[758] Read 'Em And Weep

There's something I do, not very often, but often enough that I want to talk about. I've sat on several Amazon wishlists with different groupings of items, sometimes for years. Things can range from a $1 book to a $3000 high definition camera. There's things meant to scratch the OCD-adjacent itch like American Gladiators DVDs which have no torrent presence but I'll be damned if it didn't feel like I was missing out on the ability to reminisce when I first thought to look them up. Just now, I decided to start adding up the cheapest used versions of a 50+ long book list and see how much it would be to buy them all at once. I got bored a little over half way through and decided against some that were pricier than they should be, marring the results and estimation, but it's probably safe to say it'd be about $500 or so after shipping to get everything. My finger lingered over the “place order” button when I showed the cart at $309.

 

A small point to be rushed out of the way is that I have $309. I have the $500 or more it would take to order them all. I have the money to do that, and pay rent next month, and pay for gas and food, and stay as perfectly comfortable as I am now, but with 50 more books in my life. 50 more windows or distractions on topics I've found interesting enough to note on a list and then carry on with my life in spite of. 50 reminders of all of the things I'm not learning about that inspired me, excited me, or prompted me to act in a world that I'm otherwise mostly dragging myself through without the narcissism of a proper depression. Yes, that was a deliberately provocative and ignorant phrasing, good catch. It made me smirk, so it stays.

 

The large point to be labored over and confused, I'm sure, is that I am, in fact, inspired. I'm inspired in my feelings of “deadness.” I'm inspired by the indignant and ignorant testaments to our impending demise. I'm inspired by numbers and whiffs of ill-conceived yet tangible “progress.” There's a lot of the world that, despite everything contrary I might conjure to say about it, I'm actively wishing to learn about, understand, and then build into a new expression of myself. Thus, this overwhelming empowering sentiment of self-actualization and connection becomes the most depressing thing. To have an “intellectual” mode of viewing all topics as “potentially interesting” or drumming up reasons to claim interest is a step removed from rushing to Amazon or the library to devour where thoughts were pushing you.

 

I had to individually delete each book from the list. I had to see the title of something I want to be intimately familiar with fade into the background of my “one day” life, even if that life is maybe mere months away. I had to get the sinking feeling of “what if” my car or my guy working or some inconvenience pops up and the $300 or $500 could be better spent. Right before the book list I was reexamining heating/air conditioning units. A $1000 one of those might make a survivable difference where the flow of ideas might be a lower-order need than the flow of blood.

 

More and more I want to be the quasi-hermit just learning or just experimenting. I find myself growing increasingly fascinated with the infinite potential and particulars of what it means to be truly individual. The only path to wrapping oneself up in a tough blanket of understanding seems to be in the tireless pursuit of understanding as many pieces of the infinite sea of variables as you can pass through your consciousness. I'm already a fairly provocative and particular beast. Who am I after those 50 books? Who am I after trying and failing over and over again?

 

It's a different kind of energy. I got something of an adrenaline rush dealing with a particular kind of ignorant client. I was “excited” at the prospect of being what's going to be a pretty dramatic and severe consequence to stone-cold ignorance in a way that life rarely provides. At the same time, it's not lost on me that this isn't the kind of excited I want to be. It's also a kind of weak co-opting of State power that could arguably pass through anyone with my same title. Yes, the professional world let's you jiggle around details, but picking your weapon in a war you've been conscripted into seems fundamentally at odds with the kind of individual liberty or choice that would sustain meaningful interaction with the world.

 

I want to give myself up. I want to serve myself on a platter to the ideas that want to take me as far as they are able. I want to lose myself in the argument and effort and find myself in pieces scattered between pages. I don't want to hear the back of my mind chanting “gotta work for the weekend” and “working 9 to 5” as I feel defeated cracking a book I know I'll have to put down, no matter how good, so I'm not too tired for my job in the morning. I don't want to pretend “broken” is the same thing as “tempered.” I'm playing the game Red Dead Redemption and recently learned how to lasso and break horses. It's in the person who's riding you's best interest for you to forget you're as large and kicky as a horse.

 

My compulsion to sit and play, or read, or sleep, or just talk and eat forever are also provoked by my genuine feeling that we aren't going to make it. I want to enjoy my gilded age. I want my head put through as many word washings and tumble cycles as I can get my eyes and ears on. “People,” as that abstract concept or mass are always going to provide you the same things. Carving out your individual person is an every-moment kind of task. It's why I'm thankful for writing. I know I'm awake and “mildly annoyed.” I know I have an image of a video game bucking horse flashing in front of me and am I'm exhausted by Trump-esc ignorance, unyieldingly proud, and see first hand its deadly effects personally and culturally. I know I want a nice little dopaminergic rush from spending or to feel like something is happening that finally has to do with me, and not what I'm otherwise compelled to be doing.

 

I think, at a certain point, you get to be justly complicated. The concept of “listen to your elders” comes to mind. It's hard to say someone who's been around for 2 or 3 times longer than you have is going to be summed up. In theory, we should all be filled with layers of wisdom and in/dignity to be poked and shaken for insight, but those “sparkly” people running through the halls trying to turn on the light in every room might be garnering your attention for more than bombastic or selfish reasons. Enough obituaries have read “He/she was a point of light, the center of their family, the beacon etc” to the point of absurdity, but I think about it initially more cynically. An individual, almost by definition, is a brand.

 

If I were merely a machine, and I produced “content,” you'd have nearly 740 pages of whatever you want to call it. Was Anne Frank a “good” writer? Doesn't matter. Is Viktor Frankl's voice unique? Can you feel a line from Dostoevsky in your bones that sounds worlds apart from one of his no-name contemporaries? These famous individuals are manifest in various and insidious ways, but they thrive and live on in the people who adopted deeply personal genuine understanding from what they were attempting to convey. Ignorance and relativists may want to bicker of “true understanding” verses “false understanding,” which to me might indicate they're in some of the furthest places one might inhabit in their ability to understand much of anything at all.

 

If I were merely a machine, I have a consistent and powerful history of drawing out such deeply ingrained reactions to my being as to engender some of the harshest and most incoherent judgments. Simply, I'd provoke noise. At the same time, I make a lot of noise. I raise the concern. I ask for the fight. I talk too much and too loud. I try for the next boisterous laugh. I seek out other noise makers to fill the air when I need to breath.

 

We're currently caught in a psychological hole and feedback loop where noisy content stokes the flames that power the insecure engine away from individuated self-expression. That line is a convoluted way of describing our collective death. I said recently I'm not interested in dying if I'm going to bother with life. It's that much clearer to me now why I want to buy hundreds of dollars worth of books and secure my tiny shell that everything can burn down around.

 

I'm already breaking through, but I'm not enough. So much of me already exists and fights for its sole voice. I'm taking shape, as quickly as I can through writing, and as slow as it takes to get a driveway, or build a library, or pluck a sapling. Maybe I'm too hungry in wanting it 24/7. 2 weeks at a time is 26 monopolizing moments. That's dangerous and deadly. 8 am to 4:30 pm was agreed upon without your input. The base of my current orientation I consider corrupted, which means it has an expiration, and eventually I'll talk myself out of it. But I also know that argument is essentially dead without help from another individual or statistically unlikely empowering circumstances enriching me.

If it's still somehow lost on you, this is me fighting.

[757] Natural Disaster Artist

I’m so “mildly everything” right now as my mind shoots between past thoughts and recent experiences that I think it’s time to dig.

I’ve finished my “training” at DCS. As the time went by, people loosened up more and more and those true colors started leaking through. Dress got more relaxed, pretty grievances started to surface, and the reality of our collective situation was no more epitomized than when a group presenting a mock case got reprimanded for their parody lyrics after being encouraged to be creative in their presentation on the very last day. It’s The State, ladies and gentlemen. I’m surprised you didn’t see the stick up its ass from miles away.

There were several “strong” personalities, including mine, in the class. I got to watch with the wisdom of knowing what happens already, as how I managed to integrate myself, or not, into different conversational circles. Again, older people like me. I stayed polite in playing games I find incredibly boring or biting my tongue on what would otherwise be an endless stream of jokes and commentary. There’s a handful of people I could see inviting to parties or hanging out again, but we’ll see if they’re still employed and answering their work emails even 6 months from now if I so conjured the right situation. I wasn’t so much about trading numbers.

One particularly wordy and jokey person decided to send an email out to the group about how she really enjoyed everyone and that the cohort will leave a lasting impact. I intend to getting around to writing a goofy poem in response to it. You couldn’t ask for a better example of the people who want to kind of act out using it as a shield because they really do care in more ways than they’ll let on. She also invited everyone out to drink on the second to last day, though I’m unsure who decided to attend.

With the end of the traveling, I get to settle into my townie rut. I can start regularly maintaining engagement in my distractions and practices. I can start finding my rhythm and how to disrupt it with inappropriate levels of overtime. Before that was my first foray into living that “travel a bit and visit friends” kind of life. I’m writing this from my bedroom at my dad’s house as I’ve been sort of marooned in the region after a miscommunication. Tomorrow I venture to a play before a very late drive back. Today has been needlessly spending money in an effort to distract myself and stay out of the house. I’m pausing work on the land for a month or so, so sneaking in video games, books, and a vanilla caramel chiller get to scratch spending itches.

But seriously, I’m trying to figure out how to get to the good stuff. I’ve been considerably more “functionally dead” as time goes on. I routinely envision myself strung up by my fancy belt on a door handle. I still have very little desire to connect with people in general, let alone anyone new, and even seeing some acquaintances in the mall, I did basically everything in my power to pretend I was trying to get their attention before walking the other direction. I’m an odd duck.

Part of that behavior is feeling so insular that people are again becoming flatly what they can or can’t provide me. Another polite conversation about the nothing either of us are doing or plans neither of us care about isn’t what I need. Seeing people you went to high school with get married and mall walk early Saturday morning is the kind of kick in the teeth to how “easy” it is to get comfortable and sit still.

I think a lot about people’s relationships. A trainer asked the question of our cohort, “How many of you are on your first love?” and nobody raised their hand. He was making a point about change and how hard it can be for not just our families but us as well. I make the more cynical point about the kind of desperate illusion the love story is and the power it’s had to drag us up to this point. But it was funny to see the people who didn’t know why they were in Indiana, but moved their because of their boyfriend, or who had stories about being the mom at 17 and 40 year old grandma taking tips on how to relate to their spouse from one of our book sections, or the 26 year old talk about his time in marriage counseling and girl with a 1-year old who very clearly wanted to be drunk as shit and still in college once the wheels started coming off of our group’s general civility.

It’s just lost on everyone. It’s lost that you can be forcefully and proudly yourself, and still build your life and relationships from there. Old people find themselves there sometimes by default, so they jive with me. Take no prisoners. Be honest. The “professional” world has an obligation to keep things obscure and lightly touched because they’re wielding enormous power. Society at large needs something of a baseline, sure, but if Trump has taught us anything, if you don’t protect and fight through the uncomfortable truths, you’re not just harmed by the lies, but utterly overwhelmed to the point of threatening extinction.

I have a mild post-traumatic response when I think about my stuff that got stolen. Concurrently, I have an overwhelming feeling that I don’t want “stuff.” I come in through the garage at my dad’s house and see stuff up stuff piled up. It’s been through several garage sales. Some of it is semi-useful some of the time. And this house is filled with stuff that was supposed to serve later purposes or be a part of my step-mom’s craft business. This house isn’t breathing with the lives this stuff is supposed to enable. It just feels heavier and heavier and hard to maneuver around.

That’s what my stuff was. The pieces to the coffee shop. The toys and collectables I’ve saved since childhood. The books the thieves opened one box of, threw around, and then decided they’d grabbed everything worth taking. I’m sitting with the weight of a piano I have to figure out how to pack into my space. At the heart of the acquisition of my stuff was to help enable me. I never opened a single Marvel Legend as I figured they’d be worth something one day. The same rationale left some QVC comics my grandmother bought me as well, also gone. The time and money and effort it took to get that stuff not only into my life, but onto the truck, and out to the land, just gone. My effort, my plans, and my wisdom-seeking investment behavior nullified.

Here I think about help. If I had help to establish my place earlier, I could have been out there. I could have protected my stuff. I could have made my little empire a few thousand dollars richer and extended my online sales presence. You know, the true noble goal of existence. I could continue to draw from the desperate insecurity of the past that provoked me into getting that stuff and investing myself in it when there was nothing else. I could go on and on like fires and hurricanes aren’t routinely wiping out entire lives by the thousands. I can pretend I give a fuck about them like I do what happens to me.

I guess there’s the irony. The utility and training it takes to pretend. Pretend hard enough and you’ll donate to charity and take up a noble profession. You’ll believe your just desserts in heaven are for a life well-lived and hasn’t been you jockeying to garner favor. I’ve heard a number of times from different trainers, “I have a passion for this work! It really bugs me when people are just here for the paycheck!” Because they require the nobility and dignity of their position to understand and orient themselves in the world. It’s beyond their comprehension that you could give zero fucks and do better by virtue of understanding the nature of the game. They don’t know honesty and compassion without reward, so when honesty and compassion show up brazen and “creative,” they instinctively shutter at the thought anyone would dare pay someone for their time and effort when a heart can bleed all on its own. Fuck them.

What’s funny though, I can’t really pretend. When you’re willing and able to see what I am, like the obnoxious, and older, and melancholy, that’s when my star shines. There’s a reason I seem to attract a litany of girls with severe depression and anxiety. There’s a reason I draw such visceral reactions to being consistent and persistently forthcoming in how I feel. I recognize the pretend game as death, and if I have to keep bothering with being alive, I’m not interested in dying. I only imagine myself hanging from my belt, I don’t make plans.

I keep thinking we’re, for several generations, irreparably broken. Whether it’s people feeling creeped out at the idea of picking up a phone or the obnoxious individual haze of pursuing things for the sake of things, perhaps my harking for the time spent in college becomes less about some romantic togetherness and friendship ideal, and more a recognition that that’s all there is. That’s when you’re allowed to be an individual and bounce your process off other processes. Friends are an incredibly positively selfish thing to have if you’re using them right. But what do people do instead? They pretend. They play house. They pose for Instagram. They make it incredibly hard to ever see each other again because it’s time to look for the next thing.

I don’t know what I want anymore. I wanted the struggle, and that’s been subverted by the proper form and process. I wanted to be engaged and creative, and now I’m searching for hobbies like I’m trying to pack in extra curriculars before applying to college. They say to pay for experiences, not things. What if you don’t know how to? What if your experience is so marred by your collective psychosis that no matter where you go, you’re paying for the same thing over and over until you go mad? Why do I want to be lonely and bored in a foreign country anymore than I want to be sitting alone in my field contemplating whatever there is to buy after a driveway?

Today has been one of those exercise days in really hammering down the hardest and most depressing points. I tried to be proactive. I got some slime to fix a slow leak in my tire. The head popped off, and I end up deflating the tire more. I got a magnet phone holder so I could stop precariously dancing with my fumbled phone while driving, only to lose a piece of it, somehow, into a black hole that opened in my lap. I could see the pissed away money flutter about in the aggressive wind. I was told to “ignore the barking” and “say hi, it’s about respect” as if I don’t regularly say hi or need lessons on respect and haven’t been routinely and unceremoniously ignored by the person I’m supposed to say it to for years. My working self gets to watch the step-white-trash retard in my basement play video games, still without a job, not paying rent, pissing all over the toilet, as the expectations of my household remain shackled. It happens too regularly for there not to be some metaphysical-esc being out there zeroing in on the points where the exact opposite of what should be said or did in fact happens precisely then.

I’ve been heavily restricting my diet lately too. Each day I’ve gone with a can of tuna and 4 apples. I don’t really care what you know about health and weight loss. The results are pretty dramatic even after less than a week. I’m interested in what happens when I add exercise. Part of me wants to be “default” attractive again so I can try to remain silent and/or “buff and dumb” for places like Tinder. Another part of me wants to get as close as I’m ever going to get by way of analogy to addiction. If you need meth as much as I need food, and I’m over here refraining from the hundreds and hundreds of options with my growing and growing bank account, I get to retain even less sympathy for you, and I might stumble upon some insight on how to steer your attention and behavior into another direction. If that fails, at least I’ll be skinnier and saving money regardless. But it seems, as with most things about me, it’s another behavior engaged in out of spite.

Ah ha! That was the last piece I wanted to fit in somewhere. In reminiscing about my childhood, I wonder sometimes if I was born “bad.” I don’t have a lot of insight into my childhood. I don’t have access to pictures. I don’t have family videos. My dad isn’t particularly detailed or forthcoming when I ask him about it. I still don’t talk to the cunt that bore me. I find the proposition intriguing for the consequences of pairing a bad kid with a psycho mom. Maybe it’s not all her, or her mental deficiencies’, fault. Maybe I say things like, “I don’t like helping people” or “here’s another justification for relative sociopathy” or revel in the taboo and precarious while enabling whatever pathology you have on offer because I’m bad. Maybe the world constantly signalling for me to play pretend with them has nothing to do with me as a person and everything to do with a subconscious self-preservation response about the natural disaster that is my being. If there’s a louder message I most often hear besides “you’re not a person” in so many forms, I’ve not caught it.

The insecure put me down. The scared turn what I say or do into personal affronts or redefine their laughter or buy in as something “mean” about me. The jealous avoid. And it isn’t even about them. I’m the storm. I’m a knotted ball of cancerous karma keeping myself stuck between personalities like theirs and an unforgiving world in the face of my best efforts and investments. They’re blips in my blogs and I’m still the writer. The work gets to be here even if I’ll never be.

[756] Positivity Doctrine

I think this can be more of a “for the record” kind of reiteration and blurb.

Once again, someone who does not know me and can't help but hear me has used the “n” word about me. (This being the disembodied voice of whomever sits next to Byron's cubicle.) I said some disparaging thing about a piece of shit person doing a piece of shit thing, and the party line was recited. “Think positive! Positivity!” I learned later that she expressed to Byron that my words signaled a red flag for whether or not I would survive in a job like that given the nature of the work and “if he doesn't care” about the people. Byron laughed it off, reassured her he's known me for 20 years, and that my outside gruff exterior is probably just some form of coping mechanism not to be taken too seriously.

Clearly, I still have someone not exhausted yet at the prospect of defending me, but her concern raised a different angle to the question of my “negativity.” She was worried I didn't care. For her, the words mattered more than anything I might accomplish or how I actually feel. There's similarities to how it's usually deployed, but at least this one was literally thinking of the children lol.

I'm learning that the “most negative actually most positive” method of approach to the world is utterly wasted on people at large. Little did she know or care that the person she was talking to, and his supervisor, and the people in our little pod, are all cut from the same cloth. Me, slow to office politics, didn't realize there's a special corner and offices for general comments and sentiments like mine.

The larger giant and most important point remains the same. Whatever I say, and damn knows I can constantly and annoyingly continue to say it, both in spite and celebration of things you never want to talk about, my DOING and general life circumstances are still regal. Have you forgotten I spent a good portion of my time after college sleeping and waking up whenever I wanted? That's as magnificent as cats have it. You know I'm still on the trajectory to having a jokingly small conception of “bills?” I'm too fat. I'm typing this on a big screen from a custom computer loaded with 6 hard drives and plugged into an external power supply just in case I need an extra hour or so if the power goes out. Opulence doesn't begin to describe it.

And every day now I get to interact with people who have roaches, smell weird, struggle to take care of kids, and get put through a system that maybe evenly splits the ones it might help verses exploit. Can you have that much sympathy when my extraneous stuff I've left in a moving van for almost 2 years in a field goes missing? It's immoral and makes you feel vulnerable, but then now aren't I more in line with the general circumstances of the world? Do any of my, often mocked and poorly regarded “problems” ever make the radar? The pants buttons on both of my dress pants popping off? The hassle of returning things to Amazon? My new shoes getting stained? My shampoo running out without time to get more at my hotel?

Nothing, never, that I do will be less than an incredibly rich person making a series of gambles on how he can make even bigger bets and investments. My parents commute/d an hour or more to work every day, and they didn't come back to their paid-off home. When I can actually start stockpiling and investing again, every cent that helped me I'll be able to start turning back out in repaying or whatever else. Mostly, I'll get to celebrate the perspective that taught me I could do a fuck ton beyond merely survive with $500 to $2000 if I did the math and stayed realistic about what life did or didn't owe me.

I don't know man, the prospect of the next economic crash and knowing that I'd have a hard time fucking up my circumstances even if I tried just has me excited. I wish more people could be a part of it. I guess they're too busy being positive and living their best lives.

[755] Supermassive Black Whole

I have to bite the bullet and start writing. Standard disclaimer, this is gearing up to be disorganized.

If I could only sleep I wouldn't be thinking of ways to get into trouble. You see, since I started “behaving,” a few things have started to line up. I've already paid my way to a house with power and water, and could likely afford what it'd take to keep it air conditioned. If the weather wasn't shit, it'd probably be done already, and this “1 week/2 year” project will finally be a place I can live in for the cost of a paycheck from anywhere for a week or 2's of work for a year. Then I get to merrily solve all the next problems of landscaping and monetizing.

You see, I got a job. It doesn't pay any more or less than I was doing with drug studies or in my over-working of menial tasks. I got a “job job.” I put on dress clothes. I get off at 4:30. I can get overtime. A good $200 or so is taken from my check for insurance and my responsibilities range from investigator to testifier to counselor. I have an established rhythm and a dozen people at once to collaborate with and answer to. I'm at the rock bottom place I figured I'd have to go for income once I exhausted my options that let me sleep when I wanted or leave when the mood struck me.

And I'm trapped. It's a familiar trap. It's the trap that molded much of the animal I am today. I spend the vast majority of my time around people who take 20 words when 2 would suffice. This habit so as to remain polite and not hurt anyone's feelings. This so we can all coexist like civilized beings with our singular focus. Help the children. The madness of our era and nexus of forces that result in the addictions and abuses can be addressed with 12 weeks of training, 2 years to “really pick it up” and a “positive” spirit about the impact we're having. No matter where you go, that last bit is always the most important.

I've never gotten anywhere with positivity. Positivity is abused and disguised as indulgence, and predictably, it's one of my largest criticisms of the world around me. “Let us eat cake.” Cake, and everything else around us as what's for lunch becomes a question of existential proportions. Any structure, by virtue of its being, suggests a specific kind of weight, attraction, and indulgence. How you respond to it says everything. Pride in what you're doing with an inability to question is false and dangerous. Insulating yourself instead of informing from cues in the outside environment is poisonous and suffocating.

I understand the impulse to immediate mockery when someone introduces the “big picture” into whatever little thing it is you're doing in the classroom. “Well, what do you want me to do about it? Institutional poverty you say? Ha! I wish everyone had mansions and loved each other too!” I understand this is an avoidance and fear response. It's “too much” to think about, and misplaced dog piles of information will only destroy what you're hoping to accomplish. That is, unless you're enmeshed in this blog and just want to be able to sleep ;).

My insistence for a “reality based” conversation, always, is because it helps. It helps during and after it hurts. It helps to know that people do not behave like it says on the screen and the book. It helps to know that you're wasting money paying children to get in over their heads and know full-well you're not paying them enough to tough it out. It helps when you speak to your legislators about what their priorities should be and how they should frame new policy and appropriate funds. It helps in providing a diverse way of getting people information and allowing them to respond and work with it. The irony to work so hard, spend so much time, and waste so many words when you actually care feels deadly. To take statistically inevitable “wins” as evidence of your accomplishments feels cheap and dishonest.

In this cold judgmental and dead real world is where I find every ounce of inspiration and drive. I don't believe anything ever is going to work. So when it finally does, it gets to sit with me, not like some cheap momentary high, but like a piece of me has fallen into place I won't be able to break no matter how hard I or life tries. If what I'm doing doesn't feel like it's in service to those pillars, I find myself either doing exercises that try to choke my life down, or find myself indulging in things I would otherwise enjoy if I didn't feel I was only distracting myself and being safely self-destructive. I don't need a night out, $40 worth of video games, or even cheap quick and terrible meals “because I can afford it.” I need to be in the mud of my land. I need to be learning the technology for the creation and promotion of things that haven't left my mind for years.

And I know this. And you know this. And it's going to be the singular song I sing until I get what I want. I need a whole host of other things as well, and the introspection that comes along with learning various levels of depravity has brought back old themes and stories into my head. Man oh man did I wish a DCS worker would have come into my school as a kid and explained “emotional abuse” is a real thing and not normal. Surely any ardent reader is acquainted with my flippant, cold, and disgruntled nature with regard to how people exercise those emotions. No doubt my capacity to ridicule, joke, and shut down are great homages to acquired protective mechanisms. Anyone remember the story of my mom gutting one of my stuffed animals she made me pick and bring to her?

That instance in particular has been in my head a lot recently. I started thinking of people who genuinely suffer conditions and trauma that they have no real way of explaining to people but for the often dramatic and painful consequences of their behavior. I started wondering to what degree my “general behavior” is potentially an extension of a form of “inexorable” trauma. These thoughts were prompted because of a completely simultaneous thought regarding, for lack of a better way to say it yet, “how I feel.” That, or how I consistently managed to conjure within myself when what I value seems to exist in other people.

I'll try to be more explicit. I really like the people I like. I really liked my toys and stuffed animals. I really liked the games and characters that stuck with me and helped model my behavior. I really like being the genuine best at something, and being right, and knowing how to get things done even as I'm suffering every moment around legions of people who don't or pretend they don't. Another way to state that, it's real to me. If you're trying to make a case against suicide, you'd take from the laundry list of things that have filled me with every ounce of everything there is to feel about them. That's certain party situations and great conversations, it's weird convergence circumstances that seem to confirm an instinct, it's the stream of jokes from a room of real-enough mother fuckers just being without thinking about mopping up and politicking leaking feelings from those that don't get it.

I've really cared about ex girlfriends and fuck-buddies. I wasn't going through the motions of “relationship” for a check next to the box so I could get more street cred in the eyes of the broken single mom scouring OKCupid for me. I really like that there's at least some measure of consequences and accountability being reintroduced to our culture for sex-offenders and those utterly terrified we're actively spiraling off the cliff of existence. I'm interested in seeing more. I'm chomping at bits of a chance to be of immense consequence myself and hopefully enable the people I recognize as doing it like I would. All of this is as deeply true and “hopeful,” if I have to borrow the word, and motivating and “positive” as you could ask for, but I only recognize it in contrast to a kind of baseline despair.

I know, deeply, that no matter how much you care or are devoted to something, at more scales and by more metrics than not, it doesn't matter. Broadly, the universe will swallow it up. Earthly, you aren't in control of the mechanisms of power beyond the attention you garner in the streets or the hell you might raise locally. Interpersonally, not a single person you meet might ever retain your kind of values as deeply or for as long as they're required. Personally, your mind sees your dead friend in a million fluffy pieces as cold, ignorant (worse, maybe not even that ignorant), malicious retribution reigns out on you independent of your own innocence or ignorance. Predators shoot for babies.

And that's what we are. For what we're required to do to perpetuate the species, even the dumbest of the dumb and meanest of the mean could be considered hyper-intelligent. I've pointed out the numerous kids these addicts and abusers have, and the one or two, accidents, who ever pop up in my feed from my circle of friends. We're refined down to the facial tick to figure each other out, crack each other open, and extract what we want. For those of us who don't seem to figure that out, or resent those that do, we revert to our basic ravaging form. We kill or be killed. The objects of the game are just that and it is, after all, just a game. In my mind, they play the easy version like using cheat codes and super weapons to kill everyone in a room on your “covert” mission.

That's the realm of the drinking, parties, social media cultivation, and cliche-adjacent “relationship goals” and over-indulgence at work or in hobbies. I can't express the depths of how ceaselessly boring it is to see that people know how to drive or catch a plane and look at nature. You'll never hear that the 12 hour trip resulted in seeing a long lost friend where the conversation never clicked and you forced smiles through their shitty, but polite, vegan dinner they offered you. You'll never hear the list of insane things you tried to fight about that your partner ignored or disregarded because they can't be bothered or are as equally afraid of being alone and pushing things as you. You always get the story, the filter, and the praise, because don't forget, the likes and hearts and positivity are the most important part.

I want hard mode. I want commitment to mean more than “love.” I want honesty to speak to the endless spring of invincible motivation and dialogue verses the brilliant play and distillation. I want the boredom to feel boring and the whoredom to express its ridiculous and arbitrary whims. I want each piece of the struggle of your day-to-day “reality” to be speaking towards or welded to the largest conception you have of yourself. I don't want safe words. Civility, structure, tradition, and the language compiled from every Hallmark card have their place AFTER you lay down an empty and even universal truth to root your impossibly amazing ego. Then you can accept things for what they are and merely look like a contradiction in living in spite of it all instead of celebrating the infinite void.

It should make you sick to want to run. You should shake when you're told to sit still. You should be ready to burst and actively lookout for the obscene and absurd that would deny you even exist. You should antagonize and invest. You should commit to everything worth exhausting yourself over and every moment with every person that's reminding you of what to keep looking for. There's a million cultural stories and jobs on offer to fill in the blanks and do all of the work for you. There's every reason to forget why you got started or where you want to be. There's a rhythm and a pattern for you just as soon as for every particle in your body that you'll never see or feel, but will carry you along. I'm never so sure of the origin and necessity of my antagonist being than when I hop in that unconscious stream.

So maybe consider it a warning and a point of light. I'm keeping away because I don't destroy for destruction sake unless it has to do with myself. I'll really like you, and I'm just not a dope or naive or hopeful enough that anyone, let alone you, “gets it” without the kind of conversation, honesty, and introspective exploration that I'm compelled to do, and urge everyone to practice. I'm an entire universe, and so are you, and when they meet, it's a fantastic explosion annihilation/creation event that we treat with niceties. If you think that's hyperbolic, I have to ask what's your scale. I already know who I am to the personal conversations you'll have in your head about me, mostly because they don't stay in your head. I also know that no matter how good I look in dress clothes, I'm not a good fit for interpersonal for interpersonality's sake. I'm just a car in traffic on Earth who can barely shape and inhabit 5 acres. To me, universe unto myself feels appropriately wise and cautious. It's got the most room to explore, it's ever-expanding, and it can fit every smaller conception of what it can or should be within.

[754] Cough

I don't think there is an amount of “civilizing” that I could go through that would ever erase my underlying need to lose my shit.

I guess that's a topic to start with.

I like obstruction. I like absurdity. I like random. I want whatever you expect to be something of a left turn and force you to sit on the kind of precarious edge that I do with regard to my expectations. I'm well aware the world absolutely can and does operate in predictable ways for years if not lifetimes for some people. I want to be prepared for shit to pop off any moment.

I told my friend not too long ago that with every passing day, I'm not just an atheist, but I believe in a god less and less. Each moment seems to insist on the absolute absurdity of existence in and of itself, and the relative freedom I have to respond to it as I please doesn't for a second endear me to some supernatural being grading my behavior on some ethereal scale.

This seems like the point.

Think about it. I work in a field where I get to hear daily about how family members fuck about with their children. God doesn't chime in on their paperwork. They know, like you know, somewhere in the back of your head there's a reminder that God isn't watching and you're probably going to get away with it. That's, of course, the conversation I'm interested in. What happens and why do you make the decision otherwise when there are no rules? That's my, and seemingly every other atheist's reality, so why not society at large? I don't need eternal damnation to prevent me from touching up a child, nor do I ignore that for the vast majority of human history we were perfectly fine with marrying off adolescents like a business transaction. How do you think that history should go forward but with honest conversation exposing details that feel “icky?”

Maybe I just feel old. I don't want to do obscene “stand out” things, but I'm hard-pressed to pretend my nature isn't contrarian. Something or another of my identity is involved in “the shit” and poor good story but bad otherwise decision making. But god forbid I force it. Obscene for obscenity's sake looks bad at any age. Even as I adopt the pace and tone of my domesticators, I can't help but believe in my capacity to burn it all down on a whim. I need to know that, worry about that, and believe that about myself. I'm never along for the ride.

Even tonight, I'm not as drunk as I thought I “should” be. I'm not as belligerent and angry in some incoherent blog as I thought I was gearing up for. I'm just annoyed I have the hiccups and have run out of anti-inflammatories that are going to speak to my budding headache in the morning. I'm not excited or amped up. I didn't have a conversation worth telling you about. I'm not even in some “escape” from the drudgery of my “training” for the new job. I'm probably as arbitrary a variable as I was a sixth grader in February. I have no memories of that time, and you have no reason to regard me now for the same reasons.

I started writing though because I still maintain an indignant posture. I'm not the one to be surprised by some cliché mid-life crisis. I don't cry over friends I simply haven't bothered to call but we arguably would have nothing to say to each other for months or years at a time anyway. I think it's just that I'm too smart and I figured it all out a long time ago. You have to be all about it right now. You have to be honest. You have to insist and try and sacrifice and get it all for the memories and moments as they come, because it's all right now, and it's all over as soon as it comes. I'm here, where I always am, right now, floating through memories and trying to be more let down by the bar scene than I even care to invest, perpetually looking for what I've already had in abundance. If you don't recognize and retain, it only gets worse.

[753] Applecart

I've been waiting to sense a certain kind of moment for several weeks. I think it just clicked, and it was one of those that gives you the title to what you're about to write before it's written.

I'm not even halfway through my “training” to be a DCS Family Case Manager. Entire days, excuse me, “work days,” are devoted to interviewing and paperwork and navigating these big confusing machines colloquially understood as “computers.” Just like my last job, they make it feel very large and “official” by paying for hotel stays and asking for business casual. Our I.D. badges ensure only those with the proper credentials get behind the proper doorways. The classroom dynamics and politi-speak of the trainers are what anyone “normal” would expect.

I understand there are important reasons for this. The nature of the job is to intervene in the lives of otherwise sovereign individuals. If you don't even look or sound like you have your shit together, things explode immediately. I also understand that on a very large timeline of human behavior and experience, these bland offices and formalized speech can be considered revolutionary and downright magical. You can consider a tie or belt variations on a leash theme, and I probably wouldn't disagree with you, but the vast majority of dogs I've encountered need better training on how to operate on one.

To be sure, this isn't about “office culture.” Every half-rate and occasional slam dunk media portrayal of that life and its satirization abound. This is about the mental passivity and “security” spell it puts you under. You can be as wild and indignant as I've historically been routinely accused of, and still find yourself under it. The real click happens when you think about what may disturb it. When you fear you won't have your access, or consistent check, or colleague banter. When the veneer gives way to the seedy underbelly of your mind that knows it will have to contend with everything going unverbalized.

This is a job that has a high turnover rate. Simultaneously, they want you to be informed and cheerleading for the long-term transformation of families living in varying degrees of crisis. Two fundamentally at odds with each other positions that are both very loud and very obvious across layers of the organization. A key point of insistence from one of my training days was getting to the “underlying needs” of the client. It's one thing to pop into someone's life, give them a few months of obligations for them to comply with, and then the moment you step out, they're right back to the meth, or violence, or broadly understood “neglect.”

And fair enough. A capacity and willingness to change, if it ever “really” happens a philosophical presupposition for another day, takes time. But the formal atmosphere doesn't allow for the meat of the discussion to get tenderized. These people are poor, exhausted, and often suffering from generational abuse. Their “informal supports” are legions upon legions of people who have not just “normalized” pathological behavior, but celebrate it and build it into their traditions and parallel formal structures. I think of cartels operating like Fortune 500 companies; the parallels are broader and darker than anyone cares to discuss. As well, the gaps in human knowledge and capacity aren't even part of the conversation, let alone identified as a prevailing root issue. Dumb oblivious people cause immense consequences, and some very particularly dumb and oblivious ones have disproportionate effects on the system at large.

Here's where the applecart comes in. They have theirs. We, in our “normal society” posture, have ours. Neither want to be disturbed. We want to eat to our hearts content every kind of apple available to us. For them, it's the conflicting self-destruction and rewards of being enmeshed in drugs, sex, and the proclivities of their culture. For us, it's being smarter and luckier about the conflicting self-destruction and rewards of being enmeshed in drugs, sex, and the proclivities of our culture.

I'm not trying to equivocate. I don't think you neglect, nor would neglect, children in your care like these people do. I'm not saying you're as addicted to meth as the person who fluidly lies about all of the meth fairies sprinkling it on their fries and weed. Nor do I think the poor assumptions much of modernity rests on are as destructive as the kind of jungles constructed by myriad negative forces associated with poverty and abuse. What I will say, is that at the individual level, people across the board pick their poison and pretend it isn't slowly killing them and everyone around them.

Let's be less abstract. Damn near everyone at the training building is overweight. For me, it's one of the most immediate indications that there's a problem you don't care to engage with that rests at the heart of implications for other problems. I also differentiate between the weight that happens from getting older or having kids from being fat, nor do I confuse different body types with “giving up.” I can have a big ass and still not know 3 weeks in advance I'm definitely sitting out the company kickball game.

Less obvious than ballooning bodies is inflated pride. These people, and trainers in particular, are proud of the work they do. “Despite the struggles” they know they are “helping.” Their success stories aren't a matter of statistics and what might happen anyway, they testify to their capacity and professionalism. Things are getting better! New language and evolving training materials ensure that the pain points in conversation will result in the eventual better outcomes of our families. From our “strengths-based” perspectives, we can build teams and plans that will see families reunited. Meanwhile, at the desks of the new students, and in every regional office, you'll never find more condescending and dark humor regarding the people you're dealing with.

I feel I've been resisting the urge to adopt the “negative” moniker of my disposition as a badge of pride. I cannot persuade myself that it is wise or necessary to equate “reality” with “negativity.” I also don't mean that as though I have some sort of special claim or license to dictate reality. It's more akin to a notion of “common sense.” If I point to a hand and call it a hand, and you retort “No! It's a wondrous splendiforous jerk-off orgasm machine!” I mean, okay, sure? Saying we're likely to have a fleetingly small if perhaps negative impact in how we conduct our affairs as long as we ignore the roots of poverty and addiction, or at least sideline them and refer to them as “framed too negative” to be discussed intelligently, is not me dismissing our potential or putting your shaping of the matter down.

Shifting gears a bit and more personally, if I seem to have an “insistent” posture, I think it's a reaction to all that's insisted upon me. No, I don't need to be “hopeful” to do my job, as one trainer suggested, I need to be realistic. My responsibility to child welfare transcends unyielding deference to the machine and properly worded note sheets. This means I can work within the confines of my job and give voice to other avenues I've identified as having a greater or tangible impact than my disposition. I try to maintain a sense of immediacy in my mind because, if not now, when? If you don't call the shitty food your eating shit, you definitely won't find yourself working out that afternoon. If you don't recognize your excuse not to engage with something that “sounds negative” you'll sit comfortably on the mantel of things you've awarded yourself for.

I have my under-construction house in the middle of nowhere because for years, “right now” has been when I've worried about not having something like a pension or ability to afford the inevitable medical bills or space to express creative energy that remains important to my energy and vitality. I'm only a month or 2 away of dedicated focus to reach a relative peak in fitness because no matter how far removed I am from ultimate Frisbee games or consistent gym attendance, I'm never spiraling or complacent. The truth of who you are or need to be has staying power. It's memories that don't go away. It's pain worth engaging when the topic arises. It was true when you were 5 and will be true when you're 95. Actually dying is just a part of life, but subverting yourself to a parsed mockery of the whole truth that's required to thrive is the kind of sinful suicide that mostly only dresses or talks differently depending on where and how you grew up.

[752] Sophist Space

I don't now if I should be more or less concerned about not feeling the compulsion to write recently. It could be a signifier of several different and competing things, which means I'm sure it's all of them at once, and I haven't decided which one I'll let win the narrative.

First, I could just be feeling “generally better.” While training is bullshit wherever you go, I haven't spent a single day at work yet where I wasn't laughing my ass off, figuring out a complex social problem, learning about something nuanced and complicated, or having a fair and nice chat with someone who immediately knows the nature and tone of what it takes to do a job like this. These are all reassuring things. People are dynamic, so when you're dealing with them, it's theoretically going to be hard to be “bored” in the sense that a job like delivering or stacking or generally laborious tasks might beget.

Second, it could mean I'm getting “comfortable.” I've talked about my increased spending habits for things like smoothies or frappes. I've dipped into that Amazon wishlist several more times this month for things like nicer clothes, basically for work, and a hodgepodge of items that have been staring at me for a while. What's 15% of your budget if it's things that you'll wear for the next several years? Particularly when most of your clothing is faded, misshapen, and occasionally an item you got for Christmas when you were 12 years old. I be looking fly, don't think twice about eating out, and besides general labor, there's no looming huge expense around the corner barring injury or disaster. I've even gone in for things like life and health insurance.

Third, it could mean I'm losing the capacity or will to be paying attention to “the world at large.” It's hard to be that scared of Trumpian fiery maelstroms when you're debating the whereabouts and hunting down white trash pieces of shit for several hours a day or giggling at a hilarious judge in court for several hours. I still scroll through. I still catch articles here and there. The focus? That has to keep me continually waking up in the mornings and maintaining polite-enough comments and the demeanor for a professional environment. We're at the front lines of the people's lives who are actually, sometimes literally, on fire.

Fourth, I might be losing a measure of respect for what it is I have to say when I'm realigning my place of knowledge towards a job or routine. I can't opine that intelligently and can mostly just skirt remembered statistics from headlines. I can give “general counsel” about the wisdom of not falling prey to fear-based decision making. I can say you should make time to practice all of the little things that are important to you. I can resolve myself to wildly practical and old sentiments and sentimentality because that's the kind of shielded environment I've adopted.

In reflecting on the environment, thoughts regarding “class warfare” or “protected status” came to mind. Mind you, this was while I was sitting in a court room. Here, in this little room, you have “judge” and “lawyers” and “FCM” and “CASA” and a bailiff and perpetrators and trainees and court reporters. All have their roles. All are invested in, at the very least, the pageantry and dignity of it all, and one wants to believe they have noble spirits who espouse the moral courage and commitment to the protection of rights. But, if you pay not that close attention, they're all still human. The judge can crack jokes. The attorney can look disorganized. The FCM can have his ears gauged. The whole of the endeavor is what's protected and what people will always rediscover no matter how crazy shit gets. It's safe. It has rules. It's a necessary bargain and conformity so you don't end up on the other side of the aisle crying and making excuses for your actions.

I've never been the disingenuous anarchist type. My “withdrawal” from society involves consuming as much information about it as my brain and body can handle. I slide pretty seamlessly between worlds whether or not there's an accompanying panic attack about the “radical shift” in my perspective. I think I'm hoping to discover a way to fit a multi-variant long-term position into my head without corrupting the spirit it takes to create in spite of norms. The big government machine is precisely that. Norms, procedures, pleasantries, and posture in service to maintaining certainly values which are meaningful and worth it. It's not that malicious or complicated, at least where I work, and for better or worse, if you bond with it too closely, you're not going to see the reasons and ways in which it needs to change.

I know that with my brain, no matter how seemingly comfortable or good I get with things, I'll get bored. I'll get restless. I'll start finding little things to pick at even while I wholly appreciate what makes things awesome. I stayed at a pretty terrible low-paying job precisely because every day I felt like I was working with friends who hung out after and developed flows and habits to compliment each other. I got to take this job with not only my best friend already laying out cheat codes and clout, but 2 other people I knew or worked with in the past. My biggest gripe is waking up earlier than I care to, and even that will be a fading issue after I get out of training. Turns out, I love cubicles. Movies have corrupted my mind about the utility of walls for organizing things. Grey walls don't look any bleaker to me than mountains look glorious, and I stare at white walls and a computer 60% of my time in general.

I've become ever-more painfully aware of my lack of “abstract” thinking. I can hold a small number of things in my mind at once and try to work with them. This is why I can “forget” I got my degree and am exceedingly competent and think the world is crashing when I lose a shitty delivery job after having never even applied to one that required my “adult” skills in the intervening 8 years. The cubicle bias is one example. My approach to playing and learning new music feels very static and repetitive. I need to think to myself, “I should beat the whole game” as I linger around firing up a system with one I bought months ago. I'm bad at doing things in small growing parts, I suppose besides from writing, as I feel I get lost or lose things in the transition. It feels like shuffling through the first minute of every song in a playlist. I can get the gist, but am I really appreciating what I'm listing to? Even my “bad” or “boring” shows I watch sped up, I try to, more or less, at least be focusing on it instead of reducing it to pure background noise.

Consider, I was watching shows, couldn't bring myself to continue, started playing the guitar, figured out I'd memorized well-enough a section of “Do You Want To Build A Snowman” and then remembered I hadn't written in a while and cut myself off before locking in the last 2 bars. I also have a habit of pausing a show with a minute or so left and getting up to cook or take out the garbage. I speculate I'm subconsciously trying to prevent something from ending or the feeling of “end” and the obligation to figure out something new. As long as the show is paused, or there's hundreds of them and movies in the queue, there's always something easy enough to occupy your time and mind with, right? Once the big projects on the land are done, then what? Back to eating more? Back to putting myself against invisible walls about the kind of creative and entrepreneurial example I need to be hell bent on setting? Because, I'm telling you, I fit extremely well into this well-dressed competent man world with just enough chub to make the lonely thick single ladies consider me approachable. My 2 kids and 2 car garage are about 15 flirtations and half a dozen “this is it!” cuddle moments at quasi-romantic locations.

Here I beckon my inherent obnoxiousness. The same antagonist you find insufferable ushers me along when none of you care to chime in or help. You think my polite deconstructions of our conversations were ruff? I could turn myself racist and ageist and ableist and express every ism to myself at the speed of thought if I felt myself slipping too far. Light the fires of fear and anger and get this train moving, as it were. Use the tightness in my right hand and crankiness of my knee to insist all the more urgently the need for decisive and consequential action! I'm gonna live forever, don't you know, just keep watching.

[751] Singin' In The Rain

I think I need to take a moment, after I've scribbled down an arbitrary list of notes about things I want to do or eventually buy, before I start my next random foreign film that Trakt tells me is part of some popular list, and as I stave off a weird sickness in my stomach, as well as thoughts of the work I'm blowing off because I can't be bothered. It wasn't now, but earlier today, it struck me. I really do want, more than anything, to be doing “nothing” with my time.

When I put down the presumed dollar amounts of the things I want to accomplish, on the high end I got around 8 months of “regular” work with fairly strict budgeting. This includes everything from fixing the moving van to spending way too much to play with 3D-printing materials. If I scale things back to just getting my “basic bitch” living situation figured out, shortly after I'm done with training, I should be in a pretty good spot. As I list one thing after another that I need to learn or budget for, as the mess of “random” things compiles in crooked lists on ill-suited paper, it's having the time to get lost in all of that which I cherish.

I've only been able to do so lately because I'm leaving my job and people have been canceling on me like crazy. This morning I went and mowed and weed whacked my lawn. I got home and bought a crock pot and went out to eat. I've sat and finished my shows. I've gotten lost in the dream of things to come and played again into the kind of arbitrary nature of what my general day was before I went corporate. To be sure, either extreme is bad. I recognized my need for structure in attempting #yearofeveryday. I recognize the danger of the narrative about being a lost overgrown man-child and have something of a reputation to uphold. But at bottom, I like having all the time in the world to do whatever the hell that I want with it first.

I don't regret watching movies and shows. I don't regret the books I read. I don't have lingering pains and sorrows from digesting the endless stream of depressing news. That's where I find direction. That's where I find voices to emulate. That's where I find the kind of stimulation and motivation to try my own shittier version of things. My mind has let go of the death grip “work responsibilities” has on me, and I felt a little at home. I returned to the organized chaos from which I always want to burst forth.

Basically, I know what I need to return to. I know I can't get too comfortable. I know there are definite perks to “just” doing your job and paying the bills and settling in, but that's not who I am, and I'm going to keep fighting its comforts. I'm going to keep bitching where bitching is due. I'm going to find ways to exhaust myself doing what it is I actually want to be doing. I know you've fallen asleep on me, but I won't.

[750] Work In Progress

I think I need to write this to figure out if I have any reason left to be considered interesting. The thing is, I've gone and spent about 5 months of my life doing a basic-bitch job, made as much or more money than I've managed to over-indulgently need to live on since...well, ever, and have the prospect of a new job and more money coming in looming. I've bought more McDonald's frappuccinos, shakes, and smoothies in the last month than I have in the last 5 years. I've ordered some of the more “expensive” (~$150) toys from Amazon that have sat on my wishlist for years, and I'm sitting here eyeballing $1000+ purchases for shits and giggles because I still don't have a realistic grasp on whether or not I'll have the people in place, or learn the skills necessary, to get my power and bathroom completed, let alone figuring out air conditioning with mine getting stolen.

I feel very “normal plus.” My money isn't immediately eaten up by kids or loans, so I'm more like the middle-class of old. I have a little extra cash, but not enough to be flaunting. Soon, I'll have a bit more time to do things like adult sports leagues or hitting the gym and bowling in the afternoons. I never think about simply filling up my gas tank or ordering from more than a dollar menu. If the state of Illinois wants to grab $400 in back taxes, or my registration fees come out of nowhere, or my VPN and Planet Fitness deduct fees I wasn't anticipating, I don't really bat an eye. I went to the movie theater and didn't lie about being a student.

I'm interested to see what happens when I have that consistent routine. When I know, for sure, I’ll have 5 or so hours at the end of each day and weekends to focus on something. Right now, I'm in the weird in-between realm where my schedule has freed up some with dumping and passing clients, but a surprise 7 hours of freedom isn't mentally preparing properly to do anything with it. I just feel tired that my quasi-routine has been interrupted allowing me to sleep in or stay up. I certainly see utility in routines, and my body reeling at the prospect of food or sugar after 7 certainly wants to compel me, but I still think they're fundamentally not really me.

I don't know what my first move is going to be. I wish I could “just” get the fundamental work done to live on the land. I don't even need a driveway yet. I could struggle-bus without air conditioning for a spell if I had cold water. I want to be able to sit down and power through a dozen building videos, step outside and try, and then be able to come in and shower off the ticks. I could find the rhythm to add a new room to my house every 2 weeks, presumably faster with better planning and skill acquisition. I know the costs for less-than-pretty but totally functional living. I'll save aesthetically impressing when I have money to blow that reflects my underlying pretensions. In the meantime, none of you are trying to visit.

I was eating today and started reflecting on my map again. I thought about it in a way that gave me the chills. I still maintain full faith that if I collect the information I want and organize it how it looks in my head, I'd have a proper “revolutionary” metric for approaching problem solving and idea transmission. The irony, of course, is when I get the money to commission 50 more hours on it, I wouldn't have the time budgeted to keep it under meticulous oversight. That's a great way to lose money. As well, it's supposed to be human-led individual data we're attempting to correlate and compile. I need the kind of security bills paid well in advance can only bring to fall down that rabbit hole again.

The question of whether or not I consider myself interesting, or whether I should even care about such a thing, seems to speak to the idea I'm trapped in about all experiences being one. I can't shake the idea that every possible thing is, in one manner of phrasing, the same thing. I know I have a poor and mis-remembered conception of different eastern mythologies or modes of thought that speak to this, but it's feeling more matter-of-factually compelling the less I conceive of myself as any potentially worthwhile discreet entity. That is to say, we're all made of the same stuff. Consciousness being “emergent” would suggest that the “subjective” experience of self is merely a word. Say “I'm me!” all you want, there's no rule against it. But no, you're “us” and “all.” As such, maxims like treating others the way you wish to be treated or an “eye for an eye” become more than throwaway “obvious” wisdom, but imminently consciousness preserving proofs.

I treat people like I want to be treated. I want to be presented with the opportunity to discuss my grievances until we've figured out places we can't budge. I want to be approached as if I'm potentially full of the most interesting and consequential ideas. I want to hear the “worst” jokes. I want to treat sex as flippantly as a borderline chronic masterbator might consider their dick. I want to be provoked and given the opportunity to not do just what it is you think I'm gonna do. If you can truly dish out the degree of shit that I'm accused of serving and turn me all inside out, you better. “My” experience was only made as good as I currently conceive of it by putting myself through naivety pains and hopeful pains and darkness and death and sadness and on and on until the part of me able to care that much died. I want that for everyone. It hasn't hampered my ability to have fun or appreciate things or treat people fairly. It just makes the conditions under which I'm going to do those things exacting. It isn't arbitrary when I like something, it's genuinely novel or moves me. I think you are unable to do this when you exercise the “like” button for every goddamn picture ever shared by your friends in the fucking forest.

There's a burden with depersonalization. You have to grow accepting of the crazy shit. You have to think of yourself as “justly” serving out the sentence of the reportedly innocent on the other end of a bomb or outbreak. What if “I” was a Syrian refugee? What about my experience might I want to hone for the sake of everything? A measure of resilience or hope? But, darker, who's to say any expression of consciousness is particularly worth preserving and respecting? We find it in us to kill, arbitrarily, those who violate the general pursuit of life narrowly defined. Wouldn't the death of a handful of greedy oligarchs maybe open the doors for better general welfare? Here I guess I'm trying to do a kind of moral calculus. Surely, an absurd exercise. And what fool would give the keys to the driver who can barely consider the significance of his own life save his passengers?

Here I think about the idea of “evolution” meaning “change.” I'm a fan of the saying, “the only truth is change.” At the same time, stumbling upon “consciousness” as evolution apparently suggests, the nature of the universe can change so radically as to perhaps instantiate a perpetual conscious awareness of a fraction of the expanding parts. I don't need to be “[redacted]” to create the math equation of experiences, genetics, and TV references that would constitute me in my absence. Well, I do, because we don't have the technology to perfectly map brains, but presumably something akin to the advanced Turing test-passer isn't that far off. But think about that. Everything about your being, at its best and most functioning, an engine for change. You change your and a partner's genes into another generator for change. You build institutions of thought into bedrocks to be picked at and stacked upon. The essence of the universe, is change.

Is that intimidating or sad? “You” can't even be you, by definition. You're a process. You're a probabilistic set of experiences. Here I'm thinking Dr. Manhattan, that for all of the particles and potentials, you popped out. You can write about it! I still consider that a miracle. I still think that there's a huge amount of shit we can't or can never know that makes the pursuit of lasting worthwhile institutions and behaviors worth creating and passing on. I'm literally a testament to what doesn't change in the face of the “only truth,” and that seems like a giant hint as far as dictating your behavior and adopting intentionality. I wake up every day with the same things that give me chills to think about. I dream the same dreams. I beat my empathetic head against the wall while proclaiming a fair pragmatic degree of sociopathy that always keeps the jokes coming.

I'm still going to get everything I want. That seems why I don't know if I'm still interesting. It would have been interesting to find a worthwhile person off Craigslist who let me accelerate the process. It would have been interesting to have seen my map come to life and have its implications carry me across sectors and appearances. It would be interesting even to hit the lottery as cheap as that may sound. Fuck, it’d be interesting if YOU bothered to help lol. For the life of me, going to work, being “basically responsible,” working “my” normal of never taking vacation, or sick days, or personal days, endlessly, for years, accumulating money, restricting my diet or indulgent habits, buying the shit I need, just learning “the thing,” and chugging along has got to be the dullest possible way I could consider getting what I want. I genuinely hate being so good at it I can't even consider it a problem beyond philosophically. Any idiot can pay the bills, and I want to be any idiot? No.

Maybe that's my balance sheet though. Maybe I need to generate the karma of uniting meth-mom and child consistently before the universe gives a shit about me staying up all night dicking around in a garage or hyper-reading about some new topic. Maybe I need to introduce myself to the me in other people so the rest of our experience can get a better bite out of what it is I'm actually trying to do. Maybe I fell prey to that insatiable ego metric that's glorified some level of improprietous indulgence I've dressed up. Who's to say? All I know is I have money again, don't feel like I've missed out on anything but sleep I don't require, and every inch I perceive for inserting my brand of engagement with the world, I take. I take it honestly and viciously, for better or worse, because I believe it's the best thing I can do for myself, and, if I'm right about consciousness, the best I could do for you.

It isn't based on some high-minded or convoluted religious principal either. It's just a series of questions. “Do I like me? Do I see a way through? Can I calculate the result? Is the alternative worse? Do my predictions come true? Am I open to feedback and contradiction? If I died today, would my project stand on it's own?” Overwhelmingly, I like my answers to these questions, and essentially never is someone willing to contend with the work it took to get those relative answers. Jordan Peterson has a consistent line about not saying things that make you weak, and when challenged about why he fears weakness, he explains that it corrupts you and turns you into something shit. I remember what it felt like to feel weak. On my worst, horribly phrased or deliberately indignantly picked word-choice day, don't feel weak. Any weakness in my writing is for its incompleteness, not disingenuous deception.

I think I'm gonna sit. I'm not gonna buy more stupid toys. I'm not gonna go out of my way to eat out more than I regularly do. I'll hit that overtime as it seems appropriate, but, I'm not kidding, the psychological shift of constantly calling yourself old really makes you reconsider exhausting yourself in service to “stupid shit” for more money than you can responsibly allocate in limited windows of free time. The “pretend it's not 50 steps” next step is make the house livable. I'm still of the mind that if it cost me everything but the gas money to get me to and from my next task, I'd pay it tomorrow if it'd be done tomorrow. It'd be the first attempt at calling something “home” since the ease with which I could fall asleep at my grandmother's house. Then seems the time to contemplate if I want another room, or deck, or to install a pool, or shed etc. Will you all promise to like and share my Insta pics as I refine and define my space? For the sake of us all, that is.

[749] Unjust Hearing

This is just going to be one of those nit-picking blogs about what I consider lazy word choice. A response to one of my statuses from a new acquaintance has stuck with me, and I want to stop thinking about it. You should be bored already, this is one of those “extra for me” kind of digressions.

Certain phrases come up that seem to immediately betray what's been said. In this instance, it's the tag “just saying.” It usually comes after someone thinks they've made a kind of colloquial truth point or mom-esc “told ya so” notion. It's really a very weird thing to employ because it seems to try and do so much contradictory work at once.

Consider, aren't we all, always, just saying? I'm just writing. But, of course I'm not. I'm scratching an obsessive compulsive mind's itch. I'm disagreeing. I'm “arguing” and picking apart. I'm reflecting. I'm hoping to convey a message that I'll understand now and into the future, and hey, maybe someone will gain an ounce of utility from. “Just saying” seems to desire to be let off the hook for all of that.

Surely one should respect what they say, no? Often there's an intention? I'm not saying the average cliché adopter and pleasant appeaser are mindless without their throwaway safe sentiments, but would they deny they had a goal in mind when they employed them? “Oh, you know, life's not fair!” Depending on the tone either trying to make light and or silence someone from carrying on. “Can't we all just get along?” Everyone's smart enough to know the question wasn't really asked, but the desire for a quelling of hostilities is there. How dumb would it sound to put “just saying” after something like a common cliché or aphorism? “You can't judge a book by its cover, just saying.” “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, just saying.”

Just saying is meant to downplay. It's kind of attempting to avoid a perhaps biting tone you actually feel. Just saying protects you from your angrier-than-you'd-let-on self. You've no need to skirt past something in the examples above, they exist to do a certain amount of work for you already. “Just saying” becomes misplaced and inane redundancy.

Yet, I think it goes deeper.

If you take a particularly “deep” or philosophical approach to the nature and power of words, you get an added layer of drama. You said something! That's something of a miracle. You put your voice into the mix and tried to build something or tear down something else. You entered the war of words and ideas. Was what you said “just?” The very nature of speech at this level is divine, so what's left to be said about it is whether it was divine fuckery or divinity worthy of worship and emulation. Of course, not a single person in a regular reasonable discourse is engaging this way, but again, this is for me.

My answer is almost always and certainly “no.” When you use “just saying,” I think you betray yourself. I think what you wanted to say, and what came out, don't match, so you don't give the person you were “just saying” to the respect to “just hear” what it is you actually wanted to say. In the example that was used towards me, I immediately thought of a dozen ways to “fight” the particular point raised that was just being said, but the human in me wisely figured out it wasn't worth it, and lazy or ill-conceived retorts can be dealt with, well, later (now) without necessarily implicating or breeding bad blood. (He said pretending no one's ever told him “NO ONE WANTS TO BE A BLOG!”)

It occurred to me that I have practiced, so hard, being sensitive to words and ideas coming from me that are ridiculously suspect and bullshit, that my normalized radar is set to reflexively and viciously attack any degree of bullshit I catch a whiff of. I write things as a series of individual sentences I could more or less defend, maybe not so much drunk, but way more often than not. I speak from that quasi-indignant gutterally honest place, particularly when I'm not primed to be pseudo-professional about something. As a result, insincerity, lazy catch-alls or throwaways, or general placations of a moment I've no real patience for. If you disagree with me, strongly disagree with me, and then be willing to get lost in the woods. If you don't, which usually it's a measure of either not really disagreeing and speaking too quickly, or it's not really caring and pretending you did, then I look significantly less like a pedantic dick, and more like someone who has a problem in which you've contended with his method of best coping.

But, after all, I'm only just saying these things. Who's to say if I believe them, or if they reflect a degree of emotion or lack thereof. Why did I bother? My mind was just saying some formulation of these words to me endlessly for the last day or two. Can't we just dismiss this all since it was just said and had no other impact or reason to respect there was a mind suggesting intentionality? We can all offer one or dozen things we may or may not believe in and walk away nonchalantly because where does it all go anyway and words are just weird.

Really, I'm just saying.

[748] Weeds

I must be weird.

In an interview to work for The Department of Child Services, the interviewer relayed to me a quote from a long-time judge. “A cop can be on the job for 31 years and then retire, and they'll see less trauma than your office will in 6 months.” I didn't blink.

Death, trauma, evil, pain, exploitation, lies, and otherwise wanton destruction or violence make sense to me. I thought I was mis-remembering a video I saw once of Mexican drug cartel members getting beheaded with a chainsaw, looked it up, and forgot it was only one who got the chainsaw, the other a knife. I couldn't recall if the chainsaw grazed the 2^nd guy's arm, but I thought it did, and I didn't see him flinch. Odd as it may sound, I think those, former, Mexican gangsters and I had something in common. They'd clearly accepted something about their circumstances. While I'm still flinching in the face of chainsaws, so have I.

What's striking to me about this disposition is how often and vehemently it's labeled or discussed as “negative” or “nihilistic” or “dark” or “pessimistic” or “inappropriate” or whatever analogue that is the opposite of life, joy, or the pursuit of something affirmative and lasting. And for the thousandth time I've referenced the irony at the base of everything, I think we're striking a bedrock psychological example. Some might find it as easy as asking yourself, how better to stay alive than understand as many ways in which you could die?

There's dying in the fun ways, like as many times as it takes to watch your favorite violent movie. We reenact famous plays where the characters die for love or power. We play fight and die as children. We employ a vague notion of death at a level of embarrassment or shock and intrigue. We make a game out of killing bacteria or shedding old skin in personal hygiene. Video and carnival games pick off people and ducks. Death is playful, when we want it to be.

There's ideological death. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” In the face of technological and social upheaval, many a foundation are shaken. Who you were as a believer can be as dramatic a personality shift as the alcoholic turned stone sober from “giving it all up to God.” A part of you that was protecting something died, or a part of you that was never quenched decided to kill. Maybe you were viciously hurt in love and now live in the wake of the sewage of your emotions. Maybe you were neglected and couldn't spell the word “family” or “mom” if your life depended on it. Maybe you're just realizing that no matter what you do, you'll never be the child you remember, and it's time to sober up to the “real world.”

But here again, I think I must be weird. All of that seems very familiar. I didn't really have to explain how we play with death or understand the consequences of polluting someone's mind with abuse or their naive notions of love. I mean, we literally call them “plays.”

What kills me is how (successfully?) we're pretending we're not hyper-obsessed with death. Isn't all of existence speaking to it? Isn't it the root of self-sabotage? Isn't it our addictions? Isn't it our complacency? Isn't it our entertainment, or undue celebration for personal victories, and betraying our pithy grudges? Aren't we alive as a result of all the other things we're willing to kill around us? Personal preferences held up as badges of honor. Friendships unburdened by truth or struggle. Vicious internet opinions, like so many assholes, meant to defend and defame, who? For what? In the first calculations, save the final, where does it all go? It's what we feed off of. It's nourishment.

I think this speaks to the romance narrative of death. Something has to die so others can live. We need to be proper Donner party members. I feel I watch this play out everywhere, all the time. School ate us alive. The mall ate my coffee shop. My aunts and uncles ate my grandparents, dad, and stepmom. My brother wishes he could eat me. Our country was eaten by the rich and vitriolically opportunistic. And we cheered them on because we saw so much of ourselves in them. A concert of Little Deaths, in an endless blinding sequence of pleasure.

Think how closely this mirrors and pollutes the idea of sacrifice. The death of a sacrifice isn't superficial. It's payment. It's respect. All you have to do in order to hijack it is claim you've put up whatever your particular god thinks is due, and bask in the glory. “I worked for everything I have! Fuck the moochers!” You killed your time, after all, in presumably much harsher circumstances and with greater loss than those struggling to get by now. The truth of who you've eaten be damned.

How do we “get better?” Think about it. How will the economy improve? Once we get people to eat more! Eat more Iphones, cars, and prepared meals. Eat your heart out at a generic “job.” How do we fix loneliness and boredom? Eat more Netflix and video games! Eat this new hobby and finely tuned pill. How do we celebrate in spite of every-day personal folly and failure? Eat this World Series win! Eat this master of his craft! Eat this pre-approved algorithm of characters in this most popular genre! As long as something is lined up to fill our bellies, we presume “everything” should otherwise fall in to place.

I'm in a struggle for my life right now. That's what this blog is. I'm 6 months into the throes of “comfort” of a regular paycheck, menial task, and handful of things I'd like to get done each weekend or after work. I've been describing myself as Hank Hill. I've been saying, “We can spring for the extra to get that VIP, we're old!” Am I a function of my age? I have severe doubts about the nature of time for sure, and I suppose in small ways my body feels older, but I'd argue I'm significantly more all of the mess that spews out of me in disorganized angst-ridden energy. So how does that guy put on business clothes and sit in a cubicle? I suppose I'm starting with acknowledging all the different kinds of death, and seeing if I'm buying into them.

I can 8-4 it and still build. I can sit in a cubicle and call it analogous to the living room or basement I'd otherwise be sitting in. I gave myself all the free time in the world, no one wanted to play with me, I already know without a certain amount of money or vastly different group of friends, there's nothing outside and no greener grass. There's ideological death if I've ever seen it.

I've also been working on the narrative that might make me finally bored of TV. I'd like a proper “obsession” to be sure, but any type of work and otherwise worthwhile task makes something as stupid as finishing Arrow out of spite feel more than pointless. I probably still would anyway, as I feel my TV habit has morphed into a bigger point about how many hours are really in a day, but a budding desire for a dispositional death is still there. I don't really get lost in TV or movies like I used to, but then again, that's not really why I'm watching anymore.

I don't know where to introduce it, so it's now. All the death-talk and everything that comes with it being easy makes the appeal of what seems to be so hard inevitably compelling.

How often do you find the people going out of their way to bring about goodness? This is a question that's going to need a few different phrasings. Who goes out of their way to help people succeed? Who sacrifices themselves, in a healthy way, for the benefit of others? Who gets immense joy and pride out of helping? I mean actually helping, not lip service and “good intentions,” like picking the biggest and hardest things they think they can fix, and diving in? Would you even feel comfortable saying something like that about yourself? Or would it be in the form of something personal, like child-rearing? Perfectly noble to want to rear a healthy and happy kid in spite of the broken home they were born into.

“Nice” is something of an all-consuming novelty to me. I let my ideas of nice bite me with regard to friendship. We let it perpetuate myths of people like Mother Teresa or in Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Nice is there for the exploitation. At least, that's my instinct that I'm trying to correct. I have and have had actually nice, sacrificial, genuinely good and helpful examples in my life. I've been “saved,” not by God, but by my grandma and my dad. I know there are at least 2 people in life who never have and never will try to fuck me over with their “niceness.” That's fucking important.

The flip side of that is that for every dad I have and dead grandma I have memories of, I have half a dozen other family members not like that at all and significantly more acquaintances and former “friends” who are nothing like that. This is the battle. This is the burden of the genuinely good. The person who lives and creates life because of the celebration of what it can be, not for the exploitation of what it can give them. If anyone less “blunt” or “jaded” or “cold” or “intellectual” or “funny” or “persistently indignant in his railroading and intransigence” is dealing with the same numbers of shit verses nice as I am? Get right out of town. I don't employ my “I don't have hope” mantra on a whim.

Now, for the friends reading this who've bailed me out of something or stood by through a measure of bullshit, chillax, you're deeply rooted in my mind, you just weren't first. And the larger point remains, for every one of you, there's a dozen who've shit the bed in important and consequential ways.

I want to be the genuine article of things that surprise the every-loving fuck out of me if I ever see them in other people. That's in jokes. That's in endless exploration and nit-picking until something is understood and internalized. That's in 7 months of 13 hour days to get off and load up your ill-equipped car with wood to drag out to your pitch black field in the middle of the cold night so you can inch along progress on the thing you actually care about. That's letting go without forgetting. That's recognizing and holding your precious sacrifice out in front of you before you kill it, instead of taking for granted your mere discomfort is enough to supplement the dirty work you've yet to do.

That's where we're at right now culturally. “I'm uncomfortable.” The room gasps and those weak of stomach and will run for the doors. Someone is out to eat us. Batten down the hatches and prepare to be bombarded with waves of insincere pomp and incredulity. Birds chirp, “butwhatabout butwhatabout.” Prepare a victim, anyone, and feast on what falls out. Definitions are for the power mongers! We're hungry, dammit, and if I can't get that house, or car, or job, or the girl, or the right pills, or even just my way, then I'll take every ounce of you.

What's hard to cope with is the idea of being an NPC or non-playable character. In a virtual environment, you sort of reflexively believe they don't hurt anything, even if that's absolutely not the truth. They perpetuate the story. They steal your dragon egg. They present challenges and side-quests. You're the passive agent at the will of what these pre-programmed problems drop in your lap. You're of every consequence. You're not the hero. The hero is the myth. The hero is one who has to literally die and be reborn, which, I'll remind you, isn't fucking possible. You need missions that otherwise random idiots would be wandering around in the dark killing things if they weren't a part of. When you figure out what it is you can provide, you'll stop endlessly feeding.

This is at the heart of what I don't like about “normal” jobs. I don't want to feed off the teat of established norms. I don't provide “easy.” There are millions of people paycheck to paycheck with familiar narratives about what their responsibilities are and how to “fix” or meet them. I have work-arounds. There are endless creative paths to addressing problems across societal and psychological layers. I can do none of them in the environment presently offered. I find people who like to feed off of my honesty or “taboo,” because to embody where it comes from takes work they're not interested in. I give thousands of miles for every inch I try to take back. I'm on a mission to not lose myself across the many worlds I may inhabit. But I'm not in a video game, and I doubt someone's going to walk up to me to try and join my quest.

“A working-class hero is something to be.”

I look for the people who challenge me. I look for the orators I want to be like. I look for the papers I dream of writing and shows I wish I developed. I look for lines in songs that come up time and again. I force myself to think through the words that aren't there yet, and beyond the feelings that make me want to feast on everyone around me. I pursue what I actually picture in my mind's eye. If you're anything less, then you're less. I won't let you eat me.