speed. We’re complicit and complacent in our circumstances. Our normal is to get used to it. We make excuses, we adopt distractions and vices. We project. Our normal is to ultimately reject everything about our normality ironically for “something more” we disable ourselves from ever creating. We want love, but refuse to understand or define it. We want God without holding a Godly standard. We avoid the struggle and pain because we refuse to think to a point where it finally pays out. We refuse to sacrifice even a sliver of ourselves if it means too much disappointment or another failure. Only to perpetually fail to think.

Practice makes permanent.

[282] Stupid Lucky

Sometimes I look at my life and say I’m too lucky. I think the real problem is any time I look at it and not feeling that initially. Don’t get me wrong, for the most part I absolutely do, but sometimes it just sinks in deeper than I know what to do with.

I’m stupid lucky. Everything about my circumstance is a gift. I don’t really think I know what it means to not feel indebted at this point. I don’t know if I’m ever allowed to shut up about my friends. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to convey the impact you have on my life. I’m a mere reflection of the company I keep. I truly don’t know who I am without the context of you.

I know people who are willing to be honest to the point of alienating themselves. I know people who are willing to give all of themselves to a moment without a second thought. I know the value of honesty when people are willing to be open with me about some shit going on in their life. I get to take any and all strife from my life and reduce it to a spec under the overall plan of the future I envision for me and my friends.

The last three or so days has just laid this down hard. I’m spending my time with the most amazing people I could possibly know. I don’t know how I deserve it. I don’t know why I’m allowed to have such positive thoughts about us or the future. I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to do with such circumstances.

I love you all and I don’t even believe in the word love.

[281] Random Rhyme Time 5: Not Random

Let the beat drop the tone lock your bones pop cus this time’s signature is don’t stop. Call the beat cops the hard knocks to keep locks on your happy feet. Meet your maker, the undertaker, the back-breaker on your labor screaming I am your neighbor! Face the music don’t get too [sic] it’s only too slick. Find a two-bit cheap amusement politicking time bomb. Waiting, debating, and suffocating are your charges. Cold callous criminals remain at large, holding all the keys to their iron bars.

Systemic hatred burns ironically as each fuse pops. Shoulders drop asking for lashes as hope dashes like a dog from an abusive master. These spell castors, class actors, who divide by a factor of zero. Non-sense non sums with greedy thumbs. These insulators and instigators just insta-gators while you try to tread water. Not a pot to piss in but hot enough to boil over. Roll over Red Rover the nightmare’s not over. Bandits and loons crept into your room and it’s safe to assume they are dangerous. Nefarious characters tear down your barriers only to find it hilarious.

Re-work the knee jerk attitude to platitudes the hip checks to balance you by the books. Dirty crooks with crooked looks and jagged hooks so you can bleed out. Don’t scream about what’s fair just hang out drip drying in despair. It’s not who cares, this game is for keeps, like I’ll keep you meek and I’ll take your sleep and I’ll take your feet while you’re on your knees begging for reprieve. Like this is not a Man you step to or get in their face as the place they have set for you is right at the base of their bed. Where you can curl up and bawl at blathering drawl wafting just over head.

You weren’t built for these compulsory capitulates, pessimistic petulants, and apoplectic hypocrites. A lyrical soul meets a tone deaf chorus. A deep sea diver has a suit too porous. Do you know what it is to drown? Try to scream for someone’s help but you can’t make a sound. Try to push off the surface with no floor to be found. Not a wave, not a splash, as you sink to the ground. And they watch, holding their breath and puffing their chest dumbfounded by why you would end it.   

[280] More On That Now

Keeping the lid on our reality is paramount. It’s not simply about trying to be happy. If you genuinely don’t care you isolate or kill yourself. Finding a ground that hopefully you’ve dictated is the goal. You don’t at that point have to deal with too much freedom. You get to make predictions about the future that feel gratifying. You get to feel engaged and like you’re contributing. It’s a positive feedback loop and process that is all tied up into the word “perspective.”

I think it’s easy to forget that it’s an infinitely small perspective, and in being as such it has implications for how we treat each other. To a certain extent, you have to figure out every new person you meet. You’re lucky if you still get to figure out people you already know for years on end and not because you’re coping with their drama. We’re all going to act in basically intelligible ways, let’s just not underestimate the word basic. In that sense, things can make sense in thought and theory, but not translate into a sense of action or even true empathy.

So when you look at a relationship or becoming obsessed about school or work or whatever, those become your grounding. It’s not you relating with someone on the idea and nature of your relative mediums. Well, what’s the difference? And have I even stated the issue clearly?

Your perspective is an investment. It’s a predictor. The very agendas you hold closest to your heart 10 years from now will be the result of the investments you do or don’t make today or have made before. At that level, it at least continues to feel free in your perpetuating or abstaining from some activity. But what happens when no one thing can work for you any longer? What if you allow yourself to be hijacked by ideas that can’t be nailed down? Say your goal becomes “justice.” Well you’ve just given yourself a number of options and surface contradictions that perhaps only you can arbitrate.

Is it better to be grounded? To me, I think the idea of grounding and engaging in it from time to time can be helpful, healthy, and important for developing a philosophical position, but I think there’s certainly something to my will that flirts with losing my own and stripping it from under others. What if you try to ground in “love” as evidenced by your maintained relationship or family? How many people have a solid definition of love to begin with, let alone would find themselves espousing it in the situation they’re working so hard to maintain?

With my small perspective, I can feel and know I’ve the potential to do or say just about anything. I know my will is free and constrained. I know I can be evil or righteous. I can live basically peacefully with people I more than a little think are trying to kill me and add stress to my life. I can plot out the CSI style investigation before I never do that thing you said I did and you all have my alibi. I can envision an “enlightened” future resting partly on the back on my effort. To the greater extent, I don’t feel grounded. I have my style and wits about me, but I don’t feel comfortable in picking my subject, my mate, or solitary goal.

I find myself in the ongoing conversation. It’s when I try to forward an idea or illicit a reaction. My toolbox is ideas and there are certain ones that overwhelmingly win out when it comes to characterizing me or my behavior. If I’m always doubting or judging or forming and reforming, the potential for negative consequences from destabilization are always there, but why don’t they win? Cus God made me moral, right? Haha.

My feedback loop is grounded in the complex web of feelings and explored thoughts which on the inspection of any one layer you can find a single instance of something “good” or “bad” or “me.” But if and when they can work together, it’s the absolution of all 3. I think the good news is that when you do this, the positives, practically or mentally, seem to massively outweigh the negatives. At least as they manifest currently. I still haven’t reacted violently to violent impulses. I still don’t attack commitments for sport. I manage to not debase myself for cheap thrills at the expense of some potential for more.

To that end, I think being grounded and set in your ways is extremely dangerous. Saying ‘how things are” without qualifying “only just now” can prescribe a very painful and dramatic future. If we’re going to have the temerity to speculate on the nature of existence or our place in it, how can we look for truth in anything more than the pools of freely flowing ideas? That is, what can we ever say for sure other than that things change? It seems if we’re ever going to understand the nature of things, it’s in describing that change. From there you can maybe hope to manifest intentioned consequences. Whatever that means.

[279] Let’s Get Ready To Rumbooooooooowl

Handle yo bidness!

This feels at least like the American ethic if perhaps not the one we’ve infected the rest of the world with. The fact is it’s personal. I didn’t say that loud enough. IT’S PERSONAL!!!! Caps save the day again.

We will never escape our little cavernous heads. Oh shit, time to freak out. As much as we’d like to project and predict, there’s a hint of lonely little “me” stuck wandering through the darkness of solipsistic muck.

I’ve been thinking about the utility of drama. I go on a number of digressions about my friends and the potential motivations/reactions to information. I don’t feel brought down or stressed out. It’s just a mental exercise. It’s fun to think about how who feels what given so and so fucked around with whomever while them and they said this and that flavoring the situation in such a manner. And of course it doesn’t have to revolve around sex, but go figure that’s where my mind would go first, right?

Every single person has their own stake in the game. Collaborate effort only works when people lose their identity. I don’t feel like “Nick P.” when I’m in an intense concert situation with a group of friends. I’m just a head of hair that happens to have hands and legs that manage to find the beat. Of course that isn’t the majority of our experience, and I think that speaks heavily to why things don’t get done.

Nothing escapes your small perspective. Me and the kiosk; I can get fucked for 9 grand and no one’s really empathizing with that. I have to allow the situation to mold me or not. I have to chalk it up to a lesson learned or a point to retaliate. Everyone is very happy to sit and listen to the story afterward, provided I don’t go on too long. Any and every relationship is the same way. It’s all special and amazing how he/she makes you feel. Dude, you just wouldn’t understand. But, at the end of the day, it’s very important you deny certain things, or at least ignore, suppress, or hold in less esteem to keep things going. (more on this later)

It’s seemingly impossible for people to evaluate in terms of how things could work. You have to be lucky that circumstances played out from time to time in your favor. It robs us of our agency. It takes work to empathize. It should take effort to build relationships. The last thing I’d be comfortable with is thinking the people I like and chill with are purely because we all live in Bloomington.

I think we allow our awareness to get trapped in order to feel comfortable. Whether it’s a job or school track, boy/girlfriend, “spirituality”, pick your poison. I discuss drama like it’s a tv show. I pick friends like my life depends on it. I clearly have to believe there’s more going on than the boring surface shit and fuck me if I don’t want to pick at you to get to it.

[278] What The Fucking Fuck! A Love Story

What the Fucking Fuck! A Love Story

I am currently in a state of profound unhappiness. I imagine it’s like losing someone you’ve mapped the rest of your life with; never entertaining the idea they could be gone in an instant. It’s losing something foundational and part of your core. I don’t even know if I have a simple name for what I think I’ve lost, but the more I focus on it, the more I want to lose control.

Maybe it’s my idea that if there is a problem, it can be fixed, if not relatively easily. Once you break it down into parts you can see every kink and immediately know what needs to happen to change course. Right now, it feels like some problems are so established or entrenched, the memory of how to fix them has been lost. The collective will-power or effort necessary is a shaky suggestion silently predicated with “if only” and “given a miracle.”

It’s one thing to try and fail. It’s soul crushing to try and know there are people, who without hesitation, will doom you to fail before you begin. When I think my cynicism can know no bounds, I find another layer of humanity to stomach. It’s one thing to read about it or watch Youtube clips exposing the corrupt and evil. Let it into your life, your bank account, your relationship with your family and friends. Try to explain anything without sounding like you’re making an excuse. Be “the most motivated” the “bravest” the one to take a “chance” and come face to face with the people who aren’t simply uncompelled or unimpressed, but make it their business to take advantage of you.

I develop or adopt the philosophy. I make the calls and meetings. I crunch the numbers. I pick the wording and keep the smile. I fit the puzzle together. I’m the boss whether I want to be or not. I get the stress and the drama and the stupid details you don’t care to hear about. I’ve worked 23 hours a day. I set myself to OWN what I use. I try to learn as much as I can in the time that I have and press forward because that’s the only direction you can go. I’m not the cabinet maker, architect, maintenance supervisor, plumber, electrician, or lawyer yet am expected to be as an entrepreneur. And if I’m not, I’m seemingly expected to catch the fallout from not adorning those capacities.

I can’t say I know it isn’t hopeless when I’m up against forces like these. I don’t mean in that I can’t succeed somewhere at some time. I mean with things. Like, life and morals and any remote sense of the word justice. I haven’t experienced genocide first hand or I’m sure I could’ve come to this sooner, but…to genuinely fear the loss of your resolve. To entertain the idea that your life is meant to be a cautionary tale about thinking and doing right and still having to content yourself with just what you have. To think that problems aren’t there to be fixed, they’re for keeping you in line.

It’s at this point someone tells me they know what I’m capable of. That one way or another I’ll bounce back or understand the consequences of doing one thing over another. And they’re right. We can both safely point to obvious character traits I seem to take reverence in. I’m also the person who is all of those things and still finding the capacity for hopelessness. What short term gratification it would be to just destroy. A surprise ending with a wave of conflicting feelings about legacy.

And it’s not like people can help, right? Even if they wanted to they’ve got class or their own bills or own sense of moral outrage and obligation. That was your charge Nick P. You explore that world and check back in with me when you start throwing parties again. Not that you can blame them.

I say I want my life to play out like a movie, and maybe I’m just getting everything I asked for. I really should have been more specific about the genre.

[277] Family Ties

Family.

Are you hit with compelling connotatively packed feelings with this word? You may find this surprising, but I am. They only happened as I got to know more of my family, but I feel/felt something and, holy shit, I think there is something to say about what I experience.

As a relative sociopath, stress relative, if and when I feel something, I take notice. My disposition is learned, informed, and often calculated. It takes something truly novel to “shake me up” and leave me exploring the various attitudes and avenues my mind decides to take. I’m more floored by the concept of family than I am in having one to begin with. I find myself separating my rationality from my feelings.

I think family should be a choice. It’s positively why I get so hung up on who I choose to be friends with. I like decisions, not happenstance. Our relationship shouldn't be an accident. Our allegiance shouldn’t be circumstantial. My family needs to be principled, fought for, worthy of envy and fear because others don’t think they can live up to what it symbolizes.

My family members sure can pee; all over my floor in fact. I honestly thought there was a weird noise coming from my plumbing for the first few minutes, then I ascend the stairs to find my cousin post up against my bar, picking what I’m assuming was a worthy and respectable spot on my living room carpet, to piss on. It’s truly a stream meant for Ripley’s. What it says about me not even being angry we’ll leave for another day.

This is a person who, along with his wife, had a host of things to say about our family throughout the day. Whether it’s about the petty shit that gets fought about or disrespecting the ideas my grandma lived for, it wasn’t all stuff I disagreed with. The funny, sad, ironic, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK part about it all was his insistence that it’s about us to keep the Serbian traditions alive and be the mature ones.

The thing you can’t feel, or might in different ways, but certainly aren't right now, is my compulsion, at least initially to want to defend and stick up for family. The idea that, beyond all rational observation, there are these beings, that for lack of a better description, are kind of copies of “you.” Lying, defending, and justifying are not only fashioned as reasonable and assumed, but supposed to be the pinnacle of your responsibility and love. Forgive me? I’m not there.

It’s hard to hear every pipe dream-esc phrase and pronouncement of the future. He’s only an electrician so he can strike it rich with his other endeavors you know. And please, I don’t write this to make fun, I really EVER SO fucking really just want to give you an example to hear and learn from. I can’t be the only one with a relative who has all this dreamy wild-eyed naïve teenager talk somehow making its way past the lips of an alcoholic 30 year old.

It’s impossibly sad. It’s the most depressing thing I can think of for someone. The ONE idea, granted it’s usually centered around a god for most, but when your “faith waivers” people fall to their parents or family when things get really hairy…but the ONE THING you’re supposed to cherish and respect and protect, can make you feel like all those things while being the worst thing in the world for you. Explain that to someone…

I’d turn you in. If you had a bomb planted somewhere in a city and only I knew where to find it or where to get your launch codes, there are going to be a number of lives saved that day. I’d do this because I’d expect the same from you. If I lose my shit or being anything less than the kind of person you expect me to be, I don’t deserve an irrational and detrimental level of protection. That isn’t love or devotion. That’s brainwashed.

I can feel the pull of my genes wanting me to respect and look out for my linage above all else. I can also listen to my brain to recognize what’s fucked and what isn’t.

[276] Play Me Out Johnny

I think I want to describe a pattern. Patterns are a significant thing in how I describe my perspective after all. Given that things have been “slow” and not necessarily dramatic; I’ve had this long period of calm deliberate thinking about nothing in particular that seems to speak to exactly what I wanted to say; an example of which I hope to do again with this blog. I must be after something in writing so much. It’s the “what’s my motivation” question. What am I after with this voice?

I think it might be for a “pattern of everything.” I want to describe things in a way that account for all nuance and any misconception. I want be able to express the spectrum of emotion; from glassy-eyed and empty to talking too fast and too loud at precisely the correct level of enthusiasm. There’s theoretically a way to take every sentiment from every compelling song or bad poem or rant or criminal abjection of decency and describe it in complete terms. It’s probably just a matter of semantics.

But, why? Why keep talking? Why different words for the same sentiment? It must be some level of feeling appeasement. When you get the chance to write about something that gives you chills. Maybe that’s what I want to do. Describe the pattern and make it chill worthy. The ups and down compelling at heart level while they sooth your head scrambling to protest. I want a way to understand things that doesn’t sell the experience short. A way to understand having friends who you’ll never talk to again.

Maybe I stay away from hope because the more I see reason to have it, the less a place I see for myself in the world. Part of me knows the information is out there. I know there are people who are motivated. I know there are a lot of people much smarter or better connected with a perspective I may never get. Maybe they already have the reigns and are just reeling things in in due course. It seems to miss the question to ask “what does the world need?” and then jump to fill a role. It has and has had everything it needs. It’s answered the questions and had the experience and just waits around for you to discover what it already knows.

But not to personify too much and lose my point; if I ever have one. It’s of course TV that puts my mind into a framework. Whenever a main character is killed off it really sucks. They’re as much of the story as anybody else, right? They made you feel, they fill an integral role. I mean, how does the rest of the cast even make sense without their input? And then inevitably, the story plays out. They’re remembered in old videos or hallucinations. They get paid homage to and show up just in time for a flashback. But they’re just a memory. One that no matter how long or hard their friends want to hold onto will find itself competing for time. It’s not so much about it fading, but the fact that it’s all ever a memory to begin with.

Maybe if I can describe my dream, my memories, what arises and fades in me perfectly I’ll be able to start my cycle of change. Maybe by the end it will all just make so much sense.

I worry about transcending my ego. Why am I here if it’s to forget myself? Presuming I know myself, and a why, and what “here” is…It could just be a problem of bad language to describe the circumstances. I should, as a matter of habit, be able to describe a world that makes perfect sense without me perhaps even quicker than one where my intentions are felt. The ensuing melodrama I could cross my fingers is TV worthy. The moral of my disappearance lifted from a perfectly timed line coupled with spot on camera work.

It really is a good thing I’m not suicidal because writing myself out of the story doesn’t feel any better than watching a character die off in a show. In fact, it’s a dramatically worse feeling. But the story would still go on.

[275] Bury Me Somewhere Beautiful

Bury me somewhere beautiful.

Where leaves are always turning

Because it’s fall all year

Where when you listen close

You can pick out a whisper

“I’m here.”

Bury me somewhere beautiful.

Where the wind lifts you up

And we can fly away.

Where your tears can be dried

Before they ever find a chance

To stay.

Bury me somewhere beautiful.

A hidden place just for us

So we can keep playing.

Tag you’re it, now come find me

Don’t cheat just because I’m always

With you.

Bury me somewhere beautiful

In your dreams will do

I never meant to leave you know

As if I’d make it alone

It’s about that time, I’ll see you soon

Sleep.

[274] Cause Your Friends Don't Dance

I’m a media junkie, if you haven’t heard. The news didn’t help my mental disposition during my whole “down week.” I don’t actively go out and look for shitty things to read about to reinforce my concerns about the world, I merely try to accept the implications of an article. 16 people gunned down by a trooper? Here’s my line. We’re at war, and the rest of the world doesn’t want us in to control resources that will make rich people richer and destroy the planet. We have a corrupt government that allows politicians to be bought and lie their way into staying in power so they can vote for such a path. Our behavior has, by the numbers, reduced what used to be the “greatest country in the world,” so to speak, to a declining and naïve military empire. The people who died will be remembered as a “tragic circumstance” if remembered at all. We'll ignore all discussion of human rights. I haven’t checked a Kardashians’ twitter feed in a while…

That’s just the pattern. That’s what we are as a species and I can stomach that. The long term implications of remaining that way are what concern me. The not really seeing a “majority” of people who recognize what we are and maybe how to change it concerns me. If you can hold one contradictory or nonsensical idea, you’ve the capacity to hold every one. That’s why “how you think” is always on my mind. It’s why I get people whose thoughts I can rely on to talk me down when shit gets out of hand. It’s why no matter how polite I may want to be when talking about a “sensitive” issue, I’m certainly not feeling pleasant when I hear something absurd.

There’s a huge duality to everything. You get the burden of which side is supposed to “win” with any problem. You get the ideas about family against how your family may actually treat you and make you feel. If you needed another reason to despise the world love it’s for that conflict alone. You get the arguments or a feeling of needing to protect yourself verses the moral implications of killing. Huh, even typing “moral implications” right then felt absurd to me. We don’t even consider moral implications! It’s not even a thing! As long as it feels good in the moment, that’s what you’re going to do. It’s not an excuse if you genuinely believe you’re into it. You don’t excuse a god’s lack of intervening or providing evidence, you genuinely think he doesn’t need to operate that way, AND HOW DARE YOU FOR THINKING OTHERWISE…wag of the finger.

It’s fun to think of Type 1 or 2 civilizations, but I think a grounding component of something like that is massive cooperation and obligation to “what is” and not your “opinion of what is.” It’s not that we’re incapable of realizing or behaving a certain way. We just don’t want to. It feels too good right now to squeeze life into whatever conception is burdening us this moment. I mean look, I’m writing a blog. A key difference in when I write verses when I tend to hear people’s excuses is that I want to change. I want to be wrong. I’m prepared to argue my points only as far as they go and then flip on a dime when I’m wrong. I can maintain and claim my sovereign mind and be prepared to wildly change my conception of what that statement even means any day. The harder it is to change my mind should find evidence in the effectiveness of my ideas, not because I’m being a stubborn asshole.

Even a commitment to phrasing and acknowledging before we move past a topic would speak towards a grasp of the conflict or nuance in a situation. “I’m against war, but I can’t pretend to know the agenda of the military or what may be putting us in danger, so my criticism I hope you take with a grain of salt.” “I believe life starts at conception, but I also understand I’ve literally never been in a situation that people say I need to empathize with when they chose or needed one.” “Guns are bad and only meant to kill people! But I remember shooting once as a kid and it was kind of fun…” I know I go on and on about the “stupid people” and that’s every bit the mantra of someone in the service or HR industries, but I know there are bastions of support if I ever get around to working harder at the positive ideas I hold as well.

Here’s a secret, I don’t completely know what I’m to do. I have friends who would sooner drop and hate me instead of even bring up a topic they don’t think I’d either understand or be able to handle with kid gloves. I don’t know how you go to the Deep South and “persuade” a 50 year old racist biker who even having felt the burden of taking care of family members not covered by insurance that Obama passing the health care bill is not a sign of the apocalypse or America’s decline. This is how they feel. That being the only thing I’m equating by juxtaposing those examples. #safe. Given that constraint, all I can do is make them feel, which I explained in my last blog. Is it the “best” way? Will it teach anything? Is there a better way? Will it allow for long standing results? I have no clue.

Currently we engage in beating a dead horse. We simply haven’t had enough people claiming “Islam is a religion of peace” for people to buy it in the same way they do from the Christians happy to wage war. How long did it even take to get some states, not even all, to accept gay people getting married? It’s not about marriage being sacred, it’s that gay is still “icky.” Is there a method, process, pattern, you can put people into where things like human rights and peace are streamlined? Is there a model for psychological development and financial distribution that keeps ideas both sacred and in check? That’s what I’m after. That’s why I’ll always have something more to say and another question to ask. What’s the formula for “saving yourself?”