It’s late. It didn’t used to be late, but now it is. My eyes have seen enough for the day. The movie reel of my mind is smacking the end of the tape over and over again against the inside of my forehead. I find myself, per usual, writing because I have to. Because I have words stuffed somewhere in there that have to be coaxed out like a frightened animal. They’re stuck. I’m stuck. And I suppose if you don’t know how to get somewhere “out there,” the only place left is traveling inside. Spelunk the cavernous soul and try not to provoke all the bats to fly out at once.
It’s getting weirder. My days don’t so much run together as they “are” together. My past feels as bright and relevant as the days I lived it. I’m back in my old bedroom. I’m walking my high school hallway. I’m in the fight, zoned out in front of the TV, and crying as I piss myself 10 steps from the bathroom. It’s one thing to have a good memory, or god forbid enough trauma growing up you can’t ever forget, but how do you describe when it changed. How do you say, “I didn’t live it, I am living it?”
It’s as if something is out to get you. Not catch you. Get you. Like you represent something. Like you actually are something. Asking about whether or not that something is “meaningful” seems to miss the point. Imagining some kind of god or advanced civilization powering on your program just feels vain.
You must consider how perfectly delusional it sounds. How perfectly delusional you actually are. So what? You have a handful of flashbacks or compelling memories. And? The past is the past, and my poor understanding of quantum mechanics blah blah blah. It’s not like you can remember every single day. It’s not like your brain is like a videocamera. It’s not as though you can even process that amount of information, let alone have someone you expect to believe it’s running you like you’re poorly describing.
It’s not words though. It’s a sense. It’s not an itch or a faint echo. It’s a whale. It’s an intense pressure and [BOW] that twists you up like you’re being looked at as though light is bending around you. It doesn’t pulse. It doesn’t sound. It just encompasses. It is, here, deal with it.
It’s not just to do with the past though. The future also feels here too. All of it, any of it. I can feel myself rich and I can feel the pavement of me sleeping on the street. I’ve seen my death countless time in countless ways. I have the most beautiful family that started under the most inauspicious circumstances, and I’m as lonely as anyone has ever been. It’s all true. It’s all real.
My heart is racing. I have no power to stop it. It’s excited about all there is left to accomplish. It’s dreadfully afraid the worst has come true. It longs to be trapped in the moment where it complimented the butterflies instead of wishing to set them ablaze. My chest is always so full. Fuller than my stomach could ever be. Full of rage and heartbreak and desire. Full of hope. Full of every possible future it feels in earnest and wishes could spill out like a broken dam. My head pounds away for the answer, some way to release the pressure valve. Some way to zero in on the infinity. Some voice that holds true in the blur of noises and colors.
I scowl. I snarl like a dog who knows what his teeth are really meant for. Beneath a somber and pathetic brow I breath through my nose and twitch as the lasers from my eyes attempt to transfer the debris to the page. I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. Each utterance sends chills and water wells. I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. I have to believe it? I mean, it’s not suspicious that I said “have to” instead of “I do.” I’m okay. My hands slow down wondering why I’m bothering with one more. I’m absolutely not okay.
How can you be okay when you’re everything? How does one (1) class human male (xy) 6’2” 220 pound bag of meat and hair and electricity and water feel he’s in every moment of his past and feel every possible future? This delusional fucking liar! What’s the angle? What do you get out of this? You’ve made a brand out of being a nutcase? But you’re not angry about it. You’re scared. You want an identity. You want to believe even one thing about everything remains the same. You want the words where they don’t exist and direction in the void.
But you’re chasing a shadow. Your perspective is off, and the closer you look the farther away it becomes. It’s not about your gaze. It’s not about your brains. It’s not about your wishes and feelings or hopes and dreams. It’s that. It’s that thought. It’s those words. THESE WORDS. Right here is as close or far as you’ve ever been or ever will be to anything you remember and everything you could ever be. It was true then, and it will be true again. True is as you as is. True was that, is this, and is moving right along to now. You’re the hero! You’re the despot. You’ve got a future! You’ll be fixing your car every week until the day you die. You’re a ball of confusion and anxiety well beyond your conscious control. You’re abject power to dig and beat and bite that ball until it becomes a choking hazard. You don’t have to make sense. You don’t make sense. You are sense. You make words. You make. That’s what you do.
You make tears. You make shit. You make food and people laugh. You make up stories in your head about how you might relate to the stories other people have made. You make excuses and predictions. You make the world around you fall into the same existential black hole until they’re dying to get away from you because you make 10 minutes feel like 10 years. You make your stomach rise and fall when you make yourself focus on your breath. You make clicky noises as you make yourself...finally just pick this way to end this sentence.
If there’s anything that makes you different, it’s that you're undyingly aware that it’s all coming from you! You know what you make! You know how much more you can make! You know why it’s necessary and worth it to be scared. You know how much harder it is to make some overflow of love or acceptance, but it’s not impossible. You know you can make the hate dissipate. You know the migraine can subside. Your heart has figured out how to get bored with itself in the past, and maybe one day you’ll figure out how to get there again. Except, it’s already there. It’s already as scared or as calm as it ever was or is ever going to be. You made it that way. For your own reasons, but it was you nonetheless. Why don’t you trust your own work?
Because it hurts.
Sunday, September 24, 2017
[640] Pretend Smart
(This has a very small chance of making more sense if you’re drunk and you read each paragraph like a self-contained poetic rant. You can always just skip it.)
If I were to pretend I were smart, I’d take it upon myself to know what was best for everybody. That would have to be the first hard and fast rule. Practically by definition, the smart person has the capacity to know, actually does know, and will in fact use that knowledge in a proactive way to improve our assumed impoverish circumstances. I honestly can’t think of a better way to define and understand smart. Anything that deviates turns you into a Jeopardy novelty or pretentious piece of shit. People call you smart because they assume it combines with a measure of morality and ipso facto the world becomes better.
I’ve been told I’m smart A LOT. Growing up it happened. When I make some point about a country or human psychology that no one in the room knows about it happens as well. When I write a hopelessly contrived blog that I would put money on there’s me and half of Byron that could even discern what the fuck I was talking about it strikes again. Smart is looked at as a kind of gift. It’s the gateway to a level of...one has to assume survival...that is still quietly respected while everything about what we popularize seeks to mock or caricature. You hate immigrants until you realize 9 of the last 10 best techniques for fighting the cancer you developed came from the nerdiest kids in India. The irony circle churns.
I think about “smartness” in a kind of “savior complex” way. Most people don’t seem to care if you’re smart until it turns them on, you save them from themselves, or you make a considerable amount of money. And truly, with the last one, the illusion of being smart sufficiently covers for many roads to riches. We’re taken in by the characters in movies who “read people” or who describe in detail how the next 45 minutes of the movie are going to play out. In utter contrast lies reality where the smart theory is the one that makes an informed prediction that actually comes true after building on thousands of failures. It’s not enough to read the words on the page, you have to know what came before.
This is why I have a hard time not thinking I’m smart. I feel like I see the future particularly when I study the past. I’ve complained heavily about my Cassandra complex. I’ve taken it for granted that by virtue of being human we sort of all had an insight into body language and word choice. I figured it was biologically programed to have a basic fleeting grasp of what kind of storms humanity could handle and how to orient yourself in your own sea of idiots.
The title of the blog came from me refuting Byron about my capacity for intelligence. I got into a stupid conversation with a manager of the company I work for about how he could help me and what steps he was taking. Immediately I dismissed his inability to play therapist and called out his outright lies about the measures he was taking. Byron, watching, blamed this on me being smarter than him. I said that if I was smart, I wouldn’t be working for yet another company that wasn’t my own.
I’m sympathetic to circumstance. I know you can literally work to exhaustion and have no real power to change the place you’re in. I know I’m maybe a week or 2 away from my totally idiot proof sustainable lifestyle that let’s me dick around at levels I don’t even know I’m prepared to deal with. I still struggle to call it “smart.” To me, any idiot who’s been paying attention to the myriad stupid decisions made that have constructed my circumstances would try to do most of the things I have in life. It took no special ingenuity or insight to try and live sustainably. You don’t need a throbbing temporal lobe to sit in your car and deliver food for 13 hours a day. You don’t need to deconstruct Nietzsche to pay for a plot of land or solar panels.
To me, if I were to pretend to be smart, I’d not only take my presumptuous posteur about what it is everyone around me needs, but I’d frame it in a way they could understand. I’m often accused of not speaking down to people. Let me rephrase that. I’m often accused of not taking the obvious fucking truth and putting it into terms idiots can swallow. Clearly, an actual smart person would speak the same language as those they wanted to convince. Hell, I’ve argued there is nothing if not respect for the very capacity for the message to even be translated.
I think about that a lot when I think about the advice I was once given to make my ex happy. “You know how to make her happy,” in that tone. But I didn’t want to make her happy. I wanted her to be happy. I never want to be with somebody where I turn on my “This is how I know how to work you” machinery. Some would call that unintelligent. I had what I wanted, why didn’t I keep it? Well, it wasn’t an “it.”
A big reason I started writing was how astonished or baffled I was at how easy I seemed to have it. I could turn on whatever people needed to hear. The horrifying part wasn’t so much doing so, but that they knew who I was or that I was doing it and were super keen to play along. The world gets so terrifyingly boring at that point. What are you going to say today? Who cares! Make them smile, make them laugh, or just make them feel at all, and then pinch and turn. They’re begging you to pinch and turn!
To persist in your playing and pretend, you have to keep an open-ended goal like “the perpetual survival of the human race.” In this way, you can couch every single thing you do, say, or think under the mighty noble umbrella of SAVIOR who de facto has the timeless respect for all culture and creation and therefore should be given the keys to drive home. So now I’ve told you what’s best, made it into a catchphrase, and crowned myself as your savior on the waves of your enthusiasm. Still with me?
Here’s the rub. There isn’t an end goal. There can’t be. Logically, whether the sun swallows us up or we carry on until we can’t see anymore stars in the sky, there is no such thing as “perpetuity.” At least, not in the sense that we’d like to believe. Every single particle in your body is probabilistically doing it’s own thing. Here again, I could take up the mantel of pretending to be smart and add a layer of intentionality or placating sense of immortality in referencing your soul. It’ll make you feel better. The smart guy got there in a convoluted way you don’t have to worry too much about.
I think that I have no real desire to be “smart.” I just want to be right. I want to know I felt the things I did for the right reasons. I want to know I picked the right friends and right fights. I want to know that the principle of THE WHOLE THING that I could never let go of had nothing to do with my obsessive or immature nature and was correctly rooted in why we should bother to fucking exist in the first place.
Then, I could pretend to be smart about how that whole system works. You see, if you’re actually right about “how it all works,” now you make the right kind of enemies in the right kind of predictable patterns. Instantly, not just your perspective, but your feelings and priorities and actions in the world become something manifestly magical. You’re not just acting. You’re not just of consequence. You’re right. You’re needling into the heart of everything less than right who has every ounce of your capacity to figure it out as well, but for one reason or another refuses to do so.
I feel lucky to have spent so much time exploring. To say it’s not about the dollar amount isn’t some rap lyric or hippie sentiment to me. To know not only why you picked the friends you did, but what’s worth mourning when those relationships die is a gift. You can pretend until the day you die that you have the best conception of “honesty” and that you’re capable of discerning the “love” of your feelings towards other people. You can call your efforts in life and at your job “noble” or “selfless” because, in all your worldly wisdom, picked the exact right thing to orient the whole of human existence in the proper direction. Even better than those people though are the ones who turn inward. In solipsistic grandeur, of course! It’s always and forever been about you and whatever the fuck it is you think! Ain’t no proof anyone else exists anyway.
I suppose it’s weird for me in that I accept and like to pretend. I don’t really care if I’m wrong about having such a deep-seeded sense of equality and dismissive attitude about connotation that each utterance of “nigga” leaves me as hollow as you might be enraged. I don’t care if you argue “market forces” and “budget concerns” in the face of my ideas about access to healthcare. I’ll die loud and proud about how you should have bought solar panels before they were cool and efficient the day someone told you fossil fuels were fucking dumb. We’re all just pretending anyway, right? That’s the nature of my delusion, and I find it better than yours.
Saturday, September 16, 2017
[639] Of Two Minds
This may turn into a hodgepodge, but I got tired of reciting the title in my head.
I’m increasingly aware of how often I’m in a state of “total empathy,” so to speak, about two seemingly opposing views. As logically as one imagines you can be, I can take in the details, agree with the facts, and find myself in the “center.” To be sure, I hate the language we use to describe differences. Left, right, and center pretend like something sensible or mathematical is concerned with your ideals. Unfortunately, to the extent that you try and express your “mathematical” or “impartial” or “who gives a fuck?” viewpoint, you’ll be inevitably driven back into the more ignorant and incomplete language.
Let’s take the concept of having a conversation. One of the hippiest and peace-loving ideas is that we can always talk and work it out. If we want to couch things under a giant umbrella named “conversation,” it’s hard to say I don’t think that working through the details in your own mind is helpful at the top of a blog. I’m conversing with myself, probing for the words that have come and gone over the last few days. That “side” of my mind clearly agrees with the hippies. Talk, get specific, provide examples, and bolster your point of view with the ideas of those who’ve caught your attention.
And yet, I have zero faith in conversation. It’s getting increasingly frustrating when I attempt to speak to people. It’s not what you might lazily suspect about a forceful and insecure desire to foist “negativity” into something. It’s merely the persistent pattern of people with nothing to say having no capacity to recognize how little what they’re attempting to amounts to. This happens after they become emotionally invested in a particular facet of their identity. The feminist can’t talk to you unless it’s through the domineering rape glasses of her male oppressors. The parent figure can’t help but condescend to youth. It’s the person who reflexively claims to hear every ounce of your subtext or “real” conversation, but then wants to nitpick your specific word choice in service to derailing the conversation.
This happens at high “academic” levels, most notably for me when you watch atheists “debate” the faithful or two competing economists where one likes to pretend some version of the “trickle down” system works. This happens in the stupid drunk trash talk outside of the bar. This happens between exes picking every past grievance they can remember. None of us can be “perfect” explicit speakers, perhaps like someone on the spectrum, but the moment we shift into insisting “you’re just not listening!” or “you’re completely missing my point!” the less we’re working to actually form that point better or willing to give any credit that someone has actually heard us.
Perhaps we look at death. Here again, I’m of two minds. I think a considerable amount about death. I put myself at all of my relatives’ funerals. I imagine the fiery crash on the highway. I can see me purple and bloated hanging from an extension cord regretting not thinking more about the outfit I wanted to shit myself in. I don’t find death particularly fascinating or interesting, but by virtue of it being so “secret” or taboo, my mind reflexively likes to play with ideas about it. I don’t necessarily want to die, but I also don’t know that I care as much as people want to assume “we all do” about staying alive.
The other side of my death mind uses it to fuel all the shit I want to create. It makes me unduly excited to meet someone I don’t hate. It has me yearning for “truth” as best as it can be approximated. I want real relationships. I want honesty. I know I can weather stupid financial storms or the inherent frustrations and indignities of dealing with “the masses” at large. How else do you decide to move quickly if you aren’t counting the grey in your beard? How do you achieve obtaining “the world” if you put off working to do so until tomorrow? Against my will I’m racing to the finish anyway, might as well pursue the heights of your potential happiness or achievement, because the lowest of the lows are coming no matter what.
Let’s move onto relationships. How many words have I dedicated to completely shitting on and then completely showering praise on my friends? That’s also mostly how I conceive of relationships. I don’t actually think there’s much difference between the “best” friendship statuses and just your willingness to accept and work with the people you have in your life. We’re extremely good at romanticising those connections when it’s been awhile since we’ve seen each other. It’s better than using words like “convenience” and “acquaintance” which doesn’t seem to adequately capture the love-slung drunken professions and outings. Your happiness, well-being, and until recently survival, is predicated on your ability to form these connections, right? You live longer. You get more Instagram pictures.
A natural extension of my relative indifference to myself I’m sure speaks to how and why my relationships break down. Well, some of my relationships. Unless I’m drunk, I’m not the feeler, and that constantly registers as “negative” in the minds of the feelers. I merely describe something I see or attempt to relate as much, oh no but wait, what I was actually doing was trying to bring down the vibe...or something. I don’t heap your emotional burdens onto myself, which prevents me from dancing around and using language you’d prefer, which has me looking cold and indifferent and impossible to talk to when neither of us is willing to define my horribleness beyond your choice epithet.
Here it might help to explain an interaction that happened last night. Again, I find myself hanging out with someone I don’t particularly enjoy because they’re actually the old guy who enjoys being constantly out at the bars or drunk and the one time I go out this month or over the last 3, of course I see him. He insists that my disposition is bred from a deep insecurity. He thinks he only hears me negatively describe things, and condescend, and deflect, but it’s a familiar story. When I ask him what I’m insecure about, first, he doesn’t know. When I ask him to expand on a definition, he says I’m deflecting. When I explain to him how I would attempt to answer that question based on observations about him, he takes a comment I made about looking younger if I shaved as evidence I’m insecure about my age.
It seems to me if you’re going to try and point out someone’s insecurities, they need to account for something that they feel genuinely guilty about or negatively affects their lives in ways they don't want or couldn't anticipate. You hate your hair, so you spend more money than you really should or have to keep it straightened or done up in a way that will keep your mother’s comments at bay. You think you’re too fat so you wear clothing that pretends you aren’t or does a lot of work in trying to mask how you present yourself to the world in photographs. I honestly have a hard time trying to work in the language of insecurity because the strongest times I’ve ever felt it was when I was a child. I used to hate my hair because of the constant compliments and people wanting to play with it. My mom made me feel insecure about my smile with “Gumbalina” comments when it was too big. It’s why I dreaded picture day.
If anything, my current personality is a complete rejection of the concept “insecure.” If I think I’m getting too fat, I say so, then I stick to salads and hit the gym. If I cared too harshly how I looked, I wouldn’t be wearing a “vote for Pedro” neon shirt referencing a movie I don’t like and high school class president campaign from my brother’s year. My “problem” is a marked lack of shame and insecurity. I’m not willing to pretend I don’t stink if I’ve worked too long or haven’t showered like some hippies I’ve met who’ve insisted on hugs, but I’m not nervously sweating it out in my interactions with people hoping they don’t comment.
At this moment you can sense the failure point. You see, offering explanations or honest tellings of the goings on of your mind are PRECISELY THE EVIDENCE of your insecurity! Duh! Can’t you feel the after school special, “We all have things we’re insecure about! Don’t worry kids!” Just like if you explain you’re not a “feminist” you’ve tacitly endorsed the subjugation of women or if you reference police shootings you don’t respect the danger cops put themselves through. It doesn’t matter the topic, if you don’t conform to how people need you to be, every single word, the act of bothering to look for them, becomes a shovel full.
The most pervasive level of my two-minded problem is about that overall general disposition. The drunk or high person walks next to me with their hand up for a high five, my instinct is at once, “fuck that guy” and “I’ve been that guy, here’s a high five.” I gave it, he was pleased. The guy today who yelled from his car that he loved me, I decided to ignore. I’m at once that open and gregarious bucket of fun and acceptance and the harshest critic even of the things I like. This is something that is proving impossible for most anyone to understand. I’m not “negative” anymore than I’m “positive.” I’m both. I’m happy to be both. I suspect we’re all both, but I’m not scared to flow fluidly between the two without emotionally leveraging or needing to encapsulate your being with my nicest or meanest comments.
Being everything and nothing is confusing. Seeing yourself as the author of your own story while acknowledging the forces that have shaped you is not a pretty picture. I see the wisdom in generalized peaceful approaches to things, and I’ve never been more invigorated at a handful of times where I was in position to be violent. I can understand the need for border security while endlessly shitting on a wall. I can desire a passionate and deeply connected relationship while acknowledging no flame burns the brightest at all times and changes in dynamics are inevitable. I can see myself withering away in a hospital bed the moment my heart is racing at the prospect of building out my house or an entrepreneurial idea.
If anything, I want more direction. I want more accurate judgment. Find and exploit what you think to be my insecurities. Make me feel anything, let alone bad lol. It’s precisely why I manage to get myself in “trouble” with people I don’t really care for on nights I didn’t really want to be drunk. In my view, I’m killing it, and the things that go wrong are either me pressing my luck, like with my car today, or me introducing a semi-controlled chaos, because otherwise I’d just be making money or completing my goals...too early? That’s a vastly different thing about me over the “average.” I put my feet to the floor. I take the responsibility. I already know everything is my fault and nothing will change if I don’t do it. It’s impossible to be “insecure” when that’s your default setting. I’m too old to care what you think, just fat enough to have had “too many” hook ups, smile so big you wonder how my teeth don’t get swallowed up, drive such a stunner car it’s met with all the biggest tow trucks in town, and am so fancy I’m pimping out a garage to live in. I don’t put my inherent value at the dollar amount in the bank and I don’t let my “negative judgmental attitude” get in the way of working with or pursuing people who aren’t shit.
The irony is in something needing you to be insecure. It’s not just in bad taste, but impossible you don’t have something that’s crippling you or holding you back. These people who need you to be negative that it wouldn’t matter if you raised your voice once a year, game over. These people who look at their own fat bodies or terrible relationships or unmet goals and say, “You’re human, just like me!” No. I’m not. I’m Nick P. I’m the point and the abstract. I’m my best and worst blog and all of them combined. I’m my shitty childhood and incalculable wealth. I’m my relationship to you, and the faux-resentment of incidental accusations when you aren’t helping me or talking back. I’m the thief who’s been stolen from, the murderer who’s so far stuck to insects, and Romeo Casanova. And who are you? Nothing to me? Everything to me? Certainly never more or less than you, doubtfully, “choose” to be when we interact.
I’m increasingly aware of how often I’m in a state of “total empathy,” so to speak, about two seemingly opposing views. As logically as one imagines you can be, I can take in the details, agree with the facts, and find myself in the “center.” To be sure, I hate the language we use to describe differences. Left, right, and center pretend like something sensible or mathematical is concerned with your ideals. Unfortunately, to the extent that you try and express your “mathematical” or “impartial” or “who gives a fuck?” viewpoint, you’ll be inevitably driven back into the more ignorant and incomplete language.
Let’s take the concept of having a conversation. One of the hippiest and peace-loving ideas is that we can always talk and work it out. If we want to couch things under a giant umbrella named “conversation,” it’s hard to say I don’t think that working through the details in your own mind is helpful at the top of a blog. I’m conversing with myself, probing for the words that have come and gone over the last few days. That “side” of my mind clearly agrees with the hippies. Talk, get specific, provide examples, and bolster your point of view with the ideas of those who’ve caught your attention.
And yet, I have zero faith in conversation. It’s getting increasingly frustrating when I attempt to speak to people. It’s not what you might lazily suspect about a forceful and insecure desire to foist “negativity” into something. It’s merely the persistent pattern of people with nothing to say having no capacity to recognize how little what they’re attempting to amounts to. This happens after they become emotionally invested in a particular facet of their identity. The feminist can’t talk to you unless it’s through the domineering rape glasses of her male oppressors. The parent figure can’t help but condescend to youth. It’s the person who reflexively claims to hear every ounce of your subtext or “real” conversation, but then wants to nitpick your specific word choice in service to derailing the conversation.
This happens at high “academic” levels, most notably for me when you watch atheists “debate” the faithful or two competing economists where one likes to pretend some version of the “trickle down” system works. This happens in the stupid drunk trash talk outside of the bar. This happens between exes picking every past grievance they can remember. None of us can be “perfect” explicit speakers, perhaps like someone on the spectrum, but the moment we shift into insisting “you’re just not listening!” or “you’re completely missing my point!” the less we’re working to actually form that point better or willing to give any credit that someone has actually heard us.
Perhaps we look at death. Here again, I’m of two minds. I think a considerable amount about death. I put myself at all of my relatives’ funerals. I imagine the fiery crash on the highway. I can see me purple and bloated hanging from an extension cord regretting not thinking more about the outfit I wanted to shit myself in. I don’t find death particularly fascinating or interesting, but by virtue of it being so “secret” or taboo, my mind reflexively likes to play with ideas about it. I don’t necessarily want to die, but I also don’t know that I care as much as people want to assume “we all do” about staying alive.
The other side of my death mind uses it to fuel all the shit I want to create. It makes me unduly excited to meet someone I don’t hate. It has me yearning for “truth” as best as it can be approximated. I want real relationships. I want honesty. I know I can weather stupid financial storms or the inherent frustrations and indignities of dealing with “the masses” at large. How else do you decide to move quickly if you aren’t counting the grey in your beard? How do you achieve obtaining “the world” if you put off working to do so until tomorrow? Against my will I’m racing to the finish anyway, might as well pursue the heights of your potential happiness or achievement, because the lowest of the lows are coming no matter what.
Let’s move onto relationships. How many words have I dedicated to completely shitting on and then completely showering praise on my friends? That’s also mostly how I conceive of relationships. I don’t actually think there’s much difference between the “best” friendship statuses and just your willingness to accept and work with the people you have in your life. We’re extremely good at romanticising those connections when it’s been awhile since we’ve seen each other. It’s better than using words like “convenience” and “acquaintance” which doesn’t seem to adequately capture the love-slung drunken professions and outings. Your happiness, well-being, and until recently survival, is predicated on your ability to form these connections, right? You live longer. You get more Instagram pictures.
A natural extension of my relative indifference to myself I’m sure speaks to how and why my relationships break down. Well, some of my relationships. Unless I’m drunk, I’m not the feeler, and that constantly registers as “negative” in the minds of the feelers. I merely describe something I see or attempt to relate as much, oh no but wait, what I was actually doing was trying to bring down the vibe...or something. I don’t heap your emotional burdens onto myself, which prevents me from dancing around and using language you’d prefer, which has me looking cold and indifferent and impossible to talk to when neither of us is willing to define my horribleness beyond your choice epithet.
Here it might help to explain an interaction that happened last night. Again, I find myself hanging out with someone I don’t particularly enjoy because they’re actually the old guy who enjoys being constantly out at the bars or drunk and the one time I go out this month or over the last 3, of course I see him. He insists that my disposition is bred from a deep insecurity. He thinks he only hears me negatively describe things, and condescend, and deflect, but it’s a familiar story. When I ask him what I’m insecure about, first, he doesn’t know. When I ask him to expand on a definition, he says I’m deflecting. When I explain to him how I would attempt to answer that question based on observations about him, he takes a comment I made about looking younger if I shaved as evidence I’m insecure about my age.
It seems to me if you’re going to try and point out someone’s insecurities, they need to account for something that they feel genuinely guilty about or negatively affects their lives in ways they don't want or couldn't anticipate. You hate your hair, so you spend more money than you really should or have to keep it straightened or done up in a way that will keep your mother’s comments at bay. You think you’re too fat so you wear clothing that pretends you aren’t or does a lot of work in trying to mask how you present yourself to the world in photographs. I honestly have a hard time trying to work in the language of insecurity because the strongest times I’ve ever felt it was when I was a child. I used to hate my hair because of the constant compliments and people wanting to play with it. My mom made me feel insecure about my smile with “Gumbalina” comments when it was too big. It’s why I dreaded picture day.
If anything, my current personality is a complete rejection of the concept “insecure.” If I think I’m getting too fat, I say so, then I stick to salads and hit the gym. If I cared too harshly how I looked, I wouldn’t be wearing a “vote for Pedro” neon shirt referencing a movie I don’t like and high school class president campaign from my brother’s year. My “problem” is a marked lack of shame and insecurity. I’m not willing to pretend I don’t stink if I’ve worked too long or haven’t showered like some hippies I’ve met who’ve insisted on hugs, but I’m not nervously sweating it out in my interactions with people hoping they don’t comment.
At this moment you can sense the failure point. You see, offering explanations or honest tellings of the goings on of your mind are PRECISELY THE EVIDENCE of your insecurity! Duh! Can’t you feel the after school special, “We all have things we’re insecure about! Don’t worry kids!” Just like if you explain you’re not a “feminist” you’ve tacitly endorsed the subjugation of women or if you reference police shootings you don’t respect the danger cops put themselves through. It doesn’t matter the topic, if you don’t conform to how people need you to be, every single word, the act of bothering to look for them, becomes a shovel full.
The most pervasive level of my two-minded problem is about that overall general disposition. The drunk or high person walks next to me with their hand up for a high five, my instinct is at once, “fuck that guy” and “I’ve been that guy, here’s a high five.” I gave it, he was pleased. The guy today who yelled from his car that he loved me, I decided to ignore. I’m at once that open and gregarious bucket of fun and acceptance and the harshest critic even of the things I like. This is something that is proving impossible for most anyone to understand. I’m not “negative” anymore than I’m “positive.” I’m both. I’m happy to be both. I suspect we’re all both, but I’m not scared to flow fluidly between the two without emotionally leveraging or needing to encapsulate your being with my nicest or meanest comments.
Being everything and nothing is confusing. Seeing yourself as the author of your own story while acknowledging the forces that have shaped you is not a pretty picture. I see the wisdom in generalized peaceful approaches to things, and I’ve never been more invigorated at a handful of times where I was in position to be violent. I can understand the need for border security while endlessly shitting on a wall. I can desire a passionate and deeply connected relationship while acknowledging no flame burns the brightest at all times and changes in dynamics are inevitable. I can see myself withering away in a hospital bed the moment my heart is racing at the prospect of building out my house or an entrepreneurial idea.
If anything, I want more direction. I want more accurate judgment. Find and exploit what you think to be my insecurities. Make me feel anything, let alone bad lol. It’s precisely why I manage to get myself in “trouble” with people I don’t really care for on nights I didn’t really want to be drunk. In my view, I’m killing it, and the things that go wrong are either me pressing my luck, like with my car today, or me introducing a semi-controlled chaos, because otherwise I’d just be making money or completing my goals...too early? That’s a vastly different thing about me over the “average.” I put my feet to the floor. I take the responsibility. I already know everything is my fault and nothing will change if I don’t do it. It’s impossible to be “insecure” when that’s your default setting. I’m too old to care what you think, just fat enough to have had “too many” hook ups, smile so big you wonder how my teeth don’t get swallowed up, drive such a stunner car it’s met with all the biggest tow trucks in town, and am so fancy I’m pimping out a garage to live in. I don’t put my inherent value at the dollar amount in the bank and I don’t let my “negative judgmental attitude” get in the way of working with or pursuing people who aren’t shit.
The irony is in something needing you to be insecure. It’s not just in bad taste, but impossible you don’t have something that’s crippling you or holding you back. These people who need you to be negative that it wouldn’t matter if you raised your voice once a year, game over. These people who look at their own fat bodies or terrible relationships or unmet goals and say, “You’re human, just like me!” No. I’m not. I’m Nick P. I’m the point and the abstract. I’m my best and worst blog and all of them combined. I’m my shitty childhood and incalculable wealth. I’m my relationship to you, and the faux-resentment of incidental accusations when you aren’t helping me or talking back. I’m the thief who’s been stolen from, the murderer who’s so far stuck to insects, and Romeo Casanova. And who are you? Nothing to me? Everything to me? Certainly never more or less than you, doubtfully, “choose” to be when we interact.
Thursday, September 7, 2017
[638] Willing & Able
I'm struck with an insight. It's almost never “how,” only “that” something is willing and able to be achieved. We spend considerable amounts of time arguing semantics or criticizing styles. We bring “alternative facts” to the table completely immune to the evisceration of language. We inject “isms” and “ocracies” to guide invisible psychological hands in sweeping along taken for granted trends. It's at the heart of our conception of ourselves, and we don't even put a voice to it.
I never let things go. I shut up about things. I add a million lines of perspective to them. But I never let them go. I rarely think about my “first love,” and my current ex is significantly more of a point of intrigue than the harbinger of uncontrolled feelings forcing themselves into my attention. The physical memory of my experiences with them still exists. The ability to smile or cry (well, maybe not cry) upon reflection is real. It doesn't really matter “how” I feel though. It didn't matter at the time, and I hardly think it will matter how it “resolves” to be felt moments before my death. What truly mattered was “that” I was willing to put myself through it.
I like to argue. This is to distinguish from “fighting.” I'm perfectly aware that words don't change people's minds alone. I learned that the hard way trying to talk down a swinging mother. I learned it the hard way reading books and citing evidence for ideologues. I learned it from psychological literature about how people base their decisions and what their very brains are wired like to keep them from changing too often or too quickly. We act under the collective delusion that words are more powerful than they are, because we irrationally defer to our feelings to describe their purpose. It's easier to offer a short-hand quote from an “inspiring” and “emotionally compelling” orator, than it is to parse out the complexity of the person themselves. “How” they said it has significantly less to do with “that” you've managed to use it for your feelings. (Think of every paraphrased version of “I have a dream” or misquoted movie.)
I like to experiment and create. I'm not afraid of “failure.” This at times looks like running headlong into the wind before accounting for everything that might make my life easier. But to spend too much time in research mode is to miss the point. There's an infinite amount of ways you can try to achieve something. You can think one dollar at a time, insured or not, cold or comfortable, with one trusted ally or a dozen piddling peons, and while you might inspire a biopic, it will only be “that” which people can point at which you've achieved from which they'll shower praise or condemnation. When you're willing, you try. If you're unable to recognize, you can't discover the will, therefore you'll never try. To speak to the point in the opening language of the blog, if you're primarily concerned with “how,” you'll subvert any capacity to create “that.”
It should be obvious, but it's not, this isn't an argument for the complete disavowing of details. This doesn't mean you shouldn't prefer a strong future accounting foundation where you can properly flood Houston in a way that doesn't require destroying houses. Here we must make a distinction between known and unknown. It wasn't some kind of moral or social imperative to develop flood plains in the way that one is implored to sort themselves out psychologically in their relationships, or in their creative orientation in the world. You don't know how important it is to break down fear or anger barriers like you know if you put a house in a stupid spot, something stupid can happen to it.
When it comes to confrontation, it doesn't even begin as a properly defined confrontation until both parties are willing to acknowledge “that.” You can argue with the best intentions. You can feel up and down. You can pick every word as deliberately as you might chocolates after biting into the wrong one. It simply does not matter. You won't get your girl back. You won't get your legislation passed. You won't convince the teenage Russian troll you're anything more than fodder for their paycheck.
“That” can take on infinite forms. If you want to try and be coherent, you reduce “that” to a set of observations about the psychical world or maybe root it in the terms of your surrender. If I'm willing to see a dozen projects try to be operated at once, “that” has to be my budget and tolerance for failure. Maybe I sell some t-shirts and eventually make analogous money to my step-mom. The barely considered hassle of what it means to find, wash, press, picture, store, list, and ship all became secondary to “that” phrase, “$50 is worth the try and first hand knowledge gained.” That I retain the will to try something new is what's important to me. That I understand my road to solvency as many diverging skills and interests trickling in at once underlays my energy to power through what may have been overlooked.
In an argument, “that” should conceivably be what has you bothering to speak to each other in the first place, let alone be together if you're arguing over your relationship. “How” you love someone or communicate is most often secondary (not saying it should be) to “that” they feel a certain way about it. Their willingness to feel hurt, or offended, or to make assumptions about you is significantly more real than any positive qualifier you could use to describe “how” you're relating to one another. You could count more good than bad? Little did you know each bad was a knife inextricably lodged in her heart! You might as well take your pencil recording the numbers and ram that in as well.
I listened to a book recently about how to get people to like you in 90 seconds or less. A line that has stuck with me from it is, “It depends on whether you want to adopt a productive or not attitude.” This book is clearly geared towards those who are socially angry or resentful and perhaps derail their interactions before they ever get started. This guy is a big shot photographer who has to evoke the proper emotion and head tilts from beautiful women who might not even speak his language. So he mirrors and probes and body languages and wah-lah, keeps getting the next gig. One might be tempted to say his effectiveness is in “how” he describes what is essentially manipulating people. I think this is wrong. It's “that” he's willing to do whatever it takes to get the shot that counts.
I think about this when I ask for help. I know “how” to get money out of people. I know “how” to “pitch” and “sell” myself, or some shitty product, for someone else. I know “how” to pay the bills or get girls to like me. I know “how” to “better communicate” depending on what's at stake. I knew precisely “how” my heart would react when I tried for another doomed study stay. But no matter how many times I describe the intimate details that go into the things I'm most proud of creating, all that matters is “that” I had my party house, “that” I created the coffee shop, “that” I stay open and honest with those I wish to be closest to, and “that” I work every day, and try, and sneak into my off hours the rounding up of free or cheap shit to try and sell. “That” garage needs to be renovated on “that” land, and I'm “that” willing to sleep in my car, to keep speaking to important underlying truths about “how” we may one day lean in describing society, let alone my specific efforts.
An ideal is only an ideal in that it can be recognized. As such, without a shared one, we're never going to see what you mean when you describe how you're getting fucked every day.
I never let things go. I shut up about things. I add a million lines of perspective to them. But I never let them go. I rarely think about my “first love,” and my current ex is significantly more of a point of intrigue than the harbinger of uncontrolled feelings forcing themselves into my attention. The physical memory of my experiences with them still exists. The ability to smile or cry (well, maybe not cry) upon reflection is real. It doesn't really matter “how” I feel though. It didn't matter at the time, and I hardly think it will matter how it “resolves” to be felt moments before my death. What truly mattered was “that” I was willing to put myself through it.
I like to argue. This is to distinguish from “fighting.” I'm perfectly aware that words don't change people's minds alone. I learned that the hard way trying to talk down a swinging mother. I learned it the hard way reading books and citing evidence for ideologues. I learned it from psychological literature about how people base their decisions and what their very brains are wired like to keep them from changing too often or too quickly. We act under the collective delusion that words are more powerful than they are, because we irrationally defer to our feelings to describe their purpose. It's easier to offer a short-hand quote from an “inspiring” and “emotionally compelling” orator, than it is to parse out the complexity of the person themselves. “How” they said it has significantly less to do with “that” you've managed to use it for your feelings. (Think of every paraphrased version of “I have a dream” or misquoted movie.)
I like to experiment and create. I'm not afraid of “failure.” This at times looks like running headlong into the wind before accounting for everything that might make my life easier. But to spend too much time in research mode is to miss the point. There's an infinite amount of ways you can try to achieve something. You can think one dollar at a time, insured or not, cold or comfortable, with one trusted ally or a dozen piddling peons, and while you might inspire a biopic, it will only be “that” which people can point at which you've achieved from which they'll shower praise or condemnation. When you're willing, you try. If you're unable to recognize, you can't discover the will, therefore you'll never try. To speak to the point in the opening language of the blog, if you're primarily concerned with “how,” you'll subvert any capacity to create “that.”
It should be obvious, but it's not, this isn't an argument for the complete disavowing of details. This doesn't mean you shouldn't prefer a strong future accounting foundation where you can properly flood Houston in a way that doesn't require destroying houses. Here we must make a distinction between known and unknown. It wasn't some kind of moral or social imperative to develop flood plains in the way that one is implored to sort themselves out psychologically in their relationships, or in their creative orientation in the world. You don't know how important it is to break down fear or anger barriers like you know if you put a house in a stupid spot, something stupid can happen to it.
When it comes to confrontation, it doesn't even begin as a properly defined confrontation until both parties are willing to acknowledge “that.” You can argue with the best intentions. You can feel up and down. You can pick every word as deliberately as you might chocolates after biting into the wrong one. It simply does not matter. You won't get your girl back. You won't get your legislation passed. You won't convince the teenage Russian troll you're anything more than fodder for their paycheck.
“That” can take on infinite forms. If you want to try and be coherent, you reduce “that” to a set of observations about the psychical world or maybe root it in the terms of your surrender. If I'm willing to see a dozen projects try to be operated at once, “that” has to be my budget and tolerance for failure. Maybe I sell some t-shirts and eventually make analogous money to my step-mom. The barely considered hassle of what it means to find, wash, press, picture, store, list, and ship all became secondary to “that” phrase, “$50 is worth the try and first hand knowledge gained.” That I retain the will to try something new is what's important to me. That I understand my road to solvency as many diverging skills and interests trickling in at once underlays my energy to power through what may have been overlooked.
In an argument, “that” should conceivably be what has you bothering to speak to each other in the first place, let alone be together if you're arguing over your relationship. “How” you love someone or communicate is most often secondary (not saying it should be) to “that” they feel a certain way about it. Their willingness to feel hurt, or offended, or to make assumptions about you is significantly more real than any positive qualifier you could use to describe “how” you're relating to one another. You could count more good than bad? Little did you know each bad was a knife inextricably lodged in her heart! You might as well take your pencil recording the numbers and ram that in as well.
I listened to a book recently about how to get people to like you in 90 seconds or less. A line that has stuck with me from it is, “It depends on whether you want to adopt a productive or not attitude.” This book is clearly geared towards those who are socially angry or resentful and perhaps derail their interactions before they ever get started. This guy is a big shot photographer who has to evoke the proper emotion and head tilts from beautiful women who might not even speak his language. So he mirrors and probes and body languages and wah-lah, keeps getting the next gig. One might be tempted to say his effectiveness is in “how” he describes what is essentially manipulating people. I think this is wrong. It's “that” he's willing to do whatever it takes to get the shot that counts.
I think about this when I ask for help. I know “how” to get money out of people. I know “how” to “pitch” and “sell” myself, or some shitty product, for someone else. I know “how” to pay the bills or get girls to like me. I know “how” to “better communicate” depending on what's at stake. I knew precisely “how” my heart would react when I tried for another doomed study stay. But no matter how many times I describe the intimate details that go into the things I'm most proud of creating, all that matters is “that” I had my party house, “that” I created the coffee shop, “that” I stay open and honest with those I wish to be closest to, and “that” I work every day, and try, and sneak into my off hours the rounding up of free or cheap shit to try and sell. “That” garage needs to be renovated on “that” land, and I'm “that” willing to sleep in my car, to keep speaking to important underlying truths about “how” we may one day lean in describing society, let alone my specific efforts.
An ideal is only an ideal in that it can be recognized. As such, without a shared one, we're never going to see what you mean when you describe how you're getting fucked every day.
Sunday, September 3, 2017
[637] The Future
This is going to be the speculation one does when they grew up quasi-lower-middle class enough to have their dreams tempered, but remain in that sweet spot of aspirational innovative motivation that drives the future.
The last 3 days I worked 39 hours. I made $662. As a “poor” person, this means more than 3 “rent payments,” 3 months of health insurance, a new phone and a year of payments, the internet bill for almost a year, most every expensive item I have in my amazon wishlist, and way more than enough to impress drunk idiots at the bar as who’s got us all covered; just keep smiling and poorly dancing.
I feel I can start to do that rich person thing where I flirt with the future. I don’t think my circumstances are long for the world of being compelled by the immediacy of some daming obligation and mental rental box.
So what does my future look like?
To be sure, I still need to buy all of the things like farm equipment, and the work to make the garage livable is a solid weekend I haven’t taken the time for, but why should we pretend those aren’t forgone conclusions?
The week after I’m comfortable, I call up Jeremy and get his girl Kari to do the next iteration of the map. What’s $500 to a poor person without bills? About 2 days of open to close order delivering.
If I don’t immediately do that, I pack up and visit Wendy, HatSam, Gough, and Rachel for a week. Plane tickets are less than $300 round trip, I can not only buy the drinks, but not regret fancier meals that I’m sure Mike and Rachel have become accustomed to given their rich white stature.
Okay, so I’ve made some progress on my website, visited some people I was supposed to a few months earlier, then what? Well, $650 is way more than necessary to build an extension on my house with straw bales, so I do that. We’re at about a month, month and a half total time, only 3 days each week. So maybe every month or so I build a new room? Weather and will permitting, why not?
3 solid weekends is fixing the moving truck and getting it on the streets. 2 days is the cost of contacts or a visit to the dentist. 2 or 3 months is new smaller plots I can expand or develop. 1 month is most of what I envision for the greenhouse combined with what’s already stockpiled, Jake. Let me get the workings of the Tough Mudder course from Erin (you really need to put Rin back in your name) and price the wood and heavy equipment rental fees. Let me branch off into salvage, recycling, or simple reselling of things I show up to pick up for free first habitually.
The train is moving. Fuck studies, I still work like a dog and sacrifice lifetime and limb to make it as immediate as possible. Creativity is bread from struggle? Then I aspire to be the most boring fuck you’ve ever met here shortly. When I’m like 35, maybe 40, having lived too many lives and am ready to die except for the part that goes through with anything, it’ll be because I saw myself as I am right then as I am right now. Aside from all the built in random surprises and opportunities you can’t see coming, I’m already doing the work and making the money to explore the myriad ideas I have that could go everywhere or nowhere. This is ungodly liberating and simultaneously my death sentence. Like Louis C.K. getting famous, your problems and perspective just aren’t the same.
The real question will be, who’s on board? When I post that status, “Hey, I have a couple grand just sitting here, who wants to travel to Torino and chill for a bit?” Will you say yes? Or will we have to plan months in advance and exchange “info” and dance? When you have an idea that you’ve always wanted to pursue and I’m like, “Dude, take this and work” are you going to chuck that weird white guilt thing out and just do what you and I both want you to do without having the word “handout” echo in the back of your head? But probably the most serious question, when I fly you out to party, are you actually going to drink like you’re not a bitch?
This remains to be seen. But if you’re getting as old as I am and years feel like months feel like days, then you’re going to read this blog when you do, and tomorrow you’re going to see me harping on the instances I’ve raised and we’re going to find out if you’ve done the mental homework to roll. Just to reiterate, we’re not talking theoreticals anymore. I worked for 3 days and made more in those 3 days than I would have spending 3 nights at a study. My catalyst is firmly rooted in my propensity to work, which is firmly rooted in spite and condemnation for how little my ethics compare to the world at large. The future I describe is going to happen. Are you as there already as I am?
The last 3 days I worked 39 hours. I made $662. As a “poor” person, this means more than 3 “rent payments,” 3 months of health insurance, a new phone and a year of payments, the internet bill for almost a year, most every expensive item I have in my amazon wishlist, and way more than enough to impress drunk idiots at the bar as who’s got us all covered; just keep smiling and poorly dancing.
I feel I can start to do that rich person thing where I flirt with the future. I don’t think my circumstances are long for the world of being compelled by the immediacy of some daming obligation and mental rental box.
So what does my future look like?
To be sure, I still need to buy all of the things like farm equipment, and the work to make the garage livable is a solid weekend I haven’t taken the time for, but why should we pretend those aren’t forgone conclusions?
The week after I’m comfortable, I call up Jeremy and get his girl Kari to do the next iteration of the map. What’s $500 to a poor person without bills? About 2 days of open to close order delivering.
If I don’t immediately do that, I pack up and visit Wendy, HatSam, Gough, and Rachel for a week. Plane tickets are less than $300 round trip, I can not only buy the drinks, but not regret fancier meals that I’m sure Mike and Rachel have become accustomed to given their rich white stature.
Okay, so I’ve made some progress on my website, visited some people I was supposed to a few months earlier, then what? Well, $650 is way more than necessary to build an extension on my house with straw bales, so I do that. We’re at about a month, month and a half total time, only 3 days each week. So maybe every month or so I build a new room? Weather and will permitting, why not?
3 solid weekends is fixing the moving truck and getting it on the streets. 2 days is the cost of contacts or a visit to the dentist. 2 or 3 months is new smaller plots I can expand or develop. 1 month is most of what I envision for the greenhouse combined with what’s already stockpiled, Jake. Let me get the workings of the Tough Mudder course from Erin (you really need to put Rin back in your name) and price the wood and heavy equipment rental fees. Let me branch off into salvage, recycling, or simple reselling of things I show up to pick up for free first habitually.
The train is moving. Fuck studies, I still work like a dog and sacrifice lifetime and limb to make it as immediate as possible. Creativity is bread from struggle? Then I aspire to be the most boring fuck you’ve ever met here shortly. When I’m like 35, maybe 40, having lived too many lives and am ready to die except for the part that goes through with anything, it’ll be because I saw myself as I am right then as I am right now. Aside from all the built in random surprises and opportunities you can’t see coming, I’m already doing the work and making the money to explore the myriad ideas I have that could go everywhere or nowhere. This is ungodly liberating and simultaneously my death sentence. Like Louis C.K. getting famous, your problems and perspective just aren’t the same.
The real question will be, who’s on board? When I post that status, “Hey, I have a couple grand just sitting here, who wants to travel to Torino and chill for a bit?” Will you say yes? Or will we have to plan months in advance and exchange “info” and dance? When you have an idea that you’ve always wanted to pursue and I’m like, “Dude, take this and work” are you going to chuck that weird white guilt thing out and just do what you and I both want you to do without having the word “handout” echo in the back of your head? But probably the most serious question, when I fly you out to party, are you actually going to drink like you’re not a bitch?
This remains to be seen. But if you’re getting as old as I am and years feel like months feel like days, then you’re going to read this blog when you do, and tomorrow you’re going to see me harping on the instances I’ve raised and we’re going to find out if you’ve done the mental homework to roll. Just to reiterate, we’re not talking theoreticals anymore. I worked for 3 days and made more in those 3 days than I would have spending 3 nights at a study. My catalyst is firmly rooted in my propensity to work, which is firmly rooted in spite and condemnation for how little my ethics compare to the world at large. The future I describe is going to happen. Are you as there already as I am?
Friday, September 1, 2017
[636] Just Wrong
I feel like I’m spreading myself too thin. I also feel like this is only the kind of thing you can write after getting off of a 13 hour shift with nowhere guaranteed to go that won’t cause problems.
It’s piling up. The harder I work and the more money I make, I feel the resentment and speeches growing. I start the dress rehearsal for all the bullshit all of the bullshit people need to hear. I stop looking at the things in my life that are going right as an egregious leg up bestowed upon me by birth. I stop walking the fine political lines you might’ve established to keep the peace.
It’s my sense of fairness that’s pissed. It’s a well-documented trigger for apes and monkeys. One feels like it’s getting fucked, it’ll throw what you offer it back in your face. I feel like an indignant monkey ready to throw back people’s entire lives and feckless dialogue used to justify them.
Standard disclaimer, I’m going to overspeak and there’s people in my life willing to help. My point is stronger in lieu of them, because they’re often fucked in the exact same ways I am by the exact same kinds of worthless people.
Many people work hard. They put their lives in danger. They wake up early and go to bed late. They provide in 2 or 3 jobs. Obviously, and often, this isn’t fair. It’s simply not right. I don’t mean electricians shouldn’t fear getting electrified, but we’ve gotten to a point where we pretend there aren’t distinctions and just rewards for what it takes to keep the motor of society running.
I always put an asterisk next to my work ethic no matter how hard I feel I’m working. I’m not an ironworker. I’m not a police officer. My work is “service” hell bent on finding a way to “passively exploit.” The money I make feels earned, but I’m hardly going to go out of my way to work any harder to make considerably less doing something else. The cramps in my back and shoulders aren’t going to touch a construction worker’s, but I feel them nonetheless.
Without engendering a pissing match regarding whose job means what to whom, we’ve lost a basic sense of humanity and dialogue that one imagines used to help mitigate circumstances that are fundamentally not right or unduly unfair. You need a hand? Of course I have one. You’re working hard to fix something? I’ll do a heck of a job recognizing your effort and offering what I can.
I’ve tried to be that person for more than I know how to count. One of my friends actually specifically messaged me to tell me after reading about when Colin stole from me how she took it for granted how willing I was to offer her cash when I was study money flush. She thought it was pretty cool that I was so willing to look out for and try to plan for things in a way that accounted for my friends.
And you know what? That is cool. It’s that kind of shit that makes me wince when I’m too quick with the word “sociopath.” It’s what gives me confidence when I dive into something, knowing it’s hardly whether or not I’ll find my way up, but whether or not I’ll be able to bring anyone with. I remember every gesture of friendship I try to uphold that I don’t expect from anyone else. If you were to quiz me, I could probably recall most if not all of every drink or meal you’ve covered for me. It registers deeply how little I tend to expect from anyone.
I try to speak to my life like I do my balance sheet. The numbers on there reflect the harsher side of reality. $50 is missing for 2 full tanks of gas automatically. $50 more gone to “spending” like the emergency overpriced antifreeze I had to buy today. I’ll hide $100 in the paypal account and call it untouchable or a jump start on next month’s greenhouse savings. I’ll pay my “rent” 2 months in advance. By the time there’s a number for all the money I really have, it looks depressed no matter how many hours I worked that day.
Thus, when I have a goal in life, I can certainly start with a picture, but what all has to be glued to it or cut off in order for it to work? I get my garage livable and start my quest to keep practically all the money I earn. I’ll try to be hood rich until I can figure out what to invest in that pays back quicker without me having to be present. So what then? Throw a party? For the 4 or 5 friends I still have in the area that are working all the time? Or maybe for the friends practically turned acquaintances that found their townie rut that never needed it to contain our dynamic.
I’ll need a whole show. I’ll need to razzle and dazzle new souls into a more “mature” form of the flashing lights and sick beats of a choice party house. I’ll need to have money in the bank to fly out or fly out to the people I’d still take a chance on our hanging out not being forced.
But that’s a ways off and drifting a bit away from the point. Right now is where I’m frequently moved to say “stuck.” Right now I had adopted a floor to sleep on, my car when things got pinched. Right now I’m working open to close most days of the week and sneaking about Byron’s apartment. Right now I’m waiting for someone to accompany me to the land so I can pretend to be an electrician in the off chance something goes terribly wrong and a ride might prove vital. Right now, after all the resources I’ve freely offered in my life, all the souls moved through where I’ve lived, all the opportunities I’m still focused on trying to include people in on, despite an excessively heavy list of shit I need to buy to even have a place to live, I get the side eye.
Byron’s roommate charge is an inept and insecure child. By virtue of me simply being a man, he acts like my presence is an overt problem. He’ll burst into the house, and Byron’s room, in the middle of the night to whine about his problems. I don’t think he could recognize a light switch or what it does. He’ll take the garbage out to the porch when he lives across the street from the dumpster. (You know, he reminds me of my brother…) He’s managed to untrain Ike if you leave the dog alone with him too long. And he’s angry that Byron told me, “As long as I have a place to live, you have a place to stay.” Words I relied on to my peril.
I’ve never needed that kind of help. I don’t overspend. I’m not an addict. I often over-offer for what I’m hoping to obtain from someone. I wouldn’t even need that kind of help if Colin and Byron would have better communicated. The idea that people who, literally need Byron at times to keep them alive, would look down on me like I want to be in their worthless presence is appalling. The idea that people I’ve looked out for in so many goddamn ways would leave me to have to pivot between parking lots and floors is just fucking wrong.
People act like my “ego” or intransigence is some kind of personality flaw or in-built defect I have trouble taming. Never can they imagine that I work until I pass out. Never does it occur to them that you can form a “strong opinion” when you’ve read a dozen books on the topic or 60 articles that week that you saved and intend to take further notes and better organize. Why would anyone ever suspect that what they said or did was actually a shitty thing to do or be and that’s why I called them a cunt? It’s NEVER, and I mean fucking NEVER YOUR FUCKING FAULT.
You didn’t leave me hanging, I just didn’t plan right. Of course, I should’ve suspected that I’d be fucked no matter what and I’d have to lean on finances owed for years or money that luckily came in because worked picked up for my dad this month. I’m not trying to make the garage livable, I’m leeching off Byron’s apartment for as long as I can, biding my time until I can throw Rob off the porch and claim his room. I’m not a man of my word who tries to support what he believes in and people he thinks have a good idea, I’ve just wasted money dicking around pretending to be some businessman who’s all-over-the-place mind and poor organization has had me pissing away thousands!
Wanting to help shouldn’t make you want to die. Working hard needs to pay out more than monetarily. I keep cashing in on people's’ resentment, and it’s turning me into them. I don’t want any more. I’m full.
I want to give up. I want to say fuck group projects and fuck where you get in life. I want to pull my money together, do reckless but profitable things, and just mind to my business like a faceless IU football fan wandering back from the game. I want to pretend, just like you, that nothing else matters but my personal budget and enough-to-deal-with interpersonal problems. I want to be fucking done with you. Because if you offered your floor, I don’t feel I could trust it. Not like you could trust mine, have trusted mine. My extra bed, my living room, my food, my alcohol. My careful attention to dance around your feelings because we lost whatever happened to bring us together in the first place and speaking plainly around you isn’t okay anymore. My time. Did you know I worked for free for Rob? Or you think anything remotely grateful pops into his head when his friends can crowd around my big screen that occupies his living room?
I just want somewhere I can lay down and not be fucked with. If this is the universe’s way of getting me to too closely empathize with the homeless, add that to the reasons the universe can go fuck itself. Tomorrow I’m going to try and eat my breakfast at 8:15 instead of 8:00 so maybe Rob will be gone and won’t have to see me or feel uncomfortable eating (because I promise you, the secret and purpose of life is irony) MY old oatmeal next to me. Or, I won’t.
It’s piling up. The harder I work and the more money I make, I feel the resentment and speeches growing. I start the dress rehearsal for all the bullshit all of the bullshit people need to hear. I stop looking at the things in my life that are going right as an egregious leg up bestowed upon me by birth. I stop walking the fine political lines you might’ve established to keep the peace.
It’s my sense of fairness that’s pissed. It’s a well-documented trigger for apes and monkeys. One feels like it’s getting fucked, it’ll throw what you offer it back in your face. I feel like an indignant monkey ready to throw back people’s entire lives and feckless dialogue used to justify them.
Standard disclaimer, I’m going to overspeak and there’s people in my life willing to help. My point is stronger in lieu of them, because they’re often fucked in the exact same ways I am by the exact same kinds of worthless people.
Many people work hard. They put their lives in danger. They wake up early and go to bed late. They provide in 2 or 3 jobs. Obviously, and often, this isn’t fair. It’s simply not right. I don’t mean electricians shouldn’t fear getting electrified, but we’ve gotten to a point where we pretend there aren’t distinctions and just rewards for what it takes to keep the motor of society running.
I always put an asterisk next to my work ethic no matter how hard I feel I’m working. I’m not an ironworker. I’m not a police officer. My work is “service” hell bent on finding a way to “passively exploit.” The money I make feels earned, but I’m hardly going to go out of my way to work any harder to make considerably less doing something else. The cramps in my back and shoulders aren’t going to touch a construction worker’s, but I feel them nonetheless.
Without engendering a pissing match regarding whose job means what to whom, we’ve lost a basic sense of humanity and dialogue that one imagines used to help mitigate circumstances that are fundamentally not right or unduly unfair. You need a hand? Of course I have one. You’re working hard to fix something? I’ll do a heck of a job recognizing your effort and offering what I can.
I’ve tried to be that person for more than I know how to count. One of my friends actually specifically messaged me to tell me after reading about when Colin stole from me how she took it for granted how willing I was to offer her cash when I was study money flush. She thought it was pretty cool that I was so willing to look out for and try to plan for things in a way that accounted for my friends.
And you know what? That is cool. It’s that kind of shit that makes me wince when I’m too quick with the word “sociopath.” It’s what gives me confidence when I dive into something, knowing it’s hardly whether or not I’ll find my way up, but whether or not I’ll be able to bring anyone with. I remember every gesture of friendship I try to uphold that I don’t expect from anyone else. If you were to quiz me, I could probably recall most if not all of every drink or meal you’ve covered for me. It registers deeply how little I tend to expect from anyone.
I try to speak to my life like I do my balance sheet. The numbers on there reflect the harsher side of reality. $50 is missing for 2 full tanks of gas automatically. $50 more gone to “spending” like the emergency overpriced antifreeze I had to buy today. I’ll hide $100 in the paypal account and call it untouchable or a jump start on next month’s greenhouse savings. I’ll pay my “rent” 2 months in advance. By the time there’s a number for all the money I really have, it looks depressed no matter how many hours I worked that day.
Thus, when I have a goal in life, I can certainly start with a picture, but what all has to be glued to it or cut off in order for it to work? I get my garage livable and start my quest to keep practically all the money I earn. I’ll try to be hood rich until I can figure out what to invest in that pays back quicker without me having to be present. So what then? Throw a party? For the 4 or 5 friends I still have in the area that are working all the time? Or maybe for the friends practically turned acquaintances that found their townie rut that never needed it to contain our dynamic.
I’ll need a whole show. I’ll need to razzle and dazzle new souls into a more “mature” form of the flashing lights and sick beats of a choice party house. I’ll need to have money in the bank to fly out or fly out to the people I’d still take a chance on our hanging out not being forced.
But that’s a ways off and drifting a bit away from the point. Right now is where I’m frequently moved to say “stuck.” Right now I had adopted a floor to sleep on, my car when things got pinched. Right now I’m working open to close most days of the week and sneaking about Byron’s apartment. Right now I’m waiting for someone to accompany me to the land so I can pretend to be an electrician in the off chance something goes terribly wrong and a ride might prove vital. Right now, after all the resources I’ve freely offered in my life, all the souls moved through where I’ve lived, all the opportunities I’m still focused on trying to include people in on, despite an excessively heavy list of shit I need to buy to even have a place to live, I get the side eye.
Byron’s roommate charge is an inept and insecure child. By virtue of me simply being a man, he acts like my presence is an overt problem. He’ll burst into the house, and Byron’s room, in the middle of the night to whine about his problems. I don’t think he could recognize a light switch or what it does. He’ll take the garbage out to the porch when he lives across the street from the dumpster. (You know, he reminds me of my brother…) He’s managed to untrain Ike if you leave the dog alone with him too long. And he’s angry that Byron told me, “As long as I have a place to live, you have a place to stay.” Words I relied on to my peril.
I’ve never needed that kind of help. I don’t overspend. I’m not an addict. I often over-offer for what I’m hoping to obtain from someone. I wouldn’t even need that kind of help if Colin and Byron would have better communicated. The idea that people who, literally need Byron at times to keep them alive, would look down on me like I want to be in their worthless presence is appalling. The idea that people I’ve looked out for in so many goddamn ways would leave me to have to pivot between parking lots and floors is just fucking wrong.
People act like my “ego” or intransigence is some kind of personality flaw or in-built defect I have trouble taming. Never can they imagine that I work until I pass out. Never does it occur to them that you can form a “strong opinion” when you’ve read a dozen books on the topic or 60 articles that week that you saved and intend to take further notes and better organize. Why would anyone ever suspect that what they said or did was actually a shitty thing to do or be and that’s why I called them a cunt? It’s NEVER, and I mean fucking NEVER YOUR FUCKING FAULT.
You didn’t leave me hanging, I just didn’t plan right. Of course, I should’ve suspected that I’d be fucked no matter what and I’d have to lean on finances owed for years or money that luckily came in because worked picked up for my dad this month. I’m not trying to make the garage livable, I’m leeching off Byron’s apartment for as long as I can, biding my time until I can throw Rob off the porch and claim his room. I’m not a man of my word who tries to support what he believes in and people he thinks have a good idea, I’ve just wasted money dicking around pretending to be some businessman who’s all-over-the-place mind and poor organization has had me pissing away thousands!
Wanting to help shouldn’t make you want to die. Working hard needs to pay out more than monetarily. I keep cashing in on people's’ resentment, and it’s turning me into them. I don’t want any more. I’m full.
I want to give up. I want to say fuck group projects and fuck where you get in life. I want to pull my money together, do reckless but profitable things, and just mind to my business like a faceless IU football fan wandering back from the game. I want to pretend, just like you, that nothing else matters but my personal budget and enough-to-deal-with interpersonal problems. I want to be fucking done with you. Because if you offered your floor, I don’t feel I could trust it. Not like you could trust mine, have trusted mine. My extra bed, my living room, my food, my alcohol. My careful attention to dance around your feelings because we lost whatever happened to bring us together in the first place and speaking plainly around you isn’t okay anymore. My time. Did you know I worked for free for Rob? Or you think anything remotely grateful pops into his head when his friends can crowd around my big screen that occupies his living room?
I just want somewhere I can lay down and not be fucked with. If this is the universe’s way of getting me to too closely empathize with the homeless, add that to the reasons the universe can go fuck itself. Tomorrow I’m going to try and eat my breakfast at 8:15 instead of 8:00 so maybe Rob will be gone and won’t have to see me or feel uncomfortable eating (because I promise you, the secret and purpose of life is irony) MY old oatmeal next to me. Or, I won’t.
Sunday, August 27, 2017
[635] Lamb Chopped
I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of sacrifice. One of Jordan Peterson’s last biblical lecture series explores the psychological underpinnings and implications of Abraham ready and willing to sacrifice Isaac in order to keep his covenant with God. One idea discussed was that if you don’t know what to sacrifice, looking to what you hold dear is a good place to start. Whether there’s a direct proportionality to what you hold dearest getting sacrificed and then you getting in return something commensurate was up for discussion.
In the modern world, I wonder if people consider themselves sacrificing anything that matters. If you spend all day at a job you moderately are okay with or outright dislike, but your time otherwise would have been grinding a videogame or perhaps getting yourself into some kind of trouble, is your time considered a sacrifice? Perhaps you actually want less time to yourself, less time to be burdened with thoughts that can’t be resolved or to find room to remind yourself that you’re not being everything that you believe you could be. Higher intensity professions and paychecks sacrifice any number of generally considered “human” traits in order to excel if you think high finance and big business. More noble pursuits will have you sacrificing sleep and your health to learn all there is to learn in order to practice medicine.
It seems then, that sacrifice is personal. You know if you’re giving up something meaningful to you in order to accomplish something else that’s more worthwhile. You also know if what you’ve given up means nothing to you and you’re trying to fly under the radar. A recent reddit /r/showerthought post said the first time they learned to appreciate working towards goals was after they loaded Grand Theft Auto up with cheat codes and got immediately bored. No time or emotional investment was paid; no real reward was conjured to be reaped.
I think it’s harder to conceive of sacrifice in the modern era. Comfort is the default. When you read a statistic that says 78% of workers are living paycheck to paycheck, we’re not focused on the part where people are getting paid to do an array of jobs, most unnecessary or flirting with a robot takeover, and are hardly back-breaking. We have the option to be poor in cozy apartment complexes. Before it dawned on us we were living in an oligarchy, they made sure to set the stage to keep us tucked in and quiet. My little over a month of being quasi-homeless has had some points of pains in the ass, but it hasn’t been too hard to recline my car seat and ping pong between different dwellings.
Thus, in my mind, the real sacrifice is your comfort. It’s putting yourself outside what you’re used to. To get anywhere in our culture, you have to keep sacrificing the feeling that you’re safe or moral or smart. You have to challenge your polite relationships and boldly claim the identity that’s willing to contrast anyone who thinks they have the real answer. I talk a lot about my propensity to antagonize. I don’t respect comments, behaviors, or general dispositions out of you that I won’t grant myself. I’m rarely comfortable, and it’s not because I couldn’t conceive of myself sitting playing video games for the next 7 years on the 15 thousand dollars I had saved up.
To me, time is king. The more you pay attention to time, the more you can utilize it to make the perpetual moment approach comfort and approach sense. Coasting on conscious circumstance won’t cut it. We’re incidental first, human second. So even when I made money at studies, that was as much as 3 weeks at a time of my life living in precisely opposite of the terms and conditions I’d prefer. Trust, the pain of a spinal headache you never want to experience in service to your larger goals. If I keep doing the accounting, those previous sacrifices have set me up to live a considerably larger portion of the rest of my life in service to my other goals and creative endeavors. I’m semi-retired at 29 and need to work 2 days a month to keep up with payments on my garage. Often, my most money-making friends have comparable rents to keep them in place.
I don’t want to make the mistake of reducing it all to money either. I know people who absolutely love what they do no matter the hours or paycheck. I’m absolutely jealous of these people. I’ve never had that capacity. I learn quickly, and then I get bored. That’s a strong pattern I’ve never been able to escape. If something holds my attention for 3 months it’s either insanely difficult or a miracle leaving aside accidentally tapping into old obsessive tendencies from childhood. The only metric I have from which to try and assess the general working population is how much their words match up with their actions. I can’t count the number of times the South Park character who says, “I love my work” comes to mind in the plane-arium episode. I know it’s easy for people to turn “making the best of” into “this is the best.”
That’s another important distinction to me. I’m nowhere near at my best. I haven’t been for a long time. I don’t have even a quasi-routine that would suggest perpetual progress or practice. I don’t have as many stronger ties as I think I can foster. I don’t have the free mental space that has me feeling focused and excited to devour the next topic that catches my interest. I’m still on the edge. Having a toilet has become like a symbol for when I think I’ll be in a good place. It’s just hard to brag about your circumstances without a place to shit.
I can, and persistently do, imagine my best. When I have some kind of musical instrument practice and workout regime in place every day, I’ll be harping on my best. When I’m sitting down to watch at least a movie a day with at least one other person, ring the best bell again. The suggestion there is that I’ve either found a dope ass person who’s always down and around for movies, or I’ve freed up someone’s time that they feel obligated to indulge me on a nightly tradition; either way a win. When I can see a project through from conception to finish on a predetermined timeline, look out. I won’t have a mapping website stall for a year because finding an extra $500 is practically impossible for the working poor. I won’t go to the straw-bale house builder all excited with my cardboard and SketchUp models crossing my fingers I’ll find $20K through studies before winter. When I start losing myself because I’m so involved with shit above my societally presumed station, I’ll have peaked.
And that’s precisely what I want for you. We’ve all grown familiar with similar levels of “privilege,” a word I’m growing increasingly impatient with, and finding ways to shake the shit out of our baby, for God, appears to have a timeless transcendent quality if you can find the right path. That’s the heart of all of my frustration and anxiety. That’s my shying away from trying to invest in too many new distracting experiences or people. My environment is my car, Byron’s apartment, my dad’s house, my garage, everything my land can be, and the rest of the world at the same time. 2/3 of those aren’t the most comfortable, and therefore 2/3 of those are what I’m working on and learning about. How do your environments scale? And can you make them better by giving more of yourself than time you wouldn’t know what to do with otherwise or a body you stopped respecting some time ago?
In the modern world, I wonder if people consider themselves sacrificing anything that matters. If you spend all day at a job you moderately are okay with or outright dislike, but your time otherwise would have been grinding a videogame or perhaps getting yourself into some kind of trouble, is your time considered a sacrifice? Perhaps you actually want less time to yourself, less time to be burdened with thoughts that can’t be resolved or to find room to remind yourself that you’re not being everything that you believe you could be. Higher intensity professions and paychecks sacrifice any number of generally considered “human” traits in order to excel if you think high finance and big business. More noble pursuits will have you sacrificing sleep and your health to learn all there is to learn in order to practice medicine.
It seems then, that sacrifice is personal. You know if you’re giving up something meaningful to you in order to accomplish something else that’s more worthwhile. You also know if what you’ve given up means nothing to you and you’re trying to fly under the radar. A recent reddit /r/showerthought post said the first time they learned to appreciate working towards goals was after they loaded Grand Theft Auto up with cheat codes and got immediately bored. No time or emotional investment was paid; no real reward was conjured to be reaped.
I think it’s harder to conceive of sacrifice in the modern era. Comfort is the default. When you read a statistic that says 78% of workers are living paycheck to paycheck, we’re not focused on the part where people are getting paid to do an array of jobs, most unnecessary or flirting with a robot takeover, and are hardly back-breaking. We have the option to be poor in cozy apartment complexes. Before it dawned on us we were living in an oligarchy, they made sure to set the stage to keep us tucked in and quiet. My little over a month of being quasi-homeless has had some points of pains in the ass, but it hasn’t been too hard to recline my car seat and ping pong between different dwellings.
Thus, in my mind, the real sacrifice is your comfort. It’s putting yourself outside what you’re used to. To get anywhere in our culture, you have to keep sacrificing the feeling that you’re safe or moral or smart. You have to challenge your polite relationships and boldly claim the identity that’s willing to contrast anyone who thinks they have the real answer. I talk a lot about my propensity to antagonize. I don’t respect comments, behaviors, or general dispositions out of you that I won’t grant myself. I’m rarely comfortable, and it’s not because I couldn’t conceive of myself sitting playing video games for the next 7 years on the 15 thousand dollars I had saved up.
To me, time is king. The more you pay attention to time, the more you can utilize it to make the perpetual moment approach comfort and approach sense. Coasting on conscious circumstance won’t cut it. We’re incidental first, human second. So even when I made money at studies, that was as much as 3 weeks at a time of my life living in precisely opposite of the terms and conditions I’d prefer. Trust, the pain of a spinal headache you never want to experience in service to your larger goals. If I keep doing the accounting, those previous sacrifices have set me up to live a considerably larger portion of the rest of my life in service to my other goals and creative endeavors. I’m semi-retired at 29 and need to work 2 days a month to keep up with payments on my garage. Often, my most money-making friends have comparable rents to keep them in place.
I don’t want to make the mistake of reducing it all to money either. I know people who absolutely love what they do no matter the hours or paycheck. I’m absolutely jealous of these people. I’ve never had that capacity. I learn quickly, and then I get bored. That’s a strong pattern I’ve never been able to escape. If something holds my attention for 3 months it’s either insanely difficult or a miracle leaving aside accidentally tapping into old obsessive tendencies from childhood. The only metric I have from which to try and assess the general working population is how much their words match up with their actions. I can’t count the number of times the South Park character who says, “I love my work” comes to mind in the plane-arium episode. I know it’s easy for people to turn “making the best of” into “this is the best.”
That’s another important distinction to me. I’m nowhere near at my best. I haven’t been for a long time. I don’t have even a quasi-routine that would suggest perpetual progress or practice. I don’t have as many stronger ties as I think I can foster. I don’t have the free mental space that has me feeling focused and excited to devour the next topic that catches my interest. I’m still on the edge. Having a toilet has become like a symbol for when I think I’ll be in a good place. It’s just hard to brag about your circumstances without a place to shit.
I can, and persistently do, imagine my best. When I have some kind of musical instrument practice and workout regime in place every day, I’ll be harping on my best. When I’m sitting down to watch at least a movie a day with at least one other person, ring the best bell again. The suggestion there is that I’ve either found a dope ass person who’s always down and around for movies, or I’ve freed up someone’s time that they feel obligated to indulge me on a nightly tradition; either way a win. When I can see a project through from conception to finish on a predetermined timeline, look out. I won’t have a mapping website stall for a year because finding an extra $500 is practically impossible for the working poor. I won’t go to the straw-bale house builder all excited with my cardboard and SketchUp models crossing my fingers I’ll find $20K through studies before winter. When I start losing myself because I’m so involved with shit above my societally presumed station, I’ll have peaked.
And that’s precisely what I want for you. We’ve all grown familiar with similar levels of “privilege,” a word I’m growing increasingly impatient with, and finding ways to shake the shit out of our baby, for God, appears to have a timeless transcendent quality if you can find the right path. That’s the heart of all of my frustration and anxiety. That’s my shying away from trying to invest in too many new distracting experiences or people. My environment is my car, Byron’s apartment, my dad’s house, my garage, everything my land can be, and the rest of the world at the same time. 2/3 of those aren’t the most comfortable, and therefore 2/3 of those are what I’m working on and learning about. How do your environments scale? And can you make them better by giving more of yourself than time you wouldn’t know what to do with otherwise or a body you stopped respecting some time ago?
Thursday, August 24, 2017
[634] Savage
Fair warning, I can tell right away, this isn’t one you should bother with. I don’t care if it’s the most redundant thing I’ve ever written. I don’t care if it goes on for a dozen pages. I don’t care if you immediately get the sense that the lacking and pitiful voice used to launch this warning remains intransigently smug yet full of woe.
I’ve tried to write this blog before. The one where I state plainly my stupid brain attached to my stupid heart that gets it pumped up and stressed out. I tried to find a context for why it made sense. I tried to explain the path forward in spite of it. I tried to understand it like there’s a reason.
If I get another person to tell me to “just breath” and “relax” and “don’t think about it” with regard to slowing the speed of my heart, I may slowly steer my car into oncoming traffic, making sure to choose a semi so no one gets hurt. I’m not a monster.
There’s nothing even at stake. Progress on my website? A strawbale addition to my garage? The moving van getting fixed? A riding lawn mower? I can, in theory, make half the amount of money in the same time I would have been gone. A month of my life then? What am I nervous about? It’s the wrong question though.
I’m stuck in this moment. I’ve been stuck here since, I think around 14. It’s why I can’t let shit go. It’s why I have to try and understand instead of forgive. It’s why I have the same dreams as an over-eager child. It’s why I harp on the relationships in my life that have lasted longer than a class period. It’s why I read blogs from 10 years ago and find the exact sentiment I needed today. I’m nervous about exactly what got me fucked up from the beginning, my entire life crashing down around me for no good goddamn reason.
The only antidote I’ve found is some measure of progress. Never a simple dollar amount, but a structure or a tool. I haven’t progressed until one of you assholes figures out what it is I’m doing and is working along side me when it’s not convenient. I haven’t progressed until people I admire see something I’ve built and begin to wonder how it can help influence their lives and endeavors.
I’m stuck in this moment, and I don’t want to be. This moment is horrifyingly lonely. This moment doesn’t sleep on a bed most nights of the week. This moment is sweaty basketball shorts and awkward conversations in a parking lot wrought with bees, flies, and the smell of garbage, occasionally interrupted by the world’s most obnoxious train conductor. This moment has my head swelling beyond comprehension at the temples for something trying to get out. This moment is a sunken hole at the dead center of my chest that can’t be breathed away or beared down on.
I spent a little gas money. I ate too much shitty food. I put a little more wear on my torn car. This didn’t even really matter, and I couldn’t get it done. I couldn’t sit politely and calmly for a procedure that’s the dead easiest fucking thing to pass! I used to love getting the cuff put on! As a kid I thought it was cool. After marathoning ER I was particularly interested in what the readouts at the Wal-Mart booths said. To fail one has meant to fail them all, if I can hijack a bad paraphrasing of some philosophical statement someone made.
I said some time ago that I haven’t been me for a very long time. I get hints of it at a house party. I can get lost in the flow of some work out on the land. But it’s few and far between. This money would have suggested I could move faster. Something in my mind’s eye might have been able to take up residence next to the garage. I don’t know, none of that sounds dramatic enough. Or, it’s not the heart of it. I just would have been able to work on what matters instead of work at what’s paying me.
I don’t matter. At least, I don’t know how else to state it. I know I’m one car in traffic in the suburbs of Chicago in all his grand failure glory driving past an infinite array of disappointments and ailments that are a universe away from being a headfucked asshole who didn’t get to nab an extra 5 grand. I know I’m small. While my heart defiantly beats harder and my breath gets shorter I try to persuade myself. Fuck me and what I want to do. Fuck me and what I could create. Fuck me to the degree I believe my own bullshit. Fuck every selfish aim and its incidental potential impact. Fuck thinking you have any control. Fuck blaming yourself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and fucking over and over again. Fuck trying. Fuck visualizing yourself hanging from an extension cord because if your head’s already about to pop, might as well seek a direction that will actually feel like a fucking relief, right?
I’m so tired. I’m so tired of talking. I’m so tired of waiting. I’m so tired of thinking the exact same things because they’re right and worth it and when they can’t be done you don’t get to move on.
Enough times it’s happened where while I’m writing I manage to just knock out of the park a line that sticks with me for weeks. Something like that happens or a calm will wash over me. My breathing will return to normal. My brain will feel less packed. I’ve never been able to do that thinking about this study anxiety. Maybe I’ve talked around the edges of it, maybe not. Maybe I have even the basest understanding of psychosomatic responses, maybe I’m such an inbuilt contrarian I’ve robbed myself of the capacity to change.
The last paragraph was started after I put this down and just forced myself to sleep. I pick up writing again after 13 hours. I had a dream that isn’t exactly recurring, but it’s a similar theme. I find myself in a giant bathroom with many different doors leading out of it. Some are locked. Some seem like they’re going to lead somewhere. Some have people's names on them like they’re reserved. This one had someone telling me about a space I had occupied being taken over by some people who didn’t really have any business taking it over. Someone led me through this giant bathroom that was supposed to act as a shortcut, but only ended up as a dead end. I try every door on the wall on my race back to where we entered and realize I’ve wasted a ton of time not just going to my space the way I knew how instead of following their advice and direction. The last door I tried had “reserved for Elon Musk” which I reasoned harked back to a time when he occupied that hallway or room and nobody had taken down the sign.
As far as my psychoanalytic capacity goes, I find this dream pretty on the nose. I’m anxious over the wasted time. I’m sick of terrible naive advice on how to do something or get somewhere people have no experience contending with. I want my name on a wall. I want to know that were I to leave my shit somewhere it has every right to be, someone’s going to remove the interlopers without me having to make a mad dash to keep a lid on things.
A previous bathroom, again it being large, related to me being unable to find a stall or urinal that wasn’t absolutely disgusting to use. So it was kick open a door, huff, move on, find the layout of another one provided no privacy, find the floor flooded in the next, then 4 loud ridiculous people I knew I couldn’t stand might be ambling closer just beyond eyesight so I move onto the next. Every option shitty.
I don’t take my problems seriously enough. At least I don’t respect them. I don’t know how to perpetually wallow. It gets boring. On the car ride back I couldn’t help but recall things I recognized that made me think of some stupid or hilarious thing my friends and I did growing up. I have a kind of blindness for what things are “supposed” to mean. In the same way that I use words in ways that constantly piss people off for what I consider “no reason,” I don’t know what it means precisely when I don’t get into a study or if I were to get colon cancer, as has just happened to my uncle.
I don’t believe in karma, so trying to play some metaphysical math game is out. I don’t pretend like I know the future, so I can’t rule out my highway tragedy on the day I leave the center, having spent my last 20 days confined to kinda shitty food and odd company. I’d prefer imagining myself with more money right now, but there’s an infinite list of things that might happen in the same amount of time that speak to an infinite amount of potentials, if my head doesn’t know how to drop the anxiety as the cuff inflates, it certainly figured out how to drown itself in the ambiguities that follow.
I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of life. It’s still true. It doesn’t mean I can’t be or there aren’t features I enjoy, but overall, I’ve spent considerably more time as a toy of ignorant forces than I have being anything I’d genuinely like to consider calling “me.” I have no reason to be a fan of that. I have no reason to consider my circumstances particularly blessed. I lucked out. It’s not my responsibility to mask “luck worship” as “deep appreciation” or pretend most of the examples set for me regarding other’s luck are anything beyond escapist selfish indulgence. I was lucky to be born smart, if you ignore all of the mental health risks and social isolation that poses. I was lucky to be born good enough looking if you want to see how fast you can race to considering the vast majority of the people you meet as “unfuckable.” I was lucky enough to have a few solid examples of how to behave even fleetingly morally even as I see what befalls those who bother to give a shit.
I haven’t felt able to enjoy the fruits of what I’ve set up. Sure, the “rent” on the garage is paid up for 2 months, but I still only took a day off a week, and that was usually because I had shit to do errand wise, or really needed to shower, so it hardly felt like a day off. I work all day, at the expense of my muscles, my attention, my car, so I can move faster, not because I have to do anything. I can work 2 days a month and still have a place to sleep. Add another day a year, I pay off that gym membership for that year. Add another, there’s my car insurance. I decided to hang out at my dad’s for another day, because I can, this place has air conditioning and a bed.
I’m living my poor man’s version of the billion dollar deal that didn’t go through to bring a football team to a new city, if you want to consult a recycled plot Ballers took from Entourage. Now I need to piss off to do whatever poor billionaires do in the meantime. Try to make more money they hardly need and look for opportunities to pat themselves on the back for “giving back” in wanton fashion. I need what every fat girl with fatalistic confidence who hit me up on OKCupid needs; a friend or partner to share in the future with who matches my private wit and intensity who can see past the surface and cultivate a life on the things that matter! Now, I can’t do that for them, I don’t expect anyone to do it with me.
So it’s the wrong way to approach the question. What do I really need then? I’ve always had the answer. The attractive environment. I need to be that bird who decorates his nest and puts on a dance. I’m just a horny bird who can’t dance hard enough and who knows the choice decorations are a few miles beyond where my wings start cramping. People fall for the artifice. They cultivate their personal illusions, and yours can’t be any more damming or less inviting than what they’ve rehearsed. Beauty is an illusion? Tell that to a soft cock in a sexual neighborhood it doesn’t belong. What you need is the capacity to deceive and maintain that deception. This explains why at the front of my years of writing there’s so much talk about manipulation.
I’ve found myself pretending I want what others have. I’ll think I want “the regular job” with “benefits” and a retirement account. I’ll act like I want to get up and put on clothes that make me unrecognizable. I want to pretend that they’re getting paid much more than I am or have any more free time or free mental space. I don’t exactly fall for this illusion of “security,” but I know the social animal in me is screaming for an environment that I might fit into without buttoning up my shirt and lips. Baby rape and crackhead jokes fly pretty freely at the local DCS office? Hey, I might fit in where the reality is always considerably worse than the joke.
I know I don’t want what all that entails though. I know it because I’m not there. I’ve never really been one to force myself into an untenable situation for any longer than was necessary. Is that what this moment is? Necessary? Are there forces at work that squeeze the fuck out of my chest that know more about what needs to happen down the line? When you run out of answers, appeals to the unknown unknowns are always tempting. I can entertain the thought, but I’m not that big of an idiot to claim it’s real.
I’m sure here shorty I’ll get bored of sitting here and drive back to town. I’ll line up in the CT queue, start the next episode of some show I’m barely interested in. I’ll make another $100 and then pull my car into the corner and beckon back pain until the morning where I’ll do it again. I’ll try to keep a lookout for any “reason” “the universe” “decided” I don’t require money in an even easier fashion and the “purpose” of pursuing my goals “alone” and “too slowly.” I clearly don’t understand anything, so the idea that I’d even be able to identify it if I saw it is suspect at best.
I’ve tried to write this blog before. The one where I state plainly my stupid brain attached to my stupid heart that gets it pumped up and stressed out. I tried to find a context for why it made sense. I tried to explain the path forward in spite of it. I tried to understand it like there’s a reason.
If I get another person to tell me to “just breath” and “relax” and “don’t think about it” with regard to slowing the speed of my heart, I may slowly steer my car into oncoming traffic, making sure to choose a semi so no one gets hurt. I’m not a monster.
There’s nothing even at stake. Progress on my website? A strawbale addition to my garage? The moving van getting fixed? A riding lawn mower? I can, in theory, make half the amount of money in the same time I would have been gone. A month of my life then? What am I nervous about? It’s the wrong question though.
I’m stuck in this moment. I’ve been stuck here since, I think around 14. It’s why I can’t let shit go. It’s why I have to try and understand instead of forgive. It’s why I have the same dreams as an over-eager child. It’s why I harp on the relationships in my life that have lasted longer than a class period. It’s why I read blogs from 10 years ago and find the exact sentiment I needed today. I’m nervous about exactly what got me fucked up from the beginning, my entire life crashing down around me for no good goddamn reason.
The only antidote I’ve found is some measure of progress. Never a simple dollar amount, but a structure or a tool. I haven’t progressed until one of you assholes figures out what it is I’m doing and is working along side me when it’s not convenient. I haven’t progressed until people I admire see something I’ve built and begin to wonder how it can help influence their lives and endeavors.
I’m stuck in this moment, and I don’t want to be. This moment is horrifyingly lonely. This moment doesn’t sleep on a bed most nights of the week. This moment is sweaty basketball shorts and awkward conversations in a parking lot wrought with bees, flies, and the smell of garbage, occasionally interrupted by the world’s most obnoxious train conductor. This moment has my head swelling beyond comprehension at the temples for something trying to get out. This moment is a sunken hole at the dead center of my chest that can’t be breathed away or beared down on.
I spent a little gas money. I ate too much shitty food. I put a little more wear on my torn car. This didn’t even really matter, and I couldn’t get it done. I couldn’t sit politely and calmly for a procedure that’s the dead easiest fucking thing to pass! I used to love getting the cuff put on! As a kid I thought it was cool. After marathoning ER I was particularly interested in what the readouts at the Wal-Mart booths said. To fail one has meant to fail them all, if I can hijack a bad paraphrasing of some philosophical statement someone made.
I said some time ago that I haven’t been me for a very long time. I get hints of it at a house party. I can get lost in the flow of some work out on the land. But it’s few and far between. This money would have suggested I could move faster. Something in my mind’s eye might have been able to take up residence next to the garage. I don’t know, none of that sounds dramatic enough. Or, it’s not the heart of it. I just would have been able to work on what matters instead of work at what’s paying me.
I don’t matter. At least, I don’t know how else to state it. I know I’m one car in traffic in the suburbs of Chicago in all his grand failure glory driving past an infinite array of disappointments and ailments that are a universe away from being a headfucked asshole who didn’t get to nab an extra 5 grand. I know I’m small. While my heart defiantly beats harder and my breath gets shorter I try to persuade myself. Fuck me and what I want to do. Fuck me and what I could create. Fuck me to the degree I believe my own bullshit. Fuck every selfish aim and its incidental potential impact. Fuck thinking you have any control. Fuck blaming yourself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and fucking over and over again. Fuck trying. Fuck visualizing yourself hanging from an extension cord because if your head’s already about to pop, might as well seek a direction that will actually feel like a fucking relief, right?
I’m so tired. I’m so tired of talking. I’m so tired of waiting. I’m so tired of thinking the exact same things because they’re right and worth it and when they can’t be done you don’t get to move on.
Enough times it’s happened where while I’m writing I manage to just knock out of the park a line that sticks with me for weeks. Something like that happens or a calm will wash over me. My breathing will return to normal. My brain will feel less packed. I’ve never been able to do that thinking about this study anxiety. Maybe I’ve talked around the edges of it, maybe not. Maybe I have even the basest understanding of psychosomatic responses, maybe I’m such an inbuilt contrarian I’ve robbed myself of the capacity to change.
The last paragraph was started after I put this down and just forced myself to sleep. I pick up writing again after 13 hours. I had a dream that isn’t exactly recurring, but it’s a similar theme. I find myself in a giant bathroom with many different doors leading out of it. Some are locked. Some seem like they’re going to lead somewhere. Some have people's names on them like they’re reserved. This one had someone telling me about a space I had occupied being taken over by some people who didn’t really have any business taking it over. Someone led me through this giant bathroom that was supposed to act as a shortcut, but only ended up as a dead end. I try every door on the wall on my race back to where we entered and realize I’ve wasted a ton of time not just going to my space the way I knew how instead of following their advice and direction. The last door I tried had “reserved for Elon Musk” which I reasoned harked back to a time when he occupied that hallway or room and nobody had taken down the sign.
As far as my psychoanalytic capacity goes, I find this dream pretty on the nose. I’m anxious over the wasted time. I’m sick of terrible naive advice on how to do something or get somewhere people have no experience contending with. I want my name on a wall. I want to know that were I to leave my shit somewhere it has every right to be, someone’s going to remove the interlopers without me having to make a mad dash to keep a lid on things.
A previous bathroom, again it being large, related to me being unable to find a stall or urinal that wasn’t absolutely disgusting to use. So it was kick open a door, huff, move on, find the layout of another one provided no privacy, find the floor flooded in the next, then 4 loud ridiculous people I knew I couldn’t stand might be ambling closer just beyond eyesight so I move onto the next. Every option shitty.
I don’t take my problems seriously enough. At least I don’t respect them. I don’t know how to perpetually wallow. It gets boring. On the car ride back I couldn’t help but recall things I recognized that made me think of some stupid or hilarious thing my friends and I did growing up. I have a kind of blindness for what things are “supposed” to mean. In the same way that I use words in ways that constantly piss people off for what I consider “no reason,” I don’t know what it means precisely when I don’t get into a study or if I were to get colon cancer, as has just happened to my uncle.
I don’t believe in karma, so trying to play some metaphysical math game is out. I don’t pretend like I know the future, so I can’t rule out my highway tragedy on the day I leave the center, having spent my last 20 days confined to kinda shitty food and odd company. I’d prefer imagining myself with more money right now, but there’s an infinite list of things that might happen in the same amount of time that speak to an infinite amount of potentials, if my head doesn’t know how to drop the anxiety as the cuff inflates, it certainly figured out how to drown itself in the ambiguities that follow.
I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of life. It’s still true. It doesn’t mean I can’t be or there aren’t features I enjoy, but overall, I’ve spent considerably more time as a toy of ignorant forces than I have being anything I’d genuinely like to consider calling “me.” I have no reason to be a fan of that. I have no reason to consider my circumstances particularly blessed. I lucked out. It’s not my responsibility to mask “luck worship” as “deep appreciation” or pretend most of the examples set for me regarding other’s luck are anything beyond escapist selfish indulgence. I was lucky to be born smart, if you ignore all of the mental health risks and social isolation that poses. I was lucky to be born good enough looking if you want to see how fast you can race to considering the vast majority of the people you meet as “unfuckable.” I was lucky enough to have a few solid examples of how to behave even fleetingly morally even as I see what befalls those who bother to give a shit.
I haven’t felt able to enjoy the fruits of what I’ve set up. Sure, the “rent” on the garage is paid up for 2 months, but I still only took a day off a week, and that was usually because I had shit to do errand wise, or really needed to shower, so it hardly felt like a day off. I work all day, at the expense of my muscles, my attention, my car, so I can move faster, not because I have to do anything. I can work 2 days a month and still have a place to sleep. Add another day a year, I pay off that gym membership for that year. Add another, there’s my car insurance. I decided to hang out at my dad’s for another day, because I can, this place has air conditioning and a bed.
I’m living my poor man’s version of the billion dollar deal that didn’t go through to bring a football team to a new city, if you want to consult a recycled plot Ballers took from Entourage. Now I need to piss off to do whatever poor billionaires do in the meantime. Try to make more money they hardly need and look for opportunities to pat themselves on the back for “giving back” in wanton fashion. I need what every fat girl with fatalistic confidence who hit me up on OKCupid needs; a friend or partner to share in the future with who matches my private wit and intensity who can see past the surface and cultivate a life on the things that matter! Now, I can’t do that for them, I don’t expect anyone to do it with me.
So it’s the wrong way to approach the question. What do I really need then? I’ve always had the answer. The attractive environment. I need to be that bird who decorates his nest and puts on a dance. I’m just a horny bird who can’t dance hard enough and who knows the choice decorations are a few miles beyond where my wings start cramping. People fall for the artifice. They cultivate their personal illusions, and yours can’t be any more damming or less inviting than what they’ve rehearsed. Beauty is an illusion? Tell that to a soft cock in a sexual neighborhood it doesn’t belong. What you need is the capacity to deceive and maintain that deception. This explains why at the front of my years of writing there’s so much talk about manipulation.
I’ve found myself pretending I want what others have. I’ll think I want “the regular job” with “benefits” and a retirement account. I’ll act like I want to get up and put on clothes that make me unrecognizable. I want to pretend that they’re getting paid much more than I am or have any more free time or free mental space. I don’t exactly fall for this illusion of “security,” but I know the social animal in me is screaming for an environment that I might fit into without buttoning up my shirt and lips. Baby rape and crackhead jokes fly pretty freely at the local DCS office? Hey, I might fit in where the reality is always considerably worse than the joke.
I know I don’t want what all that entails though. I know it because I’m not there. I’ve never really been one to force myself into an untenable situation for any longer than was necessary. Is that what this moment is? Necessary? Are there forces at work that squeeze the fuck out of my chest that know more about what needs to happen down the line? When you run out of answers, appeals to the unknown unknowns are always tempting. I can entertain the thought, but I’m not that big of an idiot to claim it’s real.
I’m sure here shorty I’ll get bored of sitting here and drive back to town. I’ll line up in the CT queue, start the next episode of some show I’m barely interested in. I’ll make another $100 and then pull my car into the corner and beckon back pain until the morning where I’ll do it again. I’ll try to keep a lookout for any “reason” “the universe” “decided” I don’t require money in an even easier fashion and the “purpose” of pursuing my goals “alone” and “too slowly.” I clearly don’t understand anything, so the idea that I’d even be able to identify it if I saw it is suspect at best.
Monday, August 21, 2017
[633] No Conozco
Obviously he’s going to go down as the most influential person in my life of the last year or more, but it’s the confluence of forces over the last day or so that has me starting this, and not just the dozen or so times I’ve heard Jordan Peterson discuss hero myths or the impact of one person. Concurrent to Peterson’s Psychological Significance of the Biblical Narratives lecture series I’m watching My Hero Academia. A few moments ago I caught a commercial depicting John Cena tearing up as he read thank you notes from the people’s lives he’s changed.
Wednesday I attempt to check into another drug study. It would pay $5500 if I get in. The screening my heart rate was 100 BPM, the highest it can be without either being immediately booted from screening or having to do a repeat. I felt calm the entire time. I feel more calm than not in these days preceeding check in. I have little to nothing riding on whether I get in besides THE WHOLE WORLD.
I’ve been moved lately to double down on the narrative of “being alone.” If I don’t get into the study, it’s back to the salt mines of delivery driving where I calcify muscle knots and move $100 or $200 at a time in the several directions I need to go. Whether it’s erecting a greenhouse, getting water pumped, creating a driveway, or finding the right equipment to keep the grass cut, there’s a hard and cold path forward that encourages my car to not break down and has me sinking into my car seat until we become one.
Part of what kicked off the anxiety and string of failing studies was the unknown reality of what I’m currently sitting in. I wasn’t car dwelling then. I still had rent to pay. I had just dropped a ton of cash to get the land in the first place. I hadn’t worked 3 jobs at once. I didn’t have a structure out on the land or any of my shit moved. In other words, all of the terrible circumstances I was facing, I’ve fixed. The dramatic climax of so many pillars I thought were in place collapsing around me has culminated in me sucking at playing a trumpet in a hot car as I wait to not get tipped by inconsiderate frat boys. Sure, my car can still break down at any moment, but I can afford the tow.
I have the intractable problem of actually believing in myself. I’m not worried about failure in and of itself. I’m terrified I won’t be able to set the examples I preach. How fast I work and how quick things can change is absolutely real to me. The impact I can have, particularly in the viral world, is immeasurable. The only way I can sell that is to give people something tangible to latch onto. They don’t know how to shake the shackles of bills. They don’t practice collaboration. Sustainability is a buzzword of the modern zeitgeist. They don’t even know how to verbalize and represent their real problems. As many heroes as I can read about, as many noteable examples out there that exist, there’s still really only me to try what I’m trying and do what I’m doing.
That is fucking nerve racking. It’s nerve racking because it has nothing to do with “belief.” When I wanted movie moments, I created the environment for them. When I wanted a business, I stayed on the phone and showed up every day to see it through. When I want to create a little sustainable oasis that gives me a platform to dick around across my diverse interests, I’ll do it a few hundred dollars at a time at the “most humbling” jobs imaginable as I collect stories from you about why you can’t reach your goals.
I’m a big believer, in a sense, that you create your own reality. I don’t mean to embolden people who live in outright denial of their failings and take pride in defaulting to misrepresentations in order to protect their feelings. I think when you work to give yourself a frame of reference that can accomplish “anything,” then in the act of making your world manifest, reality becomes yours. I constantly ask people to pay attention to who’s world it is they are inhabiting. Are you perpetuating the dialogue handed to you by those who want to keep you set where you are? Are you completely incoherent because you haven’t even taken a stab at even defining the words you use to base your life on? It’s important stuff. It’s necessary to cultivate your individual to as close to a T as you can.
My individual wants to move fast. I want to attract the kind of people who are motivated and excited to work and experiment with me. I’m the incidental loner. It’d be great to wake up each day to get moving on something together. You’re not the people who are going to do that with me, no matter how many appeals I make. I’d have to drag you. I’d have to account for what I suspect would be an increasing number of expenses as time went on. It’s been long enough that I’m not just blindly crying to myself in the corner about no one willing to play with me. You’re not the playful types, and that’s okay, I used my “hope” and “love” blinders to pretend otherwise.
I’ll never shake the “anxiety,” which I think is the wrong way to think about it, of my responsibility to myself or the world at large. I’ve failed 4 or 5 screenings at what felt like critical times. I’m still trying to see my head back in a stable place and trying again. My last study, which was truly critical, they NCSd (not clinically significant) my heart rate to keep me in, meaning I wouldn’t have had my moving truck or garage. I can’t be stopped. I never let up on myself. And for as long as it’s felt for me to gain forward momentum on things I’m doing, I watch people fade away at the same time. When “the last 8 years” becomes a throwaway line on my story of accomplishment, that’s 8 years you didn’t use to get started or learn or figure out how to stomach failure. I worry that eventually I’ll grow to resent the people around me and not want to contribute to “helping” them with anything if the occasion arose. I think they’d be too far gone to care either way.
I think a larger point has to do with what you practice every day. It won’t be enough to “finally” be frustrated enough or to have a psychotic break and “realize” something I’m doing or talked about was “truer” or “better” all along. I’m just trying to practice what I preach. I don’t have any more of an answer than the things I create and can point at. I can try to relate the headspace that drives me there. I can put a frame around the “crazy” that motivates moves that sometime befuddle me. But I can’t account for you anymore. I can’t pretend you’re anything more than the endless struggle or regrets or sacrifices in service to...well, I don’t know, you don’t talk about it. I know you don’t think you can save the world, and I know you probably feel obligated to keep the bills paid. So I don’t know you.
Wednesday I attempt to check into another drug study. It would pay $5500 if I get in. The screening my heart rate was 100 BPM, the highest it can be without either being immediately booted from screening or having to do a repeat. I felt calm the entire time. I feel more calm than not in these days preceeding check in. I have little to nothing riding on whether I get in besides THE WHOLE WORLD.
I’ve been moved lately to double down on the narrative of “being alone.” If I don’t get into the study, it’s back to the salt mines of delivery driving where I calcify muscle knots and move $100 or $200 at a time in the several directions I need to go. Whether it’s erecting a greenhouse, getting water pumped, creating a driveway, or finding the right equipment to keep the grass cut, there’s a hard and cold path forward that encourages my car to not break down and has me sinking into my car seat until we become one.
Part of what kicked off the anxiety and string of failing studies was the unknown reality of what I’m currently sitting in. I wasn’t car dwelling then. I still had rent to pay. I had just dropped a ton of cash to get the land in the first place. I hadn’t worked 3 jobs at once. I didn’t have a structure out on the land or any of my shit moved. In other words, all of the terrible circumstances I was facing, I’ve fixed. The dramatic climax of so many pillars I thought were in place collapsing around me has culminated in me sucking at playing a trumpet in a hot car as I wait to not get tipped by inconsiderate frat boys. Sure, my car can still break down at any moment, but I can afford the tow.
I have the intractable problem of actually believing in myself. I’m not worried about failure in and of itself. I’m terrified I won’t be able to set the examples I preach. How fast I work and how quick things can change is absolutely real to me. The impact I can have, particularly in the viral world, is immeasurable. The only way I can sell that is to give people something tangible to latch onto. They don’t know how to shake the shackles of bills. They don’t practice collaboration. Sustainability is a buzzword of the modern zeitgeist. They don’t even know how to verbalize and represent their real problems. As many heroes as I can read about, as many noteable examples out there that exist, there’s still really only me to try what I’m trying and do what I’m doing.
That is fucking nerve racking. It’s nerve racking because it has nothing to do with “belief.” When I wanted movie moments, I created the environment for them. When I wanted a business, I stayed on the phone and showed up every day to see it through. When I want to create a little sustainable oasis that gives me a platform to dick around across my diverse interests, I’ll do it a few hundred dollars at a time at the “most humbling” jobs imaginable as I collect stories from you about why you can’t reach your goals.
I’m a big believer, in a sense, that you create your own reality. I don’t mean to embolden people who live in outright denial of their failings and take pride in defaulting to misrepresentations in order to protect their feelings. I think when you work to give yourself a frame of reference that can accomplish “anything,” then in the act of making your world manifest, reality becomes yours. I constantly ask people to pay attention to who’s world it is they are inhabiting. Are you perpetuating the dialogue handed to you by those who want to keep you set where you are? Are you completely incoherent because you haven’t even taken a stab at even defining the words you use to base your life on? It’s important stuff. It’s necessary to cultivate your individual to as close to a T as you can.
My individual wants to move fast. I want to attract the kind of people who are motivated and excited to work and experiment with me. I’m the incidental loner. It’d be great to wake up each day to get moving on something together. You’re not the people who are going to do that with me, no matter how many appeals I make. I’d have to drag you. I’d have to account for what I suspect would be an increasing number of expenses as time went on. It’s been long enough that I’m not just blindly crying to myself in the corner about no one willing to play with me. You’re not the playful types, and that’s okay, I used my “hope” and “love” blinders to pretend otherwise.
I’ll never shake the “anxiety,” which I think is the wrong way to think about it, of my responsibility to myself or the world at large. I’ve failed 4 or 5 screenings at what felt like critical times. I’m still trying to see my head back in a stable place and trying again. My last study, which was truly critical, they NCSd (not clinically significant) my heart rate to keep me in, meaning I wouldn’t have had my moving truck or garage. I can’t be stopped. I never let up on myself. And for as long as it’s felt for me to gain forward momentum on things I’m doing, I watch people fade away at the same time. When “the last 8 years” becomes a throwaway line on my story of accomplishment, that’s 8 years you didn’t use to get started or learn or figure out how to stomach failure. I worry that eventually I’ll grow to resent the people around me and not want to contribute to “helping” them with anything if the occasion arose. I think they’d be too far gone to care either way.
I think a larger point has to do with what you practice every day. It won’t be enough to “finally” be frustrated enough or to have a psychotic break and “realize” something I’m doing or talked about was “truer” or “better” all along. I’m just trying to practice what I preach. I don’t have any more of an answer than the things I create and can point at. I can try to relate the headspace that drives me there. I can put a frame around the “crazy” that motivates moves that sometime befuddle me. But I can’t account for you anymore. I can’t pretend you’re anything more than the endless struggle or regrets or sacrifices in service to...well, I don’t know, you don’t talk about it. I know you don’t think you can save the world, and I know you probably feel obligated to keep the bills paid. So I don’t know you.
Sunday, August 20, 2017
[632] He Bumble
I want to explore humility and being humble. I find the concepts generally laughable. Usually you should be humbled by your ignorance to avoid some kind of downfall. The lower opinion you hold of your place or accomplishments, the greater the high of wins perhaps? I seem to see people employ it when they want to try and knock someone down for something they’ve accomplished. As opposed to knocking how they said something, the very fact of their statement suggests a head too large or ego out of check. As with a great many things in life, I find this level of irony excruciating and telling.
What does it really mean to have a big ego? How closely related is it to self-esteem? You certainly wouldn’t say it’s wrong to like yourself. You would probably think someone was off if they liked every single one of their own statuses or pictures. There’s a range, and people don’t like the idea that you don’t give much weight to the things about you that aren’t likeable. Aren’t I the complete opposite of this? Don’t I lean in and give a dozen more reasons for why we won’t get along first? The general theme of this being provoked by a gentleman who insisted I “humble myself” after I called a dumb thing dumb.
My ego is flavored by the good and bad. I was having a conversation about helping the poor with my friend today. I often view it as a pat on the back for yourself by getting involved and doing little things here and there. People are exceedingly happy to help “just one person” if they sponsor a child or donate a poor country’s GDP a month. I don’t do anything like that. I don’t claim to be capable of helping the poor like that and considering it help. The poor need a system level change and to be able to define their lives on their own terms. Until I can do that, I’m not pretending I’m helping. I go a step further and say we often cause more harm than we care to realize in our wanton approach to congratulating ourselves.
What do you call simple honesty like that? Is it not humble to say you’re comfortable sacrificing “just one child” until you can figure out a general way to approach poverty comprehensively? Or is having that goal another mere expression of an inflated ego? Who could create something like that? Someone who doesn’t believe they could or doesn’t think they have the obligation to at least try? Or is it that you should be sponsoring children in the meantime? I know there’s a philosophical school of thought that escapes me that would claim it’s immoral to spend a single cent in service to yourself while someone else is suffering. I don’t buy into it.
I don’t know how to “be humble” to any greater degree than I currently exhibit. I work 70 hour weeks. I take responsibility for more shit than I’m ever due. I put my failures on blast and try to wrap my head around them for weeks or years. I’m allowed to use my brain in a more effective way than you might recognize or agree with. I can call you dumb if you’re dumb. I can put aside the things you take great pride in achieving and shoot for exponentially higher levels. I can do it working “regular” jobs and doing drug studies. I can do it in the dirt or the office. I don’t hold any real respect for my “complaints” anymore than I try to surround myself with people giving themselves every excuse to suck worse than me.
How about you be honest. How about you grow a pair and stick by your stupid words and mischaracterizations. How about you keep your insecurities and faux patience and resolve and I’ll keep calling you fucking stupid when you apply yourself to people you feel superior over. I don’t need to be more humble, you need to stop being a lying pussy.
What does it really mean to have a big ego? How closely related is it to self-esteem? You certainly wouldn’t say it’s wrong to like yourself. You would probably think someone was off if they liked every single one of their own statuses or pictures. There’s a range, and people don’t like the idea that you don’t give much weight to the things about you that aren’t likeable. Aren’t I the complete opposite of this? Don’t I lean in and give a dozen more reasons for why we won’t get along first? The general theme of this being provoked by a gentleman who insisted I “humble myself” after I called a dumb thing dumb.
My ego is flavored by the good and bad. I was having a conversation about helping the poor with my friend today. I often view it as a pat on the back for yourself by getting involved and doing little things here and there. People are exceedingly happy to help “just one person” if they sponsor a child or donate a poor country’s GDP a month. I don’t do anything like that. I don’t claim to be capable of helping the poor like that and considering it help. The poor need a system level change and to be able to define their lives on their own terms. Until I can do that, I’m not pretending I’m helping. I go a step further and say we often cause more harm than we care to realize in our wanton approach to congratulating ourselves.
What do you call simple honesty like that? Is it not humble to say you’re comfortable sacrificing “just one child” until you can figure out a general way to approach poverty comprehensively? Or is having that goal another mere expression of an inflated ego? Who could create something like that? Someone who doesn’t believe they could or doesn’t think they have the obligation to at least try? Or is it that you should be sponsoring children in the meantime? I know there’s a philosophical school of thought that escapes me that would claim it’s immoral to spend a single cent in service to yourself while someone else is suffering. I don’t buy into it.
I don’t know how to “be humble” to any greater degree than I currently exhibit. I work 70 hour weeks. I take responsibility for more shit than I’m ever due. I put my failures on blast and try to wrap my head around them for weeks or years. I’m allowed to use my brain in a more effective way than you might recognize or agree with. I can call you dumb if you’re dumb. I can put aside the things you take great pride in achieving and shoot for exponentially higher levels. I can do it working “regular” jobs and doing drug studies. I can do it in the dirt or the office. I don’t hold any real respect for my “complaints” anymore than I try to surround myself with people giving themselves every excuse to suck worse than me.
How about you be honest. How about you grow a pair and stick by your stupid words and mischaracterizations. How about you keep your insecurities and faux patience and resolve and I’ll keep calling you fucking stupid when you apply yourself to people you feel superior over. I don’t need to be more humble, you need to stop being a lying pussy.
Friday, August 18, 2017
[631] Atom Smasher
If you’re lost in the woods, do a better job of defining your goals. Previous goals consisted of the ownership of a few expensive items, the entanglement of some hot bodies, the completion of goals imposed upon me academically, and the appeasing of my maybe aspergers-ocd-adjacent tendencies by overindulgence of media or books. In one form or another, I’ve, semi-disingenuously reduced most of my goals to dollar amounts. My website is the price of a very specific competent programmer. My living conditions every day’s wages cost of copper wire and the proper lawn equipment. My social goals the ability to attract people who, arguably couldn’t care one way or another, to my environment where I play a Gatsby cliche to their indulgence and escapism.
There’s always the overarching goal of some level or another that can be construed as “world domination.” Finding “help” is a standing goal that perhaps will never be met. I could use people who advertise and charge for their time who will pick up their phones and follow through. Having basically zero problems with myself that I can’t chalk up to psychosomatic unpredictability, my goals naturally extend, and are thus dictated by, ick, the world. 12 hour days most days of the week will do enough to whittle down your brain. Add car dwelling and too many hours of the McDonald's soundtrack and “just google it and learn it yourself” becomes not merely laughable but marginally depressing.
I want to get off the same note. I’m never without at least a dozen things I could do that are necessary and time consuming and important, and yet I sit and roast and get honked at. I’ve decided I don’t like any form of “wage slavery” no matter how easy it is. I want to be able to move. I want to know that there’s ways of increasing my cash or my standing in the off minutes. I don’t have another payment due on the shed for 2 months. If I had the equipment, that’s 2 months of weed killing or hill building or pipe laying or driveway cultivating on and on. I’ve made like $500 in 5 days, but I don’t even know if that’s “good.” I know it’s better than every other job I’ve had in town, but it still doesn’t touch studies. I have the “freedom” to leave when I want, but if you have nowhere to be except an hour away to do work, you just sort of stay in the work pocket that’s paying you.
I miss feeling like there’s a place for me more than I realize. It’s places like China and New York that people feel the most alone where you’re packed together closer than anywhere else. But the spirits aren’t aligned. The priorities shoot past each other. The obligations and goals can’t even pronounce each other. What good is having the world if it’s a cold indifferent hellscape? Why prepare a feast to eat alone? Why make the money only to watch it irresponsibly disappear into the hands of those who consider it more real than you? What is the goal? I keep asking people to a procession of depressed comments and fatalistic pithiness. What is the goal in the face of a world you barely want to occupy in the first place? When mere indulgence is a crying insult and the world in tears begs of you, “What do you want from me?”
I never had a goal of getting a girlfriend or getting married or having kids. I never even really had a dollar amount beyond lazily referring to a million dollars as a standard. I never quietly asked for a best friend or a puppy. I didn’t ask for my car. I want skills and experiences. I want genuine conversations and questions and jokes. I want access and convenience and the level of security and comfort that comes with being thoughtful and prepared. I want calculated risk. I want the truth of sacrifice, and I want to create and build. But mostly I want to do all of those things faster. I want someone to challenge me so that I’m not wholly consumed by spite. I want people to shut the fuck up if they’re not going to help. I want to rediscover the reasons for my friendships besides “solid enough company, occasionally.” I want somewhere to go.
I don’t even know if it can ever be fast enough. I don’t know why I insist it should go fast besides the feeling that I’m 8 or so years behind. Behind my best conception of myself. Behind when I could reason what I want to see was really needed. But I have no way to account for the rest of the world. I have to take their honks and jeers like I do driving for spending too much time in their plain. I’m weaving in and out of their understanding of the world. I’m crashing on the fringes of their concrete. I epitomize the ironic cliche in finding myself leashed to their world convinced too well of my own virtue and capacity, not that it’s all that virtuous, but more than nominally implicated.
Wouldn’t you know it, the dinner rush is hitting.
There’s always the overarching goal of some level or another that can be construed as “world domination.” Finding “help” is a standing goal that perhaps will never be met. I could use people who advertise and charge for their time who will pick up their phones and follow through. Having basically zero problems with myself that I can’t chalk up to psychosomatic unpredictability, my goals naturally extend, and are thus dictated by, ick, the world. 12 hour days most days of the week will do enough to whittle down your brain. Add car dwelling and too many hours of the McDonald's soundtrack and “just google it and learn it yourself” becomes not merely laughable but marginally depressing.
I want to get off the same note. I’m never without at least a dozen things I could do that are necessary and time consuming and important, and yet I sit and roast and get honked at. I’ve decided I don’t like any form of “wage slavery” no matter how easy it is. I want to be able to move. I want to know that there’s ways of increasing my cash or my standing in the off minutes. I don’t have another payment due on the shed for 2 months. If I had the equipment, that’s 2 months of weed killing or hill building or pipe laying or driveway cultivating on and on. I’ve made like $500 in 5 days, but I don’t even know if that’s “good.” I know it’s better than every other job I’ve had in town, but it still doesn’t touch studies. I have the “freedom” to leave when I want, but if you have nowhere to be except an hour away to do work, you just sort of stay in the work pocket that’s paying you.
I miss feeling like there’s a place for me more than I realize. It’s places like China and New York that people feel the most alone where you’re packed together closer than anywhere else. But the spirits aren’t aligned. The priorities shoot past each other. The obligations and goals can’t even pronounce each other. What good is having the world if it’s a cold indifferent hellscape? Why prepare a feast to eat alone? Why make the money only to watch it irresponsibly disappear into the hands of those who consider it more real than you? What is the goal? I keep asking people to a procession of depressed comments and fatalistic pithiness. What is the goal in the face of a world you barely want to occupy in the first place? When mere indulgence is a crying insult and the world in tears begs of you, “What do you want from me?”
I never had a goal of getting a girlfriend or getting married or having kids. I never even really had a dollar amount beyond lazily referring to a million dollars as a standard. I never quietly asked for a best friend or a puppy. I didn’t ask for my car. I want skills and experiences. I want genuine conversations and questions and jokes. I want access and convenience and the level of security and comfort that comes with being thoughtful and prepared. I want calculated risk. I want the truth of sacrifice, and I want to create and build. But mostly I want to do all of those things faster. I want someone to challenge me so that I’m not wholly consumed by spite. I want people to shut the fuck up if they’re not going to help. I want to rediscover the reasons for my friendships besides “solid enough company, occasionally.” I want somewhere to go.
I don’t even know if it can ever be fast enough. I don’t know why I insist it should go fast besides the feeling that I’m 8 or so years behind. Behind my best conception of myself. Behind when I could reason what I want to see was really needed. But I have no way to account for the rest of the world. I have to take their honks and jeers like I do driving for spending too much time in their plain. I’m weaving in and out of their understanding of the world. I’m crashing on the fringes of their concrete. I epitomize the ironic cliche in finding myself leashed to their world convinced too well of my own virtue and capacity, not that it’s all that virtuous, but more than nominally implicated.
Wouldn’t you know it, the dinner rush is hitting.
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
[630] So So Comfortable
I hesitate to say we need different words. That is to say, I think the words we have used to do a pretty fine job of explaining things. No matter what’s become of them in the modern era, I still think reasonable people find shared understanding through the dissemination of meaning through a shared language. The universal language is science. Most people don’t cringe like me when someone says they love them. And Nazis should almost certainly die.
People are frequently under the mistaken impression that they are “modern.” Their “advanced” knowledge of the world and the era in which they occupy gives them perfect confidence. “We” will cure cancer. “We” will ride the long arc of history towards racial and sexual justice. With enough sun tan lotion and solar panelled air conditioners, we’ll never be burned off the planet. Modernity as a concept is a mask. It’s an opportunity to hide and play pretend.
Everything about “right now” comes out of the array of possible shared experiences. I can invite anyone on Earth to my dinner table and barring some anomaly with their gut, we can both recognize and eat a life sustaining meal. That’s the easiest kind of thing. No opinion in the world can override your stomach’s desire for food. There is no other way to get on with bothering to experience anything without that in place.
Now imagine that what you’ve sat down to eat isn’t precisely food. That is, you can eat it, you can feel full, but it’s just...off. In fact, you can eat it 3 times a day for years and you won’t notice anything is really wrong until your stomach explodes. On the list of things you would probably complain and ask about would be, “Whose goddamn job was it to label this?” Before your quick and very painful death. Your friend ate it with you. Your family fed it to you. It tasted just beneath store-brand level.
You’ve caught on that this food is all information. How you approach every single second of the message you are putting out there can poison and explode you or keep you nourished and alive. Your brain does this sorting automatically. It knows when something wrong went in and will attempt to puke or shit it out quick. Your mind, on the other hand, can decide for its own self what it thinks of your arbitrary name “food.”
It’s one of the oldest patterns I use to annoy people. Vague piety. When you don’t know something you talk in group identity terms. Nothing about the group is redeeming, no individuals are allowed to be named, and closely following words of condemnation follows your own virtue and capacity to transcend their group. It’s “atheists are immoral” it’s “black people are criminals” it’s “Nazi’s should almost certainly die.” I ask you to name “the” atheist, or black person, or Nazi in question. I ask for their crimes. I ask for what their group says about them. I ask how we’re defining “Nazi” even if I’m happy to be convinced with the definition history has given us already.
It’s been going on for as long as I ever discovered a real position on something to completely disavow the details. We forgo the shared experience. We make words exactly the opposite of what they mean, and then we wake up one day to a KKK and Nazi march and are overwhelmed and confused about how it happened or what it means. As far as the modern era is concerned, it means nothing. They trended for a day, then it’s back to the video games. Or have you heard the newest most anti-American and nonsensical thing Hitler 2 said yet?
I consider shit-talking a kind of artform. To shit talk, you need to be discovering truth in a witty and damaging way. It only qualifies if you get to someone. When you’re acting in a way that doesn’t match your circumstances or words, you deserve to be called out. You’ve set yourself to fail and be embarrassed and go back and correct for something. If you haven’t caught on, a solid reason to wear all of your bullshit on your sleeve is that it makes it incredibly hard for people to shit talk you. If you live in the truth, all you see is limp-wristed flails in your direction about your character or circumstances. Often, they try to make something up or purposely distort something stupid just to fill the air.
A bad shit talker is our president. He’s the child who just repeats the first stupid thing that comes to his head. He hasn’t had a grasp of the truth for untold years so nothing he says sticks but for the insisted effort of the virulent mass. It’s often stated that he’s a symptom. He’s a champion of all those high school pissing matches you never won. He’s overcome the fights with your older siblings that made you feel small. He’s proud of his lies and excuses to not do better and expect more of himself. He’s an endless stream of reality TV catchphrases that culminate in losing even the ability to disavow white supremacy.
And we pretend like we haven’t been encouraging that, big and small, every day of our lives. We got so comfortable writing off the behavior of our friends and family members. We got so comfortable with selfish designs and stories about our contributions to the world. We got so comfortable copying the “smug elites” and their dialogue without ever figuring out how to reach the learned and frustrated place it might have come from. We doubled down in our self-destructive tendencies and turned the truth tellers, the fighters, the struggle, and the work into Hollywood cliches and context-free quotes for our walls. We got so comfortable wasting our words and wasting our time pursuing everything and everyone that let us fall a little further and sleep a little deeper on what it means to achieve The American Dream.
Nothing about you is new. The forces that molded the Nazis aren’t even 2 generations from you, let alone the hundreds of thousands or millions of years old structures that you consist of. You are always breaking down and being built up. You are always changing and fighting and keeping a foot in chaos and a foot in order. You are not above it. You cannot escape. You can’t carry a cliche or cartoon to explain away your position and why it is always and forever at the top. You’ve let your words, your body, degrade into nothing and so have forgotten how to use it. It breaks down when you try. It leaves you feeling scarred and scared and wondering how you ever let it get so bad. But you were doing it every day, with every lie.
I don’t mean “we should negotiate with Nazis” when I say “we should kill Nazis.” I respect and accept that I’m always under threat. My words are, literally, used in the exact opposite way that any other reasonable person trying and caring would find to use them. I’ve been met with the obscure posture and line by line memorized pageantry of a “heated debate.” I’ve been denied respect for every single thing I’ve ever put up as a real world manifestation of my values. I’ll never be justified to some people, I’ll never be convinced to others, and I’m so lost in the woods of my ego I could never crawl out and proclaim anything I saw as “fucking stupid.”
You want another reason people kill themselves? The rest of the world exists on a perpetual opposite day. If you apply a skeptical scientific mind to the mess, if you don’t stay specific, you’ll be completely disoriented. Death is mercy! Meanwhile, in opposite land, where words are exactly wrong, every step taken to end one’s life is heralded as a miracle! What reasonable person would make themselves a target by painting a swastika on their forehead? That’s what you’ve done when you chant genocidal battle cries. Why repeat the abuses of your familial and relationship past? Pain cares! It’s familiar! It’s super comfy to be reminded of, not the only thing I’ve known, but the thing I’m picking as the strongest and best impression of what I will strive for.
You surround yourself with liars. You hold nobody accountable to anything. You smile too often and too hard. You talk plans you can’t carry out. You make excuses for groups and circumstances. You become a caricature. You become a long line of Chinese telephone cliches about some topic or another and you don’t care where it came from, what it means, or what it’s setting you up to fail at in the future. The loudest, heaviest, deadliest, angriest, most afraid lazy liars calling out in piddling fashion every loud, heavy, deadly, angry, most afraid lazy liar that pretends to hold some kind of truth that can speak to them! Ha! Have you heard the fake news?
I just want to remind you that it never gets better. You never get happy. You never fix anything. You never change anything. You never go anywhere. You never grow. You never make peace. All you do is die enough inside so that you can pretend to resemble and to have done the work of the ones who actually looked for and found something. You’ll invite the Nazis in for tea because certainly you’re not the one they’re after. You can’t have their sickness or be guilty of the crimes they seek to punish. Not you, good Christian. Never you, nice girl. No qualms for this family man. So centered and objective and enlightened. So comfortable.
People are frequently under the mistaken impression that they are “modern.” Their “advanced” knowledge of the world and the era in which they occupy gives them perfect confidence. “We” will cure cancer. “We” will ride the long arc of history towards racial and sexual justice. With enough sun tan lotion and solar panelled air conditioners, we’ll never be burned off the planet. Modernity as a concept is a mask. It’s an opportunity to hide and play pretend.
Everything about “right now” comes out of the array of possible shared experiences. I can invite anyone on Earth to my dinner table and barring some anomaly with their gut, we can both recognize and eat a life sustaining meal. That’s the easiest kind of thing. No opinion in the world can override your stomach’s desire for food. There is no other way to get on with bothering to experience anything without that in place.
Now imagine that what you’ve sat down to eat isn’t precisely food. That is, you can eat it, you can feel full, but it’s just...off. In fact, you can eat it 3 times a day for years and you won’t notice anything is really wrong until your stomach explodes. On the list of things you would probably complain and ask about would be, “Whose goddamn job was it to label this?” Before your quick and very painful death. Your friend ate it with you. Your family fed it to you. It tasted just beneath store-brand level.
You’ve caught on that this food is all information. How you approach every single second of the message you are putting out there can poison and explode you or keep you nourished and alive. Your brain does this sorting automatically. It knows when something wrong went in and will attempt to puke or shit it out quick. Your mind, on the other hand, can decide for its own self what it thinks of your arbitrary name “food.”
It’s one of the oldest patterns I use to annoy people. Vague piety. When you don’t know something you talk in group identity terms. Nothing about the group is redeeming, no individuals are allowed to be named, and closely following words of condemnation follows your own virtue and capacity to transcend their group. It’s “atheists are immoral” it’s “black people are criminals” it’s “Nazi’s should almost certainly die.” I ask you to name “the” atheist, or black person, or Nazi in question. I ask for their crimes. I ask for what their group says about them. I ask how we’re defining “Nazi” even if I’m happy to be convinced with the definition history has given us already.
It’s been going on for as long as I ever discovered a real position on something to completely disavow the details. We forgo the shared experience. We make words exactly the opposite of what they mean, and then we wake up one day to a KKK and Nazi march and are overwhelmed and confused about how it happened or what it means. As far as the modern era is concerned, it means nothing. They trended for a day, then it’s back to the video games. Or have you heard the newest most anti-American and nonsensical thing Hitler 2 said yet?
I consider shit-talking a kind of artform. To shit talk, you need to be discovering truth in a witty and damaging way. It only qualifies if you get to someone. When you’re acting in a way that doesn’t match your circumstances or words, you deserve to be called out. You’ve set yourself to fail and be embarrassed and go back and correct for something. If you haven’t caught on, a solid reason to wear all of your bullshit on your sleeve is that it makes it incredibly hard for people to shit talk you. If you live in the truth, all you see is limp-wristed flails in your direction about your character or circumstances. Often, they try to make something up or purposely distort something stupid just to fill the air.
A bad shit talker is our president. He’s the child who just repeats the first stupid thing that comes to his head. He hasn’t had a grasp of the truth for untold years so nothing he says sticks but for the insisted effort of the virulent mass. It’s often stated that he’s a symptom. He’s a champion of all those high school pissing matches you never won. He’s overcome the fights with your older siblings that made you feel small. He’s proud of his lies and excuses to not do better and expect more of himself. He’s an endless stream of reality TV catchphrases that culminate in losing even the ability to disavow white supremacy.
And we pretend like we haven’t been encouraging that, big and small, every day of our lives. We got so comfortable writing off the behavior of our friends and family members. We got so comfortable with selfish designs and stories about our contributions to the world. We got so comfortable copying the “smug elites” and their dialogue without ever figuring out how to reach the learned and frustrated place it might have come from. We doubled down in our self-destructive tendencies and turned the truth tellers, the fighters, the struggle, and the work into Hollywood cliches and context-free quotes for our walls. We got so comfortable wasting our words and wasting our time pursuing everything and everyone that let us fall a little further and sleep a little deeper on what it means to achieve The American Dream.
Nothing about you is new. The forces that molded the Nazis aren’t even 2 generations from you, let alone the hundreds of thousands or millions of years old structures that you consist of. You are always breaking down and being built up. You are always changing and fighting and keeping a foot in chaos and a foot in order. You are not above it. You cannot escape. You can’t carry a cliche or cartoon to explain away your position and why it is always and forever at the top. You’ve let your words, your body, degrade into nothing and so have forgotten how to use it. It breaks down when you try. It leaves you feeling scarred and scared and wondering how you ever let it get so bad. But you were doing it every day, with every lie.
I don’t mean “we should negotiate with Nazis” when I say “we should kill Nazis.” I respect and accept that I’m always under threat. My words are, literally, used in the exact opposite way that any other reasonable person trying and caring would find to use them. I’ve been met with the obscure posture and line by line memorized pageantry of a “heated debate.” I’ve been denied respect for every single thing I’ve ever put up as a real world manifestation of my values. I’ll never be justified to some people, I’ll never be convinced to others, and I’m so lost in the woods of my ego I could never crawl out and proclaim anything I saw as “fucking stupid.”
You want another reason people kill themselves? The rest of the world exists on a perpetual opposite day. If you apply a skeptical scientific mind to the mess, if you don’t stay specific, you’ll be completely disoriented. Death is mercy! Meanwhile, in opposite land, where words are exactly wrong, every step taken to end one’s life is heralded as a miracle! What reasonable person would make themselves a target by painting a swastika on their forehead? That’s what you’ve done when you chant genocidal battle cries. Why repeat the abuses of your familial and relationship past? Pain cares! It’s familiar! It’s super comfy to be reminded of, not the only thing I’ve known, but the thing I’m picking as the strongest and best impression of what I will strive for.
You surround yourself with liars. You hold nobody accountable to anything. You smile too often and too hard. You talk plans you can’t carry out. You make excuses for groups and circumstances. You become a caricature. You become a long line of Chinese telephone cliches about some topic or another and you don’t care where it came from, what it means, or what it’s setting you up to fail at in the future. The loudest, heaviest, deadliest, angriest, most afraid lazy liars calling out in piddling fashion every loud, heavy, deadly, angry, most afraid lazy liar that pretends to hold some kind of truth that can speak to them! Ha! Have you heard the fake news?
I just want to remind you that it never gets better. You never get happy. You never fix anything. You never change anything. You never go anywhere. You never grow. You never make peace. All you do is die enough inside so that you can pretend to resemble and to have done the work of the ones who actually looked for and found something. You’ll invite the Nazis in for tea because certainly you’re not the one they’re after. You can’t have their sickness or be guilty of the crimes they seek to punish. Not you, good Christian. Never you, nice girl. No qualms for this family man. So centered and objective and enlightened. So comfortable.
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