what you eat/are

"tell me what you eat, and i will tell you who you are" is a well-worn quote from one Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and it is frequently used in similarly well-worn (read in both examples herein: overused) jokes along the lines of, to paraphrase internet parlance, "hahahaha i eat ass im an ass then hahahahaha." the original quote was meant to suggest that one's cuisine, taste, and food consumption, says much about them and who they are and where they come from. given, however, the rapidly ascendant meat heavy western diet now exploding in popularity in places like China, and given that the potato is also slowly pushing out rice as the global food staple, given that it is cheaper on a per calorie basis, one might be apt to conclude that, in a few hundred years, one will not have to ask what one eats, for we will all be, quite simply, meat and potatoes.

luna and the swan

a common english idiom, such as an idiom can be considered common, given their seemingly gradually decreasingly extant existence, is to express that something seemingly uncommon or rare in occurrence is equivocal to happening "once in a blue moon." a blue moon, nominally occurring once every 2 to 3 years, could indeed be used, metaphorically, to ascribe rareness to an occurrence that happens infrequently, as most of us, it could be surmised, would describe something happening less than once a year rather lacking in commonality. however, one finds that, if one were to reside in the midwestern us, the phrase may actually, instead, be interpreted differently - if one were to attribute a physical good that occurs frequently to said idiom. a quick perusal of any ice cream parlour in the midwest will almost certainly reveal an ice cream flavor described thusly as "blue moon ice cream," its blue color, of course, a seemingly intentional (or perhaps not) misinterpretation of an actual blue moon, whose astronomical occurrence has nothing to do with color. it could be said then that those events that occur once every blue moon are perhaps more common than previously assumed, as blue moon ice cream occurs on a daily basis in towns and cities throughout a handful of states. while this would be an entirely inaccurate and willfully obtuse interpretation of an idiom, one that seems fully intent to take liberty with language and use it only smarmily to make a miniscule and intentionally dishonest point, the present author would also like to point out, quickly and also haphazardly, that both the philosophical problem of deduction, and black swan theory, have statements that use language in comparatively similar ways, such as that of citing a black swan, which, as far back as 2nd century roman poet Juvenal, was considered an impossible occurrence and thus an apt metaphor for something incredibly rare. it was, of course, several centuries later that endemic populations of black swans were found in various regions of australia. it could be said then, that black swans, much like blue moons, are actually poor examples to rely on, and could be replaced with something more viable and legitimately lacking in common occurrence. given that it would require listening to the original populations of a region for a better comparison, which, in the latter case of the black swan, involves listening to residents who happen to be dark skinned and non-christian, it seems safe to assume this will not occur. through it all, nassim taleb, unfortunately, will still make money off of it.

30 is the new 30

sometime many, many years ago, you decided you would not live until age 30. you would not deal with the number, the age, and given your obsession with death and suicide, well, it seemed like, statistically, you weren't going to make it anyways. and if you did, well, that would be the last day. you had it all planned out if it came to that day. you'd finish what you tried to do almost 11 years ago. you would turn 30 and then you would never turn anything again. you never wanted to live long. you never wanted to see more of life than what you had.

you were 29 when you realized you had a change of heart. you suppose it's never to late to change. you are going to see your 30th birthday, and you are going to enjoy it. part of you still doesn't understand how or why it happened. but it did. you have plans, ones that don't involve death or falling or cutting. plans that involve music and kissing and hugging and love. you tear up writing about it, this very second, black letters appearing on a white background on a 21 inch screen. you feel thankful, lucky, like you made it through something. like you won the lottery. your fiancée tells you she is taking the entire day off to be with you. you wonder if you are a burden. a few weeks ago she came home and found you asleep with a knife on the table next to you and a strong dose of xanax running through your veins. she surprises you with coffee and hugs and songs and speeches and you think you could never offer anything like that to anyone, and that she is so much better than you. but she says she loves you, no matter what, that you are always good enough. and then you realize it is not a contest, not a scoreboard, not a 'you do this, I do that' but a 'you love me, i love you' and, well, it all clicks into place. when you turn 30 you will turn 30, and then you will turn 31, and you will keep going until your bones decay and your body breaks down. you hope that day, when you stop turning, when it all comes to an end, is very, very far away.

you missed it

you hear people complain about obligations to friends and you get it. it's pressuring. a wedding you can't afford to go to. a game night or movie night you really can't make. saying no. making time for yourself. and it takes work and upkeep. but you missed it. you remember in washington dc with a good friend years ago, your first time out and socializing in years and years. two women approached and the four of you flirted and laughed and got drunk and ate 2am jumbo slice pizza. it was a highlight amongst a trip full of sights and museums and skyscrapers. you missed it. you missed late night drives to lansing with your mcdonalds coworkers to crash a msu party your friend was going to, and even though you didn't drink with your friends, you all laughed and talked and played rock band.

on saturday you slept in with your fiancée then went shopping and got some cool things and took it easy. you cuddled and napped. at night you had friendsgiving and ate way too much mexican food, then you all went to your place and got drunk and high and laughed so much it hurt.

you missed it. you missed relationships before you even had them, and you missed friendship after you had said goodbye to it for good. now you have both and you could never ever go back. even the commitment, the work, the cleaning the place up, the cleaning yourself up, the driving, whatever, it's all worth it, when before the laughter and drinks and food and too much money spent, there was just you, on a friday or saturday or sunday night, deciding how much xanax should go with how much alcohol, eying the blade on your nightstand, wondering why you couldn't be put out of your own misery. you had that past and it was awful. you're no social butterfly. but maybe you've spread your wings a bit. that's all that can really be asked.

turkey

it's always bad. always! it's like clockwork, because it happens every year. every year, some shitty jokes or comments, questions, you try to keep your head down at the table, just quietly eat the turkey. you've come back anxious and upset after your uncle told his wife to get over almost being raped and learn to work with the guy, even when home alone with him, where the first attempt happened.

nothing absolves them. but this time you had a thigh to place a hand on, someone to laugh and sing with on the way back home. no matter what was said at dinner, nobody could take that away. she was there for you the whole time. and you've never loved her more.

were wrong/are right

'This constant reminder of how wrong I’ve been'

in class you sit and stew and realize you were wrong, again. that all things you are bad at are just all things, the few things you thought you maybe, might be good at it, you are bad at, too. you can't really write. in 7th grade eric marveled at you doing long division in your head. like, hard long division, in seconds. dividing 16437 into 2348912 and remembering each decimal as you went through tenths... hundredths... thousandths. you had the lowest score on your team in the state competition because you changed an answer you knew was wrong because you couldn't have gotten it right, to a different answer. the first one was the correct one. you played yourself. your mother doesn't realize how well off she is because she enclaves her self in those who have more. you were never gifted. don't think you were. a good ACT score is money.

you can no longer do that division in your head.

your brain is a constant source of telling you that you were wrong. even when it turned out ok. you were wrong to protest your parents sending you abroad because you had fun and grew and learned and found something to hang your hat on. maybe you were wrong to protest them. maybe that's the point. and it reduces and reduces into it's not you were wrong but you are wrong. the books you read were trash, the grades you got were trash, the way you kept your room was trash, until all things that are built or consumed by you were trash and that renders you what, exactly?

you will hurt people. it is unavoidable. everyone does. and yet the way in which you can hurt people seems worse. for the longest time you viewed yourself unfixable, and so why put anyone through your existence? you got better and yet, cruelly, that just gives you more room to hurt. isolation is not an answer. living in fear is not an answer. it's an incubator that warms and warms you until you incinerate into ash and leave a messy form on a mattress that hasn't been changed out in 15 years.

every mistake is a potential mark, a potential heartbreak. you keep a running total in your head of how you've fucked up. of hands on shoulders, of faked signatures, of high school grades, of your fiancée coming home to a knife next to you, edge unmarred by blood, thankfully, still a few years clean of that one.

you told her earlier that day the one time you knew you were right. you were wrong to get there, that's the irony; your parents dragged you kicking and screaming, but in a moment of clarity, standing there, sun setting over the pacific ocean on a warm evening, you realized this was right. this was right. you are scared and constantly reminded of being wrong because you can't let those get in the way. you were wrong, again. wrong about love, about a future, about happiness. you have them now. even with the knife there, the pills upstairs, the tears shed, the pain you caused, the lack of power, the fear, everything, and how you wonder if you'll ever be good enough for you or your family, how you hope to god that you can hold on to her forever, you realize that this was the result. no, not what you did that night, but holding her, lying down next to her, being there, and you drill into your brain to never do this again, because just like the sunset over the ocean, you wouldn't want to tarnish anything about this for the world. this time, you're right.

Copycat

A cursory examination of many institutions reveals a sort of demonstrated copycat functionality when one particular formula achieves success. A team wins the Super Bowl or World Series, and immediately, other teams embark on copying the winning team's blueprint. A campaign successfully gets a seemingly small odd challenger elected, and suddenly, we are inundated with attempts to be the most Trumpian.

Alas, this pernicious and insincere form of flattery likely - nay, certainly - leaves on consummate popular pop poet Robert Frost if, such a thing were possible, rolling in his grave. For his most famous poem - an elucidation of taking the road less traveled by - is, the second it is written, an immediate refutation of itself. How many times are we told to not follow the crowd, to be cool by not being cool, to be different, be ourselves. In a more macro sense, no industry perhaps better displays this than that of travel, in which some moderately well off yuppies "discover" a developing, formerly colonized country, extoll its virtues of limited western values and industrial domination, only to, in turn, bring upon it the very forces that will lead to that.

Indeed, one can imagine that, in Frost's supposed yellow wood, metaphor or not, the success of the poem quickly lead both paths to be equally well worn and documented. Given the impending nature of the rapid and seemingly unstoppable forces of global warming we have unleashed, in part upon our constant consumption of the very thing that we use to lead us down said road, a 21st century amendment to the clause might read that one who takes neither road has found that to make all the difference. Until, of course, we are all stationary, staring down a path, unable to make up a decision on which way to go.

it's too easy to be nothing

it's too easy to listen to music that makes you feel and makes you live and realize you'll never, ever create something like that. never bare your soul in a way that moves other people or makes them desperate to cling to what you do. is there a point? fame of any kind is fickle and full of traps and anxiety. you'll never write something like the books you read. never direct a galaxy far, far away. maybe you'll live with the small stuff. you go to a party with your scar laden arms bare and your shoulders bare in an outfit you'd never wear before, not because you didn't want to, but because you felt safe with the person you were with to do so. and even the touching; the hand petting, the nose poking, the flirting, the lap dance propositions, the loud noise and crowds of people. they're uncomfortable but you're there with her and have that. but is it what you want? you're torn because you know you have to commit to being out there, you still need friends, contacts, people to shoot the shit with, but why be here when you could be home? there are kisses and cuddles and quiet and safety. there's a place where you could maybe find some time to do what you want, your hobbies, the things you've written about you've still abandoned, like the occasional album or video game or book. but it feels different, it feels you still. you're finally you. dyed black hair and dainty clothing and all. you don't know. you never know. you won't create, you won't have a novel, a short story, an album, you won't have the time you once had, perhaps ever again, to sit down and lose yourself in The Elder Scrolls, or Final Fantasy, or listen to a bunch of albums in one weekend and really digest them, to power through an entire book in one evening. but maybe you'll have the degree, eventually. maybe you'll have the confidence to wear what you want, when you want, to tell people 'no' for the first time. she helps a lot with that. because you never thought you'd be in love, or safe at home, or happy about your future. all things are impermanent. you've given up bits and pieces of yourself to find others. you leave the halloween party holding hands, tired. you learned about yourself from it. maybe you don't need to create a book or an album. maybe you don't need to fix the world. maybe you don't need to be there for your family 24/7. maybe an occasional trip, a goal to return to a corner of the world you love, the occasional binge of some show or video game or book, some music exploration while at your computer, maybe that will be enough. because she tells you that you are good enough, whatever you are. and if you can learn to accept that, then the rest will fall into place.

Meeting Quotas

It's just a number, right? Not a character judgement. I guess it is in a way. Your character - your fitness - is judged by GPA. By income. By size of living space. By friend counts. By hours performed. Two minutes in bed isn't enough. Fun for everyone is the goal. Not just dudes. Where were you? Oh yeah. The service is so fast. Just a number. Coffee is out so quick. Saves you time. Time to go somewhere else and squeeze it in. It is work, I suppose. Always work to be done.

Four posts a month for October, November, December means you'd have written three more posts than 2017. An improvement! But wait; in terms of word count you've already blown past it. Earlier this year you wrote a four part blog post series with something like 30 thousand words. Does the post count matter? You're still down like 60% from a few years ago. You haven't written fiction in a couple years. This is the longest break in awhile. That's your passion, dude. You've wanted to be a writer for awhile. Since first grade. Sure it waxes and wanes but your number is small. It's zero. You can't write a story if you don't write a story.

The bank account matters. It's small now. You want so bad to wake up to the sounds of traffic in Kuala Lumpur or Penang or Ho Chi Minh or Singapore or anywhere really.

They say age is just a number, right? But your back hurts from your office chair and your skin is dry and your feet get sore when trapped in shoes for a long time.

In 20 minutes the washer will be done. The dryer will take longer. You can do the dishes in the meantime. Fit it all in. Work quota. You napped this morning, a mistake.

Your academic forgiveness was denied and your wage hasn't been upped in years. It won't be. I guess both make sense. The quotas that matter most say that you matter the least. Or at least, that you weren't good enough to matter more than that. There are people who think you matter. You hang onto them tight because they are all you have and all you need. But this is adulthood, some friends fade and disappear. You haven't had a heart to heart with your travel friend in many months. So it goes.

The toaster dings behind the counter. The coffee place is busier than usual. They will meet their sales quota today. The underemployed employees might make more money in tips. Another college says "no" to you, vain attempt to finish something you know you can't. That's ok. You'd say no to yourself if you could.

The number is one. It's one person who loves you more than anything. I guess as far as numbers go that's actually pretty great. That's 100%. More than a lot of people. More than your grades or your wage. It's not a quota. It is an incredible feeling. Someone said yes to you. Maybe you would too deep down.

someone died not far from here

someone died not far from here. around 10pm last friday she attempted to cross a street for the last time. a grey ford fusion and a 2nd car hit her. a man would step out of the convenience store nearby - the one she had just shopped in - and see her body on the ground. emergency services would arrive shortly and pronounce her head on the scene. she was 40.

two days later i am turning off of the street where the condo i live in sits and onto west michigan avenue. she died here, at this intersection. 100 yards away from where i lived, at most. a man in a button down dress shirt tucked into khakis is wandering the street aimlessly, in the middle of the left turn lane, seemingly at a loss. a young kid rides away on their bike so fast i can scarcely make out any detail. beyond, a crowd of 20 or so; heads tucked onto shoulders, tears running freely, a power pole smothered with flowers and balloons and cards.

the next day a lone balloon from the power pole has detached itself and blown itself into the street where the condo i live in sits. the slightly deflated mass sways gently in place, as if indecision by way of a light breeze has it rooted permanently.

the police say alcohol is not involved, and 'freak accident' is the term used. i recall briefly, though, how violent this town is, in the top 4 percentile nationwide, a violent crime rate that towers over most other cities, assault and rape and manslaughter seemingly insurmountably high here in a country already obsessed with guns and violence like no other. i recall how this town has 2.5 times the amount of harmful air quality days compared to the national average, one of the worst rates in the country. i recall how over 30% of the population here lives in poverty, much higher, again, than most of the nation. someone died not far from here, but 2 days later that news story is forgotten. someone not far from here was murdered.

you aren't anymore

there are things you aren't anymore as you get older. i used to want to be a programmer, delusions of grandeur about designing a video game, the next mario or something. then i took a programming class and stared empty at a screen working my way through a simple 'program a webpage' assignment and wondering how anyone could ever do this.

i used to play basketball almost every day. there are limitations now physically. space is a factor. a sore back is a factor. time is. but im also not playing more, on a team, in school, hoping to uphold my skill level to prevent judgment. nobody is really judging me for my basketball skill anymore. i can let it atrophy.

i used to be a morning person. i guess i sort of still am. i get up at 7:30 am for work. but what used to be an immediate jumping out of bed moment is now prolonged. it used to be easy, really. not because i wanted to, but because what else was there? lying in bed anxious about the upcoming day or showering anxious about the upcoming day? at least one gets me clean and gets me getting stuff done. it's hard now. it's not that waking up is hard. it's that now there's an arm around me and breath on my neck and body heat and warm brown eyes and i wondered how or why i could ever be someone who hops out of bed first thing again. it's not that i am not a morning person anymore, i guess, it's that parts of the morning are way harder to say goodbye to than others. but i suppose having a part of the morning i want to hold onto, which i've never had before, is something incredible in its own right.

bad day/good day

it was a bad day at first because it was bad. like, really bad. like, passive-aggressive, rude, shitty work, physical pain, people treating you like you deserved nothing. 9 hours of it. crying in the bathroom. stress. anger. actual anger, bitterness on your end. never happens.

it was 7 hours of good. that's less than 9. but it was so good that ratios are meaningless. it was so good because bad is just plain bad but the good was profound. singing together while the night sky covered up the air like a darkly tinted lense. uncontrollable smiling at how cute someone apparently can look in so many dresses. mooncake and surprises and late night cuddles. so much laughing.

this is the truth now, i guess. no more sad naps starting at 6pm because the day was so bad and all you want is to forget and un-exist. no more thoughts of harm and xanax and other ways to self-immolate. now you have hope and optimism and something to look forward to. even when the day might be bad, it will actually always be good, because she is in it, and coming home to her outweighs the job, the sadness, the anxiety. you'll work yourself into her arms and her eyes, and it'll all work itself out.

the things that make you that don't make you

a friend asked you recently what some of your favorite albums this year were and if you had any recommendations since you used to listen to music a lot and you said you don't know because you had none because you don't listen anymore

another friend asked if you'd read any good books lately - what person-who-wishes-they-were-a-writer hasn't? - and you said no because you had read none

a third friend asked if you had played any good video games lately and wanted to play any with him and you said no because you hadn't and couldn't. you're mad at yourself for paying $60 for spiderman and only beating the tutorial. or buying monster hunter world and... only beating the tutorial.

you look in frustration as your blogger roll says "1" next to posts made in September by the time it's early on the 25th. for a supposed writer you sure don't write. the other day you woke up and went to work for 9 hours, then drove to class for 2 hours there, then went to pick up some gifts, then wrapped them, then did dishes, then did homework, and then your fiancée called and you said you thought it was like 10:30 pm but it was 11:30 pm and the day was over. the day before that you spent over 8 hours cooking and cleaning. you know tonight you will be doing homework because it is due tomorrow and you still have 9 hours in an office each day. you keep saying "ah but this is the exception" like when your summer class was so brutal with homework, but the exceptions came in may and june and july and august and september and it seems apparent that they are the norm. it's ok for now while you drive; listening to the same exact music you did last year is fine for now, you keep playing songs you still love. you try to ignore the bank account that even without the video games and music and books continues to drop precipitously. you wait patiently for a student loan to come to just transfer debt from american express to the state. you realize that the kingdom hearts sequel you used to be so, so excited about is not even worth purchasing, not because you don't want it, but because you know it will just sit unused and you might as well burn some 20 dollar bills and get the same level of entertainment. you wonder how dota plays these days, but that's a 45-55 minute commitment a match, or if some of your favorite bands will be in the area, or how the dune movie is coming along, but who cares, really. you started american gods and never touched it again even though you liked it, a friend begged you to start reading the fifth season and it has just sat on your desk forever, never to be opened. you realize that there's no point to buying video games or books or music again. that's ok. there's always work to do.

people who know you mention to others you like to travel but you haven't left the country in awhile now and you probably never will again, so you like to travel becomes you like when you travelled, or you travel becomes you travelled, once, once, once, and you can no longer look forward to new foods or new sunsets or new smells and sounds. it's ok because you can't afford it anyways. it's like how you used to read, or used to listen to music, or used to play video games, the new parts are gone and the old ones are relegated to shelves, dusty books you once loved, passports you once used. you haven't played your guitar since february. you didn't even bother bringing it to your new place because you knew it'd just take up space and never get used. like your stuff you're slowly throwing all away.

when you were younger you used to write screenplays and act and now you don't but your parents still ask if you've watched any good new movies lately out of some vague attempt to divine a passion out of your passive, droll communication with them, and between the cost and the time you say no and it's true. talking is stunted and you've already given up most sports and that was one thing you wanted mostly gone from your life, tired of the culture and the machismo and watching 18 year old kids in college destroy their lives permanently while they smashed skulls together.

in five years you'll be driving to the same music you are now, not writing, not reading, not playing video games. you have lots of new, better feelings in a way; love, a small inkling that maybe you are good enough. these are growth and change and when you're lying there with her head in your lap or her arms around you nothing in the world could be better. but part of you wants to take two weeks off and veg out even if you know it's irresponsible and bad habit inducing. so you plow on and swallow your fears and realize the shitty media hobbies you used to enjoy and never defined you anyways are dead and gone forever. your mom complains about not getting enough of you, even though you are already stretched so thin your presence is translucent, and reminds you to be there for your sister, constantly, even though she is an adult and you would anyways if you had to. you will be anyone you can be for everyone else and nobody for yourself, and that's ok, because that's all you've ever been.

the things they buried

My name is Chad and everything I have ever done is wrong. It's ok, I guess, because I think many of us feel the same way. There's truth in wrongness. Or something like that. That's what I said one day in English in high school my senior year. Not necessarily wrongness, but fiction, lies. Not because I endorsed them, but because that was the theme. You know... what's the theme? My teacher asked me to answer. About the book we had all, presumably, just read.

The book was The Things They Carried, because of course. A staple of high school and white teen dudes everywhere, which I guess makes it fitting, in that I was in high school, and even though there were not white dudes everywhere, or even close to it, that is how all things are assumed. My teacher was self-described as the "only pro choice Republican teacher on the planet." She once asked me to tell her something that was going on in the world, so I replied - given that it was 2006 - that a recent Pentagon report came to the conclusion that the Iraq War was "unwinnable." She asked me what I thought. Such question seemed a bit haphazard to me; whether that war, a war, any war, is "winnable" is debatable as a sort of ontological claim, and putting that aside, how the fuck am I supposed to know? Like, really? I have no information on troop levels, estimated size of enemy combatants, public opinion on the ground, training progress of Iraqi Defense Forces, nothing more than what grabs headlines and boils down to mainstream news stories.

So I said I don't think it's winnable because the insurgency is too entrenched. Which seemed right. It's basically what the report said. It's what much of the media pontificated. The growing public dissatisfaction with the war pointed in that direction. I believed it! Maybe that was the important part. If I believed it, as a white male, I could be president one day. Look where it got us in 2006, halfway through Bush's second term. Look where it got us 10 years later. A horde of 19 year old white men nod.

The "only pro choice Republican teacher on the planet" said we should have "bombed them back into the Stone Age" if we wanted to win. Alas. I guess it doesn't make sense then that we read The Things They Carried.

What is the theme?

My voice shaking, eyes beginning to tear up, I explained it. The tears weren't because I was sad, it's because this was hard to do. This was an opinion. Stating my case. Extrapolating based on my personal interpretation of a text. I've cried when debating my parents in politics. More than once. Many times more. I tear up at the hint of a serious dialogue between two people. I've teared up over texts. Am I weird? Don't answer.

I explained that even though the book was fiction, even though none of it happened as described, it was getting at a higher truth. That war is hell. That fucked up stuff happens to everyone involved; wanton cruelty, death and destruction, and it doesn't take a Vietnam diary to show that. That's what good fiction does, right? Makes fiction seem like fact? Allows you to empathize? Like Catch-22? Like The Catcher in the Rye? Like The Things They Carried? Like Atlas Shrugged? A horde of 19 year old white men nod.

So did my teacher.

Said teacher always treated us like adults except for when we were shitty and then she treated us like dumbasses, which I suppose is true of lots of adults with teens. I was mostly just trying to survive that class. I guess I did, I got good grades and most people assumed that because I had answered The Questions that I was smart. I knew the actual things they carried! A few months later I'd curiously look at the Sparknotes for The Things They Carried and realized that what Sparknotes had as the theme was basically word-for-word what I had said. It had been essentially regurgitated back at me via LED screen, staring at me as I stared at it. I often wonder if my teacher ever wondered if I went off Sparknotes. If I was right but only because I looked it up. I don't think she did, but who knows. She was smart enough to know about it. Certainly a bunch of dumbass teens were. I've tried to bury that thought; why do I have it? What good does it do? Does it matter? But it feels distantly relevant, like if I knew, I could judge something not of her character, but of mine, that whatever or whoever I was back then made her think that maybe I had looked it up on Sparknotes. I've tried to bury that thought to know avail. I guess I did use Sparknotes with The Scarlet Letter. But that was sophomore year. I've never seen that teacher since. Not once.

A year later in Short Stories and Poetry class at college, during a critique of my dystopic short story (a horde of 19 year old white men nod), a woman dressed as Darth Maul (it was Halloween), made the comment that a specific scene in my story where I offhandedly, casually said the main character's office has blown up, thus explaining the lack of calls about why the main character has not shown up, reminded her of Office Space.

I'm going to be honest; I don't think Office Space exists. I don't know what the fuck it is. I mean sure, I get that it's a movie, I can picture, sort of, the characters, I know some of the memorable lines or moments, but I have never seen it. I don't think anyone has. I have an idea of it, of glasses and haircuts and staples and boredom and that's how everyone seems to communicate, so I have concluded that it exists solely as a sort of cultural simulacrum, or stand alone complex, this creation a lot of, say 39 year old white dudes came up with simultaneously, or thought they did, and now we all just cite it. Like, "ah, yes, that reminds me of Office Space!" (A horde of 39 year old white dudes nod.) Or, "remember the stapler guy from Office Space?" and we're all so convinced that such a mundane lampooning of our mundane lives has to exist, and that it has to be just in that so late 90s way that, well, of course I know what you're talking about!

The good news is that no copies of that story exist any more nor have for a long time. Just like Office Space.

I think every few months I get into a debate with someone about if every story has ever been told. It reminds me of the false statement that history repeats itself. Like, yeah, if you boil history down to "war" or "pandemic" or "authoritarianism" I guess it repeats itself. Guess what!? A bunch of people will live and all of them will die. See! History repeats itself! We can't escape!!! It ignores the fact that every single event is a specific event in that time in which it exists. The fall of Rome was the fall of Rome and happened over so many hundreds of years that it is entirely a process of its own, specific example, and yet I feel anything that falls is now Rome. Oh god, my fucking sandwich just fell on the floor. That reminds me of how Rome fell!

If you boil down everything to a comedy or tragedy or a love story or not then of course everything has been said, because you're distilling everything that has been said to a one word categorization, and if it was that simple we would never even need libraries. Take Ex Machina. It was an alright movie. It was a modern day interpretation, in many ways, of Frankenstein. One reviewer, however, said it was a bad regurgitation of it, just taking old, already told stories and repackaging them. Which is interesting to me. Everything about Ex Machina exists because of the very moment it was made. The constant fear and foreboding and control portrayed by the film is a direct result of the massive, in real life rise of Google and other tech companies and a response to that. A mere 10-15 years before the film came out, the CGI didn't exist to pull it off, and so much of the technology in the film wouldn't have existed or been imagined by the creators. And then we're all taking, if you have any shred of belief in postmodern analysis, our own values and baggage to everything each of us views or reads or consumes, and always will. Maybe one day, someone will grow up and make a movie, and it'll be because when they were 15 years old the saw Ex Machina and it really struck a chord with them, and they'll want to honor that and grow it and do their own thing with it, and some stuffy reviewer in, like, Scottsdale will be like "GOD, this is just Ex Machina all over again" and oh fuck I just confirmed the counter-argument, didn't I? I mean, my hot take is the opposite. It's not that every story has ever been told, it's that no stories have ever been told, because if every single existence is unique at every single moment in time and will be uniquely observed by every single participant, then the grand total of stories told, filmed, sang, painted, danced, and more, is literally infinitesimal, and as a percentage of possible stories, effectively nil. So why the fuck do we keep citing Office Space?

I still think about the time someone ripped a condom off me on our second date and said "let's get that bad boy off" as she did so. A condom is latex. Is it a bad boy? Isn't a condom a good boy? I was her 61st sexual partner in 21 months. I know because she told me. I know it was a horrible thing but nothing happened and so I guess I'm mostly just upset that the line was so cheesy. I should try to bury that thought, but it sticks with me. Like my mind tells me I should be way more upset than I am, and maybe deep down I am, because taking a condom off mid-coitus without consent or previous dialogue is fucked up.

It could be frustration at the fact that I get more writing done when I am sad and depressed than happy. That's such a cliche. It probably fucking exists in Office Space. I don't want to know.

I suppose we're all burying some things we don't want to deal with or remember or suffer from. Some worse than others. It's not a contest... it's not a contest. For an upright animal with a spine I sure feel amorphous and spineless, like the very next thing I have to try to bury, to ignore, to stash away will be the one that breaks me. I still have to try to avoid having sharp objects at easy access at all times. No scissors or knives in a bedroom. Stay out of the kitchen if in a bad mood. This feels so childlike and silly and yet I know it's for my own good, like parents tell their children... it's for your own good. Perhaps I am so fundamentally emotionally messed up and unable to process that this is how I - (a horde of 19 year old men nod) - fucking stop it you guys!

There's a guy at work who thinks I am an idiot. He thinks I am a loser who does nothing with my life (ok, fair), and thinks every mistake I make is another notch in the belt of stupidity I posses. He has told me as such. Other people at work have said how smart they think he is, because he is worldly or knows about foreign countries or politics or whatever. He steals toilet paper from the office. He stole hundreds of dollars of food from a snack box whose employee made commission off of the money it made, so he stole wages out of a working class guy's pocket and then had the audacity to joke about it when the guy finally wised up and removed our snack box. He has also gotten most everything wrong. He waxes and wanes about ancient Persia or Japan or Watergate in ways that are stunningly factually simplistic or grossly incorrect, and I wonder if he is intentionally trying to pull a fast one (I suspect as much), and even when he gets routinely owned by conservatives at work in political debate a very small part of me finds solace in the fact that he gets brought down to the level of idiot with me. But he stands there and fondles his nuts and picks his butt crack underneath his pants while talking to people and pays no mind. I try to ignore his existence but then he approaches me and tries to correct something and I know when I quit part of me wants to walk up to his desk and rip into him and try to defend myself but why bother? My own self-image is piss poor so why do I need to make him think I'm better? He only says to me what I say to me. I don't yell at myself that I am smart. I will bury this thought.

I guess the alternative to burying is projecting, and there's a difference between self-destruction and some sort of external combustion that brings down others. I'd rather not be the kind of person who takes some trauma and makes some unfair summation of all those who orbit any similar classification. Too many bitter, violent people use that as justification for their anger or hate or abuse towards entire groups of people (none of the 19 year old white men nod their heads). Really guys? Really? This is the one time. Come on. Admittance is the first... fuck it. We were all teens, right? All did bad stuff? That's the defense, right? No ability to discern playing hooky and smoking a cig with assault? No subtlety in assessing human behavior? Ok, well, that's cool.

Maybe I'm still wrong. Probably. I have nothing to add that hasn't been said and done better than anyone before me. Even a jack-of-all-trades knows all trades. Even my self-deprecation is boring and contrived. Any tone seems forced and all this post reads like is some aggrandizing nonsense. But that's ok. It was therapeutic on a Thursday night last week when all my thoughts were negative. I guess that's the most important thing. It got me moving on.

Moving on from burying things or not burying things or coming to terms with them. I can live with that. For now. Because perhaps one day in LA someone will be walking from their car to their office with a big stack of papers - a script - and it won't be bound together, and that day will be a big day for Santa Ana winds, and a strong and sudden gust will come through and rip all the papers up and into the air and disperse them extravagantly, swirling and flying and landing everywhere and anywhere, fully a part of the world, of existence, an idea that already exists and already did, now mixed in with everything else as it was meant to be. And maybe a few years later, someone dressed up as Darth Maul, new robotic spider legs and all, will sit and listen as some 19 year old white dude reads off his dystopic fiction, and a single scene of offhanded, casual absurdity made mundane will trigger a memory in Darth Maul's head, a memory from something that doesn't really exist and yet we all know does, and she'll raise her hand and smile and say "just like Office Space 2!" and everyone else, not just the 19 year old white men, will nod.

review

one finds that, over time - indeed, many years - the present author's writing style has changed significantly. what began in high school as relatively simplistic, unencumbered writing often based entirely in reality gave way to dystopic sci-fi, which gave way to melancholy sci-fi, which gave way to melancholy slice-of-life, which gave way to postmodernism, which gave way to a blog originally fashioned by grammatically formulaic construction and simple, straightforward sentences. that, of course, gave way to 2nd person evocations and rambling, cumbersome elucidations of unnecessary english vocabulary. this growth - and the present author means that in the negative, medical term, not as a personal value - is something that many go through, whether they find themselves in creative arts or something more rigorously structured. the average person may and often finds that how they value, evaluate, and process things changes; tastes in music and movies change, and taste buds themselves wither and die. alas, the present author, in a vain attempt to find any thing to stick, has experimented with a variety of styles and formats in writing over the last 10 years - as previously noted. where this will take the present author in time is but anyone's guess; perhaps said writing will regress to high school trappings, perhaps it will go back to primarily 3rd person pontifications, perhaps it will descend into completely incoherent ramblings. whatever the case and the stylistic endeavors thus endeavored to endeavor, the end result of any constitution of language in this blog or any other aperture by the present author shares one thing across all mediums and attempts to ingratiate specific style to the reader; it will, inevitably be, in simple parlance, crap.

brain myth

a common misconception promulgated by pop culture and word of mouth is such that humans, in all our pitiful squalor, use a very small percentage of our brain, and that the rest goes untapped, waiting to be unlocked so that perhaps one day, humans can reach their full potential as intellectual ubermensch. alas, such misconception is just that - and humans do, and have always, used their brain in its entirety; putting aside the fact that a brain operating at, say, 20% for thousands of years is one hell of an evolutionary waste. alas, however, the present author would put forth that some manner of this misconception is indeed true, by allegory or perhaps physical reality, for as the myth goes, it suggests that untapping more of our brain would equal more intelligence. given the present author's complete and utter lack thereof, it may, indeed, be apt to argue that some among us - the previously alluded to, for one - may indeed have, somehow, found a way to use an inadequate percentage of their brain. however, given that such argument would also assuage the present author of responsibility for their lack of capacity for knowledge, such an argument might also be a simple and lazy way to irresponsibly shift blame. the truth of the matter, like all things, is inconsequential.

learning

i guess you learn about yourself. you can't live with animals, you never have, you'll mess up. those first couple weeks filled with agonizing anxiety, nervous every time you didn't see the cat for awhile, nervous she got out, somehow, some way, even though you've been so careful. nervous the dog won't like you. you spent moments on the couch fighting off panic attacks and nightmarish scenarios when your brain went into overdrive and convinced yourself the cat had ran out and been run over or some other horrible fate. you can't live with someone in such close proximity, you need your room, your space, the last time you did this was college and you spent entire days hiding in the library, self-harming when a moment's peace was available in the dorm room, spending every living second wanting to die. but then at night when you're close and can hear her breath and reach out and touch her you're glad that someone is here to be a source of comfort after long days. you might as well not live where they have a pool because even though you love swimming you're too nervous to go. then you do and it's ok and you plan to go again and nobody cares what you do or don't wear or at least they don't vocalize it. there are lots of things you still can't do; you can't write, and you can't seem to get a degree, but the list gets a bit shorter every day and maybe before you know it the 'can't do' parts will be replaced with a sense of accomplishment that for almost 3 decades you have never once had.

you want

more than anything to make them safe and happy and feel loved in your arms. suddenly you have something that means so much to you the single abstract thought of her being sad for 2 seconds makes you sad. everything has to be great for her. and you know it can't be and even if it was how would one grow but you just want her to feel perfect in your arms and like nothing bad ever will happen so you can be that for her. because she knows and you know and everyone knows how the world can be a cold dead place, but in her arms or on the couch or her head on your chest or you on hers the earth is a warm live place and everything hums along and feels good. you agonize over saying you have to get up in the morning, eking out every moment in bed together you can, pushing yourself to the last possible second even though being late is so anxiety inducing. you wait to see her again but after 15 minutes at work you wonder why this 9 hour travesty has to infect 5 days a week, soon to have 4 hours a week of class added and hours of homework too and that you can't just have her. in the meantime you try to maintain yourself; fulfill your hobbies, listen to the music you loved so much you'd cry at it when no other medium would do so to you, play the video games you have made more friends on than any other medium or hobby, disappoint yourself with FLCL, write more again because since 1st grade part of you deep down has tugged you towards that more than anything else you've ever done in life, more even than travel and games and music and swimming, and also make sure, because the addiction and need is real, the love is more powerful than anything, to just constantly hold and touch her, to smile, to see her smile, to wrap your arms around her and smell her hair and look at her eyes and take those 30 minute lunch reprieves and forget work and school and boxes and if you are boring. you have no idea where anything is going, if travel is gone for good, if writing and reading and DOTA and craft beer are gone, done in by money and car repairs and dental disasters and time and unpacking and commitments to so many people all wanting you, you, you, and a stubborn, vain re-attempt (5th time?) at school, but you have her by your side through it all and everything pales in comparison to that, you'll find a way to make it work, to have a sense of self, because in the end nothing is better than waking up next to her, to her hands on your chest, to her head in your lap, to falling asleep wondering why, oh why, didn't that contestant plate the last ingredient on her dish for Chopped.

morning on the third coast

there's a quietness at 9:00 am. the seagulls flying above a mainstreet 3 hours away from noise and calamity can still be heard. the sounds of traffic are uncommon, only the occasional diesel truck roaring by stirs any sort of commotion. the beach sits almost entirely empty, the crashing waves just another of several non-human sounds that can only be heard early like it is now. a coffee shop sits empty and unused currently, two employees hug before one walks off, after ordering you sit at a table with a breakfast sandwich and cappuccino and count your blessings for being unencumbered by customers, whose presence and watchful eyes would make you irritably and anxiously self-conscious about eating alone. outside, the occasional cyclist flies down the road and through intersections without needing to look or stop for cars or crossing pedestrians. the parking; filled and overflowing for blocks and blocks by the afternoon is spacious and copious right now. the sky seems even bluer before mufflers and cigarettes and trucks and motorcycles all fill the air with their exhaust. every few minutes things begin their ascent; there are a few more people, a few more cars, a few more shops opening. you could sit and watch forever here as a city wakes up to the warm summer air and sunlight and spotless sky, your only wish now is that you had someone's hand to hold as you did so. before you know it your two hour parking is up, and you have to move the car, detach yourself from the stillness, and leave, for a moment, observation and comfort behind.

being this age always seemed so far away

i can be afraid of taking the medicine that is supposed to make me feel less afraid
i can be afraid of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to absolutely anyone
i can be afraid of being less successful than my parents
i can be afraid of being more successful than i deserve
i can be afraid of getting older
i can be afraid of what line to stand in at the dmv because the new one they built years ago still doesn't really have any demarcation for which station is which
i can be afraid of touching the side of the lawn mower again where the metal is after running it for an hour and a half years ago and accidentally doing so when i went to prime it after it stalled and feeling like the entire end of my finger was on fire
i can be afraid of the feeling of burning my thumb when i use a lighter on a windy day like i have before; i just got the goosebumps again
i can be afraid of shots and blood draws and spinal taps
i can be afraid of toxoplasma gondii
i can be afraid of people on facebook i used to know from school finding out about me or seeing my posts or my pictures
i can be afraid about removing said people from facebook and seeing my miniscule friend count suffer
i can be afraid of my future
i can be afraid of giving up on my dreams because they're untenable but that not giving up on them and failing is even more frightening
i can be afraid of forgetting to shave that little patch of hair where my neck curves inward above my chest and how it gets red when i use a trimmer
i can be afraid of going shirtless
i can be afraid of wearing shorts
i can be afraid of hurting myself
i can be afraid of going into a new store for the first time alone and not knowing where anything is so instead I don't and just continue to buy stuff online
i can be afraid of people on the phone so i raise the pitch of my voice and make myself sound very timid and sometimes people call me a woman and whatever it takes to make myself seem non-threatening
i can be afraid of failure
i can be afraid of hospitals
i can be afraid of staining my pillowcase with wet hair so i put a towel down over my pillow if i lie down after a shower
i can be afraid of not seeming like i care enough or emote enough
i can be afraid of being angry
i can be afraid of accidentally putting something that isn't mine away in the wrong cabinet
i can be afraid of letting down everyone i know
i can be afraid of black ice and spinning out of control on it and slamming into another car
i can be afraid of using public restrooms
i can be afraid of being too early
i can be afraid of being late
i can be afraid of walking through a restaurant looking for the person i am supposed to meet there and then realizing they're not there and now i look like an idiot
i can be afraid of getting my hands and face all sticky and getting up from the dinner table to fix it mid meal because it makes me so uncomfortable
i can be afraid of being ugly
i can be afraid of feeling trapped at work or school or anywhere
i can be afraid of anything

distance

there are fireworks in the distance as you coast along a highway just south of the ohio and michigan border, grandiose lights and colors off to the north, but not too far, you think maybe perusing your phone you could find the town, the occasion. you remember as a kid on late night highway drives home from chicago or detroit wanting to know what each and every overpass lead to, the lights in the distance of cities and towns and countless stories of people existing in them completely unaware of the camry or mitsubishi you were in barreling down the highway. now you're obsessed with finding these fireworks, who, what, where, but google tells you nothing and at 80 miles per hour you're quickly beyond them and unable to assume they're due north of your location on the map. it's not a holiday and you assume county fair or something but in these northern ohio or southern michigan counties west and beyond detroit and toledo nobody really lives. maybe this was always the writer in you, seeing cars go by and wondering the driver's story, seeing these towns light up all miniaturized when above them in a plane, passing over countless decadent rejections of night time darkness, light pollution blaring louder than the sound of plane engines separated from your chair by just a small wall and window. maybe that's why sitting in an airport and having a drink or coffee and just observing was comforting. you'd imagine stories and be curious and observe and as a teen you used to say you liked the idea of people more than people themselves and maybe part of that is still true but then you meet someone wonderful and you think to yourself "gosh isn't that cynical." it's ok though because all the stories are gone. the blog you write in had the fewest visits in years, 5-10% of the traffic it used to get because you no longer put out 6, 7, 8 entries a month, you're now on... you can't even remember. 1.5 years? 2 years? 3 years? since you finished a short story. the other day you had an idea for a story and a blog post based on all these people, all these lights, all these nights and hushed confessions and observations but it was late and the idea was fleeting, just like the fireworks were, as the car motored down the highway, answer to your curiosity lost in the distance behind you, just another slowly unobservable object in a mirror closer than it appears.

spice

It's been said that "variety is the spice of life" by a variety of people in a nearly endless enumeration of various walks of life. Indeed, similar sentiments can be found divulged in languages and cultures all over the world.

This is, of course, considered very different from spice used in regards to food. Spicy food is a source of pleasure for many, but also a source of heartburn and intestinal issues that render said consumption folly.

In many ways, then, one might say both "the spice of life" and "spicy hell ramen in Chicago" are, actually, extremely similar. For to pursue the former - vis a vis variety - one must often confront intestinal discomfort brought on by anxiety and stress, such that may upset one's stomach, not unlike one who struggles with chili peppers or ghost peppers consuming copious amounts of very spicy food. The end result, the present author supposes, is the same for both forms of consumption; uncomfortable trips to the bathroom and internal questioning of whether this or anything else is, indeed, worth it.

matter of time

every mistake ever made is yours and it's ok because you're used to it right? you messed up the other day and the other day before that and you will again. will it be today? tomorrow? the weekend? who knows. you know because it's all you know and you expect and it will be your fault because it is, and you hope others will forgive you because you won't forgive yourself. each source of discomfort in any arena; social, work, academic, is your fuckup and your fuckup alone and one day you want to be perfect but perfect always takes so long, because it doesn't exist, and yet still you cower in fear of each mistake you will make, by saying or doing the wrong thing, not being enough, being too anxious, being too dumb, falling short of expectations. the next big mistake is a matter of time. you will be there to see it.

there are things here that you can walk on

we stumbled into a restaurant before hitting the beach in case things closed, stuffed into a simple and crowded bar with a neatly creative menu and the heat and humidity coming in through the single door and emanating off the grill behind the bar. we talked about all the things that looked good but kept it simple with drinks and pasta and an appetizer they were out of, making a mental note to come back for the mac and cheese or burgers or something. the rain came. we sat and looked, me over my shoulder, as trees whipped left to right as the gusts rolled in off the lake, rain pouring down, visibility rendered to almost nothing, people running for cover. after holding hands and laughing and smiling and food we walked. down the main street and towards and pier and then suddenly the skies opened up and it wasn't just rain it was hail, solid pebbles of ice enough to break skin and sting and burn, my towel over her neck a worthless gesture. the seam in the front of my right shoe where the soul has come undone spewing bubbles as the weight of every step pushed the water in the instep upwards and outwards through any crevasse it could find. in the shelter of a marina whose bathrooms smell and were soaked with water and urine we waited until the hail relented. the 92 degrees had given way to 75, and we held hands walking to the beach, walking on the wet sand and then realizing that might be more work than the warm sidewalk, avoiding the pebbles that would pick at our feet at every opportunity. at a picnic table she sang songs with the theme of water and we watched families and friends take group photos and even I sang albeit poorly. we eventually made our way in, 4 foot waves and red flag warning and all, the violent thrust of water pushing us back and side to side, bracing ourselves every time one approached. we laughed at how the water itself tried to strip us to our skin, the water was as warm as the great lake ever gets, we stood and jumped and splashed until my fingers became prunes. and somehow, the storms and hail and rain and wind managed to dissipate enough so that the clouds dispersed and the yellow and orange and red hues of the sunset blasted out forth on the late summer evening, turning everything the very shade of the nearest star. we walked back to the car smoking a cigarette and getting our lips sweet and the breeze tore at our hats and towels like it did earlier. the night drive was full of singing and endless fireflies illuminating the sides of the 2 lane highway almost as if natasha pulley had dreamed up the scenario herself, countless, reoccurring flares as far as the eye could see. in the distance the storms that had rolled through illuminated the sky with lightning that illuminated the clouds enough to make out their intimidating, ungainly shape. everything about life was perfect in that moment.

this job is murder

it has been said that by doing something you love, you will never work a day in your life. given the ridiculousness of said statement; it assumes the ability to do what you love, that doing so as a means of income will not render the love ethereal and transient, and that no other time spent outside of the job consists of work, one might simply choose to wholly disregard the entirety of said idiom and banish it away never to be summoned as hackneyed speech or motivational poster ever again. however, one finds that, given how many people on social media routinely ascribe a desire to die to their existence, such as in the way "i want to die" or "please kill me" one might infer that death is what many users of social media - a sizeable but shrinking majority of which are humans - love. one finds that, unlike all other professions, death is the passion project that has a 100% success rate in ensuring you never work another day in your life.

push/stare

she was born this day to gentry family and well-to-do-ness, and as all good well-off were supposed to do then, promulgated a life of art and galleries. her husband commissioned a completely penniless painter, the size was to be extravagant, the social recognition and prestige of such scale had to be fully pursued. would she still do it, now? hundreds of years later the crowds push and shove, and swear words in dozens of languages echo around the click of buttons and the flash of small 4.5 inch screens. i didn't get it. surely the vast, overwhelming nature of the structure and all the riches it contained meant the crowds and the shoving and the rudeness weren't worth it for this one thing that has taken on a life of its own, one thing that wasn't so beautiful, really, yet still worth more than all else in its stead. maybe that's why it works; the sly, subtle smirk - missed if stared directly at - of someone whose Italian name roughly translates to 'happiness', at her all-knowing conclusion. people stare at her and idolize her more than any other former gentry and whatever they too hoped to achieve with their bourgeois language and evening parlances to expensive locations and commissioned frames who plaster the wall with extravagant scope, all because a broke artist saw in her something he wanted to capture. giocondo got the last laugh, i suppose, we just got left with the wonderment of how something could still be taunting us hundreds of years later.

Things Die and Things Grow

You used to think you might like programming but then you took a programming class and that killed it, eyes rolling out of their sockets as you stared at the screen trying to find your mistake in vain. You used to think you might like meteorology but you didn't want to be on TV and stuck talking about weather all the time. You used to think you might like astrophysics but once your grades slipped you knew that was a dead proposition and you didn't want to have quite that much advanced math anyways. You used to think you might like journalism but then you grew out of the repetition and lack of creative freedom. You used to think you might like writing but you realized you had no talent and the lack of ability to come up with stories or ideas torpedoed that, stuck going years without a single creative project finished and not for lack of trying, dozens of hours lost brainstorming and staring at a screen and typing up drafts that ran out of steam and had no story in the first place. You used to think you would play video games your whole life but the time commitment and cost got in the way. You used to think you'd travel in your late 20s but you ran out of money and time. You used to think you'd always listen to 200+ albums a year but it became a cost cutting measure to avoid doing so.

You used to think you wouldn't make any new friends or find any wonderful partners but then both stumbled into your life right when several of the former had stumbled out. You lost some other friends recently and they're worried but 60+ hours a week at work and school and the rest spent trying to keep a house together means entire evenings are lost and there's nothing you can do besides fall asleep and wake up next to your favorite person and hope some day you might be able to write again or travel again or check out some new music or even play a game of Overwatch, but until then you cram yourself full of numbers and tests and laundry and yard work and dishes and beautiful sunsets holding hands that are your only escape and hold on hoping it'll be alright. She tells you it will be and you believe her. Maybe you should write a story about it.

Expect/Prepare

It's been said to "expect the best, prepare for the worst." This quote is commonly attributed to someone who the present author neither knows intimately nor even by name. Alas, given that expectations, in reality, universally result in "the worst" possible outcome - which the aforementioned quote promulgates one to prepare for anyways - one wonders if expecting the best is merely a cruel abdication of reality, insomuch as that if one were to both expect the worst and prepare for the worst, one would frequently be without disappointment and wasted effort, while to expect the best leaves one constantly, irrevocably, crushed.

____ Oneself

The present author, being an abject doofus, has, at times, contributed to the shortly-hereafter-to-be-mentioned harmful trope as an expression of both self-flagellation and self-deprecation, both of which are, in themselves, often harmful tropes. Alas, the trope in question here; "you must love yourself before you can expect someone to love you", often appearing in many similar forms, is the one the present author whishes to admonish - much like the present author wishes to admonish oneself. To wit, not even taking this statement to its logical extremes - a sort of pseudo-slippery slope fallacy that is often poorly used - is needed to render it inaccurate at best, and perniciously harmful at worst. And while some might simply say "the statement is cruel in that it implies depressed people, or kids with self-image issues don't deserve to be loved" and that would be, indubitably, true, the present author would instead like to use a completely nonsensical, unrelated, and amateurish comparison. For instance; given one (1) person who has cooked a meal - the specific recipe matters not - and another singular (1) person not affiliated with the cooking of the meal but instead being a participant in its consumption, we can quickly and, with a terribly contrived manner, demonstrate the fallibility of this entire "love yourself" trope. Let us say, then, that the singular cook does not like their finished meal, but the other person, infact, loves the meal. For the purposes of this exercise the present author - whose omnipotence in this blog post goes as far as necessary in constructing this G rated scenario - puts forth that the latter genuinely loves the meal and says so, and none of their enjoyment is derived from flattery, social pressure, groveling, or an expectation to be nice. If the present author were to introduce a third, singular (1) person who was then presented with this exact scenario and asked to pass judgement, this observer would likely simply surmise that the cook did not like their meal, but the second person did, and the cook's opinion of said meal does not invalidate the other, and vice-versa. Given this long-winded and wholly pointless comparison, the present author puts forth that it is apt to conclude that no matter how one feels about themselves, said feeling can not and does not invalidate or irrevocably negate someone else's feelings about said person.

The conclusion to this perfunctory and superfluous pursuit is not a subtle, incoherent critique of the objectivity presented by reality based cooking shows where judges ordain supposed quality, but simply to state that, no matter how you feel about yourself, know that you can't control others, who will respond to your behavior as they are apt to, and in the end, all parties involved; self-loving, loved by others, popular, or simply passing away their time in a permanent state of social exclusion, die alone.

the idea of being anything other than the worst is piled up in the fiction section at the bookstore

my parents would tell me time and again it'll work itself out, money always does, blessed by no injuries or sickness. neither parent was ever injured on the job, no hospitalization records, healthy like me for so long. left me home alone starting at age 3 because they could, when they worked 70 hours a week, something most parents don't have the luxury of. the alcohol was kept in a cabinet under the microwave at ground level, unlocked, next to the cleaners and chemicals. i could have crawled my way in there, much less walked, and downed a fifth and a windex without anyone knowing. no locks, no guard rail on the stairs, nothing, just some books and the knowledge they'd be gone for hours. i read a lot those days. i still do. i am thankful for that. i started reading before i turned two and nobody believes me when i say that but i know it's true because my parents have it on video.

they're still wrong though. i have more in credit card debt than i do in savings right now, and i will soon join the 69% of americans (nice) with less than $1000 in a savings/checking account to use in an emergency. traveling is over, the security of having money in my savings account is over, i question everything and inwardly grimace even at 5 dollar charges at a store. i'd stop eating to save money if i could, calories avoided and dollars saved. i fear waking up one day and telling people i care about that i can't do anything anymore, i can't go out, i can't see movies, or shows, or shop, or whatever. it doesn't work itself out. my car has a $900+ repair that has to be done some time this year. there isn't any hope really, and soon penny pinching to the extreme will be the norm, and i'll have to get super aggressive about a second job.

i tell people im not good enough and people disagree but they don't know me like i know me. maybe im hard on myself a bit but i also understand the depth of my aloofness, by coldness, my complete lack of social, intellectual, and support skills and mechanisms. everyone i know is good and probably (definitely) can find someone better than me. walking on eggshells around me because i might cut or hit myself or take enough benzos and alcohol to kill an elephant. the people at work are assholes and ive had exes assault me but i cant bring myself to hate or dislike or be mad at anyone except me and that's ok, because it's not victim blaming if i am the perpetrator of the failure and disappointment.

the sun finally came out today after seemingly 10 years of rain and all i could think about was how i will continue to hurt everyone i love, except me, because if i dont love me then it doesnt matter if i hurt myself.

10 feet away a man at work curses and berates me for not recognizing the coffee pot is empty when it's right next to me. i could have filled it if i noticed, but i am somewhere else like i always have been when i most needed to be present. i don't know where somewhere is because there is no home and no comfort in office walls, in a classroom, in a kitchen where dishes pile up. he has to try to get through a meeting drowsy now. maybe later he'll steal some food like he always does. i only hate myself. he could just be really tired.

the floor is littered with goodness

her boots and coat and socks lie crumpled up on the floor and it feels real and tangible and shared. you never used to want people in your room. it was your one and only recluse. months and months of dating meant you slowly opened up to the idea but it was always temporary. now you wake up and wish she could come in and out whenever and you feel so able to trust her that you even like the idea, of her walking in and out any time and leaving bits and pieces of her there, knowing that nothing she does will be invasive or wrong or done out of anything but the same desire to share a space. every morning you wake up and see her things and wish you saw her too. for now you will settle with after work, after class, in between moments when you can feel her skin and taste her lips and laugh together and make shitty puns and talk about life until 3am, wishing you could fall asleep in each other's arms every single night.

everything is worse with politics

fredrik barth's foundational text on transactionalism may, at first blush, appear appealing. but beneath the surface of the idea that all human decisions and action result in a sort of result-based reciprocity is one of those things that is just broad enough to always work. the present author has, indeed, on an unscrupulous social media site designed to create short pontifications, argued that laziness is less a character flaw and more a survival mechanism, or even a value judgment; that in that time, not expelling as much energy is more a reward than doing so. this conclusion is a sort-of inherently transactionalist viewpoint, even without any sort of interaction with another self, in this case, said laziness could very well manifest itself as interaction with one's environment.

of course, barth and later transactionalists appeared to not really grapple with the fact that even if all decisions and actions are a transactional, interlocking response resulting in reciprocity and co-transactional outcomes, little is said about how the information we use to make these transactions can be sorely, sorely lacking.

this wouldn't be a fatal flaw really in barth's argument - we all know we have imperfect and at times limited data. but alas, as a fairly well off norwegian white dude, barth maintained that essentially all transactions; contractual, political, otherwise, were made my individuals with equal standing and resulted in authority figures having to acquiesce to said demands and transactions of the individual.

the present author posits this is not true, and that by advancing this argument into the realm of politics, it becomes, perniciously, irrevocably, stupid.

concurrently, there is a prevailing argument that cultural actors, individuals, authority, anything, attempt to manipulate and use society to achieve profit, and that individual choices maintain and validate authority systems and figures. that it is all a system of equal, co-dependent choices and outcomes.

the problem ultimately is that truth from inquiry, while noble, is inherently invalidating. if there is value in knowing how a transaction will present itself (referred to as the time between "means and end") then one should strive to know all possible outcomes and probabilities. this is impossible, and even more so when you consider the underlying way knowledge expresses itself in this case is via interaction and transaction and not universal epistemological truth.

a driver in a blue subaru impreza was recently kicked out of their apartment for being trans; their landlord made a transaction from an established place of power that rendered equal standing and co-dependent consent moot. the driver looks down at their phone and quickly tries to send a text, while rounding a bend, to their mother, asking if they can crash for a time. a deer jumps out in front of the car, and the driver, whose eyes are not on the road, smashes into the deer. the probability of a deer in that moment was small, the transaction in this case was presenting itself as the text conversation in which the driver attempted to require an end in which they had a place to say. the deer was a confounding, unknowable factor, the landlord was an authority figure whose existence did not require this individual's transactional existence, and indeed, could brute force their way into controlling others. the end result of this... transaction, ultimately, is the same as any other trade or worldview or summation. a sudden end to existence, hastened by unequal standing between haves and have nots.

the storm before the calm

it's 10:15 or so and the 90 degree day has been replaced by a cooler evening, warmth whisked away by rain. a can of some popular, phase inducing, calorie free drink rests in your hand. you pull the ottoman to your feet and sit on the front porch. lightning occasionally flashes in the sky, it's the brightest object now that the nearby KFC is closed and its white and red visage is permanently unlit. a rumble of thunder follows, hesitantly, as if to suggest that maybe it's too quiet and still a night to be this way. the drug house across the street is playing loud music, and while it's not late enough to bother anyone, it messes with the ambience of the storm, of the still gently tapping rain drops and the smell of wet grass, not that you can smell the music. after about 30 minutes two sets of sirens race by the main street to your left, towards downtown, likely the slick and puddle filled roads causing some sort of traffic calamity. you hope nobody is hurt badly. the blanket you grabbed just incase is now getting used, draped over your legs and chest where the flimsy, loose-fitting t-shirt isn't doing its job. usually you'd play music out here, sad, depressing tunes about loss and depression and failure, but you had a good evening, and the storm is calming, so instead you look at pictures of cats and hope that they can also, somehow, find comfort in the simultaneously distant and near storm. it gets to 11:10. your head droops and your eyes close and your phone falls. you jerk awake. best not fall asleep outside. there are mosquitoes now. you'd say stink bugs too but they're indoors as well. you take one last look at the sky, briefly illuminated by one last flash of lightning, and then the thunder comes, the loudest one yet, as if to say good night. the front door slams shut behind you. you're out cold in minutes. two texts go unanswered. the storm slowly moves on.

finding the delta

the sidewalk runs east/west towards lake michigan. it is an 82 degree evening at 7:30. the warm air has you wearing swimming trunks and a t-shirt. you cross a bench where an older couple are singing and playing guitar, and everything changes. the light breeze is now heavy with the smell of fish and algae, and it almost immediately yanks your hat off from your head. it rips a beach ball away and pulls it over a pile of rocks, a pier, a barrier, and into the water. the temperature has dropped... 20? 30? degrees. in mere feet travelled, what was once sunny and warm and calm is now cold and harsh and garish. and you think if only it were that easy. if only it were a few steps, a 5 minute walk, a slight movement, and you too could change, you too could have a completely different environment, aesthetic, body, temperature, look, knowledge, experience, something, anything, because it's not that easy, and it takes time, and it's hard to see the future, like it's hard to see the setting sun, swallowed up by the clouds swirling near the horizon, and if there was a god, you'd accuse her of a cheap metaphor, right then and there.

going back

deep breath, collect self in car. do this. walk in. hands in pockets? head down? like always. be invisible. your clothes are bad, your hair is bad. at least with what you want to wear you can be a projection, now you're just overdressed, formal, stoic, aloof, it gets more negative. stop. there are a lot of people outside. you sit down in a chair and fiddle on your phone before you go in. collect yourself. you can do this. you've pretended to use your phone before. is it dishonest? a bad coping mechanism? does it matter? you aimlessly click away at nothing. more deep breaths. you can do this, remember? you just did. you do. done. later, different area. talk to staff. your jaw is trembling up and down, you try to clench it so that nobody notices but you know they might notice your jaw clenched anyways. rejection. it's also done. you tried. the fear is there. $550 for horrific stomach pains, anxiety, people seeing you, a first step of what, 30? 40? the hallways look and feel the same but your older now and less wise. were you ever wise? who knows. deep breaths in the car. someone is waiting for you when you get out. a hug means the world. just make it until then. you will probably never finish. they will love you all the same.

the rays of sun coming in through the blinds

...are lines against a back - her back - not just a back, you can touch. Not the lines, either. I suppose. It's light, electromagnetic radiation, but you touch her skin and cover up the line and then run your fingertips back and forth. For a second you could convince yourself that like the bed and the shared space and this feeling, everything is warm, that the snow that keeps falling well into April is a trick, an illusion, before you know it you'll be cursing the lack of A/C and the stifling heat of an 89 degree room. You've gotten used to it over the years but you worry if she will want to sleep here and wake up to stifling nature of it all and the feeling of sweat.

There's a hug in a store, a restaurant, any place, and each time it gets a bit easier, the self-consciousness becomes less about self and more about conscious decisions to affirm this. If people are looking they can look, really, maybe, where was I? In the store. Nobody is looking. It's 11 pm and the greeting card aisle is empty but the two of us. The hug feels safe and reassuring and like something that should last forever.

Each dress looks good. You don't understand. You have color preferences, black, blue, maybe a few others, but every one of them looks just right on her. You wonder if puke green would for a brief second and then admonish yourself for such a stupid question; of course it would. She shows you pics of herself over the years and every single one looks good. She scrolls through; different hair styles, different colors, different clothes, different poses, things change but you still find yourself enamored with each one.

Some days you wake up alone and the first thing you smell is the pillow next to yours where her hair rested the night before, until the most painful part of each night; saying goodbye at 2 am, getting up from this space, this warmth, this holding and sharing, walking out to her car, flip flops ungainly down the stairs and against the slick sidewalk. We're back to the fucking April snow again, but I'm kidding myself if I say it'd be easier to say goodbye at 65 degrees than it is at 25. It's for the best, I suppose, both parties need sleep, right? You're not convincing. Is anyone?

There's anxiety in arguments and conflict. There always is. Remember how you shake when you go to class? When you discuss politics with parents? Sometimes when you get home from work even though nothing happened that day? There's shaking. There maybe always will be. Your doctor originally told you to take the Xanax daily, years ago, the prescription still says to do so, maybe the daily anxiety would be better but resistance is a hell of a non-drug and forgetfulness is a hell of a non-remembrance. But you remind yourself that even though you can't communicate, even though you've bungled something or been shitty or whatever, you have each other. There's a walk into the treeline after one such occasion, after argument and shaking and music and the sounds of birds permeating the silence when your brain can't construct a thought. Their are paw prints on the trail and joggers and people with dogs. Suddenly, a jaunt off the beaten path, she takes a sharp turn away from the people, maybe that's the key to everything, the road less traveled; so say inspirational posters and occasionally your brain when you discuss which restaurant to eat at. The details of what conspired in the woods thereafter are messy.

There's some future to construct. There never really was. Now there is. Of road trips and coming home and cat pictures and someone having your back. Life is hard alone; it's hard together too - what isn't - but the little texts and pics and smiles and kisses mean even on the worst days there will be highlights, and I suppose that's about as much as you can ask for, not every day can be a good day, but hopefully the bad ones are a little less severe now. She reaches out to touch you on the couch while you eat the noodles she brought to you. It was a bad day. It's much better now. You still don't know what the best response is when you get the late night text saying "I love you." Han Solo is cool, but that gets old eventually, right? Say the same but amend a "too" onto the end? Why is this so hard? It's not. Her responses are great. No big deal. Sorry Finn. The next morning, it's 10 am and phantom phone vibration sensations set in. There's an excited anxiety for the first text. Or all of them. Or what to respond. Maybe you just wanted to ring out one more Star Wars reference. Stay on target.

In a car you share string cheese and eat it like corn on the cob, she laughs and you laugh and now you have a reference, an in-joke, you can always come back to it and smile. It's not just the humor, the ridiculousness, it is that shared moment, the positive upswell brought forth by the spontaneity of the hilarity, the warm expressions, her head thrown back and her hair draped down across her shoulders and the car seat. A strong feeling of contentment.

You have it a lot lately. Other feelings, too. Your boss won't communicate. Your money is still evaporating, months after you figured it couldn't get any worse. It didn't. It just never got better. There's a class in a few weeks. Remember all the times school made you want to self-harm, hide, disappear, give up? You're walking back in. Fifth time is the charm now? You can't remember how many times. Does it matter? Failure is the beaten path this time, and the side jaunt feels distant. Your closest friend is in a strung out medical emergency. Travel is probably over, the immense luxury afforded to you in tatters, like the car whose brakes are squeaking again. Remember all those friends who left? They never came back. But there's a voice inside you that says you have more support than ever, a feeling that maybe this time will be different, because something very important is different, and there's no more doing this all alone. You're used to that, the alone-ness, you have to unlearn it, but it's worth it, and you feel optimistic about things. Not all things, but some things, for the first time in a while. The early part of the year was rough.

It's the evening. There's no more light coming in through the blinds. In nervous excitement, you keep peeking through them, every few seconds, waiting for a green car to show up. Your neighbors might suspect you for drugs if they weren't dealing themselves. You know that the light doesn't have to come through the blinds and onto her back later on when she lies there. She's right next to you. The light is already in the room.

The Odds

The asshole friend gets his entire education at NYU Tisch School of the Arts paid for by his mom. He knew how to use the special effects software they used in Lord of the Rings in high school, he taught himself. Just like he taught himself triple rack focuses, lighting, camera work, professional grade photography, advanced piano, editing, some screenplay writing, audio design. Whiz. Wins hundreds of dollars in high school in film festivals across the country. As a kid. Goes to college. Graduates. Gets complimented by a famous indie director when he shows him a film he made.

Ten years later his presence is gone. The blog he used to maintain has no posts for years. His IMDB page doesn't have any new films listed. First for two years. Then three. Then four. The program he made to help women on campus immediately report unsafe situations is barely downloaded by anyone, languishing at the end of the Google Play store and the Apple store. Richard Dawkins, the narrator for a game he once made, a raging sexist Islamophobe. He texts me one day tacitly admitting he's... depressed? In a bad place? Years of work for nothing. Now living in New York. I'm sure it's expensive. He could move back home, but his parents are long ago divorced and hate each other, and most of his friends are spread across the state or country.

My mom told me a long time ago if she could go back in time she would go to college and become a nurse to help people. She couldn't go to college because she grew up poor. Nobody in my family has a college degree. That includes my extended family; grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. All the same lacking piece of paper. My cousins girlfriend is in med school and wants to work in a hospital. He (cousin) works in a factory and his parents, who own two houses, let him live in their older, smaller one for free. That uncle (his father) makes really good money, well into 6 figure incomes. He hates women and black people. Most people in their family do to some extent.

The present author could, as originally envisioned, self-publish a collection of poor short stories that have now been rejected from all 40+ attempts to get them published. But to do so would require hundreds of dollars, tying a full name to an existence that family could dig up, and using a medium (Amazon publishing) that would get even more meager views than this blog does. Of course, the benefit would be the 0.0000000000001% odds that it gets lucky and catches on, but such odds are so low that, as enumerated in a bunch of pithy, unglamorous, poorly written blog posts over the last several years, perhaps life is about knowing when to give up on them, and use that $300 dollars commissioning a cover would take on covering 3 months worth of insurance so that the present author can panic a bit less about money for 90 more days. If that's not worth the price of admission, well, then who knows what is.

Time Flies; Time Doesn't Fly

A common English idiom maintains that "time flies when you are having fun." Common parlance also routinely admonishes a slow work day for being one in which time descends to a crawl because of the lack of activity. That the very awareness of time, and the lack of busyness, creates a scenario in which one's existence may seem extended, even if uncomfortably, and even if only by perception and not objectivity. Given the generally universal behavioral drive towards living (as opposed to, say, dying), one might proclaim that, then, "having fun" is indeed against one's aptitude for survival, given that it can trick your brain into perceiving time as shorter; thus, to increase one's very existence on this planet, or at least, their perception of one's existence on this planet, one must be constantly under a state of suffering of the ignominy of routine boredom, something that, to the present author's chagrin, comes easy. However, given also that said time at work or ignominious boredom can often lead one to a certain l'appel du vide, one must also surmise that, no matter how one chooses to express their time, one is either flying towards death, or in the case of the latter, perhaps falling into it.

Tradeoff

The present author gave up the privilege of college education - thousands of dollars a year many are told from a young age, cruelly but realistically, are unobtainable to have - in order to enjoy the privilege of travel. Of seeing more countries in one's 20s than most see in a lifetime. Of course, the present author now can both no longer travel, nor afford a 4 year degree - much less achieve comfortably, either - so the tradeoff, in retrospect, was more of a loan against the future, in desperation, to try to create any semblance of enjoying the present. The memories of the unique and wonderful experiences are there, but they've been replaced by rust spots on an old Camry, the knowledge that a 2 year degree is meaningless (so say the stats, the data, the present author's father, friends, and more), and realization that if it was supposed to be fun while it lasted - said economic fortune and geographical privilege - and it wasn't, really, then what does that leave the rest of life, when even said luxuries are gone, replaced by the mundanity of a 100+ year old house, a breaking down car, a breaking down body, a passion (writing) whose ability to conjure up worlds and characters has disappeared, possibly forever, storytelling fun enough until everything needed to be said had been said (poorly), and what was left was staring, like we all do, at an LED screen, cursing the blank space, the social media, the newscaster, the world.

cut off at the knees

'Family obligations' as a term feels apt, insomuch as so much of what we do for family is out of a sense of obligation. One wonders where this obligation comes from; the financial stressors of raising a kid that as one gets older one recognizes and seek to pay back? Who knows. Is enjoyment something that should be a primary goal? Is knowledge? My teen self would have said the latter at all costs, but as years of self-harm and depression and anxiety took its toll, my cursory answer began to morph.

I'm a shithead. I don't really deny that, and I have made mistakes that a lot of people have and haven't made, and have committed a lot of fuckups, even ones I am sure I am not aware of. So it behooves me to question if obligations - to friends and family - are worthy endeavors. Life is not full of doing only what we enjoy, but the balance has never been, perhaps, what we most want, what Keynes and others envisioned 100s of years ago as efficiency skyrocketed and technology flourished. We commit ourselves to displeasure to try to wring pleasure from what we can, in ways that are inefficient and temporary (large TVs? Backlogs of video games to never play?).

In the last few months the present author has fraternized with people whose values are, to say the least, consistently inconsistent with said author. While in some cases these values are superficial and manageable, in other ways they represent deep-seeded values, how one sees other people, women, PoC, trans individuals, and more. In many cases, these people are family, in others, they were attempted friends. We all grapple with when we draw the line, and life is full of compromises and the like. Peter Jackson in his movie directing history with LotR and the Hobbit was not terribly kind to animals in the filming process, and the movies, much like the books, are replete with racism and sexism. But I do enjoy them I suppose, as my partner pointed out to me, so there is value to be gained.

Is there value to be gained in these other social events where discomfort reigned? But perhaps more fundamentally; is the discomfort a result of a toxic combination of social anxiety, introversion, and perfectionist standards? Many of my closest friends have, unintentionally, misgendred other close friends of mine, and while I correct them, it seems to only fix itself temporarily, before resorting back to he/she in inaccurate ways. But I accept them given our relationship and their other values. Or perhaps accept is too strong a word, because even now we talk less and I cringe at their statements at times and their pushback to things I value, denigration of PC culture and the like that escapes their lips.

So I wonder; do I like LotR because it is easy, but not the family and social fraternations because it isn't, and with effort I could not only address the poor jokes and environment but also derive value? Do I shortchange myself and others the chance to grow? Or if I don't, do I indirectly or directly harm others by condoning their behavior? The internet is littered with articles and op-eds as Thanksgiving approaches about how abandoning and at least countering the bigoted uncle is not just Good, but Required.

As I sat at a kava bar with anxiety increasing, wishing for a hit of Xanax or something, I wondered the same. As I sat with family members who joked about black people or women I wondered the same. Do I compromise on what is easy and not what is hard? Do I owe a family who loves me more leeway or time? Do I cutoff too many people out of a perfectionist demand I never even meet? Am I a hypocrite for doing so? Do we all, in the end, reveal ourselves to be nothing more than contradictory trash heaps of hate and flaws and insecurity and bigotry so much so that selectivity is flawed and overdone? Find out more next time, on a blog in an empty corner of the web.

Revisiting Desire

Revisiting desire, one finds that, perhaps the most pertinent desire that many of us maintain is the desire to be better. Lebron James desires, nay, endeavors, to be a better basketball player at all times. And yet, a perfunctory glance at efficiency numbers, real plus minus, and more, shows he has mostly been playing at his otherworldly peak for over a decade now. While he has, say, improved at his 3 point shooting, his defense and stamina has taken a step back with age.

I use this example because nobody would criticize a world class athlete, surgeon, writer, etc., for desiring to be better. Without denigrating the work, effort and drive to be better, and the fact that, for many, this journey is a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself, one must wonder, then, if the desire to be better is reinforcing. That is, we desire to be better in a way that is hard to achieve. Given that practice accounts for something like 15% of success, and given that success often only creates a desire for more success, one finds that the apathetic shrug of a black sheep family member, who, say, never got married, or never 'achieved' what others did, might be the most enlightened amongst us. A conversation with my mother many months ago, for instance, in which she spoke of how she worked 70+ hours a week to go from lower-middle class to middle to upper-middle, was used as an argument for work being the great equalizer. A probing question - what if there had been an injury, or sickness, or natural disaster, relegated her to the admission that her success probably would not have been achieved. This is uncomfortable to admit, because it gives a preponderance of significance to luck in terms of what drives our success. Bill Gates was not at all the first to invent a GUI, and Apple probably to this day has older former workers who curse his name in vain, but through a series of coincidences, breaks, talent, and yes, some hard work, he became the wealthiest person on earth for a two decade period.

To bring this back to the point, while also staying within the realm of sports and tech, people like Lebron, or Jeff Bezos, and others, appear to be attempting to achieve constant, continual improvement. They desire to be the best, have the most wealth, and then when they achieve that, only want more. Given that this overwhelming desire can affect even the very top 0.001% of athletic human beings and the world's wealthiest, one does wonder if desiring to be better is a cycle that will never resolve itself. We desire to be better, in order to accrue more of what we desire, which will never meet our desire, so we desire to continue to be better. Lebron James once dropped his warmup clothes at the feet of a kid whose job was to collect them from teammates and offered to grab them for him, Jeff Bezos built a company in which thousands of workers require food stamps, pass out in overheated warehouses, pee in bags in their delivery vehicles to save time, and are denied breaks of any kind. Their desire gave them the ability not just to suffer, but to bring suffering to those around them.

The 'lazy' family member (and the present author is increasingly convinced laziness is a coping mechanism, or survival mechanism, and not an innate trait or learned trait or any trait at all) may be chided by family members and friend for their lack of achievement. But as they sit at home happy, content, absolved from employing people who shit in bags in cars and have heat stroke in warehouses where they work 12 hour shifts, perhaps there is something to be learned.

The lazy family member desires a nice meal, and goes out to eat a place they can barely afford. They stress over bills and employment in ways that Bezos or Lebron never will. Perhaps that's the lesson. No matter what we do or don't do, the fact that safety and comfort is a desire guaranteed by no social order or government and that we fail to free ourselves from it in any way leads us to put ourselves in positions where we can self-sabotage, perhaps the only innate trait we most commonly share.

That the present author writes this and continues to wish to be a better writer, friend, person, singer, etc., and more, in ways entirely unachievable, is not an irony lost amongst anyone.