[524] Stabby Stab Stab

I don’t even want to write this. I feel left without a choice. It only takes a fleeting glance to provoke a rush of bullshit you’ve been trying to ignore. So here I’ll go trying to get rid of it.

I actually managed to trick myself. I believed. I thought one way or another I’d have a future with someone I could be perfectly honest with. I believed after I disavowed the word love. I believed despite a handful of dramatic fights. I believed because it seemed to be the thing happening in my life that I had little control over how it was stuck together despite so many things I’ve employed to keep it apart.

I can’t decide whether I feel worse having had that someone or when I only dreamed of being with someone. Over time it’s easier to distort the fantasy of a life not lived. What are you supposed to do with the actual good times? Where do you replace the trust you exhibited? What do you make of your new plans when they were all B, C, or D to your guiding ethic?

And then what to make of it when things were bad? The idea of saying something you can’t take back. What truth was being spoken to when lashing out didn’t just feel good, but necessary and appropriate. When the other person doesn’t even pretend to feel or care about what you’re experiencing. As if the reality of separating is as neat and professional as a “conscious uncoupling.”

I just want to be able to forget. I don’t want to feel anything from looking at her. I belittle people frequently who profess their heartfelt tales of woe as having little perspective and naïve hearts. I’m not going to endlessly profess how amazing, beautiful, or “special” she was to me. This needs to remain clear. I don’t let myself be dictated by the stomach I can’t control or the irrational whims of people I choose to be close to. My response is measured reflection for as long as it takes to die.

The tragedy is in the act of believing. The tragedy is in trust. The tragedy is going to be what turns every positive emotion, memory, or interaction we’ve had into something I actively work to forget or degrade so I can take back my nervous system. If trying to be human has taught me anything, it’s that I’m not a bitch. I may have to endlessly write. I may have to cut mutual friends. I may have to embody the worst myths from your perception of me, needlessly playing up their importance under the guise you’re even bothering to think that hard about me.

Nothing in my life has suggested you can rely on anyone that isn’t practically suicidal in their self-effacement or psychopathically transparent in their motivations. Everything in between is a liar’s game of rationalization and excuses. That’s the evidence. That’s why I know what you can rely on about me.

[523] The Body Politic

I need to readdress the idea of good, gooder, and best. When I first spoke about it, as time provides irony with a field day, it was with regard to relationships. I see, or at least pretend to see and sometimes argue for, a difference in relationships of convenience, abuse, or mutual encouragement as existing on a kind of sliding scale. You can be in a good relationship that “keeps the lid on” something about you or perhaps opens you up to new experiences, but remains couched in crippling insecurities about being alone. Depending on what level you want to look at or what you want to be steered by in life, the description can change fairly quickly.

This time around, it's about politics, as the conversation keeps swirling around Hilary or Hitler 2. As a habit, I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with often false dichotomies. Literally nothing exists that's “only” one or the other. Besides me begrudging people for introducing bad philosophy into their “pragmatic” conversations, I see a sort of “fundamental” concern that keeps getting ignored. I don't believe any reasonable person thinks it's hard to distinguish the nuclear fallout of a Hitler 2 presidency verses the, albeit very bad, neoliberal warmongering wall street jerking of Hilary. I get it, sorry poor children of the world, America doesn't really give a shit about you, Hitler 2 is right around the corner.

My concern is about where does the hard and fast line exist between “practical” and “idealist” show up? I contend that things change, almost randomly, for any number of unforeseen reasons. To maintain that the “only” way forward is to remain complicit in systems that are broken seems so ridiculously callous, lazy, and unwise but I hear it over and over again from politicians I admire or celebrities I enjoy, and I'm trying not to adopt a kind of doublethink about where they're coming from, and why I'm not voting for Hilary.

Say you never have to make a decision. Say your whole life is carried out for you by servants or a level of extravagance reserved for royalty. How would you make your decisions? What's most distracting? What's most pragmatic? Do these words even mean something to you at that point? Your attention is already whatever you want it to be. Your desires are met and there's nothing to “sit and deal with.”

Now you have to introduce some outside force. You get in a car accident. You decide to not just buy, but build the most amazingly safe car ever built and mandate the roads be cleared for your travels. You get sick. You build the most amazing hospital and import the world's doctors. You're reacting to your fears. You're making decisions in service to combat the dangerous reality that surrounds your extravagance. Consider what Hitler 2 promises and how his solutions, solutions for fear mind you, are as fanciful and hard to imagine as the person given all the resources in the world insulating themselves from danger or death.

To state the above explicitly, when nothing exists that concerns you beyond fundamental truths of existence, you can choose to live in fear.

Here, the hard work of discussion and philosophy needs to remind us that advocacy and sticking by what's best can remain worthwhile and viable in a world absolutely consumed by hatred and fear. Because make no mistake, the business as usual is complicated legalese that spells out someone in power's hatred for your being. Hatred for your rights, bodies, opinions, or even presumption that you have something they don't. And they have so much, and it's never enough, and it's because it's rooted in fear.

You're royalty. No bills to be paid. No wars to be fought (that you're not creating for amusement.) You're not hungry, you're not even bored. You can choose to live for other people or ideals that exist outside of your safe space.

In order to do that, you need to not just be aware of how good your life is going, you have to be able to explain, in due detail, all the forces that have to come together to make sure it remains a safe space. The millions of minds that lend credence to your royalty. The advances in science that will help keep you alive. The guards and caretakers and entertainers that you devour. You have to introduce guilt. You have to hold yourself accountable to something that nobody else can. What you've learned, what you've argued for, what you'd like to see in the future. It's when you've actually done the work to become something more than what you've been born into.

It's a tall order when all you have to do is react to remain complicit with the other side. How easy is it to fear Hitler 2? It's a cliché. You don't even have to think about it. In fact, I would argue, the ethos and purpose of modern society is to be able to label Hitler 2 as such without irony. Of course, I'm afraid of him. Of course I want to laugh more than cry when I see footage of his followers. But I'm not going to live my life in anymore fear than is necessary. I'm not going to pretend Hilary speaks for the same things Bernie does. What are synonymous vote percentages in lieu of a conscious or basic awareness of the problem?

That's what bugs me. I understand there's a political game always afoot. I get that there's sometimes inconvenient truths about the balance of power and influence. I do not understand approaching a system so dominated, by what used to be incidental quirks, as it now completely renders the desires of the population mute with your “vote” for what's going to keep it that way. Even if you're vote is symbolic. Even if it only has the fleeting impact of a set example. Are we going to get where this irrational, angry, and afraid animal needs to be by exercising it like the hateful planners at the top figured we would?

And honestly, I feel I'm not even explaining it as compellingly as it feels. If you want a child to do something, you can threaten them or you can encourage their best behaviors. I view humans as perpetual children. Hilary is threatening us with Hitler 2. Hitler 2 threatens everyone and encourages people to as well. If it's “my” vote, I choose die in the self-righteous flame of actual progress. I've been saying I don't believe in progress, which seems as of late to speak to the deficiency of language. There's things I want over other things. I want Bernie over Hilary, practically anything over Hitler 2, an informed and rational population over oligarchy and capitalism. And what I want is still out there, and it needs advocates. It's realities want a shot at being the new “practical reality” (you know, unless you're already there as a different civilized country.)

If Hitler 2 wins, it will be your fault. You don't know what you stand for and you deny your fear. You took it easy on your racist uncle. You adopted a catch-phrase about undocumented workers. You refused to read links I often provide offering context or numbers that soundly destroy some mythology shat out over pundit bickering or Hitler 2 himself. You allowed yourself to be swallowed, as we're all swallowed, by the system and then resolved yourself. You got tired and didn't ask why. You gave away all your time and then clung to the weekend that much harder. You threw personal pity parties and trumpeted your shallow conception of self-worth and righteousness as waves of ignorance and guilt washed out the notes.

My vote for Obama was because I hadn't figured out what I stood for. I was raised in a Democrat household. I believed minority opinions needed to be elevated and by that metric alone might help things. I thought the system was “basically good.” By all comparisons, my life is a breeze, the breeziest of breezes, and it's because of this country. But the foundation of my life is not because of the politics of today. It's because the people before me stood for something that we've lost all institutional memory of. How does it come back for my grandkids? Not with my vote for Hilary Clinton. How will I know I don't want grandkids? When you show we've accomplished so much only to elect Hitler 2.

[522] Nothing In Particular

I'm trying to figure out why I've just been staring at nothing for the last half hour. I can't seem to orient myself. I have shows to watch that I'm not. I have a pile of books I managed to half address for a couple hours when I woke up. There's inventory and cleaning I wanted to do around the house. But it's like I was stuck. Clicking aimlessly between tabs not really looking at anything in particular. Glancing at the clock as if I'm waiting for the cue to perhaps leave or I don't know what else.

Why? What am I facing when I'm not really looking? What's pressing down on my shoulders and directing my eyes to (finally) movement focused on a single point? Maybe too many thoughts at once? Maybe lingering regret about the last thing I wrote not quite reaching a satisfying conclusion? Some stark realization that my gut and subconscious are trying desperately to keep from my waking mind?

Sometimes I think I'm as angry as I can ever be, but all the time. Not “ready to explode,” but actively, perpetually exploding. I'm angry at my own effort to learn things. I'm angry that I can be made to feel self-conscious not in a way that would make me stop, but provoke me to double down. I'm angry that I pretend there's a thing called “progress” and that enough conversation can fix nearly anything. I don't like how I think, even though I've spent years trying to undermine how I got here.

The flow of it all just leaves me dizzy. Within 30 seconds I can be in a perfectly understood and receptive dialogue and slip into entrenched dislike or anger for my being. The internet of course making the transition all the smoother for when I'm not drunkenly table hopping for conversations. I don't understand why people are willing to harbor such resentment without any effort to explain themselves. Or worse, that explanation reduces to a bevy of insults and accusations with no patience for your position.

Old news though. Why do I care? Why did I ever choose to care? What's left in me that I'm referring to it as “caring” at all, at least as it functions to leave me confused and paralyzed? Again, old news. The whole song and dance about togetherness and empathy. “Respect” for “friends” so on and so forth.

I'm really fucking annoyed though. I want to know why I allow myself to get worked up about what you refuse to do. Is it that I don't want to face the inevitable consequences? Am I just really that bored with seeing things coming? Do I play the scale-up game where I see how your behavior lays the foundation for what we're seeing nationally concerning politics? That connectedness idea is a total bitch. Every one of my failed interactions is a statement about the whole and its capacity. Maybe just too many examples are clouding my view of the world from the negative camp.

I think for the first time I actually voiced how lonely it is to have all of your time on your hands. It gets worse though when you hear how the rest of the world is spending its time. When you really think and can't escape and can't discuss the larger systems of behavior and attitude we're plugged into. I'm just watching people rot. I'm watching my makeshift wood plank sailboat drift farther from the shore. I just turned 28, most people I know have been 40+ for as long as I can seem to remember anymore. I've worked so many jobs like theirs. I've spent so many hours playing the exact same games. How does it not drive them crazy?

It's almost a paradox. The less I pay attention and just focus on indulgences, I can genuinely feel my mood improve. I almost feel motivated to start taking selfies. (okay, that's a lie) I could budget random trips and show you how worldly and cool I am. I could have dozens of beautiful meals. That's how we're judging each others' happiness and stature still, right? It didn't switch on me and I should be making Vine videos about Pokemon Go?

What's next? Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Your job still gonna be there? Are you truly afraid of Hitler 2 or just playing along with the copious offered cliches and dialogues? Are you mad? Are you feeling your sanity slip? Are you settled and comfortable riding out your life the way it's going now? Are you just tired enough to find yourself no longer concerned about my, disparagingly named, “ramblings?”

After my facebook account fiasco, my friends list went from 60 something to 48. It's diminishing fast. Who really cares to stay on for the ride? At this rate, by the time I'm 30 I'll be lucky keep my dad on the list. Am I bad? Can people pick on something about me that looms too large? Have I hurt you? It seems like I rarely have to look far for someone mad at me, but I have to wonder if I'm really the enemy. How much harm can one person do from their basement with blogs and statuses to such a small group of people? It seems like way too much.

Maybe I'm just in a weird mood because of the imposed silence for so long. Even reading a book on the future I'm sitting here going, “Don't I already know this, Kaku?” I don't know what I've left to learn or do that isn't wildly complicated, and even then, to some nondescript end. I have no place but to self-indulge. I have no design but to wait for everything I know to degrade or change dramatically. I don't expect growth or understanding. I barely conceive of teamwork or “shared” anything. The friends I engage with constitute that “barely.” Maybe I'm scared of unburdening myself with the responsibility of caring about when things go wrong.

What kind of shit show would that spell? Countless throwaway drunken escapes? Years of social depravity and exploitation? A stark look back down the line flooded with regret about all the wasted time and how “they won?” I don't know who I am but for what forces its way out of me. Lines of potential that keep my fingers moving and allow for projects to run in the background, but I can't force everyone's hand to work per my guide and deadlines. It's just, when am I going to discover something new? Be it to say or do. Is that the faulty destructive assumption I've been operating under? “Newness?”

I don't even know what I sound like anymore. Is that weird? I feel like all semblance of a “tone” that's supposed to accompany questions or ideas is losing its grip on me. I sort of take it for granted that people feel by virtue of me asking a question they immediately feel I'm accusing them of something. In a sense they'd be right, but it's only that they probably don't know what they're talking about. That clear path to winning friends and influencing people Socrates mastered. But why make it about me? Just because I asked. Just because you don't know anymore than I do, why does the anger and blame have to be directed at me and be mine? Why can't you just be as angry and explosive as you'll ever be, in general, and use it to address your approach to yourself?

I just know I'm not going to stop. I'm going to pick and pick and pick until you make yourself unpickable. And usually, that has nothing to do with me needing to quench an insatiable desire to destroy. I need people capable of talking back, keeping me in check. I need real friends. I need real conversations. I need something to rely on. I wish it was you, but we seem to learn so quickly sometimes how it isn't. You don't care, right? You don't care and want me to go away. Say so, or I promise I'll bring it to your door eventually.

[xx-18] Marriage Blurb

Of course do you and I've been to some fun weddings, but the more I read this, the more I'm proud of its concise yet encompassing nature. I also may have lied about being married because reddit is where I go to lie :). The question was "What does marriage mean to you?"

Marriage is sobriety. I've personally never been capable of prolonged "deep feeling" regarding anyone, so when I was married, it was more transactional and for her. It's impossible for me to deny the attraction I have for...well everyone I find attractive, and I don't make strict line in the sand comparisons about the fun or conversations I can have with who I was to my wife. The sober reminder, that while you care about this person, they are a person, one of many potential "the ones." Something *beyond* you and them belays ideas of *us.*

Marriage is putting someone first. That was sort of the guiding light that many people call "commitment." I allowed certain things I wanted to do or say be subsumed by her desires. Unfortunately, it's hardly a perfect system when your spouse decides to stop talking to you or the stress from sacrificing yourself works its way into your bones. It was nice while it lasted, but hardly something I consider reliable.

Marriage is convention. Regardless of what I discovered over time, be it in someone's struggles they shared online or in a book, or just what I figured out through dating, the all-purpose fixer-upper glory day remains when you get married. If you're lucky you get to revel in the honeymoon phase. You start to adopt a way of speaking that you've heard from your parents or on television. I inched out a lot of the quirk or spontaneity I considered myself, at one point, full of.

Marriage is an investment. Like all investments, it's subject to inbuilt risk. I made big romantic professions. I put money down. I opened up to moving mountains of my personality so the packed earth could house something we would build together. I found the market to be rigged. A fantasy stoked as often as someone opens their mouth to profess the love and beauty. When it fails, instead of blaming obvious culprits, a game of finger-pointing and hot potato ensue. Neither of us deserved it.

Marriage means an illusion. It's the illusion against divorce. It's the illusion that your life can mimic a Disney movie or your favorite romantic holiday. It's forcing yourself to focus on the special date or great sex scene while ignoring years of dirty clothes, passive aggressive comments, and morning breath. It's the song and dance of togetherness and renaming "forcing it" with "better together." Marriage means politics. This is your cage so come to the table or be nuked and sanctioned. But make sure your facebook only displays the best smiles from the convention.

Marriage means denial. Denial for its roots in property negotiations. Denial of systems that do it in an arranged way with equal or greater "success" when you consider social power dynamics. It's denial of human psychology and sexuality. It's denial that the "sanctity" is not bestowed by some timeless all-loving being in the sky.

Marriage is hope. The childlike hope instilled in you since you can remember that it's about you and your feelings and your story and nothing else. The hope that while you pursue the heights of selfish indulgent and extravagant thinking, you'll remain capable and worthy to opine on selflessness and "love." The hope that people will believe your photo montage and forget what they know about you from school. The hope that even one thing can remain stable against the tide of truth that is enduring change.

Marriage means nothing to me, and it's why I understand it as something that can mean absolutely anything to someone else.

[521] Salt To Taste

If you're willing to pay attention, you can catch your own attention. It's also hard to imagine if you're habitually taking your awareness and perspective for granted. One method that I seem to have recently discovered is to just shut up. When you shut up, and focus on shutting up, then you can retreat and wait for what provokes you to want to speak. At that point, you may get more “heartfelt” professions from your inner core than mindless ramblings.

Pulling away from too much political dialogue has certainly helped me. Every headlines, every interview, every “debate” is reinforcement. You are forced, your perspective locked in, to how those people frame the issue. I wouldn't be able to justify my vote for Jill Stein listening to the mainstream media. It's essentially a vote for Hitler 2! They don't recognize what I'm trying to affirm. They don't see it as the cart being put before the horse. I'm lumped in with indignant “Bernie or bust” types who don't understand math and should be as afraid.

Here we can perform the layers and splitting game. Of course I'm afraid. I was afraid of the millions of people who showed up to vote for Sarah Palin in any capacity. Now that they're back out and stirred up more, I'm even more afraid of their new glorified posturing ignorance. A vote for Hilary Clinton denies those people exist. It's to shove them under the rug. I want to channel their fear and make it fight against what I actually believe. Hell, not even “believe.” What I've gone to great lengths to write about, read about, and argue for that is actually rooted in history or science. I don't “believe” we should care about each other or that there are ways to afford what we want. I didn't pray about it.

I'm generally looking for the surprise outside. I like to think I'm a redundant open book. It's why it's kind of relief to feel motivated to write. There's potential for new analogies or discoveries. I can piece together the handful of lines I thought might have kicked off a new blog a few days or weeks ago that couldn't hold up. It was my birthday 2 days ago, and I had about half the desire to be a selfish rod of destruction as I normally do. It clicked, I don't want anything for my birthday that I didn't want the day before or will want the day after. I don't need distractions or even strictly money. I need a place in society lol. I need to feel invested in more than my future.

To me, at least, “things” just feel like they're going to get worse. Hitler 2 is the new normal. Jobs being consumed by technology will leave people who've wrapped their whole identities into catch-phrases surrounding the nuclear family adrift. We'll keep being angry at each other. We'll still be isolated. Our conversations stunted and afraid. Our prospects appearing at random and still draped by a cloak of exploitation...Uber. But, I'm not sitting here shivering. I don't even have a pain in my stomach. I just look at it and go, “duh.”

I can't stress it enough, I can't repeat it enough. I don't know if you should take anything away from this more than the following idea. I almost never, in fact practically never, hear people express how wrong they are. We are culturally isolated from our capacity to be wrong. Line after line flows in service to arguments and rebuttals and never not once does someone go “you know, I may be wrong.” When it does happen, it's half-assed like, “Oh, I agree Hilary isn't literally the devil” and still not even phrased with the operative word “wrong.” If you've no capacity to respect how wrong you are, let alone how compoundingly wrong those wrongs pile up, the potential truth of your words can't begin.

If you sat in a room next to someone with completely “opposite” views and neither of you said a word, how would you feel? Murderous intent? Suspicious of their motives? Terrified of their color? The words fuck everything up. Blame them first. Blame yourself for using them irresponsibly. Blame a system that teaches you that yelling is better than reading. Figure out who you're mad at, learn that it's yourself and often forces you've yet to properly identify and then stop being mad and start trying.

[520] Ode to My Basement

Here no one can hurt me
Here I can lie and lie
Here it is warm and cozy
Here could be a nice place to die

I shouldn't stay nor should I go
There's nothing to and nothing fro
Burn it down, it's all a show
Never are sure of what you know

Here I can read and write it too
Here I can sleep and dream
Here I can bang or blow a tune
Here I reign supreme

I am trapped in my own mind
It's the only one of its kind
Nowhere to run, I cannot hide
Too much of the world provides

Here I drive myself insane
Here we mask each inch of pain
Here the crooked point holds weight
Here lies buried a life of hate

I stare blankly at the wall
Curl up tight into a ball
Every instant ever so small
With each step you mind the fall

Here I stand in stark contrast
Here I have noise and shapes
Here things move too fast
Here I start to waste

There but for the grace of God
To other worlds I give a nod
Need to feel or else so odd
Point me to nearest escape pod

Here I fight the silence
Here I am fighting the noise
Here I can play with the violence
Here I'm not one of your toys

I wait around for nothing new
Listen close it could be true
Probably not, left black and blue
Dramatic save not meant for you

Here I run on empty
Here I can see the end
Here I given you entry
Here where reality bends

Trickled out speck by speck
I never know what's coming next
No relief in 'nother breath
Not soon enough my impending death

[519] Mortal Criti-sin

I'm trying to recall the last time I heard someone criticize something in colloquial conversation that didn't reduce to a cliché. It strikes me that the backlash I receive for not describing things in generally positive ways might be comprised of several screwed up forces in tandem. Like threads on a rope that snap together to whip me into submission.

Consider Pokemon Go. It seems like it is on its way to taking over the world. Jokes about getting outside for the first time in whenever. Screen shots of who's got the most and where they found them abound. For every article that's abused the relentless capacity for “millenials” to feel “nostalgic,” this app seems to have screwed right into the heart of it. I certainly don't blame people for having fun or connecting with people. I'm unable to shake how this feels like a culmination of perpetual infantilism.

I liked Pokemon as much as the next guy. Then I started to grow up. I don't want this to be overstated as I don't draw stark lines in the sand about acceptable ways to kill time, have fun, or whatever. Collect Pokemon, stamps, jerk off all day, I don't give a shit. I care that we only seem to find enthusiasm for “stupid” things like apps or get arm-chair “outraged” by things like shootings and racism. Our emotional perspective seems trapped, stunted, and ignorant.

What if we put as much time and emotional energy into learning about the world as we did wandering the neighborhood to catch Pokemon? Let me put it to you like this. Time is the most valuable thing. I have watched more movies and television than anyone I've ever met, and am a couple hundred levels from beating the main story of Candy Crush. I know how to waste time. I don't call what I do any more or less worthy of my time but for it's capacity to distract me or keep me entertained. But I couldn't do any of those things unless I thought I could offer a salient opinion about my place in my country or our collective responsibility to the world. I get guilt stricken. I feel lazy and dishonest. I honestly don't know if other people do, and frankly doubt it.

I fear we abuse apps and “nostalgia” like we abuse alcohol or drugs. One is arguably better if you had to choose, but what provokes the abuse and, perhaps overstated enthusiasm, I think is the same mechanism. The mad dash away from coping and dealing with larger problems. These are late 20's people who can't afford shit, aren't fucking, and have been under the unrelenting heal of debt and corrupted social services, if the news is to be believed, so why not Pokemon? It rings like the modern peasant farmers who at least get to get wasted at the end of the day.

Your 20's seems to have become this new tender age. People react so poorly to my critical statements because subconsciously their whole life has been under review and doubt and problems. They're just now maybe glancing at an opportunity to look like an adult and achieve things they dreamed about as kids. And here I come shitting even more. The stark contrast between why I seem to get along with adults verses kids is simple. Kids just wanna have fun and I'm a meanie. Adults have grown resolved to hear it all and move with or work past without much fuss.

While I was working out the details of emotional struggles and the lack of wisdom in relationships, people were doubling down on those feelings and believing in the future 10 years later. While I was giving myself headaches learning every angle of choose-your-topic, school was stressful enough for them or, “what's the point?” of driving yourself insane about things you can't fix. Add the backdrop of financial insecurity onto the undeveloped disposition of a batch of children, it's not a secret why anything remotely not ironic or critical on a site like reddit gets shit on to oblivion. It doesn't matter if you have a point, no one has developed the capacity to see it.

This is also different from a pretentious thing. Like, you can make convoluted crazy “points” about anything, drawing from your disparate experiences that...well they certainly seem to make sense to you. I'm talking about a kind of ignorance that has old white people saying Black Lives Matter is overreacting and need to take more responsibility for themselves. Any black person, as well as any reasonable person, would not look at someone in police custody ending up in a coma and say, “He should have worn a seat belt” like the dude wasn't kicked the shit out of. You can see the rates of incarceration, read histories worth of racially targeted legislation, and just be generally awake and honest and land on the side of sympathy.

I look down on those people. The ones who have no reason to pretend about something simple, but choose to anyway. Impersonal hive-mind children on an internet forum? Not my target audience. The same mechanism of defensive fear for conceding that the world ain't roses? I think it stems from the same kind of insecurities. The world can be described accurately in a way that transcends your opinion. There's degrees and levels to consider if you're going to act like your approach is relatively wise. If we persist under a cultural lunge to suppress and escape, well, Hitler 2 is actually a presidential candidate.

So I'm willing to double down. I'm willing to write 10 blogs contemplating why you would think it's me who's “negative.” The negativity stems from your avoidance and reluctance. It stems from your inability or unwillingness to respect your time or capacity to change something. Me talking about it isn't the problem, and never will be. You making me the enemy instead of yourself will always be. By choosing to react to the suffering of institutional guilt instead of motivating yourself from a personal one, you ensure we'll drive right over the edge of a cliff while I insist it’s not worth trying to catch the Onyx at the bottom.

[518] Extra Extra

Provoked by the movie Mr. Nobody, reading The Drunkard’s Walk, my facebook profile being flagged and blocked, my birthday on the horizon, as well as that impending sense of doom that’s not anxiety always in play, here I go.

I know I’m not the center of the world. I don’t want to believe it, but I know it. When I watch a movie or ruminate on what it means to be a star, it sets in how perpetually reinforced the ideas of being “special” or “consequential” are. Some lament the “selfie” craze and point out it has reached ridiculous and deadly heights. Others I’ve read point out that we’ve been trying to copy and represent ourselves since cave drawings.

The Drunkard’s Walk helped lock my head into thoughts about how random things truly are. They’re so reliably random, we have mathematical constructs that can predict across topics the degree in which you’ll find those star outliers or abysmal loses. And no matter how detailed a picture we give, no matter how accurately we attempt to measure and account for the forces beyond our control, we retain the judgments about ourselves and others about what should or could have been done.

Mr. Nobody has the world’s last and oldest human recounting several different lives different versions of himself took. Each one meaningful, filled with love and loss. It’s frankly creepy that I managed to watch it randomly right after finishing the book. It explores each reality existing on top of each other and as Mr. Nobody recounts fragments of each tale, he never once refers to himself as his name. He’s merely a figment, an idea. Nobody in particular at the center of all possible worlds.

The movie makes me think I’ve already seen the last of the “fun” or “spontaneity” that are classically associated with youth and naivety. The big bad stressful life wrecking ball came in and smashed any temptation to throw caution to the wind. I’ve complained about seeing “the end” for years, and I feel steeped in it like a soggy tea bag. Like I can see the handful of conversations I’m going to have with a few specific friends. I’m only going to hang out perhaps less than 10 times with a few others. Like, then we die. I watch you update your profile picture a few times, we get coffee, then we die.

The book constantly reinforces how not to make the popular mistakes when attempting to reason through probabilities and statistics. If you think you have a 7/10 chance of being fired after sending an email and your boss doesn’t respond as quick as they normally do, you’re leaving out any number of circumstances that may be holding up your boss. Before I phrase it in a stupid or incorrect way, the idea is to not pretend you can accurately account for all variables, nor should you use confirming “evidence” that only exists in your mind to make you feel bad.

Anecdotally, I consider friend interactions. Whether it’s responses to texts, facebook messages, or willingness to join in some get-together. I can state over and over that I know I live a different kind of life filled with more time and more money than people usually have. I don’t have the same stressors. I treat social media platforms as trying to be social and actually have debates or share things that genuinely push the limits of my knowledge or interests. This in contrast to memes, Buzzfeed, or 70 similar pictures of my walk through the park. Even with cutting my list down to 68 ish friends I don’t see nearly anything they post anymore, let alone know what to think about what I post may not be getting through.

I think my habits are what make a place like facebook so depressing. When I can’t stare at 50 people who used to have a good time bowling or drinking or would love to go down a waterslide, I eventually have to cut them down to 30 who might if I badger them. When the badgering starts to feel rude or they’ve moved away, let’s lose 20 more and shoot for 10 that I’ll prepare well in advance and employ tactfully to coincide with something else.

The term coming to mind is “FOMO.” It’s not so much a fear of missing something as it is a general dismay felt for every day that’s lost to the noise and hustle. I just missed a 4th of July get-together, a house party, and a friend I haven’t seen in maybe a year. I find this tragic in so many senses. Not only because they happen so rarely, but even if I had made it, I’m scared of what being around all the adults does for my disposition. There’s a place in between alcoholism and nursing a beer all night.

With my profile being blocked and me sending angry expletive-laced commentary to facebook about how ridiculous it is to ask for someone’s license to confirm such a bullshit profile, I managed to finish the book start to finish. I was acutely aware of how many times I looked for the facebook emblem to be flashing. How much time I spend looking into the abyss waiting for a notification of something happening or interesting to take place. In fairness, It’s heightened given that my options are a bed and hallway at the moment, but then it also occurred to me that facebook is my only connection to many of these people. The hallowed few who haven’t met the drunk fatalistic unfriend axe. To collect them all back on another profile, I started asking if it was worth it.

There’s that saying about living simply and cleaning your house; if you pick it up and it doesn’t bring you joy, get rid of it. It get’s complicated for me because the joy comes so few and far between, at least as far as experiencing personalities in person. The joy is the thought that you exist and are being kickass you wherever you are, and I mostly just have a memory of it. One corrupted each time it’s accessed. I think it’s why friendships I thought I could rely on “randomly” blow up. The parts of you that liked or recognized what I’m about became subjected to something else. I find them primed to explode over a long decay that ends abruptly when something...real?...happens.

There’s just a general sense of receptiveness I feel has died. From economic forces all the way down into how old you feel locking it away. Friends too old for you. New people way too sad. (Turns out most townies don’t stay because they’re hyper enthused about the town and their place in it.) I don’t even know if I’m saying anything of value at this point. I had to say something, maybe you’ll figure out how to say it better than I can. This remaining my rather meager means of keeping you abreast of what is or isn’t changing about me.

[517] All The Things I Know

“I am the one who knows!” - Starhawk, Guardians of the Galaxy

In the scientific spirit of replication, this may make a redundant case, but my experiences of late beget an explanation. People, please, agree or disagree. There is a difference between feeling something and thinking something.

Of course, even I immediately throw up protest given that our nervous system runs throughout our body and I’ve read fairly persuasive arguments for considering the tips of our fingers as mini-brain-adjacent agents. Your gut may prove correct time and time again, but it is less reliable than a study of all guts and the degree in which they conjure general human intuitions. The distinction is perhaps more to do with speech.

It’s perhaps one of the few things I feel dangerously proud to claim I know. Closely related to it is body language, as they tend pair fairly well. Moreover, without really realizing it, in some ways, we are all veritable professionals. It speaks to why we speak and other great apes don’t. What you may not have been keen to do is dissect our language and bodies down to the minutia. You may not know the patterns. What strikes me as a red flag you may regard as “that’s just that person.”

I know that I know because I write. When I write, I punctuate points I make with my experience of your language. When I get into an argument or hear about some relationship squabble, I’ve already written about how it started, why it failed, and why it won’t get fixed. I can point you to the academics with the professional versions of my explanations. This is no less true when it happens in my personal life. In order to find this perch from which to assess our perfunctory language, I’ve had to exercise better precision in the use of my own.

Essentially, I end up with “different” definitions for words. A general pattern of behavior evokes the general language needed to describe what is happening. I’ve dissected or done away with many words this way: love, progress, friend, hope, hate, lie, truth, or often the colloquialism we, by definition, take as so common and appropriate as to actually describe what we mean. The difference isn’t that I’m inventing something new as much as trying to peel away the intuition that would defend more merit than is due.

So when I call you a liar, what do I mean? I allow for it to mean the full breadth of its usage. You can lie by accident. You can betray yourself with the very words you hold to be more truthful than you’ve ever been. Whenever you’re dealing with the veracity of a claim, there’s an appreciable nuance for the degree of thinking and feeling like you think. Consider your average Baffler reader verse Trump supporter. Who would you wager harbors the most feels? I’d say it’s a tie. Who’s likely patient and responsible enough to work through and think about their feelings? I don’t think it’s the racist catch-phrase crowd.

As a condition of existence, we’re constantly lying to ourselves. We have to protect our sense of self-worth. We have to play games in our social and work lives to maintain a semblance of order. If I’m remembering one survey correctly, a majority of Americans, or American teens perhaps, rated themselves as more attractive and intelligent than average. As someone who considers himself attractive, intelligent, and a bit of a whore, even anecdotally, I don’t trust that I want to fuck most people, if the disparity in our capacity for reason wasn’t stark enough.

Where it matters, to me, is when we get an opportunity to translate our ideas to the page. We can pounce on each other, and I think we should, and I think it’s a good thing. I write so I can catch myself. I write to remind myself. Do you have any idea the amount of things I’ve felt about myself? You probably certainly do. Do you have an appreciable measure for how much of it is complete dogshit that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny? Here I think my blogs are evidence of having you beat.

I know you feel like you’re telling the truth. I know you think I’m not listening. I know you think we can’t be friends. I know you think I’m a smug self-satisfied sociopath who’s openly proclaimed how it’s all just a game to him. What none of my knowledge speaks to is the responsibility you should have for yourself. In the abstract space of the mind, I’m absolutely every inch of everything I’ve said in a blog. In, what I refer to as reality, I can make appreciable claims about who I am or want to be that struggle to resemble drunk ravings or teary-eyed and desperate professions as a teenager.

I’m as predictable as you, but you have made no appreciable effort, that I’ve seen, to respect and listen to my style or type as I have yours. Frankly, I’ve just run out of patience. I know literally every time I talk with a “feeler” we’ll have the same argument, they’ll use the same accusations, and they’ll walk away feeling the same things. I am not persuaded they should be handled with kid gloves. I am not persuaded I’d rather live in what I find a very compelling and destructive lie waiting to explode than burn it all down. It’s why I know how to cope with it when it does explode. It’s why I already had a postmortem written for a fight I didn’t have until 3 weeks later. People with less experience would rather carry on like it wasn’t coming.

The struggle for me is how much is enough? What lies do I let keep a lot of mediocre relationships going? Am I underselling my potential for experience because of my inability to find the inherent worth of just accepting people? Here I think my pretension kicks in. I want the best. I want something I can rely on. Long term emotional and financial investments are made based on these conflicts between thinking and feeling. I can only expect out of a partner, in any respect, what I expect of myself.

And that’s this. To actually try and not feel like I tried so hard but it all failed so blaaah! Let you into my “intimate” fights and check my potential bullshit against the date. In a way, I’m not even asking you to trust yourself capable or worthy of evaluating anything than my simple argument in service to what I claim to know. Also, this game converts into a few neat party tricks if you ever catch me talking to the newly drinking initiated.

When you truly figure out “change” doesn’t equal “growth” the vast majority of “new” conversations and people will reduce to the embarrassing blight of the modern imagination. It’s why even as a quasi-whore I’ve turned down a fair amount of opportunities because the biggest sexual organ is the brain. Much as I find no respect for myself picking off the immature and self-loathing, I don’t want to encourage in my friendships and conversations the level of the predictable lowest commoners. It certainly happens way more often than I’d like to admit, but if there’s greater evidence of my sympathies and not being a sociopath, I challenge you to find it.

[516] I'm Super, Thanks

Any time a word gets set to repeat and decides to bounce around my head incessantly means it is time to write. Today, that word is “superficial.”

In my view, the vast majority of my interactions with people are forced into the superficial realm. Of course this is where we remain civil towards each other. This is a quasi-foundation of a healthy society. “How ya doin!?” “Living the dream! Another day in paradise!” It’s the place where the words aren’t supposed to matter but for their ability to reinforce ideas of us all being in this together.

The superficial world is most certainly a world unto itself. There are rules. Different cultures will vary, but the same kind of expectations are there. It seems often about suppressing our “base” selves so as not to disturb those around us. Is it fun to get woken up at 5 AM after being annoyed by roommates making it hard to sleep to have an angio inserted into your arm? Of course not, but when asked how excited you are, the “correct” response is “so.”

My argument is not against civility. Mine is to urge us to recognize the destructive nature of ignoring and downplaying what’s happening underneath. There’s only so much time to sift through people’s language and learn how they’d prefer to talk about something or approach a problem. At the same time, I think we often deny that in attempting to “respect” or “defer” to someone else’s “style” we end up complicit in our own demise.

The more you allow yourself to be aware of time, the less patience I feel you have for unnecessary games. To make it dramatic, I envision an asteroid barreling towards Earth, and the Council For Kicking Asteroid Ass comprised of 100 nations is being broadcast on TV. We’d all lose our shit if they spent the first 5 hours presenting introductory walk-ons like they do at the Olympics.

In life you only get so much time to get a handle of yourself and perhaps deeply know and appreciate other people. If you’re like me, you’re willing to play the high-stakes mental game of thinking any day could be your last. What then is the sense in offering even a second to the superficial world? Why pretend you don’t want to connect? Why pretend your feelings are invalid? Why not pursue the failure point of something earnestly and honestly instead of attempt to hide the place that makes life worth living behind catchphrases from a pull cord?

“There’s a time and place…”

I can feel the cultural resistance. To me, the problem still remains; no one ever tells me what that time or place is. I’ve had friends tell me I “insist” on talking about negative things when I was under the impression these were people I could “really” talk to about anything. I didn’t find those things to be negative, but I didn’t play by some forgotten or non-established rules and had it thrown in my face.

Or maybe it’s drunk at a party! Oh, wait, there isn’t really a time or place anymore where people feel like celebrating anything, let alone each other or the prospect of being alive. Maybe it’s online! Riiiight, the ignorant hellscape of trolling and sporadic hatred. Maybe in the classroom! I don’t know what school you went to, but my teachers were considerably more preoccupied by whatever homework was due than they were us getting in touch with our humanity or culture.

No, the only time and place seems to be when someone is so broken down they disavow all decorum and thrust themselves into your life. When they can’t keep the wall up anymore, it’s your time to receive them, or else. When they’re finally prepared to share something real you’ll get acknowledged for the place you try to occupy that persistently fights the charmed malaise of daily interaction.

I fucking hate it. In my view, it’s rarely to do with your capacity to handle strong emotions or ability to engage in “tough” conversations. It’s just about responsibility and friendliness. I don’t mean at the drop of a hat should you be prepared for hours of intensive soul searching despite your day or whatever else is going on in your life. I do mean that we pretend we’re always walking this highwire with regard to how we can engage with each other.

I think this experience is reinforced when we see what happens on TV and online. Very few people are out there showing us how to be thoughtful or how to connect. Very few people methodically break down controversial ideas and help us walk through each step. And even with the ones that exist, we barely feel like we have the time to join them for a stroll. This is where finding the responsibility to make time should come in. This is where we learn that “respecting boundaries” is all well and good until that boundary is a bottomless pit only fools dare to try and cross.

We just refuse to get better. We refuse to try. We arm ourselves with the superficially sanctified excuses and employ the cliches with no intention of ever making them mean something. Have you come up with “the right time and place” yet? Therapy? Where did that ridiculous phrase come from?

You don’t have to be on the tightrope. We all think it. We all feel it. You can walk around planet Earth, down here, with me, and we can work on turning the shit into something more productive or at least a string of jokes. I don’t need another minute of polite coddling. I don’t want you to tell me “it’s really coming down” during a storm. You can try harder, or, at all.

[515] No We In Me

I'm inspired by Henry Rollins and his idea that there is no such thing as “we.” In his view, “we” don't do shit. There is no we. It's something of a mythical concept we engage in to reassure ourselves that no matter how terrible our personal lives may be going, as a whole, there's something to rely on. It helps us scapegoat responsibility. Maybe I'm not donating or volunteering like I should, but we mostly try to look out for each other and care. It's an affectation of the highest order.

His idea struck me because of how I considered my life before and after I tried adopting friends. That is, I always had people in my life to kill time with or whatever else, but regarding them as human beings with a whole host of potentials I respected and wanted to be apart of if not foster, was an entirely different kind of playing field. The majority of my life was living the “me not we” kind of idea. I wanted to kill time and I wanted people around who would coalesce to my behavior or intentions. Arguably, my life got insanely more stressful when I stopped playing that game.

Over the last few weeks I've majorly toned down my reading about the world. It honestly gives me a headache to see article after article about Hitler 2 talking stupid shit that compounds into more stupid shit. People like to joke or pretend, but I impress upon you, I get very sick to my stomach and violent headaches when I run my mind through the tumble cycle of that maniac. On top of that, I start to get, not just a “sense,” but a myriad of researched and despotic reasons to believe nothing about how “we” are supposed to behave or believe is true. My “sense” was Hitler 2 was in fact a modern iteration of Hitler until he actually quoted Hitler. Then he lost all license to his former moniker.

Today I've been day drinking and listening to old white peoples' ideas about what they do and don't want to listen to. Fly fishing and golf came up. The new technology in the classroom from a teacher gentleman I talked to was there. The plight of modern civilization was not.

Old people seem super keen on the “me not we.” Old people will sit in complete silence with you in the smoking room of a cigar shop until you're both good and ready to get up and leave. One imagines they care about their families or friends, but whatever their concerns, it isn't worn on their sleeves. My mind shoots to the Swedes given the book I'm reading at the moment. Get them drunk and pump them full of crayfish and you'll finally learn something interesting. Until then, they're happy to bump into you as if you don't exist walking down the street.

I suppose then perhaps I find a particular kind of wisdom. Say I give a shit about my friends, mostly, kinda. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter until they need something from me. Until they're particularly talkative or broke. I'm a vague idea. I'm an impression. My feelings extend to who I can compel in the moment. It's pointless and exhausting to try and extend them further.

I've been thinking again lately of “fundamental truths.” While I tend to lead with “the only truth is change,” one thing that's been floating around is the nature of the human animal. This, again, because of the book I've been reading, and comparing Scandinavian attitudes and ideas to what I'm familiar with in the US. We can be radicals or capitulate to “benign totalitarianism.” We can be emboldened individuals or suffer endlessly as a kind of puppet inundated with thoughts we don't understand and refuse to approach in any way resembling proactive. Your “progressive” cause is contingent upon way more than hopes and prayers about the arc of history. Today Britain voted to leave the EU. Ten minutes later the most googled question from Britain was, “What's the EU?”

A fundamental truth then seems to be we are infinitely ignorant. That is, without irony, we employ our tools for knowledge only after we've subjected ourselves to the punishment our feelings would wreak.

Essentially, as it pertains to me, I feel less burdened. I still want to pursue my goals and website and yada yada. I want to organize the information better and provide tools. I'm not naïve enough to think it will matter. If I win awards and get spots on television shows, I'll very dryly proclaim that it's all a game and all bullshit and my ideas about death being an eventual relief more than something to fear remain in tact. I know from today that I'm not merely contented to drink, smoke, read, and bullshit with strangers, but I won’t turn what actually makes me happier into some noble pursuit of “truth” meant to “fix” anything. I can't save you. I have a fleeting glance at marginally influencing a world or two that I come in contact with. If I can't be happy swallowing that, I won't be happy with anything.

[514] Full Stop

It's getting very hard not to have any problems. I'm not hungry. I'm not in bad health. Even if I've lost my youthful sheen it's hard to conceive of myself as ugly. I have way too much stuff from instruments to electronics. I have enough time to watch 60 TV shows and read several books every week. If I can keep the lie going, I make and manage friends very easy. I've got a college degree. I've been able to experiment as an entrepreneur. My dad looks out for me.

I can still make it sound like what plagues me is the worst place in life to be. I don't even have to cheat and claim depression or anxiety. My "sense of being" is one that fixates on whatever is wrong. I don't believe this happens because I enjoy getting worked up in some kind of emotional fervor. In fact, it mostly just sets in as a sort of added house guest in a space meant for one less person. This is in contrast to anxiety. It picks at you like maybe your best friend might who spits on your arm while they talk, and yeah it sucks, but after 20 years you kinda just wipe it off down your pants and move on. It's the thought out of nowhere during a nice dinner with your spouse or closest friends that you're all gonna die one day. You're going to immediately laugh at the next joke, but fuck your dumb brain, right?

And what if it's not just an errant thought? What if it has become a way of life? You impress upon yourself to approach most everything and everybody in life from that sort of high stakes place? You might even call it a form of desperation. There's thirst, and there's dehydration. You crave opportunities to be awash in life-affirming and honest interactions because for you, the drought is real.

I think people like to believe their perspective is their savior. They assert it when dismissing each other. They lean on it in claims about their happiness. They draw from personal wells of wisdom. To flash the badge of your perspective grants you access to every level of human coping ability. I'm doing it now. I usually rush to diminish or disqualify my perspective because I recognize it as one part to a whole. I reinforce that I acknowledge writing is my coping or "shit" or "very small window" into the world. I don't want you to think I believe I have special license. I don't want you to find something about me compelling or convincing to tragically and ironically leap right over actually thinking about how I feel.

Are those the words to help me discover a problem? People peeking their head in, having a particularly insufferable time given modern conditioning of our attention spans, and glancing at, dismissing, or abusing my ideas for inappropriate or opposite ends? Are my ideas like guns? There's no clearer definition of an object than a gun to efficiently kill someone, but the language of protection and "rights" is endlessly appropriated to keep it polished as something else. Now so shiny we can't really see it anymore but for the bodies it leaves behind.

It's one thing to have an extra house guest that keeps to themselves quietly reading in the corner. Unfortunately, this one is very chatty. Has a lot of opinions. One might say is unable to help himself from blurting out how cramped it's getting. And you know what? The others tend to agree. But what are they going to do? They invited him. He can usually be pretty fun and engaging if you know what you're getting into. Certainly no one is suggesting murder...

I gave my perspective up. I forsook what I used to argue fairly convincingly as not really having any problems. I left it up to friends. I turned my back on it as it drowned in pools of horrifying news. I begrudged my confidence and short memory for the institution of time-honored words and their bottomless capacity for undue connotative pride. It's where people love each other under a ceaseless deluge of timeless positive qualifiers, or "because." It's the place where your "best effort" and "latest attempt" become synonymous. It's an ethos of "overlap" because the tricky and incomplete nature of, if perhaps sometimes philosophically unsound, scientific discernment causes too many headaches. Who cares if facebook says we're friends? We're friends! Keep calm and click along.

We rise to the capacity of our tools. Why have the bomb or guns if we can't figure out how many people they can really kill? How can we be sure we've the capacity in our emotional magazines to appreciate hatred unless we're given opportunities to fawn over increasing numbers of the dead? Aren't we learning our lessons? "These are problems! These are problems! But alas isn't it clear!? We get to have problems! Purpose! Something to fix, and it's not us" If it's not, you, then who? Pick your scapegoat.

I still get blamed for things though. It's very clear that other people feel capable of informing me how many problems I actually really do and truly have. My style sucks, how I talk or don't care to dress. My disposition is all over the place, but mostly wrong or inappropriate. I don't do enough. For all my words, what have I fixed? What am I working on? Whose life have I made easier? Couldn't I donate more of my time? Aren't there things left to sacrifice in service to each other? Isn't the world burning down somewhere? Are you even human or don't you feel connected to the rest of it?

Now we turn into a whirlwind of confusion. Is being confused a problem, though? I have these words, these weaponized perspectives, aimed squarely at me. As a general rule, if I'm professionally unsure about much of what I think, just how far should I run with their ideas? Do they want contrary examples? Experience shows to offer those at your peril. Are they just trying to help? I mean, did they even consider that I maybe really don't have a problem?

It's many more questions than answers, right? That's the nature of that extra guest in a space meant for one less. The only way you ever get to feel comfortable is engaging and accepting the guest. You might find yourself lost in the good way in conversation. You might find the space feels larger as you become drawn to each other. Eventually, with enough practice, you might become so self-aware that you realize you're fictional people in one asshole's ongoing analogy.

I think stabs at genuine friendship are invitations to that guest. We only tacitly accept them again at our peril. It's why I'm generally willing to burn the whole house of cards down that many of my friendships take. I'm a very confused and talkative man in the corner rarely finding the company willing to discuss how cramped it truly is. I'm a party to your happy homes and c'est la vies. It's perfectly uncomfortable.

If only to defy myself, what problems might I invent? Maybe I can discover one by poorly framing ones that I could adopt. Here's one, I can't make people try. Whatever would have made me think I could? I've carried on about my capacity to "manipulate" for years. You certainly don't discover you don't have problems without it. People get cheeky or the giggles recalling someone who could always talk their way out of or around something. Angling yourself for achievement or safety in the world isn't categorically wrong. So then maybe the problem is that I have a few bad ideas about people, their capacity or definitions of trying, or have turned the word manipulate into something too obscure. Well now we're just pulling philosophical word play games and that's as easy to fix as a slap to the face.

Maybe a problem could be that I want to be understood? That's hard to really qualify as well. When were you more terribly feeling than under the abuse of your mom or under the confines of love for someone in high school? In very important ways you certainly got over those, right? Your mom is insane and can't understand really anything. The girl certainly didn't empathize with you and hindsight speaks her wisdom and or luck. Do you really give a shit if you're understood? You don't discover that you don't have problems unless you knew there were people that perpetually seem to understand you. Why do you need one more? What happens then? They devolve into the cycle of asking nothing questions to no one in particular like you?

What if it's a problem just to want at all? This is tricky. Something insists. In an undefinable sense, I want you to feel, I want you to read, I want you to try and see things. The first half of each sentence betraying the second. Why do I want, let alone want you to take responsibility? Why do I want to see my effort reflected back?

AHA! The problem is that I'm selfish!

I feel betrayed when I'm not recognized. Why did I bother coming to this plain of existence and start using your words to embed myself in all layers of your problems and perspectives if you've got no time for mine? What am I alive for? The problem dictates that I can't know without you. As long as you don't think of yourselves as not having problems, then I must resolve myself to looking like the fool to be poked, judged, or impressively ignored. Giving up on what I, at least once, saw in you as ideal or powerful or intriguing about us, is giving up on something that allows me to claim a problem free life. Perhaps in my selfishness I've been willing to give up too much too often or perhaps the wrong things entirely.

It's really hard to say. I've carried on about the wrong and right kinds of selfishness before. My perspective, though small, I've fought very hard to find. It won't go down in one blog and would certainly need the failure of more honest and fluid friendships to harbor greater insecurity. But at least we've maybe stumbled into a more illuminated problem I might adopt. I selfishly want for you. Should I stop?

[513] The Next Smartest Thing

What's the next smartest thing to say or do?

I think this question has become something I'm crushed by. I hope to accidentally stumble over a few lines or paragraphs when I write blogs. You'd be perfectly ridiculous in thinking that these lined up as some kind of measure of progress or will terminating at some bastardized conception of “enlightenment” or some such nonsense. But it's something I'm constantly wondering about my friends and speaks to why I say I hate you when you don't talk.

I've said a number of times that we already live in Utopia. All of the best ideas are here. The problems are the same, and we're mostly just playing a reorganization game. If that's true, and I think it is, what is our next move? For me, it's been to read what's sparked my interest. It's been to talk. It's been to find the humor in the darkest layers of our depravity. I've adopted something of a “reinforcing posture.” Perhaps that's why you might call me “negative.” In my mind, I'm negative like the Germans who engrave the dead family's names in plaques outside of your house and post signs on the street corner citing old anti-Jewish laws. Who wants to think of the Holocaust? The Germans do, every single day.

The problems don't go away. They don't disappear behind the facebook pictures. They aren't fixed by likes. This is why it causes me an undue amount of suffering to see no one I'm claiming to respect sound anything like me in public. You have hundreds, if not thousands of “friends.” I impress upon you, 68, to even give me a page that makes me feel like we have more in common than the worst imposed American selfish and solitary archetypes. My mouth is only good for making me noisy and getting me in trouble. You'll phrase it better. You'll interpret an angle I have no perspective on. Put it out there. Let me share it. Let me read it and incorporate it into my thoughts so they can be a little less like “me” and more like “us.”

That's what I feel like my next step is. To get 68 blogs to read out of my friends instead of 68 news articles about how the world is going to shit. The world's not really going to shit, but my head can only take in so much. How do you really feel about your job? What are you worried about? What do you think about our relationship being, apparently, an opportunity for me to find ways for you to lower your opinion of me once or twice every couple of years? What problems do your jobs face and what do your coworkers talk about? This is where we find life. This is the connection that feels broken in our society.

And I don't even know if anyone agrees with that. I know what I'd have to be doing as a college graduate if I didn't have drug studies. I know debt can't feel good. I know the little things or dreams that seem to be slipping away as I get older. I know whether I read ten books this week or watch 50 movies I'm not going to feel connected to you unless we spark up some semi-bullshit idle chit-chat on facebook. I recently railed about how I was sick of being lied to. I feel like the silence is the lie. When we talk in person, the gap closes, you come out. But here, in our new town square, we can’t find each other even when we're plugged in 24/7?

I've been romanticizing just disappearing. Just going to a country that would pay me to get my master's or doctorate. Just be a modest arbitrary specialist and go get “cultured.” Maybe find a way to relax and discover a way to write in a way that provokes action. Then I realized I'd be glorifying what I can't stand about us. Run away and be self-indulgent. Pretend the problem isn't there. Pretend I don't have something to say, even if it just needs to be reinforced. Act like what I want said exists and that's why I'm putting thousands into trying to better organize it. The world doesn't really need me with a psychology or sociology PH.D. Does it need you doing what you're doing? Are you practicing for the next smartest thing to do or say? Because at least for me, this morning, it was to open my mouth and ask the question.

[512] Listen to the Wind Blow

So, I want this to kind of talk about two things, and apologies in advance if it seems...kind of back and forth.

The first thought is that I think I'm a perfectly terrible friend.

The second thought is that.......jesus fucking christ I think I lost it.....fuck it was compelling on the drive home. Maybe I'll come to it again as I digress upon the first thought. We'll see.

The longer thought anyway is that I'm a perfectly terrible fucking friend. One reason is very obvious. Consider when I was told I was “negative.” I like when things go to shit, not because I actively enjoy or root for failure mind you, but because I like to live in the consequences of inevitable failure in general. I barely know shit about you, I poke my head in disingenuously, and I don't know, it's not like you do anything more than me to suggest you're better than me, but I still feel like I don't do enough to suggest what you mean to me.

In any event, that means I can't root for you. That means I'm not sorry for your loss.
I'm quick to cut you down because I don't speak the language of sympathy. I'll defend this idea until the day I die. I can know where you're coming from with having no inclination or justification for carrying on like what you choose to feel registers in my mind as correct. I get that you generally believe I'm just a sociopath. You're fucking wrong, and if you're an asshole, the more you'll pretend like you're not wrong. Fuck you deal with it. (Christ, you can tell the drunkenness at this point, right? I'll try to do better)

Nothing I do in life is, in my mind, by accident as far as I'm allowed to surmise. I don't shoot for an open relationship because I've somehow managed to quell feelings of jealousy. I don't call people friends had I not done anything less than sacrifice the amount of manipulative matter-of-fact plays into the future I might conjure about your behavior. I know what I'm giving up. I know what I could exploit.

You get that right? Like, when I'm crazy, it's probably part of a game. When I get fucking obliterated and try to defend drunk driving, the first instinct you should have is that I'm bored. I feel like I stress this in a way, but it doesn't always connect. Like, I'm not your suicidal friend. I'm not someone you should ever be convinced about. I play. I'm a fucking terrible asshole. I use words and impressions to give me reasons to feel marginally “in place” with regard to you and in life. Please, always allow yourself the leisure to fuck me the fuck off.

You're my friends because I think I can fuck with you. I think you can play my stupid game. Mind you, the game informs, but ultimately, I'm seeing if you can handle my egomania as it pertains to language and bullshit. Doesn't that feel vapid and empty? Of course it does! You're beginning to maybe see the fun!

Part of being cool with me is understanding my “essence.” It's grasping what drives me. It's knowing that behind the most fucked up thing I could ever say there's something you can rely on. I know I'm not going to kill myself, for example. The longer you pretend you don't know is your problem. Think about that. Really mother fucker, think about it. If I wrote a ten page digression tomorrow expressing the virtue or legitimacy and wisdom of suicide, I'm significantly more intrigued by your reaction to it than what “nothingness” holds for me as I bleed out in a fucking bathtub.

It struck me that the moment I scared the shit out of my dad I started getting more texts and likes to my statuses. I'm a fucking attention whore. It's fucking deplorable. I just want people to acknowledge they give a shit and my problems are themselves dismissed immediately. I can know logically there's always people there I can rely on, but the fact that they like the status or send me the “how you doing” text makes all the difference in the world. And I've even shitted on that idea in the past! Just to make it that much more confusing.

I guess you can call it a head nod to the “real shit.” My dad doesn't care if no one needs to like the last 7 stupid things I said on facebook. He cares that he was there for me. As do I. I don't mean to scare him or friends or whatever, I just try to impress upon them that I'm the sole ambassador for everyone I know who says anything fucking resembling anything fucking real. It sucks. I want you to talk and you fucking suck and you don't. Fuck you, friends. I fucking hate you for that.

If I were to parlay this into a discussion of relationships, I might speak to that second thought that escaped me

It's always going to go to shit. You can be the 20 year old infatuated with your high school sweetheart, or you can be the 50 year old with tales of your rapist and insane family members which colorized your contrasting “perfect” relationship today.

It's always going to go to shit.

I love this idea not for some horrible feeling it's supposed to arouse in you. I think people vastly and perpetually mistake my position on this to the length they're capable of feeling self-righteous and indignant.

“Love,” “trust,” “care,” “perfection,” “the dream,” “my one and only,” “fill in the blank something fucking Disney taught you” IS NOT REAL. Nor is the fucking complicated reality antithetical and opposite to those ideas. Should I really have to fucking state this shit at this point? Absolutely, because new idiots are born everyday.

My first thought when Kristen was like “peace!” was how relived are friends might be. How the fuck could I manage that for as long as I did? Well, if we pretend I didn't call it from about day one, it's as much a mock of VICE verses Disney. And fuck discussing the minutia, you just want her ass tapped by Gaston.

I'm cold. I'm boring when I'm boring. I bring up the para-glider who died by being a dumb-ass amateur flying over the trees as we're looking over the forest at the national park. I managed to drive myself into a place that can't escape “necessary consequences.” Every time I express some colloquial or matter-of-fact sentiment, I'm lying to you. I need to shut the fuck up and not play the “regular person” game or I'm disrespecting you. Kristen's grandma just died. What the fuck else do grandma's do? Mine certainly figured it out as well.

I “love” it.

I don't think people really get that. I love being right. I love seeing things coming. I love knowing that when I wish I could be an emotional wreck, I'm mostly just playing a game with myself. I love watching your excuses play out. I love knowing I'll be your coolest fucking friend on the planet when you and I are 35-40 after you've crashed and burned in your marriages or shitty kids. I love seeing things coming. I love holding my tongue for the conversation we'll have ten years from now.

It doesn't sound human. I'm not your friend because I don't believe the lies your parents taught you to engage in the shitty lives you lead right now. I sell my fucking body so I can tan and read and watch movies from pushing 100 years ago. I'm after every perspective that makes everything you or I say a fucking joke. You know so much about one thing. Bravo. I'm not saying you won't keep my ass alive when something goes terribly wrong. I just don't know if I want to live in a world where you forgot why getting fucked up with me was just as worthwhile when we're both going to die anyway.

I'm not sad. I'm not negative. I'm not the cynic. I'm not a reaper or wisher of terrible things. If you refuse to figure out what I am, I can't help you, and we're probably not friends. We'll certainly never be family as I have the inkling my dad knows the kind of fucked up I am regardless of what I write.

68. I have 68, less than what old tribes might have considered their villages, as my amount of friends. I'm basically too old and dead already. How long do you want to play the game of superficial facebook likes and brushes past each other every couple of years? How many times are we going to have the same stupid fucking conversations about our relationships? Where can we go if we all just choose to not suck and be honest?

I'll just be here watching you die failing as you read me bitching. It's really the best we can fucking hope for right? Lol I sound so angry.

[511] I'm So Fancy

Despite what this may look like, there's a very clear and very poignant point I want to get across in this post. I'm deeply mired by the colloquial milieu over the last few hours, so please, bear with me. I think I can do it. I'm not even really that drunk anymore, but again, I've been provoked by a conversation I had with what I deem the “normal” folks. Let's begin.

I think we dismiss “class” at our peril. For as often as it is invoked in our modern political arenas, I do not believe we spend time defining it. I've offered a few instances in the (too lazy to link atm, but stay tuned) past. We tend to believe it has much to do with our income. You're automatically in a higher class once you breach a threshold. Jay-Z says, “we don't pay the same taxes,” because his realm of existence is better than yours.

As with everything, I've again noticed a pattern. I know guys, my bad, it's all just boring patterns and shit, but really, I think it can inform and help. Maybe you won't sound stupid or like someone of a lower class one day because you caught this blog. :p

Anyway, first we must bring up the idea that someone isn't “political.” I think this is a horrendously vacuous and insidious lie. It is a lie that is so reflexively employed that people routinely take pride in espousing its virtue. Shame on them.

You see, in my view, we don't have a choice. By being born, for all the shit loaded upon your shoulders, you are by default “political.” You want your food not poisoned? Yeah, politics stepped in and regulated that shit. You want a world not suffocated by a nuclear Holocaust? I'd put money on the idea that you have an opinion on our maintenance and use of such weapons.

What's important to understand, is that for the “normal” folks, they can't be bothered. This sounds simple, but it speaks to so much more that you can only get when you impress upon them.
A woman I talked to tonight said she wasn't “political.” Her exact reasons why were, “I was raped when I was 7, then again when I was 11, my family are drunks, and it's taken me years to find this guy who I for the first time in my life am actually happy with.”

At first glance, her story has nothing to do with some political position she may take. More importantly to realize, she is speaking to the kind of overflow our minds are constantly dealing with in attempting to discern where our attention should lie. Because everyone has a story, right? We're all still in the margin of error coming out of primarily murderous and rapist behaviors that fueled our species to this point, no? One not need be callous in dismissing someone's story or hardship, but if we're going to power on into the future, your personal hardship is not a counterpoint to your responsibility or capacity to engage with a larger picture.

Because that's the important thing. You're not just your hardship or capacity to pursue happiness. You're not the endless stories you can offer me about some trip down video game lane or vacation or conversation you took that stood in stark contrast to your otherwise terrible or tumultuous life. This is an extremely hard, if not impossible sell, in the moment someone is trying to relate these things towards you.

It speaks to the tools I hope to create. We're all in this together and probably speaking about the same language even if you only ever get peaks at it in my drunken diatribes because you're pussy ass niggas who ain't worthy my time. Or at least, that's the story you tell me by faking your lives on facebook and giving me nothing to read. It's hard to burrow down until you find common ground. If it's hard between me and people I might have too quickly jumped into calling friends, get drunk and talk to the your average Steak and Shake employee. I promise you, by virtue of you seeing this, you occupy a class unfamiliar to them, if only because my patience cannot abide otherwise.

Endless deferral is the name of the game with regard to the desperate, broke, and tired. It's not their responsibility to think about who's going to be the next President. All they know is, when time comes to abort their mistake and they can't afford it, times are tough once again. When they used to get that dank weed from the guy who got deported, man, just our luck, gotta go back to the mediocre shit. It's a one to one analogy when you think of the general thesis to Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Poor dad has no other option. 2 thousand or 6 thousand doesn't mean shit to him except as something that's going to be spent in some form of desperation or treat. You're dumb to tell him to invest, just like you're dumb to expect people who've never felt their impact on the system to appreciate the degree of impact from their choices.

It's the sickest thing to recognize that these desperate, had their whole lives fucked with mother fuckers, actually do care. They ask questions. They'd get involved. It's like looking at the “dumb kid” and realizing they just need to be given the time and attention. People only go so far as you're prepared to support them.

I think we just need to spend more time talking to each other. You'll see the same shit I do. You'll see the great divide in perspectives that still seems to resolve around similar points. I know a world's amount of information more than the people I talked to tonight. That doesn't make me special. It's not particularly hard or different than the shit they know. But I come from a place of privilege that allows me to contemplate and play with that information. I have to “bestow” tools that get them involved because I don't have a pocket “I was raped when I was 7” story to use in service to my disenfranchisement.

We're only as good as our worst player. And I keep meeting people who say the stupid ass phrase, “I'm not political.” I think we can do better.

[510] Drip

Just troll and down vote now. You won't care to read this, I promise. (reddit disclaimer)

I'm so fucking sick of being lied to. It's so loud. It's an endless cacophonous barrage that beats its way into my head despite every effort to fight. Or worse, I don't fight and try to avoid, or maybe play along, and the insidious fear and anxiety burrows into the pit of my chest.

It feels like "everything." Logically, I can pull back and know some things or people remain consistent. They are the clear exceptions to the rule. I do not believe culturally we have a grasp on what it means to be truthful. I don't mean the truth as you see it. I don't mean some throwaway comment about opinions being like assholes. We don't understand the transcendent value of striving, fighting, and sacrificing for what is true and real.

I know this because I struggled to not put "truth" and "real" in quotes like just now. Because I know what I mean by them. I get the feeling previous eras had fairly strong conceptions of them. Talking at the jaded fuck tards in a shit hole forum has me sensing their desperate desire to pounce. Their insecure "wisdom" meant to perpetuate compounded lies about their capacity for perception or clinical diagnosis. My capitulation to addressing the non-existent impersonal and presumed "hive mind" in jaded fuck tard shit hole forums.

It's easy to shit on people when they present as whiny cliches that compose the various relationship and life advice subs here. "I just don't believe in myself." "My upbringing was terrible." "I'm super stoked about my spouse, but should we be fighting this much?" "My suicide ideation has reached critical mass." "It's just, I'm not that old, but I feel..." "Mostly it's that I'm out of shape and unmotivated." "My friends left, my girl left, I'm in recovery." "The one book I've read this year really opened my eyes."

I find cliches useful only insofar as they promote genuine and nuanced change. You can't blame your brain for phrasing things like you've grown up to hear them. But cliches aren't the answer. We'll all talk ourselves into someone else's all-too-familiar corner. How'd you get there? Can it change or inform for the better? Do you really care, or are you just pretending; have you been told you should care and found yourself here by accident?

I reflexively shit on cliche people and stories because I don't truly identify with them. I'm confident in my looks, even if I could stand to be more active. I don't try to lie and hide my faults behind the mirage of happy and healthy relationships. The last girl I was with we were together for 5 or so years. It might have been day 2 that I voiced constantly why it was going to be her to leave and all the reasons that would start to add up in her head.

I don't root for failure, but I genuinely attempt to be honest. I try to acknowledge the oncoming train and actively prepare for fallout. My life tends to not arbitrarily and unexpectedly blow up that way. It still hurts when things go bad, but it's the loneliest place on the planet being Cassandra.

It's hard enough to point outside of your relationships and start noting what's wrong. It's even harder to feel intimately every failing and foreboding point of your day to day. The first time, that you're aware, that your partner lies to you in years. The laundry list of things they say are wrong with you or they don't want. A list strikingly similar to character flaws and strategically negotiated characteristics you've had since day one. Did they not know what they wanted? Were they lying all along?

I'm willing to believe people are dumb first. I think it takes time to figure anything out about yourself, let alone many things about yourself. But what we do control is what makes me feel like death. We do control our approach. We don't have to lie. You can feel as sad as you've ever been and come to it honestly even if you feel you deserve to feel as bad as you do trying to lie.

But relationships will always be a clusterfuck. How about at large? Again, we can defer to cliches to write off people that don't try. I do. Unfortunately, I try. I experiment and say yes. I invest. I engage in conversations with people I would instantly judge and write off. I explore entertainment or other topics in the same fashion. I hate Arrow, and I hate it after watching every episode of it. It's real. I can provide truthful examples of its brand of stupid without lazily proclaiming the folly of The CW or kitsch superheroes.

Media gets to lie. The most popular gets that way why? For the same reason we're flirty with fascism. Repeat something often enough, you get comfortable. You get persuaded, even against your will. I never wanted the name Trump to pass my lips. It's hard to imagine being a functioning human being if I hadn't adopted a position on him today. Lazy, cynical, and ham-fisted attempts at "entertainment" or "journalism" become our standards for conversation and beguile our capacity for evaluating information.

We learn to accept it. We learn to breathe the deception. Personal public relations departments take up office space in our heads to spin the filth of our circumstances clean. We're not struggling, we're fighting. We're not sick, we're poised for revolution. We're not dying, we just can't be bothered to care.

Honesty, for me, I practically worship. I'm so "meh" or "even" that by the time I feel sad, especially sober, it's a glorious invitation for me to mine personal truths and find words for why I'm tearing up. It's a privilege to be moved to create. It's a privilege to abuse your perspective in service to try and understand or connect. Honest feeling leading to honest reflection, if only back at yourself, when the ones you wish could see it aren't able or are unwilling.

I hurt for my craft. Every area of human engagement requires some kind of street cred. If your hands aren't burnt and cut up, you're probably not a real cook. If you haven't broken a bone, what are you doing at the X-games? If you're a stark-raving mad doctor of anything who experiences borderline PTSD upon reflecting on grad-school, you owe it to yourself to insist people use the proper title.

My sacrifice is different, because it always seems to manifest in relationships. I always have to be prepared to lose the friend even if I don't want to. I'm not allowed to believe I can't see where something is going. I have to eviscerate my privacy and notions of "taboo personal thoughts" or a different, and worse, machinery kicks in. I have to really think and work with suicide. I have to really play with and tempt certain kinds of fate, or I'll never find the truth. You certainly don't have it. The collective wisdom I employ to manage train wrecks still leaves the trains crashing.

I don't like looking angry or "crazy." I don't like being picked apart by people with no capacity or respect for what I try to create. From writing to my relationships, it's all meant to strive for truths you can rely on. It's never and not for some naive or perpetual "happiness." I'm not hoping we polish and politicize our avoidance mechanisms. I don't want the "implied" demeanor and level of conversation. I'm so fucking sick of being lied to.

I'm so sick of it, I find myself empathizing with my bat shit mother. I've taken more slaps to the face over lies as a child than anything else. She vehemently hated when we lied. If she felt as broken and insane as it's making me, maybe I understand why she'd fuck us up. We were persistent and easy enough targets. Certainly I currently feel like a number of people could stand to be slapped.

I want more people to sound like me. I want them to start any and every discussion with "now, I could be perfectly upside down on this issue." "My feelings are super compelling and probably shit right now, perhaps we should talk later." "I respect and acknowledge your perspective and see your point, can you offer it with regard to my next question?" "I will talk to you as long as it takes for us to find common ground." In today's world, the first one to scream, throw up their arms, or accuse the other side of something wrong "wins." Take the last quoted approach, say in "debating" with a fundamentalist. Someone who re-asserts the same lines over and over isn't willing to talk, but their lips will keep moving. They can't be honest, but they certainly feel like they're saying something.

It's the liar that perpetuates the self-fulfilling feedback. You can rely on nothing if not for things to fail. With a simple adoption of that idea, you've set things in motion. To distinguish how and why something or someone fails as opposed to categorically dismissing them as inherent failures deserves the widest distinction. I could take my Cassandra plight and refuse intimacy, scorn women, and levy endless blame on my ex. Because, of course, pick your favorite cliche about humanity in general or women specifically or condescendingly "kids" perpetually.

Instead, I can talk about the moments it sinks in how bad I feel. I can identify the strategies and ideas I think should permeate every relationship, intimate or otherwise, and pick out when those stopped functioning. When the lies come out. When the conversation stops. When the positive characteristics and good habits get ignored so the looming monster can be made to look all the more necessary to be killed.

And I don't think it will get better. I don't think I'll meet many more if any people who don't fall right in line with a kind of failure I'm pressed to call even spoiled and bratty. I took my racing heart and bout of kicking my bed over a culmination of frustrating forces, and turned them into a boring procedural explanation. I allowed myself to be human, and then attempted to approach my actions as an adult.

My life feels stagnant. My life constantly has parts of it breaking down and away. Much, if not nearly all of it, is predicated on lies. I try to respect and explain how I feel concurrent to the fact of my friends' recent and terrible hardships. The false comparisons and pissing matches would be the liar's game. As long as I can't find honest assessments and self-reflection, per my mother's instruction, I'll just continue to beat it out of me. I'll have to rely on my torrential television and foreboding literature. I'm losing my ability to cope with engaging people much further.