You Gotta Know Why You're Doing Something, Don't You?

reblog to share a fat blunt with ur mutuals

I’ve been inexcusably lazy this week. I’ve written nothing this week save for what you’re now reading.

Laziness and boredom have been the order of the day. It’s a bit excruciating to even sit down and attempt to write this. I know that I’ve got to try though.

I come from a fairly conservative background. I grew up in the suburbs. The suburbs are tough for me to endure now. There ain’t much in the way of soul there. It’s all Neighborhood Watch and I’d like to talk to your manager. It’s wine moms and religion that consists of nothing but not making Jesus cry over what you may or may not be doing with your genitalia. I’ve changed. Maybe you can say that I’ve evolved into whatever it is that I am now. Whatever it is? C’mon. I guess I can label. Wishy washy agnostic socialist writer who can be pretty god damn angry sometimes.

Anger.

I woke up from a nap Saturday evening. I see I have a notification on Twitter. It’s someone that went to my high school who I used to be friendly with. They tell me that I’m being a typical irrational lefty and labeling people fascists who disagree with me. The last sentence of his insightful commentary tells me that ANTIFA are the modern day fascists. Call me pathetic, call me crazy, but if you ask me it’s crazy, this pretty much ruined my Saturday night. I fired off a multi-tweet reply. I never heard a word back in response. It took a lot of effort not to just attack him personally (Although there was a bit of that. Sue me. I’m no debate team nerd here. I’m not above ad hominem attacks.) but I have to say that I’m a bit in awe of a person who thinks exactly the same way that they did when they were a “porn addicted” pimply-faced teenager. There really has not been too much in the way of appreciable evolution. This is a guy with a well-paying job in tech, a wife and an investment portfolio. I guess you can’t blame him in a way, this is a guy who has a lot invested in keeping things exactly the way that they are now.

ANTIFA engage in violence. Thing is though, I can’t fault them for that. They are putting their bodies on the line to defend people who are not white, not Christian, not straight against fascists who are very openly calling for their forcible removal from society. I told the guy on Twitter who I used to be friendly with that it was very clear that he didn’t care. He doesn’t care. Even if this country gets even more horrifyingly authoritarian, they are never coming for him.

You’re Already Vastly More Valuable to Society Than a Capitalist Could Ever be.

Strumming a guitar in a dimly lit room. A little stoned. Slightly stoned. Just a little.

Strum the guitar.

Think of how I might give you multiple orgasms.

Brain feels kinda smooth today. It always feels like it’s not quite firing on all cylinders on a Monday. 

Fuck Mondays. 

Yeah. I said “Fuck Mondays” but I don’t really feel it that viscerally at the moment. Nothing much happened really. Just dealt with minor problems here and there that I was able to fix fairly quickly. I got to spend my idle time at my desk listening to podcasts and reading. I’m about halfway through the book The Great Divide by Matt Taibbi. Maybe I can finish it by the end of the week. Been awhile since I actually finished a book. 

I’m flirting with the idea of cutting back on my gaming, specifically Rocket League. I’ve played Rocket League pretty much every single day since I got it some time last year. It’s a fun game but I think it distracts me too much. Yeah. You are reading about a 35 year old man talking about his need not to game so much. I find myself firing up Rocket League even when I don’t really have a desire to play that much. I guess it fills up time when I have absolutely nothing else that I could be doing. It stimulates my brain when I ain’t got shit else to stimulate it. I guess I want to see what happens if I try stimulating it with something else. 

I put in a call to a therapist I saw some time last year. He hasn’t called me back yet.

This navel gazing is getting old to me. I want to be writing about something else but I have no idea what. 

I’m fucking bored. 

I suppose I’m bound to catch a feeling about something this week. 

I am half-assing right now and not even lying about it. I am phoning this in. I don’t give a shit. 

Sup with you? You good? Did you daydream about sex or murder today? Did you fantasize about being some sorta hero? Did you cry today? Did you do anything to advance a criminal conspiracy today? 

This is a man throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. This is a man sitting cross-legged in a chair and trying to think. 

This feels like a fuckin’ homework assignment.

I don’t feel much of anything right now. 

I just am. I guess that’s okay. I mean, what’s the alternative? 

Been working almost 6 months. I have not held down a job for more than 6 months since 2012. If I make it beyond 6 months and I’m still employed, do I fucking win something? I’ve been thinking about that. What does that mean for me, if anything? 

Fuck. I tried. 

What I See

I’m typing this as I sit in the office. For all I know, someone is going to walk up to me with a crisis any second. I’ve usually been going “home” (I’ll explain the quotation marks another day.) and engaging in this exercise this week but I’m afraid that I simply won’t have the motivation after the work day is done so here I am. I type fast. As odd as it is to say, I’ve been typing since I was a kid. I’ve been told that I’m an angry typer. Now that I’ve just typed that, I’m cognizant of the noise my typing is making.

The office is quiet. The people with offices are all buttoned up in them.

I’m buttoned up in my thoughts but not really. I guess I’m trying to be buttoned up in them. How the fuck do you manage to be truly present in your thoughts? Shit. That reminds me of all the talk of mindfulness. Practice mindfulness so you can be a better employee. The CEO should practice mindfulness so that maybe he doesn’t feel so bad when he has to lay off a bunch of people. Maybe the homeless should practice mindfulness so that homelessness might suck less.

I’m getting political now. I’m sick of people who are sick of everything being political. There is a political dimension to everything. Nah. Nope. It is deeper than that. Everything is political. There is no divorcing the personal from the political.

See, the piss of the political class gets on me. There is no escaping that. Even if I never mentioned the name of a politician or a political party or anything in my written emo ruminations, the forces that these things exert touches my thoughts whether I want to acknowledge it or not. I’m choosing to see these things. The bitch of it though is I feel like I cannot un-see them even if I want to. I don’t want to make myself into some kinda god damn martyr but there is a real price to pay for awareness. It ain’t pleasant and it really kinda sucks.

I woke up one day and I took a look around. It didn’t use to be this way but every job I saw was some kind of temporary or contract job. A job that offered barely a living a wage and that offered terrible or no benefits. I don’t know when exactly almost every job I came across became like this but that’s how it is now. I’ve been in such jobs. Those precarious gigs offered by companies who have smiling minorities plastered all over their websites. Look, listen to me, okay? Almost any organization that has pictures of smiling minorities in their advertisements is up to some shit. That’s just the way that it is. Apparently, since the year 2005, almost every job that has been created is a contract job. You ever hear the term precariat? It’s a portmanteau of proletariat and precarious. That’s what we’ve got. We’ve got a work force that is in a permanent state of precariousness drifting from temporary job to temporary job for years and for years. We’re a nation of Uber and Lyft drivers. We barely noticed that shit. Do stand-up comics who get HBO specials talk about this? Is this a plot point in romantic comedies? Hell no. Most of us have been too busy working to notice.

I guess being a flake who constantly had to look for work has its advantages because that had a lot to do with me noticing that trend. It’s not like it’s hidden. You can Google it but it just doesn’t get emphasized all that much. After a long day of working hard so that the boss can buy another Bentley, who wants to think about the fact that a lot of us find ourselves in a terrible position?

What else do I see? I see more transients in the suburbs. I’m a sheltered kid from the ‘burbs. I’m used to going to an urban area and averting my eyes when the stench of the homeless tickles my nostrils. Thing is though, I don’t have to go to an urban center to see homeless people. I see them more and more in the suburbs now. I see people sleeping rough. I see people panhandling. I bring this up to people I know to see if they notice this too and I’ve gotten asked if I called the cops cuz that’s scary. I’m no sociologist. I’m an expert in precisely nothing. I think what I’m seeing is the decay of a society. I find myself wondering how many of those sleeping rough on the streets of the suburbs once owned houses there.

See. You are being psychologically abused. Yes. You. I’m talking to you. You are being gas lit. The TV tells you that the economy is booming, that jobs are being created left and right and that the country is becoming great again but you know that that’s all complete bullshit because you have EYES. You actually live in the world that they supposedly are describing. That fucks with a person.

So, I see what I see and what I see is a society that is decaying, rotting. What is society becoming?

A fascist police state. It’s nascent right now but fascism is here and it will get worse. Trumpism is conservatism in America. The media loves to parade around these allegedly sane and respectable conservatives who don’t much like the Trumpster but here’s the thing, THEY FUCKING LOST. The man is the party now and Trumpism will be with us after one too many Big Macs finally stops his heart. A certain segment of this fucking country loves him because he says the shit they say in taverns loudly and proudly. He’ll make all of those dirty, criminal Mexicans disappear. We got ourselves an efficient deportation task force in ICE. We got privately run facilities that ICE throws detainees into. Children are being ripped from their mother’s arms. People get abused in all sorts of ways in these facilities. Right now, the people subject most to the police state are undocumented immigrants and people of color. That who it is today. It’s going to be somebody else tomorrow.

The reality is this, okay? We’ve got a septuagenarian ex-game show host with a mean streak and a thing for vindictiveness who has control over a nuclear arsenal and the most sophisticated surveillance grid ever devised. I’ve reminded people that this septuagenarian ex-game show host could possibly end human civilization and it gets laughed off.

An unwillingness to engage with the world as it really is could be deadly.

That’s what I see.

The problem with school is that it doesn't teach you to be a human being.

I wanna lick everywhere you'll let me.

Random embarrassing fact #1

When I was in high school, I used to play this game on the Internet called Harsh Lands. It was a MUD. Basically, it was this text based medieval game world with a heavy emphasis on in-character roleplaying. You stayed in-character. You talked like your character at all times no matter what. You did what your character did. My character was this deeply religious warrior who rose to the rank of Master Sergeant in The Tashal Watch. The Watch was the organization in charge of keeping the peace in the city of Tashal which was the largest city in the Kingdom of Kaldor as I recall. I was the highest ranking player character lawman so I was basically the law in that city. After I retired that character, I played a thug/enforcer type who was a member of the Lia Kavair. The Lia Kavair were basically a medieval Mafia. They were a den of thieves, assassins, racketeers. My character roughed people up who needed roughing up, extorted people, menaced people and on one occasion even killed someone. I remember spending a lot of time ruminating on this character's guilt for having taken a life to the point where I made myself pretty much a wreck in real life. I should mention something about death in this game. Death was permanent. If you died, there was no coming back and starting over after losing some gear or whatever. You were dead. As you can imagine, that made shit pretty intense at times. This sounds nerdy and dumb and it was but it was incredibly fun to collaborate with other people and create stories.

Okay.

I’ve dabbled in Buddhism. The Buddha talked about subduing your own mind. You need to subdue it because it’s powerful. I guess maybe you can let it play a little but sometimes you’ve got to subdue it and make it do something. 

What I’ve just described would be seen as problematic as fuck by actual Buddhists. Can you imagine how insufferable a Buddhist fundamentalist would probably be? Imagine a self-styled western Buddhist fundamentalist. God. Think about how annoying Calvinists are. When I was in my late 20s, I saw a fair amount of the people I came up with go all Neo-Calvinist. They start wearing black. They grew beards. They listened to this funeral folk music shit that I felt guilty for not liking cuz maybe that meant I was going to Hell. It was all such a drag. It was really fatalistic and mournful and had this twisted conception of God as this holy serial killer who gonna fuck some people up with tornadoes and STIs. 

Part of me still fears going to Hell. 

Part of me wonders if they’re right. 

If they were right, that would be one hell of a plot twist, right? 

Imagine you go through a year of Hell. Imagine losing everything you love. Imagine losing your mind. You stumble upon the truth and it’s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or it’s The Church of Scientology. Sometimes I imagine what it’s like to actually believe the truth is in one of those places and to fear that you’re turning away from it if you forsake it. Forget the Job shit. Maybe it’s not that dramatic. Imagine that hole inside you is filled up by what you get in those places. It’s hard for me to conceive but I think about it. 

I’ll tell you what though. I don’t really want to fake it till I make it just because I’m deathly afraid of Hell. No. That does not seem like a very good idea at this juncture.