[336] It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing

I've been inside a kind of deadness lately. It's not sad or dramatic. It's flat. Maybe it's just a special kind of tired. I'm not sure, but all I know is that it's a special kind of non-feeling. To generally run rather tepid when it comes to things, then to get excited, is very much a high. It's not a terribly lasting high, but the contrast is noteworthy. But when nothing seems to register, even if it's for a short time, it becomes noteworthy as well.

A few examples. While everyone is naming their new babies after a fictional pair of meth dealers, I can call it a pretty good episode. While I'm assuming there's an invigorating passion to spend the next several months flying new machines and blowing people up, I'm reminded I have 2 video games I haven't opened and a 3rd I've been playing for months and might be half way through. I think about how quick, although I know it's not that quick, friends seem to pass through your life and really really want to press people to figure out why or why not I should be someone in their life. I see more people getting shot up and think “of course...onto more pressing concerns like dick cutting pictures.” I'm getting back into business and realize that whether it does or doesn't work, I'll know what to do.

It's all just stuff that's happening.

To the point on friends, I don't like to feel as if I'm treating them as passing acquaintances. It influences very much what I do or don't and how I engage with them. I can believe that it can be viewed as a kind of insecurity. Like, just act natural Nick P! It's your friends after all. But I understand relationships as work. Me, natural, doesn't treat people as people. So I need to dial back natural for better things like respect. I deliberately hinder my mind of thinking of friends as “marginally intentional beings with fleeting pithy feelings I need to deliberately navigate in order to achieve x, y, and z.”

In that instance, I'd rather be misunderstood as a bumbling idiot killing the mood or deliberately awkward, instead of understood as someone who would treat you that way.

I'm certain this is hard to understand, mostly because it has everything to do with me and nothing really to do with you. It's the odd ways I can be made to think or feel and the work my rules do or don't help with that. To say I take my friendships personally is to say I have as much invested in the story I can tell about myself as I can about our relationship. It's an ever-present conversation during a high stakes game.

I don't think winning belongs to the smart, or loud. Sincerity wins. They believe you when you believe you. It's less what you say than it is they believe you. Feeling this deep in your gut and knowing what it means is what necessitates my “anti-behavior.” If I can't make you aware of a path I see, I might find myself on it and not terribly comfortable, nor necessarily convinced against, what it means if I keep following it. So help me keep dialogue open. The more I can fumble over words and persistently go nowhere, probably dunk, in person, the less I can recede so far into my head that I can't hear anything.

I want to feel normal, but not at your expense.

[335] Put One Foot In Front Of The Other One

Now, I believe myself to be at the perfect level of drunken introspectiveness, thus making everything I'm about to write simply magic.

You know how I like read about world affairs and post the “best” links I find to summarize how basically shit a lot of things are? I know like ex military people and my “old” friends are into that shit, but does it click with anyone under 30? I can't really tell. It seems like minimum wage jobs and shitty papers will always take precedent to (just tried to drink a beer without taking the cap off) what's actually happening in life. I wouldn't mind a “I follow current affairs!” comment either, because I need to better gauge my overall people may give a shit meter.

I went to ballroom dance call-outs today. I will always be amazed and intrigued by the people who just sit down next to you and want to start a conversation. It's not that I can't, it's just that I'm bad at pretending I care right now. You may be super cool. I just don't know why yet and that's why my body language would suggest you're shit. You're probably not shit, but fuck me, I'm bad at pretending I care. Gimme a minute. But I think what we did at ballroom dancing is part of the epitome of what you're supposed to be able to do in life. Meet random cute people and shake your ass for no reason. It's kind of the best you can hope for and it's totally awesome.

So by the rules of obvious and duh mother fucker, why is it hard to figure out “global action plans” that don't involve killing everything? Like I said before, it's always present in my mind. Having fun and doing nothing and “wasting” money all exist with the backdrop of how I conceive of our species treating itself. Sure, I got to dance with a tiny hot girl (amongst other hot girls) and could turn on the flirting if I wasn't sweating like a goddamn fountain. But in what real world does any of that shit matter?

I wonder, and frankly hope it doesn't happen, if I'll ever start to take “myself” too seriously. I see what happens to public intellectuals that spend so much time researching and writing and putting their moral foot on top of all the bullshit. I can't say I see the kinds of change they're likely hoping for. I can't see their personal understanding doing much of anything like moving big chess pieces of culture that need to change. I suppose I'm trying to justify my apathy. If someone who gives a shit doesn't care....hahahaha just keep laughing.

Be real! That's the goal right? Be that like jaded voice that doesn't get blamed for being jaded. Just say those things. Be the constant stream of shit that everyone can get a whiff of when they feel themselves taking too much for granted. It's tough dude. How do you practice an innate wanting attachment to things when you are infinitely prepared to let them go? The word genuine takes a very long walk. You can't justify laziness anymore than you can in achieving dweeb status about “some issue in particular.”

I guess you just get used to making excuses, UNBEARABLY IRONICALLY. Because we all just tryin' to live n shit, right?

[334] Windows Into Our Minds

It's infinitely humbling to read old rants. I hesitate to even dignify them as “blogs” as if that has a modicum of associated respect. I'm also starkly reminded that there's always something more to say. Every person that enters the conversation, every random interaction or some fight gives you an opportunity to be challenged and reflect. Probably the most amazing thing is how many times I read the words “I hate” or “fuck this or that” without feeling the kind of crippling emotions, at least persistently, that I might not be incorrect in saying, most of my friends seem to deal with.

That's what I wanted to tackle head on a few days ago. A drunk conversation that didn't really start because agreements were made to not have those kinds of conversations drunk, needed to end up somewhere. I don't think I'll ever do the talk about other peoples' sadness or stress well. I can listen or offer my perspective, but I feel like for all my cynicism and hatred, very little if none of it is self-directed. Yes, you can rest assured that if I say I hate you, I do just in fact, hate you for all the big and little shitty things you are. I didn't see something I didn't like in the mirror and say “someone needs to be told what a worthless fuck they are today.”

As with most genuine, large, institutional or intimately personal problems, I'm irrationally concerned about how little I think I can do to help. Literally, all I have is my “good will” towards the people I like. I know there are several feel good books out there that would suggest that just “being there” or some similar sentiment is all you may have to do to have the biggest impact on someone's life. If you'd like to believe this, then you have to start making decisions about how many people and to what extent you're going to be there. If you think this is kind of bullshit, then you just try to keep the happy times going with your friends and cross your fingers all the shit doesn't hit the fan at once.

Like, I've already written a blog pondering why everyone in my life, 4-5 years ago seemed angry, depressed, or anxious. For those of you not tracking my groups of friends, rest assured there's been a fairly large changeover, and I find myself again under a similar contemplation. Now you may congratulate me on my capacity for cynicism and despotic outlooks and finding such well-equipped crowds to indulge me, but that's incorrect and dickish. I'd rather see this as more confirmation that there's something larger going on psychologically and socially that isn't addressed or understood enough. I feel somewhat desperate to grasp this “large fucked up thing with our heads.”

I can only hope people aren't insulted or put-off in how I try to talk about it as well. I'm acquainted with the word depression, but I've only been able to engage with the darkest places it can take my friends fairly recently. My pop-sci answers or advice from high school “worked” in that no one I've engaged with ended up dead, which is hardly a reliable metric of success. I'm anxious because sometimes I genuinely don't know if I'm going to blurt out an obviously inappropriate epithet. That has nothing to do with the anxiety that makes you question every single social interaction you have and measure it against whether you should bother to continue to exist.

So then maybe I can finally offer my speculation on the ways and why's these pervasive and debilitating emotional states exist, and if any of them ring true, it could click with that one person who doesn't think I'm ridiculing them, calling them a liar, trying to undermine what they feel or have been through, or think I'm offering some definitive answer to what seems like some kind of evolving social virus only the blissfully naïve seem to be able to avoid.

Let's start wide then move specific. Overall, I think there's a huge familial and social institutional problem. I think modern conceptions or aftermaths of families left a lot of scars on people from my experience. I'm sure they only learned how to scar their children from the ways their parents scarred them. They of course were hurt by a turtle, and then it's turtles all the way down. There are cliches about not ending up like parents abound and who can't find a movie where someone is “shocked” they just did exactly what they swore would never happen to them. I took divorce as an opportunity for two Christmases. I've had people explain to me they'll never believe in love after their parents split.

Clearly, “looking back” and only feeling the pain of the relationships that have gone bad in your developmental years might be a predictor for how and whether you are close to people in the future.

I think we fail dramatically in the social institutional realm as well. I can't go a day without hearing what the “right” or “best” kind of ANYTHING to do or buy is. This goes doubly for relationships. The perfect boy or girlfriend does this for you, buys that for you, feels only these things and despite all odds love will conquer all. Also, before you get to deal with your relationship, you have to look a certain way, feel a certain way, be into the cool new things of the day, and sit at the bar society has raised for you. Every corner is a chance to not be good enough, smart enough, or acne-free enough.

I don't think it's a very conscious thing, but by the rule of “practice makes permanent,” I have to think reinforcing shitty ideas about yourself or the world you live in doesn't beget positive feelings or insight into wellness. But that's the thing, it's always reinforced. Your friends will tell you you're doing well because they don't “feel they have the right” to speak about something “they don't know enough about.” Yes, things like a shitty relationship. But who told you that friends can't “obtain rights to more information about people willing to share with you?” It took years of my “prying” into peoples' lives before I just became “that guy” and people opened up presumably because I didn't shatter the world with their information.

So fuck our shitty families and fuck the people telling us things with their fucking agendas and consequence blindness. Great.

Another wide view institutional failure is how we react when we clearly recognize things are wrong. Just take meds! Of course in the modern age you can play with your brain chemicals and all will be well in a few weeks. Just keep taking your meds of course, or we might have to face the real significance and nature of the problem. For those who can't or won't take meds, I don't blame you, there's your not-a-doctor friends doing everything they can to remind you of why you should be happy or not anxious. Or worse, they don't believe there's even a problem and carry on like it's a phase or like a bad cough. And what is the afflicted person do then? I bet they don't feel motivated to “bring down their friends” with their problems.

Some people can talk things out. Some people can run for miles and find clarity or at least distraction. Sometimes the medicine actually works. None of these kinds of “solutions” explain or speak to why so many suffer to begin with.

As always, the best I can do with my opinionated, angry toned rants is try to start a conversation. I need as many inputs, as are relevant, to paint a picture that hopefully people can learn from. When I look at the angry or immature things I've written, I still think there's no substitute for just laying it all out there. You don't want citations and rationality when you're explaining how shitty the fights are with your ex-girlfriend, but if you describe the situation in the same words years later, you might not have learned anything. When peoples' pain is expressed today, it's glamorized and commercialized; equated with an exhaustive list of pseudo-real problems. You're expected to “frame” yourself. Make what you feel and do presentable. Ludicrous.

When you get specific, you've got every variation of the big problems as you have personalities. The happiest and saddest person you know could be the same person. People who are merely stressed or going through a tough time hijack the language and blur the lines between “sometimes I want to die” and “all the time, sometimes I want to die.” Sometimes you just really like to smoke weed, sometimes you don't know how you'd function “dealing with it all” without it. I wish I could recite the laundry list of things I've known people to self-medicate with, but I imagine you have a fair idea already. Can you blame them? When and why is it worth bumping the pot-head up to problem smoker?

For me, I just see them as bandages. But who's cursing a bandage for not giving the body a chance to fix itself? I certainly can't pretend to know someone else's mind, but if my concern was for more than myself, I'd want to talk about the big problems and whether there's potential for big solutions, not just go numb to it all. No, I am not trying to equate depression or anxiety medication with drugs. Nor do I necessarily expect people to look beyond themselves if what they're suffering from makes them unable to do so. I just want to separate lazy entitled bitching and indulgence from genuine pain.

And, as always, for me the best thing to counteract the waves of self-loathing and drama is to get out in front of it all. I still don't know if it doesn't work for other people because of different personality types or for lack of effort. Before I get too involved in hating or criticizing myself, it just seems easier and worthwhile to point the finger at as many obvious targets or responsible parties as possible. But mostly, I don't want you to suffer. I don't want you to feel like there's no one to talk to or no one willing to spend the time. While I'm not in your head, here's me prying open mine, take anything you like.

[333] Fools Rush In

I want to run with a more positive idea. I often refer to how people behave and what they engage in as circle-jerking. Their avoidance of fact and reality perpetuating a mental stability and happiness that throws caution to the wind and whose goal is the bad kind of selfish. Surely, from a big picture, this is all we can expect as there is no grand determined right and wrong and the idea of “holding on for dear life” is as effective as anything else. I want this to stop ringing as such a bad thing for me.

I don't so much have a problem with what people do. I don't care if you are the best heart surgeon or video game developer. I find an “equal” kind of happiness in thinking I can get my heart repaired as enjoyment from a compelling story. I would take this a step further and say that maybe finding any form of artistic expression, specialized hard fought experience that gives you a rare and valuable opinion, is one of the noblest forms of purpose.

What's really bugged me is the lack of consciousness and awareness. When you say something without the opposite of, or what would make it wrong, ringing in your mind at the same time. When you pursue things “because.” When you judge and blame, and feel everything while forgetting your responsibility or role.

It speaks to my personality. Why do I keep making the same kinds of jokes with the same “inappropriate” themes? If it gets a rise out of you, you may not be aware of the role it plays in your life. If you feel bad before you wonder why I said something, it's an opportunity. You can either learn something about me, or yourself in the context of me, or I can learn I don't necessarily want to be around you. Win win. But even when it's just delving into a person's life, it's the same search.

I don't have something deeply invested in anyone else's relationships. Maybe I want to fuck around with your girlfriend, but that plays significantly less a role in how I talk to them or what about than you'd care to believe. And don't let me pigeon hole the word relationships because I mean it to be about any and every one you choose to have. Sometimes it's a happy accident that you had the best parents or grew up with the best friend. But it doesn't have to be that way and I think it's downright destructive when you try to force something to work beyond all evidence to the contrary.

It's never been enough for me to “just do it.” I can't just have a girlfriend or just get a degree, or just own a business. It's genuinely more satisfying to rot if I don't understand my motivation. I don't quite understand the point is all. I don't understand getting invested if you don't believe in something and if you're going to believe in something, you damn well better make sure you know why. “Why” is the privilege. Why is the only thing we do that nothing else does, as far as we know. Knowing why seems to hold a special kind of dignity. This would explain why so many people claim they really do in fact know why!

You can set yourself up to do better. Musicians who just pump out albums because they can or there is some unreasonable expectation from their label surely feel the criticism from betrayed fans. Look at a Youtube channel that was brilliant in it's first 100 episodes when the 16 year old had nothing but time and creativity until they got a sponsor and had a quota. When you know why you're doing it, you know why or when you should stop. The example you leave won't be a brand, it will be your intention. You can say “because I'm an entertainer” not “because I had no choice.”

“Why” opens up the world of choice. It makes you contemplate any moment. It makes you constantly have to justify and reinforce that what you're doing is in line with who you are or how you actually think. It can obviously be a paralyzing force as well, which may not be a bad thing. Maybe you do more than hesitate to do something stupid and just decide to appreciate why you shouldn't do it. Or, of course, knowing explicitly why you did something stupid is just as satisfying.

I think a lot of people don't like the word or find an easy way to answer it because they constantly arrive at “I don't know.” As if that's a terrible thing. To not know something and at least be aware of that fact is better than charging head first into the darkness. It also can be a great place to start gathering more information so you can start knowing. I think the defensiveness kicks in about here. If you start to not really know why you believe in god, or love your partner, or pursued a career, BY GOD! WHAT ELSE DON'T YOU KNOW!? It's easy to claim something makes you happy when you haven't defined happiness or bother yourself with justifying that definition.

In this way I'm slightly worried about creativity and mass produced entertainment. I'd like to believe that you had to be “good” to start garnering an audience or leave a lasting impression. Anymore, as long as you can be talked about, it seems to suffice. You don't have the new take, the fresh look, the next big thing, or even make a fair point. Things just are or aren't “marketable.” They mesh well with this eras buzzwords. They have a look that resembles that big thing, oh you know from a month ago, but with bigger tits.

I think the more whys you answer, the more you can flesh out your personality. You can do more things that speak to your subconscious, your feels as translated through your thoughts. One of the ways I avoid staying in a perpetual state of distress and hatred is to remind myself of how little I yet know. That's frustrating in and of itself for sure, but as much as I'd love to point a million fingers, I always sink back into my gut knowing it's not the whole story. And if I can't know the whole story, what theme should it carry that makes it one worth learning from or telling?

And it's this “Human Story” that I want to contribute towards and have people take away from. I'd love to inflate the theme with air only I can blow. If I'm even remotely different, let alone different in an “important” way, whether you catch one thing I do or read everything I've ever done, I'm nothing if I'm not speaking towards why. If I'm a process it's a fools game to consider yourself with the beginning and end. I'd rather be an example than left up to interpretation. Spilling paint on a canvas isn't art. I would hope that why they did it was compelling.

[332] Cynics, Save The World

There’s utility in being a cynic. You don’t have to waste time playing pretend with the other children. When you’re government is fucked, it’s easy to recognize that it’s not in fact a democracy and there is little hope. When you see how we handle foreign relationships, you don’t have to guess that the impacts will be many and lingering. Before we get too far, it may help to have George Carlin in your head as much of this is written after a morning spent contemplating his prescriptions.

There is little I disagree with when it comes to Carlin. I don’t think we’re going to last. I think we’re addicted to things we don’t need that don’t work and don’t matter. I think this is a circus where the “happiest” amongst us look on in sheer wonder and awe at the kind of display you couldn’t ask for if you tried. He observes and reports, much of his act is memorization feats essentially word for word the astounding dialogue of our times. I think we’re infinitely selfish, in the bad way, and it’s all about squeezing whatever little satisfaction we can out of everything and everyone, consequences be damned. I think it’s every bit as bad as he states if not worse and we are in the throes of our inevitable demise.

Yet, I’m unable to detach. Maybe it’s because of my age or my wide-eyed naïve ideals. Maybe my definition of “hope” is so small and penetrated that a goal becomes so modest it’s barely a goal worth having. Sure, I want to let go and ride it out and watch, but I think in particular with me, it would have dramatically destructive consequences. Carlin can let go and feel like he needs to talk. I’d let go and start saying “I don’t see a reason not to.” But we’ve known for some time how and why I keep myself in check.

I want to believe there is a not so hidden genius in his method and advice to just detach. There’s still some level of irony in not caring about anything “but.” It’s a psychological necessity sometimes, sure, but it’s not the only, or necessarily the best means by which people are happy or found some level of contentedness. I think he knew that and that’s why he kept getting on stage. I also think he knows that when you reach rock bottom you start to figure things out in a different way. Whether you need to drop off and not care or vehemently disagree with him, you’re still going to end up in a more thoughtful and attentive place, exercising that brain he believed we’ve all taken for granted.

But let’s go back to being cynical. Only when you cut out the bullshit are you capable of identifying and addressing a situation for what it is. If you call it a problem, you’ll know better how to fix it. If you call it a shit show, you’ll know better where you want to sit. You’ll never catch me seriously wondering what a god thinks about my sex habits or the Reese’s I stole from Wal-Mart. I think you can easily assume that, but more-so, I’d be completely useless to you. I wouldn’t even accidentally come across something “new” or insightful or ever make an awesome metaphor again. You didn’t come here for bullshit…usually.

Because I haven’t just sat on my rose-colored glasses and effectively threw them into a wood chipper, I feel a sense of overall clarity even when attempting to explain my confusion. At the very least, I’m not making it up. I’m not sad or pissed off for no reason and likewise for when something feels genuinely hopeful. Carlin talked of a phrase “when you scratch a cynic you see a jaded idealist.” I think an intrinsic property of being an idealist is an inability to let go of the ideas you think will actually work. No real idealist gives up because they are painfully stuck with a brain full of ideals. It’s a burden and work. When it gets to be too much it seems to be a passive aggressive taking of the reigns to describe how you’re going to just sit back and watch it burn.

Carlin stated that he doesn’t even know if he’d be the same kind of person if he started his career today. With the kinds of technology and rapidly changing environment, who’s to say his perspective wouldn’t have been carried a little farther. When you saw something as a 20 year old in 1960 is not how I saw something as a 20 year old because I got to see what you saw when I was 15, plus 50 more examples and how and whether potential solutions played out all over the world. I can’t so easily set into “this is how it works” when I know how to change it and change it quickly.

I think it’s the cynic that knows how people think. They know what to say to make people think. They know what you feel when your thoughts take you places, and they know how you avoid them and what it would take to make you unable to avoid them. I think people recognize that they need to be saved and can’t do it themselves because they don’t have the correct language or attitude. They’re too stressed, they’re too afraid, they’re at the end of not just one horrible decision that has created a hole where adopting an “I don’t give a fuck” attitude isn’t enough. I think people say save me and the cynic says you aren’t worthy. You are the problem. You are what you’re afraid of. And who’s admitting that? Not without a smile and laugh, that is.

We will live and die by our superstitions, our allegiances to branding and the status quo. And we’ll do it slowly using soft language and remaining “decent enough” until our time runs out. This is convention and it’s why I hate convention. It’s why I’m always asking why and asking YOU why and wanting to know more. You may not care about the consequences or want the short term fix, but I’m compelled to call-out a junkie.

The nicest way I can put it is that I want the species to last for me and mine. It’s sheer ego. I want my kids happy and healthy. I want my friends recognized and admired for what they are. I want the big human middle finger staring in the empty abyss of space for as long as I can, and I want to know that it’s mine. As far as I know, I’m the only kind of thing on this planet that can appreciate what it’s flipping off. Anyone else along for the ride is just circumstance. “They” can’t be fixed, nor is “the world” broken. It’s every intention, good or bad, and if you want yours to last, that's what needs to be accounted for.

[331] It's An Acquired Taste

I’m going to run with the idea that it’s all perfectly arbitrary. There’s no reason someone should be pent up with so much rage for longer than a day or so. Therefore, it is necessary and important that I find a way to become happy again.

My difficulties awaken when I start to make judgment calls. I’d say the sliver of wisdom, and it’s only a sliver, in not judging a person is a clearer path to happier thoughts about them. I’m currently weighed down by the idea of responsibility. Really, truly, the idea of responsibility is causing stress. This begs the question, responsible for what?

The simple answer is “life.” It’s being responsible for what you do and say, who you associate with, what your hobbies are, projecting, if you have one, a message. More specifically it’s a responsibility to awareness. For example, I can comfortably say I’m an idiot just like all the other idiots save for one thing, I know how to acknowledge and admit it.

This one little difference is generally what sets me up to like you forever or constantly insist to myself that you sell not just our relationship short, but yourself in everything you do. If I didn’t think of myself as an idiot, I wouldn’t constantly write things that are rife with opportunity to get judged, picked apart, and potentially thrown back in my face. I’m asking for the controversy because I don’t want to remain an idiot.

Right now, I’m an idiot because I have all the time in the world and I’m here, writing about how I have all the time in the world and it’s not quite as I remember it. Maybe I’m languishing on thoughts about my friends, maybe I’m just not as excited to scrape and spend to get back to work, or maybe I’m too plagued by my generations’ late 80s early 90s birth window and focusing is a thing of the past. I don’t really know.

What I do know is that I’m definitely not only or specifically angry at myself. When I think of that dammed responsibility it’s a vague enough construct to apply across the board from a friend to a newscast to a very poorly worded retort on a facebook comment. It just seems like everyone (read “everyone” as the majority of people in my experience thus far, there, now I never have to say it again) is making the same error. Everyone prefers to hear and see what they want and respond in kind. They refuse to take the actual point, and do the work, to figure out what and if there is a proper response.

I can raise a concern to a friend, they can respond with the brilliance of their long term earning potential. I can watch a newscast about Treyvon Martin and am offered the reasoned and appropriate expertise of Nick Cannon. I can offer an opinion on a “funny” article online and am only met with the learned and insightful point that different people find different things funny. I sometimes feel like my head must exist in a fairy land where I expect something to make sense so often, and am so often denied, that maybe I’m just a well-functioning psychotic. That would make a handful of you people crazy too; or morbidly encouraging.

How I want to be responsible does not match up in how I currently am. It’s not to scale. That doesn’t mean I don’t hold true to me or maintain a kind of demeanor, but I know I’m failing, I know there’s more room to work than I even have words for. It makes all the little things disinteresting. Part of the reason I was so motivated to learn everything I could about science/god stuff was the mission of going out and trying to celebrate reason and evidence and see about changing a lot of bad ideas. But it doesn’t just have to be your faith that you’re intractable about and there is no persuading the persistent fairy tale teller.

My cynicism or mean jokes is the “best” way I’ve come up with to express just how darkly I see the world. Your happiness, to me, is a selfish trip doing the best you can to forget that you don’t really have a functioning country, people die all the time for no reason, you don’t really give a shit and the hopeless feeling you get when you have to give a shit propels you ever farther towards what feels good. It so often gets characterized as preachy, but thinking about this shit really does start to fuck with me! Shocked?

Not only can I barely do anything about it, I’m seemingly the only one who’s frequently plagued by it. I’m the only one who can’t allow himself the kind of reckless abandonment that marginalizes things until they *somehow* get better later. I feel like I see people cheating. It’s too easy. They adhere to a construct for stability in a world unstable. They adorn laurels of praise and reinforcement from people who never expected otherwise; as if there’s dignity and wisdom hidden away in repeating the same failed experiments.

In one way, I’m not trying to shit all over your happiness, but in an increasingly depressing manner I really really do want to shit all over your happiness. I find myself envying not what people have, but their ability to put what I can’t aside. Oh what it would be to have the ability to focus on one small thing like a lover or job. If only I was content to be Joe Blue-Collar or even Burnout Benny, everyone’s favorite druggie friend!

I can’t get the conversations I want because just referencing the topic generally makes people defensive. I can’t get the solutions I want because they either take a fuck ton of time and/or money, and a lot of speculation and chance regarding the future. I certainly am not “happening upon” an intense and intelligent debate about any topics, let alone one’s I may have something to contribute to. It just gets old. Of course I could find a corner of the internet to satiate any flatly intellectual itching, but it’s not enough. I’m not just a fact reader. I don’t understand things merely as a collection of web pages or scholarly articles.

The only way I find myself being able to justify anything is to accept that it’s all perfectly arbitrary. That it simply doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, outside of what you do or don’t think about it. There’s no moral imperative, responsibility is funny, and to stress out and think about anything besides the lengths of your self-determination is the height of folly. The only glaring problem with this is how it makes zero sense if you want or have kids, or friends, or find yourself enjoying the endless spoils from those you’ll never know. It’s simply, even if you can’t do much, you can at least think and talk. It can’t just be the responsibility of the “activists” or “smart people who will figure it out eventually.”

I crave a kind of feedback that hints at tearing down peoples’ worlds. They don’t like that, because after all, look what it does to me. I guess it’s time to draw up a lengthy analogy about the taste of beer.

[330] Problem Solved

Is it even possible to fix a problem?

As I find myself writing, still deeply rooted with the thought that I do not have real problems, I find that I don’t give myself really any credit in having this disposition. I didn’t have real problems when I was ridiculously broke, and I have even less real problems now that I have the money to restart business and live fairly comfortably for another year.

I’m intrigued by how often people get angry at this prospect. I’m also intrigued by how often they get angry that I expect things from people and my relationships. Furthermore, their anger over and insistence upon telling me I’m in denial is flatly amazing. It appears that many people simply don’t want to be better and are insulted at the presumed insinuation. I don’t know why.

Surely I’ve become “better” over time. Whether it’s with a calmer reaction or more information, it’s hard to argue that yelling and swinging solve things just as well. I find when I read old blogs that if my actions don’t change the meaning they take on grows under different lights. I’d say it’s precisely this that has mitigated much of the heartache concerning how and what to think of my friends. I’m still working on translating that to the whole of humanity.

The denial charge I find most insidious. It’s sickeningly ironic. Even when I try to invent problems or bitch about a circumstance, they just don’t resonate as real. More so, they aren’t mine. I didn’t hijack a truck, pop a tire, and burn through $50 worth of gas. I had to alleviate the situation, but it wasn’t mine. I didn’t choose that, that happened to me; it happened in and around my world. I don’t deny I wasn’t having a terrible amount of fun in fixing it. I also know how it felt, and continues to feel, having resolved it; this extending on from the moment it was resolved. I still ate, hit the gym, and Kristen’s in my bed. It wasn’t a real problem.

The “hot conversation” I got in about what I expect from people and what I expect from myself as “people” was the next most confusing. I won’t say it was structured or had much of a point besides tipsy squabbling, but what I remember most was a point about “well people don’t act that way.” I think we initially got into it because I got the usual eye roll and “pfft” noise about how an open relationship works. In any event, it quickly derailed and I honestly have no real memory of why.

All I took away was that I had been in that conversation many times before; not because there was a discernible topic by any means, but because I knew the second nothing could be conceded or taken for what it meant, instead of what it meant personally, it had nowhere to go from that onset. It’s unfortunate, but it was easier to navigate when there was nothing to lose. Surely voices didn’t have to rise, but who even knew such a scenario was even to play out until it was upon us? It couldn’t be “fixed” with anything but reflection. I read “tomato soup” and all I got was worms.

But this speaks to the nature of all my not real problems. My circumstances allow for an endless stream of misfired conversation starters. But I didn’t walk into someone’s house with derogatory comments and a misunderstood position, my voice raised to a level of expectation met only by the utmost polite and tranquil engagement this side of Downton Abbey. I suppose as “best” I can, I simply try not to be those kinds of problems. I create the problems I want. I’ll have the same conversation time and again to my frustration for the last sordid soul on Earth who actually came prepared to have it. I’ll drop of something of relative value in a semi-sketchy situation and take the damn car keys with me next time.

My “problem” comes in the form of what I’m willing to do, not what happens to me. Most of the time simply choosing fixes it just fine. A lot of my solutions come the same way except I didn’t die and give me money; that was my grandma. She helped create the conditions, influenced an environment so that I could keep not having real problems. Maybe once I get big enough or people read my voice in the English that it’s speaking they’ll start to figure out why they want me to have their anger and their problems. It’s not even that I don’t want them. I just can’t even accept them with the significance you need them to have. I can’t take and fix what’s not mine. You can shape someone’s world, but you can’t dictate their disposition.

[329] Who is En Nui Nui

A round of reading old blogs later….

I can chase a rabbit no problem. I want to assert a more specific goal. I simply want to experiment. The underlying motivation will be for global change, none too specific, but with the idea of things getting better. I want to explore a ton of vague-ish ideas and to pull any number of conjectures I can and put them under a spotlight.

My robot blog reminds me I’m only as good as the information I get. My “past love” blogs remind me of how easy it is to be retarded. A hundred or so on perspective tell me there needs to be more words for the word perspective. But all of my ramblings, for better or worse, are part of the experiment. I follow where my head goes at the time and cross my fingers. I have to take for granted that when people are doing things, retarded or otherwise, they’re doing just as much experimenting as me.

It’s why I really try not to make things personal. I need to draw analogies to grasp things. I, in some form or another, care about your lives and every new piece of information is a launch pad. I think I come across as “having all the answers” when I really only have many of them. ::wink:: The only reason to even talk in such terms would be to see how individuals sway a group. Patterns rule my life, and I’m sure it applies to when I make presumptive errors.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of people needing drama. How much of our perceived issues in the world are part of the fake fog of bullshit that isn’t really there for anything but boredom? How many problems are created when your resolve others? Maybe alone is significantly worse than “someone” for many people in a relationship and the idea of “being your full self” is an utterly foreign concept. Maybe there’s a ground floor act required regardless of the social or power systems that undermines ideas of change to begin with. Things I will need to collect more information about and experiment with.

I think I’m preparing myself to feel “less burdened.” That isn’t to say I don’t need to move fast, don’t care, have grown to accept, or anything resembling complacency. I think I’ve just become overwhelmed with the infinite potential for further answers and exploration, even amidst things that were easier to take for granted. I want to take more things with a grain of salt, not because I think they’re even good, but because I want to try to understand them even further. I think it’ll help slow me down as well and hopefully preempt these headaches.

[328] Good Gooder Best

Lately, I feel like I’ve been watching people set themselves up to fail. Maybe not today, maybe not even in the next couple years, but almost certainly eventually. If I look at my parents, it took them like 10-12 years to get divorced. You people realize that my general audience for these things that’s half their lives? They were a child maybe just getting into middle school and it took from the time they were born until then for my parents to figure out that their marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

 I’m not ragging on them for trying; I just want you to feel time. I want you to have a sense of how long things can go right or how long something wrong can take to unravel. When I talk to people who’ve gotten divorced or who’ve just been in long term relationships and see little choice otherwise, it’s a common theme. There’s the comfort and familiarity of the situation. There’s maybe a financial concern or kids involved. There are questions of what friends and family will think or how they’ll react.

 I think it’s not so much about separating a good from a bad relationship. It’s pretty easy to collectively wag our fingers at abuse or emotional manipulation. I want to make bigger lines between “good” “gooder” and the “best” kinds of relationships. Because I see plenty of good relationships that try to happily float past the very bad things that cause a lot of heartache and stupid things to happen over time. I also think there are different emotional states that predicate whether you find yourself in one of these categories or another.

When I first thought I was “in love” I would have done anything to be with that person. She was all I could think about. I wanted to change any and everything about me to make it work. It was hell, but it was absolutely the best kind of hell I could imagine. Even though at the time I knew I was an idiot, I definitely wasn’t an idiot! How could I be when it all just made so much sense? You’re not me, you can’t know, agree or I’m going to write off what you think and keep dreaming about her.

You know what would have happened if I got with her? Because I think it would have been terrible. After a while I would realize all the changes I made weren’t really me. I’d have a million little itches about how real life wasn’t living up to the fantasy. I would have made decisions early on that had everything to do with “us” and nothing necessarily to do with common sense or what’s best for me. But I was a kid. I got caught by the evolutionary drive that has made me one of the most recent incarnations of a billion year process to find someone overwhelming, knock them up, and throw caution to the wind.

When I think about that and compare it to what Kristen and I have, it’s like night and day. I craved, I was desperately in love. Now I have a constant hug and reminder, kisses I can constantly reflect on. Back then I struggled and contemplated every little thing I did. Now I get to just express myself and not stress out that any little thing is going to change what’s so naturally affirming. I was dishonest to myself and to what I could probably be to the girl in the past. I can’t think of a single thing I wouldn’t tell or haven’t told Kristen, and I don’t like how I could’ve been persuaded that something less than that would have ever worked. I hate the word love because I believe in something better than it. For me to care about her is so “duh” it’s effortless.

The transition from make-out buddy at a party, to spending time talking, to spending the night, to spending basically every night, to the first whispers throwing around that stupid L word took like 2 years. I made sure she knew that I wasn’t around to take advantage, I wasn’t about monogamy and don’t have too many feelings beyond general anger or general happiness. This never had her judging or making excuses for my views. She’s even said she would’ve been happy to get in a relationship sooner in order to feel special to someone. This we both identify as that trap where feelings begin to trump reality.

This is what I want for my friends. I don’t want them to be in good relationships, I want them to know they have someone in their life they can “take for granted.” Think healthy parent who always looks out for their child type taken for granted, not "I can do anything I want and you'll stick around." The second you pretend that those overwhelming lovey-dovey feelings at the start of a relationship mean something “magical” or “more than anyone else can appreciate” you’re setting yourself to ignore how much work it’s taking you to maintain. You’re ignoring what your parents can’t anymore that keeps them upset. It’s a wide brush to paint with the word “good” but it doesn’t mean you’re getting to be everything you are, only better, because you’re in that relationship.

Because that’s what I am; I’m better in light of her. It’s not “if only we could talk more things would be perfect.” “If only her jealousy wasn’t out of hand.” “If only I didn’t have to keep that part of my life or what I think secret.” “I wish this one (x) thing could just be a pinch more (y) and man would this be great.” She helps me better understand and express myself, and I’m fairly certain the feeling’s mutual. We don’t just get along, I didn’t just need a nice girl to sleep next to, and no amount of fucking around puts her out of my mind. You should think nothing less of yourself or the people you’re with.

Keep in mind this is a metric you should apply to any relationship in your life. I know which of my friends help me be a better me and which ones sort of almost play along until we stop sharing mutual friends. I recognize when you “struggle” to relate to something I’m saying or maybe just find it easy to pigeonhole where I’m coming from. Ironically I’ve had deep, insightful, and honest conversations with them in the past, but then something changes and it’s easy to get written off. I keep holding a candle for what was I guess. I think it has something to do with reading blogs like these as personal attacks and not opportunities to wonder why and if something sticks.

I see so many regretful old faces. It’s what could have been, who they once were, what they had to sacrifice. Whether you got knocked up early, ran your whole life from your fears, or spent too long finding the words for what you knew in your gut, I never want you to have the forlorn “back when I was this person” face. It’s not that people shouldn’t change you it’s that you shouldn’t let them stop you. You shouldn’t get used to it, you shouldn’t have to hide, and you shouldn’t ignore the details. Getting bogged down by societal or family or ill-conceived personal expectations closes the best door. There’s nothing like being understood and appreciated for who you really are.

[327] Just Be In The Know

I feel like before I die I should ever be striving to convey what I consider to be the truth of my disposition. Foremost because I think it has longstanding implications for your disposition. I don’t want people to be confused. I don’t want you to read my other despotic or seemingly judgmental blogs with the wrong back drop. There’s just a fundamental state I maintain that I think needs to be celebrated.

I have no problems. I don’t hesitate to type it. When I’m bitching about your relationship or life or some confusion, it amounts to “existential angst.” I cannot complain. Another idea I’d like to beat into the ground and restate in everything I ever write; I have peaked. I’m healthy, fed, and intellectually quelled with a roof over my head. I do and always remember my place in lieu of the rest of the world.

The problem is in how people perceive this. You get a lot of jealousy. Like, “why the fuck do you think you’re so happy!?” And I think this has everything to do with missing the point. I call life a game. It’s an exercise. It’s a learning experience. It’s the consequences of cause and effect. It’s not about me, or you, or any one thing you want to base you pathetic conception on. I have fun with it. I play with it. I know that if it were over tomorrow, I was playing the game I wanted to play.

It’s what I hope to change when I get more influence. I want more people to realize that no one is like you. Your perspective has something important for the world at large. No one is going to sound like me. While there are business leaders I idolize and comedians that speak so closely to what I would say on stage, nobody says it or does it like me. Therefore, my message and method is important and has consequence and can impact in potentially significant ways provided I’m speaking to what we all know and think, but speaking to it in my way.

I wish you would think of your life as not having problems. It’s such an unnecessary burden to bog your day or psyche down with bullshit that doesn’t speak to anything. Like, if I feel anxiety, it’s about how I’m going to react to something. Do I beat the ever loving fuck out of you or make a smart ass comment or maybe just shut the fuck up and turn away. I’m not genuinely worried about anything. I’m more concerned with the message I sent and the conception I’d have to defend about myself given a scenario.

I just can’t wait. I really can’t wait. Provided I don’t up and die randomly in a car crash, I cannot wait for the stage. The opportunity to be me or speak me or lay it out like I’m desperately waiting to hear it be said will be a fucking thrill. And I hope I have you laughing. I hope the mother fuckers that know me are like “haha I bet he..OH SHIT HE JUST and are cracking their shit up while the world spends their time judging and re-characterizing. I’d get off on the idea of confusing the fuck out of people or rattling the cages of those not in the know.

It’s around the fucking corner. Get excited.

[326] Right In The Feels

I want to be right! It’s the only thing I want besides all those other things. I want to know when I say something it carries weight. I want to see the consequences of my actions. I want to have a grasp on the situation that sees 10 ways out when all you’re looking at is the gun. It’s insatiable. I’ll never be right about enough things. When I get something right it’s like a drug. It’s the power of understanding. It can surprise you! I love the idea of potentially being right about things I can’t even be consciously aware of yet. Right is right. Wrong is wrong.

There is a right way to convey information. When you pick an end, you can tailor the metric by which that information is heard. Peoples’ perception of your tailoring will claim you are wrong. They aren’t aware there is a right way to listen. Maybe your joke didn’t land; that doesn’t mean you don’t know how to tell a joke. If the joker cares more about the laugh than the message, he can learn your language. If you don’t need to laugh in order to grasp what he’s saying, now you’re getting somewhere.

We’re forced to deal with consequences. It becomes harder and harder to claim it was a joke when you’re addressing a crowd whose language you ought to understand. That is, any reasonable person doesn’t stand up to give a commencement speech at a black college and toss around the word nigger genuinely expecting people to give him a chance and just listen a little closer to the innate hilarity. He’s downright desperately wrong in his acceptance of the consequences of words under specific circumstances.

It’s in the consequences, the science of cause and effect if you will, that I want to be right. Socially, I want to be generally right, pragmatically I want to be calculably right, and personally, I want to be infallible. Clearly, we should define what that infallibility would look like. I base my life on rules that were hard-fought and hopefully overtly rational. For one of them to change, it should be quite the argumentative spectacle.

For example, who’s lining up to persuade me otherwise that people should be healthy? Of course, someone will play the small mind and say something to the effect that “healthy doesn’t quite mean healthy.” And we’ll merrily skip away from the point. Someone will say “look over here at my mentally-challenged brother, which my family loves unconditionally!” Seemingly unaware of the slighted mockery they’ve just made of the situation. No doubt we’ll hear from way left field something to the effect of “if people don’t get sick, how are they supposed to die?”

Along with my premise of peoples’ health being a “should,” an “ought,” and a “go fuck yourself if you could possibly think otherwise” there are natural tie-ins related to what that idea rightly means. It means we should not have poisonous food, or poisonous water, or poisonous air. It means that there are consequences that overwhelmingly people don’t like when they get sick. It acknowledges the reality, ubiquity, and severity of sickness unchecked. It’s as obvious as it is accessible and relatable. That is, if you accept the right definition of healthy.

I think, the blanket statement “people should be healthy” is a right one. “We’ll eliminate suffering due to illness” is a wrong statement. I point this out because people begin to expect outlandish and over-reaching things. To advocate health is not to cultivate a God-complex. But that’s what people will think you are doing, and then it will become about everything besides health.

So try. Shake me from my premise with a brilliant argument and I might change my mind, just be careful the moment I do I’m not dropping the vials of Ebola I’ve been juggling. If you, as a reasonable person maintained on my friend list, were persuaded after the first line and think this is carrying on far too long. I AGREE! But this cumbersome joke of a conversation we get dragged into by long-winded bloggers with more opinions than hairs on their head is why nothing changes. There are, in fact, lawyers that argue health doesn’t quite mean health. There have been people, at a microphone in public, who’ve asked if we perfect technology and can keep people alive, how they’ll ever be expected to die.

It’s hard to be right about something. It’s respectable because it takes work that you can’t fake. People don’t contemplate a bullshitter, they suffer through what’s been forced into their heads. If you’re the victim of a “brilliant” ad campaign and have genuinely longed for some piece of something and it made you sad not to get it, you’ve suffered a bullshitter. If you’ve “never found the right person” because no one can live up to what it takes to understand you or make you feel like a princess, you’ve suffered a bullshitter. You’re no more a man because you drive a big American truck than you are because you shave with 5 razors instead of 1. I hope to be contemplated, not suffered.

There is a right way to think about being right and wrong. Black and white doesn’t exist, but blacker and whiter become clearer the more specific you get. An individual pixel doesn’t tell you this word is white.

Yes, we live in a complex ecosystem with trillions upon trillions of externalities no matter what corner of the existence you want to look. All of it has a history. All of it lives or dies by ideas. It is right to accept the consequences of history and ideas.

One time a guy thought we should get rid of all the Jews (and a few others). This is a patently ridiculous idea that actually made The Holocaust and has been mirrored towards different sects around the world through to modern times. Why? We try to understand it in daft terms like “one day one guy wanted to kill Jews.”

It’s right to analyze political structure, and human psychology, and economies, and incentives, and fear, and opportunism, and every little thing that contributes to a big picture. You have to remember those things don’t go away. An argument from a textbook or quote from “touted smart fuck Ph.D.” does not negate the many windows you can open to let in common sense.

I get tired of feeling like a forlorn fan-girl when I hear people speak, rather eloquently, about shit that’s just obvious. I don’t need a doctor to tell me we should save seeds or a Harvard professor to explain all the bad things that can happen when you don’t hold people accountable. There is no legal argument to be made that makes me believe my vote should amount to how much money I make or that I’m still in a representative democracy.

It’s like we can’t just be “human” anymore when all I know how to do is rightly discern the implications of acting like one. You can’t just live. You can’t just eat and drink. You can’t trust that people will do what’s best, because what’s best has nothing to do with humanity and everything to do with indulgence and predation. We’re too big. It’s not just the litany of ideas but the overwhelming inability to understand what they’re doing to the world around you. It is right to think there are many things wrong with our circumstances. People have done, are willing, and are currently doing you wrong and I don’t even know exactly what it’ll take to change it. And would you look at that, I found my own good argument to feel sick.

[325] Talkin' Bout My Mo-ti-va-ti-on

Let’s talk motivation. Say you’re interviewing a psychopathic killer. If they worked for the mob, their reasons to kill can range from “he pissed me off” to “I was getting paid.” There isn’t an emotional component; it’s simply about what they were expected to do or what they were going to get out of it. But, say your killer is the Iceman, who has a clear emotional attachment to his family. He can choke a guy out over his back and not bat an eye, but the idea of not being with his family while in prison makes him tear up.

I want to know why people are so pushed to go places in their heads. Why is the brain so segmented into seemingly non-overlapping parts? Where did I go and why did I choose to be so motivated to learn about something in the past? How and why does that motivation change with new information, and are those changes good, bad, or arbitrary?

I’m dreading the idea of getting a normal job and working all the time despite my bigger motivation to make and save money. When I look at my capacity, I’m not allowed to doubt myself. Now, I understand Jay-Z believes it ain’t about where you been it’s about where you goin, but if I start pretending I know where I’m going, things are just going to get messy. I’m a conditional being after all, with maybe the worst case of presumptive intentional ego and free will that can exist.

It’s just the clarity with a goal in mind is unmistakable. You don’t read, you search and prepare an argument. You don’t talk, you persuade. You don’t suggest, you order, and people listen. It’s brilliant. I think what might put me back in that mode is currently a goal that feels out of reach. At least, out of reach if I’m to go about getting it while also adhering to a set of conditions that tend to bode happiness and are fairly easy to defend. Let that shit go and I’m practically a slave were it not for all the money I’d be making.

The “emotional” component to my motivation is more of an invigoration. It’s not “this makes me happy.” It’s cycling through the laundry list of implications and potential and never being able to shut it off. It’s something I know I can use to motivate or educate other people. It’s the precursor disposition for what’s needed to dramatically change someone.

Is it worth it to “mock” that for something that simply isn’t worthy? By what “right,” if we’re to believe in such things and maintain a semblance of order and respectability, do I subject that or ignore that or hand it over to the highest bidder? No one will value my time like I do, so why should I play along? I think I might just have a big problem with a limited perspective on ANYTHING else I could do to find a work around. Problem being, everyone else seems to be out of ideas as well. There’s a million ways to make money and spend time, there’s like a handful of ways to do it correctly.

How you define what’s correct is all about what you decide to obligate yourself towards. If killing people equaled a paycheck, sure you got what you wanted and didn’t get caught, but it’s hard to say you got the money in the right way. Is “killing yourself,” or at the very least suffocating or ignoring ideas for money, worth it? See Wall Street, or lawyers.

My concern is the realm of ideas, and I’m supposed to knowingly trample on mine and expect people to find good reason to stick behind theirs? I’d have a kill switch against anything I’ve ever advocated for at the level of mind. Talking myself into a shitty situation is not the same thing as acknowledging “how things are” and it is likely better to consider something as beyond the reach of my circumstance than capacity.

The clichés don’t work. Persistence is most likely to get you somewhere, it’s not guaranteed. Every one person you see loving what they do, there’s thousands who didn’t know what else they were going to be able to. It’s not enough to be smart or motivated. It’s not enough to be nice or genuine. There’s a whole world to contend with. The day I “get my shot,” which is a horribly small way to state it given the circumstances I was born into, it will be because someone with a little (or lot) more money sees that I’m a workhorse or have thought a lot about something. I’ll be only and just as good as when I threw on ankle weights to run through and clean theaters.

And then what? I do something that catches on and I run the media circuit? Two idiots in Colorado get to put all the tv channels on their budget web page because they’ll cook you a burrito and clean up after a party. Brilliant entrepreneurs? I bet you’re dying to look up their interviews on Youtube this second. Or maybe I just do something personally gratifying. Let’s cross our fingers I’ve got a moral core in tune with what will also logically and calculably account for the positive change I bring the planet. This, just so it can inevitably change again. Because who knows if we’ll ever decide to cement things like honesty or accountability into our culture for good.

I can’t seem to find those middle ground people. Ones who start with a philosophy but don’t ignore what may be required practically. You either get hippies or whatever it is “normal” people say and do. Or you get people with excellent advice if we pretend they didn’t have a giant backdrop to suggest, provide, and work in for their “insight” that isn’t always readily available or scalable to your problem.

Keep in mind, I’ve all but signed away everything but the memory of a flame on the candle I hold in my heart for humanity. That could change, but it doesn’t seem like it will any time soon. It’s only the sheer weight of demoralizing sadness with the idea I can’t shake off. Lucky me.

[324] Is There Anybody In There?

So it’s not so much about pursuing happiness as it is about avoiding suffering. To avoid something is to put it outside of your mind or turn it into something different. Avoidance typically plays out in some form of denial, but when it’s projected, it’s dramatically trying to shape the context to fit some form of twisted logic. I think you only do this when you are haunted by your logic engine of a brain. Every time you turn your key and expect your car to start or pick your nose ever assured you’ll get a booger, your mind is using that logic. Cause and effect is always in play and you can recall familiar circumstances.

Denial serves a purpose; it has much utility. There are a million different things at any one time we’d like to think are not true. We know what it looks like. Maybe you have a parent that refuses to accept something fundamental about your personality. Maybe you have a friend who’s in a ridiculous relationship under the hypnosis of superficial bells and whistles. Maybe you reassure yourself every day because what other choice do you have?

I’m a bad messenger. I have something that I, capital K, Know about everyone. It is the only reason I, when I try, always get what I want, it’s the only reason I know how to make you mad, and it’s the only thing that’s ever given me power over tear ducts. I just can’t seem to convince everyone that they know it too.

What I Know makes me cynical. I know relationships are conditional, often convenient, and not a fairy tale. I know how good you feel, I know what questions are struggled with; I know what things you should be doing and saying and feeling in a good one. You do to.

I Know what it’s like to try to believe in God. I know what it is to question, resolve myself to fate, and be afraid of what I’ve done or said. I know what it’s like to want to fit in with a “chosen” crowd or having some kind of divine understanding. I know I’ve never heard or seen a sign, never felt the love, nor have been moved by some other-worldly force. You do to.

You know what’s likely and unlikely. You know enough about human psychology and different ways people feel or expression emotion. And if you don’t know, you know Google exists and friends who have been there exist, and every day you spend not addressing or thinking about something is a lost opportunity.

I feel like in the event there is no hope for humanity, if we’re patently too dumb and too populated to enact any real form of change or longevity, I want to ride it out on a wave of honesty. And if it isn’t yet honest, I want the idea to be pursuing the honesty. 

This plays out in different ways. It’s someone asking me “how ya doing?” at work and I say “not terribly well working here!” Only to meet a disappointed face because I acknowledge my job is reinforcing poor peoples’ alcoholism. It’s conversations with friends where I’ll double down on a ridiculous statement or mean sentiment because it’s infuriating and hurts to see things change for stupid reasons or to struggle on behalf of dismissing stupid comments as any well-adjusted and understood group of people should be able to do. I really do blame my friends if they go home sad or angry that I called them a pussy for something as trivial as not drinking. We clearly need to better understand each other, or we’re clearly not really friends. I think it bugs people I don’t mind pushing it. If I was upset by something, I’d bring it up with the person. The onus is on me.

But to care about friends is to suffer. To want the best while you watch them be too human, too much like the rest of the world is painful. It’s worse when you recall moments or nights when you were on the brink of something new. When you remember the first time you thought to yourself, “you know, I kinda like you, I think we’ll get along alright.” And it isn’t just about friends. It doesn’t matter what you care about, you’re asking to get hurt, and you’re walking a fine line regarding how you define and relate your situation.

I prioritize things very deliberately. It’s the only reason I ever hold my tongue. It explicitly dictates where I spend my time. In order to do this, I have to be more than comfortable defending the reasons I laid things out in that order. I need to be principled. I need to have rules that, when shaken, still speak to the overall intent. It’s why I’m overly concerned with the idea of “circle-jerking.”

You could argue that life is fundamentally a circle-jerk, and you’ll probably see my nodding along for most of it. I’m not referring to circumstantial jerking, I’m talking about choices. People get together because they’re horny meat sacks intrinsically programmed to not feel bad and get fucked circumstantially, but you choose to stay in a, not-quite-right, situation for longer than you needed to learn your lesson.

For me, it’s an exercise thinking of the myriad of things I could potentially do to speak to my ideas. If I care that we have homeless people, I could work at a food bank. Have I really done anything beyond self-gratifying? A trained monkey can put food on a tray and I arrest my perspective and motivation between an apron and hairnet. Do I hand out eco light bulbs because “every little thing counts” no matter how much I know it doesn’t? Do I go back to school and get specialized degrees because “a specific amount of money will guarantee something” even though it absolutely won’t? It’s circle-jerking.

I don’t need to be loud over a microphone because I’m so fly or so different; I need to by saying something. I don’t really care about your day unless your day made you think about all your other days and what it might do to your days in the future. I don’t want to argue because I don’t care and I don’t want to defend because I prefer to stand and clarify instead of cower. I’m not “passionate” about anything that doesn’t speak to how things actually work and I want to learn how to breed novelty so it can inform a perspective. I need to prove myself right, and I need to know that the language in which I do so you are able to translate.

I didn’t feel like I was circle-jerking in trying to keep my schedule open to hang out with friends. I wanted memories. I wanted shared experiences and to keep replaying the best parties and to allow people to keep being “kids” for as long as possible. Part of me feels like I failed, but another acknowledges that I didn’t go out of my way to manipulate. It just feels like there would be something to regret in washing my hands of these people, but I’m not positive that “something” is universally acknowledged or felt.

I legitimately believe the world is doomed. I don’t want to believe it, but I do. I think it has nothing to do with people being evil, but I do think it has to do with them being in a bubble. In a bubble is where you can deny. In a bubble is where you can disavow. In a bubble you can paint anything you want on the inside to obscure what’s happening outside. I think “smart” people are easy to lose in their mental masturbation and interpersonal anxiety. I think dumb people are fundamentally overgrown scorned children who society gives license to unleash their demons after 18 short years. I think the distance you experience with any person or them to any topic is the bubble inflating. It gets bigger and bigger and only deflates when they honestly acknowledge they’re suffocating.

Lately, it’s been really hard to breathe.

[323] Picture Perfect Perspective

It’s important for me to know my priorities. Your perspective shapes everything. This is really an idea that I can’t belabor enough. It can change as quickly as your environment or it can remain as steadfast as your “thoroughly” thought out ideas. I have religious friends who will believe in God, despite all evidence or reason otherwise, and it shapes their attitudes and behavior seemingly as dramatically as a clear and present danger. They are entirely different people because of one idea. But that’s the thing. I don’t think they really are. I think your perspective is rooted in something deeper that gets hijacked. I think when you are aware of this hijacking it’s hard to take any one view about things overwhelmingly seriously.

I think there are main-stage ideas that pull off a hijacking better than others. These include being beholden to the ideas of your parents, getting into a relationship, believing in a god, extremism in any sense, and falling victim to present hedonism. It’s the last one I’m concerned with because it seems to be the setting of the “phase shift” that all of my old friends are going through. It’s a shift I warned about in however many blogs ago.

It can certainly get old. Whether it is doing certain things or spending too much time or thinking too long, a craving to change takes root. There’s something of a psychological need when it pertains to happiness, there’s a hedonistic want that shapes your decision to change as the “right” one regardless of how you came to that conclusion. It’s the thing where the excuses come from. This is where the lapses in memory reside. I certainly understand this want. I mean, who’s more presently hedonistic than me?

I don’t mind or care if people want to split up and travel around the world or seek certain kinds of jobs. I practice a certain kind of detachment from things that doesn’t make me message or text every friend that’s moved away to remind them of my undying love and affection. Not that I don’t appreciate hearing from someone who’s been thinking about me. I just don’t want my point to get confused when I go further. I don’t mean to force together some idiotic hippie love nest theoretical future model of togetherness. I’m not trying to be deliberately naïve to the wants and needs of other people. I just want to lean on an idea that there are significantly more options when you allow them for yourself.

I picked, for example, to live relatively cheaply, work a form of denigrating job just enough to not go crazy, try to make it to every hang out time and party, and fill in the free time with TV shows, reading, music or other practices. Whether intentional or not, I’ve talked to people who would frame this as “rotting away” in a college town trapped in a sea of retarded college kids. My perspective tells me that I will remember almost every day I spend at the park with my friends in a way that I won’t stacking beer in a cooler. My perspective has informed me of the amount of money I can potentially make when I sacrifice all my time towards some goal, and I’ve learned that I don’t want to spend that much time unless I have to or am thoroughly enjoying whatever it is I’m working on.

My perspective is also shaped by too much news and too many conversations. It really does, as odd as it seems to come across to most people, always weigh on my mind just how much I really have in comparison to the rest of the world. If I rotted away for the rest of my life in this town at a shitty job engaging with infuriating people, it would still be one of the best lives that anyone who’s ever existed has ever lived.

This doesn’t mean I don’t want “more,” I mean, I’m American. It just means I don’t feel a level of angst or maybe sadness when things don’t go my way. Of course I’m not just happy to sit and wait, but there seems to be some form of existential trauma going on with people who didn’t get into grad school or who can’t find the perfect job.

Why I advocate so heavily on behalf of keeping the relationships or surrounding yourself in friends is because that’s worked for me. If I manage to feel something it’s on those “perfect” days or perfect parties or hilarious string of jokes bullshitting with friends or breaking in new personalities. I understand relationships change and people grow apart, but that’s different from forcing yourselves apart to power through your individual forms of hell.

How much of what you expect from yourself comes from “you” and how much is beaten into you by society or some comparison to someone else?

If no one told you that you had to be a certain level of “smart” what would you be interested in? If no one painted a 2 story house with attached garage and a dog as an American Ideal, would you be dramatically upset about not having something resembling it? When I think about doing things to “better myself” it’s in better understanding my relationships. I understand that other people have other metrics, but I promise you, no amount of things I own or far in advance I pay my rent will ever speak to how I conceive of my capacity.

It’s for this reason that when I see relationships failing or being redefined in negative terms for no other reason than distance, I’m skeptical you are doing yourself any favors digging your heals into your new environment. It’s the same skepticism when you get into a relationship because you’re desperately lonely. It’s the same skepticism that tries to keep these blogs indirectly direct so that if you feel something resonate, I didn’t try to tell you how you feel, but hopefully I’m actually speaking to what you feel.

We’re constantly trying to prove things to ourselves, but doing so without keeping in mind the environment we’re working in seems to be destructive. This doesn’t mean to work up the best excuses using a “modern times” theme to arrest action, it means when you send out hundreds of applications and get 2 call backs to less than ideal jobs or schools, it really has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the shitty infrastructure you’re working in. It means when I don’t do them same thing as you and don’t meet the same kind of disappointment, I was sold on how little was out there earlier and it’s shaped my choices.

I just want you to know why you’re moving away. I want you to see every detail for why or if a relationship has to change. I want you to really feel what the difference is when the balance between friendships and money or time spent in different environments has shifted. I say often that I’m not terribly interested in traveling outside of the novelty and social experimentation because I know wherever I go, damn there I am. And who am I without my relationships to reflect it back?

[322] Better Than My Last Title

I think every living entity is an extension of the universe trying to understand itself.

This is why I have no real conception of right and wrong outside of a specific context. I think every little particle and mystical thing you can say about every individual cell or network of particles we consist of speaks to something so magnificently grandiose that it’s hilarious and the height of folly to pretend like, as the subjects, we’ll understand like the experimenter.

No. this doesn’t mean I believe in a god. This means I think reality is so unbelievably and ridiculously nuanced and convoluted that at most we’ll ever be able to do is “heal the world” or “developed a perpetuating species.”

It sounds vague, vein, egotistical, and cunty when I, at some seriously creepy and fuck me level, feel like I have nothing left to learn. Knowledge is never complete. I don’t mean that I genuinely understand everything. I simply mean, I don’t know what else I need to live a happy or fulfilled life nor what I’d wish for other people.

I regard myself as a relative sociopath. Once you swallow that you get to think about how I manage to have brilliantly amazing friends, a girl more than merely worth “love’ in my life and all the things that come along with being kinda cute and kinda smart. It’s not a secret that you should live for other people, that you should care and sacrifice and worry about and invest and bloody hell make the people you believe in the center of your world.

Everything just feels obvious.

Just because you have a stupid opinion doesn’t mean it isn’t a position an inquisitive and infinitely unbiased universe can’t or wouldn’t want to consider. It’s impossible to judge, no matter how much cheap gratification I will likely continue getting from doing so the rest of my life.

Of course I’m comfortable. Of course I’m taken care of. Of course there are people in my life I can rely on. Of course I can manage. Of course I’m smart enough to “fix” something.

KISS…keep is simple you fucking retard. Kiss. So much is involved with a kiss. Make your message a kiss. Let it be known and proud. Bring other people to the moment. Let it excite and let it linger. Make them laugh and crave and push for more. Put your neck into it! Wish for the awkward and hard so your path can become that much clearer. Double down when they think it’s time to pull away.

Everyone’s a fucking poet. Anyone wanna help me figure out how the fuck I’m to go about doing what all I mean?

[321] In The Jungle

Maybe I go positive. My friends are all smart and motivated; of course they will find jobs or areas to live in that will make them exceedingly happy. Any time there’s been a problem there have been conversations abound that recalculate what it means to appreciate and enjoy each other. Isn’t there something or another about forgiveness and trust that you can say about your best friends? Whether it’s the looks or the attitudes or the general inquisitive and productive natures, there’s something special there worth defending and touting. The dignity and love that comes from choosing your family is incalculable.

Maybe I go neutral. People are a social animal. For better or worse when we share resources or gain a sense of comfort and security, we form tribes that can meet those needs. There is a “healthy amount” of in-group out-group dynamic that plays out depending on access to monetary and time resources and shared mutual interest. Each person fills some form of sexual or emotional roll to varying degrees which can become hotly contested during bouts of miscommunication or alienation. While it is easy to see the strength of the whole, it’s a point of vast intrigue as to how some pups would fare alone in the wild.

Maybe I sound cold. Regardless of what you wish or want, people will be swayed by their stresses more than their ideas. Your friends will start to phrase things in such ways that makes you wish they’d just lie. They’ll leave when they want to be around people. They’ll settle on anyone when they feel too alone. They’ll settle on practical over fulfillment because bills after all. They’ll kill all of their time making little excuses, little concessions, until you no longer recognize each other. Everyone will double down on what it means to judge to make the breaks easier. Life will get to them, they’ll get old, they’ll forget and they’ll regret.