Here I am, on the precipice of my chrysalis. Pressing against the dried, transparent walls of my cocoon. Can you see my coloration? I don't worry about what shape or decoration I will take when I emerge but the shape of the world I'm emerging into. But then again, just as all acting is reacting, I don't actually give a fuck about what shape your petty, fetid world is in. It is not mine to control, so what matter should I give to my mind over its form? I guess the tables turned, the facade is down: I do truly, actually worry what shape I will become. How I will be pressed and molded as I molt and shed, poked and bled by this greedy machine of consumption. I'd hope it's "as an avenging angel doing the work of God." But how do I guide that hope – that intention – into practice? Such notions make wrestling matches in my mind, the spectacle of thought.
If I haven't stated it so clearly before, then here: This world was not made for me but I belong in it.
Mother fucker.
...
At long last, I'm making re-entry preparations, after a solid month of avoiding all news post-election. Yes, for those of you who haven't read my | previous | posts, when November began I dropped some white-hot singles on YouTube and SoundCloud, which blew up and everybody loves.
I assume. Because the very next thing I did, was cut myself off from all forms of social media and any possible sources of news. No new episodes of my favorite YouTube shows, no freeform chats, no push notifications of any kind. Full-on Do Not Disturb mode, except for phone calls from a select few, in the know about my temporarily temperamental condition. And I hid away in my room for a very short month. The good news? No news! I don't even know the results of any of those judge's elections most people skip on the back. ...Although, I got a few buzzes texted to me about upcoming Marvel Studios projects. Not that I solicited those, either, but I log it here in the interest of full disclosure.
And say, part of my exit strategy concerns the topic of full disclosure! If I can manage to spend a solid fifty-seven days and change not chained to the panicking ticker tape of putrid parade, and published pubic pustules, paying no pretense to profiteers parading in positions of power as pretend public servants... and the only thing I really can't do that I would like to is hang with my Slack group, watch new BlameSociety videos and check Instagram... then by gum, you can do it, too! If not the you 'you,' then the me 'you,' myself in the future: the butterfly. With wings giving the impression of a white tiger: a 'symbol whose appearance is meant to make wealthy men humble.'
...Or something like that. It's been a while since the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Opening Ceremony where the announcer said something about the white tiger being something of a symbol of something of that sort. I can't google it without stumbling upon unsourced sites of people who are really into symbology, but also I'm not gonna go back and sit through the opening ceremony again to find that titbit. Suffice it to say, this tangent has gone far enough, but I am at liberty to make an artistic rendering of this white tiger butterfly design at my discretion. The sort of thing some people would make a tattoo, but I'd at most get printed on a single t-shirt (which is still rather committal to procure, since most printers do bulk orders and stuff.) I'll shuffle it into the "art projects (non-video division)" deck and see what happens to it. (Also the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail seems to be the closest real butterfly to my concept. Papilio glaucus.)
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| Colorful boy with soft body || © Edith Smith (Shady Oak Butterfly Farm) |
Tangent over! My point is that I, and by extension all of us (because we're all the same, mannn) can in fact effectively shield ourselves from news and continue to live our lives, as long as the 100 or so corporations who are responsible for 70% of carbon emissions will allow us to live. They need to be dee-stroyed. So part of my Butterfly Dance will be to continue staying The Fuck Out Of It. No Twitter trends, deleting texts from organizations asking for money [like I'm the key to doing anything good for this world,] and ignoring the plight of others for whom I can't frankly do jack shit.
Sorry?????
Not to be all "And then they came for me..." no sir. Not at all. Like I already wrote, I am still politically active, my positions set firmly in stones which can be chiseled to bricks and hurled through the glass ceilings. My whole heart is with the oppressed. My stance is strong and firm. But I'm not going to engage in the cycle of misery porn and existential dread. No, I am not ignorant enough to think that politics will decide to invite reason back into the room where it happens. But I'm not breaking any amendments by quartering my supply of reason in my own home, for my own practical uses. In the spirit (because not 'in the words', really,) of this quote from Ray Milland in Panic In Year Zero, "When civilization gets civilized again, I'll re-join."
Is that bitchy? Abso-bitchin'-lutely. Is it kinda muddled or hypocritical or paradoxical? Well, I'm trying to parse that out, too.
24-hour news is inherently violent to our species. Even the 1-hour news. Or X-hour news. Quotas can be bad when it comes to people-things (police, schools, news.) The idea that you need to fill a set amount of time with news means you're certainly going to report on irrelevant-yet-harrowing shit, fam. And here's the big ol' rub: news must be novel. It's in the name. Therefore, 24 hours of news means 24 hours of excitement. And maintaining any excitement, good or bad, without recess inevitably leads to fatigue, exhaustion, and/or stress. And with a globally-connected world where borders are meaningless and information yearns to be free, there's a shit-ton of news I'm not involved in or affected by that someone could serve up between dick hardness commercials nonetheless.
It's unhealthy. Cut it out of your diet. I realize I sound like something of a hippie uncle pothead type. But I'm not, and I still reached this idea, so you know it's some solid true shit.
Tangent over!
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I'm saving the last slice of my birthday ice cream cake for mental health purposes. Since I've begun seriously back-burner-thinking about my exit strategy, I've stumbled into a "¿Porque no los dos?" attitude about my options; my reactions to the bad news outcome (good news doesn't need a reaction, as I've written before.)
I've come up with a few preparable paths; seemingly mutually-exclusive, but in reality (which I can't control,) I can decide to choose multiple paths and let them coexist as simultaneous realities (which I can control.) Two different horses pulling the same cart. Because maybe the job is too fucking heavy for one horse.
And here's how I am confident that I can take on more than one shape after this mental health break that may come after this mental health break: I'll be whatever shape any given situation calls for because I'll be the shape of water. Simple philosophy, and a great movie to boot.
So I'll be a white tiger-printed butterfly made of water. Got it.
One of my options is deliciously, desimply: denial. But not in an actually-delusional way. No, I'm too sane, too cognizant, too self-aware...and too sober for that. It would be in a knowingly delusional way, like when the Tooth Fairy gives your children some money. That is the truth! And yet, you are the tooth fairy. These realities exist alongside one another with two parties involved. Why not with one?
Why not act in a denialist manner, purely denying a bad outcome to its face, while still actually understanding it to be real? I've basically been doing that simply by being in arrested development since 2016: I'm still in that Cold November Ninth mindset of "You must arrest this guy, he cannot be president, should not be president, and does not be president. Nothing will continue until this next step is taken." Like my $1.50 deposited in the vending machine, I waited patiently for it to uncurl and drop my candy bar, because that is the next step after the first thing happened, and before I can eat.
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| First known photo of me unhappy, unable to eat. Cold November Ninth, 2016 8:01am |
And those who can control things ain't done those things yet. So I just waited, knowing it was the thing to do, the way to be. Denying he was president so much that I denied we even had one at all for the time being. Because we didn't, did we? So I waited for one to be elected (perhaps the one who got the most votes by a margin of a few million; she was available.) Sitting in that amber, preserving my continuity until the boozy greedsters of the world caught up and did their damned jobs. But that was a denial borne of the stages of grief. This would be a denial as a weapon.
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| Just an aside: when you can call any challenging candidate a "functioning adult" on yard signs, and it's not crazy? You don't have a president. |
Shiiiiit dawg, hold up a minute: I just figured it out as I'm writing! Another comparison, better than the Tooth Fairy one, comes to us via the world of professional wrestling. They have the exact word for it: Kayfabe. 'A shorthand term that involves acknowledging the staged, scripted nature of professional wrestling, as opposed to a competitive sport, despite being presented as such.'
Precisely what I'm going on about, in this mixing board that is the preparation and organization of my thoughts. My denial will simply be play-acting, my kayfabe. I'll acknowledge the realities to the extent that I must, but otherwise: meet me in the ring, brother. Oh yeahhh! Only fitting, when the bad man is in the WWE Hall of Fame. After all, thusly, he is a fiction. A naked emperor can't be a compulsive denialist without denial working against him. Fight lies with truth, yes, that's important too. But here's a new idea: fight fiction with fiction.
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| Leaping out of my cocoon like |
So, yes, in drafting this out I have cracked it: I can have my cake and pretend to eat it too. This denial is indeed a humorous jest but in the least-joking and most-comforting way possible: gone is sarcasm, gone is irony, gone is the angry joke. Gone is the funny joke. It's not funny. It's not meant to be funny. It's not meant to be a true delusional psychosis, either, but it's not an amusement to be chuckled at.
Kayfabe Denial is a joke to rest my head upon. Get it? Perception is reality and even when it's a lie, repeating it is comforting. Playing the part makes it more real, if only fragmentally. It's sorta like a skewed, diagonal approach to whatever the fuck The Secret is. A vision board can bring things to life, denial is meant to live the life that an impossible vision board cannot manifest. The world is better when yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
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| Hoh Hoh Hoh! |
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I don't...really know what my other options of actions are, exactly. Part of those misty paths can only be enlightened amidst a reaction. But I've got some vague ideas and I'll jot down what I've got in the pot on that brainiac back burner. They may be undercooked and some might be tossed out like a bay leaf before serving, but you're just looking at them for a second. Just seeing how soft the noodles are or aren't. Take a gander at my ramble stew:
I've been preparing for the worst, as I've written before and as I need to keep telling myself. I don't need to prepare for the decent-to-okay. Nobody ever does. You can't be blindsided by good news. We expect things to go as we intend, and we precaution ourselves for dangerous or unforeseen mishaps, or "oopsie-doopsies." Well, my mantra of "Do I know? No." has been effective at reducing my Sherlockian deductive conclusions into mere simulatory droplets of poison with which to inure myself. In 2016 I had my hopes up (i.e. >0.0001%) and had absolutely zero worst-case scenario planning; because that scenario would be too bad and stupid, so it wasn't going to happen. And so, I was suddenly hit by a mortality van of despair and dread and panic and death and kill and fuck and shit and piss and bitch and fuck and shit and ass and fuck and shit and piss and fuck and shit and fuck and shit and ass. Total mental collapse.
So that's one way to prepare for a reaction: prove that I can live. I've lived for a whole month and a half, regardless of the outcome, without knowing it. So knowing it cannot hurt me. How it went did not and does not affect or effect me, so I'll go back to doing what I was doing; staying in quarantine, waiting for money and spending some on Pokémon Go here and there (because even without leaving the house much it's much too cold this time of year to walk around long.) I have movies to watch, videos to edit, books to read (hah!) and music to surround my conscious. It matters not which chalice I'm bestowed to drink from: Vizzini will die and I will live. This metaphor has gotten instantly confusing but I think I got my point across as well as referring to a corrupt villainous douchebag dying while pretending he has the upper hand.
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| Bottoms up |
So, I've come to be somewhat inured to the worst. Exposure Therapy, that's what they call it. Say, I had some of that myself in a specific way: in the realm where problems don't exist from the outside. The sometimes-Danger Room known as Dreams.
I had this dream in early December, but the day is uncertain. All that's important to recollect is the feeling, so even the scenario doesn't matter. No scene to set. I dreamt that I was made aware of news; the bad news. The oopsiest of doops. Whether it was on a TV that was near me, or someone had told me, or whatever. Doesn't matter. The scenario was playing out in my mind so that when I awoke I was stronger. That's the point. Beyond tiny sips of poison every day, this was a simulated episode of the dreaded experience. And I woke up finally feeling the 'something click' that made me start front-burner-ing the exit strategy. The click that made me appreciate what I wanted on the other side of the chrysalis walls. The click that made me think I could get there.
I've had dreams kickstart crushes on unexpected people, I've had dreams give me impossible experiences like flying or warping through portals (before Portal even existed) and here, once more, my subconscious served me up a real change in an unreal realm: I felt my wings bud and I was ready, to be ready, to emerge.
Speaking of dreams giving you ideas, I got another one in the past couple weeks. This one featured the Nazi himself goose-stepping right into the Danger Room. But since I was the dreamer, it was a danger room for him. And it gave me a pretty fair practical idea of how anyone (who has uptilnow been a huge butterball of cowardice) who shares a room with him can easily become a hero. The dream dance went a little something like this: punch throat, pull legs from behind, fall face-down. Punch head til fists hurt, switch to stomp til fear of having done a murder stops you either too soon or not soon enough. Go down in history books as cool heroic figure.
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| Only in dreams. |
I'm a nonviolent person in real life, but I've saved the world more than once in the dreamscape...
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The next tactic I can employ upon emerging I think I've already mentioned, which is just not lookin' at news, no ma'am. But I can take it further: no names. When I ask my parents (it's gotta be them, they weathered the original storm I turned into four years back) I will request no names. Just tell me if it was good or bad. That's the binary, so all I need is that. Did we elect a president or are we still carving open our own ballsack with a serrated bread knife lathered in chili paste? Only two options. (Any third party voter voted for the serrated blade and are just as dead to me as the people who made the obviously-wrong choice when presented with the easiest choice in the history of choices. Only two options.)
I do not, for example, need to hear Hitler's name to understand the guy was a dumb piece of shit. Nobody says 'Adolf' anymore, and you and I still know to not be a dick. You know what movie came out the year after he died? It's a Wonderful Life. I digress: I'll cut news out of my diet. Simply put, in mantra form: "What you can control is enough." That's written up on my whiteboard 'bove my desk. I read it every day. Ain't much news fit to control, is there? So no thanks, I'm not hungry. I'll make room, however, for just desserts.
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| Hard to do this step during a pandemic, anyhow |
Next up, in the same vein as "What I can control is enough" and "proving that I can live," is remaining cognizant of the fact that the world didn't end before so there's no reason to fear it happening, should the bad outcome come out. You overpower the apocalypse by getting up in the morning. Not by being a sheep or cog; not like Emmett at the start of The LEGO Movie. More like Emmett at the start of The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part.
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| That's more like it |
If you think I'm a little self-centered thinking so much about 'Oh, how I'M going to live', and you rightfully ask, "what about other people?" Well, take that the fuck up with your representatives who did nothing while 200,000+ people died of a preventable pandemic.
I would've yelled and screamed and fought to do something, but I'm not anyone's representative. It's literally not my job, good though I would try to do if it were. I'm aware of my own privileges as a cishet white dude, believe me. It's not like I'm resting comfortably on them; I'm allowed to be concerned about myself, and I have to be adamant about that to myself. What I can control is enough. I have to believe that.
Understand? I've remained terrified for myself and my friends and those without privileges, but I've yet to – for example – blow up one concentration camp. I don't live near one, as far as I know (I don't read news, remember?) To quote Watsky: "I don't keep a knife under my seat, to join the revolution and spill blood in the street."
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| Only in dreams. |
I couldn't even rescue anybody if I wanted to, because I'm supposed to stay away from other people in order to stop the spread of a virus. That's what I've been doing all damn year. That's the extent of my heroics. I'll let Foxy Shazam help you outline my general attitude of cooping up and being fine with that: "Darkness grows, coming in from all sides. That's it. I quit."
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| My mood and my facebook banner |
And yes, of course climate change is an ever-present threat to our generations, but so far nobody's killed 100 CEOs or blew up 100 corporations or whatever it is that's standing in our way, and guess what: I can't or won't or both, either. I'm nonviolent. And it irks me a little bit, from time to time.
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All you can do is all you can do. That's just another way to put it. I can only do what I can, and that's good. Not good enough, maybe...but it's good, and it's enough. This is my constant and present struggle. It's not about balancing 'self-care' and 'trying to be like Christ.' It's about trying to reckon how self-care is important, and worthwhile, while that very self is surrounded by anti-Christs. A whirlpool of shit. A hurricane of heartache. A tornado of turmoil for no damn reason at all other than the greed and indifference of a few.
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| That feel when... |
After all, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. And though I worry about feeling (and appearing?) indifferent because I can't wrap my head around 200,000+ people as a number let alone as a number of deaths from a preventable pandemic, I know I only worry and ache because I love. And I hate those who are indifferent. That doesn't cancel out my love, because they're not opposites. They're a tandem. Hate and love are both sourced from and ignited by high-passion.
My attitude toward the pandemic is kind of an apt guide for where my attitude post-election should be: not indifference but a similar kind of defense mechanism. The feelings I feel when I can't fathom 200,000+ deaths so I go on with my day isn't indifference, but more like a cell wall that protects me from conceiving that number. A Lovecraftian fog that obscures my mortal eyes from gazing clearly at the horrific cavity of 1% of the country's population gone for no reason (let's not even talk about the global toll. ...In fact, for a while, I was primarily focusing on how my own state was doing, just because it was easier to imagine.)
I watched 9/11 happen on TV when I was nine years old and I didn't really understand what I was seeing. I'd never seen those buildings before, myself. My dad's shocked reaction was the thing that clued me in that it was a surprising, non-accidental, horrific thing. A very big deal. Now the same happens every day and nobody gives a fuck, why should I still watch?
And this time it actually is our own government doing it.
I'm an empathetic person. So I apparently need these walls to protect myself. Not a callus of indifference but a buffer or filter or dermis to keep all that pain out. Indifferent people don't have any walls up: they just don't feel the pain because they are sad and cruel, heartless and broken, empty and other adjectives. Despite our fundamental mental differences, I need to at least appear to mimic some of what those sorry fucks do [un]naturally. Because I can only process so much pain. I only have so many spoons. I only have so much Distress Tolerance.
So I have to act in a way that seeks a homeostasis, a "normal." That 'cares' for the 'self.' And I'm afraid that doing so can look as though I am also indifferent. (A strong fear of mine is people getting the wrong idea about me.) And I worry that my self-care is depleting care from [or ignoring the misery of] others. And I worry that my inability to give away all my money is a bad thing. And that being unplugged from the misery-porn and staying away from constant mental lashes is somehow bad. It's a cruel trick: thinking that to be good is to be grieving all the time. So tune into the news at 5 and 10!
Have I made myself abundantly, excessively clear? I do this a lot: repeating my thoughts as though I were circling it like a vocal vulture until it's ready to dine, bite-sized. Polishing the window of thought until it's clear ten times over. Refining an outline into a draft into a final draft as I speak. That's the loosey goose at the center of this blog's style. So, let me pull this particular train into the station:
I worry about being a hypocrite, sometimes, when I think about treating myself better...or rather how I'd like to be treated. That's why I have to say "What I can control is enough" and "All I can do is all I can do" or "I can't afford it [even though I technically can] so I can't give X to Y." ...and inevitably why I have to say "Fuck it, fuck the news and fuck them assholes."
To appropriate a quote from the film Strange Cargo: I hate hard, which means I love hard. So to keep my sanity these days, I'm not being indifferent, I'm not being apathetic, I'm just...doing what I can. And once I'm out I don't know exactly what that will look like. But I promise I'll try to make it look like me.
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| It me, on Christmas |
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Sometimes we get the guidance we need from a song that hits us just right: an arrow shot into the hole in the boat's hull that plugs it up nicely.
This one came up in my iTunes shuffle, while wearing wireless headphones in the bathroom brushing my teeth the other week. I was, subconsciously, pondering this very blog post's question: How do I live in a world where the bad outcome happened? Happened twice, when it could not be any more obviously-bad? How can I...Can I possibly not stress about that all the time forever? This thought is the amniotic fluid I walk through in the cocoon. Do caterpillars have amniotic fluid? Doesn't matter, I mix metaphors how I like around here. Metaphor gumbo! Get yourself a bowl, I hope you're hungry!
Anyway... That night, a solemn piano and soft voice pierced through the cloud of non-thinking that I have around me as I get ready for bed, and it clued me in to the wit and wisdom of its words, and I locked eyes with myself in the mirror:
You.
You exist here
What is it you're looking for?
Don't
Don't cry
Everything will be alright.
Find yourself at the center of the storm.
Make your peace with the signal and the noise.
You
You belong here.
What is it you're asking for?
We:
We are alive
at the center
of the storm
Exact right song at the exact right time. Thank you, Max. You're right, and as much as I can think similar thoughts to myself, it's incredibly important to hear it from other people. And by that token, it's important that I pass it along, to whoever reads this. That's what I'm trying to do by writing these, after all. We are in the middle of a great and frightful storm. But we are alive. Find yourself, make peace with your surroundings. A message of zen wisdom. I really needed it on this journey. (Serendipitously, it just came up again the moment I began to revise this section of the post!)
As for dealing with the storm itself, Max has a cousin named George Watsky; I might've referenced him once or twice on the blog. He has a song that also recently clicked into place with the current mentality of mine. More sage advice:
I see a lot of other Watsky fans citing Embrace the Quake as a favorite of theirs from the new record. Though I fell in love hard with the jam that is Best Friend the Floor on first listen, and it quickly proved to be a mantra to get us through this quarantine, (or just to get me through a day at the office,) I've come to appreciate Embrace the Quake of late. Really, the whole album is fantastic and I could gush about each song for 'graphs and 'graphs but I won't, and I don't need to. And I don't need to compare these songs, even as I reference between them 'cause of their common threads.
Do you fear that you fear too much?
The fact is, when you listen to an album over and over for a long time, the songs can share the 'favorite track' spotlight between themselves as you come to the album in different moods. Invariably your relationship with the songs grows deeper, and the songs will reveal more and more to you, even after you've heard them a thousand times and thought you'd gotten everything from them that they had. Maybe you recognize a double-meaning you didn't catch before, despite knowing the words front to back. Or the lyrics hit you in a certain way, as your frame of mind syncs up with the artist's.
Do you feel that you feel too much?
So it was that Embrace the Quake came to mean more to me as I pupated in this cocoon of double-isolation. "My ego is a bulletproof vest." The song is as reflective as it is ponderous of the future, and what freedom it would take to really be at peace with the swirling vortex of stars that stimulate your consciousness. It's introspective on the author as well as questioning the listener. It gets right at the raw: do you fear that you fear too much? Do you feel that you feel too much?
Embrace the quake
The music is engulfed by a symphony of china smashing, something vulnerable and beautiful being shook to ruin by forces outside of its control and conceptions. The song is inviting you to clap at the beauty of that ruin, like George and his brother did as babies 'the day the Bay ripped in two' as he recalls in Dreams & Boxes.
Embrace the quake
The song asks you to question your fears, and your fear itself. Fears are legitimate, no matter what they are, and can be perceived as insurmountable obstacles. Something that prevents you from something else, sometimes something good. Watsky asks you to entertain the dual mindsets of being able to stare them dead in the eye, and to know the unknown about your mortality. These real imaginary obstacles, hypothetically reduced to short fences. What would it take to allow yourself to act more like you were free? To feel free?
There's a lot to be gotten from this song, because by asking you these things, it turns into a very personal conduit for thought. What I get out of it, right now, is that the central, titular message is saying "Let the bad things in the world happen, be at peace with it. That way you'll make it through, and stay who you are." To quote Speed Racer again, from my second cocoon post, "What matters is if we let racing change us." And remember, one of the things 'racing' represents in that sentence is 'life.'
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| Turn the turbulence into a dance, and you flow like water. |
Don't bastardize yourself. Don't let bad things change you in ways you don't want. We all have our ugly episodes on occasion, but we can bend back into shape. We can strive to be the person who we'd like to be. I won't commit suicide, so what's the alternative? Stay good. Find myself, know thyself. Keep on truckin'! Be kind unto others, be a light in their life. Be excellent to each other, and party on, dude!
If you feel like you're insignificant, if your best videos get no views, then you can embrace that: Maybe you're not important. Just make sure what you make and do is. Because then you are.
Or take a cue from one of the greatest movies ever made, It's a Wonderful Life, which proclaims that you already are important because you're here. Don't sacrifice your life when it's a far more valuable gift than the sacrifice would be. It is nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of this outrageous fortune.
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| Another similar message in another great movie |
It's a spiritual message that even agnostics and atheists can get on board with: Dan Harmon has talked about the idea that, 'if life is meaningless, if there is no point to existence, then roll with that punch' and, as humans, we do whatever it is we do in order to create meaning. We make something out of nothing.
We think, therefore we are.
That pursuit, that praxis, can be enough to give life meaning. I'm definitely citing my memory and not any specific quotes from Harmontown, but this theme is one that Harmon brought to Rick and Morty, as well. It's part of why the first Interdimensional Cable episode (Rixty Minutes) is so darn great. It's a philosophical pick-you-up for when you or I are at our most depressed. When the darkness is hard at work pressing you down to the rockiest bottom, you can still cling to that like the rebel scum you are: "Fuck you, I'm important; I mean something because I say so."
I'll make my art for myself. This blog post is for myself. I spent a year making a Swiss Army Man parody-cum-short film in order to process the damage inflicted to me by the 2016 election, and you know what? I don't value the 231 views it has (as of publishing) that much. They don't really mean anything to me, although I appreciate them. What I value is that the art I made is helpful to me. Not just in a "I watch this good thing I made to remember I can make good things" way. It is a video-as-therapy, which reminds me of a message I need to repeatedly hear, and it's one from myself. And it's also one from The Daniels, directors of Swiss Army Man. And it's also one from George Watsky. And from Dan Harmon. And Frank Capra, Rian Johnson, George Miller, Dan and Kevin Hageman and Phil Lord & Christopher Miller. And many other influences that appear in that video or elsewhere in my life. It's another gumbo, a triple-decker sandwich full of philosophical ingredients and messages blended from all different sources. And I need a serving of my own from time to time, to remember that flavor. Soup for the soul, indeed.
Fuck it, if you got twenty extra minutes watch it right here, right now.
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Another tool in my belt to bring out with me, or to try to do better at rather, is learning to actually forgive those who trespass against me. That's Jesus's whole jam, innit? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone and all that? We're all sinners. And in repeating "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us" (or 'trespass' as some versions go,) in church, it's easy to pray for the first part but harder to live up to the second. Harder to synthesize the meaning of those words into a way to live by.
The first is an ask, the second is a duty that we must practice. So maybe part of "Being Chillaxed" or "Live and Let Live" or whatever, is to seek that ability to forgive the fucking dumbasses of the world. The people trying to kill me and all my friends. Those hardest to forgive. Those other sinners. We're all crabs in the same bucket to the cosmos: so even as we are better than they are, we cannot and should not act as though we are better, to the extent that we deny them forgiveness for their [worse, often profitable] sins, since we ourselves want our own forgiveness. Spiritualism is hard, man. You gotta put your brain and your heart into it. Otherwise you risk becoming a chump.
Besides, I respect the law that evil must exist for good to exist. "Without an occasional defeat, your victories would be empty things." Light can only exist because of darkness. And so, sure, for me to be here, there's no-doubt gotta be a man who is diametrically opposite me in every single possible way: every thought, every attitude, every opinion, every impulse, every mental faculty, every emotional process, every ounce of ego, every lack of awareness, every adjective, every polynucleotide chain of DNA. I can accept that. I just think he really needs to stop having a say in anything and start being in jail for all the crimes he's done. Not for my sake, but for all the people he's killed and is killing, if no one else. You don't see me killing hundreds of thousands of people, but then again: I am the exact opposite. I'm cool, and well-liked, with a normal wang.
To quote more from the extended Watsky family: Chukwudi Hodge has a lyric in the Pat Dimitri song Count, "the world's a mess, we got a donald cheatin' dumb people." and that resonates with my bad-outcome-attitude preparation, too. I want to be unaffected because I shouldn't be: I am not a dumb people. Because I am not at all cheated by the bad man. It's their folly, their misfortune, their problem. If their husband gets deported and they didn't see it coming: that's their's. (I'm not gonna look it up to link it but that's a real story from back when.) If you're a sucker, then the onus is on you to suck it.
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To kinda bounce back a few topics: I'm not turning away from it all, like a blind man. Being sat on the fence just don't work (besides, if you ride the fence you picked the wrong side.) I'm not coming out with the attitude of "I don't give a shit about what's going on and/so I'm not going to do anything, or not sympathize for X." It's, "I don't give a shit about what's going on; everybody already knows what needs to be done, what the solutions to obvious problems are, and who the bad guys are, end of sentence: there is no need to have this conversation at all period."
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| "You don't need to yell at us." |
We're all on the same page, it's merely a small handful of assholes who are reading too slow. It's just that they're the ones reading aloud for the class, and it's insufferable. They get caught on words with silent letters and shit, you remember those times? But we all read ahead anyway. I'll be chapters ahead, I don't care. I simply don't know how to help them read better, but that's not my role right now. Just a wish.
I can step back, control what I can control, and decide to stop self-suffering what I can't. Other people will step up, and fill the shoes I can't even afford; so why should I beat myself up over them when I'm only window shopping?
"While there's life there is truth, while there's truth it demands to be spoken. And someone's gonna speak it, it's really not a secret. You just need to search it, you just need to seek it." - Watsky
(Of course...that quote alludes to the fact that our villains seek to extinguish life in order to bury the truth. 'While there's life.')
This is practically the reason I "quit" news four years ago, and sat twiddling my thumbs up my ass (to mix metaphors in an...unpleasant way) waiting for bad people to get arrested and/or lose positions of power. Only, what I failed to do was avoid paying attention to twitter trends, tweets, instagram posts, etc. I even let TV news get in front of my earballs. I even glanced at newspapers! I paid any credence at all!
And it just made me upset, angry, sad, and depressed! What the fuck! That's not what I wanted! There's gotta be a better way! In order to do it for real I have to commit to a fresh new way that's trouble free. It's got Paul Anka's guarantee!*
In essence: I don't want to feel any more pain over something that shouldn't even be. Factors that shouldn't even exist, not just something I disagree with: something that is universally disagreeable to the extent that it should not
It should not. That is why I must attempt to have an unconcerned or 'zen' attitude towards the possible bad outcome. I don't talk about it that much but I am autistic. I feel strongly, more saturated than neurotypical people. I have too much sympathy, too much empathy, too little power and too little interest in suicide to cope with the amount of pain, dread, and despair that these bastards rain down on all of us. The plague that profits them (so to speak.) There's a word for people like them, but it's a slur for people like me so I shouldn't perpetuate it.
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| Ignore-ence is bliss |
So you can count me out! Simple as that, baby! If some org sends me a text that begins, like one I got the day I wrote this sentence, "URGENT: a D.C. judge..." then I'm going to delete it sight unseen! Fuck you very much! If a D.C. judge wants to throw hands or something they have to come to my house! What do you want me to do, bub?
Take the pandemic for [prime, almost literarily-symbolic] example. I simply can not wrap my head around or even conceive of the empathy needed to process 200,000+ deaths! I've said it before, and I'll say it again because my brain can't process it! Once I started reading articles again because the pandemic made it so news was actually useful information [not just 100% do-nothings bragging from their gilded cages about how you're going to die and there's nothing nobody can do about it,] I started absorbing the bullshit and despair more and more. Wanting to be a good quarantine lad roped me back into the news, which quickly turned into even more graphic misery-porn. (That's not even exaggeration; that's the world we live in. The world's cartoonish: headlines are satire. Plain and simple facts are epic tragedy. Unbiased reporting of the official policies of the republican party sound like left-wing hyperbolic propaganda, because it's all designed to be that way. The terrorists won.)
I have no power to stop the pandemic – the spread of the virus itself, the unbelievable dipshit parties, or the unbelieving parties of dipshits – other than putting a God Blessed mask on my God Blessed face and not leaving my God Blessed abode. That's pretty much literally all I can do. I can't even support folks with donations anymore because I no longer have any fucking money. The people with power to do more than me, plenty of whom are the same people who could just give us all some fucking God Damned money are doing JACK SHIT and SQUAT and ZIP and ZILCH.
Point is, those Year of the Rat bastards cleeeeearly do not give any shits. All indifference embalmed in lip-service. No scraps of empathy, so why is the burden on me? Why do I feel like I (we) alone am weighing down the emotional side of the scale, facing something wholly inconceivable to my fragile little mind, while those on the power side of the scale masturbate and cum in their own mouths (metaphorically, of course)?
My refrain: Fuck that! I refuse to take on that burden of pain. Obviously this means I still feel for the people who have lost so much this year. But I plainly do not have enough spoons to... I dunno, sip all of the soup? (to add to the spoon theory metaphor.)
Know I love you, I just have the strength of one man.
So I'm still fuckin' here, I'm just tryna stay out. Be quit. Da bricks: hit. You feel me? Do you kinda glean how this ain't all so hypocritical now? It's a jittery needle to thread, I'll admit. So I fuss: I repeat myself. Don't get me wrong: there's plenty of hypocrisy in my head. I "don't have money to donate to people" but I'll spend a few bucks on myself here and there and pay Wells Fargo tens of dollars every month so they don't LoWeR mY pReCiOuS cReDiT sCoRe. Heaven forbid I can't buy a fucking houssehahahahahahahahaha fuck off. My credit card is effectively free money for now, I'll pay a higher and higher minimum as long as it takes. In an okay world I'd be on my eighth $4,000 check.
I can't be Jesus Christ. [And the state killed him anyway so I kinda don't want to be, even as typing that feels immensely selfish of me.] But I can heal myself. And part of that is waiting in the dugout until they remove the streakers on the field and ask us to play ball again. Okay that metaphor kinda sucks. I'm not out-out, I'm just out? I seem unable to explain it with so many words...
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| if only there was a meme or something that could convey these complex emotions for me... |
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I think I've covered all the bases. Outlined my options, tallied my tools, paraded my possible pathways. My prepared positions to prevent familiar meltdown. It's been forever since the election, by now. I cannot be blindsided like before. My hopes are comfortably shielded deep in the toilet. I've come to suspect and expect the worst so that it may have less power over me being myself. Myself is wonderful and deserves to remain as much.
Whatever I do, part of why I'm writing all this is I am exercising my Distress Tolerance. Slowly getting used to both the idea that vacant-skulled racist moron shitstain filthy Goddamned pock-marked fascist assholes made a bad decision and voted for the wrong creepy elderly white republican**, and the idea that I am doing okay regardless.
Even my practice of watching lots of movies has really helped me. Helped me get in the right mindset, focus on what's important, how to be, and even giving me confidence. I worry there is no way off the sea other than some great wall of death. A thundering typhoon I never asked for, straight ahead, that we can't help but go through. But we have to. And if that's okay for Tintin, I guess that's okay for me.
Just like my exposure therapy dream, this moment in this movie I watched on Christmas night clicked like a puzzle piece in place within me, and gave me a fragment of confidence I didn't have before. One I didn't even know existed, and thus didn't know I could have. Didn't know I lacked, didn't know I wanted or needed. But it's very welcome and possibly essential. Now I have to land the plane. Knowing I can because it needs to be done. Leaving the cocoon is scary, but I can face that fear.
Because I can do okay regardless of the outcome. Is it like going cold turkey on a drug? Knowing I can live comfortably*** without being tethered to the thing, makes me unrestrained by its threads? Pinocchio metaphor?
Apt comparison to Room (2015)? If I've seen that I can live outside of the Room then the Room loses its power and when I return to the Room I see it for what it really is: small, ugly, evil, and weak.
It is I who is strong.
And you can be too. Here's a head start: you already are.
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| Who knows, maybe I can be happy again... |
I am going to try to stop agonizing over the power I do not have to fix problems I actually cannot solve. I'm going to focus on me, my friends and family, and my world. My news will only affect and effect me, like 100 years ago. Crime will be punished, bad guys will go to prison, prison will stop being a thing. Good will prevail, the arc of the universe will bend toward justice and the meek shall inherit the Earth.
My emotional pain will be regulated to the sphere of my own existence. Through a combination of kayfabe denial, rap music, creating and experiencing art, just not looking, practicing forgiveness, telling people I love them, being like water, and voting every God Blessed year, I shall persevere. Entertain this mindset if you think it might help you, too. We shall overcome. The world didn't end before and it sure as hell won't end now. That is a power I do have, that promise:
Everything is going to be okay.
Happy Holidays, and have a Happy, Prosperous, Blessed New Year.
— David "The Pants" Hoh
* Guarantee void in Tennessee.
** Despite being ill-advisedly courted to by another creepy elderly white republican who oh, actually happens to have experience being a politician. Or at the very least isn't a drug addict. Or at the very, very least, actually loves his family.
*** Relatively. GIVE ME MORE STIMULUS MONEY, YOU CHAPPED-ASS CHEAPSKATE CHARLATANS.
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