I have several points

Last month or so, I wrote about how I wanted to say something, and how I wanted to write the truth. I wasn’t real clear on what exactly it was I was trying to say, though I dropped a few hints and said a few things about it. I know what I want to say, I really do, I’m just not sure how to say it. Hmm. I had a shitty childhood. Straight up. I’m saying it right here. Both of my parents would probably argue that it’s better compared to a Nigerian child who grows up poor and dies young. Tons of internet cynics would too. Lots of people, droves of them. And they might be right. They might agree with the part of me that says that too. But I don’t give a fuck. I had a shitty childhood. It did not leave me as a capable and responsible adult. It did not leave me with a cornucopia of friends and the social experience to match. It did not help me understand much about who I am, though it taught me plenty about who other people want me to be.

This is a tirade, straightforward and up-front. I am complaining about stuff I have already complained about. If you already hate me or hate listening to me complain, please, there’s the little tab up there, x out of it.

My point here is: my life sucks. Or at least sucked for a very long and very influential period. Shit happened. I am sort of over it now, but I really don’t think I can be over it. And certainly, when I go to other people’s houses and meet parents and families that aren’t horribly dysfunctional and made of rational and (relatively) mature people, I do feel jealous in spite of myself. I don’t know if that will ever go away. It’s a dumb thing to get hung up on, and I know it.

So what I want to say comes down to essentially “holy shit, this shit is bullshit, you fuckers.” I hate it so much. I hate the feelings that I went through. I hate the situations I was in. I hate myself for letting it happen, I hate the world for letting it happen, I hate everything. I am a very bitter person. Really, I am. It’s the truth. And I realize, though, that this bitterness isn’t going to get me anywhere. I’m not going to stop this kind of crap from happening to other people just by hating it. So I do my best, whatever I can, to fight it. I wish I could say something really impressive and be all like “oh yeah I stopped like thirty teenagers from suicide by talking them out of it and raised such and such amount of money for foster care and child protective services,” but obviously, I can’t. I suck. I suck too much for that kind of thing. I can barely handle my own issues, let alone solve anyone else’s.

Suicide annoys me. There are large and obvious reasons for a person to want to kill themselves, and I went through all of them. The biggest problem though, Is people’s reaction. They act like it’s a tragic event and attempt to comfort the people they left behind and so on. Suicide hotlines are set up so that really depressed people can talk to someone and get talked out of ending it all. Drugs are prescribed that are supposed to “level” your mood so that you won’t off yourself. All of this shit is bullshit. They’re addressing the symptom (suicide) and not the cause. People don’t just suddenly up and decide to off themselves, they do it because they can’t bear to live in the world. Why not? Lots of fucking reasons, but pretty much all of them come down to other people. My mother is fucking insane. She would whip from caring and being kind to me to being the meanest bitch on planet McBitch. She made every effort to eliminate my control over my life, all while questioning me. “Why won’t you take control of your life, Jacob? Fix your problems, Jacob. You need to look inside yourself and find out where your problems lay, Jacob.” All of this shit was directly related to how psychologically crazy she insisted I was. A new diagnosis popped up for her every couple of months. I went through half a dozen different psychiatric programs. To this day, I am still listed as an emotionally disturbed person in Montgomery County, Maryland. All of this thanks to her. And what bugs me most of all is that I still have a voice in my head that tells me “well, maybe you are crazy, Jake. Maybe she was right.”

That shit made me want to kill myself. I had no control over my life, right when I was a teenager, the time you’re supposed to start taking control of your life. I had no friends, because I was too busy going through the psychiatric wringer. I had no life, my mom wouldn’t let me get a license, let alone drive me anywhere. I had nothing but the material possessions she bought for me. Even those I lost at her whim. I had no options, no way out. So suicide seemed pretty good, but I never did go through with it. I never really had that option either. If there were some legitimate drugs or a nearby bridge or an actual gun at that house, I might not be here bitching about shit.

So anyway, my point is everything sucks and I know why it sucks and I don’t want it to suck any more. I don’t like the way western society is run. I have problems with the fundamental understanding of this society. Yes, it’s partly capitalism, yes it’s partly Christianity, but the problem is bigger than that. The problem is the basic assumptions people make about other people. The problem is our flawed understanding of how people work or how society works. I have a problem with the moral and social underpinnings that allow the average person to accept the wholesale disregard for human life that is so popular today. I have a problem that happens to be the same problem many people have had for a very long time, so it’s often and readily dismissed by those who find change too difficult or too painful to handle.

There are too many of us. That’s all it comes down to. The world is getting rather full, and some of us are taking larger slices of it than others. We have here in America a system that not only allows for it, but morally justifies it with the idea that they’ve somehow contributed more to society than most. A lot of the time when you hear teachers demand greater pay, that’s the message being delivered “we help society more than some corporate slave, pay us better.” It’s a huge sham, of course. Bill Gates didn’t invent the computer, nor did he invent the GUI operating system, nor much else of worth, but his aggressive business tactics propelled his company to the forefront of equally qualified competitors. Nothing Windows does these days can’t be done in some other way. Yet still, he is sitting on a fortune that is the approximate lifetime earnings of about 27,000 average college educated Americans. And no one gives a shit. It’s just how it is. Not even you, you don’t give a shit. You’re reading this and thinking “oh you” instead of being angry. I’m angry. I’m really angry. No one in a society is worth that much. We will not suddenly lose that much of our GDP if Bill Gates died tomorrow. No one will starve, and very few will be unhappy. His wealth is totally contrary to the very system underlying it. And again no one cares.

I’m not saying “abandon money.” Money has a purpose and is pretty handy as far as a human tool goes. I’m saying “Stick to your principles or abandon the pretense.” I’m demanding consistency in message and in action. The stock market at its simplest is not a terrible idea. People collaboratively pool their money and invest it together with other people to make up corporations that can get lots more done than a single person can. Collaboration is important. That’s how we’ve got all of the nice things we’ve got. The problem is when stocks began to be bought with money that people don’t actually have. The problem began when corporations became able to purchase other corporations or spend money on campaign contributions or pay its employees more than its investors. The problem began when people started valuing housing far beyond the actual labor and costs that went into building it. It’s when we lose touch with the purpose of our inventions that we begin to take them for granted and assume that their current iterations are the proper ones. When we forget that a bank’s purpose is not actually to lend money but to hold it and keep it safe from thieves, we allow them to take that money and lend it back to us while charging interest. Banks become a profit-driven organization. You put your money in a bank, and you essentially hand your money to someone who really really doesn’t want to give it back. That was ultimately the cause of the first great depression. People wanted their money back and banks just plain didn’t have it. The numbers in the columns didn’t add up to the amount in the safe.

But I’m getting away from the point. What I’m trying to say, what I want to say is that we as a species need to start thinking as a species. Yes, part of it is that we need to stop thinking “east” and “west” and “Christian” and “muslim” and “this culture” and “that culture.” We’re smarter than that. We’ve identified the mental processes that generate these logical missteps and we may even have found a gene that codes for it. National boundaries are meaningless in this day and age just as they were thousands of years ago. Every single line between “us” and “them” exists solely within our minds.

We need to stop thinking in the short term. Humans in general have this problem, and it’s a very good way of thinking when survival hinges on your short term decisions, it’s very bad when your survival depends on what goals you operate on in the long term. Humans are unique in the animal kingdom of being able to frame themselves in the long term and think past their children all the way to their grandchildren. We really ought to embrace this very divergent quality of ours and start thinking not about how we’re going to get more oil out of the ground, but how we’re going to live without it. It may not happen in 50 years, it may not happen in a thousand, but it will happen, and ignoring it is at our peril. We need to consider what may be happening to the climate. Changes have and will happen, with or without human intervention, and we need solid, sustainable strategies for adaptation. “It’s too expensive” won’t cut it. Money doesn’t exist.

We’re going to run out of space on earth. It’s inevitable. There is literally no way around it. So it baffles me to hear people describing the space program as a waste of time and money. We need to get out of here. We need to get off this planet. Or. And that’s a big Or, we need to cut down and enforce population limits. We can’t stay here and have babies willy-nilly. We cannot have it both ways. It appalls me that we halted operations in space just because a shuttle’s worth of crew members died back in 2003. We would have never gotten here from Europe with that kind of misdirected value for life. I read an article recently about the oil volcano lamenting the 11 people who died. WHO THE FUCK CARES? THIS OIL VOLCANO IS GOING TO KILL US ALL IF WE DON’T DO SOMETHING.

Seriously, almost worse than that are the suggestions that we should blow up some nukes underwater to stop it. What kind of messed up backwards retarded idea is this? This isn’t an oil well, where we pump the stuff out most of the time, following an initial surge, this is a compressed gas and oil volcanic monstrosity that will continue to flow up and out until all the gas is dispersed. If you nuke the sides of it, you’ll just be treated to some hilarious rock shooting action, blasting them out of the hole and only serving to make it wider.

And fucking nukes, my god. We’re already dumping oil into the ocean, are we going to irradiate it too? This is exactly the kind of thinking that led to this disaster: Short term and without concern for the consequences. It’s a problem. It needs to stop. Fixing these disasters, applying safety regulations, making broad statements of concern, these are all aimed at treating the symptoms of this mindset and not the cause.

Most importantly, we must not be complacent. We cannot fall into the familiar old routines of our lives and forget about the world we live in. I don’t care what your personal politics are. I don’t care if you hate everything I’ve said. All I care about is whether or not you are actively expressing yourself. If you feel some way about something, don’t be afraid to let other people know. Don’t flip your shit if they disagree either. That’s just the way it is when there are literally billions of other independent consciousnesses out there. What matters is that you make your life a statement of intent. What matters is that your life has meaning to you. You won’t get that by just going with the flow, living day to day. You won’t get that by staying silent for fear of offense. You’ve only got one life, and that’s gonna end one way or another. Make it count.

Ugh. I feel so dull when I write this stuff. I also hate it. I hate everything I write within a few days of writing it. I literally don’t trust the opinion of anyone who thinks my writing is good, at least when it comes to writing. But that’s me. I have an awful self-image, about half the time. People who take interest in me clearly have something they want from me, because no one actually cares what I’m like. I don’t care how many people prove me wrong, that’s just how I feel most of the time. A lot of that is tied to my childhood. It’s a hell of a downer when your mother treats you as though you were deranged. On the other hand, I try to make the best of it. I’ve got more than one voice in my head, and at least one of them is telling me that I’m doing the right thing and that “Hey, you look pretty good” or “Hey, that was a darn good joke you told.” For every embarrassing conversation that gets played back in my head for some reason, I get a nice positive experience played back some other time. I dunno.

I don’t really practice what I preach. Well, I do, in that I participate in long-term thinking and I seriously don’t let my judgments affect my behavior, but I am not great at expressing myself. I say that here in an expressive essay, sure, but in person I’m really very shy. Like retardedly shy, if you’ve ever spent any time with me, you’d probably notice that. I’ve been working on that, trying to put myself out there more, but it’s still pretty hard. It’s not really that I’m afraid of people, it’s just that I’m afraid that I will go and put myself out there and then hear that cynical part of me talking back to myself. I dunno, I guess I’m just being typical. I better shut up now. I like the people I have been hanging out with forever now okay because I know I can be myself with them and they won’t just up and leave. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s an abandonment thing.

ANYWAY I hope this essay has left you with a little more understanding of who I am. I’d fill these things with my own conclusions, but then you’d just be hearing who I think I am, and not me per se. I am glad that some people bother to read these. I was told once or twice by anonymous to put them in a text file and keep them on my computer and never share them, but then where would I be? What would be the purpose of expressing yourself if you’re not communicating it to someone else? Of course all forms of self-expression are regarded as pointless egocentrism by anonymous, as that is their goal and purpose for being anonymous in the first place. It’s really very interesting.

The New Locality.

Humans escaped Africa by working together. Small tribes of people shared knowledge, tools, food, and love. This altruism is the key factor in humanity’s dominance over all of nature. None of us is as strong as all of us, a concept only shared by colonies of insects in the wild. We worked hard to get where we are today, and most importantly, we worked together. This is true in every society, in every culture, all across history. Altruism is the single most important factor in our survival, more than any amount of intelligence, any number of weapons, or any development in agriculture. Nowadays, however, we don’t live in tribes. We don’t live in communities that have to work together for survival. It’s perfectly possible and incredibly common for people to get along just fine without knowing anyone in their neighborhood. My parents didn’t have any friends. Friends and the like are for school, where you’re forced to rub up with other people and navigate socially. Once you’re done with schooling, all you have to deal with is co-workers, who you don’t get to choose. There’s no reason to make friends, so many people don’t. And why should they? Having friends is tough. There is all sorts of interpersonal drama inevitable with any size of group. You can avoid any of that altogether by simply not having friends. You can’t be disappointed if you don’t care about anyone enough to expect things from them.

That’s the world we live in today, here in suburban middle class America at least. Social interaction is voluntary and altruism outdated. Only here in this society, only here in this culture will you hear the idea that humans are all “competing” or that we’re all “ruthless motherfuckers who would stop at nothing for want of some resource” or the idea that humans are “inherently selfish.” It’s not surprising. We live in a culture that gives us the luxury of being selfish, but without significant moral or historical grounding for this attitude, so we start making the assumption that it’s just a base part of human nature and we selectively cherry-pick examples from nature or history or biology to support this simply so that we can justify our culture to ourselves. It’s not that we’re heartless. It’s not that we’ve stopped being altruistic. We just don’t live in a time or a place that supports it. Americans grow up and get out of high school and typically leave their homes and travel some fairly large distances away from their families and hometowns. We have to. We need to go where the jobs are to make a living. Our locality is determined by the fiscal potential of a place, much like nomads traveling the desert in search of oases. The difference is that now it is just you traveling, not your family or your tribe. So communities are destroyed simply by dint of necessity. It’s not a new thing, not at all. Here is a Time article from 1972 covering a book discussing exactly that. The author mentions that his closest relative is 110 miles away. How close is your family? I have two living relatives within fifty miles. Every other one is at least 300 miles away.

So here we have a situation that is anathema to the very functioning that humans developed to survive. It’s being held together by artificial concepts like money and the over-emphasis of very real concepts like individualism, but it’s not enough, and people know that. Have you ever wondered why high school musical is so popular that they went back in time and made a prequel called grease? Have you ever heard the phrase “high school was the best 4 years of my life?” What makes high school so magical and different? It’s the community. It’s the fact that everyone knows everyone else. That jokes can be shared across a huge body of people because they’re all familiar with the subject matter. That the people you see are the same people you’re going to see for the next four years. It is magical. It is totally outside the scope of adult experience. Like it or not, here in America and now at this time, you’re not likely to experience anything like it ever again. Sometimes I describe Las Positas as “high school part 2.” It would be true, except that there is no real sense of attachment to LasPo. Even at the larger schools, unless you’re in a fraternity or a member of dozens of clubs, the experience is just a hollow mockery of what high school was. People realize that. That’s why high school is so thoroughly fetishized in our culture. That’s why ridiculous things like alumni clubs, yearbooks, reunions, letter jackets, and all that stuff exist. When you get a job, you don’t take a lot of pictures and conglomerate your experience into a book every year. If you’re lucky there may be an employee of the month program or the occasional snacks in the breakroom.

So we do realize that we need community. We realize it to the point of worship. And we do try our best. There are dozens of clubs and groups and hangout spots even here in Livermore, all trying to keep a membership going and find people with similar interests to do stuff with. Heck, before it became over-saturated thanks to starbucks and its ilk, coffeeshops used to be a major hangout for the literati. But none of these are working, because not enough people care or are aware of their existence or are too scared to try or they simply don’t like and don’t trust strangers. That’s understandable; strangers are pretty much the most horrifying thing you’ll meet on a day to day basis. Other people walking around with the free agency and potential to kill you are good enough reason for many to stay in. But even so, everyone wants to “be a part of something,” even if that something is hating strangers. Humans are incredibly community oriented. What’s stopping us is not internal or mystical or interesting, it’s just simple geography. We live too fucking far from each other.

That’s not really new either. We spread across the U.S. pretty quick and spaced ourselves out quite a lot, under the (correct) assumption that the land would be totally worth something someday. For a long time, we didn’t have any real way of distant communications. There was the mail, which you could get on trains and such, but that still took a fairly large amount of time and was largely unavailable to most folks until the middle to late 19th century. Then we invented the telegraph, which was just like mail, but faster and shorter. It was rare and not particularly widespread until we ended up building lines all over the place. Good timing too, because we invented the telephone shortly after, which used those lines. And woah. Suddenly you’re hearing voices from the other side of the country. The phone played and still plays a huge role in the American life today. It has long since displaced mail as the primary method through which families keep in touch. It’s just something about hearing the human voice. Now we have the internet.

The internet blows the doors open for non-local interactions. It took all of our previous methods of communication, combined them, and added more. Want to send a letter? Send an e-mail. Want to have a chat with someone? Use any of the dozens of voice transmission services available for free. Want to post on a bulletin board for people in your area? Craigslist. Want to make friends with people who have similar interests? Join one of the hundreds of thousands of internet forums or BBSs. Hell, just want to talk to strangers and see their faces? Chatroulette is but one of several websites that do just that. Want to share the stuff you do with your time? Take your pick of twitter, facebook, tumblr, livestream, whatever. It’s amazing. This is where it’s at. These forums are communities, with personalities, drama, crises, all of the things that would affect a community in real life. Even better, these communities are totally voluntary unlike early human tribes, so you can be certain to find people who actually do think like you or share your interests. And if it upsets you, you can simply walk out without the bothersome worry of dying in the wild. At last we have overcome the problems of distance and isolation. At last we have transcended the physicality of our bodies and discovered a new locality, one that is not limited by petty things like “proximity” or “propinquity.”

In the end, though, it’s me sitting here with my laptop. Mern, as much as I love her, is just a blinking icon and some text and some low resolution video. Ina is a girl who I might have met once but I probably wouldn’t recognize in real life. Emily is a shout “hey you” and a fleeting glance. Both Gavins are just static pictures and interesting conversations to me. Ryan is an identity on a forum I was banned from plus some pictures. Adam is a guy I met based solely on his putting his aim screenname on 4chan. None of these people are “real” to me in any traditional sense. No matter how complicated and thorough interactions on the internet become, they’ll never be the same as being physically near someone. No matter how many quizzes are taken and pages liked, who you are on the internet is still a grossly distorted version of who you are in person. Many are comfortable with this facsimile, just as many use it only as a supplement to their “real” lives. It fills a need, even if not as satisfactorily as it could. Socialization lite, now without the potential anguish of a “Real” relationship. Still, physicality exists. Still, locality is a barrier. Still, I am trapped here in myself.

Vance asked me last Saturday “are you going to go home and write another status about how your friends redeemed yourselves?” and I was like “what? How can you redeem yourselves again? You already redeemed yourselves once and you haven’t fucked that up yet.” I think at the time I was missing the point. Apparently I know people who legitimately care what I think of them, which is entirely fascinating to me because it happens to be near a time when I’ve finally managed to get over caring so much what other people think of me, at least to the crippling degree I did before (I still fret constantly over stupid things I’ve said and done, I just do my best to not let it affect my behavior) and it’s throwing me for something of a loop.

In the same week I talked to two (2) different people who professed a desire to live a life of hermitage (they also know each other. I am intensely interested in whether or not they have said this to each other and formed some sort of mutual hermit pact.) which I find endlessly fascinating, as these two are people that I think of as being very “cool” and “sociable” because I hear about all sorts of parties and things that they do that I don’t and I feel dumb and a bit jealous. It’s funny that they should mention hermitage to me, because frankly I’ve been there. When I was 14-15-16-17-18 that was all I wanted to do in life. Social interaction was too fucking scary. It took years to get out of that mindset, and those were pretty much years where I didn’t talk to anyone that wasn’t essentially virtual. I was invited to one thing by a crazy guy who I have immense respect for during that time and it was a ton of fun, though it scared the crap out of me at the time.

I’m really not saying “don’t do it, man” or anything, because frankly I think people should experience everything they can. I just feel a bit sad and dumb that they’re just now deciding to pursue this just after I finished realizing how shitty it really was. Plus I feel a bit ironic that they would tell me that they wanted to live a life totally away from people, because that’s essentially what I do.

Maybe I’m just being unrealistic. Mern tells me, though, about all this cool stuff she does with or did for her friends and I feel… well a bunch of stuff. Partly jealous, partly happy, partly some sort of vicarious pleasure in hearing about things that I’d like to think that I would do if I were in that situation. She’s the kind of person who bakes things for people and shows up at their dorms with candy and hugs when they’re sad and cries on the phone for hours when faraway friends have their mothers in the hospital and stuff like that. I just think “wow” most of the time when hearing this.

I tell people that I want to be a prophet, but I tend not to be clear on what exactly I want to be a prophet of (a religion where everyone is fucking everyone else all the time, I said once). I want to be a prophet of peace and love, I suppose. There’s some great words. Jamie Whyte terms them “hooray” words, words you can say and everyone will say “hooray!” like “justice” or “democracy.” They’re words that you can say and everyone in your audience will have a different idea of what it means. And by not elaborating you can avoid alienating some portion of your audience who disagrees with you. It’s a very popular political trick. I’ll go kind of against the grain here and define exactly what I mean by peace and love.

Peace as in the unconditional agreement not to harm other people. Don’t be a dick. On a personal scale, it’s pretty much unavoidable, but on an international scale, it’s downright unforgivable. There is no fucking reason to start a war with another country. There never has been and there never will be. This includes interfering with another country’s governance. Putting economic and political pressure on other nations simply because you don’t trust their motives is schoolyard bullshit and totally inexcusable, especially from nations who spend so much time trumpeting their impressive “freedom.” Fortunately, globalization should cover this. The continued economic and cultural merging of the globe should hopefully result in a relatively homogenous world and (I dare to dream) political stability under a unified world government. Or it will collapse into petty squabbles over resources or fascinating proxy wars between corporations. We’ll see.

Love as in the understanding that every other person is another person; complete with all the same fears, hopes, desires and needs as you. I envision a world where everyone has a friend or three like mern, and everyone does what she does for everyone else. Because being lonely really fucking sucks. Love is about the connections people have to one another, not some mystical ideal, not a single emotion. Love is turning to your fellow man and saying “He too, is me.” It is about turning to your fellow woman and saying “She too, is me.”

I’m not saying everything will be perfect. Far from it. Putting yourself out there and caring how other people think is almost always a risk. Interacting with other people and investing yourself into these interactions is almost always a whirlwind of suck. There will always be relationships that fall through, spurned lovers, cheating, lying, ugly rumors, and so on. I just want no one to be alone in this. Everyone needs a friend like Mern, and they’re only lying to themselves when they say they don’t.

I hate all of this. It scares the living Jesus out of me. (Literally. I renounce Christianity every time someone shouts “boo!” behind my back) I spent my life acting more or less like this song here by Regina Spektor that made me cry so much when I first heard it I tried to go to sleep to make it stop. It just reminded me of how totally lonely I really am. (Yeah yeah, what a fucking pussy loser. Crying over a song he must be a huge fucking faggot. You can say what you like, but I already said it to myself. You’d just be repeating after me. I can outdo Gavin for self-deprecation; I just don’t go on about it.)

ANYWAY. My point is that I spent so long trying to get along without anyone else that I’m just absolutely frightened of opening up to anyone. But I’m not a brain-dead moron like Daniel, and I realize that Opening up is exactly what I need if I am ever going to get out of this horrible funk. If I ever expect anyone to be friends with me, first I’m gonna have to be friends with them, and all. I remember hearing that a lot in elementary school. I still think this just goes to show that you learn everything you really need to learn about the world from Disney movies and kid stories and that just gets fucked up later by reactionary cynicism that declares “Oh ho, that must not be true because it was made for kids” or that ridiculously pervasive lie “It’s not that simple.”

So I am spending all my time trying to not be a hermit, to the best of my ability and tolerance for doing things out of the norm. If you click on my profile there (or take my word for it, if you’re reading this on my blog) I copied and pasted the Meyers-briggs personality thing from some site or other that I consistently get, ENTP. There’s a bit I particularly like that goes “Aside from those two areas, ENTPs tend to be oblivious of the rest of humanity, except as an audience -- good, bad, or potential.” which I find pretty accurate. I hate myself for it, but I’m pretty judgmental of everyone I meet, though I do my best to not let it color my actual actions, I’m polite to everyone regardless of how hideous ore dumb I think they are. That said, it does provide myself with ammunition to argue myself out of making friends with people. Stuff like that. As if the cognitive dissonance wasn’t apparent enough, I more or less love everyone I know. I am annoyingly uninterested in my own activities to the point that I will pretty much drop everything and go help someone else if I really thought it would help.

I dunno, here I am back to talking about myself and making statements that I’ll regret and hate in 3-5 days. I should probably stop here.

I just feel like dicks lately and I wanted to tell no one in particular. Actually I wanted to tell one guy I really respect, but he raincheck’d. Now I’ll feel dumb bringing it up again because I already wrote about it and I variate wildly from assuming everyone reads everything I write to assuming that no one reads anything I write.

Yep, I’m nuts.

“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.”

I am a lucky person. I get to listen to impassioned speeches about how great las positas is because when I go to “real” college (or “a four-year”) there won’t be all this support to help me learn the material. I’ll be in a big room with two hundred students and a professor that doesn’t know my name and the class will be entirely lecture and then a midterm and a final and that’s it. The only people who will really be helping me will be graduate student researchers (interestingly enough, the very people my aunt hires at berkeley) who are essentially TAs. It will apparently be a horrifying experience, compared to the high-school-like student numbers at laspo. I am very lucky I do not have to go through this.

The thing is, it’s the high-school-like classes that are killing my grade and me as I keep getting hit with mundane busywork assignments that serve only to inflate the grade, rather than assist in comprehension. Sure, ultimately it’s my responsibility to complete this stuff, but when I can take a class that’s purely a midterm and a final and get an immensely better grade than a class that has homework and projects up the wazoo, there’s clearly a problem somewhere. Humh.

“Jake you’re just a lazy asshole”

Yeah, pretty much.

It’s my choice to be one, I suppose. It’s my freedom here in America to choose lazy assholedom over studious application of talent. Capitalists and libertarians might say “well, you’ll never get anything that way. There’s no way to make money without working hard (besides inheritance, which you clearly don’t have).” I hugely beg to differ. If I wanted to make money I could totally do it. Lots of lazy assholes do, somehow. They trade stocks. They make connections in a business and jump straight to manager. They start businesses and cheat on their taxes. They start websites based off of other people’s ideas and then spin them off to be sold for huge chunks of money to suckers larger businesses who think that the advertising revenues alone is totally worth it.

“Jake, those people work hard.”

No, they don’t. They most certainly do not work as hard as the millions of people who hold more than one job just to pay rent and utilities. What’s the difference? They’ve got connections. Or they’re smarter. Or they’ve just got a different worldview. I dunno. Tim Rogers, still my favorite writer even though he hasn’t responded to my legit and totally awesome game ideas, wrote recently “All around the world, people like myself and Bob [Pelloni, of bob’s game fame] are finding ourselves in a state where legitimately earning money is about as complicated as downloading pirated music.” And it’s sorta kinda true. It’s really bugging me for two reasons, those being “fucking fuck you capitalism” and “why am I not getting some of that?”

I dunno, this stuff sucks dicks to think about. I have been wildly blitzing through money lately, a shocking twist from last year when making rent was such a huge deal that I would often end up finding myself with exactly twenty dollars to last me two weeks and budgeting out groceries to fit. Now I ended up moving back in with my dad and my attitude has gone totally downhill (so regardless of what happens this fall I’m moving the hell out). I don’t know what to tell you.

I love school, though. I can’t tell you how much joy I take in listening to lectures on rituals and anthropoidal evolution and political maneuverings and all of this stuff. I want to be in academia for the rest of my life. I want to do research and learn everything I can about anything I feel like. Leave no stone unturned, no argument mystified. I want to be one of those people that news magazines call up and say “hey what is your opinion on this?” and I whomp out some two thousand totally accurate words stating and defining a position. I want to start a cultural movement that sweeps the entire world and paves way for a proper unified world government and hegemony, giving globalization a real chance at succeeding and incentivizing space exploration as the next logical step of human existence, now that all of earth is one unified government and wars are outmoded methods of expression and limited to skirmishes between rival local factions that are quickly pacified by a council of affair and police corps made of the countrymen of that region.

Yes.

It’s all very radical and I’ll bet people who’ll argue against it are a dime a dozen. I want to shoot these people. Ugh. I hate traditionalists. I hate people who thrive solely on nostalgia for a time they hardly remember. I hate people who are old and don’t appreciate the new. I’m not saying that novelty is really a great factor in decision making (no suh) but for christ’s sake, neither is nostalgia. Seriously, social conservatives and reaganites and all those people who seem to think the middle ages were the best ages because “knights were still chivalrous and wars were fought with honor” (HAH) and then they dress up and prance around and pine for something they have absolutely no experience with outside of what little writing and oral histories survived them are infuriating. It gets worse as the years move up. People who whine about how cell phones are destroying the capacity for people to form communities and neighborhoods (that shit died in the fifties) or that the internet and video games are the devil because they’re teaching kids things without censorship are even worse. No renaissance fan, no matter how rabid, legitimately considers the idea of re-instituting a medieval society. At worst they simply want to integrate parts of it they like into the modern era. But those other folks have hundreds of thousands of people who support the censorship and destruction of our communications infrastructure simply for the cause of recreating an idyllic past that exists solely in their minds.

It’s a stubborn, dogmatic point of view, and it’s remarkably difficult to defeat. Just a hint of the mindset was demonstrated in the demonization of the healthcare bill and the uncanny lockstep reaction to its passage. This is not the way humans will survive. This is not the way we have survived. The reason we have all this great shit, hell the reason these people can behave like this is because some humans were deviant little bastards who decided the world ought to be different than it was or is. Social conservatism is literally the cancer that is killing the human race. They’re eating the telomeres of society. We’re going to end up with another dark age because we’re halting innovation in favor of delusion.

Man, that just bugs the fuck out of me.

So let’s kick ass, you and me. Let’s tell those fuckers to shove it up their crusty assholes and forge ahead to a brilliant new future. Let’s maniacally flail around in desperation, doing everything we can to do anything we can. Let us lose the wisdom to know the difference between what we can and can’t change, but gain the courage to change it anyway. Let us ditch the patience and understanding to accept what is and forge our own path through life. Let us make mistakes, let us triumph, let us fail spectacularly and succeed amazingly.

Let us live our lives on our terms, not the terms others shackle us with. We are alive and we are always free.

Turns out I can totally backdate these.

Good morning. I went swimming today. It was fun, but I ate too much pizza last night so I felt kind of ill afterward. Woah hold on. I just saw a commercial for a scooter with a swivel wheel. Woah. Man. Woah, here’s a commercial about reading the serving size on the food you eat.

What the fuck? Being a kid these days is weird.

But this super hero super squad show is great! It’s condensing all of those complex and horrible plotlines in the comics to a sort of nice summary. They’ve got all sorts of stuff just in this episode. Skrulls, the super-skrull, hulk and things weird animosity, fucking thanos and his infinity gauntlet, which appears not to be as great as it usually is. “zounds! My symbolic tool of righteous aggression!” Out of thor losing his hammer (which is also symbolic for a penis, aww yeah)

Oh hey check it out. The same commercial for zoobooks they had on like fucking 12 years ago when I was a kid. I remember zoobooks. I had a ton.

Oh god. The skrull invasion plan was on a facebook page.

Oh god.

I think I’m in love.

Oh, I see. Thanos was really a skrull. Explains the lack of ULTIMATE UNIVERSE DESTROYING POWER. “it makes string cheese. For all their advances, the skrulls were never able to make string cheese. String theorists would make a fortune from this tube.”

Oh man. That was so great.

Anyway, yeah being a kid is hella weird these days. Like there are so many things that companies are expected to push on you to keep you healthy. Responsibility for this thing has shifted largely from parents to the entertainment companies that sell things to parents for their kids. Why? Cause parents have money. also corporations are evil. Evil like taxes. Anyway so you grow up being told on the tv “go outside and jump around and do stuff. Stop watching tv” and you end up largely ignoring it cause what the fuck, you’re watching tv. God damn. If I wanted to be outside I would be outside.

Though, I guess it’s not really new. The spinach industry totally ran the popeye comic. If you learn nothing from it, you learn that hamburgers hake you fat and worthless and that spinach makes you beat up dudes you don’t like. Maybe I’m just being silly. I just get kind of annoyed when videogames ask me to take a break like once an hour. God damn, what happened to free enjoyment of the media I’m consuming? By George, I am going to write a book one of these days that between every chapter says “Get up and go outside and meet people, you horrible shut-in. This book will do nothing to help your life.” That way irate readers can’t sue me when they realize they’ve wasted their life reading a series of cheap starcrafty knockoffs (I’ll call them “Spacewar: the final war in space.” The first novel will be subtitled “the obscure threat” or “fighting advanced”) and become horrible neckbeards who spend their lives fapping to ships of the hot three titted alien bimbo chick and the shy nerdy girl with the glasses that maintains the space library.

Man, the other day I was at a borders wandering around and not buying things (pfft, paying for books. That’s what libraries are for. I have been not paying for things long before napster or any of that shiz) and I wandered into their study section. So that got me to thinking. There are absolutely hundreds of books in this section, right? There are all these books on. Passing all manner of tests: GREs, LSATS, AP courses, and so on. It got me to thinking how weird this was, that there’s an entire cottage industry of helping people pass these tests that are supposed to be indicative of how much a person has learned or exactly how smart they really are. So instead these tests become not about how smart a person is, but how much money they spent on study books, or how well they absorb these study books. What the hell is up with that? AP courses especially. They’re supposed to be something for students who find their regular classes mindlessly dull (*cough*) to look forward to, because they’re all college and at a higher level. Then the AP tests started counting for college credit (or maybe they always did. Dunno) and it became an important part of an achiever’s job to get a 5 on the tests so that they can secure an early start for their future college careers. Fuck the achievers man. They don’t give a shit about the material. Seriously, you talk to them. They have no passion beyond scoring that A. They treat school like a job.

And school is a job these days. Kids go to school to learn valuable knowledge for their future careers. It says so right on the mission statements of most high schools. That’s also fucked up. Why does a high school have a mission statement? No wonder everyone hates it. You don’t go to school to learn about the world around you. You go to school to pass a test and get a job that pays you money so you can afford to have kids and pass on your genes. School is just a means to an end, and that end is your inevitable death. If you’re lucky, your kids will have done well in their schools so they can afford to support you on top of their families and you die comfortably in a nice rest home.

“oh no, that is not me” you think. “I am destined for something much more fascinating and also I never want kids or to get married.” Ha. Ha. Ha. You don’t think that millions of other people don’t also think the exact same way? Simple economics and statistics dictate that your dream is foolish and irresponsible and simply not likely. What’s all the worse to me, is that these delusions are inevitable in an environment like this. You spend your childhood growing up and watching cool kids and cool people on tv and in movies doing awesome things and you decide that you also want to be cool and awesome and that eventually through sheer moxie or something, you too will obtain the coolness of these tv and movie people. Yes.

I used the word “I” 158 times in this document, not counting that one. Man I am so self-centered.

Woah man. I just watched an entire episode of aqua teen hunger force. I didn’t laugh once. What is this thing on tv for. And yet like a sucker I sat through the entire thing. I was thinking about making this into a rant about tv, but I thought “naw, no one actually watches tv any more.” At least hardly anyone I know does. Which is good. Good for you guys. Tv is awful and terrible and just awful.

It’s kind of fascinating to me how very ocular we are as a species. We evolved this vision essentially to help us avoid running into branches and to see fruits from afar and we’ve taken it to the point where we’ve got devices that are pretty much standard in pretty much everything that show us all manner of abstract information. It’s totally fascinating to me and probably inevitable for a species like –

You know what they say “if there’s snow on the fields, plow it from both ends”

Sorry, still watching tv.

Anyway, a species like us.

Wow that was the weirdest show. Titan maximum or something. It was sort of like a high speed webcomic.

By the way have I mentioned that I love webcomics? They’re so great. They’re a visually appealing way to get a nice story and some good characterization across. And since they’re pretty much self-published, censorship is non-existent. Like for serious, ever since I found “kong: the gay barbarian” I have not needed porn.

Huh. “drinky crow and gabby” (or something) was pretty interesting. It’s basically just “draw blood, guts, use bizarre 3d cell shading techniques.” But it had some fascinating writing. The show was a snappy commentary on the purpose and concept of god and religion, delivered entirely too quickly. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t very funny, but it was contemplative.

Anyway webcomics. Yeah man. I read them. I spent the last couple of days being absurdly depressed and reading the entirety of shortpacked and finally getting around to reading questionable content. I am so full of weird transformers references and witty indie band quoting I’m ready to burst. Man. I love the character work on both of them. They’re interesting people. Genuinely fascinating and pretty well developed. No blank and obvious stereotypes here. That’s what you get when you (let your heart win) get your stories raw. The less middlemen in the way of art, the closer it can hit home. That’s cool. I love it when people do things just for the hell of it, not because it will sell. And the internet is totally the best platform for this. Space on the internet is essentially unlimited, as it can grow by exactly the amount your thing needs. On tv space is limited by literally time (if time were infinite would space be infinite too? Is this equation correct: t/∞+s/∞=2?) That’s neat.

Er, sorry, totally not focused here. In the newspaper you only have so many pages to print. In film, only so much money to spend on making them. In life itself, there is only so much room for so many foodstuffs and for so much housing. It’s a bit crazy that the internet destroys all that. Granted, the internet will run out when we run out of oil, just like everything else. But that will never happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway. Discussion for another time.

I don’t really understand the obsession with comedy, though it is entirely probable that I am just a cranky son of a bitch ((no, really) the bitch part, I mean) right around this hour of night. I like things, and I find some things very funny. For example the daily show earlier had on a muppet version of perennial whackjob micheal steele saying the outrageous things he says. It was fucking hilarious. Also steve carrel is much more likable when he isn’t acting. Also Colbert made a joke about the muslims and jews having to quit smoking and how that might make them a little edgy. I laughed absurdly hard. But comedy itself I just don’t really appreciate. Well, that’s not it. It’s comedy that adds something else. Or something else that adds comedy. Like, I dunno, that titan maximum cartoon. It was some sort of comedy/action mashup. And it entirely failed to amuse me. It’s like trying to have a serious moment in a dungeons and dragons game and having a dude start yelling “the eyes demand sacrifice” or “blood for the blood god.” It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who bursts out in song every couple of minutes.

I dunno, maybe I am being grouchy. I like humor, I do. Some people seem to think I’m a reasonably witty guy (I SO am) and it really bugs me how often a joke I make in passing I hear told back to me a few dozen times as some sort of meme.

Speaking of memes –

Actually, look, if I say something that doesn’t make sense to you, please do me a favor and google it. You’re already here on the internet. google is literally in a box straight up the screen there. You have no excuses for not educating yourself about what I’m talking about. Google has rendered all oblique references opaque. You know the first time I read the word opaque was in an animorphs book when I was twelve. I remember looking it up later in an actual physical dictionary, rather than ignoring it and just assuming that the author was smarte—another discussion for later.

Speaking of memes, I hate them. You all have figured out by now that I browse 4chan, right. 4chan.org, once a haven for creepy japan-o-philes now a hipster hang out, because like, it’s so edgy dude. Seriously, it has totally lost the reputation it never deserved in the first place. And I don’t care, cause I’m a hipster who is so edgy. Anyway, memes come from 4chan, supposedly. It’s not actually true, memes come from all over the internet, but the entire internet eventually ends up on 4chan anyway. So they go there to breed, more or less. Like salmon. They’re awful, because they’re essentially a crutch for people who are incapable (it can’t be done!) of making jokes. They’re the hip and edgy equivalent of a 13 year old girl (or Amanda Frescas (:p (eh, who am I kidding, you’re not even reading this))) yelling “spork!” for no reason. It’s pretty uncool. I, with my superior wit, do not need such a crutch to generate spontaneous laughter. I simply do.

Fake superiority complex aside, my real superiority complex dictates that if you make a joke, don’t make it more than once (unless the opportunity comes up more than once and you’ve hit the point where making that joke again would invite a sense of recognition and camaderie rather than simple spite or boredom). Make a new joke every time. Because the world is made of jokes. So many jokes that there are two fake news shows on back to back more or less every night (I think) that do nothing but make fun of the same day’s news. It’s great.

I dunno, maybe I’m just really bugged by it because I hate hearing my own joke thrown back at me with no real addition in humor. Plus I hate to see jokes run ragged.

Hmm. I complain about a lot of things, I think. I’m not really doing it out of any legitimate resentment, but I think I’m discontent. And the only way to fix discontentment is to change something in yourself or your environment. This is part of that to be honest. I complain because I want to get my complaints down on something and I want to enunciate them and have them disputed or understood. I think I’m mistaking that (and I think a lot of people will probably mistake that) with complaining for the sake of complaining. I’m trying to make changes in my life. I’m working on this issue, because it’s a pressing one that bugs me with annoyingly suicidal thoughts from time to time. (note to people who care too much about me, please don’t take this as a sign for intervention. This is something that I need to do, otherwise I may as well have died.)

I just need my life to go somewhere. I was hoping college would help me do that, but so far college has sounded like high school, and I’ve largely treated it like I treated high school: by avoiding everyone around me because I am too damn scared to talk to them. I need to change this. I am already flailing about blindly through life. I need to flail harder. I need to learn to take risks. I need to learn to get up from a fall. Most importantly, I need to stop rejecting myself before I even feel rejected.

So I’ve decided to be gay.

I’ll make housecalls.

No, I’m kidding. Actually I will make housecalls. To play scrabble or something. Actually monopoly. I kick ass at collecting money from hapless tenants.

Ugh, now I’m trying to change the subject, because I am not really sure where to go from here. When I write, I write very seriously. Everything I put into a work that I write has some reason for being in it, mostly because I delete the stuff that shouldn’t be in it. I am hoping that when I am dead and my lesbian bondage fiasco novels have made me world famous, historians will look back on my early writing and write critical essays determining through divination just exactly how gay I was anyway. Nobody with any actual balls writes about his feelings. A lot of the time, I wish I were dumb. I wish that I could pick just one retarded hobby and stick with it. I wish I could just say “oh, hey, transformers, that’s my shtick” or “oh hey, guitars and various rock trivia” or “oh hey, I’m ridiculously flamboyantly queer” or “yeah, man, I love the shit out of recreational drugs.” It’s funny, because the typical response is something like “oh yeah well real people aren’t like that.” I beg to differ. Like for serious. People telegraph what their main interests are, and boy do they enjoy them. Me? I dress sorta-kinda hipsterish but I look kinda intimidating (all 150 pounds of me) and then I talk to people about videogames, then I turn around and discuss philosophy or fucking sci-fi novels, and then I go on about religion or current events, or then I start talking about 4chan or something. I dunno. I don’t have anything that defines me, really.

When I was thirteen, I really really wanted to be a video game developer. I even downloaded rm2k and had something of an epiphany as to how games actually work. Along with the epiphany was the realization that, shit, this shit is a lot of work. So then I decided I wanted to be a journalist at some point, because I really like reading the newspaper. Then I realized that I really enjoyed reading the newspaper much more than I enjoyed writing it. For a while, I wanted to be dead, because everything sucked. Now I kinda want to be a prophet, but I’m finding it really hard to convert people because I can’t fucking talk to them one on one. Like, seriously, I am the only person I know who gets shy and nervous when a waitress tries to make small talk. I am a shitty-ass prophet.

It probably doesn’t help that I spend so much time trying to get away from things or from people. I go outside walking wearing reflective dark sunglasses and huge, loud headphones so that I don’t need to see or hear anything when I walk around. I call my outdoorsy stuff my “sensory deprivation apparatus” because I am a huge dork. It’s really bad. It really worries me when I go about telling things to people over the internet that I don’t tell to people I actually know, based wholly on the assumption that people on the internet can hurt me less. Man, I’m messed up.

Maybe the problem is that I’m not embracing the right things. Maybe tv is a good thing, because it helps me avoid my problems like everything else. I have a pet theory that if I ever actually bother to get drunk, I’m going to end up an alcoholic, because it’s a vastly more efficient means of escape than lying in bed in the middle of the night and imagining I gain the ability to fly or being at home alone and doing silly stances and pretending I’m an earthbender (((toph is so hot) I don’t care that she’s twelve, she’s a fictional character) my name’s toph, which sounds like tough, which is what I am).

I read QC and stuff to live vicariously a life where people care about what I say or what I think about, and those people happen to be in the same apartment building as I am. Same with shortpacked. And it’s retarded. I’m trying to pretend to be someone I’m not without actually changing myself into that person. It’s like a super-lazy version of escapism.

I really hate it. I hate being smart enough to know that that won’t work. I wish I was autistic and could truly believe in the idea of having a virtual furry girlfriend who I photoshop into all of my photos, or believe that a licensed character re-color rip-off is actually my best friend. Instead I get to spend all my time sitting here thinking “gee, Jake, you got problems. You should, like, go fix them or something” and replying “eh, too lazy. I don’t know how to use photoshop anyway.”

Truth and Happiness 3/3

You know the drill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64liF2VuLxI


I hate people, right. I hate parts of people anyway. I would be hard-pressed to find anyone I actually hate all the way through. I was in a music class the other day, and this dude who sits like three seats to the left was totally bs’ing the instructor, even though he was texting openly, right in front of her in the first row. He was joking with her and otherwise trying to play “oh look at me I am a funny guy” shit. I don’t know what I hate more, the dude for pulling that shit or the instructor for putting up with it. I was very annoyed by it, but I know that it’s just the same sort of thing I do myself to some people. I hate it anyway, though, cause I hate it when I do it, and I hate it when it works. But hate is not all I do. I like a great many things. I was writing the last couple of things I wrote, and I thought “gee, I am a downer” and I decided I should try and finish with something that didn’t make me sound like such a sorry sack of shit.

Things that make me happy in no real order and not really complete

Mern makes me happy. She is so cool. When I die and become one with the great spirit and then decide what I want to come back to earth as so that I can continue my education for the next world (it’s a complicated theology my grandmother has) I would totally pick her so I can learn how to be cool. She is like the icy half of that Icyhot stuff. She is like chewing ice and wintergreen gum while jumping out of an airplane with a snowboard to go down K2. In boxers.

Gavin and Emily make me happy. They’re such a cute couple and such cool people individually. I love seeing other people happy like that.

Music makes me happy. Everything about music. I love playing it, I love listening to it, I love pretending I can dance. If I weren’t so awful and hadn’t started so late, I would love to be a musician for the rest of my life.

Protesters make me happy. Anyone who gets angry, goes outside and masses together to wave signs and yell is damn cool in my book. People who do protests like this make me even happier. I love people with their heads on straight. Even if they have some kooky mysticism behind their movement. I would be the Judas from Jesus Christ Superstar, supporting the movement because it helps people, not because it becomes centered on a single ego, like Jesus. Anyway you should watch the movie, it’s really good.

Dnd makes me happy. I like playing pretend, and it’s even more fun playing pretend when I play pretend with other people. I get kind of grouchy about it sometimes because it turns into not being about playing pretend as much as rolling dice or arguing, but on the whole I enjoy it.

Ms. Keturi makes me happy, though I am less clear on why. If I had to say, I would say something dumb like “because she is so real.” It’s just, I met her and man if nothing else she is someone I feel like I can trust with anything forever. Also she is six kinds of hot.

I like walking. It makes me happy just to wander around and listen to music and look at people who walk past me. I like that. I like wearing a warm coat on a cold night and listening to some horrible techno bullshit and staring at the stars. I like the stars too.

Space exploration makes me happy. I want to be in space. Earth is so dull. I want to be alone in a entirely silent vessel hurtling towards nowhere at the speed of sound. I want to die majestically when a star goes nova and rips apart my very flesh at the molecular level.

Shopping for stupid shit online makes me happy. It’s also bankrupting me, so I really need to stop, but when I find a website that sells brothel tokens for three bucks each, I just have to buy a bunch. Same with these stupid glasses. And that dumb hat. Chris was right when he said when I’m old the front of my house is going to be a museum of curios collected over the years.

Grant makes me happy. He’s such a cool dude. I still think he’s going to burn out in drug fueled blaze of glory, but that will be pretty awesome too.

Comics make me happy. I've been reading them forever. Not the convoluted and confusing comic books, but the short and snappy comic strips from the newspaper. Squeezing a message into a few boxes and some words always seemed like the best way to go. I still read comics, though now they are on the web and have transcended the limitations of print in both censorship and format. It's pretty great. Here's some classic peanuts, back when it was new and exciting.










Sleeping makes me happy. I over-indulge in sleep whenever I can. It's just what I do. It's an awful habit, but damn do I enjoy the fuck out of my dreams more than I enjoy being awake.

I started out writing these as a response to two different questions, “who are you to tell them that?” and “what the hell?” which were asked by two different people in two different contexts, which got me to thinking, which got me to writing, etc. Thanks for reading all of them, or skipping to the last one cause you’re a jerk. Jerk.

I’m trying to express myself, I guess. It’s hard because I am not a cat. If I were a cat I would just pee all over everything. Instead I am a person, and because I am a busy person I do not have the time to go around and yell statements about myself at the top of my lungs to no one at all. Writing at least offers some form of permanency of self. There is a person in these essays. He’s there. He isn’t me, but I made him and he reflects how I think right now. Does that make sense? It’s philosophical nonsense, I guess, but useful philosophical nonsense. This, I suppose, is how I handle journal-writing. By squeezing my massive and malformed ego into chunks of poorly chosen words with only a loose connection to their author.

In the long run, the question I am asking myself and asking you is, “is that true?”

Truth is all I really want to write, all I feel is worth writing.

last song= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

Truth and Happiness 2/3

Hey, I thought the multimedia components of that last thing were pretty cool, so I am going to do it again for this one. Here is the first song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyFmOWUQY7A


So. I wrote some stuff. Yes. It’s pretty emo, huh. Buncha weird emotional bullshit, right. Lots of cussing. I cuss cause I’m raw. I say “cuss” cause I’m southern. Check this shit out:

Nigger faggot cunt dicks shitty ass fuck chink kike damn.

Yeaaaaah. I probably just blew your mind out, right. I am just that raw and edgy. Check out my deep emotions. I feel shit, nigger. Because I’m punk, right. I say stuff no one does cause I’ve got huge cojones. Agh, this was a terrible way to start this. But I am not even going to edit it, that way it’s more original and raw.

The key idea here is raw. The fresher it is, the better. The more I shock you, the better. Ka pow ka pow. It’s a Cormac McCarthy approach to journal-writing. Blood. Guts. Impropriety. Check it out I’m dane cook, saying what shouldn’t be said. I’m George Carlin, I’m Dave Chappelle. I’m fucking Hunter S. Thompson. This is so stupid. We idolize people who have the guts or complete lack of shame to say whatever they feel like in public. We idolize people that go against the grain, regardless of their motivation or message. We idolize Sarah Palin, we idolize Glenn Beck, anyone at all who is willing to stand up and say “I’m different, and you should be too.” When I was a kid, for a short time I wanted to be like everyone else. Then I decided I wanted to be different, right about at the same time everyone else decided they wanted to be different. Nothing changed, really.

I guess what I was trying to say, I wrote all that stuff and I sound like an angsty bastard and I hate it. Cause I’m not really angsty. It’s just how I feel sometimes, you know. Maybe I sound depressed, but I am not really, I swear. I am perfectly capable of taking enjoyment in things. I do it all the time. I don’t hate the world at all. If I ever tell you I am depressed (*cough*) I am just saying that because I feel sad at the moment and I’m not good at seeing things that make me happy when I am sad. It’s not really the truth.

The truth is: I’m a person, just like any other person. The only thing I’m doing here is talking about it more than many other people do. It doesn’t make me better, it doesn’t make me unique, it just makes me a person. Why am I doing it? Well, I can tell you all the reasons I can think of right now, but I’m not sure if they’re quite right. The answer, like most answers, is probably some horrible amalgamation of all of these, plus several things that I am too embarrassed to mention, or am not actually aware of.

Reason one: to get it out of me. I need an outlet for this sort of thing. Sorry I make it public, but I feel like a part of the outlet is that someone has to read it. Thanks for doing so, by the way.

Reason two: For attention. I am a huge attention whore. I desperately seek the notice of everyone around me to validate my existence because I am vapid and shallow

Reason three: Because I am depressed and crying for help. I hate everything and I hate life, and I am saying it the only way I know how: through internet cutting by writing dumb things.

Reason four: I’m bored as fuck. I need something to do. Why not write. If I am going to write, why not write about me. It’s easier than writing about someone else, that’s for sure.

Reason five: Writing practice. I need to work on writing and mastering my “craft” as it were if I hope to ever achieve any form of success in a writing career. This also helps with other things that I write, such as essays and such. It helps me to actually put things down on paper so that they’re there and immutable. Relatively.

Here is the other song here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o86wru6sT6I

Reason six: I’m trying to inspire myself. Sounds a bit like masturbation, I guess, but I’m trying to jumpstart my creativity by thinking and writing this sort of thing and taking feedback and the like.

Reason seven: I’m searching for people who feel the same way sometimes. It would be cool to meet people I could honestly say are like minded. They’re pretty rare, I think, though I have met a lot of mad fresh peeps represent’n their shit up front. Anyway, only way to meet them is to advertise, yeah?

Reason eight: I’m attempting to (I wrote satisfying for some reason.) verify and rationalize my existence. I’m just trying to make sense of it all. If I can get it out of my head and take a step back, maybe I can understand myself a little better. It’s a key tenet of Taoism, you know. In order to comprehend Tao, you must first comprehend yourself.

Reason nine: I’m trying to capture a frame of reference, a state of mind, a composition of being that I am now and will likely never be again. It’s a form of memoir, an autobiography in action. Years down the road, I will be terribly embarrassed for myself, but happy to have a real record of how I actually thought back then.

Reason ten: by telling you everything, I can tell you nothing. I say all that I can about myself and the way I feel so that it seems like I’ve been entirely trustful and forthcoming but really, I have told you very little. It’s a form of hiding in plain sight. It’s like dropping smoke when you’re in a tank. Stuff like that.


None of those are true, or conversely, all of those are true. They’re all plausible at least. When people ask me why I pick one of those reasons and present them. Sometimes I change reasons when they ask me again, which makes me seem like a liar. But I’m not actually lying. All of those reasons are correct. There are even more reasons, in fact. All of this to explain one simple essay. And the kicker? This isn’t just me. This is every single person on the planet it’s me times six billion. It’s fucking crazy. It’s incomprehensible.
I’m just one of them, you know? I’m no better, no smarter, no stronger than a kid born in Africa (at least born without some awful crippling disease). There are hundreds of millions of people who have the capacity at least, to vastly outstrip me in every endeavor I ever attempt. I’m a dot on a screen of static. It’s crazy. I really am not special, and neither is anyone I am ever likely to meet. Sure, maybe I can write okay. Sure maybe I can reference all sorts of history, science or math. But I certainly couldn’t survive in the wild. I couldn’t survive on my own. I have no clue how. I need society. I need it to live. But society most certainly does not need me, nor anyone else I know.

There’s this kid in Florida. He’s fifteen, and he listens to me. He respects what I have to say. This to me is just phenomenal. He respects me and what I say solely based on what I’ve said to him over aim! It’s nuts! I didn’t really do anything to deserve it, but damn. Now I feel like I should do something to deserve that respect. He’s so cool, too. He’s like the fifteen-year-old I wish I was when I was fifteen.

This ended up being a bit short, but I have one more to go and I want to finish it today. Nigger.

It's not that

I haven't been writing, it's just that I put them all on facebook so I feel much more like people are reading them. People still visit this sometimes, though, so perhaps I need to start publishing in two places.

Truth and Happiness 1/3

Hey, I've decided to make this a multimedia note, since this is the internet and you can do anything here. Listen to these three songs when you see the links for them. I dunno how fast you read, but you should get the point by the time the next one comes up, hopefully. The first song that you should probably start with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo9VCnw35LY

okey doke? here we go.


I want to say something that’s true, for once. God, doesn’t that sound angsty and juvenile. Man. Cynicism is the devil. You can spend all day standing around and pointing out how everything is stupid, everything is petty, everything is duplicitous, everything is hypocritical, but then you’ve spent your entire day doing nothing of worth.

In the interest of continuing to write, I’m starting a new paragraph. I hate everyone. I say that all the time. Other people say that all the time. I’m not sure if we agree why, but whatevs, go misanthropy. Me? I hate everyone because they don’t care. They’re not interested. And neither am I, by my definition. People do all sorts of things that are cool and wonderful. Everywhere you go, you see examples of people caring, from the littlest cause to the largest wars. So that’s dumb. It’s not true. It’s a perception based on faulty data. But all data is faulty, all perception biased. What do we do?

I read stuff about hipsters, right (cause I totally am one lololollollolool), and when they aren’t overwhelmingly negative (get a job and cut your hair, fake hippies) they tend to say something along the lines of “they passively consume art and media in a search for genuineness” or something similar. They talk about how bands are thought to “sell out” when they become popular and such. This is a stupid philosophy. Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it isn’t genuine.

Free-form unstructured writing (*cough*) is popular with these people because of a belief that it’s a form of genuineness. Its lack of editorial oversight and proper proofreading taken as a hallmark of its apparent truthiness and relevance to the author. Independent films are treated the same way, as more “real” than Hollywood flicks and such. Indie record labels are supported because of the “rawness” of the message. Media becomes paralleled to fruits and vegetables, with “organics” being considered superior. It’s a social movement. It’s called “post-consumerism” or something.

It’s not true. None of it is. There is no reason that indie developers should be thought of as any better than large companies. If I film myself watching porn for fifteen minutes I have not made a movie that has any more meaning than “The Hurt Locker.” Organic fruits and vegetables are no better than fruits or vegetables that had Mexican laborers jizz on them (washed later, of course). It’s just not true. Buying and using reusable plastic bags has a negligible effect. For every plastic bag that you don’t use, a dick like me without a car is going to get three double bagged loads so I can carry them home. And then I’ll throw them away. In the garbage. That’s not true either.

Recycling is terrible. It’s awful. In fact environmentalism is awful. Everything is wrong. It’s all a business. I know! I went to recycling conventions for vendors and investors as a kid! My mom dragged me along. I saw all these businesses peddling their services and handing out pens and notepads and little plastic recycling bins and all manner of useless tchochke bullshit. These people don’t give two shits about the environment, and by extension no one who supports them really cares either. There are real solutions to the genuine ecological problems in the world, but they’re not what we want, so they’re not what we’re going to get. We want to feel good about our actions, not do good actions. It all sounds very heinous, but it isn’t really. It’s how our culture works. It’s the society that we were born in, that we’ll live in, and that we’ll probably die in.

It’s not true to say that they’re all wrong either. It’s good that people are in touch with their morals. It’s good that people will put forth some sort of effort into things like this. It’s nice. I usually like to offer alternatives around here or so, just so it doesn’t look like I’m just complaining, but I don’t really feel like it, because I can’t write truth either.

For example, a few minutes ago I was wondering what I looked like. Instead of turning around where a mirror happens to be, I fired up the webcam on this laptop here. What kind of truth is that?

hey, here is the next vid. If you hate it or something, just listen to the bit at about 1:05 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KtRP4J3TQk

Let me talk about something else again. I do this because I am shitty at making things flow together a lot of the time, so it’s easier if I just start over and talk about something new until I run out of that too. I met a guy the other day who asked me to help him with political science seven, intro to government. He’s a pretty strange fellow, one of those people who actually focuses on their academics and studies and stuff (crazy fuckers), and I guess is having legitimate trouble with the class. So, I agreed to and such, and we get to talking and inevitably I end up asking him what he wants to do when he grows up (I ask everyone this) and he said (like most people do) “I don’t know.” So we keep talking and I get two things out of him: “I don’t really care about money, I just want to be financially secure, not rich, really” and “I want to make a difference.” Oh, and also “I don’t want to work a 9 to 5.” Man, that just bugs the hell out of me, cause it’s what everyone thinks. They’re all idealists. Bright eyed, bushy tailed. Looking to do good in the world. In twenty years their spirits will be crushed as they find themselves trapped doing the very things they hate just to make a living. And I’m that way too. I hate it. I do want to make a difference. I want to change the world. And I probably won’t and I hate that and I want to die.

Ugh. That’s stupid. There is nothing wrong with wanting to change the world. Nothing at all. It’s a normal thing that pretty much everyone does. The problem I have is that the world doesn’t change much because of it. I guess. I dunno. And wanting to change the world is so very much a product of my culture. Wanting to be different, wanting to shake up the norms, wanting to be “unique.” Who do I sound like? Fucking sonic the fucking hedgehog. It’s not true either. Defying norms maintains the very norms you attempt to defy. No one (except bjork) is an army of themselves. It’s all a scam designed to sell you items to make you feel like you’re more individual than the next person. What a crock.


It never ends. It doesn’t matter how well you get along with society, it still sells to you. Because that’s what America is. That’s what capitalism is. That’s what western culture is. That’s what happens when you give animals big brains and the capacity to carry things and the desire to do things that aren’t simply mating and eating.

It’s like this series of comics:










But it’s not that bad. At least it exists. Monotony would be vastly worse than counter-culture. It’s just... not true.

Last one, here you are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYZA7pn6WM4

What is truth anyway. What is something real? They way I go on it sounds like I’m searching for the elusive zahir of art. Well, I don’t know. I assume that I will know when I meet it, because I do know when I don’t. I met someone a while ago that I really really like (I would say love, but whenever I do, people tell me “oh, no, that’s lust. You haven’t felt love yet” which gets me to wondering what the hell love is anyway, which gets that stupid fucking song stuck in my head so I don’t think about it very much) because she’s amazing. I haven’t not thought about her since I met her. That feels pretty true, but it lends itself to all sorts of analysis. Do yourself a favor. Never ask yourself the question “why” because that will never get you anywhere. If you need to ask a question, ask “how.” Etic is better than emic if you don’t want to simply depress the hell out of yourself. But I don’t know how to write that. I hardly can express it in person. I can barely express it here.

In the end, I’m just a hipster, I guess. Just another jerk who thinks he’s better than everyone because he’s searching for authenticity and truth rather than… I dunno, working on a career. Doing something of value to society. I hate society. I absolutely do not intend to contribute to it until it stops sucking. So you’re not getting much out of me. Which is a total lie, as here I am talking to society and telling it that I hate it. I contribute criticism. I contribute thoughts. I contribute ideas. Just cause no one is consuming it doesn’t mean that I am not producing it. I, too, am a cog in the machine. I’m just another gear. I’m just… a gear that spends all of its time trying to figure out how to fuck the machine up. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but frankly neither does anyone else ever, so fuck you, I’ll do what I want. To hell with the rest of you.

But… that’s not true either. I care about everyone. I wouldn’t want to change society if I hated people. I want to change it because I love people. It was Che Guevara, noted hipster and teenage rebellious icon, who said “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” I want what I think is best for you, because all I can see is people hurting and people hurting each other. And I hate that. It’s not cool. What kind of ridiculous fucking world did I end up in, where we have all the fucking money, power, technology, all this crazy shit that we can do and yet we sit there and use it to hurt each other, make each other mad, to fuck everyone up from cradle to fucking grave.

Is that true? I don’t really think so. There’s truth in it somewhere, but I haven’t found it yet. Can you?