[297] I Are Robot

I think there is a superficial line between “us” and machines. I semi-consistently get accused of being a robot because I understand people's lives and relationships in terms considered cold, impartial, or somehow (given how deeply it cuts) utterly misinformed. Maybe I can run with an explanation of this robotic nature. Maybe I can explain that the picture is more complex, and frankly more meaningful, than you have the capacity to hear.

I’m not an advocate of circumstance. I don’t want to “fall in love” with someone because we grew up in the same place. I don’t want to “find myself surprisingly agreeing with” someone because we both found an angst ridden philosopher our freshman year of college. I don’t want to subject someone to the whirlwind of my feelings. I don’t want to constrain someone because I’m afraid they’ll leave me. I, in an important sense concerning your personhood, personality, well-being, and arbiter of your decisions, don’t want to be responsible for making decisions for you. I don’t want to trap you or guilt you, or exert a horribly conceived sense of power over you.

I just am. Whether I’m happy or sad, that is up to me. Whether I choose to find a way to swallow what I’m doing in life or not, again, up to me. My decisions, as long as I’m going to claim responsibility for them, I’m going to regard them as free, if only pragmatically. “I” am not “us” and don’t burden you with my little exploration of self, meaning, or place in the world. I think this is a position of respect, understanding, and freedom. If I openly state that I’m an ongoing puzzle to be put in relative space, far be it for me to be the judgmental stopping point on what to say about who you are.

And because it never gets old, apparently as a robot, I’m interested in strings of data. I like to let my brain process an input and see some kind of conclusion. Funny thing about drawing conclusions, nobody likes it when you “doom them to fail.” Now, I stress that I’m using their language, for us robots merely see things as “necessary consequences.” You may have guessed that we robots get the most flack when it comes to talking about how people get along with one another. It gets extra dramatic when they’re supposed to or have been “getting along” for long periods of time. Proposing a more nuanced and specific answer as to why that diverges from “because they love each other” gets quite a load of shit dumped on a poor merely processing robot’s head.

Now don’t go humanizing, this isn’t a pity party. This is one in a string of ongoing explanations. I understand this is the point to start touting a litany of feelings, and they’ve been taken under administrative consideration.

A little about robots; it isn’t that they don’t feel, it’s that they feel sparingly. And even when those feelings kick in, they tend to be fleeting and not overwhelmingly compelling. See, for robots, feelings inform. They’re like a lick from an enthusiastic puppy; “Oh, that was sooo cute! And a little wet lol” but it’s going to dry up and the dog will shit on the rug. This doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy the puppy licks, but robot memories are designed to store the smell of puppy shit. We understand the amount of work it takes to get that puppy to a happy and healthy place for both parties.

A robot is only as good as in the information available. My inputs come from hundreds of self-descriptions describing a million different versions of the same relationship! Even pointing this out to a fellow converser is a robots folly. Why, however could a robot know MY LOVE?! This seems to misunderstand a robot’s position. I have nothing vested in whether you work or don’t, I’m merely stating the experiential data and drawing an analogy to a seemingly similar situation. Live long and prosper for all I care, but why not contemplate the significance of your defensiveness?

I say loud and I say often how much I don’t believe in love. For those of you who understand this is almost my 300^th blog on or referencing the topic, I’ll save the rehashing why. Love, like all things in a robots mind, is constrained by how useful it can be used to compute an outcome or understand the data. Given enough conversation, explanation, and an indefinitely growing list of the definitions of love, it does not compute. However, all hope is not lost! Surely there is a positive swing that can be described as to why people relate the way they do.

So then we can traverse into the hard, pragmatic, and dare I claim “rational” world. With this streamlined sensibility, we take people’s words for it; we apply basic understandings of human psyches, and use some good old fashioned plain speech. Here, people don’t want to be alone. In this world, people are afraid of having nothing to show for their lives. In this magical place, people go through experience after experience and, if they're lucky, have lives play out like their favorite television drama provided no one ended up dying. Love comes as quick as you’re willing to say it. The “cutest” “smartest” “most amazing” guy or girl in the world is a mere Facebook status update and/or few years away from the last one.

Please note, simply being a pattern does not mean I lament the pattern, or that it’s a bad pattern, or that I don’t believe there is a large amount of genuine happiness to be derived from said pattern. BUT IT’S A FUCKING PATTERN! It’s this odd thrust of ego and hubris and self-importance that placates common sense and historical perspective that just throws this humble robot for a loop. If, and let me stress if, patterns can be, at least semi-relied upon to predict the future, why not try to live in that future and behave accordingly? Why not try to account for all the things people would like to ignore or forget, and own them now, get good at them now, and see what manifests from that?

Now, I understand I could just have a much fucked up conception of happiness or well-being. This is something I don’t heavily debate, so if that’s the resounding opinion, it hasn’t reached my ears. But part of my robotic perspective is to try and state things plainly, or at least as plainly as the data informs me. Yes, I like you. Yes, I get bored. No, boredom doesn’t mean I don’t like you. No, it isn’t always about boredom. Yes, I would absolutely like to keep what we have. No, I will not keep what we have it means I feel I’m made to start lying about myself. No, I don’t want anything resembling the kind of things people have been inputting me with since I found an interest in the subject.

Before something changes, it has the capacity to do so. It is “ingrained” with an ability to reformulate around new ideas, behaviors, or environmental settings. That’s my robot brain. I have little to no control over why it decides to see things as re-hashing the past, and little to no control over not wanting to fall in line with what has proven to be dismal denial ridden insecure and ill-informed relationship rings of the past. As far as I can tell, it just seems to make sense not to behave that way.

I won’t equate sex with your personality or our relationship. I won’t pretend you have a quota of texts or Facebook comments in order for me to really believe you like me. I won’t subject my infinitely joking and dismissive personality so you get an opportunity to feel insecure or pissed off for something that doesn’t even register once you care to slow things down and break them into their smallest obvious conclusions. I have this small, ever so small, robot conception of self that is responsible for how it thinks and what its thinking may do to or for the rest of the world. If I’ve managed to actually get somewhere in my processing, I simply can’t sacrifice it to sensibilities of a common man. After all, it’s only after enough of them that I’ve been driven here in the first place.

So when a robot manages to feel, it’s not an accident. When a robot is trying to be honest, it’s hanging its reputation on the line because it doesn’t believe you should accept what it has to say without understanding its reasons. When a robot is willing to talk about or fight for what it believes in, open your fucking ears and minds. As a robot, they need a closet and alcohol. Incorporating you into the mix might as well be an act of your god. It’s not whining, nor a threat; it’s just the reality as far as a robot can see. How ironic when the robot gets blamed for not being able to connect like all the normal people.

[296] Thoughts Upon Which To Hang Our Baggage

My “meta-idea” has to revolve around time. I think about how my time is being used and how I describe it. I think that well before you can engage in an activity or not, the consequences will carry, your thoughts will carry, well into what will inevitably be your current mind. I don’t, even when I’m doing conceivably “nothing” genuinely feel like my time is being wasted. Perhaps the only aspect to respecting and enjoying your time is making as many active and self-espousing decisions while you’re using it.

Time frames how I think about money. It frames how I think about the pursuit of money and what money is really good for. Money, to me, is more of an exchange towards a purpose. If you have no purpose, you have no reason to care for money. If you’re purpose involves redefining or re-purposing money, it becomes less of a burden marred by ideas about paying the bills or feeding yourself. I can do a lot with a little bit of money. Whether it means getting something priced cheap, the easy old way to look at something, or in the kind of dividends you get when you’re paying for a chance to express who you are.

So I don’t pay the back taxes just quite yet. The consequences just aren’t of the kind that would significantly negatively impact my life. I don’t work 80 hours a week. The dividends paid out from my psyche would literally start to change who I fundamentally was. I may splurge a little on dinner or a night out. Nobody spends their time talking about the hours they spent reading a book or studying a topic. Of course doing such things helps inform and shape the moment, but it’s snippets you’ll remember over time. It’s snippets you’ll reflect on that will be how you define entire years or people. There’s a million ways I’d like to be remembered than “eh, kind of a cool dude, I guess.”

An obsession with time frames how I think about time frames. I simply know how long it takes me to understand something or make things happen. Delays happen because people don’t pick up phones, answer emails, say they’ll do it tomorrow, spend time complaining or stressing about restrictions, were told not to from someone on high, were given conflicting information, didn’t understand what you meant, or deliberately slowed down because they’re a dick and why not. Therefore, I know what needs to happen so things happen now, or in an hour, or by tomorrow morning, or holy shit what did we just create this week.

This time-centric view puts things in perspective, provides a plethora of answers, and makes it easy to form rules. It helps mitigate risk, define what’s worthwhile, and decide the very reasons to even bother existing. I am playing a game after all, and games are either finite or infinite. My life is finite, the impact I may leave on existence though, who’s to say?

So I won’t spend that time pretending. I won’t believe in god because I’m not schizophrenic. I won’t call you friend unless I can see, feel, and think about the positive impact you have on my life. I won’t double-speak unless I’m pulling some 1984 shit. As long as I have a voice in my head that can be persuaded to make me feel shitty about myself, I need to be doing the kinds of things that can fight back. It’s a voice we all have. A voice I see so flagrantly expressed outward lately as the stress of life appears to be beating the ever-loving shit out of my friends.

An important component to “taking over the world” then, is to put you on my time. When the world around you operates in a manner that exudes my values, then I’ll be truly confused when too much ran awry. I’m already happy, and that’s my biggest problem. As Jay-Z would say, I’m already home. My existence therefore needs to extend farther. It needs to include more to think about, more contingencies and responsibilities. I need to inform my perspective in a manner that goes beyond being a basically functioning human being just getting along.

I can’t tell if this seems too hard to understand sometimes, or if it just comes in too abrasive a package. I don’t consider hurting feelings or “being a dick” to necessarily be a personality flaw. Wanting to make people feel bad is the personality flaw, but that only tends to happen when I’m addressing something that barely resembles what I’d describe as “people.”

I question because I am endlessly intrigued by how and why you spend your time. Mine isn’t riddled with damn near any of the bullshit that most describe as a waste of their time. I want to know about your relationships and the extent they keep you happy. I want to know the heart of your interest in a topic so I can understand why it’s worth my time to even hear about it or explore further. My mind is already in a million different directions and picking a specific path to focus on takes something or someone special. It has to be something/someone worthy of advocating across my interests or to anyone. Something story worthy.

The best stories can connect with a million people in a million ways whether it’s because of the moral it espouses or because it’s speaks so close to something you’ve maybe never had words for. I can write a million blogs that will never match what it means to operate that kind of machine I envision for the future. There will probably be a handful of people in the thousands I’ll meet that I’ll trust to work alongside with, to help write part of the story. Certainly, it will take people who know it can’t be about “them,” but us. Hopefully, there will be a kind of truth that wasn’t force fed, but always existed waiting to be accepted.

[296.5] Stupid Vs. Smart

This is a blog I should have written weeks ago so excuse me if it’s a little scattered. For just as important as thinking about time shapes my perspective, the eternal struggle between what I’d call “smart” and “stupid” rages on. I would love to be able to draw a strict demarcation between the two. As far as I can tell, everyone is both smart and stupid given a specific context, so how do we get to the “meta-smart or “meta-stupid” person?

Theoretically, we want to “grow” as individuals. If we look at a child, it’s generally preferred that we want them to learn the ABCs and how to count and how to walk and maybe one day look both ways before crossing the street. These are “smart” if not practical, life affirming, intelligence expressing ideas. They are growing. As adults we hope to find people who can share in another’s perspective. Hopefully they’ll accept people despite their color or sexual orientation. They grow to understand that these are not things which threaten them or account for the morality of the individual.

Surely, this growth caps at a certain point academically. We don’t really go around arguing about who is more PH.D.’d or fiercely debate the merit and number of books each of us has read. So we must be expecting, hoping, that people are growing “emotionally” or “spiritually.” What’s odd, is that we consider these areas to be “too personal” to really be discussed intelligently. We don’t get smart, as far as I can tell, about how or why you grow to accept different people, or how life works, and on what basis you should do so.

It’s this kind of emotional stupidity that we somehow match against intelligence. It takes work to get informed, but anyone can feel. In my experience, my feelings only bring me back to a point where I need to explain something intelligently. If I get super pissed, I need to talk out the details for why I’m not going to burn a place down. If I’m getting close to someone, I need to venture down what it means to be emotionally manipulative. Huh, I kinda have two settings, pissed or tepid.

It’s emotional stupidity that prevents me from having too many meaningful conversations about religion. If you weren't afraid to lose something, afraid of change, or even if you don’t feel afraid still unable or unwilling to take any and every question as far as they can go, it has something to do with stupid emotions, because I’m convinced your brain works. It’s like an overbearing mom speculating about all the crazy things that can happen if you stay out too late; you know you’re just wandering around Wal-Mart or bullshitting at Steak N Shake. Even if she knows this logically, she won’t accept it. Sooner or later she’s picking you up from jail or taking you to rehab, she just knows it.

The folk knowledge is that all teenagers are crazy. They destroy, can’t be trusted, and upon reflection of your adventures as a kid, you know all you need to. Even if 98% of the time you spent it on the couch playing Halo, you remember that one fire you lit that got a little out of control and ignore you had the foresight to bring the hose around. You remember trying cigarettes, but forget not liking them. Hanging onto these ideas is problematic, much as believing in anything BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS it to be true, because the idea is incomplete. Much as my time in school, it’s too easy. Easily offered and accepted.

Emotional stupidity I see as a hindrance; it’s anything that prevents you from growing into accepting more about the world. It’s when you could apply your “reasoning by way of feeling” to the world and see a measurable decline in the reliability of information. It’s believing in a god to the point of campaigning against science or to justify some atrocity of nature or personal depravity. It’s believing in love or a relationship to bring a kid into an unstable situation because you’re searching to be complete. It’s placating a person’s entire history by one act or what they look like. It’s being ruled by the fear of the unknown or of where the thoughts might take you.

Therefore, smart should be the opposite of that. It’s learning enough about yourself and place in the world to adopt a stake worth having in it. Understanding how small or big your decisions may impact the people in your life. Holding yourself accountable for how you feel and still managing to consistently go with what makes the most sense, if only at the time. To me, if I’m to be considered smart anymore, it’s not because I read and write, it needs to come from being personally responsible and accountable. It’s not to say I won’t do stupid things or allow a twinge of emotionality to creep in, but I’m capable of recognizing when it does.

Stupid follows a pattern of avoidance while smart explores. Stupid is afraid and smart perseveres. Stupid sums things up, smart is in the details. Stupid makes excuses, smart offers different theories. Most importantly, stupid is empty and smart is a kind of fulfilling that I've never been able to experience another way. Yes, I consider myself smart. Yes, I can do stupid things. There’s a mental happy place I reach when I’m doing something smart. It’s almost like a lifestyle, where shit just makes sense, even when you can’t tell why.

This might speak to why I have two settings. Either things “are” or are going well-enough, or there’s a threat. I can react so viscerally because if I’m threatened it has to be at a very fundamental level. Luckily, that’s usually only coming from myself and over-thinking I suppose.

But as to why I don’t think we’ll make it as a species and call most people stupid, it just seems smart given everything they say or do. Given the stress and drama presented to me, given their non-productive, emotionally driven squawking, their inability to answer anything or change anything without so much undue hassle. The smart thing to do just seems to be “get by” primarily and espouse a personal set of ideals about exploring the potential extent of an intellect. If that, by happenstance, tends to help people, then yay I guess, but to truly care that much would beget me being emotionally stupid about their judgments from the onset.

Funny how the exact same words can mean completely different things.

[295] Option 2

This is a laborious blog. I do not suggest you read it.

My new way of thinking…First and foremost, it’s pretty fucking weird that I should be able to adopt a “new” way of thinking in the first place. For sure, I should be able to view what I’m doing and be acting in relative accordance with my previous mode regardless of what I’d like to believe about some sort of “fresh start” or something “new.” Fuck it, you’ll have to trust that it’s actually different. All I can assure you is that I’m significantly more mentally fucked than you’ll ever want to give me credit for, and that capacity allows me even the preconception that I can pull off such a feat, which coincidentally, is enough. So there.

The first step I can tell for a new way of thinking, is to put aside all of the bullshit that I can consider old or beyond relevant modes of thought. I’ve been streaming Current TV and had the “duh mother fucker you should have realized this sooner” epiphany that I don’t need the Young Turks telling at me that giving money to the rich will not help the economy and that trickle-down economics is a fools idea. So, I put myself to task naming and thrusting aside the old conceptions of what people are arguing about. Screw your leftist or independent blog, the facts care not for labels. I don’t need more convincing on reality.

Human rights: everyone, no matter how intellectually infuriating and inept, is equal under the law and I don’t care who you fucking, what you’re snorting, what color you’ve dyed your skin or been born into, or even what magic you believe dictates our existence, you have a vote, you’re perspective matters to the extent that you can give it a voice, and I will be made to swallow it in an open forum debate as to the how we decide to govern society. BOOM, just wrote a four and a half line sentence, drunk, that is grammatically correct: eat a dick.

Personal goals: I want to open EVERY business. I want to be in your mind and up your ass. I want people to think Mystik or Nick P. or whatever conception I choose to thrust upon this world every waking moment because I want to be a process. I don’t want to be the rule or the ultimate dictum; I want to be the method by which things change. I want to be the discussion. I want to be a guide on the cycle. I want to be the endless pursuit of what could be, what can change, what it could mean, and what things could become. I want to black out and hit a fugue state state where things just rush into being in the order they are supposed to and to the needs by which they can serve.

I’m sorry, but I WIN. I will always win. I will put my mind and heart and whatever conception you have about a soul to it and I will win. I will talk till you have no choice. I will decide until something beyond me robs me of the ability. I will learn and follow the pattern. I will giggle at the idea that I don’t know what’s going on, like I don’t care, like I can’t change it, like it’s new, like it’s special, like I’m not capable of turning my thoughts to deconstructive tendencies. I will look like however I think you need me to look. I will fail in the ways you respect as failing. I can’t escape it! I can’t do anything but talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and fucking, fucking, talk. But that’s what I’ll do. I don’t know what else I could do.

So new way of thinking…It involves a greater resolve to “roll with the punches.” It lets people get away with a different and significantly greater degree of murder. It subjugates free will and marginalizes it to a variable point of obscurity. For as much as I think I want to be the arbiter of my fate, I do not pretend things didn’t come before me. Whether this has the proper bearing on where I’m to go and what I’m to do is yet to be established, but it’s important to play out as many scenarios as I can come to realize. Either something is dramatically wrong with this person who thinks that they have “all the answers” who wakes up at 2 and plays a game he hates whilst realizing he has a joke to show for the amount he wants to really express, or something deeper and significantly misunderstood is going on underneath it all that may be realized by shifting how I can manage to conceptualize myself. The very prospect puts butterflies in my stomach.

A significant part of me knows “to what end” is a ridiculous question. Any and everything I could accomplish can and will be erased by time. BUT to the extent that it existed in the first place, that can never be denied. To the extent it worked for what I advocated and worked for, fuck what happens a million years from now, I made the kind of world or developed a paradigm in which people didn’t have to hate what I hate. People, or moreover, the ones I give a shit about, didn’t have to struggle with the same shit I did. Forget the endless unbearable thoughts that I would love to say “you’re human now for suffering what I have.” Now I’ve really made the kind of world where one can simply exist and meditate and love and care and whatever hippie fuck idea you think should fit in next.

I need to be part of a cycle. I need to get used to the idea that I am simply part of a, potentially endless, trend of existence that goes from conscious to unconscious and back again and that merely observes what the fuck can happen. Maybe not what’s supposed to happen or what’s destined to happen, but everything that in fact can. The net energy level of the universe is 0. Not positive, not negative. Not hot or cold. It just “is.” So all the energy spent worrying, judging, pretending like we have a fucking clue, is merely balancing a bigger equation than we know. As infinitely up my own ass as I am, as much as I love to idealize Nick P. and what it means to be me and how no one has my history, I’m essentially an irrational concept thrown together by a confluence of inert forces that perhaps inevitably led to me writing this blog at this time. It’s more than a little humbling if such is the case.

You need to win too. You need to equate me, not de-thrown me. You need to realize just how much is and can be. You need to realize that you are the world. You are reality. You are the world! It’s the best defense against someone like me and it’s the only recourse to actually giving yourself a fucking prayer for the future or your meager conception of self in it. I will truly win when this is the message I get across. I will have beyond everything when you are drunk with power at a whisper of my words. You fuckers are just going to make me work for it though.

It’s ridiculous the amount you have to work before you can even get around to working. I would love to spend 23 hours a day on something that actually mattered and existed to forward the ideas I have come to believe can shape and change the actual landscape of reality. Turns out it’s not enough to graduate college, open a business, read and write until you can barely make sense of words, or maintain some level of moral high-horsery. No, you have to scrape. You have to take orders from absolute idiots who by virtue of being a little older or starting with a little more money put them in a position to try and tell you the kind of employee or person you need to be. You have to fight with your arms tied behind your back when representatives of a billion dollar company take bets on your success or failure and lie to you to the tune of thousands of dollars. You gotta have money to make money? By what method do you get that initial money without resenting yourself, the people you’ve worked under, and the very existence under which you struggled so hard to endure?

What if it isn’t about the lofty thoughts? What if it isn’t about the labor? What if it has nothing to do with “the future” or “potential?” What if always right now there’s something being completely overlooked or unaccounted for that puts the state of the world in order that can quell the disconcerting thoughts and align itself as the proper tract to walk? It’s not resolving myself to fate; it’s a commitment to ignorance. It’s “not even trying” (read: being effortless) because I’ll never actually know the extent of the consequences. It’s a commitment to less stress and judgment to see if my mind will still bring me round to where I’ve sat so comfortably inevitably anyway. It’s still a search for fulfillment, but I get to stop blaming myself so dramatically. It’ll hopefully find more words as I spend more time under its spell.

[294] Idealize The Man

What if complete and utter empathy is possible? What if it is not only possible, but required? Empathy as I understand it is about an understanding of feeling. It’s the infinite sadness of losing someone you love. Maybe it’s the awkward settling in to a new social scene. Some know the ability to be pushed to absolute rage that negates pain and the passage of time. You may talk to a therapist or best friend about your experiences and they’ll say “I understand” like everyone trained to engage/dodge where you’re coming from. But when is it the best talk? Is it platitudes and a rub on the back or when they immediately know what the next course of action is? Do you want someone to tell you they understand, or guide you through in a way that validates your feelings when the words are never enough? Understanding of feeling; true compelling empathy that moves someone in the way they know you need to be moved.

I argue (read: hold various strong stances towards or against things) constantly and talk a bigger game than anybody I know. I know that I do not translate my message that makes others feel it like I want them to. There is a lot of trouble you can get into if you relegate everything you think or feel to talk. Luckily, I act, but nowhere near the amount I talk. I sort of feel I’m in a perpetual dress rehearsal. It’s like one day I’ll get my TED talk and lay my case out so brilliantly and like Nick P, you will be forced to walk away from it moved to action. That feels like a worthy challenge or intellectual pursuit. I just have entirely too much theory and not enough data.

And that data can come in many forms. Before I’m anything, I want to be pragmatic. If I wasn’t able to pay the bills, maintain a friend, or even scrap the surface of pop culture or politics, I don’t think you should even bother with me. Data for instance with the turning my car into a cab thing. I already worked a cab job, I already know there’s room for more cabs and more getting drunk people home safe, and I know how much money there is to be made. Until I come home with a few hundred bucks in hand, I don’t even believe me. Granted, I find this odd, but if I didn’t believe it at least in some very important way, I wouldn’t pursue the endeavor in the first place. It’s a mismatching in understanding between expectations for the not experienced future and the ever present now. Maybe I just need to refocus on “ignoring the future.”

I wonder sometimes how much of my experience is because “I’m fairly certain this is the correct thing” played against “this is novel.” It really does take, what feels like something special, because it’s so few and fleeting, to get me excited. Accidents, taboos, spur of the moment decisions, stirring up emotions or conversations that I’ve forced into existence. It’s not so much “risk seeking behavior” as it is “something worth contemplating” or “something that might dramatically change the perspective of all involved.” When I think of the million and a half reasons people don’t do things, I always settle on the very fact of my decision to do so being the only one that matters. If I decide, I win. And people don’t empathize with that.

I can feel fear and uncertainty. I’m perpetually doubtful. I’m always going to go too far and have to make nice. But I’m still going to explore. I’m still going to take a chance. I’m still going to know that there is a simple enough take on a complex picture that can take the infinite uncertainty and see it tamed. It’s empowering in a way that you can’t help but be respectful. It’s “too much power” tempered by the endless perspectives it allows you work with and think about. It’s something I wish everyone felt. It’s something that should be freely exchanged via shared experience. In my mind, in many ways, it’s how I idealize humanity.

I don’t consider myself, necessarily, a good person. I know I’m frequently capable of going out of my way to be a bad one. Underneath these empty judgments about myself is a basic inability to call anything good or bad without a context. I have the freedom to forgive or condemn, not the obligation. I have the potential to flip a desk and crack a foreign fuck cab driver in the face equally to the potential to walk away. Whether you choose to accept circumstance or fate, given the many more ways I have to alleviate problems in my life, I found it “best” to walk away. May your god help you if you think I’d never do otherwise. With this in mind, I see my goal heavily characterized by a burden to create context.

For as good a shit talker as I can be, I need to make sure as many of my actions are far from judgments that don’t take into account how I think a future maybe healthy society should behave. This is a far cry from making excuses for peoples’ behavior. I’m not going to abstain from holding a door open for a fat person because “they need the exercise” for example. But as far as interpersonal relations go, I’m hard pressed to move much beyond basic civility, at least currently. This I think mostly comes from what I see from history. People need a thick skin, they used to have a thicker skin, being kind of dickish to dicks or dick-like things merely flavored the overall conversation. I also think it’s a nice spring board to the even harder conversations that require honesty, accountability, and introspection.

I suppose one of the methods I’m dying to see the results of is rewarding the personality. I literally want to enable people to be more of the kinds of people they are. I think there is a forgotten dividend to respecting respectable people and cultivating a culture of people you want in the future. I think there is a big guise we operate under where life is this thing that happens to us and we have to deal with. I mean, the very reason I don’t go insane is a commitment to creating something new and touting that which I find worth respect. I freely obligate myself to a world that could eventually make sense filled with people I don’t perpetually hate. I want to contribute to the pool of resources you can dip into to feel where I’m coming from. Because god knows it must be hard to follow a lot of these blogs.

In a weird way, I feel like when “I win” everyone does. And I’m not winning until everyone actually is. The fate of my happiness or action/inaction is intimately tied to the degree in which you actually feel it. I want to send a message that can be heard a billion different ways that results in a single thing; a feeling of infinite potential. I want us to arbitrate the context. I want us to write and rewrite and rewrite the rules until the exercise becomes as absurd as the presupposition. We need to feel what we idealize or we’re stuck with what we fear and hate. What we fear and hate will never “disappear” to the realm of merely informing our perspective until we know there’s something more. No, I don’t think it’s something that can be given to you by a sky daddy or guy in a fancy robe. So, that’s where I come in.

[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.